Health & WellnessS


Syringe

Flashback New York's HIV experiment

HIV positive children and their loved ones have few rights if they choose to battle with social work authorities in New York City.

Comment: For further reading, we recommend "Out of control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science" by Celia Farber, which has been published in the March 2006 issue of Harper's Magazine. Ms. Farber provides ample evidence that experimenting on unsuspecting people has become a standard in drug manufacturing:

**America is a place where people rarely say: Stop. Extreme and unnatural things happen all the time, and nobody seems to know how to hit the brakes. In this muscular, can-do era, we are particularly prone to the seductions of the pharmaceutical industry, which has successfully marketed its ever growing arsenal of drugs as the latest American right. The buzzword is "access," which has the advantage of short-circuiting the question of whether the drugs actually work, and of utterly obviating the question of whether they are even remotely safe. This situation has had particularly tragic ramifications on the border between the class of Americans with good health insurance, who are essentially consumers of pharmaceutical goods, and those without insurance, some of whom get drugs "free" but with a significant caveat attached: They agree to be experimented on. These people, known in the industry as "recruits," are pulled in via doctors straight from clinics and even recruited on the Internet into the pharmaceutical industry and the government's web of clinical trials, thousands of which have popped up in recent years across the nation and around the world. Such studies help maintain the industry's carefully cultivated image of benign concern, of charity and progress, while at the same time feeding the experimental factories from which new blockbuster drugs emerge. "I call them what they are: human experiments," says Vera Hassner Sharav, of the Alliance for Human Research Protection in New York City. "What's happened over the last ten to fifteen years is that profits in medicine shifted from patient care to clinical trials, which is a huge industry now. Everybody involved, except the subject, makes money on it, like a food chain. At the center of it is the NIH, which quietly, while people weren't looking, wound up becoming the partner of industry.

By June 2004, the National Institutes of Health had registered 10,906 clinical trials in ninety countries. The size of these trials, which range from the hundreds to more than 10,000 people for a single study, creates a huge market for trial participants, who are motivated by different factors in different societies but generally by some combination of the promise of better health care, prenatal care, free "access" to drugs, and often - especially in the United States - cash payments. Participating doctors, whose patient-care profits have been dwindling in recent years because of insurance-company restrictions, beef up their incomes by recruiting patients." **

Additionally, many pharmaceutical companies take their clinical trials to developing countries because of lesser costs, more lenient laws and the availability of participants, for whom even the unproven drugs represent a major improvement over the standard of care they receive at local hospitals. That often turns deadly, as it was in a recent case of children in a Russian orphanage who died from an experimental measles vaccine. The manufacturer of the vaccines, a Belgian company, suffered no penalty.


Heart

Onions 'cut heart disease risk'

Eating a meal rich in compounds called flavonoids reduces some early signs of heart disease, research shows.


Gear

Small Amounts Fluoride Destroy The Will To Resist

The following letter was received by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Milwaukee Wisconsin, on 2 October 1954, from Mr. Charles Perkins, a chemist:

"I have your letter of September 29 asking for further documentation regarding a statement made in my book, The Truth About Water Fluoridation, to the effect that the idea of water fluoridation was brought to England from Russia by the Russian Communist Kreminoff. "In the 1930's, Hitler and the German Nazi's envisioned a world to be dominated and controlled by a Nazi philosophy of pan-Germanism. The German chemists worked out a very ingenious and far-reaching plan of mass-control which was submitted to and adopted by the German General Staff. This plan was to control the population in any given area through mass medication of drinking water supplies. By this method they could control the population in whole areas, reduce population by water medication that would produce sterility in women, and so on. In this scheme of mass-control, sodium fluoride occupied a prominent place.

Attention

Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back in the Tap Water

That nutjob senator from Oklahoma had it wrong: It's not climate change that's the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American People.

It's bottled water. Way back at the Bioneers conference in 2005, when I traded my Nalgene bottle for a stainless steel Klean Kanteen, which I fill with filtered tap water, I had reservations about drinking bottled water that had been transported from Australia/Fiji/England/France/Venus in plastic. I was only concerned about my health back then, not so much the planet.

But after reading about plastic in the oceans, plastic in the landfills, the environmental cost of manufacturing and disposing of plastic bottles and this:

Question

Flashback Is Your Boss a Psychopath?

Odds are you've run across one of these characters in your career. They're glib, charming, manipulative, deceitful, ruthless -- and very, very destructive. And there may be lots of them in America's corner offices.

One of the most provocative ideas about business in this decade so far surfaced in a most unlikely place. The forum wasn't the Harvard Business School or one of those $4,000-a-head conferences where Silicon Valley's venture capitalists search for the next big thing. It was a convention of Canadian cops in the far-flung province of Newfoundland. The speaker, a 71-year-old professor emeritus from the University of British Columbia, remains virtually unknown in the business realm. But he's renowned in his own field: criminal psychology. Robert Hare is the creator of the Psychopathy Checklist. The 20-item personality evaluation has exerted enormous influence in its quarter-century history. It's the standard tool for making clinical diagnoses of psychopaths -- the 1% of the general population that isn't burdened by conscience. Psychopaths have a profound lack of empathy. They use other people callously and remorselessly for their own ends. They seduce victims with a hypnotic charm that masks their true nature as pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless manipulators. Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek thrills from real-life "games" they can win -- and take pleasure from their power over other people.

Bomb

Emotional Intelligence and the use of tobacco and cannabis

The term Emotional Intelligence could be defined as the capacity to perceive, comprehend and regulate one's own emotions and those of others so as to be able to distinguish between emotions and use this information as a guide for one's thoughts and actions. One of the important benefits of developing this type of intelligence is the ability to learn how to interact with others and to face an ever changing social and cultural world more effectively.


Comment: In other words, so called "emotional intelligence" is a defense/dumping mechanism or buffer against ever increasing stress of everyday reality.


The Stress and Health Research Group (GIES) of the UAB Department of General, Development and Educational Psychology has carried out a research entitled "Perceived emotional intelligence and its relation to tobacco and cannabis use among university students".The objective of this research consisted in analysing the possible relation between EI and the use of tobacco and cannabis among 133 UAB psychology students with an average age of 21.5.

Light Saber

Sending his cancer a signal

John Kanzius, sorely weakened by leukemia treatments, drew on his lifetime of working with radio waves to devise a machine that targets cancer cells. The miracle: It works.

©John Beale / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"I want to see the treatment work," says John Kanzius, whose cancer has recurred. He knows the process he developed may not be ready in time to save his life, but the project was never about him.

Wine

Mmm...Beer: A pint of beer is better for you after a workout than water, say scientists

Yesterday we were warned of the health dangers associated with alcohol - not to mention bacon, ham and sausages.

Today there is more cheering news from a different set of scientists.

They have come up with the perfect excuse for heading to the pub after a game of football or rugby.

Their research has shown that a glass of beer is far better at rehydrating the body after exercise than water.

Question

The Case for Pathology: Brain MRIs Find Hidden Neurological Problems

Screening MRIs can uncover potential trouble in the brain, a new study suggests.

As a matter of fact, that might happen more than 10 percent of the time, according to Dutch researchers who found that 7.2 percent of those who received MRIs had blocked blood vessels in their brains, 1.8 percent had cerebral aneurysms, and 1.6 had benign brain tumors.

"Our study shows that incidental findings are much more frequent than was thought previously," said study co-author Dr. Aad van der Lugt, an associate professor of radiology at Erasmus MC University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.


Comment: One has to wonder what kind of effect it has on psychological make up of those individuals, even if there are no apparent physiological symptoms.

From Political Ponerology by Andrew M. Lobaczewski
Brain tissue is very limited in its regenerative ability. If it is
damaged and the change subsequently heals, a process of rehabilitation
can take place wherein the neighboring healthy tissue
takes over the function of the damaged portion.
This substitution
is never quite perfect; thus some deficits in skill and proper
psychological processes can be detected in even cases of very
small damage by using the appropriate tests. Specialists are
aware of the variegated causes for the origin of such damage,
including trauma and infections. We should point out here that
the psychological results of such changes, as we can observe
many years later, are more heavily dependent upon the location
of the damage itself in the brain mass, whether on the surface
or within, than they are upon the cause which brought them
about. The quality of these consequences also depends upon
when they occurred in the person's lifetime. Regarding pathological
factors of ponerogenic processes, perinatal or early
infant damages have more active results than damages which
occurred later.

The findings are published in the Nov. 1 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Health

H5N1 hits poultry in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam

Officials in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Vietnam have reported new outbreaks of H5N1 avian influenza in poultry this week.

In Bangladesh, an official from the government's livestock department said the H5N1 virus was detected at three farms in the northern part of the country, Reuters reported today. Workers culled about 6,000 chickens, which were buried over the last 2 days, the report said.

The country's last reported H5N1 outbreak occurred in May, according to a World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) report.

Meanwhile, a livestock official in Pakistan said yesterday that 45,000 chicks at a breeding operation in the Northwest Frontier province were destroyed and buried after a laboratory in Islamabad identified the H5N1 virus in samples from the flock, The Post, a Pakistani newspaper, reported today.

According to OIE reports, Pakistan's last poultry outbreak occurred in July.

Elsewhere, veterinary officials in Vietnam reported two more H5N1 outbreaks in ducks, according to a report from Xinhua, China's state news agency. An outbreak that began on Oct 29 in southern Vietnam's Tra Vinh province struck a flock of 2-month-old ducks, killing 400 and sickening 500, the report said.

On Oct 28 an H5N1 outbreak killed 210 of 400 ducks at a household in northern Vietnam's Nam Dinh province, the Xinhua report said.