First Case of Highly Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Found in U.S.

December 28, 2009

The Associated Press

By Margie Mason and Martha Mendoza

It started with a cough, an autumn hack that refused to go away.

Then came the fevers. They bathed and chilled the skinny frame of Oswaldo Juarez, a 19-year-old Peruvian visiting to study English. His lungs clattered, his chest tightened and he ached with every gasp. During a wheezing fit at 4 a.m., Juarez felt a warm knot rise from his throat. He ran to the bathroom sink and spewed a mouthful of blood.

I’m dying, he told himself, “because when you cough blood, it’s something really bad.”

It was really bad, and not just for him.

Doctors say Juarez’s incessant hack was a sign of what they have both dreaded and expected for years — this country’s first case of a contagious, aggressive, especially drug-resistant form of tuberculosis. The Associated Press learned of his case, which until now has not been made public, as part of a six-month look at the soaring global challenge of drug resistance.

Juarez’s strain — so-called extremely drug-resistant (XXDR) TB — has never before been seen in the U.S., according to Dr. David Ashkin, one of the nation’s leading experts on tuberculosis. XXDR tuberculosis is so rare that only a handful of other people in the world are thought to have had it.

“He is really the future,” Ashkin said. “This is the new class that people are not really talking too much about. These are the ones we really fear because I’m not sure how we treat them.”

Forty years ago, the world thought it had conquered TB and any number of other diseases through the new wonder drugs: Antibiotics. U.S. Surgeon General William H. Stewart announced it was “time to close the book on infectious diseases and declare the war against pestilence won.”

Today, all the leading killer infectious diseases on the planet — TB, malaria and HIV among them — are mutating at an alarming rate, hitchhiking their way in and out of countries. The reason: Overuse and misuse of the very drugs that were supposed to save us.

Just as the drugs were a manmade solution to dangerous illness, the problem with them is also manmade. It is fueled worldwide by everything from counterfeit drugmakers to the unintended consequences of giving drugs to the poor without properly monitoring their treatment. Here’s what the AP found:

• In Cambodia, scientists have confirmed the emergence of a new drug-resistant form of malaria, threatening the only treatment left to fight a disease that already kills 1 million people a year.

• In Africa, new and harder to treat strains of HIV are being detected in about 5 percent of new patients. HIV drug resistance rates have shot up to as high as 30 percent worldwide.

• In the U.S., drug-resistant infections killed more than 65,000 people last year — more than prostate and breast cancer combined. More than 19,000 people died from a staph infection alone that has been eliminated in Norway, where antibiotics are stringently limited.

“Drug resistance is starting to be a very big problem. In the past, people stopped worrying about TB and it came roaring back. We need to make sure that doesn’t happen again,” said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who was himself infected with tuberculosis while caring for drug-resistant patients at a New York clinic in the early ’90s. “We are all connected by the air we breathe, and that is why this must be everyone’s problem.”

This April, the World Health Organization sounded alarms by holding its first drug-resistant TB conference in Beijing. The message was clear — the disease has already spread to all continents and is increasing rapidly. Even worse, WHO estimates only 1 percent of resistant patients received appropriate treatment last year.

“We have seen a huge upburst in resistance,” said CDC epidemiologist Dr. Laurie Hicks.

Juarez’ strain of TB puzzled doctors. He had never had TB before. Where did he pick it up? Had he passed it on? And could they stop it before it killed him?

At first, mainstream doctors tried to treat him. But the disease had already gnawed a golf-ball-sized hole into his right lung.

TB germs can float in the air for hours, especially in tight places with little sunlight or fresh air. So every time Juarez coughed, sneezed, laughed or talked, he could spread the deadly germs to others.

“You feel like you’re killing somebody, like you could kill a lot of people. That was the worst part,” he said.

Tuberculosis is the top single infectious killer of adults worldwide, and it lies dormant in one in three people, according to WHO. Of those, 10 percent will develop active TB, and about 2 million people a year will die from it.

Simple TB is simple to treat — as cheap as a $10 course of medication for six to nine months. But if treatment is stopped short, the bacteria fight back and mutate into a tougher strain. It can cost $100,000 a year or more to cure drug-resistant TB, which is described as multi-drug-resistant (MDR), extensively drug-resistant (XDR) and XXDR.

There are now about 500,000 cases of MDR tuberculosis a year worldwide. XDR tuberculosis killed 52 of the first 53 people diagnosed with it in South Africa three years ago.

Drug-resistant TB is a “time bomb,” said Dr. Masae Kawamura, who heads the Francis J. Curry National Tuberculosis Center in San Francisco, “a manmade problem that is costly, deadly, debilitating, and the biggest threat to our current TB control strategies.”

Juarez underwent three months of futile treatment in a Fort Lauderdale hospital. Then in December 2007 he was sent to A.G. Holley State Hospital, a 60-year-old massive building of brown concrete surrounded by a chain-link fence, just south of West Palm Beach.

“They told me my treatment was going to be two years, and I have only one chance at life,” Juarez said. “They told me if I went to Peru, I’m probably going to live one month and then I’m going to die.”

Holley is the nation’s last-standing TB sanitarium, a quarantine hospital that is now managing new and virulent forms of the disease.

Tuberculosis has been detected in the spine of a 4,400-year-old Egyptian mummy. In the 1600s, it was known as the great white plague because it turned patients pale. In later centuries, as it ate through bodies, they called it “consumption.” By 1850, an estimated 25 percent of Europeans and Americans were dying of tuberculosis, often in isolated sanatoriums like Holley where they were sent for rest and nutrition.

Click here for the full report

Dr. Jeff McCombs

Click the picture or link below to hear Kevin’s interview with Dr. Jeffrey McCombs. Click here to order The McCombs Plan and click here to purchase LifeForce: A Dynamic Plan for Health, Vitality, and Weight Loss.

Dr. Jeff McCombs on The Kevin Trudeau Show 12/23/09

The Kevin Trudeau Show: 12-23-09

Today, Kevin gives you the hard evidence behind the September 11th conspiracy, the reasons why Barack Obama is merely a puppet and his solution to Obamacare!!

Plus, Dr. Jeff McCombs, the author of LifeForce, explains how Candida is polluting your body and what you can do to rid your body of this toxin! Also find out how antibiotics are hurting you and how the McCombs Plan can completely transform your body!

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Two Years of Failure in Directing the Economy

December 23, 2009

The International Forecaster

As we look back and this year comes to an end we find two plus years of failure. Even government admits to 1-1/2 years of negative growth – a sorry record after having poured trillions of dollars into the economy. The recent 3rd quarter results supposedly broke that record. If it did it was the result of government stimulus and Fed monetization. If you look back further you will find a stock market that rallied 54% just to reflect the highs of 1999. House prices have decline to 1990s levels as well. Both markets, which were bubbles, next year will fall again. Americans opened their markets to products of Communist China’s slave labor and China became the world’s biggest exporter. Via free trade, globalization, offshoring and outsourcing, transnational conglomerates have stolen America’s destiny and handed it to China. This is what corporatist fascism is all about.

The dollar will soon end its mini-rally and the USDX will test 71.18 in the first quarter as the euro tests $1.62. Interest rates will stay at zero for at least two years, and mega monetization will continue. As you have just seen the Treasury wants TARP funds for Treasury debt and the administration wants the TARP funds to further stimulate the economy. Either way it is very inflationary.

We are told the credit crisis is over and that recovery is underway. We do not believe that. It is projected that as many as 300 more companies will default on debt in 2011. A default rate of 12 to 14 percent. That is up from 1% in 2007 and a long-term average of 4.5%. These are not just small firms, but companies with more than $100 million in assets as well. That doesn’t sound like recovery to us. What is very significant is that the 300-figure is based on recovery. Only 116 companies defaulted between 2004 and 2007. One of the groups hit hard will be commercial real estate. The figures are already bad, but companies and lenders have been buying time by using two sets of books, marking to model and refinancing. All that doesn’t change the big picture and that is with a recovery the situation will be bad, without recovery it will be dreadful.

Corporate America has lots of problems, but the federal government has many more. It has to finance more than $1 trillion a year in borrowings. Interest rates are the lowest ever, but rates will begin to climb next year; 5% real interest rates would add some $600 billion to the debt service. That is more than the combined costs of Iraq and Afghanistan, energy, education and Homeland Security.

The Fed has been backstopping short-term interest rates and holding down long-term rates. They say they will end their $300 billion program to buy up Treasury bonds and will stop buying mortgage securities by the end of next March.

The administration believes it will have to borrow $3.5 trillion over the next three years, plus rolling over short-term debt, or another $1.6 trillion. That is a total of $5.1 trillion. Knowing politicians you can increase that number by at least 50%. The wages of sin have caught up with the government as it attempts to replace short-term bills with 5, 7, 10 and 30-year paper. We do not believe the debt is payable and the consequences are not going to be pretty. All the velocity of monetary circulation is not going to change the final outcome.

To continue reading this report, click here.

Wait 18 Months To See A Doctor

December 23, 2009

Info Wars

By Paul Joseph Watson

Eye surgeon and senatorial candidate Rand Paul warns that under ObamaCare, Americans could be forced to wait a year and a half merely to see a doctor due to Canadian-style rationing of health care being imposed.

As an eye surgeon with his own private practice, Paul warned that senior citizens could be forced to endure debilitating conditions as a result of health care rationing under the system being readied for passage, and be forced to wait as long as 18 months just to see a doctor as happens in Canada and Britain.

“There are 1 million people waiting for any kind of elective surgery in Canada at any one time,” he told Newsmax.TV’s Ashley Martella.

“Canada’s so bad that they have a lottery, there are some little towns that have one family doctor, they do a lottery and you can sometimes wait a year and a half to see the doctor,” said Paul. “I have friends who are eye surgeons in Canada, they’ve finished their surgery by September, they’re allotment, they’re given a number of surgeries they can do, when they’re finished in September some of them come to the U.S. and do elective cosmetic eye surgery in the U.S. because they’re not allowed to operate any more in Canada.”

In his article, There’s No Such Thing as Free Health Care, Journalist John Stossel highlights how even people with life-threatening conditions are told to wait. A woman with a blocked artery that prevented her from digesting food was told by doctors in British Columbia that she had only weeks to live, but that the surgery was still “elective.”

“The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live,” said the woman, who traveled to the United States to receive treatment.

It’s true that America’s partly profit-driven, partly bureaucratic system is expensive, and sometimes wasteful, but the pursuit of profit reduces waste and costs and gives the world the improvements in medicine that ease pain and save lives.

“[America] is the country of medical innovation. This is where people come when they need treatment,” Dr. Gratzer says.

“Literally we’re surrounded by medical miracles. Death by cardiovascular disease has dropped by two-thirds in the last 50 years. You’ve got to pay a price for that type of advancement.”

Canada and England don’t pay the price because they freeload off American innovation. If America adopted their systems, we could worry less about paying for health care, but we’d get 2009-level care—forever. Government monopolies don’t innovate. Profit seekers do.

On this note, Paul stressed that problems in health care were created by too much government interference, and that the only way to fix the system was to increase competition, not restrict it.

The Republican candidate for Senate highlighted FEMA’s botched efforts to distribute water bottles at the superdome after Hurricane Katrina as an example of the failings of government-run health care.

“They can’t even distribute water, there’s no way they can distribute health care,” said Paul.

The Senatorial candidate also said that with 46 million new people on government assistance, the new system could bankrupt medicare and lead to rationing for everyone. Doctors who have already tolerated shrinking wages for the last fifteen years would also leave the U.S. warned Paul, creating a vacuum.

“It’s intellectually dishonest for Democrats to say it’s going to cost $874 billion, but it’s really not going to add anything to the deficit. I don’t think the American public believes that,” added Paul.

Paul pointed out that the longer the debate raged about health care, the more people opposed the government’s proposals, emphasizing why the Obama administration is hell-bent on ramming through the legislation later this week on Christmas Eve.

Click here for the full report.

Health Care Bill Is A Huge Tax Heist

December 23, 2009

Prison Planet

By Paul Joseph Watson

A Boston Globe analysis of the health care bill which Democrats are trying to ram through before Christmas illustrates how the legislation is a gigantic tax heist which will further economically cripple Americans already laboring under the worst financial crisis since the great depression.

H.R. 3590 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act [2], which is set to be voted on by the Senate on Christmas Eve, contains a raft of pork barrel and tax hikes. The legislation has not even been read in full by many of the representatives eager to make it the law, including fervent advocate John Kerry.

“While it would take days to read the entire bill, my cursory review of the legislation identified at least 19 tax increases,” writes the Globe’s Jamie Downey.

Chief amongst those tax hikes is the one outlined in Section 1501 – Requirement to maintain minimum essential coverage. Individuals who don’t maintain mandatory health insurance will face an annual tax penalty of $750, an amount set to escalate even higher in future.

Section 9013 reduces the amount that can be deducted as expenses for people incurring significant health costs. This will directly impact the living standards of individuals already struggling under the burden of long-term illnesses.

With income taxes already on the increase to pay for the mass looting of the American taxpayer in the form of the multi-trillion dollar bailout, with the highest rate already increasing by 3.6 percent, a further tax on Medicare will be imposed on individuals making in excess of $200,000 and married couples making over $250,000 under Section 9015.

The government will also collect a new 5 percent tax on voluntary cosmetic procedures under Section 9017. Since in other state-run health care systems, such as Canada, “voluntary procedures” is a term also applied to people with life-threatening conditions who sometimes have to wait 18 months to get treatment, the eventual scope of this new tax can only be imagined.

While the new taxes on individuals are bad enough, the penalties imposed on pharmaceutical corporations, health insurers and employers are perhaps worse because the tax hikes will undoubtedly passed on to the general public in the form of higher costs.

Section 9008 imposes an annual fee on branded prescription pharmaceutical manufacturers and importers, which equates to a a $2.3 billion excise tax on the pharmaceutical industry based on market share starting immediately. Prescription drugs, which will not be free for Americans under “free” health care, will soar in cost as a result of this new tax.

Section 9009 imposes a $2 billion excise tax on the medical device industry. This will increase the cost of life-saving technology and equipment, meaning hospitals will buy fewer devices, meaning longer waiting lists for vital treatment and more deaths as a result of these delays.

An annual excise tax of $6.7 billion on health insurance providers under Section 9010 will also jack up prices.

“How can the imposition of $11 billion in excise taxes (section 9008, 9009 and 9010) on the health care industry reduce costs to consumers? Does anyone else suspect these companies will have to pass these costs over to consumers?” writes Downey.

Click here for the full report.

Obama’s Latest Health Care Lie

December 23, 2009

Reason.com

That would be in remarks the president made yesterday:

Let me be clear The Congressional Budget Office now reports that this bill will reduce our deficit by $132 billion over the first decade, and by as much as $1.3 trillion in the decade after that.  So I just want to be clear, for all those who are continually carping about how this is somehow a big spending government bill, this cuts our deficit by $132 billion the first 10 years, and by over a trillion in the second.  That argument that opponents are making against this bill does not hold water.

There are actually multiple lies and deceptions in this paragraph, beginning with the verb “reports” to describe what the Congressional Budget Office does. The CBO, as Peter Suderman documented in his foundational Reason feature on the organization, does not “report,” it “projects,” in highly speculative fashion, what a proposed piece of legislation may cost. What’s more, as Suderman detailed in a more recent piece that every American should read before listening to a word the president says, the CBO is bound in its “scoring” to take at face value what every living politician–Obama included–knows to be a stinking lie. That is, Congress’ promises to make hundreds of billions of dollars worth of unspecified future spending “cuts.” From the article:

[A]s the health care debate has progressed throughout the year, Congressional Democrats have become far more adept at getting the CBO to count the beans just the way they want. [...]

Indeed, they have become so skilled at getting what they want out of the CBO that the office has taken to including strongly worded warnings that the various bills’ real costs may not actually match their estimates. [...]

Analysts at the CBO are not blind to this, but they must score bills as if what is written is what will happen. However, they are not prohibited from issuing strong warnings about what might happen if the legislative reality they assumed for scoring purposes somehow does not come to pass

Which is exactly what they have done (read the whole thing for multiple examples). And even given Obama’s root lie of “reports,” and passing over the absurd lie that this is somehow not “a big spending government bill,” there’s a lie built into the very CBO claim that the president is waving around like a lie-shattering club. Cue ABCnews.com’s Jake Tapper:

But the deficit reduction number cited by the president has been disavowed by CBO.

When CBO first guesstimated by how much the Senate health reform legislation would reduce the deficit, they said it would be about half a percent of GDP — $1.3 billion, said Democrats.

But on Sunday, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf issued a correction, downgrading the estimate from half a percent of GDP to between a quarter and a half a percent. The reason is that CBO misinterpreted when recommendations from the Medicare Advisory Committee would kick in.

Finally, as Suderman again has tirelessly pointed out, cutting the deficit is not the same as spending less, contra Obama’s formulation here. Why, it’s almost as if you could write something every day about the president’s health care mendacity!

I’m still waiting for those who whooped and hollered when Obama said “we will call you out” to react with similar enthusiasm when the caller-outer-in-chief is caught red-handed. I guess we’ll have to wait until they find themselves on the other side of the legislative argument. Who coulda guessed that the “reality-based community” would fudge facts to win fights just like the faith-based monsters they replaced?

Click here for the full report.

Health Care Bill “Death Panels” Could Only Be Repealed With 67 Senate Votes

December 23, 2009

SayAnythingBlog.com

Apparently found buried deep in Harry Reid’s last-minute amendment to the health care legislation was this passage changing Senate rules so that the control over doctors and patients given to the Medicare Advisory Panels (government regulators tasked with determining how much of what kind of care you should get when) can only be repealed with a super majority in the Senate.

Or 67 votes.

Upon examination of Senator Harry Reid’s amendment to the health care legislation, Senators discovered section 3403. That section changes…

Click here to read the rest of this story.

Goldman Sach’s Attempt to Ambush Dollar Aborted

December 23, 2009

Zerohedge.com

By Tyler Durden

Just as the year end onslaught on the dollar was spearheaded to a climax by Blankfein’s minions, so did Europe finally decide to convulse under an unbearable lead of ridiculous mispriced “assets” and vomited up a whole load of troubling financial data, which spread from Greece to Austria to Ireland, setting sovereign CDS to multi month highs. Obviously, this did not help the weak dollar case and cost GS traders a few hundred million.

A note to traders indicates that while Goldman has not lost the war of intergalactic domination, it too, can lose the occasional battles:

Last Friday we were stopped out of two tactical trades, long EUR/$ for a potential loss of 1.8% and long GBP/$ for a potential loss of 1.1%.

Timing was clearly not optimal, and we were too early in fading the recent improvements in US data and the impact of Greek budget tensions. The technical break of important moving averages may have amplified the Dollar rally.

However, we continue to believe that the risks to both crosses remain skewed to the upside. In particular the balance of payment situation remains very Dollar negative. We also remain focused on very stretched speculative short EUR/$ and Cable positions and the related unwinding risks. We would therefore continue to look for opportunities to position tactically for Dollar weakness.

Fear not Goldman, there is only three months at most before Bernanke announces that he will be forced to buy all MBS from the end of QE 1 into perpetuity. In the meantime we suggest you do what you do best: short the dollar and bet on the imminent demise of America’s middle class.

Click here for the full report.

Real ID Law Deadline Postponed

December 23, 2009

Telegram.com

By John J. Monahan

Few states, including Massachusetts, are prepared to meet a Dec. 31 deadline to comply with the controversial Real ID law passed by Congress in 2005 to prevent use of fraudulent state driver’s licenses.

As a result, federal officials have postponed the deadline and are looking to redesign the law.

In a letter to state officials, Juliette N. Kayem, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who once challenged the federal license mandates when she worked in the Massachusetts Department of Public Safety, said the year-end deadline has been extended.

Gov. Deval L. Patrick had signed on to a letter opposing the program, as well.

The extension will postpone federal requirements for all those boarding passenger planes or accessing federal programs to have driver’s licenses that comply with the federal anti-fraud standards of the Real ID law by Dec. 31.

Ms. Kayem said that will “ensure that millions of American travelers are not impacted during the holiday season.”

With the vast majority of states unable to comply with the terms of the law in time for the deadline and because Congress has not acted on revisions backed by the Obama administration, she said, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano decided to extend the deadline.

As a result, she said, “All valid, state-issued driver’s licenses and identification cards will continue to be acceptable for federal purposes beyond Dec. 31, 2009.”

A May 10, 2011, deadline for full compliance, however, will remain in effect, and the administration will seek revisions to the law with passage of another bill being called PASS ID.

Like the Real ID law, the Pass ID bill would require use of digital photos and signatures on licenses as well as optical scan bar codes. It also would require verification of applicants’ identities by checking immigration, Social Security and federal security databases. Unlike the Real ID law, it would not establish a nationwide database for use by law enforcement around the country.

Ms. Napolitano is seeking to repeal the Real ID act, which was expected to cost $4 billion to implement, and replace it with the less stringent and less costly requirements. As the governor of Arizona before taking over Homeland Security, Ms. Napolitano had said the Real ID law was not worth the cost and she signed a state law in 2008 opting out of the federal program.

The Real ID law was adopted on the recommendation of the 9-11 Commission that terrorists who hijacked planes in the 9-11 attacks had obtained state identification cards that allowed them freedom of movement around the country.

When the Real ID plan was announced, then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said two of the hijackers got phony Virginia driver’s licenses by paying $100 to an illegal alien in a convenience store parking lot.

It quickly became controversial, however, because of the cost to states of redesigning driver’s license procedures, and because critics said it would establish a national database of driver’s licenses and personal information that could be accessed by tens of thousands of law enforcement officials around the country.

Critics said it amounted to establishment of a national ID card. State Sen. Richard T. Moore, D-Uxbridge, filed legislation seeking to stop implementation in Massachusetts. Meanwhile, Attorney General Martha Coakley also voiced opposition to the Real ID law, saying it would create a false sense of security, create a lucrative market for fake “Real ID’s” and pose major new risks of identify theft.

Ann C. Dufresne, state Registry of Motor Vehicles spokeswoman, said in recent years Massachusetts has strengthened security of driver’s licenses, making them more tamper-proof and harder to duplicate. In addition, the state has used new technology to detect fraudulent identification and fake birth certificates if they are submitted with license applications, and new databases are being used to verify license information.

Click here for the full report.

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