Open source health research - NewsGrabs 21 December 2008

Festive season coming up. We have today's winter solstice, the shortest day in the year, followed by Christmas and then the turn of the (Gregorian calendar) year in a bit more than a week. May all of you have a happy and relaxing holiday season and ... don't overdo it with food and drink.


CureTogether - open source health research
CureTogether is a place where patients, doctors and researchers share their health knowledge, to help each other feel better and to make new discoveries. It's as private as you want it to be, it's open and it's free.

Patients have actually been getting together and exchanging information on websites to share experiences and cures. This site just provides a dedicated space for a growing phenomenon of open-source self reliant medicine.


Europe's Traditional Herbal Medicines Directive - No place for Ayurveda?
Dr Robert Verkerk and Meleni Aldridge of the Alliance for Natural Health have almost finished a 10-day information gathering, network strengthening tour of India, as part of ANH’s ongoing campaign to protect traditional medicinal cultures. Their tour took in the historic city of Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, which many argue is the birth place of modern civilisation itself, as well as being the origin of India’s overriding philosophical and health care system, Ayurveda.


Nobel prize committees accused of bribery
The second corruption case involves Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, which earlier this year signed a sponsor agreement with two Nobel companies with close ties to the Nobel Foundation: Nobel Web and Nobel Media.

Half of this year's Nobel Medicine Prize went to Harald zur Hausen of Germany for his discovery of the human papilloma virus (HPV) that causes cervical cancer.

AstraZeneca receives royalties for the two available vaccines against HPV.


Calcium fluoride deemed safe in supplements in Europe
Responding to a petition from Australian-based food supplements manufacturer, Blackmores Ltd, EFSA’s Panel on Food Additives and Nutrient Sources added to Food (ANS) concluded there were no major formulation issues after reviewing the available science.

What a topsy turvy world this is.

Vital nutrients are BAD (if you get too much) but fluoride, a poison, not a nutrient, is quite ok. The European Food Agency (EFSA) looks more and more similar to the rapidly failing US FDA. It allows the poisons and limits the good stuff like nutrients.

The ANH has posted a comment: EFSA—are you trying to poison us?


SWATing Farmers: Should Farmers be allowed to sell us their Food?
The SWAT team held the Stowers family with assault weapons for nine hours while tearing their farmhouse apart looking for evidence. The Stowers’ crime? Selling farm-fresh foods to friends and neighbors! This SWATTING of farmers leads us to ask…

Should farmers be allowed to sell us their foods, or should we be forced to buy their foods from government-sanctioned corporations?


New anti-cancer components of extra-virgin olive oil revealed
"Our findings reveal for the first time that all the major complex phenols present in extra-virgin olive oil drastically suppress overexpression of the cancer gene HER2 in human breast cancer cells".

Extra-virgin olive oil is the oil that results from pressing olives without the use of heat or chemical treatments. It contains phytochemicals that are otherwise lost in the refining process.


Canada: Raw Milk Farmer Michael Schmidt Slams Criminal Charges
Canadian officials have conspired to orchestrate a malicious targeted and unlawful harassment campaign against all small family farmers that produce their own eggs, butter, cheese, yogurts and other dairy products on their own farms using raw milk, says raw milk farm activist Michael Schmidt.


Ireland overfluoridated, says VOICE
... a survey has revealed that a high percentage of people living in Ireland's fluoridated counties who volunteered for a test were found to be at or above what are considered safe levels of fluoride, as determined from urine analyses.


Cover-Up of Hidden MSG Food Additives
Experts and whistle-blowers claim that MSG functions not only as a flavor enhancer, but as a harmful neurotoxin that has adverse effects in the short term and long term for much more than 2% of the public. However, the FDA regards MSG as generally safe and claims that only 2% of the public suffers from adverse reactions to it. They allow many companies, such Kraft, Pringles and Campbell's Soup, to hide it in seemingly benign ingredients without including it on the label. In many ways, the FDA has been part of a cover-up of hidden MSG in many food and beverage products as well as a cover-up of MSG's potential health risks.


New study ties hormone use to breast cancer
It is clear that breast cancer rates plunged in recent years mainly because millions of women quit hormone therapy and fewer newly menopausal women started on it, said the study's leader, Dr. Rowan Chlebowski of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

"It's an excellent message for women: You can still diminish risk (by quitting), even if you've been on hormones for a long time."


Mystery illness paralyses girl given cervical cancer jab
Ashleigh Cave suffered dizziness and headaches soon after the vaccination at her school and then deteriorated rapidly, collapsing several times over the following days.

A week later she was admitted to hospital after losing all strength in her legs and, two months on, there has been no improvement.


Johnson & Johnson, Texas And Medicaid Fraud
J&J’s Janssen Pharmaceutica funneled kickbacks to Texas health officials, distributed false marketing materials and deployed phony advocacy groups to get its Risperdal antipsychotic prescribed to low-income Texans, the state alleges in a new filing in an ongoing fraud lawsuit filed in 2006.


Swedish Officials Investigating Nobel Prize Board
Swedish state Prosecutor Christer van der Kwast told Dagens Medicin that he had ordered a full criminal investigation, on the eve of Wednesday’s lavish award ceremonies, adding dryly: "It was not my intention to ruin the party."

Meanwhile, controversy also centered on the other half of the Nobel prize in medicine, given to Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute, for his claims of the 1983 discovery of what was termed the “AIDS virus.”

International medical ethics watchdog group The Semmelweis Society has issued a press release drawing attention to numerous breaches of scientific standards that undermine the notion that an "AIDS virus" was ever discovered, or proven to be causative.


650 Scientists Challenge Global Warming "Consensus"
The report features contributions from hundreds of prominent researchers, including current and former IPCC scientists, who are now speaking out in opposition of the UN's stance on climate change.

The Senate report is an updated version of a 2007 release, with over 250 more names added, highlighting how widespread dissent continues to grow in the scientific community to the alleged “consensus” that the modern warming is primarily man-made and is a crisis.


ZERO SUM - “Free Trade” as a global playground for big business
Rather than heralding a new day for the poor, however, chaos has increased in Mexico and South America, where millions are protesting the effects of the treaties. The biggest beneficiaries of CAFTA and NAFTA were multinational corporations who, after shutting down small farms and businesses that were the lifeline to their communities, have used the trade agreements to create new monopolies on everything from water to food to energy.


- - -

Got things to say .. have news to share?

Join the healthfreedom group on Ning.com and start posting your messages. Healthfreedom is a social network and discussion forum about natural health and a more effective and 'user friendly' type of medicine.

- - -

More information out there...

There is much I cannot cover but other sources for this kind of information exist and are active.

You can subscribe to the Zeus Newsletterhere. Appears twice monthly. If you would like to see some samples of Louise's collection of informative links, here are the archives. She also has a weekly newsletter all about homeopathy - Zeus Homeopathy News.

Dr Mercola's health blog and Mike Adams' Natural News have good health information.

The Alternative Medicine Yahoo Group and the healthfreedom ning group are places where you can discuss and exchange information on what is happening in the world of natural health.

For the influence of electromagnetic waves from radio, mobile phones and other radio emitting devices, check out the emr-updates group on Yahoo.

A few sites to keep up to date with the other side of world affairs, the stuff you won't necessarily find on your tv or in the papers:

http://therealnews.com/
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com
http://www.commondreams.org
http://www.globalresearch.ca/
http://rawstory.com/
http://www.truthout.org/

and remember ...

The individual is supreme and finds its way through intuition

Could Microwave Technology End Human Race? - NewsGrabs 14 December 2008

Could Microwave Technology Spell The End of the Human Race?
The question is really not so far fetched. DNA breaks are serious stuff. Mobile phones are ubuquitous. They use microwaves to transmit the message. More and more scientific studies find damaging effects on users and those who live close to repeater antennas. Industry covers up those studies. It's a large scale experiment. We are the guinea pigs. Amy Worthington has put a lot of the evidence together here.

The term "Generation X-ray" refers to youth addicted to communicating and recreating with wireless devices—cell phones, PDA’s, WiFi computers and music/gaming equipment. These wireless devices emit high-frequency microwave radiation, recently demonstrated by European researchers to efficiently inflict the same horrific damage on human cells as X-radiation.

For the sake of human survival, mankind must quickly master this critical fact: modern wireless technology is capable of causing the genetic destruction of humans as a species. Microwave radiation used for wireless communications and surveillance is extremely injurious to human DNA. It is therefore also destructive to both the human genome and the epigenetic chemical switches which control expression of the genes.


Attacking Alzheimer's with Red Wine and Marijuana
Two new studies suggest that substances usually associated with dulling the mind -- marijuana and red wine -- may help ward off Alzheimer's disease and other forms of age-related memory loss.


St John’s Wort works as well as drugs – with far fewer side-effects
Use of the whole herb (one of the fundamental practices in traditional forms of herbalism) appears in many cases to enable synergistic actions of the many biochemical components, thus increasing efficacy. For example the antidepressant effects of hypericin and pseudohypericin were found to increase significantly by adding in the procyanidin constituent, since this enhanced their solubility. Use of the whole herb also appears to enable ‘buffering’, which is believed to reduce adverse effects, and the risk of interactions.


High Doses of Vitamins Fight Alzheimer's Disease
The news media recently reported that "huge doses of an ordinary vitamin appeared to eliminate memory problems in mice with the rodent equivalent of Alzheimer's disease." They then quickly added that "scientists aren't ready to recommend that people try the vitamin on their own outside of normal doses."

In other words, extra-large amounts of a vitamin are helpful, so don't you take them!

That does not even pass the straight-faced test. So what's the story?

Researchers at the University of California at Irvine gave the human dose equivalent of 2,000 to 3,000 mg of vitamin B3 to mice with Alzheimer's. It worked. Kim Green, one of the researchers, is quoted as saying, "Cognitively, they were cured. They performed as if they'd never developed the disease."


Diabetes Epidemic Linked to Toxic Chemicals in Food & Environment
Ask why diabetes is epidemic in the 21st century and most people will point the finger at bad diet, laziness and obesity. According to a small but growing group of scientists, though, the real culprit is a family of toxic chemicals known as persistent organic pollutants, or POPs. If these researchers are right, POPs - which include some of the most reviled chemicals ever created, including dioxins, DDT and PCBs - may be key players in the web of events that lead people to develop the disease.


Sugar can be addictive, scientist says
The rats drank more alcohol than normal after their sugar supply was cut off, showing that the bingeing behavior had forged changes in brain function. These functions served as "gateways" to other paths of destructive behavior, such as increased alcohol intake. And, after receiving a dose of amphetamine normally so minimal it has no effect, they became significantly hyperactive. The increased sensitivity to the psychostimulant is a long-lasting brain effect that can be a component of addiction, Hoebel said.


Irish natural health organisations call on European leaders to respect Irish ‘No’
The organisations - which include the GM-free Ireland Network, the Leitrim Organic Farmers Co-operative Society, the Irish Association of Health Stores and the Irish Institute of Nutrition & Health – say that the European Union is increasingly having such a damaging effect on their sector that to expect them to vote ‘Yes’ for the Lisbon Treaty would be absurd and akin to expecting them to vote in favour of the contamination of the Irish ecosystem and food chain by GM crops; the continued removal of people’s freedom of choice to avail themselves of safe, natural approaches to healthcare; and the ongoing pollution of the drinking water supply by industrial waste fluorides.


Videos:European Social Forum, September 2008 in Sweden
Paul Taylor of the Dr Rath Foundation and Meleni Aldridge of the Alliance for Natural Health at the EU Social Forum. The talks are about the EU's legislative strategy with regards to supplements and other natural health options. Meleni links this to a wider world-embracing plan where European legislative experience is being "exported" around the world through Codex Alimentarius. Paul Taylor describes how pharmaceutical control of medicine has caused great injury and death and asks "why not change the way we look at health...?"


Conflict of Interest - Could Astra Zeneca be profiting from Nobel Prize?
According to Attorney-General Christer von der Kwast, connections between the drug company Astra Zeneca and individuals associated with the Nobel Foundation might offer grounds for criminal proceedings. The British-Swedish company holds patents for both vaccines against human papillomavirus (HPV), which is capable of causing cervical cancer.

German virologist Harald zur Hausen was nominated for half of the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering HPV. This illustrious approbation could lead more countries to add HPV-vaccination to their routine vaccinations, and Astra Zeneca would profit thereby.


Pharma: Are national economies betting on the wrong health paradigm?
C is for contraction. C is also for convulsion. Both describe what pharma is experiencing these days. The trend was under way a few years ago, of course, when Merck began eliminating thousands of jobs. But since early last year, the bloodletting has been particularly severe.


The New World Order & Codex Alimentarius
With biting political analysis, Ian R. Crane probes the track record of those who openly crave the introduction of a One World hierarchical Government. Exposing the agenda of those who have presided over events leading directly to the launching of illegal wars in Afghanistan & Iraq and who continually demonstrate their desire to perpetuate a state of permanent global conflict; whilst systematically eroding personal freedom, through the process of gradualism.

So what does all this have to do with Organic Farming and Natural Health? Part of the New World Order agenda is to remove the requirement for food labelling & to restrict and ultimately prohibit the sale of all natural health products.


FDA’s $1.5 Million Morale Contract Draws U.S. Lawmaker Scrutiny
Let me get this right - the FDA can't get their stuff together, the drugs they approve kill hundreds of thousands and what do they do? They hire a PR firm to improve morale at the drug division.

Two Congressmen take up the matter and they write to the FDA chief ...

“We are very concerned about the lack of any justifiable metrics for measuring contract success,” Barton and Shimkus said in a letter to the FDA commissioner, Andrew von Eschenbach.


UK: Hampshire County Council rejects proposal to mass fluoridate water supply
Despite the best efforts of the UK's Chief Dental Officer, Secretary of Health for State and the Strategic Health Authorities to foist water fluoridation on an unwilling populace, thankfully the County Council for Hampshire have voted against fluoridating the county's water supply.


India: Genetic Modification in Court - Dr Mae Wan Ho comments
Government mandated testing of the safety of genetically modified food plants is being contested by the GM industry in the Indian Supreme court. Dr Mae Wan Ho of I-SIS explains why biosafety assessments are absolutely indispensable.


France abuzz over alcoholic 'cure'
Dr Olivier Ameisen, 55, one of France's top heart specialists, says he overcame his own addiction to alcohol by self-administering doses of a muscle-relaxant called baclofen.

"I detested the taste of alcohol. But I needed its effects to exist in society," he says in Le Dernier Verre, which comes out in English next month.

Dr Ameisen says he tried every known remedy to end his dependence. Between 1997 and 1999 he spent a total of nine months confined in clinics - but nothing worked.

In March 2002 he began treating himself with daily doses of five milligrams.

"The first effects were a magical muscular relaxation and baby-like sleep," he says. Almost immediately he also detected a lessening in his desire for drink.

I am not advocating drug cures, but addiction is a serious and at times quite intractable problem. If a muscle relaxant can do it, that would seem vastly preferable to getting people on psychiatric drugs, replacing one addiction with another, which is what's being done today.


Antibiotics: Largest Single Class Of Drugs Causing Liver Injury
"Drug Induced Liver Injury or DILI is a serious health problem that impacts patients, physicians, government regulators and the pharmaceutical industry," said Naga P. Chalasani, MD, of the Indiana University School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "Further efforts are needed in defining its pathogenesis and developing means for the early detection, accurate diagnosis, prevention and treatment of DILI."


Prozac Nation, Prozac Violence?
The drug companies want to relabel these symptoms as a resurgence of the original disorder. The problem they face in doing so is that discontinuation syndrome is entirely drug related. Prozac’s maker, Eli Lilly, has fought several protracted legal battles trying to dislodge evidence that its psychotropic is linked to violence—-and Lilly is not the only drug maker that has had trouble making its case convincing.

As the Tribune’s Manier reminds us, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the shooters at Columbine High School, abruptly stopped taking the same class of antidepressant medication days before they opened fire on their classmates. Jeff Weise, the Red Lake High School killer in Minnesota, was taking Prozac before he killed nine people and then himself. Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the eighteen-year-old who began shooting in Jokela High School, Finland, had a history of S.S.R.I. use. According to investigators, so did Seung-Hui Cho, who killed thirty-two people at Virginia Tech and wounded dozens more.

The list of other killings involving S.S.R.I. psychotropic medication is troublingly long. It includes Michael McDermott, the software engineer who went on a rampage in Wakefield, Massachusetts, killing seven; Byran Uyesugi, who shot eight of his colleagues in Hawaii (seven of them fatally); and Charles Carl Roberts IV, who assassinated five Amish school girls before shooting himself.


Psychiatric drugs & suicide (PDF)
This report by Swedish investigator Janne Larsson examines the (psychiatric) drug history of persons who have committed suicide in Sweden. Janne says that the drugs, far from being the panacea they are made out to be, actually cause many of the suicides but doctors and patients aren't told.


Statin warning for pregnant women
Current clinical guidelines already recommend that women who are pregnant should stop taking statins but the advice is based on the knowledge that cholesterol is essential for normal fetal development.

New research from The University of Manchester has shown that even water-soluble or 'hydrophilic' statins, such as pravastatin, can affect placental development leading to worse pregnancy outcomes.


Chemotherapy contributes to a quarter of cancer deaths: study
The study was done by the National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Deaths. The enquiry's members are drawn mainly from British medical royal colleges.

Most of those patients looked at in the study had chemotherapy as palliative treatment to relieve the symptoms of cancer - a cure had already been ruled out.

The report found 40 per cent of them suffered significant poisoning as a result of the treatment.


Why won't our doctors face up to the dangers of radiotherapy?
It is clear that radiation damage is a significant health care issue. Yet, to date, there has been no national attempt to collate statistics that would enable any significant research work to begin.

Remarkably, it is not even officially classified as a specific medical condition; nor is there any definitive information on how to deal with it.


US: Rep Henry Waxman Renews Call To Ban Ads For New Drugs
“It is in these first few years of a drug’s life that drug companies often aggressively market their products and engage in direct-to-consumer advertising. This increases the number of consumers exposed to safety risks of new products long before those risks are truly understood,” Waxman said at a conference sponsored by The Prescription Project, a group critical of industry marketing.


Wyeth Paid Ghostwriters To Boost Prempro
Wyeth paid ghostwriters to produce medical journal articles favorable to its Prempro hormone replacement therapy, according to Congressional letters seeking more info about the drugmaker’s involvement in medical ghostwriting, The New York Times reports, adding that at least one article was published even after a federal study found the drug raised the risk of breast cancer.


FDA Scientists Warn Of Deaths Connected to 4 Asthma Drugs
"Two federal drug officials have concluded that asthma sufferers risk death if they continue to use four hugely popular asthma drugs - Advair, Symbicort, Serevent and Foradil...."Sudden deaths among asthmatics still clutching their inhalers have fed the debate."

There seems to be an emerging pattern of drug related deaths of patients who suffer from conditions that are not normally a cause of death. In other words - it's the cure that kills, rather than the illness.


HPV VACCINE MYSTERIES
On December 10th, a Nobel Prize will be awarded for finding HPV and proving its link to cervical cancer to Dr Harald zur Hausen. However there is a missing link in this – for he failed to find a way to persuade cells to make his virus.

Does HPV vaccine lessen our chances of getting this cancer? If the virus is present in many healthy people it seems unlikely it to be the cause. If the ‘co-factors’ are the main causes, then a vaccine cannot give us immunity. It has also to be said that the vaccines have not yet been proved to work– as the cancer takes 10 – 60 years to appear and the vaccines have not been tested for more than a few months.


Book:Fear of the Invisible
Janine Roberts in her book "Fear of the Invisible" raises some basic and very serious questions about the validity of the concept of vaccination. She also delves into the research that has been done on AIDS, SARS and the Bird Flu. Prepare for eye opening revelations. An introduction to the book and the themes of its chapters can be found on the site www.fearoftheinvisible.com/ Liam Scheff has reviewed the book here.


Collateral damage from HIV/AIDS
Enormous harm has been caused by the mistaken view that “HIV-positive” signifies infection with a fatal retrovirus that can only be held in check by highly toxic medication to be administered until the patient dies.

By now, millions of people have been subjected to this iatrogenic damage; including some unknown but large number of babies, whose mitochondria (central to cellular energy processes) have been irreparably debilitated. We know of people who tested positive only because of anti-tetanus shots, or flu vaccination, or surgical procedures...


Recreational HIV drugs
Anti-retroviral drugs used to treat HIV/Aids are being bought and smoked by teenagers in South Africa to get high. Reports suggest that the drugs are being sold by patients and even healthcare staff for money. . . . Aids patients themselves have been found smoking the drugs instead of taking them as prescribed. . . . Smoking the pills has a hallucinogenic and relaxing affect. . . . ‘When you look at them, just a few seconds after taking it, they are in another world’ . . . . The children do not know where they are and they stop making sense. . . .


Liam Scheff: Why I Write about Aids - “Reduce the Burden. Remove the Stigma.”
We have robbed citizens not only of their lives, but of their ability to fight for life, to hope for life, to overcome illness, to prove us wrong, to surprise us, to teach us, to correct the errors of our too-sure judgment. Instead we enforce their death through daily reminders - drugs, tests, and the stigmatizing label: “unsafe, and permanently infected.”

We’ve got to reduce the burden on Aids patients. We cannot ethically, morally or spiritually take their death as pre-ordained, lest we enforce it by over-medicating, over-burdening, and over-reaching with an hypothesis, or a belief, whose effectiveness may well be spent, and whose validity is long past. We must open ourselves to re-considering this problem; we may discover, if we allow ourselves to, that it can be solved with a different, more open, more compassionate, and more hopeful approach.


Global warning: We are actually heading towards a new Ice Age, claim scientists
British and Canadian experts warned the big freeze could bury the east of Britain in 6,000ft of ice. Most of Scotland, Northern Ireland and England could be covered in 3,000ft-thick ice fields.

Professor Crowley said the stark findings do not mean we should stop fighting warming.

But he urged: ‘Don’t push the panic button.’

‘There’s no excuse for saying “we’ve got to keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,”‘ he told Reuters.

‘Geologically it’s tomorrow, but we have lots of time to argue about the appropriate level of greenhouse gases.’


Video:Al Gore sued for fraud over Global Warming Movie
KUSI-TV Weatherman and founder of Weather Channel leads 30,000 Scientists in lawsuit charging Al Gore with fraud in Global Warming Scam. Also supporting the Scientists are 9000 PHD researchers.


Credit crunch? What credit crunch?
The credit crunch is not nearly as severe as the U.S. authorities appear to believe and public data actually suggest world credit markets are functioning remarkably well, a report released on Thursday says.

Yes, but banks already made off with billions of dollars - but then, perhaps that was the purpose of the exercise?


- - -

Got things to say .. have news to share?

Check out my healthfreedom group on Ning.com and start posting your messages. Healthfreedom on Ning is a social network and discussion forum about natural health and changing medicine to become more effective and 'user friendly'.

- - -

More information out there...

There is much I cannot cover but other sources for this kind of information exist and are active.

You can subscribe to the Zeus Newsletterhere. Appears twice monthly. If you would like to see some samples of Louise's collection of informative links, here are the archives.

Dr Mercola's health blog and Mike Adams' Natural News have great health information.

The Alternative Medicine Yahoo Group is a place where you can discuss and exchange information on what is happening in the world of natural health.

For the influence of electromagnetic waves from radio, mobile phones and other radio emitting devices, check out the emfrefugee group on Yahoo.

If you are interested in a different take on the news that isn't health centered but is certainly fun, check out Robin Good TV News.

A few sites to keep up to date with the other side of world affairs, the stuff you won't necessarily find on your tv or in the papers:

http://therealnews.com/
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com
http://www.commondreams.org
http://www.globalresearch.ca/
http://rawstory.com/
http://www.truthout.org/

... and remember,

The individual is supreme and finds its way through intuition

Lexapro - The Real Killer of Taylor Hooton

I just finished watching Bigger, Stronger, Faster.  In it, the father of Taylor Hooton rails against steroids because he thinks they caused Taylor to commit suicide.

I feel bad for him of course, but am pretty pissed off that he seems to completely ignore that his son was taking Lexapro, a psychiatric drug KNOWN TO CAUSE SUICIDES.

 

Tags: Antidepressants, Depression, Psychiatric Drugs

FDA Needs Overhaul - NewsGrabs 30 November 2008

Ailing FDA May Need a Major Overhaul, Officials and Groups Say
Alarm about the agency began to spike after a series of highly publicized incidents, including the discovery that the painkiller Vioxx caused heart attacks. That has been followed by other safety issues, including questions about the widely used diabetes medication Avandia and several psychiatric drugs.

"I'm afraid we're going to see more horrible things happen if we don't get our act together on this," said David Ross, who was a drug reviewer at the agency for 10 years.

The FDA appears to be busy trying to eliminate nutrition as a competition to synthetic medicines. Perhaps they should be re-directed back to actually protecting consumers instead of the profits of pharmaceutical medicine.


FDA latest threat to dietary supplements
The FDA's highly controversial bid to ban interstate trade of food, food ingredients and—dietary supplements—that have been subject to clinical investigation is utter madness. The more effort a company spends in trying to verify the efficacy and benefit of its product, the more likely that it will not be able to trade the product between states!


Cancer Cured For Good
The weekly injection of just 100 billionths of a gram of a harmless glyco-protein (a naturally-produced molecule with a sugar component and a protein component) activates the human immune system and cures cancer for good, according to human studies among breast cancer and colon cancer patients, producing complete remissions lasting 4 and 7 years respectively. This glyco-protein cure is totally without side effect but currently goes unused by cancer doctors.

My comment: Fighting tumor formation is a secondary intervention in cancer. Tumors (uncontrolled proliferation of cells) form as a natural consequence of serious changes in the chemistry of cells, where the normal energy mechanism is no longer workable and the cell changes into a different type that survives by forming cell colonies (tumors) rather than by being part of an organism. So the ideal anti-cancer intervention would be to prevent those changes in the cells' chemistry in the first place. But apart from that, the research seems to be a great advance from what we have today.


Doctors aren’t scientists, and medicine isn’t science
Whereas science left alone is universal, medicine left alone — in the unfettered professional hands of doctors — is not universal. What doctors believe to be the best treatment for a given condition varies from country to country, because the understanding of what that condition is, the explanation of that condition, also varies from country to country.

Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be radical differences between countries regarding HIV/AIDS theory. On the central mistaken points, that HIV causes AIDS and that HIV is sexually transmitted and that antiretroviral drugs are a good thing, there seems to be trans-national agreement.


Patient-led drug trials defy medical establishment
Dozens of ALS patients are testing treatments on their own without waiting on the slow pace of medical research. They are part of an emerging group of patients willing to share intimate health details on the Web in hopes of making their own medical discoveries.

Working online, Karen Felzer and Macedo recruited nearly 200 patients worldwide to take a specific lithium dosage and answer standard surveys to gauge their symptoms. They began running their study through a Web site called PatientsLikeMe.com, using it to attract volunteers and track their progress.

On the site, patients share detailed information about their symptoms and the drugs they are taking. The site focuses on conditions that have stubbornly resisted medical science, such as ALS, Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis.

This is an illustration of the failure of the pharma-for-profit model of current western medicine. Patients must do their own studies while pharma stands by idle. Actually worse than idle, as the most widely sold drugs of pharma - statins - are said to be a possible CAUSE of ALS and similar neurological problems.


Indonesia To Pharma: Build A Factory Or Else
“If they want to get licences (to sell their products) they have to invest here also, not just take advantage of the Indonesian market,” Supari told Dow Jones. “They can’t just operate like a retailer here, with an office size that’s three metres by three and make billions of rupiah. That is not fair.”


FDA Draws Fire Over Chemicals In Baby Formula
"When FDA claims there isn't any reason to worry, that's exactly what the consumer should do," said Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group. "The once-revered public health agency has morphed into a taxpayer-funded public relations arm for the very industries it was created to oversee."


J&J gave money in return for positive drug studies, court documents say
Johnson & Johnson gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to a research center run by an influential child psychiatrist explicitly to generate data to help expand sales of the company's antipsychotic drug Risperdal in children, according to court documents.


Bayer Pays $97.5M To Settle Kickback Charges
According to the Justice Department Bayer allegedly paid Liberty Medical Supply, one of the largest direct-to-patient suppliers, approximately $2.5 million to convert patients to Bayer supplies. The alleged kickbacks were based on the number of patients that Liberty successfully converted to Bayer products and were disguised as payments for advertising. In addition, Bayer allegedly paid kickbacks of approximately $375,000 to 10 other diabetic suppliers to convert patients to Bayer supplies.


US: Senate Probe Snares Major Bipolar Researcher, "Infinite Mind" Radio Show
Sen. Charles Grassley has caught yet another researcher in his conflict of interest probe. This time out, it's Fred Goodwin - perhaps the most influential researcher and writer in the world of bipolar disorder - and the well-known radio show "The Infinite Mind." As a result of these new revelations, the show is going off the air.


HIV Tests: Reduce the Burden - Remove the Stigma
It is morally and ethically wrong to rob someone of their right to live, by informing them, with the full weight and support of society, that they now and forever have been diagnosed with a disease that has “no cure,” and that their only recourse is a lifetime of potent drugging, with drugs which themselves can, do and have caused death.

We have robbed citizens not only of their lives, but of their ability to fight for life, to hope for life, to overcome illness, to prove us wrong, to surprise us, to teach us, to correct the errors of our too-sure judgment. Instead we enforce their death through daily reminders - drugs, tests, and the stigmatizing label: “unsafe, and permanently infected.”


State of HIV/AIDS Denial: Carcinogenic HAART
“Cognitive dissonance” is the social scientists’ way of saying, “Not seeing what we don’t wish to see”. “Being in denial” has crept into common usage to describe the same phenomenon. In states of denial, the same unwished-for discovery is made, reported — and then ignored; over and over again.

When you have a fundamentally wrong theory, facts become quite difficult to explain, and an endless variety of conundrums are generated — all of them suitable topics for grant proposals, of course.

“This thing is going to be studied long after our time. This is so much greater than the Lysenko Affair [which had set Soviet agriculture and biology back decades]. I’m urging all of my colleagues to save all of their papers and make the historical record as complete as possible. What was the dynamics of the events that led to poisoning people with AZT? Because this is a major historical event that is going to be studied for 100 years — how the United States gave AIDS to the world”.


Bush Administration USDA Rushing Through Dangerous New Rules on Genetically Engineered Foods & Crops
In the waning months of the Bush administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has joined the ranks of federal agencies rushing through new regulations that weaken protections for human health and the environment. USDA has released a proposed rule that would significantly weaken oversight of all genetically engineered crops, and which continue to allow companies to grow food crops engineered to produce drugs and industrial chemicals.


Corrupt to The Core
Health Canada, and I suspect all governmental regulatory bodies, more or less are usurped and essentially owned by the industry. Instead of scientists, Health Canada's upper management is now stacked with industry public relations men. A good account is made of how our science based institutions have been systematically overhauled into industry organs while maintaining the pretence of protecting the public.... Surely, under these circumstances one can never be safe given that the fox is guarding the hens...


The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008
If you're into watching corporate shenanigans, here's some food for thought.
- AIG: Money for Nothing
- Cargill: Food Profiteers
- Chevron: "We can't let little countries screw around with big companies"
- Constellation Energy: Nuclear Operators
- CNPC: Fueling Violence in Darfur
- Dole: The Sour Taste of Pineapple
- GE: Creative Accounting
- Imperial Sugar: 13 Dead
- Philip Morris International: Unshackled
- Roche: Saving Lives is Not Our Business


Free Currencies: the next global currency system
Money is an information system. It's made to measure and balance flows in the real world. Money needs not to be scarce otherwise it turns the world into artificial scarcity, even when it's abundant. Money should be in right supply to account for flows so that every marketplace in the world -- companies, neighborhoods, towns, regions, global communities, etc -- can grow their wealth without constraints.


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Got something to say? Have news to share?

Join the healthfreedom group on Ning and start posting your messages. Healthfreedom on Ning is a social network and discussion forum for all who are interested in natural health and nutrition and in promoting a new medical paradigm.

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More information out there...

There is much I cannot cover but other sources for this kind of information exist and are active.

You can subscribe to the Zeus Newsletterhere. Appears twice monthly. If you would like to see some samples of Louise's collection of informative links, here are the archives.

Dr Mercola's health blog and Mike Adams' Natural News have great health information.

The Alternative Medicine Yahoo Group is a place where you can discuss and exchange information on what is happening in the world of natural health.

For the influence of electromagnetic waves from radio, mobile phones and other radio emitting devices, check out the emfrefugee group on Yahoo.

If you are interested in a different take on the news that isn't health centered but is certainly fun, check out Robin Good TV News.

A few sites to keep up to date with the other side of world affairs, the stuff you won't necessarily find on your tv or in the papers:

http://therealnews.com/
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com
http://www.commondreams.org
http://www.globalresearch.ca/
http://rawstory.com/
http://www.truthout.org/

... and remember,

The individual is supreme and finds its way through intuition

Fear of the Invisible - The Virus that never was

Fear of the Invisible is a book by Janine Roberts that takes a deep look into the world of virus isolation and vaccine manufacture. It appears that isolation of a virus is not a clean-cut business, nor is the evidence that these little fragments of information from our cells' DNA actually do cause disease.

Since the data puts the causation of polio, the flu, and even aids into doubt, the advisability of vaccination as a practice to prevent "viral diseases" loses much of its appeal as a public health measure.


fearoftheinvisible_cover_150x221.jpg


The book "takes its readers on a journey into the very heart of the hunt for viruses – to the key experiments performed to prove that these invisibly small particles cause diseases that often were previously blamed on toxins or bacteria. It sheds light on the extraordinary assumptions underlying much of this research into viruses – and the resulting vaccines and antiviral medicines."

From the book's Introduction

The word ‘virus' comes from the Latin for a poisonous liquid, and before that from the Sanskrit for the same. The hunt for them started when, towards the end of the 19th century, it was suggested that invisible living particles much smaller than bacteria might cause the epidemic illnesses for which no bacterial cause could be found. When the electron microscope found tiny particles in the blood serum of patients entering and leaving human cells, this was a Eureka Moment. The prediction was surely about to be proved true. These particles were assumed to be invading and hijacking our cells in order to reproduce. They were thus all condemned as poisons, as ‘viruses.'

As more of these were searched for and found in sick people, many illnesses became blamed on them. They became the invisible enemy, the nano-terrorist we must fear. We were instructed that one of our first duties for our newborn children is to vaccinate them against this dreaded foe. Thus was created an ever-growing multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry.

As an example of what passes for virology, the science of viral illnesses, on which rests the whole edifice of a multi-billion dollar vaccine industry and the 'preventive strategy' of much of western medicine, Martin Barnes has summarized a chapter of the book that details the scientific history of polio.

You may be amazed at some of the mind boggling blunders that are at the basis of the 'science' of vaccines. But to get the full story, do buy the book and if you are able to, spread the word.

We need honesty in medicine!

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Outline of the Science History of Polio

by Martin Barnes

This summary was created from information extracted from Janine Roberts' book 'Fear of the Invisible' (Impact Investigative Media Productions, 2008).

1909: Landsteiner and Popper
They ground up the spinal cord of a 9-year-old polio victim and injected a cup of the suspension directly into the brains of two monkeys. One died immediately and the other slowly became paralyzed.

1910: Flexer and Lewis
Ground up human spinal cord with polio and injected the suspension directly into a monkey's brain, the monkey became paralyzed, then they extracted some fluid from its brain, and injected it into another monkey's brain, and so on through a series of monkeys paralyzing all of them in the process. But making the monkeys drink the liquid or injecting into their arms did not paralyze them.

(These experiments are celebrated in modern textbooks as being the first time a 'virus' was proved to cause a major epidemic.' They could not find a bacteria in film preparations or cultures. They concluded: 'The infecting agent of epidemic polio virus belongs to the class of minute and filterable viruses that have not thus far been demonstrated with certainty under a microscope.' Toxic causes were not considered, or the shock of injecting this foreign stew directly into the brain, bypassing the immune system.)

However, the scientists were under a lot of pressure then to find a cure for the waves of polio hitting middle class kids in the summertime.

1948: Dalldorf and Sickles
Took excrement from a polio victim and prepared a 20% suspension with ether and centrifugation, then injected it directly into the living brains of suckling mice 3-7 days old. They became paralyzed.

1949: Enders of Harvard claims he can make this 'virus' from human embryonic cells, making it far easier to make a vaccine.

(Their conclusion was that this was the successful isolation of a virus that must be causing polio paralysis in humans! But all they proved was that a faeces-derived suspension of human cellular material caused illness in lab animals. They called this suspension 'polio virus' and it was to become a 'vaccine seed' for modern polio vaccines. Enders receives the 1954 Nobel Prize for this!)

1950: A small ball like particle, 24-30 nm in size, was isolated from human excrement, and made visible with an electron microscope. It was named the 'polio virus.'

(Gut enteroviruses like this are very common in humans. We all have many of them.
Where was the proof this was a causative agent? Why and how would a virus found in the gut go over to attack the nervous system as polio does?)

1951: Scientists report they cannot find the designated polio virus in many polio victims.

(This information was ignored. It was inconvenient. The public was demanding a solution to the polio epidemic attacking middle class kids.)

1952: Prof Konstantine Vinodouroff of the Institute of Neurology, Russian Academy of Medical Science, tells the Americans that Russia has never had an outbreak of polio. The Americans are amazed.

1954: Dr. Jonas Salk developed the first commercial polio vaccine with a virus found in 'the pooled faeces of three heathly children in Cleveland.'

(Dr. Salk did not even use the faeces from polio victims!)

The 'poliovaccine' is administered as a safety test to 400,000 US children. The official safety report stated that it protected '30-90 percent' of recipients.

(This was a vague statistic. However, manufacturers could make a 300% markup on the vaccine.)

1955: Salk marketed his patented vaccine 'seed' —derived from the excrement of healthy children— to manufacturers. The next step was to sprinkle it into vast quantities of minced monkey kidneys and allow the virus to multiply, then add formaldehyde to kill it. They made 27,000,000 vaccination doses.

1955: President Dwight Eisenhower awarded Salk the Congressional Medal declaring the polio vaccine a great victory for American science.

1956: Health Authorities change the rules for defining polio. Doctors are instructed to diagnose polio only if the patient has paralytic symptoms for 60 days or more. Milder cases of polio are no longer reported.

1958: CDC changes the rules for defining polio again. Cases of inflammation of the membrane that protects the brain and spinal neuron cells, causing muscular weakness and pain, but not paralysis, are no longer to be classified as polio. These cases must now be called viral or aseptic meningitis. Non-paralytic cases were now to be re-named meningitis even if the polio virus is present. The reported figures for polio were officially to exclude 'cases of aseptic meningitis due to polio virus or other entero viruses.' Reported cases of aseptic meningitis went from near zero to thousands, and polio cases dropped the same amount.

1958: Officials reduce the definition of polio again. Now all cases with classic polio paralytic symptoms are to be diagnosed initially as Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP). Two turds are taken from the patient and sent to the CDC to see if they can find polio in them. If not, they are declared as not polio, even if the children have all the classic symptoms.

(Making fewer cases of polio by changing the definition was a fraudulent way to make it seem like the polio vaccinations were working.)

1958: Officials triumphantly declared large parts of the world polio free, even while the newly defined Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP) suddenly became common. Credit for this great victory over disease was given to Salk, Sabin and the vaccine manufactures.

Report in JAMA Feb 25, 1961: "It is now generally recognized that much of the Salk vaccine used in the U.S. has been worthless." Live strains produced by Sabin and put in sugar cubes were adopted instead.

2008: Ordinary doctors still do not have the power to diagnose polio by observing symptoms. The World Health Organization still demands that two turds from each victim of infantile paralysis be sent to their laboratories. If no polio virus is found in these, the cases are declared not to be polio, even if these children are suffering from the same severe paralysis symptoms and pain as found in the worst cases of polio during the American epidemics.

Question: Could something else be causing polio besides the virus? Finding the polio virus in human excrement is natural, and finding it there does not prove it causes polio, symptoms of paralysis in the motor neuron cells of the backbone.

2008: On the CDC website Dr. John Lienhard explains that too much hygiene was the cause of the polio epidemics. Most kids pick up the virus in garden soil and become naturally immune to it, but not the kids subjected to the overly hygienic parents of the 50's.

Conclusion: The effectiveness of the Salk vaccine (and Sabin live vaccine in sugar cubes) is something that we have all come to accept, but it is nothing more than a scientific myth, fraudulently promoted by the political and medical authorities of the time, and still believed today. Millions of polio vaccine injections are still given worldwide every year for essentially no purpose. Causation by a virus has not been shown.


The Case for Toxins Causing Polio

1824: Metal workers had suffered for centuries from a paralysis similar to polio caused by the lead and arsenic in the metals they were working with. English scientist John Cooke observed: 'The fumes from these metals, or the receptance of them in solution into the stomach, often causes paralysis.'

1890: Lead arsenate pesticide started to be sprayed in the US up to 12 times every summer to kill codling moth on apple crops.

1892: Polio outbreaks began to occur in Vermont, an apple growing region. In his report the Government Inspector Dr. Charles Caverly noted that parents reported that some children fell ill after eating fruit. He stated that 'infantile paralysis usually occurred in families with more than one child, and as no efforts were made at isolation it was very certain it was non-contagious' (with only one child in the family having been struck).

1907: Calcium arsenate comes into use primarily on cotton crops.

1908: In a Massachusetts town with three cotton mills and apple orchards, 69 children suddenly fell ill with infantile paralysis.

1909: The UK bans apple imports from the States because of heavy lead arsenate residues.

1921: Franklin D. Roosevelt develops polio after swimming in Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick. Toxicity of water may have been due to pollution run-off.

1943: DDT is introduced, a neurotoxic pesticide. Over the next several years it comes into widespread use in American households. For example, wall paper impregnated with DDT was placed in children's bedrooms.

1943: A polio epidemic in the UK town of Broadstairs, Kent is linked to a local dairy where cows were washed down with DDT.

1944: Albert Sabin reports that a major cause of sickness and death of American troops based in the Philippines was poliomyelitis. US military camps there were sprayed daily with DDT to kill mosquitos. Neighboring Philippine settlements were not affected.

1944: NIH reports that DDT damages the same anterior horn cells that are damaged in infantile paralysis.

1946: Gebhaedt shows polio seasonality correlates with fruit harvest.

1949: Endocrinologist Dr Morton Biskind, a practitioner and medical researcher, found that DDT causes 'lesions in the spinal cord similar to human polio.'

1950: US Public Health Industrial Hygiene Medical Director, J.G. Townsend, notes the similarity between parathion poisoning and polio and believes that some polio might be caused by eating fruits or vegetables with parathion residues.

1951: Dr. Biskind treats his polio patients as poisoning victims, removing toxins from food and environment, especially DDT contaminated milk and butter. Dr. Biskind writes: 'Although young animals are more susceptible to the effects of DDT than adults, so far as the available literature is concerned, it does not appear that the effects of such concentrations on infants and children have even been considered.'

1949-1951: Other doctors report they are having success treating polio with anti toxins used to treat poisoning, dimercaprol and ascorbic acid. Example: Dr. F. R. Klenner reported: 'In the poliomyelitis epidemic in North Carolina in 1948 60 cases of this disease came under our care... The treatment was massive doses of vitamin C every two to four hours. Children up to four years received vitamin C injection intramuscularly... All patients were clinically well after 72 hours.'

1950: Dr. Biskind presents evidence to the US Congress that pesticides were the major cause of polio epidemics. He is joined by Dr. Ralph Scobey who reported he found clear evidence of poisoning when analyzing chemical traces in the blood of polio victims.

Comment: This was a no no. The viral causation theory was not something to be questioned. The careers of prominent virologists and health authorities were threatened. Biskind and Scobey's ideas were subjected to ridicule.

1953: Clothes are moth-proofed by washing them in EQ-53, a formula containing DDT.

1953: Dr. Biskind writes: 'It was known by 1945 that DDT was stored in the body fat of mammals and appears in their milk... yet far from admitting a causal relationship between DDT and polio that is so obvious, which in any other field of biology would be instantly accepted, virtually the entire apparatus of communication, lay and scientific alike, has been devoted to denying, concealing, suppressing, distorting and attempts to convert into its opposite this overwhelming evidence. Libel, slander, and economic boycott have not been overlooked in this campaign.'

1954: Legislation recognizing the dangers of persistent pesticides is enacted, and a phase out of DDT in the US accelerates along with a shift of sales of DDT to third world countries.

(Note that DDT is phased out at the same time as widespread polio vaccinations begin.)

1962: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is published.

1968: DDT registration cancelled for the US.

2008: Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP) is still a raging, but little mentioned, epidemic in many parts of the world where pesticide use is high, and DDT is still used.

2008: WHO states on its website: 'There is no cure for polio. Its effects are irreversible.'

Conclusion: Modern belief that polio is caused by a virus is an ongoing tragedy for the children - poisoning victims - involved. Public funds are wasted on useless and dangerous vaccines when the children could be treated with antitoxins.


polio.jpg


This graph shows that polio death rates were already in steep decline when polio vaccines were started. This directly throws into question the effectiveness of the vaccines.

Martin K. Barnes
www.maisondemartin.com

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See also:

Polio Vaccine Page

The Polio Vaccine Myth