The Kevin Trudeau Show: 07-21-09

Today, Kevin Trudeau gives you the “food facts” and why Food, Inc is so important to see.

Find out how…
Your Food is Genetically Modified.
Health Insurance is a Scam
The Government is Trying to Control Your Life Through Health Care

Plus, Kevin Gives You Even MORE Proof That His Health Methods Work and the Cleanses That Have Helped Him Stay Healthy All These Years!

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UAE Blackberry Update Was Spyware

July 21, 2009

BBC News

By Ben Thompson

An update for Blackberry users in the United Arab Emirates could allow unauthorised access to private information and e-mails.

The update was prompted by a text from UAE telecoms firm Etisalat, suggesting it would improve performance.

Instead, the update resulted in crashes or drastically reduced battery life.

Blackberry maker Research in Motion (RIM) said in a statement the update was not authorised, developed, or tested by RIM.

Drug Groups to Reap Swine-Flu Billions

July 20, 2009

Financial Times

by Andrew Jack

Some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies are reaping billions of dollars in extra revenue amid global concern about the spread of swine flu.

Analysts expect to see a boost in sales from GlaxoSmithKline, Roche and Sanofi-Aventis when the companies report first-half earnings lifted by government contracts for flu vaccines and antiviral medicines.

The fresh sales – on top of strong results from Novartis of Switzerland and Baxter of the US, which both also produce vaccines – come as the latest tallies show that more than 740 people have died from the H1N1 virus, and millions have been affected around the world.

GlaxoSmithKline of the UK confirmed it had sold 150m doses of a pandemic flu vaccine – equivalent to its normal sales of seasonal flu vaccine – to countries including the UK, the US, France and Belgium, and was gearing up to boost production.

GSK also produces Relenza, an antiviral medicine that reduces the length and severity of the infection, and is preparing to increase manufacturing towards 60m annual doses. The UK placed an order for 10m treatments this year.

One beneficiary of the fears about the pandemic has been Roche of Switzerland, which sells Tamiflu, the leading antiviral drug, and has seen a sharp rise in orders from private companies as well as governments.

A report last week from JPMorgan, the investment bank, estimated that governments had ordered nearly 600m doses of pandemic vaccine and adjuvant – a chemical that boosts its efficacy – worth $4.3bn (€3bn, £2.6bn) in sales, and there was potential for 342m more doses worth $2.6bn.

It forecast that fresh antiviral sales could boost sales for GSK and Roche by another $1.8bn in the developed world, and potentially up to $1.2bn from the developing world.

But there were also uncertainties for the pharmaceutical manufacturers. With demand likely to outstrip supply, and initial production suggesting that the yield for the pandemic vaccine is relatively low, they may face difficult choices in determining how much to supply to the countries seeking orders.

They are also under pressure to provide more drugs and vaccines for free, or extremely cheaply, to the developing world.

Click here for the full report from FT.com

Beachgoers Beware: Stomach Bugs Lurk in Sand

July 20, 2009

MSNBC

by Linda Carroll

Beach fun for most kids includes burrowing in the sand and being buried by friends and siblings. Parents figure that as long as the kids are within sight, they’re safe. But a new study shows that some pretty nasty bugs may lurk in those glistening, gleaming grains.

The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, found that digging in the sand raised the risk of diarrhea by 44 percent in young children — those under the age of 11. And kids who were buried in the sand were 27 percent more likely to develop diarrhea than those who weren’t.

Bonnie Shimp, who takes her infant grandson and a friend’s 6-year-old on outings to the Jersey shore, was sorry to hear that beach sand isn’t as benign as she thought. Shimp has many fond childhood memories of digging in the sand and being buried by her brothers.

“This makes you feel like you need to tell your child, ‘Don’t dig in the sand, just walk on it and go into the water,’” says the 53-year-old teacher from Pennsville, N.J. “Now, I would definitely think twice before letting them play in the sand.”

For the new study, researchers interviewed more than 27,000 people who visited seven beaches around the country between 2003 and 2007.

People who took part in the study were asked about their contact and their children’s contact with sand on the day they visited the beach and then, 10 to 12 days later, they were phoned up and asked about any health symptoms that had developed in family members since the visit.

A total of 307, or 6 percent, of the kids developed diarrhea. All of the kids got better on their own and none ended up in a doctor’s office, Heaney says. But even relatively mild cases of diarrhea can spoil the fun for a kid and put a damper on the family’s vacation.

The beaches included in the study were all within seven miles of a sewage treatment plant. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that beaches far from such plants are safe, says the study’s lead author Chris Heaney, a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The study was conducted in partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency.

What lies beneath
Other studies that have examined the bacteria content of sand at a variety of beaches that were nowhere near a treatment plant have found high levels of E. coli and Enterococcus bacteria in the top 8 inches. In fact, levels can be almost 40 times those found in the water at the same beaches, Heaney says.

The contamination may come from storm sewer runoff or from the feces left by domestic and wild animals. Once the germs are there, the sand provides a very friendly environment for the bugs to replicate, Heaney says.

When the researchers looked at their data by location, they found that some beaches were far worse than others. Huntington Beach, which is on the shores of Lake Erie in Bay Village, Ohio, had no increase in the risk of diarrhea, while Fairhope Beach, which is on the shore of Mobile Bay in Fairhope, Ala., had an increase of almost 200 percent among those who dug in the sand.

Karen Colucci is assuming that’s why she’s never had any problems with sand-related diarrhea. She goes to a big, spacious and very uncrowded New Jersey beach called Brigantine Beach. “I’ve been bringing my son Alex to play in the sand since he was 3 months old,” says the 50-year-old account executive from Malaga, N.J.  “And we’ve never had any problems. Of course, I always carry a bottle of hand sanitizer with me and I tell my son he needs to use it any time he eats or puts his hands in his mouth.”

Colucci is doing exactly the right thing, experts say.

Click here for the full report from MSNBC.

GAO: FDA Can’t Estimate Its Own Budget Needs

July 20, 2009

Associated Press

by Matthew Perrone

The Food and Drug Administration — which has struggled to fulfill its mission of regulating food, drugs and other consumer goods that make up nearly a quarter of the U.S. economy — does not have the expertise to forecast its own budget needs, according to congressional investigators.

While many lawmakers and consumer advocates have long complained that the agency lacks the staff and equipment to accomplish its mission, the Government Accountability Office says the agency doesn’t even have “the data to develop a complete and reliable estimate of the resources it needs.”

The GAO places some of the blame on the FDA’s lopsided budget — which dedicates significant resources to approving new products, but far less to tracking their safety once they’ve reached the market.

FDA officials acknowledged the problems uncovered by the GAO, saying they are working to get a better picture of the agency’s spending and how much additional funding it needs.

“We have to be able to talk about the funds we need, and how we’re using the money, with more detail than FDA has in the past,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, the agency’s deputy commissioner.

The GAO report, released Monday, is the latest in a series to document the problems facing the agency. The FDA has spent the last few years careening from one public health crisis to the next. They have included the recall of the painkiller Vioxx — which was linked to heart attacks, contaminated blood thinners imported from China, and an investigation into a salmonella outbreak that dragged on for weeks before peppers were identified as the culprit.

The agency’s product review program is largely funded by user fees from drug and medical device companies, while the company’s safety inspections are funded by taxpayer dollars. Over the last 10 years, funding from private companies increased nearly 270 percent, while funds from the U.S. government grew less than 70 percent.

Currently, the federal government pays for just over 30 percent of the FDA’s medical products budget. As a result, the FDA is approving more new products but is spending far less to make sure they are being used safely.

“The approval of new products has increasingly become the beneficiary of the agency’s budget,” according to the GAO report.

Between 2004 and 2008 the agency failed to inspect all U.S. drug manufacturing plants every two years, as required by law. In other areas, such as reviewing reports of negative drug side effects, the FDA could not even say how much money and manpower it spent.

Investigators recommended the FDA conduct a comprehensive assessment of its current workload and use that to develop future budget requests.

Sens. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., requested the GAO probe.

“This report makes it clear that the FDA has to get a handle on its own resource requirements and how to use resources more effectively,” Grassley said in a statement.

Under the Bush administration, FDA officials often insisted the agency had sufficient funding, even when its own advisers said it desperately needed more. In 2007, the agency’s independent group of science advisers said the FDA was in danger of failing in its mission due to a lack of expertise and resources.

“American lives are at risk,” the group concluded.

Sharfstein said President Barack Obama is aware of the agency’s funding woes and is working to boost its budget for safety and inspection activities. The administration’s fiscal year 2010 budget proposal would increase FDA’s federal funding by more than 14 percent, to $2.35 billion from $2.06 billion. The spending bill passed the House earlier this month and is moving through the Senate.

Obama tapped Sharfstein to fill the FDA’s No. 2 position in March. A pediatrician and former Baltimore Health Commissioner, he reports to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, who was confirmed by the Senate in May.

FDA officials already are working to keep better track of how the agency uses its funding.

“We’ve actually been working on this since we started here, but it’s a big agency and it’s going to take some work to get to the level of detail people want,” Sharfstein said.

Click here for the full report from the Associate Press.

New Threat: Antibiotic-resistant Bacteria Causes Deadly Pneumonia

July 18, 2009

Natural News

by S. L. Baker

While the talking heads on TV have recently reported that thousands of people in the U.S. are now infected with the new “swine flu”, or H1N1, there’s another infectious disease problem brewing that has received little attention. The over-use and abuse of antibiotics has produced antibiotic-resistant bacteria. According to the National Institutes of Health, over the past forty years, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus has changed from a usually controllable nuisance into a serious public health problem.

At first, it was primarily one of the most common hospital-acquired infections. But in recent years, new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, often dubbed “super bugs”, have popped up in communities and caused severe, even life-threatening infections in otherwise healthy people, involving the skin, heart, blood or bones.

Now a paper just published in the June edition of The Lancet Infectious Diseases discusses an emerging and potentially deadly threat from community acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA) — necrotizing, i.e. “flesh eating”, pneumonia. And according to previous research published in Nature News, this type of pneumonia is fatal in 75 percent of cases.

Doctors at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta write in The Lancet Infectious Diseases article that CA-MRSA has become well known for causing skin and soft-tissue infections that are transmitted by person-to-person contact or contact with contaminated objects. However, now there are increasing cases of CA-MRSA caused pneumonia that kills lung tissue. And those becoming sick with the disease aren’t necessarily the old and/or physically weak. In fact, according to the report from the Emory team led by Alicia Hidron, MD, an infectious diseases fellow and Henry Blumberg, MD, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Emory, CA-MRSA pneumonia appears to most commonly affect young and previously healthy patients.

Dr. Hidron and Dr. Blumberg also noted in their paper that, besides causing a high fever, CA-MRSA pneumonia can sometimes cause low blood pressure that progresses to septic shock and requires patients to be placed on mechanical respirators in order to breathe. Another important point discussed in the article may turn out to have special relevance due to the emergence of H1N1 influenza, especially by the time flu season rolls around this fall: potentially deadly CA-MRSA pneumonia appears to occur most commonly following a flu-type illness.

Serious MRSA disease can strike anyone, regardless of age, health or where they live. Outbreaks have occurred among young athletes who play contact sports and among people living in close quarters, such as nursing homes, military facilities, nursing homes, and childcare centers.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases advises using these precautions to help prevent CA-MRSA infections:

• Practice good hygiene.
• Keep cuts and scrapes clean and bandage until healed.
• Avoid contact with other people’s wounds or bandages.
• Don’t share soiled or used personal items, such as towels, washcloths, razors, or clothes.
• Use hot water and bleach to wash soiled sheets, towels and clothes.

Click here for the full report and links from NaturalNews.com

Warning: Imaging Tests Can Damage Kidneys, Increase Stroke and Heart Attack Risk

July 20, 2009

Natural News

by S. L. Baker

No matter what your health complaint is, if you go see your doctor you might end up undergoing some kind of high tech imaging procedure such as cardiac angiography, CT (computed tomography) or MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). According to a study published last fall in the journal Health Affairs, medical imaging has soared over the last few years across all types of these tests, doubling the annual medical cost per patient. In fact, the study confirmed previous reports that patients are far-too-often being subjected to unnecessary imaging.

At least, most of these tests are minimally invasive and thoroughly studied to make sure they carry few risks so they are safe, right? Unfortunately, the answer is no. New reports of lasting, health-harming effects from some imaging tests are accumulating. A case in point: a new study just published in the Clinical Journal of the American Society Nephrology (CJASN) warns that seemingly minor and reversible kidney damage injury which can arise after undergoing certain common medical imaging procedures is a serious health threat. The reason? It is linked to a greatly increased risk of stroke, heart attack and death.

University of Vermont physician Richard Solomon,MD, and his colleagues investigated 294 patients with kidney disease who were exposed to contrast agents during cardiac angiography. Patients in this study, dubbed the CARE (Cardiac Angiography in REnally Impaired Patients) trial, were randomly divided with half receiving the contrast agent iopamidol and the other receiving the contrast agent iodixanol.

Many medical imaging techniques, including cardiac angiography and CT scans, often involve the use of contrast agents, substances that contain iodine (like iopamidol and iodixanol) and barium, because they enhance the contrast between body structures or fluids within the body. This allows blood vessels and changes in tissues to be more clearly visualized.

When Dr. Solomon and his colleagues followed the CARE patients for one year or longer, they found that 92 (31 percent) of the research subjects experienced negative health effects after their imaging test. Their risk of having a stroke or heart attack over the next year or two after the test was elevated. Overall, 38 (13 percent) of the patients experienced a major event, such as death, stroke, heart attack, or end-stage renal disease. Those who developed contrast-induced kidney injuries had twice as many long-term negative health effects compared with patients who didn’t suffer kidney damage.

It isn’t only people who already have problems with their kidneys who can be at risk from the imaging testing, either. Doctors have long known exposure to contrast agents can cause damage in seemingly healthy kidneys, but patients are usually assured this is just a temporary side effect that will resolve on its own. However, recent studies have suggested that contrast-induced kidney damage might actually be lasting and serious. In a statement to the media, the University of Vermont researchers said “the CARE trial findings should prompt investigators to design additional studies on the long-term negative health effects of contrast-induced kidney damage”.

In addition to kidney damage, the contrast agent iopamidol has also been known to sometimes cause seizures in people with a history of epilepsy. In rare case reports, including one published earlier this year in the Internet Journal of Neurology, iopamidol has been found to cause severe seizures and respiratory arrest in non-epileptic patients undergoing imaging tests.

As reported in Natural News last April, the use of contrast agents isn’t the only potentially dangerous downside to some common imaging procedures. A study in the medical journal Radiology found that people who had numerous CT scans over their lifetime had a significantly increased risk of cancer. In fact, CT scans increased the risk of cancer by 2.7 to 12 percent.

Click here for the full story and links from NaturalNews.com

H1N1 Pandemic Spreading Too Fast to Count: WHO

July 17, 2009

Reuters

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday that the H1N1 flu pandemic was the fastest-moving pandemic ever and that it was now pointless to count every case.

The United Nations agency, which declared an influenza pandemic on June 11, revised its requirements so that national health authorities need only report clusters of severe cases or deaths caused by the new virus or unusual clinical patterns.

“The 2009 influenza pandemic has spread internationally with unprecedented speed. In past pandemics, influenza viruses have needed more than six months to spread as widely as the new H1N1 virus has spread in less than six weeks,” it said in a statement on the new strain, commonly known as swine flu.

It has become nearly impossible for health authorities and laboratories to keep count of individual cases — which have mostly been mild — as the virus spreads, according to the 193 member-state agency.

The new flu strain can be treated by antivirals such as Roche Holding’s Tamiflu or GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza, but many patients recover without medical treatment.

Flu experts say at least a million people are infected in the United States alone, and the WHO says the pandemic is unstoppable.

“It is very much agreed that trying to register and report every single case is a huge waste of resources,” WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said.

Such tracking has limited authorities’ capacity to investigate serious cases and is no longer essential to monitor the level or nature of the risk posed by the virus, WHO said.

However, all countries should still closely monitor unusual clusters of severe or fatal infections from the pandemic virus, clusters of respiratory illness requiring hospitalization or unexplained or unusual clinical patterns.

“Signals to be vigilant for include spikes in rates of absenteeism from schools or workplaces, or a more severe disease pattern, as suggested by, for example, a surge in emergency department visits,” it said.

Britain reported on Thursday that 29 people had died to date after contracting the virus. Health Minister Andy Burnham said this month the government was projecting more than 100,000 new cases a day of the flu in the country by the end of August.

The WHO will no longer issue global tables showing the numbers of confirmed cases for all countries — which stood at 94,512 cases with 429 deaths as of its last update on July 6.

Instead, it will issue regular updates on the situation in newly affected countries, which should report the first confirmed cases, weekly figures and epidemiological details.

Countries should still test a limited number of virus samples weekly to confirm that disease is actually due to the pandemic virus and to monitor any virological changes that may be important for the development of vaccines, it said.

At least 50 governments have placed orders for vaccines against the new H1N1 strain or negotiating with drug makers, WHO vaccine chief Marie-Paule Kieny told Reuters.

The WHO does not report figures for cases of seasonal influenza, which it says is linked to 250,000 to 500,000 deaths a year globally.

Click here for the full report with links from Reuters.

ATMs Defend Themselves With Pepper Spray!

U.S. Senate Health Committee Passes Health Care Reform Bill that will Bankrupt America

July 16, 2009

Natural News

by Mike Adams

The great lumbering health care reform gears are in motion in Washington D.C., and the Big Government machine is spitting out a new recipe for the bankruptcy of America: A “health care reform” bill that pleases all the special interest groups and pharmaceutical companies but does nothing to improve the health of ordinary Americans.

Health care reform in Washington today isn’t about health, or reform. It’s about mandating monopoly-priced western medicine for the masses. It’s about fining people who wisely opt out of the criminally-operated health insurance industry, and it’s designed to keep the American people sick and diseased while emptying their pockets of any remaining earnings they might have somehow squirreled away during the ongoing financial / real estate crash.

For starters, this Senate health reform bill would financially penalize people who take care of their own health and choose not to hand over $1,000 or month (or more) to a corrupt, criminally-operated health insurance system. This is a bill that actually punishes people for staying healthy! At the same time, it just happens to expand the monopoly of western medicine to encompass the entire U.S. population, criminalizing those who have opted out of the failed health care system.

The other joke in this health care reform is the idea of a new government-run health plan, which is being hilariously presented as a way to “drive down costs.”

Since when has Big Government ever been able to drive down the costs of anything? It was Big Government, under the Bush administration, that actually made it illegal for government to negotiate price discounts with drug companies, locking in monopoly prices that filled the coffers of Big Pharma while bankrupting the taxpayers.

Even now, the FDA (under the Obama administration) continues its outright war against the natural products industry, censoring truthful information about the health benefits of dietary supplements in a tyrannical effort to eliminate Big Pharma’s competition. This has the effect of eliminating choice for consumers, ultimately driving up monopoly health care costs under the system of western medicine that (laughingly) claims to provide health care today.

Click here for the full article from naturalnews.com

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