A newly fashioned United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) working paper tracking "the rise of online anti-vaccination sentiments in Central and Eastern Europe" identifies independent health websites, including GreenMedInfo.com, Mercola.com, NaturalNews.com and VacTruth.com, as contributing to lackluster vaccine uptake.

The UNICEF report, titled "Tracking anti-vaccination sentiment in Eastern European social media networks," obtained data using "state-of-the-art social medial monitoring tools," and confirmed that parents are using social media networks to decide whether to vaccinate their children...

...Ironically, UNICEF's own vaccine-based programs to combat child deaths from disease in West Africa appear to reduce survival relative to areas outside the reach of their programs. According to a 2010 BBC News report, "Unicef spent $27m (£17m) rolling out vaccinations, vitamin A pills and bed nets to protect against malaria from 2001 to 2005 in areas of 11 countries. The researchers studied parts of Ghana, Mali and Benin and said children often survived better outside the UN scheme." Indeed, the most well-known criticism of UNICEF is that it has done very little to decrease child mortality (in sub-Saharan Africa it has actually increased) underscoring why its focus on promoting vaccination, and now monitoring and perhaps targeting "anti-vaccine" organizations, is profoundly misguided.

Ultimately, UNICEF's new report is more than an objective analysis of so-called "anti-vaccine" organizations, but a concerning bit of propaganda aimed at dissuading the millions who visit alternative health sites daily from obtaining information that was not underwritten and/or ghostwritten by the very industries who stand to gain most by hiding the well-known adverse health effects of their products, and who have managed to transform many governmental health agencies - and we can see, even global ones - into their cheer leading, marketing, liability protection and now surveillance divisions.

The use of antibacterial drugs on healthy livestock is a common practice in the United States. The meat industry's overuse of antibiotics has become so widespread that about 29 million pounds of these drugs (or 80% of all antibiotics sold in the US) are used in industrial feedlots, with only 14% of these drugs being used for therapeutic purposes.

As a result, dangerous germs, dubbed "super bugs", capable of fighting off antibiotics, are spreading throughout our communities, not only jeopardizing our health, but also the future of healthcare.

For the last several decades, doctors have been warning about the dangerous practice of routinely feeding antibiotics to healthy animals. Many farmers do this in an attempt to ward off disease in crowded conditions and to speed growth, but public-health researchers have linked the overuse of antibiotics in farming to the sharp rise in hard-to-kill - and sometimes fatal - superbugs in people.

Actually, the scientific consensus regarding antibiotic-resistant bacteria has been conclusive for many years. In 1989, the Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academy of Sciences, stated that the use of antibiotics in factory farms was responsible for antibiotic resistance in bacteria and was seriously undermining the ability of these agents to protect human health. Three years later, the Institute of Medicine stated that multi-drug-resistant bacteria had now become a serious medical concern. The Institute of Medicine laid the problem squarely on the doorstep of Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), also known as factory farms.

In 1997, the World Health Organization called for a ban on the routine feeding of antibiotics to livestock. A year later, the journal Science called the meat industry "the driving force behind the development of antibiotic resistance in species of bacteria that cause human disease." In 1998, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) blamed the serious emergence of Salmonella bacteria that had become resistant to no less than five different antibiotics on the routine and non-medically necessary use of antibiotics in livestock.