Last week The Age reported that cholesterol – lowering drugs increase the risk of diabetes and memory impairment. This is really bad news for around two million Australians who take these medications believing they’ll lower their heart attack risk. While the report is concerning, it is also comforting to know that there is now too much evidence for health authorities to ignore the side effects of statins.

Statins are drugs that block the enzyme in the liver responsible for making cholesterol.But the reality is that every cell membrane contains cholesterol, vital for the production of hormones, cellular repair and overall good health including that of the brain. Medication with statins such as Lipitor, Zocor and Pravachol rob our bodies of cholesterol, crucial for neurological function, so it’s no surprise that there’s an increase in dementia. Rising rates of diabetes are also understandable as cholesterol is required for the regulation of blood sugar levels.

But there is much more to the myth that is the cholesterol story. Dr. Uffe Ravnskov, author of The Cholesterol Myths explains that it all began with the landmark Framingham Heart Study, which followed healthy people in the early 1950s to see who had a heart attack and what distinguished them from the people who did not. High cholesterol was one risk factor–but it was only one of more than 240 others. Ravnskov said that the public health officials and cardiologists, confused a statistical association with causation, resulting in a new disease called hypercholesterolemia, the health issue of the 21st century.

According to researchers Sally Fallon and Mary Enig, many people who feel perfectly healthy suffer from high cholesterol– in fact feeling good is actually a symptom of high cholesterol. Living longer is an effect of high cholesterol with Dr. Harlan Krumholz of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at Yale University, reporting in 1994 that twice as many elderly people with low cholesterol died from a heart attack than did elderly people with high cholesterol.

It is pleasing to hear that a recent study has found that clinical and public health recommendations regarding the ‘dangers’ of cholesterol should be revised. This is especially true for women, for whom moderately elevated cholesterol may prove to be not only harmless but even beneficial. ‘High Cholesterol is not a risk factor for women’, says Dr Uffe Ravnskov, but in spite of this many women are being treated for high cholesterol.

The Cholesterol Myths begins with a story about Karla. She was a fit and healthy 62 year old cleaner when she learned she had an elevated cholesterol reading. She was instructed to change her diet and lose weight. ‘I was as fit as a fiddle’, Karla told Ravnskov. Even so she followed her doctor’s orders changing her diet to one of high fibre and using vegetable oils instead of butter and cream. Failing to lose the prescribed weight and unable to lower her cholesterol she was put on medication.  In no time her ravenous appetite had disappeared and her positive demeanour was gone, but her cholesterol was way down.

Karla is not alone. Mary Adams began to notice slurred speech, balance problems and severe fatigue after she had been taking a commonly prescribed statin drug for three years. Her symptoms included loss of sleep due to restless and twitching limbs. She soon began to suffer loss of balance and problems with her gait and her fine motor skills were not what they had been. Once Mary took the next step and ceased taking her regular cholesterol-lowering pill she recovered her previous health.

So if cholesterol isn’t the villain what does cause heart disease? According to researchers Mary Enig and Sally Fallon, heart disease was very rare in 1900 responsible for about 8% of all deaths in the US compared with today’s figures of approximately 45%. The type of heart disease prevalent today is a myocardial infarction, or a heart attack where a blood clot obstructs the coronary arteries with the subsequent death of the heart muscle and is a form of heart disease that was almost unheard of before 1910. By 1950, coronary heart disease was the leading cause of death in the US.

We do need to counteract the high rates of heart disease. But rather than swallowing drugs that interfere with vital cholesterol function we need to adopt healthy lifestyles such as eating fresh foods, not smoking, avoiding pesticides and chemicals and taking up daily exercise.

Helen Lobato 

 By: Helen Lobato

I matured physically long before my friends. The signs of puberty, the underarm hair growth, the budding breasts, and the menarche – they all occurred prematurely. But the concern that developed about my breasts began well before puberty for my grandmother had breast cancer dying at the age of 47, leaving my mother to rear her siblings. According to Breast Cancer Australia, one in 11 women will be diagnosed with the disease before the age of 75 years. Our health rather than large, sexy breasts is the issue.

One of the first operations I ever saw was a radical mastectomy. This mutilating surgery, uncommon these days, removes all breast tissue along with the lymph glands on the affected side. As an apprentice nurse I watched as a young mother had her diseased breast hacked from her chest wall and plonked on a cold, stainless steel dish and when she died one Christmas Eve, I was there with her husband and her two young boys.

In 2008 more than 300,000 women and teenagers underwent breast augmentation with saline implants. All breast implants will eventually break with studies of silicone breast implants showing that most last seven to twelve years with some breaking during the first few months, while others can last more than fifteen years. The risks are many, ranging from scar tissue to breast or nipple numbness to breakage and leakage and even death. There have been 20 cases of cancer among French women who have received allegedly faulty breast implants. These are the French made Poly Implant Prothese silicone-gel implants, a non-standard cheaper variety.

Dr Marilyn Yalom, author of A History of the Breast states that ‘the size of a woman’s breast has become one of the identifying markers of her entire persona’. And it’s not just happening in ‘Tinsel Town’, she said. In 2005 Darlene Watkins was fitted with the French-made PIP implant and she told the ABC’s 7.30 program ‘I just wanted to feel a bit more sexy’. Five years later her surgeon warned her that French authorities were concerned about the high rupture rate and recommended an ultrasound which revealed breakage and leakage.

I’m content with my breasts and even if I needed a mastectomy I would decline reconstructive surgery. Why have more surgery and post-operative pain?  Why risk complications and death just to look sexy or even normal for that matter.

Lesbian feminist and poet, Audre Lorde had a mastectomy and rejected the imposition of post-mastectomy prostheses and reconstructive surgeries, arguing:

Prosthesis offers the empty comfort of 'nobody will know the difference.' But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women. If we are to translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then the first step is that women with mastectomies must become visible to each other.

It would not be easy to lose a breast or breasts through cancer but to risk your health or even your life in order to placate personal and societal dissatisfaction about your breasts is a tragedy.

Helen has a blog: http://allthenewsthatmatters.wordpress.com/

Renate Klein

RU486 abortions approved in Australia: Regrettable and dangerous

Yesterday’s announcement by the Therapeutic Goods Administration that it has approved an application by the private company MS Health, set up by Marie Stopes International (MSI), to import the abortion drug RU486 does not come as a big surprise. It has been on the cards ever since the vote in Federal Parliament in 2006 that stripped the Health Minister of the day of their veto over a potential application by a pharmaceutical company.

What’s more, proponents of RU486 such as Professor Caroline de Costa from Cairns, have regularly announced that an application by a pharmaceutical company to import RU486 was imminent. Now it’s not a pharmaceutical company that lodged an application but a private company set up by MSI, an abortion ‘chain’ with a number of clinics in Australia (one branch in Croydon was recently closed down after dozens of women had been infected with hepatitis and a woman had died after an abortion in 2011, no details revealed).

As a feminist long-time women’s health researcher who supports women’s access to safe pregnancy terminations, this decision by the TGA begs many questions. Documentation for the safety and effectiveness which I hope MSI had to submit to the TGA to obtain approval would have to be based on overseas research since no large scale trials on RU486 have been conducted in Australia. Is this good enough for Australian women?

Also, until now, RU486 - and the second drug, a prostaglandin (PG Misoprostol, Cytotec™) which by the way has never been approved for use in abortions by its manufacturer (Pfizer, formerly Searle) - could only be used by medical practitioners after obtaining an authorized prescriber license from the TGA. Indeed, Professor de Costa who was the first to obtain such a license reported that the combination RU486/PG had strict conditions imposed: only women with life-threatening or otherwise serious health conditions such as kidney disease, high blood pressure and other heart conditions for whom a suction abortion was deemed unsafe, could be administered RU486/PG.

But these strict conditions gradually fell away, notably by MSI Australia clinics who two years ago sent a brochure to Victorian GPs suggesting they refer women who wanted pregnancy terminations to one of their clinics without any mention of restricted use or review requirements by the TGA.

When the first death of a woman in Australia from RU486/PG in 2010 was reported on 19 March this year - a two year delay -in The Australian, the TGA issued new guidelines for follow-up care to clinics using the abortion pill (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/health/abortion-pill-death-sparked-warning/story-fn59nokw-1226303297539). We know few details about this death other than that the woman died from sepsis after the abortion. The coroner did not order an Inquiry which is most unfortunate given that this was the first reported case of a woman dying in Australia from RU486/PG abortion.

RU486/PG abortions overseas have resulted in a number of women dying where sepsis was the cause of death (the bacterium Clostridium was identified in uterus infections in the USA, UK and Sweden). Other women have died from severe blood loss when no medical facilities were available for blood transfusion.

Promoters of medical abortions led us to believe that RU486/PG abortion is more ‘natural’ than suction abortion and that it is ‘just like a miscarriage’ and safe. This is twisting the truth more than a little bit! Women who have used this method tell other stories. The vomiting, pain and nausea can be close to unbearable and as one woman who had a recent RU486/PG termination in South Australia told me she got such a high fever combined with extreme blood loss that she feared for her life. She would certainly never do it again.

The RU486/PG combination also has a lower success rate than suction abortion: depending on which figures you quote between 91% and 93%; suction abortion succeeds in 99%. (I actually prefer to call RU486/PG a ‘chemical’ rather than a ‘medical’ abortion which sounds so benign compared to ‘surgical’ abortion, a misnomer as nothing is ‘cut’ in a suction abortion.)

Importantly also, once she has swallowed the RU486 pills (and the prostaglandin 2 days later), the woman is entirely on her own. Some women have instant adverse reactions, but for others, the blood loss or pain from uterine contractions may start only days into the procedure. The point is that it is entirely unpredictable in which women the termination will happen without problems or lead to possibly fatal complications.

Instead of being looked after in an abortion clinic should complications occur and having the suction abortion finished in half an hour, RU486/PG abortions can take as long as six weeks! It is absolutely crucial that women go back to doctors for a check-up to make sure the abortion is complete. If it is not, a D&C is required, the most frequently reported adverse effect (442 instances as reported by Jamie Walker in the article quoted earlier).

Surely this abortion method is not the panacea that its promoters hail it to be. We know that many women feel ambivalent about having an abortion. They make this often painful decision because they can not see a way to rear a(nother) child. Having to physically experience the consequences of their decision with ongoing pain, nausea and blood loss for weeks is surely inhumane punishment. In some instances the women find the small embryo passed out in their sanitary pads…even a person who supports a woman’s right to abortion would find this most upsetting and sad.

Promoters hail RU486/PG as a breakthrough especially for women who live in rural and isolated parts of Australia. But given the potential of life-threatening complications with no nearby hospital for emergency procedures, I consider this irresponsible and reckless. It is true that abortion facilities are hard to access but I believe that it is the medical system’s responsibility to provide safe abortions, instead of writing prescriptions for pills - to be filled in pharmacies and taken later: in my books this is the 21^st century version of backyard abortions and women deserve better.

For all of these reasons I certainly was not popping champagne yesterday. Marie Stopes’ use of RU486/PG abortion in Australia requires careful monitoring and reporting and the TGA must put these requirements in place. And as MSI’s prostaglandin registered with the TGA is Gymiso™ (used in France) rather than the usual Cytotec™, this needs attention as well.

As for considering inclusion in the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, this is a question that should not even be asked at this point.

This is an extended version of an article published 30 August 2012 at http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/should-ru486-be-available-on-the-pbs-20120830-252zg.html#ixzz254uc6xzq

Dr Renate Klein is a feminist-long term women’s health researcher and together with Janice Raymond and Lynette Dumble coauthored RU486: Misconceptions, Myths and Morals, available from Spinifex Press in print and as an eBook.   

 
Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home.


            

                     
                    The Unfinished Revolution              Seeking Palestine

The Unfinished Revolution, edited by Minky Worden documents the unfinished revolution for women’s human rights and asks if the aftermath of the recent uprisings will prove to be - an ‘Arab spring’ or a ‘women’s winter’. 

In her chapter ‘Letters in the Night’, Rachel Ward, a senior regional advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan tells the story of Hossai, a twenty-two-year-old Afghan aid worker from the southern city of Kandahar. Hossai had received threatening phone calls from a man who said he was with the Taliban who told her to stop working with foreigners. But Hossai didn’t want to give up a good job with the American development company and within weeks Hossai was dead.

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, widespread insecurity, displacement, financial hardship and the dissolution of law have contributed to an increase in prostitution and trafficking. The trafficked women are transported internally and internationally for prostitution and also into forced marriages. In Afghanistan small girls are taken away from their families and become victims of sex trading due to their family’s inability to repay huge loans borrowed from drug traffickers in order to grow opium crops.

Photo: The Unfinished Revolution

Editor Minky Worden, Human Rights Watch’s director of Global initiatives is joined by over 30 writers among them Nobel Prize laureates, leading activists, policy makers and former victims who tackle these tough problems and offer bold new approaches to the issues that are still affecting millions of women today.

In July, Spinifex Press released Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home. This wonderful collection of essays by Palestinian essayists, novelists, poets and critics probe the human costs of a home no longer home and contributes greatly to our understanding of the lives of Palestinians.

 

The contributors reflect on 'What it means to be Palestinian' and come up with individual and collective experiences of seeking, waiting, living for, and being or becoming Palestinian. Words and feelings of Memory, Resilience and Revolution feature strongly throughout this fine collection.

Jean Said Makdisi in her chapter “Becoming Palestinian”, laments the lack of Memory for her native Jerusalem although it continues to be her ideal model of a home where past, present and future meet in her mind to create the one place on earth where she can imagine herself resting, laying down at last the burden of anger and sorrow created in her by the loss. 

In ‘Exiled from Revolution’, Karma Nabulsi regrets ‘the fragmentation of the body politic’ where Palestinian leadership no longer involves itself in the ideas and practice of liberation, but in business deals. While the former representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation pens this chapter ‘the awesome West watches mesmerised’ ‘as masses of Arabs’ ‘ create and celebrate their revolutions’. Nabulsi hopes the recent Arab uprisings will result in a return to Palestinian organizing and a revolutionary present.

Seeking  Palestine is also about Resilience – that of those who have ‘remained in place’, as novelist and poet Mourid Barghouti discovered when he hired a driver to take him to Jericho. Barghouti has been living away from his fellow passengers, his countrymen and women, and finds their light approach to the plans of the ‘terrifying individual such as Sharon’ incomprehensible. 

When Mahmoud announces that the anticipated attack will come tonight his fellow passengers are not particularly upset. ‘Everyday they kill us retail, and once in a while they get the urge to kill us wholesale’ says one of the passengers. Barghouti says that for the inhabitants of these Palestinian cities, ‘everything has become food for jokes’. The poet regards his taxi driver Mahmoud as a hero. “We are his nation: an old man and two women (one of whom doesn’t cover her hair and face, while the other wears a full veil); a man who’s short and another who’s fat; a university student; and a poet who is amazed by everything he sees." He asks himself if he would be able to lead such a trip. But as he says: ‘I am a writer-that is, I don’t do anything.

But that is not his job: The poet and the writer's task is to write- they teach, inform, enlighten and entertain and this applies to the work of the contributors to this fine collection of new Palestinian writing on exile and home-Seeking Palestine.

Alex Nissen, a teacher working within the TAFE sector spoke of her enlightenment from a Jewish girl growing up with the usual expectations of patriarchal society - to marry and become a mother. However Alex had other ideas - evolving and becoming a radical lesbian feminist, a peace activist and part of the Israeli women’s peace movement for over 20 years. For many years the articulate and energetic activist taught women’s studies and now mourns the extinction of feminist thought within academia. 

       Alex Nissen

Samah Sabawi is a writer, political analyst, commentator, author and playwright and a policy advisor to the Palestinian policy network. Samah was born in Gaza and escaped the Israeli occupation by seeking refuge in neighbouring Jordan before immigrating to Australia. For Samah, the essays written by the women contributors to Seeking Palestine were particularly moving: Susan Abulhawa and her chapter ‘Memories of an Un-Palestinian Story’ where she relays a ‘searing account of her childhood’, and Rana Bakarat who suggests that ‘Palestine-in exile’, ‘is an idea, a love, a goal, a movement, a massacre, a march, a parade, a poem, a thesis, a novel and yes, a commodity, as well as a people scattered, displaced, dispossessed and determined.’

Palestinian writer and activist Samah Sabawi wonders aloud if it is possible for non - Palestinians to understand the passion found in Seeking Palestine. For those who are lucky enough to thoughtfully take the time and read this anthology, the answer is YES.

 
 
Samah Sabawi, Gula Bezhan, Helen Lobato, Onnie Wilson, Alex Nissen 

Onnie Wilson, an activist for women’s human rights, spoke of the need for males to change their behaviour.  In The Unfinished Revolution and included in a chapter called ‘Girls not Brides’, Archbishop Desmond Tutu points out that child marriage is rooted in a way of thinking which men have endorsed for far too long. 'Child marriage occurs because men allow it,' he said. ‘Women’s needs must be recognised as having equal social priority in areas such as reproduction, health, education, economic independence,’ says Wilson, who stressed the importance of women across the globe needing to connect so the push for women’s human rights can have a tsunami groundswell effect.

Our final speaker for the night was Dr Gula Bezhan, a community leader of Afghans living in Melbourne. Gula related a harrowing tale of how she was forced to leave Afghanistan where she had lived and worked as a gynaecologist. In 1995 when the Northern Alliance took control of Afghanistan they instigated a rampage of targeting and killing professional people. Gula and her family fled to Pakistan, from where she immigrated to Australia. A community leader, she established the Afghan Woman’s Association of Victoria and has since completed a Bachelor of Social Science. Her employment is in settlement of newly arrived asylum seekers and she has no regrets about not being able to practice medicine.

These books are not yet bestsellers although there has been recent acclaim for Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, -  The Age, Non-Fiction 'Pick of the Week' - August 11.

In these gritty poetic stories, Palestinian writers imaginatively reclaim what has been lost. —Fiona Capp 

Talk for launch of Australian Poetry Journal, Issue 2, Technology, June 2012.

By Patricia Sykes

I’ve titled this preamble From Neanderthal to app and I begin idiosyncratically, with a question to myself: is interactive technology capable of functioning as muse? The nine classical muses, said to collaborate in the ordering of the world, were celebrated by the disciples of Pythagoras as “keepers of the knowledge of harmony and the principles of the universe”, which allowed humans “access to the everlasting gods”. This is a statement of faith as well as a claim of privilege and it seems to me that some futurists would like to claim the same for technology. I’m not a Luddite but I am something of a refusenik: I want to maintain a distance between creator and tool. If our era were to define a world order, along the lines of the Elizabethan World Order, ie God, Angels, Humanity and so on down to the insects, where would technology be placed?

Every generation of course uses the tools specific to its discoveries and aspirations, and we’ve been inscribing the planet in one way or another  ─ and more recently our solar system ─ since Neanderthal times. When I began school life the permitted tool was a slate pencil. It was tied to a piece of string which was tied to a corner of the slate. The slate had only a small surface so it needed to be erased frequently. Erasure was by organic method. You spat onto a cloth and then wiped the slate clean.

My next tool was a pencil. When you had mastered printing you were permitted to progress to cursive writing. When you could write perfectly between the lines, at the designated height, you were permitted to write with a pen, which consisted of a tapered handle, wider at the top. Inside the top was a metal slot into which a nib was inserted. The ink (black, blue or red) was contained in an inkwell into which you dipped the nib: the most poetic aspect of ink wells was how the ink seeped up to striate the petals of the jonquils we stuck in them during winter. This was also an era of much blotting paper: write, blot, write, blot.

Then came the fountain pen. Then the biro, which only became widely accepted in schools in the 1950s. Until then it had been considered injurious to the quality of writing. Then came typewriter, then word processor, then computer and its enhanced facility for memorising and storage. In the time of the slate with its frequent erasures, brain memory was essential. Rote learning too. During and immediately after the end of WWii there was simply not enough paper for school children to write on. Now memory is becoming more a matter of technological storage and retrieval and I’m very aware of this in my own practice.

And so to neuro plasticity: is the tool taking over from its human creator, shaping and attuning the human as it were, and if so what implications might this have for the writing, reading and appreciating of poetry? Susan Greenfield, the neuroscientist, argues that the rise in IQ ascribed to the visual era of the VDU, or visual display unit, indicates a greater facility with process but not with content. In her view the human brain is being changed by the technological dominance of the visual.

While in Canberra recently I came across four pages in The Canberra Times celebrating Italian National Day. One of the features, Science, technology and innovation, included a description of the iCub, developed at the Instituto Italiano di Technologica in Genoa, as an “open source platform for research into humanoid robotics, brain and cognitive sciences” and which has the capacity “to learn to have natural interactions and to learn from humans”. It’s perhaps no accident that the iCub is shaped like a child “with hands for manipulating objects and…sensors for seeing, hearing and touching”. Therefore cute and non-threatening, on the surface at least. Thus far the iCub is a responder rather than an initiator. But what if further development turns it into an initiator? What if it begins using humans as amanuenses, even apps?

I didn’t have any of this in mind, nor even the theme of technology, when I wrote A flight of leftovers, nor when I submitted it to the journal as part of a small unrelated batch of poems. Which brings me to the process I used in the creation of the poem. I frequently use a voice recorder when I’m driving. No sooner am I behind the steering wheel than a line or an image will slip into my mind and by the time I reach the next set of traffic lights it can have vanished. The recorder is simple technology, relying on batteries and reel-to-reel recording and playback. A year after I began using the device I started to wonder what I was going to do with the accumulating material. The fact that I had a lot of it didn’t matter because I had transcribed it and stored it in computer memory and hey presto retrieval does the rest.

So I was at my desk, having typed out final versions of two poems I’d written by hand and planned to submit, when my eyes alighted on a folder of transcribed recordings. I opened it, reading at random, noting a recurrence of themes, and decided to see what eventuated if I selected a few entries and got them talking to each other in a poem. In the process I discarded some images and lines, in full or in part, wrote new ones, rearranged, re-wrote, and finally arrived at a final draft. I could not have done this without the aid of recorder, computer and printer. Nor could they have fulfilled their functions if I had not fed them.

I wonder what Homer’s response would have been to such tools. I recently heard a Radio National discussion on The Iliad’s first print run, which would have amounted to roughly six painstakingly handwritten copies. Subsequent reprints would have been the of the same order: how different literary history would be without the printing press. I can’t quite imagine reading The Iliad on a Kindle or similar device. To hold the entire book in your hand is to hold the journey. It’s the tactility of a book that I’d find difficult to give up. I find it interesting that the iCub has been designed to include sensory capacity, as if the developers knew that such a capacity would make it more acceptable to its human inter-actors.

I think one of the ways technology spoils and deludes us is through the dubious reward of immediacy, things at the fingertips, quick, quick, quick. Perhaps it’s because I was born in an era when it was still the practice that I value the organic aspects of writing poetry, the writing by hand, the musings and interactions between hand and mind. I’ve long been fascinated by the Chinese perception of calligraphy, how they named it the greatest art because there is no first draft, no erasure, no editing, only finished object: the idea or form travelling into the mind, down the arm into the hand onto the page in one fluid movement: breathless! In contrast my poem is a worked and re-worked thing, laboured over.  

Patricia Sykes is an award-winning poet, and a librettist, whose work has been described as ‘leaping over boundaries’. Her most recent work is 'The Abbotsford Mysteries' published by Spinifex Press.