Health & WellnessS


Top Secret

New Underhanded Tactics from Pharma: Is It Greed, or an Act of Desperation?


Alliance for Natural Health
Tue, 13 Dec 2011 19:35 UTC
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© Alliance for Natural Health
It wasn't enough that they raised the price of this critical drug from $10 to $1,500 per dose. Now they are going after pharmacists and hitting pregnant low-income women the hardest.

KV Pharmaceutical Company is trying a new approach to corner the market for their drug Makena, which helps prevent premature births. They are "raising concerns" about the quality of 17P (17-Hydroxyprogesterone), a hormone that forms the active ingredient in the drug that has been used for many years by compounding pharmacies to make a low-cost version of the pregnancy medicine. The FDA has now agreed to investigate.

You may recall from our earlier article that KV took a compounded drug costing $10 per dose, patented 17P, got it approved by the FDA under the Orphan Drug Act, and immediately raised the price to $1,500/dose (or as much as $30,000 over the course of a pregnancy). When the media picked up this story, KV Pharmaceutical eventually lowered its price from $1,500 to $690 per dose - but that's still an absurd price when the compounded version only costs $10.
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Health

Stillbirth Mysteries Revealed in New Studies

Rachael Rettner
MyHealthNewsDaily
Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:55 UTC
Pregnant Woman
© MyHealthNewsDaily

Half of all stillbirths result from pregnancy complications, such as a woman going into labor too soon, or abnormalities of the placenta, a new analysis of the causes of stillbirths finds.

On the other hand, a woman's characteristics at the start of her pregnancy, such as her weight, blood sugar levels and smoking habits, did not account for much of her stillbirth risk.

The extent of the risk also differed by ethnic group, the researchers said.

"Stillbirth is more common than people realize, affecting one out of every 160 pregnancies in the United States," said study researcher Dr. Robert Silver, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah School of Medicine.

Still more work is needed to understand why stillbirths happen, the researchers said. More autopsies as well as additional studies of early pregnancy may help pin down its causes, the researchers said.
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Attention

The Hidden Epidemic Destroying Your Gut Flora

Dr. Mercola
Mercola.com
Sat, 10 Dec 2011 17:05 UTC

Dr. Don Huber is an expert in an area of science that relates to the toxicity of genetically engineered (GE) foods.

(Alternative terms for GE foods include genetically modified (GM), or "GMO" for genetically modified organism.)

His specific areas of training include soil-borne diseases, microbial ecology, and host-parasite relationships.

Dr. Huber also taught plant pathology, soil microbiology, and micro-ecological interactions as they relate to plant disease as a staff Professor at Purdue University for 35 years.
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Beaker

Transgenic Cotton Offers No Advantage

Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Prof. Peter Saunders
Institute of Science in Society
Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:08 UTC
transgenic cotton monsanto
© Unknown
The use of transgenic cotton does not provide increased returns to the farmer. This is the conclusion of a 4-year study reported in Agronomy Journal by researchers at the University of Georgia and the US Department of Agriculture1.

It is a pity that the researchers have not included organically managed cotton in their study, because it is clearly a much better option. Persistent and massive crop failures of transgenic cotton have contributed substantially to the worsening epidemic of suicides among farmers in India, where a timely return to organic cotton growing is saving lives, and turning despair into hope2-4 (Organic Cotton Beats Bt Cotton in India, SiS 27; Message from Andra Predesh:Return to organic cotton & avoid the Bt cotton trap, SiS 29; Stem Farmers' Suicides with Organic Farming, SiS 32).
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Newspaper

Flashback GM food banned in Monsanto canteen


Independent.co.uk
Wed, 22 Dec 1999 16:22 UTC
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© crisisboom.com
Monsanto, the biggest promoter of genetically modified food, was hoist with its own petar when it was disclosed that it has a staff canteen in which GM produce is banned.

The firm running the canteen at Monsanto's pharmaceuticals factory at High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, serves only GM-free meals, Friends of the Earth said. In a notice in the canteen, Sutcliffe Catering, owned by the Granada Group, said it had taken the decision "to remove, as far as practicable, GM soya and maize from all food products served in our restaurant. We have taken the above steps to ensure that you, the customer, can feel confident in the food we serve."
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Bandaid

Under The Foreign Knife

Isaac Davison
New Zealand Herald
Sat, 30 Jul 2011 14:55 UTC
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© oneyearintexas.com
Expensive dental and cosmetic surgery here is creating a burgeoning industry overseas. Isaac Davison finds while a nip and tuck is cheaper offshore, experts say it might also be riskier.

Consumer champion Kevin Milne thinks New Zealanders should plead poverty if they cannot afford their exorbitant dental bills.

The tongue-in-cheek advice from the former Fair Go host was offered as a last-ditch option for a mother struggling to pay a $5000 bill.

But it highlighted a problem that is sending New Zealanders halfway across the world for dental care instead of down to the local clinic.
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Heart

Cholesterol Paradox In Survival After Stroke Thrombolysis

Dr. Barry Groves
Barry Groves Blog
Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:17 UTC
There are many paradoxes in cardiovascular medicine. These are where real life doesn't follow what 'everyone knows' is true. Indeed there are so many paradoxes that I would have thought that by now, the 'establishment' would have caught on to the fact (as I see it) that these paradoxes are not paradoxes, but examples of evidence that the accepted paradigm about raised cholesterol being the cause of a wide range of cardiovascular diseases is wrong, wrong, wrong!

good-bad-cholesterol
But they don't, so to add to the many, already published 'paradoxes' another has just been published in the European Journal of Neurology. It is from research conducted at the Hospital del Mar, Barcelona. Paradoxically, it finds that patients with ischaemic stroke who have low cholesterol levels are more likely to die after a stroke than similar patients with higher cholesterol levels.

The research team measured cholesterol levels in 220 patients with ischemic stroke who underwent intravenous thrombolysis (clot-busting treatment) within 4.5 hours of symptom onset.

As expected, stroke severity, as measured on the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS), was the most significant determinant of patient survival at 3 months in all models. However, the NIHSS score correlated inversely with patients' levels of total cholesterol, triglycerides, and LDL cholesterol (it did not correlate with HDL cholesterol).

Put another way, it means that higher total cholesterol levels were significantly associated with higher survival, and remained so after accounting for stroke severity.
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Ambulance

Botox Style 'Do It Yourself' Shots Disfigure Women

Nicholas Jones
New Zealand Herald
Thu, 19 May 2011 14:23 UTC
Image
© ThinkstockAn increasing number of New Zealand women are buying beauty products online to inject at home.
An increasing number of New Zealand women are being disfigured - and risking death - by buying beauty products online to inject at home.

New Zealand and Australian surgeons are warning people not to buy derma fillers, or fake products purporting to be Botox, on the internet.

Dr Teresa Cattin, president of the New Zealand College of Appearance Medicine, said she saw women with injuries from DIY cosmetic procedures about once every six weeks.

One patient was admitted to hospital for six weeks after a friend injected a substance bought online into her face.
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Cheeseburger

Take a Look at the Damage Wheat Bread Can Cause You

William Davis, MD
Best of You Today
Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:38 UTC
bread
© Unknown
Which makes you fat faster: whole wheat bread or white sugar? The answer might surprise you. Even what we think of as healthy whole grain wheat has been found to increase appetite and the impulse to eat more. Dr. William Davis, cardiologist and author of Wheat Belly, says if you want to lose weight and improve your health, you need to completely eliminate wheat from your diet.

He says wheat isn't even the healthy grain it used to be; it's been engineered so far beyond recognition it shouldn't even be called wheat. And it's pervasive in our processed foods. Here, Dr. Davis gives us an in-depth look at the damage wheat can cause and the healing benefits of completely eliminating it from your diet.
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Megaphone

Put the Fat Cats on a Diet: Stop Buying Tainted Food From Billion Dollar Corporations

Ronnie Cummins
Organic Consumers Association
Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:36 UTC
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© americanpatriottoday.net
For the first time since the late-1960s, the American elite and their indentured politicians are losing legitimacy, part of a deepening global crisis that is simultaneously political, economic, and ecological. In the powerful wake of the 2011 Arab Spring, the European Summer of the Indignados (the indignant ones), and the Occupy Wall Street movement, rebellion is in the air. As protestors in New York put it
"The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%."
Across the U.S. and planet, the corporate elite is under attack. An emerging army of indignados are starting to act on the premise that minor policy adjustments in corporate boardrooms, or a cosmetic reshuffling of faces in Washington, are not enough. What the Earth and the 99% underclass need, including consumers and farmers, is a grassroots revolution - a fundamental transfer of power from the corporatocracy to the people. What is required in the face of economic meltdown, deteriorating public health, and climate disaster is a full-scale mutiny on the USA Titanic, a radical change of course before the 21st Century suicide economy of Wall Street and Corporate America puts an end to the human species and life on Earth.
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