Fukushima
On this episode of The Health and Wellness show we'll discuss new developments in old topics. Many people are well aware that, despite the convenience and seeming necessity, the use of cell phones can be hazardous to your health. Well a new generation of cell phone tech is coming down the pike and promises to blanket the earth with even higher levels of microwave radiation than ever before. Is it too late to turn back the clock or has humanity's love affair with wireless technology doomed it forever?

With a new vaccine commission in the works, RFK Jr. is shaking up the health world with his call for more investigations into vaccine safety. The consensus among the medical community is that the debate is settled: Vaccines are safe and effective. However, with new information on contaminated vaccine batches and research on various neurological disorders linked to vaccines how can this possibly be the case?

Not only is Fukushima wreaking havoc on the health and well-being of humans and animals around the planet it's also killing robots! This ongoing disaster has surpassed Chernobyl in severity and the news (not reported in the mainstream, of course) seemingly gets worse by the day.

Join us for a lively discussion and stay tuned for Zoya's Pet Health Segment where the topic will be vaccine titer tests for pets.

Running Time: 01:29:52

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

Jonathan Welcome to the Health and Wellness Show everybody. Today is Friday, February 24, 2017. My name is Jonathan. I'll be your host for today. Joining me in our virtual studio from all over planet we have Doug, Tiffany, Gaby and Elliot. Hey guys.

All: Hellos.

Jonathan We're missing Erica today so we wish her well. So today we are going to be talking about new developments in old topics, stuff that we have talked about before but there are new stories around these topics; essentially Cell Phones, Vaccines and Fukushima - Oh My! is our topic.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Jonathan So some new information on the hazards of cell phone use. Is it too late to turn back the clock or has humanity's love affair with wireless technology doomed us forever? We're going to be talking about the new vaccine commission, RFK Jr. and developments in Fukushima. I guess to start us off, let's get the really dark stuff out of the way and talk about Fukushima first.

Tiffany: Is that the darkest? I don't know.

Gaby: I was wondering myself.

Tiffany: Kind of hard to separate this out. They're all really, really bad. Fukushima is horribly, horribly bad. It's even killing the robots that they send in there now, or at least melting their cameras. These robots are supposed to be able to withstand up to 1,000 sieverts of radiation but they send them in there and the robots are melting and dying.

Doug: Yeah. And they're still trying to say it's only 600 sieverts - "only" 600 sieverts, which is something like 15 times what can kill a person but they're like "Yeah, we guess that it's about 600." But how does that make any sense if their robots are supposed to stand 1,000?

Elliot: Yeah, and they only lasted for two hours as well. I think it was two hours that they sent them in for and I think they were probably designed to last longer than two hours. So I'm guessing it's a lot worse than they actually thought it was.

Gaby: And a lot of people don't understand these units but I think that we can give an example. I think 0.1 sieverts is enough to increase your risk of cancer.

Doug: Yeah.

Jonathan You know there's a point at which you go from "I might get cancer someday" or "I have an 80% chance" - to like, "your body is going to melt and you're going to die within a week".

Tiffany: Ten sieverts can kill a person. There's milli-sieverts because they thought that sieverts was too big to measure radiation exposure but they had to go to that because the amount of radiation coming out of Fukushima is just astronomical, way, way worse than Chernobyl.

Doug: The previous record which I think was Chernobyl was 73 sieverts, I believe. And now they don't know how much this one's leaking but it's obviously well over that.

Tiffany: In 2012 there was this researcher who was doing some research about the effects of Fukushima radiation on people who lived on the West Coast of the United States and they studied the time before Fukushima and the time immediately after and she said that she and her team came up with an increase of about 14,000 deaths, a lot of them children and old people because of their lowered immune systems. But 14,000 more deaths than would be expected in the West Coast right after Fukushima.

Jonathan Sometimes I don't know what to think about this. I know that it's bad, so I'm not denying that but I wonder if it's also a function of our modern environment and how things are generally more toxic now and so the bad things are worse than they used to be. The reason is, there's a story about a guy when the nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan, who went to work in Hiroshima, was there when the bomb went off, survived and then went to Nagasaki and survived the bomb blast there.

Doug: Are you kidding?!

Jonathan No, it's true.

Doug: He was there for both of them?!

Jonathan He was there for both of them and he lived to be 95 years old.

Tiffany: He's either the unluckiest or the luckiest dude that ever lived.

Jonathan So that's a pretty extreme case but there's also in Chernobyl, the wolf population is coming back and they're not crazy mutant wolves. So I'm not trying to say radiation isn't all bad, but I'm curious, is it worse now in our day and age because of all the other things that we have compounding, like people's bodies are already beaten down so the radiation has a more drastic effect than it would have otherwise?

Doug: Well it's also the amount of radiation. I don't remember the exact figure, but the amount that's pouring out of Fukushima right now is significantly higher than what came about from those nuclear blasts. I wish I had the figure in front of me because it was pretty astounding. But I think that probably has something to do with it.

Gaby: Some people give the example that Fukushima is like an ongoing nuclear blast because the robots melted at the second nuclear reactor and they don't know where the first one and the third one are.

Jonathan They don't know where they are?

Doug: Yeah, there's speculation that they've melted completely out of the containment area. I think Tepco says that they haven't, that that's still contained, but of course you can't really believe anything coming out of Tepco because they're just putting their own public relations spin on the whole thing to make it sound like it's not as bad as it is. So they don't know. I don't think they even know where the second one is, do they?

Tiffany: I don't know if they would even know a fuel core from a hole in the ground which is basically what they have. But nuclear power plants, when you think about it, all they really are is they're using these uranium or some other kind of nuclear atoms, they split the atoms to produce heat and they use that heat to boil water and then the steam from the water moves the turbines that generate electricity. It seems like they could have found - if they really wanted to, whoever "they" are - some safer way to heat water to generate steam. Why do you have to split atoms and engage in nuclear fission to have electricity?

Jonathan Yeah, that was something I learned maybe five or six years ago and it blew my mind. I had always thought when I was younger that it was some magical scientific process that we don't really understand and it just kind of sits there and generates electricity, but it's really just a fancy steam engine.

Doug: Yeah. Which is insane when you think about it. The most dangerous steam engine ever to have been created.

Gaby: You know, seismic fault off the coast of Japan.

Tiffany: And that makes even less sense.

Jonathan I know there are a lot of jokes about how humanity is stupid, right, we do a lot of stupid things, but humanity's also pretty smart. Humans have come up with some pretty crazy things technology-wise inventions, all of these innovations and it's hard for me to wrap my mind around when there are literally viable proven alternatives like the power generation from tidal forces. They put these giant buoys out off the coast into the ocean and as they move up and down they generate power. Why don't we just lay those all along the east and west coast and we could power the entire country? Combine that with solar and wind, it literally doesn't make sense why we're not moving in this direction. I guess maybe we are, but just way too slow for our own good.

Doug: But then there's always the chance - and don't get me wrong because I'm sure that's a much better solution than nuclear power - but it seems like everything that we do to maintain this level of wired existence seems to backfire in some way. So maybe that kind of thing will affect the tides and then that affects ocean life. You know what I mean? Or with wind power, they say that if you have these whole fields of wind turbines, it slows down the wind and then the wind isn't going in the same direction anymore and that affects something.

Tiffany: And all the birds fly into it and die.

Doug: Yeah. Sometimes I just get in this frame of mind where I just think it doesn't matter what we do, we're just going to be screwed.

Tiffany: Yeah, it is kind of a double-edged sword because you don't know what's going to happen. But even people who come up with this new technology, I'm sure they're thinking "Wow, this is fantastic! It's going to change the world. It's going to be a benefit to so many people." They can't envision the things that could do go wrong or could go wrong or will go wrong. But at the very least, if I'm going to fool around with splitting atoms, I'm going to build it on bedrock or something super safe. I'm not going to put it on a fault line in a place that is just known for earthquakes. At the very least, could they have not done that?

Doug: Didn't they more recently build one under a volcano or something like that? I remember seeing the headline that said something like "Not having learned their lesson from Fukushima the Japanese are building a nuclear power plant under a volcano". It's just come on!

Tiffany: That sounds like from the pages of Dr. Evil.

Doug: Exactly.

Tiffany: In his secret underground lair.

Doug: It's like, okay, Fukushima seemed to go off without a hitch, so what's the second most dangerous place we can put a nuclear power plant?

Tiffany: Well another thing about this Fukushima is that it is not getting a lot of reporting in the mainstream press. Alternative press is all over the place and also when they talk about it they talk about the iodine 131 which only has a half life of 8 days but they totally leave out the cesium and the strontium and those both have half lives of 30 years.

Gaby: And plutonium as well.

Tiffany: So basically from what I've read it would take about 300 years for a lot of this radiation to go away. And then, not surprisingly, a lot of the West Coast radiation detectors were shut down after Fukushima. Ignorance is bliss in that case.

Doug: North American scientists were actually gagged from actually talking about radiation levels at one point. I don't know if that's still in effect or not but I remember around the time of the incident, they weren't allowed to quote scientists talking about this kind of thing in the press.

Jonathan But it's not just Fukushima. Remember when we did our show on radiation and playing some of those clips from Michio Kaku talking about nuclear disasters. Some incredible things. And more recently too, in 2015. With this one you can find it but you'll never hear about it in the news; Carlsbad, New Mexico when they used improper materials to store plutonium and the barrel ruptured and it leaked out and hospitals within a 100 mile radius of this town were giving free CAT scans to people because the risk of cancer had gone up something like 80%.

Doug: Just getting back to what you were saying Tiff, about the fact that the mainstream press doesn't seem to be reporting this at all, I actually wonder if it's sort of reflective of human psychology, that we don't really want that kind of level of bad news on a daily basis. What more can you really say other than "By the way Fukushima is leaking out 400,000 tonnes or something like that, of radioactive material into the ocean every single day." I don't know if there's a deliberate cover up going on there or if people are like "That is way too dark. We can't talk about that". Or you just can't say the exact same thing every single day. So I don't know.

Gaby: You know when Chernobyl happened, or actually when Fukushima happened in 2011, I went and reviewed the Chernobyl literature just to have an idea of what will happen with Fukushima. The Russian Academy of Sciences published a book in a main scientific journal about their whole research and experience with Chernobyl and this was in 2009 I think, two decades or more are Chernobyl. They started their book with that concept that basically the status quo just wants to cover themselves and cover up is the norm when a nuclear disaster happens. They estimated that there were nearly one million excess deaths related to Chernobyl and it also affected the northern hemisphere over North America, even though this was in eastern Europe. They estimated that there was going to be radiation for hundreds of years and then that actually is going to increase because of the nature of the nuclear meltdown. So Fukushima is like several times worse than Chernobyl. Yes, we're going to find out that this is going to be so bad and yes it might take us 20 or 30 years but we'll get there.

Doug: Oh god!

Jonathan I think Doug, you had a good point and it may be a function of just too much bad information because if you sat down with somebody and said "Let me tell you all of the bad things that are going on right now", before too long it would be "Stop! Okay, I get it." We're naturally dissociative anyway and even more so now. Look back at our recent show with Dr. Kardaras about just dissociation through using screen technology, but extend that out to how humans live their lives and what we do with negative information. It's like the asteroid scenario. Right, so if there's an asteroid coming at the planet and it's going to kill off half of the human population, do you tell people? Or do you just let it happen? Do you risk the upheaval that would happen or just hope for the best?

So with this, Helen Caldicott who's a medical doctor who does a lot of talking about radiation says that every single male, because toxins naturally collect in the male testes, that every single male in the northern hemisphere has one atom of plutonium in their testicles.

Doug: Oh don't tell me that!

Jonathan So it's like do we tell them that?

Tiffany: You just did.

Jonathan Imagine if that came from a trusted source of authority like the government or the FDA or something like that and somewhere where the majority of people would actually believe it! They would lose their minds.

Tiffany: Yeah, people seem to have a particular threshold, depending on the individual, about how much bad news they can take. But I think for everyone at a certain point it just becomes "Okay, what am I going to do?" At a certain point you have to just go on and live your life. We can't stop Fukushima. We can take iodine, that's for sure to kind of mediate the effects, but what are you going to do?

Jonathan Yeah.

Gaby: Life goes on. Somehow.

Doug: Maybe.

Tiffany: In a mutated form but it might go on.

Jonathan By saying this I don't mean to make light of all of the suffering that's going on in the world, but it is an exciting time to be alive. There's a lot of crazy things happening right now. Like you said, we're at a time in history where there's such an overwhelming concentration of new information, positive and negative things that are happening. To truly absorb all of this I think and understand all of it in one shot and have that 30,000 foot view of the whole situation, you have to be like a monk or a genius or something to actually handle and process all the information at once.

I don't know if I'm getting a little bit too meta, but I think it's an exciting time to be alive and at the same time it's also a horrible time and we're seeing all of this happen. And like you said, there's not really anything we can do to change the larger view of what's going on. We just have to learn from it. So it's like the hardest kind of lesson where you're just "Here you go. Deal with this. See what you can learn from it." We can't change it.

Tiffany: Depending on your worldview, it can be a very exciting time to be alive or it can be an absolute cluster-smurf where everything is just chaos. So I think it all comes down to working on yourself, gathering as much knowledge as you can and finding ways and means to reduce the stress because there is really nothing else you can do.

Jonathan One of our chatters says "In the middle of a slow motion car wreck." It is kind of like that. So to add some levity to the discussion because we had talked before the show about how this was going to be a really depressing show, I heard a comedian recently talking about Fukushima and saying that it's just amazing that this happened in Japan because they're dumping all this water back into the ocean and that's where the story of Godzilla came from. It's like "Don't you understand that you're not supposed to dump radioactive water into the ocean?"

Tiffany: I never knew Godzilla's origin story.

Gaby: There you go.

Doug: You're living it right now.

Jonathan To look at more practical approaches to this - and we have talked about this on the show before - that there are ways to handle it to maintain yourself and not curl up into a foetal position and freak out about Fukushima and the planet being irradiated. Basically just keep a handle on your health. That's why we do this show, is to talk about health and wellness and what you can do and at the same time talk about how to, in a sane and rational way, approach the world around you and all the bad things that are happening.

So you don't want to freak out. You need to keep your job. You need to pay your bills so you don't get kicked out of your house and all this kind of stuff. But you can do some practical things like using iodine, like using bentonite, montmorillonite clay to chelate radioactive isotopes within your body. You can improve your immune system by improving your diet. You can reduce your exposure to certain technologies and still lead a normal, modern life. It's not saying you should never look at Twitter. Just don't look at it 400 times a day.

Doug: I think that's a good point. A lot of times, like we've been saying, it becomes overwhelming and you do get to that point where it's like what can I possibly do. It's like a turning point in some ways because a lot of people will be like "You know what? I can't pay attention to this. I'm turning this off. I'm not going to look at this anymore because it's just driving me crazy" versus what are the things that I can reasonably do to try and at least mitigate some of these effects. I think as most of our listeners are aware, we're very big on gathering knowledge and then acting on that knowledge.

So as tempting as it may be to try and brush this under the rug and not worry about it and think "the authorities will deal with this", it's better to stay informed and take some of the steps, like you said Jonathan, the different supplements that can help or clean up your diet, maybe not move to Japan or whatever. Change your location if it's possible if you are in a hot zone. There are things that you can do and yeah, it is going to be planet-wide if it isn't already but certainly there are things you can do to help mitigate the circumstances.

Jonathan I hate to come at it with such an almost Rastafarian type of view but just enjoy life, man. There's a certain element of yes, understanding the dark things that are going on and wrapping your head around that, but actually there's a balance. If you let that make you a morose person day-in and day-out, 24/7 to the point where you have lost the ability to enjoy things that are beautiful, that sucks too. So it's like there's a certain element of balance in there where you find things to enjoy and be like "Okay, sure, I might have a higher risk now of dying in my 50s than I would have otherwise, but am I going to freak out until that moment comes? Or am I going to enjoy the time that I have here and learn as much as I can?

Gaby: For example stocking up on potassium iodide.

Tiffany: Nobody knows when their day will come anyway so that's a good point. Live your life to the fullest. There is decay and disgustingness in the world, but there is also beauty. You can find spots of beauty here and there, beautiful sunsets, mountains, nature. There's still some pristine areas that can be enjoyed, but balance like you said Jonathan, that's important.

Elliot: And the thing is you'll probably do yourself more harm just by stressing about it so much. Understand these things happen, acknowledge them, don't try to block them out, but you can't let them overwhelm you or take over your reality because that way the stress is going to kill you. You know what I mean?

Jonathan Yeah.

Elliot: You have to just deal with it.

Jonathan Yeah. Exactly. That may more come into play with the topic of cell phones I think. So if I can make sense out of what I'm thinking, Fukushima is bad. It's leaking radiation. It is going around the planet. The Pacific Ocean is pretty much screwed at this point. Long-term, it's not like it's turning green but long-term yeah. But that's harder for people to wrap their heads around because it's "out there" unless you live on the West Coast or you live in Hawaii or something.

I think cell phones is a more immediate thing that people might have the propensity to freak out about. Just from personal experience, it's something that happens with me. I do work that involves computers and all my clients are remote so I have to use my phone to stay in touch with people, to check things. It's for work. Now that's not to say that I have to keep it on me all day long but I usually do because of that. And everyone once in awhile I'm thinking "Oh shit, it's in my pocket! It's radiating my thymus." That thought is for anybody who has any propensity to freak out about things could easily go south to the point where that's the only thing you think about.

So it's a practical approach. Have some balance in your life. I was trying to lead us into talking about cell phones and the development around 5G. So now we have 4G everywhere but we are on the road to 5G and they have not tested the safety of the increased intensity of the frequency.

Doug: The 5G technology involves using higher frequency microwaves. I learned something actually. I didn't realize that all the Gs actually just stand for generation, like first generation, second generation, third generation. So this is the fifth generation of cell phone technology. I never knew that. So anyway, I might be exposing my ignorance there. But anyway, apparently the 5G technology is going to require all new cell towers and they're like mini cell towers but they have to be in a higher concentration in any one area. So instead of having a cell tower every kilometre or something, now it's going to be every 200 or 300 metres. I'm making those numbers up. I don't actually know how concentrated it is. So apparently it seems like it's going to be a lot harder to actually escape this stuff.

Gaby: There's a guy who gives a nice analogy so people can have an idea because with the microwave oven, a lot of people take the precaution to leave it properly closed and not put their face in front of the microwave. So this is just like leaving your microwave oven open while it's working.

Doug: Yeah, that's apparently what it's like.

Tiffany: So they're using untested frequencies in the range of 28 to 100 gigahertz, whatever that is. I can't even wrap my mind around it but it's more than humanity has ever used before and it's going to be spread all around. Like you said Doug, basically they're going to be blanketing us with microwave technology. And the tech companies or cell phone companies who are pushing for this are going to benefit financially but they're not only ones. The cities who host their towers also get a piece of the pie so they don't have very much incentive to say "no, we don't want these towers in our city". There are some voices in the wilderness speaking out against it but overall there's no big push against 5G except in the alternative sphere of course.

Jonathan I hate to go back to pessimism, but who wants them to test this? The vast majority of people are like "Don't waste time testing it, just gimme. Give me the faster service. I don't need you to test anything."

Doug: Because there's been such an effective washing over of the dangers. Most people, if you suggest that cell phones or wifi or any of that kind of stuff is actually dangerous, they think you're just a kook. "Where is your tinfoil hat?" Honestly, even just talking to family members about it, at one point a family member got me a wifi for Christmas router and I was like "uhhhh" and he was like "You don't believe all that kind of stuff do you? Come on! That stuff's been proven not to be the case. It's perfectly, perfectly safe!" And I'm thinking "Okay". It's just been so effective because the industry concentrates on only thermal radiation. So if it's generating heat then they'll say "Okay, there's a biological effect because there's heat there" but if there's no heat then they don't admit that there's any kind of effect whatsoever. One article that we read was talking about basically that's like 1930s level of science, trying to judge a 2017 invention and saying it's safe based on those 1930s understandings.

Elliot: It kind of links into the whole mechanistic view of the whole organism, that we're just a bag of cells and we're just miraculously stuck together and we move really mechanically. That's the biology that's laid out in textbooks but that's not even true. When you actually start to look at cell physiology it turns out that the way cells communicate is by electromagnetic oscillations. Every single cell in the body has a specific frequency. It's intimately tied to electromagnetic radiation. That's how our body works. So to think that you can just bombard it with exogenous radiation that the body has never had a chance to adapt to is absolutely stupid. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that when you put a piece of meat in a microwave it turns really dry, you know? And that's essentially what you're doing to your cells. It's not hard. It's not difficult.

So there's a massive, massive clamp down on this idea that somehow exposing yourself to these non-native frequencies is going to be wrong or it's going to be detrimental. The research clearly shows that the human body is not adapted to this and it cannot adapt to this. Maybe it could over thousands of years but right now we can't do that. It's really going to spell some issues for humanity. I think it already is.

Doug: Well there's also the issue of the fact that over the hundreds of thousands of years that we've been populating this planet, we're used to a particular type of background radiation. cosmic radiation, etc., etc. and all this non-native stuff that we're flooding into the environment completely blocks that stuff out. So it's not just that you're bombarding the body with a foreign frequency, it's also that you're blocking the frequencies that you are used to. It's kind of speculative, but we might rely on those kinds of frequencies in some way.

Tiffany: I don't know if any of you follow basketball and this is something that I just learned, but LeBron James who plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers, I guess he was using his cell phone a lot and he ended up with a salivary tumour right on the place where he held his cell phone while he was talking. I'd never heard of this - not that I follow basketball or sports news or anything like that - but he's a pretty popular guy. It seems like it would have been more common knowledge. He had the tumour removed and after that he was offered a sponsorship for Samsung cell phones and Beat wireless headphones.

So in a way that was kind of like those companies were acknowledging that 'yes, our products are dangerous and they do have health effects, but let's just shut up LeBron James and give him all this money to be our sponsor and maybe this story will go away' which I thought was pretty dirty. These kind of technologies do have a lot of really dire health effects.

There's this one lady, I think she was in California, and she was young, didn't have any family history of breast cancer or anything like that. She was Asian and I guess in these studies Asian people have lower incidents of breast cancer and she came in with this really advanced and serious form of breast cancer. Everybody was puzzled because she wasn't a typical breast cancer case. She had this bad habit of putting her cell phone in her bra and the nodes of her breast cancer tumour lined up perfectly with the outline of her cell phone.

Doug: Jeez!

Jonathan Wow!

Gaby: Scary.

Tiffany: Yeah. So they say you should stay at least six inches away - I don't think that's enough - but six inches away from any kind of wireless technology. You definitely should not be having your phone on your belt buckle or in your pocket or in your bra, for god sakes! Not letting your kids play with it. That's just a whole other story we talked about in Glow Kids, but it's just so dangerous and I don't think the average person knows. Like was written in the show description, it's just this big love affair. Is it too late? Can we de-tech ourselves at this point?

Jonathan No. I hate to be the negative one there, but no.

Tiffany: No, I don't think we can either.

Jonathan I'd be utterly shocked, utterly shocked if that were to happen, if people would give that up because of the convenience and the level of dissociation that it provides. Not just that conversation but the convenience of connection, access to communication and all that kind of stuff, the addictive qualities of it, like we talked about with Dr. Kardaras. No, nobody's giving up their phones! Look at the human suffering viewpoint of this. Everybody knows.

Okay, maybe there are a few people that don't but I think that the vast majority of people understand if you were to ask them, that phones are mostly made in China. They're made by people who make a dollar an hour. They have nets around the buildings for suicide jumpers for chrissake because it's such an awful job. And this is a real thing. Now granted this story may have been blown up but it does exist as a real thing that's going on. People know that. They're like "Yeah, we know that people make our phones for slave wages. But ooooh, the new iPhone came out. Give me one."

Like you said, it's a love affair. As a hypothetical, if a person is in a relationship with somebody else who is psychopathic and manipulative but they have the oxytocin flush going on and they're "in love" and they ignore all of the red flags and the warning signs, that's what we're doing with wifi technology right now. It's totally a love affair and we're ignoring all the negative things; not just the physical health implications but also the human implications and how these things are made. If you made phones in factories with skilled workers who were paid according to the level of their expertise, they would be $5,000 a piece and nobody would have them.

Gaby: That would be great!

Jonathan Yeah.

Tiffany: Well speaking of skills and ingenuity, just like with the nuclear power plants, is there not a safer way to keep us all connected than by just blanketing the entire earth with microwaves? Is there some other way that we can stay in touch with each other without having to suffer such ill effects?

Doug: Write letters.

Tiffany: Can people write anymore?

Doug: I don't know. We've kind of passed some point where I don't know if it is possible to go back. I kind of lean more towards what Jonathan was just saying, no. People aren't going to give that stuff up, especially given the level of awareness of your average person. There's this obscure idea that cell phones might cause brain cancer or something like that and some people will take some sort of precaution against that by using a headset or something that mitigates it, or keeping it in airplane mode when you're not using it, things like that. But the idea that we would actually give it up, throw it away, "I'm done with cell phones, done with computers" all that kind of stuff, it seems like we've already passed a certain point that you can't really go back now. I can't really see a mass movement of people going back to the land, Little House on the Prairie style. I just don't see it.

Elliot: Yeah, it seems like the only thing that people can really do to try and mitigate some of those effects is to try and understand first of all what does something like EMF do to the body. Essentially, from what I understand, it decreases the body's ability to make its own energy. And that's generally what most toxins do. Most of the things that are known to be toxic or linked with illness are generally things that generally stop the body from being able to produce its own energy so that it can repair itself.

So I really think that one of the only things that we can do is just try to optimize the way that our body produces energy, optimize our health, optimize our lifestyle and just do the best that we can to try and initiate those repair mechanisms because we can't simply just get away from this. Even if you move out in the country somewhere, you're still going to be affected by this. You can only try your best.

Tiffany: Yeah, you can't go around shooting down all the cell phone towers.

Gaby: That's a thought!

Tiffany: There's a company - I don't know if it's Amazon - but they have the cell phone towers, maybe about 220,000 with the 4G technology and then the 5G technology is going to have even more. But now there's some companies developing flying cell phone towers, so I guess the cell phone tower can move to wherever it's most needed. You can put your phone on airplane mode, you can optimize your energy production, but you can't do anything about a cell phone tower flying right over your house.

Jonathan It's like a slow motion car wreck. You can't stop it from happening. You can only observe and learn as much as you can until the crash happens.

Doug: I don't understand the point of a flying cell tower though.

Tiffany: They understand it and I guess that's all that matters because nobody's really asking for it.

Jonathan The cell network is created by the overlap of the circumference of the wave that comes out, the reception from the tower and they overlap with each other and that's how you get more increased coverage. That's why when you go to a city you get really great service because there's more towers that are overlapping with each other. Conceptually it makes sense that if you had a tower that was mobile you could adjust the strength of the network on the fly by moving the towers around.

Tiffany: No pun intended.

Jonathan Yeah.

Elliot: I think it was George Soros who was actually campaigning to create a matrix upon the whole globe. I don't know whether they used towers or not, but a weird net effect around the whole globe where you can get wifi coverage anywhere you go. So I think soon it may even be a case where there will be nowhere that you won't get cell phone coverage. There will be nowhere that you can't get wifi. You'll be constantly locked into this grid. I don't even know what to say about that.

Jonathan Well when you lock that in with the new augmented reality technologies that are coming out, if anybody's ever seen Black Mirror, the show on Netflx. It's a dystopian twilight zone. In a lot of the episodes of Black Mirror, the characters have little implants in their eyeballs that allow them to see an augmented reality user interface laid over the environment around them. That is not that far away.

Gaby: That's creepy.

Doug: That's really creepy.

Jonathan Maybe 10 years from now it could be available. You can already do that with glasses. Google Glass does that and Occulous which is this big, clunky videogame interface. But at the pace that technology improves - 'improves' is a relative term - increases, it's not going to be very long before this is boiled down to a contact lens or an implant of some kind that you can put directly into your eye.

Tiffany: Sony already patented contact lenses where you can take pictures or video just by blinking. So really it isn't that far away.

Jonathan No.

Gaby: Maybe we should rethink this whole technology.

Jonathan The leaders in the industry want this, the so-called "thought leaders" who are at the forefront of developing technologies and tech philosophers I guess you might call them, want by and large, the increased bio-integration of technology to the point where it's a part of your body. If you're a cyberpunk author it sounds really cool. But when you look at the actual effects, I think Tiff, the stories you told about the tumours that are coming up from phones, that we're seeing the initial rise of the wave. You can see a wave coming in off the ocean and there's that initial water sucking back and then you see it rising in level. That's what we're looking at right now with all of this. Who know how it will be. It could be a few years, it could be 15 to 20 years but it's going to happen at the point where there's going to be an undeniable explosion of negative health impacts that cannot be ignored any longer and everybody's going to go "Oh shoot! Screwed up. Now we have to backtrack and find another way to do this." Or I guess it's going to be completely swept under the rug and that will be the new normal. If you're a human being you die of cancer when you're 52. That's just how it is and everybody understands that's how it works. That could be the new normal.

Tiffany: Well I think slowly we're creeping towards merging with machines anyway. The cells phones that came along with people wearing them on their body and now they have the nanotechnology clothing, the smart glasses. They have smart onesies and leg bands and diaper clips and smart socks for babies that can monitor their physiological functions to keep their parents aware. Like if they experience any kind of oxygen de-saturation or if their heart rate slows down or they stop breathing or something like that.

So we're not too far removed from completely merging with the Borg. There's going to be some people who go against it but a lot of people want it. I think it's in the Netherlands somewhere, there's this company where the employees are getting chips embedded into their hands so they can just wave their hand in front of the door and door opens instead of waving a key card because that's just so inconvenient to do. But there's a certain segment of the population, the tech heads that are calling for it.

Doug: Like rabidly enthusiastic about these sorts of things. Any little technological innovation that comes out they're completely 100% onboard. I think you actually said a lot Jonathan when you said that if you're a cyber punk author it's pretty cool. I think a lot of these people are living in that world. They have this fantasy about some sort of utopian future where where you stop and the computer begins is a completely blurry line.

Gaby: Dystopian future.

Doug: Well yeah to me, to us, that's true but I think there are a lot of people out there and I think it's promoted in a lot of things in mainstream movies and television things like that, who are rabidly enthusiastic about these sorts of ideas.

Elliot: What's really ironic about a lot of this is that you have loads of these tech giants who won't even let their kids use this technology. For instance it's fairly well acknowledged that Steve Jobs, the creator of Apple and iPhones, I'm sure I read somewhere that he didn't even let his kids use this technology because he understood the potential negative health effects. You've got to be a pretty spineless individual to not let your kids have it because you understand how damaging it is but then sell it to millions and billions of people. I just find that really...

Doug: Evil?

Elliot: ... evil, yeah. Totally evil.

Jonathan Doug, what you were talking about, I used to be that way. I've done interface design and stuff like that for quite a few years and I started working in that field in 2000 and at that time there were flip phones and the cell phone thing had not exploded yet. I remember talking with my colleagues at the time about how cool would it be if when you walked into your house you had a little transmitter in your pocket and you could set your preferences for your house so when you walk in the door the heat turns to the level that you want, or the air conditioning and as you walk through the rooms the lighting adjusts and the music changes. That was like "How cool is this, this incredible idea?!" Come to find out that is now on the market and understanding at this point that it's damaging to the body to have that amount of wireless frequency around you, I think it got away from us. People got taken in by the romantic idea of technological innovation and ignored the potential health side effects that were going to happen because how long has this been around? It's been less than 20 years that we've been blanketed in this kind of frequency fence.

So we haven't had time to wrap our heads around the fact of what's even possible let alone troubleshoot it and test it and find out what it's doing to us. And now, like Tiffany said, at that source we have people getting tumours in the shape of their cell phone when they leave it against their body. I feel like it's going to come to a head. We were talking about whether we've gone too far, is there a point at which we can turn back. I don't think so, but I think we're in that process of if you back way up and look at humanity and history over the span of millions of years, that we destroy our environment through our desire for more convenience. So we use our powers of innovation but it gets diluted and distorted by greed and laziness and then we destroy everything around us and then the planet resets for 100 million years and then we do it again. And we just keep doing that over and over.

Doug: That's pretty morbid.

Jonathan That's my view on humanity.

Doug: There's no real question. We all got taken in by the cool factor, like you were saying Jonathan. I used to think about that kind of stuff too when I was a kid and I was reading sci-fi novels. How cool would that be?! That would be so awesome! But you just get so wrapped up in this rosy image so that very few people are looking at the negative effects; all the stuff we talked about with Dr. Kardaras about the social negative aspects in that way as well as the more physical stuff like the radiation. So it's pretty bleak. I like to think that maybe humanity can learn this particular lesson and maybe not have to do it again in 100,000 years but I don't know. We'll see.

Jonathan I don't know. Yep.

Tiffany: Well if that wasn't bad enough...

Jonathan Should we cheer ourselves up and talk about vaccines for a little bit? It's like whistling past the graveyard is a skill now.

Doug: Yeah, definitely.

Tiffany: There is new information coming out about even more contamination besides the usual amount of contamination in vaccines. Some researchers studied vaccines and they found that all of them, every human vaccine that they tested contained metals and debris. The only vaccine that was clean so-to-speak, was a cat vaccine. But they found red blood cells from humans, animals, which isn't really surprising considering that they use bovine serum to grow the vaccine substrate and they used humans cells and there's no way they can filter all of that out even with the best filters. But they also found lead, tungsten, gold, chromium, stainless steel, platinum, bismuth, silver and iron, just to name a few and none of this stuff is listed on the vaccine ingredients insert page. So this is just an extra added cherry on top for when you get your vaccine.

Doug: Yeah, like it's not bad enough with the stuff that is listed on the ingredients, now you have to worry about all the stuff it's contaminated with as well.

Gaby: I also learned for this show that all vaccines are in theory possessed with mercury because it's just what they use to sterilize them. Supposedly it leaves traces and that's not listed. It's not considered a mercury contaminated vaccine just if they add extra mercury, like for the influenza vaccine. Yes.

Doug: So they'll say "Oh yeah, most vaccines don't have mercury in them". Mercury is used in the processing so it's a pretty good chance that there's going to be traces in there. So the idea that because mercury is always thought of as the ingredient in thimerosal. And they say "Oh yeah, this vaccine doesn't have thimerosal in it so there's no mercury." Are you sure because chances are there's some in there, among all this other stuff.

Jonathan So this is another thing that's fascinating to me because it's so hard to talk about because you get this rift between people. I try not to do the black and white thing, so there's one side and there's another side. However in some cases I think that does happen. I think generally politically, socially, most people are in the middle and then you have outliers on the extremes and they're the ones that make the media and that's why everybody thinks that it's left and right.

But when it comes to vaccines there does seem to be this rift. There's people on one side who trust the medical establishment and say doctors know best and they're going to tell me how to heal myself and the other side, which I consider myself a part of, where if you think that the medical establishment has your best interests at heart you're off your rocker. And the idea, like you just said Tiff, that there are all these metals in the vaccines and they're not on the label. Well of course they're not on the label! In my mind that makes total sense. They're not going to tell you that. But a lot of people consider that disinformation because "there's no way that there that there would be all this stuff. This is $20 million per test. It has to be vetted and there's no way they would lie to us about this." It's just so hard to bring up to people.

But all you have to do is take a cursory look at the history of the rise of the medical establishment in this country and where it's gone; the opiate epidemic, vaccines, all of these things. I understand that it's a sacred cow for a lot of people but I fail to grok just how trusting people are in the medical establishment. And I'm not talking about doctors. We've talked about this before. Yes, there are a lot of screwed up doctors.

I think generally by and large, doctors get into the field because they want to help and heal people, generally. But then you have a system that's built around billions and billions of dollars in profits and that's what drives the industry, not the one guy in Tuscaloosa who wants to help his patients.

Tiffany: So Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the vaccine commission under Trump is still in the works and he offered $100,000 to any journalists who can find a peer-reviewed study that demonstrates that thimerosal is safe in the amounts that they are currently in, in vaccines. And so far no takers!

Gaby: Ha-ha. Good luck! This topic has been researched for 10 years.

Doug: Yeah, it's kind of an interesting approach though. It's like "Well put your money where your mouth is." All these people are making these blanket denials that there's anything wrong with it, that it's perfectly safe. Well prove it! Show us! Is it safe? If there's a study out there that says that it's safe then show it because so much of what you hear in the mainstream media is "Oh, vaccines have been proven safe." Well no they haven't! That's not actually the case.

Gaby: Actually more mainstream publications are publishing side effects. For example recently for the HPV vaccine, the human papillomavirus vaccine, they are admitting more clusters of side effects, complex regional pain syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, paralysis, weird neurological syndromes where women are in wheelchairs. Then they published a study recently which showed that there are more neuropsychiatric syndromes in vaccinated populations, more OCD syndrome, anorexia, ADHD, anxiety and severe depression and bipolar syndrome.

Tiffany: Well I think a big issue with this is a lot of people really do trust the medical establishment that what they say is gospel and until they experience an adverse reaction themselves or - god forbid - one of their children comes down with some kind of disorder, they're not going to believe that vaccines aren't safe. It's a great divide. It's like two different realities going on. With a lot of the advocates, it's kind of like screaming into the wind a lot of the time because there are people who know and they don't need to be convinced and the ones that you feel the need to convince can't be convinced in a lot of ways. It's good to have this research out there but it just seems so much like beating your head up against a brick wall to even bring this up with a lot of people.

Gaby: I was just going to give an example of an interview I saw with a pharmacologist. He was 60-something years old so his whole life he has been a pharmacologist. This is a person who doesn't work for big pharma but studies drugs and he said point blank that "I've been studying this my whole life and I've just managed a few drugs that I can count with my fingers", like eight that he knows well. And then he says "How can a doctor know hundreds of drugs out there that he uses on a daily basis if I've been studying this my whole life and I only know eight?!"

Jonathan Yeah. They don't.

Doug: In response to what you were saying Tiff, I think it's like taking the red pill for a lot of people. To have to admit that these things aren't safe, it's like so much of your psychological structure is built on this idea of "these things are safe, these things are not safe, these authorities or people can be trusted and these people can't". The idea of admitting this one fault into that whole structure, the whole thing comes down. So I think in a lot of ways we protect our psyches against these kinds of complete disintegrations just out of a need for cognitive safety more than anything else.

So I think that's probably why you see such rabid blow-back against this anti-vaxxer thing. People feel threatened by it. They'll give excuses like "Well you not vaccinating your kid puts my kid at risk" which is nonsense. If vaccines worked, that wouldn't be the case. But I think really it's that they're protecting their psyche in a way, from having to accept something so mind-blowing for lack of a better term.

Jonathan Yeah, and the whole cointelpro around the whole thing. I don't know if it's on the books somewhere in Washington, D.C. that there's a book called "cointelpro" and this is one of the procedures in that book. I don't know if that's the case but cointelpro is a real thing. I think most of our listeners are familiar with it but if you're not, look it up. It's the idea of infiltrating a movement and then discrediting it by creating false associations and disinformation and things like that to bring the movement down.

So this is a documented method and I think that those methodologies can be seen in what we're talking about. And what I'm referring specifically to is the blanket association of any kind of a controversial viewpoint with all of the other controversial viewpoints at the same time. So if you say "Hey, there's some weird stuff going on here. Vaccines might not be safe," all of a sudden Lee Harvey Oswald didn't do it, you believe in the flat earth, you're all about UFOs and conspiracy theories and tinfoil hats and abolish the Fed and you're a Trump supporter. All of these things get blanketed into this one picture and people are so quick to label you with all of that other imagery based on one thing that you've said.

Doug: As a good example of that, I noticed in the stuff that we were reading, any of the statements that RFK makes about vaccines, he's always very careful to put out there at the very beginning "I'm not anti-vaccine" and I think that his position is "I'm not anti-vaccine. I want safe vaccines" which is very different. He's having to do that to try and avoid being painted with the anti-vaxxer nutcase stigma which has been propagated by the mainstream media so effectively. Even if he is anti-vaccine he can't come out and say he's anti-vaccine because nobody will listen to him.

So he has to say right off the bat, "Listen, I'm not anti-vaccine, but I think we need safe vaccines" which I don't think is a bad position to be in. I think that that's actually very reasonable. You don't necessarily have to discredit them altogether to say "We need to take a better look at this" because the position put forth in the mainstream media is that "Vaccines are 100% safe and if you question that you are a complete nutcase" which is a ridiculous perspective.

Tiffany: Well there was a mainstream study that they did on children ages 6 to 15 years old and the researchers looked at the year after they were vaccinated for various ailments. First off, they just totally dismissed the link between vaccines and autism but they said that there is a link - a temporary link so they said, temporarily related - between vaccines and OCD, anorexia nervosa, anxiety, chronic tic disorders, ADHD, major depression and bipolar disorder, but not autism. That's just impossible.

Doug: Yeah, that's ridiculous.

Tiffany: Yeah. And then at the end of the article they said that these may be temporarily related to having received a vaccine in the year prior to the study. They just go on and they warn the public against not vaccinating. It just doesn't make any sense. I applaud RFK for bringing this out into the open and offering the money, but I think just like everything else, it's screaming into the wind when it comes to vaccines. There's too much money behind it. The interests are too big. I don't have any hope that anything is going to change for the vast majority of people who believe that vaccines are safe and effective. I think that they're just going to go on and continue to believe what they believe and the people who know the truth will go on in their own way.

Gaby: But it's going to get ridiculous because I think they're testing 200 or 300 new vaccines. And they want them all to be on the vaccination schedule. It's going to get ridiculous.

Doug: It already is.

Tiffany: Yeah, it's going to get super ridiculous. It's ridiculous enough as it is. Maybe there will be more awareness if doctors, especially ER doctors where most of the problems are first discovered, like when a child comes in due to some adverse event. There's the database called the vaccine adverse events reporting database, "VAERs" so it is called, but there is a former ER doctor was saying that he very rarely used that and he's seen lots of cases where he thought that the symptoms were linked to a child getting a vaccine that very same day and they came into the ER that night. But he said that 99% of adverse events about vaccines are not reported so I think that is another reason why people are so in the dark about the damage that vaccines can do.

Jonathan And now it's being tied in with the social justice stigma too. I don't know if you guys have seen this at all but I've seen it crop up a few times here and there on Facebook specifically, where it's essentially saying if you think vaccines cause autism, do you hate autistic people?

Tiffany: What?!

Jonathan I know I'm simplifying it, but that's what it boils down to. It's like by saying that vaccines cause autism, autism is bad, you are bigoted against autistic people.

Doug: Oh my god!

Tiffany: That doesn't make any sense!

Doug: It doesn't make any sense!

Jonathan I know, I know, but I have seen that. So I'm not saying it's full blown yet but the seeds of that are starting now.

Doug: So if you don't want to get cancer then that means you're biased against people who do have cancer?

Gaby: What an absurdity!

Jonathan They're awful, awful people!

Doug: You're racist against cancer-havers.

Jonathan I remember having that thought when I saw this. No. Obviously we can all say that doesn't make any sense but even if you tried to have a rational argument with somebody about that you can say autism is not this horrible thing. It doesn't mean that autistic people are bad, it's just a malformation. You can't have this rational argument; it's this melding of simplistic ideas, where they're all merging together into this great mass of theocracy essentially.

Elliot: It seems almost like a counter-attack almost because there's all of this stuff coming out about the vaccine link with autism and everything else like the chemicals in the food, all these things are being linked up to autism. But then there's also loads of people coming out now who are trying to promote the view that autism is somehow a benefit and we should accept it in society and these people are somehow almost like, evolved in some way or they're special. I'm not saying that people with autism are not special. What I'm saying is that it is inherently a defect, yeah?

And some people are saying that it's not a defect and it's something that we should acknowledge as almost like a personality benefit or something. It's almost like this counter-trying to essentially, as you were saying Jonathan, I find it hard to explain what I'm trying to say. But it's kind of like they're trying to say that autism is not this bad thing when it actually is.

Jonathan Well it's hard to explain because it doesn't make any sense. But you can hold these two viewpoints at the same time and you can say autism and things on the spectrum are a defect or a malformation in the human brain but that doesn't mean that those people are bad or that they should have less rights or that they asked for that. It doesn't mean any of that. I know a person who has asperger's who is a frigging genius, absolutely total genius. I bet you at the same time if you asked this person if they would prefer not having aspergers they would say "Yeah, I wish I didn't have this." But you can't hold those two viewpoints. You've got to be one or the other and it's frustrating. That's what makes it really hard to talk about.

Doug: Well it makes a kind of sense. On one of our past shows we were talking about one researcher who had looked at the rise in autism and said something absolutely astounding - actually it might have been in Vaxxed now that I think about it - but that by 2030, if autism rates continue to increase the way that they are, by 2030, 50% of the male population will have autism! So it's almost like this is the beginning of the autistic rights movement because clearly it's a growing population.

Gaby: Clearly everybody's going to be autistic.

Doug: Yeah. We're all special.

Jonathan Yeah.

Doug: Stop oppressing the autistic Jonathan.

Jonathan Yeah. How did we get here? By the runaway train that is experimental medicine. It's really frustrating. Of course I could go on for hours and hours about this but one thing that comes to mind is meanwhile they just made CBD a Schedule 1 substance.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Doug: I didn't know that.

Jonathan Schedule 1 literally means no medical usage whatsoever, when that is the only purpose of CBD as a compound is the medical usage. It's like making Tylenol Schedule 1. It's just crazy. I don't want to go off on that tangent but that's one example of this cognitive dissonance that's around the whole field; "whatever the establishment says is the truth and I'm not going to worry too much about it", but as soon as you start to dig into it and look at the contradictions you want to scream because it doesn't make any sense at all.

Doug: One of the ways that we got here was in the US in particular, when they removed all accountability from the pharmaceuticals in regard to vaccines because they were at this point where vaccine manufacturers were saying "We're not going to do this anymore because we're having adverse events and then we're getting sued and we're having to pay all this money, so our bottom line isn't being covered here. So we're going to stop producing vaccines." I can kind of see that the government, if it has the viewpoint that vaccines are absolutely necessary to have a healthy population, and suddenly you have this threat of vaccines disappearing because nobody wants to make them anymore, suddenly they're like "Well we're going to remove all your accountability so that nobody can sue you directly and we'll see all the cases about adverse events in the vaccine court - which is a nickname for their court system where you can actually sue for adverse events from vaccines. So they basically said "You're no longer accountable."

Well what's going to happen in that situation? I can see that maybe this was done out of a benevolence, that they saw a need and said "Okay, we'll do this". But as a result, because the pharmaceuticals aren't accountable anymore, what's their incentive to actually do the right research to make sure that none of the ingredients they're putting in are actually harmful or anything like that? They can't be sued! So there's no accountability there at all anymore. So I think that's one of the main things that has led us to where we are.

Jonathan Yeah, I think it's a great point.

Tiffany: And just like with cell phones and Fukushima, there's no going back. They're not going to not produce vaccines anymore. It's just going to get worse and worse.

Gaby: Total reset! Total reset!

Doug: I think they would take a great step in actually renewing that accountability but I can't see that happening any time soon.

Tiffany: So I hope we haven't bummed out everybody too much.

Jonathan The moral for today's show is that we're all screwed and there's no good way out of this. So whistle while you work I guess. But on that note, we are coming up on our time. Just to say real quick, just so that we're not leaving it on a total bummer because a lot of stuff is a bummer but like we have talked about before and I know I'm repeating myself, but the best you can do is see what you can do for yourself and your immediate friends and family. I would say basically just yourself and your children, how you can mitigate negative effects of the toxins and the radiation in the environment around you, how you can learn about things that are going on but be very careful to take in all sources and try to employ some critical thinking. Just do your best not to be sucked in by the authoritarian follower movement that's raging right now and just try to be a broad-thinking person and do what you can. That's pretty much it and do your best. I think that those self-regulating procedures do a lot to mitigate depression around these kind of topics because you know that there are some things you can do and that gives you something to concentrate on to learn about.

Anyway, we are coming up on our time so let's go to the pet health segment for today and we'll come back and wrap up after that.

Zoya: Hello and welcome to the pet health segment of the Health and Wellness Show. This week I would like to talk about the topic of vaccines again. Our regular listeners know about the dangers of over-vaccination for pets and how annual boosters are totally unnecessary and in fact can be very harmful. But then it seems certain infectious diseases like parvovirus in dogs and panleukopenia in cats are not only prevalent but also very deadly.

Is it possible to find a proper solution that could not only be effective but also optimal for your pet's health? Well in fact there is a solution and I also mentioned it in the past several times. I'm talking about titer tests. On the one hand, it sounds easy enough. Instead of a vaccination, do a titer test to see if the level of antibodies is high enough. But just in case there are still questions about it, I found a recording made by Dr. Greenway where he explains it in an understandable way. It's also important to remember that while there are pets, especially cats, that can live all their lives happily and whole without any vaccinations at all, there is still danger of bringing the virus home on the soles of our shoes for example, and other things.

So even if there is real danger from vaccines, unfortunately sometimes it is important to at least vaccinate once in a lifetime for only four vaccines. So here is the recording.

Dr. Greenway: I'm Dr. Clayton Greenway with healthcareforpets.com. What I want to talk about is vaccine boosters and something called titer testing. The first thing I'll say is that clients are always surprised how often we have to booster vaccines in our pets and you have to remember that animals are much more intimately exposed to the environment. They've got their mouths on the ground. They pick up dirty things. That gives them a higher risk of being exposed to these diseases, so we have to keep up their protection against them by boostering these vaccinations.

So as far as boosters are concerned, we have to think about how long does a vaccine last and this concept is known as duration of immunity. This term basically means that when you give a vaccine it's guaranteed to last a certain amount of time but in a lot of pets those vaccinations will actually last longer than that. So you have a choice to just go ahead and booster at the end of the guaranteed amount of time or you could do something called titer testing to determine if you really need to booster that vaccine or not.

So titer testing is a blood test and it measures the number of antibodies that are in your pet's bloodstream to that disease that you're vaccinating for. If it's over a certain level, it means that they have protective immunity against that and they don't require a vaccine to booster it. If it comes underneath this particular level then it means that they need another vaccination to boost those antibodies up to a protective level. Doing titer testing is something I want every client to do because it cuts down on the need to vaccinate and I think that's in general, healthier for your pet, but it's very important that we maintain those antibody levels.

The problem is that titer testing is more expensive. In some cases the duration of immunity can be very long. In fact in a study that was reported in 1997, there were dogs that received a distemper vaccine. This is one of the core vaccines here in Canada that we give to every dog. And they were found to have antibodies and were therefore protected, for at least 10 years after vaccination according to this study. The current recommendation is to give this vaccine every three years to guarantee protection, but if you wanted to invest in regular titer testing for your dog, you could potentially only be boostering this somewhere between every 5 and 10 years.

So if you don't like the idea of vaccination for your pet or think it's unnatural or want to avoid it if you can, I really recommend titer testing to determine if you need that booster or not. Review the information in our vaccine program about the different vaccines, why you would give them, which ones you would select. We've developed a program called the Vaccination Plan Generator. What this does is it allows you to read about each vaccine that you think your pet should get and it allows you to check it off and then you can print it out and take it to your vet and see if they agree with your assessment of which vaccines you want to give and the risks that your pet has based on its lifestyle and whether that plan is effective or not.

I've tried to put this together in plain language so that you can understand why you would give that vaccine or not and whether you want to select it. So please have a look at our other videos about general vaccination and about vaccine reactions here at healthcareforpets.com.

Jonathan Are those some unvaccinated goats? Because they're happy?

Doug: They had their titer test.

Jonathan Yes. Well thank you Zoya.

Doug: Do they have titer tests for people?

Gaby: They do.

Tiffany: I had one.

Doug: Are they commonly used or no?

Gaby: Yes.

Doug: You had one.

Tiffany: Yeah, I had one for chickenpox and I was well protected because I had chickenpox.

Gaby: Yeah, they usually do it for any workers that are worried if they need a vaccine or not, so they use titer tests, yes.

Doug: Sounds like a good option.

Jonathan Just wanted to say as we wrap up for today, thank you to all of our listeners and for participating in the chat. I would say sorry for the depressing show but this stuff exists and it needs to be looked at. So do the best you can.

Gaby: It's happening.

Jonathan Keep your chin up, take the appropriate health measures. So thanks again everybody for tuning in and be sure to check out the SOTT Radio Show on Sunday at 12:00 eastern time. Go to radio.sott.net to see the local air time for that show on Sunday and we will be back next week.

All: Good-byes.