Vaccine Doctor Given at Least $30 Million Dollars to Push Vaccines
June 25, 2009
Mercola.com
by Dr. Joseph Mercola
Dr. Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia earned at least $29 million as part of a $182-million sale by the hospital of its worldwide royalty interest in the Merck Rotateq vaccine. The amount of income distributed to Offit could be as high as $46 million. Offit has refused to say how much he made from the vaccine.
The high price placed on the patents raises concerns over Offit’s use of his former position on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) to help create the market for rotavirus vaccine — effectively, to vote himself rich.
Offit’s claim to a share of the profits from Rotateq revenues is based on his role as a listed inventor on the cluster of patents that protect Merck’s vaccine. Paul Offit had a great personal interest in Rotateq’s commercial success, and more than any other individual in the world he found himself in a position to directly influence that success.
Unlike most other patented products, the market for mandated childhood vaccines is created by the recommendation of an appointed body, ACIP. From 1998 to 2003, Offit served as a member of ACIP.
Click here to read the full article from Dr. Joseph Mercola.
UIC Study Hopes to Shed Light on Autism, ‘Insistence on Sameness’
June 24, 2009
Chicago Tribune
By Emily Stone
As a kid, Alec Kedziora was a picky eater, refusing anything new and subsisting on a self-selected diet heavy on Cheerios, Chex Mix and bacon. He insisted that all doors in the house be kept closed. His morning activities were identical every day and timed perfectly. If he overslept by even a few minutes he was late for school.
Alec was diagnosed with autism when he was 3, and his rigid routine is common among people with the disorder. Though he was an affectionate, sweet kid, if something went awry he often threw a fit and sometimes banged his head against a desk or wall.
Two years ago, as a freshman in high school, things took a turn for the worse. His frustration turned aggressive and he started getting in fights. His parents, Joe and NiCole Kedziora of Orland Park, were horrified. Alec realized he was acting badly and would apologize to his parents. “I was suffering,” he said recently. “I was sad about it.”
Hoping to provide relief to people like Alec and to solve a piece of the autism puzzle, a team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago is looking at the relationship between the brain chemical serotonin and the trait known in the field as “insistence on sameness.”
With the help of a five-year, $9.6 million federal grant, the team is using a combination of genetics, medication and brain scans to explore possible mechanisms behind this craving for routine. Alec was enrolled by his parents.
There’s no single pattern to autism spectrum disorders, which affect perhaps 1 in 150 children. Some with autism repeat phrases over and over. Some barely interact with anyone. Others are outgoing, but their lack of social skills can sabotage their efforts to make friends. Up to a quarter have insistence on sameness, said geneticist Ed Cook, director of autism and genetics in UIC’s psychiatry department.
The differences make autism a challenging condition to study and to treat.
“Autism is too big as a whole to attack,” said John Sweeney, director of UIC’s Center for Cognitive Medicine and the group’s brain imaging specialist. “We have to go through the brain bit by bit to find out what’s working and what’s not. Get the bricks sorted out, and then build the house.”
Having to take the same route to school each day to keep a kid calm may not seem like a big deal. But not doing it can trigger distress, and that can lead to anxiety or aggression. Cook said he knows parents who can track the severity of their child’s symptoms by the amount of trashed drywall in the house.
Treating that rigidity has a huge payoff. “They still have autism, but they feel better,” Cook said. “And everybody else feels better.”
Each participant in the study gets blood drawn for genetic tests, including an analysis of the genes related to serotonin, a neurotransmitter that is part of the brain’s system for modulating mood and emotion. Participants’ families are asked to donate blood samples so researchers can look for hereditary links. All the blood Cook collects from participants — he’s hoping for more than 250 — will be shared with a national autism database for other researchers to use.
Participants with a high level of insistence on sameness are referred to the group’s pharmacologist, Tom Owley. The outgoing head of UIC’s Neurodevelopmental Psychopharmacology Clinic, Owley conducted a preliminary study two years ago on the antidepressant Lexapro, which affects serotonin levels. Sixty-five percent of participants who took the drug were helped, according to results of a detailed questionnaire completed by their parents.
He’s hoping this new study backs up those results and that combining the Lexapro research with the genetics and brain scans will help the team understand why the drug may not help some patients. Eventually, he hopes, the research could lead to medications targeted for people with specific autism symptoms.
This month, researchers in another large federal study reported that an antidepressant similar to Lexapro was no more effective than a placebo in reducing repetitive behavior, which seems to contradict UIC’s initial results. Cook said the studies are looking at slightly different things.
The UIC study is focused only on repetitive behaviors that cause the participant distress — like the breaks in routine that caused Alec to bang his head on a wall or start a fight. The other study measured all repetitive behaviors, whether they were upsetting the subject or not. Cook said he agrees that antidepressants don’t appear to help reduce repetitive behaviors that a person is not hoping to shed, such as a compulsion to order things in a particular way.
In the Chicago project, people taking Lexapro undergo brain scans that record activity in key areas as the participants perform different mental exercises, both before they begin the medication and several months later. The results will be contrasted with those from a group of participants with low insistence on sameness.
The researchers eventually will have a data set that overlaps all this information — the genetics, the medication results, the scans.
So far, 93 people have participated in the study, nine of whom were put on Lexapro. The researchers are looking in particular for more teenagers and young adults.
Alec, now 17, has been on Lexapro for a year and a half — he continued to take it even after his time in the study ended. He and his family said the drug made an immediate difference. His family said he’s able to vary his routine.
Click here to read the full Tribune story.
Get Your Fill of Food Film
June 24, 2009
Chicago Tribune
by C.B.
It’s at roughly the midway point of Robert Kenner’s documentary “Food, Inc.” when the creeping sensation begins. You think, this is not an argument for eating organic, and it’s not a provocative portrait of independent farming in the age of Big Agriculture (though, to an extent, it is both of those things). No, mainly, you begin to wonder if this was intended to be a horror movie, a frightening portrait of food production in America, one in which the threat has too many tentacles to count and an incredibly long reach.
“It is a horror movie, in every sense,” Kenner said in a phone interview. “I didn’t know the world I was entering when I began. There are shocking moments I wasn’t expecting. And there are things that exist in this world that I didn’t know existed, like cloned meat that we can eat, and that companies lobby the government not to require ‘cloned’ on packaging because they say it would confuse consumers, and that I would ask to speak with about 40 companies involved in food production and about 40 would say no. It’s because they don’t want you thinking about this stuff. Yes, this is a horror movie.”
And as with any horror movie, your stomach turns, you cringe, then you think, “Wait, I’ve seen this.”
Indeed, “Food, Inc.” is the latest example of what might have seemed like a narrow niche a decade ago, the activist food documentary.
But that was before Michael Pollan’s farm-to-fork manifesto “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” became a best seller and Wal-Mart began carrying organic produce.
“Food, Inc.,” however (produced by Participant Media, the indie behind “An Inconvenient Truth”), has unprecedented marketing weight behind it and is looking like a sleeper summer hit. And so, before this sub-genre gets too crowded, we decided to compare oranges to oranges.
Click here to read the full story from the Tribune.
Obama Calls on HuffPost for Iran Question
June 24, 2009 by mike
Filed under Government
June 23, 2009
Politico
by Michael Calderone
In what appeared to be a coordinated exchange, President Obama called on the Huffington Post’s Nico Pitney near the start of his press conference and requested a question directly about Iran.
“Nico, I know you and all across the Internet, we’ve been seeing a lot of reports coming out of Iran,” Obama said, addressing Pitney. “I know there may actually be questions from people in Iran who are communicating through the Internet. Do you have a question?”
Pitney, as if ignoring what Obama had just said, said: “I wanted to use this opportunity to ask you a question directly from an Iranian.”
He then noted that the site had solicited questions from people in the country “who were still courageous enough to be communicating online.”
“Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn’t that a betrayal of the — of what the demonstrators there are working towards?”
Reporters typically don’t coordinate their questions for the president before press conferences, so it seemed odd that Obama might have an idea what the question would be. Also, it was a departure from White House protocol by calling on The Huffington Post second, in between the AP and Reuters.
CBS Radio’s Mark Knoller, a veteran White House correspondent, said over Twitter it was “very unusual that Obama called on Huffington Post second, appearing to know the issue the reporter would ask about.”
According to POLITICO’s Carol Lee, The Huffington Post reporter was brought out of lower press by deputy press secretary Josh Earnest and placed just inside the barricade for reporters a few minutes before the start of the press conference.
Click here to read the full report and to view the press conference from Politico.
Massachusetts Housing Homeless in Motels
June 24, 2009 by mike
Filed under Government
June 24, 2009
Associated Press
BOSTON — Massachusetts is housing a record 751 homeless families in motels around the state, a number officials say is driven by high unemployment and a rising number of home foreclosures.
Housing the families, including about 1,000 children, costs an average of $85 per night, or about $2 million in taxpayer money last month alone.
Bob Pulster, executive director of the Interagency Council on Housing and Homelessness, tells The Boston Globe motels are not ideal, but in many cases are the best that can be done.
Advocates for the homeless worry that families in motels are left without the in-house support of shelters equipped with kitchens, living rooms and play areas.
Nancy Paladino of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless says it can be hard to eat right in a motel.
Click here to read the full report from the Associated Press through the Boston Herald.
Can You Keep Mosquitoes Away This Summer with Natural Repellents?
June 23, 2009
The Star Press
by Oseye T. Boyd
MUNCIE — You know you should, but you won’t.
You’ve been through this routine enough to know it’s inevitable. When you spray on that stinky, chemical mosquito repellent, you plan to shower it off that night. You never do.
By the time you get home from hanging out with friends and family at the Fourth of July cookout and later fireworks, you’re too pooped to take a shower, let alone give your kids one. So you sleep in the stuff, knowing you shouldn’t. Every year saying you won’t.
Natural repellents could put an end to this dilemma.
Essential oils such as peppermint and tei-fu are great at keeping mosquitoes at bay, said Maria French, a certified natural health professional and trained herbal specialist.
Because essential oils are concentrated and might irritate the skin, the oil needs to be diluted. French adds a few drops of essential oil to a spray bottle filled with water and sprays all over herself and her children. Unlike chemical sprays, the essential oil mixture can be sprayed on the face.
“It seems like kind of expensive for what you’re getting,” French said. “Because it’s so concentrated they last forever. The thing is when it soaks in it’s just doing good things for their body. Those particular scents, the insects are repelled by them. I think the tei-fu is a little more repellent against all insects.”
Thanks to all the rain in the region, mosquitoes could be in abundance this summer. If it’s hot and wet, expect tons of mosquitoes because they grow faster in such a climate. Cooler weather means it will take mosquitoes longer to mature, Indiana Department of Health State Epidemiologist James Howell said.
“We’re already catching a lot of mosquitoes,” Howell said. “We’ve not caught any that have tested for any viruses yet.”
According to Howell, there are some mosquitoes that bite and some that don’t — these mosquitoes are just a nuisance. Contrary to popular belief, mosquitoes don’t just bite in the evening. Some bite all day long, so repellent should be worn all day. Mosquitoes that carry the West Nile virus do tend to bite at night, however.
Besides using repellents, Howell reminds people to keep mosquitoes from breeding by removing standing water and cleaning gutters.
French also suggests people check out their yard and remove plants that attract mosquitoes. Instead of evergreen bushes, try ornamental grass, she said.
Click here for additional facts given by the Star Press.
Ron Paul: Obama’s ‘Goal’ is Economic Collapse
June 24, 2009 by mike
Filed under Government
June 23, 2009
The Raw Story
by David Edwards and Stephen Webster
Ron Paul, the popular Republican Congressman from Texas, is ripping into the president and Congress for what he sees as their “goal” with round after round of stimulus: complete economic collapse.
“From their spending habits, an economic collapse seems to be the goal of Congress and this administration,” he said in his June 22, 2009, weekly address.
He added that Democrats who voted for the president’s war funding request, which gave an additional $106 billion to military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq — among other, unrelated items — were actually voting in favor of the wars, not just authorization of the president’s agenda.
He called it an affront to everyone who believed a vote for Obama was a vote for a peace candidate.
The president’s insistence on including an additional $108 billion in asset exchange with the International Monetary Fund is merely “buying global oppression,” he said.
Paul added that, “this [bill sent] $660 million to Gaza, $555 million to Israel, $310 million to Egypt, $300 million to Jordan and $420 million to Mexico; and some $889 million will be sent to the United Nations for so-called peace keeping missions.”
In other words, the latest U.S. war funding was an “International bailout,” he said.
The legislation’s provisions for the IMF included 100 billion dollars for the New Arrangements to Borrow (NAB), a credit instrument providing the multilateral institution with additional resources to deal with exceptional risks to the stability of the international monetary system.
They also include an expansion of the nation’s special drawing rights by five billion SDRs, adding roughly eight billion dollars to the IMF’s financial firepower.
The 100 billion dollars for the NAB acts as a credit line for the IMF in case member countries need emergency loans that exceed the institution’s resources. As such, the money is not considered an immediate budget expense.
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) had proposed to strip out the IMF funds, but his measure was defeated in May by a vote of 64-30.
“Not only does sending money to the IMF hurt citizens here, evidence shows that it even hurts those it pretends to help,” Paul said. “Along with IMF loans come IMF required policy changes called ’structural adjustment programs,’ which amount to forced Keynesianism. This is the very fantasy-infused economic model that brought our own country to its knees.”
This audio is from Congressman Ron Paul’s weekly address, released June 22, 2009.
Click here to view the full story and hear the audio from The Raw Story.
US Funds New Flu Vaccine to Meet Possible Demand Surge
June 24, 2009 by mike
Filed under Government
June 23, 2009
The Raw Story
The US Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday announced that a 35-million-dollar contract has been awarded to a US company that is developing a flu vaccine using insect cell technology.
“The technology has advanced in recent years to a point that we believe it could help meet a surge in demand for US-based vaccine for seasonal and pandemic flu,” Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement.
The A(H1N1) virus, or swine flu, which emerged in Mexico in April, has been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization and has killed 231 people worldwide and infected more than 52,000 people in 100 countries.
The contract awarded to Connecticut-based Protein Sciences Corporation could be extended for another five years for a total cost of 147 million dollars, the health department said.
Most of the world’s flu vaccine is produced using chicken eggs, and production capacity is severely limited.
But Protein Sciences is working on making flu vaccine by infecting caterpillar cells with a baculovirus carrying the gene for hemagluttinin, a molecule that sticks out of the surface of the influenza virus.
“Using this method, vaccine candidates, clinical investigational lots, and commercial-scale vaccine production may be available faster than by using traditional vaccine production methods,” the health department said in a statement.
“Because the basic cells can be frozen and stored indefinitely, manufacturing large quantities of a vaccine is also faster using this recombinant technology.”
Click here to view the full Raw Story article.
The Kevin Trudeau Show: 06-23-09
Today Kevin tells YOU how the mainstream media (MSM), major corporations, and the government are hiding important information to keep you from being healthy and making money. Plus:
Kevin’s continuing battle with the FTC
How financial “experts” are outperformed by monkeys
The Law of Attraction
Why unemployment is larger than the official numbers indicate
Vaccine warnings
GMO foods shown to harm health in the longterm
KFC “beefing” up their chicken
Inconclusive research on how fluoridated water affects tooth decay
Take Trudeau on the Go! Click here to download this show to your ipod, mp3 player, or PC at Itunes! Don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed to get The Kevin Trudeau Show automatically sent to your player of choice and never miss a must-hear Kevin Trudeau Show!
Click below to hear The Kevin Trudeau Show!
FDA Threatens to Seize All Natural Products that Dare to Mention H1N1 Swine Flu
June 23, 2009 by mike
Filed under Government
June 18, 2009
NaturalNews.com
by Mike Adams
(NaturalNews) In an effort to censor any online text that might inform consumers of the ability of natural products to protect consumers from H1N1 influenza A, the FDA is now sending out a round of warning letters, threatening to “take enforcement action… such as seizure or injunction for violations of the FFDC Act without further notice.”
“Firms that fail to take correction action,” the FDA warns, “may also be referred to the FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations for possible criminal prosecution for violations of the FFDC Act and other federal laws.”
The message is crystal clear: No product may be described as protecting against or preventing H1N1 infections unless it is approved by the FDA. And which products has the FDA approved? Tamiflu (the anti-viral drug that most people will never have access to), and soon the new H1N1 vaccine that’s being manufactured at a cost of one billion dollars (paid to Big Pharma by the taxpayers). This vaccine, of course, will be utterly useless because H1N1 will undoubtedly mutate between now and the time the vaccine is ready, rendering the vaccine useless.
In other words, according to the tyrants at the FDA, the only products that may be marketed alongside the term “H1N1″ are those products that either don’t work or aren’t available to most people. Anything that really works to prevent influenza infections — such as natural anti-virals, medicinal herbs, etc. — is banned from even mentioning H1N1 without the threat of being criminally prosecuted.
Such are the operations of our U.S. Food and Drug Administration — a criminal organization that’s working hard to do what every criminal organization does: Eliminate the competition!As the defender of Big Pharma, the FDA is also the destroyer of knowledge that seeks to remove educational statements from the internet. Truth has nothing to do with it — it is verifiably true that anti-viral herbs, probiotics and other natural products help protect consumers from influenza — but the FDA cannot allow such statements to remain online for the simple fact that people might become informed. And that, it seems, would be a dangerous precedent.
If people were informed about the healing and protective powers of herbs, they would no longer remain enslaved by the medical establishment. Profits would be lost. Power would evaporate. This is why people can never be allowed to attain any real knowledge about herbs, superfoods or nutritional supplements. And the FDA will threaten people with imprisonment just to make sure they don’t dare publish knowledge that the FDA does not want the people to see.
Targeted by the FDA
Who is being attacked and threatened by the FDA? Lots of companies offering highly-effective natural remedies.
Byron Richards’ company Wellness Resources, a favorite target of the FDA (no doubt because Richards wrote a book attacking the FDA), is also targeted in this censorshipcampaign.
The FDA sends similar letters to other companies, invoking terrorizing language designed to scare companies into self-censorship. This is the FDA’s key strategy, and it largely works: Most companies are scared to death to take a stand against the FDA because the ones that do end up being shut down, with their owners arrested at gunpoint and thrown in prison.
This is how natural medicine advocates are treated in the United States of America, the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” (It is really the land of the enslaved and the home of the cowards who don’t even have the courage to protest in the streets anymore…)
This is how the FDA secretly intimidates the natural products industry: It sends threatening letters to anyone who dares tell the truth about a natural product they sell. While pharmaceuticals can openly and brazenly lie about their supposed benefits, natural product companies aren’t even allowed to state obvious truths about their products! (Like “Vitamin C helps prevent colds” or “Omega-3 oils improve moods.”)
Note, carefully, that the FDA openly brands the people promoting natural anti-viral products as “criminals.” The language from the FDA’s own website says it is listing “Web sites that are illegally marketing unapproved, uncleared, or unauthorized products in relation to the 2009 H1N1 Flu Virus.”
In reality, this FDA list is a really good list of highly effective natural products that can protect you from Swine Flu. Many of the companies on the list, in fact, offer products that are far more effective than any vaccine or Big Pharma anti-viral drug. And that, by the way, is precisely why the FDA must accuse these companies of being criminals: Products that effectively compete with Big Pharma’s drugs simply cannot be allowed to exist in the marketplace!
This is all about destroying the competition, limiting consumer options and censoring truthful health information on the internet.
And it’s all paid for by your tax dollars, by the way. This is a government operation taking place under the Obama Administration, which apparently continues in the Bush Administration’s footsteps when it comes to destroying the natural products industry and leaving consumers helpless in the next great pandemic.
Click here to for the full story and links to vital information from NaturalNews.com
