When I was at the right age, I was lucky to have a mom who explained this stuff to me. It wasn’t until I got a little older and talked to some of my friends did I realize that all parents clearly did not do this. You don’t have to be gross and graphic but if we keep holding on to this puritanism and this mythology of the pure as snow teenager, we’re effectively giving kids uzis without any instruction as to how to use it and what kind of damage it can cause.

American squeamishness about talking about sex has helped keep common sexually transmitted infections far too common, especially among vulnerable teens, U.S. researchers reported Monday.

Latest statistics on chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis show the three highly treatable infections continue to spread in the United States.

‘Chlamydia and gonorrhea are stable at unacceptably high levels and syphilis is resurgent after almost being eliminated,’ said John Douglas, director of the division of sexually transmitted diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

People have sex. It happens. Explain this to your kids, so they don’t die or kill someone.

In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser’s Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback. “This study helps dispel one of the commonly held beliefs among vaccine-refusing parents: that their children are not at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases,” Glanz says.

“I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die,” Offit says, frowning as he ticks off recent fatal cases of meningitis in unvaccinated children in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. “So now I’ve changed it to ‘when enough children start to die.’ Because obviously, we’re not there yet.”

Politicians and notable figures who pander to the non-science behind vaccine fear (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for instance) are essentially complicit in these deaths and illnesses people are causing by not vaccinating their kids. People who send their children to school without vaccines should be sued, and they should probably be considered some kind of a child abuser.

This attitude caused a measles outbreak in San Diego and is basically child abuse.

Vaccinate your children. A lot of scientists worked hard on these medicines and as a result our generation is resistant to many ailments that shortened the lives of past generations. This stuff is so irresponsible.

The government acknowledged Friday that a shipment of peanuts from the plant linked to a salmonella outbreak contained a “filthy, putrid or decomposed substance” later identified as metal fragments. The shipment was returned to the U.S. in April, months earlier than reflected in a federal tracking database.

The rejected shipment — coming across a bridge between New York and Canada — was logged by the Food and Drug Administration but never tested by federal inspectors, according to government records. The computer records show a mid-September date, just weeks before the earliest signs of the outbreak.

…

“The FDA failing to follow up after this incident, does that mean that products that are not good enough for a foreign country are still good enough for the USA?” asked Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. “That’s a double standard that has deadly consequences for our citizens.”

New research challenges the notion that you can be fat and fit, finding that being active can lower but not eliminate heart risks faced by heavy women. “It doesn’t take away the risk entirely. Weight still matters,” said Dr. Martha Gulati, a heart specialist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Previous research has gone back and forth on whether exercise or weight has a greater influence on heart disease risks.

The new study involving nearly 39,000 women helps sort out the combined effects of physical activity and body mass on women’s chances of developing heart disease, said Gulati, who wasn’t involved in the research.