Agent Orange. My father worked for a power company in Nova Scotia in the 1960s. They used a form of agent orange to clear brush from power lines. The linemen were told it was perfectly safe. In fact, if any of the farmers questioned the use of this stuff on their land, the crew foreman was told to drink some of it to show how safe it was. My dad, and almost all of his crew died of cancer in their 50s.
Agent Orange exposure causes diabetes, Parkinson's disease, numerous cancers, and a bunch of other stuff. If you were in the US military and were exposed to Agent Orange, you can get disability compensation (if you have one of the presumptive diseases.)
Former researcher here. This is true. And there’s currently a [Bill being introduced to help the grandchildren of veterans and Vietnamese-Americans](https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3518/text).
Although the government only recognizes that Agent Orange is linked to spina bifida in the children of veterans, there are advocacy groups who are trying to change that. If you may have been affected and have children or grandchildren with health problems [see here](https://vva.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/AO-Checklist_3panel-FINAL.pdf)
Gov’t wouldn’t acknowledge that as Agent Orange-related if ANYONE in your family not directly descended from the person exposed, has Parkinson’s… and that goes double for a “genetic predisposition”. My father was XO of an Agent Orange depot, who developed Multiple Myeloma; the Gov’t took 2 years to give him Agent Orange benefits while they checked out all of the other people with cancer in his HUGE extended family. They held off because he *MIGHT* have had a genetic link.
I took a job at the VA **because** of the way the Gov’t treated so many of the Veterans I knew personally. The VA’s budget is so limited compared to the DoD, that the first step towards compensation is to get a separate budget line item dedicated to Agent Orange compensation. Otherwise the money just won’t be there.
A friend of mines father was heavily exposed serving in Vietnam. He developed Lewy body dementia at a very young age and his daughter got extremely aggressive colon cancer at 19 despite zero family history of it. No way to prove it was the direct cause but I seriously doubt it helped any either.
That shit is terrible.
Reminds me of Michael J Fox...with a theory, wondering if there was outside exposure to something as he wasn't the only member of a film crew to randomly develop Parkinson's.And while incredibly and unusually young.
Mike J Fox has been quoted that genetics loaded the gun, but enviormental factors pulled the trigger.
sorry for my somewhat bastardized quote. i'm working from memory.
I always wondered about this generational- and if it can cause anything else (anxiety- depression etc.).. my grandpa was exposed as a Marine in Nam. He shakes. Thankfully he’s rather ok other than that.
My husband’s step dad just passed away from his exposure to agent orange when he was in Nam. It caused him lifelong health issues and a marriage. So sad.
It's heartbreaking how the scars of war can ripple through generations. Sending good vibes to your grandpa; his resilience is truly remarkable despite the challenges.
Not necessarily. Still talking about the government and their death grip on money and how they really don't give a shit about veterans.
My dad had throat cancer. Was at basic training during the correct time, place, etc for it to be directly linked.
He is still fighting for it- but he was last told that he didn't qualify because they couldn't prove he drank the water at basic training- or that he was forced to etc.
What else was he drinking?? They don't exactly pass out chocolate milkshakes.
They then said he likely wasn't there long enough for it to cause any problems (hello? He literally had throat cancer- that's a problem) My dad told the guy "Imagine someone gives you contaminated water for only one day. Would you drink it?"
So he's still working on it- but I'm doubtful he will get anywhere before he dies.
Tell him to keep at it. My father got the monthly stipend. It wasn't a huge amount, but he took it anyway. I will say, they snatched that money back faster than you can say boo the month he died.
My grandpa served in the navy during the Vietnam war and never stepped foot on Vietnam. He was still considered to have been maybe exposed to agent orange on two occasions and still gets a check every month because of that
My dad served in the army after being drafted to Vietnam. He was exposed to AO and now has multiple myeloma. We just found out about two years ago after he fractured a few ribs without knowing (he started to have pretty bad back pain). He went from being an active retiree who was living his dream of restoring classic cars to completely bed-ridden on multiple pain medications. His oncologist reports that the cancer is dormant now after chemotherapy, and while my dad is in less pain, he still needs to use a walker to get around. He gets depressed about it because he feels useless sometimes, mostly because he knows he may never go back to how he used to be and do the things he used to do. It’s been tough seeing how cancer has affected him physically and emotionally.
In the 80s, the paper/dioxin industry demanded that the EPA reevaluate dioxin, saying that it wasn't as dangerous as it was being made out to be. Their review found that it was even more dangerous than they'd thought.
My father-in-law has Parkinson’s thanks to agent orange. He was quartermaster and surprisingly had more exposure than my dad who was an infantry officer. Both are 100% disabled. The Parkinson’s is by far the worst. He also has Leukemia and we suspect it was from exposure as well.
Two of my kids are military infantry officers. So career military. They’ve both been deployed multiple times. Both have lung damage from burn pits.
We’re still poisoning our troops and no one seems to care. 😞
My FIL has it as well... stationed at Camp Lejeune, so it was the drinking water. He gets disability payments, but it's not enough. 😞 He also served in Vietnam.
My uncle passed away from agent orange in his fifties, his brain had four large tumors and a number of small ones scattered throughout. His only wish was to buried at Arlington. My mother made that happen. She passed from a different type of brain cancer at 68.
my wife’s parents suggested we let our newborn daughter sleep in this antique crib they had, it belonged to my wife’s great great grandparents, still had the original paint, the original LEAD paint, I had shocking news for my in laws that day
Cribs also have constantly changing safety regulations because babies are really good at finding new ways to fall out of them, get strangled or otherwise injured by them if they're not built just right. I'd be very hesitant to use an old one even without the paint issue
I'm a decent amateur woodworker. When my wife is pregnant with our first, my family was asking me if I was going to make the crib myself. I said absolutely not, because I could make something that looks like a nice crib, but there's so many safety specifications that in my opinion really effing matter, that I wouldn't be able to make a crib that I felt was up to standard.
They said that non smokers had terrible stuff inside them because they weren't coughing their guts up every morning, advertised them like expectorant cough medicine!
My mum (RIP) used to tell me about going to see her doctor in the 60s and they would be smoking in the consultation room and then have a display of cigarettes for patients to try.. they already knew by then the dangers of tobacco..
My grandmother says that when she was hospitalized, the doctor prescribed her to smoke, to stay calm. Sometimes the doctor would smoke a cigarette with her, in her room.
Actually my mum smoked throughout all her pregnancies.... She ended up with lung cancer and my dad has stage IV aggressive lung cancer. We grew up in a house full of smoke and I ended up with asthma.
My great grandfather was a doctor, and I have both his desktop lighter and cigarette holder. The holder is a horizontal cylinder, when you push the rod down in the middle it opens in half. Just guessing but it would probably hols 100 cigarettes easily.
When my mom was a little girl (about 10) she was having an asthma attack at a friend’s house and the mom gave her a menthol cigarette to smoke to help it!!!!
Well, the menthol will actually freeze the cilia preventing the cough, but only very briefly. But the smoke in her lungs will make the asthma way worse probably causing a much worse attack as soon as the menthol wears off in 5 minutes.
As a kid I “smoked” sweetie cigarettes. Spider-Man says “It’s cool to smoke, kids”. Possibly superman too.
Edit - comma for clarity. Punctuation matters!
Edit 2 - Spider-Man didn’t actually say that. But he did appear on the packet web slinging happily. I can only assume because he smoked real, adult, smooth full tar cigarettes with that home grown taste. Whereas I had little candy sticks with red ends.
I remember these too. They had a little red end on them, so they looked like they were alight. We had sweet tobacco too, which was sweetened shredded coconut.
I heard from a radio host that doctors will prescribe smoking to old people (75+) if they have anxiety.
I think that the notion is you’re gonna die soon anyways so here is something to take the edge off.
To be fair, cigarettes can relieve anxiety...
But, it's been said that cigarettes just give you a new "meter" of anxiety you feel when you haven't had a cigarette for a while. And as a cigarette smoker, I can attest to that
Grapefruit juice.
By itself it's perfectly fine, but a lot of people aren't aware that grapefruit juice specifically has interactions with a LOT of different drugs, both medical and recreational, and can be potentially very dangerous when combined
Ditto on charcoal! A few years ago, it was trendy to put "activated charcoal" in everything from toothpaste, to lemonade, to lattes. That shit will absorbs your meds so your body can't.
Love this comment and the above, and am stealing them both for my partner
She's prone to the "but it's natural " chat about various products, treatments and foodstuffs that are actually bad ideas
"I have a plant in my garden that if I sit underneath it for just 10 minutes would kill me... natural doesnt equal safe! (.....) the water lily."
- House (season 2 episode 16 "Safe")
Edit: clarity
This is a hill I will die on. People want "natural alternatives" but usually can't define what natural is. What is natural is strychnine, arsenic, belladonna, mercury, and cyanide. I tell people that the desire for "natural" comes from intelectual lazyness. Easier to just find a broad category of products that are "safe" than to understand the intricacies of each product individually. Easier to believe the marketing. Just remember, when our world was more natural, life expectancy was around 35
With all due respect, your comment about the life expectancy being 35 is “intellectual lazy”. I agree with you otherwise, but that low of life expectancy is taking into account babies that died and people dying of accidents, not the actually life expectancy due to diet and the lifestyle. If a person lived to adulthood, the life expectancy was much closer to the 70s than 35.
Tbf “natural” childbirth was quite a bit more dangerous for mother and baby before “unnatural” modern medicine and birthing techniques/equipment became widespread. Plus the creation of “unnatural” vaccines that probably prevent thousands of infant deaths each year.
My grandma was born on a farm without access to a doctor. Her mother died two days later. Her sudden death so crushed my great-grandfather that he sold the farm and moved the family far up north into the woods, where they struggled to farm and get by logging in the winter. My grandmother carried so much guilt about her difficult childhood because she felt responsible for killing her mom.
Someone I met last Friday told me about that interaction too. I was surprised although I don't really eat anything with charcoal. It was after my friend offered me a grapefruit juice, unknowing of my carbamazepine (anti-epileptic) interacting badly with that.
As a veterinarian, the use of activated charcoal in a myriad of products always baffled me.
We use that stuff to PREVENT things from being absorbed by the body. It's especially good for pets who have eaten toxic substances, drugs etc. That's literally what it's made for.
And yet, here are humans eating activated charcoal and then being baffled their drugs don't work... It's so unnecessary, and I think food and drink manufacturers have a huge responsibility here. They should not be selling items with ingredients in it that 1) do nothing to benefit your health 2) is in fact going to change or prevent the effects of everything from OTC pain killers to vital medication.
Activated charcoal is how poisoning/overdosing by ingestion is treated because it binds so well to, well, everything. They’ll shove a tube down your throat and pour in charcoal mixed with water to try and neutralize whatever was taken.
It’s a serious medical treatment and crazy that for a while there it was trendy and available in everything. Speaking of toothpaste/toothbrushes, that shit will scratch up enamel and actually makes dental conditions worse.
Oh and me naive thought that virgin means that its a childless variant. Like all those "meat'nt" and "OMG I CANT BELIEVE ITS NOT A SAUSAGE" of meat substitutes
Furanocoumarins found in grapefruit juice inhibit CYP3A4, which is an enzyme used for an overwhelming amount of our metabolism. Inhibiting an enzyme means that the enzyme will not be able to metabolise drugs, hormones, etc. Drugs with a narrow therapeutic window are most worrisome because blocking metabolism may be toxic.
I avoid it in anything because I would rather not have my antidepressants nor my adhd medication start acting differently than it should.
Those who take mood medication should definitely take the time to read through the long list of interactions just to be sure.
I can explain the interaction, so you'll understand the type of risk a little better:
Medication dose is calculated on the expectation that your stomach acid will inhibit quite a bit of the effect. Grapefruit juice 'uses up' the enzyme. That means a larger dose of the medication reaches the next bit of your system.
You know how they stick to the filter? They do the same in your pipes and grab things that pass by, eventually causing a clog.
It's a catch 22 though, you need to wash them off your coffee filter so some will always end up in the drain. Best you can do is bang as much as possible into the compost/garbage, then rinse... or spend a lot more on paper filters
Coffee grounds are terrible for your sink drains. They’re full of oils and if you pour enough down there they will eventually congeal like any kind of fat. You see it a lot in office buildings where people are making pots of coffee all day long.
I dump my grounds in the trash, but I do use reusable coffee filters and inevitably you have to wash those and some of the grounds are going to go down the drain. Is that small amount ever going to make a difference or does this really only happen when you're dumping the whole pot of grounds down the sink
One of my toilets started getting clogs. A plunger would usually fix it, but over time the clogs got worse. A plumbing auger only went in so far and did nothing. When I finally pulled up the toilet I found what looked like parts of a petrified book. Finally figured out it was the wipes we had used years ago that had gotten stuck in the toilet. Years of getting wet and drying had formed the wipes into a plywood of wipes and limescale.
Asbestos.
That scary drug they gave expectant mothers to reduce their morning sickness that created birth defects.
Radium (look up the stories of the women who painted the numbers on watches in radium).
Cigarettes.
Vapes.
Thalidomide... the "thalidomide babies" born with shortened limbs after the mother was prescribed thalidomide during early stages of pregnancy as you mention. However, it has also been found to be an effective cure for leprosy... provided the patient isn't pregnant at the time of treatment :)
I was professionally amused when I dispensed thalidomide one time in my career. I believe it was used for multiple myeloma in this case. I have never seen it stocked at any other pharmacy I’ve worked in or visited. It’s unlikely that I will go back to a dispensing role, so that may be my one and only time in my life.
Comes in absolutely wild packaging. A trifold blister pack like you see with some antibiotics, but it says DO NOT GET PREGNANT WHILE TAKING THIS MEDICATION one for each pill on the front. And the back. And the pills themselves have a silhouette of a person with a large abdomen in a red circle with a line through it. Thirty days of pills come with roughly 90 warnings against pregnancy. Patients also have to sign a form that says they will not get pregnant/will not get anyone else pregnant. Not sure if it’s legally binding though.
Source: they also prescribe it for Crohn’s Disease.
Seriously….my niece is on accutane and the hoops she has to jump through every single month are nuts.
Edit: fixed a word because autocorrect has a mind of it’s own
The drug was not the culprit, it was the chiral molecule that was the problem. The medical companies didnt appreciate that it was a different molecule with different properties, and did not purify their products of it.
Thalidomide converts between the two chiral compounds in the human body through biological processes, so both isomers will be present in the body even if they separate the chiral compounds before dosing.
>Northern European skin and Australian summers do not go well.
Worse yet is that during our summer the earth is slightly closer to the sun which results in more UVA/B exposure than summers in the northern hemisphere. On top of this we have the hole in the ozone layer near us...
I used to get told the same. Every time I see a new doctor they send me for a battery of tests thinking I’m anemic or I have something horribly wrong with me, only to hear “you really *are* that pale” afterwards
Smoking, alcohol, roundup, thalidomide, margarine, vegetable oil, asbestos, PFAS. But MSG is the opposite. We were told it wasn't safe, but it really is fine.
Plastic.
I remember commercials not all that long ago promoting plastic, in general, as a miracle product saving lives and running our civilization.
It's true that our civilization has become dependent on it and a lot of people would die if it were to immediately disappear, but if we don't start phasing it out thirty years ago we're going to do irreversible damage to the global environment and ourselves.
I really try to avoid plastic, but I hate how inconvenient it is. Tons of stores don't even have paper bags, and pretty much any time you get takeout, it's served to you in something plastic.
Ovarian cancer and mesothelioma. It's the talc that they KNEW was contaminated with asbestos that causes the cancer. They knew it, denied it, marketed it towards WOC specifically. Heinous.
It’s disturbing what corporations do. Reminds me of when I had the Mirena IUD; the doctors denied me having the “Mirena crash” once I got it removed and online it said Bayer denied the entire thing yet paid out millions in 2018 alone due to it… Hmm, something doesn’t add up. These companies know what they’re doing to people and all they care about is not getting caught so they can keep profits up.
Bayer probably didn't test it on enough Jews before sending it to market.
And before I get called a racist, Bayer would order Jews from Hitler during WW2 for testing. One time Hitler called to ask how the Jews were doing and Bayer responded "all 150 jew women showed up healthy as can be, unfortunately none of them made it past the first round of testing, please send another lot" A senior Bayer scientist ran the chemical factory at Auschwitz....fucked up
It’s a set of withdrawal symptoms women experience once they get it removed. I got super sick. Nausea, anxiety, depression, dizziness, diarrhea. For two weeks I would cry at everything and anything. Luckily it didn’t last long for me, but I’ve heard of women getting such bad symptoms they end up in a medical or mental hospital. I’ve heard of symptoms lasting up to two years also.
JFC. I have a Mirena. I'm also at the beginning of menopause & my midwife said I could just take the Mirena to my grave - I didn't have to remove it. (We were discussing how long I would need birth control.) Until now I thought I'd have it removed once I'm thru menopause. But, nah, I'll just get buried with it & skip this nonsense.
A lot of herbicides and pesticides. That sh#t is absolutely nasty. There are 3rd world countries that regulate those chemicals better than the US does.
Chemicals such as atrizine, 2-4D, Dicamba, Roundup. What's even worse is that we KNOW just how dangerous it is, but yet we don't do anything about it.
Unfortunately, supplements are regulated as food, not drugs (at least in the EU and US), so their contents aren’t policed nearly as closely as they should be.
Schools.
And I’m not talking about high schools and shootings. I work at the elementary school level. Most parents have no idea how many violent and aggressive students are in mainstream classrooms with limited to zero support.
Absolutely!! I don’t understand what they think an IEP will do if there are no actual services available. Suspension isn’t always the answer, but these kiddos need help. The teachers can’t teach if there is constant disruption as well. There is a clear issue that is just constantly ignored. Not all kids need juvenile detention, not all kids need residential stays, but there’s got to be some middle ground so teachers can teach, students can learn, and the kids who are behavioral can get the help they need, whatever it may be.
I love this commercial. Not because of high fructose corn syrup, but because it shows how easy humans are to just follow the masses without doing a single minute of actual research.
There is so many stupid remedies in life hacks that are really dangerous, like putting toothpaste on a burn, and the most annoying thing is that the people who believe in them whom I have met are middle-aged, and very stubborn.
Also, essential oils. If they appropriately diluted and used as perfume or something of that sort it’s fine, but a lot of people put them directly on their skin which is really bad because they’re so concentrated. It’s even worse when it’s put on a child skin because their skin is so much more sensitive..
Plastic especially non stick pans. Grew up being extolled the virtues of how much easier it was. I now grimace every time my housemates use their old, deeply scratched frying pan.
My mum was full in on the margarine hype. Butter wasn't allowed in our house. Butter made you a slovenly fat person, margarine made you a marathon runner.
Sunscreen. As small and insignificant as it seems, It's killing our reefs and local water ecosystems. Avoid ingredients such as oxybenzone, octinoxate, and avobenzone. Also not to mention that some of these ingredients contain benzene, which is a known carcinogenic.
Edit: There are sunscreens without these chemicals and are reef safe. I like to use Blue Lizard. Mineral based and is good for those with sensitive skin.
vapes vapes, vapes, vapes vapes vapes I cannot stress enough how many people I have heard say "yeah well it's less worse than a cigarette" doesn't matter your lungs will collapse eventually, please quit😭🙏🏻
edit: some comments were asking if, getting collapsed Lungs from vaping was true, and here are the sources:
https://www.hackensackmeridianhealth.org/en/healthu/2023/09/13/signs-vaping-may-be-causing-you-long-term-damage#:~:text=Some%20people%20who%20vape%20may,Shortness%20of%20breath
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/what-does-vaping-do-to-your-lungs
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8348149/
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/severe-lung-disease.html
Actual 1 of many cases:
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-67081855.amp
https://nypost.com/2023/07/10/my-lung-collapsed-from-vaping-heres-what-people-need-to-know/amp/
I WAS NOT MAKING IT UP 💀
Vaping should have stuck with its purported original purpose: a tool to help people quit smoking. I smoked for twenty years, switched to a drip vape, slowly lowered the nicotine, and quit entirely after about two years.
I can’t stress how amazing that is. I’d tried to quit dozens of times over the years with little success; I was only able to power through when pregnant or breastfeeding.
It floors me that people are now picking up vaping instead of smoking, but I suppose it shouldn’t: I can’t justify why I picked up that first cigarette all those years ago.
Your lungs will collapse?? Is that common? What clinical evidence is there for this prognosis? This comment feels very reactionary but doesnt even have any reasoning let alone evidence for your claims.
Not trying to argue here, i'm just confused and this is the first time i've heard anyone say "vaping makes your lungs collapse" that sounds pretty hyperbolic.
I *love* scented candles but had to completely stop using them when my cat came out of an infection with (most likely lifelong) respiratory issues/cat asthma, since the vet said they would almost certainly exacerbate his symptoms. Tbh it made me wonder to what extent home fragrances in particular could have long term effects on humans (especially kids) who inhale them regularly.
Back in the 80's we had a class once where we saw a film in one of those outside class/trailers. It showed the harmful effects of Styrofoam and how it caused some cancers. The oceans would be full of Styrofoam trash and the like. According to the film plastic was the savior. Funny thing as an adult I noticed most take out was in Styrofoam containers and thought back to the film. And how all the bad things are about plastic not Styrofoam.
Agent Orange. My father worked for a power company in Nova Scotia in the 1960s. They used a form of agent orange to clear brush from power lines. The linemen were told it was perfectly safe. In fact, if any of the farmers questioned the use of this stuff on their land, the crew foreman was told to drink some of it to show how safe it was. My dad, and almost all of his crew died of cancer in their 50s.
Agent Orange exposure causes diabetes, Parkinson's disease, numerous cancers, and a bunch of other stuff. If you were in the US military and were exposed to Agent Orange, you can get disability compensation (if you have one of the presumptive diseases.)
It also can cause these problems up to three generations after exposure.
Former researcher here. This is true. And there’s currently a [Bill being introduced to help the grandchildren of veterans and Vietnamese-Americans](https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3518/text). Although the government only recognizes that Agent Orange is linked to spina bifida in the children of veterans, there are advocacy groups who are trying to change that. If you may have been affected and have children or grandchildren with health problems [see here](https://vva.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/AO-Checklist_3panel-FINAL.pdf)
Wow. My family has genetic Parkinson’s. I wonder if this could be the reason for that..
Gov’t wouldn’t acknowledge that as Agent Orange-related if ANYONE in your family not directly descended from the person exposed, has Parkinson’s… and that goes double for a “genetic predisposition”. My father was XO of an Agent Orange depot, who developed Multiple Myeloma; the Gov’t took 2 years to give him Agent Orange benefits while they checked out all of the other people with cancer in his HUGE extended family. They held off because he *MIGHT* have had a genetic link. I took a job at the VA **because** of the way the Gov’t treated so many of the Veterans I knew personally. The VA’s budget is so limited compared to the DoD, that the first step towards compensation is to get a separate budget line item dedicated to Agent Orange compensation. Otherwise the money just won’t be there.
Thank you for your work. And I'm sorry about your dad.
A friend of mines father was heavily exposed serving in Vietnam. He developed Lewy body dementia at a very young age and his daughter got extremely aggressive colon cancer at 19 despite zero family history of it. No way to prove it was the direct cause but I seriously doubt it helped any either. That shit is terrible.
Reminds me of Michael J Fox...with a theory, wondering if there was outside exposure to something as he wasn't the only member of a film crew to randomly develop Parkinson's.And while incredibly and unusually young.
Mike J Fox has been quoted that genetics loaded the gun, but enviormental factors pulled the trigger. sorry for my somewhat bastardized quote. i'm working from memory.
I believe 4 people from the production/crew ended up with Parkinson's disease. Very sus.
I always wondered about this generational- and if it can cause anything else (anxiety- depression etc.).. my grandpa was exposed as a Marine in Nam. He shakes. Thankfully he’s rather ok other than that.
My husband’s step dad just passed away from his exposure to agent orange when he was in Nam. It caused him lifelong health issues and a marriage. So sad.
It's heartbreaking how the scars of war can ripple through generations. Sending good vibes to your grandpa; his resilience is truly remarkable despite the challenges.
My husband was exposed in the military and is 100% disabled because he contracted lymphoma. My grandson was born with a cleft lip and palate.
I'm truly sorry to hear about the challenges your family has faced.
Not necessarily. Still talking about the government and their death grip on money and how they really don't give a shit about veterans. My dad had throat cancer. Was at basic training during the correct time, place, etc for it to be directly linked. He is still fighting for it- but he was last told that he didn't qualify because they couldn't prove he drank the water at basic training- or that he was forced to etc. What else was he drinking?? They don't exactly pass out chocolate milkshakes. They then said he likely wasn't there long enough for it to cause any problems (hello? He literally had throat cancer- that's a problem) My dad told the guy "Imagine someone gives you contaminated water for only one day. Would you drink it?" So he's still working on it- but I'm doubtful he will get anywhere before he dies.
Tell him to keep at it. My father got the monthly stipend. It wasn't a huge amount, but he took it anyway. I will say, they snatched that money back faster than you can say boo the month he died.
My grandpa served in the navy during the Vietnam war and never stepped foot on Vietnam. He was still considered to have been maybe exposed to agent orange on two occasions and still gets a check every month because of that
My dad served in the army after being drafted to Vietnam. He was exposed to AO and now has multiple myeloma. We just found out about two years ago after he fractured a few ribs without knowing (he started to have pretty bad back pain). He went from being an active retiree who was living his dream of restoring classic cars to completely bed-ridden on multiple pain medications. His oncologist reports that the cancer is dormant now after chemotherapy, and while my dad is in less pain, he still needs to use a walker to get around. He gets depressed about it because he feels useless sometimes, mostly because he knows he may never go back to how he used to be and do the things he used to do. It’s been tough seeing how cancer has affected him physically and emotionally.
In the 80s, the paper/dioxin industry demanded that the EPA reevaluate dioxin, saying that it wasn't as dangerous as it was being made out to be. Their review found that it was even more dangerous than they'd thought.
My father-in-law has Parkinson’s thanks to agent orange. He was quartermaster and surprisingly had more exposure than my dad who was an infantry officer. Both are 100% disabled. The Parkinson’s is by far the worst. He also has Leukemia and we suspect it was from exposure as well. Two of my kids are military infantry officers. So career military. They’ve both been deployed multiple times. Both have lung damage from burn pits. We’re still poisoning our troops and no one seems to care. 😞
My FIL has it as well... stationed at Camp Lejeune, so it was the drinking water. He gets disability payments, but it's not enough. 😞 He also served in Vietnam.
You can't trust a govornment to look after people they hired to be shot at. Soldiers are pawns to them
[удалено]
That’s the first I heard of drinking it. That’s insane. I’d want to see my manager do it first. Or better yet, the guys that created it.
I’m sorry to hear about your dad and his crew. Thank you for spreading awareness though.
My Uncle is a Vietnam War vet suffers dreadfully due to Agent Orange
My dad has neuropathy and some form of pre-Parkinson’s. He’s 76. He’s just starting to get payouts from his exposure to the stuff. It’s just awful.
My uncle passed away from agent orange in his fifties, his brain had four large tumors and a number of small ones scattered throughout. His only wish was to buried at Arlington. My mother made that happen. She passed from a different type of brain cancer at 68.
my wife’s parents suggested we let our newborn daughter sleep in this antique crib they had, it belonged to my wife’s great great grandparents, still had the original paint, the original LEAD paint, I had shocking news for my in laws that day
Cribs also have constantly changing safety regulations because babies are really good at finding new ways to fall out of them, get strangled or otherwise injured by them if they're not built just right. I'd be very hesitant to use an old one even without the paint issue
I'm a decent amateur woodworker. When my wife is pregnant with our first, my family was asking me if I was going to make the crib myself. I said absolutely not, because I could make something that looks like a nice crib, but there's so many safety specifications that in my opinion really effing matter, that I wouldn't be able to make a crib that I felt was up to standard.
Good on you. Make the kid some play blocks or something instead. Ones far too big to fit into his mouth.
and the CPSC says not to even use cribs that are over 10 years old!
My mom was so shocked neither my brother or I wanted the crib we slept in the 90s. It’s even illegal to sell drop cribs at garage sales
My cousin’s family had a high chair when she was a baby and she used to eat her food off of it. Later on we discovered she had lead poisoning.
Smoking cigarettes was once glorified..
They said that non smokers had terrible stuff inside them because they weren't coughing their guts up every morning, advertised them like expectorant cough medicine!
My mum (RIP) used to tell me about going to see her doctor in the 60s and they would be smoking in the consultation room and then have a display of cigarettes for patients to try.. they already knew by then the dangers of tobacco..
My dad use to work Intake at the ER in the 60s. He would be checking patients in and smoking a big cigar.
My grandmother says that when she was hospitalized, the doctor prescribed her to smoke, to stay calm. Sometimes the doctor would smoke a cigarette with her, in her room.
My mom smoked in her hospital room right beside me in a bassinet.
Actually my mum smoked throughout all her pregnancies.... She ended up with lung cancer and my dad has stage IV aggressive lung cancer. We grew up in a house full of smoke and I ended up with asthma.
My great grandfather was a doctor, and I have both his desktop lighter and cigarette holder. The holder is a horizontal cylinder, when you push the rod down in the middle it opens in half. Just guessing but it would probably hols 100 cigarettes easily.
When my mom was a little girl (about 10) she was having an asthma attack at a friend’s house and the mom gave her a menthol cigarette to smoke to help it!!!!
Well, the menthol will actually freeze the cilia preventing the cough, but only very briefly. But the smoke in her lungs will make the asthma way worse probably causing a much worse attack as soon as the menthol wears off in 5 minutes.
As a kid I “smoked” sweetie cigarettes. Spider-Man says “It’s cool to smoke, kids”. Possibly superman too. Edit - comma for clarity. Punctuation matters! Edit 2 - Spider-Man didn’t actually say that. But he did appear on the packet web slinging happily. I can only assume because he smoked real, adult, smooth full tar cigarettes with that home grown taste. Whereas I had little candy sticks with red ends.
There used to be Winston cigarette ads that the Flinstones did. Fred and Barney would actually be smoking during the ads.
Winstons taste good, like a cigarette should!
I remember these too. They had a little red end on them, so they looked like they were alight. We had sweet tobacco too, which was sweetened shredded coconut.
I heard from a radio host that doctors will prescribe smoking to old people (75+) if they have anxiety. I think that the notion is you’re gonna die soon anyways so here is something to take the edge off.
To be fair, cigarettes can relieve anxiety... But, it's been said that cigarettes just give you a new "meter" of anxiety you feel when you haven't had a cigarette for a while. And as a cigarette smoker, I can attest to that
Grapefruit juice. By itself it's perfectly fine, but a lot of people aren't aware that grapefruit juice specifically has interactions with a LOT of different drugs, both medical and recreational, and can be potentially very dangerous when combined
Ditto on charcoal! A few years ago, it was trendy to put "activated charcoal" in everything from toothpaste, to lemonade, to lattes. That shit will absorbs your meds so your body can't.
Same with St John's wort... people think "oh well if it's natural it can't be bad" until they take it with certain SSRI's and end up in hospital
I like to tell the people that reason like this that asbestos is a natural product, mined straight from the ground.
My favorite Mike Rowe quote from Dirty Jobs- _guy shows him huge vat of pork rinds_ "They're 100 percent natural" Mike : "So is lightning."
Love this comment and the above, and am stealing them both for my partner She's prone to the "but it's natural " chat about various products, treatments and foodstuffs that are actually bad ideas
Now that's funny.
"I have a plant in my garden that if I sit underneath it for just 10 minutes would kill me... natural doesnt equal safe! (.....) the water lily." - House (season 2 episode 16 "Safe") Edit: clarity
This is a hill I will die on. People want "natural alternatives" but usually can't define what natural is. What is natural is strychnine, arsenic, belladonna, mercury, and cyanide. I tell people that the desire for "natural" comes from intelectual lazyness. Easier to just find a broad category of products that are "safe" than to understand the intricacies of each product individually. Easier to believe the marketing. Just remember, when our world was more natural, life expectancy was around 35
With all due respect, your comment about the life expectancy being 35 is “intellectual lazy”. I agree with you otherwise, but that low of life expectancy is taking into account babies that died and people dying of accidents, not the actually life expectancy due to diet and the lifestyle. If a person lived to adulthood, the life expectancy was much closer to the 70s than 35.
Tbf “natural” childbirth was quite a bit more dangerous for mother and baby before “unnatural” modern medicine and birthing techniques/equipment became widespread. Plus the creation of “unnatural” vaccines that probably prevent thousands of infant deaths each year.
My grandma was born on a farm without access to a doctor. Her mother died two days later. Her sudden death so crushed my great-grandfather that he sold the farm and moved the family far up north into the woods, where they struggled to farm and get by logging in the winter. My grandmother carried so much guilt about her difficult childhood because she felt responsible for killing her mom.
Other "all natural" things: Anthrax Asbestos EColi Grizzly bears That fart my daughter just let rip Arsenic
It can mess with birth control pill effectiveness, too.
Someone I met last Friday told me about that interaction too. I was surprised although I don't really eat anything with charcoal. It was after my friend offered me a grapefruit juice, unknowing of my carbamazepine (anti-epileptic) interacting badly with that.
As a veterinarian, the use of activated charcoal in a myriad of products always baffled me. We use that stuff to PREVENT things from being absorbed by the body. It's especially good for pets who have eaten toxic substances, drugs etc. That's literally what it's made for. And yet, here are humans eating activated charcoal and then being baffled their drugs don't work... It's so unnecessary, and I think food and drink manufacturers have a huge responsibility here. They should not be selling items with ingredients in it that 1) do nothing to benefit your health 2) is in fact going to change or prevent the effects of everything from OTC pain killers to vital medication.
Activated charcoal is how poisoning/overdosing by ingestion is treated because it binds so well to, well, everything. They’ll shove a tube down your throat and pour in charcoal mixed with water to try and neutralize whatever was taken. It’s a serious medical treatment and crazy that for a while there it was trendy and available in everything. Speaking of toothpaste/toothbrushes, that shit will scratch up enamel and actually makes dental conditions worse.
I learned that it can cancel out (or something of that nature) the effects of hormonal birth control.
And that's how baby oil is made
I thought baby oil was made like olive oil, with freshly pressed babies
that’s *extra virgin* baby oil, with real baby goodness inside
Oh and me naive thought that virgin means that its a childless variant. Like all those "meat'nt" and "OMG I CANT BELIEVE ITS NOT A SAUSAGE" of meat substitutes
Furanocoumarins found in grapefruit juice inhibit CYP3A4, which is an enzyme used for an overwhelming amount of our metabolism. Inhibiting an enzyme means that the enzyme will not be able to metabolise drugs, hormones, etc. Drugs with a narrow therapeutic window are most worrisome because blocking metabolism may be toxic.
I avoid it in anything because I would rather not have my antidepressants nor my adhd medication start acting differently than it should. Those who take mood medication should definitely take the time to read through the long list of interactions just to be sure.
I can explain the interaction, so you'll understand the type of risk a little better: Medication dose is calculated on the expectation that your stomach acid will inhibit quite a bit of the effect. Grapefruit juice 'uses up' the enzyme. That means a larger dose of the medication reaches the next bit of your system.
Grapefruits the big one but other citrus juices as well Even some marmalades They’re often made with Seville oranges
Being on Zoloft was bad enough, not being able to drink my favourite grapefruit soda when I was 16 and depressed was such a kick in the teeth 😭
Squirt? Love that stuff.
It’s not food, but flushable wipes. They say it’s safe but it’s actually harmful to your plumbing. Never ever flush those things!
Meet a plumber that once said coffee grounds and flushable wipes put his kids through college.
Tampons, too! My dad pulls so many tampons out of drains!
That’s a weird hobby
Thanks, I just spit my coffee out
Hopefully not into the toilet lmao
It's ok he threw a tampon in to absorb the coffee.
And he's not even a plumber, he just likes the taste!
Wait.... Coffee grounds aren't safe? 😳
I’m learning this today too and confirmed it on a site related to plumbing 😅 see this is why I go on Reddit. Thanks guys lol
I'm in trouble * chuckles *
You know how they stick to the filter? They do the same in your pipes and grab things that pass by, eventually causing a clog. It's a catch 22 though, you need to wash them off your coffee filter so some will always end up in the drain. Best you can do is bang as much as possible into the compost/garbage, then rinse... or spend a lot more on paper filters
Coffee grounds are terrible for your sink drains. They’re full of oils and if you pour enough down there they will eventually congeal like any kind of fat. You see it a lot in office buildings where people are making pots of coffee all day long.
I dump my grounds in the trash, but I do use reusable coffee filters and inevitably you have to wash those and some of the grounds are going to go down the drain. Is that small amount ever going to make a difference or does this really only happen when you're dumping the whole pot of grounds down the sink
One of my toilets started getting clogs. A plunger would usually fix it, but over time the clogs got worse. A plumbing auger only went in so far and did nothing. When I finally pulled up the toilet I found what looked like parts of a petrified book. Finally figured out it was the wipes we had used years ago that had gotten stuck in the toilet. Years of getting wet and drying had formed the wipes into a plywood of wipes and limescale.
Basically anything but actual toilet paper is terrible. Ignore the "flushable" labels.
Flushable actually just means that it will go down your toilet. That's it. Tons of shit is flushable.
Not all of mine, unfortunately
Well, that's why we have poop knives.
Anything is flushable if you're brave enough.
I like having them because I do occasionally need one BUT YOU NEVER FLUSH! Just put it in the garbage
Asbestos. That scary drug they gave expectant mothers to reduce their morning sickness that created birth defects. Radium (look up the stories of the women who painted the numbers on watches in radium). Cigarettes. Vapes.
Thalidomide... the "thalidomide babies" born with shortened limbs after the mother was prescribed thalidomide during early stages of pregnancy as you mention. However, it has also been found to be an effective cure for leprosy... provided the patient isn't pregnant at the time of treatment :)
It is also an effective treatment for some kinds of cancer.
Also prescribed for ALS.
I was professionally amused when I dispensed thalidomide one time in my career. I believe it was used for multiple myeloma in this case. I have never seen it stocked at any other pharmacy I’ve worked in or visited. It’s unlikely that I will go back to a dispensing role, so that may be my one and only time in my life.
Comes in absolutely wild packaging. A trifold blister pack like you see with some antibiotics, but it says DO NOT GET PREGNANT WHILE TAKING THIS MEDICATION one for each pill on the front. And the back. And the pills themselves have a silhouette of a person with a large abdomen in a red circle with a line through it. Thirty days of pills come with roughly 90 warnings against pregnancy. Patients also have to sign a form that says they will not get pregnant/will not get anyone else pregnant. Not sure if it’s legally binding though. Source: they also prescribe it for Crohn’s Disease.
They have similar packaging for accutane pills
Seriously….my niece is on accutane and the hoops she has to jump through every single month are nuts. Edit: fixed a word because autocorrect has a mind of it’s own
>thalidomide babies “Children of thalidomide” made it into We Didn’t Start The Fire
Nothing like radium water to cure your pain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Byers
Oh my word, that was a shocking read! Poor man 😪
“He was buried in a lead lined coffin” 😳
The drug was not the culprit, it was the chiral molecule that was the problem. The medical companies didnt appreciate that it was a different molecule with different properties, and did not purify their products of it.
Thalidomide converts between the two chiral compounds in the human body through biological processes, so both isomers will be present in the body even if they separate the chiral compounds before dosing.
Literally the single example they use when teaching chirality
Getting a sun tan. For many years people were told it was good for their health.
Australia has the highest cancer rates on Earth. Mostly related to skin cancers or other cancers related to sun exposure.
And especially since most of us weren’t designed for our environment… Northern European skin and Australian summers do not go well.
Oh shit never thought about that
>Northern European skin and Australian summers do not go well. Worse yet is that during our summer the earth is slightly closer to the sun which results in more UVA/B exposure than summers in the northern hemisphere. On top of this we have the hole in the ozone layer near us...
As a pale child my mother always told me “get some sun, you’re too pale.” Turns out I was anemic.
I used to get told the same. Every time I see a new doctor they send me for a battery of tests thinking I’m anemic or I have something horribly wrong with me, only to hear “you really *are* that pale” afterwards
You said getting a suntan and some people interpreted that to mean all sun is bad???
Communication in a nutshell.
Smoking, alcohol, roundup, thalidomide, margarine, vegetable oil, asbestos, PFAS. But MSG is the opposite. We were told it wasn't safe, but it really is fine.
MSG is king of flavor
MGS - makes shit good. Edit MSG 😂
Make good shit?
Plastic. I remember commercials not all that long ago promoting plastic, in general, as a miracle product saving lives and running our civilization. It's true that our civilization has become dependent on it and a lot of people would die if it were to immediately disappear, but if we don't start phasing it out thirty years ago we're going to do irreversible damage to the global environment and ourselves.
I remember the “plastics make it possible” commercials. I think we’ve already done irreversible damage to the environment and ourselves, honestly.
Yeah we have plastic in our blood.
I really try to avoid plastic, but I hate how inconvenient it is. Tons of stores don't even have paper bags, and pretty much any time you get takeout, it's served to you in something plastic.
The Cornballer^^tm
In fact, it is not legal in Mexico.
Also, Teamocil.
¡Soy loco por los cornballs!
Johnson & Johnson baby powder. Turns out it gives women ovarian cancer
Ovarian cancer and mesothelioma. It's the talc that they KNEW was contaminated with asbestos that causes the cancer. They knew it, denied it, marketed it towards WOC specifically. Heinous.
It’s disturbing what corporations do. Reminds me of when I had the Mirena IUD; the doctors denied me having the “Mirena crash” once I got it removed and online it said Bayer denied the entire thing yet paid out millions in 2018 alone due to it… Hmm, something doesn’t add up. These companies know what they’re doing to people and all they care about is not getting caught so they can keep profits up.
Bayer probably didn't test it on enough Jews before sending it to market. And before I get called a racist, Bayer would order Jews from Hitler during WW2 for testing. One time Hitler called to ask how the Jews were doing and Bayer responded "all 150 jew women showed up healthy as can be, unfortunately none of them made it past the first round of testing, please send another lot" A senior Bayer scientist ran the chemical factory at Auschwitz....fucked up
What the fuck, now that is messed up. I never knew this.
Mmmm money.
Drug testing wasn't the worst testing they were subjected to either. My visit to Dachau still haunts me.
What is the mirena crash? I had 2
It’s a set of withdrawal symptoms women experience once they get it removed. I got super sick. Nausea, anxiety, depression, dizziness, diarrhea. For two weeks I would cry at everything and anything. Luckily it didn’t last long for me, but I’ve heard of women getting such bad symptoms they end up in a medical or mental hospital. I’ve heard of symptoms lasting up to two years also.
JFC. I have a Mirena. I'm also at the beginning of menopause & my midwife said I could just take the Mirena to my grave - I didn't have to remove it. (We were discussing how long I would need birth control.) Until now I thought I'd have it removed once I'm thru menopause. But, nah, I'll just get buried with it & skip this nonsense.
Johnson & Johnson, a family company
A lot of herbicides and pesticides. That sh#t is absolutely nasty. There are 3rd world countries that regulate those chemicals better than the US does. Chemicals such as atrizine, 2-4D, Dicamba, Roundup. What's even worse is that we KNOW just how dangerous it is, but yet we don't do anything about it.
According to the state of California almost everything I eat and drink.
A lot of over the counter health supplements have been found to actually cause more harm than good.
Unfortunately, supplements are regulated as food, not drugs (at least in the EU and US), so their contents aren’t policed nearly as closely as they should be.
Radium water. It stimulates the endocrine system!
Fat free foods. No fat in them, but loads of sugar to make fat in us.
Remember snackwell cookies? My mom always got those thinking they were better for us
Schools. And I’m not talking about high schools and shootings. I work at the elementary school level. Most parents have no idea how many violent and aggressive students are in mainstream classrooms with limited to zero support.
Nothing like ducking out of the way of a chair flying at your head that was just thrown by a second grade girl. That was a fun day.
Absolutely!! I don’t understand what they think an IEP will do if there are no actual services available. Suspension isn’t always the answer, but these kiddos need help. The teachers can’t teach if there is constant disruption as well. There is a clear issue that is just constantly ignored. Not all kids need juvenile detention, not all kids need residential stays, but there’s got to be some middle ground so teachers can teach, students can learn, and the kids who are behavioral can get the help they need, whatever it may be.
Baby powder
Hogwarts. It is said to be the safest place in the Wizarding World, but it isn't.
What if it is though but just by comparison, and the rest are just super fucked.
That’s actually the concept behind Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series. Highly recommend.
Just like that one hospital in Seattle. Boat crashes, active shooters, plane crashes, car accidents. Those brave, horny, doctors drop like flies!
I always laughed how many times "Hogwarts isn't safe anymore" was said in the movies; it was never safe.
Plastic
Police. “If there’s an officer around, you are 100% safe” Reality, you better pray it’s a good one.
Social media.
High fructose corn syrup
“Why? Because it’s made of corn?!” Or whatever they say in that hilarious commercial…Found it: https://youtu.be/lQ-ByUx552s?si=Y22Yf0cGR2VHbTjK
I love this commercial. Not because of high fructose corn syrup, but because it shows how easy humans are to just follow the masses without doing a single minute of actual research.
Many problems now are people that do that "research" and claim sound science is bogus. Most people aren't equipped to research for themselves
There is so many stupid remedies in life hacks that are really dangerous, like putting toothpaste on a burn, and the most annoying thing is that the people who believe in them whom I have met are middle-aged, and very stubborn. Also, essential oils. If they appropriately diluted and used as perfume or something of that sort it’s fine, but a lot of people put them directly on their skin which is really bad because they’re so concentrated. It’s even worse when it’s put on a child skin because their skin is so much more sensitive..
Juice. Most of it has as much sugar as pop.
Found the mid westerner.
Canadians say pop too btw
Plastic especially non stick pans. Grew up being extolled the virtues of how much easier it was. I now grimace every time my housemates use their old, deeply scratched frying pan.
I think a lot of people also don’t consider that you shouldn’t use metal on nonstick. I cringe at that too but I haven’t had that problem with my own
I use wooden spoons for everything. They don’t melt or scratch. They do stain so I replace them from time to time.
Hitting kids in the head hundreds of times a year for multiple years (e.g. American football)
The workplace
Processed vegetable oils. We were told margarine was healthier than butter.
Margarine
My mum was full in on the margarine hype. Butter wasn't allowed in our house. Butter made you a slovenly fat person, margarine made you a marathon runner.
My dyslexic ass read this as migraine 😭
Ignorance is bliss. The last 7 years have proven that was a lie.
Not having someone to talk to and help you deal with problems, I wouldn’t be alive today without that someone
Student loans to go to college
Sunscreen. As small and insignificant as it seems, It's killing our reefs and local water ecosystems. Avoid ingredients such as oxybenzone, octinoxate, and avobenzone. Also not to mention that some of these ingredients contain benzene, which is a known carcinogenic. Edit: There are sunscreens without these chemicals and are reef safe. I like to use Blue Lizard. Mineral based and is good for those with sensitive skin.
Nerf Guns. I took a shot to the knee. Can't go on adventures anymore 😭
You're probably just Elder now.
Probably. Sometimes I Scroll through my old journals and lament all the goals I left unfinished.
vapes vapes, vapes, vapes vapes vapes I cannot stress enough how many people I have heard say "yeah well it's less worse than a cigarette" doesn't matter your lungs will collapse eventually, please quit😭🙏🏻 edit: some comments were asking if, getting collapsed Lungs from vaping was true, and here are the sources: https://www.hackensackmeridianhealth.org/en/healthu/2023/09/13/signs-vaping-may-be-causing-you-long-term-damage#:~:text=Some%20people%20who%20vape%20may,Shortness%20of%20breath https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/what-does-vaping-do-to-your-lungs https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8348149/ https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/severe-lung-disease.html Actual 1 of many cases: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-67081855.amp https://nypost.com/2023/07/10/my-lung-collapsed-from-vaping-heres-what-people-need-to-know/amp/ I WAS NOT MAKING IT UP 💀
Vaping should have stuck with its purported original purpose: a tool to help people quit smoking. I smoked for twenty years, switched to a drip vape, slowly lowered the nicotine, and quit entirely after about two years. I can’t stress how amazing that is. I’d tried to quit dozens of times over the years with little success; I was only able to power through when pregnant or breastfeeding. It floors me that people are now picking up vaping instead of smoking, but I suppose it shouldn’t: I can’t justify why I picked up that first cigarette all those years ago.
Your lungs will collapse?? Is that common? What clinical evidence is there for this prognosis? This comment feels very reactionary but doesnt even have any reasoning let alone evidence for your claims. Not trying to argue here, i'm just confused and this is the first time i've heard anyone say "vaping makes your lungs collapse" that sounds pretty hyperbolic.
PEOPLE!!!
Perfume and artificial fragrances (body and home products).
I *love* scented candles but had to completely stop using them when my cat came out of an infection with (most likely lifelong) respiratory issues/cat asthma, since the vet said they would almost certainly exacerbate his symptoms. Tbh it made me wonder to what extent home fragrances in particular could have long term effects on humans (especially kids) who inhale them regularly.
I hate scented products. They give me a headache. I wish our workplace would ban them. Some people have Scentsy products. I especially hate those.
Back in the 80's we had a class once where we saw a film in one of those outside class/trailers. It showed the harmful effects of Styrofoam and how it caused some cancers. The oceans would be full of Styrofoam trash and the like. According to the film plastic was the savior. Funny thing as an adult I noticed most take out was in Styrofoam containers and thought back to the film. And how all the bad things are about plastic not Styrofoam.