Arsenic-free

" everyone in the house used to drink water from the tubewell, though we knew it had a very high iron content. Sometime ago, I got the tubewell water tested and found that it was arsenic positive," says Abdur Razzak Mollah, a resident of village Dhuldi Rajapur in Faridpur district, Bangladesh.

Smoking your skin

Here is yet another reason why women should not smoke. A recently-published study says that smoking causes wrinkles by upsetting the body's mechanism for renewing the skin cells. Normally, the skin remains healthy, as there is a balance between skin cells lost and new skin cells formed. But it appears that cigarette smoke selectively enhances enzymes called matrix proteases (MMPs) that chop the fibers that form collagen, the supporting structure of the skin.

Holy river?

A study by the Norwegian Institute of Water Research has found the water of the Ganga "to be highly polluted with concentration of chemical oxygen demand (cod) twice as high and the concentration of chrome a thousand times higher, when compared to a untreated public sewer in Norway. The institute had conducted tests on water samples collected from the downstream of the Ganga near Combined Effluent Treatment Plant (CETP) in Jajmau, Kanpur.

Victims of pollution

the health of hundreds of women who live off the Pulicat Lake, a bird sanctuary on Chennai's northern outskirts, have been severely affected due to pollution of the lake by industrial and domestic waste. These women earn a living by fishing in the lake and now they are suffering from severe skin diseases.

Wanted: hair donors

despite the presence of between 100,000-150,000 hair on the scalp, a bald pate remains a nightmare for virtually every person. Not surprisingly, extensive research is being done to understand the complex process of the growth and regeneration of adult hair.

Ecstasy rashes

People taking the drug Ecstasy may have side effects in the form of a rash that looks like acne, said a German dermatologist. Uwe Wollina of the University of Jena in Germany first noticed the symptoms when a woman was admitted to the university hospital with liver failure after consuming ecstasy. "She developed a facial rash that resembled acne, but it wasn't," said Wollina. Another ecstasy user being treated for drug-induced psychosis developed a similar rash. It cleared up within a few days, by which time the drug had left the patient's system.

Screen test: failed

Sunscreens do not help prevent skin cancer. This startling revelation came recently at a science conference in Philadelphia, USA, where the widely-held belief that sunscreens lower the risk of deadly melanoma skin cancer was questioned. Sunscreens prevent sunburns, and since there is evidence that frequent burns, especially at an early age trigger melanoma, many assume that using them help ward off this cancer. However, melanoma cases have risen dramatically over the last 25 years despite the numerous brands of sunscreens that have flooded the markets.

Heal thyself

Licking promotes wound healing, say Nigel Benjamin and his colleagues of Clinical Pharmacology Department at the Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry, London, UK. Saliva contains anti-microbial substances and concentrated nitrate that are converted to nitrite by bacteria present on the tongue. As the surface of the skin is acidic, the salivary nitrite in contact with skin is converted to nitric oxide that contributes to the anti-microbial effects of wound licking.

Beware of the Ganga

It was not the spending of hundreds of crores of rupees in cleaning the Ganga that made the average Indian who takes a dip in the river, sit up and acknowledge something that the world had known for long. The Ganga was polluted. And highly polluted at that.

Scalp protection

Researchers from Brazil have just reported that skin flakes in the hair of children with dandruff provide a comfortable refuge for house-dust mites, which trigger allergic responses that can cause asthma. Charles Naspitz and his colleagues from the paediatrics department of Federal University of Sao Paulo have collected through a hand-held vacuum cleaner material from the children's scalp just before they took a shower. They discovered two common species of dust mites Matophagoides pteronyssinus and Bloma tropicalis in the scalp of both asthmatic and non-asthmatic children.