In response to growing concerns over head injuries in football, Pop Warner, the nation's largest youth football organization, announced rule changes on Wednesday that will limit the amount of full-speed collisions and other contact allowed in practice.

The issue of brain injuries sustained on the football field has forced a reckoning at all levels of the sport in recent years. Pop Warner's new rules, which will affect hundreds of thousands of youth football players, some as young as 5 years old, were seen as the latest acknowledgment that the nation's most popular sport poses dangers to the long-term cognitive health of its athletes.

As scrutiny of the impact of football has escalated, studies have shown that younger players can face repetitive brain trauma similar to that sustained at the college level - and perhaps even more acutely, because their brains are not fully developed and require longer rest periods after injury. Pop Warner officials said they were persuaded to alter their rules by research earlier this year showing that players as young as 7 are exposed to collisions as severe as those at the college level.

For years, bacteria have had a bad name. They are the cause of infections, of diseases. They are something to be scrubbed away, things to be avoided.

But now researchers have taken a detailed look at another set of bacteria that may play even bigger roles in health and disease: the 100 trillion good bacteria that live in or on the human body.

No one really knew much about them. They are essential for human life, needed to digest food, to synthesize certain vitamins, to form a barricade against disease-causing bacteria. But what do they look like in healthy people, and how much do they vary from person to person?

In a new five-year federal endeavor, the Human Microbiome Project, which has been compared to the Human Genome Project, 200 scientists at 80 institutions sequenced the genetic material of bacteria taken from nearly 250 healthy people.

Ten years ago, a group of scientists working at the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbioloy at SUNY, Stony Brook, described for the first time the de novo chemical synthesis of polio virus, which they confirmed was fully infectious.

This discovery, when reported in newspapers around the globe in July of 2002, created a great deal of controversy, which Eckard Wimmer, one of the key scientists involved in the project, described thusly:

This unexpected news struck a raw nerve among lay people and scientists alike. The work was condemned as dangerous and irresponsible, scorned as a stunt and perceived as a challenge to divine power. It was also hailed as a milestone in biology. What really happened?[i]

What did really happen?

Beyond the fact, as obvious as it is disturbing, that polio can now be recreated by anyone (friend or enemy) with the technology capable of doing so, the goal of vaccinating polio into extinction through global and universal vaccination campaigns has now been proven absolutely impossible to accomplish.

While not discussed openly until ten years later, in a seminal work published in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, authored by Neetu Vashisht and Jacob Pliyel titled, "Polio programme: let us declare victory and move on," the global polio eradication campaign is revealed in all its inglorious and ignoble duplicity to be founded upon nothing more than pseudo-science:

The charade about polio eradication and the great savings it will bring has persisted to date. It is a paradox, that while the director general of WHO, Margret Chan, and Bill Gates are trying to muster support for polio eradication (22) it has been known to the scientific community, for over 10 years, that eradication of polio is impossible. This is because in 2002 scientists had synthesised a chemical called poliovirus in a test-tube with the empirical formula C332,652H492,388N98,245O131,196P7,501S2,340. It has been demonstrated that by positioning the atoms in sequence, a particle can emerge with all the properties required for its proliferation and survival in nature (23, 24). Wimmer writes that the test-tube synthesis of poliovirus has wiped out any possibility of eradicating poliovirus in the future. Poliovirus cannot be declared extinct because the sequence of its genome is known and modern biotechnology allows it to be resurrected at any time in vitro. Man can thus never let down his guard against poliovirus. Indeed the 18-year-old global eradication campaign for polioviruses will have to be continued in some format forever. The long promised "infinite" monetary benefits from ceasing to vaccinate against poliovirus will never be achieved (24). The attraction that 'eradication' has for policy makers will vanish once this truth is widely known.[ii]

Not unlike the purportedly "endless war on terrorism," the global polio eradication campaign will never end, requiring an infinite number of vaccines to be used in the future against an infectious agent which biotechnology itself has guaranteed will never fully disappear.

The United States Preventive Services Task Force, an influential group that recently recommended against routine P.S.A. tests to detect prostate cancer, issued a draft statement on Tuesday recommending that healthy postmenopausal women should not take low doses of calcium or vitamin D supplements to prevent fractures.

The group, an independent panel of experts in prevention and primary care appointed by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, also considered use of the supplements by healthy premenopausal women and men. For those groups, it said, there was insufficient evidence to recommend taking vitamin D with or without calcium to prevent fractures.

Are You Flushing Your Money & Health Down The Toilet?

A recent study investigated over the counter vitamin and mineral supplements for the presence of gluten, and the results were alarming for those who are trying to follow a gluten free diet and maintain a healthy lifestyle through the use of multi-vitamins, probiotics, etc.

we investigated the presence of gluten in twenty one common dietary supplements from the national market using the immunochromatographic assay. This visual assay proved to be an efficient rapid tool for gluten screening as an alternative to the ELISA techniques. The results have shown the presence of gluten in 23.8% of the investigated samples (vitamins, minerals, plant extracts, probiotics supplements, lactoferrin, propolis supplements).

Source: Roum Arch Microbiol Immunol. 2011 Oct-Dec;70(4):174-7

Migraine headaches are generally severe and typically affect one side of the head, and may be preceded by neurological symptoms including visual disturbance. In some people, they can be common and extremely debilitating. The good news is that certain naturally-oriented strategies can be very effective in reducing the frequency and/or severity of attacks.

One of my standard approaches here will be to consider whether there are any food triggers. The classical triggers I learned at medical school include cheese, chocolate, coffee and red wine. Actually, in practice I find perhaps the most common food trigger of migraines and headaches in general is wheat. Actually, I had a conversation today with someone with celiac disease (gluten sensitivity) whose predominant symptom (on eating gluten) is headache.

Having difficulty breathing and catching your breath after exercising? Feeling nauseous after completing physical activity? These are signs that you might be fatigued and, if you're taking statins to lower your cholesterol, there is a new report that might be of interest to you. A recent study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, released results that statins, drugs taken to decrease cholesterol level, may have negative side effects on people's energy levels.

Researchers believe that the possible tolls, which hasn't been verified by other studies, should be of interest to women. They believe that four out of 10 women who take Merck's Zocor, otherwise known as simvastatin, feel tired or have less energy while exercising as a result of taking the drug. Even though Statins are generally safe, they are thought to cause muscle and joint pain in some patients.

"To our knowledge, this is the first randomized evidence affirming unfavorable statin effects on energy and exertional fatigue," wrote the researchers in the paper. "These findings are important, given the central relevance of energy and functional status to well-being."

Medical experts have differing opinions on the results; while some physicians believe that the results are not unexpected and should be taken notice of, others believe that the study has limitations and patients should consult with their doctor before discontinuing taking their medication.

"Fatigue is reversible and not fatal," Dr. Kausik Ray told Reuters Health in an email. "Risks and benefits in absolute terms should be discussed on a case by case basis."

Today, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) confirmed what we've long suspected: the pollution from dirty diesel engines causes cancer.

"The scientific evidence was compelling and the working group's conclusion was unanimous: Diesel engine exhaust causes lung cancer in humans," Christopher Portier, chairman of the IARC working group, said in a statement. "Given the additional health impacts from diesel particulates, exposure to this mixture of chemicals should be reduced worldwide."

Today's news places diesel exhaust in the same category of cancer risk as asbestos and arsenic. As my colleague Diane Bailey pointed out, the IARC report adds to the mountain of studies, reports, and data connecting diesel exhaust to a wide range of health impacts, including increased asthma emergencies, bronchitis, emphysema, and heart disease.

The cost of our reliance on dirty diesel fuels and engines is staggering. In the United States alone, diesel engines that power our buses, trucks, construction and farm equipment, locomotives, and ships trigger more than 50,000 premature deaths and $300 billion in health costs every year. Worldwide, the cost is many times greater, due to the much dirtier diesel fuels and engines that are typically used in the developing world.

Last month, an article was published in the interdisciplinary journal Langmuir titled, "Patterning of Antibodies Using Flexographic Printing," which read like a chapter out of a science fiction novel:

Antibodies were patterned onto flexible plastic films using the flexographic printing process...Printing antibody features such as dots, squares, text, and fine lines were reproduced effectively. Furthermore, this process could be easily adapted for printing of other biological materials, including, but not limited to, enzymes, DNA, proteins, aptamers, and cells.[1]

This concept - and now reality - of creating plastic antibodies and associated biological components, to be used for "medicinal purposes" within the human organism, is technically a form of cybernetics; that is, combining artificial technologies and biological systems to create human-machine hybrids (i.e. cyborgs) with enhanced abilities. While the trans-humanistic ethos which subtends cybernetic technology is, for lack of a better word, creepy, the successes of synthetic antibodies have recently been lauded in both the experimental literature and mainstream media, alike.

A 2010 study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society titled, "Recognition, neutralization, and clearance of target peptides in the bloodstream of living mice by molecularly imprinted polymer nanoparticles: a plastic antibody," reported on the ability of plastic antibodies to completely neutralize a toxic peptide in the bloodstream of living mice:

We report that simple, synthetic organic polymer nanoparticles (NPs) can capture and clear a target peptide toxin in the bloodstream of living mice. The protein-sized polymer nanoparticles, with a binding affinity and selectivity comparable to those of natural antibodies, were prepared by combining a functional monomer optimization strategy with molecular-imprinting nanoparticle synthesis. As a result of binding and removal of melittin by NPs in vivo, the mortality and peripheral toxic symptoms due to melittin were significantly diminished. In vivo imaging of the polymer nanoparticles (or"plastic antibodies") established that the NPs accelerate clearance of the peptide from blood and accumulate in the liver. Coupled with their biocompatibility and nontoxic characteristics, plastic antibodies offer the potential for neutralizing a wide range of biomacromolecules in vivo.[2]

The unintended, adverse effects of injecting plastic antibodies into animals or humans in order to improve on, optimize or replace natural immune processes, are likely immense. Plastic, after all, is a derivative of crude oil, and lacks biocompatibility with most living systems (being therefore xenobiotic), excluding rare forms of bacteria and fungi. It is likely that if we continue to see overwhelmingly positive reports such as this in the animal model, it will only be a matter of time until human clinical trials begin, and FDA approval becomes a very real possibility.

African-Americans are 25 percent more likely to die from cancer than white Americans are, and the reasons are numerous, including lower socio-economic status, poorer access to health care, and the cancer diagnosis coming at later, more deadly stages.

Still, health experts say these factors cannot fully explain the extent of disparities in survival for the most common cancers, such as breast, lung, colon and prostate cancers.

A paper published in the current issue of the journal Dermato-Endocrinology points the finger at a seemingly obvious but overlooked culprit: the sun.

The researchers' theory is that, in northern latitudes, the dark skin of African-Americans cannot absorb enough sunlight to generate adequate amounts of vitamin D, which is often called the "sunshine vitamin." The body uses ultraviolet rays from the sun to manufacture vitamin D in the inner layers of the skin.

Vitamin D is needed for strong bones; doctors nearly 100 years ago associated a lack of adequate sun exposure with rickets among child laborers, exemplified by bowed legs. Recent studies also have shown that low levels of vitamin D in the blood seem to contribute to a weak immune system and a host of diseases, such as cancer and multiple sclerosis.

This lack of vitamin D could completely fill in the health disparity gap for cancer survival between white and black Americans, the researchers said.