Weeks of investigation by federal and state agencies have failed to uncover how a potential bioterror agent escaped from a Louisiana laboratory four months ago, or how far it has spread.

Since November, four rhesus macaque monkeys and a USDA investigator have been infected. Cultures of Burkholderia pseudomallei somehow got out of the secure facility at Tulane National Primate Research Center in Covington, about 50 miles north of New Orleans, reported USA Today. Officials insist there is no danger to the public.

The bacteria cause meliodosis, a disease with a 50%-fatality rate even with treatment. Because it's resistant to multiple antibiotics, meliodosis has been researched as a potential biological weapon, though the Tulane lab is said to have been working on a vaccine.

Major US news media have presented a grossly distorted and misleading interpretation of vaccines and their relationship to public health since early January. These journalistic organs have suggested the recent measles outbreak in the Western US has been a crisis of monumental proportions.

This flagrant and cynical sensationalism has become a foundation for intense advocacy on behalf of the pharmaceutical corporate and regulatory cartel targeting patient informed consent—a founding principal of modern medical practice and personal freedom. Keeping in mind the close to 300 vaccine products now in the pharmaceutical industry's pipeline,[1] closer analysis of "measles outbreak" press coverage suggests a conscious effort by corporate news media to virtually banish such notions and practices from the public mind. A news media dependent on over $1 billion in advertising dollars from big pharma must almost by necessity indulge their clients' broader agenda.

Throughout U.S. history, certain selected groups of citizens have been subjected to extreme verbal, judicial and even physical abuse at the hands of bigoted oppressors. The historical abuse of African-Americans -- subjected to generations of abusive language and racism that still lingers today -- was villainously summed up with a bigoted hate speech label I dare not utter here.

Gay Americans were similarly subjected to the label of "f-@@-t," a hate-based derogatory slur invoked to demean a human being because of their sexual orientation. It was this campaign of verbal abuse and derogatory hate speech that helped give rise to violence against gays in America.

Importantly, every effort to demean and denigrate a selectively targeted class of citizens -- whether for their skin color, their sexual orientation or their beliefs -- has been preceded by a campaign of verbal abuse intended to dehumanize that targeted group. The invocation and use of bigoted, derogatory labels lays the social and cultural groundwork for not only discrimination but even actual violence committed against the groups being targeted.

Racism and hate speech are wrong. It is morally, politically and socially incorrect to use hate speech labels in a derogatory manner in a civilized society. These terms are hate-based forms of speech meant to emotionally hurt and demean targeted groups of innocent people. Yet, astonishingly, it has now emerged in America that it is socially acceptable to use precisely the same bigoted hate-speech language against another group: children who are damaged by vaccines (and children who are unvaccinated). This group is now being widely and aggressively disparaged with the hate-based term "anti-vaxxers."

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For the past ten years or so, I have felt a deep and growing compunction against giving routine vaccinations to children. It began with the fundamental belief that people have the right to make that choice for themselves.

But eventually the day came when I could no longer bring myself to give the shots, even when the parents wished me to. I have always believed that the attempt to eradicate entire microbial species from the biosphere must inevitably upset the balance of Nature in fundamental ways that we can as yet scarcely imagine. Such concerns loom ever larger as new vaccines continue to be developed, seemingly for no better reason than that we have the technical capacity to make them, and thereby to demonstrate our right and power as a civilization to manipulate the evolutionary process itself.

Purely from the viewpoint of our own species, even if we could be sure that the vaccines were harmless, the fact remains that they are compulsory, that all children are required to undergo them, without sensitivity or proper regard for basic differences in individual susceptibility, to say nothing of the values and wishes of the parents and the children themselves.

I read with great interest the recent 'measles epidemic' articles that addressed the vaccine debate from the point of view of a cancer parent. My interest is the result of being a cancer parent myself - my little girl has been battling leukemia on and off for the past 10 years. I read these articles, and I became angry. Very, very angry. Once again, the government and drug companies are exploiting the plight of children stricken by cancer to achieve a profit-driven end without actually helping them. In fact, this profitable end could cause great harm, even increasing the rates of pediatric leukemia, if their obvious goal of a federally mandated vaccination protocol is achieved. I am a seasoned Momcologist, a term the research-driven cancer parents call themselves. We are the cancer equivalent of Thinking Moms, critical thinkers. I have done extensive reading on the etiology of leukemia, its connection to autoimmune disease, and how vaccines and natural disease may influence these sorts of childhood illnesses. Come connect the dots with me.

Clearly, I empathize with the raw fear the parents in these articles have that their immunocompromised children may contract an illness that could be devastating. I have walked for years in their shoes. I get it. However, the parents in these articles are either grossly misinformed, or their comments have been edited with bias. Let's get some facts straight about cancer treatment and infection. One of the first things we were warned about after my daughter's diagnosis was live-virus vaccination. No one in the family was to receive a live-virus vaccine while my daughter was on treatment because these viruses can and do shed (1, 2, 3, 4), some for as much as four weeks (5), potentially infecting the immunocompromised patient with disastrous results. That includes the measles vaccine (MMR II and ProQuad), the intranasal flu vaccine, and the chicken pox shot. In fact, my other children were able to get medical waivers not to receive vaccines because of my daughter's illness. I know my child is much more likely to encounter a peer at school who has been recently vaccinated with a live-virus vaccine than she is to encounter natural disease from an unvaccinated child'

If my child were at a stage of treatment in which she was very immunocompromised, she would not be in school. My daughter missed most of fourth grade and a good portion of fifth, not because she was so sick, but because others were sick. Despite a nearly 100% vaccine compliance rate at our school, there were regular outbreaks of shingles, occurring after chicken pox vaccine boosters, influenza and other illnesses. Please note that, even in areas in which vaccine compliance is extremely high, there are still outbreaks of disease that are not caused by the unvaccinated (6).

The most deadly threats for a child during intensive cancer treatment lie right within his or her own body. Immunocompromised pediatric cancer patients are far more likely to die from opportunistic infections that originate from overgrowths of fungi, mold and bacteria(7) than they are from vaccine-related viral infections. When I searched to find the last recorded incidence of a child dying of measles (because that is the hated disease du jour) while undergoing cancer treatment, well, I couldn't find one. I did, however, find at least one death in the immunocompromised from the measles vaccine (8), with no indication of when it or they occurred. There hasn't been a recorded death in the U.S. from measles in the past 10 years. (9) In fact, measles infection may actually be curative of some blood cancers (10, 11), presumably by initiating normal immune system defenses. The measles virus as an actual treatment has also been explored in other malignancies (12, 13).

There is evidence that the "hygiene theory" of the immune system may have some relevance to to vaccines. It has been found that more "hygienic" populations, i.e. kids who have had fewer exposures to everyday germs, are at higher risk for some illnesses. The idea being that the immune system needs to "learn" how to respond appropriately by coming in contact with common bugs in order to develop properly. Industrialized countries that have a decrease in infectious burden over less developed nations nevertheless show an increase in allergies and autoimmune disease. "The leading idea is that some infectious agents — notably those that co-evolved with us — are able to protect us against a large spectrum of immune-related disorders." (14) Are we trading benign, transient illnesses that were once considered normal childhood rites of passage, illnesses that appear to be protective for more serious disease, for a lifetime of chronic illness, even death?

BBC newsman Malcolm Brabant says yellow-fever vaccination led him to believe he was the Devil

Malcolm Brabant's face - round, ruddy, full-featured, and crowned by a bald dome - is immediately recognisable. For 30 years he has been an award-winning member of the BBC's team of foreign correspondents, bringing wars, natural disasters, political stand-offs and occasionally something a bit more cheerful into our living rooms on the evening news.

If the countenance is familiar, though, his current location isn't. His usual on-screen sign-off is ringing in my ears — "Malcolm Brabant, BBC News, Athens" - but today he is welcoming me into his home in Copenhagen.

He is, he explains, currently living in exile from the Greek capital, and thereby "missing one the biggest news stories of my career". The reason is the biggest personal story of Brabant's 58 years. As he puts it with what I quickly learn is characteristic bluntness: "I went bonkers."

In April 2011, he attended an Athens clinic for a routine vaccination against yellow fever before an assignment in the Ivory Coast. As well as reporting from Athens, he has also travelled the globe to cover international stories, winning a coveted Sony award in 1993 for his reporting from a besieged Sarajevo at the height of the Bosnian crisis.

His reaction to the vaccine, however, was anything but routine. "It fried my brain," he states simply. Overnight a previously sane man developed severe psychosis. An agnostic, Brabant became so convinced he was the Messiah that he telephoned his bemused fellow correspondent, Allan Little, to appoint him "first disciple" and ask him to record his words of wisdom.

Many consumers avoid products that contain bisphenol-A (BPA) because the estrogen-imitating chemical has been linked to an array of health effects in people and animals. But new research published Thursday suggests that an ingredient that has replaced BPA in many items may have a similar effect on the heart.

BPA-free labels have been popping up on many plastic bottles, cash register receipts, food packaging, and other products.

Although the label implies a sense of safety, "our research suggests that BPS and potentially other BPA substitutes aren't necessarily free of health problems," said Hong-Sheng Wang, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

A new study finds the chemical war against cholesterol using statin drugs was justified through statistical deception and the cover up of over 300 adverse health effects documented in the biomedical literature.
Better safe than sorry, right? This is the logic that defines the grasp that the pharmaceutical company has on our psyche. Perhaps your mother, father, brother, and boyfriend have been recommended cholesterol-lowering medication, just to help hedge their bets around a possible chest-clutching demise. In fact, recent guidelines have expanded the pool of potential statin medication recipients, so that there are very few of us who seem to be walking around with acceptable levels of artery clogging sludge.

But how is it that drug companies got a foothold? How have they convinced doctors that their patients need these medications, and need them now? They are banking (literally) on the fact that you haven't brushed up on statistics in a while.

It turns out that a common sleight of hand in the medical literature is the popularization of claims around "relative risk reduction" which can make an effect appear meaningful, when the "absolute risk reduction" reveals its insignificance. In this way, 100 people are treated with statin medications to offer 1 person benefit, and the change from a 2% to a 1% heart attack rate is billed a 50% reduction rather than a 1% improvement, which is what it actually is.

The missing link behind what causes gluten intolerance and celiac disease, and why prevalence of these two autoimmune conditions has risen dramatically over the past several decades seemingly without cause, may have more to do with how conventional wheat is grown in the U.S. today rather than what it contains naturally.

Like with the massive rise in autism spectrum disorders, the scientific community is trying to explain away the near-tripling of celiac cases over the past 20 years as being a result of improved detection and diagnosis techniques. Many people simply weren't aware that the condition existed back in the 1990s, some scientists claim, dismissing any other outside causes.

But the evidence increasingly points to the chemicals applied to modern wheat crops, primarily in the U.S., as a major driver behind this epidemic of supposed gluten allergies. Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, which contains glyphosate, is often applied to conventional wheat crops at the end of their life cycle, leaving behind residues of the chemical formula on the wheat consumed by millions.

This little-known process, which was recently brought to light by The Healthy Home Economist, allows farmers to harvest wheat early and produces a slightly higher yield. But the consequence is contaminated wheat, which ends up being made into breads, cakes, crackers and other consumer products.

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data from 2012, the latest available, reveals that 61 percent of winter wheat, 97 percent of spring wheat, and 99 percent of durum wheat grown in the U.S. is treated with Roundup just prior to harvest. This is up from 47 percent of winter wheat, 91 percent of spring wheat and 88 percent of durum wheat treated in 1998.

According to one U.S. wheat farmer, the application of Roundup to wheat plants at over 30 percent kernel moisture results in the plants actually abosrobing Roundup and distributing it into wheat kernels. These kernels are later ground into wheat flour, which is then processed and turned into various wheat-containing foods consumed by millions of Americans.

"Consumers eating products made from wheat flour are undoubtedly consuming minute amounts of Roundup," said wheat farmer Keith Lewis, as quoted on the Wheat Belly blog, about this completely unlicensed practice.