NFH Denver 2008

What an event! Our family had a great time. The factor company evening events were well attended and fun. The best in my mind was The CSL Game Face event. CSL had 11 Wiis they were giving away to the winner of 5 Wii games. The games were: swimming, golf, basketball, baseball, and bowling. The kids were separated by age (12 and under, and 13 to 18) and only kids with bleeding disorders were able to win. Once the event was started all the kids played the Wii games and the CSL reps kept track of high scores. At the end of the GAMES all the kids that played received a "gold" medal. Then, the winners of the individual Wii games were called up on the stage and awarded a Wii console. The 11th Wii was drawn from the attendants and given away.

I tried my feet at Dance Dance Revolution that evening. I don't know how they do it. I got boo-ed of the stage for missing too many steps.

Val Bias is our new CEO. I think it's a good pick. He has a vested interest in the betterment of our cause. I did hear a few things that concern me. Is he going to champion hemophilia or broaden the umbrella of our "cause" to include all blood disorders. He did comment of the safety of our blood supply. We have an interest in the blood supply being clean, but should "we" take on that cause? I don't know!? I also don't know about the joining of the local chapters. What's in it for me? What is in it for us? Do all the chapters need the same thing? the only thing I know for sure is.....
I don't want to be like the American Liver Foundation
The ALF is not much more than a money making local chapters for the national organization. They have a lot of national clout but what do they do for the local community. I haven't seen much and I don't want our Local Hemophilia Chapter to be money making chapters with no programming for the community.

I'll take a wait and see approach with Val - I've seen him in person before NHF Denver and I like what I hear. What is his slant? What is he going to do shake things up to validate him being appointed to CEO?

WOW that was a deviation from the topic...... back on point. I didn't see HFA at one of the booths. Anyone know why the Hemophilia Federation of America was not there?

The morning symposiums were great. The Wyeth breakfast on "It Takes A Village" was excellent. It was great to hear how some HTC use families to support other new families. Our HTC does not do this - I've asked. I wish we could have had a mentor family we could have called for the little challenges in life. Wyeth had two families come and describe what they did to help each other through life with hemophilia. I'd like my son to have a mentor and one day to be a mentor.

I love going to these national events. WHY? I learn so much about other communities and families. What they do and How they do it? An informed consumer is better for the community than an uniformed one. We can be more of a pain in the ass to the Association and HTC. I understand that they, the Association and HTC, want to do things the way they always have done it, but if it doesn't work, why not change how your doing it.

That last paragraph was crude and not well thought out. The overall idea is there.

What an I putting on my body?

Ever want to know what those long words we can't pronounce on the back our shampoo, toothpaste, makeup, soap, or other consumer products we use every day?

Here is a site that ranks the chemicals from 0(low hazard) to 10(high hazard). I don't know how they have done the ranking but it's a tool to discover what we are using on and in our bodies.

Click here - SKIN DEEP then type the ingredient you want to know more about or you can type the product name.

For example:
Water has a score of 0.
Barbasol Shaving Cream W/ Aloe Vera has a score of 5.
Jason natural cosmetics satin soap has a score of 5.
Benzene has a score of 10.

Thanks to Miryam (mama o' the matrices) for showing me this website.

Bottled Water is contaminated!??

In a two year study, a lab tests detected 38 chemicals in only 10 sampled brands. An average of 8 contaminants were found in each kind of bottled water. Contaminants include: coliform, bacteria, caffeine, acetaminophen, fertilizer, solvents, a radioactive element (strontium), chlorine byproducts, and plastic-making chemicals.

Other chemicals also found were arsenic, toluene, trihalomethanes. Go ahead and look up the ones you don't know anything about.

ARSENIC - A poison. TOLUENE - Cannot be excreted by regular means, so it must be metabolized by the body. 5% of the product is made into products that severely damage cells. TRIHALOMETHANES(THM) - Garbage term for chemical compounds in which three of the four hydrogen atoms of methane (CH4) are replaced by halogen atoms, like fluorine, chlorine, bromine, or iodine. Chloroform is the best known. Many THMs are carcinogenic - cause cancer.

Some of these contaminants came from pollutants often found in tap water. The Federal legal limit for THM is 80 parts per million(ppm), California has a limit of 10 ppm. Both Wal-Mart and Giant Food exceeded the International Bottled Water Association limit of 10 ppm. Wal-Mart's Sam's Choice water and Acadia of Giant Food supermarkets were over 35 ppm for THM. Wal-Mart also exceeded California's standard for a second chlorine byproduct, bromodichloromethane by five times.

Since chlorine is used as a disinfectant for tap water and bottled water is nothing more that tap water in a bottle, chlorine byproducts in bottled tap water should be expected. There are no better regulations on bottled water than that of tap water. Why are we are just willing to pay 1,900 times the cost for bottled tap water than we would pay for tap water.

My suggestion: Buy a filter for your sink or your house.

Just remember:

BUY a filter or BE a filter.

I'd rather buy a filter.

Bedbug Infestations on the Rise, Tough to Kill

This is nothing more that a direct copy and past - no credit is taken for a single word in this post. The phrase "don't let the bedbugs bite." takes on new meaning to me. After reading this article I have lots of questions.

The Columbus Dispatch By Elizabeth Gibson October 01, 2008

The red splotches and scabs along his arms make Colton Oser look like he's suffered a nasty case of chicken pox, but the itchy 3-year-old in Whitehall actually has been attacked by an infamous nighttime monster.

Bedbugs are on the rise across the country, and experts warn that central Ohio needs to start looking into a comprehensive control program before infestations spiral out of control.

"If you bury your head in the sand, you're going to get bitten, and it's just going to get worse and worse," said Susan Jones, an entomology professor at Ohio State University.

With a bedbug-awareness bill in the Ohio House and Cincinnati still recovering from infestation, Franklin County officials say they're just starting to look beyond case-by-case management.

"We need to step it up," said Charlie Broschart, supervisor for Franklin County community environmental health.

After a co-worker attended a conference on bedbugs in Cincinnati, Broschart said, they spent Monday morning brainstorming ways to make people more aware of the problem.

Bedbugs had been nearly eliminated from the U.S. in the 1950s, but they've sneaked back thanks to international travel and a ban on harsher pesticides such as DDT.

The county started counting bedbug complaints about a year ago as calls increased, but Broschart said there has yet to be a comprehensive effort to collect and analyze information on bedbugs in central Ohio.

There's also the matter of who is responsible.

"The question is: Is it a public-health issue or not?" Columbus Health Department spokesman Jose Rodriguez said. "Bedbugs are really looked upon as a nuisance issue."

OSU's Jones, however, said scabbing, secondary infections and the anxiety caused by fearing your own bed are serious health concerns.

Code enforcement handles individual complaints, but Jones recommends a centralized master plan.

She suggested a task force that combines the expertise of pest-control, health, code-enforcement and housing agencies. Trends would be easier to spot with all the complaints and treatment numbers in one place, and a task force also could coordinate a publicity campaign to tell people how to stop the spread of bedbugs.

People should seal infested furniture in plastic before disposing of it; travelers ought to check hotel beds for pests; and exterminators need to know that bedbugs are harder to kill than most insects, experts said.

Jones works with a similar task force in Hamilton County. The group was launched after the Cincinnati Health Department received 737 bedbug complaints in 2007 -- the same number as for mice, rats and roaches combined.

The Cincinnati department is requesting $348,000 for bedbug education and inspections for 2009, Assistant Health Commissioner Camille Jones said.

The agency's home page is crawling with bedbug videos, warning labels for furniture and the number for a bedbug hot line.

Columbus's health department released its own tip list in March as bedbug calls started coming in.

Ohio State University emptied 114 rooms in Jones Graduate Tower last year for bedbug control, and the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority has identified 124 infested residences so far this year. It also treated 500 surrounding housing units to keep the bugs from spreading, Director of Public Housing Claude Nesbit said.

He said his agency needs to double its extermination budget.

Regular pest control in one apartment costs about $60, but bedbug treatments cost $300, he said. Bedbugs require repeat visits and thorough spraying because the pests hitchhike on humans, rapidly reproduce and fit into the smallest cracks.

Clutter makes it difficult to find the bugs, so it's hard to contain infestations in areas where people don't have the resources to clear out their homes, experts said.

The problem isn't limited to low-income apartment complexes, but complaints are more likely to reach officials in those cases because they take the form of landlord-tenant disputes.

The county, for instance, identified two bedbug infestations at an apartment building at 4218 Rickenbacker Ave. in November.

Broschart said it seemed to get better with a little pest control, but calls picked up again this summer.

After an order from the board of health, the landlord hired Orkin to start a new round of treatment Monday. By this point, Colton Oser's mother, who has an apartment there, had started collecting the bugs in a bottle and naming them.

Who attends Bedbug conferences? I missed it on 8/14/08 @ 8AM at the Duke Energy Center, but more than 400 people showed up - Camille Jones and Chirley Clauss did. Click here to see the video! Who wants to be on the Bedbug Task Force(BTF)?Dale Mallory and Coroner O’dell Owens, to name a few Who is the expert on Bedbugs? Tiffaney Hardy What is the Bedbug hot line number? (513) 591-6000

Want to go to the website dedicated to bedbugs? click here for disturbing photos and facts about bedbugs. Want to find out if you have them or want a trap to get rid of them? Click here

Hemophilia Walk Arizona 2008

ARIZONA RAISE OVER $37,000

Chaparral Park is a 100-acre park constructed in the Indian Bend Wash, providing a lush greenbelt with a 10-acre lake for urban fishing and boating. The park is located in Scottsdale Arizona and shares recreation path system that is ideal for running, walking, biking, and rollerblading. For a map of Chaparral Park, click here. The walk started at the Central Ramada just South of the Jackrabbit Road enterance. The walk continued around to the West side of the lake. The course circled the lake path counterclockwise twice and finished just north of the Multi-use Court.

The event was Nationally sponsored by Baxter, Bayer HealthCare, CSL Behring, Grifols, and Wyeth. The local Sponsors were CSL Behring, Valley of the Sun United Way, Wells Fargo, AZVerveVending, and VitaminWater.

The goals of our team was to raise awareness of Hemophilia within our community and city. Our goal was to get 100 people on our team, we came up a little short. We didn't have the most colorful shirts, see picture. Our team was easy to find in a croud.

We all had fun and were invited to a post walk party at Firesky Resort. It is a beautiful resort in central Scottsdale.

I would like to thank all the sponsors and participants for helping raise the awareness of Hemophilia in Arizona. Next YEAR - 100.

Chickenpox Parties and Fluoride

Not that these two things have anything in common with each other. They do to me. I have an opinion on both of them.

Chickenpox Parties

Questions: Do you trust what "everyone" says about vaccines? Do you ask what are the motives behind what people and companies say? Do you do any research on what others have told you?

Statements:

immunity the old-fashioned way, by catching the disease from an infected child and muddling through weeks of itchiness. Such chickenpox parties were also held in the pre-vaccine era because some experts argued it was safest for kids to get the disease early in life, when the effects tend to be relatively mild.

Getting kids infected can be harder than parents assume, experts said. Chickenpox is most contagious during a period of slightly more than one week, beginning a few days before lesions appear and lasting until scabs form on the chickenpox sores.

One recent study found that 70 percent of people hospitalized for chickenpox complications were otherwise healthy.

I wonder about this statistic. What percentage of people who get chickenpox are hospitalized and how old are they?

Read the entire article here.

Fluoride

Questions: Is Fluoride good for you? How is it made? Are there any side effects? What is a TOXIC dose? Why aren't all cities putting Fluoride in their water? Do all dentist recommend Fluoride for their patients?

Statements:

Fluoride in higher concentrations is a potent poison. In 1952, the Alcoa (AMEX:AA.PR) (NYSE:AA) aluminum plant in Vancouver, Washington was found to have illegally dumped up to 7,000 pounds of fluoride compound wastes into the Columbia River each month. The chemical contaminated the surrounding grass and forage and resulted in injury and death to cattle, according to a report in the Seattle Times.

Vancouver, Washington uses pure granular sodium fluoride to treat its water supply.

But the fluoride added to most public drinking water supplies, a compound called hydrofluorosilic acid, comes from phosphate fertilizer plants, where it is stripped from smokestack scrubbers that also capture trace amounts of heavy metals such as lead, arsenic and radium. If it weren't put into drinking water, it would be treated as toxic waste.

O.K. picture this one........ Hydrophuorosilic acid is a by product of a fertilizer plant. They collect it by scraping it from smokestacks along with lead, arsenic and radium. Great picture - now let's put that in our water, otherwise it will just go to waste. RECYCLE!

Employees who work with fluoride must wear protective clothing and respirators. A 1998 study by the International Society for Fluoride Research, published in the journal Brain Research, found that laboratory rats given fluoridated drinking water at the same concentrations used in public water systems suffered brain and kidney damage.

In 1999, a union representing 1,500 scientists, lawyers, engineers and other professional employees of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency called for an end to fluoridation of drinking water, saying the practice "borders on a criminal act" on the part of government. EPA scientists cited scientific literature documenting "the increasingly out-of-control exposures to fluoride," the lack of benefits from ingesting fluoride and the potential hazards to human health, including the risk of kidney damage, gene mutations, cancer, reproductive effects, damage to bones and the nervous system, and dental fluorosis.

In 2006, Harvard researchers published a multiyear study reporting that exposure to fluoride at levels considered optimum by the American Dental Association increased the risk of bone cancer in boys by more than 500 percent.

Also in 2006, a report from the National Research Council recommended that the EPA lower its standard for naturally occurring fluoride, which is currently 4 parts per million per liter of water. The council cited adverse impacts including increased bone fractures and damage to neurological, immune and reproductive systems. Based on that report, the American Dental Association issued a new warning against the use of fluoridated water in infant formula, which was echoed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

Melody Scheer, oral health coordinator for Clark County, said "If a child swallows toothpaste, or takes too many vitamin pills, that is where you can get an overdose."

Read the entire article here. I don' know if this is an argument for Fluoride or against it. Does that mean if my kids are drinking the water and using Fluoride toothpaste at the same time they can get an overdose. What is the dosage needed for a 50 pound kid? WANT THE ANSWER - scroll down.

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Sodium Fluoride: The LD50 for a rat is 75 MG/KG if given orally. LD 50 means the amount of a substance needed to be a lethal dose for 50% of the test population. For a 50 pound rat one would need 1.7 grams or 0.059 ounces.

The LDL for a human is 71 mg/kg in given orally. LDL mean lowest lethal dose. Sodium Fluoride is class 6.1 Poisonous Material for the DOT (Department of Transportation). Looking for the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS).

Hydrofluorosilic Acid:M There is no LD50 for this chemical. The DOT marks it as a Class 8 Corrosive liquid. Looking for the MSDS. We can use this chemical to etch glass!

The toxic dose of fluoride for a 2-year-old child weighing 22 pounds is 320 milligrams. Toxic fluoride doses are based on weight, and a toxic dose of fluoride for an 8-year-old child weighing 45 pounds is 655 milligrams. In comparison, an 8-ounce glass of water fluoridated to 1 part per million contains 0.25 milligrams of fluoride.

Taken from Colgate.

Potential Presidential Leaders’ Views on Health Care System

I don't know the bend of the Kaiser Family Foundation, but it's information. My problem: there is so much information to sift throught. If you find a bias let me know.

For more information and videos go here. Another site with side by side information is the Kaiser Health08 website.