• Green Bank, West Virginia is situated in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone
• All electromagnetic signals are banned within the zone including WiFi and cellphones
• The zone was set up to protect the world's largest radio telescopes from electronic interference
• Americans from across the country have resettled in Green Bank to get away from the signals, which they find physically damaging
• More than 30 people have relocated to Green Bank as of 2013

A small remote town where Wi-Fi is banned has become an unlikely haven for people claiming modern technology has been making them ill.

The so-called 'Wi-Fi refugees' are flocking to the tiny settlement to escape painful symptoms including burning skin, chest pains and acute headaches.

The sufferers argue the affliction - a condition known as Electromagnetic Sensitivity - has been eased by the move and report feeling much better.

Dateline: Ontario, Canada. Eighteen-year-old Brennan McCartney visited his doctor for a chest cold and, despite no history of mental health issues or diagnosis of depression, received a prescription for the antidepressant Cipralex. Four days later, on November 8, 2010, he hanged himself.

Dateline: Laytonsville, Maryland. A psychiatrist prescribed the antidepressant Zoloft to 12-year-old Candace Downing, who suffered anxiety related to schoolwork but was otherwise a bright child with a loving family, a wide circle of friends, and no history of depression. On January 10, 2004, her mother found her dead, hanging from her bed valance.

Dateline: Indianapolis, Indiana. To help pay her college tuition, 19-year-old Traci Johnson volunteered for a clinical trial of a new antidepressant called Cymbalta. On February 7, 2004, she hanged herself at the Eli Lilly laboratory where the experiment was held. She was one of five participants who took their lives during clinical trials of the drug prior to its debut, though all had been pre-screened to confirm they did not have mental problems.

Thousands of similar stories link suicide, self-harm, and violent behavior to psychotherapeutics, but these medicines, often referred to as blockbuster drugs because they top $1 billion in annual sales, are among the most popular in medical history. The antipsychotic Abilify is now the nation's top-selling drug. Research firm IMS Health reports sales totaled nearly $6.5 billion in 2013. The medicine involved in the clinical trial suicides recounted above, Cymbalta, is the fourth-most-prescribed drug in the United States and the fifth top seller at $5.2 billion. Vyvanse, an amphetamine used to treat childhood attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), holds the eighth position on the list of most prescribed meds. Ninth is Lyrica, an anticonvulsant often used to treat social anxiety disorder. Number 36 is antipsychotic Seroquel, prescribed for a wide range of conditions from depression and anxiety to schizophrenia. Antidepressants are the most commonly prescribed medication class in the United States.

Peshawar - After using scare tactics at places, authorities in Pakistan are moving to bribe parents for vaccinating their children with the questionable oral polio vaccine (OPV).

The politics of polio vaccination in Pakistan is seeing new and interesting turns every now and then. The latest move in this connection is the decision of the authorities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province to pay parents who let their children be vaccinated for polio and other diseases, as reported on The Guardian. Parents will be offered 1000 rupees, or around $10, for vaccinating each newborn child.

"It is the first time the country has resorted to monetary incentives, which are rarely used around the world," wrote the paper.

The move comes a month after authorities ordered the arrest of parents in the Sindh province in case they refused to vaccinate their child for polio during a 3-day district-wide vaccination campaign.

Last month, we reported on a mysterious global epidemic of fatal kidney disease, focusing on a study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health¹ that laid down evidence showing the herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) is responsible for an epidemic of kidney-related deaths in a rural farming region of Northern Sri Lanka, as well as other rural regions around the world, including Costa Rica and Nicaragua. You can review the report here: Roundup Weedkiller Linked To Global Epidemic of Fatal Kidney Disease.

This information, while shocking to many who still consider glyphosate herbicide and the GM food produced with it to be relatively non-toxic, is not surprising to those who have been tracking the published research on glyphosate's wide ranging harmful effects, and which now shows a link between glyphosate and several dozen health conditions. You can view the first-hand toxicological citations here: Adverse Health Effects of Glyphosate Formulations.

Food is big business, everyone eats. Global food production is about profit.

In the North, store shelves are always full. It's cheap, we're told it's safe, healthy and suddenly it's sustainable, because sustainable sells.

Sustainable agriculture used to be defined by peasant farmers, by organic farmers; farmers who avoided using pesticides on their crops, farmers who avoided using antibiotics and hormones on their livestock, farmers who relied on integrated farming practices to make their farms regenerative - sustainable.

Now, Monsanto bills itself as a leader and innovator in sustainable agriculture. Elanco tells us technology yields sustainability and Elanco president Jeff Simmons tells us that "access to safe, proven, efficiency-enhancing technologies ensures: the three rights", Food as a basic human right, Choice as a consumer right, and Sustainability as an environmental right.

What? Biotechnology giants are standing up for the rights of people and the environment? The same corporations who for decades have ridiculed consumer protests and environmental concerns because their technology, their GMO's (Genetically Modified Organisms), their crop protection chemicals, their seed patents were all based on "sound science"?

A bill currently being debated in Colorado would force parents who attempt to opt out by seeking a personal exemption from getting their kids vaccinated, "to watch a video that discusses the benefits and risks of immunization to the student," according to ABC 7News Denver.

Not everyone thinks subjecting people to government propaganda just so they are allowed to make their own decisions about what's injected into their children is a good idea:

Susan Lawson testified against the bill, recalling how her daughter suffered brain injuries seven years ago after taking a vaccine to prevent measles, mumps and rubella when she was one year old.

"It's about choice and it's about not pressuring and using coercion to get parents to do what the government wants them to do, which is to vaccinate," Lawson told 7NEWS.

You can't live without this vitamin. But the FDA wants to reserve the natural form for monopoly drug companies, leaving only the synthetic form for supplements.

The FDA has just released a new 109-proposed rule on the revision of nutrition and supplement labels. (You can read more about the implications of the new labeling rules in our other article this week.)

On page 69, the agency slipped in two little paragraphs that could risk the health of millions of people who desperately need folate. It's a sneak attack so quiet and unobtrusive that few people will even realize it's there.

According to the guidance, the word "folate" will be banned from the Supplement Fact labels - only the term "folic acid" will be allowed.

Folate is the naturally occurring form of the water-soluble vitamin B9. It is found in foods such as black-eyed peas, chickpeas and other beans, lentils, spinach, turnip greens, asparagus, avocado, and broccoli, but is also available as a supplement.

It's called Zohydro.

Clinical Psychiatry News (3/13) has the story. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin is protesting FDA approval of the drug. He's written a stunning letter to US Health and Human Services head, Kathleen Sebelius.

"...Sen. Manchin noted that the FDA approved the drug 'despite strong opposition from its own Anesthetic and Analgesic Drug Products Advisory Committee.'"

This is highly significant. The FDA turned its back on its own panel of new-drug reviewers.

Senator Manchin continues:

"Simply put, the FDA's approval of Zohydro ER, in its current form, must be stopped before this dangerous drug is sold to the public... [Zohydro] has up to 10 times as much hydrocodone as Vicodin and Lortab and will come in a formulation that can be easily crushed, snorted, and injected."

In other words, Zohydro, used as a pain killer, is a nightmare. If you've ever taken Vicodin, imagine a pill with ten times the strength.

About three out of four older Americans have multiple chronic health conditions, and more than 20 percent of them are being treated with drugs that work at odds with each other -- the medication being used for one condition can actually make the other condition worse.

This approach of treating conditions "one at a time" even if the treatments might conflict with one another is common in medicine, experts say, in part because little information exists to guide practitioners in how to consider this problem, weigh alternatives and identify different options.

One of the first studies to examine the prevalence of this issue, however, found that 22.6 percent of study participants received at least one medication that could worsen a coexisting condition. The work was done by researchers in Connecticut and Oregon, and published in PLOS One.

In cases where this "therapeutic competition" exists, the study found that it changed drug treatments in only 16 percent of the cases. The rest of the time, the competing drugs were still prescribed.

"Many physicians are aware of these concerns but there isn't much information available on what to do about it," said David Lee, an assistant professor in the Oregon State University/Oregon Health & Science University College of Pharmacy.

"Drugs tend to focus on one disease at a time, and most physicians treat patients the same way," Lee said. "As a result, right now we're probably treating too many conditions with too many medications. There may be times it's best to just focus on the most serious health problem, rather than use a drug to treat a different condition that could make the more serious health problem even worse."

More research in this field and more awareness of the scope of the problem are needed, the scientists said. It may be possible to make better value judgments about which health issue is of most concern, whether all the conditions should be treated, or whether this "competition" between drug treatments means one concern should go untreated. It may also be possible in some cases to identify ways to treat both conditions in ways that don't conflict with one another.

A common issue, for example, is patients who have both coronary heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. Beta blockers are often prescribed to treat the heart disease, but those same drugs can cause airway resistance that worsens the COPD.

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