Health

From a press release of the same title from University of California - Berkeley:

When used indoors under certain conditions, many common household cleaners and air fresheners emit toxic pollutants at levels that may lead to health risks, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Exposure levels to some of the pollutants - and to the secondary pollutants formed when some of the products mix with ozone - may exceed regulatory guidelines when a large surface is cleaned in a small room or when the products are used regularly, resulting in chronic exposure, according to the study.. Four years in the making, the team's 330-page study and report, "Indoor Air Chemistry: Cleaning Agents, Ozone and Toxic Air Contaminants," was posted online by the ARB on Wednesday, May 10, at http://www.arb.ca.gov/research/apr/past/indoor.htm. The ARB asked Nazaroff and his team to focus their work in two areas: an investigation of toxic air contaminants in household cleaning products and air fresheners, especially a class of chemicals known as ethylene-based glycol ethers; and an examination of the chemistry that occurs when such products are used indoors - in particular, products that contain a reactive group of chemicals called terpenes... In several realistic use scenarios, the tests showed that people could be exposed to potentially dangerous levels of toxic pollutants. The scenarios included:

• Cleaning in a small, moderately ventilated bathroom. In calculations based on emissions from one of the glycol-ether containing products, the team found that a person who spends 15 minutes cleaning scale off of a shower stall could inhale three times the "acute one-hour exposure limit" for this compound set by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.
• Air freshener and ozone in a child's bedroom. This scenario could occur when people use both air fresheners and ozone-generating devices simultaneously in a room. This could lead to exposures to formaldehyde that are 25 percent higher than California's guideline value. Because other sources of formaldehyde could also be present in the room, exposure to formaldehyde would probably be even higher, the report states.
• Cleaning when outdoor ozone levels are high. This scenario simulates an apartment in Southern California on a day when the mid-afternoon outdoor ozone concentration is high. A person who stays in the kitchen for two hours after using a moderate amount of one of the terpene-containing products would breathe in about one quarter of the total daily guideline value for particulate matter.
• Multi-house cleaning by a professional home cleaner. Under this scenario, a person who cleans four houses a day, five days per week, 50 weeks per year, would take in about 80 micrograms per day of formaldehyde, double the guideline value set by California's Proposition 65. In addition, the person's intake of fine particulate matter during the hours spent cleaning would exceed the average federal guideline level for an entire year. These quantities are in addition to the formaldehyde and particulate matter that the person would be exposed to from all other sources and activities during the year.

The take-home message from these studies, according to Nazaroff, is that everyone - but especially cleaning professionals - should be cautious about overuse of products with high levels of ethylene-based glycol ethers and terpenes. Rooms should be ventilated during and after cleaning, some products should be used in diluted solutions as opposed to full-strength, and cleaning supplies should be promptly removed from occupied spaces once cleaning is done. Also, people should avoid the use of ozone generators or ionizing air cleaners, especially in the same space where terpene-containing cleaning products or air fresheners are being used.

Via The Week, from an article by Clare Masters in Australia's The Daily Telegraph:

A study of more than 7000 women found expectant mothers who work more than 32 hours in a stressful work environment deliver lower birthweight babies and are more vulnerable to the high-blood pressure pregnancy condition pre-eclampsia. Dutch social health professor Gouke Bonsel advises women to work no more than three days a week if their job causes unusual amounts of stress.

From a story by Elizabeth Mehren in the LA Times:

Virginity pledges, in which young people vow to abstain from sex until marriage, have little staying power among those who take them, a Harvard study has found. More than half of the adolescents who make the signed public promises give up on their pledges within a year, according to the study released last week... "The Harvard report is wrong," said Janice Crouse, a fellow at a Concerned Women for America think tank. "This study is in direct contradiction with trends we have been seeing in recent years," Crouse said. "Those who make virginity pledges have shown greater resolve to save sex for marriage." [The Harvard study also found that]...of those who had sex after telling the first interviewers they had taken the pledge, 73% denied in the second interview having made the pledge.

From a press release from the British Medical Journal:

The idea that 'puppy fat' in children disappears as they progress to adolescence is a myth which may put the future health of children at risk... Previous studies have shown that adolescence is a key time, since excess weight during teenage years pre-disposes adults to continued weight problems - with all the associated health risks. But today's study, tracking 5863 children as they developed into young adults, shows that the problems are established before teenage years - since those with excess weight by the age of 11 continued with it during adolescence. ...overall, girls had higher rates of excess weight problems than boys. Black girls had particularly high levels, with an average of 38% being overweight or obese over the study period, compared to 28% for white girls or 20% for Asian girls. For boys, however, ethnicity made little difference to excess weight levels. The findings were less clear cut for economic status. 35% of the most deprived girls were overweight or obese compared with 28% of other girls, but other economic categories showed less consistency. "Children who are obese when they enter secondary school will very likely leave it obese," say the authors. More monitoring is crucial if rising tides of obesity are to be tackled effectively, they conclude.

From a Washington Post article of the same title by Marc Kaufman:

Poor women in America are increasingly likely to have unwanted pregnancies, whereas relatively affluent women are succeeding more and more in getting pregnant only when they want to, according to a study analyzing federal statistics. As a result of the growing disparity, women living in poverty are now almost four times more likely to become pregnant unintentionally than women of greater means, the study found. Based on nationwide data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics and other sources, the researchers found that from 1994 through 2001, the rate of unplanned pregnancies increased by almost 30 percent for women below the federal poverty line -- now defined as $16,000 annually for a family of three. For women in families comfortably above poverty, the rate of unplanned pregnancies fell by 20 percent during the same period. The abortion rate also rose among poor women while declining among the more affluent... Asked what was driving the trends, the authors noted that some state and federal reproductive health programs have been cut or made more restrictive in recent years. State and federal programs have increasingly focused on abstinence rather than contraception, and some analysts have argued that the shift is leading to less use of contraceptives and more unintended pregnancies. Many social conservatives say, however, that contraceptives have limitations and that the only way a woman can ensure she will not have an unintended pregnancy is to refrain from sexual intercourse until she is ready to have a child.