Cynical Activities - P
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PILL, TAKING THE
The most effective way to use the pill is to hold it between your knees: at least one in every twenty women who takes it the usual way becomes pregnant, often from taking it incorrectly. Taking the pill raises the risk of strokes and heart attacks in women over thirty-five who smoke or have high blood pressure, and women on the low-estrogen "third generation" pill have a higher risk of blood clots. Women on the pill are more likely to suffer from deep vein thrombosis as a result of long-distance air travel. The pill can alter women's sense of smell, interfering with their natural tendency to choose men whose odors signal genetic complementarity and the likelihood of healthier children. (But then, if you're on the pill, you don't want his babies anyway, so who cares?) |
PLASTICS
Some plastics used for toys, food packaging, and household products contain phthalates, chemicals that could be carcinogenic or might cause abnormalities in male sexual development. Now your son will have something else to blame you for in therapy, forty years from now. |
PLAYGROUNDS
If you remember childhood at all, you know that a grade-school playground is probably the most dangerous place in the universe. In 1999, more than five hundred thousand children and teenagers required medical treatment for injuries related to playground equipment, at a cost of almost $10 billion in medical, legal and liability, pain and suffering, and work loss expenses. It's unclear how many of these were actually caused by the playground equipment and how many were in the "Honest, Ms. Beastey, he just fell" category. |
POLLUTION
Well, if you didn't already think pollution was bad for you (for example, if you decided to back out of a worldwide treaty limiting greenhouse gases), there's a scientific probability that you may be dumber than a box of rocks. |
PORTLAND, OREGON
In a study of sixty-eight American cities, Portland was ninth worst in terms of traffic, with 47 percent of daily travel taking place in congested conditions. |
POTTING SOIL
People in at least three U.S. states have contracted Legionnaires' disease from handling contaminated potting soil. What we want to know is, what were you doing with legionnaires in your potting soil? |
POVERTY
Most of us already figured that people don't live in poverty for the good of their health, and guess what? We were right. By the age of five, poor children are already more likely than richer children to be fearful, anxious, and sad, as well as to have serious behavior problems. Poor boys are more likely to get muscular dystrophy, and both girls and boys from poor homes have a higher risk of strokes, heart disease, stomach cancer, respiratory disease, and Alzheimer's later in life. They also tend to live in places with unusually high levels of environmental toxins such as lead, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and organophosphate pesticides. If you're poor, you're more likely to suffer from fatigue; you have a higher risk of certain diseases, such as cervical or smoking-related cancers; you'll get inferior medical care for conditions such as congestive heart failure; and you're more likely to die in the weeks following a heart attack. A study in the U.K. estimated that ten thousand people, including 1,400 children, die prematurely each year because they are poor. Looks like "give me your tired, your poor" wasn't such a great offer after all. But then, we have better things to spend money on (most of which go bang or emit carbon monoxide). |
POWER LINES
If you live downwind of an electrical power line, you should sleep over at your boyfriend's more often: the lines affect particles of pollution that blow past them, you inhale the particles, and they may increase your risk of cancer. |
POWER PLANTS
Nobody has ever figured out exactly what the Environmental Protection Agency does, but it doesn't appear to involve protecting the environment. Pollution from power plants cuts short the lives of over thirty thousand people in the U.S. each year, with hundreds of thousands more suffering from asthma attacks, cardiac problems, and respiratory difficulties. In 1999 alone, the 594 dirtiest power plants emitted 12.5 million tons of sulfur dioxide, 5.4 million tons of nitrogen oxide, and 2.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide. |
PREGNANCY
Sure, you were prepared for morning sickness, backache, stretch marks, and the rest of it, but we bet nobody warned you about drawbacks like these: getting pregnant increases the likelihood that a woman will become obsessive-compulsive, die of homicide, suffer from deep vein thrombosis when flying long distances, or come down with malaria. |
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