On January 15, 2014, Mr. John Sanders was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the murder of his 12 week-old baby daughter, Ja'Nayjah, who died just 24 days after receiving eight vaccinations in one day.

Ja'Nayjah Sanders was born a healthy, normal baby and received routine vaccinations, along with her mother, Marrie, before leaving the hospital. Two days later, at a routine checkup, the doctor told Marrie that her daughter had lost a couple of pounds since her birth and asked her to bring the baby back the next day for tests.

However, believing that her daughter was fine, Marrie decided to ignore the doctor's advice and wait until her next scheduled appointment, when Ja'Nayjah was scheduled to receive her routine vaccinations.

A tragic vaccine injury

This is a decision Marrie now bitterly regrets, because shortly before her appointment was due, Ja'Nayjah's health began to deteriorate and she began vomiting continuously. As Marrie was worried about her daughter's condition, she mentioned this to the doctor at the baby's appointment.

A new study by scientists at McGill University and the University of Zurich shows a direct link between metabolism in brain cells and their ability to signal information. The research may explain why the seizures of many epilepsy patients can be controlled by a specially formulated diet.
The findings, published Jan. 16 in Nature Communications, reveal that metabolism controls the processes that inhibit brain activity, such as that involved in convulsions. The study uncovers a link between how brain cells make energy and how the same cells signal information - processes that neuroscientists have often assumed to be distinct and separate.

Tiny particles of silver could appear soon in children's toys and clothing, embedded inside plastics and fabrics to fight stains and odors.

No one knows how the germ-killing particles, part of a new pesticide called Nanosilva, affect human health or the environment in the long run. But regulators have proposed letting Nanosilva on the market for up to four years before the manufacturer has to submit studies on whether the particles pose certain dangers.

That's because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has backed approving Nanosilva through conditional registration, a fast-track process that recently has drawn criticism for oversight problems. Unlike regular registration, it allows a pesticide to be sold before all required safety studies are in. In this case, manufacturer Nanosilva LLC can move ahead even though it hasn't explored fully the potential health risks if the product were to seep out of plastic or be inhaled.

Scientists have documented for the first time that several phthalates - controversial chemicals used to make vinyl and fragrances - are declining in people while several others are rising. The study, published today, is the first comprehensive, nationwide attempt to document trends in exposure to these widely used chemicals over the past decade.

The researchers said the results suggest that manufacturers may be reformulating products in the wake of a federal regulation and environmental groups' campaigns.

Three compounds banned in U.S. toys and other children's products in 2008 have declined. But since other phthalates are increasing, it's possible that industries have substituted them in some products.

"Our findings suggest that interventions may be working, though legislation didn't entirely predict which levels went up or down," said Ami Zota, a George Washington University assistant professor of environmental and occupational health who led the research when she was at the University of California, San Francisco.

Phthalates have been linked to a variety of health effects in animal tests and some human studies, including hormone disruption, altered male genital development, diabetes, asthma, attention disorders, learning disabilities and obesity.

Four adults have been recommended for post-exposure treatment after being exposed to rabies by a cat that tested positive for the disease after being found in the Hemingway area of Williamsburg County, state health officials reported Wednesday.

"To reduce the risk of getting rabies, we recommend that people avoid wild animals acting tame and tame animals acting wild," said Sue Ferguson of S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control's Bureau of Environmental Health Services.

"About 275 South Carolinians must undergo preventive treatment for rabies every year, with most exposures coming from bites or scratches by a rabid or suspected rabid animal. Wild animals carry the disease most often, but domestic pets can contract rabies as well."

Ferguson said state law requires pet owners to have their pets regularly vaccinated against the disease.

When you've covered a topic long enough, you get the idea you've heard it all. Then along comes a factoid like the one I discovered while preparing my recent piece on the recent blockbuster Consumer Reports study on supermarket chicken and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. I learned that at the industrial hatcheries that churn out chicks for the poultry industry, eggs are commonly injected with tiny amounts of an antibiotic called gentamicin, which is used in people to treat a variety of serious bacterial infections.

That alone dropped my jaw - what, the practice of dosing chickens with antibiotics has to begin literally in the egg? But get this: The practice is allowed in organic production, too. Organic code forbids use of antibiotics in animals, yet in a loophole I'd never heard of, such standards kick in on "the second day of life" for chicks destined for organic poultry farms. (The practice isn't used for the eggs we actually eat - just the ones that hatch chicks to be raised on farms.)

John Glisson, a veterinarian for the US Poultry & Egg Association, told me the practice originated decades ago, when the industry began vaccinating chicken embryos to prevent a common condition called Marek's disease, a deadly herpes virus that attacks chickens. To sterilize the small hole required to get the vaccine into the egg, the industry would shoot in a bit of gentamicin. Glisson added that it remains a common practice, but that it has declined in recent years as (he insisted) the industry has begun to move away from reliance on antibiotics. Neither Glisson nor the FDA could give me precise data on how often it's used these days. The Food and Drug Administration allows such injections only when prescribed by a veterinarian, a spokesperson said.

A report published by Alberta health officials over the weekend lays out the swift clinical course of the H5N1 influenza infection that killed a young Alberta woman on Jan 3, including brain inflammation and swelling, an unusual complication in human H5N1 cases.

The woman, a nurse in Red Deer, Alta., fell ill while returning from a 3-week trip to Beijing on Dec 27. How she was exposed to the virus remains unknown, since she had no contact with poultry during her trip, and no H5N1 outbreaks have been reported in Beijing recently.

The case is the first human H5N1 illness reported in the Americas. Of 649 cases reported since 2003, 385 have been fatal, according to the World Health Organization.

The case report was posted on ProMED-mail, the reporting service of the International Society for Infectious Diseases, on Jan 12. Kevin Fonseca, PhD, a clinical virologist with Alberta Health Services, served as lead author and was joined by a number of colleagues from the provincial agency.

The chicken pox is going around a community in the San Juan Islands in Washington State.

The first case was in a boy who was vaccinated for chicken pox 10 days prior!! So the vaccinated kids started the outbreak.

Two other kids who got vaccinated also got the chicken pox.

Now get this. These children who contracted the chicken pox from the vaccine have been deemed to have not had the chicken pox but rather "a negative reaction to the immunization".

In an even greater twist of logic, these children who got the chicken pox from the vaccine have been cleared to return to school - even though a vaccinated child who contracted the disease from the vaccine started the outbreak - but the unvaccinated kids who DO NOT have the chicken pox, must stay out of school for 21 days.

So let me get this straight. If my kid is vaccinated and gets the chicken pox, it is not the chicken pox and he can go back to school but if he is unvaccinated and has no symptoms, he has to stay home?!?!?

Chicken pox is a LIVE virus vaccine and live virus vaccines can in fact cause disease. Just like in this case. These people have mastered the art of denialism in order to carry on like this.

With NASA reporting a "potentially hazardous" asteroid nearly half-a-mile wide possibly heading toward earth, and some upstate New Yorkers claiming they experienced a loud boom and a bright light in the sky last night caused by a meteor, a doctors' organization is offering some timely advice:

Just as when the American populace first prepared for the possibility of a nuclear blast, a person's best option for surviving a meteor strike is the same "duck and cover" created during the 1940s and '50s when nuclear weaponry was still in its infancy.

The warning comes from Physicians for Civil Defense, which issued a statement recently during a meeting of the Emergency Management Agency of Utah.

"All Americans, starting with first responders and emergency managers, need to know this basic life-saving principle: 'Drop and cover if you see a sudden very bright light,'" said the statement from the organization's spokeswoman, Jane Orient, M.D.

With the CDC's recent warning that deadly, antibiotic resistant 'nightmare bacteria' are taking the lives of at least 23,000 U.S. patients a year, the discovery that regular consumption of coffee and tea slashes the risk of nasal colonization of MRSA in half is all the more remarkable.

In previous articles, we have examined the emerging science on how common beverages such as coffee^[1] and green tea^[2] promote health and wellbeing. We believe these herbal decoctions attained worldwide popularity for dual reasons. Not only are they powerfully psychoactive, with coffee for instance having potent morphine-like propertiesin addition to its stimulating caffeine content,^[3] but they also possess under appreciated medicinal properties, some of which may be life saving.

As Kakuzo Okakura, author of The Book of Tea, once wrote, "Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage." The same goes for coffee, no doubt.

Thanks to the advent of deep scientific exploration of botanicals, we are now finding that empirically verifiable mechanisms exist explaining how common herbal droughts fend off and treat a wide range of lethal diseases. There are literally hundreds of examples of this in the biomedical literature, but we will focus on methillicin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus(MRSA) in this article, as MRSA was recently identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as one example of a wide range of antibiotic resistant bacteria infecting millions of Americans, with at least 23,000 dying as a result each year. You can read our latest article on the topic to catch up, if you like: "CDC's "Bacteria of Nightmares" A Monstrosity Created by Outdated Theory and Practice."