The majority of doctors, nurses and front line health workers were not vaccinated against flu last winter, official figures have revealed.

Health officials said they were "very disappointed" with the figures, which mean that, despite drives to improve uptake, only 45.6 per cent of health care workers were vaccinated against seasonal influenza - only slightly more than the previous year.

Of more than one million health care workers involved in direct patient care, 466,600 were vaccinated. Forty five per cent of doctors were vaccinated and only 41 per cent of qualified nurses.

Professor Nick Phin, a flu expert at Public Health England (PHE), said: "We are very disappointed to see that fewer than half of frontline healthcare workers received protection against flu last winter, and that the number is only slightly more than the previous year.

"Few healthcare workers will need reminding of the potential impact of flu during winter. Apart from reducing their chances of a miserable illness, vaccination is the only way to protect those patients who are at high risk of the complications of flu. PHE strongly recommends that all frontline health and social care staff take up the offer of vaccination before next winter, and that they encourage their professional colleagues to do the same."

The American medical system is corrupt, ineffective and unnecessarily costly. These outcomes are due to state violence on behalf of the politically connected elite (namely private insurers, physicians, pharmaceutical and medical device companies). Artificial scarcity, price-gouging, misallocation of research funding and the suppression of alternative (non-patentable) therapies can be ameliorated by revoking state-conferred elite privilege and re-establishing cooperative, mutualized healthcare financing.

"Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now."

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 17, 157 - 61

Grocery Insurance

The essential problem with medical financing is described by the Grocery Insurance analogy - third party payment (nominally "private" insurers or the state) divorces price from cost, distributes responsibility, suppresses competition and puts upward pressure on prices: when your insurer only requires a small deductible for each trip to the supermarket, you will probably buy a lot more caviar, filet mignon and white truffle oil.

Likewise, the seller will raise prices. When someone else pays, the seller and the buyer do not have antagonistic interests; the seller wants to charge higher prices and the buyer does not care. Ultimately, costs are externalized. Insurance companies are unscrupulous in their efforts to contain costs, deny coverage and swindle customers (as a matter of necessity) - despite it all, costs are aggregated within the insurance fund and redistributed in the form of higher premiums for everyone. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and the insurance model is based on trying to eat yours.

The state, as disorganized as it is, has less incentive to ruthlessly minimize costs, but immense waste is written off as necessary humanitarian spending. The state suffers diseconomies of scale, bureaucratic inertia, lacks incentive to economize and by its nature the state is centralized and prone to corruption. Hospitals, drug companies and doctors take advantage of the inept Panopticon by price gouging, pushing drugs and executing unnecessary procedures.

Thus, the two-pronged system of unaccountability drives healthcare costs in one direction - up. Meanwhile, tax and premium-payers are gouged with nowhere to turn - to the point at which 17% of U.S. GDP and 23% of the Federal budget is spent on sick care. Nobody should blame sick people for the broken system; they operate within very narrow constraints, especially lack of access to healthy food, clean water, accurate medical information and they endure unsafe working conditions. Claiming that people are hedonistic free-riders is facile. Few will make healthy choices because of the specter of future medical costs; they do so to avoid contracting a disease. The problem is that there are few choices, period, and they're all unhealthy.

In the largest outbreak ever reported in the U.S. of blastomycosis, a fungal infection with flulike symptoms, 55 people in central Wisconsin became sick in 2010.

The fungus that causes blastomycosis is commonly found in soil, but exactly what triggered the spike in cases in Marathon County remains a mystery, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Wisconsin health officials.

Unlike a blastomycosis outbreak in a neighboring Wisconsin county in 2006, in which a pile of waste in a large yard was the likely source, the culprit in this episode remains elusive.

"We didn't find evidence for a single source in the environment that could explain all the cases," said Kaitlin Benedict, an epidemiologist with the CDC's Mycotic Diseases Branch, who was involved in the research.

"We think there were probably multiple 'hot spots' for the fungus in several different neighborhoods."

It's also unclear why infection rates among Asians, particularly those of Hmong descent, were about 12 times higher than non-Asians, the report said.

Some 45 percent of people affected by the outbreak were of Hmong ethnicity. This group is originally from Southeast Asia, but many of those who became sick in the outbreak had been living in Wisconsin for more than a decade, according to the report.

The large number of cases among the Hmong was one of the most surprising things about this outbreak, Benedict said.

"This is the first known report of Asians being disproportionately affected" by the fungal illness, she said, adding that previous studies have shown high blastomycosis rates among African-Americans in other U.S. states.

The report was published online (June 3) in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Beyond just being loaded with "artery-clogging saturated fat" and sodium, bacon has been long considered unhealthy due to the use of nitrates and nitrites in the curing process. Many conventional doctors, and well-meaning friends and relatives, will say you're basically asking for a heart attack or cancer by eating the food many Paleo enthusiasts lovingly refer to as "meat candy".

The belief that nitrates and nitrates cause serious health problems has been entrenched in popular consciousness and media. Watch this video clip to see Steven Colbert explain how the coming bacon shortage will prolong our lives thanks to reduced nitrates in our diets.

In fact, the study that originally connected nitrates with cancer risk and caused the scare in the first place has since been discredited after being subjected to a peer review. There have been major reviews of the scientific literature that found no link between nitrates or nitrites and human cancers, or even evidence to suggest that they may be carcinogenic. Further, recent research suggests that nitrates and nitrites may not only be harmless, they may be beneficial, especially for immunity and heart health. Confused yet? Let's explore this issue further.

The world of meat-eaters got a rude awakening earlier this year when it was found that meat passed off as beef in the U.K. was actually horse meat. But, if you thought meat in the U.S. was safe from secret ingredients, the bliss of your ignorance may soon be shattered. A recent analysis into several different fast food hamburgers found relatively little meat, and a whole host of other "stuff".

According to GreenMedInfo, the study was to determine what exactly Americans are eating when they consume their 5 billion hamburgers annually. The burgers, from 8 different fast food establishments, were analyzed by weight and then microscopically for tissue types.

Their analysis found that water constituted about half of the weight of the burgers, with water content ranging from 37.7% to 62.4%, with an average of 49%. Meat, what you'd expect to make up the majority of the burgers, was found to be as low as 2.1% in some cases, to the maximum of 14.8% in others.

Over a thousand pedestrians had to make a trip to the emergency room in 2010 for
injuries related to using their cell phone and walking.

According to a new nationwide study published in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention, more than 1,500 pedestrians were injured while walking due to cell phone distractions. This number has more than doubled since 2005, even though the total number of pedestrian injuries dropped during that time. The researchers from this study even believe that the number is actually higher than results show.

"If current trends continue, I wouldn't be surprised if the number of injuries to pedestrians caused by cell phones doubles again between 2010 and 2015," said Jack Nasar, co-author of the study and professor of city and regional planning at The Ohio State University. "The role of cell phones in distracted driving injuries and deaths gets a lot of attention and rightly so, but we need to also consider the danger cell phone use poses to pedestrians."

Nasar and colleagues found that people between the ages 16- and 25-years-old were most likely to be injured from distracted walking, and most were hurt while talking rather than texting. The team used data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) to make the finding. They examined data for seven years involving injuries related to cell phone use for pedestrians in public areas.

A new study from the Mayo Clinic on our 'Medication Nation' showed almost 70 percent of Americans are being prescribed at least one prescription drug.

According to the study, published in the clinic's own Mayo Clinic Proceedings journal, antibiotics, antidepressants, and opioid painkillers are the top three groups of prescribed drugs in the US.

Study co-author Jennifer St. Sauver said the study provides insight into the prescribing habits of doctors, which may or may not be indicative of health trends.

"Often when people talk about health conditions they're talking about chronic conditions such as heart disease or diabetes," said St. Sauver, an epidemiologist at the clinic. "However, the second most common prescription was for antidepressants - that suggests mental health is a huge issue and is something we should focus on. And the third most common drugs were opioids, which is a bit concerning considering their addicting nature."

In the study, the researchers used information from the Rochester Epidemiology Project, a health research collaboration that includes medical records from people living in Minnesota's Olmstead County. According to study authors, the study cohort represented almost 99 percent of those living in the county and the statistics from the project are comparable to those from other US populations.

"Anyone that says, 'Oh, we know that this is perfectly safe,' I say is either unbelievably stupid, or deliberately lying. The reality is, we don't know. The experiments simply haven't been done, and now we have become the guinea pigs." ~ David Suzuki, geneticist

Now that the mainstream media is catching on to the public sentiment against GMO food, or at least against unlabeled GMO food, to the tune of millions of Americans who made it a point to drag themselves out of their homes to protest Monsanto last month (as well as at least 40 additional countries), inevitably the indictment will be made: "the anti-GMO movement is "unscientific."" Is that really so?

What we do know is that the unintended consequences of the recombinant DNA process employed to create genetically engineering organisms are beyond the ability of present-day science to comprehend. This is largely due to the post-Human Genome Project revelation that the holy grail of molecular biology, the overly-simplified 'one gene > one trait' model, is absolutely false.

Since 2010, at least three ruptured pipelines have spilled oil into U.S. neighborhoods, forcing officials to decide quickly whether local residents would be harmed if they breathed the foul air. But because there are no clear federal guidelines saying if or when the public should be evacuated during an oil spill, health officials had to use a patchwork of scientific and regulatory data designed for other situations.

As a result, residents of the three communities received different levels of protection.

No houses were evacuated in Salt Lake City, Utah, where a ruptured pipeline leaked 33,000 gallons of medium grade crude oil before it was discovered on the morning of June 12, 2010. The oil ran down Red Butte Creek, past neighborhoods where windows were left open in the summer heat. The fumes, which are known to cause drowsiness, left some people so lethargic that they didn't wake up until after noon.

In Marshall, Mich. officials called for a voluntary evacuation after more than a million gallons of heavy Canadian crude spilled into the Kalamazoo River on July 25, 2010. But they agonized over the decision for four days before making that recommendation.

In Mayflower, Ark. authorities quickly evacuated 22 families after a broken pipeline leaked about 200,000 gallons of heavy crude on March 29, 2013. But people living in the same subdivision, just a few blocks away, were not asked to leave. Neither were the residents of the lakeside community where the oil eventually pooled and where the cleanup continues today.

After each of these spills, people complained of headaches, nausea and respiratory problems - short-term symptoms that health experts say are common after any chemical spill and usually disappear as the air clears.

The latest news out of Oregon is that two wheat farms there have filed suit against Monsanto, charging that their businesses have been harmed by the discovery in the state of a field of genetically modified wheat from seeds that Monsanto developed and supposedly discontinued almost a decade ago. At the same time, the Center for Food Safety has filed a similar suit. It is possible that one or both of the suits could achieve class action status.

So what do we know? Very little, as it happens.

We know that there is a field with wheat that has been grown from genetically engineered seeds. We know Monsanto says it is shocked that this has happened, while cynics (and I'm one of them) believe that Monsanto is shocked like Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains) was when he found out there was actually gambling going on at Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca.

I'm not going to litigate the whole GMO issue here. For one thing, it would take way too long and would be way too complicated. For another, I'm not nearly smart enough to understand it all, much less explain it.