A new strain of the MRSA "superbug" has been found in the milk of British cows as well as swab samples taken from humans.

Experts have ruled out any general threat to the safety of milk or dairy products, but they point to "circumstantial" evidence of the bacteria passing between cattle and the human population.

However, the findings, published in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases, have fuelled controversy over intensive farming methods and the way antibiotics are used to protect livestock.

The Soil Association called for a complete ban on routine use of the drugs, which is said to promote the development of drug-resistant bacteria. It also urged an end to the continuing economic pressure on farmers to cut costs and maintain low prices.

I was sent an article recently on autism that provided quite a bit of illumination. Here it is:

Though people with autism face many challenges because of their condition, they may have been capable hunter-gatherers in prehistoric times, according to a paper published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology in May.

The autism spectrum may represent not disease, but an ancient way of life for a minority of ancestral humans, said Jared Reser, a brain science researcher and doctoral candidate in the USC Psychology Department.

Some of the genes that contribute to autism may have been selected and maintained because they created beneficial behaviors in a solitary environment, amounting to an autism advantage, Reser said.

The "autism advantage," a relatively new perspective, contends that sometimes autism has compensating benefits, including increased abilities for spatial intelligence, concentration and memory. Although individuals with autism have trouble with social cognition, their other cognitive abilities are sometimes largely intact.

The paper looks at how autism's strengths may have played a role in evolution. Individuals on the autism spectrum would have had the mental tools to be self-sufficient foragers in environments marked by diminished social contact, Reser said.

The penchant for obsessive, repetitive activities would have been focused by hunger and thirst towards the learning and refinement of hunting and gathering skills.

Today autistic children are fed by their parents so hunger does not guide their interests and activities. Because they can obtain food free of effort, their interests are redirected toward nonsocial activities, such as stacking blocks, flipping light switches or collecting bottle tops, Reser said.

"Control oil, and you control nations. Control food, and you control the people" - Henry Kissinger.

In 2008, Canadian conservatives introduced a wildly unpopular Bill C-51 - the Food and Drugs Act - legislation regulating foods, therapeutic products and cosmetics. Enraged vendors of herbs, supplements, and other natural remedies fought back hard. Conservatives didn't proceed with the Bill, but instead introduced C-36, the Consumer Product Safety Act, in 2010. C-36 is essentially a revised version of C-51 with the supplements marked as exempt.

Two weeks after the United States passed its most restrictive legislation yet against health freedoms (the Food Safety Modernization Act, S.510), its Canadian counterpart, Bill C-36, was passed into law in December 2010 and will soon go into effect.

Bill C-36 purports to protect the consumer, but what it actually does is abrogate the Rule of Law and grant police forces powers of invasion, arrest and confiscation on the mere suspicion that 'unsafe' consumer products are being sold, without the involvement of the courts. 'Violators' are to be assumed guilty until proven innocent. Additional provisions bypass Parliamentary procedure, thereby giving authority by decree to foreign organizations. Such unconstitutional legislation is no stranger in the Senate. Previous bills C-51, C-52, and C-6 (Anti-Terrorism Act) were all squashed, never reaching final reading status. Bill C-6 effectively died during the prorogation of Parliament early last year and was reincarnated as bill C-36 in the summer of 2010.

The exemption of natural supplements appears to have satisfied the natural health industry as C-36 has slid through with little complaint. According to Shawn Buckley, president of the Natural Health Products Protection Association, C-36 could however be a Trojan horse of sorts. All that needs to happen now is a reintroduction of C-51 and we're right back where we started - health freedoms reduced to zero. From Canada's Preventdisease.com, the salient features of the Bill are as follows:

Parents of newborns should immunise themselves against whooping cough as reported cases of the highly contagious disease have doubled to more than 4000 in Victoria this year, health authorities say.

Health Minister David Davis yesterday announced that Victoria would extend a program of offering free vaccines to parents of newborns in an effort to provide a cocoon of protection around young babies to whom the disease posed the most danger.

A drug that farmers have given to chickens for decades is being pulled off the market after federal scientists found a potentially carcinogenic form of arsenic in the livers of animals treated with the substance, officials announced Wednesday.

Alpharma, a subsidiary of Pfizer, is voluntarily suspending sales of the drug 3-Nitro, which has been given to chickens since the 1940s to protect them from a parasitic disease and help them gain weight, the Food and Drug Administration announced.

The action comes after an FDA study of 100 broiler chickens found a form of arsenic known as inorganic arsenic, which is a known carcinogen, at increased levels in the livers of birds treated with the drug compared to those that were not, the agency said.

During a briefing for reporters, David Goldman of the Agriculture Department and Bernadette Dunham of the FDA stressed that the levels of arsenic detected in the chickens were very low and do not pose a health risk to consumers.

Since posting the piece on ketone bodies and their causing breathalyzer problems I've had enough comments and emails to make me realize that there are probably many people unsure of what ketones really are, where they come from and why. Let's take a look at the goals and priorities of our metabolic system to see what happens. Fear not, I'm going to try to keep the biochemistry to a minimum.

The primary goal of our metabolic system is to provide fuels in the amounts needed at the times needed to keep us alive and functioning. As long as we've got plenty of food, the metabolic systems busies itself with allocating it to the right places and storing what's left over. In a society such as ours, there is usually too much food so the metabolic system has to deal with it in amounts and configurations that it wasn't really designed to handle, leading to all kinds of problems. But that's a story for another day.

If you read any medical school biochemistry textbook, you'll find a section devoted to what happens metabolically during starvation. If you read these sections with a knowing eye, you'll realize that everything discussed as happening during starvation happens during carbohydrate restriction as well. There have been a few papers published recently showing the same thing: the metabolism of carb restriction = the metabolism of starvation. I would maintain, however, based on my study of the Paleolithic diet, that starvation and carb restriction are simply the polar ends of a continuum, and that carb restriction was the norm for most of our existence as upright walking beings on this planet, making the metabolism of what biochemistry textbook authors call starvation the 'normal' metabolism.

Before I get into a discussion of the absolutely phenomenal book you see pictured at the right, I've got a few disclosures to make. First, I'm not much of a believer in the notion of man-made global warming or climate change (as they now call it since temperatures have been constantly falling instead of rising). I'm a denier, in the pejorative term used by those who are believers.

Second, I'm not particularly pro-feminist. And I certainly don't hang around with any self-proclaimed radical feminists. I have a wife who is smarter than I am, who is more talented than I am, and who, pound for pound, is probably a better athlete than I am, and I'm not bad. (In my defense, I can read much, much faster than she, but, she has better comprehension.) I long ago gave up the idea (if I ever really considered it seriously) that men are superior to women in any ways other than brute strength. Having said that, however, I do believe that men are better suited to certain endeavors than woman and vice verse, but that doesn't mean either men or women should be denied the opportunity to give whatever it is they want to do a whirl just because of their sex. I guess I consider myself an egalitarian. But from what I've seen of radical feminists, I'm not sure that I would count myself a big fan.

Given the above, you wouldn't think I would enjoy and recommend a book written by a self-proclaimed radical feminist who is obviously a believer in global warming and the impending end of the earth as we know it. I wouldn't think so, either. Not my cup of tea even when it is sort of preaching to the choir.

But I can tell you that Lierre Keith's book is beyond fantastic. It is easily the best book I've read since Mistakes Were Made, maybe even better. Everyone should read this book, vegetarian and non-vegetarian alike. If you're a radical feminist, you should read this book; if you're a male chauvinist, you should read this book; if you have children, especially female children, you should read this book; if you are a young woman (or man) you should read this book; if you love animals, you should read this book; if you hate vegetarians, you should read this book; if you are contemplating the vegetarian way of life, you should definitely read this book; if you have a vegetarian friend or family member, you should read this book and so should your friend. As MD said after she read it, "everyone who eats should read this book."

Industry regulators have known for years that Roundup, the world's best-selling herbicide produced by U.S. company Monsanto, causes birth defects, according to a new report released Tuesday.

The report, "Roundup and birth defects: Is the public being kept in the dark?" found regulators knew as long ago as 1980 that glyphosate, the chemical on which Roundup is based, can cause birth defects in laboratory animals.

But despite such warnings, and although the European Commission has known that glyphosate causes malformations since at least 2002, the information was not made public.

Instead regulators misled the public about glyphosate's safety, according to the report, and as recently as last year, the German Federal Office for Consumer Protection and Food Safety, the German government body dealing with the glyphosate review, told the European Commission that there was no evidence glyphosate causes birth defects.

The CDC says 1 in 3 US adults will be diabetic by 2050. But the ADA - the supposed authority on diabetes - is providing seriously misguided information on how to manage and reverse the disease.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that there will be nearly 140 million diabetics in this country within the next 40 years. But the true number of diabetics will be much higher, because the conventional test for diabetes does not detect the disease until it's in its advanced stages, and most doctors don't perform more sensitive diagnostic tests necessary for early diagnosis. According to research done by Bill Faloon at the Life Extension Foundation, more than 75% of people over the age of 40 suffer some degree of pre-diabetes.

The good news is that diabetes and pre-diabetes can be controlled and even reversed, preventing kidney failure, limb amputation, and blindness. The risk of cardiovascular diseases could also be greatly reduced by better management of diabetes. And of course, the earlier it's caught, the easier it is to get it under control.

The standard American diet tends to create insulin resistance, leaving higher levels of blood sugar to circulate in the system for longer and longer periods of time, wreaking havoc in the body and leading to organ damage. (Here is a brief animation showing how insulin regulates the amount of blood sugar is allowed in to our cells.)

This is how a former laborer for Dole Food Company described the campaign to get the company to take care of poisoned banana workers:

"They're just waiting for all of us to die off. Because they know once that happens, they won't have to fight anymore and they will have gotten away with it. We refuse to let that happen."

As the confident but somehow fragile-seeming man spoke in the warm accent characteristic of Nicaraguan Spanish, a spark of passionate anger coursed through me... How dare a company treat its former employees so horribly!

Dole Food Company first poisoned the workers on its banana plantations outside of Managua, Nicaragua in the 1970's, and then refused to provide them with adequate medical coverage. Fully aware of the health problems the use of the pesticide dibromochloropropane (DBCP) causes in humans (particularly sterility in males, which led to the chemical being banned in the US) Dole continued to require its application on banana plantations without providing proper training or handling equipment for its employees.