Sex dissatisfaction! Child car seats! Deadly headaches! Chronic fatigue! Radiation safety! Male facelifts! Fitness myths! Poison prevention! Trauma survival! And a hot new lupus update! It's your Tuesday Health Watch, where we watch your health—with head-splitting authority!
After a Toronto Star investigation, the Canadian government has acknowledged that it used Agent Orange — the same cancer- and birth defect-causing chemical used by the U.S. military to clear the jungles of Vietnam — to clear brush from roadsides in Ontario between the 1950s and 1980s. Yes, until the fucking 80s!
A New Jersey man is in critical condition after being bitten by his new pet, an albino Monocled Cobra, which he purchased over the weekend along with a rattlesnake and a copperhead. He thought the venom sacs had been removed.
There is no hope. Discouraged and terrified scientists now tell us that the modern urban bedbug has spent the last decade drinking in our best poisons while emitting tiny cackles, growing stronger and stronger and stronger and scarier.
If you find your personal chef's cooking "disgusting," make sure you have it checked at a lab! That's what sex toy chain Ann Summers founder Jacqueline Gold did—turns out her nanny had been poisoning her with wiper fluid.
What terrible things should you fear today, you ask? Terrorists plotting to poison food at hotels and restaurants; crude bombs on Rome's subway; and the "suspicious odor" that caused the UN to evacuate this morning. And it's only 1pm.
According to CBS News, the government has identified a "credible" terrorist plot to poison restaurants and hotels by infecting buffets and salad bars with ricin and cyanide. To be completely safe, don't ever eat anything again. Especially salad. [CBS]
Last year, the FDA released a report that said mercury fillings are totally harmless when lodged into your head forever. But yesterday, an advisory committee told the FDA to look at new data that might suggest otherwise. Go figure.
Last month the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a recall on supposedly lead-laced superhero and Wizard of Oz drinking glasses because they're made for children. Well, the CPSC has changed course, saying they're for adults, and therefore just fine! (Updated)
In 1997, Pacific Gas & Electric paid $333 million in settlements to residents of Hinkley, California over groundwater laced with cancer-causing chromium. Today, the same town from Erin Brockovich is under threat from a "plume" of chromium in the groundwater.
Point Comfort, Texas is home to an Alcoa alumina plant, which spews clouds of red dust into the air, coating residents' clothes and and eating the paint off their cars. But don't worry because it's not harmful, says Alcoa. [AP]
The Hungarian government is calling a toxic sludge spill there an "ecological disaster" and has declared a state of emergency after three people were killed and over 100 injured when a reservoir at an alumina plant ruptured. Six are missing.
The commie food police in San Francisco have officially crossed the line: A proposed city ordinance would ban toys from McDonald's Happy Meals until the chain adds fruit and vegetables to their kids' menu, and lowers calorie counts. Hippie extortionists.
DaiJyoBu Ginger Candy is being recalled in California due to "an elevated level of lead." Nice.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a former oil lobbyist, thinks that oil remaining in the Gulf is a-okay, poison-wise. It's fine! Really. And if any water critters get smothered in it, well, toothpaste would have had the same effect.
Now that BP's oil well is plugged, government scientists can start looking at what 1.8 million gallons of the chemical dispersant Corexit did to the environment, and seafood in the Gulf of Mexico. The FDA says don't sweat it!
Just after the end of World War Two, the US Army dumped 16,000 mustard gas bombs in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii. But don't worry, they have a solution: Just leave it where it is!
Somali pirates have hijacked a ship "carrying a poisonous chemical." [!!!!!]. Don't panic.
In Bangladesh, a country of 160 million, some 77 million people have been poisoned by arsenic in the drinking water, according to a 10-year Lancet study. The WHO calls it "the largest mass poisoning of a population in history." [BBC]
