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Scientists who say GMOs not proven safe climbs to 231

Barbara H. Peterson
Farm Wars
Wed, 30 Oct 2013 21:19 UTC
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Developer of first commercialised GM food says debate isn't over.

The number of scientists, physicians and legal experts who have signed the group statement, "No scientific consensus on GMO safety" has climbed to 231 in just over a week - and it's still growing.

The number of initial signatories stood at almost 100 on the day the statement was released, 21 October. It has more than doubled since.

A recent signatory is Dr Belinda Martineau, former member of the Michelmore Lab at the UC Davis Genome Center, University of California, who helped commercialise the world's first GM whole food, the Flavr Savr tomato. Dr Martineau said:
"I wholeheartedly support this thorough, thoughtful and professional statement describing the lack of scientific consensus on the safety of genetically engineered (GM/GE) crops and other GM/GE organisms (also referred to as GMOs). Society's debate over how best to utilize the powerful technology of genetic engineering is clearly not over. For its supporters to assume it is, is little more than wishful thinking."
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Syringe

Health officers group voices concern over vaccine exemption form

Eryn Brown
Los Angeles Times
Fri, 01 Nov 2013 02:28 UTC
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© Ricardo DeAratanha
California's new vaccine exemption forms were intended to make sure parents got complete and accurate information about immunizations before they opted against having their children get shots. Will a separate religious exemption undermine the form's intent?
Two days after the California Department of Public Health released its new form requiring parents who want to exempt their kids from required vaccinations to speak with a doctor, an association of public health officers is voicing concern over an option on the form that allows parents to easily bypass the requirement.

A box parents can check allows them to skip talking to their doctor if they vouch that they're "a member of a religion that prohibits me from seeking medical advice or treatment from authorized healthcare practitioners."
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Battery

Endurance athletes find success with paleo diets

Dorsey Kindler
Men's Journal
Sun, 03 Nov 2013 14:26 UTC
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© Doug Pensinger
What do professional cyclist Dave Zabriskie, ultramarathon runner Timothy Olson, and gold-medal triathlete Simon Whitfield have in common? All of these elite endurance athletes have pushed away the time-honored plate of pasta in favor of a "paleo" approach to nutrition.

They've dialed down the carbohydrates and replaced them with copious amounts of healthy fat. And as multitudes of paleo converts claim (and anecdotal evidence suggests), this may be the key to optimizing performance and extending careers into the late thirties and beyond.

But it requires a leap of faith. "It's like NASA," says conditioning coach Jacques DeVore on the trepidation he felt sending Zabriskie into the 2013 racing season on an unproved diet. "You can test everything in the lab, but then you put it up in space and sometimes things don't work out."
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Pills

Department of Justice reaches $2.2B settlement with Johnson & Johnson to resolve unapproved drug marketing allegations

Matthew Perrone
The Star Tribune
Mon, 04 Nov 2013 12:12 UTC
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© Lisa Poole, Associated Press
Johnson & Johnson products are seen on the shelf, at a grocery store in Danvers, Mass.
Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiaries have agreed to pay over $2.2 billion to resolve criminal and civil allegations that the company promoted powerful psychiatric drugs for unapproved uses in children, seniors and disabled patients, the Department of Justice announced on Monday.

The allegations include paying kickbacks to physicians and pharmacies to recommend and prescribe Risperdal and Invega, both antipsychotic drugs, and Natrecor, which is used to treat heart failure.

The figure includes $1.72 billion in civil settlements with federal and state governments as well as $485 million in criminal fines and forfeited profits.

The agreement is the third-largest U.S. settlement involving a drugmaker, and the latest in a string of legal actions against drug companies that allegedly put profits ahead of patients. In recent years, the government has cracked down on the pharmaceutical industry's aggressive marketing tactics, which include pushing medicines for unapproved, or off-label, uses. While doctors are allowed to prescribe medicines for any use, drugmakers cannot promote them in any way that is not approved by FDA.

Comment: Spending $2 billion on settlements, plus over $4 billion on marketing is nothing for these criminals. They can get away with murder just fine after paying billions and with a profit!

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Bomb

Study: Bat-to-human leap likely for SARS-like virus

Gautam Naik
The Wallstreet Journal
Wed, 30 Oct 2013 19:07 UTC
Chinese horseshoe bat
© Dr. Libiao Zhang, Guangdong Entomological Institute/South China Institute of Endangered Animals
A Chinese horseshoe bat. SARS-like coronaviruses were found in a colony of these animals in Yunnan province in southwest China.
A decade after SARS swept through the world and killed more than 750 people, scientists have made a troubling discovery: A very close cousin of the SARS virus lives in bats and it can likely jump directly to people.

The findings create new fears about the emergence of diseases like SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. The virus spread quickly from person to person in 2003 and had a mortality rate of at least 9%. Worries of a severe pandemic led the World Health Organization to issue an emergency travel advisory.

While bats have previously been fingered as a host for SARS, it was believed that the virus jumped from there to weasel-like mammals known as civets, where it went through genetic changes before infecting people. Operating on that belief, China cracked down on markets where bats, civets and other wildlife were sold for food.
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Arrow Down

West Australian patients swamp GPs in heart pill confusion

Cathy O'Leary
The West Australian
Sat, 02 Nov 2013 02:40 UTC
Pills
© The West Australian
TV fallout: Worried patients have swamped GPs.
WA doctors are being inundated with patients asking if they should dump their anti-cholesterol drugs after a television documentary suggested the pills were overprescribed and doing more harm than good.

Experts are furious by claims in the ABC medical science program Catalyst that cholesterol is a heart disease myth and the drugs statins have few benefits and significant side effects.

The program was a rating success, with almost one million capital-city viewers tuning in to the series on the past two Thursdays.

There is now speculation the ABC has left itself open to litigation after reports of worried patients taking themselves off the drugs without telling their doctor.

Some critics claim the program was heavily biased to the views of several hand-picked US doctors, nutritionists and "suntanned charismatics" who played down the role of cholesterol and saturated fats in heart disease.

Australian Medical Association WA president Richard Choong said one in five patients he had seen at his Port Kennedy practice in the past two days came because they were worried about their prescribed statins.
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Syringe

131 ways for an infant to die: Vaccines and sudden death

Neil Z. Miller
NaturalNews.com
Thu, 31 Oct 2013 00:00 UTC
There are 130 official ways for an infant to die. These official categories of death, sanctioned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), are published in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD).[1-3] When a baby dies, coroners must choose from among these 130 categories.

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© vaclib.org
The official causes of death listed in the ICD include nearly every imaginable -- and tragic -- possibility. However, there is NO category for infant deaths caused by vaccines.[4] This is odd because the federal government is aware that vaccines permanently disable and kill some babies -- the very reason Congress established a "death and disability" tax on childhood vaccines more than 25 years ago when the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 (Public Law 99-660) created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP).

Comment: Resources for parents, parents-to-be, and researchers can be found at vaclib.org.

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Attention

The grain that damages the human brain

Sayer Ji
Greenmedinfo.com
Sat, 02 Nov 2013 13:28 UTC
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With increasing recognition among medical professionals and the lay public alike that the health of gut and brain are intimately connected (i.e. the 'gut-brain' axis), the concept that gluten-containing grains can damage the human brain is beginning to be taken more seriously.

Books like Dr. William Davis' New York Times best-selling Wheat Belly made great progress in opening up popular consciousness to the subject of gluten's addictive properties, my own e-book The Dark Side of Wheat explored the role that wheat and grains in general played as an addictive agent, and Dr. David Perlmutter's new book Grain Brain places significant emphasis on this connection as well.

After all, if wheat is a common cause of intestinal damage ("enteropathy") both in those with celiac disease and non-celiac gluten sensitivity, it is no wonder that gluten-associated damage to the gut - sometimes called the "enteric brain," or "second brain," - could have adverse effects to the central nervous system as well.

Indeed, our research project at GreenMedInfo.com has identified in biomedical literature directly from the National Library of Medicine over 200 adverse health effects linked to gluten-containing grains, with neurotoxicity top on the list of 21 distinct modes of toxicity associated with this grain's effects.[i] These neurotoxic properties extend from neuropathy and ataxia, to distinct psychiatric conditions such as acute states of mania, and schizophrenia.
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Bacon n Eggs

Doctors say cholesterol and saturated fat do not cause heart disease and statins do not save lives

David Evans
Healthy Diets and Science
Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:01 UTC
Please watch the two videos, each last about 30 minutes.

In the first video Dr Maryanne Demasi follows the road which led us to believe that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, and reveal why it's been touted as the biggest myth in medical history.

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Hearts

Butter and your heart: The facts

Dr John Briffa
drbriffa.com
Fri, 01 Nov 2013 08:07 UTC
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Many of us will know the gustatory gratification butter can give us, whether spread on a piece of bread or toast, infused in mashed potato or melted over some veggies. However, we also likely to be only too aware of butter's rich stash of saturated fat, which we're warned raises our risk of heart disease via an elevating effect on cholesterol. Butter has inevitably been damned to nutritional hell by official health bodies, which have eagerly advised us to opt for lower-fat and cholesterol-reducing spreads instead.


Comment: Take a Look at the Damage Wheat Bread Can Cause You


This week, though, a British Medical Journal article by cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra which urges us to choose butter every time hit the headlines. So, are our beliefs about the 'heart-healthy' properties of margarine built on solid scientific foundations, or just the result of slick marketing and misinformation? Is it time we got our fats straight?

Butter

While the saturated fat that makes up the bulk of butter might boost cholesterol levels in our blood, any effect here is actually irrelevant: it's the impact it has on health that counts. All the most recent, major scientific reviews of the evidence simply fail to find any link between intakes of saturated fat and risk of heart disease.

These 'epidemiological' studies fail to impugn saturated fat, but cannot be used to determine 'causality' (whether or not saturated fat causes heart disease). More enlightening are studies in which the health outcomes of individuals who cut back on saturated fat or replace it with supposedly healthier fats are compared with those who do not make these changes.

Comment: For more information see:

Heart of the Matter - Dietary Villains
10 Reasons Why I Love Butter
Higher cholesterol levels associated with improved outcomes in stroke
From the Heart: Saturated fat is not the major issue
Swedish Expert Committee: A Low-Carb Diet most effective for weight loss

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