From the "law of unintended consequences" department comes this finding, suggesting that the push for eco-friendly energy savings may be doing more harm to us than good.

Study links night exposure to blue light with breast and prostate cancer

A study performed by an international team led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation, reports a link between exposure to blue light at night and higher risk of developing breast and prostate cancer. Blue light is a range of the visible light spectrum emitted by most white LEDs and many tablet and phone screens. The results have been published in Environmental Health Perspectives.

"WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified night shift work as probably carcinogenic to humans. There is evidence pointing to an association between exposure to artificial light at night, disruption of the circadian rhythm, and breast and prostate cancers. With this study we sought to determine whether night exposure to light in cities can affect the development of these two types of cancer", explains Manolis Kogevinas, ISGlobal researcher and coordinator of the study. "We know that depending on its intensity and wave length, artificial light, particularly in the blue spectrum, can decrease melatonin production and secretion", says Martin Aubé, physics professor at CÉGEP in Sherbrooke, Canada and study co-author.

The study was conducted within the framework of the MCC-Spain project cofunded by the 'Consorcio de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Epidemiología y Salud Pública' (CIBERESP), and includes medical and epidemiological data of more than 4,000 people between 20 and 85 years of age in 11 Spanish regions. Indoor exposure to artificial light was determined through personal questionnaires, while outdoor levels of artificial light were evaluated for Madrid and Barcelona, based on nocturnal images taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

Goldman Sachs has outdone itself this time. That's saying a lot for an investment firm that both helped cause and then exploited a global economic meltdown, increasing its own wealth and power while helping to boot millions of Americans out of their homes.

But now Goldman Sachs is openly saying in financial reports that curing people of terrible diseases is not good for business.

I wish this were a joke. It sounds like a joke. In fact, I'll show you later that it used to be one of my favorite jokes. But first, the facts.

In a recent report, a Goldman analyst asked clients: "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" Salveen Richter wrote: "The potential to deliver 'one-shot cures' is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy. ... However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies. ... While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow."

Yes, a Goldman analyst has said outright that curing people will hurt their cash flow. And he said that in a note designed to steer clients away from investing in cures. Can "human progress" have a bottom? Because if so, this is the bottom of so-called human progress-down where the mud eels mate with the cephalopods. (Or at least that's how I picture the bottom.)

Important note from Age of Autism editors. The vax/unvax study is now-officially published in a peer reviewed journal. The full text is available on line HERE at the Journal of Translational Science.

The .pdf is HERE: Mawson et al 2017 vax-unvax Jnl Translational Science

In a development that autism parents have long anticipated, the first-ever, peer-reviewed study comparing total health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children was released on line yesterday. According to sources close to the project, the study had been reviewed and accepted by two different journals, both of which pulled back on their approval once the political implications of the findings became clear. That's largely because, as parents have long expected, the rate of autism is significantly higher in the vaccinated group, a finding that could shake vaccine safety claims just as the first president who has ever stated a belief in a link between vaccines and autism has taken office.


Working in partnership with the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), Dr. Anthony Mawson led a research team that investigated the relationship between vaccination exposures and a range of over 40 acute and chronic illnesses in home schooled children, a population chosen for its high proportion of unvaccinated children. Surveying families in four states--Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oregon-the study (officially titled Vaccination and Health Outcomes: A Survey of 6- to 12-year-old Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Children based on Mothers' Reports), reported a number of startling findings.

When I was a child, nearly everybody became ill with chickenpox. Like nearly all kids, when I became ill with it, I stayed home from school about a week and fully recovered.

All that changed in 1995, when the FDA licensed and approved the live attenuated chickenpox (varicella) vaccine in persons aged >12 months. After the vaccine began to be used by most children, the incidence of chickenpox rapidly declined. However, due to continual outbreaks of chickenpox, a second dose of the chickenpox vaccine was added to the childhood immunization schedule in 2006.

Is the chickenpox vaccine effective at significantly lowering the incidence of chickenpox? Yes. Due to the vaccine, there is a significantly lowered incidence of chickenpox.

However, the most important question to ask is, "Has the chickenpox vaccine (along with the other 70 doses of vaccines given) improved the lives of our children and the rest of the population? The answer to that question is easy: No.

If anything makes us human it's our minds, thoughts and emotions.

And yet a controversial new concept is emerging that claims gut bacteria are an invisible hand altering our brains.

Science is piecing together how the trillions of microbes that live on and in all of us - our microbiome - affect our physical health.

But even conditions including depression, autism and neurodegenerative disease are now being linked to these tiny creatures.

The patient was dying.

Valerie Hobbs, 53, was in the throes of sepsis - an infection coursing through her veins that was causing her blood pressure to tank, her organs to fail and her breathing to flag.

"When you have a person that young who's going to die, you start thinking, 'What else can we pull out of the bag?' " said Dr. Paul Marik, who was on duty that day in the intensive care unit of Sentara Norfolk General Hospital.

In this case, he reached for Vitamin C.

Marik, chief of pulmonary and critical care at Eastern Virginia Medical School, had recently read medical journal articles involving the vitamin, and decided to order IV infusions of it, along with hydrocortisone, a steroid, to reduce inflammation.

Then, he went home.

The next morning, Hobbs had improved so much she was removed from four different medications used to boost her blood pressure. Her kidney function was better. Her breathing eased.

Three days later, she left the ICU.

This is the first article in a three-part series on the current state of multiple sclerosis diagnosis and treatments with focus on effective nutritional treatments. A summary of detailed treatments worthy of consideration based on clinical data is included at the end of this first article. The second article will provide more background on high-dose therapy with thiamine and niacin. The final article is written for those scientifically inclined and will describe where more research focus is needed.

The party line for researchers is "We need more research." The party line for clinicians is "There is no clinical proof; RCTs are needed." But as far as the patient is concerned, it might be this: "Based on current available data and studies so far, what can be most useful in preventing my disease progression?" With that in mind, this series of articles presents the patient's perspective first. The patient's needs are the most urgent of all.

Approximately 200 people per week are diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in the United States and if current trends continue, 30% will become wheelchair bound for the rest of their lives. [1, 2]. Multiple sclerosis is the most commonly diagnosed CNS disorder and we do not know what causes this autoimmune disease. Many different etiologies (bacterial, viral, heavy metal poisoning) can present with clinical symptoms identical with an initial MS diagnosis. There are no effective consensus treatments. Accordingly, differential diagnosis of MS is exceptionally challenging since biopsies are not an option for much of the CNS. The average age of MS onset is approximately 34 years. Imagine that you are in the prime of your life having just graduated from college after previously completed 12 years of school. Then out of the blue, you are diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease for which there is no cure and the cause of the disease is unknown. As if student loan debts and the prospect of four decades of stagnant wages weren't enough to worry about, the average monthly cost for many MS therapeutics including one of the most popular multiple sclerosis treatments (dimethyl fumarate; Tecfidera) is roughly $5,000 a month.

The unpleasant symptoms of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) may be linked to alcohol consumption, according to a new analysis.

The authors of the review, from Spain's University of Santiago de Compostela, say the evidence gathered cannot unambiguously determine whether PMS is made worse by alcohol, or whether some women who experience the syndrome use alcohol to manage the symptoms.

However, they note that a higher prevalence of reported PMS symptoms among women who drink heavily, "which favours a causal explanation of the relation between alcohol intake and PMS".

If further study supports the contention, they add, then encouraging women to lay off the booze might make the secondary effects of the menstrual cycle more bearable.

To conduct their analysis, the researchers, led by María del Mar Fernández, combed medical databases looking for research that recorded PMS incidence, duration and symptom strength as well as lifestyle behaviours, including alcohol intake. They identified 19 suitable studies involving 47,000 participants.

Running the numbers, they discovered that, over all, 11% cases of PMS were linked to alcohol drinking.

Instinctively, most of us know that pregnancy is a time when it makes sense to be cautious. After all, as even popular culture attests, "precious cargo" is involved. With medications, focus group research indicates that when the risks of a given medication are unknown, most women are not willing to take the medication during pregnancy.

To help pregnant women navigate potential risks to themselves and their "cargo," WebMD furnishes a long checklist of substances known to cause birth defects, including acne drugs, some antidepressants and heavy metals such as lead and organic mercury. However, when it comes to flu shots (some of which contain organic mercury), the website tells women that the vaccines are completely safe any time during pregnancy. The website's certitude in this regard rests on the assurances of entities like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which has long recommended influenza vaccines for pregnant women. CDC's rationale is that the vaccines are needed to help pregnant women avoid the "excess" influenza-related deaths that apparently occurred during early-20th-century influenza pandemics.

Published reports point to an increased risk of miscarriages and elevated risks of birth defects and autism in the offspring of mothers who received influenza vaccines during pregnancy-

Changing Recommendations

Around 2006, CDC took stock of the persistently low compliance with its influenza recommendations, largely ignored by both doctors and pregnant women, and began more aggressively promoting flu shots for pregnant women. In an update in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, CDC cited as evidence of the vaccines' safety during pregnancy a grand total of two retrospective epidemiological studies of medical records - one of which was published in 1973.

A veteran who was injured in Afghanistan has received the world's first total penis and scrotum transplant, Johns Hopkins Hospital announced Monday.

A team of nine plastic surgeons and two urological surgeons performed the 14-hour surgery last month. The penis, scrotum and part of an abdominal wall came from a deceased donor, the hospital said.

The patient has recovered from the surgery and is expected to be released this week, officials say. The hospital did not disclose in which branch of the military the patient served.