Literally....
"Pageant hopeful to have mastectomy" by Hannah Dreier | Associated Press, January 12, 2013
LAS VEGAS — Win or lose Saturday, Miss America contestant Allyn Rose will have conveyed a message about breast cancer prevention using her primary tool as a beauty queen: her body.
The 24-year-old Miss DC plans to undergo a double mastectomy after she struts in a bikini and flaunts her roller skating talent. She is removing both breasts as a preventive measure to reduce her chances of developing the disease that killed her mother, grandmother, and great-aunt.
‘‘My mom would have given up every part of her body to be here for me, to watch me in the pageant,’’ she said between dress rehearsals and preliminary competitions at Planet Hollywood on the Las Vegas Strip on Wednesday. ‘‘If there’s something that I can do to be proactive, it might hurt my body, it might hurt my physical beauty, but I’m going to be alive.’’
If crowned, the University of Maryland, College Park politics major could become the first Miss America not endowed with the Barbie silhouette associated with beauty queens.
Rose said it was her father who first broached the subject, during her freshman year of college, two years after the death of her mother.
‘‘I said, ‘Dad I’m not going to do that. I like the body I have.’ He got serious and said, ‘Well then you’re going to end up dead like your mom.’ ’’
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That was tougher than I thought.
UPDATES:
Angelina Jolie’s preventive surgery shows harsh choices
Angelina Jolie: The courage to save lives
Jolie helps out in Congo
Couldn't she have waited for the mammogram?
"Mammograms may raise cancer risk for some, study says; MRI maybe safer for young with suspect gene" by Maria Cheng |
Associated Press, September 07, 2012
LONDON — Mammograms aimed at finding breast cancer might actually
raise the chances of developing it in young women whose genes put them
at higher risk for the disease, a study by leading European cancer
agencies suggests.
The added radiation from mammograms and other types of tests with
chest radiation might be especially harmful to them, and an MRI is
probably a safer method of screening women under 30 who are at high risk
because of gene mutations, the authors conclude.
The study can’t prove a link between the radiation and breast cancer,
but is one of the biggest ever to look at the issue. The research was
published Thursday in the journal BMJ.
‘‘This will raise questions and caution flags about how we treat
women with [gene] mutations,’’ said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief
medical officer of the American Cancer Society. He and the society had
no role in the research.
Mammograms are most often used in women over 40, unless they are at
high risk, like carrying a mutation of the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene. Having
such a mutation increases the risk of developing cancer fivefold. About 1
in 400 women has the gene abnormalities, which are more common in
Eastern European Jewish populations. Unlike mammograms, an MRI does not
involve radiation....
Now I see the why there are such concerns about it in my paper.
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Related: Should breast cancer patients have a decade of tamoxifen?
‘Chemo brain’ confusion may result from stress, not medicines
Sigh.
Yes, ladies, the problem is all in your heads. How many centuries have you been hearing that one?
Also see: Does the Boston Globe Hate Women?
Komen Right Back at You
The Massachusetts Model: The Imagery of Massachusetts Health Care
British Babies
As always, the root question is who$e making money?
And what the heck, while we are there let's make a try for something lower:
"Beavers expanding range, making homes closer to people; With trapping ban, population grows" by Beth Daley | Globe Staff, December 26, 2012
WEST ROXBURY — The furry rodents are making a comeback throughout the state, in large part because of a more-than-15-year ban on trapping them. Their distinctive log-and-branch architecture is dotting landscapes and damming up streams and culverts from woodsy bogs to big-box-store parking lots.
Though the beavers have done little real damage yet in Millennium Park, there are few places in the state where their impact is more stark. More than 80 trees have been chewed or felled along a popular walking path — and many more appear down in the adjacent wetlands and in the thick tangle of woods near the canoe launch on the Charles River....
Beavers were once intensely hunted in Massachusetts and disappeared from the state by the mid-1700s because of trapping and deforestation as land was cleared for farming. Trees grew back and by 1928, the first beavers in nearly 180 years were spotted in West Stockbridge in the Berkshires....
With few natural predators, the beaver population grew so quickly that state officials established a hunting season in the early 1950s. But public sentiment against certain types of traps for animals grew, and in 1996, a state ballot referendum banned most types of traps....
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