Health & WellnessS


Red Flag

Flashback The Pigs' Revenge

Felicity Lawrence
The Guardian
Sat, 02 May 2009 20:59 UTC
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© Christopher Furlong/Getty ImagesA litter of pigs
Just as an unsustainable financial system caused the current banking crisis, the intensive farming of animals is at the heart of the swine flu pandemic

In modern disaster management theory, when any large system experiences a major shock or failure, you assess the risk, activate an ordered emergency response, and manage the after-effects. In the world of real people hit directly by the real shock, you look for someone to blame.

For ordinary Mexicans this week, who faced the shutdown of their country by swine flu and an unknown number of deaths, it was a culprit that was needed.
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Video

Documentary on Intensive Pig Farming Faces Legal Threat

Judith Soal
Common Dreams
Sat, 30 May 2009 19:45 UTC
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© Guardian photoFilmmaker, Tracy Worcester, with a pig as seen in the documentary
A documentary about intensive pig farming due to be screened at the Guardian Hay festival on Sunday is facing a legal threat from one of the companies it investigates. Pig Business criticizes the practices of the world's largest pork processor, Smithfield Foods, claiming it is responsible for environmental pollution and health problems among residents near its factories.
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Health

Many autism cases are 'undiagnosed'


Press TV
Sat, 30 May 2009 22:43 UTC
Cambridge researchers have recently reported that for every three children with autism and related disorders two others remain undiagnosed.

Autism is the most common developmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction, problems with verbal and nonverbal communication, and unusual, repetitive or severely limited activities and interests.

Latest reports have revealed that about one percent of school-aged children have an autistic spectrum disorder, indicating that the prevalence of the disease has increased by 12 times in the past 30 years.
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Bandaid

Bill Moyers: How Can We Expect an Industry That Profits from Disease and Sickness to Police Itself?

Bill Moyers & Michael Winship
Alternet
Sat, 30 May 2009 20:01 UTC
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The health care industry has spent $134 million on lobbying this year to keep its profits high and public health in the shadows.

In 2003, a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama told a local AFL-CIO meeting, "I am a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program."

Single payer. Universal. That's health coverage, like Medicare, but for everyone who wants it. Single payer eliminates insurance companies as pricey middlemen. The government pays care providers directly. It's a system that polls consistently have shown the American people favoring by as much as two-to-one.
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Health

How fear makes some things clear


New Scientist
Sat, 30 May 2009 17:46 UTC
Fear changes how we see things, enhancing our ability to identify blurry shapes but impairing our perception of fine details. This may help us to escape threats.

Looking at a fearful face, which activates the brain in a similar way to feeling fear, enhances sensitivity to visual contrast, but whether it improves vision across the board wasn't clear. So Bruno Bocanegra and René Zeelenberg at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, showed people pictures of faces with either fearful or neutral expressions, followed by a "blob" covered in stripes of varying thicknesses.

Those shown a fearful face were better at identifying whether thick stripes were vertical or slightly tilted and worse at identifying the orientation of thin stripes than those shown neutral faces (Psychological Science, DOI: link).
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Health

Intestinal bacteria associated with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease


PhysOrg
Sat, 30 May 2009 05:17 UTC
Intestinal permeability and an overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine are both associated with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). These findings are revealed in a new study in the June issue of Hepatology, a journal published by John Wiley & Sons on behalf of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD).

Previous studies have suggested that bacteria from the intestine might play a role in NAFLD, which is the hepatic component of the Metabolic Syndrome. NAFLD can worsen to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, and some experts have wondered if liver exposure to bacteria from the gut could promote this progression.
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Red Flag

Flashback Psychological Warfare Techniques -- Used on Your Doctor


Dr. Mercola
Sat, 18 Aug 2007 19:18 UTC
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Pharmaceutical sales reps are trained in tactics that are on par with some of the most potent brainwashing techniques used throughout the world, according to an in-depth report co-written by former Eli Lilly drug rep Shahram Ahari, and Adriane Fugh-Berman, associate professor of physiology and biophysics at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C..

Pharmaceutical companies spend more than $15 billion each year promoting prescription drugs in the United States.

These campaigns are designed to effectively alter prescribing behavior, to sell more of the high-profit drugs (as opposed to the most effective, and least dangerous).
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Attention

Do Perfectionists Face Early Deaths? Study Suggests Yes

Tom Jacobs
Alternet
Thu, 21 May 2009 18:44 UTC
Perfectionism, as a way of life, tends to be self-defeating. New research suggests it may also be deadly.

That's the conclusion of a Canadian study of senior citizens just published in the Journal of Health Psychology. Researchers conducted psychological tests on 450 elderly residents of southern Alberta, and then kept tabs on them for 6½ years. During that period, just over 30 percent of the subjects, who ranged in age from 65 to 87, died.
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Pills

Why are More Americans Taking Drugs for Mental Illness?


Dr. Mercola
Fri, 29 May 2009 18:00 UTC
Many more Americans have been using prescription drugs to treat mental illness since 1996. In fact, 73 percent more adults and 50 percent more children are using drugs to treat mental illness now than were doing so in 1996.

Among adults over 65, use of so-called psychotropic drugs -- which include antidepressants and antipsychotics -- doubled between 1996 and 2006.

The findings come from several large public surveys of health in the United States, including from the National Center for Health Statistics, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Social Security Administration.
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Magnify

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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