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Resistant Superbugs Pose Serious Risks

Anthony Gucciardi
Natural Society
Sat, 14 Apr 2012 15:56 UTC
Image
© unk
Drug-resistant superbugs, such as the heavily defiant strain of tiberculosis that is now popping up across the globe, are causing serious shockwaves throughout the medical community. Rampant use of antibiotics for unnecessary conditions and pumping livestock up with an exorbant amount (around 80% of the entire United States antibiotic supply) of drugs is a leading factor, but research shows that anti-bacterial hand sanitizers and cleaners are also contributing to the problem.

Anti-bacterial products have become commonplace in many households and classrooms across the nation, though they are especially prevalent in India - where scientists say the overall use of antibiotics in drug and cleaning form alike are way overused. In addition to containing the problematic ingredient triclosan, these anti-bacterial hand washes and disinfectants are also contributing to the rapid growth of antibiotic-resistant superbugs that pose a serious risk to human health. At least when trying to 'treat' them with the same pharmaceutical interventions that spawned them in the first place.
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Attention

Why Does Toothpaste, Not Fluoridated Water Carry A Warning?

Dr. George Grant
GreenMedInfo
Fri, 13 Apr 2012 07:00 UTC
Tooth Paste
© GreenMedInfo

One of the first things to look at is a tube of toothpaste clearly carries the warning: "Do not swallow," and "in case of accidental ingestion, contact the poison control center."

The amount of fluoride they're talking about is a quarter milligram of fluoride, contained in a pea size amount of toothpaste.

But here is the kicker, This is the same amount of fluoride you find in 8 oz of water. Yet toothpaste carries a "Do not swallow" warning, whereas you're typically told to drink eight 8oz glasses of water each day, without any concern for the amount of fluoride you will ingest. Commercial Toothpaste also contains toxic formaldehyde as a filler which is used as embalming fluid! I recommend using Natural Toothpaste for all your family.

Even some dentists are up in arms about the overuse of fluoride. Dr. Osmunson, for instance, is mainly concerned about water fluoridation for infants. The American Dental Association (ADA) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) recommend that infants NOT receive fluoridated water for drinking, nor for making their formula, as fluoridated water contains 250 times more fluoride than mother's milk.

"We shouldn't fluoridate water and harm our most vulnerable," he says.

Personally, I also strongly advise you do not give your children fluoridated water.

Unfortunately, the only way to ensure your water is pure enough to drink is by installing a good water filtration system in your house, such as a reverse osmosis filter that can filter out fluoride and other dangerous water contaminants like disinfection byproducts (DBPs). Bottled water also typically contains fluoride, even though it's not stated on the label.
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Bad Guys

Just One of Monsanto's Crimes, Or Why We Can't Trust the EPA

Alexis Baden-Mayer
Organic Consumers Association
Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:52 UTC
Image
2,4-D and the dioxin pollution it creates are too dangerous to allow, period, but in the hands of bad actors like Monsanto and Dow Chemical the dangers increase exponentially. What's the Environmental Protection Agency doing? Helping coverup the chemical companies' crimes!

In February, Monsanto agreed to pay up to $93 million in a class-action lawsuit brought by the residents of Nitro, West Virginia, for dioxin exposure from accidents and pollution at an herbicide plant that operated in their town from 1929 to 2004.

That may seem like justice, but it is actually the result of Monsanto's extraordinary efforts to hide the truth, evade criminal prosecution and avoid legal responsibility.

A brief criminal fraud investigation conducted (and quickly aborted) by the EPA revealed that Monsanto used a disaster at their Nitro, WV, plant to manufacture "evidence" that dioxin exposure produced a skin condition called chloracne, but was not responsible for neurological health effects or cancers such as Non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

These conclusions were repeatedly utilized by EPA and the Veterans Administration to deny help to citizens exposed to dioxin, if these persons did not exhibit chloracne.
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Pills

Big Pharma Whistles, and the Drug Enforcement Administration Comes Running


Alliance for Natural Health
Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:35 UTC
Image
© takeoffthetown.com
The DEA is enabling - even encouraging - a generation of opiate addicts, while the FDA tries to quash safe and helpful supplements like DHEA.

Goodness, the legal drug-makers have been busy! This week the Associated Press revealed that in 2010, US pharmacies dispensed the equivalent of 69 tons of pure oxycodone (used as ingredient in OxyContin, Percocet, and Percodan) and 42 tons of pure hydrocodone (used in Vicodin, Norco, and Lortab). That's enough to give forty 5-milligram Percocets and twenty-four 5-milligram Vicodins to every single person in the United States.

The production and sale of both drugs has increased tremendously over the past decade; in some locations, sales have increased by 1,500 percent. Distribution is particularly high in Appalachia, the Midwest - particularly suburbia - and the Southwest.

Why the increase? Our poor diets and inactive lifestyles increase inflammation and pain. Older people are especially vulnerable in this regard. And doctors are increasingly willing to treat pain with drugs. Sales are also being driven by addiction, as users become physically dependent on painkillers and begin "doctor shopping" to keep the prescriptions coming.
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Attention

USDA 'Doesn't Know' if You Are Eating Cloned Meat

Anthony Gucciardi
Nation of Change
Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:08 UTC
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It may come as a surprise, but you may be consuming cloned meat on a regular basis. In fact, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture (head of the USDA) says that he has no idea whether or not cloned meat has been sold inside the United States - or even how much. But instead of investigating or setting up parameters, the USDA asserts that it is safe in their view so there is no cause for alarm. It is currently forbidden by the agency itself for any producer to distribute or sell cloned meat.

The news came back in August of 2010, when U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack went on record saying that he really doesn't know whether or not cloned meat is being put on dinner tables nationwide. The announcement was made after the United Kingdom's Food Standards Agency told consumers that meat from descendants of cloned animals had already entered the food supply. Of course the agency made the statements a year after the cloned products leaked into the food chain. Still, just like the USDA, the UK's FSA stated that they believe cloned meat poses no risk, so citizens should not panic. The reason? They say that cloned meat has ' no substantial difference' to traditional meat, and therefore it is safe.

Comment: The following articles about the various issues associated with 'cloned meat' appeared on the SOTT.NET website back in 2010, read more about how 'cloned meat has already invaded the food supply':

How Would You Fancy Cloned Beef?
Cloned Milk and Meat: What's the Beef?
U.S. Unsure if Cloned Meat has been Sold in North America
'Cloned Beef' On Store Shelves Causes Stir In Britain
Cloned Meat May Already Have Invaded Our Food Supply, Posing Alarming Health Risks

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Info

Antibiotics in Your Meat? The Ethanol Industry Might Be Partly to Blame

Twilight Greenaway
Grist
Wed, 11 Apr 2012 18:53 UTC
Image
© USDA
Last year, while touring a fairly small, pasture-based farmstead cheese company, I found myself in a giant feed barn with a group of curious foodies. It was one of the last stops before the cheese tasting, so no one wanted to linger. But I have a distinct memory of what it was like to stand there staring at the giant piles of grains, thinking: "The cows eat all this, on top of the grass?"

Like many dairies and livestock operations, the farm owners had been able to lower their feed costs by using the byproducts of industrial food and fuel production. Towering around us that day, we were told, were giant piles of canola pellets, cotton seeds, and soy hulls (from oil production), and dried distillers grains (from ethanol production). I bookmarked the image in my mind and I've been considering it ever since, especially as I've heard about the aquaculture industry moving toward a grain-based model to avoid feeding wild seafood to farmed fish. In both industries (agriculture and aquaculture), it's not hard to see why distillers grains are so popular. They're affordable and the ethanol industry has been pushing them hard in recent years, because, as Tom Philpott pointed out a few years back,
"finding a high-value use for this 'coproduct' is absolutely vital to the corn ethanol project."
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Arrow Down

Fast Food America: Hospitals Serving Up McDonald's to Patients

Mike Barrett
Natural Society
Thu, 12 Apr 2012 15:54 UTC
Hospital
© NaturalSociety
It is no surprise that fast food is extremely unhealthy. On one level, the processed junk food lacks essential vitamins and nutrients, while they are also concocted with numerous health-hazardous substances and chemicals which should not be found in food - let alone be eaten. Knowing this information, it is no wonder why you should avoid fast food at all costs.

It is safe to say that no healthy individuals would or should be consuming fast food, and certainly no sick individuals who are depleted of nutrients (as a result of avoiding real food) should be consuming it either. So what in the world are fast food chains like McDonald's doing in places like hospital cafeterias?

One common pun states that if you want to get sick you should go to a hospital, but the fact that fast food resides in these 'health' institutions lends even more truth to the humorous statement. It turns out that some hospitals, such as a hospital in Des Moines, think nothing of the fast food placement. Since 1988, the Des Moines hospital has been blessed by a McDonald's fast food restaurant, and management seems to want no change.
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Info

Was This Man 'Cured' by Music?

Trace Dominguez
Discovery News
Thu, 12 Apr 2012 11:42 UTC
Mute Man
© YouTube
We know music cannot strictly cure, but in the video below an unresponsive, mostly mute old man seems revitalized and full of life and emotion simply by hearing some of his favorite music.

The video is powerful and moving, and the science behind it is a fascinating mix of neurology and primal instinct.

According to Dr. Michael DeGeorgia, Director of the Neurocritical Care Center at University Hospitals' Case Medical Center in Cleveland, "Music stimulates certain neurochemicals and hormones in the brain and body that promote feelings of pleasure, joy, serenity or excitement."

However, he adds, "Nobody really knows where music comes from or why it is so important to humans."

In the video, music brings an elderly man out of his torpor and he experiences a "quickening" as Dr. Oliver Sacks says in the video, quoting the philosopher Kant who once described music as "the quickening art."

DeGeorgia points out another philosopher, Plato, once said that music "gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything."
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Heart - Black

New View of Depression: An Ailment of the Entire Body

Shirley S. Wang
Wall Street Journal
Mon, 09 Apr 2012 05:08 UTC

Scientists are increasingly finding that depression and other psychological disorders can be as much diseases of the body as of the mind.

People with long-term psychological stress, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder tend to develop earlier and more serious forms of physical illnesses that usually hit people in older age, such as stroke, dementia, heart disease and diabetes. Recent research points to what might be happening on the cellular level that could account for this.

Scientists are finding that the same changes to chromosomes that happen as people age can also be found in people experiencing major stress and depression.
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Pills

Are Drugs Behind Epidemic of Mental Illness?

Gary G. Kohls, MD
Consortiumnews.com
Tue, 10 Apr 2012 21:36 UTC
pills
© n/a

Millions of Americans, when facing depression or even just anxiety, turn to powerful psychiatric drugs marketed by pharmaceutical giants, whose ads gloss over the risks in fast-talking fine print. A counter-movement warning of the dangers from an over-prescribed society is emerging, as Gary G. Kohls describes.

Since the introduction of major tranquilizers like Thorazine and Haldol, "minor" tranquilizers like Miltown, Librium and Valium and the dozens of so-called "antidepressants" like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, tens of millions of unsuspecting Americans have become mired deeply, to the point of permanent disability, in the American mental "health" system.

Many of these innocents have actually been made "crazy" and often disabled by the use of - or the withdrawal from - these commonly prescribed, brain-altering and, for many, brain-damaging psychiatric drugs that have been, for many decades, cavalierly handed out like candy - often in untested and therefore unapproved combinations of two or more.

Trusting and unaware patients have been treated with potentially dangerous drugs by equally unaware but well-intentioned physicians who have been likewise trusting of the slick and obscenely profitable psychopharmaceutical drug companies aka, BigPharma, not to mention the Food and Drug Administration, an agency that is all-too-often in bed with the drug industry that they are supposed to be monitoring and regulating. The foxes of BigPharma have a close ally inside the henhouse.

That is the conclusion of two books by a courageous investigative journalist and health science writer named Robert Whitaker. His first book, entitled Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill, noted that there has been a 600 percent increase (since Thorazine was introduced in the U.S. in the mid-1950s) in the total and permanent disabilities of millions of psychiatric drug-takers.
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