Geneva - Five of the 15 experts that advised the World Health Organisation about swine flu pandemic alerts had received support from the drugs industry, including for flu vaccine research, the WHO revealed on Wednesday.
The agency released for the first time a list of the 15 members of the Emergency Committee headed by Australian tropical diseases professor John Mackenzie, who was the only member publicly named during the outbreak.
They came from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin and North America, the list posted on the WHO's website showed.
Most were scientific researchers and epidemiologists, along with a Senegalese diplomat, public health officials from Thailand and Chile as well as two specialists on international air travel and health. The list can be seen here.
Dan Goodin The Register Wed, 11 Aug 2010 04:27 UTC
Just add email address
A bug in Facebook's login system allows attackers to match unknown email addresses with users' first and last names, even when they've configured their accounts to make that information private.
The information leak can be exploited by social-engineering scammers, phishers, or anyone who has ever been curious about the person behind an anonymous email message. If the address belongs to any one of the 500 million active users on Facebook, the social-networking site will return the full name and picture associated with the account.
Comment: "Backdoors" in software are so common, that it's almost a certainty that they're designed that way. Software 'glitches' provide plausable deniability to the host, while unknown third parties benefit from these designed and controlled 'breaches'.
Onerous Rule has Devastated California Raw Almond Producers
Washington, DC - A federal appeals court ruled today, overturning a lower court decision, that a group of California almond farmers have the right to challenge a USDA regulation requiring the treatment of their raw almonds with a toxic fumigant or steam heat prior to sale to consumers. For the past three years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has denied American consumers the right to buy raw almonds, grown in the USA, when they shop in grocery and natural food stores.
A group of almond growers sued the government to challenge USDA's rule, but the federal district court ruled that courtroom doors were closed to the growers' claims. The controversial rule has cost individual farmers millions of dollars in lost sales since it was enacted in September 2007..
"We are delighted by the court's decision," said Will Fantle, Cornucopia's Research Director. Cornucopia has been coordinating the legal strategy for the farmers' lawsuit. "At long last the farmers who have been injured by this rule will have the opportunity to stand in court and state why this poorly thought out regulation should be thrown out," Fantle added.
Jeffrey M. Smith Dr. Mercola Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:25 UTC
Jeffrey Smith
In 2004, the peer-reviewed British Food Journal published a study claiming that when shoppers in a Canadian farm store were given an informed, unbiased choice between genetically modified (GM) corn and non-GM corn, most purchased the GM variety.
The research, which was funded by the biotech industry and conducted by four staunch proponents of GM foods, other findings around the world that show how people avoid genetically modified organisms (GMOs) when given a choice.
The controversial article was nonetheless given the Journal's prestigious Award for Excellence for the Most Outstanding Paper of 2004. It is often cited by biotech advocates as proof that people are embracing GM foods.
Fortunately Stuart Laidlaw, a reporter from Canada's Toronto Star, had visited the farm store several times during the study and described the scenario in his book Secret Ingredients. Far from offering unbiased choices, huge signs placed over the non-GM corn bin read, "Would you eat wormy sweet corn?" It further listed the chemicals that were sprayed during the season.
Cholesterol could easily be described as the smoking gun of the last two decades.
It's been responsible for demonizing entire categories of foods (like eggs and saturated fats) and blamed for just about every case of heart disease in the last 20 years.
Yet when I first opened my medical practice in the mid 80s, cholesterol, and the fear that yours was too high was rarely talked about.
Somewhere along the way however, cholesterol became a household word -- something that you must keep as low as possible, or suffer the consequences.
You are probably aware that there are many myths that portray fat and cholesterol as one of the worst foods you can consume. Please understand that these myths are actually harming your health.
Not only is cholesterol most likely not going to destroy your health (as you have been led to believe), but it is also not the cause of heart disease.
And for those of you taking cholesterol-lowering drugs, the information that follows could not have been given to you fast enough. But before I delve into this life-changing information, let's get some basics down first.
Michael Jacobson Alternet Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:12 UTC
Despite signs that they may cause cancer, food manufacturers continue to pour about millions of pounds of synthetic dyes into the American food supply every year.
It's not easy, right? That explains why this mouthful goes by its friendlier name, Red 40. It might sound innocent, but this ingredient and others like it are far from harmless. And they're in our food.
For years, we at the Center for Science in the Public Interest and food-safety officials in Europe have highlighted studies linking food dyes to hyperactivity and other behavioral problems in children. The British government and the European Parliament even decided to phase out artificial dyes based on these concerns alone, but the same can't be said for the United States. So why do food manufacturers continue to pour about 15 million pounds of eight synthetic dyes into the American food supply every year?
People are very upset about this, and with good reason. Female infants in China who have been fed formula have been growing breasts.
According to the official Chinese Daily newspaper, medical tests performed on the babies found levels of estrogens circulating in their bloodstreams that are as high as those found in most adult women. These babies are between four and 15 months old. And the evidence is overwhelming that the milk formula they have been fed is responsible.
Synutra, the company that makes the baby formula consumed by these babies, says it's not their fault. They insist that "no man-made hormones or any illegal substances were added during the production of the milk powder."
Mark Hyman, M.D. UltraWelness Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:59 UTC
Inflammation is "hot" topic in medicine. It appears connected to almost every known chronic disease -- from heart disease to cancer, diabetes to obesity, autism to dementia, and even depression. Other inflammatory diseases such as allergies, asthma, arthritis, and autoimmune disease are increasing at dramatic rates. As physicians we are trained to shut off inflammation with aspirin, anti-inflammatory medication such as Advil or Motrin, steroids and increasingly more powerful immune suppressing medication with serious side effects. But we are not trained to find and treat the underlying causes of inflammation in chronic disease. Hidden allergens, infections, environmental toxins, an inflammatory diet, and stress are the real causes of these inflammatory conditions.
Autoimmune diseases, specifically, now affect 24 million people and include rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, thyroid disease, inflammatory bowel disease, and more. These are often addressed by powerful immune suppressing medication and not by addressing the cause. That's like taking a lot of aspirin while you are standing on a tack. The treatment is not more aspirin or a strong immune suppressant, but removing the tack.
It you want to cool off inflammation in the body, you must find the source. Treat the fire, not the smoke. In medicine we are mostly taught to diagnose disease by symptoms, NOT by their underlying cause. Functional medicine, the emerging 21st paradigm of systems medicine teaches us to treat the cause, not only the symptoms, to ask the question WHY are you sick, not only WHAT disease do you have.
Comment: There is also a wealth of material relating to detoxification and healing here.
The idea that meditation is good for you is certainly not new, but scientists are still trying to figure out exactly why meditating so reliably improves mental and physical health. One old theory is that meditation is just like exercise: it trains the brain as if gray matter were a bundle of muscles. You work those muscles and they get stronger.
A recent paper in the journal Psychological Science tries to identify brain functions that are actually enhanced by meditating. The study shows that intensive meditation can help people focus their attention and sustain it - even during the most boring of tasks. But while participants who meditated were able to pick up visual cues better than a control group, it was not clear whether meditating helped them process the new information in a meaningful way.
Comment: For more information on a simple and easy to use meditation technique read about the Éiriú Eolas Breathing and Meditation Program here.
So preserve yourselves, my brothers, from the calamities of this place, for distinguishing it is extremely difficult! Souls find it sweet, and then within it they are duped, since they become completely enamored of it.
- Sufi proverb
Recent Comments
IMO, this is not how you 'pay back' the 'elites'. It makes the rest of them more jumpy and gives them an excuse to do even stupider draconian...
Comment: "Backdoors" in software are so common, that it's almost a certainty that they're designed that way. Software 'glitches' provide plausable deniability to the host, while unknown third parties benefit from these designed and controlled 'breaches'.