Health & WellnessS


Health

Nearly sixty percent decline in Western mens' sperm counts

April McCarthy
Prevent disease
Wed, 26 Jul 2017 13:35 UTC
sperm
An analysis of research into male fertility suggests that there has been a steep decline in sperm counts for men living in richer nations.

The review pooled data from 185 different studies, and found a 59.3 per cent drop between 1973 and 2011 in the average amount of sperm produced by men from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. No similar pattern was seen in South America, Asia and Africa, although fewer studies had been conducted in these countries.

Dietary and environmental exposures as well as pharmaceuticals are all linked to the quality of male sperm, revealing that toxins in many substances we interact with affect sperm maturation and membrane function in men. This means that men who are at increased risk of sperm DNA damage because of advancing age can do something about it.

"Given the importance of sperm counts for male fertility and human health, this study is an urgent wake-up call for researchers and health authorities around the world to investigate the causes of the sharp, ongoing drop in sperm count," says Hagai Levine, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who worked on the analysis.

Comment: Dead sperm? Here's why

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Health

Zika returns: First sexually transmitted infection of 2017 confirmed in Florida


RT
Wed, 02 Aug 2017 08:08 UTC
zika virus
© Ivan Alvarado / Reuters
Florida's first sexually transmitted Zika infection of 2017 has been discovered, bringing the statewide number of cases to 90. The mosquito-borne fever has no vaccine, and infected babies may suffer lifelong disabilities, among other symptoms.

The Florida Department of Health confirmed the finding Tuesday. An individual in Pinellas County was exposed to the Zika virus through sex after their partner returned from a trip to Cuba. The partner fell ill with the common symptoms of the virus, according to health officials.

Cuba is currently listed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as one of the countries with a Zika travel risk. This is the second confirmed sexually transmitted Zika case in the US.
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Attention

Pesticide biotech continues to threaten environmental and human health

Dr. Mercola
mercola.com
Tue, 01 Aug 2017 19:39 UTC
pesticide distribution
© Medical News Today
Pesticides are taking a major toll on health across the globe. According to a recent United Nations (UN) report,1 pesticides are responsible for 200,000 acute poisoning deaths each year, and chronic exposure has been linked to cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, hormone disruption, developmental disorders and sterility.2

In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a research arm of the World Health Organization and the "gold standard" in carcinogenicity research, found glyphosate - the active ingredient in Roundup, the most widely used herbicide in the world - is a probable human carcinogen.3,4 As of July 2017, glyphosate is listed as a known carcinogen under California's Proposition 65,5 which means products containing glyphosate must carry a cancer warning label.

Pesticides like Roundup also threaten the health of the soil, thereby threatening the very future of agriculture itself, as healthy soils are key for growing food.6 So grave are the concerns over the health and environmental effects of pesticides, the UN's report proposes a global treaty to phase them out and transition to a more sustainable agricultural system.
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Pills

Drugged nation: Over one third of Americans were prescribed opiate pain medications in 2015

Andrew M. Seaman
Yahoo News
Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00 UTC
opioid pills
© Global Look Press
The United States needs to curb excessive opioid prescribing and improve access to pain management techniques, suggests a new government study.

Researchers found that more than one third of U.S. adults were prescribed the medications in 2015 and many also misused the drugs.

"A very large proportion and large number of adults use these medications in a given year," said study author Dr. Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Maryland. "I was still a bit surprised that 38 percent or about 92 million people used prescription opioids in 2015."

Limited data on the prescription of opioids and their abuse are available despite the number of deaths from drug overdoses in the U.S. having quadrupled between 1999 and 2015, Compton and his colleagues write in the Annals of Internal Medicine, online July 31.

For the new study, the researchers analyzed data from 51,200 adults collected in 2015 during face-to-face interviews for the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

Based on those interviews, the researchers estimate about 38 percent of U.S. adults were prescribed an opioid in 2015.

Comment: New study confirms big pharma & federal govt root cause of opioid epidemic

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Water

US soda consumption at a 31-year low

Leo Sun
The Motley Fool
Mon, 24 Jul 2017 12:00 UTC
Guzzler
© ABC News
Soda consumption in the United States fell to a 31-year low in 2016, according to Beverage-Digest. That decline can mainly be attributed to waning demand among health-conscious consumers.

Here's how much each drink category grew between 2015 and 2016, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation.
Beverage chart
© DATA SOURCE: BMC. CHART BY AUTHOR
The theme is easy to spot: Lower-calorie products like value-added water (sparkling, flavored, and "enhanced" waters), bottled water, coffee, and tea are attracting more shoppers. Higher-calorie products, like sugary sodas and fruit beverages, are fading.

That would seem like terrible news for Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO) and PepsiCo (NYSE:PEP), but both companies have been diversifying away from sodas with bottled water, teas, sports drinks, and other higher-growth beverages.

Comment: See also:

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Sherlock

Monsanto Papers: Leaked docs reveal scientific mischief and regulatory collusion

Carey Gillam
Huffington Post
Tue, 01 Aug 2017 15:51 UTC
monsanto evil
The other shoe just dropped.

Four months after the publication of a batch of internal Monsanto Co. documents stirred international controversy, a new trove of company records was released early Tuesday, providing fresh fuel for a heated global debate over whether or not the agricultural chemical giant suppressed information about the potential dangers of its Roundup herbicide and relied on U.S. regulators for help.

More than 75 documents, including intriguing text messages and discussions about payments to scientists, were posted for public viewing early Tuesday morning by attorneys who are suing Monsanto on behalf of people alleging Roundup caused them or their family members to become ill with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer.

The attorneys posted the documents, which total more than 700 pages, on the website for the law firm Baum Hedlund Aristei Goldman, one of many firms representing thousands of plaintiffs who are pursuing claims against Monsanto. More than 100 of those lawsuits have been consolidated in multidistrict litigation in federal court in San Francisco, while other similar lawsuits are pending in state courts in Missouri, Delaware, Arizona and elsewhere. The documents, which were obtained through court-ordered discovery in the litigation, are also available as part of a long list of Roundup court case documents compiled by the consumer group I work for, U.S. Right to Know.
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Pirates

The Concentration of Power in the Food Industry: What We Eat is Dependent Upon Who's in Control

Dr. Joseph Mercola
mercola.com
Sun, 30 Jul 2017 00:00 UTC
food monopolies
Most of us have little to no idea how behind-the-scenes forces control the food we buy, and the depth of the corruption involved. Philip Howard, Ph.D., author of "Concentration and Power in the Food System: Who Controls What We Eat?," studies food system changes, with an emphasis on visualizing these trends.1
"My motivation [for writing the book] was to uncover what's going on, to help people understand who owns what and all the strategies these dominant firms use to further increase their power," he says.
His work has been featured by many prominent media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Chicago Tribune. He's an associate professor in the department of community sustainability at Michigan State University and holds a Ph.D. in rural sociology.
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Folder

The Poison Papers: Secret concerns of industry & regulators on the hazards of pesticides and other chemicals

Center for Media and Democracy
Ecowatch
Thu, 27 Jul 2017 22:31 UTC
Poison Papers
© Risa Scott/RF Scott ImagerySome of the more than 100,000 pages of discovery material related to the chemical industry that were stored in Carol Van Strum’s barn in rural Oregon.
The Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy released a trove of rediscovered and newly digitized chemical industry and regulatory agency documents Wednesday stretching back to the 1920s. The documents are available here.

Together, the papers show that both industry and regulators understood the extraordinary toxicity of many chemical products and worked together to conceal this information from the public and the press. These papers will transform our understanding of the hazards posed by certain chemicals on the market and the fraudulence of some of the regulatory processes relied upon to protect human health and the environment.
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Telephone

Interview with Dr. Jacob Puliyel: WHO's revised norms are allowing the use of unsafe vaccines

Priyanka Vora
The Vaccine Reaction
Wed, 26 Jul 2017 14:57 UTC
vaccines
© CDC Global“Every time there is a death after vaccination, we have WHO-trained experts saying that because the other children who received vaccine from the same vial did not die, this death cannot be due to the vaccine.” — Jacob Puliyel, MD
Even as India plans to introduce new vaccines into its national immunization program, two public health experts have flagged serious flaws in international standards adopted in 2013 to assess deaths that may occur from adverse reactions to vaccinations.

An Adverse Event Following Immunization or AEFI is an untoward medical occurrence that follows immunization. In the old system of classification of AEFIs, called the Brighton classification, if illness or death occurred soon after a vaccine was administered and no other cause of death could be found, then the death was termed as "possibly" or "probably" caused by the vaccine.

Comment: Read more from Scientists who have come out against vaccines
When researching scientists' recommendations for public health policies in regards to vaccines, it is surprising how few of them support vaccination unless they work for the pharmaceutical industry.

In order for vaccines to be truly safe and effective, adverse reactions would be rare and breakouts of vaccine-preventable diseases among vaccine compliant populations would be rare or non-existent. Clearly, neither outcome is reality. The science does not support the statement that vaccines are safe and effective. This is not a scientific finding. This is a marketing slogan taught to doctors in medical school.


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Attention

UK: Massive row ensues over importation of chlorine-washed chickens from the US

Michael Powell & Daniel Bates
Daily Mail
Sat, 29 Jul 2017 16:18 UTC
chicken washing
This image shows the chickens being doused in chlorine at a farm in the United States.
The disturbing prospect of chlorine-washed chickens from the US going on sale in British shops in a post-Brexit trade deal last week sparked an explosive row at the heart of Government.

But beyond the politics lies the story of why American poultry needs such drastic chemical treatment - and of the horrendous conditions at the farms where they are bred and reared.

Now whistleblower farmers have revealed the full horror of the suffering to The Mail on Sunday, including how:
  • Tens of thousands of super-sized 'Frankenstein' birds are crammed in vast warehouses.
  • The chickens, which weigh up to 9lb, often buckle under their weight and must live without natural sunlight.
  • Chickens frequently die before they reach maturity and many are left covered in their own faeces, turning warehouses into vile breeding grounds for disease.
Unlike in the UK and Europe, there are no minimum space requirements for breeding chickens in the US. America also does not have any rules governing lighting levels in the sheds and, crucially, its farms have no maximum allowed level of ammonia, which indicates how much urine and faecal matter is present. This means there is no limit on how much can fester inside the sheds.
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