Posts in category Health
Written by Study concludes Gulf War syndrome involves real brain damage
For the last twenty years, veterans of the Persian Gulf War of 1991 have been complaining of a range of ailments, including pain, fatigue, and problems with memory and concentration. And for just as long, the causes have remained uncertain and there has been a tendency by the military to attribute the complaints to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Now a long-term study at the University of Texas in Dallas has used a new technique to measure blood flow in the brains of sufferers and has detected “marked abnormalities” in brain function that can probably be attributed to low levels of exposure to sarin nerve gas. This abnormal blood flow has persisted or even worsened over the eleven years of the study.
“The findings mark a significant advancement in our understanding of the syndrome, which was for years written off by the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs as a form of combat stress rather than an objectively diagnosable injury,” reports the Dallas Observer.
Gardasil HPV vaccines found contaminated with recombinant DNA that persists in human blood
(NaturalNews) In seeking answers to why adolescent girls are suffering devastating health damage after being injected with HPV vaccines, SANE Vax, Inc decided to have vials of Gardasil tested in a laboratory. There, they found over a dozen Gardasil vaccine vials to be contaminated with rDNA of the Human Papillomavirus (HPV). The vials were purchased in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Poland and France, indicating Gardasil contamination is a global phenomenon.
This means that adolescents who are injected with these vials are being contaminated with a biohazard — the rDNA of HPV. In conducting the tests, Dr. Sin Hang Lee found rDNA from both HPV-11 and HPV-18, which were described as “firmly attached to the aluminum adjuvant.”
That aluminum is also found in vaccines should be frightening all by itself, given that aluminum should never be injected into the human body (it’s toxic when ingested, and it specifically damages the nervous system). With the added discovery that the aluminum adjuvant also carries rDNA fragments of two different strains of Human Papillomavirus, this now reaches the level of a dangerous biohazard — something more like a biological weapon rather than anything resembling medicine.
As SANE Vax explains in its announcement, these tests were conducted after an adolescent girl experienced “acute onset Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis within 24 hours” of being injected with an HPV vaccine. (http://sanevax.org/sane-vax-inc-dis…)
School removes Wi-Fi over health concerns
OTTAWA – An Ontario private school has removed its wireless Internet system due to potential health concerns associated to it.
Pretty River Academy, located north of Toronto in Collingwood, is a private kindergarten to Grade 12 school with just under 150 students. Officials have switched to a hard-wire Internet system.
In May, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer reclassified radio frequency emitted by wireless devices as possibly carcinogenic.
The school’s principal Roberta Murray Hirst said the new system was fairly effortless to install and the school wanted to choose the safest Internet option.
Dr. Magda Havas, who studies environmental contaminants at Trent University, hopes other schools will move towards this model.
“This is a much better way of connecting kids to the Internet, it’s not nearly as dangerous as wireless,” Havas said.
EU bans GM-contaminated honey from general sale
The European Union’s highest court on Tuesday ruled that honey which contains trace amounts of pollen from genetically modified (GM) corn must be labelled as GM produce and undergo full safety authorisation before it can be sold as food.
In what green groups are calling a “groundbreaking” ruling, the decision could force the EU to strengthen its already near-zero tolerance policy on genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
Bavarian beekeepers, some 500m from a test field for a modified maize crop developed by Monsanto – one of only two GM crops authorised as safe to be cultivated in Europe – claimed their honey had been “contaminated” by pollen from the plant.
The European court of justice found in their favour, a ruling that should offer grounds for the beekeepers to claim compensation in a German court.
Fight Over Compensation for 9/11 Responders Shifts to Cancer Victims
“The Tea Party hasn’t dealt with John Feal yet,” said John Feal, the former construction worker who has been one of the loudest advocates for sick and injured 9/11 rescue and response workers. Missing half a foot as result of his efforts at Ground Zero, Feal often stands out among the politicians and union officials who speak in diplomatic, politically safe terms.
Feal was referring to his movement’s latest hurdle: amending the James Zadroga Act — a bill passed last year ensuring federal funding for 9/11 health monitoring and treatment programs –- to cover certain types of cancers. In July, the federal government announced the bill would not provide medical benefits to first responders who developed cancer. Now the unions and other hope a new report will make their task easier.
United States admits scientists injected Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases
The United States government has made the shocking admission that its 1940s-era scientists deliberately infected Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases – and even gave a dying woman syphilis.
The horrifying revelation was made this week by a panel commissioned by President Obama to investigate the dark chapter in American medical history.
More than 1,300 Guatemalans were given various STDs between 1946 and 1948 to see if the diseases could be treated with penicillin, and at least 83 people died during the trials, the panel discovered.
The findings, some of which were revealed to the White House last year, prompted Obama to call his Guatemalan counterpart to apologize.
The scientists’ methods were stunning even when considering the different medical ethics in the post-World War II era, according to the presidential panel.
“The researchers put their own medical advancement first and human decency a far second,” said Anita Allen, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.
The U.S. government paid for its Public Health Service to work with several Guatemalan government agencies to expose soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis, gonorrhea or chancroid.
Only 700 of those infected were also given penicillin. The trials did not yield any useful medical knowledge, according to medical records.
Though investigators cautioned that it could not be determined if the 83 deaths were caused by the tests, the experiments were unethical and indefensible, the panel concluded.
Several women who battled epilepsy and lived at a hospital in Guatemala dubbed “Home for the Insane” were injected with syphilis through the skull in an attempt to cure their condition.
Bird Flu Back Again, U.N. Agency Warns
A new vaccine-resistant strain of avian H5N1 influenza has begun circulating in poultry flocks in Vietnam and China, posing “unpredictable risks to human health,” the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned on Monday.
“In Vietnam, which suspended its springtime poultry vaccination campaign this year, most of the northern and central parts of the country — where H5N1 is endemic — have been invaded by the new virus strain, known as H5N1-2.3.2.1,” the FAO said in a statement.
No cases of human infection with the novel strain have yet reported by the FAO or its sister group, the World Health Organization. Vietnam has remained free of human infections with any avian H5N1 strains this year, according to WHO.
The FAO indicated that Vietnam’s veterinary services had been alerted to the threat and the county is “reportedly considering a novel, targeted vaccination campaign this fall.”
The new strain is “apparently able to sidestep the defenses provided by existing [poultry] vaccines,” the agency said.
The ongoing H5N1 flu virus epidemic, which was first detected in 2003 when humans began falling ill and dying, has affected wild birds as well as domestic poultry. That has aided the disease’s spread out of eastern Asia, and its reintroduction in areas where it was thought to have been eradicated.
Desperate to drink, West Texas turns to wastewater
Big Spring, Texas (CNN) — Desperate times call for a tall, cool glass of creativity in this patch of West Texas where water is scarce and quickly disappearing.
But a plan to pump millions of new gallons of drinking water into the system has many people across West Texas holding their noses.
This week construction started on a $13 million water-reclamation facility. That’s a fancy way of describing a treatment plant that will turn sewage wastewater into drinking water.
“That’s not something I even want to think about,” said Eunice Thixton, a Big Spring resident. “It really doesn’t sound too good.”
There are three major reservoirs that provide drinking water for half a million people who live around Midland, Texas. But the drought is draining those lakes and threatens to create major water shortages in the months ahead.
This is an age-old problem in the dust-hardened landscape of West Texas.
Authors Of 9/11 Health Care Bill Push To Expand Coverage
Authors of the Zadroga health care bill are pushing to quickly expand coverage for 9/11 first responders.
Representatives Carolyn Maloney, Jerrold Nadler, and Peter King sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
They want her to appoint members to a panel created under the bill before the 10th anniversary of the attacks.
The panel would then review evidence and make suggestions on providing coverage for additional 9/11-related health conditions.
Super blood donors could be tapped in a disaster
Next time a national disaster strikes, whether it’s an earthquake or a pandemic, dedicated blood donors could be tapped — quite literally — to give again within as little as two days, under a plan being considered by federal health officials.
The Food and Drug Administration is asking advice from blood experts this week about whether it’s a good idea to dramatically shrink the intervals between blood donations in the event of emergencies.
Under proposals being considered by the Blood Products Advisory Committee, donors would be allowed to reduce the interval from the normal eight weeks down to four weeks without a doctor’s approval, and down to as little as 48 hours with a medical release.
“If things got really bad, we would like the ability … to draw more fully qualified donors more quickly,” explained Dr. Louis Katz, executive vice president of medical affairs for the Mississippi Valley Regional Blood Center, who supports the idea.
The move essentially would create a potential fleet of super blood donors, regular donors available on short to notice to boost the blood supply by less than 10 percent, but enough to get over a donation hump.
“We’d like already-committed donors that we could look to in a bad pinch,” Katz said.
Nigerian state to prosecute parents over polio vaccines
KANO, July 29 – A Nigerian state that has battled polio outbreaks has vowed to prosecute parents who refuse to immunise their children against the highly contagious disease, a health official said Thursday.
“The government will henceforth arrest and prosecute any parent that refuses to allow health workers to vaccinate his child against child-killer diseases, particularly polio,” the permanent secretary in the Kano state health ministry, Tajudeen Gambo, told AFP.
Parents would be charged under an already existing law prohibiting someone from denying children access to health care, he said. He said the law allows for penalties of jail time or fines, but he did not know how much for either.
Program won’t cover 9/11 responders for cancer
New York (CNN) — Workers who were involved in the response to the World Trade Center attack will not have their cancer treatments compensated under a program set up after September 11, according to a controversial decision released Tuesday by the World Trade Center Health Program.
There is inadequate “published scientific and medical findings” that a causal link exists between September 11 exposures and the occurrence of cancer in responders and survivors, program Administrator John Howard said in a statement.
The decision forms part of the first periodic review of what the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act will provide.
After a lengthy battle, President Obama signed the $4.2 billion legislation in January to provide health care for those who helped clear the rubble and search for human remains at the World Trade Center site in New York.
“As new research and findings are released, we will continue to do periodic reviews of cancer” for the program, Howard said, with the next review expected in early to mid-2012.
Some of the New York lawmakers who originally hailed the legislation are now speaking out against the exclusion of cancer.
“As the sponsors of the Zadroga Act, we are disappointed that Dr. Howard has not yet found sufficient evidence to support covering cancers,” Democratic Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler and Republican Rep. Peter King, who wrote the act, said in a joint statement.
Should severly obese children be taken away from their parents?
A controversial new opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests taking severly obese children out of their homes and placing them in foster care.
Dr. David Ludwig, who co-authored the article, claims he’s not blaming parents but protecting children.
State intervention will “support not just the child but the whole family, with the goal of reuniting child and family as soon as possible,” he said.
Ludwig proposes foster care in drastic cases, where surgery might have been the alternative.
