Health Wanted: Halloween!
HEALTH WANTED, a weekly radio show and podcast produced in partnership with WABE, brings need-to-know public health headlines and breaks down the science behind trending topics.
The Episode
The topic: Halloween is here, listen if you dare! Turns out some of the most popular horror myths are based in public health reality. This week on Health Wanted, host Laurel Bristow is joined by two special guests: comedians Mark Kendall and David Perdue. The three talk through some of the science behind vampires, zombies, mummies, and other things that go bump in the night.
The takeaway: While many of our most beloved Halloween stories come from the imagination and creativity of writers and filmmakers, some of these sinister subjects may derive from connections to historical events in public health.
- There are a few creepy connections between what we know about rabies, tuberculosis, and popular culture’s ideas about vampires. Rabies can cause aggression, biting, sensitivity to light, and insomnia. Tuberculosis often gives victims pale skin, light sensitivity, and a slowed heart rate. Whether from an infectious disease or vampirism, these are symptoms you want to avoid.
- Cemeteries are not only classic backdrops for some of our favorite horror movies, they were also historically prime haunting grounds for grave diggers looking for extra cash. In the 1800s, Baltimore was a hotbed of grave robbers due to strong demand from medical schools looking to supply anatomy classes. It was not until 1900 that the practice was discontinued and the state Anatomy Board developed a system to allocate unclaimed corpses to medical schools.
- Today in the health care world, it is usually preferred to keep blood inside the body. However, up until the 1800s, many people held the belief that illnesses came from the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) being out of balance. They believed that removing blood, or bloodletting, could help a patient regain health by losing some of the humor causing an imbalance.
The Listener Questions
How long can you keep leftover Halloween candy?
You can keep leftover candy for a long time! If you store your candy in a cool, dry place and it’s properly sealed, it will last well past the expiration date. It also will likely not make you sick even after the expiration date, but the taste and texture might be less than ideal.
However, this only applies to your classic, mass-produced candies that have preservatives in them to keep them shelf stable.
Dark chocolate can keep up to two years if the foil it’s in is kept cool and away from light and milk chocolate can keep about 10 months because it has a higher fat content.
Hard candies can last a super long time if they are not exposed to moisture. You’ll know they’re too old if they get a grainy texture or start to melt.
Marshmallows can stay good for up to six to eight months if they are stored in a cool, dry place, and candies with a high sugar content like caramel, nougat, and candy corn can last six months at room temperature.
Is fluoride lowering child IQs?
There is apost going around social media that says the government has been putting fluoride in water, attacking anyone who questions it, and that now the NIH has admitted that fluoride in drinking water is causing lower IQs in children and is hazardous to your health.
What actually is happening is something involving the National Toxicology Program (NTP), which is supported by research groups fromthree governmental agencies: NIH, EPA, and CDC.
The NTP released a300+ page systematic review of the available research on fluoride exposure and neurodevelopment and cognition.
The NTP uses four levels of confidence to indicate the strength of evidence that a particular outcome is associated with a particular exposure. Those levels are high, moderate, low, and very low. Their review concluded that there was moderate confidence in the evidence to suggest that exposure to high levels of fluoride was associated with reduced IQ in children.
There are a few important things to remember: the review was looking at total exposure to fluoride. It was not and could not evaluate fluoride in drinking water alone.
In addition to being in some communities’ drinking water, either naturally or from intentional fluoridation, people are exposed to fluoride through other foods, beverages, toothpaste, mouthwash, and more.
When it comes to drinking water, they were looking at fluoride exposure at a level of at least1.5 milligrams per liter. That’s over twice as much as the recommended limit for fluoridating water. They even explicitlystated there was insufficient data to make determinations about the health impacts of the low levels of fluoride that are added to drinking water.
So this is not some bombshell about fluoride in drinking water, it’s further proof that too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing and that more data is needed to understand the exact connection and the levels at which fluoride’s risks outweigh the benefits.
Catch all the listener questions and Laurel’s answers on the full episode of Health Wanted by:
- Streaming at wabe.org or the WABE app
- Subscribing on Apple or Spotify
- Watching on WABE's YouTube channel
