Health & WellnessS


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1,000 Species of Bacteria Found on Healthy Humans

Karen Kaplan
Los Angeles Times
Fri, 29 May 2009 17:44 UTC
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© Julia Segre, National Human Genome Research InstituteMicrobes: Through studies of skin bacteria, researchers hope to learn more about eczema and other skin diseases.
The organisms that inhabit the skin may not be the bad guys. They probably enable the body to function properly, researchers say in the journal Science.

Here's a finding that'll make your skin crawl: A healthy human epidermis is colonized by roughly 1,000 species of bacteria.

Furthermore, the microorganisms have evolved to exploit the unique attributes of those body parts they call home, according to a study to be published today in the journal Science.
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Blackbox

New swine flu cases point to "invisible" pandemic

Debora MacKenzie
New Scientist
Fri, 29 May 2009 17:18 UTC
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© KPA / Zuma / Rex FeaturesRussian scientists are trying to create a vaccine against swine flu in the Flu Scientific Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences in St Petersburg
Hospitals in Greece have identified H1N1 swine flu in two students who had no contact with known cases of the virus and had not been in countries with widespread infection. The infections were discovered even though the students should not have been tested for swine flu under European rules. The Greek authorities say this shows the rules must change.

Indeed, an investigation by New Scientist earlier this month showed that the EU rules would exclude exactly such cases and could make H1N1 appear much less widespread in Europe than it is.

Takis Panagiotopoulos of the Hellenic Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Athens and colleagues reported on 28 May in Eurosurveillance, a weekly bulletin published by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Stockholm, Sweden, that two Greek men returning home from Scotland had tested positive this week for H1N1 swine flu.
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Attention

Food Companies Are Placing the Onus for Safety on Consumers

Michael Moss
The New York Times
Thu, 14 May 2009 02:51 UTC
The frozen pot pies that sickened an estimated 15,000 people with salmonella in 2007 left federal inspectors mystified. At first they suspected the turkey. Then they considered the peas, carrots and potatoes.

The pie maker, ConAgra Foods, began spot-checking the vegetables for pathogens, but could not find the culprit. It also tried cooking the vegetables at high temperatures, a strategy the industry calls a "kill step," to wipe out any lingering microbes. But the vegetables turned to mush in the process.

So ConAgra - which sold more than 100 million pot pies last year under its popular Banquet label - decided to make the consumer responsible for the kill step. The "food safety" instructions and four-step diagram on the 69-cent pies offer this guidance: "Internal temperature needs to reach 165° F as measured by a food thermometer in several spots."
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Footprints

How the American Medical Association Got Rich

Dana Ullman
Natural News
Fri, 08 May 2009 18:30 UTC
History reveals that the AMA was dictatorially led for the first half of the twentieth century by George H. Simmons, MD (1852-1937) and his protégé, Morris Fishbein, MD (1889-1976). Simmons and Fishbein both served as general manager of the organization and as editor of its journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). While these two leaders provided substantial benefit to the organization and to medical doctors, their methods of doing so have been severely criticized, with some historians referring to them as "medical Mussolinis."
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Syringe

Patient detained at border: Cancer Drug erases fingerprints

S. L. Baker
Natural News
Thu, 28 May 2009 14:04 UTC
Imagine being treated like a suspected criminal or terrorist by immigration officials all because you have cancer and your doctor gave you a drug that causes a strange side effect -- your fingerprints have disappeared into thin air. Does that sound like a novel or movie plot? Unfortunately for one 62-year-old cancer patient, and possibly others, this was anything but fiction.

In a letter just published in the cancer journal Annals of Oncology, Dr Eng-Huat Tan, a cancer specialist in the medical oncology department at the National Cancer Centre in Singapore, reported on a perplexing case of missing fingerprints due to the cancer drug capecitabine. And he has warned that other people taking the drug should start carrying a doctor's letter with them if they want to travel to the U.S.

Here's what happened: Dr. Tan's 62-year-old patient (known only as Mr. S., due to privacy considerations) was suffering from metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma -- a head and neck cancer that had spread. Fortunately, the malignancy had responded well to treatment and, in hopes of preventing a recurrence of the malignancy, the patient was put on capecitabine, the generic name for the drug sold in the U.S. as Xeloda. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in some people, capecitabine stops cancer cells from growing and decreases the size of tumors. But it also can produce a host of adverse side-effects including severe diarrhea, life-threatening bleeding and hand-foot syndrome. The latter problem is a condition that stems from chronic inflammation of the palms and/or soles of the feet. It makes the skin peel, bleed and develop ulcers or blisters. "This can give rise to eradication of finger prints with time," Dr. Tan stated in his letter.
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Syringe

10 Ways to know you're living in a Medical Police State

Mike Adams
Natural News
Thu, 28 May 2009 13:52 UTC
Are Americans really living in a medical police state? The recent news with Daniel Hauser and his family's fight over chemotherapy seems to indicate so. Here are ten ways to recognize whether you're living under the oppressive tyranny of a medical police state.

1) - If an armed U.S. Marshall is posted outside your house at night -- just to make sure you don't escape "treatment" -- you're probably living in a medical police state.

Source: "Daniel was allowed to spend the night at home, but County Attorney James Olson said a deputy was posted at the Hauser farm in Sleepy Eye." (FoxNews)

2) If saying "I'd rather not inject my child with that poison" to your doctor results in him calling Child Protective Services, you're most likely living in a medical police state.

3) If a nationwide manhunt (involving FBI agents) is unleashed just to find you and drag you back to the hospital to submit to dangerous pharmaceuticals, there's little doubt you're living in a medical police state.
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Pills

Drug Company Freebies turn Medical Students into Drug Pushers

S. L. Baker
NaturalNews.com
Thu, 28 May 2009 13:41 UTC
Pharmaceutical companies routinely shower medical students with all sorts of freebies -- from notepads and ballpoint pins to clipboards and calendars - that are emblazoned with the names of prescription drugs and devices. That may sound pretty harmless but research just published in the current issue of Archives of Internal Medicine concludes these seemingly trivial items can influence these doctors-in-training's attitudes about the products drug companies are pushing. The freebies can also sway behaviors, making med students more likely to prescribe the promoted medication or device to patients in the future.
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Health

Deadly Salmonella: Frozen Food's Newest Ingredient

Jim Hightower
Alternet
Thu, 28 May 2009 11:24 UTC
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© unknownContamination has become so widespread that major frozen food purveyors admit they can no longer ensure the safety of their products.
Out in Arizona, an old tombstone bears an epitaph for a young gunslinger: "I was expecting this/But not so soon."Gunslinging, of course, is a high-risk business. But today, some of us can expect to have the following marker on our graves: "Here lies a guy/Killed by a pot pie."

America's pot-pie threat lurks in an ingredient that today's producers of frozen foods don't list on their packages: salmonella. In just one salmonella outbreak in 2007, the Banquet brand of pies sickened an estimated 15,000 people in 41 states.

The true culprit in such poisonings, however, is not the little deadly bug, but the twin killers of corporate globalization and greed. Giant food corporations, scavenging the globe in a constant search for ever-cheaper ingredients to put in their processed edibles, are resorting to low-wage, high-pollution nations that have practically no food-safety laws, much less any safety enforcement.
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Attention

Governments' Drug-Abuse Costs Hit $468 Billion, Study Says

Eric Eckholm
New York Times
Thu, 28 May 2009 07:24 UTC
Government spending related to smoking and the abuse of alcohol and illegal drugs reached $468 billion in 2005, accounting for more than one-tenth of combined federal, state and local expenditures for all purposes, according to a new study.

Most abuse-related spending went toward direct health care costs for lung disease, cirrhosis and overdoses, for example, or for law enforcement expenses including incarceration, according to the report released Thursday by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, a private group at Columbia University. Just over 2 percent of the total went to prevention, treatment and addiction research. The study is the first to calculate abuse-related spending by all three levels of government.

"This is such a stunning misallocation of resources," said Joseph A. Califano Jr., chairman of the center, referring to the lack of preventive measures. "It's a commentary on the stigma attached to addictions and the failure of governments to make investments in the short run that would pay enormous dividends to taxpayers over time."
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Youth diabetes in Europe set to explode: study


Agence France Press
Thu, 28 May 2009 07:21 UTC
Incidence of Type 1 diabetes in children aged under five in Europe is set to double by 2020 over 2005 levels while cases among the under-15s will rise by 70 percent, according to a study.

The trend, based on diagnosed cases between 1989-2003, will be highest in the former Communist countries of eastern Europe, it warns.

The paper, published online by the British journal The Lancet, says the increase is so dramatic that it cannot be attributed to genes alone.

Instead, "modern lifestyle habits" are the likely culprits, it says.
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