Scientists: Restructure FDA - NewsGrabs 11 January 2009
FDA Scientists Ask Obama to Restructure Drug Agency
A group of scientists at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday sent a letter to President-elect Barack Obama's transition team pleading with him to restructure the agency, saying managers have ordered, intimidated and coerced scientists to manipulate data in violation of the law.The nine scientists, whose names have been provided to the transition team and to some members of Congress, say the FDA is a "fundamentally broken" agency and describe it as place where honest employees committed to integrity can't act without fear of reprisal.
FDA Tells Pregnant Women it's OK to Consume Mercury!
The U.S. FDA is urging the government to amend its advisory that women and children should limit how much fish they eat. They argue that the benefits of seafood outweigh the health risks and that most people should eat more fish, even if it contains mercury.FDA has allowed mercury in tooth fillings despite evidence of neurotoxicity of the metal. This new advice is more of the same fatally flawed approach to "protecting consumers" which seems to be written in very small print on the FDA's charter.
The FDA allows natural sugar replacement stevia
One has to wonder why it took more than 70 years for the FDA to allow companies to use stevia as a sugar replacement in food and sweet drinks. The benefits and safety have been proven over a long period of time and the acceptance of this herb should have supported its use in America.This is a clear indication that the FDA only works for industry. In the absence of pressure from the huge industry conglomerates that have now patented stevia extracts, there was no movement for 70 years. As soon as Coke got in trouble with aspartame and put money into researching stevia as a replacement, the FDA took notice.
Aspartame Maker Merisant files for bankruptcy protection
Chicago-based Merisant Worldwide Inc., maker of the artificial sweetener Equal, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Friday, hobbled by the global credit crisis and sliding sales.Merisant has its roots in G.D. Searle & Co., the Skokie-based firm that invented the artificial sweetener aspartame in 1965. Monsanto bought Searle in 1985 and then in 2000 sold its aspartame-related businesses to separate buyers, with the tabletop sweetener operation christened Merisant.
Back then, Equal was the leading tabletop sweetener, with 37 percent of the market. Splenda, an artificial sweetener made by Johnson & Johnson, has since come to dominate.
To Encourage the Others - Martin Walker on Vaccine-damage-denial in the UK (26 pages, PDF)
The hearing for fitness to practice against Dr Wakefield, professor Simon Murch and Professor Walker-Smith will start again on Monday 12th January. This hearing has now run for around 110 days and is schedule to run until the middle of this year, in a vain attempt to keep the lid on vaccine damage caused to thousands of children.Martin Walker's essay is about the way in which the Joint Committee on Vaccine and Immunology (JCVI) have tried to disguise the very real fact of vaccine induced fits and febrile convulsions, or their pre-vaccine history, by claiming that deaths from vaccination are actually the nebulous, sudden infant death syndrome deaths (SIDS).
Vitamins in Cancer prevention - study designed to fail
"This study was destined from the outset to obtain a negative result. One would suspect this was intended, if there were a single author likely to understand the subject under study—nutrition. That there is none, and hence no real understanding—as is well explained in the critique below by Robert Verkerk—is reprehensible, but less so than the actions of the editor who must have published this in the knowledge that the data do not support the conclusions."
Chemopreventive agents in black raspberries identified
Researchers at the Ohio State Comprehensive Cancer Center found that anthocyanins, a class of flavonoids in black raspberries, inhibited growth and stimulated apoptosis in the esophagus of rats treated with an esophageal carcinogen."Our data provide strong evidence that anthocyanins are important for cancer prevention," said the study's lead author, Gary D. Stoner, Ph.D., a professor in the department of internal medicine at Ohio State University.
Chemopreventive? What's wrong with just plain preventive, with food preventing cancer? And by the way, anthocyanins which are plant antioxydants, can be found in other fruits as well, and notably in red wine .. and they are available as healthfood supplements.
ANH: Detox works—we can prove it!
There is ample evidence to show that our ‘normal diet’ and natural detoxification processes are, for many people, no longer capable of managing the chemical burden to which we’re exposed.
Old gastrointestinal drug slows aging
Recent animal studies have shown that clioquinol - an 80-year old drug once used to treat diarrhea and other gastrointestinal disorders - can reverse the progression of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases.This goes to show how wrong-headed our insistence on always new drugs is. There are many substances that could be put to good use if research were done on them. Unfortunately that research isn't forthcoming, as pharma research money only pays for new, patentable drugs.Indeed, even in the article, there is a warning against using the drug as "it can be dangerous if abused" (like just about everything, I would add).
Alzheimer's drugs double death risk in elderly
Anti-psychotic drugs commonly used to treat Alzheimer's disease may double a patient's chance of dying within a few years, suggests a new study that adds to concerns already known about such medications."For the vast majority of Alzheimer's patients, taking these drugs is probably not a worthwhile risk," said Clive Ballard, the paper's lead author, of the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases at King's College London.
"Would I want to take a drug that slightly reduced my aggression but doubled my risk of dying? I'm not sure I would," Ballard said.
Study: Excessive use of antiviral drugs could aid deadly flu
So all that money governments the world over spent to stockpile Tamiflu at the height of the hysteric campaign on the bird flu, might as well have been given as a grant to the ailing pharmaceutical industry - would have been more honest.
Video: Merchants of death - The Pharmaceutical Industry
This is an excerpt of a film called "Making a Killing."It's not flattering to the pharmaceutical companies or to general trends in the psychiatric profession.
We recently had a "physician" aggressively push a dangerous drug on a 91 year old family member.
The warning in the pharmaceutical company's own fine print clearly stated that this drug created a danger of heart failure in patients with the very same symptoms our family member had.
The doctor responded: "It's just a baby-sized dose. It shouldn't do any harm."
We've fired the doctor.
Video: Making a Killing - Psychiatric Diagnoses and marketing of drugs
This page links to the first three parts of "Making a Killing", a video documentary on a failed medical paradigm, divided into several YouTube segments. I have not been able to find them all in an easily accessible page to link here, or even a page where the video is commercially available. Maybe you have better luck.
Drug from genetically engineered goats
In what would be a scientific first, an anti-clotting drug made from the milk of genetically engineered goats moved closer to government approval Wednesday after experts at the Food and Drug Administration reported that the medication works and its safety is acceptable.So the drug is safe and effective, whatever that means these days, but what about the process for making it? Do we really want to have goats around that don't make "normal" milk but some genetically engineered variant? What about that stuff getting into the food chain? And don't think they will stop with goats, either.
Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind
This article is one (it's number 12) in the "Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009".While the Business Roundtable maintains that the high-stakes tests administered nationwide hold schools accountable to “Adequate Yearly Progress,” NCLB has instead benefited the testing industry in the amount of between $1.9 and $5.3 billion a year. NCLB requires states to produce “interpretive, descriptive, and diagnostic reports,” all of which are provided at a price by members of the industry.
Marijuana Arrests Set New Record
Another one of the top 25 Censored stories. According to this one, the US 829,625 in connection with the suppression and prohibition of marijuana. A friend who wrote to some bigwigs about their marijuana arrest policy, quotes DEA Judge Francis L. Young as saying:"Marijuana is the safest therapeutically active substance known to man, safer than many foods we commonly consume."
(See last week's newsgrabs for some more on marijuana prohibition and some attempts to re-think our position on this one.)
Destroying the World to Save It: The Awful Truth About Religion in 2009
The religious vision that "we" (whoever "we" may be) must destroy in order to save cannot be defeated with military might. The only way the love of death in religion can be overcome is through a more powerful religious vision of world-affirming, peace-performing and justice-making love.I believe that those are our religious choices, both nationally and internationally, in 2009.
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More information out there...
There is much I cannot cover but other sources for this kind of information exist and are active.
...
Dr Mercola's health blog and Mike Adams' Natural News have good health information.
The Alternative Medicine Yahoo Group and the healthfreedom ning group are places 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 emr-updates group on Yahoo.
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
posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Sunday January 11 2009
updated on Wednesday August 15 2012URL of this article:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2009/01/11/scientists_restructure_fda_newsgrabs_11_january_2009.htm