(Family & Intimate Partner Violence Quarterly) Spring 2016
Abstract: This article shines a light on the extremely risky landscape on which family members of abusive police officers are forced to live. In this piece, author Alex Roslin articulates the terrifying situation endured by many spouses of domestically violent police officers as they seek protection from a partner who happens to carry a gun, because he happens to be a police officer. Among the most intractable barriers to justice is the habitual extension of “professional courtesy” as per the “thin blue line” of police officers who “protect their own.” Casting this situation in an even more dire light is the fact that the rate of abuse perpetration by police officers is 15 times higher than in the general population. © 2016, Alex Roslin.
Alex Roslin is an award-winning investigative journalist and author of the book Police Wife: The Secret Epidemic of Police Domestic Violence, 2nd Ed. (Knowlton, Quebec: Sugar Hill Books, 2016), winner of the American Society of Journalists and Authors’ Arlene Book Award and a finalist for four other international book prizes.
Read the article here.
Fire and Ice
ZOOMER Magazine
December 1, 2014
[This article was nominated for a National Magazine Award. Read the full article here.]
A year after a nursing home fire devastated a small Quebec town, Alex Roslin revisits that fateful night and asks whether continued political apathy on safety measures might expose how we value the vulnerable.
It was one of the coldest days of an unusually nasty winter, even for L'Isle Verte. A bracing northern wind blew all day out of the snowy Charlevoix Mountains. It tore across the frozen mouth of the St. Lawrence River, 25 kilometres wide at this point, and blasted the village of 1,400 nestled on the river's south shore, six hours northeast of Montreal.
Fifty-two elderly denizens of L'Isle Verte huddled in the warmth in the Résidence du Havre seniors home, gazing out at the colourful row of ice fishing shacks that stood on the frozen river. They were used to harsh weather. Most had farmed the land and fished for smelt and herring all their lives. But even for such sturdy folk, this day -- Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2014 -- was a little much. Most hadn't ventured into the bitter weather and deep snows for days....
December 1, 2014
[This article was nominated for a National Magazine Award. Read the full article here.]
A year after a nursing home fire devastated a small Quebec town, Alex Roslin revisits that fateful night and asks whether continued political apathy on safety measures might expose how we value the vulnerable.
It was one of the coldest days of an unusually nasty winter, even for L'Isle Verte. A bracing northern wind blew all day out of the snowy Charlevoix Mountains. It tore across the frozen mouth of the St. Lawrence River, 25 kilometres wide at this point, and blasted the village of 1,400 nestled on the river's south shore, six hours northeast of Montreal.
Fifty-two elderly denizens of L'Isle Verte huddled in the warmth in the Résidence du Havre seniors home, gazing out at the colourful row of ice fishing shacks that stood on the frozen river. They were used to harsh weather. Most had farmed the land and fished for smelt and herring all their lives. But even for such sturdy folk, this day -- Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2014 -- was a little much. Most hadn't ventured into the bitter weather and deep snows for days....
Dental Dilemma
Studies link dental x-rays to brain tumours, thyroid cancer, and low birth weight
Growth in dental use of CT machines raises radiation exposures dramatically
by Alex Roslin
The Georgia Straight
August 14, 2013
Brain Tumour Risk Higher
Growth in dental use of CT machines raises radiation exposures dramatically
by Alex Roslin
The Georgia Straight
August 14, 2013
CAROLE-ANNE STANWAY HAD lived
with blinding headaches for 17 years before she decided enough was enough.
The grandmother of five in Kelowna
finally asked her doctor for an MRI to see what was wrong. He refused to give
her a referral, saying the headaches were just from tension. He had put her on
Tylenol 3 and antidepressants, but those hadn’t helped.
Stanway got an MRI done privately
anyway, at a cost of $2,700. The result: she had three meningiomas, a type of
brain tumour.
The good news was the tumours weren’t
cancerous. The bad news was the specialist didn’t want to remove them unless
they became cancerous because of the risk of brain damage.
Stanway put up with the headaches for
five more years until, in 2002, they and other health problems forced her to
stop working as an assistant in a medical office. She’s been on disability
leave ever since.
Buffet of Pain Drugs
Buffet of Pain Drugs
She has been prescribed a buffet of
pain drugs, which, along with noninsured medical procedures and travel to see
specialists, have drained her savings. The drugs reduced the pain for a while,
but her body quickly got used to them. Then they didn’t help anymore.
She stopped taking the pain meds five
years ago after they started to cause her kidney problems. Some of the drugs
also gave her severe nausea. But she’s still on the antidepressants. “Chronic
pain is difficult to deal with otherwise,” she said in a phone interview from
her apartment.
A few months ago, her eyes started
moving uncontrollably while she was reading, likely a side effect of
meningioma, which can cause optic problems.
Stanway said doctors don’t know what
caused her meningiomas, but she thinks dental X-rays are a possible culprit. “I
had a lot of dental work done when I was younger. As children, we received a
lot of radiation.”
In a study in the journal Cancer last
year, 1,433 people with meningioma were found to be two times more likely to
have had a “bitewing” dental X-ray as those without the illness. Those who
reported having a panorex scanning dental X-ray (which gives a two-dimensional
panoramic view of the mouth) before age 10 were 4.9 times more likely to have
meningioma.
Meningioma is the most common form of
primary brain tumour (tumours that start in the brain). Women get it more than
twice as often as men.
Other studies have linked dental
X-rays to thyroid cancer, breast cancer (in women who hadn’t worn a shielded
apron), saliva-gland tumours, and glioma (a cancerous type of brain and spinal
tumour).
Pregnant women who got a dental X-ray
were three times more likely to deliver a low-birth-weight baby (weighing less
than 2.5 kilograms), according to a 2004 study in the Journal of the
American Medical Association.
Dental X-rays are the most common way
Americans are exposed to human-made radiation, the 2012 Cancer study
said.
Yet despite growing awareness about
the risks of X-rays, radiation in many dental offices is actually rising.
That’s thanks to the explosive growth of 3-D cone-beam CT (computed tomography)
machines, which give off up to 60 times the radiation of a conventional dental
X-ray.
...
Nanoparticles: A Tiny Question of Safety
Revolution Without Regulation
How do you get the ketchup to slide easily out of the bottle? Nanoparticles. They're the miracle technology we're using in everything from sunscreen to paint. But how much do we really know about nanotechnology and its potential impact on our health?
How do you get the ketchup to slide easily out of the bottle? Nanoparticles. They're the miracle technology we're using in everything from sunscreen to paint. But how much do we really know about nanotechnology and its potential impact on our health?
BY ALEX
ROSLIN
August 11, 2012
August 11, 2012
THE MONTREAL GAZETTE
If you have Robert Schiestl over to your house,
don’t be surprised to see him peeking at ingredient labels on things in your
kitchen or bathroom.
He can’t help it. Schiestl, a leading U.S. cancer
expert, instinctively reads the label before he buys or uses a host of products
— any food that’s partly white, toothpaste, sunscreen, shampoo,
over-the-counter medicine.
He’s trying to avoid nanoparticles, which a growing
pile of studies say may cause cancer, damage to organs and skin, Crohn’s
disease and environmental pollution.
Labels in Canada and the U.S. don’t have to say
whether a product contains nanoparticles — so to be completely sure, Schiestl
avoids all products with two ingredients that are increasingly used in
nano-form: titanium dioxide and zinc oxide.
The tiny particles causing the concern are as
little as 10,000 times the width of a human hair and are measured in
nanometres, or billionths of a metre.
They’re part of a revolutionary technology that’s
been touted as “the most powerful tool the human species has ever used” —
giving us the ability to build anything we can conceive molecule by molecule,
and potentially leading to healthier lives and cleaner energy.
Governments, eager to get on the nanotechnology
bandwagon, have shovelled huge public subsidies into nanotech in the past
decade, fuelling its growth into a $250-billion-per-year global industry that
is expected to grow to $3 trillion by 2015.
The subsidies have helped promote the use of
nanoparticles in thousands of goods — everything from food colouring to
scratch-resistant coating on eyeglasses and anti-bacterial agent in clothes.
Nanotech has even answered the age-old problem of
getting ketchup out of the bottle. In 2007, German scientists developed a
super-slippery nano-coating for bottles that lets ketchup slide out more
easily.
Yet, more than a decade after nanoparticles started
being widely used in consumer products, they are still subject to virtually no
regulation in Canada, and little is known about their health impacts....
[Read the rest of this story here. Also see "How Nanoparticles Are Made?" and "Sweets, Sunscreen, Toothpaste: Labels Tell Only Part of the Story."]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)