Thanks to Trop50 for sponsoring my writing about fabulous bloggers. This year Trop50 is granting 50 Fabulous Wishes. Click here to enter for a chance to win $1,000 to celebrate a friend with a refreshing attitude about looking and feeling fabulous!
Fabulous bloggers, according to my definition, are folks whose well-written words and pretty photos inspire me to do better, be better, feel better. They are almost always women, and moms, and they work really hard at empowering others. They don’t pretend to be perfect (they sometimes eat donuts, skip workouts, raise voices, and let the laundry pile high). They strive for balance in their crazy days. They make me laugh. And the really, really good ones give away lots of free stuff. There are five fab bloggers in my world. Here they are:
in HIS grace is a newbie to me, a blog I just recently stumbled upon, by way of a friend. WOW is what I have to say about Chrissie Grace, a way-clever, stay-at-home mother of four, plus artist, author, and poet. Chrissie chronicles her everyday life and amazing projects with few words and many photos (I love that!). Bonus: she links to her etsy shop, so all the rockin’ projects featured on her blog can be located and purchased with just a few clicks. One of my faves is this print:
Click on image!Because she does pretty things with food, is tech/social media-savvy, and homeschools her kids (anyone who can do that for longer than half a day is, in my book, a hero), Christine and her ColorMePink blog rank right up there with the best of the best. I mean, the blog is pink, for one, and her presentation is slick, and there’s just such a wide variety of good stuff, I keep going back. And to think I might have never found this wonder woman had I not met her hubby, the money man at a Honda dealership, the day I bought a minivan. We talked blogging, he passed me her business card, and the rest is hisherstory.
MizFit keeps me coming back, too. Recently named People’s Choice winner of the Fila Toning Real Women model casting call, this muscle momma is a rock star. She takes healthy eating and purposeful exercising and makes them seem so achievable. She is smart, witty, beautiful, and she knows her subject well (before and after photos prove it). No surprise she has a dedicated following. Not just on her blog, though — the girl tears things up on Facebook and Twitter, too! She is a force, for sure!
Then there’s fitness guru Fitz, who first met me in her home gym, where she brought me back from the brink. Still in treatment for breast cancer, she took my weak, dizzy, bloated, blah self and morphed it into something strong and healthy. She convinced me I could run, when I swore I could not, and then she joined me for a Making Strides Against Breast Cancer 5K months later. Last year, I ran a half marathon, and yea, I think she had something do with major feat! OK, so back to the whole blog thing: Fitz has a blog, where she offers tips for optimal living, glimpses into the lives of fit celebs, and there’s never a shortage of giveaways (I just happened to win one — ChopKeeper cutting boards are all mine!)
Click on image!Finally, my last fave: One in a Million, because I have a thing for the power of words, and this blog is full of words that make me smile. That’s the point, says blogger Sara Louise, who calls her little spot on the Internet, “a place to come when you really need to smile.” (Sara crafts her blog for herself and her mom, who has a rare cancer that can’t be cured.) *Be warned: the F-word sometimes appears on this site, but only in the most inspirational of ways, of course.
Don’t forget to enter the 50 Fabulous Wishes contest for a chance to win $1,000 to celebrate a friend with a refreshing attitude about looking and feeling fabulous. I was selected for this Tropicana Trop50 sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do. I received compensation to use and facilitate my post.
Tags: Blog With Integrity, Clever Girls Collective, fabulous bloggers, favorite blogs, Trop50, Tropicana, wishesView the original article here
About 1100 people each year die in the UK from lung cancer correlation to indoor radon, but current government protection policies focus mainly on the small number of homes with high radon levels and neglect the 95% of radon related deaths caused by lower levels of radon, as per a research studypublished on bmj.com today.
The authors argue that installing basic and cheap measures to prevent radon in all new homes would be more cost-effective and have greater potential for reducing lung cancer deaths caused by radon, and UK Building Regulations should be amended to enforce this.
Radon in the home is a natural air pollutant produced by the decay of uranium in the ground. Radon gas seeps into buildings through cracks and holes in the foundations and when it decays it produces particles that can enter the lungs and expose them to damaging radiation.
At present, government policies in the UK concentrate on searching for homes with high levels of radon and encouraging homeowners to take remedial action at their own expense.
Professor Alastair Gray, Professor Sarah Darby and other colleagues from the University of Oxford, assessed the contribution of indoor radon to lung cancer deaths in the UK, and examined the cost- effectiveness of policies to control radon exposure. They used recent evidence on the risk of lung cancer from indoor radon, based on data from 7,000 people with lung cancer and more than 21,000 people without lung cancer across Europe. They then calculated the lifetime risk of lung cancer death before and after various interventions to control radon, and the costs involved.
The authors estimate that 1100 deaths a year in the UK are correlation to radon, about 3.3% of all deaths from lung cancer, but less than 5% of radon related deaths occur from exposure above the current action level. In addition, they report that a number of homeowners refuse to have their home tested or to spend money reducing radon levels. As a result these policies are costly and have a minimal impact on radon related deaths.
In contrast, the authors observed that installing simple preventive measures in new homes is highly cost-effective, but at present is only being done in selected areas of the country. This should be rolled out across the whole UK, say the authors, and should be backed up by changes to the Building Regulations. A gas-resistant membrane in the foundations would reduce radon by about 50% and would cost only about 100.
Importantly, the study also observed that six out of seven radon related lung cancers occur in people who smoke or who have smoked in the past. The best way for current smokers to reduce risk is to stop smoking. Current and former smokers can also reduce their risk by taking radon control measures seriously, say the authors.
The authors suggest that their findings are relevant to a number of other countries, most of which have higher concentrations of radon than the UK. The average radon concentration in UK homes is 21 bequerels per cubic metre, but in the European Union the average is 55, suggesting that about 8% of deaths from lung cancer, or 18,000 deaths each year, are caused by radon across the EU.
This is the most extensive and detailed evaluation to date of the policies to counter radon-induced and deaths from lung cancer, say Professor Anssi Auvinen from the University of Tampere in Finland and Professor Gran Pershagen from the Institute of Environmental Medicine in Sweden, in an accompanying editorial.
The findings suggest that:”Radon policies need to be scrutinised [and especially in populations with low average levels], the priority should be to apply basic measures universally rather than to take action only when high radon levels have been identified by measurement.”
Posted by: Justin234 Source
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My medical advice
22/10/11
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Coal from China’s Xuan Wei County, widely used for cooking and heating, may contribute to unusually high rates of lung cancer among women in the region.
Credit: US Department of Energy
David Large and his colleagues note that parts of China’s Xuan Wei County in Yunnan Province have the world’s highest occurence rate of lung cancer in nonsmoking women 20 times higher than the rest of China. Women in the region heat their homes and cook on open coal-burning stoves that are not vented to the outside. Researchers think that indoor emissions from burning coal cause cancer, but are unclear why the lung cancer rates in this region are so much higher than other areas. Earlier studies show a strong link between certain volatile substances, called PAHs, in coal smoke and lung cancer in the region.
The researchers observed that coal used in parts of Xuan Wei County had about 10 times more silica, a suspected carcinogen, than U.S. coal. Silica may work in conjunction with PAHs to make the coal more carcinogenic, they indicate. The researchers also observed that this high-silica coal was formed 250 million years ago, at a time when massive volcanic eruptions worked to deposit silica in the peat that formed Xuan Wei’s coal.
Posted by: Justin234 Source
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