The Girls are Back in Town

Things have been a little dead here at Dourapple the last few months. I’m not going to make any excuses, but I have two words to describe my hiatus:

Final exams. Also… graduation!

Now, to get back into the swing of things, let’s look at what I missed in April and May. 

• A man-turned-woman is pregnant.

• Wal-Mart launched a hormone-free milk.

• HBO aired a chilling documentary, “The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo”.

• Merck launched a new ad campaign promoting the HPV vaccine Gardasil. Instead of “One Less,” the new tagline is “I Chose.”

• California approved same-sex marriages.

• Soy is linked to lower breast cancer risk.

• Women who have c-sections could pay more for insurance coverage.

• Tomatoes caused a salmonella outbreak in 9 states.

• Toenail clippings gauge women’s risk for heart disease.

 

Anna gets the HPV shot

Want lower blood pressure? Fall in love, get married

Happily married people tend to have lower blood pressure than singles, a new study out by Brigham Young University says.

But the reverse is also true. Unhappily married people had the highest blood pressure than anyone in the study. And considering the high rate of divorce today — which various sources say hovers between 40 percent and 50 percent of marriages — it seems like there are quite a bit of unhappily married people.

I’m glad someone funded an entire scientific study, only to prove that happiness has positive health ramifications. It seems like a no brainer to me. Next, let’s fund a study that shows a correlation between having sex and pregnancies. My guess is, they might be related.

Gardasil gets FDA’s quick review, for approval in women 27 to 45

The United States Food and Drug Administration will give Merck priority review to expand the Gardasil vaccine for use in women ages 27 to 45.

FDA officials announced today that they would make the decision in six months, as opposed to the agency’s typical 10-month review period.

Read the story by Reuters here.

‘What to Expect’ includes new sections on fatherhood, working during pregnancy

Publishers Weekly and Jezebel.com are reporting that the famous, bestselling pregnancy book “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” will receive its third update next month.The fourth edition of the book, which is due out in April, includes expanded sections on working during pregnancy, “expectant beauty,” preconception and fatherhood. According to the book’s editor Suzanne Rafer, the chapter on eating while pregnant is “more realistic than ever,” and the new edition has an updated jacket, with a hip-looking mom-to-be replacing the older editions’ more matronly pregnant woman.

The book was first published in 1984 and every edition since has been on the New York Times bestseller list.

This PSA about sex abuse creeps me out

Check out this creepy public service announcement about sexual abuse. Does it get the message across, or does it just leave you feeling nauseous?

The video was produced by German ad agency Dunkelziffer.

Another gross Lysol ad

Here’s yet another disturbing Lysol ad, courtesy of the Vintage Ads blog on LiveJournal.

I love stories like this…

A Starbucks barista in Tacoma, Wash. donated a kidney to one of her regular customers.

Read the story in the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

A quarter of U.S. teen girls have STDs

The New York Times broke an alarming story this morning.

According to a new government study, one in four U.S. teenage women have at least one sexually transmitted disease. And those numbers are alarmingly double for African-Americans. Nearly half of the African-American teenage girls in the study had an STD.

The diseases the Feds monitored in the study included human papillomavirus, chlamydia, herpes simplex type 2 and trichomoniasis, a common parasite.

The two most comon diseases? HPV at 19 percent and chlamydia at 4 percent.

The study included more than 800 women, ages 14 to 19, who agreed to be tested for STDs.

This news makes me wonder — how can parents keep arguing that the HPV vaccine will promote premarital sex and promiscuous behavior? At 25 percent (which is a significant number) it seems that we’re already beyond that point.

And those are just the girls that have diseases — not the ones who have had sex and never contracted a disease.

Finally, my biggest concern about this story: where’s the study about boys? While women have achieved equality across many fronts since the Feminist movement, there’s one we still haven’t conquered. Medical institutions and the media, for decades, have perpetuated this idea that women are the only gender to be held socially responsible for sexual health – not men, who as I see it, play an equally important role.

Aromatherapy, a bunch of foolery?

Researchers say that two of the most common scents in aromatherapy do nothing to heal wounds, relieve pain or enhance immune status, according to a report published in the April issue of Psychoneuroendocrinology, an online journal.

Washingtonpost.com featured an article about the study today.

The researchers analyzed lemon, which is thought to be a mood enhancer, and lavender, which is often used as a sleep aid. Neither scent had an impact on the biochemical markers for stress, pain control or wound healing.

That doesn’t change the fact that lavendar just smells good, period. I’m sure there are plenty people out there who will still buy scented candles, whether or not they have magical effects.