Thursday, March 31, 2011

Bacteria C. Difficile Spores and Klebsiella pneumoniae Resists Last Resort Drugs

Tags: Bacteria Klebsiella pneumoniae C. Difficile Spore Resistant Last Resort Drugs Carbapenem Vaccines Fear Healthy Colon Probiotics Healthy Person

I have noticed in the last several years that more famous people who get the best care in hospitals are dying of pneumonia. It is especially high in New York Hospitals, but has spread to 37 states according to a Scientific American April 2011 article I just read.

Mutated Klebsiella pneumoniae, a gram negative bacteria is especially worrisome because it has transferred this resistant gene to E. Coli which lives in the intestine of every human. It has been extremely hard to eliminate from Intensive Care rooms because the patients urine and feces tend to invariably contaminate the hands and clothes of the healthcare workers and doctors. Even more troubling is that there are apparently healthy carriers of this bacteria.

Recently I had an endoscopy operation to remove an olive from my esophagus. I was horrified that the endoscope sterilization process was not good enough to get rid of the mutated Klebsiella pneumoniae!

Recently I sent information on the difficulty of treating C. Difficile bacteria which produces spores when stressed so the antibiotics often do not work on the spores and release the bacteria when it is safe. Based on the article, a woman who was sure to die when nothing worked, was saved by a desperate attempt by the surgeon of adding healthy feces from her husband into her colon. She regained her health and left the hospital in several weeks. ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2011) —http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110321162001.htm

The lesson we all should follow is to do everything possible to keep us as healthy as possible with diet, exercise, and a daily dose of Probiotics from yogurt or individual pills. Costco just started selling them. I have found that fresh organic yogurt did wonders for my digestive system and have not got sick one day from the constantly changing wet and cold weather in Oregon.

A final caution. The Intensive Care unit at my hospital is filled with very sick Flu victims. Don’t believe the anti-vaccine fear scares who rely on the Internet instead of Science. We should require a course in the scientific method in every high school and college. I have never seen so much muddy thinking based on fear than I have seen from extremely intelligent college graduates who are not vaccinating their children.

Jim Kawakami, March 31, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

The Enemy Within: A New Pattern of Antibiotic Resistance by Maryn McKenna, March 22, 2011, A new pattern of resistance has emerged among a particularly challenging group of bacteria called the gram-negatives; it threatens to make many common infections untreatable.

The bacterial genes responsible confer resistance to the carbapenems, a group of so-called last-resort antibiotics. Two of the most important resistance genes are dubbed NDM-1 and KPC.

Carbapenem resistance in gram-negative bacteria is especially worrisome because these germs are ubiquitous and share genes easily. Plus, no new drugs for these bugs are being developed.

This confluence of factors means many people in hospitals and in the wider community could die of newly untreatable infections of the urinary tract, blood and other tissues.

Supplemental Material

Sidebar
Antibiotic Resistance Is Taking Out 'Last-Resort' Drugs Used to Combat Worrisome Category of Germs

In early summer 2008 Timothy Walsh of Cardiff University in Wales got an e-mail from Christian Giske, an acquaintance who is a physician on the faculty of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. Giske had been treating a 59-year-old man hospitalized that past January in Örebro, a small city about 100 miles from Stockholm. The man had lived with diabetes for many years, suffered several strokes and had lately developed deep bedsores. But those were not the subject of Giske’s message. Instead he was worried about a bacterium that a routine culture had unexpectedly revealed in the man’s urine. Would Walsh, who runs a lab that unravels the genetics of antibacterial resistance, be willing to take a look at the bug?

Walsh agreed and put the isolate through more than a dozen assays. It was Klebsiella pneumoniae, a bacterium that in hospitalized patients is one of the most frequent causes of pneumonia and bloodstream infection. This strain, though, contained something new, a gene that Walsh had never seen before. It rendered the Klebsiella, which was already resistant to many antibiotics used in critical care medicine, insensitive to the only remaining group that worked reliably and safely—the carbapenems, the so-called drugs of last resort. The one medication the investigators found that had any effect on the resistant strain was colistin, a drug that had been out of general use for years because of its toxic effects on the kidneys. Walsh named the enzyme that this gene produced New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, or NDM-1, for the city where the man acquired the infection just before he returned home to Sweden. (Full copy on website for subscribers.)

Bacteria Antibiotic Resistance of C. Difficile Enhanced Forms Protective Spores When Stressed which can Reemerge Safe Climate ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2007) — http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070920111350.htm Hospitals world-wide battle nosocomial infections on a daily basis. One of the most difficult bacteria to combat is Clostridium.difficile. To help ensure the best control methods possible, Dr. Michael Libman, Director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), studied the most effective ways to eliminate C.difficile bacteria from the hands of health care workers, with the highest honour going to soap and warm water!


Dr. Libman's team, which included Dr. Oughton, Dr. Vivian Loo, director of the MUHC Department of Microbiology, and Susan Fenn, MUHC assistant Chief Technologist, tested five separate hand washing protocols that emulated hospital conditions as closely as possible. After the hands of the ten volunteers were contaminated with C.difficile, they washed successively with: regular soap and warm or cold water, antiseptic soap and warm water, an alcohol-based solution, and eventually with a disinfectant towel.


"The results were striking: the protocols that involved washing with water eliminated more than 98% of the bacteria, while washing with an alcohol-based solution eliminated almost none! The protocol involving a disinfectant towel eliminated around 95% of bacteria." stated Dr. Oughton.

A characteristic of the bacteria family to which Clostridium difficile belongs is the ability to produce spores when under stress. These spores, which are highly resistant, then produce new bacteria when favourable conditions return. Eliminating them is a major part of the challenge in controlling the bacteria. …


Thursday, March 24, 2011

Autism Link Brain Disorders Vitamin D Deficiency Supported Swedish Minnesota Studies

Tags: Vitamin D Deficiency Autism Somalis Sweden Minnesota Sharp Increase North Whites Summer Sun 1,000 IU per minute Vitamin D3 Mid-1980s USA Increase Began Studies 20 Animal and Human Studies Vitamin D Vital Normal Brain Function Cornell Studies Higher Autism Rainy Parts of Washington, Oregon, and California and Less Other Parts of Drier State

I heard briefly on TV about Autism and Vitamin D deficiency reported by Scientific American a few years ago. I recently started subscribing to Scientific American so I had access to its archives and found the article below. You can get the total 5 page article at the library or pay online a few dollars. This article with some other studies only strengthens my conclusion that Autism and widespread use of sunscreens of increasing SPF is the primary cause of Autism. Sunscreens were not mentioned in this article for whatever reasons.

In the 1980s both Australia and Sweden reported sharp increases Melanoma among Caucasians along with sharper increases among Somali Immigrants. In both cases sunscreens lowered vitamin D3 production which led to its deficiency.

Every to be mothers, and infants need to start taking much larger amounts of vitamin D3 due to a great loss in vitamin D from sun exposure. The vitamin D3 metabolite, 25-hydroxy-vitamin D, should be measured with blood tests. Do not let your doctor measure 1,25=dihydroxy-vitamin D metabolite which is produced by the kidneys. Every cell in our body converts 25-hydroxy D as needed into the active form to greatly improve our immune system to lower the risk of infections and autoimmune diseases.

Adults also need to start taking supplements of at least 2,000 to 4,000 IU of vitamin D3 daily. 10,000 IU over long periods have been found not be toxic. Even those who took one million IU daily for a month survived but got very sick from high calcium levels in the blood. Many patients take 50,000 IU of vitamin D3 every week for a month and then take it every other week to cure osteoporosis with much less risk than Big Pharma drugs. It does not happen immediately, but should help greatly over a year. The vitamin D3 metabolite gets activated in the intestines to help transfer the calcium into the blood stream.

Jim Kawakami, March 24, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

What If Vitamin D Deficiency is a Cause of Autism? Scientific American. Gabrielle Glaser, April 24, 2009, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vitamin-d-and-autism At northern latitudes in the summertime, light-skinned people produce about 1,000 international units (IUs) of vitamin D per minute, but those with darker skin synthesize it more slowly, says Adit Ginde, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine. Ginde recommends between 1,000 to 2,000 IUs per day, calling current recommendations of 200 IUs per day outmoded.”

“The idea, although not yet tested or widely held, comes out of preliminary studies in Sweden and Minnesota. Last summer, Swedish researchers published a study in Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology that found the prevalence of autism and related disorders was three to four times higher among Somali immigrants than non-Somalis in Stockholm.”

“Gene Stubbs, an associate professor emeritus of psychiatry and pediatrics at Oregon Health & Science University, says the preliminary research is already intriguing. "We don't have proof, but I am certainly leaning in the direction that this hypothesis could be correct for a proportion of kids," says Stubbs, who has been studying autism for 30 years. He is launching a pilot study of 150 pregnant women who have at least one child diagnosed with the disorder. The women will receive 5,000 IUs of vitamin D3 during gestation and 7,000 IUs during lactation. "If we find that we are able to reduce the recurrence rate of autism within families substantially enough, others will want to study this in larger groups with larger controls."

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Microbes Digestive Intestines Obesity Malnutrition Crohn’s Healthy or Sick

Tags: Gut Microbes Type Influence Our Health, Obesity, Alzheimer's, Depend on Diet, High Fructose Dangers


Many of our health problems arise not from our genes, but whether the genes are turned off or on which can be influenced by diet, vitamin D3 from pills or sun without sunscreens, and possibly even all the chemicals we take whether from antibiotics, hormones, food we eat and drink. We are what we eat and drink which influences the type of gut microbes we carry around.


When I lived in Los Angeles, the medications I had to take daily were causing me daily bouts of either diarrhea or constipation. It was driving me crazy. When I moved to Eugene, Oregon, I finally decided on a diet with foods that normally cause diarrhea with foods that cause constipation. After making adjustments on the way, I now have a perfectly regular healthy feces twice a day on a high fiber diet. Even my rice is brown which takes 50 minutes to cook, not the 20 minutes for White Rice which is fiber stripped just like almost all processed foods to cut microwave time and cooking time at the manufacturing plant.


The main point of this research below was to show that lab grown gut microbes under anaerobic conditions behave similarly to the original digestive track microbes. Human microbes were successfully transplanted to mice.


As I reported earlier, a woman near death from antibiotic resistant C. Difficile bacteria was given a small sample of healthy gut microbes from her husbands feces which saved her life and allowed her to leave the hospital in several weeks. Her husband’s microbes replaced the wife’s one which was not able to fight the resistant bacteria with one that could.


Two important lessons. The composition of the gut microbes is strongly determined by what we eat. A common American diet of fat and sugars (High Fructose Corn Syrup prepared enzymatically from corn sugar to pure fructose and glucose.) gives a different profile of microbes from one that is based on high fiber, non-meat, vegetables, and fruits, not fruit juice which has a much higher content of fructose. This diet makes us crave sugar and fat and can lead to demential or Alzheimer's Disease among others.


Our digestive intestinal track is the second brain and immune system which creates hard to deny hunger pangs for more sugar and fat in a typical American diet, especially in manufactured foods free of fiber, flavor, and loaded with high fructose corn syrup and countless additives to make it palatable and preserve it for years. The nutrition guru, Pollan at the University of California, Berkeley, says that anything that contains more than 5 additives should be rejected. Eat when hungry, but eat slowly chewing extra well, and eat food you like that is free of sugar as much as possible. Fructose metabolizes to lipids that are likely responsible for dementia, obesity, and metabolic syndrome.


Jim Kawakami, March 23, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com


ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2011) — http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110321162001.htm Each of us carries a unique collection of trillions of friendly microbes in our intestines that helps break down food our bodies otherwise couldn't digest.


This relationship between humans and their microbes is generally a healthy one, but changes to the mix of microbes in the digestive tract are suspected to play a role in obesity, malnutrition, Crohn's disease and other ailments.

Now, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis show they can grow and manipulate personalized collections of human intestinal microbes in the laboratory and pluck out particular microbes of interest.

The research sets the stage for identifying new probiotics and evaluating in preclinical trials whether microbe transplants can restore the natural balance of intestinal bacteria in "sick" microbial communities.

The research, by Jeffrey I. Gordon, MD, the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor and director of the Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology, and his team is reported online March 21 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ...

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Epigenetics in Cancer: What’s the Future? Promising Drugs?

Tags: Epigenetics in Cancer Treatments, Review, Future Drugs, Causes, Histone, DNA Methylation, Demethylation, Cell Dissociation, Apotheosis Cancer Cell Death, Vitamin D Role Health and Cancer

Although some of you will not be able to understand the various terms and are not familiar with the various drugs as I am not, I thought that some of you would appreciate that we are getting closer to understanding more completely how our cells can become cancerous and increase into tumors and spread throughout our body.


The key thing in our body that can lead to cancer for our cells to dissociate, a topic not discussed in the article, which makes our DNA more susceptible to attack by outside forces such as methylation or demethylation of our genes to deactivate our ability to fight cancer.


Unfortunately many of you are either too busy or not interested in reading technical articles because it takes time and is often not written well enough for us to understand.


I just want you to understand the role vitamin D3 and its metabolites play in reducing the chance for cancer as a recent study by the University of California, San Diego, did in Texas with thousands of seniors. They were shocked that it took 4,000 IU of vitamin D3 daily to largely stop cancer production by 50 percent.


Once cancer is advanced, it puts out proteins and enzymes that can block the action of vitamin D3 by attaching to the same receptor or degrading vitamin D metabolite so it behooves all of us to consider taking vitamin D3 daily at elevated levels. Because it is needed in every cell in our bodies and not just for bones, taking 4,000 IU or higher is really not that much.


The unit IU is International Units used for vitamin D3 capsules is based on its molecular weight instead of the simpler weight used in many medications and over the counter supplements. The amount in your blood at midlevel of 50 nanograms per milliliter is 50 billionth of a gram per milliliter. A milliliter is one thousand of a liter.


Michael F. Holick, Ph.D., M.D. Boston University Medical School, recently published the Book The Vitamin D Solution: A 3-Step Strategy to Cure Our Most Common Health Problem, one of the pioneers in defunded vitamin D research speculated that taking the well known fact that normal cells have to separate from the cluster of cells to become cancerous. He knows that vitamin D causes cancerous cells to commit suicide or apotheosis.


In the article below the scientists discussed the DNA wrapped around the irregular alkaline histone proteins which can be pictured as a spool wrapped by DNA threads. Changes in the histone proteins may make it easier for the DNA to unravel making cancer formation easier by way of methylation or demethylation process which turns genes off or on.


It is also known that one of the deadliest and usually fatal cancer is ovarian cancer. We know that this cancer destroys vitamin D so post treatment with vitamin D is largely ineffective because it is usually detected too late when tumor becomes large.


As I have often repeated, get the inflammation test, the C-Reactive Protein Test which is as cheap as a cholesterol lipids test. It can detect infections, and inflammations resulting from cancer and fresh plaque in your arteries.


Whenever there is an infection, cancer, plaque formation, or uric acid inflammation of blood vessels when we consume too much High Fructose Corn Syrup, the inflammatory Cytokines [C] are produced. Corn sugar is enzymatically converted to fructose and glucose by a Japanese process developed in the 1973.


It was not that popular until Reagan gave corn a huge subsidy which made it as cheap as dirt so it is now in just about everything we eat at Fast Food joints and restaurants, especially Colas such as Coke and Pepsi, which gave us the huge increase in obesity and overweight Americans since 1985.


All the wealth increase in the 1980s was made by the top one percent by huge tax cuts and deficits. The sunscreens with blocking the penetrating UVA increased melanoma. Some tanning salon owners are finally saying the Dermatologists and Big Pharma are using propaganda in ads and comments to deemphasize to attributes of taking vitamin D3 supplements or getting the same from tanning salons during the winter.


Remember Corporations hire psychologists to optimize their propaganda, and professors to support their views. Trust Us, We’re Experts book has reams of examples showing this happens all the time. Yes, even the New York Times gives us propaganda. There have always been rumors that the CIA propagandist occupy the basement at the New York Times.


So read the whole article without a point of view. Hint, the later paragraphs give the most important information, thanks to the banks of editors who write the headlines and the first six paragraphs on the front page and throughout the newspaper. In the recount of the Bush Coup, the front page headline in huge block letters was Bush Would Have Won Anyway. I came to an opposite conclusion after reading 5 jump pages!


The George W. Bush Coup with the help of Jeb Bush taking 100,000 Democratic voters off the voting roll illegally and especially the Scalia Supreme Court stopping the recount. The guild of newspapers found that Gore would have won with any permutation of how the recount votes were counted! It is ironic that those who profess the most religiousity also violate the teachings of Jesus in the Christian religion and even turned the religion on its head by the radical Evangelicals reversing the teachings of Jesus during the late eighteen eighties or the Renaissance Popes such as the Borgia family. A series starts on Showtime soon starring


Jim Kawakami, March 19, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com


REVIEW ARTICLE

Epigenetics in Cancer: What's the Future?


By Yanis Boumber, MD, PhD1, Jean-Pierre J. Issa, MD2 | March 16, 2011


1 Hematology/Oncology Fellowship Program, Division of Cancer Medicine, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas

2 Department of Leukemia, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas


ABSTRACT: Epigenetics is a rapidly expanding field that focuses on stable changes in gene expression that are not accompanied by changes in DNA sequence and that are mediated primarily by DNA methylation and histone modifications. Disruption of the epigenome is a fundamental mechanism in cancer, and several epigenetic drugs that have proved to prolong survival and to be less toxic than conventional chemotherapy were recently approved by the FDA for cancer treatment. These include azacitidine (Vidaza), decitabine (Dacogen), vorinostat (Zolinza), and romidepsin (Istodax).


Promising results of combination clinical trials with DNA methylation inhibitors and histone deacetylase inhibitors have recently been reported, and data are emerging that describe molecular determinants of clinical responses. Despite significant advances, challenges remain, including a lack of predictive markers, unclear mechanisms of response and resistance, and rare responses in solid tumors. Preclinical studies are ongoing with novel classes of agents that target various components of the epigenetic machinery. In this review, we focus on recent clinical and translational data in the epigenetics field that have potential in cancer therapy.


pastedGraphic.pdf


Epigenetic mechanisms; Source: National Institute of Health

http://www.cancernetwork.com/cancer-genetics/content/article/10165/1822105 Epigenetics is defined as the study of stable changes in gene expression that are not accompanied by changes in DNA sequence.[1] Epigenetic changes are important biological processes with relevance to all multicellular organisms. Studies in various models have shown that epigenetic regulation is critical for proper embryogenesis and development. Several mechanisms of epigenetic change have been described, and all seem to be interdependent to some degree. DNA methylation, posttranslational modifications of histones, and chromatin remodeling enzymes mediate epigenetic changes in many organisms.


It has become clear that disruption of the epigenetic machinery plays a fundamental role in cancer development. Tumors often exhibit global hypomethylation, hypermethylation of CpG islands, and genome-wide alterations in the levels of histone modifications. These abnormalities are associated with widespread changes in gene expression, which are thought to contribute to tumor formation by affecting oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes.[1]


What Is Epigenetic Therapy?
The understanding that epigenetic changes are prevalent in cancer and play a causative role in its biology has led to the development of new therapeutic approaches that target the epigenetic machinery. The first successful drugs developed as epigenetic agents were DNA methyltransferase inhibitors; these were followed by histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDIs). Both classes of drugs aim at reversing gene silencing and demonstrate antitumor activity in vitro and in vivo. Several other classes of drugs have been developed that target various other components of the epigenetic machinery; one such class is the histone methyltransferases, with new drugs in this class currently in early preclinical development Click on Table below to get readable table. (Table 1). … http://www.cancernetwork.com/cancer-genetics/content/article/10165/1822105?pageNumber=1 10 more pages!

Friday, March 18, 2011

Nuclear Reactor Fukushima Not Chernobyl Worse Case Local Water Contaminated

Tags: Scares Overwrought, Nuclear Reactor, Fukushima Chernobyl Compared, Radioactivity Mostly Local, Water Contamination Danger, French Nuclear Reactors Best

Propublica is a reliable source of information as you can see below, unlike the corporate press and media who tend to slant news stories in such a subtle way that very few notice it. Clue: Don’t discuss certain things and emphasize others. Polls are used to sway public opinion. How can the people be wrong?


I guess the word Plutonium has been wiped from the corporate press and media vocabulary. This is one major product from the fission of uranium 235. The French are the most sophisticated Nuclear Reactor system experts in the world. They have been able to recycle Plutonium as fuel which I suspect will greatly lessen the dangers of the heating of the spent fuel.


Another topic not discussed is that one-third of our uranium tipped weapons such as bombs, missiles, antitank arms and even bullets are tipped with uranium and 1/3 nuclear reactor wastes with plutonium removed to make them more penetrating such as through buildings. We have not been building nuclear reactors for a long time. When no product is being produced, the workers are fired. Our guided bombs are also tipped with a one-third of nuclear wastes and two-third uranium. Some of the fission isotopes which decay faster than Plutonium are deadlier.


Although strongly denied by our military, the cancer rate in Iraqi children mushroomed after we started using these weapons in the wars against Iraq, especially in Basra, the oil town. In the first Gulf War, some of these weapons were used in Saudi Arabia. The uranium plus dust had to cleaned up. The First American Team all got sick and died. The team leader had failed kidneys and was the leader in determining the toxicity of these uranium tipped weapons, but Clinton did nothing about them. Fighting off the sex scandals consumed all his time. Shows how powerful billionaires can be in smearing politicians.


Preteens had a large increase in breast cancers and the number of birth deformed babies went up sharply. When the New York National Guard soldiers complained about various ills and sophisticated tests reveal radioactive isotopes in the soldiers blood as reported by the New York Daily News and repeated once by a Long Island newspaper.


Except for short comments by Senator Clinton and Schumer, the story died. As far as I know the all the news fit to print newspaper did not report it at all.


All attempts to bring this to the public eye failed. Only Pacifica Radio reported it as well as Democracy Now. Juan Gonzales wrote the story at the Daily News and he and Amy Goodman discussed it extensively. See www.democracynow.org


The good news is that the public now knows on a more direct level that the nuclear wastes are very deadly which could be blown up by terrorists or stolen and used in cities. One fact not often reported is that Al Qaeda 911 terrorists considered driving the plane into the nearby nuclear reactor. Perhaps they had some modicum of humanity and decided not to do it.


Jim Kawakami, March 18, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com




pastedGraphic.pdf

A TV news broadcast of an explosion at Japan's Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant on March 16, 2011 (Photo by Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images)

http://www.propublica.org/article/six-ways-fukushima-is-not-chernobyl The crisis at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi has already been dubbed the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, and the situation there continues to worsen.

But along with references to the "ch-word," as one nonproliferation expert put it, experts have been quick to provide reasons why the Daiichi crisis will not be "the next Chernobyl."

Experts have noted several key differences in the design of the reactors in question, as well as in the government's reaction to the crisis:

1. Chernobyl's reactor had no containment structure.

The RBMK reactor at Chernobyl "was regarded as the workhorse of Soviet atomic energy, thrifty and reliable -- and safe enough to be built without an expensive containment building that would prevent the release of radiation in the event of a serious accident," The Guardian's Adam Higginbotham noted.

As a result, when a reactor exploded on April 26, 1986, the radioactive material inside went straight into the atmosphere.

Fukushima's reactors are surrounded by steel-and-concrete containment structures. However, as the New York Times reported Tuesday, the General Electric Mark 1 reactors at Fukushima have "a comparatively smaller and less expensive containment structure" that has drawn criticism from American regulators. In a 1972 memo, a safety official suggested that the design presented serious risks and should be discontinued. One primary concern, the Times reported, was that in an incident of cooling failure -- the kind Fukushima's reactors are now undergoing -- the containment structures might burst, releasing the radioactive material they are supposed to keep in check.

At least one of Fukushima's reactors -- No. 2 -- seems to have cracked, and has been releasing radioactive steam. The seriousness of this breach is still unclear, with a Japanese government official maintaining on Wednesday that the damage to the containment structure may not be severe.

2. Chernobyl's reactors had several design flaws that made the crisis harder to control. Most crucially, their cooling system had a "positive void coefficient," which means that as coolant water is lost or turns into steam, the reaction speeds up and becomes more intense, creating a vicious feedback loop.

Shan Nair, a nuclear safety expert who spent 20 years analyzing the consequences of Loss of Coolant Accidents like the one at Fukushima, discussed this factor on TIME's Econcentric blog. Nair was a member of a panel that advised the European Commission on how to respond to Chernobyl. As he explained:

[Fukushima] can't be Chernobyl because the Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs) at Fukushima are designed differently than the High Power Channel-type Reactor (RBMK) reactor at Chernobyl. The RBMK was designed so that the hotter the core gets the greater the reactivity -- so you have a situation where you are in a vicious cycle and a race to an explosion. [Fukushima's] BWRs are designed in such a way that the hotter it gets the less radioactive the core gets so there is a self-shutdown type of mechanism. But the problem is that before you can get to a safe level you might have a complete meltdown. I believe that's what they are battling against now in Japan.

3. The carbon in Chernobyl's reactor fueled a fire that spewed radioactive material further into the atmosphere. Fukushima's reactors do not contain carbon, which means that the contamination from an explosion would remain more localized.

Dr. Colin Brown, director of engineering for the UK-based Institution of Mechanical Engineers, described another of the Chernobyl reaction's design flaws in a post on the Institution's website explaining why it was "unlikely" that Fukushima "will turn into the next great Chernobyl with radiation spread over a big area." He wrote:

The reason why radiation was disseminated so widely from Chernobyl with such devastating effects was a carbon [graphite] fire. Some 1,200 tonnes of carbon were in the reactor at Chernobyl and this caused the fire which projected radioactive material up into the upper atmosphere causing it to be carried across most of Europe. There is no carbon in the reactors at Fukushima, and this means that even if a large amount of radioactive material were to leak from the plant, it would only affect the local area.

Britain's Chief Scientific Officer, Sir John Beddington, made a similar point about the localized nature of an explosion in a speech about Fukushima on Tuesday:

In this reasonable worst case you get an explosion. You get some radioactive material going up to about 500 metres up into the air. Now, that's really serious, but it's serious again for the local area. It's not serious for elsewhere even if you get a combination of that explosion it would only have nuclear material going in to the air up to about 500 metres...And to give you a flavour for that, when Chernobyl had a massive fire at the graphite core, material was going up not just 500 metres but to 30,000 feet [about 9144 metres]. It was lasting not for the odd hour or so but lasted months, and that was putting nuclear radioactive material up into the upper atmosphere for a very long period of time. But even in the case of Chernobyl, the exclusion zone that they had was about 30 kilometres. And in that exclusion zone, outside that, there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate people had problems from the radiation.

One of the most pressing worries about Fukushima is that radiation might be spewed into the atmosphere not from reactors themselves, but from spent fuel rods exposed to the air once the pool of water protecting them boils away. According to the Los Angeles Times, U.S. officials believe one of the spent fuel pools has been breached, potentially exposing 130 tons of uranium.

4. Unlike Chernobyl, however, a meltdown at Daiichi could end up contaminating the water table.

One troubling possibility that has received little attention is that a reactor meltdown could send radioactive material downwards until it reaches the water table, which could contaminate both water supply and crops. Discussing Daiichi on TIME's Ecocentric blog, Nair, the nuclear safety expert, noted:

If the entire fuel has melted the odds are it will go straight through the pressure vessel and therefore through the ground until it gets to the water table. Then it will cool down, but the problem is that the water table will start leaching actinides and fission products from the melted glob of fuel into the environment. So you will end up with some radioactive contamination of water supplies and ultimately crops and other products. That's a major problem because radioactive particles are much more dangerous when digested -- they cause internal irradiation of organs with resulting increased cancer risks...The severity of the water table risk depends on the local topography -- it depends on the depth of the water table, which itself moves up and down. I would imagine the water table is quite close to the surface right now because of all the flooding, which is not good.

At Chernobyl, fears that the radioactive material from the exploded reactor would reach the water table prompted a massive two-part project: first, to use liquid nitrogen to freeze the ground beneath the exploded reactor, and secondly, to build a shielding structure beneath the reactor. Although the effort exposed many miners to intense radiation, it was ultimately unnecessary.

5. Much of the public health impact of Chernobyl was the result of the Soviet government's attempt to cover up the crisis, rather than moving quickly to inform and protect the public.

In Japan, the government evacuated the 20 kilometers, or 12 miles, surrounding the Fukushima plant fairly quickly, and have continued to upgrade the warnings to citizens in the vicinity (although, according to the United States government, not quickly enough).

That didn't happen at Chernobyl. In the sunny April morning after the explosion, the residents of the nearby town of Pripyat were left to go about their business. As the Guardian has noted, children went to school, an outdoor wedding was celebrated, and sunbathers went out to enjoy the good weather, as the plume from the exploded reactor continued to fill the air with radioactive particles.

One of the plant's employees, who had been away on business, returned home to find his wife outside in the garden, where she was paying no attention to the small pieces of graphite that had landed "on the petals of her wild strawberry plants." Before long, the sunbathers began to experience strange cases of nausea and vomiting. The town would not be evacuated until the next day. And it was only after heightened levels of radioactivity set off alarms at a nuclear plant in Sweden that the Soviet government finally admitted publicly that something had gone wrong.

The delay and denial had serious implications, including an epidemic of thyroid cancer among about 6,000 people exposed to radiation as children.

As the New York Times noted, this epidemic "would probably not have happened if people had been told to stop drinking locally produced milk, which was by far the most important source of radiation."

(Russia distributed iodine tablets, as has Japan. But as we reported on Monday, these offer little protection against ingesting contaminating food or milk.)

6. Emergency workers at Chernobyl took few precautions, and may not have been fully informed about the risks they were taking.

The "Fukushima 50" who stayed at the plant on Tuesday and Wednesday to keep containment efforts underway have been facing serious risks. But they have been taking precautions, the Times reported, including breathing through respirators, wearing full-body jumpsuits, and limiting their exposure time.

At Chernobyl, the Guardian wrote:

[The firefighters] had had no protective clothing, or dosimetric equipment to measure radiation levels; the blazing radioactive debris fused with the molten bitumen, and when they had put the fires out with water from their hoses, they picked up chunks of it in their hands and kicked it away with their feet.... This heroic but utterly futile action took them closer to a lethal source of radiation than even the victims of Hiroshima...When they died two weeks later in Hospital No 6, Zakharov heard that the radiation had been so intense the colour of Vladimir Pravik's eyes had turned from brown to blue; Nikolai Titenok sustained such severe internal radiation burns there were blisters on his heart. Their bodies were so radioactive they were buried in coffins made of lead, the lids welded shut.

The Times noted that 28 of Chernobyl's emergency workers died from radiation exposure within three months, and more than 100 developed radiation sickness.

Chernobyl's final toll of deaths and injuries is still a subject of fierce debate. A 2005 Chernobyl Forum report, jointly produced by eight UN agencies and the governments of the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Berlarus, concluded that up to "4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure" from Chernobyl, including 50 emergency workers who died of acute radiation syndrome, 15 children (as of 2005) who had died of thyroid cancer, and a projected total of "3940 deaths from radiation-induced cancer and leukemia" among emergency workers, evacuees, and residents of the most contaminated areas around Chernobyl. (The report noted that it's impossible to tell which cancer deaths in the region were specifically caused by Chernobyl radiation, only that there is an expected 3 percent increase.)

Lois Beckett writes for the Nieman Journalism Lab, the SF Weekly, and the East Bay Express.

Inform our investigations: Do you have information or expertise relevant to this story? Help us and journalists around the country by sharing your stories and

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Financials Japan Nuclear Plants Supply Chain Risk Feds Free Money Caution Need?

Tags: Gillian Tett Insight, MacIntosh Short View, Japan Nuclear Reactors, Supply Chain Complexity, Buy i-Phone, i-Pad Now

In the article today which I read while watching Sorcerer’s Stone again, I read Gillian Tett’s Insight article in the March 16, 2011 Financial Times, titled Japan’s Supply Chain Risk Reverberates Across the Globe.


She thought one reason for the collapse of the world’s financial system is its great complexity where one really did not understand what would happen because many investors did not realize the extent of these essentially secret world-wide distribution of all these fancy financial derivatives. The companies like Moody were essentially giving these instruments AAA ratings even though they did not really understand them. They unfortunately relied on banks such as J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs to “explain” these "safe" instruments.


I thought the risk was essentially in the USA, but how wrong I was so I did not short the S&P 500 and get out of stocks!


Tett uses the same argument about the complexity of our supply chain where the i-Phone, for example, depends on nine companies in different countries with Japan being important too. So if you want to buy the i-Phone or i-Pad, order it now. You might get it. Apple decided not to open sales in Japan because of the potential shortage.


In another analysis in the FT, Lindsay Whipp and Robert Cookson tells us that most of the Japan market selling was done mostly by foreign fund managers. What happens to the world economy depends on how successful Japan is in lowering the risk of further radioactive leaks.


James MacIntosh in The Short View explains the risk is minuscule that the Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant will turn into a new Chernobyl. I agree based on the restoration of electricity to the plant. A Canadian Japanese theoretical physicist who is popular on radio and television unfortunately ignorantly called for a possibility of another Chernobyl and on Maddow show a Carnegie Peace fellow, an organization I do not trust, made some outrageous comments about the nuclear plants dangers to worsen the current scare climate.


Contaminated Meat from China: Although we tend to blame the Chinese for adulterated products such as Heparin, dog food, and now chilled processed meats on China, at least a large part of the blame should be placed on American companies such as Walmart and Big Pharma who demand such low prices that the Chinese manufacturers have to avoid paying their workers to meet the American price threat of going to Vietnam. As in the Stock Market crash all American investors are to blame. We insist on low prices no matter the consequences to our supplier, and force companies to increase profits each quarter or we will sell their stock!


Investor Caution? We may expect more bad news says Hal Weitzman and Daniel Pimlott of FT, March 17, 2011. Many owners may opt for bankruptcy as the economy heats up because of a freeing up of credit. As I said before the financial market is too hard for me to really understand. I do understand that the risks are not over. I increased my holdings in global fixed income shares, put my toes into real estate REIT now because everyone is negative which allows me to wait getting six percent interest rates.


Sure folks are buying Treasury bonds again, but I would not make them long term holdings. Remember the Federal Reserve was formed for the Rich People by calling it not a National Bank which President Jackson, the people’s President, with the exception of Native Americans and Mexicans. In the panic of 1907, J.P. Morgan, one of the Robber Barons, himself kept the US financial system from collapsing. In 1913, the Federal Reserve was reformed to keep the rich folks rich by checking inflation to keep their bonds from falling. Bernanke said today that he will continue to allow zero interest loans for the rich a while longer and not end it in June as he indicated not too long ago so apparently he does not think inflation is just over the hill. I agree.


Jim Kawakami, March 17, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Dog Behavior Problems: Dogs Helped Humans Survive, but Not Now

Tags: Dog Behavior Problems: Dogs Helped Humans Survive, but Not Now

Perhaps growing up in a severely racist society in Los Angeles, made me more an observer than an actor except when I had no choice, then my natural aggressive behavior seen in my scientific research was expressed with fists. My outlet has been in sports such as tennis, baseball, and skiing.

I have known for a long time that dogs are herd animals are much like us. We have bosses and followers. Dogs should not be the bosses, but they often are. This happens more with gentle woman than men.

Caesar Millan on National Geographic indicate that woman have more problems with uncontrollable dogs than men. Part of the problem with bad behavior results from neglect during the day because dogs don't like to be alone like cats. Take time to train your dog with a professional. I suspect that conservatives may not necessarily love their dogs, but they like to dominate so probably have more success in controlling bad behavior.

My brother likes Pit Bulls and has no problems with the many dogs he has had because he is a kind boss. In fact the dogs have been quite friendly even though I have seen them infrequently. Just like children, time, love, and discipline produces good dogs.

I had an Apple Head Siamese cat who was very affectionate which I had to give up because of allergies. I got many calls from people from New York to Canada to pay for my cat. Even though I got some high offers, I decided to give Kia to someone I thought would provide the best environment and love. I chose well when I picked Sheri in Canada. He became her favorite.

Jim Kawakami, March 15, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Dog Behavior Problems, Benedict Carey, NY Times, March 14, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/health/15pets.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general First, he tore up his dog toys. Then shredded the furniture, clothes, schoolbooks — and, finally, any semblance of family unity. James, a chocolate-brown pointer mix, turned from adorable pet to problem child in a matter of weeks.

The big bone of contention was that my mom and my sister thought that he was too smart to be treated like a dog; they thought he was a person and should be treated as such — well, spoiled,” said Danielle, a Florida woman who asked that her last name not be published to avoid more family pet strife. “The dog remains to this day, 10 years later, a source of contention and anger.”

Psychologists long ago confirmed what most pet owners feel in their bones: that for some people bonds with animals are every bit as strong as those with other humans. And less complicated, for sure; a dog’s devotion is without detectable irony, a lap cat’s purring without artifice (if not disapproval).

Yet the nature of individual human-pet relationships varies widely, and only now are scientists beginning to characterize those differences, and their impact on the family. Pets alter not only a family’s routines, after all, but also its hierarchy, its social rhythm, its web of relationships. Several new lines of research help explain why this overall effect can be so comforting in some families, and a source of tension in others. The answers have very little to do with the pet.

“The word ‘pet’ does not really capture what these animals mean in a family, first of all,” said Froma Walsh, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and co-director of the Chicago Center for Family Health. The prevalent term among researchers is now “companion animal,” she said, which is closer to the childlike role they so often play.

“And in the way that children get caught up in the family system as peacekeepers, as go-betweens, as sources of disagreement, the same happens with pets.”

People cast these roles in part based on the sensations and memories associated with their first Princess or Scooter, psychologists say — echoingFreud’s idea of transference, in which early relationships provide a template for later ones. In many families, this means that Scruffy is the universal peacemaker, the fulcrum of shared affection.

In a family interview reviewed by Dr. Walsh in a recent paper, one mother said that the best way to end an argument between siblings was to bark, “Stop fighting, you’re upsetting Barkley!” “This is always more effective than saying, ‘Stop hitting your brother,’ ” the mother said. (Barkley made no comment.)

Animals often sense these expectations and act on them. In a video recording of another family discussed in the paper, the cat jumps on a woman’s lap when it senses an impending argument with her husband. “And it works,” Dr. Walsh said. “It reduces tension in both; you can see it happening.”

“She’s my first child,” said Adrienne Woods, a cellist in Los Angeles, of Bella, the Husky puppy that she and her fiancé just got. “The biggest upside is this sense of inner peace. I feel like a grandma, like I have a companion I’ve been wanting for 30 years.”

Yet pets can also raise tension, as millions of couples learn the hard way. The Animal Planet show “It’s Me or the Dog” is built on such cases. And Cesar Millan, a dog behavior specialist, has become a celebrity by helping people gain control over unruly hounds, bringing order into households with uncertain lines of authority.

Perhaps more often, pets become a psychological wedge not from lack of boundaries but because family members have diverging views of what a pet should be. And those views are shaped by cultural inheritance, more so than people may realize.

In a study of dog ownership, Elizabeth Terrien, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, conducted 90 in-depth interviews with families in Los Angeles, including Ms. Woods. One clear trend that has emerged is that people from rural backgrounds tend to see their dogs as guardians to be kept outside, whereas middle-class couples typically treat their hounds as children, often having them sleep in the master bedroom, or a special bed.

When asked to describe their pets without using the word “dog,” people in more affluent neighborhoods “came up with things like child, companion, little friend, teenage son, brother, or partner in crime,” Dr. Terrien said. In neighborhoods with a larger Latino immigrant population, owners were more likely to say “protector,” or even “toy for the children,” she found. “In those neighborhoods you’ll sometimes see kids yanking around a dog on the leash, pushing and playing, the sort of behavior that some middle-class owners would think of as abuse,” she said.

Such differences often emerge only after a family has adopted a pet, and they can exacerbate the more mundane disagreements about pet care, like how much to spend on vet bills, how often to walk the dog, how the animal should interact with young children. The fallout from such conflicts isn’t hard to find: Most everyone knows of couples who have quarreled over pets, or even divorced, because her spaniel nipped at his Rottweiler.

And there are countless single people out there all but married to some hairy Frida or Diego — banishing any potential partner who doesn’t fall quickly, and equally, in love.

The reason these feelings run so deep is that they are ideologies, as well as cultural and psychological dispositions. In the summer of 2007, David Blouin, a sociologist at Indiana University, South Bend, conducted extensive interviews with 35 dog owners around the state, chosen to represent a diverse mix of city, country and suburban dwellers.

He found that, as a rule, people fall into one of three broad categories of beliefs concerning pets. Members of one group, which he labels “dominionists,” see pets as an appendage to the family, a useful helper ranking below humans that is beloved but, ultimately, replaceable. Many people from rural areas — like the immigrants Dr. Terrien interviewed — qualified.

Another group of owners, labeled by Dr. Blouin as “humanists,” are the type who cherish their dog as a favored child or primary companion, to be pampered, allowed into bed, and mourned like a dying child at the end. These include the people who cook special meals for a pet, take it to exercise classes, to therapy — or leave it stock options in their will.

The third, called “protectionists,” strive to be the animal’s advocate. These owners have strong views about animal welfare, but their views on how a pet should be treated — whether it sleeps inside or outside, when it should be put down — vary depending on what they think is “best” for the animal. Its members include people who will “save” a dog tied to tree outside a store, usually delivering it home with a lecture about how to care for an animal.

“These are ideologies, and so protectionists are very critical of humanists, who are very critical of dominionists, and so on,” Dr. Blouin said. “You can see where this can create problems if people in a family have different orientations. Every little decision about the pet is loaded.”

Up until, and including, the end: Couples may not only disagree over when to put an animal down but also have vastly different emotional reactions to the loss. “For someone who’s been treating the pet like a child, it can feel like the loss of a child — and of course children are not supposed to die before their parents,” Dr. Terrien said. It’s an end-of-life crisis, which often begins a lengthy period of grieving. Whereas for the partner who sees the pet differently, the death may bring relief.

None of which is to say that a resourceful pet — using the combined power of cuteness, doleful stares and episodes of getting stuck in boxes or eating crayons — cannot bridge such opposing religions. But family therapists say that, usually, four-legged diplomats need some help from the two-legged kind to succeed.

“Families either figure it out and manage these differences,” Dr. Terrien said, “or they give up the pet — which happens far more often than people think.”

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Obesity Income College Ranking: States Rank Alzheimer’s Disease Mechanism

Tags: Obesity of the Poor and Middle Class Less Affluent Relation to Alzheimer's Disease Scientific Explanation


In the top Universities, the view is that it is behavior modification that really leads to permanent weight loss. For at least 95% of those who lost weight, they regained all the weight and more in 5 years. Weight Watchers is a program meant to modify behavior, but it costs too much to implement all the procedures even a good program fails.


Even at age four, we can predict his or her future success. It has to do with ignoring immediate gratification for larger rewards later. Candy now or much more candy later. That is why more successful individuals are not as obese as many others.


Two of the strongest urges are food and sex. If we are hungry, we eat no matter the consequences. As I said many times, do not drink fruit juices which is loaded with fructose which is metabolically converted to low density lipoproteins in our liver and to uric acid in our many cells which increases inflammation in our arteries enhancing deposition of cholesterol plaque.


Fructose somehow sabotages our satiety process in the Omentum organ in our belly. That is where triglycerides are stored. Don’t believe the recent publication that is saying that it does not matter where fat is stored. In very fat people, we cannot see this internal fat next to our organs. It is full of triglycerides, the source of our very low density lipoprotein cholesterol.

As we consume large amount of HFCS or an average of 150 pounds per year for Americans, fructose enzymes increases so we get a craving for this sugar and drink an excess of Coke and Pepsi to satisfy our craving. McDonalds giving us large amounts of fat and fructose results in pleasure hormones released by our brain which is similar to drug addiction. Very hard to stop. Depressed people eat more.


The South Beach diet forbids any fructose containing food for two weeks. Instead of following the rest of the diet, just eat good foods that you can eat all your life when you are hungry, but avoid eating too many fruits as our government recommends. By avoiding lunch, our body forces us to keep eating because hormones are produced to keep us hungry longer. Vegetables should contain fibrous foods like cauliflower, broccoli, or other similar class of vegetables. Carrots contain fructose so limit how much you eat. Search google for fructose content in fruits and vegetables. The Sugar Fix: The High-Fructose Fallout That Is Making You Fat and Sick by Richard J. Johnson, MD.


Dr. Johnson lists the amount of fructose in foods and proposes various changes in what we should eat to lose weight. Go for ten pounds which comes mostly from the Omentum Organ. I lost ten pounds very fast after two weeks of fructose fasting. I stopped drinking Apple and Orange juice. Apple juice is pure Fructose.


Thankfully, even the huge food products such as ketchup are changing from high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and to sucrose from cane sugar and beet sugar. For example, Wheat Thin is going to 100 percent whole wheat and replacing HFCS with sucrose.


HFCS is a 55/45% glucose to fructose mixture. For reasons not explained yet, sucrose which is a combined fructose and glucose structure, it does enzymatically convert to a mixture of fructose and glucose at some time after eating. The Fructose is metabolized mainly in the liver and inefficiently in all our cells. Fructose converts to glucose and 30 percent very low density lipoproteins which some claim including myself leads to heart attacks, strokes, and Alzheimer’s Disease, both genetic (1%) and not (99%). Too much fructose results in cirrhosis of the liver in a similar metabolic process as alcoholic drinks. Part of the aging phenomena.


For unknown reasons, the lesions in genetic and old age Alzheimer’s progress in different parts of the Hippocampus memory bank which kills the cells. The genetic process depends on not being able to metabolize very low density lipoproteins Putting more information input into the Hippocampus causes it to grow such as a taxi drive who memorizes his routes.


Like most diseases, Alzheimer’s probably has more than one route towards disease and not all dementia is fat based. Another possibility which has been largely ignored is the role of medications in dementia. At least a dozen are involved and even more in inducing cardiac arrest by disrupting the electrical signal needed for our heart to beat evenly.


Very recently we heard that the amount of beta-amyloid, the long associated cause of Alzheimer’s is turning out to be a protein needed in the brain and the production rate does not change, but the ability of the brain to get rid of excess proteins has been impaired. This reminded me of the effect of some antihistamines of blocking the enzyme that gets rid of excess proteins in our muscles.


Could the same thing be happening with the generation and brain penetration of very low density lipoprotein may block enzyme output to get rid of excess beta-amyloid in our brain. The excess protein along with another chemical blocks our synapses according to a recent publication.


One phenomena never explained by current theories is why some Alzheimer’s Patients get moments of clarity of various lengths so we need to think about why? The above explanation provides one answer. Perhaps a vegetarian (Vegan) diet or a macrobiotic diet may be a diet tried. They may have been, but not very much or else I would know about it.


Jim Kawakami, March 12, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com


Mississippi Tops State Obesity Ranking

State-by-State Ranking: Mississippians Most Massive, Coloradans Leanest

By Daniel J. DeNoon

WebMD Health News

Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

Aug. 29, 2006 -- Mississippians are the most massive Americans, while Coloradans are leanest, a state-by-state obesity survey shows.

Nearly 30% of Mississippi adult residents are obese. The state tops the new list from Trust for America's Health, a nonprofit group lobbying to make disease prevention a national priority.

But Mississippi isn't alone. It's among the 13 states in which at least one in four adult residents is obese.

The 10 states with the highest obesity rates are:

  1. Mississippi
  2. Alabama
  3. West Virginia
  4. Louisiana
  5. Kentucky
  6. Tennessee
  7. Arkansas
  8. Indiana (tie for 8th)
  9. South Carolina (tie for 8th)
  10. Texas

Colorado is the leanest state. But that's only by comparison: Seventeen percent of Coloradans are obese. Not even a single U.S. state is near the national goal of reducing the obesity rate to 15% by 2010. … http://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20060829/mississippi-tops-state-obesity-ranking