Health Supreme NewsGrabs - 12 February 2007
Sepp Hasslberger's News Grabs - a selection of alternative health news and related bits of interesting information ...
In this issue:
EU Commissioner on food supplement dosage -
EU relaxes 15-year usage norm for herbs -
UK: Anti-drug vaccine at birth? -
Merck's Mandatory Vaccine Campaign -
Zyprexa: Nobody Buys Lilly's Innocence -
Do SSRI antidepressants lead to increased violence? -
Drugmakers Hurry Sales, Delay Safety Studies -
Never trust new wonder drugs -
HRT-Cancer: Jury awards $1.5 million in damages -
Lee Evans Video On Aids Tests -
- - -
Germans take pride in local money
"It's quite simple," he said. "The money you spend stays in the region. When I accept Urstromtaler in my shop, I then have to see how I can spend the local banknotes. You get to know everyone who's participating in this project, and at the end of the day, you have a good feeling about life." More than 200 businesses are using the regional currency, including shops, bakeries, florists, restaurants. There is even a cinema which accepts Urstromtaler.
'Doomsday' vault design unveiled
The Svalbard International Seed Vault will be built into a mountainside on a remote island near the North Pole. The vault aims to safeguard the world's agriculture from future catastrophes, such as nuclear war, asteroid strikes and climate change. Construction begins in March, and the seed bank is scheduled to open in 2008.
Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts?
Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide. This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification. For example, Environment Canada brags about spending $3.7 billion in the last five years dealing with climate change almost all on propaganda trying to defend an indefensible scientific position while at the same time closing weather stations and failing to meet legislated pollution targets.
An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change
Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun’s brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism. He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds.
Mystery killer silencing honeybees
Something is killing the nation's honeybees. Dave Hackenberg of central Pennsylvania had 3,000 hives and figures he has lost all but about 800 of them. In labs at Pennsylvania State University, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, and elsewhere in the nation, researchers have been stunned by the number of calls about the mysterious losses.
In a similar incident some years ago in France, a Bayer seed treatment chemical, Gaucho, was identified as the culprit for bee deaths. Perhaps someone should check if the seeds they use are treated in this way...
EU: Health and Consumer Commissioner Kyprianou on food supplement dosage
"... we can reassure that in this exercise of setting the maximum levels for
vitamins and minerals in food supplements at Community level, we will consider with
the utmost care all existing national rules and will endeavour to incorporate in the
measures as much flexibility as is compatible with the principles of the internal
market."
EU relaxes 15-year usage norm for Indian herbal exports
The European Union has relaxed its norms of 15-year usage criteria under the Herbal Medicinal Product Directive that posed technical barriers to the Indian exporters of herbal products.The Indian side emphasized that Ayurveda is a holistic health science and its teaching, practice and products are properly regulated in India and EU's concerns relating to safety and quality control are being addressed by mandatory testing for heavy metals/microbial load/pesticide residue and institution of export inspection mechanism.
UK: Anti-drug jabs given at birth
Newborns would be injected with brain-altering chemicals that would prevent them getting “high” on cocaine, heroin or tobacco. Details of the extraordinary proposal to stop the yearly £20BILLION cost of drug misuse are in a leaked Number Ten policy document seen by The Sun. The document, being considered by Blair’s working group on crime, talks of “immunotherapies” — developed in secret — to protect a generation.
Although the news here is based on a "leaked policy document" that no one but the Sun's reporters/editors have seen, this would seem just like the plan people in government could come up with - the same people that think it's a great idea to invade a country because it might have weapons...
Merck's Mandatory Vaccine Campaign to Help Pay for Vioxx
If one looks beneath the surface, Merck's strong-arm marketing tactics are really a "Do or Die" effort to finance its huge Vioxx litigation costs. Thus, the mandatory HPV vaccine campaign is really a campaign to "Help Pay for Vioxx" losses. American preteen girls have been designated to pay the price by exposing their bodies to risks of harm.
Nobody Buys Lilly's Innocence Routine About Zyprexa
Some internal Lilly documents recently leaked to the press, that Lilly somehow managed to have sealed with a court order, reveal that Lilly hid the side effects of Zyprexa identified in its own clinical trials a decade ago and engaged in wide-ranging off-label marketing schemes to make a drug approved by the FDA only to treat adults with schizophrenia and bipoloar disorder into its top selling product bringing in a reported $30 billion thus far.
Do SSRI antidepressants lead to an increase in violent behaviour?
They are the kind of killings that would chill even a crime writer’s blood. Not motivated by money or social gain, not spurred by revenge, jealousy, or long-repressed rage, these bizarre and brutal slayings are committed by seemingly average people against strangers, intimates, and themselves. Almost all are unprovoked. Many appear to come out of nowhere. They range from school shootings such as Columbine to incidents of parents drowning, suffocating, or shooting their children, and children stabbing, burning, or shooting their parents, grandparents, and siblings. They include suicides so unexpected that loved ones are stunned with disbelief.Yet if some drug-awareness advocates, psychopharmacologists, psychiatrists, lawyers, judges, and juries are right, many are not random killings. The perpetrators have one thing in common: they took or were withdrawing from a class of antidepressant drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.
Drugmakers Hurry Sales, Delay Safety Studies
The FDA reported that of the 1,259 "open post-marketing commitments" tied to already-approved drugs, 899 were still "pending," meaning the studies had not yet begun. Only 15 percent of the studies were currently underway. Another 3 percent were officially behind schedule. Within the year, only 160 post-marketing commitments were fully concluded with all study requirements met.
So this means drugs are 'rushed to market' citing important public health reasons, but the studies that are then supposed to bring final evidence the drugs' safety or their efficacy are never done. The FDA and the drug companies are one corrupt bunch - and unsuspecting patients pay the price!What's more ... the recent FDA approval for an HPV vaccine produced by Merck and now being given to girls of school age has a list of such post-marketing studies to be performed. Can you say guinea pig kids?
Why you should never trust new wonder drugs
"The effect of these scandals is to show that something has gone badly wrong with the way our medicines are researched and sold. The scientific literature, the very place doctors would look for a warning, contained barely a hint of problems. What's more, no one seems likely ever to have to answer for what appears to be fraud. And no one in Britain has any means of finding out why their husband or child might have died."
Jury declares Wyeth's HRT drug caused woman's breast cancer, awards $1.5 million in damages
A Philadelphia jury yesterday awarded an Ohio woman $1 million and her husband $500,000 for damages suffered after Wyeth's hormone replacement drug Prempro was found to be the cause of the woman's breast cancer. Jennie Nelson, 67, of Dayton, Ohio, took Prempro for about six years, and believed it to be the cause of her breast cancer, for which she underwent a mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation treatments.
HIV on Trial
An appeal case has HIV-AIDS specialists on tenter hooks awaiting the outcome which they say could set a dangerous precedent for public health campaigns and the criminal law.One of the witnesses is Dr. Papadopulos-Eleopulos. In a 50-page Powerpoint presentation, she told the court that AIDS had nothing to do with HIV, which - if it existed at all - was not a retrovirus and not transmitted between people by sexual intercourse. Papadopulos-Eleopulos cited a 1997 published paper written by University of California researcher Nancy Padian who put the risk of a male transmitting HIV to a female at 0.0009 per contact.
Guinea Pig Kids
This website is dedicated to Guinea Pig Kids - a BBC documentary that exposes how the city of New York has been forcing HIV-Positive children under its supervision to be used as human guinea pigs in tests for experimental AIDS drug trials. (Guinea Pig Kids was broadcast on Tuesday, 30 November, 2004, at 1930 GMT on BBC Two in the UK.)
Lee Evans On Aids Tests
This is a new website where you can watch or download (also for iTunes/iPod) the new 5-minute video by two-time Olympic Gold Medal winner Lee Evans, who outlines the myriad of problems with the so-called HIV tests that are incorrectly diagnosing people as HIV-Positive. This version is higher quality than YouTube or Google can offer. By the way, the Lee Evans video has had over 6000 views in its first 15 days on YouTube, Google, and Mercola.com.
Do You Have Microwave Sickness?
"... if people did really know the facts regarding the dangers of cell phones and WiFi and the masts that emit a pervasive level of microwave radiation, would they still be willing to use them? Would they still be willing to allow the antennas to be built in vicinity of their homes, work places, schools, and hospitals?"
GM Food Nightmare Unfolding and the Regulatory Sham
Many varieties of GM crops - soybean, tomato, maize, cotton, potato, pea - with different transgenes, fed to rats, mice, cows, sheep, chickens, or human beings, resulted in illnesses and deaths. The obvious suspect is the GM process and/or the artificial genetic material used. It is worth mentioning here that synthetic approximations of the natural genes are invariably used, and in new combinations that have no counterparts in billions of years of evolution.
posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Monday February 12 2007
updated on Thursday September 25 2008URL of this article:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2007/02/12/health_supreme_newsgrabs_12_february_2007.htm