American Cancer Society Does Very Little to Prevent Cancer...irony

Wow, this is kind of an eye opener.

The basic premise is that the ACS gets huge donations from the mammography industry and the cancer drug industry, so this tends to focus the ACS on cancer curing. In other words the ACS focuses on dealing with cancer after you’ve already gotten it. 

It makes very little effort to focus on prevention.

“The ACS … [has] long continued to devote virtually exclusive priority to research on diagnosis and treatment of cancer, with indifference to prevention, other than faulty personal lifestyle, commonly known as ‘blame the victim,’ … Not surprisingly, the incidence of cancer over past decades has escalated”.

Fair-trade coffee producers end up poorer

That fair-trade cup of coffee we savour may not only fail to ease the lot of poor farmers, it may actually help to impoverish them, according to a study out recently from Germany’s University of Hohenheim.

The study, which followed hundreds of Nicaraguan coffee farmers over a decade, concluded that farmers producing for the fair-trade market “are more often found below the absolute poverty line than conventional producers.

For starters, it discriminates against the very poorest of the world’s coffee farmers, most of whom are African, by requiring them to pay high certification fees. 

To add to the perversity, it’s an open secret that the certification process is lax and almost impossible to police, making it little more than a high-priced honour system. 

Although the certification associations have done their best to tighten flaws in the system, farmers and middlemen who want to get around the system inevitably do, bagging unearned profits. Those who remain scrupulous and follow the onerous and costly regulations — another source of inefficiency the German study notes in its analysis — lose out.

we have received bags of coffee, some labelled fair trade, some not, grown on the very same farm and identical in every respect. The fair-trade certified farmer himself can’t tell which beans will be sold as fair trade and which not — that decision is made by the higher-ups.

Because the fair-trade associations are intent on keeping the price of fair-trade coffee up, they limit the supply of coffee that can be labelled as certified. To the certified farmer’s chagrin, most of his fair-trade certified crop could end up being sold as uncertified conventional coffee.

And in this well-intentioned price-fixing game, the fair-trade farmer is the pawn and the joke is on the customer.

And as wikipedia says…

Fair trade coffee is coffee which is purchased directly from the growers for a higher price than standard coffee. Fair trade coffee is one of many fair trade certifiedproducts available around the world. The purpose of fair trade is to promote healthier working conditions and greater economic incentive for producers.

Irony.

Compulsive Washing Ages You

devora:

If you’re trying to figure out how old someone is, take a look at their hands. One thing that can really make our hands look older is obsessive washing. Washing your hands compulsively strips away the outer layers that protect us from germs in the first place.

True for hands, face, etc. Ironic that it lowers protection from germs.