Monday, October 28, 2013
The Truthseeker: ‘Casualty catastrophe’ – Cell phones & child brains
RT
Insurers stop covering for cell phone use, called the next ‘casualty catastrophe’ after tobacco and asbestos; phone manufacturers hit with a class action and personal lawsuits; and the warning deep inside your mobile. Seek truth from facts with Ellie Marks, whose husband Alan is suing the industry for his brain tumor, ‘cell phone survivor’ Bret Bocook, leading radiation biologist Prof. Dariusz Leszczynski, Microwave News editor Dr. Louis Slesin, Storyleak editor Anthony Gucciardi, and former senior White House adviser Dr. Devra Davis
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Need health care coverage? Just dial 1-800-F**KYO to reach Obamacare’s national hotline
Daily Caller
Need health insurance? The Obama administration has you covered. Simply dial 1-800-FUCKYO to reach the next available health-care provider. Far from being a mistype, that’s the official number that Health and Human Services wants Americans to dial when seeking health care.
Obamacare’s national call center really did list its number as 1-800-318-2596, helpfully spelling out President Barack Obama’s tendency to blatantly flip the bird in plain view.
After allowing for the lack of letters attached to 1 on a traditional American telephone keypad, the number spells out a clear message. For every duped voter, every young invincible weighing the cost of a penalty versus a newly tripled yearly deductible, every ailing old granny in a wheelchair (whom, remember, Paul Ryan wants to push off a cliff) who needs adequate and affordable health care, Obama’s message is:
1-800-3(F) 8(U) 2(C) 5(K) 9(Y) 6(O).
That’s 1-800-FUCKYO. Sadly, the Obama administration failed to swap the useless 1 for a more functional 8 to complete the heartfelt message, perhaps in consolation to former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s tragically shortened middle finger.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius launched a media campaign this week to propagandize the transformative health-care overhaul. She compared the sweeping, coercive law that gives government huge power over the health-care industry to an iPhone system update.
“Everyone just assumes, “Well, there’s a problem, they’ll fix it, we’ll move on,’” Sebelius said about Apple’s iOS updates. “And like many of their customers, I put the ‘new’ system on my phone and went on my merry way, but it was just a reminder that we’re likely to have some glitches. We will fix them and move on. Is this a sign that the law is flawed and failed? I don’t think so. I think it’s a sign that we’re building a piece of complicated technology. We want it to work. We want it to work right. We’ve got an incredible team working 24/7 to do just that.”
“Hopefully they’ll give us the same slack they give Apple,” Sebelius said, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Save Our Supplements: “Do You Believe in Paul Offit?”
by Alison Rose Levy
The Medical Establishment’s “Favorite” Doctor and His Crusade Against Supplements and Alternative Medicine
Paul Offit’s new book and media blitz pretend to be objective, but really offer one-sided bashing of natural healthcare.
Dr. Paul Offit, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has authored a new book, Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine (Harper, 2013 ). Now on the stump, he encourages thinking more critically about healthcare treatments. Too bad his is a one-sided view. And that his intended audience is unlikely to be convinced because health information has been increasingly available over the last 25 years. Nor do many physicians and prominent medical organizations subscribe to his views (although a few legislators do).
“People are systematically choosing to manage their own health in a way that is unprecedented,” points out James S. Turner, chairman of Citizens for Health, a health advocacy group with over 100,000 members. “The conventional treatments that Offit champions are often very helpful. The problem is that the industry has oversold them, and more and more people see that now.”
If Offit’s book had aimed to explore all health options even-handedly for their upsides and their downsides, it might have truly advanced the conversation about how to better health and lower healthcare costs. (And ranking below 16 developed nations across the lifespan and for all income levels, while stuck in the midst of a polarized debate over costs and coverage, the U.S. sorely needs that conversation.) But instead, in his book and media tour, Dr. Offit plays the predictable role of debunker, single-mindedly championing his own medical brand. Unfurling an arch skepticism about the use of herbs and other nutritional supplements, for example, Offit presents himself as the stalwart for science. But it’s instructive to see what happens when he encounters someone conversant with the health literature.
In a radio exchange with NPR reporter Ira Flatow and Victoria Maizes, MD on Science Friday, Offit targeted St John’s wort. Based on a single study, he dismissed its efficacy. Maizes, the executive director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and a professor of medicine and public health
at the University of Arizona countered with a 2008 review of 29 trials—including 17 that compared SWJ to standard antidepressants, and found it just as effective for moderate depression, with fewer side-effects.
Upon hearing this key finding, Offit never paused for breath before he redirected to attack some other hapless herb. There is an extensive scientific literature on St. John’s wort (and other nutrients available in supplements) but Offit cherrypicks the few studies that validate his concerns that supplements are dangerous.
Say your body needs lycopene and the lycopene content typically found in tomatoes has been depleted by conventional agriculture practices. If you get lycopene from eating a tomato, or even five tomatoes, you’re not trespassing onto the sacred ground of medicine. But if you take a lycopene capsule, you have stepped over a line, Offit and company claim. If conventional medicine were producing such terrific results, perhaps more people would be eager to see what pharmaceutical research would do with that lycopene, beyond spending millions on a special extraction of the active ingredient to make it available only by prescription at skyhigh prices.
The 1994 battle for the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) was fought to protect the public right to access low harm supplements. It is one of the most successful citizen-driven movements of the late 20th century, which activated nearly two million people to contact their legislators. The popular will has thus far opposed and defeated Big Pharma in its ongoing campaign to regulate supplements as drugs.
The Rationale for Supplement Use
With an obesity epidemic and millions of people eating sweets, soda and fast foods, there’s little reason to pretend that all Americans consume a healthy diet. Moreover, USDA data reveals that the nutrient quality in even healthy foods has declined due to depleted soils. A comparison of nutrient values in food grown in the years 1950 and 1999 reveals declines of key nutrients and protein in 43 foods.
This is due in part to conventional agricultural practices. “In hundreds of studies, scientists have shown that incrementally higher levels of fertilizer negatively impact the density of certain nutrients in harvested foodstuffs, hence the name, the ’dilution [of nutrients] effect,’” said Preston Andrews of Washington State University in a 2009 presentation on the impact of conventional agricultural practices on food quality.
Alan Gaby, an expert on supplementation and the author of The Natural Pharmacy: Complete A-Z Reference to Natural Treatments for Common Health Conditions, says that “people who consume foods grown on deficient soils may not obtain sufficient amounts of trace minerals like selenium, iodine, chromium, or manganese in their diet.”
Gaby further points out that many common foods contribute to nutritional depletion. (So do drugs.) According to several studies, caffeine consumption can contribute to calcium loss. which can be mitigated by calcium supplementation other research found.
High sugar consumption prompts urinary excretion of chromium, one study found, while a USDA study found that chromium intake helped to improve glucose tolerance in people with diabetes.
These are just a few examples of the extensive literature that reveals both the reasons many may have nutritional deficiencies, and the benefits of using micronutrients from foods to correct them.
Who Takes Supplements
In 2008, the CDC and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) found that that natural nutritional products are the most commonly used “integrative” health approach. A 2007 Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) survey found that 68 percent of adults (over 150 million Americans) report taking nutritional or dietary supplements.
Medical opinion has converged on some supplementation as essential. “For women of childbearing age, every single national medical organization agrees,” says Maizes. “The US Preventive Task Force, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology all advise that women of childbearing age should be taking a multivitamin with folic acid to prevent neural tube defects, heart defects, skeletal defects, and cleft palate.”
According to Maizes, who is also the author of Be Fruitful: The Essential Guide to Maximizing Fertility and Giving Birth to a Healthy Child (Scribner, 2013), “The Nurses’ Health Study found that among those taking a multivitamin six times per week, there was 41% less infertility, fewer miscarriages, and less cancer in their children.” She points out that, “The CDC says that 75% of Americans don’t get enough folate. Dr. Offit is out there countering a science-based public health message.”
What causes Offit’s disquiet? He quotes Yale neurologist Steven Novella on herbal remedies: “Herbs are drugs and can be studied be studied as drugs.” He would like to see supplements studied and regulated as drugs.
The FDA does regulate supplements as food products, and they are currently the most highly regulated food products. The FDA cannot regulate either BPA or mercury because they are “grandfathered” into use. The FDA chooses not to regulate personal care products or cosmetics. The FDA does not bother to study the safety of GMOs, or the chemicals used in fracking, but according to Offit’s book, certain FDA officials are miffed that they can’t regulate vitamin C, a component of food found in many fruits and vegetables, as a drug.
Before conferring the special status of drug-hood on an herb (or other food ingredient), it’s fair to ask whether drugs and nutrients are equivalently dangerous and therefore require the same extensive and costly drug trials to assure their safety for use.
Take too much vitamin C and you might get a loose bowel movement. Take too much of a statin drug and you might get liver damage or kidney failure. That’s just one example of the difference in risk between high-harm and low-harm ingredients. Drugs are heavily studied and regulated because they are high harm— highly toxic single novel chemicals devised in a lab for a high-potency targeted use with mechanisms of action and side effects new to the human organism. Basic nutrients from foods and plants are low-harm because they are natural complexes of ingredients with long histories of biological compatibility with humans.
It’s therefore not surprising that the number of adverse events reported to the FDA due to the use of pharmaceuticals number a total of 2,739,254 for the years 2008 through 2011, while those for supplements number 6,307 for the same years, according to a March 2013 report by the General Accounting Office. (This data cannot tell us what any given report was about, or its validity.)
Nevertheless, in an apparent quest to reassert the conventional monopoly on health authority, Offit wants every nutrient to be vetted like a drug by an RCT—the randomized controlled double-blind trial considered the gold standard of evidence-based medicine. In his view, just like drugs, vitamins, minerals and herbs are dangerous until proven innocent. There are three key problems with Offit’s caring caution. What he’d like to see is:
1. Impossible. Conducting an RCT of every edible component in nature will never happen because going through the FDA study and review process typically costs $100 million per component. No one with the money to spend has the incentive to study natural substances that cannot by law be patented.
2. Unnecessary. RCTs came into use to assess the benefits/risk ratio of novel highly toxic chemicals, namely drugs. An existing and growing body of literature studies nutritional supplements for their utility and efficacy in less costly ways.
3. It’s colonial. Unless every edible natural substance in existence, many safely consumed or used by humans for millennia, can be colonized and vetted by a recently devised process designed to test drugs, they are assumed to be harmful? That’s empire building, not empirical science.
According to Jim Turner, “Dr. Offit’s form of science is like taking a flashlight into the attic and shining it on an old photo album. That’s good. But Dr. Offit goes off track when he contends that there’s nothing else up there in the attic. It’s a specific belief system: He believes that all that exists is that which falls into the range of his flashlight.”
According to Maizes, many kinds of health levers will never be visible within the range of that flashlight. “We can’t do a double blind study on the effects of yoga. People know if they are doing yoga or not. We can’t expose one group to toxic chemicals in order to study the effects on them. Nor can we put people into a nutrition lab for decades to see if eating a specific diet makes a difference. Therefore, we need observational trials and that means we have to be open to other kinds of scientific data.”
Maizes maintains that it makes sense to use a hierarchy of evidence—the more harmful the ingredient the stricter the assessment of safety for use. Offit claims that he accepts all health treatments that work and even deigns to dub those that do “medicine.” Nevertheless, he devotes an entire book chapter to deploring the inclusion of integrative medicine into medical centers nationwide. He chides the public for influencing their doctors to consider integrative approaches, and is piqued by doctors listening to patients.
Some of the most prominent medical institutions don’t share his view. When the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine first formed in 2000, there were eight centers with active programs. Over a dozen years later, there are 56, nearly half of the nearly 125 medical schools in North America, which belong to the Consortium and have integrative programs. Harvard, UCLA, Duke, Michigan, Albert Einstein and more, all have programs with the strong support of their medical college deans. Hardly a rejection of integrative health approaches. Moreover, many doctors use these approaches themselves.
A 2007 study conducted by the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) found that 72 percent of physicians and 89 percent of nurses personally use vitamin, mineral, herbal, and other supplements. Eighty-five percent of these providers recommend supplements to their clients. Among the 28 percent of physicians who don’t personally use supplements, 62 percent recommend them to their patients.
With or without RCTs, both the scientific and clinical evidence— and their own health experiences— appear to be persuasive. Are the parameters for evidence-based medicine expanding, even though some holdouts (like Dr. Offit) haven’t gotten the memo?
“There are no guarantees in medicine. You can do every aggressive treatment for cancer and still die. No one would tell anyone that they have a 100% chance of survival with any treatment,” Maizes says. “There’s a multibillion-dollar industry implanting stents in people when studies show it does not enhance survival.”
Despite the recurrent rallying call to evidence based medicine, less conventional practice is based upon it than people realize. A 2009 study published in JAMA found that only 19 percent of the most basic cardiovascular treatments (or devices) are based on RCTs.
“There’s a double standard when it comes to integrative approaches, bolstered by the myth that everything in conventional medicine is proven and nothing in integrative medicine is. But the reality is subtler,” says Maizes. “In healthcare, we always need more study. If a study only goes up to people aged 65, is it relevant for an 80-year-old? We can’t say for sure. For years we only had studies on men and told women to do the same thing even though women respond differently. We will never have all the evidence.”
In this context, with plenty of standard medicine used in practice failing to meet this exalted RCT standard, Offit’s demand for it sounds much more like a call to brand loyalty. And if he’s truly interested in seeing more science on nutrients, he can always look into the existing literature.
The Medical Establishment’s “Favorite” Doctor and His Crusade Against Supplements and Alternative Medicine
Paul Offit’s new book and media blitz pretend to be objective, but really offer one-sided bashing of natural healthcare.
Dr. Paul Offit, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has authored a new book, Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine (Harper, 2013 ). Now on the stump, he encourages thinking more critically about healthcare treatments. Too bad his is a one-sided view. And that his intended audience is unlikely to be convinced because health information has been increasingly available over the last 25 years. Nor do many physicians and prominent medical organizations subscribe to his views (although a few legislators do).
“People are systematically choosing to manage their own health in a way that is unprecedented,” points out James S. Turner, chairman of Citizens for Health, a health advocacy group with over 100,000 members. “The conventional treatments that Offit champions are often very helpful. The problem is that the industry has oversold them, and more and more people see that now.”
If Offit’s book had aimed to explore all health options even-handedly for their upsides and their downsides, it might have truly advanced the conversation about how to better health and lower healthcare costs. (And ranking below 16 developed nations across the lifespan and for all income levels, while stuck in the midst of a polarized debate over costs and coverage, the U.S. sorely needs that conversation.) But instead, in his book and media tour, Dr. Offit plays the predictable role of debunker, single-mindedly championing his own medical brand. Unfurling an arch skepticism about the use of herbs and other nutritional supplements, for example, Offit presents himself as the stalwart for science. But it’s instructive to see what happens when he encounters someone conversant with the health literature.
In a radio exchange with NPR reporter Ira Flatow and Victoria Maizes, MD on Science Friday, Offit targeted St John’s wort. Based on a single study, he dismissed its efficacy. Maizes, the executive director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and a professor of medicine and public health
at the University of Arizona countered with a 2008 review of 29 trials—including 17 that compared SWJ to standard antidepressants, and found it just as effective for moderate depression, with fewer side-effects.
Upon hearing this key finding, Offit never paused for breath before he redirected to attack some other hapless herb. There is an extensive scientific literature on St. John’s wort (and other nutrients available in supplements) but Offit cherrypicks the few studies that validate his concerns that supplements are dangerous.
Say your body needs lycopene and the lycopene content typically found in tomatoes has been depleted by conventional agriculture practices. If you get lycopene from eating a tomato, or even five tomatoes, you’re not trespassing onto the sacred ground of medicine. But if you take a lycopene capsule, you have stepped over a line, Offit and company claim. If conventional medicine were producing such terrific results, perhaps more people would be eager to see what pharmaceutical research would do with that lycopene, beyond spending millions on a special extraction of the active ingredient to make it available only by prescription at skyhigh prices.
The 1994 battle for the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) was fought to protect the public right to access low harm supplements. It is one of the most successful citizen-driven movements of the late 20th century, which activated nearly two million people to contact their legislators. The popular will has thus far opposed and defeated Big Pharma in its ongoing campaign to regulate supplements as drugs.
The Rationale for Supplement Use
With an obesity epidemic and millions of people eating sweets, soda and fast foods, there’s little reason to pretend that all Americans consume a healthy diet. Moreover, USDA data reveals that the nutrient quality in even healthy foods has declined due to depleted soils. A comparison of nutrient values in food grown in the years 1950 and 1999 reveals declines of key nutrients and protein in 43 foods.
This is due in part to conventional agricultural practices. “In hundreds of studies, scientists have shown that incrementally higher levels of fertilizer negatively impact the density of certain nutrients in harvested foodstuffs, hence the name, the ’dilution [of nutrients] effect,’” said Preston Andrews of Washington State University in a 2009 presentation on the impact of conventional agricultural practices on food quality.
Alan Gaby, an expert on supplementation and the author of The Natural Pharmacy: Complete A-Z Reference to Natural Treatments for Common Health Conditions, says that “people who consume foods grown on deficient soils may not obtain sufficient amounts of trace minerals like selenium, iodine, chromium, or manganese in their diet.”
Gaby further points out that many common foods contribute to nutritional depletion. (So do drugs.) According to several studies, caffeine consumption can contribute to calcium loss. which can be mitigated by calcium supplementation other research found.
High sugar consumption prompts urinary excretion of chromium, one study found, while a USDA study found that chromium intake helped to improve glucose tolerance in people with diabetes.
These are just a few examples of the extensive literature that reveals both the reasons many may have nutritional deficiencies, and the benefits of using micronutrients from foods to correct them.
Who Takes Supplements
In 2008, the CDC and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) found that that natural nutritional products are the most commonly used “integrative” health approach. A 2007 Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) survey found that 68 percent of adults (over 150 million Americans) report taking nutritional or dietary supplements.
Medical opinion has converged on some supplementation as essential. “For women of childbearing age, every single national medical organization agrees,” says Maizes. “The US Preventive Task Force, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology all advise that women of childbearing age should be taking a multivitamin with folic acid to prevent neural tube defects, heart defects, skeletal defects, and cleft palate.”
According to Maizes, who is also the author of Be Fruitful: The Essential Guide to Maximizing Fertility and Giving Birth to a Healthy Child (Scribner, 2013), “The Nurses’ Health Study found that among those taking a multivitamin six times per week, there was 41% less infertility, fewer miscarriages, and less cancer in their children.” She points out that, “The CDC says that 75% of Americans don’t get enough folate. Dr. Offit is out there countering a science-based public health message.”
What causes Offit’s disquiet? He quotes Yale neurologist Steven Novella on herbal remedies: “Herbs are drugs and can be studied be studied as drugs.” He would like to see supplements studied and regulated as drugs.
The FDA does regulate supplements as food products, and they are currently the most highly regulated food products. The FDA cannot regulate either BPA or mercury because they are “grandfathered” into use. The FDA chooses not to regulate personal care products or cosmetics. The FDA does not bother to study the safety of GMOs, or the chemicals used in fracking, but according to Offit’s book, certain FDA officials are miffed that they can’t regulate vitamin C, a component of food found in many fruits and vegetables, as a drug.
Before conferring the special status of drug-hood on an herb (or other food ingredient), it’s fair to ask whether drugs and nutrients are equivalently dangerous and therefore require the same extensive and costly drug trials to assure their safety for use.
Take too much vitamin C and you might get a loose bowel movement. Take too much of a statin drug and you might get liver damage or kidney failure. That’s just one example of the difference in risk between high-harm and low-harm ingredients. Drugs are heavily studied and regulated because they are high harm— highly toxic single novel chemicals devised in a lab for a high-potency targeted use with mechanisms of action and side effects new to the human organism. Basic nutrients from foods and plants are low-harm because they are natural complexes of ingredients with long histories of biological compatibility with humans.
It’s therefore not surprising that the number of adverse events reported to the FDA due to the use of pharmaceuticals number a total of 2,739,254 for the years 2008 through 2011, while those for supplements number 6,307 for the same years, according to a March 2013 report by the General Accounting Office. (This data cannot tell us what any given report was about, or its validity.)
Nevertheless, in an apparent quest to reassert the conventional monopoly on health authority, Offit wants every nutrient to be vetted like a drug by an RCT—the randomized controlled double-blind trial considered the gold standard of evidence-based medicine. In his view, just like drugs, vitamins, minerals and herbs are dangerous until proven innocent. There are three key problems with Offit’s caring caution. What he’d like to see is:
1. Impossible. Conducting an RCT of every edible component in nature will never happen because going through the FDA study and review process typically costs $100 million per component. No one with the money to spend has the incentive to study natural substances that cannot by law be patented.
2. Unnecessary. RCTs came into use to assess the benefits/risk ratio of novel highly toxic chemicals, namely drugs. An existing and growing body of literature studies nutritional supplements for their utility and efficacy in less costly ways.
3. It’s colonial. Unless every edible natural substance in existence, many safely consumed or used by humans for millennia, can be colonized and vetted by a recently devised process designed to test drugs, they are assumed to be harmful? That’s empire building, not empirical science.
According to Jim Turner, “Dr. Offit’s form of science is like taking a flashlight into the attic and shining it on an old photo album. That’s good. But Dr. Offit goes off track when he contends that there’s nothing else up there in the attic. It’s a specific belief system: He believes that all that exists is that which falls into the range of his flashlight.”
According to Maizes, many kinds of health levers will never be visible within the range of that flashlight. “We can’t do a double blind study on the effects of yoga. People know if they are doing yoga or not. We can’t expose one group to toxic chemicals in order to study the effects on them. Nor can we put people into a nutrition lab for decades to see if eating a specific diet makes a difference. Therefore, we need observational trials and that means we have to be open to other kinds of scientific data.”
Maizes maintains that it makes sense to use a hierarchy of evidence—the more harmful the ingredient the stricter the assessment of safety for use. Offit claims that he accepts all health treatments that work and even deigns to dub those that do “medicine.” Nevertheless, he devotes an entire book chapter to deploring the inclusion of integrative medicine into medical centers nationwide. He chides the public for influencing their doctors to consider integrative approaches, and is piqued by doctors listening to patients.
Some of the most prominent medical institutions don’t share his view. When the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine first formed in 2000, there were eight centers with active programs. Over a dozen years later, there are 56, nearly half of the nearly 125 medical schools in North America, which belong to the Consortium and have integrative programs. Harvard, UCLA, Duke, Michigan, Albert Einstein and more, all have programs with the strong support of their medical college deans. Hardly a rejection of integrative health approaches. Moreover, many doctors use these approaches themselves.
A 2007 study conducted by the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) found that 72 percent of physicians and 89 percent of nurses personally use vitamin, mineral, herbal, and other supplements. Eighty-five percent of these providers recommend supplements to their clients. Among the 28 percent of physicians who don’t personally use supplements, 62 percent recommend them to their patients.
With or without RCTs, both the scientific and clinical evidence— and their own health experiences— appear to be persuasive. Are the parameters for evidence-based medicine expanding, even though some holdouts (like Dr. Offit) haven’t gotten the memo?
“There are no guarantees in medicine. You can do every aggressive treatment for cancer and still die. No one would tell anyone that they have a 100% chance of survival with any treatment,” Maizes says. “There’s a multibillion-dollar industry implanting stents in people when studies show it does not enhance survival.”
Despite the recurrent rallying call to evidence based medicine, less conventional practice is based upon it than people realize. A 2009 study published in JAMA found that only 19 percent of the most basic cardiovascular treatments (or devices) are based on RCTs.
“There’s a double standard when it comes to integrative approaches, bolstered by the myth that everything in conventional medicine is proven and nothing in integrative medicine is. But the reality is subtler,” says Maizes. “In healthcare, we always need more study. If a study only goes up to people aged 65, is it relevant for an 80-year-old? We can’t say for sure. For years we only had studies on men and told women to do the same thing even though women respond differently. We will never have all the evidence.”
In this context, with plenty of standard medicine used in practice failing to meet this exalted RCT standard, Offit’s demand for it sounds much more like a call to brand loyalty. And if he’s truly interested in seeing more science on nutrients, he can always look into the existing literature.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Magic trick: promoting diseases that don’t exist
by Jon Rappoport
The disease/treatment/profit machine requires more and more diseases, even if they aren’t real.
Here is an unspoken but largely accepted medical notion of what a disease is:
A group of physical symptoms shared by many people, which has a single cause.
For example, take the flu. Wikipedia lists the common symptoms: chills, fever, muscle pains, headache, coughing. For each type of flu, there is single virus announced as the cause. E.g., Swine Flu; H1N1 virus.
Drug companies develop medicines and vaccines to kill the virus or prevent it from gaining a foothold in the body. They sell the drugs and vaccines. Profits soar. Nice and neat.
Of course, many doctors don’t bother to test patients to see if they have a disease like seasonal flu. It’s too time consuming to take a blood sample and send it to a lab and wait for the results.
So the doctor makes an eyeball diagnosis based on symptoms and the season of the year.
As I explained in my previous article, “What happens when only 16% of flu patients have the flu?”, a cursory investigation of this practice can lead to embarrassing results.
Every year, many blood samples from patients are, in fact, sent to labs, and only a small fraction of these “flu cases” turn out to reveal any flu virus at all.
But this fact is blithely ignored.
You have hundreds of thousands of people in the US who display the general “flu symptoms,” but it turns out most of them don’t have the flu. They have a variety of other problems.
But admitting this is bad for business. How can drug companies justify making flu drugs and vaccines when most “flu cases” don’t have the flu?
The solution? Fake it. Pretend all people diagnosed with the flu actually have it.
Bottom line? Just because you have a group of people who have the same general symptoms…that doesn’t mean they have the same disease…and it doesn’t mean the same germ is causing their symptoms.
Consider Autism. If you were to Google “Diagnostic Criteria for 299.00 Autistic Disorder,” at autreat.com you would read through a whole menu of behaviors. These behaviors are, in fact, the definition of Autism. They are the entire definition.
There is NO cause listed. There is no single cause. No germ or fungus or mold or errant gene or neurological defect.
So in this instance, the medical cartel pretends they already somehow know Autism (the collection of behaviors) is a single disease, and “they will eventually find the single cause.”
But again, just because you have a great many children who have the same GENERAL symptoms (behaviors)…that doesn’t mean they have the same disease…that doesn’t mean the cause of disease is the same across the board.
Nowhere in the definition of Autism will you find a single cause or any sort of bottom-line physical explanation. You will only find lists of behaviors.
So…how do they know Autism (or each sub-category in the so-called spectrum) is a single disease?
THEY DON’T KNOW.
YES, the children are suffering. YES, they have serious problems. Yes, they are not like other children. YES. But is Autism a single disease? Is it even a spectrum of different types of “developmental disorder,” as advertised? No persuasive evidence exists to affirm that.
I chose Autism for a special reason: the vaccine connection.
I’ll try to boil it down. The medical bosses assert that vaccines COULD NOT be the cause of Autism. On what basis do they say this?
Follow closely. There are diagnosed cases of Autism where the child did not receive any vaccines. Or the child didn’t receive any vaccine containing the neurotoxin mercury.
And since vaccines are demonstrably not the cause IN EVERY CASE OF AUTISM, vaccines are not the cause at all.
You might want to read that last sentence again.
Single cause of a single disease means: the cause is the same in every case of the disease.
This is how the medical bureaucrats refute vaccines as the cause of Autism. This is their “proof.” “Okay. We know (pretend) Autism is a single disease. So it has to have one cause across the board, in every case. Let’s see. Can we find any diagnosed cases where the child didn’t receive vaccines with mercury in them? Yes. We can. All right, end of story. Vaccines couldn’t cause Autism.”
But is Autism (or any sub-type of Autism) a single disease? Is there any convincing proof? Is there a single cause in all cases?
No. If there were, you would find it in the official definition of Autism, and it isn’t there.
At this point, people repeat familiar medical-propaganda slogans: “We’re on the cusp of a breakthrough in finding a genetic cause.” “We’re closer than ever.” “It could turn out to be a virus.” “It might relate to early childhood infections.” “Its roots are neurological, and these days we understand that system at a deeper level than ever before.” “We’re seeing similar patterns in brain scans.”
All supposition. All speculation.
No reason under the sun to accept the idea that what is called Autism is one thing with one cause.
In many cases of what is called Autism, we are looking at vaccine damage, pure and simple. Then CALL IT VACCINE DAMAGE, NOT AUTISM.
In other cases, the cause would be chemical poisoning from a variety of non-vaccine sources. SO CALL IT CHEMICAL POISONING, NOT AUTISM.
In other cases, a severe oxygen deficit. CALL IT OXYGEN DEFICIT.
In other cases, major nutrient deficiencies. CALL IT NUTRITIONAL DEFICIENCY.
In other cases, all four of these. CALL IT ALL FOUR OF THESE.
Call “it” what it is found to be, in that given child.
Look into the life and body of each unique child.
Stop using the generalized label, Autism.
Ah, but if that happened, doctors would be forced to do things they aren’t trained to do. And drug companies, the last time I looked, don’t have a safe and effective drug to reverse vaccine damage.
These companies wouldn’t be able to make billions on a drug aimed at some single mythical cause for “Autism.”
If Autism isn’t one disease with one cause, there is no single way to treat all children diagnosed with Autism.
The diagnosis itself is a misnomer and a deception. The label is a deception. A lie.
“Then what’s wrong with my child?” a parent says. “If it isn’t Autism, what is it?”
The answer could only come with a truly honest and competent and skillful examination of the child. That unique child.
Holding out for one grand solution to a problem that isn’t one general problem is doomed.
Many children are waiting for a successful universal treatment that will never come.
There are reports that, in some of cases of “Autism,” hyperbaric oxygen has shown good results.
But what about cases where the real problem is severe nutritional deficit?
It comes down to this: do parents want a solution to what their unique child is really suffering from? If so, then someone has to discover what that is. And then that practitioner has to come up with an answer that truly helps.
Calling all children who have similar generalized symptoms “Autistic” doesn’t help.
But it does provide an avenue of profit for drug companies. Their paid researchers can announce “breakthroughs” and “partial answers” and come in behind that with new drugs.
And then they can even say, “We’ve found the cause,” when they haven’t. They can market a whole raft of drugs that “alleviate the cause.” And make billions of $$, while children still suffer.
Here’s a real-life illustration. The parents of a young boy are at their wit’s end because he has withdrawn from the world. He can’t communicate. His physical coordination is lacking. He has other problems.
The doctor says: Autism.
But another doctor, someone who practices medicine but also has human instincts and a genuine desire to go the distance and help that boy, investigates.
And he finds several crucial things. The boy, who has never had vaccines, has severe nutritional deficiencies. On top of that, he’s extremely sensitive and reactive to certain artificial colors and dyes in processed foods. He has bowel problems, debilitating gastrointestinal infections. He almost strangled on the umbilical chord at birth.
Suppose the the doctor can prepare a comprehensive non-drug program to correct these problems. And after a time, the boy begins to emerge from his isolation. Into the world.
Did he have Autism?
This is like asking whether the victim of an automobile accident had Broken Bone Syndrome.
There is a simplicity at the bottom of all this. When the doctor says, “Your son has VCR$#S or some other label, the parent can say, “Do you have a treatment that will correct the situation?”
If the answer right now is no, there is no reason to buy the label and walk down the tortuous path the label implies.
If later on, the doctor says yes, we definitely do have a cure, then the parent can look at it through a high-power magnifying glass of intelligence and justified skepticism, to find the fine print, and understand what the doctor is really talking about.
Is he telling the truth? Is he lying? Does the supposed cure have such dire adverse effects the child is merely trading one set of crises for another? Are the new crises just masking the old ones?
Here is the rule: if someone claims that a cluster of symptoms adds up to a disease label for many people with that cluster, but the doctor has in his hands no cause for the cluster, there is no reason to assume the label means anything.
Yet still, the parent says, “All right, but the doctor said my son is Autistic. What am I supposed to do?”
Yes, and the doctor probably also says Autism is a neurological disorder and much research is underway, and the prospects are looking better…
But does the doctor have the cause of Autism? Does he have a treatment that really works? Is the parent in better shape by assuming her boy has “Autism,” whatever that is supposed to mean? Is the boy helped in any way by this?
Or is the mother of that child simply assuaged and relieved, because the doctor has put a label on her child who, up to now, was a troubling mystery?
I know people are going to write me with alt. solutions for Autism. They are going to assume there is such a thing (across the board) as Autism and it has a single cause, and there is a brilliant treatment for all of it.
To them I would suggest reading this article again and thinking about what it actually means.
People are also going to say, “But Autism researchers are making progress. They may not have the single cause yet, but they’re getting closer.”
Really? They SAY they’re getting closer. That’s different. What do you expect them to assert? They’re getting farther away?
Related: What happens when only 16% of flu patients have the flu?
Sunday, October 13, 2013
Fukushima's Fish Tale
A Canadian paper talked to experts and used government data to estimate the risk to human health from Fukushima contaminated fish. The results were rather disturbing. Using EPA cancer calculations and Japan’s existing fish testing data they found a clear cancer risk to not just people in Japan but anywhere those fish are exported to. They then looked at the potential due to distribution of radiation around the pacific and found an exponential risk to the public.
Something not tested for to date but mentioned by Straight.com is the risk from strontium 90 and plutonium in Pacific fish. No agency or citizen group is testing for these two isotopes in the food supply, this includes Pacific sea food. The amounts and distribution of these isotopes in the international food supply remain a mystery.
Straight.com also pointed out the other heath risks rarely mentioned when talking about radiation exposure such as heart disease and genetic damage. They spoke to a number of experts, in the end they all agreed there is at least some risk to eating fish with man made radionuclides such as cesium, strontium or plutonium. They disagreed somewhat on the degree of risk. The research also found a similar problem with Canadian seafood testing that we found previously with FDA testing. The fish most at risk for contamination were rarely if ever tested. This tactic gives a false sense of security and leaves the true risk factor unknown. CFIA did some other food testing in 2012 but has refused to release the data even a year later. They claimed it is still being analyzed. This excuse is a non-starter. Citizen groups, farm coops and the Japanese government have all managed to put out radiation testing results for food in a timely manner. This is usually the same day or within a week of conducting the tests.
TEPCO has been testing fish in the port at the plant and within a 20km radius. The types of fish being tested in both locations differs. This may be partially due to the habitat of those fish species or a reluctance to sufficiently test the same species in both locations as it could show contamination is not staying in the port as TEPCO has tried to claim. There is also no 3rd party verification or oversight on their fish testing efforts. Only some of the haul could be being tested or only desired results are reported. The pubic really has no way of knowing and would need to accept TEPCO’s testing on faith. Some of the fish tested by a local university showed higher levels than TEPCO’s testing. A rockfish caught 1.5km from the plant showed 442 bq/kg of cesium. Meanwhile TEPCO’s testing shows much lower in their testing. Kinki University, that found the contaminated rockfish is also working on other fish testing in the Pacific in conjunction with US universities.
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/f1/smp/2013/images/fish02_130918-e.pdf
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/f1/smp/2013/images/fish01_130918-e.pdf
Meanwhile Russia is looking to increase their screening of fish due to concerns from Fukushima. Officials expressed concern over the possible re-importation of fish via South Korea or China since screening programs in some countries do not have an actual tracking system. Japan began efforts this week to get the WTO to intervene in South Korea’s ban of some Japanese seafood after new leaks at Fukushima Daiichi were admitted.
A citizen radiation watchdog group, BQwatcher posted these contamination readings this week, found on Japanese government websites.
Miyagi Full Season → Genki blue uni Kesennuma 8.7 Bq / kg
Ibaraki 130 Bq / kg · Komonkasube 33, flounder, yellowtail flounder 11 7.7, rock trout, red sea bream 2.8 1.2 1.1 Shousaifugu
Ibaraki Kasumigaura 44 Bq / kg · Gengoroubuna 40-26-whitebait smelt 14 (river fish).
While the levels are lower than many found around the effected areas of Japan they do show the diversity of contamination. The is obviously much left to do to understand and properly deal with the problem. Despite concerns by a variety of experts no effort is underway to screen seafood for strontium or plutonium.
Related: Cesium Found In Children’s Urine Shows Ongoing Widespread Problem In Japan
Yoshinoya Fast Food Chain To Grow Rice & Vegetables In Fukushima To “Secure Low Price”
Something not tested for to date but mentioned by Straight.com is the risk from strontium 90 and plutonium in Pacific fish. No agency or citizen group is testing for these two isotopes in the food supply, this includes Pacific sea food. The amounts and distribution of these isotopes in the international food supply remain a mystery.
Straight.com also pointed out the other heath risks rarely mentioned when talking about radiation exposure such as heart disease and genetic damage. They spoke to a number of experts, in the end they all agreed there is at least some risk to eating fish with man made radionuclides such as cesium, strontium or plutonium. They disagreed somewhat on the degree of risk. The research also found a similar problem with Canadian seafood testing that we found previously with FDA testing. The fish most at risk for contamination were rarely if ever tested. This tactic gives a false sense of security and leaves the true risk factor unknown. CFIA did some other food testing in 2012 but has refused to release the data even a year later. They claimed it is still being analyzed. This excuse is a non-starter. Citizen groups, farm coops and the Japanese government have all managed to put out radiation testing results for food in a timely manner. This is usually the same day or within a week of conducting the tests.
TEPCO has been testing fish in the port at the plant and within a 20km radius. The types of fish being tested in both locations differs. This may be partially due to the habitat of those fish species or a reluctance to sufficiently test the same species in both locations as it could show contamination is not staying in the port as TEPCO has tried to claim. There is also no 3rd party verification or oversight on their fish testing efforts. Only some of the haul could be being tested or only desired results are reported. The pubic really has no way of knowing and would need to accept TEPCO’s testing on faith. Some of the fish tested by a local university showed higher levels than TEPCO’s testing. A rockfish caught 1.5km from the plant showed 442 bq/kg of cesium. Meanwhile TEPCO’s testing shows much lower in their testing. Kinki University, that found the contaminated rockfish is also working on other fish testing in the Pacific in conjunction with US universities.
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/f1/smp/2013/images/fish02_130918-e.pdf
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/f1/smp/2013/images/fish01_130918-e.pdf
Meanwhile Russia is looking to increase their screening of fish due to concerns from Fukushima. Officials expressed concern over the possible re-importation of fish via South Korea or China since screening programs in some countries do not have an actual tracking system. Japan began efforts this week to get the WTO to intervene in South Korea’s ban of some Japanese seafood after new leaks at Fukushima Daiichi were admitted.
A citizen radiation watchdog group, BQwatcher posted these contamination readings this week, found on Japanese government websites.
Miyagi Full Season → Genki blue uni Kesennuma 8.7 Bq / kg
Ibaraki 130 Bq / kg · Komonkasube 33, flounder, yellowtail flounder 11 7.7, rock trout, red sea bream 2.8 1.2 1.1 Shousaifugu
Ibaraki Kasumigaura 44 Bq / kg · Gengoroubuna 40-26-whitebait smelt 14 (river fish).
While the levels are lower than many found around the effected areas of Japan they do show the diversity of contamination. The is obviously much left to do to understand and properly deal with the problem. Despite concerns by a variety of experts no effort is underway to screen seafood for strontium or plutonium.
Related: Cesium Found In Children’s Urine Shows Ongoing Widespread Problem In Japan
Yoshinoya Fast Food Chain To Grow Rice & Vegetables In Fukushima To “Secure Low Price”
Friday, October 4, 2013
Cancer risk linked to radiation levels in fish species after Fukushima
Two-and-a-half years after Fukushima, many fish species still have highly elevated amounts of radioactive cesium from the stricken plant, including species that Japan exports to Canada, according to the Japanese Fisheries Agency’s tests on fish catches.
And Japanese fish and seafood exports to Canada have grown significantly since Fukushima, with $24 million in exports in 2012, up 20 percent from $20 million in 2010, according to Statistics Canada data.
In July this year, a sea bass caught in Japan had 1,000 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium—10 times Japan’s ceiling of 100 becquerels per kilo in food. It was the second-highest amount found in a sea bass since the disaster occurred.
And in February, a greenling in the harbour of the Fukushima plant had a record 740,000 becquerels per kilo of cesium—7,400 times Japan’s ceiling. Two in five fish tested in July had detectable levels of cesium 134 or cesium 137, radioactive isotopes released from Fukushima.
On average, fish in the 33,000 tests since March 2011 had 18 becquerels per kilo of cesium. In March and April 2011, fish also had 65 becquerels per kilo of iodine 131. (The Straight didn’t count in these averages any fish caught in Fukushima prefecture, where most species are banned from the market.)
Fish caught far out in the Pacific had an average of two becquerels of cesium per kilo.
The Straight used these levels to determine how much radiation the public has been exposed to in Japan and elsewhere, based on fishery data from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.
The average radiation levels are below Japan’s ceiling and Health Canada’s much higher ceiling of 1,000 becquerels per kilo for cesium and iodine 131. But the radiation detected can still cause cancer, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s cancer-risk formula, a leading international standard for forecasting cancer risks from radiation. The What’s more, the EPA formula underestimates cancer impacts because it doesn’t fully include all research on radiation impacts, in the estimate of Daniel Hirsch, a UC Santa Cruz nuclear expert.
(Also according to Hirsch, Health Canada uses a less accepted cancer-risk formula that underestimates the dangers even more.)
Hirsch helped preside over a study of nuclear-power workers in the 1990s that found cancer rates at least six to eight times higher than predicted by official formulas.
Thursday, October 3, 2013
GMO ‘Golden Rice’ Tested on Kids Without Parental Consent
Beta-carotene enhanced GM rice, the “golden” child of biotech, is now hampered by a fudged study under ethics scrutiny. A GMO study conducted in China, but funded by the USDA, tested unapproved “Golden Rice” on children without authorization, creating serious violations of ethics rules.
Tufts University researchers admitted that their lead scientist, Guangwen Tang, had broken the rules of disclosure in tests on human subjects, but maintain that their August 2012 study titled “β-Carotene in “Golden Rice” is as good as β-carotene in oil at providing vitamin A to children” remains valid.
Greenpeace China blew the whistle on what it called a scandal over a “potentially dangerous product.” Not properly informing the parents of the children used in the study constitutes a clear and serious ethics violations, the organization indicated.
The larger Greenpeace organization has played a long-term role in opposing the approval and use of “Golden Rice” to fight disease in the developing world. They and other opponents have long argued that “tried and true” methods of treating Vitamin A deficiency render the biotech “solution” irrelevant and unnecessary.
Nature.com highlighted an investigation conducted by CCTV in China, who aired a special documentary program on the ‘scandal.’ Emails turned up by reporters showed that a Chinese CDC official hid mention of the fact that the Golden Rice was genetically modified, claiming that it was dropped because it was ‘too sensitive’ to discuss with the parents of the children being fed GMOs in the study.
Many parents have since “demanded a guarantee that the rice will not affect their children’s health” as well as compensation money for the ethics breach. “If it’s safe, why did they need to deceive us into this?” a parent angrily asked China’s CCTV in their exposé.
There were further issued raised about how often the children in the study were actually fed the “Golden Rice,” with inquiries revealing that the children may have only eaten the rice ONCE during the study rather than daily over the course of three weeks.
Nature reported: Critics note that discrepancies remain over the full details of the trial. For instance, the CDC’s investigation revealed that the children ate Golden Rice just once during the study — and not lunch every day during the three-week study as the paper states.
“How much Golden Rice did the children have exactly?” asks Wang Zheng, a policy researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Policy and Management in Beijing. “Either the researchers are lying about this now or they lied about it in their paper. It’s a serious offence either way.” [emphasis added]
According to the published study, the GM trait in “Golden Rice” that produces beta-carotene, a precursor to Vitamin A, was produced using heavy water (a technique derived from Harold Urey’s development of enriched uranium during the Manhattan Project) “harvested from a hydroponic plant system housed in the USDA-Agriculture Research Service Children’s Nutrition Research Center at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston TX.”
Along with Tang’s research conducted at the Hunan Province Center for Disease Control and Prevention in China was additional research provided by the Carotenoids & Health Laboratory, USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston. Golden Rice has been a hot-button issue in genetically-modified politics for decades now. Proponents blame GM opponents for delaying its approval, and outlandishly claiming that they have cost lives, building upon the long-standing claims that “Golden Rice” could save a million lives per year, prevent blindness (and other related pro-GM puffery).
Slate accused anti-GMO activists of lying to get their way, reporting that groups behind the destruction of a trial GM rice field had falsely claimed farmers in the Philippines were behind the sabotage.
Biotech watchdogs like GM Watch, on the other hand, have long claimed that the benefits are less than shimmering, and that instead its real significance is in expanding the reach of GM agriculture – and companies like Syngenta who push it – in the developing world. Since 2001, activist Michael Pollan, Greenpeace and others have shown that the concentration of beta-carotene is not enough to make a ‘life saving’ or disease preventing difference – a problem worsened by the fact that cooking the rice reduces the Vitamin A content by 50%.
GM Watch explained how “Golden Rice” co-inventor Ingo Potrykus acknowledged back in 2001 that Greenpeace’s argument concerning the ineffective concentrations of beta-carotene in the rice amounted to a valid concern and notable flaw.
“I am happy to acknowledge, that Greenpeace is arguing on a rational basis… I also acknowledge, that Greenpeace has identified a weak point in the strategy of using Golden Rice for reducing vitamin A-deficiency… We will know for sure of course only, when all the standard biosafety assessments have been performed… we need far more data, than we have to date.” [emphasis added]
The current levels of beta-carotene produced by the heavy water “Golden Rice” would require children to eat between 100-150 grams of rice per day (or about 1/2-3/4 of a cup of cooked rice) in order to achieve 60% of the recommended daily allowance.
Even the Rockefeller Foundation, which long funded the development of “Golden Rice” – and, arguably, the entire “Gene Revolution” that brought genetically modified crops into mainstream use – conceded in a letter written by Gordon Conway in January 2001, that “we do not consider Golden Rice the solution to Vitamin A deficiency” and noting that “the public relations uses of Golden Rice have gone too far.”
Conway writes: “The industry’s advertisements and the media in general seem to forget that it is a research product that needs considerable further development before it will be available to farmers and consumers.”
Yet more than a decade after industry proponents tried to knock environmental watchdogs for their critique and delay of “Golden Rice,” researchers are caught fudging their data and failing to properly inform the parents of the children used in the study that the product was even genetically modified.
If the benefits for the world are so profound, why is there so much to hide?
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Obama Inc. to Deny Cancer Treatments by Redefining What “Cancer” Is
Investment Watch BlogThe death panels aren’t going to come through the front door. They’re going to sneak up on you from behind with piano wire.
On July 29, 2013, a working group for the National Cancer Institute (the main government agency for cancer research) published a paper proposing that the term “cancer” be reserved for lesions with a reasonable likelihood of killing the patient if left untreated. Slower growing tumors would be called a different name such as “indolent lesions of epithelial origin” (IDLE).
Their justification was that modern medical technology now allows doctors to detect small, slow-growing tumors that likely wouldn’t be fatal. Yet once patients are told they have a cancer, many become frightened and seek unnecessary further tests, chemotherapy, radiation, and/or surgery.
By redefining the term “cancer,” the National Cancer Institute hopes to reduce patient anxiety and reduce the risks and expenses associated with supposedly unnecessary medical procedures. In technical terms, the government hopes to reduce “overdiagnosis” and “overtreatment” of cancer.
Related: US employers slashing worker hours to avoid Obamacare insurance mandate
The IRS Wants to Be Exempt from Obamacare While also Being in Charge of Making the Rest of Us Comply
Radioactive Bluefin Tuna Caught off California Coast
Liberals uniteEvery bluefin tuna tested in the waters off California has shown to be contaminated with radiation that originated in Fukushima. Every single one.
Over a year ago, in May of 2012, the Wall Street Journal reported on a Stanford University study. Daniel Madigan, a marine ecologist who led the study, was quoted as saying, “The tuna packaged it up (the radiation) and brought it across the world’s largest ocean. We were definitely surprised to see it at all and even more surprised to see it in every one we measured.”
Another member of the study group, Marine biologist Nicholas Fisher at Stony Brook University in New York State reported, “We found that absolutely every one of them had comparable concentrations of cesium 134 and cesium 137.”
That was over a year ago. The fish that were tested had relatively little exposure to the radioactive waste being dumped into the ocean following the nuclear melt-through that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in March of 2011. Since that time, the flow of radioactive contaminants dumping into the ocean has continued unabated. Fish arriving at this juncture have been swimming in contaminants for all of their lives.
Radioactive cesium doesn’t sink to the sea floor, so fish swim through it and ingest it through their gills or by eating organisms that have already ingested it. It is a compound that does occur naturally in nature, however, the levels of cesium found in the tuna in 2012 had levels 3 percent higher than is usual. Measurements for this year haven’t been made available, or at least none that I have been able to find. I went looking for the effects of ingesting cesium. This is what I found:
When contact with radioactive cesium occurs, which is highly unlikely, a person can experience cell damage due to radiation of the cesium particles. Due to this, effects such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and bleeding may occur. When the exposure lasts a long time, people may even lose consciousness. Coma or even death may then follow. How serious the effects are depends upon the resistance of individual persons and the duration of exposure and the concentration a person is exposed to. The half life of cesium 134 is 2.0652 years. For cesium 137, the half life is 30.17 years.
The Fukushima disaster is an ongoing battle with no signs that humans are gaining the upper hand. The only good news to come out of Japan has later been proven to be false and was nothing more than attempts by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to mislead the public and lull them into a sense of security while the company searched vainly for ways to contain the accident.
This incident makes Three Mile Island and Chernobyl pale in comparison. Those were nuclear meltdowns. A nuclear melt-through poses a much more serious problem and is one that modern technology doesn’t have the tools to address. Two and a half years later and the contaminants are still flowing into the ocean and will continue to for the foreseeable future.
The FDA assures us that our food supply is safe, that the levels of radiation found in fish samples are within safe limits for consumption. But one has to question if this is true and, if it is true now, will it remain true? Is this, like the statements issued from TEPCO, another attempt to quell a public backlash in the face of an unprecedented event that, as yet, has no solution and no end in sight?
As for me, fish is off the menu.
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Planned Parenthood Exposed – James Corbett
Youtube
Although the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bill Gates are happy to sing its praises (or perhaps because they are), Planned Parenthood has a racist eugenicist past that it would prefer to sweep under the rug. The bigger problem for the organization, though, is that the past isn’t over and the public is beginning to discover the real driving force behind this globalist institution. Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we pull back the curtain and expose Margaret Sanger’s monstrous offspring: Planned Parenthood.
Although the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bill Gates are happy to sing its praises (or perhaps because they are), Planned Parenthood has a racist eugenicist past that it would prefer to sweep under the rug. The bigger problem for the organization, though, is that the past isn’t over and the public is beginning to discover the real driving force behind this globalist institution. Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we pull back the curtain and expose Margaret Sanger’s monstrous offspring: Planned Parenthood.
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