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onenettvchannel · 7 months ago

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BALITANG KONSYUMER: Unveiling the Hidden Dangers of Skin-Whitening Products when Mercury is found and sold in the PH sparks brazenness alarm

MALOLOS, BULACAN -- In a world where fair skin is often seen as beautiful, skin-whitening products (SWP) can be very alluring. However, there is a hidden reality lurking beneath the promise of a more radiant complexion that potential buyers of these beauty commodities in the Philippines must consider. These supposedly harmless creams and lotions contain mercury, which has recently been brought to light through revelations regarding illegal trade.

Mercury, being a toxic heavy metal; is found in most SLPs because it inhibits melanin production. Mercury still pervades some brands sold on the market despite the regulatory bodies' ban like Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for instance here in the Philippines. The ramifications of employing such mercury-filled products are dire; they range from similar illnesses like contact dermatitis to more severe ones including immuno-compromised systems and neurologic defects.

A groundbreaking documentary dubbed 'The Dark Side of Skin-Lightening' was launched Monday morning (April 22nd, 2024 -- Bulacan local time) at La Consolacion University-Philippines (LCUP) in Malolos, Bulacan with an intention to create awareness about this pressing issue. The documentary, which was presented both in-person to 1,200 senior high school students and streamed LIVE on Facebook during the school's Earth Day Celebration, highlighted the global proliferation of mercury-added SLPs and the urgent need for stricter regulations to protect Filipino consumers.

During the forum, BAN Toxics conducts a LIVE testing session on the table using an XRF (X-Ray Fluorescence) analyzer, with the help of Traders Industrial Supply Company Inc. (TRISCO) ensuring no mercury is presented in some beauty products. All these imported or locally-made products are not completely sponsored for scientific hazard-related reasons.

In light of these shocking revelations from 'BAN Toxics', it is crucial for individuals to take proactive steps to safeguard their health and well-being. Before purchasing any of beauty or cosmetic products, especially skin-whitening creams to try it out… Consumers are advised to thoroughly check all the list of ingredients for any mention of mercury or other harmful chemicals when you always read the label.

The other thing is that, one should consider consulting with dermatologists or any trusted health professionals to guarantee safety and effectiveness of the products in question.

As long as the demand for skin lightening creams remains high, there will always be a need for consumers to be on guard. By being wise enough, well informed consumers can hugely assist in fighting against mercury laden beauty products’ illegal trade and create a culture of safe and responsible skincare practice.

Our natural skin color should be embraced and celebrated without falling for the dangerous traps hidden behind creams used to bleach the human skin.

PHOTO COURTESY: BAN Toxics via PR

-- OneNETnews Team

#consumer news #malolos #bulacan #mercury #beauty products #cosmetics #hidden dangers #fyp #awareness #BAN Toxics #OneNETnews

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listen-to-the-inner-walrus · 1 year ago

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you mentioned in one of your posts about titanic (maybe?) something to do with the philosophy of lifeboats and idk why but the idea of it has been stuck in my mind for at least a week now and i only just refound the post today. could you pls explain what you meant by it?

hello anon, you must have seen my post nitpicking how j bruce ismays character was handled in the titanic movie when i very briefly mentioned the philosophy of lifeboats thing because I Was Being Petty lmao

but yeah so this is gonna be a dumb-downed explanation about a topic thats fairly complex. also im just not gonna get into the debacle of liferafts because im gonna try and keep it simple.

[edit: i have very much failed at keeping it short or simple so if you are interested, come join me after the cut]

see, its only really been within the last century or so that weve regarded lifeboats as things you can escape a sinking ship on and remain within until rescue arrives.

which sounds kinda insane when thinking about it from a modern point of view, right? like in regards to modern sinking incidents or disasters at sea like say the ms achille lauro, msc napoli, ms estonia or even the ss henry steinbrenner to go back to 1953, the story of the rescue is the passengers board the lifeboats, get a safe distance away from the sinking ship and wait for rescue. and nowadays, if this occurs to you, your chance of survival is fairly high.

so its understandable for people to initially be confused as to why this is a modern school of thought as it seems very logical and is what the namesake implies. and for that, we have to put this into the context of the developments within lifeboat technology.

and im aware of how pretentious that sounds, but its a very important part of this discussion.

to start, im unfortunately going to have use the titanic as an example because its the only point of reference for most people.

when we look back at the titanic today, we can very easily criticise white star line and harland & wolff simply for not including enough lifeboats on board. and while those are not undue criticisms, they are unduly harsh.

yes, it is ridiculous to not have enough lifeboats on board for all passengers, but back in the 1910s, naval architects found it ridiculous to suggest ships should have that many.

because this is what titanics lifeboats looked like:

compared to modern day lifeboats:

now, you might notice just how different these are: modern day lifeboats tend to be enclosed; they are made of sturdier material; theyre much more buoyant; they have radios on board; are at significantly less risk of capsizing; are legally mandated to come with a sea anchor that can be used to steady your boat; and often can operate under their own power.

also, your ship probably had an epirb (emergency position-indicating radio beacon) or something similar that sent out an automatic distress signal if you werent able to do so yourself.

modern lifeboats can withstand the tumultuous nature of the ocean for a, relatively speaking, very long time and that allows for rescue. thats why people are sometimes rescued from a lifeboat several days after a shipwreck and why rescuers can sometimes be conservative in their rescue, such as waiting for the weather to clear up before approaching.

if youre nearer the equator, you could likely survive weeks within a lifeboat if rescuers either couldnt find you or couldnt reach you.

but thats not always been the case.

for a long time, lifeboats were these tiny, rickety, wooden boats (as seen in those photos above) that were easily capsized or sank if they came into contact with even the smallest of waves.

if you needed to sail further from the sinking ship or toward land, you would have to do it with wooden paddles and depending on the state of rescue, you might not even have them. your methods of communication were a limited number of flares where you couldnt be sure theyd even work, rocket flares that again night not even work, a torch, a whistle, or just shouting which rarely ever helped.

so even if you could evacuate safely onto a lifeboat, there was no guarantee that youd be able to signal down another ship or potentially an aircraft.

if you werent able to send out a distress signal or were just on a ship that didnt have the technology to do so, no one would know you were in trouble for hours, if you were lucky. for some, it took days or even weeks.

at approximately 2:15am on the 30 november 1966, the ss daniel j morrell broke in half on lake huron. she was not reported missing for ten hours, after which the coast guard dispatched search and rescue vessels. among the 29 crew aboard, only 1 man survived: dennis hale. he was rescued after nearly 14 hours in a liferaft wherein a further 3 men had passed while waiting for rescue. during those 14 hours, the liferaft had been capsized multiple times sending the few survivors into the freezing waters over and over again. [x]

or for an even more extreme example, take the ss naronic. she set sail on 11th february 1893 from liverpool; she was expected to arrive in new york around the 21st february. she never did arrive, and as this was 5 years before the marconi wireless set would be available on ships, the crew could not put out a distress signal. as the ocean was experiencing bad storms, there was no worry about the ship to begin with as it was presumed she was delayed. it took until the 13 march before any alarms were raised. by then, 74 lives had been lost, and to this day, we dont know anything about why she disappeared. its presumed she sank, but no wreck has been found. while her lifeboats were found, that wasnt the case for survivors. [x]

and even if you were lucky enough to have sent out a distress signal, be relatively safe aboard a lifeboat and have ample methods for communicating, you were still at the mercy of the sea. rescue was coming, but there was no guarantee your lifeboat would stay afloat until it arrived.

it was miraculous that titanics lifeboats were able to stay afloat until the carpathia arrived, and that was only around an hour and a half after the titanic had gone down. because this happened in the north atlantic; any other night, the number of casualties would have been significantly higher because those lifeboats would not have survived in rough seas or a storm.

titanic was the exception to the rule; it was the odd duck. and to exemplify this, lets talk about the clallam, the ss valencia and the ss princess sophia.

quick warning about these ships: these were very tragic incidents with monumental loss of life. out of the approximately 608 people who were aboard one of the three ships, only 83 people survived.

(the ss princess sophia is a particularly tragic incident and its one that has made me cry multiple times so just a warning with that.)

we'll begin with the clallam which was a steamboat that ran a regular route from tacoma to seattle to port townsend to victoria. she ran into trouble during a storm while on this run on the 8 january 1904, with 92 people aboard.

she began taking on water when the deadlight was smashed by the waves, and the emergency pumps aboard were not working. this meant they had very little chance of saving her from sinking, especially when the water entered the boiler and cut out the power.

at this point, you may think that the best case scenario for survival would be to abandon ship, but that assumption was quickly proven false.

around 3pm, captain george roberts ordered the ships 3 lifeboats lowered. these were mostly filled by women and children, which makes what came next even more tragic. within minutes of the boats being lowered, they capsized in the rough waters.

everyone on board the lifeboats drowned; all 56 people on board.

but the clallam stayed afloat for several more hours. this gave enough time for the steam tug richard holyoke to arrive on scene, and eventually the 36 people remaining on the clallam were rescued.

all children aboard drowned when the lifeboats were lowered because in 1906, lifeboats were just as much death traps as they were lifeboats. [x] [x]

the sinking of the ss valencia is a similar tale. she was a passenger steamer that was briefly filling in the route of the ss city of puebla, which ran the san fran to seattle route, in january of 1906.

on the 20th, she set sail with around 173 people aboard. the captain aboard was unfamiliar with the route and visibility was so low that the crew could not make celestial observations (by using a sextant, for example) to determine where they were. instead, they had to rely on dead reckoning.

while dead reckoning is fairly reliable, is subject to errors like directional drift and cumulative errors are particularly disastrous and can cause tragedies like the honda point disaster. further, its been alleged the captain did not know how dead reckoning works.

this led to the valencia striking a reef on the night of the 22 january. she was less than 100 yards from shore, but the water around her was rough.

6 of the 7 lifeboats were lowered quickly, as had occured on the clallam. 3 of the boats flipped while being lowered, emptying the survivors into the ocean. the 3 that were lowered successfully did not fair better as 2 of them capsized very quickly and the 3rd simply disappeared.

the last lifeboat was the only one that made it to shore. but still, they had to hike for 2½ hours before they could find help.

while various ships responded to valencias distress call, they were not able to get close enough to offer much assistance. the crew of the valencia launched the 2 life rafts aboard in hopes of drifting close enough to another ship to be rescued. this happened for 18 men on one of the rafts as they were rescued by the city of topeka. the second raft drifted ashore and the 4 survivors aboard were rescued by a group of first nations from the island.

soon, the valencia was washed off of the rocks and she sank. those still on board went down with the ship.

of the approximate 173 people on board, 136 of them died during the disaster. similar to the clallam again, every child on board died. [x]

and this brings us into the ss princess sophia which was a canadian passenger liner. she set sail on the 23rd october in 1918 with 343 people on board. in the early hours of the 24th, she ran aground on vanderbilt reef.

though she was able to send out a distress call and a rescue flotilla of boats were able to arrive on scene, the ss princess sophia took all 343 souls aboard with her when she was eventually washed off of the reef and into the ocean.

now, this is when we get into what lifeboats were intended for back then. the evacuation plan would be for the 8 steel lifeboats aboard sophia to be lowered with passengers and crew members aboard, and paddled toward one of the various rescue ships. the passengers would be taken aboard while the crew would paddle back to the sophia where more passengers would come aboard and be ferried to safety.

this is what happened when the rms republic sank in 1909 and what occured with the ss andrea doria in 1956 though in that case, they only had enough lifeboats to rescue everyone once the ss île de france arrived on scene as dorias list meant half her lifeboats could not be lowered.

unfortunately, captain locke never saw a time where he believed this process could occur. there was only a very short break in the storm, but even during those 5 hours, the ocean was rough with high waves.

captain ledbetter captained the uslht cedar, one of the rescue ships, and went on record saying he never saw conditions that would have permitted an evacuation. [x] [x]

these three cases both exemplify the philosophy of lifeboats only a century ago and why we cant simply apply a modern lens to it without missing crucial details.

now lets quickly detour back to the titanic.

as most people know, there were not enough lifeboats aboard for everyone aboard.

this is one of the nitpicks i have about titanic because the portrayal of it paints a warped picture.

so with everything ive rambled on about in this post, we can see why this decision was made. they only needed enough lifeboats to safely ferry passengers from a sinking ship to rescue.

and it was believed that this was a viable evacuation plan in the case that titanic sank. the route she was sailing was a very busy route that often had at least 5-6 ships nearby that could answer a distress call. this is exactly what happened with the rms republic which i mentioned above.

this belief wasnt unique to the titanic or even the white star line. it was held about every ocean liner sailing as these ships were often able to stay afloat for hours acting as its own giant lifeboat due to safety measures and developments like watertight compartments.

and titanic did stay afloat for over 2 hours as it sank. rms republic took over 24 hours irrc while the ocean liner it collided with, the ss florida, was able to sail to port for rescues. ss andrea doria took 10 hours to sink.

during her sea trials in 1927, the ss malolo collided with a freighter (impact equal to the icebrrg to titanic) and was still able to stay afloat and sail despite being flooded with over 7000 tons of sea water.

this belief was clearly not unfounded.

however, the sinking of the titanic practically shattered it. and from then on, almost all ships had enough lifeboat capacity for every passenger on board as it introduced a new function to lifeboats.

and this kinda leads us into the somewhat conclusion to this rambling mess that very much could have been shorter and much simpler.

but anyway,

put simply, by philosophy of lifeboats, i mean how the function of a lifeboat evolved alongside developments in technology and maritime disasters.

it seemingly had never occured to naval architects pre-titanic that what occured that night in 1912 was a hypothetical they needed to consider.

lifeboats are still used today to ferry survivors to safety if that is what the situation necessitates, but they are now also designed to function as their namesake implies.

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