Health & WellnessS


Health

Measles outbreak hits Queensland

Measles vaccine
© John Woudstra
Thirty-five people have now contracted measles in Queensland in one of the worst outbreaks of the disease in Queensland's recent history.

This year 30 of the 35 measles cases have emerged since August, with eight cases now confirmed at Woodford Correctional Centre.

Last year only four Queenslanders contracted measles.

Questions are being asked if the measles outbreak is linked to overcrowding in Queensland prisons.

The Department of Justice and Attorney General on Wednesday evening confirmed there were now 6432 prisoners in Queensland jails on November 6.

It is the first time in Queensland history prisoner numbers have been more than 6000.The extra 832 prisoners include hundreds "doubling up" in cells at several prisons in the Ipswich area.

Comment: Diseases usually flourish in conditions of overcrowding and poor nutrition. Coincidentally (or not), a measles fear-mongering campaign is also underway in the UK.


Syringe

Second major measles outbreak in four months hits UK - Doctors tell parents: 'Lobotomise your children with MMR vaccine now!'

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© GETTYMeasles can be fatal.
Thousands of children are in ­danger of catching measles because their parents still refuse to let them have proper vaccinations.

Health chiefs have warned Britain is on the brink of a second major ­epidemic just four months after the previous outbreak which claimed one life and more than 1,200 victims.

The virus is highly contagious. Experts say one child with measles sitting in a classroom for just an hour will pass it on to at least 70 per cent of other pupils who are not vaccinated.

Cases have once again soared in Swansea, the area which was hit earlier this year.


Comment: Measles can indeed be a fatal disease. This is usually the case in infants with already compromised immune systems due to different factors such as poor nutrition, hygiene etc.

On the other hand, the risks associated with the administration of measles vaccines are not to be taken lightly.

A quick search of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)2 reveals nearly 5,100 vaccine-related deaths were reported in the U.S., for example, between 1990 and August 2012. The vast majority of deaths - nearly 60 percent - occurred in children under the age of three. Just over 360 of the reported vaccine-associated deaths in the US have been related to any of the measles-containing vaccines.


Comment: Coincidentally (or not) there is also another measles fearmongering campaign underway in Australia at this time.

It's strange that UK doctors today blame measles outbreaks on people refusing to lobotomise their children with the MMR vaccine... and yet just two years ago, outbreaks were also happening despite record numbers of children being vaccinated.

See also:

US Media Blackout: 'MMR Vaccine Caused Autism' Rules Italian Court

Girls aged 15 and 11 forced to have MMR jabs by High Court judge after parents disagree over vaccine

Dr Wakefield demands retraction from BMJ after documents prove innocence from allegations of vaccine autism data fraud

Vaccine Dangers: Interview with researcher Dr. Andrew Wakefield


Syringe

Is mandatory RFID chipping actually being implemented in Wyoming?

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Yet another fatal blow to American privacy and liberties.

In Hanna, Wyoming, the Obamacare RFID chips are currently being "test ran."

Over the last two weeks there has been legislation that has passed that mandates anyone who is receiving government welfare or any sort of government assistance, to get the RFID implant. It doesn't stop with welfare recipients though. This fascist invasion extends to all Police officers, military and even garbage men will be required to have the RFID chip by the end of next month or face termination from their jobs.

Tammy Josephine Laurence, a single mother of three, who is currently accepting housing assistance, was mandated to get the chip..this is what she had to say about it.
"Well, they said I better do this, or they was gonna cut the welfare. I'm a full time single mother. I got three young kids that need me at all hours and ain't no man to help. I didn't have no choice..."

Comment: This blogpost provides no evidence or sources so for now we have to assume it's bogus.


Ambulance

The surprising truth about wheat, carbs, and sugar - Your brain's silent killers

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The new book "Grain Brain" explains how numerous neurological afflictions have a root cause of consuming too many carbs and too few healthy fats.
The following is an excerpt from the new book, GRAIN BRAIN: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar - Your Brain's Silent Killers by Dr. David Perlmutter (Little, Brown and Co., 2013).

Imagine being transported back to the Paleolithic era of early humans who lived in caves and roamed the savannas tens of thousands of years ago. Pretend, for a moment, that language is not a barrier and you can communicate easily. You have the opportunity to tell them what the future is like.

From a cross-legged perch on a dirt floor in front of a warm fire, you start by describing the wonders of our high-tech world, with its planes, trains, and automobiles, city skyscrapers, computers, televisions, smart phones, and the information highway that is the Internet. Humans have already traveled to the moon and back. At some point, the conversation moves to other lifestyle topics and what it's like to really live in the twenty-first century.

You dive into describing modern medicine with its stupendous array of drugs to treat problems and combat diseases and germs. Serious threats to survival are few and far between. Not many people need to worry about crouching tigers, famine, and pestilence. You explain what it's like to shop at grocery stores and supermarkets, a totally foreign concept to these individuals. Food is plentiful, and you mention things like cheeseburgers, French fries, soda, pizza, bagels, bread, cinnamon rolls, pancakes, waffles, scones, pasta, cake, chips, crackers, cereal, ice cream, and candy. You can eat fruit all year long and access virtually any kind of food at the touch of a button or short drive away. Water and juice come in bottles for transportability.

Comment: For more information, see:

Why Refined Grains Are Harmful
Your "healthy" diet could be quietly killing your brain: Q&A with David Perlmutter, author of Grain Brain
The grain that damages the human brain


Cheeseburger

Do carbs kill your brain?

Carbs
© ChrisKresser.com
Recently, I've been hearing from many patients who have read Dr. Perlmutter's new book, Grain Brain, and are now concerned about their carb intake. In his book, Dr. Perlmutter suggests that dietary carbohydrates cause high blood sugar, inflammation, and other effects that lead to a "toxic brain," which can then develop into neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, depression, and others. Based on this line of causality, he recommends that everyone consume a very low carb diet (<60g per day) in order to prevent neurological disease.

First of all, I'd like to point out that very low carb (VLC) and ketogenic diets can be effective therapeutic tools for treating many neurological disorders. I touched on this briefly a while back in my podcast with Emily Deans, and initial studies on low-carb diets and mental health have shown promise. (1, 2, 3, 4)

Because Dr. Perlmutter is a neurologist, it makes sense that he would be a proponent of low-carb diets for his patients based on these therapeutic effects.

However, recommending a low-carb diet as an intervention for sick people is very different from promoting it as a preventative measure for the entire population, which is what Dr. Perlmutter does in Grain Brain. His approach would be somewhat akin to recommending that everyone go on the Autoimmune Protocol to prevent autoimmune disease, which would be unnecessarily restrictive and unhelpful.


Comment: While Chris Kresser is a well-respected researcher in the Paleo world, he is showing his bias here. There is a great deal of evidence that a ketogenic diet is beneficial for many conditions, not just neurological and that yes, it is indeed beneficial in a preventative manner. For a comprehensive review of the literature, check out "The Ketogenic Diet: An Overview".


It's important to realize that just because a low-carb diet can help treat neurological disorders, doesn't mean the carbs caused the disorder in the first place. While I don't argue with the idea that refined and processed carbs like flour and sugar contribute to modern disease, there's no evidence to suggest that unrefined, whole-food carbohydrates do. In fact, there are three compelling reasons why this is not the case.


Comment: No evidence? I beg to differ. Seriously. Seriously.


Comment: It's a misnomer to label a ketogenic a "canned approach". There is a great deal of personalization that can be accomplished on a ketogenic diet, as will naturally happen with any diet. In fact, Kresser's Personal Paleo code could likely be adjusted to allow for a ketogenic approach.


Clock

Why late nights are bad for your immune system

Body Clock
© Image generated by Xiaofei Yu, Shipra Vaishnava and Yuhao WangTiming is everything. Infection-fighting TH17 cells (green) in the intestine cause disease when the body clock is disrupted.
Jet lag, shift work, and even late nights staring at your tablet or smartphone may be making you sick. That's because the body's internal clock is set for two 12-hour periods of light and darkness, and when this rhythm is thrown off, so is the immune system. One reason may be that the genes that set the body clock are intimately connected to certain immune cells, according to a new study.

The finding "was a happy accident," says Lora Hooper, an immunologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. She and her colleagues were studying NFIL3, a protein that guides the development of certain immune cells and turns on the activity of others. The gene for this protein is mutated in some human patients with inflammatory bowel disease, and mice lacking the gene for NFIL3, the team found, had more so-called TH17 cells in their intestines.

These cells are a type of immune cell known as a T cell. They get their name from a signal they produce, called interleukin 17, which tells other T cells to increase the immune response. In normal numbers, TH17 cells, which live in the intestines, help the body fight bacterial and fungal infections.

But when there are too many, the immune defense begins to cause illness rather than prevent it. Boosting NFIL3 levels in T cells growing in lab cultures resulted in fewer of them turning into TH17 cells, the researchers found, suggesting that the protein's job is to prevent T cells from going into that area of specialization. The absence of the protein, the team concluded, leads to runaway TH17 activity.

Smoking

Alberta government further endangers health of Canadians by making its smoking bans even stricter

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Canada joins the rest of the 'civilized world' in taking another step in the direction of devolution
The Alberta government introduced new legislation on Thursday which makes it illegal to smoke in a vehicle where anyone under the age of 18 is present.

The Tobacco Reduction Amendment Act or Bill 33 will also ban the use of waterpipes in public areas like restaurants. If passed, the government plans to give businesses 12 to 18 months to comply with the new legislation.

"We'll proclaim the bill in parts so we can give people an opportunity to transition," Health Minister Fred Horne said.

The government also plans to support Bill 206, a private members bill banning the sale of flavoured tobacco products.

Health experts believe that flavoured tobacco gets young people hooked on smoking. However, it isn't clear if menthol will be included under the ban.

"We're not taking a position at this point on menthol specifically what we're supporting is a bill that would allow us to target any flavoured product," Horne said.

Comment: They claim to be worried about the children, but what they don't understand is that asthma levels have gone up AS A RESULT OF the introduction of smoking bans:

The Scientific Scandal of Antismoking


Syringe

Sisters' HPV vaccine injury claim heads to federal court

Gardasil
© Wisconsin State JournalMadelyne Meylor, 20, left, and her sister, Olivia Meylor, 19, say their premature ovarian failure was caused by Gardasil, a vaccine against the human papillomavirus, or HPV, which can cause cervical cancer. Their claim will receive a hearing Thursday and Friday in federal court in Washington, D.C.
Two sisters from Mount Horeb say a cervical cancer vaccine shut down their ovaries and almost certainly left them unable to get pregnant, a claim scheduled for a hearing Thursday and Friday in federal court in Washington, D.C.

Madelyne Meylor, 20, and Olivia Meylor, 19, say their premature ovarian failure came from the vaccine against human papillomavirus, or HPV.

It's the first allegation that the vaccine caused the condition to reach a hearing through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, said their attorney, Mark Krueger, of Baraboo.

Health officials recommend three doses of the vaccine against HPV, a sexually transmitted virus, for girls and boys ages 11 and 12 to protect against cervical cancer, throat cancer, genital warts and other conditions. Two brands are available: Gardasil, approved in 2006, and Cervarix, approved in 2009.

The vaccine injury program has awarded payments for HPV vaccine injuries in 68 cases for a total of at least $5.9 million, according to the federal government and Judicial Watch, a nonpartisan foundation. The program has dismissed 63 claims and 81 claims are pending.

About 22,000 adverse reactions from the HPV vaccine were reported nationally from June 2006 to March 2013, a period in which 57 million doses were distributed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About 92 percent of the reactions, including the most common ones - fainting, dizziness and nausea - weren't serious, the CDC said.

Eye 1

A baby's gaze may signal autism, study finds

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© Kay Hinton/Emory UniversityIn the eye-tracking lab at Marcus Autism Center, researchers are tracking a baby’s eye movements on a video.
Scientists are reporting the earliest behavioral sign to date that a child is likely to develop autism: when and how long a baby looks at other people's eyes.

In a study published Wednesday, researchers using eye-tracking technology found that 3-year-olds diagnosed with autism looked less at people's eyes when they were babies than children who did not develop autism.

But contrary to what the researchers expected, the difference was not apparent at birth. It emerged when babies were 2 to 6 months old, and autism experts said that may suggest a window during which the progression toward autism can be halted or slowed.

The study, published online in the journal Nature, found that infants who later received a diagnosis of began spending less time looking at people's eyes between 2 and 6 months of age and paid less and less attention to eyes as they grew older. By contrast, babies who did not develop autism looked increasingly at people's eyes until about 9 months old, and then kept their attention to eyes fairly constant into toddlerhood.

Health

Gluten free healing

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© realfoods.co.uk
More and more people are turning toward a gluten free diet to help improve mysterious medical conditions. This new awareness of the gluten free lifestyle is definitely very positive. The problem however lies in the foods being sold as gluten free replacements. The gluten free food industry has blossomed into a multi-billion dollar business. With this, we see a rash of unhealthy, highly processed foods being used as replacement fillers.

Breaking The Cardinal Rule of Nutrition

It is in this that the cardinal rule of nutrition is being broken. What is the cardinal rule? Simple - one cannot achieve or maintain health eating unhealthy foods. Now all we have to do is define healthy. This is where a lot of confusion sets in. Healthy for one, many not be healthy for another. I have had patients react to blueberries and broccoli. So part of how we define healthy for an individual is by following the next three rules -
  1. Don't eat foods that you are allergic or intolerant to (get tested to avoid confusion)
  2. Don't eat it if it makes you feel bad.
  3. If you can't pronounce the terms on the ingredients label without a biochemistry degree or lots of practice, then it is not healthy.