Cynical Activities - A
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ACETAMINOPHEN
When you wake up with a life-threatening hangover, maybe a big bottle of painkillers washed down with a Bloody Mary isn't the best solution. Taking too much acetaminophen, especially in combination with alcohol, has been linked to liver and kidney damage. |
AIR
Let's hear it for affluence, everybody. Thanks to the pollution that cars and industries generate, this entry could be about you! Sixty-two million Americans live in areas whose air contains such high levels of major pollutants that it's officially defined as unhealthy. Unhealthy air can cause preterm births, birth defects, brain and nerve damage, heart attacks, and long-term injury to the lungs. It's generally correlated with both mortality and hospitalizations, especially among the elderly. And if you think you can solve the problem by retreating to your air-conditioned office, read on. |
AIR CONDITONING
Next time it's a hundred degrees outside and you're sitting smugly in your nice, cool office, keep this in mind: pollution in an air-conditioned room is likely to be two to five times as great as in the air outdoors. |
AIRPLANE CABIN CREW, BEING
One cabin-crew member in ten has been injured in flight, through collisions with drink trolleys, burns from galley equipment, slipping on walkways, or exposure to infected blood during in-flight emergencies. Flight crews may also be exposed to fumes from engine lubricants containing organophosphates, possibly causing irreversible health problems such as nervous system disorders which could make that little demonstration with the oxygen masks a lot more complicated. |
AIRPLANE TRAVEL
Welcome to Air Agony! Here's what's on our in-flight menu for today: obstructed eustachian tubes, barosi-nusitis, facial pain, ankle edema, airsickness, deep vein thrombosis leading to pulmonary embolus, dehydration....Traveling by air can give you all these, not Airplane to mention the diseases you can catch from other passengers. If you wear contact lenses, air travel can irritate your corneas. It can also disrupt your body's circadian rhythms, cause frequent filling of evacuation bags in people with colostomies, and accentuate psychotic or other unpredictable psychological tendencies, so you might want to keep a sharp eye on that guy sitting next to you conversing with his bread roll. If you're a frequent flyer, you're running the risk of inhaling dangerous levels of organophosphates; you're also being exposed to cosmic radiation at a greater intensity than you'd experience at ground level. Thank you for flying with us, and please come again soon! |
AIRPLANES
If you're a nature lover, take the bus. Airplanes produce more greenhouse gases per passenger-mile than other forms of transport. |
AIRPORTS
If you live anywhere near an airport, you already know about the traffic, the jet noise (which by itself can double your risk of high blood pressure), and the bad vibrations from the crowds outside the lost luggage department. But you might not know you can get malaria from mosquitoes that hitch rides on planes coming from infected areas and then fly to your house and bite you. |
ALBUQUERQUE
Albuquerque's drinking water contains more arsenic, which can cause cancer of the liver, bladder, lungs, kidney, and prostate— than does the water of any other major American city. Albuquerque can also be deadly when encountered in spelling bees. |
ALFALFA SPROUTS
Have some health food! Alfalfa sprouts, the most common type of sprout in salad bars and produce departments, have been linked to a number of disease outbreaks due to contamination by salmonella and E. coli. In California between 1996 and 1998, more widespread outbreaks of food poisoning were caused by alfalfa sprouts than by anything else. However, this could be linked to the fact that in California between 1996 and 1998, people ate more alfalfa sprouts than anything else. |
ALL-TERRAIN VEHICLES
Between 1985 and 1998, 3,825 people were killed and more than 950,000 were treated in emergency rooms in the U.S. as a result of ATV-related injuries. (And, although it didn't make the news, Bambi and Thumper are now off-roadkill.) |
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