The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a coalition of 25 healthcare organizations are joining forces to fight the overuse of antibiotics in people and livestock in a bid to curb the rise of drug-resistant "super bugs."

Without action, patients could soon face a time when antibiotics are powerless to treat many of the most common infections, said CDC experts and the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy, a public health research group.

"How we use and protect these precious drugs must fundamentally change," Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, associate director for healthcare-associated infection prevention programs at the CDC, said in a conference call with reporters on Tuesday.

Dr. David Relman, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, which is part of the effort, said doctors are already seeing patients with bacterial infections resistant to "every antibiotic we have left."

"It will take all of us - consumers, health care providers, researchers, policymakers, industry, and others - to tackle this problem," he said.

As the defeat of Prop 37 is mourned in California and throughout the food movement, students are actually enacting it, continuing the hard work for food chain transparency that they started well before the Prop 37 battle entered the mainstream. For 4 years, from coast to coast, students have created, piloted, and refined the Real Food Calculator, the most meticulous assessment tool for food procurement available.

The qualifications of 'real food' are stringent and precise, utilizing strong third-party certifications and going the extra step in verifying source agricultural and labor practices. GMOs are outright prohibited from counting under any of the Calculator's four categories: community-based, fair, humane, and ecologically-sound. The Calculator's criteria actually enact Prop 37 on an institutional basis - with it, students are literally taking Prop 37 into their own hands.

The Real Food Calculator evaluates each food item purchased along with its source, producing a percentage indicating the proportion of the school's food budget dedicated to real food. Most importantly, the Calculator is conducted by students - the consumers.

Does AARP really speak for the elderly? Or the AMA for doctors?

In Washington, AARP (the American Association of Retired Persons) is said to represent the interests of retirees in arguments about medicine. Their endorsement of President Obama's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was mentioned reverently during the October 3rd presidential debate. Similarly, the AMA (American Medical Association) is said to represent the interests of doctors.

But do these groups actually represent anyone other than their members? Is their support basically for sale?

Consider AARP. It gets only about 20% of its revenue from its members. Over 50% comes from its medical insurance business where it has the largest share of "Medigap" policies, the policies that fill in the holes in traditional Medicare. When the administration sought AARP's support for the Affordable Care Act, it promised to exempt Medigap policies from the requirement that insurers could not turn away people with preexisting conditions. Not only that, it also promised to exempt Medigap policies from rate review. (Ordinarily, health insurance companies must tell consumers when they want to increase insurance rates for individual or small group policies by an average of 10% or more.) In the end, Medigap was exempted from most of the law.

It turns out antibacterial soaps aren't so "clean" after all. A common chemical in antibacterial products, triclosan - which can be found soaps, toothpastes and mouthwashes - was found to impair muscle function in lab and animal tests.

Originally, the chemical, developed in the 1960s, was used in hospitals to prevent bacterial infections. Since then, it's been used in countless household products, and several studies - mostly in animals - have hinted that the effects of triclosan may not be entirely beneficial.

According to a recent Smithsonian article:

Studies have shown that the chemical can disrupt the endocrine systems of several different animals, binding to receptor sites in the body, which prevents the thyroid hormone from functioning normally. Additionally, triclosan penetrates the skin and enters the bloodstream more easily than previously thought, and has turned up everywhere from aquatic environments to human breast milk in troubling quantities.

A Not-So-Hidden Health Threat

There is an already pervasive and rapidly expanding force of disease that no doubt affects you on a daily basis. It is a potentially harmful force that many people, quite frankly, cannot resist and may actively seek exposure to like an unknowing addict. I am talking about electronic media which includes the news media, television, social media, email, and the internet in general. Many will, of course, immediately argue that electronic media is not all harmful and point to its many efficiently informative and individually empowering aspects.

While this is most certainly true, discussions regarding the benefits of electronic media are highly prevalent. Most individuals need little persuasion to agree that this tantalizing technology is generally positive or even some type of utopian catalyst. In contrast, I believe the harmful power of this technology is severely overlooked or denied, leading to a dangerously positive and careless attitude toward its use. The negative impacts of electronic media are extremely broad (just as broad as its positive impacts), including significant environmental, social, political, and economic effects. To keep this essay brief, however, I'll focus mainly on individual health effects.

Who Controls You?

Before you decide that you, unlike many others, have this issue under control and move on to consume electronic media without further concern, let me tell you that you are NOT in control. Nothing less than your personal freedom is at stake here, and you might be surprised just how much that freedom has been eroded without your awareness. I'm drawing from the field of affect theory here, a cultural studies concept that examines how individuals and populations are "affected" by various social and cultural forces to behave, believe, and consume in specific ways. Many researchers and authors have written extensively on this subject yet I'll keep my discussion here brief. For those wishing to examine the concept in more detail, the Affect Theory Reader is a good start for a more academic discussion[1].

The concept is well developed, allowing industry, government, marketers, and the news media to make constant and effective use of manipulative psychological techniques intended to affect your behavior, thoughts, and material consumption. We commonly call this marketing, but before it was called marketing, it was called the "engineering of consent." Marketing is much more than simply informing the public. It is achieving uniformed, irrational, and emotional consent. You might be surprised to learn that many modern marketing techniques were largely pioneered by Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, who drew upon Freudian psychological theory (among other systems) to manipulate the masses.

Thousands of people struck down by norovirus across the UK

Rate is up by a quarter on last year and higher than any point in past five years

The colder than average weather is believed to be partly to blame for the rise

The winter vomiting bug has arrived early, with rates already up a quarter compared with last year.

Health experts have confirmed that cases of norovirus are now higher in this period that at any comparable time in the last five years.

Although patients succumb to the illness all year round, rates usually peak in the winter between December and February.

But the Health Protection Agency says the seasonal rise has come a month early this year, with 1,207 confirmed cases since July.

This is up 27 per cent compared with the same period last year and is the highest level in five years.

A new study demonstrates the dynamic role cilia play in guiding the migration of neurons in the embryonic brain. Cilia are tiny hair-like structures on the surfaces of cells, but here they are acting more like radio antennae.

In developing mouse embryos, researchers were able to see cilia extending and retracting as neurons migrate. The cilia appear to be receiving signals needed for neurons to find their places.

Genetic mutations that cause the neurodevelopmental disorder Joubert syndrome interfere with these migratory functions of cilia, the researchers show. The finding suggests that problems with neuron migration may explain some aspects of Joubert syndrome patients' symptoms.

The results were published in the journal Developmental Cell.

"The most surprising thing was how dynamic the cilia are," says Tamara Caspary, PhD, assistant professor of human genetics at Emory University School of Medicine. "As interneurons migrate into the developing cerebral cortex, they move in steps. When they pause, we could see the cilia extending, as if the interneurons are trying to figure out where to go next."

A new Northwestern University study shows the power of language in infants' ability to understand the intentions of others.

As the babies watched intently, an experimenter produced an unusual behavior--she used her forehead to turn on a light. But how did babies interpret this behavior? Did they see it as an intentional act, as something worthy of imitating? Or did they see it as a fluke? To answer this question, the experimenter gave 14-month-old infants an opportunity to play with the light themselves.

The results, based on two experiments, show that introducing a novel word for the impending novel event had a powerful effect on the infants' tendency to imitate the behavior. Infants were more likely to imitate behavior, however unconventional, if it had been named, than if it remained unnamed, the study shows.

When the experimenter announced her unusual behavior ("I'm going to blick the light"), infants imitated her. But when she did not provide a name, they did not follow suit.

Sciatic pain, or sciatica, occurs off and on with many people. Sometimes it's mistaken for lower back pain or leg cramps. When it does, the tendency is to stay in bed and gulp down some ibuprofen or other OTC (over the counter) pharmaceutical.

But sciatica is a symptom of another problem that is pinching or creating pressure on the sciatic nerve. It's not a diagnosed condition itself. The sciatic nerve is the largest single nerve in the human body. It runs down each leg from the lower spine all the way to the feet, providing movement, feeling, and strength to either leg.

Sciatica symptoms can include sharp painful burning sensations or cramping. Sometimes there can be tingling sensations and numbness in different areas of the buttock, leg or foot. The wording is singular because usually sciatica occurs on one side or the other, not in both legs simultaneously.

Did you know that while the United States makes up only five percent of the world's population, we consume over 50 percent of all the world's pharmaceutical drugs?

This sobering statistic and much more is revealed in Jeff Hays' documentary film, Doctored.

The primary focus of the film is on the chiropractic profession and its long-standing struggle to be recognized as authentic health professionals. In the 1980's, chiropractors were still by and large viewed as quacks whose treatments were unscientific and potentially dangerous. Worse yet, chiropractors were also derided as 'cultists' at a time when Charles Manson and his cult followers wrought terror in California, and Jim Jones persuaded his followers to drink the Kool-Aid spiked with deadly poison.

Yes, chiropractors were tossed in with this charming lot!

However, this bizarre consensus reality in which chiropractors were deemed "unscientific cultists" on par with some of the most heinous criminals in US history was, as the evidence shows, doctored by the medical industry at the behest of Big Pharma. As stated in the beginning of the film:

"There's been a deliberate campaign to label anybody who doesn't sell or distribute drugs, surgery or radiation as a quack."