The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 31, 2008

Official News page 7


REAL LIFE NEWS: HEALTH SCARE HITS HIPPIES

by Hazed

Terrible news for anyone who is now, or used to be, a hippy - even a weekend hippy like I was in my youth. Researchers are warning that burning joss-sticks and incense can cause cancer. A 12-year study by scientists at the Statens Serum Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark supports previous research pointing to the smoke from incense containing "cancer-causing chemicals such as polyaromatic hydrocarbons, carbonyls and benzene, which cause mutations to DNA in human cells. "

Yikes!

In the study, Dr Jeppe Friborg and his colleagues quizzed more than 60,000 ethnic Chinese people in Singapore over a five-year period between 1993 and 1998. They asked "how much they used incense and collected detailed information on their lifestyle including their diet and how much they drank alcohol and smoked," and excluded "all participants who had previously had cancer."

Then in December 2005 they checked back on the original participants in the survey, using detailed health records in Singapore's National Cancer Registry. They found that £325 had developed cancer of the upper respiratory tract and 821 had developed lung cancer."

Adjusting the figures to include other factors, such as smoking, which could have an effect on cancer, the researchers discovered that incense does indeed increase the risk of developing cancer. The small risk of developing upper respiratory cancers, for example, was nearly doubled in those who used insence regularly. The cancers were also more common amongst women, which could be "explained by the fact that women tend to spend more time in the smoky home environment."

So put that joss stick out now, and go back to breathing the healthy, clean air found in our towns and **cough cough** cities.


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