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• Rules may require calorie counts on menus, vending machines, salad bars
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• Is this Lyme disease?

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To learn more about mosquitoes, repellent and dengue fever:

Insect Repellents: Use and Effectiveness

Active Ingredients Found in Insect Repellents

Minimum Risk Pesticides

Dengue Map

What You Need to Know about Mosquito Repellent




Randy Buchanan, environmental engineer, and Lane Carr, senior environmental inspector, of Henrico County Public Works, inspect a backyard for mosquito breeding locations.

 

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The July 31 Your Health column deals with a state investigation into elevated mercury levels in people using an imported skin bleaching cream containing mercury. Virginia health department officials said 10 people were identified with elevated mercury levels. Here are English, Spanish and health-care provider focused FAQs on the investigation.

The case was related to a California health department investigation.

Skin-bleaching is an issue throughout the world. Mercury, corticosteroids and hydroquinone are the main ingredients in many of the products.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2006 proposed removing the over-the-counter status of products containing hydroquinone, a substance used in many skin-whitening products in the U.S., but held off so more research could be done.

Read more in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

 

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You might guess that Hardee’s one-third pound bacon cheese Thickburger has a lot of calories, 850 in fact. Or that a Burger King Double Whopper has 920 calories.

But you might be a little fuzzy on some other foods. For instance, a six-inch Subway tuna sub has 530 calories, a few less than the 550 calories in KFC’s Original Recipe Double Down, with two pieces of bacon, two slices of cheese and sauce between two white meat chicken filets.

A 32-ounce McDonald’s Strawberry TripleThick Shake has 1,100 calories, compared to 330 calories in the chain’s 22 ounce Strawberry Banana Smoothie. Wendy’s Southwest Taco Salad has 680 calories, almost as many as a meal of a Double Jr. Cheeseburger Deluxe (390 calories) and small fry (330 calories).

Today’s Moneywise feature in the business section of the newspaper is on a provision of federal health reform that would require chain restaurants with 20 or more locations to post calorie counts of standard items. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is taking public comment on the provision.

Putting calorie counts on menus and menu board is controversial. Health officials say the information can help people make healthier choices as the nation deals with an obesity crisis and more meals are eaten away from home. Business owners said it’s just more government regulation.

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FDA list of drugs recommended for flushing

Additional resources:

Smart Disposal

Virginia Department of Environmental Quality

South River Compounding Pharmacy

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Actually, this article is incorrect in two areas.  One, several research articels suggest that the expiration dates pushed by drug manufacturers are several months (up to 18 months) in advance of actual expiration or loss of potency.  In addition, most medications (with the notable exception of tetracycline antibiotics) are VERY safe to take despite posted expiration dates.  Early expiration dates waste billions of dollars!

2.  NEVER flush medications!  This pollutes our water,  The effects of this have been little studied, through the levels of antibiotics in our drinking water have surely complicated the incidence of resistant bacteria..  These medications are found in detectable levels in most of our drinking water in the United States.

A coworker being treated for Lyme disease took a photo of his rash, at right. He was bitten about two weeks ago.

I have also posted a CDC photo of the typical bull’s eye rash that usually is a sign of a bite by a deer tick infected with Lyme disease. I have also asked public health experts to comment.

I’ve also posted a photo of the blacklegged deer tick, which carries Lyme disease.

CDC photos by James Gathany.



















Followup:

David N. Gaines, Ph.D., State Public Health Entomologist at the Virginia Department of Health, had this to say about my coworker’s rash:

“It might be a bull’s eye rash.  How big was it [inches across] and did it grow bigger?  All bull’s eye rashes typically expand to larger diameters [up to 12 inches in diameter] over the course of a week, and because there are other types of bug bites that will cause a rash right around the site of the bite, VDH does not count cases where the rash is less than 2 inches in diameter.”

“Bull’s eye rashes also do not itch or hurt (at most they will feel just a little bit warm), so a person who gets one may not notice it unless they happen to see it.  This is particularly true for bull’s eye rashes that occur on a person’s back side, under hair on the scalp, or in places that are normally covered by clothing and hard to observe without a mirror (e.g. the buttocks).  Thus, if this rash was smaller than 2 inches in diameter, and itched or had other evident sensations associated with it, it probably was not a bull’s eye rash.”

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