Critics Say Proposed Wisconsin Bill Would Unnecessarily Hold Up Asbestos Lawsuits

Madison, Wisconsin - Opponents of a proposed Wisconsin bill say that if the legislation passes, lawsuits for asbestos and other injury victims could be drawn out until the victim dies, a situation that angers many in a state where diseases like asbestos-caused mesothelioma are still on the rise.
According to an article in the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, the proposed bill, introduced by State Rep. Andre Jacque, R-DePere, will supposedly prevent attorneys from “double-dipping” on jury awards. Trial lawyers say, however, that it’s just a way to delay cases, possibly for years.
“It basically addresses the fact that you have trial attorneys, plaintiffs’ counsel, that in zealously advocating for their clients are trying to seek additional awards beyond what fair compensation might be, as a result, in some cases depleting trust funds that should be available to compensate other victims,” said Jacque in a statement to the press.

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Canadians Say British Columbia Often Ignores Asbestos Safety

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada - Proponents of a ban on asbestos, as well as individuals simply concerned about public safety, say that British Columbia’s Work-SafeBC isn’t being tough enough on repeat offenders who are consistently charged with violations of asbestos handling laws.
An article in the Vancouver Sun points out that in the last three years, the agency has issued nearly 2,500 orders against construction companies that violate regulations that are put in place to protect their employees (and others) from asbestos exposure. Data shows that 59 penalties and nearly a half-million dollars in fines were imposed on the law-breakers, yet repeat offenses continue. That’s because, many say, the province – beyond warnings and fines - just isn’t tough enough on those who break the rules.

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South Australian Town a Lingering Asbestos Wasteland

Terowie, Australia - A small town in South Australia says they’ve been an asbestos wasteland for long enough and are appealing to the government to remove the debris they say is having a negative effect on the health of everyone who lives there.
A story aired by the Australian Broadcast Company outlines the plight of the town of Terowie, where there sits a legal asbestos dump that’s been festering for decades, say residents. The site is owned by the South Australian government, they note, but there’s no fence around it and not even any warning signs.
Unfortunately, a playground and school sit downwind from the dump, and residents say particles from friable asbestos in the dump often blow in the direction of where children are playing.
One resident, who’s lived in Terowie for 2 years, describes the mess.
“I walked down to the southern rail yards and saw just the massive asbestos down there,” said Dave Perron. “It blew me away that it had been there for so long and nobody had bothered to clean it up. The ground is just covered with broken up fragments of asbestos. It extends for well over 200 meters from the bottom of the southern platform to up at the cemetery.”
Locals say that Terowie wasn’t always a “forgotten town”. It was once a thriving railway stop, they explain, and served as a staging area for Allied Forces during World War II. It was visited by Douglas MacArthur, they state, proudly.
But when the train station was closed and then demolished in the early 1970s and the asbestos wreckage left behind, the town’s popularity waned and no one ever bothered to come back and remove the debris. Asbestos roof shingles and sheeting and other small pieces of the material remain at the dumpsite and can be found along a popular walking trail, says Perron.
“I have young grandchildren who want to come over here and explore the buildings, the old train station and the old train line,” he said. “To do that they have to walk on this asbestos. I won't allow them here because I don't want my grandchildren in 30 years time to be diagnosed with mesothelioma.”
Some individuals who’ve lived in the town for years are already suffering from asbestosis and other respiratory problems. Those people have vowed to fight until the South Australian government commences a clean-up project. So far, they’ve made little progress.

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U Penn Scientists Say They've Created an "Immunity Passport" for Cancer Treatment

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - This weekend, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania announced that they’ve made what they believe could be a huge breakthrough in cancer treatment and screening with the creation of an “immunity passport” that allows the body to accept foreign objects normally used for imaging or during treatment.
According to a story aired by CBS News Philadelphia, the researchers created the “passport” to get past the immune cells in the body that work naturally to remove objects that don’t belong there. University of Pennsylvania Chemical bimolecular professor Dennis Discher, one of the individuals involved in the research, referred to the passport as a way “to get past the immune cells that act like customs officers, border immigration that sort of want to remove things that are foreign from things in the body.”

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Apartment Dwellers Fear Fall-Out from Removal of Asbestos Materials

Yarmouth, Massachusetts - A group of tenants who rent units at an affordable housing complex in Yarmouth, Massachusetts were surprised and upset when they received letters last month stating that the vinyl flooring in their kitchens and bathrooms would be replaced shortly and that they could expect “debris”. That’s because many of the tenants feared what was underneath the flooring – asbestos.
According to an article in The Register, tenant Beth Harris, who lives in the Swan Pond Village Apartments, was aware that there was asbestos underneath the vinyl tiles and questioned the need to replace the floors, which Harris says are in perfectly good condition. Other tenants who received the same letter, Harris says, were totally unaware of the presence of asbestos. Those others, she notes, include disabled persons and small children.

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World Health Organization Denies Influence of Russian Asbestos Industry

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the research arm of the World Health Organization (WHO), is denying allegations by the Lancet medical journal that they have come under the influence of the Russian asbestos industry.
In a February 2 article in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal, the writer questioned whether the IARC has fallen prey to “corporate capture” by the asbestos industry in Russia, even though WHO has been behind a consistent push to end the use of the material worldwide. The article goes on to suggest that the agency might be behind the campaign to keep chrysotile – “white” – asbestos off a list of hazardous substances. The IARC denies the allegations.
In a statement to the Toronto Star, representatives from both agencies called the Lancet article “erroneous.”
“The Lancet report is poorly researched and contains a number of false allegations and unfounded inferences,” the statement said. “The Agency has extensive experience of conducting important research whilst protecting itself from undue influence from a variety of stakeholders with vested interests.”
In the past, Canada has been at the forefront of the campaign to protect the export of chrysotile, primarily because it was once the top exporter of this particular type of asbestos. Now it seems Russia has replaced Canada in that role.
Currently, chrysotile asbestos is the only form of the mineral that’s not included on the UN Rotterdam Convention, a list of controlled hazardous substances. The issue of the inclusion of white asbestos is about to arise again in April, when member states meet to address the list. The decision to include any material on the list must be unanimous and, thus far, Canada has been the dissenting vote. But the asbestos industry in Canada is now defunct, leaving Russia as the world’s largest export of the material. So, it’s natural for that country to assume the position once put forth by Canada, explains the authors.
The continuous blocking of chrysotile from the hazardous substance list has angered many, including some Canadians. “Russia is the world’s leading exporter of asbestos by far and it is the centre of propaganda and corrupt science on asbestos,” said Kathleen Ruff, a senior human rights adviser at the Rideau Institute in Ottawa who was quoted in the Lancet article, expressing her concerns about the issue.
The article notes that concerns about the IARC’s collusion with the Russian asbestos industry were first raised in November, when the agency accepted an invitation to attend a conference in Kiev, Ukraine.
Asbestos is a known carcinogen and researchers have stated that all types of the mineral, including chrysotile, are dangerous and can cause mesothelioma and other serious diseases.

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Tooth Loss Due To Periodontal Disease More Likely In Postmenopausal Women Who Smoked

Postmenopausal women who have smoked are at much higher risk of losing their teeth than women who never smoked, according to a new study published and featured on the cover of the Journal of the American Dental Association by researchers at the University at Buffalo.

The study involved 1,106 women who participated in the Buffalo OsteoPerio Study, an offshoot of the Women's Health Initiative, (WHI), the largest clinical trial and observational study ever undertaken in the U.S., involving more than 162,000 women across the nation, including nearly 4,000 in Buffalo.

The UB study is the first to examine comprehensive smoking histories for participants that allowed the researchers to unravel some of the causes behind tooth loss in postmenopausal women who smoked.

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Modern Diet Is Rotting Our Teeth

A study of the evolution of our teeth over the last 7,500 years shows that humans today have less diverse oral bacteria than historic populations, which scientists believe have contributed to chronic oral diseases in post-industrial lifestyles.

The researchers, from the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD), the University of Aberdeen (Dept of Archeology), Scotland, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge, England, published their study in Nature Genetics.

The authors say that analyzing the DNA of calcified bacteria on the teeth of humans throughout modern and ancient history "has shed light on the health consequences of the evolving diet and behavior from the Stone Age to modern day".

The scientists explained that there were negative changes in oral bacteria as our diets altered when we moved from being hunter-gatherers to farmers. Further changes were observed when humans started manufacturing food during the Industrial Revolution.

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Implementation Of Fizzy Drinks Tax Is 'Essential', Claims Charity

The British Dental Health Foundation has joined more than 60 organisations backing recommendations for a tax on sugary drinks.

The report, compiled by Sustain entitled 'A Children's Future Fund - How food duties could provide the money to protect children's health and the world they grow up in', makes three main recommendations for Budget 2013 it believes would help to improve children's health. They are:

• Introduce a sugary drinks duty for the UK which, for example at 20p per litre, would raise around £1 billion a year;
• Ring-fence the majority of money raised from a sugary drinks duty for a Children's Future Fund, which could be spent on improving children's health by, for example, providing free school meals, or sustainably produced fruit and vegetable snacks in schools; and
• Give an independent body the responsibility to oversee how the sugary drinks duty is implemented and make sure the revenue is spent effectively.

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Possible Link Between Obesity And Gum Disease

Impacting approximately one-third of the U.S. population, obesity is a significant health concern for Americans. It's a risk factor for developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and certain forms of cancer, and now, according to an article published in the January/February 2013 issue of General Dentistry, the peer-reviewed clinical journal of the Academy of General Dentistry (AGD), it also may be a risk factor for gum disease.

"We know that being overweight can affect many aspects of a person's health," says Charlene Krejci, DDS, MSD, lead author of the article. "Now researchers suspect a link exists between obesity and gum disease. Obese individuals' bodies relentlessly produce cytokines, proteins with inflammatory properties. These cytokines may directly injure the gum tissues or reduce blood flow to the gum tissues, thus promoting the development of gum disease."

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Gum Disease Found To Worsen Infection In Animal Model Of AIDS

Texas Biomed scientists in San Antonio have found that moderate gum disease in an animal model exposed to an AIDS- like virus had more viral variants causing infection and greater inflammation. Both of these features have potential negative implications in long term disease progression, including other kinds of infections, the researchers say in a new report.

The public health message from the study is that even mild inflammation in the mouth needs to be controlled because it can lead to more serious consequences, said Luis Giavedoni, Ph. D, a Texas Biomed virologist and first author of the study.

"This is important because moderate gum disease is present in more than 50 percent of the world population. It is known that severe gum disease leads to generalized inflammation and a number of other health complications, but the conditions that we created were moderate and they were mainly localized in the mouth," he added.

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Do The Health Benefits Of Berries Make It Past Your Mouth?

Research has suggested that compounds that give colorful fruits their rich hues, especially berries, promote health and might even prevent cancer. But for the first time, scientists have exposed extracts from numerous berries high in those pigments to human saliva to see just what kinds of health-promoting substances are likely to survive and be produced in the mouth.

It's too early to name the best berry for health promotion based on this initial work, but the researchers have discovered that two families of pigments that provide berries with their colors, called anthocyanins, are more susceptible to degradation in the mouth than are the other four classes of these pigments.

The Ohio State University study also showed that bacteria living in the mouth are responsible for most of the breakdown of these compounds that occurs in saliva. Researchers are investigating whether it's the berry pigments themselves, or instead the products of their degradation, that actually promote health.

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What Chimpanzees Can Teach Us About Tooth Development And Weaning

For more than two decades, scientists have relied on studies that linked juvenile primate tooth development with their weaning as a rough proxy for understanding similar developmental landmarks in the evolution of early humans. New research from Harvard, however, is challenging those conclusions by showing that tooth development and weaning aren't as closely related as previously thought.

Using a first-of-its-kind method, a team of researchers led by professors Tanya Smith and Richard Wrangham and Postdoctoral Fellow Zarin Machanda of Harvard's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology used high-resolution digital photographs of chimps in the wild to show that after the eruption of their first molar tooth, many juvenile chimps continue to nurse as much, if not more, than they had in the past. Their study is described in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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The Eco-Dentistry Association Will Hold Industry's First Green Dentistry Conference, 3-4 May 2013, Utah

Ground-breaking event will focus on opportunities presented by high-tech, green, wellness based dentistry

The Eco-Dentistry Association® announced last week that it will hold the industry's first dental conference devoted exclusively to high-tech, environmentally sound dental practices. The event will take place May 3 and 4, 2013, at the stunning, eco-friendly Robert Redford Conference Center in Sundance, Utah, part of the Sundance Resort. Continuing Education credits will be available and attendance is limited to the first 100 registrants.

The 2013 Green Dentistry Conference™ will showcase the information and products dental professionals need to create and maintain state-of-the-art green practices. "A" List dental speakers include Gary Takacs of Takacs Learning Center, who will share the essentials of branding and marketing a green dental practice, as well as dental technology gurus Marty Jablow, DMD, Paul Feuerstein, DMD, and John Flucke, DDS who will talk about how dental technologies reduce waste and save energy, and boost the practice bottom line. With a generous sponsorship from US Bank, Bill Roth, noted sustainability author and speaker, will lead a break out group called "Green Builds Business."

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Tooth Root Formation Requires Beta-Catenin Molecule

Today, the International and American Associations for Dental Research (IADR/AADR) published a paper titled "B-catenin is Required in Odontoblasts for Tooth Root Formation." The paper, written by lead authors Tak-Heun Kim and Cheol-Hyeon Bae, Chonbuk National University Korea School of Dentistry, Laboratory for Craniofacial Biology, is published in the IADR/AADR Journal of Dental Research.

The tooth root, together with the surrounding periodontium, maintains the tooth in the jaw. The root develops after the crown forms, a process called morphogenesis. While the molecular and cellular mechanisms of early tooth development and crown morphogenesis have been extensively studied, little is known about the molecular mechanisms controlling tooth root formation.

In this study, Kim and Bae et al show that a protein called ß-catenin is strongly expressed in odontoblasts - the cells that develop the tooth dentin, and is required for root formation. Tissue-specific inactivation of ß-catenin in developing odontoblasts produced molars lacking roots and aberrantly thin incisors.

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Gingivitis Bacteria Manipulate Your Immune System So They Can Thrive In Your Gums

A new research report published in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology shows how the bacteria known for causing gum disease--Porphyromonas gingivalis--manipulates the body's immune system to disable normal processes that would otherwise destroy it. Specifically, the report shows that this pathogen prompts the production of the anti-inflammatory molecule Interleukin-10 (IL-10). This, in turn, inhibits the function of T-cells, which would otherwise help to protect the host from this particular microbial infection.

"Since greater than 50 percent of the U.S. population over 50 years-of-age develop adult periodontal disease, we hope that the results of our study will ultimately help in the development of novel treatments that could prevent or ameliorate the chronic infection caused by the pathogen P. gingivalis,'" said Jannet Katz, D.D.S., Ph.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Department of Pediatric Dentistry at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

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Quick Detection Of Periodontitis Pathogens

Twelve million Germans suffer from periodontitis, an inflammation that can lead to the loss of teeth if left untreated. A new diagnostic platform enables the pathogens to be detected quickly, enabling dentists to act swiftly to initiate the right treatment.

Bleeding gums during tooth brushing or when biting into an apple could be an indication of periodontitis, an inflammatory disease of the tissues that surround and support the teeth. Bacterial plaque attacks the bone, meaning teeth can loosen over time and in the worst case even fall out, as they are left without a solid foundation to hold them in place. Furthermore, periodontitis also acts as a focal point from which disease can spread throughout the entire body: If the bacteria, which can be very aggressive, enter the bloodstream, they can cause further damage elsewhere. Physicians suspect there is a connection between periodontitis pathogens and the sort of cardiovascular damage that can cause heart attacks or strokes. In order to stop the source of inflammation, dentists remove dental calculus and deposits from the surface of teeth, but this is often not enough; particularly aggressive bacteria can only be eliminated with antibiotics.

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Nature-Inspired Advance For Treating Sensitive Teeth

Taking inspiration from Mother Nature, scientists are reporting an advance toward preventing the tooth sensitivity that affects millions of people around the world. Their report on development of the substance, similar to the adhesive that mussels use to attach to rocks and other surfaces in water, appears in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Quan-Li Li, Chun Hung Chu and colleagues explain that about 3 out of every 4 people have teeth that are sensitive to hot, cold, sweet or sour foods and drinks. It occurs when the hard outer enamel layer on teeth and the softer underlying dentin wear away, stimulating the nerves inside. Some sugar-free gums and special toothpastes can help reduce that tooth hyper-sensitivity. However, Li and Chu cite the need for substances that rebuild both enamel and dentin at the same time. To meet that challenge, they turned to a sticky material similar to the adhesive that mussels use to adhere to surfaces. They reasoned that it could help keep minerals in contact with dentin long enough for the rebuilding process to occur.

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Evidence Insufficient To Recommend Routine Antibiotics For Joint Replacement Patients Who Undergo Dental Procedures

The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons(AAOS), and the American Dental Association(ADA) found that there is insufficient evidence to recommend the routine use of antibiotics for patients with orthopaedic implants to prevent infections prior to having dental procedures because there is no direct evidence that routine dental procedures cause prosthetic joint infections.

The AAOS and ADA's recommendations are based on a collaborative evidence-based clinical practice guideline that focuses on the possible linkage between orthopaedic implant infection and patients undergoing dental procedures.

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Coffee Drinking May Halve Risk Of Mouth And Throat Cancer

A new study from the US finds people who drink more than 4 cups of caffeinated coffee a day have half the risk of dying from oral/pharyngeal (mouth and throat) cancer as people who drink it either occasionally or not at all. However, the researchers say their findings need to be confirmed by more research, and for now should just be received as good news for coffee drinkers and not be used as a reason to recommend everyone should drink 4 cups of coffee a day.

Lead author Janet Hildebrand and colleagues from the American Cancer Society (ACS) in Atlanta, Georgia, write about their findings in a paper published online first on 9 December in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

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