2.29.2008

Mercks New ProQuad Vaccine Linked To More Convulsions

ATLANTA - Children suffered higher rates of fever-related convulsions when they got a Merck & Co. combination vaccine instead of two separate shots, according to a new study presented Wednesday.

The results prompted a federal advisory panel on vaccines to water down their preference for the combo vaccine ProQuad, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella as well as chickenpox. Read more..
http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/16054722.html


ONCE AGAIN..FOLLOW THE MONEY. VACCINATE YOUR CHILD AND WORRY ABOUT THE SIDE AFFECTS LATER. WOULD YOU EAT OR FEED YOUR CHILD SOMETHING FROM AN UNMARKED PACKAGE WITHOUT KNOWING WHATS INSIDE?
THEN WHY WOULD YOU CONTINUOUSLY LET SOMEONE EXPERIMENT ON THEM BY POKING THEM WITH NEEDLES AND INJECTING THEM WITH A FOREIGN SUBSTANCE THAT YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT CONTAINS?

All Kids Must Get Flu Vaccine, Panel Says To CDC

All U.S. children aged from six months up to 18 should be immunized every year against influenza, a panel of federal vaccine advisers said on Wednesday.

The panel, which advises the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine matters, agreed unanimously at its regular meeting in Atlanta that the new recommendations should go into effect as soon as possible, but no later than the 2009-2010 flu season.

The vote from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices would add about 30 million children to the list of those who should be vaccinated, CDC spokesman Curtis Allen said. The current recommendations cover children aged 6 months to 5 years old.
Read more..
http://news.aol.com/health/story/_a/all-kids-must-get-flu-vaccine-panel-says/20080227152609990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

EVIDENTLY, THEY DID NOT MAKE ENOUGH MONEY FROM THEIR VACCINATIONS THAT WERE INEFFECTIVE? LET'S SEE...THEY WON'T DISCLOSE CURES FOR CANCER AND THE MANY OTHER DIS-EASES THAT HAVE BEEN AROUND FOREVER, THEY SPEND TAX MONEY ON CLONING AND REPLICATING HUMAN ORGANS..AND NOW, THEY'RE COMING UP WITH A VACCINE FOR EVERYTHING. I WOULD NOT PUT THAT AMOOUNT OF UNKNOWN BACTERIA AND LIVING VIRUSES INTO A PET MUCH LESS A CHILD.

2.28.2008

Depression in Young Doctors Tied to Medication Errors

Medical residents who are depressed are about six times more likely to make medication errors than those who aren't depressed, says a study that looked a 123 pediatric residents at three children's hospitals in the United States.

Researchers found that 20 percent of the residents were depressed, and 74 percent were burned out. During the study period, the residents made a total of 45 medications errors, and those who were depressed made 6.2 times more medication errors than those who weren't depressed. Read more..
http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20080209/hl_hsn/depressioninyoungdoctorstiedtomedicationerrors;_ylt=ArzY6ImOhC1k_XJO_E2NEjuCSbYF

2.27.2008

Drugmakers asked to reveal educational grants to doctors

Wondering how much money drug companies spend on continuing education for doctors — and who gets all the support?

Eli Lilly & Co. thinks you deserve to know and lists its grants on its website. Pfizer plans to post similar details soon. Despite Pfizer's move, it is among the 15 companies getting a letter today from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, asking what they're doing to "meet the public's demand for transparency."

If your company does not have any plans in place, the letter says, "please explain why not."

"Transparency builds both trust and accountability," says Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid. "I'm asking other pharmaceutical organizations to follow Lilly's lead and show the public there's nothing to hide." Read more...
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-02-25-drugmakers-money_N.htm

UK - Sex Ed. could be made compulsory for five-year-olds


Children as young as five could be given compulsory sex education, it was revealed yesterday.

The prospect emerged as ministers unveiled a review of Sex and Relationship Education in primary and secondary schools.

A panel will examine "the right age to begin teaching what the key messages are and content that young people should receive at each key stage".

The group will make recommendations to the Government later in the year without first consulting the public.

Panel members include representatives from the Family Planning Association, Brook Advisory Centres, HIV charity the Terrence Higgins Trust and the Sex Education Forum.

Critics warned that the review is an attempt to introduce by stealth a more explicit sex education programme for young children. Read more..
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=518670&in_page_id=1770

2.19.2008

A day and a half of chemtrails sped up (higher rez).

Oceanic Dead Zones Off West Coast are the 'New Normal'


Millions of dead crabs are washing up onto Oregon and Washington state beaches from the offshore "dead zone".

Ever since it was first noticed by crab fishermen who hauled up hundreds of dead and dying crabs in 2002, the "dead zone" that popped up in the waters along the northwestern coastal shelf just off the coast of Oregon has claimed unknown millions of lives. This oxygen-depleted region has transformed formerly rich seafloor communities teeming with life into vast graveyards filled with the bodies of crabs, echinoderms, molluscs, sea worms and other creatures. This carnage was easily visible to a team of research scientists from Oregon State University, who sent an underwater vehicle, equipped with video cameras, into the depths to look around.

"We saw a crab graveyard and no fish the entire day," noted Jane Lubchenco, co-author of the papers that report on their discovery. Lubchenco is the Valley Professor of Marine Biology at Oregon State University.

"Thousands and thousands of dead crab and molts were littering the ocean floor, many sea stars were dead, and the fish have either left the area or have died and been washed away." Read More..
http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2008/02/oceanic_dead_zones_on_west_coa.php

PCC says no to cloned animal products

PCC Natural Markets is prohibiting suppliers from using cloned animal products in their food. It also wants them to disclose where ingredients are from and what they mean by terms such as "natural flavors."

These moves come months after the Seattle chain eliminated high-fructose corn syrup from its eight stores and began identifying the countries of origin for its meat, seafood, peanuts and fresh and frozen produce.

Although the 2002 Farm Bill called for mandatory country-of-origin labeling for those products, the law has not been implemented and is being reworked as part of the 2007 Farm Bill still being considered in Congress.

"The failure of our regulatory agencies to mandate full disclosure of food ingredients makes it incumbent on leaders in the natural-foods industry to step forward and provide what our consumers want," PCC Chief Executive Tracy Wolpert said in a news release Tuesday.

PCC will continue selling food from China, unlike Trader Joe's, which said last year it would phase out single-ingredient food items from mainland China by April 1 because of customer concerns.

Much food that is certified as organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture comes from other countries, including China. Read more..
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2004179295_pcc13.html

Fish devastated by sex-changing chemicals in municipal wastewater

While most people understand the dangers of flushing toxic chemicals into the ecosystem through municipal sewer systems, one potentially devastating threat to wild fish populations comes from an unlikely source: estrogen.

After an exhaustive seven-year research effort, Canadian biologists found that miniscule amounts of estrogen present in municipal wastewater discharges can decimate wild fish populations living downstream. Read more..
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/fish-devastated-sex-changing-chemicals-municipal-wastewater-15488.html

2.18.2008

U.S. Company Seeks Permit to Import Nuclear Waste

WASHINGTON, DC, February 2, 2008 (ENS) - Bart Gordon, the Tennessee Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Science and Technology, does not want the United States to receive low-level radioactive waste from Italy for processing in Tennessee and disposal in a Utah waste site.

He says acceptance of the waste would put the U.S. on a path to becoming "the world's nuclear garbage waste dump."

On Friday, Gordon asked the Northwest Interstate Compact for Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management to withhold its support for a license application to accept the Italian waste filed by EnergySolutions, the company that operates the only private Class A low-level radioactive waste disposal in the United States.

This application marks the first time in the history of the NRC that a company has asked to dispose of large amounts of foreign-generated low-level radioactive waste in the United States.

"The U.S. already faces capacity issues and other challenges in treating and disposing of radioactive waste produced domestically," said Gordon. "We should be working on solving this problem at home before taking dangerous waste from around the world."

Low-level radioactive waste consists of contaminated protective shoe covers and clothing, wiping rags, mops, filters, reactor water treatment residues, equipments and tools, luminous dials, medical tubes, swabs, injection needles, syringes, and laboratory animal carcasses and tissues, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, NRC.

The radioactivity can range from just above background levels found in nature to very highly radioactive in certain cases such as parts from inside the reactor vessel in a nuclear power plant, the NRC says.

Gordon has long said that the application did not appear to represent a "one-time" event because EnergySolutions, which became a publicly traded company in November, has made clear its intent to pursue decommissioning work in both the United States and Europe.

"It is highly likely that this is the first application with a string to follow," Gordon said.

On November 16, 2007, EnergySolutions' CEO and Chairman of the Board Steve Creamer rang the bell to open trading at the New York Stock Exchange where EnergySolutions' stock (NYSE: ES) began trading publicly.

EnergySolutions operates waste processing and disposition facilities in Tennessee, South Carolina, and Utah. The company also operates low-level radioactive waste disposal facilities, vaults, and landfills on the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee and Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

U.S. low-level waste is typically stored on-site by licensees, according to the NRC, either until it has decayed away and can be disposed of as ordinary trash, or until amounts are large enough for shipment to a low-level waste disposal site in containers approved by the Department of Transportation.

To obtain a permit to send waste to a law-level radioactive waste depository, federal regulations require the approval of the state and the Compact in which the disposal site is located.

EnergySolutions disposes of more than 90 percent of the low-level radioactive waste generated in the U.S. through a license granted by the State of Utah and with the permission of the Northwest Compact.

The Compact allows EnergySolutions to take low-level radioactive waste from outside the Compact because it serves "an important national purpose" and has reserved the right to "modify or rescind" its authorization at any time.

2.15.2008

Navy Research Paper: 'Disrupt Economies' with Man-Made 'Floods,' 'Droughts'


A recently-unearthed U.S. Navy research project calls for creating mad-made floods and droughts to "disrupt [the] economy" of an enemy state.

"Weather modification was used successfully in Viet Nam to (among other things) hinder and impede the movement of personnel and material from North Viet Nam to South Viet Nam," notes a Naval Air Warfare Weapons Division - China Lake research proposal, released last month through the Freedom of Information Act. But "since that time military research on Weather Modification has dwindled in the United States."

The proposal suggests a study of the latest weather manipulation techniques, to "give the U.S. military a viable, state-of-the-art weather modification capability again." With that in hand, American forces would be able...

To impede or deny the movement of personnel and material because of rains-floods, snow-blizzards, etc.

(2) To disrupt economy due to the effect of floods, droughts, etc.

The proposal is undated. But it's pretty clearly from the Cold War. Not only is "the Soviet Union (Russia)" mentioned. The money is also relatively small, by today's standards -- less than a half-million dollars, over two years.

A military in-house newspaper calls "weather modification" an "area of China Lake preeminence. Between 1949 and 1978, China Lake developed concepts, techniques, and hardware that were successfully used in hurricane abatement, fog control, and drought relief. Military application of this technology was demonstrated in 1966 when Project Popeye was conducted to enhance rainfall to help interdict traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail." (Here's a picture of China Lake's "Cold Cloud Modification System."

In 1980, the United States ratified a treaty banning military weather manipulation. But every once in a while, someone in the armed forces floats the idea of doing it again. "Our vision is that by 2025 the military could influence the weather on a mesoscale [theater-wide] or microscale [immediate local area] to achieve operational capabilities," a 1996 Air Force-commissioned study reads.

Today, Chinese officials are trying to figure out ways to keep it from raining over Beiing, during this summer's Olympics.

2.11.2008

Is Your Doctor Prescribing Placebos?

In a study published this week in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, a student-and-professor team at the University of Chicago surveyed 466 faculty physicians at Chicago-area medical schools. Almost half of the 231 respondents — 45% — said they had prescribed placebos in regular clinical practice and, of those, just over half had prescribed them in the previous year. Among the reasons the doctors gave: to calm a patient down, to respond to demands for medication that the doctor felt was unnecessary, or simply to do something after all other clinical treatment options had failed. Read more..
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0%2C8599%2C1700079%2C00.html

2.07.2008

Tainted pills hit U.S. mainland

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - The first warning sign came when a sharp-eyed worker sorting pills noticed that the odd blue flecks dotting the finished drug capsules matched the paint on the factory doors.

After the flecks were spotted again on the capsules, a blood-pressure medication called diltiazem, the plant began placing covers over drugs in carts in its manufacturing areas.

But the factory owner, Canadian drug maker Biovail Corp., never tried to find out whether past shipments of the drug were contaminated — or prevent future contamination, according to U.S. regulators.

Thirteen of the 20 best-selling drugs in the United States come from plants on this island. But an investigation by The Associated Press has found dozens of examples over four years of lapses in quality control in the Puerto Rican pharmaceutical industry, which churns out $35 billion of drugs each year, most of it for sale as part of the $300 billion market in the U.S.

An AP review of 100 pages of Food and Drug Administration reports shows even modern drug plants here under the watch of U.S. regulators have failed to keep laboratories sterile and have exported tainted pills.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080206/ap_on_he_me/puerto_rico_pill_problems_7

Chemical Food Additives - Are They Slowly Killing Our Children?

Let me start by saying a chemical additive doesn't necessarily 'appear' to be a problem immediately after ingestion. Quite often the effects are cumulative; a gradual build-up in the body produces roller-coaster days, some good, some bad. Some children are more sensitive to food chemicals and display immediate effects soon after ingestion of additives, colours in particular. In small amounts additives are not harmful. Effects are dose related and, tragically, dose for weight, children are consuming several times more additives than the acceptable daily intake (ADI). Before we get into the details of the most common problem foods, it is necessary to understand the testing and approval process, with emphasis on those factors that may confer the level of risk of toxic additives in infants and young children's diets. Read more..
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_9824.cfm