Did You Know?: HEALTH

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Did You Know? How To Test Your Home For Radon

Radon in your home increases your cancer risk

When it comes to reducing your cancer risk, one important step could be right under your nose, or below your feet.

Getting your home tested for radon can help protect you and your family from a key cause of lung cancer.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), each year about 21,000 deaths can be attributed to exposure to radon.

While that is nowhere near the 480,000 deaths a year caused by smoking, it is still significant.

Radon is also the leading cause of lung cancer in non-smokers.

WHAT IS RADON?

Radon is a gas that occurs naturally outdoors in harmless amounts. It is produced from the breakdown of uranium in soil and rocks and sometimes becomes concentrated in homes built on top of soil that has natural uranium deposits.

WHERE IS RADON?

Radon can enter buildings through cracks in floors or walls, construction joints, or gaps in foundations around pipes, wires or pumps. Radon levels are usually highest in the basement or crawl space and that area is where radon testing is recommended.

When radon gas is breathed in, it enters the lungs, exposing them to small amounts of radiation. This may damage the cells in the lining of the lungs and increase a person's risk of lung cancer.

HEALTH RISKS

The risk of lung cancer is higher in those who have lived for many years in a radon-contaminated house.

The lung cancer risk from radon is much lower than that from smoking.

However, exposure to the combination of radon gas and cigarette smoke creates a greater risk for lung cancer than either factor alone.

Because radon gas can’t be seen or smelled, the only way to know whether it is a problem in your home is to test for it.

A Citizen’s Guide to Radon, produced by the EPA, explains how to test your home for radon easily and inexpensively, and what to do if your levels are too high.

TESTING

You can hire a professional tester, or save money and do it yourself with a kit you buy at a hardware store or online.

Follow the instructions for leaving the kit in your house for the required number of days. Then mail it to a lab and wait for them to send you the results.

If you find out that your radon levels are high, you can take steps to lower the amount of radon in your home.

The most common method is to have a vent pipe system and fan installed, which pulls radon from beneath the house and vents it to the outside.

It is also possible for radon to enter your home through your water supply, though this is a much lower risk than radon entering your home through the soil.

If you have a private well, you can have it tested for radon. If the levels are high, you can have the water supply treated so that the radon is removed before it enters your home.

COST

As with most home repairs, the cost of reducing radon in your home can vary widely, depending on how your home is built (whether you have a basement, crawlspace, or neither) and what kind of system you need.

If you think you have been exposed, you should get tested.  There are no widely available medical tests to measure whether you have been exposed to radon.

But if you think that you might have been, talk with your doctor about whether you should get regular health checkups and tests to look for possible signs of lung cancer.

Possible symptoms include shortness of breath, a new or worsening cough, pain or tightness in the chest, hoarseness, or trouble swallowing.

If you smoke and you know you have been exposed to high levels of radon, it’s very important to quit smoking. The combination of cigarette smoking and radon exposure raises the risk of lung cancer more than either smoking or radon exposure alone.

For some people exposed to radon through their jobs, like uranium miners, millers and transporters, the US government has established the Radiation Exposure Compensation Program. It offers compensation for lung cancer and some other lung diseases to people who qualify.

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Did You Know? Fast Facts About Liver Disease

It's amazing that all our organs
can fit inside our abdomen

There are a lot of temptations to overindulge during the summer and Christmas holidays. It is important to eat healthy and continue to exercise.

Your liver needs foods that contain Vitamins A, E and K to stay healthy. Your liver is a vital organ that you can't live without and it performs over 500 bodily functions.

If you drink alcohol, do it in moderation.

If you have risk factors like diabetes or high cholesterol, stay on the straight and narrow, especially when there are multiple opportunities to indulge.

For liver transplants, your new liver will still be functional while it regenerates. But even if 75% of your liver were removed due to disease or trauma and if you only had 25% left, that 25% could regenerate a full-size liver in 8 to 15 days. Isn't that amazing?

Now that is Awesome!

WHERE IS YOUR LIVER?

Your liver is located in the front upper right-hand section of your abdomen, just under your diaphragm and on top of your stomach, right kidney, and intestines.

WHAT IS ITS FUNCTION?

Your liver is one of your largest and most important organs and performs over 500 functions. Primarily it filters your blood just like the kidneys do, and helps to digest and break down food and drugs to make it easier for the rest of the body to use. The liver also stores glucose in the form of glycogen and helps in maintaining the proper amount of glucose in the blood

RISK FACTORS FOR LIVER CANCER OR CIRRHOSIS

One main cause of cirrhosis is drinking large amounts of alcohol for many years.

If you are very overweight, have diabetes or a condition called metabolic syndrome, you are at higher risk of getting nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, a buildup of fat in your liver which can lead to liver cancer.

Certain diseases can make you more likely to get liver cancer, including:

Long-term hepatitis B or C -- viruses that attack and damage your liver

Cirrhosis -- liver damage that can make scar tissue replace healthy tissue

Liver diseases you’re born with, like Wilson’s disease (when you have too much copper in your liver)

Toxins Raise Your Risk

Some of these can cause liver cancer, including:

Aflatoxins: poisons made by molds that can grow on crops like corn and peanuts if they’re not stored the right way

Arsenic: a chemical that’s sometimes in well water

Thorium dioxide: a substance once used for some kinds of X-rays (it’s not used anymore)

Vinyl chloride: a chemical used to make some kinds of plastics

SIGNS AND SYMPTOMS OF LIVER CANCER

Most people don’t notice any signs of liver cancer early on. Here are some of the main symptoms:

-- Feel full easily or not want to eat

-- Have a lump below your right rib cage

-- Feel pain on the upper right side of your belly or near your right shoulder

-- Have an upset stomach

-- Have swelling in your belly

-- Feel tired and weak

-- Lose weight

--Have white, chalky poop and dark urine

-- Notice your skin and the whites of your eyes are a yellowish color

TESTS

If your doctor thinks you might have liver cancer, he may recommend:

Biopsy: He will take a small sample of your liver to test for cancer.

Blood tests: Checks how well your liver is working and look for things in your blood that may be signs of cancer, called tumor markers.

Imaging tests: This might be an ultrasound, CT scan, MRI, or an angiogram, which is a kind of X-ray that looks at your blood vessels.

STAGES

The stages tell you how far the cancer has spread:

Stage I: One tumor that hasn’t spread anywhere else

Stage II: One tumor that’s spread into blood vessels, or more than one tumor, but all smaller than 2 inches

Stage III: One tumor that’s spread to major blood vessels or nearby organs, or more than one tumor and at least one of them is larger than 2 inches

Stage IV: The cancer has spread to other body parts.

TREATMENT PLANS:

Treatment for liver cancer depends on the stage you have, as well as your age, overall health, and the health of your liver. If the cancer hasn’t spread and you don’t have other liver problems, you may have:

--Treatment: Surgery to remove the tumor

A liver transplant, where you get a new liver from a donor. This isn’t common.

--Treatment: Ablation Therapy

This tries to kill cancer cells in different ways:

Alcohol: Your doctor puts pure alcohol into the tumors to destroy them.

Freezing: Your doctor uses a thin, blunt instrument called a probe to freeze and kill tumor cells.

Heat: Microwaves can make enough heat to destroy tumors.

Electrical pulses: Bursts of electricity kill cancer cells (this is still being tested).

--Treatment: Targeted Therapy

Cancer cells work differently than normal cells. Targeted therapy uses drugs designed to attack cancer cells based on those differences. This may keep tumors from making blood vessels they need to survive, or it may stop tumor cells from dividing so they can’t grow.

CAN LIVER CANCER BE PREVENTED?

No, but you can lower your chances of getting liver cancer:

1. Get the hepatitis B vaccine.

2. Stay a healthy weight through the food you eat and exercise.

3. Limit the amount of alcohol you drink: up to one a day for women, two for men.

4. Don’t use intravenous (IV) drugs -- if you do, use clean needles.

5. Get tattoos and piercings only at safe, clean shops.

6. Practice safe sex.

Sources: WebMD, Healthline, and NIH

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Did You Know? Legal, But Poisoned Alcohol

Cause of death - Alcohol Poisoning

In the 1920s through to the mid-1930s, bootlegged whiskey and liquor that was made in homemade stills and gins often made people sick. That's because the liquor produced in these well-hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities.

But on December 24, 1926, it wasn’t tainted gin that poisoned them. It was the U.S. government.

To keep people from drinking during Prohibition, the government reverted to poison: redistilled industrial-grade alcohol. This was liquor that was initially produced for things like cleaning supplies and paint.

When they added unpleasant chemicals so that people wouldn't drink it, they called it "denaturing." It was tactic that had been used once before, back in 1906 for manufacturers who wanted to avoid taxes on spirits.

During Prohibition, people would steal the industrial alcohol and re-process it into a somewhat palatable liquor, then sell it to thirsty Americans, like Antonio Rizzo, who was arrested in Brooklyn in 1922 at the Eureka Chemical Company when he had in his possession 25 gallons of denatured alcohol and a reprocessing machine. They threw him in jail.

But pretty soon, the government decided that jailing these offenders wasn’t enough.

So in 1926, the President Calvin Coolidge's Administration decided to make the booze more toxic in the hopes that this would deter people from drinking the stuff.

The government ordered companies to add even more additives to the industrial alcohol, which actually made it lethal.

The government wanted to scare people into giving up drinking.

It didn’t work.

Instead, by the end of Prohibition in 1933, the federal poisoning program had killed at least 10,000 people.

There was an incident in 1928 in which 33 people in Manhattan died in three days, mostly from drinking wood alcohol.

Prohibition agents with a 2000-gallon illicit still, seized near Waldorf, Maryland, circa 1925.

Bootleggers

The government made no attempt to pretend that increasing the denaturing formula wouldn’t lead to deaths.

Seymour M. Lowman, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in charge of Prohibition, told citizens of the upper echelon of society that drinkers were "dying off fast from poison 'hooch' and that if the result was a more sober America, "a good job will have been done."

Industrial alcohol itself was a deadly cocktail of chemicals. A list of the additives and their uses from studies done by the New York City medical examiner in 1928 included the following:

Kerosene: A fuel made of distilled petroleum used today in jet engines, lamps, and cleaning solvent.

Brucine: A bitter and extremely poisonous alkaloid found in the seeds of the nux vomica plant that is used as an additive in lubricants and local anesthetics.

Gasoline: Refined petroleum used for internal combustion engines.

Benzene: A liquid from coal tar and petroleum that used to be in solvents, but is no longer used because it’s extremely carcinogenic.

Cadmium: A metal that resembles tin that’s used in plating, metal alloys, batteries, and pigments.

Zinc: A metal found in brass and used to galvanize iron and steel to protect against corrosion.

Mercury salts: A chemical compound of mercury and chlorine.

Nicotine: The chief active ingredient of tobacco that is also used in insecticides.

Ether: A highly flammable liquid used as an anesthetic and as a solvent.

Formaldehyde: A compound made from oxidized methyl alcohol that’s used as a disinfectant and preservative in resins and plastics.

Chloroform: A liquid used as a solvent that used to also be used as a general anesthetic.

Camphor: A crystalline compound used in insect repellent, as well as plastic and explosive production.

Carbolic acid: Also known as phenol, carbolic acid is a highly poisonous compound in antimicrobial and anesthetic solutions.

Quinine: A bitter alkaloid used to treat forms of malaria.

Acetone: A liquid made from oxidized isopropanol used as a solvent.

Just reading that list of additives is enough to make you sick. The government added rat poison, which is defies logic how the government didn't think that 'liquor' wasn't lethal enough to kill.

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Did You Know? Ancient Inventions You Thought Were Modern

It is surprising how many things we use every day that have been in use by humans for thousands of years. This list of ten things all predate the birth of Christ and they are all things that we are familiar with and might be regular users of some.