Air pollution can decrease odds of live birth after IVF by 38%, study finds
Oh Dear! Another "pollution" study that does not measure anything about people and pollution at all. The constancy of these empty reports has become boring. The journal abstract is here:
https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article/39/Supplement_1/deae108.182/7703768?searchresult=1
They have NO data on how much pollutant each person actually breathed in at the time concerned. They have data only on what the weather was like in one place at one time in Perth.It's the usual failure of control. WHY was time a factor in implantation success? They say it was times of low pollution that generated the improvement. But was that in fact the influence at work?
That low pollution days were also days that were more congenial to exercise was not looked at but it is an easy inference that they were. So maybe what they have really found is that doing light exercise before implantation is beneficial, which is not at all improbable. It was the exercise that conferred benefit, not the low levels of pollution
And the odds ratios were in any case very low, suggesting a high probability of non-replicability
I'll leave it at that
Air pollution exposure can significantly decrease the chance of a live birth after IVF treatment, according to research that deepens concern about the health impacts of toxic air on fertility.
Pollutant exposure has previously been linked to increased miscarriage rates and preterm births, and microscopic soot particles have been shown to travel through the bloodstream into the ovaries and the placenta. The latest work suggests that the impact of pollution begins before conception by disrupting the development of eggs.
“We observed that the odds of having a baby after a frozen embryo transfer were more than a third lower for women who were exposed to the highest levels of particulate matter air pollution prior to egg collection, compared with those exposed to the lowest levels,” said Dr Sebastian Leathersich, a fertility specialist and gynaecologist from Perth who is due to present the findings on Monday at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology annual meeting in Amsterdam.
Air pollution is one of the leading threats to human health and is estimated by the World Health Organization (WHO) to have caused 6.7 million deaths in 2019. Microscopic soot particles have been shown to cross from the lungs into the bloodstream and are transported to every organ in the body, raising the risk of heart disease, gastric cancers and dementia. The contamination has also being linked to reductions in intelligence.
“Pollution is harmful to almost all aspects of human health and it’s no surprise to me that reproductive health is also affected,” Leathersich said. “I’m hopeful that these findings will help to highlight the urgency of the situation – that climate change poses a serious and immediate threat to human reproductive health, even at so-called safe levels.”
The study analysed fertility treatments in Perth over an eight-year period, including 3,659 frozen embryo transfers from 1,836 patients, and tracked whether outcomes were linked to the levels of fine particulate matter, known as PM10. The overall live birthrate was about 28% per transfer. However, the success rates varied in line with exposure to pollutants in the two weeks leading up to egg collection. The odds of a live birth decreased by 38% when comparing the highest quartile of exposure to the lowest quartile.
“These findings suggest that pollution negatively affects the quality of the eggs, not just the early stages of pregnancy, which is a distinction that has not been previously reported,” Leathersich said.
The team now plan to study cells directly to understand why pollutants have a negative effect. Previous work has shown that the microscopic particles can damage DNA and cause inflammation in tissues.
Prof Jonathan Grigg, whose group at Queen Mary University of London uncovered evidence that air pollution particles are found in the placenta, said: “This study is biologically plausible since it has recently been discovered that inhaled fossil-fuel particles move out of the lung and lodge in organs around the body. Reproductive health can now be added to expanding list of the adverse effects of fossil fuel-derived particulate matter, and should prompt policymakers to continue to reduce traffic emissions.”
The link was apparent despite excellent overall air quality during the study period, with PM10 and PM2.5 levels exceeding WHO guidelines on just 0.4% and 4.5% of the study days, the scientists said. Australia is one of just seven countries that met the WHO’s guidelines in 2023, and this study is the latest to show evidence of harm even at relatively low levels of pollution.
Prof Geeta Nargund, a senior NHS consultant and medical director of abc IVF and Create Fertility, said further work would be crucial to better understand the full impact of air pollution, which disproportionately affects those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
“In the face of a global fertility crisis, a clear picture of the link between environmental factors such as air pollution and fertility health or treatment outcomes could play an important part in tackling falling fertility rates,” she said.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/07/air-pollution-live-birth-ivf-fertility-study
************************************************Women wanted for cybersecurity course, no men allowed
The Left never seem to be able to see that if you descriminate FOR some group, you automatically discriminate AGAINST another rgroup. They're emphatic that discrimination is a great evil but promptly go on to practice it. It's a sort of chronic insanity among them
Only women and gender-diverse candidates will be invited to participate in the latest cybersecurity course from one of Australia's largest security providers as part of an effort to address inequality in the sector.
CyberCX launched its first full-time, women-only training course on Monday, offering 40 paid roles that will begin in November.
The announcement comes after research from Per Capita revealed women made up just 21 per cent of Australia's cybersecurity workforce, and a study from Engineers Australia showed only 13 per cent of qualified engineers were female.
The low rates of participation have persisted despite widespread predictions of skills shortages in Australia's technology workforce.
CyberCX Academy director Rosemary Driscoll said the six-month, full-time training course was designed to address the industry's gender imbalance and used feedback from other all-women training courses.
"Australia needs a more diverse cyber security workforce to meet demands of industry and government now and into the future," she said.
"Everyone has a role to play here, from the government to our tertiary institutions and the private sector."
The full-time course comes after Per Capita research found Australia was likely to suffer a skills shortage of up to 30,000 cybersecurity workers by 2026, and women represented just 21 per cent of professionals in the field.
Engineers Australia's report into Women in Engineering also found women made up just 16 per cent of engineering graduates and 13 per cent of the workforce.
Its recommendations to improve gender diversity included addressing a non-inclusive culture, providing greater opportunities for female engineers in workplaces, and offering mentoring programs.
The CyberCX entry-level cybersecurity course will be open to women studying cybersecurity or looking to change careers, and will feature 10 weeks of practice and 12 weeks of on-the-job experience.
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8688492/women-wanted-for-cybersecurity-course-no-men-allowed/
************************************Nationalism: The Great Rethinking
Jeffrey A. Tucker
My own top intellectual influence is the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. His 1919 book was “Nation, State, and Economy.” In his view, language (speech) was the best basis to define nationhood. It’s hard for Americans to understand this since it would seem to put us in one nation with England and Australia. At the time, however, this theory made sense in a European context. Think of the strange and unsustainable amalgams of Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia; a language-centered nationalism could have predicted their demise.
Mises himself was Austrian, of Jewish heritage, and was thinking in those terms.
If a group was united in language, he argued, it was a viable nation. And this is a good path to peace.
“The nationality principle above all bears no sword against members of other nations,” he wrote. “It is directed in tyrannos. Therefore, above all, there is also no opposition between national and citizen-of-the-world attitudes. The idea of freedom is both national and cosmopolitan. It is revolutionary, for it wants to abolish all rule incompatible with its principles, but it is also pacifistic. What basis for war could there still be, once all peoples had been set free? Political liberalism concurs on that point with economic liberalism, which proclaims the solidarity of interests among peoples.”
It’s fascinating to read that passage in light of what came after. As it turns out, a different form of nationalism was rising in Germany from 1923 and onwards. It absolutely bore a sword. It took the idea of race and ran with it, postulating that the German nation should extend to everyone of “Aryan” race, purging territories of groups that fall outside that designation. In this, the rise of German nationalism drew on race studies of the late 19th century, and trampled all over both Renan’s postulates and Mises’s hopes for the future of nationalism.
What makes for fascinating reading is Mises’s own 1944 wartime history of the rise of the Nazis. His book “Omnipotent Government” offered a diametrically opposed view of nationalism. In chapter after chapter, he shredded the racial view of political community, condemned all forms of imperialism, and blasted militarism based on nationalistic ambitions. Clearly, his attitudes had changed in light of events. The Second World War caused him to turn against the ideology of nationalism, treating it as potentially aggressive and the enemy rather than the friend of freedom.
The purpose in recounting this history is simply to say that there is not one correct view of nationalism. It depends on the historical and political context and the cultural and political assumptions behind nationalist feelings.
After the end of the Cold War, many had hoped that the United States would return to its roots as a peaceful commercial Republic, doing as George Washington said: trading with all and making political alliances with no one, being a light unto all nations while staying out of the internal affairs of foreign nations. This view was widely held on the left and right. However, many in power had different views. They wanted to deploy the newly earned status as the world’s only superpower to become the globe’s policeman, with war after war, intervening in every border dispute or otherwise.
It was in those days that my own attitudes on nationalism shifted. On matters of political organization, nationalism struck me as mostly benign. But on matters of race and migration, globalism seemed to me to be the right answer. Yes, I was a product of my times and did not know it.
What I and others had not seen coming was something different, the rise of globalist institutions—built from both public and private monies—that had every intention of trampling on sovereign rights, not only of the domestic political community but also on foreign peoples.
This new globalism was never more on display than in the pandemic policy response, which the World Health Organization urged every nation to adopt the strategies and tactics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China, locking citizens in their homes and attempting to protect health through use of extreme force. All nations in the world adopted this tactic, save only a few, and this approach wrecked economies, destabilized political systems, and demoralized people of the world. If nothing else, this experience highlighted the dangers of globalist ideology.
Here we are still grappling with the great question of nationalism. We do have experience to draw on. We know now that nationalism can be a check on globalist power, exactly as Mises imagined it after the Great War, but we are also aware of the dangers associated with chauvinism and imperialism in the name of nation building too, as Mises also mapped out.
For now, I’m inclined to have a warmer view toward the nationalist temperament if only to guard against the real and present threat of a globalist ruling class imposing rules on the entire planet, creating a regime for the world over which national political systems have no influence. This danger is real and all around us.
For now, the urge to reassert national sovereignty—whether in the form of American patriotism or European skepticism toward the European Union—strikes me as a necessary frame of mind to get us back to the fundamental principle of freedom itself.
In theory, the path toward freedom seems easy: human rights, governments that are limited to strict functions only, and diplomacy over war. In practice, this ambition ends up taking a circuitous route. It was true in the last century and it is true in ours as well.
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California Lawmakers Discover the Obvious about crime
Two California lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agree that the state’s Proposition 47 is hurting more than it is helping. The measure was designed to reduce the state’s prison population and divert resources used on incarceration toward schools and social programs.
On July 9, Reps. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.) and Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.) appeared in an online event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the problem of rising organized retail theft in the country. They both said California’s Proposition 47 is creating more problems in the Golden State than it is solving.
Proposition 47, approved by California voters in 2014, “maximizes alternatives for non-serious, nonviolent crime” by reducing the charges and penalties associated with certain, nonviolent crimes.
In particular, Mr. Garcia noted that Proposition 47 reduced to a misdemeanor the charges for stealing less than $950 worth of merchandise. Criminals know the law, he said. So individual and organized shoplifters are taking advantage of the state’s leniency and certain district attorneys’ lack of willingness to prosecute low-level crimes.
Mr. Garcia said small businesses are “slowly bleeding by 1,000 paper cuts.”
The U.S. Chamber, a Washington-based national organization lobbying on behalf of businesses, prioritizes combating organized retail theft.
According to data collected by the organization and published in 2022, organized retail crime costs stores more than $700,000 per $1 billion in sales. Separately, small businesses are raising prices due to increased shoplifting, and some retailers are closing stores in response to theft.
The chamber says that “crime rings are operating with impunity across the country.” Criminals are profiting by reselling stolen goods online or on the street.
Mr. Panetta, a former deputy district attorney in California’s Monterey County, said Proposition 47 allows criminals to commit the same crimes repeatedly “without suffering consequences.” The law was passed with good motives, he said, but it has had detrimental effects on the state in the decade since its passage.
Elevated crime, even if it is not violent, is causing Californians to feel less safe, Mr. Panetta said. The growing perception of lawlessness in California’s biggest cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, is contributing to recall elections and electoral challenges for local politicians in those areas.
Mr. Garcia, who represents the northern suburbs of Los Angeles, said California’s businesses, law enforcement, and politicians are so fed up with Proposition 47 that they are rolling out a ballot measure to repeal portions of it.
In April, the bipartisan group Californians for Safer Communities submitted more than 900,000 signatures to get its proposal on the state’s November ballot. As proposed, the new law would charge shoplifters with a felony if they have two prior theft convictions within a three-year span.
On the evening of June 30, Democrat leaders in Sacramento, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, announced their own version of a Proposition 47 reform plan that proposed lesser penalties for theft than the Safer Communities proposal. However, the governor withdrew the measure on July 2 citing an inability to meet the ballot deadline.
Nationally, Mr. Panetta, who represents a Pacific Coast district south of San Franciso Bay, said he, Rep. Young Kim (D-Calif.), and others are proposing a bill—the Improving Federal Investigations of Organized Retail Crime Act—that would enable federal agencies to coordinate with state and local officials to build the evidence needed to bring organized retail crime networks to justice.
Moreover, he spoke about the Integrity, Notification, and Fairness in Online Retail Marketplaces for Consumers, or INFORM, Act of 2022. The INFORM Act requires online retailers to collect, verify, and disclose information about “high-volume third-party sellers” in an effort to stop the sale of stolen or counterfeit merchandise. The same law requires retailers to allow consumers to report suspicious activity.
Nevertheless, Mr. Panetta said that criminals are selling stolen merchandise on sidewalks and other online forums to circumvent the INFORM Act.
Mr. Garcia said lawmakers must continue to push for ways to use federal powers to stop organized retail theft around the country. He mentioned the proposed Combating Organized Retail Crime Act of 2023, which would establish a federal center aimed exclusively at tackling the problem. Moreover, he said, Congress needs to direct more money to local law enforcement that deals with the brunt of the issue.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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