Health & Wellness
Good to see that the Telegraph of London has picked up on developments I wrote about here in the U.S., where a head of official steam is building behind the perception that there is a troubling relationship between certain childhood vaccines, including MMR (mumps/measles/ rubella), and autistic symptoms and other damage in a subset of particularly vulnerable children. As I have written, this has been prompted by recent U.S. cases in which multiple vaccinations have aggravated an underlying mitochondrial weakness to produce catastrophic effects, leading Dr. Bernardine Healy, the former head of the National Institutes of Health, to tell CBS News:
Jon LaPook
CBS NewsWed, 04 Jun 2008 01:57 UTC
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Led by actors Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, they're
marching against the medical establishment that says there's no evidence vaccines cause autism, CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook reports.
"We want to send the message to the CDC and our federal government that vaccinations schedules are not one size fits all for all children and that each child is different," said concerned parent Michael Williamson.
Young girls in Ireland should be vaccinated against the human papilloma virus (HPV), as this will reduce their risk of developing cervical cancer, the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) has said.
HIQA has proposed a school-based national programme of vaccination for all 12-year old girls against the HPV virus, in addition to a once-off HPV vaccine programme for 13 to 15-year old girls.
It says both such vaccination schemes would, along with the new cervical screening programme, help reduce the incidence of cervical cancer in Ireland.
Comment: Unfortunately, the situation is not as clear cut as made out in this article. There are many opinions that the
HPV vaccine's benefit is modest and not worth the risk and cost. Plus, there are a lot of reported cases with adverse side effects (
here and
here). And the disease is
not even contagious. So why is the push for more and more vaccines onto young children?
Can 'Blue Zones' Help Turn Back the Biological Clock? Dan Buettner spent five years visiting areas of the world where people tend to live longer, healthier lives, areas he calls "Blue Zones
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| Author Dan Buettner has traveled the globe visiting "Blue Zones," where people tend to live longer and lead healthier lives
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Comment: For his book Buettner interviewed several experts on aging. While they all had the usual: eat well, be active, etc., expert Robert Kane also had to inform us that "the biggest threat to improving our lifestyles has been smoking"
And indeed it is ,since it couldn't also be the toxic stuff in our food and water and the socio-economic shock doctrine imposed on us.
Bruce E. Levine
AlterNetFri, 06 Jun 2008 18:58 UTC
Mothers suffering from depression are increasingly pushed into taking pills, at great potential risk to themselves and their infants.
Today in the United States, 11 percent of women take antidepressants, the use of antidepressants by pregnant women has dramatically increased, and postpartum depression -- rare in those cultures in which women receive high levels of social support following childbirth -- has become so staggeringly common among U.S. women that Congress is legislating increased medical treatment.
So what did you do to earn your manhood? At the very worst, some of you had to read a prayer or two from a select holy book, maybe a distant uncle sent you a few bucks. Your parents start bugging you about getting a job and force you to move out by the time you're 20, or maybe 35.
But in some parts of the world, manhood is still something you earn.
Milwaukee - The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are looking into whether two cases of salmonella food poisoning in Wisconsin might have come from eating raw tomatoes.
RPIFri, 06 Jun 2008 14:35 UTC
Like a wristwatch that needs to be wound daily for accurate time-telling, the human circadian system - the biological cycles that repeat approximately every 24 hours - requires daily light exposure to the eye's retina to remain synchronized with the solar day. In a new study published in the June issue of Neuroscience Letters, researchers have demonstrated that when it comes to the circadian system, not all light exposure is created equal.
The findings have profound implications for exploring how lighting can be used to adjust our bodies' clocks, and they could redefine the way lighting is manufactured, according to Mariana Figueiro, lead author of the paper and assistant professor in the Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Short-wavelength light, including natural light from the blue sky, is highly effective at stimulating the circadian system. Exposure to other wavelengths - and thus colors - of light may necessitate longer exposure times or require higher exposure levels to be as effective at "winding the watch."
A South Korean humanitarian agency says a mysterious epidemic has been spreading along North Korean towns along the border with China, killing dozens of children.
The Seoul-based Good Friends agency says five or six children have died every day since the highly infectious disease emerged on April 27.
Cuba, in the latest change since President Raul Castro took office in February, has allowed doctors to perform sex change operations, a specialist at the National Center for Sex Education said on Friday.
Center director Mariela Castro, the president's daughter, has pushed for the operations and said that at least 28 people in the country of 11 million want the surgery.
The specialist, who asked not to be named, said the Public Health Ministry approved the surgery this week. Cuba's health care system will perform it free of charge.
Comment: Unfortunately, the situation is not as clear cut as made out in this article. There are many opinions that the HPV vaccine's benefit is modest and not worth the risk and cost. Plus, there are a lot of reported cases with adverse side effects (here and here). And the disease is not even contagious. So why is the push for more and more vaccines onto young children?