News and Issues

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) has published an opinion piece stating that Susan G. Komen for the Cure has used in its ads, “misleading statistics and deceptive statements about mammography to promote breast cancer awareness and screening.”

By doing this, the authors state, the Komen organization ignored "a growing and increasingly accepted body of evidence [showing] that although screening may reduce a woman's chance of dying from breast cancer by a small amount, it also causes major harms."

You will need a subscription to BMJ to read How a charity oversells mammography. However, you can read about the piece and about the Komen organizations’s response to it in BMJ OpEd Says Komen Ads False (MedPage Today).

An online story July 13 looks at how illnesses related to wireless devices - environmental sensitivities including electro-magnetic hypersensitivity (EMS) - are being treated at the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto. The article mentions waiting lists of up to nine months.

EMS is the umbrella term used for medical issues related to cell phone use, wireless radiation and other related concepts. Symptoms include disrupted sleep, headaches, nausea, dizziness, heart palpitations, memory problems, and skin rashes.

Read Wireless Radiation Illnesses Treated at Toronto Hospital (WhatsYourTech.ca).

The Réseau québécois d’action pour la santé des femmes (RQASF) has produced a brochure called FASHION HEALTH WOMEN INNOVATE ACT ON IT! This brochure will be distributed to the public during the Montréal Fashion & Design Festival.

The brochure will be available throughout the week starting July 30 at The Bay stores (St. Catherine Street in Montréal, Carrefour Laval and Place Laurier in Québec City), at Complexe Les Ailes (downtown Montréal), and at the Harricana  workshopboutique (Saint-Antoine Street in Montréal).

Read more about it here.

Volume 3(2) of IGH’s biannual newsletter Intersections is out from the Institute of Gender and Health of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.  This issue is dedicated to the Institute’s strategic direction on advancing methods and measure for gender, sex and health research. With this capacity-building priority, IGH aims to support the development of innovative ways to examine sex and gender variations and to capture the influences of gender and sex on health outcomes.

Inside this issue of Intersections:
• Are Men and Women Equally Irritable? 
A new tool bursts the bubble on gender stereotypes about “bad moods.”  
• Measuring Men: The Search for Better Measures for Better Health
See why there are no simple categories for gender and sexual orientation.  
• Suicide and the Gender Paradox 
Do established explanations for gender differences in suicide-related behaviours in adults hold true for youth?
• Young Adult Parenthood: Library Science’s Latest Revelation
What library science reveals about gender and health information behaviour in young adult parents.

Columns
• Message from the Scientific Director
• KT Monitor
Stop bullying by using your WITS!
• IGH Cochrane Corner
Curious how we pick reviews for the Cochrane Corner? Here’s how...
• Trainee Spotlight
4 Questions for Nadia Lakis
• News Briefs

In the latest Our Bodies, Our Blog, learn about the work of Women on Waves, an organization working to increase access to safe abortions for women in countries with restrictive abortion policies.

Women on Waves offers hotlines for information, details on obtaining medical abortions via the web, and information on each nation’s abortion laws and misoprostol (a medication that induces abortion) brand names and availability. The organization also runs ship campaigns, in which women who can’t get abortions in their countries ride out to international waters for medication abortions.

Read about their work in Our Bodies, Our Blog.

The Coalition for a Blueprint for Action on Women and Girls and HIV/AIDS says that Ottawa is failing to help women and girls with HIV and AIDS. Their press release at the International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C. this July states: "... the Canadian federal government is failing women generally and particular communities of women specifically through funding cuts, laws and practices that are counter to what evidence reveals is necessary to address the HIV epidemic among women, young women, girls and trans women."

Read their press release below.

Read the CBC news story, HIV/AIDS prevention and care for women faulted.

The CWHN wishes to thank the Morisset Library at the University of Ottawa who recently arranged to house our extensive collection of books and other women's health resources formerly maintained at our office in Winnipeg. The Morisset Library houses the Women's Studies collection for the University of Ottawa, making this a fitting home for these resources.

Our new CWHN website launched in July 2012!

After months of work, our new website is finally operational!  Please check it out for a host of new features: our breast cancer prevention postcard project, GET THE WORD OUT! – a response to the film “Pink Ribbons, Inc.”– as well as several new articles in Network, our on-line magazine.

Also on our refurbished site you will find a number of new resources relating to alcohol’s worrisome health effects on girls and women. In conjunction with our partners at the British Columbia Centre of Excellence in Women’s Health, we are undertaking a major initiative on girls, women and alcohol in the coming months. Check out our latest webinar on the topic, an interview with award-winning journalist Ann Dowsett Johnston.  Her findings are, well, sobering...

Please check out our new site throughout the summer, as we’ll be updating it weekly with breaking news, resources, and research on women’s health.

Have a great summer!

Please note: sections of the site are still under construction.

The Health News Review website last week took a critical look at how a recent study linking alcohol and a lower risk of arthritis has been reported in the media.

It is an interesting — and telling — look at how easy it is to mis-report and misunderstand the results of health research.

Read: BMJ news release on alcohol & arthritis may have contributed to misleading coverage

Vaccination for the human papillomavirus (HPV) was once again in the spotlight this week with news of a study showing that the HPV vaccine may create “herd protection”.

Herd protection refers to the lowering of infection rates among unimmunized people that occurs when a critical mass of people in a community is immunized against a contagious disease.

While most reports on this new study appear uncritical of mass HPV vaccination campaigns, CWHN has long been advising strong caution about the efficacy of HPV vaccines.

Upcoming on our site we will feature an article by Lyba Spring in which she notes serious concerns about the HPV vaccine, discussing how it has not yet been shown to be effective over long periods of time.

Quoting from her article:

Diane Harper professor of Medicine at the University of Missouri, was a lead researcher in the development of HPV vaccines and involved in clinical trials for both vaccines.  She stated that HPV vaccines must maintain a near 100 per cent efficacy for a full 15 years, at a minimum, for cervical cancer to be prevented. “If we vaccinate 11- and 12-year olds and Gardasil only lasts 10 years, then 21- and 22-year old women are no longer protected.” 

In 2009, Diane Harper stated in an interview with Huffington Post journalist, Marcia Yerman, that “9 to 15 year-olds may not be exposed to the virus until after the vaccine has waned... Until Merck funds a multi-ethnic efficacy study lasting at least 15 years the vaccine should be used primarily by women within the first six years of their onset of sexual activity, to gain the most protection possible...if they choose to be vaccinated.