Whether you are aware of it or not, your food, air and water are the battle ground upon which a titanic struggle between the multinational biotech corporations Monsanto and Dow AgroScience is now playing out. As a result, your health and environment (and that of all future generations) are at risk of being irreparably harmed.

Dow AgroSciences (a subsidiary of Dow Chemicals) recently announced their development of genetically-engineered corn, soybean, and cotton plants metabolically resistant to the herbicide 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), a major ingredient in Agent Orange. What this means for our future is that, if approved for use, vast regions of our country will soon be sprayed with a chemical that has been linked to over 400,000 birth defects in Vietnam.

How did we end up here?

History is repeating itself before our eyes. Dow Chemicals and Monsanto, joined at the karmic hip, both manufactured Agent Orange for use in Vietnam, and both are notorious for minimizing the adverse health effects associated with exposure to the agent. Neither corporation learned from its mistakes, largely because the US government underwrote the risk of using the chemical, and therefore shielded them from the bulk of the legal and financial fallout. But this lack of culpability has now set up the conditions for a reliving of the horrors of systemic herbicide exposure, only this time on American soil, with Monsanto choosing glyphosate (also a birth-defect causing chemical), and Dow sticking with its old time favorite.

More Americans now die from prescription pills than car accidents. The nation's response to the trend will define an era, but corporate influence threatens reform.

For the first time in nearly a century, automobile accidents are no longer the nation's leading cause of accidental deaths, according to a major report released Tuesday by the National Center for Health Statistics. The new number one killer is drugs - not smack, crystal meth or any other stepped-on menace sold in urban alleyways or trailer parks, but bright, shiny pills prescribed by doctors, approved by the government, manufactured by pharmaceutical companies and sold to the consumer as "medicine." Yet of the billions of legit pills Americans pop every year for medical conditions serious and otherwise, the vast majority of lives are claimed by only a select few classes - painkillers, sedatives and stimulants - that all share a common characteristic: they promote abuse, dependence and addiction.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg of the prescription drug abuse problem," says Dr. Margaret Warner, the federal report's lead author. "The take-home here is, this should be a wake-up call." Some 41,000 Americans died from what the report refers to as "poisonings" in 2008, compared with 38,000 traffic deaths. That tally marks a 90 percent increase in poisonings and a 15 percent decrease in car accidents since 1999.

Tyson recalls 41,000 pounds of ground beef; Hannaford nearly all

Per the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, on Dec. 20, Tyson Meats, Inc. recalled 41,000 pounds of its ground beef from 16 states, suspecting an E. coli O157:H7 contamination. Last week, Hannaford Stores, a Scarborough, Maine-based grocery chain, recalled an unspecified amount of fresh ground beef products that may be contaminated with a multidrug resistant strain of Salmonella Typhimurium.

The Tyson products may be packaged under different brand names, per FSIS. Full list here [PDF]. Tyson's products subject to recall have a "BEST BEFORE OR FREEZE BY" date of "11/13/11″ and "EST. 245C" on the box label. The products were shipped to institutions and distributors in Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Hannaford's various ground beef packages bear sell-by or freeze-by dates of Dec. 17, 2011 or earlier and were sold at Hannaford stores throughout Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont.

Does vitamin E naturally help protect against the effects of aging, or does it lead to liver damage and complications associated with lung cancer? Well, it depends on what the study authors want to tell you. The synthetic version of vitamin E is a petrochemically derived analogue of natural vitamin E that is capable of disrupting the endocrine system, whereas the natural form of vitamin E is effective against aging, oxidative stress, and hundreds of other conditions. The truth of the matter is that many - if not most - of vitamin studies are completely worthless, as they use isolated synthetic vitamins or low quality multivitamin supplements loaded with toxic fillers and synthetic ingredients.

Study authors could use high quality food-based multivitamins without any fillers or harmful ingredients, but they generally do not. Whether this is due to nutritional ignorance regarding the true nature of the pharmaceutical company-dominated supplement industry (think highly-popular Centrum, which we will soon discuss) or the fact that these researchers truly think that essential nutrients are damaging to your health, the fact of the matter is that very few studies utilize the right form of vitamins.

Dr. Terry Wahls learned how to properly fuel her body. Using the lessons she learned at the subcellular level, she used diet to cure her MS and get out of her wheelchair.

Impact Seen As Roughly Comparable to Radiation-Related Deaths After Chernobyl; Infants Are Hardest Hit, With Continuing Research Showing Even Higher Possible Death Count.

Washington, D.C. - An estimated 14,000 excess deaths in the United States are linked to the radioactive fallout from the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan, according to a major new article in the December 2011 edition of the International Journal of Health Services. This is the first peer-reviewed study published in a medical journal documenting the health hazards of Fukushima.

Authors Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman note that their estimate of 14,000 excess U.S. deaths in the 14 weeks after the Fukushima meltdowns is comparable to the 16,500 excess deaths in the 17 weeks after the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. The rise in reported deaths after Fukushima was largest among U.S. infants under age one. The 2010-2011 increase for infant deaths in the spring was 1.8 percent, compared to a decrease of 8.37 percent in the preceding 14 weeks.

The IJHS article will be published Tuesday and will be available online as of 11 a.m. EST here.

Much attention has been given to the gap in performance between boys and girls in mathematics skills. In a new study published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Jonathan Kane, a professor of mathematical and computer science at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, and Janet Mertz, a professor of oncology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, examine this gender gap and test several popular explanations. Their cross-cultural analysis seems to rule out several causal candidates, including coeducational schools, low standards of living, and innate variability among boys -- a proposal made famous in a 2005 speech by Lawrence H. Summers, who was Harvard University's president at the time. "We have pretty clear data debunking the greater male variability hypothesis," Mertz says.

What, then, is the cause of the gender gap? Like the gap itself, the cause varies, the authors conclude. Mertz and Kane, who are married, don't rule out the existence of very small biological difference, but, by comparing test scores across cultures, they indict local social factors as the likely primary culprit. Gender gaps vary from place to place, showing that cultural factors swamp biological ones.

For most of the twentieth century mastectomy was the first line treatment for Ductal Carcinoma In Situ (DCIS), and younger patients were more likely to undergo the procedure. Even after lumpectomy and radiotherapy were shown to be at least as effective for invasive cancer as mastectomy, still in 2002, 26% of DCIS patients were still receiving mastectomy.¹

The most common scenario today following diagnosis of DCIS is for the oncologist to recommend lumpectomy, followed by radiation and hormone suppressive therapies such as Arimidex and Tamoxifen. The problem here is that women are not being educated about the nature of DCIS or the concept of "non-progressive" breast cancers. There is still the black and white perception out there that you either have cancer, or do not have cancer. In a poll on DCIS awareness published in 2000, 94% of women studied doubted even the possibility of non-progressive breast cancers.² In other words, these women had no understanding of the nature of DCIS. And why would they? Major authorities frame DCIS as "pre-cancerous," implying its inevitable transformation into cancer. When the standard of care for DCIS is to suggest the same types of treatment used to treat invasive cancer, very few women are provided with the information needed to make an informed decision.

Early detection through x-ray mammography has been the clarion call of Breast Cancer Awareness campaigns for a quarter of a century now. However, very little progress has been made in making the public aware about the crucial differences between non-malignant lesions/tumors and invasive or non-invasive cancers detected through this technology. When all forms of breast pathology are looked at in the aggregate, irrespective of their relative risk for harm, disease of the breast takes on the appearance of a monolithic entity that you either have, or don't have; they call it breast cancer.

The concept of a breast cancer that has no symptoms, which can not be diagnosed through manual palpation of the breast and does not become invasive in the vast majority of cases, might sound unbelievable to most women. However, there does exist a rather mysterious clinical anomaly known as Ductal Carcinoma In Situ (DCIS), which is, in fact, one of the most commonly diagnosed and unnecessarily treated forms of "breast cancer" today.

What women fail to understand - because their physicians do not know better or have not taken care to explain to them - is that they have a choice when diagnosed with DCIS. Rather than succumb to aggressive treatment with surgery, radiation and chemo-drugs, women can choose watchful waiting. Better yet, a radical lifestyle change can be focused on eliminating exposure to chemicals and radiation, as well as improved exercise and nutrition. This choice is not being made in most cases because the medical community is not informing their patients that there is such.

Every once in a while a study pops up on the National Library of Medicine's bibliographic database known as MEDLINE that not only confirms the therapeutic relevance of natural substances in cancer treatment, but blows the conventional approach out of the water.

Published in 2007 in the journal Planta Medica, researchers found that an enzyme extracted from pineapple stems known as bromelain was superior to the chemo-agent 5-fluorauracil in treating cancer in the animal model. The researchers stated:

"This antitumoral effect [bromelain] was superior to that of 5-FU [5-fluorouracil], whose survival index was approximately 263 %, relative to the untreated control." [view entire study]

What is so remarkable about this research is that 5-FU has been used as a cancer treatment for nearly 40 years, and has been relatively unsuccessful due to its less than perfect selectivity at killing cancer, often killing and/or irreversibly damaging healthy cells and tissue, as well.

As a highly toxic, fluoride-bound form of the nucleic acid uracil, a normal component of RNA, the drug is supposed to work by tricking more rapidly dividing cells -- which include both cancer and healthy intestinal, hair follicle, and immune cells -- into taking it up, thereby inhibiting (read: poisoning) RNA replication enzymes and RNA synthesis.

The chief executive of a French company whose questionable breast implants are under international scrutiny is on the Interpol police agency's most-wanted list.

Interpol's website says Jean-Claude Mas is wanted by Costa Rican authorities for crimes involving "life and health." It bears a photo of the 72-year-old Mas but does not elaborate on his alleged crimes or link to Costa Rica.

The international police agency issued a so-called red notice for Mas, who ran Poly Implant Prothese. Officials at France-based Interpol could not be reached for comment late Friday on the notice.

The company is in liquidation. France offered Friday to pay for 30,000 women to have their PIP implants removed because of the risk the products could rupture and leak industrial-grade silicone.