We consume more than 70% of the world's opiates and are dying of overdoses at epidemic rates. Where is the oversight?

A decade after Congress began dramatically increasing imports into the United States, Americans are consuming more than 70 percent of the world's legal medicinal supply of opiates - poppy-based pain drugs related to heroin, a Chronicle analysis of the Congressional Record and international treaty data shows.

The resulting wave of accidental prescription drug overdoses has been called a national epidemic, but the same federal agencies that license drugmakers and oversee imports and doctors have been slow to react to exponential increases in deaths reported in states like Texas, Florida, West Virginia and others from coast to coast.

"The truth is this is killing people and there are things that can be done," says A. Thomas McLellan, a prominent addiction researcher who until September served as assistant director of the Office of National Drug Policy in Washington, D.C., better known as the office of the drug czar. "In 2008, there were 28,000 deaths and one of them was my son. It was one of the reasons that I took this job."

Prescription drug overdoses nationwide have doubled in the past five years, according to the latest reports from emergency room doctors who participate in the government's Drug Awareness Warning Network. Some hard-hit metro areas have seen even bigger increases in both nonfatal overdoses and deaths, Texas and national data shows.

McLellan was among a prominent group of health specialists who met last July in a summit organized by the Food and Drug Administration. A majority of that group urged the FDA to collaborate with other regulatory bodies to require specialized training on the dangers of pain drugs for all doctors who must get federal licenses to prescribe opioid medications, such as Vicodin (hydrocodone) and OxyContin (oxycodone).

McLellan considered the meeting historic. But so far, nothing has happened.

More recent research reveals that there could indeed be a link between the controversial MMR vaccine and autism, as well as bowel disease in children. The study appears to confirm the findings of doctor Andrew Wakefield, who suggested a possible link in 1998 and has since been accused of fraud.

A research team is in the process of examining 275 children with regressive autism and bowel disease. Of the 82 looked at so far, 70 tested positive for the measles virus. In all cases, the virus came from a vaccine strain rather than wild measles.

The Daily Mail reports:

"The 1998 study by Dr. Wakefield ... and 12 other doctors claimed to have found a new bowel disease, autism enterocolitis ... This is the second independent study to back up Dr. Wakefield."

Sources:

Daily Mail January 25, 2011

Dr. Andrew Wakefield - VideoTranscript [PDF]

Over the past 15 years, Canadian farmers' experience with contamination from genetically engineered (GE) crops has exposed the seriousness of the problem. One of the earliest arguments advocating caution in the release of GE plants into the environment was based on the fact we cannot control or recall these living, self-replicating organisms. Our inability to fully predict the path of contamination and its consequences is one reason why genetic engineering is still referred to as one large, living experiment.

Contamination from GE crop plants or other GE organisms can occur through a number of different means, including insect or wind pollination, seed mixing and human error. Commonly, the contamination is not examined before GE crops are approved, partly because the social and economic impacts of contamination are not taken into consideration when government creates regulations. Bill C-474, which will be voted on early this month, would recognize the possible economic cost of contamination by requiring that the government assess export market harm before a new GE seed is permitted.

Contamination from GE crop plants is a reoccurring, predictable problem that can have serious impacts on the livelihood of farmers and the future of organic crops. For example, because of GE contamination organic grain farmers on the Prairies lost organic canola as a market and rotation crop; GE canola contaminated non-GE canola to such a degree that, most, if not all, pedigreed seed growers in Saskatchewan could not warrant their canola seed as GE-free and most, if not all, grain farmers could not warrant their canola crop as free of GE contamination, even if it was planted with GE-free seeds.

Peanuts, Vaccines and Better Diagnosis. Please watch a mom and doc explore Johnnie's systemic problems. Hold on until the end, it's worth it! Brought to you by L.J. Goes, Managing Partner of The Misuta Project, L.L.C. Autism media in search of the truth, supporting those pursuing it.

More than a quarter of Americans taking antidepressants have never been diagnosed with any of the conditions the drugs are typically used to treat, according to new research.

That means millions could be exposed to side effects from the medicines without proven health benefits, researchers say.

"We cannot be sure that the risks and side effects of antidepressants are worth the benefit of taking them for people who do not meet criteria for major depression," said Jina Pagura, a psychologist and currently a medical student at the University of Manitoba in Canada, who worked on the study.

"These individuals are likely approaching their physicians with concerns that may be related to depression, and could include symptoms like trouble sleeping, poor mood, difficulties in relationships, etc.," she added in an e-mail to Reuters Health. "Although an antidepressant might help with these issues, the problems may also go away on their own with time, or might be more amenable to counseling or psychotherapy."

Since the flu pandemic was declared, there have been several so-called "vaccine experts" coming out of the wood work attempting to justify the effectiveness of vaccines. All of them parrot the same ridiculous historical and pseudoscientific perspectives of vaccinations which are easily squelched with the following 9 questions.

Claim: The study of vaccines, their historical record of achievements, effectiveness, safety and mechanism in humans are well understood and proven in scientific and medical circles.

Fact: The claim is completely false.

1. What to ask: Could you please provide one double-blind, placebo-controlled study that can prove the safety and effectiveness of vaccines?

2. What to ask: Could you please provide scientific evidence on ANY study which can confirm the long-term safety and effectiveness of vaccines?

3. What to ask: Could you please provide scientific evidence which can prove that disease reduction in any part of the world, at any point in history was attributable to inoculation of populations?

4. What to ask: Could you please explain how the safety and mechanism of vaccines in the human body are scientifically proven if their pharmacokinetics (the study of bodily absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion of ingredients) are never examined or analyzed in any vaccine study?

One of the most critical elements which defines the toxicity potential of any vaccine are its pharmacokinetic properties. Drug companies and health agencies refuse to consider the study, analysis or evaluation of the pharmacokinetic properties of any vaccine.

There is not one double-blind, placebo-controlled study in the history of vaccine development that has ever proven their safety, effectiveness or achievements (unless those achievements have underlined their damage to human health).

There are also no controlled studies completed in any country which have objectively proven that vaccines have had any direct or consequential effect on the reduction of any type of disease in any part of the world.

Every single study that has ever attempted to validate the safety and effectiveness of vaccines has conclusively established carcinogenic, mutagenic, neurotoxic or fertility impairments, but they won't address those.

An ancient surgical procedure, called trepanation, consisted of drilling a hole in the head and removing a piece of the skull. It is thought this practice was used to release evil spirits that caused mental illness, migraine headaches and other ills. Nowadays, however, if you went to your naturopath with complaints of headaches and she pulled out her drill, you would bolt from her office in horror.

Sadly, when it comes to heart disease, it seems we haven't advanced all that much. When future humans look back to 2010 and the way we treat heart disease, they will shake their heads in disbelief. Much of heart care today, in both conventional and alternative medicine, ranges from harmful to hopelessly misguided.

Although cancer recently took the top spot, heart disease has long been the leading cause of death since the advent of processed foods almost 100 years ago, and it's no wonder. The root of disease almost always begins in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, with problems compounding in the immune and endocrine (hormone) systems, which in turn stress the heart. That gut health and immunity status affects the heart is lost on most conventional doctors, including many holistic ones.

These days we see two extreme viewpoints of cholesterol, both of which are incomplete. In conventional medicine, cholesterol is the defining marker for heart disease. While your local MD's approach to treating high cholesterol has been seriously questioned and successfully challenged by reputable science, the standard of treatment - low-fat diets and Lipitor, for example - hasn't budged. And when this model fails to prevent heart disease, as it often does, doctors simply blame the patient for not toiling long enough in the prison of low-fat diets.

In holistic medicine, on the other hand, cardiovascular health is often dismissed when symptoms are lacking, and high cholesterol is brushed away. Although the nutritional model is safer (for statin drugs can have devastating side effects), it too falls short when it doesn't address the risk of high cholesterol levels.

More than half a billion people, or one in 10 adults worldwide, are obese -- more than double the number in 1980 -- as the obesity epidemic spills over from wealthy into poorer nations, researchers said on Thursday.

And while rich nations made big strides in cutting rates of high cholesterol and hypertension, or high blood pressure, the overall number of people with high blood pressure rose from 600 million in 1980 to nearly 1 billion in 2008, fuelled by an aging and expanding global population.

"Overweight and obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol are no longer Western problems or problems of wealthy nations," said Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London and Harvard University, who led the studies published in the Lancet journal.

The research, conducted with the World Health Organization, benchmarks changes in key risk factors that affect heart health.

Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of people in the industrialized world, and billions of dollars are spent every year on medical devices and drugs to treat it. Thursday's study showed progress in some areas, but also areas of major concern.

Still think saturated fat is bad for you? Still think eating eggs raises cholesterol? Still think high cholesterol causes heart disease?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you really need to watch these videos. (But hey, you might learn something even if you answered "no".)

In this presentation I:

* debunk the myth that eating saturated fat and cholesterol causes heart disease.
* explain why LDL and total cholesterol are not useful markers for heart disease.
* present three markers that are useful markers for heart disease.
* demonstrate that low-fat, high carb diets promote - rather than protect against - heart disease.
* show you how eating saturated fat and cholesterol can prevent heart attacks
* tell you how to order a test that more accurately predicts your risk of heart disease

In step #1, we talked about what not to eat. In this article, we'll talk about what to eat.

Most of the calories we get from food come from protein, carbohydrates and fat. These are referred to as macronutrients. We also get other important nutrients from food, such as vitamins and minerals. These don't constitute a significant source of calories, so they're called micronutrients.

For the last 50 years we've been told to follow a diet low in this or that macronutrient. From the 1950s up until the present day the American Heart Association and other similarly misguided and pharmaceutically-financed "consumer organizations" have advocated a low-fat diet. More recently, low-carbohydrate diets are all the rage.

Not all macronutrients are created equal

The problem with these approaches is that they ignore the fact that not all macronutrients are created equal. There's a tremendous variation in how different fats and carbohydrates affect the body, and thus in their suitability for human consumption. Grouping them all together in a single category is shortsighted - to say the least.

What many advocates of low-fat or low-carbohydrate diets conveniently ignore is that there are entire groups of people around the world, both past and present, that defy their ideas of what constitutes a healthy diet.

For example, the low-fat crowd will tell you that eating too much fat - especially of the saturated variety - will make you fat and give you a heart attack. Tell that to the traditional Inuit, who get about 90% of calories from fat, and were almost entirely free of obesity and modern degenerative disease. The same is true for the Masai tribe in Africa, who get about 60-70% of calories from fat (almost entirely from meat, milk or blood.) And then there's the modern French, who have the lowest rate of heart disease of any industrialized country in the world - despite the highest intake of saturated fat.

The low-carb crowd is very much aware of these statistics, which are often used in defense of low-carb diets as the best choice. Tell that to the Kitavans in Melanesia, who get about 70% of calories from carbohydrate and, like the Inuit and Masai, are almost entirely free of obesity, heart disease and other chronic, degenerative diseases that are so common in industrialized societies. We see a similar absence of modern diseases in the Kuna indians in Panama and the Okinawans of Japan, two other healthy indigenous populations that get about 65% of calories from carbohydrate.

These rather inconvenient exceptions to the low-fat and low-carb dogma vigorously promoted by advocates of both approaches show us that humans can in fact thrive on a wide range of macronutrient ratios, ranging from extremely high fat (Inuit, Masai) to very high carb (Kitavans, Kuna & Okinawans). They also hint at the idea that perhaps not all carbohydrates are the same in terms of their effects on human health.