EPA proposes taking saccharin off hazardous waste list

I still don't like it

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EPA proposes taking saccharin off hazardous waste list: "

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to remove the artificial sweetener saccharin from its list of "hazardous wastes, hazardous constituents and hazardous substances," the agency announced Wednesday. It's been on the list since the 1980s.

The reason for the removal: saccharin is no longer considered a hazard to human health. This reassessment of saccharin and its salts was done in the late 1990s -- more than 10 years ago -- by the National Toxicology Program and the International Agency for Research on Cancer, who concluded these chemicals aren't potential human carcinogens.

Here's a National Toxicology Program website with a long list of saccharin toxicology studies in humans, animals or cells in dishes.

And here is the change to saccharin's status that the EPA proposes to make. It follows from a petition made by the Calorie Control Council, a trade group that represents the "low-calorie and reduced-fat food and beverage industry."

There's a 60-day public-comment period.

The proposal surely won't be welcome by those who continue to believe that saccharin is dangerous in spite of the many studies that haven't found this to be so. In that regard, here's an interesting piece of trivia: Saccharin is still banned in Canada, whereas cyclamate, another type of artificial sweetener, is not. Here,the opposite is true. (Both countries have been looking into lifting the prohibitions.)

Pretty much every artificial sweetener has come under fire as dangerous at one time or another: aspartame, cyclamate, saccharin, sucralose, you name it. Here's a 2007 L.A. Times article by freelance writer Emily Sohn, "With faux sugars, real suspicion," that explored some of the science.

-- Rosie Mestel

Photo credit: Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

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Arizona lawmaker, Cardinal Mahony trade charges over proposed illegal immigration bill

Getting ugly fast...

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Arizona lawmaker, Cardinal Mahony trade charges over proposed illegal immigration bill: "

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Americans Need Help Shaking The Salt Habit

But it tastes so good...

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Americans Need Help Shaking The Salt Habit: "

Reducing salt intake requires more than cutting out the shaker. (TooFarNorth/Flickr)

By Scott Hensley

When it comes to salt, we are just eating way too much of the stuff.

How much? Try 1 1/2 teaspoons a day for the average American. That works out to about 3,400 milligrams of sodium a day, 1,100 milligrams more then the recommended maximum.

Too much sodium raises the risk for high blood pressure and, in turn, heart disease and stroke. For people with congestive heart failure, a salty hot dog can trigger a trip to the hospital.

But even if you want to cut down on salt, it's pretty hard to do because the vast majority of it in Americans' diets comes from processed foods and restaurant fare. Cajoling over the past four decades hasn't made a dent.

Those facts make reducing salt consumption a public health problem that calls for government action, says a report just out from the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine. The experts say the new target for sodium intake should be set at 1,500 milligrams daily.

To reach that goal the Food and Drug Administration should regulate salt in food and gradually lower the amount that's allowed, the IOM report says. One of the report's editors, by the way, is Dr. Jane Henney, the first female FDA commissioner.

People get used to lots of salt and like its flavor-enhancing qualities -- up to a point. But it's also the case that people can grow accustomed to eating less salt, if the amount is decreased a bit at a time.

The Washington Post reports the FDA is working on a plan to ratchet down on salt. But it's new regulatory ground and will take a while. 'This is a 10-year program,' an unnamed source told the Post. 'This is not rolling off a log. We're talking about a comprehensive phase-down of a widely used ingredient. We're talking about embedded tastes in a whole generation of people.'

A recent analysis figures that cutting salt consumption by a half-teaspoon a day could save at least 44,000 American lives a year.

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Lung Cancer Screening Often Raises False Alarm

I think I would still have a false positive than false negative.

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Lung Cancer Screening Often Raises False Alarm: "

By Richard Knox

Somewhere north of 90 million Americans are at risk of lung cancer because they're current or former smokers. Many are tempted to get a CT lung scan, costing $300 to $1,000, to see if something's lurking.

A CT scan of the lungs picks up signals of cancer. (iStockphoto.com)

The idea has obvious appeal. After all, up to 30 percent of lung malignancies have already spread by the time they're diagnosed. And CT scans can detect tumors smaller than a pea. Small and early should mean curable, right?

Well, it's not so simple. An analysis of lung cancer screening results in 3,200 people from the National Cancer Institute finds that 21 to 33 percent of the suspicious nodules found by CT scans are false alarms. They're not really cancer.

These 'false positives' cause a good deal of anxiety, of course. To clear up the mystery, seven percent of patients undergo bronchoscopy -- a procedure involving a tube threaded into the lungs -- or have needles stuck into their lungs to retrieve a biopsy sample. Or they undergo exploratory lung surgery.

Patients who undergo screening with conventional chest x-rays have false positives too, but less often -- 15 percent after two rounds of screening.

These false-positive rates may be under-estimates, say NCI officials, because in the study only lung nodules larger than 4 millimeters across (about an 0.16 inches) are followed up. Smaller ones are thought to pose minimal risk. But in typical medical practice, all suspicious nodules are usually investigated.

The results appear in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The extra scans and biopsies triggered by a false positive add around $1,100 per patient to the cost of lung cancer screening. They also expose people to additional radiation, which can cause cancer itself.

The false-positive problem is only one of the issues surrounding lung cancer screening. Experts worry that some malignancies might never pose a risk to patients, leading to unnecessary treatment.

It's also not clear whether the increased survival times reported in some studies among patients whose lung cancer was detected through screening may only reflect that a tumor was found earlier, not that death was really delayed. Experts call this 'lead-time bias.'

The NCI is running a clinical trial in which 53,000 current and former smokers were randomly assigned to get CT scans or chest x-rays to screen for lung cancer. The National Lung Screening Trial is designed to see if one test is better than another in terms of preventing death from lung cancer.

The results are expected sometime in the next year or two.

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Day-care practices of excluding sick kids are much too strict

Something to look forward to?

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Day-care practices of excluding sick kids are much too strict: "

One day, many years ago, I was called at work by my 2-year-old daughter's day-care provider and told to come and get her. She probably had an infectious childhood illness called hand, food and mouth disease, the director explained, because of the pinkish cracks in the palms of her hands.

I was fairly certain my daughter wasn't ill. However, I left work, picked her up and took her to the pediatrician, who glanced at her palms and said she had dry skin. I returned her to the sheepish day-care director and drove back to my office, thinking what a waste of time and money the morning had been for my employer and me. My daughter rather enjoyed the unplanned interlude, but I worried that she'd probably picked up some real illness at the doctor's office and would be vomiting by morning.

This experience, it turns out, is all too common. Despite detailed guidelines on illness from the American Public Health Assn. and the American Academy of Pediatrics, day-care centers routinely exclude children with mild illnesses, according to a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics. The study polled 305 directors of day-care centers and presented them with scenarios of various illnesses, asking when they would exclude the child from care.

Researchers found that directors would unnecessarily exclude 57% of children with mild illnesses. Here are some of the scenarios in which the majority said they would exclude children but, under guidelines, do not warrant exclusion.

• Three-year-old, clear, runny nose for five days, dry cough for three days, temperature normal, able to participate in usual activities.
  
• Four-year-old, red eyes, clear drainage, temperature normal.
  
• Two-year-old, toilet trained, vomited what she ate once and had two loose, watery stools in the toilet. Temperature normal.
  
• Three-year-old, felt warm, fever of 101 taken under the arm, no other symptoms and "acting his usual perky self."
  
• Four-year-old, circular rash on scalp, hair not growing well at site of rash, temperature normal, acting normally.

Children were more likely to be unnecessarily excluded if they attended smaller centers and centers with less experienced directors. However, children were less likely to be excluded at centers with a higher proportion of single mothers and children on state-assisted tuition.

The findings suggest that all child care directors should have regular and ongoing training to reduce the rate of unnecessary exclusion. In the directors' defense, it is sometimes difficult to know when to exclude a child for illness. Child care personnel have to worry about the transmission of infectious illnesses. On the other hand, there is no excuse for not having the APHA/APA guidelines readily available and referring to them often and carefully. It's hard enough to be a working parent without having to find alternative child care for every running nose.

Child care personnel and parents can find out more about the issue at
the National Resource Center for Health and Safety in Child Care and Early Education.

-- Shari Roan

Photo credit: Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

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