Many people use the new year to reflect on their relationship with alcohol. Just-released government guidelines are giving Americans another reason to consider a “dry January.”
Over the past few decades, mounting scientific evidence has shown that as little as 1-2 alcoholic drinks per day can lead to increases in the likelihood of several cancers. This prompted the U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, to release a new Surgeon General Advisory on Jan. 3, 2025, warning about the link between alcohol and cancer. This report highlighted the evidence and included a call for new cancer warning labels on alcoholic beverages.
Alcohol is the third-most preventable cause of cancer in the U.S, putting it just behind tobacco and obesity. As the surgeon general’s report highlights, alcohol is associated with approximately 100,000 cancer cases and 20,000 cancer deaths every year, playing a role in breast, liver, colorectal, mouth, throat, esophagus and voice box cancer cases. Alcohol-induced cancer deaths outnumber alcohol-associated traffic crash fatalities every year.
With so few people aware of the links between alcohol consumption and various cancers – and the fact that the vast majority of people consume some alcohol every week – it’s easy to see why the surgeon general is calling for greater awareness. The 22-page report highlights what scientists know about the relationship between alcohol and cancer, and suggests actions for moving forward. Those include label changes on alcohol, which have not been updated since they were created in 1988.
Somewhat strikingly, breast cancer carries a large portion of this risk – making it particularly worrisome in the face of increased alcohol use among women.
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These numbers don’t only apply to heavy alcohol drinkers. While less alcohol is better, 25% of these cancer cases were in people classified as moderate drinkers – consuming, on average, fewer than two drinks per day. This means that anyone regularly drinking alcohol, even small amounts, should know about and understand the risks.
Surgeon general’s advisories are the primary way that the Department of Health and Human Services, where the Office of the Surgeon General resides, communicate health issues of great importance to the public. Surgeon general’s advisories are not necessarily breaking news, but they take the opportunity to bring public awareness to science surrounding big public health issues.
The science behind the link between alcohol and cancer
The relationship between alcohol and cancer has been clear to scientists for decades. In fact, it was highlighted in a 2016 surgeon general’s report as well, which focused on addiction more broadly.
The surgeon general’s report highlights four key pathways through which alcohol can cause cancer. These largely focus on the ways alcohol can negatively affect your DNA, the building blocks of cells. While the healthy cells in your body divide all the time, their abnormal growth can be driven by aberrant factors like alcohol-induced DNA damage.
This DNA damage leads to uncontrollable growth of tissue instead of healthy, normal tissue growth. This abnormal tissue growth is cancer. The four pathways through which alcohol can lead to cancer highlighted in the report are:
Alcohol creates reactive oxygen species. Reactive oxygen species, sometimes called “free radicals,” are unstable molecules that contain oxygen and can further damage DNA, proteins and fats.
Alcohol can influence hormones, like estrogen. Alcohol can raise the amount of estrogen in the body, which may explain its link to breast cancer. This increased estrogen can influence breast tissue by causing – you guessed it – DNA damage.
Alcohol is a solvent, which means other things can dissolve in it. This makes it easier for carcinogens from other sources – like cigarettes and e-vapes – to be absorbed by the body when the two are consumed together.
The biggest question on people’s minds right now is likely “how much alcohol can I safely drink?” and the answer to that might disappoint you – probably none.
Alcohol use remains one of the most preventable risk factors for cancer. And even moderate alcohol consumption – one or fewer drinks per day – may elevate cancer risk for some types, such as breast, throat and mouth cancers.
But none of these studies can tell you what your individual risk for cancer is. The relationship between alcohol and cancer can be influenced by your genes, such as those that control the enzymes that metabolize alcohol, and other lifestyle factors that influence the rates of cancer broadly, like diet and inflammation. All of these lifestyle and personal health factors can influence how risky alcohol consumption is for you.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that if you choose to drink, consider sticking to less than one, for women, or two, for men, standard servings of alcohol per day – which might be smaller than you think, and don’t binge drink alcohol at all. The surgeon general is also suggesting a rethinking of these guidelines to include updated limits on daily alcohol consumption and greater educational efforts around the link between alcohol and cancer.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has similar recommendations around limiting alcohol consumption and advises that for people who choose to drink alcohol, “the less, the better.”
The institute offers tips on its website for managing your alcohol consumption or abstaining from alcohol consumption altogether, including finding alternative hobbies and activities, identifying what leads to your urges to drink and having a plan to handle urges, and identifying a strategy for saying “no” to an alcoholic beverage in social settings.
Nikki Crowley, Assistant Professor of Biology, Biomedical Engineering and Pharmacology, Penn State
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Workers who are in frequent contact with potentially sick animals are at high risk of bird flu infection.
Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesRon Barrett, Macalester College
Disease forecasts are like weather forecasts: We cannot predict the finer details of a particular outbreak or a particular storm, but we can often identify when these threats are emerging and prepare accordingly.
The viruses that cause avian influenza are potential threats to global health. Recent animal outbreaks from a subtype called H5N1 have been especially troubling to scientists. Although human infections from H5N1 have been relatively rare, there have been a little more than 900 known cases globally since 2003 – nearly 50% of these cases have been fatal – a mortality rate about 20 times higher than that of the 1918 flu pandemic. If the worst of these rare infections ever became common among people, the results could be devastating.
Approaching potential disease threats from an anthropological perspective, my colleagues and I recently published a book called “Emerging Infections: Three Epidemiological Transitions from Prehistory to the Present” to examine the ways human behaviors have shaped the evolution of infectious diseases, beginning with their first major emergence in the Neolithic period and continuing for 10,000 years to the present day.
Viewed from this deep time perspective, it becomes evident that H5N1 is displaying a common pattern of stepwise invasion from animal to human populations. Like many emerging viruses, H5N1 is making incremental evolutionary changes that could allow it to transmit between people. The periods between these evolutionary steps present opportunities to slow this process and possibly avert a global disaster.
Spillover and viral chatter
When a disease-causing pathogen such as a flu virus is already adapted to infect a particular animal species, it may eventually evolve the ability to infect a new species, such as humans, through a process called spillover.
Spillover is a tricky enterprise. To be successful, the pathogen must have the right set of molecular “keys” compatible with the host’s molecular “locks” so it can break in and out of host cells and hijack their replication machinery. Because these locks often vary between species, the pathogen may have to try many different keys before it can infect an entirely new host species. For instance, the keys a virus successfully uses to infect chickens and ducks may not work on cattle and humans. And because new keys can be made only through random mutation, the odds of obtaining all the right ones are very slim.
Given these evolutionary challenges, it is not surprising that pathogens often get stuck partway into the spillover process. A new variant of the pathogen might be transmissible from an animal only to a person who is either more susceptible due to preexisting illness or more likely to be infected because of extended exposure to the pathogen.
Even then, the pathogen might not be able to break out of its human host and transmit to another person. This is the current situation with H5N1. For the past year, there have been many animal outbreaks in a variety of wild and domestic animals, especially among birds and cattle. But there have also been a small number of human cases, most of which have occurred among poultry and dairy workers who worked closely with large numbers of infected animals.
Pathogen transmission can be modeled in three stages. In Stage 1, the pathogen can be transmitted only between nonhuman animals. In stage 2, the pathogen can also be transmitted to humans, but it is not yet adapted for human-to-human transmission. In Stage 3, the pathogen is fully capable of human-to-human transmission.Ron Barrett, CC BY-SA
Epidemiologists call this situation viral chatter: when human infections occur only in small, sporadic outbreaks that appear like the chattering signals of coded radio communications – tiny bursts of unclear information that may add up to a very ominous message. In the case of viral chatter, the message would be a human pandemic.
Sporadic, individual cases of H5N1 among people suggest that human-to-human transmission may likely occur at some point. But even so, no one knows how long or how many steps it would take for this to happen.
Influenza viruses evolve rapidly. This is partly because two or more flu varieties can infect the same host simultaneously, allowing them to reshuffle their genetic material with one another to produce entirely new varieties.
Genetic reshuffling – aka antigenic shift – between a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza and a strain of human influenza could create a new strain that’s even more infectious among people.Eunsun Yoo/Biomolecules & Therapeutics, CC BY-NC
These reshuffling events are more likely to occur when there is a diverse range of host species. So it is particularly concerning that H5N1 is known to have infected at least 450 different animal species. It may not be long before the viral chatter gives way to larger human epidemics.
Reshaping the trajectory
The good news is that people can take basic measures to slow down the evolution of H5N1 and potentially reduce the lethality of avian influenza should it ever become a common human infection. But governments and businesses will need to act.
People can start by taking better care of food animals. The total weight of the world’s poultry is greater than all wild bird species combined. So it is not surprising that the geography of most H5N1 outbreaks track more closely with large-scale housing and international transfers of live poultry than with the nesting and migration patterns of wild aquatic birds. Reducing these agricultural practices could help curb the evolution and spread of H5N1.
Large-scale commercial transport of domesticated animals is associated with the evolution and spread of new influenza varieties.ben/Flickr, CC BY-SA
People can also take better care of themselves. At the individual level, most people can vaccinate against the common, seasonal influenza viruses that circulate every year. At first glance this practice may not seem connected to the emergence of avian influenza. But in addition to preventing seasonal illness, vaccination against common human varieties of the virus will reduce the odds of it mixing with avian varieties and giving them the traits they need for human-to-human transmission.
At the population level, societies can work together to improve nutrition and sanitation in the world’s poorest populations. History has shown that better nutrition increases overall resistance to new infections, and better sanitation reduces how much and how often people are exposed to new pathogens. And in today’s interconnected world, the disease problems of any society will eventually spread to every society.
For more than 10,000 years, human behaviors have shaped the evolutionary trajectories of infectious diseases. Knowing this, people can reshape these trajectories for the better.Ron Barrett, Professor of Anthropology, Macalester College
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
(Family Features) For some, tax season represents the opportunity for a return and some much-needed relief for their bank accounts. Yet for others, it’s time to write a check to Uncle Sam. Ensure you’re up to date on all things 2025 taxes with this guidance from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the IRS.
Tax Deadlines
If you’re unable to file before the traditional April 15 deadline, you do have a few options. Filing for an extension provides an extra six months until Oct. 15, however, if you believe you will owe taxes, you’re required to estimate how much you owe and pay that amount alongside your extension form.
Filing Your Taxes
Each person’s tax situation is unique, but there is an assortment of options when it comes time to file. Some people (an estimated 100 million) are eligible to file their returns for free, such as seniors, those who speak English as a second language, those with incomes of less than $60,000, servicemembers and more. Be sure to check your eligibility for services like IRS Volunteer Income Tax Assistance, AARP Foundation Tax-Aide, The Tax Counseling for the Elderly, MyFreeTaxes, GetYourRefund, IRS Free File, MilTax and more.
Accessing Your Refund
Electronically filing and choosing direct deposit is the fastest way to receive your refund. The IRS typically issues refunds within 21 days, but issuance of a paper check may take 4-6 weeks. Make sure to have your account and routing numbers ready when filing your return. One alternate solution is to have your refund issued to a prepaid card that accepts direct deposit, but there may be fees involved. Check with the card provider to determine any applicable fees.
Watch for Scams
The IRS will not contact you by email, text message or social media to request personal or financial information. Scammers may impersonate the IRS to convince you to share personal information through the mail, telephone, email and beyond.
Find more tax tips and information at irs.gov and visit eLivingtoday.com for additional financial advice.
Photo courtesy of Unsplash
SOURCE:eLivingtoday.com
If you’ve recently discovered that your paycheck is smaller than expected, it’s possible you’re dealing with wage garnishment—a distressing situation that affects millions of Americans every year. This means a portion of your hard-earned money is being taken before it ever reaches your bank account, making it incredibly challenging to manage your budget, especially during tough financial times.
Image created with AI
Understanding how wage garnishment works can help you navigate this rocky terrain. It usually occurs after a creditor has sued you, won a judgment, and obtained a court order to garnish your wages. However, certain exceptions—such as unpaid taxes, child support, and student loans—allow for garnishment without a court order. Regardless of how you found yourself in this situation, it’s important to know that there are steps you can take to mitigate or even stop the garnishment altogether.
If you’re facing wage garnishment, don’t lose hope. Acting quickly can be crucial. Here are six steps to help you address this issue and potentially find relief:
1. Verify the Garnishment Is Legal
It may feel overwhelming to see your paycheck impacted, but the first step is to confirm the legitimacy of the garnishment. Federal law mandates that you must receive a garnishment notice prior to any wage withholding. Carefully review this document to ensure that the debt belongs to you and that the creditor followed all proper legal protocols. Garish mistakes can occur, and verifying each detail can empower you to challenge any discrepancies.
2. Check for Violations of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act
It’s disheartening, but some debt collectors may engage in questionable practices throughout the garnishment process. If you have not been properly notified or if your wages have been garnished beyond what is legally allowed, this might constitute a violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA). Knowing your rights can be the first step in seeking justice. If you notice any irregularities, document your experiences—this could be crucial in seeking damages or legal fees.
3. Know Your Legal Protections
Understanding your legal protections can provide significant relief. Federal law stipulates that creditors can only garnish a limited portion of your earnings—typically 25% of disposable income or the amount by which your income exceeds 30 times the federal minimum wage, whichever is less. Additionally, certain income sources, like Social Security and disability benefits, are generally exempt from garnishment. Familiarizing yourself with these protections can bolster your confidence as you navigate this process.
4. File an Objection or Exemption Claim
If the garnishment is causing you severe financial hardship, you have the right to file an objection, often referred to as a “claim of exemption.” This usually involves submitting a formal request to the court that issued the garnishment order. It might feel daunting, but many courts are willing to reconsider garnishments that pose a significant burden on your ability to support yourself or your dependents. Advocating for your rights can lead to a modification or even termination of the garnishment.
5. Negotiate Directly with the Creditor
Even after wage garnishment begins, there’s still room to negotiate with the creditor. A direct conversation can sometimes open the door to negotiating a more reasonable payment plan or even settling for a lesser amount of what you owe. Many creditors are willing to work with you rather than endure the complexities of garnishment procedures. Approach this conversation with transparency about your financial situation and be prepared to offer a realistic, sustainable payment option.
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6. Consider Bankruptcy as a Last Resort
When all else fails, it might be time to consider bankruptcy. While this option can feel intimidating, it offers a pathway to eliminate debts and stop wage garnishment. However, bankruptcy comes with its own set of complexities and consequences, so it’s essential to seek guidance from a qualified financial advisor or an attorney specializing in bankruptcy law.
Conclusion
Finding out that your wages are being garnished can evoke a whirlwind of stress, uncertainty, and fear. Remember, you’re not alone in facing this issue—millions are battling similar challenges. It’s critical to know that there are legal steps you can take to protect your rights and alleviate the strain of garnishment. By verifying the garnishment, understanding your rights, and taking action, you can work toward regaining control of your financial situation. With determination and the right approach, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
If you want to read more on this topic, check out the story from CBS News that highlights important steps to take when facing wage garnishment. It provides valuable insights and information that can help you navigate this challenging situation. Don’t miss it!
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Ron Barrett, Professor of Anthropology, Macalester College
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
(Family Features) For some, tax season represents the opportunity for a return and some much-needed relief for their bank accounts. Yet for others, it’s time to write a check to Uncle Sam. Ensure you’re up to date on all things 2025 taxes with this guidance from the 
