Before there was Betty Ford, the outspoken first lady who brought breast cancer awareness to the wider public, there was Babette Rosmond, a diminutive New York City writer and editor who went public with her diagnosis of breast cancer 40 years ago, three and a half years before the first lady. If Mrs. Ford is remembered for her grace and honesty, we should remember Ms. Rosmond for her courage and persistence. What Ms. Rosmond demanded of her doctors - the right to choose her cancer treatment - is now the minimum that cancer patients deserve.

When Ms. Rosmond discovered an olive-size lump in her left breast in February 1971, she was 49, the author of six novels and an editor at Seventeen magazine.

It so happened that Ms. Rosmond had two friends with breast cancer, both of whom had experienced psychological and physical side effects from radical mastectomy, the extremely disfiguring operation routinely used by surgeons to treat the disease. The operation removed not only the cancerous breast, but the underarm lymph nodes and both chest wall muscles on the side of the cancer, leaving women with hollow chest walls and swollen arms. Moreover, the decision to perform the operation typically occurred during intraoperative biopsies, when women were under anesthesia and had no voice.

Ms. Rosmond would have none of this. She essentially bullied a surgeon into performing only the biopsy. When the tumor turned out to be cancerous, he told her she needed an urgent radical mastectomy.

Soon, GM food may be labeled for consumers by mandate of the State of California legislators.

Over half a million signatures have been collected by advocates supporting the requirement of labeling of genetically modified foods. Several county registrars in California have received the measure called The Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act. California would be the first state to demand detailed labeling of these foods in such a wide range of processed foods containing GMO.

The proposal is not the first labeling law to be drafted in California.

The proposal states that by 2014, a label, explaining to consumers that the processed food they are purchasing contained ingredients derived from plants whose DNA was altered with genes from other plants, animals, viruses and/or bacteria.

Supporters of the proposal say more states, like Vermont and Connecticut are willing to enforce stringent labeling to educate consumers in their states. The US Congress has also tried unsuccessfully to mandate that GM foods be labeled. The demand for transparency and the fostering of trust with the general public and the food industry is the foundation of these efforts. Voters in California are demanding that their food be made safe. The Mellman Group's survey contends that Americans believe GM's are "basically safe" although scientific data proves otherwise.

Ecstasy in stores? Dr. Perry Kendall, British Columbia's chief provincial medical health officer, is adamant that pure ecstasy, or MDMA, can be "safe" when consumed responsibly by adults.

He's taking his controversial opinion a few steps further by advocating for the legalization of the drug and for the selling of the drug through licensed, government-run stores. Essentially, Kendall wants an LCBO for ecstasy. Yet, people who shop at the LCBO still get drunk. How will "strict controls" be enforced once the buyers take their drugs home?

Although the plague is typically considered a remnant of the Middle Ages, when unsanitary conditions and rodent infestations prevailed amid the squalor of poverty, this rare but deadly disease appears to be spreading through wealthier communities in New Mexico, researchers report.

Why the plague is popping up in affluent neighborhoods isn't completely clear, the experts added.

"Where human plague cases occur is linked to where people live and how people interact with their environment," noted lead researcher Anna Schotthoefer, from the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation in Wisconsin. "These factors may change over time, necessitating periodic reassessments of the factors that put people at risk."

This latest study confirms previous reports that living within or close to the natural environments that support plague is a risk factor for human plague, Schotthoefer said.

Plague is caused by a fast-moving bacteria, known as Yersinia pestis, that is spread through flea bites (bubonic plague) or through the air (pneumonic plague).

The new report comes on the heels of the hospitalization on June 8 of an Oregon man in his 50s with what experts suspect is plague. According to The Oregonian, the man got sick a few days after being bitten as he tried to get a mouse away from a stray cat. The cat died days later, the paper said, and the man remains in critical condition.

A dairy ingredient in junk food may be responsible for rising rates of inflammatory bowel disease and other immune disorders, research suggests.

Scientists believe milk fat upsets the gut ecosystem, causing an influx of potentially harmful bacteria.

In certain individuals, this can trigger an extreme immune reaction, leading to Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) conditions such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.

The discovery may explain why once-rare immune disorders have become so common in the West over the past 50 years, US researchers said.

Study leader Professor Eugene Chang, from the University of Chicago, whose findings are reported in the journal Nature, said: 'This is the first plausible mechanism showing step-by-step how Western-style diets contribute to the rapid and ongoing increase in the incidence of inflammatory bowel disease.

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