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.

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.

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.

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

The video was produced by German ad agency Dunkelziffer.

Read the story in the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

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.

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.