"Dental Mercury's Toxic Journey Into The Environment" was narrated by Robert Lamarck and produced as a collaborative effort between The International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, the website Mercury Exposure and the film You Put What In My Mouth? a documentary about the devastating effects of dental mercury on patients, staff and the environment. Original music score composed by Joshua Myers

The IAOMT has sent a distinguished panel of experts to attend the International Negotiating Committee (INC5) meeting being held in Geneva by the United Nations Environmental Programme. The INC5 is writing a Globally Binding Treaty that will eliminate the use and trade of mercury and mercury containing products. Dental Mercury accounts for 10% of the annual global emissions and therefore is considered a significant contributor. The IAOMT group of experts will represent our position that mercury amalgam is a risk to the environment, dental workers and the general public, and whose use should be discontinued as there are many suitable alternatives available.

A new study published this month (April 2014) compared two diets with overweight diabetic people.
One group ate the standard recommended diet by the American Diabetes Association, which was a low-fat, high carbohydrate, restricted calorie diet, as per the USDA dietary guidelines for a "healthy" diet. This group was assigned a "registered dietician with several years of diabetes education experience." The group was encouraged to eat a diet that was 45-50% carbohydrates, while restricting calories and fats. As per the study: "the diet includes high-fiber foods (such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and legumes), low-fat dairy products, fresh fish, and foods low in saturated fat."

The other group, almost in direct contrast to the ADA diet, was encouraged to eat a a very low carbohydrate, high fat, non calorie-restricted ketogenic diet. Their goal was to reach a state of "ketosis," defined as a blood beta-hydroxybutyrate level between 0.5 and 3 mM, as measured twice a week at home using blood ketone test strips.

So what results did this study find comparing these two contrasting diets?

The bacterium that causes whooping cough, Bordetella pertussis, has changed in Australia -- most likely in response to the vaccine used to prevent the disease -- with a possible reduced effectiveness of the vaccine as a result, a new study shows.
A UNSW-led team of researchers analyzed strains of Bordetella pertussis from across Australia and found that many strains no longer produce a key surface protein called pertactin.

The latest medical acronym to fear is MERS: Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. The virus has killed 83 people in the Arabian Gulf since first emerging in 2012 and now looks as if it could pose a global threat.

This week, the number of new cases rose at a rate that causes concern, the World Health Organization said in a .

There have been only about 300 cases detected worldwide in the past two years. But Saudi Arabia has reported more than 50 in just four days. Cases also turned up in Greece, the Philippines, Malaysia and Jordan. All of the patients were exposed to the virus in the Gulf.

There's no treatment or vaccine for , which kills about 30 percent of those who are infected.

The disease hits like a severe flu. Symptoms include fever, coughing and shortness of breath. Most people who die have another medical condition. It's also possible for someone to become infected but show no symptoms.

"We barely know what we are doing when it comes to probiotic supplementation," I admitted to my patient, "but we do know that we are on the verge of the most sophisticated understanding of human health and disease since the dawn of medicine, and it comes down to our symbiotic relationship to our body's microbes."

The abuses we have brought upon our gut flora are largely obvious - we have been eating loads of sugar, processed vegetable oils, pesticides, genetically modified foods, and living in a bath of and industrial chemicals.

But what should our microbiome look like?

It turns out that the answer to this question is unlikely to derive from a randomized placebo controlled trial of the latest probiotic on the market. Because we can only guess what the Paleolithic diet actually looked like, the most valuable nutrition data, to my mind, comes from naturalistic surveys such as the invaluable contributions of Weston A. Price who traveled the world assessing the dietary patterns of those traditional societies who were free from the scourge of modern chronic diseases, seemingly brought about by the adoption of Western sweetened, canned, and processed foods. In this way, he was able to identify a through line connecting diverse dietary practices, which included consumption of animal foods, natural fats, and associated minerals and fat-soluble vitamins. These traditional cultures, however, are coming more and more under the influence of industrialized food products and modern medical "care".



© environmentandsociety.org

"A Who's Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones - we had better know something about their nature and their power." - Rachel Carson, Silent Spring 1962

There is a reason why our springs still have bald eagles, screeching falcons and wave-skimming pelicans on this Earth Day. The reason is Rachel Carson, who died 50 years ago this month - just two years after her book Silent Spring alerted the world to how pesticides like DDT had infiltrated and were poisoning the very building blocks of life.

Today, DDT is banned in the U.S. and many of the creatures it had nearly extinguished have rebounded, but the plague of pesticides Carson warned about continues to infiltrate our lands, our air, our water, and many of Earth's creatures, among them ourselves. It's a plague hard to fight and hard to protect ourselves against - in part because our regulatory system treats the chemicals as if they had rights; safe until proven guilty.

If you're a regular Mark's Daily Apple reader, you probably have at least a generally accurate if somewhat vague notion of the important functions performed by our gut bacteria. They're a "big part" of our immune systems. They "improve digestion" and "eat the fibers and resistant starches" that our host enzymes cannot digest. Yeah, gut bacteria are hot right now. Everyone's talking about them. And, since our host cells are famously outnumbered by our gut bacteria, 10 to 1, we need to be apprised of all that they do.

We don't know everything yet - and we probably never will - but here are some of the most interesting and unexpected functions of our gut bacteria:

They learn from each other.

Bacteria are simple, straightforward organisms. They don't have all the hangups that we mammals do, all the middle men and physiological bureaucracy between "us" and outside information. Bacteria can directly exchange genetic material - defense mechanisms, enzymatic functions, and other characteristics - from other bacteria they come into contact with in the gut. They're very quick learners operating on an entirely different time scale.

Researchers have made some surprising findings.

Microbes are in the news these days. Specifically, the microbes that live in and on the human body, making up our "microbiome." Michael Pollan made a splash with a column titled "Some of My Best Friends are Germs" about a year ago, and now Martin Blaser, director of the Human Microbiome Project at NYU, has published a book called Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues.

In a short period of time, bacteria, fungi and other microbes have gone from enemy to friend in the public consciousness.

But in addition to the many studies finding out about the numbers and diversity of the microbes with whom we share our bodies and their roles in our nutrition and immune function, some researchers have made some surprising findings: the bugs in your gut might actually impact your emotions.

Could the Black Death Actually Have Been an Ebola-like Virus?
Things seem to be looking up for rats. After more than 500 years, rats may be off the hook for causing the Black Death, the horrible plague that claimed up to 60% of the European population. In virtually every textbook the Bubonic Plague, which is spread by flea-ridden rats, is named as the culprit behind the chaos. But mounting evidence suggests that an Ebola-like virus was the actual cause of the Black Death and the sporadic outbreaks that occurred in the following 300 years.

At the forefront of this theory are two researchers from the University of Liverpool, Dr. Christopher Duncan and Dr. Susan Scott. Let's look at six small pieces of this puzzle.

"Eppur si muove" - And yet it moves - were the words Italian mathematician and physicist Galileo Galilei allegedly uttered after being sentenced by the Inquisition for heresy. Galileo's heresy was his opinion that the Sun lies motionless, that the Earth is not at the centre of universe, and that it moves. Unlike those around him who were quite happy to blindly follow dogma concerning the universal order, Galileo observed the world around him, measured different parameters and finally, after he analysed enough collected data, worked out that the Earth is moving around the Sun. Galileo was certainly luckier then Giordano Bruno, another Italian mathematician, who was burned at the stake in 1600 for advocating the same idea.

People who attack homeopathy these days do so with the same fervor as the Inquisitors. With their small, medieval minds, they repeat the same nonsense and misconceptions about homeopathy, over and over, without making the slightest effort to conduct their own research or empirical quest. I have to admit that my first reaction to homeopathy was of a similar myopic nature, my 'conventional scientific mind' immediately dismissed it as nonsense, and I had no desire to study the subject further.

Enter Spark, the appropriately named dog

But then one day Spark visited my practice and everything changed.

It took me a few moments to realize that Spark was not some strange, hairless breed I had never encountered before, but rather a West Highland Terrier. He had only a few tufts of hair remaining, mostly on his head, chest and the tip of his tail. The rest of his skin was completely bald, blackish and covered with oozing sores and scabs. I was the fourth veterinarian to see Spark. After learning his medical history and previous treatments, it became obvious that there weren't many options left to try. He had already been treated with several anti-parasitic medicines, tested for different allergies and was eating nothing but hypoallergenic dry-foods. None of this had worked. He'd also been on several types of antibiotics and steroids, as well as a course of fungicidal medicine, all to no positive effect whatsoever. In fact his health kept deteriorating.