Consumer and dental groups challenged the FDA's analysis that determined mercury released from fillings doesn't cause harm.

Less than 18 months after concluding that mercury in dental fillings was not harmful to patients, the Food and Drug Administration is reviewing the scientific basis for its decision.

A panel of outside experts will meet next week to consider challenges from four consumer and dental groups to the analysis that FDA used to justify its conclusion that mercury released from dental amalgam fillings is too low to cause harm.

Agency officials said Thursday there's no new evidence contradicting that assessment, and that "at this time FDA is not modifying its existing guidance."

The FDA's position is supported by the American Dental Assn., which says that treatment decisions should be left to patients and their dentists.

Execution by lethal injection has shone a harsh light on the complicity of health professionals - physicians, nurses and paramedics - in carrying out capital punishment. In a 2001 survey in the prestigious journal, Archives of Internal Medicine, an astonishing 41 percent of physicians surveyed said that they would assist or even carry out an execution by lethal injection and there is little evidence that the percentage has changed significantly since then. Deborah W. Denno JD, PhD, a leading scholar of death penalty litigation at the Fordham University School of Law in New York City, remarked that physician participation in executions is more prevalent than one might think, although exact numbers are not available because of the secrecy surrounding executions. And this does not even include the nurses and paramedics (also known as Emergency Medical Technicians or EMTs) who head up the execution teams in many states. Interestingly, the leadership of several major organizations have taken a more enlightened view on executions than many of their members.

Execution medicine is not a new specialty. Two centuries ago, physicians helped to design the guillotine, which remains an iconic symbol of the French Revolution. In the United States, hanging was the punishment of choice until 1890, when New York State carried out the first execution with the electric chair - invented by a physician, touted for its humaneness by an oral surgeon and carried out secretly by Thomas Alva Edison.

Animals in factory farms get daily doses of antibiotics, both to keep them alive in their stressful, unsanitary conditions and to make them grow faster. What's the annual volume of antibiotic use on factory farms? The question is a critical one, because the practice has given rise to a novel strain of antibiotic-resistant staph (MRSA), known as ST398, that's widely present in our vast hog and chicken factories.

Well, federal regulators have for years ignored the question and refused to release estimates of just how much antibiotics the livestock industry burns through. But that ended yesterday, when the FDA released its first-ever report on the topic. The answer: 29 million pounds in 2009. According to ace public-health reporter Maryn McKenna, that's a shitload. (I'm paraphrasing her.)

Here is a summary of crops, foods and food ingredients have been genetically modified as of May, 2010:

Currently Commercialized GM Crops in the U.S.

(Number in parentheses represents the estimated percentage that is genetically modified.)

Soy (91%) Cotton (71%) Canola (88%) Corn (85%) Sugar Beets (90%) Hawaiian papaya (more than 50%) Alfalfa (at Supreme Court), Zucchini and Yellow Squash (small amount) Tobacco (Quest® brand).

Other Sources of GMOs

- Dairy products from cows injected with the GM hormone rbGH
- Food additives, enzymes, flavorings, and processing agents, including the
sweetener aspartame (NutraSweet®) and rennet used to make hard cheeses
- Meat, eggs, and dairy products from animals that have eaten GM feed
- Honey and bee pollen that may have GM sources of pollen
- Contamination or pollination caused by GM seeds or pollen

Some of the Ingredients That May Be Genetically Modified: Vegetable oil, vegetable fat and margarines (made with soy, corn, cottonseed, and/or canola).

Ingredients derived from soybeans: Soy flour, soy protein, soy isolates, soy isoflavones, soy lecithin, vegetable proteins, textured vegetable protein (TVP), tofu, tamari, tempeh, and soy protein supplements.

Ingredients derived from corn: Corn flour, corn gluten, corn masa, corn starch, corn syrup, cornmeal, and High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS).

In 2009, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) stated that, "Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with genetically modified (GM) food," including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, faulty insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. The AAEM has asked physicians to advise all patients to avoid GM foods.[1]

Starting in 1996, Americans have been eating genetically modified (GM) ingredients in most processed foods. Why isn't the FDA protecting us?

In 1992, the Food and Drug Administration claimed they had no information showing that GM foods were substantially different from conventionally grown foods. Therefore they are safe to eat, and absolutely no safety studies were required. But internal memos made public by a lawsuit [2] reveal that their position was staged by political appointees who were under orders from the White House to promote GMOs. In addition, the FDA official in charge of creating this policy was Michael Taylor, the former attorney for Monsanto, the largest biotech company, and later their vice president.

While it is generally clear, even to the relatively uninformed, that government and corporations have become one and the same, the extent to which this is the case is still largely unknown amongst the general public. Likewise, the extent to which this merger is affecting public health is also not widely known. In recent years (aside from their other horrific projects) government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), think tanks, and corporations have all banded together to combine two of the biggest scourges on the environment and human health -- genetic modification and vaccines -- into one entity.

While "scientists" have been genetically modifying insects for years, only in the last few have they begun to openly discuss releasing them into the environment. As always, the fact that public discussion has just now begun to take place on the issue means that the project has already been initiated. This much has been borne out by the facts in that the release of the insects has already been announced.

Under the guise of eradicating Dengue fever, GM mosquitoes were released into the environment in the Cayman Islands in 2009. Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne, virus-based disease that has largely been non-existent in North America for several decades. Dengue fever can morph into a much more dangerous form of the illness known as Dengue Hemorrhagic fever. Symptoms of Dengue fever are high fever, headache, pain behind the eyes, easy bruising, joint, muscle, bone pain, rash, and bleeding from the gums. There is no known cure or treatment for Dengue fever besides adequate rest and drinking plenty of water.

Generally speaking, it is one specific type of mosquito, Aedes aegypti, which transmits the virus.

Few health issues are accepted as uncritically, at least in United States, as the addition of fluoride to drinking water. While there was initially intense opposition and vigorous debate on the issue, the concern and the debate died down over time to such an extent that the US Centers for Disease Control, in 1999, proclaimed water fluoridation one of the ten great Public Health Achievements of the 20th century.

Water fluoridation became accepted to the extent that to question it was no longer merely an academic position but risked branding oneself as a scientific illiterate or Luddite quack. This wide-spread acceptance occurred, however, even as more and more evidence began to accumulate that adding fluoride to the water supply indeed has serious, far-ranging and significant health risks.

Finding suggests handling store receipts could be significant source of internal exposure

Bisphenol A readily passes through skin, French scientists report. Best known as an estrogen-mimicking constituent of some plastics and resins, BPA is also found in a large share of cash register receipt paper in the United States and Europe, a trio of studies recently indicated. One of the three also showed that the powdery coating easily rubs off onto the hands.

"The new study is now unequivocal in showing that yes, BPA can go through human skin," says Frederick vom Saal of the University of Missouri-Columbia.

It may also explain why a survey due to appear in an upcoming issue of Environmental Health Perspectives found that among nearly 400 pregnant Cincinnati-area women, the highest BPA concentrations were in cashiers. However, Joe M. Braun and his coauthors note, "these results should be interpreted cautiously since estimates from cashiers were based on 17 women."

A recent study of the use of metaphors in spoken language and various sign languages shows that certain types of metaphors are difficult to convey in sign language.

The study, "Iconicity and metaphor: Constraints on metaphorical extension of iconic forms," to be published in the December 2010 issue of the journal Language, is authored by Irit Meir of the University of Haifa.

Dr. Meir's research sheds new light on the interrelations between two notions that play an important role in language and communication, iconicity and metaphor. This study shows that the iconicity of a form may constrain the possible metaphorical extensions that the form might take. Put another way, certain metaphorical expressions in spoken language cannot be "translated directly" into sign language if their form is iconic.

Sign languages are natural languages, with rich and complex grammatical structures and lexicons. Sign languages have rich use of metaphors. But quite often, when trying to translate metaphors from a spoken language to a sign language, we find that it is impossible to use the same words. For example, it is impossible to use the sign FLY (in Israeli Sign Language and American Sign Language) in the expression "time flies" or "the day just flew by." The metaphorical uses of a word such as FLY are impossible because of the form of this sign, in particular, its iconicity. The sign for FLY is produced by moving the arms as if flapping one's wings. But in the expression "time flies," we do not mean that time is flapping its wings. Rather, the metaphor is built on an implication of the action of flying, namely that it is a very fast way of motion. So there is a clash between what the form of the sign encodes (wing flapping) and the aspect of meaning on which the metaphor is built (fast movement).

Luc Montagnier is applying unorthodox ideas to the treatment of autism. With support from the Autism Research Institute (ARI), based in San Diego, California, the Nobel laureate is about to launch a small clinical trial of prolonged antibiotic treatment in children with autism disorders. The trial will also use techniques based on Montagnier's research into the notion that water can retain a 'memory' of long-vanished pathogens, and that DNA sequences produce water nanostructures that emit electromagnetic waves, published last year. But experts are critical and worry that the nobelist's status may lend unwarranted credibility to unconventional approaches to autism.

The planned pilot trial in France - funded by a US$40,000 grant from ARI - will screen around 30 children with autism disorders and 20 or so controls for bacterial infections, and then test whether months of antibiotic treatment improve the children's condition. Montagnier, who shared the 2008 Nobel prize for physiology or medicine for the discovery of HIV, concedes that there is no solid scientific evidence that infection causes or contributes to autism, but he argues that many parents and physicians have observed "spectacular" benefits from prolonged treatment. Stephen Edelson, director of ARI, says he's "very excited" about the "cutting-edge, groundbreaking" study.

Catherine Lord, a clinical psychologist working on autism at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, says that the trials are "not mainstream science". Lord says that many of the widely practised alternative medicine treatments for autism - including dietary modification, nutritional supplements and chelation therapy - are "semi-medical, not evidence-based science, and more pseudoscience."