Lisa Schryver Ericzon's daughter, Jessica F., died two years ago, and Ms. Ericzon says she believes the Gardasil vaccine was the cause. Ms. Ericzon, Omar, has spent the past two years researching the vaccine and connecting with other parents, in an effort to get her concerns about the vaccine heard.
"We're getting along. We take it day by day," Ms. Ericzon said. "I've done a lot of research since Jessie died. We cannot prove it, but it seems that there are way too many girls who have been injured or died after getting this vaccine."
Ms. Ericzon returned home after work Feb. 22, 2008, to find Jessica, 17, dead on the bathroom floor. It was two days after receiving her third dose of Gardasil. Jessica had been complaining of pain in the back of her head since receiving the shot, Ms. Ericzon said.
She said she believes that Gardasil was to blame for Jessica's death, and during her research on the vaccine, she has tried to contact agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to voice her concerns.
Comment: For more information about the negative side effects of the Gardasil vaccine and another mother's story about her daughters death after receiving the Gardasil shot read the following article carried on SOTT:
Grieving Mother Blames Gardasil
Mark Ames
AlterNetFri, 26 Feb 2010 13:52 UTC
Today her works treated as gospel by right-wing powerhouses like Alan Greenspan and Clarence Thomas, but Ayn Rand found early inspiration in 1920's murderer William Hickman.
© Photo Credit: Creative Commons
There's something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don't have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?
It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who exerts a huge influence over much of the right-wing and libertarian crowd, but whose influence is only starting to spread out of the US.
In a society riddled with complicated, expensive and even dangerous detoxification methods, oil pulling offers a technique that is refreshingly simple. Oil pulling is a practice taken from Ayurvedic medicine that involves swishing, or pulling, unrefined oil in your mouth for several minutes. The modern adaptation of oil pulling has only recently become popular in Western society, but already many are reporting amazing results from this unorthodox therapy.
Why should anyone practice oil pulling? What are the benefits?
The alleged benefits of oil pulling cover everything from curing gingivitis to facilitating weight loss. Some users even report a decrease in gray hair! However, since oil pulling is not a scientifically documented procedure, claims like these should probably be taken with a grain of salt. On the other hand, since oil pulling is such an easy and virtually harmless practice, it's certainly worth a try to see if some real benefits can be had.
More young people are having strokes while older people are having fewer, according to data from Ohio and Kentucky presented at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2010.
The average age of stroke patients in 2005 was nearly three years younger than the average age of stroke patients in 1993-1994 -- a significant decrease, researchers said. Moreover, the percentage of people 20 to 45 having a stroke was up to 7.3 percent in 2005 from 4.5 percent in 1993-1994.
"This is scary and very concerning," said Brett M. Kissela, M.D., the study's lead author and Associate Professor, Co-Director of the Neurology Residency Program, and Vice-Chair of Education and Clinical Services at the University of Cincinnati Neuroscience Institute. "What was shocking was the proportion of patients under age 45. The proportion is up, the incidence rate is up."
When Youngstown, Ohio, factory workers started losing their jobs in the 1980s, labor researcher and advocate John Russo invited local doctors to meet with a stress expert to prepare them for the onslaught of medical problems sure to come.
"None of the doctors was interested," said Russo, who is co-director with Sherry Linkon of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University. "Nobody wanted to acknowledge that losing your job could hurt your health, even after it was clear that it was happening. Heart disease, strokes, depression, diabetes -- it can take up to five years for these to manifest after losing a job, but we were definitely seeing it.
"We even saw an increase in teenage suicides because the kids were internalizing what was happening to their parents and blaming themselves."
As Russo and Linkon always are quick to point out, it didn't help that most of the laid-off employees who were hurting were from the working class. Their plight didn't spark a lot of studies or media coverage.
"Back then," Russo said, "nobody cared. Even those on the political left tended to blame the victims, saying the blue-collar workers were suffering because of their 'lifestyles' -- their drinking and smoking and eating unhealthy foods and not going to spas. There were definite class issues at play."
© CounterpointAuthors Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie
Inspired by Morgan Spurlock's fast-food gluttony in the movie Super Size Me, two environmental activists from Canada devised their own experiment. Instead of fast food, Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie absorbed themselves in everyday products like shampoos, soaps and cleaners to find out what kind of damage might be done to their health.
Their book about the adventure is called
Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things. Smith tells Guy Raz that writing the book was like conducting an adult science fair project - with one cardinal rule.
"Our experiments had to mimic everyday life," Smith says. "Obviously it would be very easy to dramatically increase your Teflon levels if you were willing to drink some Teflon, but nobody does that, so it wouldn't have any applicability to daily life."
Contamination of drinking water by a common herbicide poses a greater health threat than previously believed, according to a report issued by the nonprofit environmental organization Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) monitors average yearly levels of the popular herbicide atrazine in drinking water supplies, based on four tests per year. But the NRDC notes that levels of the toxin in drinking water regularly spike after heavy rains or during the spring when it is being widely applied, and that the four yearly testings may miss these events. The organization's researchers found several such spikes in its own testing of water supplies in towns in agricultural regions of the South and Midwest.
"Our biggest concern is early-life-stage development," said Jennifer Sass of the NRDC. "If there's a disruption during that time, it becomes hard-wired into the system. These endocrine disrupters act in the body at extremely low levels. These spikes matter."
Most people are familiar with traditional weapons of mass destruction such biological weapons, nuclear weapons and chemical weapons. The point of all such weapons of mass destruction is to inflict a large number of casualties on civilian populations as a way to cripple a nation into political or military submission.
When it comes to actually deploying weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) against civilian populations, no country has murdered more innocent civilians than the United States of America through its bombing of two Japanese cities during World War II. (This isn't rhetoric, it's an historical fact.)
Atomic bombs were very visible WMDs deployed in World War II as a way to force the empire of Japan to surrender to western forces. Since that time, full-scale nuclear weapons have never again been used directly on civilian targets, meaning the United States of America maintains the distinction of being the only nation in the history of human civilization to have dropped atomic weapons on civilian populations.
It begs the question: If national leaders believe dropping atomic weapons on civilian populations is justified, what other weapons might they feel justified in unleashing upon civilian populations?
JoAnne Allen
ReutersSun, 28 Feb 2010 23:18 UTC
Eating meat may be a much more common trigger for anaphylaxis -- a severe and potentially deadly allergic reaction -- than previously thought, U.S. researchers said on Sunday.
A study of 60 patients who had unexplained severe allergic reactions suggests that a compound in meat known as alpha-galactose may be the culprit, according to research presented at a meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology in New Orleans.
They found immune system proteins called IgE antibodies in 25 out of 60 patients who had unexplained allergic reactions.
"We believe that the presence of IgE antibody to this sugar is wider spread in the human population as a whole than we had initially expected," Dr. Scott Commins of the University of Virginia, who led the research, said in a telephone interview.
It's been tough to even find an asphalt driveway these days under all the snow, let alone think about sealing one. But before long, thousands of central Ohio homeowners will spend hot, sunny days spreading fresh layers of thick, black sealant on their driveways.
These sealants, used for more than 50 years to help keep asphalt from cracking and crumbling, now face increasing scrutiny from federal environmental officials.
Recent studies of sealants made with coal tar show that the substances can contain high concentrations of toxic compounds called polyaromatic hydrocarbons, or PAH.
The compounds are washed into streams and carried into our houses in tiny particles of sealant that break off under the weight of car tires and snow shovels and in rainwater.
Comment: For more information about the negative side effects of the Gardasil vaccine and another mother's story about her daughters death after receiving the Gardasil shot read the following article carried on SOTT:
Grieving Mother Blames Gardasil