A "Brazilian blowout" is a kind of hair treatment in which a liquid is applied to hair, and then heated with a blow dryer to either straighten hair or reduce frizziness. Environmentalists are suing the FDA, claiming the agency has failed to address potential health risks of the treatment.

Some of the liquid products used contain formaldehyde, a probable human carcinogen. When the liquid is heated, critics say excessive levels of formaldehyde may become airborne, causing irritation of skin, eyes and lungs of both salon workers and their clients.

A filed lawsuit aims to force the FDA to restrict the products' use or pull it entirely from shelves.

State of Health

The United Health Foundation recently issued its annual rankings of the state of states' health: a look at 34 measures such as state health policies, drug deaths, air pollution levels, obesity prevalence and clinical care outcomes.

For the fifth year in a row, the healthiest state was Hawaii, followed by Massachusetts, Connecticut, Minnesota and Vermont. Mississippi ranked last. Louisiana improved to 49, followed by Arkansas, Alabama and Oklahoma.

The national cardiovascular death rate ticked up slightly for the first time in the 27-year survey, from 250.8 deaths per 100,000 people to 251.7. The drug death rate climbed 4 percent nationally in the past year as well.

On the plus side, the national smoking rate has declined 41 percent since 1990, and preventable hospitalizations among Medicare enrollees has decreased 35 percent in the past decade.

Body of Knowledge

In terms of compression strength, the femur (thigh bone) of a 150-pound man with size 11 feet can withstand the weight of 16,000 people standing on it at one time.

Stories for the Waiting Room

In 2013, actress Angelina Jolie announced she had tested positive for higher-risk breast and ovarian cancer mutations and underwent a preventive double mastectomy. The news prompted anecdotal reports of subsequent increased testing and preventive surgeries among U.S. women.

In a new report, Harvard researchers looked at data from 9 million American women between ages 18 and 64 with private health insurance, examining both the weeks before Jolie's announcement and after. Before, there were about 7 cancer mutation tests per million women; after, there were 11 per million, an increase of 64 percent.

Conversely, the percentage of women who tested positive who followed up with mastectomies declined, from 10 percent before Jolie's announcement to 7 percent after. One explanation may be that the women who tested were primarily those who did not have a family history of breast cancer, which Jolie did.

Get Me That, Stat!

More than 1,000 times a minute, or roughly 554 million times a year, Americans eat a Jack in the Box taco. It is the most-sold item on the San Diego-based fast food chain's menu. The tacos are deep-fried tortillas containing a beef filling, topped by American cheese, lettuce and hot sauce. That's it. The Wall Street Journal offers the description of "a wet envelope of cat food." The paper could find no source able to explain the tacos' enduring popularity. (They've been around since the 1950s.)

Life in Big Macs

One hour of sitting quietly in a church burns 68 calories (based on a 150-pound person) or the equivalent of 0.1 Big Mac. There is no empirical evidence that praying fervently for that hour to end quickly (so you can get a Big Mac) burns up any extra calories.

Counts

500: Amount, in millions of dollars, that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services provides annually to Planned Parenthood, primarily to offer health services to low-income families via Medicaid

Sources: HHS, STAT

Phobia of the week

Koniophobia: fear of dust

Never Say Diet

The Major League Eating record for pasta is 10 pounds in 8 minutes, held by Matt Stonie. Stonie consumed spaghetti with red sauce, an obvious choice. (Penne wise, pounds foolish.)

Observation

"Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals." —Napoleon Bonaparte

Medical History

This week in 1964, the first animal-to-human heart transplant was performed when Dr. James Hardy at the University of Mississippi transplanted the heart of a chimpanzee into the chest of 68-year-old Boyd Rush in a last-ditch effort to save his life. (No human heart was available.) The transplanted chimp heart beat on its own, but was too small to maintain independent circulation and Rush died after 90 minutes.

Med School

Q: What is the mesentery?

A: According to a professor at the University of Limerick, it's the body's 79th organ. The mesentery is a mass of tissue connecting the abdomen to the intestines. Conventional medical wisdom has long assumed it to be a fragmented group of tissues, but J. Calvin Coffey and colleagues recently published findings asserting that it qualifies as a single organ.

Curtain Calls

On January 15, 1919, a particularly warm day for that time of year, fermenting gases in a 2.3 million tank of molasses at a Boston refinery caused the tank to burst, sending a fast-moving wave (35 miles per hour) down local streets. Twenty-one people were killed, 150 injured. The event became known as the Great Boston Molasses Tragedy. Ninety-two years later, some residents in the affected area say a hint of molasses can still be sniffed on host summer days.

To find out more about Scott LaFee and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.