Monsanto's efforts to dismiss new evidence linking its genetically modified (GM) corn to tumors has been thoroughly debunked in a public briefing by the food sustainability nonprofit Earth Open Source.

"NK603 must be immediately withdrawn from the market and all GMOs must be subjected to long-term testing," the briefing concludes.

In a two-year study, a team of French researchers led by Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini found that rats fed Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" corn developed significantly more tumors than a control group not fed GM corn. The rats fed a GM diet also developed tumors that appeared earlier and behaved more aggressively, and died sooner than rats in the control group.

The study found similar effects in rats exposed to Roundup herbicide at levels currently considered safe by most regulators.

"Roundup Ready" crops have been engineered for resistance to Monsanto's top-selling herbicide glyphosate, marketed under the trade name Roundup. In the scientific literature, Roundup Ready corn is also known as NK603.

© Unknown

Newborn mice use mum's unique odour, not a pheromone, to begin breastfeeding.

Researchers show for the first time that a mammal begins to suckle its mother's milk through a learned response built on learning her unique combination of smells. When it is born, the newborn is exposed to the smell of its mother's amniotic fluid and the baby then responds to those smells to feed.

Prevailing thought has been that pheromones - chemicals that trigger an innate behaviour - drove the suckling response as an automatic behaviour. The new work determines that, in mice, the smells must be learned before the behaviour can occur.

Suckling is a critical step for survival in mammals, which are defined by giving birth to offspring that need to feed from their mother's milk. The newborn must begin to feed soon after birth or it will die. It is a crucial, defining behaviour in mammals and offers researchers an opportunity to investigate the biology of instinct.

Previous research into suckling has shown that European rabbit mothers use a pheromone to initiate suckling in their newborn babies. This led most scientists to think that all mammals were likely to use the same mechanism. Keen to discover the pheromone involved in other mammals, the team chose the mouse because they have a parenting style similar to that of humans, nurturing and caring for their young.

"We were expecting to find a pheromone controlling suckling in mice, but we found a completely different mechanism at work," says Dr Darren Logan, lead author of the study from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "We have shown for the first time that it is not a pheromone response in mice, but a learned response, founded on a mix of odours: the unique signature smell of the mother."

To discover the smells involved in initiating suckling, researchers introduced newborn mice delivered by Caesarean section to breasts that had been washed clean and then soaked in one of the fluids that a baby would first inhale at birth. These included amniotic fluid, the mother's saliva (from being licked clean), breast milk and urine. Only the breasts that smelt of the mother's amniotic fluid initiated suckling.

A new study by Washington State University researchers found that TCDD dioxin, when exposed to one generation of pregnant rats, had a multi-generational effect resulting in a multitude of diseases. These include diseases of the kidney and ovaries as well as fertility and growth difficulties.

Dioxin is an industrial pollutant linked to cancer and reproductive disorders. For this study, the researchers used a particular dioxin called TCDD - a major component of the herbicide Agent Orange made infamous by the Vietnam War as well as recent events in agribusiness.

"Not only does the individual exposed get the disease," says senior author Michael Skinner, "but it's transmitted to great-grandchildren with no exposure."

New York (AP) - As the U.S. wrestles with its biggest whooping cough outbreak in decades, researchers appear to have zeroed in on the main reason: The safer vaccine that has been in use since the 1990s loses effectiveness much faster than previously thought.

A study published in Wednesday's New England Journal of Medicine found that the protective effect weakens dramatically soon after a youngster gets the last of the five recommended shots around age 6.

The protection rate falls from about 95 percent to 71 percent within five years, said researchers at the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Research Center in Oakland, Calif.

The U.S. has had more than 26,000 whooping cough cases so far this year, including more than 10,000 in children ages 7 to 10.

"The substantial majority of the cases are explained by this waning immunity," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious-disease specialist at Vanderbilt University.

In light of the findings and earlier, similar research, health officials are considering recommending another booster shot for children, strengthening the vaccine or devising a brand new one.

But "there's nothing in the pipeline that's close," said Dr. Tom Clark of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The history of Breast Cancer Awareness Month's surprising origins is a matter of the public record:

"NBCAM was founded in 1985 as a partnership between the American Cancer Society and the pharmaceutical division of Imperial Chemical Industries (now part of AstraZeneca, maker of several anti-breast cancer drugs). The aim of the NBCAM from the start has been to promote mammography as the most effective weapon in the fight against breast cancer." ~ Wikipedia

If you doubt Wikipedia as a reliable source, visit the NBCAM website and try to contact them. It will be AstraZeneca that you will required to connect with, as evidenced by the screenshot below.

AstraZeneca, manufacturer of the blockbuster breast cancer drugs Arimidex and Tamoxifen, founded the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in 1985, in partnership with the American Cancer Society, in order to promote the widespread adoption of x-ray mammography, whose horrors we have documented elsewhere.

Sadly, Breast Cancer Awareness Month is a time of increasing awareness not of the preventable causes of breast cancer, but of the breast cancer industry's insatiable need to both raise money for research into a pharmaceutical cure, and to promote its primary means of "prevention": early detection via x-ray mammography.

On first account, a pharmaceutical "cure" is as unlikely as it is oxymoronic. Drugs do not cure disease anymore than bullets cure war. Beneath modern medicine's showy display of diagnostic contraptions, heroic "life-saving" procedures, and an armory of exotic drugs of strange origin and power, it is always the body's ability to heal itself - beneath the pomp and circumstance - that is truly responsible for medicine's apparent successes. Too often, in spite of what medicine does to "treat" or "save" the body, it is the body which against invasive chemical and surgical medical interventions, silently treats and saves itself.

If it were not for the body's truly miraculous self-healing abilities, and the ceaseless self-correction process that occurs each and every moment within each and every cell, our bodies would perish within a matter of minutes. The mystery is not in how our body succumbs to cancer; rather the mystery is in how, after years and even decades of chemical exposure and nutrient deprivation our bodies prevail against cancer for so long.

Pregnant women exposed to higher levels of the chemical bisphenol A gave birth to baby boys with lower thyroid hormones, according to a new study published today.

The study by University of California, Berkeley, scientists is the first to link the ubiquitous chemical - used in hard plastics, canned food liners and some paper receipts - to altered thyroid hormones in babies, and it adds to evidence that BPA may have some effects on fetuses.

For every doubling of the mothers' BPA levels, there was 9.9 percent less thyroid-stimulating hormone in their baby boys. No significant effect was detected in the girls; animal studies suggest females may be able to metabolize the chemical better.

"Most work up to this point has focused on [BPA's] estrogen properties. The fact that it's also messing up thyroid function is very surprising," said Laura Vandenberg, a postdoctoral fellow at Tufts University who studies BPA but was not involved in the new study.

How has Big Pharma managed to get so many children on expensive drug cocktails for "mental illness"? Drugs that they may not even need?

Big Pharma has spent millions on public relations campaigns that tell parents, teachers and clinicians to dose children at the first sign of problems. It knows if parents treat their kids early they will never know if the kids needed the drugs in the first place and whether residual problems are "mental illness" or drug side effects. The kids will also probably be life long customers because parents will be afraid to take them off the drugs. No wonder Pharma tells parents not to wait for "excessive energy" or "mood swings" to go away in the awareness campaigns. Ka-ching.

One "prescribe early" campaign for the atypical antipsychotic Risperdal uses a macabre abandoned wallet, a teddy bear, and keys on a barren street "to reposition a drug that was being used too late to achieve its maximum benefits," said its advertising agency, Torre Lazur McCann. Brand managers for Seroquel, a competing antipsychotic, even considered creating Winnie-the-Pooh characters like Tigger (bipolar) and Eeyore (depressed) to sell Seroquel, according to published reports, at an AstraZeneca sales meeting. Parents say they have seen toys emblazoned with Seroquel logos.

We all love our coffee and many health benefits have surfaced regarding consumption, but something has changed in the coffee bean in the last hundred years. Coffee growers have become reckless in their practices and conventional sources have become very polluted.

The average cup of joe is not what it used to be. A new study now suggests caffeinated coffee drinkers should limit their intake to reduce their chances of developing vision loss or blindness.

Over 1,000 chemicals have now been reported in roasted coffee, and 19 are known rodent carcinogens. Coffee is the second most traded product in the world after petroleum. Worldwide coffee production tips the scales at about 6 million metric tonnes. The average yield from one tree is the equivalent of one roasted pound of coffee and it takes five years for a coffee tree to reach maturity. Coffee growers must thus resort to toxic methods to ensure maximum yield from their crops including the use of harmful chemicals to ensure crops are free of insects and pathogens.

The coffee plant is one of the most heavily sprayed crops. It's coated with chemicals, pesticides, and herbicides, nothing you'd want to be ingesting. These chemicals then leech into the ground water and make people sick in local areas where coffee is grown.

A previous study on women found that drinking caffeinated coffee can alter levels of estrogen, a regulating hormone in women.

According to a new scientific paper in Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, heavy caffeinated coffee consumption is associated with an increased risk of developing exfoliation glaucoma, the leading cause of secondary glaucoma worldwide.

A fragment of a child's skull dating back some 1.5 million years offers some of the earliest evidence that early humans were hunters who ate meat regularly, scientists say.

The piece of bone discovered in the Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, has signs of nutritional deficiencies commonly caused by a lack of meat in its owner's diet, suggesting early man needed meat to thrive.

The discovery by a team of researchers led by Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo from Complutense University, Madrid, suggests early human ancestors began eating meat much earlier in history than previously believed

The skull fragment identified is thought to belong to a child somewhat younger than two and shows bone lesions that commonly result from a lack of B-vitamins in the diet.

Previous studies have suggested that early hominids ate meat, but whether it was a regular part of their diet or only consumed sporadically was not certain.

Hypertension isn't just risky for a pregnant woman, it can have lasting consequences for a child's cognitive ability, a new study suggests.

A Finnish study found that men whose mothers' pregnancies had complications from hypertensive disorders scored lower on tests of cognitive ability than those whose mothers did not have high blood pressure during pregnancy. The study appears in the journal Neurology.

About 10% of all pregnancies become complicated by hypertensive disorders, such as preeclampsia, the study said. Such conditions are linked to premature births and small baby body size, factors that are also linked with lower cognitive ability.

Methods

Researchers identified 398 men who had taken a basic ability test for the Finnish Defense Forces twice: around age 20 and again around age 69. In this way, study authors were able to look at verbal, arithmetic and visuospatial reasoning scores. Visuospatial means understanding visual representations and their spatial relationships.

Information about the mothers' blood pressure and urinary protein were used to determine which pregnancies were complicated by hypertension.