This Valentine’s Day, give a true gift of the heart by giving the gift of life – help fund heart surgery for a child. Even $5.00 will help, and you can even donate through Paypal – it doesn’t get much easier than that!

Dr. Mani Sivasubramanian – Dr. Mani to his friends and young patients – is a heart surgeon in India. Through his Dr. Mani Children’s Heart Foundation, he funds – and performs – thousands of heart surgeries, without which his young patients would die.

I personally know Dr. Mani – and many of my friends and colleagues also know, and vouch for, Dr. Mani.

We all donate to his foundation, because, well, we don’t like children dying if they don’t have to, and he saves their lives. It’s as simple as that.

What would you do if your child needed a routine, readily-performed heart surgery – without which they would die – but you couldn’t afford to pay for it?

It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it?

But you really can make a difference!

And we guarantee it!

Take our Valentine’s Day challenge – donate something, anything, to Dr. Mani’s heart surgery for children fund – and if at any time, ever, you change your mind, the Internet Patrol will personally refund your full donation – just show us your receipt.

Help us make our goal of $3000 by Valentine’s Day – enough to fund a complete surgery and actually save a child’s life! That’s only $1500 a week – that’s less than $215 per day – just a few dollars from each of our readers! Make a donation, and then drop us a line at info@theinternetpatrol.com and tell us about your donation.

Please let us know if you’d like us to list your name along with the amount of your donation, or you prefer to make it anonymous.

Make your donation now, via Paypal – you can use any credit card! – here:

P.P.S. Dr. Mani funds much of this himself, through the proceeds of his EzineMarketingCenter.com site. That is why that is the address to which donations are sent through Paypal. But we promise (and guarantee) that your donation will get to the right place, and be used for the right purpose.

In 2002 I ordered a tagine from a vendor, online. I had made a point of communicating with the vendor first, to make sure that the tagine was lead-free. They assured me that not only was it lead-free, but that it was the same tagine that they supplied to restaurants all across the country. After cooking with it twice, and serving the food to both guests and my own family (including our young son), I decided to test it, and guess what? It had lead in it. Here’s our story.

After the tagine arrived, we cooked a family meal in it. Then we had friends over, and cooked another meal for them and our own family.

Then, after using it twice, a nagging concern made me go out and get a lead test kit.

The tagine tested positive.

Great, I’d cooked and served two meals, nearly back-to-back, which had included acidic foods (like tomatoes), likely to enhance the lead’s leaching into our food.

I figured that, still, with it being just two meals, the odds were low that we’d ingested enough lead to worry about – but I was concerned for our son, who was barely 3 years old at the time.

To be safe, I called poison control.

It was then that I got really concerned, because they advised me that we needed to get the whole family tested immediately. The intellectual side of me was saying “How could two uses possibly lead to a dangerous level”, but the emotional and mom side of me was terribly worried. Especially as cooking, and acidic foods (like the tomatoes we’d cooked in the tagine, twice) exacerbate the leaching.

So, I got tested. I wanted to be tested first, because I did not want to put our son through the trauma of a blood test. I figured my test would show no lead, and so we’d be fine.

Here is something I wrote when I received those test results:

“Well, my blood lead tests results are in, and while I do have a detectable blood level above trace, and by inference so would our son (we tested me first, to try and avoid the trauma to him of a blood test), it seemed certain that any level he had, even taking into account his much smaller mass, would not be high enough that they would actually *do* anything (which level would be 10 micrograms per decileter or higher; my level was 1.4). So we’re as reassured as we can be, under the circumstances, and darned thankful that we tested the bl**dy tagine before using it any further.”

Along the way, I learned more than I cared to about lead in the body. You (well, I) sort of take for granted basic, background knowledge, such as “don’t eat lead, it’s bad for you”. But when you start having to look at “exactly why is it bad”, “how much is truly bad”, “how can you undo the effects”, etc., it’s never that simple. Some interesting tidbits:

Mind you, I am a layperson to the extreme here, so do NOT take any of the
above as gospel – it is just what one person learned/was told in the course
of trying to find out what we could/should do about our own lead exposure.

I of course called the merchant from whom we had purchased the tagine; I
was fortunate enough to have the owner answer the phone when I called, so I
was able to drop my little bombshell on her directly (“there’s lead in them
thar tagines”). She seemed genuinely concerned and surprised, and refunded
my purchase price immediately.

Still, given that they had told me directly (in a previous call) that “these are the same tagines we sell to restaurants all over the country”, I felt it was serious enough that I tried to report it to the FDA, and local (to NYC, where the merchant is) health authorities.

It took me 2 days to get through to anyone who seemed to care at either agency, and to be honest, even though I finally reached someone at both levels who seemed concerned, and took the details, I still wasn’t convinced that there wouild be any follow-up. Which was really frustrating.

So, that’s our story. You can be sure that we are much more aware of lead now!