Former pharmaceutical sales representative, Gwen Olsen talks about her time at the job. She discusses who these sales reps really are and how they can influence doctors into prescribing certain drugs! Are these people educated enough or just being told what to say?

US health officials are on high alert as a mosquito-borne virus that yet has no cure has struck six of the US states. The virus called chikungunya causes severe joint pain which can last for years.

The latest case of the virus has been confirmed by Tennessee officials as the resident of Madison County, has been tested positive for the virus. The officials, however, added that there was no transmission to other residents in the state.

"It will be more difficult for the virus to establish itself here," Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee told Tech Times.

Rhode Island authorities also confirmed two cases of the mosquito-borne virus. They involve travelers who returned from the Dominican Republic on May 17 and May 29, said state officials, adding that authorities are currently investigating several other suspicious cases of the virus.

Researchers in Canada have discovered one of the deadliest kinds of antibiotic-resistant bacteria for the first time in a food product - raw squid - widening the potential exposure for consumers, according to a report published Wednesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Most antibiotic-resistant bacteria have, until now, been in health-care settings and spread by infected patients, as occurred in the "superbug" outbreak at the National Institutes of Health clinical center in 2011 that killed seven people.

The discovery of such a microbe in food means "the risk of exposure in the public goes beyond people with travel histories and beyond people who have been previously hospitalized," said Joseph Rubin, assistant professor of veterinary microbiology at the University of Saskatchewan.

"This finding means a much broader segment of the population is potentially at risk for exposure. It's something you may be bringing into your home rather than something you would acquire while traveling or following hospitalization," he said.

Cooking the squid at the proper temperature would kill the bacteria. But the bacteria could still spread into humans through cross-contamination if kitchen surfaces and hands aren't properly cleaned.

What would readers think about aspartame, the artificial sweetener that's an ingredient in thousands of products, if you were privy to information regarding its harmful health effects, plus lawsuits, that have been settled out of court with documents sealed under gag order? Could that be only the tip of the proverbial iceberg?

To understand the sordid realities surrounding the release of aspartame into U.S. food and pharmaceutical use, one has to appreciate that controversy surrounded aspartame almost from its very beginning when the U.S. FDA's own scientists would not recommend it.

Probably nothing encapsulates the aspartame 'pedigree' more than the article The Aspartame / NutraSweet Fiasco written by Attorney James S. Turner, with whom I've been in contact since the 1980s. Jim's work has been at the forefront of preserving healthcare and consumer rights and safety issues since his days as of one Ralph "Naider's Raiders" ^[1]. Thank you, Jim, for all your good work over the decades - and you still keep going.

Not long after the presumably more consumer-friendly nutritional information labels were rolled out, Beth Landman of The New Yorker magazine published an expose, entitled 'Too Good To Be True', in the May 30, 1994 issue that spelled out how deceptive marketing paired with the new labels seemed to confound an otherwise moderately intelligent consumer base.

The mid-90′s experienced a craze that might seem somewhat familiar today, the obsession with fro yo. Companies like Haagen-Dazs, Frusen Glädjé, and others promised those who purchased their products would experience decadent pleasure without any of the guilt. Another product of that era, Nabisco's Snackwell's brand of Devil's Food Cookies, labeled as "Fat-Free", became so popular with the 'snack without consequences' set, that many stores across America couldn't keep the cookie in stock.

While one would like to think lessons are learned and the American consumer becomes incrementally smarter and more savvy over time, it appears the genius of food marketing is that seeking suckers operates on a cyclical calendar. A new study by researchers at the University of Houston (UH), focusing on consumer knowledge of nutritional labeling and carefully selected marketing buzzwords, illustrates the veracity of the claim above.

While sugar-free and fat-free were the attention-getters some two decades ago, shoppers today find their eyes attracted by words like "antioxidant", "whole grain" and "gluten-free." The last is especially more interesting in light of the recent news that non-celiac gluten sensitivity was most likely disproven as being a real condition, according to Forbes contributor Steven Ross Pomeroy.

Nevertheless, it appears those and similar other buzzwords are able to lull the average consumer into believing that the food within its packaging is actually healthier than it is. This willingness to be duped by Madison Avenue when paired with a functional ignorance of just what the information on a nutrition label actually means usually results in poor dietary choices being made. According to Temple Northup, assistant professor at the Jack J. Valenti School of Communication at UH, the epidemic of obesity ends up being more pronounced due to decisions made by people thinking they are making healthy food selections.

Prof Kim McPherson, a public health specialist, calls on Prof Sir Rory Collins, a fellow Oxford don, to publish full data on which new NHS statins guidance is partly based.

© PAStatins have been associated with a 48 per cent increase in the risk of diabetes in middle-aged women.

One of the country's most eminent public health experts has attacked the NHS rationing body for advising millions of people to take statins based on "wholly inadequate" evidence supplied by a fellow Oxford don.

Prof Kim McPherson said it was "foolhardy" to tell many patients over 50 to take the cholesterol-lowering drugs when the "evidence base" for such advice was insufficient.

The epidemiologist, who has led previous panels issuing NHS guidance, called on Prof Sir Rory Collins, who runs trials at Oxford on which the advice was partly based, to open up his studies to be independently reviewed.

Last week the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), which drew up the draft guidance, admitted it was not given access to the full data.

Prof McPherson, 72, has written to Sir Rory to express concerns about possible side effects of the drugs, suggesting they had impaired his own "mobility and agility".

When people first consider alternative treatment (which really should be considered the "original" treatment) and are shown how well it can work, there is typically the defiant retort of "if this is so good, why doesn't my doctor know about it"? The truth is there are many reasons the more natural way has been scorned by conventional doctors and other members of the medical community, but the reality is they are not rooted in any reliable research. However, there are understandable reasons why conventional doctors ignore alternative medicine, and this is just a few of them.

Free thinking discouraged

The selection process of medical students largely depends on college grades. Students learn to get high grades by simply by repeating in their tests exactly what their teacher wants them to say. However, students that question what they are being taught usually do not get the higher grades.

Therefore, medical schools are full of students who are good at adopting the given "wisdom" of their teacher, but not necessarily good at free thinking and questioning as they have learned to follow precepts handed to them from presumed authorities.

This creates a myopic medical dogma that is incredibly hard to break, and even the thought of adopting a system that is completely opposite to what they have been taught for an extended period of time, brings about a level of cognitive dissonance that makes alternative medicine nearly impossible for them to consider.

A new study published in Current Medicine and Chemistry titled, "Sudden infant death following hexavalent vaccination: a neuropathologic study," lends support for the long theorized link between an ever-expanding number of infant vaccines and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

The fact that the peak age for SIDS is 2 - 4 months, which coincides with the introduction of 11 shots containing 16 vaccines (within the US immunization schedule), is so obvious a cause for concern, that even the CDC has been compelled to address the seeming 'coincidence' directly:

"From 2 to 4 months old, babies begin their primary course of vaccinations. This is also the peak age for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The timing of these two events has led some people to believe they might be related...With babies receiving multiple doses of vaccines during their first year of life and SIDS being the leading cause of death in babies between one month and one year of age, CDC has led research studies to look for possible linkage."

However, threat remains relatively small: study says

Combining two common childhood vaccines into one - rather than administering them separately - doubles the risk of febrile seizures in children, a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal has found.

Febrile seizures, convulsions brought on by fever in infants or young children, are a rare side-effect of measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, occurring at a rate of less than two seizures per 10,000 doses. When the MMR vaccine is combined with the vaccine against chickenpox, creating the MMRV (for varicella) vaccine, that risk doubles. It still remains relatively small, however - at a rate of 3.52 seizures per 10,000 doses, according to the study by a team led by Dr. Shannon MacDonald at the University of Calgary's faculty of medicine. Seizures among high-risk children were not significantly different, the study also found.

In British Columbia, the doubled MMRV vaccine is not given to babies because of the higher risk of febrile seizures, according to Dr. Monika Naus, the medical director of immunization programs for the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.

A serious mental health problem can reduce life expectancy by 10 to 20 years, according to a new analysis by psychiatrists.

In comparison, the loss of years due to heavy smoking is around 8 - 10.

Researchers from Oxford University analysed studies which included 1.7 million people, reporting 250,000 deaths to compare the effects of smoking and serious mental health problems (Chesney et al., 2014).