Ailing FDA May Need a Major Overhaul, Officials and Groups Say
Alarm about the agency began to spike after a series of highly publicized incidents, including the discovery that the painkiller Vioxx caused heart attacks. That has been followed by other safety issues, including questions about the widely used diabetes medication Avandia and several psychiatric drugs.
"I'm afraid we're going to see more horrible things happen if we don't get our act together on this," said David Ross, who was a drug reviewer at the agency for 10 years.
The FDA appears to be busy trying to eliminate nutrition as a competition to synthetic medicines. Perhaps they should be re-directed back to actually protecting consumers instead of the profits of pharmaceutical medicine.
FDA latest threat to dietary supplements
The FDA's highly controversial bid to ban interstate trade of food, food ingredients and—dietary supplements—that have been subject to clinical investigation is utter madness. The more effort a company spends in trying to verify the efficacy and benefit of its product, the more likely that it will not be able to trade the product between states!
Cancer Cured For Good
The weekly injection of just 100 billionths of a gram of a harmless glyco-protein (a naturally-produced molecule with a sugar component and a protein component) activates the human immune system and cures cancer for good, according to human studies among breast cancer and colon cancer patients, producing complete remissions lasting 4 and 7 years respectively. This glyco-protein cure is totally without side effect but currently goes unused by cancer doctors.
My comment: Fighting tumor formation is a secondary intervention in cancer. Tumors (uncontrolled proliferation of cells) form as a natural consequence of serious changes in the chemistry of cells, where the normal energy mechanism is no longer workable and the cell changes into a different type that survives by forming cell colonies (tumors) rather than by being part of an organism. So the ideal anti-cancer intervention would be to
prevent those changes in the cells' chemistry in the first place. But apart from that, the research seems to be a great advance from what we have today.
Doctors aren’t scientists, and medicine isn’t science
Whereas science left alone is universal, medicine left alone — in the unfettered professional hands of doctors — is not universal. What doctors believe to be the best treatment for a given condition varies from country to country, because the understanding of what that condition is, the explanation of that condition, also varies from country to country.
Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be radical differences between countries regarding HIV/AIDS theory. On the central mistaken points, that HIV causes AIDS and that HIV is sexually transmitted and that antiretroviral drugs are a good thing, there seems to be trans-national agreement.
Patient-led drug trials defy medical establishment
Dozens of ALS patients are testing treatments on their own without waiting on the slow pace of medical research. They are part of an emerging group of patients willing to share intimate health details on the Web in hopes of making their own medical discoveries.
Working online, Karen Felzer and Macedo recruited nearly 200 patients worldwide to take a specific lithium dosage and answer standard surveys to gauge their symptoms. They began running their study through a Web site called PatientsLikeMe.com, using it to attract volunteers and track their progress.
On the site, patients share detailed information about their symptoms and the drugs they are taking. The site focuses on conditions that have stubbornly resisted medical science, such as ALS, Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis.
This is an illustration of the failure of the pharma-for-profit model of current western medicine. Patients must do their own studies while pharma stands by idle. Actually worse than idle, as the most widely sold drugs of pharma - statins - are said to be a
possible CAUSE of ALS and similar neurological problems.
Indonesia To Pharma: Build A Factory Or Else
“If they want to get licences (to sell their products) they have to invest here also, not just take advantage of the Indonesian market,” Supari told Dow Jones. “They can’t just operate like a retailer here, with an office size that’s three metres by three and make billions of rupiah. That is not fair.”
FDA Draws Fire Over Chemicals In Baby Formula
"When FDA claims there isn't any reason to worry, that's exactly what the consumer should do," said Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group. "The once-revered public health agency has morphed into a taxpayer-funded public relations arm for the very industries it was created to oversee."
J&J gave money in return for positive drug studies, court documents say
Johnson & Johnson gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to a research center run by an influential child psychiatrist explicitly to generate data to help expand sales of the company's antipsychotic drug Risperdal in children, according to court documents.
Bayer Pays $97.5M To Settle Kickback Charges
According to the Justice Department Bayer allegedly paid Liberty Medical Supply, one of the largest direct-to-patient suppliers, approximately $2.5 million to convert patients to Bayer supplies. The alleged kickbacks were based on the number of patients that Liberty successfully converted to Bayer products and were disguised as payments for advertising. In addition, Bayer allegedly paid kickbacks of approximately $375,000 to 10 other diabetic suppliers to convert patients to Bayer supplies.
US: Senate Probe Snares Major Bipolar Researcher, "Infinite Mind" Radio Show
Sen. Charles Grassley has caught yet another researcher in his conflict of interest probe. This time out, it's Fred Goodwin - perhaps the most influential researcher and writer in the world of bipolar disorder - and the well-known radio show "The Infinite Mind." As a result of these new revelations, the show is going off the air.
HIV Tests: Reduce the Burden - Remove the Stigma
It is morally and ethically wrong to rob someone of their right to live, by informing them, with the full weight and support of society, that they now and forever have been diagnosed with a disease that has “no cure,” and that their only recourse is a lifetime of potent drugging, with drugs which themselves can, do and have caused death.
We have robbed citizens not only of their lives, but of their ability to fight for life, to hope for life, to overcome illness, to prove us wrong, to surprise us, to teach us, to correct the errors of our too-sure judgment. Instead we enforce their death through daily reminders - drugs, tests, and the stigmatizing label: “unsafe, and permanently infected.”
State of HIV/AIDS Denial: Carcinogenic HAART
“Cognitive dissonance” is the social scientists’ way of saying, “Not seeing what we don’t wish to see”. “Being in denial” has crept into common usage to describe the same phenomenon. In states of denial, the same unwished-for discovery is made, reported — and then ignored; over and over again.
When you have a fundamentally wrong theory, facts become quite difficult to explain, and an endless variety of conundrums are generated — all of them suitable topics for grant proposals, of course.
“This thing is going to be studied long after our time. This is so much greater than the Lysenko Affair [which had set Soviet agriculture and biology back decades]. I’m urging all of my colleagues to save all of their papers and make the historical record as complete as possible. What was the dynamics of the events that led to poisoning people with AZT? Because this is a major historical event that is going to be studied for 100 years — how the United States gave AIDS to the world”.
Bush Administration USDA Rushing Through Dangerous New Rules on Genetically Engineered Foods & Crops
In the waning months of the Bush administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has joined the ranks of federal agencies rushing through new regulations that weaken protections for human health and the environment. USDA has released a proposed rule that would significantly weaken oversight of all genetically engineered crops, and which continue to allow companies to grow food crops engineered to produce drugs and industrial chemicals.
Corrupt to The Core
Health Canada, and I suspect all governmental regulatory bodies, more or less are usurped and essentially owned by the industry. Instead of scientists, Health Canada's upper management is now stacked with industry public relations men. A good account is made of how our science based institutions have been systematically overhauled into industry organs while maintaining the pretence of protecting the public.... Surely, under these circumstances one can never be safe given that the fox is guarding the hens...
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008
If you're into watching corporate shenanigans, here's some food for thought.
- AIG: Money for Nothing
- Cargill: Food Profiteers
- Chevron: "We can't let little countries screw around with big companies"
- Constellation Energy: Nuclear Operators
- CNPC: Fueling Violence in Darfur
- Dole: The Sour Taste of Pineapple
- GE: Creative Accounting
- Imperial Sugar: 13 Dead
- Philip Morris International: Unshackled
- Roche: Saving Lives is Not Our Business
Free Currencies: the next global currency system
Money is an information system. It's made to measure and balance flows in the real world. Money needs not to be scarce otherwise it turns the world into artificial scarcity, even when it's abundant. Money should be in right supply to account for flows so that every marketplace in the world -- companies, neighborhoods, towns, regions, global communities, etc -- can grow their wealth without constraints.
- - -
Got something to say? Have news to share?
Join the healthfreedom group on Ning and start posting your messages. Healthfreedom on Ning is a social network and discussion forum for all who are interested in natural health and nutrition and in promoting a new medical paradigm.
- - -
More information out there...
There is much I cannot cover but other sources for this kind of information exist and are active.
You can subscribe to the Zeus Newsletterhere. Appears twice monthly. If you would like to see some samples of Louise's collection of informative links, here are the archives.
Dr Mercola's health blog and Mike Adams' Natural News have great health information.
The Alternative Medicine Yahoo Group is a place where you can discuss and exchange information on what is happening in the world of natural health.
For the influence of electromagnetic waves from radio, mobile phones and other radio emitting devices, check out the emfrefugee group on Yahoo.
If you are interested in a different take on the news that isn't health centered but is certainly fun, check out Robin Good TV News.
A few sites to keep up to date with the other side of world affairs, the stuff you won't necessarily find on your tv or in the papers:
http://therealnews.com/
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com
http://www.commondreams.org
http://www.globalresearch.ca/
http://rawstory.com/
http://www.truthout.org/
... and remember,
The individual is supreme and finds its way through intuition
Fear of the Invisible is a book by Janine Roberts that takes a deep look into the world of virus isolation and vaccine manufacture. It appears that isolation of a virus is not a clean-cut business, nor is the evidence that these little fragments of information from our cells' DNA actually do cause disease.
Since the data puts the causation of polio, the flu, and even aids into doubt, the advisability of vaccination as a practice to prevent "viral diseases" loses much of its appeal as a public health measure.
The book "takes its readers on a journey into the very heart of the hunt for viruses – to the key experiments performed to prove that these invisibly small particles cause diseases that often were previously blamed on toxins or bacteria. It sheds light on the extraordinary assumptions underlying much of this research into viruses – and the resulting vaccines and antiviral medicines."
From the book's Introduction
The word ‘virus' comes from the Latin for a poisonous liquid, and before that from the Sanskrit for the same. The hunt for them started when, towards the end of the 19th century, it was suggested that invisible living particles much smaller than bacteria might cause the epidemic illnesses for which no bacterial cause could be found. When the electron microscope found tiny particles in the blood serum of patients entering and leaving human cells, this was a Eureka Moment. The prediction was surely about to be proved true. These particles were assumed to be invading and hijacking our cells in order to reproduce. They were thus all condemned as poisons, as ‘viruses.'
As more of these were searched for and found in sick people, many illnesses became blamed on them. They became the invisible enemy, the nano-terrorist we must fear. We were instructed that one of our first duties for our newborn children is to vaccinate them against this dreaded foe. Thus was created an ever-growing multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry.
As an example of what passes for virology, the science of viral illnesses, on which rests the whole edifice of a multi-billion dollar vaccine industry and the 'preventive strategy' of much of western medicine, Martin Barnes has summarized a chapter of the book that details the scientific history of polio.
You may be amazed at some of the mind boggling blunders that are at the basis of the 'science' of vaccines. But to get the full story, do buy the book and if you are able to, spread the word.
We need honesty in medicine!
- - -
Outline of the Science History of Polio
by Martin Barnes
This summary was created from information extracted from Janine Roberts' book 'Fear of the Invisible' (Impact Investigative Media Productions, 2008).
1909: Landsteiner and Popper
They ground up the spinal cord of a 9-year-old polio victim and injected a cup of the suspension directly into the brains of two monkeys. One died immediately and the other slowly became paralyzed.
1910: Flexer and Lewis
Ground up human spinal cord with polio and injected the suspension directly into a monkey's brain, the monkey became paralyzed, then they extracted some fluid from its brain, and injected it into another monkey's brain, and so on through a series of monkeys paralyzing all of them in the process. But making the monkeys drink the liquid or injecting into their arms did not paralyze them.
(These experiments are celebrated in modern textbooks as being the first time a 'virus' was proved to cause a major epidemic.' They could not find a bacteria in film preparations or cultures. They concluded: 'The infecting agent of epidemic polio virus belongs to the class of minute and filterable viruses that have not thus far been demonstrated with certainty under a microscope.' Toxic causes were not considered, or the shock of injecting this foreign stew directly into the brain, bypassing the immune system.)
However, the scientists were under a lot of pressure then to find a cure for the waves of polio hitting middle class kids in the summertime.
1948: Dalldorf and Sickles
Took excrement from a polio victim and prepared a 20% suspension with ether and centrifugation, then injected it directly into the living brains of suckling mice 3-7 days old. They became paralyzed.
1949: Enders of Harvard claims he can make this 'virus' from human embryonic cells, making it far easier to make a vaccine.
(Their conclusion was that this was the successful isolation of a virus that must be causing polio paralysis in humans! But all they proved was that a faeces-derived suspension of human cellular material caused illness in lab animals. They called this suspension 'polio virus' and it was to become a 'vaccine seed' for modern polio vaccines. Enders receives the 1954 Nobel Prize for this!)
1950: A small ball like particle, 24-30 nm in size, was isolated from human excrement, and made visible with an electron microscope. It was named the 'polio virus.'
(Gut enteroviruses like this are very common in humans. We all have many of them.
Where was the proof this was a causative agent? Why and how would a virus found in the gut go over to attack the nervous system as polio does?)
1951: Scientists report they cannot find the designated polio virus in many polio victims.
(This information was ignored. It was inconvenient. The public was demanding a solution to the polio epidemic attacking middle class kids.)
1952: Prof Konstantine Vinodouroff of the Institute of Neurology, Russian Academy of Medical Science, tells the Americans that Russia has never had an outbreak of polio. The Americans are amazed.
1954: Dr. Jonas Salk developed the first commercial polio vaccine with a virus found in 'the pooled faeces of three heathly children in Cleveland.'
(Dr. Salk did not even use the faeces from polio victims!)
The 'poliovaccine' is administered as a safety test to 400,000 US children. The official safety report stated that it protected '30-90 percent' of recipients.
(This was a vague statistic. However, manufacturers could make a 300% markup on the vaccine.)
1955: Salk marketed his patented vaccine 'seed' —derived from the excrement of healthy children— to manufacturers. The next step was to sprinkle it into vast quantities of minced monkey kidneys and allow the virus to multiply, then add formaldehyde to kill it. They made 27,000,000 vaccination doses.
1955: President Dwight Eisenhower awarded Salk the Congressional Medal declaring the polio vaccine a great victory for American science.
1956: Health Authorities change the rules for defining polio. Doctors are instructed to diagnose polio only if the patient has paralytic symptoms for 60 days or more. Milder cases of polio are no longer reported.
1958: CDC changes the rules for defining polio again. Cases of inflammation of the membrane that protects the brain and spinal neuron cells, causing muscular weakness and pain, but not paralysis, are no longer to be classified as polio. These cases must now be called viral or aseptic meningitis. Non-paralytic cases were now to be re-named meningitis even if the polio virus is present. The reported figures for polio were officially to exclude 'cases of aseptic meningitis due to polio virus or other entero viruses.' Reported cases of aseptic meningitis went from near zero to thousands, and polio cases dropped the same amount.
1958: Officials reduce the definition of polio again. Now all cases with classic polio paralytic symptoms are to be diagnosed initially as Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP). Two turds are taken from the patient and sent to the CDC to see if they can find polio in them. If not, they are declared as not polio, even if the children have all the classic symptoms.
(Making fewer cases of polio by changing the definition was a fraudulent way to make it seem like the polio vaccinations were working.)
1958: Officials triumphantly declared large parts of the world polio free, even while the newly defined Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP) suddenly became common. Credit for this great victory over disease was given to Salk, Sabin and the vaccine manufactures.
Report in JAMA Feb 25, 1961: "It is now generally recognized that much of the Salk vaccine used in the U.S. has been worthless." Live strains produced by Sabin and put in sugar cubes were adopted instead.
2008: Ordinary doctors still do not have the power to diagnose polio by observing symptoms. The World Health Organization still demands that two turds from each victim of infantile paralysis be sent to their laboratories. If no polio virus is found in these, the cases are declared not to be polio, even if these children are suffering from the same severe paralysis symptoms and pain as found in the worst cases of polio during the American epidemics.
Question: Could something else be causing polio besides the virus? Finding the polio virus in human excrement is natural, and finding it there does not prove it causes polio, symptoms of paralysis in the motor neuron cells of the backbone.
2008: On the CDC website Dr. John Lienhard explains that too much hygiene was the cause of the polio epidemics. Most kids pick up the virus in garden soil and become naturally immune to it, but not the kids subjected to the overly hygienic parents of the 50's.
Conclusion: The effectiveness of the Salk vaccine (and Sabin live vaccine in sugar cubes) is something that we have all come to accept, but it is nothing more than a scientific myth, fraudulently promoted by the political and medical authorities of the time, and still believed today. Millions of polio vaccine injections are still given worldwide every year for essentially no purpose. Causation by a virus has not been shown.
The Case for Toxins Causing Polio
1824: Metal workers had suffered for centuries from a paralysis similar to polio caused by the lead and arsenic in the metals they were working with. English scientist John Cooke observed: 'The fumes from these metals, or the receptance of them in solution into the stomach, often causes paralysis.'
1890: Lead arsenate pesticide started to be sprayed in the US up to 12 times every summer to kill codling moth on apple crops.
1892: Polio outbreaks began to occur in Vermont, an apple growing region. In his report the Government Inspector Dr. Charles Caverly noted that parents reported that some children fell ill after eating fruit. He stated that 'infantile paralysis usually occurred in families with more than one child, and as no efforts were made at isolation it was very certain it was non-contagious' (with only one child in the family having been struck).
1907: Calcium arsenate comes into use primarily on cotton crops.
1908: In a Massachusetts town with three cotton mills and apple orchards, 69 children suddenly fell ill with infantile paralysis.
1909: The UK bans apple imports from the States because of heavy lead arsenate residues.
1921: Franklin D. Roosevelt develops polio after swimming in Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick. Toxicity of water may have been due to pollution run-off.
1943: DDT is introduced, a neurotoxic pesticide. Over the next several years it comes into widespread use in American households. For example, wall paper impregnated with DDT was placed in children's bedrooms.
1943: A polio epidemic in the UK town of Broadstairs, Kent is linked to a local dairy where cows were washed down with DDT.
1944: Albert Sabin reports that a major cause of sickness and death of American troops based in the Philippines was poliomyelitis. US military camps there were sprayed daily with DDT to kill mosquitos. Neighboring Philippine settlements were not affected.
1944: NIH reports that DDT damages the same anterior horn cells that are damaged in infantile paralysis.
1946: Gebhaedt shows polio seasonality correlates with fruit harvest.
1949: Endocrinologist Dr Morton Biskind, a practitioner and medical researcher, found that DDT causes 'lesions in the spinal cord similar to human polio.'
1950: US Public Health Industrial Hygiene Medical Director, J.G. Townsend, notes the similarity between parathion poisoning and polio and believes that some polio might be caused by eating fruits or vegetables with parathion residues.
1951: Dr. Biskind treats his polio patients as poisoning victims, removing toxins from food and environment, especially DDT contaminated milk and butter. Dr. Biskind writes: 'Although young animals are more susceptible to the effects of DDT than adults, so far as the available literature is concerned, it does not appear that the effects of such concentrations on infants and children have even been considered.'
1949-1951: Other doctors report they are having success treating polio with anti toxins used to treat poisoning, dimercaprol and ascorbic acid. Example: Dr. F. R. Klenner reported: 'In the poliomyelitis epidemic in North Carolina in 1948 60 cases of this disease came under our care... The treatment was massive doses of vitamin C every two to four hours. Children up to four years received vitamin C injection intramuscularly... All patients were clinically well after 72 hours.'
1950: Dr. Biskind presents evidence to the US Congress that pesticides were the major cause of polio epidemics. He is joined by Dr. Ralph Scobey who reported he found clear evidence of poisoning when analyzing chemical traces in the blood of polio victims.
Comment: This was a no no. The viral causation theory was not something to be questioned. The careers of prominent virologists and health authorities were threatened. Biskind and Scobey's ideas were subjected to ridicule.
1953: Clothes are moth-proofed by washing them in EQ-53, a formula containing DDT.
1953: Dr. Biskind writes: 'It was known by 1945 that DDT was stored in the body fat of mammals and appears in their milk... yet far from admitting a causal relationship between DDT and polio that is so obvious, which in any other field of biology would be instantly accepted, virtually the entire apparatus of communication, lay and scientific alike, has been devoted to denying, concealing, suppressing, distorting and attempts to convert into its opposite this overwhelming evidence. Libel, slander, and economic boycott have not been overlooked in this campaign.'
1954: Legislation recognizing the dangers of persistent pesticides is enacted, and a phase out of DDT in the US accelerates along with a shift of sales of DDT to third world countries.
(Note that DDT is phased out at the same time as widespread polio vaccinations begin.)
1962: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is published.
1968: DDT registration cancelled for the US.
2008: Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP) is still a raging, but little mentioned, epidemic in many parts of the world where pesticide use is high, and DDT is still used.
2008: WHO states on its website: 'There is no cure for polio. Its effects are irreversible.'
Conclusion: Modern belief that polio is caused by a virus is an ongoing tragedy for the children - poisoning victims - involved. Public funds are wasted on useless and dangerous vaccines when the children could be treated with antitoxins.
This graph shows that polio death rates were already in steep decline when polio vaccines were started. This directly throws into question the effectiveness of the vaccines.
Martin K. Barnes
www.maisondemartin.com
- - -
See also:
Polio Vaccine Page
The Polio Vaccine Myth