Health & WellnessS


Sherlock

Consumer Reports finds most pork contaminated with Yersinia

Helena Bottemiller
Food Safety News
Tue, 27 Nov 2012 14:47 UTC
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In a new study of raw pork chops and ground pork, Consumer Reports found 69 percent of samples were contaminated with Yersinia enterocolitica, according to a report published by the group today.

A lesser-known foodborne pathogen, Yersinia enterocolitica can cause fever, abdominal pain and diarrhea, lasting one to three weeks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There is approximately one confirmed infection per 100,000 people reported each year, but since these cases are severely under-reported, CDC estimates there are actually around 100,000 infections in the United States annually.

Consumer Reports tested 198 samples and found that while the vast majority were positive for Yersinia, only 3 to 7 percent were positive for the more common foodborne pathogens Salmonella, Staphylococcus aureus or Listeria monocytogenes.
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Health

Kaiser Permanente advises members against GMOs

Michael Stone
examiner.com
Sat, 24 Nov 2012 14:09 UTC
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© permaculturenews.org
Kaiser Permanente, the largest managed healthcare organization in the United States, is advising members to limit exposure to genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

In its Northwest Fall 2012 newsletter, Kaiser warns of the potential danger GMOs pose to the national food supply. According to the newsletter:
GMOs have been added to our food supply since 1994, but most people don't know it because the United States does not require labeling of GMOs. As of 2012, most corn, soybeans, canola, cotton, and sugar beets are genetically modified. Nearly 80 percent of processed food and most fast food contain GMOs.

Despite what the biotech industry might say, there is little research on the long-term effects of GMOs on human health. Independent research has found several varieties of GMO corn caused organ damage in rats. Other studies have found that GMOs may lead to an inability in animals to reproduce.
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Bacon

Sorry, vegans: Eating meat and cooking food is how humans got their big brains

Christopher Wanjek
Washington Post
Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:00 UTC
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© Bigstock photo
Vegetarian, vegan and raw diets can be healthful, probably far more healthful than the typical American diet. But to call these diets "natural" for humans is a bit of a stretch in terms of evolution, according to two recent studies.

Eating meat and cooking food made us human, the studies suggest, enabling the brains of our prehuman ancestors to grow dramatically over a few million years.

Although this isn't the first such assertion from archaeologists and evolutionary biologists, the new studies demonstrate that it would have been biologically implausible for humans to evolve such a large brain on a raw, vegan diet and that meat-eating was a crucial element of human evolution at least a million years before the dawn of humankind.

Comment: Despite the low-fat propaganda at the end, this article gives good evidence for why vegetarians have been found to have smaller brains than their meat-eating peers.

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Alarm Clock

Is genetically modified food killing us?

Alex Daley
dailyreckoning.com
Mon, 26 Nov 2012 12:31 UTC
Image
© terravim.com
Last month, a group of Australian scientists published a warning to the citizens of the country, and of the world, who collectively gobble up some $34 billion annually of its agricultural exports. The warning concerned the safety of a new type of wheat.

As Australia's number-one export, a $6-billion annual industry, and the most-consumed grain locally, wheat is of the utmost importance to the country. A serious safety risk from wheat - a mad wheat disease of sorts - would have disastrous effects for the country and for its customers.

Which is why the alarm bells are being rung over a new variety of wheat being ushered toward production by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) of Australia. In a sense, the crop is little different than the wide variety of modern genetically modified foods. A sequence of the plant's genes has been turned off to change the wheat's natural behavior a bit, to make it more commercially viable (hardier, higher yielding, slower decaying, etc.).

What's really different this time - and what has Professor Jack Heinemann of the University of Canterbury, NZ, and Associate Professor Judy Carman, a biochemist at Flinders University in Australia, holding press conferences to garner attention to the subject - is the technique employed to effectuate the genetic change. It doesn't modify the genes of the wheat plants in question; instead, a specialized gene blocker interferes with the natural action of the genes.
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Health

Grapefruit conflicts with many medications


United Press International
Wed, 28 Nov 2012 12:53 UTC
Grapefruit
© Andrew Crowley
Eating grapefruits or drinking the juice can cause serious side effects if taking certain medicines, doctors have warned.
More than 80 common medications interact with grapefruit -- about half with serious complications, including death, Canadian researchers say.

David Bailey, a clinical pharmacologist at the Lawson Health Research Institute in London, Ontario, first discovered the interaction between grapefruit and certain medications more than 20 years ago. Since then the number of drugs with the potential to interact has jumped.

"What I've noticed over the last four years is really quite a disturbing trend and that is the increase in the number of drugs that can produce not only adverse reactions but extraordinarily serious adverse drug reactions," Bailey told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

Many of the drugs are common, such as some cholesterol-lowering statins, antibiotics and calcium channel blockers used to treat high blood pressure. Other medications include agents used to fight cancer or suppress the immune system in people who have received an organ transplant, Bailey said.
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Health

Texas medical board's lawsuit against CAM cancer pioneer Stanislaw Burzynski dismissed!!


alliance for natural health
Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:00 UTC
justice scale
© Unknown
The state's attack on Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski is finally over. And some states are even passing laws that protect integrative physicians.

As we reported last November, Stanislaw Burzynski, MD, PhD, is a physician and biochemist practicing in Texas who developed (with his own money) a nontoxic gene-targeted cancer therapy called antineoplastons. This therapy has been shown to help cure some of the most "incurable" forms of terminal cancer.

In the 1980s, the Texas Medical Board (TMB) charged this caring and pioneering doctor with breaking a law that didn't actually exist, and tried to revoke his medical license. Numerous investigations later - including an appearance before the Texas Supreme Court - found no violation of any law or standard of care.

The FDA, the pharmaceutical industry, and the National Cancer Institute, knowing how promising Dr. Burzynski's therapy was proving to be, tried to duplicate his invention, then tried to steal his patents - but failed. Despite the fact that two informal medical board settlement panels found that Dr. Burzynski was acting within the standard of care, the TMB refused to drop the case and, earlier this year, made another attempt to revoke Dr. Burzynski's medical license.
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Syringe

Homeopathy regime is rejected as judge tells parents to immunise child

Harriet Alexander
The Sdyney Morning Herald
Tue, 27 Nov 2012 16:51 UTC
Immunization
© John WoudstraA judge has ordered a couple to immunise their daughter.
A judge has ordered a couple to immunise their eight-year-old daughter according to government health guidelines, in a rebuke to the homeopathic regime pursued by the mother.

But the father will shoulder the cost of doing so.

The mother had sought in a injunction in the Family Court to stop the father and his partner from immunising the child without her written permission.

She made the application after discovering that her daughter's stepmother had secretly taken the child to a medical centre to have her immunised against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B, polio, HIB, measles, mumps, rubella and meningococcal C.

Previously, the mother had been arranging homeopathic vaccines.

She told the court that she adhered to a ''simple and healthy way of life'', that included eating organic food, using non-toxic cleaning products and sending the child to a Rudolph Steiner school where the toys were made from natural products such as wool, wax and silk.

Most parents at the school focused on ''building up the immune system of the child through homeopathics'', she told the court.
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Health

Common drug increases deaths in atrial fibrillation patients


ScienceDaily
Tue, 27 Nov 2012 16:25 UTC
Digoxin, a drug widely used to treat heart disease, increases the possibility of death when used by patients with a common heart rhythm problem − atrial fibrillation (AF), according to new study findings by University of Kentucky researchers. The results have been published in the European Heart Journal, and raises serious concerns about the expansive use of this long-standing heart medication in patients with AF.

UK researchers led by Dr. Samy Claude Elayi, associate professor of medicine at UK HealthCare's Gill Heart Institute, analyzed data from 4,060 AF patients enrolled in the landmark Atrial Fibrillation Follow-up Investigation of Rhythm Management (AFFIRM) trial. This analysis was intended to determine the relationship between digoxin and deaths in this group of patients with atrial fibrillation, and whether digoxin was directly responsible for some deaths.

"These findings raise important concerns about the safety of digoxin, one of the oldest and most controversial heart drugs," said Dr. Steven E. Nissen, chair of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. "Although considered obsolete by some authorities, digoxin is still widely used. A thorough review by the FDA is warranted to determine whether regulatory action is needed, including stronger warnings about the use of digoxin in patients with atrial fibrillation. "
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Health

Mysterious respiratory virus claims one more life: WHO


The Hindu Business Line
Sat, 24 Nov 2012 15:50 UTC
Another person has died of a mysterious respiratory virus and three more cases have been discovered in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the World Health Organisation has said.

"This brings the total of laboratory confirmed cases to six," the Geneva-based UN agency said in a statement.

A Saudi man died from the novel coronavirus in June and a Qatari man was hospitalised in London with the virus after a trip to Saudi Arabia.

The WHO has previously confirmed that the new strain was part of the coronavirus family, which also includes the deadly SARS virus as well as the common cold. What sets the new virus apart from SARS is that it causes rapid kidney failure, the WHO said.
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Attention

Dutch authority just weeks away from gagging health journalists and restricting free speech

Marco Torres
PreventDisease
Tue, 27 Nov 2012 14:33 UTC
Codex
© PreventDisease
The Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (nVWA) is set to launch a major offensive endorsing the censorship of online health content, including escalating restrictions in free speech. On December 14, 2012, Codex Alimentarius will shift into overdrive when a European Regulation goes into effect restricting all health claims for food unless approved by a regulatory body.

Codex is a subsidiary body of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO). Codex develops international food safety and quality standards, such as standards concerning the safety of food additives. Standards set by Codex traditionally served as a minimum floor for less developed countries. It has over 170 member countries within the framework including the EU and US which have participated in Codex for decades.

The Codex Alimentarius Commission is responsible for establishing a system of guidelines, standards and recommendations that guides the direction of the global food supply. It aims to tell us what is safe, but in the process often uses criteria that are manipulated to support the interests of the world's largest corporations.

The text for the Codex Guideline on Vitamin and Mineral Food Supplements, which has been based closely on the EU Directive--sharing some of its text verbatim--was ratified in July 2005 but it was finalised by stealth earlier this year.

It is now being slowly integrated as the basis for national and regional laws in many parts of the world. To a large extent, the EU is now adopted its standards and implementing Codex, so all countries in the EU will eventually be required to abide by the policies and recommendations set forth. The Netherlands is one of those countries that they are attempting to test the platform.
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