Inventing Letters Along the Way

STRESS got you when you begin to think that everything is a matter of life and death. For this, Natalie Goldberg explained in her book, Wild Mind (1990): “Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.”

The International Labor Office (ILO) issued on April 28—in time for the World Day for Safety and Health at Work—a report entitled, “The Emerging Risks and New Patterns of Prevention in a Changing World of Work,” that noted significant changes in the patterns of employment in the recent decades and had a hand in emerging new risks that affect the workforce. These risks include work restructuring, downsizing, subcontracting and outsourcing, all making it harder for workers to achieve balance between healthy life and productive work.

In countries like the Philippines, with populations working in precarious employment status, people accept jobs with low occupational safety and health (OSH) standards, low wages, and poor working conditions.

A study conducted by Michael Hilton and Harvey Whiteford of the University of Queensland School of Population Health in Herston (Australia)—it involved 11,259 employees (60 percent female) and six employers—found... [Read more.]

This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 2 February 2011.

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Deadly X-Gene Mutants

A RECENT study on macrophages (i.e. defensive cells in our body that engulf threatening substances inside our body) introduced me to a lethal, genetic disease that targets the male population. This disease is called Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), named after the French neurologist Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne, who described it in 1861. While it has an incidence of one in 3,500 newborn males, health experts consider this as the most common lethal disease of childhood around the world. Mutation in the male (X) chromosome [dystrophin gene, locus Xp21] causes a rapid degeneration of the muscles, leading into an eventual loss of walking ability and then death. While females do not exhibit symptoms, they can be carriers of these defective genes, especially if the father had this condition or the mother is also a carrier. Symptoms usually appear before age five; at times visible in early infancy. These symptoms involve... ( Read more .) This article appears in Sun-Star Ce...

Joy, Temperance and Repose

“I RECKON being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh (1903). The term “antioxidant” was originally used in the 18th century to refer to a chemical that prevents the consumption of oxygen in laboratory experiments. However, in the late 19th and early 20th century, extensive study exploded... ( Read more ) This article appeared in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 02 June 2010.

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