Tropical Traditions announced this week that they will soon be shipping their 2015 pastured turkeys raised on pastures in Wisconsin. This year's batch offers something new: the specially formulated Cocofeed that the birds consumed was not only soy-free this year, but also corn-free, and tested for the presence of GMOs and glyphosate.
The cracks in support for the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine by the medical community and public are turning into bottomless fissures. Country after country is calling for investigations into fraudulent research, damage, and the lack of medical ethics. Meanwhile, in the United States, political and medical leadership are ignoring serious questions, concerns, and damage continually mounting around the HPV vaccine. Thankfully at this point, there appears to be a disconnect and wedge between the views of medicine, politics, and the public regarding this shot. A study published in 2015 in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, looked at the quality of physician communication to their patients about the HPV vaccine. The survey has given a glimpse into an American health care system that is showing doubt and apathy towards following unethical orders to push a highly questionable HPV vaccine.
Deceptive and manipulative public relations strategies are the standard approach of the chemical industry. People may believe chemical companies would strive to create chemicals that are as harmless as possible, and to provide strict safety instructions for use when they're not, but history has shown that this isn't the case. Instead, the industry promotes chemicals as harmless even when they are well aware of the risks. What's worse, companies have been repeatedly found to have lied to federal and local regulators, consumers, and even their own employees about the toxicity of various chemicals. DuPont is one such company, which has recently seen a slew of negative press following the filing of thousands of personal injury claims in what The Intercept1 calls "an epic legal battle" against the company — a battle that has been waged for the last 15 years, with little media coverage. Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA, also known as C8), was an essential ingredient in DuPont's non-stick cookware for decades. PFOA is now the subject of about 3,500 personal injury claims against DuPont, including 37 claims for wrongful death.
Americans are finally waking up to the fact that drinking soda is an unhealthy practice. Sales of sugary, carbonated drinks have fallen dramatically in recent years, sending the soda industry into a panic. A recent piece in The New York Times by Margot Sanger-Katz details the decline in soda sales and the efforts that led to it.
The mainstream media is using a new study funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), released last week, to renew the false charges that supplements are unregulated, unsafe, and require more federal oversight. Even a cursory examination of the data provided in the study, however, demonstrates once again that the alarmist headlines and the calls for tighter regulations are completely unsupported by the evidence.
The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, a division of the US Treasury Department, recently sent letters to several producers of kombucha, warning them that since their beverages supposedly exceeded the allowable alcohol limit, they must be labeled as alcoholic beverages and be subject to alcohol regulation or face hefty fines and legal action. Kombucha is a fermented tea drink brewed with yeast and bacteria. The drink contains trace amounts of alcohol, but it typically falls below the federal limit of 0.5% alcohol by volume. Why is this happening? Is there a safety concern? Not in the least. On the contrary, kombucha appears to be very good for you. It seems unlikely that the government would go after kombucha without prodding from some special interest. Has the soft drink industry detected a threat from a rapidly growing market and decided to use the power of the federal government to eliminate competition? There doesn’t seem to be another explanation.
Species often explode suddenly into life, as in the Cambrian explosion, which even Darwin found to be a problem for natural selection. Some of them do not persist beyond the age to which they are adapted. That does not require an explanation. But others just settle down to long eons where they don't change much, no matter what the environment. And "stabilizing selection" does not account for that. The cockroach, for example, is still around and still easily identifiable after perhaps 350 million years. The 350-million-year-old coelacanth fish and the 300-million-year-old horsetail grass survive largely unchanged.
A Montreal social scientist and the federal agency that awarded her almost $300,000 to study the HPV vaccine are facing criticism after the professor condemned the vaccine and called for a moratorium on its use. Concordia University’s Genevieve Rail also said there is no proof that the human papillomavirus directly causes cervical cancer.
Personal injury law firms around the United States are lining up plaintiffs for what they say could be "mass tort" actions against agrichemical giant Monsanto Co that claim the company's Roundup herbicide has caused cancer in farm workers and others exposed to the chemical. The latest lawsuit was filed Wednesday in Delaware Superior Court by three law firms representing three plaintiffs. The lawsuit is similar to others filed last month in New York and California accusing Monsanto of long knowing that the main ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, was hazardous to human health. Monsanto "led a prolonged campaign of misinformation to convince government agencies, farmers and the general population that Roundup was safe," the lawsuit states.
The recent case of an American toddler diagnosed with type 2 diabetes highlights the severity of the problems our modern processed food diet causes. According to Reuters,1 the three-year old girl, who weighed in at 77 pounds, is one of the youngest persons ever diagnosed with this obesity-related disease. In the past, type 2 diabetes was referred to as “adult onset” diabetes, and most patients were in the senior category. But as our diets and lifestyles have changed, so has the disease. And, while lack of exercise is certainly a factor, one would be hard-pressed to accuse a two-year old of being too sedentary. Clearly, diet plays a more important role in individuals this young. So what’s wrong with children’s diets these days?
Half of the European Union’s 28 countries and three of its regions have opted out of a new GM crop scheme, in a blow to biotech industry hopes. Under new EU rules agreed in March, 15 countries have now told Brussels they will send territorial exclusion requests to the big agricultural multinationals including Monsanto, Dow, Syngenta and Pioneer. Applications from Latvia and Greece have already been accepted by the firms and if that pattern is extended, around two-thirds of of the EU’s population – and of its arable land – will be GM-free.
Did you know that AstraZeneca, manufacturer of two blockbuster breast cancer drugs (one of which is classified as a known human carcinogen), is behind Breast Cancer Awareness Month? Why is it, do you think, that during Breast Cancer Awareness Month (BCAM) you never hear the word "carcinogen" mentioned, but are barraged a million times over by the word "cure"? Truth be told, BCAM should be renamed Breast Cancer Un-Awareness Month, as it has nothing to do with generating awareness about the true causes and solutions for the breast cancer epidemic and everything to do with making the public focus on a presumably not-yet-existent "cure" to be produced through the pharmaceutical pipeline somewhere off in the future only after enough money is raised.
Is it possible that the conflict in Ukraine is really just a front for a Monsanto land grab? Before Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was forcibly removed from office, he had repeatedly rejected agreements and loan packages from international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, which padded their deals with conditions that included loosening regulations for Ukraine's agricultural sector.
The United States continues to carelessly move forward with the HPV vaccine Gardasil. Meanwhile, due to its endless damage, the shot is the center of criminal lawsuits in Spain, India, France, Japan and many other countries. In the UK, the HPV vaccination push has 8,228 official reports of side-effects, almost more than all other vaccine reports combined. Dr. Dalbergue, a former pharmaceutical industry physician with Gardasil manufacturer Merck gave a 2014 interview stating that: “Gardasil is useless and costs a fortune” as well as predicting “Gardasil will become the greatest medical scandal of all times…” Ignoring data and worldwide protest, Departments of Health within the U.S. are now sending letters to parents advising them to submit their children to HPV vaccinations. With no prior announcement, parental consent given, or notice, the states of New York and Indiana have tracked HPV vaccine non-compliers and are now hassling them with physical letters.
Cody and Ashley Miller of Kentucky took their sick 5-month old baby Easton to the Emergency Room of Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee late Saturday evening, September 26, 2015. When Vanderbilt made allegations of abuse against these concerned parents, they could barely comprehend what was happening. Ashley painfully recalled that moment when Shell Peters, the CPS worker (or DCBS in Kentucky) entered the hospital room with 2 officers, and uttered those 2 words: "We’re taking…" Ashley painfully recalls, "My world crumbled when I heard those 2 words. I was nursing Easton one moment, and then they walked in, and then I was balling my eyes out hysterically. He can’t be on formula – I’m breastfeeding!"
By training, I am a plant biologist. In the early 1990s I was busy making genetically modified plants (often called GMOs for Genetically Modified Organisms) as part of the research that led to my PhD. I was not, at the outset, concerned about the possible effects of GM plants on human health or the environment. I now believe, as a much more experienced scientist, that GMO crops still run far ahead of our understanding of their risks. I have become much more appreciative of the complexity of biological organisms and their capacity for benefits and harms. As a scientist I have become much more humble about the capacity of science to do more than scratch the surface in its understanding of the deep complexity and diversity of the natural world. To paraphrase a cliché, I more and more appreciate that as scientists we understand less and less. I have read numerous GMO risk assessment applications. These are the documents that governments rely on to ‘prove’ their safety. Though these documents are quite long and quite complex, their length is misleading in that they primarily ask (and answer) trivial questions. Furthermore, the experiments described within them are often very inadequate and sloppily executed. Scientific controls are often missing, procedures and reagents are badly described, and the results are often ambiguous or uninterpretable. I do not believe that this ambiguity and apparent incompetence is accidental. To any honest observer, reading these applications is bound to raise profound and disturbing questions: about the trustworthiness of the applicants and equally of the regulators. They are impossible to reconcile with a functional regulatory system capable of protecting the public.
In what is becoming an all-too-familiar scenario, a young couple living in Fayetteville, North Carolina, took their baby to the emergency room when he was not acting right, only to find themselves almost a year later still battling to try to bring their child home out of Child Protective Services custody.
An article in the current British Medical Journal explains why the link between antidepressants and the epidemic of violence is stronger than previously thought. ANH-USA has researched dozens of the most high-profile cases of violent crimes over the last few decades. We found that in just under half of the cases (eleven out of twenty-three), the perpetrator was documented to be taking, or had recently stopped taking, some form of antidepressant or antipsychotic medication. The FDA recognizes this, and many antidepressants carry “black box warnings,” the most stringent precaution a drug label can carry before being removed from the market. Many antidepressants carry a black box warning of an increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior. Dr. Robert Whitaker notes that there is also a shocking risk of increased violence to others, which is not highlighted in the black box.
In the New York Times (Friday, September 18. 2015), a large-font headline proclaimed, “Jardiance, a Diabetes Drug, Cut Cardiovascular Deaths by 38%, Study Says.” The accompanying article goes on to state, “For the first time, a widely used modern diabetes drug has been shown to reduce deaths from cardiovascular disease, a long-sought goal of treatment, researchers announced on Thursday. In a clinical trial, the drug—Jardiance, sold jointly by Eli Lilly and Boehringer Ingelheim–reduced the overall risk of {dying from cardiovascular complications by 38 percent}.” The article continued with the usual platitudes about how this was a “…landmark result”. Analysts estimated that, due in large part to this study, Jardiance sales will reach $2.7 billion in 2020. For over 30 years, drug companies have been trying to show that treating diabetes with diabetic drugs will lower the risk for cardiovascular disease. Unfortunately, oral diabetic drugs have never been shown to have cardiovascular benefits. In fact there are many studies, some dating back decades ago, that the use of oral diabetic drugs increases the risk of cardiovascular complications and death. Therefore, if this study holds up, Big Pharma could have a pot of gold on their hands. So, does this study really lower cardiovascular deaths by 38%?
Yesterday we reported the story of Jason Janbahan and how he lost custody of his 5 year old son to LA County DCFS due to a charge of "medical neglect," and then saw his son die from medical complications while staying in a foster care group home. Mr. Janbahan told his emotional story during an interview with the National Safe Child Show. On Monday September 28, 2015 Mr. Janbahan returned to dependency court in Los Angeles regarding the custody of his only remaining child, his daughter Sarah. Unfortunately for Mr. Janbahan, just months after the death of his son who died a tragic death while in DCFS care, he also lost his daughter when a judge in dependency court put his daughter into permanent placement. Before the hearing, Jason went to the sheriff's station to file charges against the social workers and county counsel alleging illegal conduct, fraud and collusion.
