This week, the BMJ has published a study that adds further to the debate regarding the safety of statins. It is officially recognised that one potential adverse-effect of statins is the development of diabetes. In this study, Canadian researchers pooled the results of several studies to see if the risk of diabetes was higher in individuals (with known cardiovascular disease) taking higher potency statins rather than lower ones. It was: compared to lower potency statins, the taking higher potency ones were associated with a 15 per cent increased risk of diabetes.

Now, I should make clear that evidence assessed in this study was epidemiological in nature. This means it shows that while the review found a link between higher dose statins and increase diabetes risk, this is just an association. However, we do know from other clinical studies known as randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that statins do have a genuine capacity to cause diabetes.

Perhaps in the ideal world we would be able to rely more heavily on RCTs to judge the safety of statins. The problem is, as I wrote this week, there are many reasons why RCT-derived data is utterly unreliable in this respect. The fundamental problem is that RCTs are often designed or reported in a way that can massively downplay any hazards or harms.

A northern California man said his insurance carrier refused to pay for treatment of more than a dozen tumors, reported KPIX-TV.

Jeffrey Rusch, of Sonoma County, said an MRI revealed more than 20 tumors in his brain, and a CT scan two days later revealed a large tumor in his lungs and others in his liver and bones.

"My husband was having a lot of difficulty breathing already, and he was getting a lot worse, so we went to the hospital and they admitted him immediately," said his wife, Zoe Keating.

Doctors removed a half-liter of fluid from Rusch's lungs, prescribed steroids to reduce brain swelling, and administered emergency chemotherapy.

But the family's health insurance carrier, Anthem Blue Cross, sent them a letter that arrived Tuesday denying coverage for the hospital stay, saying the treatments did not meet the criteria for medical necessity.

"I would call saving my husband's life medically necessary," Keating said.

Most physicians would choose a do-not-resuscitate or "no code" status for themselves when they are terminally ill, yet they tend to pursue aggressive, life-prolonging treatment for patients facing the same prognosis, according to a study from the Stanford University School of Medicine to be published May 28 in PLOS ONE.

It's a disconnect that needs to be better understood, said VJ Periyakoil, MD, clinical associate professor of medicine and lead author of the study.

"Why do we physicians choose to pursue such aggressive treatment for our patients when we wouldn't choose it for ourselves?" said Periyakoil, director of the Stanford Palliative Care Education and Training Program. "The reasons likely are multifaceted and complex."

In the study, Periyakoil and her colleagues set out to determine how physicians' attitudes have changed toward advance directives since passage of the Self-Determination Act in 1990, a law designed to give patients more control over determining end-of-life-care decisions.

Advance directives are documents that patients can use to indicate end-of-life care preferences.

The study involved two sets of subjects: One comprised 1,081 physicians who in 2013 completed a web-based advanced directive form and a 14-item advance directive attitude survey at Stanford Hospital & Clinics and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System; the other comprised 790 physicians from Arkansas who were asked the same 14 survey questions -- but did not complete an advance directive form -- in a 1989 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Roundup is Monsanto's best-selling herbicide product, and it contains a toxic ingredient known as glyphosate.

It is widely known that glyphosate is profoundly damaging to human health. Two major peer-reviewed studies showed links to breast cancer cell proliferation and intestinal and gut damage, which can lead to diseases such as diabetes, gastrointestinal disorders, heart disease, obesity, autism, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Research conducted in 2010 suggests that glyphosate may be linked to birth defects.

Regulators - and of course, Monsanto - claim glyphosate is excreted from the body. But studies disproved that: the chemical has been detected in urine samples, blood samples, and even breast milk.

Butter has gotten a bad rap for many years, starting in the last century with the rise of margarine, which we now recognize as a deadly trans fat. More recently, butter has been shunned in favor of olive oil and canola oil. But here's why we should reserve a place at the table for good old-fashioned butter.

A study from Lund University in Sweden shows that butter leads to considerably less elevation of fats in the blood after a meal compared with olive oil, flaxseed oil or a new type of canola oil. High blood fat normally raises cholesterol levels in the blood, which according to the discredited "lipid hypothesis," elevates the risk of atherosclerosis and heart attack.

You won't believe the ingredients in your flu shot.

Transcript

Interviewer: Doctor I wish I could've been around you a couple of years ago when H1N1, that was coming out. That got to the point where we would watch the local news and find out where we could finally get our shot. There were not shots available here, let's wait next week and go at the local college and people would line up for hours on end to get these shots.
No doubt something else was going to pop up in the next couple of years that is going to lead to the same thing. But that was going to be a pandemic and nothing ever really came of all of that.

Sherri J. Tenpenny, D.O., AOBNMM: Oh gosh. You know, we had SARS, we had bird flu, then we had another round of swine flu. You know, bunny flu next. I mean who knows? And so it's going to keep recycling.

But what those two big pushes were for in 2005, the bird flu and then swine flu again was the 7.2 billion dollars that George Bush gave to Novartis to develop their new flu shop factories and then swine flu came along it was the rest of the money that the government gave them to build new flu shot factories. That's all it was, really, at the end of the day when you pull back the curtain and see what's back there.

Was because how flu shots are manufactured are in eggs. It's a very labor intensive, time intensive, expensive process. That they take an egg and they literally pick a little top of the shell and they inject some viruses in there and then the virus grows in the egg for 11 days, they centrifuge off the virus and supposedly separate the virus from the egg which doesn't all get separated and then they get viruses that come out of the egg and that ends up in the flu shot. And that's how flu shots are made. Very expensive, time labor intensive.

Food and feed quality are crucial to human and animal health. Quality can be defined as sufficiency of appropriate minerals, vitamins and fats, etc. but it also includes the absence of toxins, whether man-made or from other sources. Surprisingly, almost no data exist in the scientific literature on herbicide residues in herbicide tolerant genetically modified (GM) plants, even after nearly 20 years on the market.

In research recently published by our laboratory (Bøhn et al. 2014) we collected soybean samples grown under three typical agricultural conditions: organic, GM, and conventional (but non-GM). The GM soybeans were resistant to the herbicide Roundup, whose active ingredient is glyphosate.

We tested these samples for nutrients and other compounds as well as relevant pesticides, including glyphosate and its principal breakdown product, Aminomethylphosponic acid (AMPA). All of the individual samples of GM-soy contained residues of both glyphosate and AMPA, on average 9.0 mg/kg. This amount is greater than is typical for many vitamins. In contrast, no sample from the conventional or the organic soybeans showed residues of these chemicals.

"Sometimes I ask myself, why me? Why did this have to happen again?" says 31-year-old Andile from the Khayelitsha township in Cape Town, South Africa. "But the problem is I could have got it anywhere, on the bus, in a taxi, in my work. It's everywhere."

Andile has extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), a form of the airborne disease that is resistant to the four main groups of drugs used to treat it, meaning treatment can take years and requires alternative drugs that have more side effects.

He's had tuberculosis for more than two years but it's not the first time he's been infected.

"Where I stay, the environment is not right, it's not clean. I could have got TB there, or on the taxis we use as they never open the windows," he says.

TB has long been known as a disease of poverty. Dense housing, shared living space, poor ventilation, poor nutrition and poor healthcare systems are the prime conditions for the infection to spread, and thrive. This ancient disease was known as the "White Plague" in 18th century Europe and still kills more than one million people a year globally.

When you're a teenager, a tad cocky about your flossing-and-brushing prowess, and a proud worshipper at the altar of Colgate, the last thing you want to hear is that you might need dentures by the time you're thirty.

Unfortunately, that's the exact situation I found myself in one fateful November day. I was seventeen. It'd been a full year since I'd become a strict, low-fat, fruit-noshing raw vegan - led there by a cocktail of food allergies and dewy-eyed trust in people from the internet (bad idea is bad). Perhaps too distracted by my constant brain fog, perpetual shivering, and the clumps of hair making a mass exodus from my scalp, I'd failed to notice the prime victim of my lopsided diet: my teeth.

Up until then, I had pleasant associations with the ol' dental chair. My mouth had only ever seen one cavity - a fluke in an otherwise pleasing track record. I'd never missed a day of flossing. I'd never needed braces. For me, dentist visits were an opportunity for people to tell me nice things and make me feel good about myself, even if I'd gotten too old for their goodie drawer of parachute men and Lisa Frank stickers.

So when that familiar praise didn't come, the blow was all the more devastating. After a series of "hmms" and heavy sighs, my dentist delivered the news: a grand total of sixteen cavities - more of an estimate, really, because the cavities-sprouting-from-cavities nature of the damage made it hard to count. Massive wear capped the surfaces of my back teeth, and my front ones were becoming translucent from enamel loss. Unsightly recession plagued my once-healthy gums.

The dentist didn't mince words when telling me he'd never seen someone so young with such a terrifying mouth - and it'd all happened in the span of one year.

Officials in Iran say they have confirmed the country's first two cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome.

Two sisters from Kerman province tested positive for the virus that kills around a third of those it infects.

One sister is in critical condition and the other is receiving treatment, the health ministry's centre for disease control and prevention said.

Mers has been spreading throughout Iran's close neighbour Saudi Arabia.