by Gordon Edwards, CCNR and Michel Duguay, MSQN   Three Mile Island taught the world that nuclear power is inherently dangerous. With Chernobyl the entire world witnessed the awesome power of a total meltdown. At Fukushima we have seen simultaneous partial meltdowns in three reactors and four spent fuel pools. Canada’s reactors have a...

Apr 4, 2011

by Joseph Roberts Deb Reynolds got lots of people to trust her. She opened a little shop at 196 West 18th called The Home Grow-In Grocer. Neighbours were so taken by her that they wanted to lend her money. And they did.   There were large lenders, and hundreds of local folks who paid Deb up front for her Grow-In Grocer box programs. It went like this. Deb...

  by Kenneth Peters   Western thought tends to the approach that if a little is good, a lot must be better. How else to explain the medical profession sending people (mostly women) off to take 1,200, 1,500 and even 2,000 mg of elemental calcium per day. Even the medical profession acknowledges that all the calcium in the world won’t rebuild...

Apr 3, 2011

by Paul H. LeMay One day, while in a store that sells vitamins, you pick up a bottle labelled vitamin E. While pondering your prospective purchase, your eyes briefly linger over the proviso “as d-alpha tocopherol.” But just how important can that be? After all, in bigger print, the label reassuringly reads “Vitamin E.” And in the flicker...

Apr 3, 2011

by Siegfried Gursche Researchers from a number of medical universities and public health institutes in Japan have concluded an average low intake of saturated fats is not associated with an increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease. In fact, some intake actually decreases the risk of dying from a stroke. The results were published in the American...

  DRUG BUST by Alan Cassels Let’s try a skill-testing question: name a well-studied medical monitoring technology in wide use today, often used unnecessarily and frequently for things that have nothing to do with a patient’s immediate health and typically used with people ignorant of its potential harms. While one part of your brain tries to...

Apr 3, 2011

by Robert Bateman On October 13, 2008, a 15-year-old boy named Brandon Crisp walked out of his house because his parents had taken away his Xbox video game; after a three-week search, his body was finally found. The November 19, 2008, issue of the New York Times described the huge increase of medications that are prescribed to young people. Parks and natural...

Apr 3, 2011

another year later Last year in our April edition, we invited individuals from several environmental organizations to write about the important environmental issues facing BC and Canada. Their collective list included Independent Power Projects (IPPs) in BC, the proposed Enbridge Pipeline and the Alberta Tar Sands. This year, we asked the same organizations to...