An interesting article by Rebecca Armstrong in the Independent:

As she makes her way through the hospital wards, Billie-Jean keeps up an impressive pace. She has to if she is going to see all the patients who are waiting for her. Wearing her official uniform, she looks neat and trim, and despite how busy she is, she always has time to stop if someone wants to say hello or slip her a Bonio. You see, Billie-Jean isn’t a ward sister doing the rounds or a doctor bringing vital medicine, she’s an Irish terrier. But despite the fact she’s a canine, not human, carer, her medical value is second-to-none because she is a Pets As Therapy dog.

Pets As Therapy is a charity that takes pet dogs and cats to hospitals, hospices, residential care homes, day centres and special-needs schools. It was formed in 1983, explains chief executive Maureen Hennis, by a group of pet owners who were convinced that their animals could help other people. “At that time, people were moving into residential accommodation and nursing homes, and they had to give up their own pets,” she says. “This wasn’t only making them sad and depressed, sometimes it was actually making them ill.”

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The Bush FDA continues it new role of protecting businesses. Brian Clark Howard posts on The Daily Green:

The controversy over the safety of the chemical bisphenol A continues, as the U.S. FDA issues a statement saying that the agency sees no reason to tell consumers to stop using products that contain it, Reuters reports. This includes polycarbonate baby bottles, water bottles and more (which should be labeled with the #7 recycling code).

The FDA’s statement, released in a climate of heavy pressure from the chemical industry, is in contrast to developments in Canada. On April 19 the Canadian government began a 60-day public comment period on whether polycarbonate baby bottles should be banned in the country. Observers have said a comprehensive ban on polycarbonate is even possible up north in the near future.

For its part, Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., makers of Nalgene bottles, have announced that they will stop using polycarbonate. Wal-Mart says it expects all baby bottles it carries to be free of the material by early next year, and Toys R Us has discussed a similar plan.

If such major players are clearly expressing concern over BPA, what legs does the FDA have to stand on for its reassurance? According to Reuters, the FDA’s associate commissioner for science, Norris Alderson, said the feds are reviewing safety concerns, and pointed to two industry-funded studies claiming it poses no risk.

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The cause of the rise of autism and ADD disorders is still unknown. It’s not likely to be simply better detection and reporting: There really is an increase in those ailments as well as in illnesses such as asthma. [See comments below for reason for strikeouts. - LG] One thing that has also increased, of course, is the variety and amount of chemical pollutants in our environment. Discover has an interesting interview with a doctor who investigates these things. It begins:

Philip Landrigan doesn’t look like a tough guy. With his nest of white hair and vibrant blue eyes, he seems more like an amiable country doctor than a Harvard-trained physician who has fought the world’s most powerful corporations and bullied bureaucrats to protect the public from poisonous pollutants for nearly 30 years.

In the early 1970s, as a newly minted pediatrician, he was dispatched to El Paso, Texas, by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to investigate lead poisoning in children living near a lead smelter. His medical sleuthing revealed that even minuscule levels of lead caused profound damage to health and cognition, a discovery that helped propel the phaseout of lead in gasoline in 1976.

It would set the pattern for his career. In the forefront of battles to eliminate environmental toxins ever since, the Boston native has helped show the relationship between asbestos, pesticides, and benzene and human disease. From 1988 to 1993, Landrigan was chairman of the National Academy of Sciences committee whose chilling report showed that children in the United States were steeped in pesticides from a host of environmental sources, resulting in the Food Quality Protection Act. More recently, his cavernous, sparsely furnished office at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York has served as nerve center for tracking the environmental impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

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Very pleasant walk, and the uphills are now almost unnoticeable. I’m thinking that today I’ll do the hilly route in both directions, out and back, instead of the flat route back.

The President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports has an Adult Fitness Test to gauge aerobic fitness, strength, and flexibility. Go to the Adult Fitness Test web site for how to take the tests, which measure health-related fitness.

Health-related fitness is linked to fitness components that may lower risks such as high blood pressure, diabetes, or low back pain. Health-related physical fitness includes the following components:

• Aerobic fitness - ability of the heart and lungs to deliver blood to muscles,
• Muscular strength and endurance - enough to do normal activities easily and protect the low back,
• Flexibility - ability to move your many joints through their proper range of motion, and
• Body composition - not too much body fat, especially around the waist.

The activities featured on this adult fitness test are provided as a way for you to get an estimate of your level of aerobic fitness, muscular strength and endurance, flexibility and your body composition. The results on each test provide you with a measure from which you can track your progress in each area as you become more physically active.

Another good walk, and furthering into Wuthering Heights. Took a very solid nap after the walk. I’m going for 5 walks this week, so this afternoon I’ll be out on the heath walking through Pacific Grove again.

Two videos of good fitness exercises with a medicine ball.

Via Lifehacker, SmarterFitter offers a downloadable grocery list (your choice of Excel or PDF) that focuses on good food choices.

A good walk on Monday, and excellent weather for it: clear, sunny, slightly cool, occasional breeze. I’m listening to Wuthering Heights, which makes me eager for the next day’s walk. (I’ve not read the novel.)

Interesting:

An expert panel’s new quit-smoking guideline says more smokers would quit if their doctors offered them both counseling and medication — and if health plans covered the expense.

The official 256-page U.S. Public Health Service guideline comes from a panel of 37 experts who reviewed some 8,700 scientific articles — about 2,700 of them published since the last guideline came out in 2000.

What’s different? More hope, says panel chairman Michael C. Fiore, MD, MPH, founder and director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention.

“The guideline represents a scientific statement of hope,” Fiore tells WebMD. “We now have a substantial body of evidence that we can take a patient who smokes and dramatically increase that patient’s likelihood of quitting.”

Steven A. Schroeder, MD, head of the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center at the University of California, San Francisco, praises the new guideline. Schroeder was not a member of the Department of Health and Human Services panel.

“Our center is very happy with this. They broadened the sense of who can we help quit smoke,” Schroeder tells WebMD.

The new guideline asks every doctor to intervene with every patient who smokes at every health care visit.

Doctors are encouraged to provide at least brief counseling, and to help patients who smoke find more intensive counseling from telephone quitlines (1-800-QUIT-NOW) and from trained providers.

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AP has this story showing how sincerely the Bush Administration opposes public health:

The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority.

The government seeks to reverse a lower court ruling that allowed Arkansas City, Kan.-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef to conduct more comprehensive testing to satisfy demand from overseas customers in Japan and elsewhere.

Less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows are currently tested for the disease under Agriculture Department guidelines. The agency argues that more widespread testing does not guarantee food safety and could result in a false positive that scares consumers.

“They want to create false assurances,” Justice Department attorney Eric Flesig-Greene told a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

But Creekstone attorney Russell Frye contended the Agriculture Department’s regulations covering the treatment of domestic animals contain no prohibition against an individual company testing for mad cow disease, since the test is conducted only after a cow is slaughtered. He said the agency has no authority to prevent companies from using the test to reassure customers.

“This is the government telling the consumers, `You’re not entitled to this information,’” Frye said.

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Mike Lillis has two excellent articles on the healthcare crisis in the Washington Independent. The first begins:

In 2004, Tommy Thompson, then-Health and Human Services secretary, approached his boss with a request. Observing that the nation’s doctors and hospitals operate a tangled web of incompatible forms and technologies, Thompson asked President George W. Bush to create a universal system of electronic medical records that would follow patients around the country, eliminate redundant treatments and, according to some estimates, trim billions of dollars from the nation’s annual health care tab. Thompson wanted the president to establish the system within 18 months.

“He came out for 10 years,” Thompson said this week, “and as a result, we haven’t been able to get there.”

The anecdote, which Thompson told the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday, offers a glimpse of the obstacles facing health-reform advocates. With medical costs skyrocketing, employers increasingly dropping or trimming coverage, Medicare projected to go belly-up in a decade and the number of uninsured Americans tickling the 50 million mark, most observers contend the health-care system needs a complete overhaul. But such shakeups are rare in Washington, where special interests spend millions to keep things as they are, and the political will to confront industry is all but absent. Instead, lawmakers tend to dabble at the edges of problems until sweeping change becomes unavoidable. The health reform debate now seems to revolve around when that time will arrive.

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A good walk, and now the weekend off. The walks together with the kid’s plate are starting to have some effects. 3 lbs down.

Very overcast yesterday and somewhat chilly, but the walk went well. Little by little…

No extra walking yesterday, so the 8500 is probably the “regular” walk along with the daily movement about the apartment. Today will be no walk, though next week I may go for five.

The extra steps were due to a little trip to library and PO. I parked in a lot just a ways from the library and walked from there to the library and on to the PO and back, enough steps to exceed 10K. Once you start looking for it, there are many opportunities to get additional steps in the natural order of things.

This very handy little site let me measure the route I walk: 3.128 miles. So I’m not walking all that fast, given that it takes just a little over an hour: 3 mph is my best guess.

Not bad at all. I feel good today, but still will take the weekend off. And next week I’ll shoot for four days again.

Just came back from the 4th walk. Step count tomorrow, but no walk on Saturday or Sunday. Right now I’m thinking next week is another 4-walk week, and then maybe I’ll think about 5.

And on interesting shoes. I want to get a pair. The article, by Adam Sternbergh in New York magazine, begins:

Walking is easy. It’s so easy that no one ever has to teach you how to do it. It’s so easy, in fact, that we often pair it with other easy activities—talking, chewing gum—and suggest that if you can’t do both simultaneously, you’re some sort of insensate clod. So you probably think you’ve got this walking thing pretty much nailed. As you stroll around the city, worrying about the economy, or the environment, or your next month’s rent, you might assume that the one thing you don’t need to worry about is the way in which you’re strolling around the city.

Well, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you: You walk wrong.

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