The Vaccination Debate Continues

Health officials are trying to slant the recent outbreak of Measles that started at Disneyland on the rise of unvaccinated children as the cause, yet scientific studies suggest that it is more likely a recently vaccinated child carrying the live virus, that would spread the disease. Vaccinations, such as the MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) which contains the live virus, can infect both an un-vaccinated child and vaccinated child, even if the child is displaying no symptoms. It seems that government and health officials are using this opportunity to push a pro-vaccine agenda, rather than looking at the real statistics. I was led to believe that it was the Measles vaccination that was responsible for eradicating the disease from our society, but the number of deaths from measles had already declined before the introduction of the vaccine. According to the CDC, in 1920, there were 7575 deaths from measles, but between the years 1958-1962, there were only 432 annually. The vaccine wasn’t introduced until 1963. However, between the years 2005-2014, there have been no deaths from measles, yet 108 deaths from the vaccine. I suggest parents do their research, and question the reasoning behind introducing so many viruses and toxins into a healthy child. Unfortunately, the pressure from pharmaceutical companies on government and health officials, and the money at stake, makes it hard to not distrust the outcomes.

To Lift Your Spirits, Get Up from Your Desk

It is not news that walking is healthy and that people who walk or otherwise exercise regularly tend to be more calm, alert and happy than people who are inactive.? We all know Murphy’s Law:? an object in motion stays in motion, while an object at rest stays at rest.

Past studies of the effects of walking and other exercise on mood have focused on long-term, gradual outcomes, looking at how weeks or months of exercise change people emotionally.? Fewer studies have examined more-abrupt, day-to-day and even hour-by-hour changes in people?s moods, depending on whether they exercise, and even fewer have focused on these effects while people are at work, even though most of us spend a majority of our waking hours in an office.

For a new study, published this month in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, researchers at the University of Birmingham began by recruiting sedentary office workers.

The volunteers completed a series of baseline health and fitness and mood tests at the outset of the experiment, revealing that they all were out of shape but otherwise generally healthy physically and emotionally.

Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani and her colleagues then randomly divided the volunteers into two groups, one of which was to begin a simple, 10-week walking program right away, while the other group would wait and start their walking program 10 weeks later, serving, in the meantime, as a control group.

The responses to in-the-moment assessments of mood and energy levels, were substantially different when people had walked. On the afternoons after a lunchtime stroll, walkers said they felt considerably more enthusiastic, less tense, and generally more relaxed and able to cope, than on afternoons when they hadn?t walked and even compared with their own moods from a morning before a walk.

So, set your timer to remind you to get up and use your legs!

Global Warming:? Will Cost Business

Greg Page, executive chairman of Cargill (the food conglomerate), is not a typical environmental activist. He says he doesn?t know ? or particularly care ? whether human activity causes climate change. He doesn?t give much serious thought to apocalyptic predictions of unbearably hot summers and endless storms.? But, over the last nine months, he has lobbied members of Congress and urged farmers to take climate change seriously, because he knows it will effect his bottom line, and that is what he cares about!

He says that over the next 50 years, if nothing is done, crop yields in many states will most likely fall, the costs of cooling chicken farms will rise and floods will more frequently swamp the railroads that transport food in the United States. He wants American agribusiness to be ready.

He is a member of the Risky Business Project, an unusual collection of business and policy leaders determined to prepare American companies for climate change. It?s a prestigious club, counting a former senator, five former White House cabinet members, two former mayors and two billionaires in the group.

The 10 men and women who serve on the governing committee don?t agree on much. Some are Democrats, some Republicans. Even when it comes to dealing with climate change, they have very different perspectives. Some advocate a national carbon tax, some want to mandate companies to disclose their climate risks. Mr. Page suggests that the world may be able to get by without any mandatory rules at all. Some members want to push investors to divest from fossil fuel companies. Several favor construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, while one member has spent more than $1 million lobbying to stop it. But they all do agree on one issue: shifts in weather over the next few decades will most likely cost American companies hundreds of billions of dollars, and they have no choice but to adapt.

Competition for Food Crops and Land

World Resources Institute, has written a report regarding the use of plants as biofuel.? Some types of biofuels do make environmental sense, the report found, particularly those made from wastes like sawdust, tree trimmings and cornstalks. Large-scale conversion of plant matter into liquid fuel or electricity, however, it is so inefficient, this solution is unlikely to ever supply a substantial fraction of global energy demand. Additionally, this method uses up vast tracks of fertile land that could otherwise be devoted to helping feed the world’s growing population.

Many of the pro-biofuel policies adopted by Western governments date to a period when other types of renewable energy were viewed as prohibitively expensive. But costs for wind and solar power have plummeted over the past decade, and the new report points out that for a given amount of land, solar panels are at least 50 times more efficient than biofuels at capturing the energy of sunlight in a useful form.