How Many Americans Don’t Pay Taxes?
August 23rd, 2011
The Atlantic
By: Derek Thompson
Half of American tax payers owe no federal income tax, and most of those filers actually net tax benefits from federal income taxes, according to analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation in a letter to the Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee.
This is the kind of statistic that is bound to get traction as Osama news subsides, and here are two ways to look at it.
THEY’RE STILL PAYING TAXES (MOST OF THEM, ANYWAY)
The majority of households who pay no income tax still pay net taxes to the IRS. Federal income taxes account for about 40 percent of total government receipts. Most of the rest comes from payroll taxes, which workers of all income levels do pay. Since every dollar up to $106,800 is subject to taxes, a typical middle class family pays payroll taxes on all its income while a millionaire employee pays payroll taxes on only a tenth of his income.
At the same time, there are Americans — millions of them — who really do pay practically zero overall taxes. About fifteen million American households, or 10 percent of all taxpayers, receive more cash from the IRS than they contribute in federal income taxes and payroll taxes. That’s thanks to “refundable credits,” tax credits that can bring your tax bill into negative territory. To some, these 15 million are low-income Americans benefiting from smart and targeted welfare run through the tax code. To others, they are unacceptable free riders, citizens with a vote but no stake in federal government.
THE TOP 20% EARNS 50% OF THE INCOME
The richest 20 percent of the country pays more than half of income taxes for two simple reasons: America’s wealthiest 20 percent earns half the nation’s income and their income is taxed at a higher rate. The Wall Street Journal brings the visuals:
The wealthiest quintile’s share of federal taxes has grown more rapidly than their share of income. This suggests that the rich are facing steeper taxes. Not so. Effective tax rates at the top have fallen in every decade since 1970. But since effective tax rates also fell for every other quintile, the share of taxes paid by the rich has increased.
I have a feeling we’re going to hear variations of the question: How can the rich be paying too much while income inequality is at an 80 year high? I think it’s better to see both stats as a part of the same story rather than two conflicting narratives. In the last 30 years, incomes have grown faster at the top than the middle. Over the same time, effective tax rates fell for every family. And because a four percentage-point tax cut means a 50 percent tax cut for the poor but only a 10 percent tax cut for the rich, the share of overall taxes paid by the middle- and lower-class has decreased faster than their share of pretax income.
Click here for the full report from The Atlantic
Corn Sugar vs. Cane Sugar
August 22, 2011 by KT
Filed under Kevin's Blog
Recently, the President of the Corn Refiners Association left a comment on KTRadioNetwork.com defending their stance on high fructose corn syrup.
First of all, who is the Corn Refiners Association? It is an association that gets their money from all the corn refiners and corn producers. They give this association a mandate; do everything you can so that we can continue to sell huge amounts of high fructose corn syrup. Their goal is to increase the sale and usage of high fructose corn syrup. That is what they were set up to accomplish.
Click here to read the comment and Kevin’s response: http://bit.ly/qUR055
Yours in health…
KT
The Kevin Trudeau Show: 8-22-11
Today, Kevin explains why it is wrong for America to force the wealthy to pay for their mistakes. Plus, find out why the War on Terror is a joke and why food stamps should be abolished!
Self Help:
Decrease Your Cancer Risk
Get The Nutrition You Are Lacking
Avoid Processed Commercial Meat
Health:
Are Vitamin D Levels Linked to Certain Cancers?
Cancer Expert Blames Agencies For Losing War Against Cancer
Are There Toxic Chemicals In Your Kids’ Car Seats? YES!
Processed Meat May Give You Cancer
Chipotle Admits Major Menu Mistake
Why Are Fruits and Veggies Less Nutritious Today?
It’s Easier To Get Prescription Drugs Than You Think!
Lawsuits Pile Up Over Diabetes Drug
Government:
Secret Services Pays to Rent Joe Biden’s House
Former U.S. Officials Make Millions Advocating For Terrorist Organization
Some Immigrants With Criminal Records MIGHT Not Get Deported
Wealth:
Feds Oppose Ban On Food Stamps For Sodas In NYC
NWO:
Data Dealing Is A Bigger Scandal Than Phone Hacking
Why Do Feds Want To Keep Tucson Shooting Suspect Medicated?
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Some Immigrants With Criminal Records MIGHT Not Get Deported
August 22, 2011 by Andrew
Filed under Government
August 22nd, 2011
The Huffington Post
By: Elise Foley
The Obama administration announced on Thursday it will do a case-by-case review of deportations, allowing many undocumented immigrants without criminal records to stay in the United States indefinitely and apply for work permits.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will send a letter on Thursday to Senate members who had asked for details on how the agency would prioritize its immigration enforcement. The policy change is meant as a framework to help prevent non-priority undocumented immigrants from “clogging the system,” senior administration officials said on a conference call with reporters Thursday.
First, the agency will look at its pending immigration cases and close the low-priority cases, so immigration courts can focus on the most serious ones, administration officials said. The low-priority cases can be reopened if circumstances require. Next, guidance will be given to immigration enforcement agents to help them better detect serious criminals and other high-priority undocumented immigrants.
Undocumented immigrants whose cases are closed will be allowed to apply for work permits, but will not be given them automatically, officials said.
The move was perhaps meant to combat harsh criticism from Latino groups and immigration reform advocates, who have rebuked President Obama for continuing to deport undocumented people at record rates, while at the same time insisting he supports immigration reform.
Although the Obama administration has repeatedly said its deportation policies focus on the “worst of the worst,” immigrant rights groups say enforcement agents still net a large number of non-criminal undocumented people.
The administration had earlier attempted to defend its record on Tuesday, with a blog post meant to “set the record straight” on the Secure Communities enforcement program.
Cecilia Munoz, White House director of Intergovernmental Affairs, wrote that more than half of all removals are of people with criminal records. Among non-criminals, most of those removed were apprehended crossing the border, had recently arrived in the United States or had been previously deported, she wrote.
“Those statistics matter,” Munoz wrote. “While we have more work to do, the statistics demonstrate that the strategy DHS put in place is working.”
The administration earlier tried to clarify its immigration enforcement policies in a June memo, which specifically recommended prosecutorial discretion. That memo cited the possibility of considering whether a person under removal proceedings would otherwise be eligible for the DREAM Act, an un-passed bill that would allow some undocumented young people to gain legal status in exchange for two years of college or military service.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), one of the key supporters of the DREAM Act, applauded the administration’s decision Thursday.
“The Obama Administration has made the right decision in changing the way they handle deportations of DREAM Act students,” Durbin said. “These students are the future doctors, lawyers, teachers and, maybe, senators, who will make America stronger. We need to be doing all we can to keep these talented, dedicated, American students here, not wasting increasingly precious resources sending them away to countries they barely remember.
Durbin pledged to “closely monitor DHS” to ensure the new policy would be implemented.
But increased discretion on the part of administration prosecutors may not be enough to please advocacy groups, many of which argue the administration should abolish certain enforcement programs altogether.
“In order to fulfill its promises, the administration must end policies like Secure Communities that result in the criminalization of innocent immigrants who are Americans in Waiting like those who came before them,” said Chris Newman, legal director of the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, in an email statement. “The administration has pursued policies that are sowing fear and devastation among immigrant communities, and it must reverse course to stop the Arizonification of the country,” he added, referencing Arizona’s strict immigration enforcement policies.
Click here for the full report from The Huffington Post
Lawsuits Pile Up Over Diabetes Drug
August 22nd, 2011
The Huffington Post
By: Linda A. Johnson
The maker of the world’s best-selling diabetes drug is facing hundreds of lawsuits and likely a big sales drop as suspicion grows that taking the pill for more than a year raises the risk of bladder cancer.
In June, Takeda Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. halted sales of Actos, its top drug, in Germany and France after pressure from regulators.
Since then, both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency have issued warnings about the cancer risk based on new research, but they have allowed sales to continue. Doctors are being told not to prescribe Actos for people who have or have had bladder cancer.
The warning will limit patient choices and could spell the end for a once-promising class of Type 2 diabetes drugs that debuted more than a decade ago amid heavy promotion.
The once-a-day pills were appealing. They helped control blood sugar tightly, had few side effects in most patients, boosted the effects of some other diabetes drugs, worked by a new mechanism – improving the body’s sensitivity to insulin – and even allowed patients to reduce or delay use of injected insulin.
Actos, despite links to heart failure risk and other serious side effects, became the No. 1 diabetes pill after Avandia, the only other drug in that class, was found in 2007 to sharply increase risk of heart attacks. Avandia’s use was banned in the EU and sharply restricted here. Actos sales jumped from about $2.9 billion in 2006 to more than $4.3 billion last year.
Now those billions may well shift to Takeda rivals.
In the past week, the first of what lawyers predict will be thousands of lawsuits were filed in courts across the country. They allege Actos triggered bladder cancer, in some cases fatal, in clients who took the pills daily for years.
Nancy Rios, 54, is suing Takeda, blaming her recurrent bladder cancer on Actos, which she took for more than a decade. Rios, a hospital secretary, was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2009. In June, she had her second surgery to remove tumors. Rios, who lives in Reading, Pa., is worried about missing more work and being able to pay her medical bills. Next month, she will learn whether more treatment is needed.
“I could lose my bladder and possibly need chemo,” she said.
Her attorney, Paul Pennock of Weitz & Luxenberg, said the firm already represents another 104 clients, has about 120 more expected to pursue lawsuits and is getting 30 to 40 possible new cases a week.
“When a manufacturer distributes a drug, they owe it to the public to ensure that their product is safe for use and it appears that Takeda Pharmaceuticals failed to fulfill that fundamental duty,” Pennock said.
Other large law firms are evaluating potential cases by the dozen or more. More than 20 firms, from Florida to Washington state, are advertising for clients on the Internet or in newspapers, a standard practice in personal injury law.
“We don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’ve been contacted by so many people who have been taking Actos and have bladder cancer,” said Marc Jay Bern of Napoli Bern Ripka Shkolnik & Associates. “We have more than 100 (cases) that we’ve confirmed and many more that we’re evaluating.”
Takeda declined to comment on the lawsuits. The company, which is based in Japan, has issued statements that it’s committed to keeping Actos available for patients who need it.
Spokeswoman Elissa Johnsen noted an April study in the journal Diabetes Care found Actos “use for more than two years was weakly associated with increased risk.”
However, the FDA analyzed data from the first five years of a 10-year Actos safety study Takeda begun in 2002 and concluded this June that risk of bladder cancer was 40 percent higher for patients taking Actos for at least a year, although still small: an extra 28 cases a year for every 100,000 people taking it.
Erik Gordon, an analyst and professor at University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, said Friday that the new safety questions are “a big deal” for Takeda, particularly since the Actos patent expires in August 2012. They mean Actos won’t make as much money as expected in the final months, and they dampen prospects for two experimental drugs Takeda was hoping would succeed Actos.
“One, alogliptin, has been stuck at the FDA over safety concerns, and the other, a combination of alogliptin and Actos, now looks doomed,” Gordon said.
Alogliptin is an experimental drug in the same class as Merck & Co.’s blockbuster Januvia. Those drugs increase production of insulin, which breaks down sugar in the blood, and reduce glucose production in the liver.
Les Funtleyder, an analyst and portfolio manager for the Miller Tabak Health Care Transformation fund, said Januvia is likely to gain sales as patients defect from Actos.
He doubts the cost of the bladder cancer litigation will hit the level of Vioxx. That’s the painkiller that Merck pulled off the market in 2004 because it doubled risk of heart attacks and strokes – triggering more than 50,000 lawsuits and, eventually, a $4.85 billion settlement to end most of them.
Whatever the outcome of the Actos litigation, diabetes patients and their doctors will be considering their options now.
Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a Yale School of Medicine professor who directs its Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, said more long-term data on the effects of Actos is needed.
“It’s not clear if this (bladder cancer) risk is real,” but Actos and Avandia both are linked to heart risks, weight gain and possibly bone loss and fractures, he said. “The consensus already is that (Actos) should only be considered … after patients have exhausted all other options.”
Click here for the full report from The Huffington Post
Why Are Fruits and Veggies Less Nutritious Today?
August 22nd, 2011
EverydayHealth.com
By: Lindsey Marcellin
When it comes to getting enough nutrients in your diet, one bit of information is pretty clear-cut: Everybody should be eating an abundance of different fruits and vegetables every day. Yet according to research, fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be say 50 years ago. The reason?
A number of studies have explored the phenomenon of declining nutrients in fruits and vegetables, but the one that garnered the most media attention was led by Donald R. Davis, PhD, at the University of Texas in Austin, and was published in HortScience. Among Davis’s findings, one of the most consistent was that a higher yield of crops — in other words, more crops grown in a given space — almost always resulted in lower nutrient levels in the fruits and vegetables. What’s more, the median mineral declines among a variety of fruits and vegetables could be fairly significant, ranging from 5 to 40 percent, with similar declines in vitamins and protein levels.
Higher yield is one reason behind the decline, but several nutrition experts say it’s not the only one. “The soil itself has been over-harvested, meaning that over years of use and turnover of soil, it becomes depleted in nutrition,” says Michael Wald, MD, an integrated medicine specialist in Mount Kisco, N.Y. “All crops growing upon depleted soil must therefore be depleted in nutritional content.”
Cherie Calbom, MS, a clinical nutritionist and author of The Juice Lady’s Living Foods Revolution, sees it as a bigger problem that extends to many aspects of modern farming. “Our poor farming practices are leading to sick plants, depleted soil, and a need to use higher and higher doses of pesticides and herbicides to ward off what healthy plants would naturally ward off,” she says. “We are heading toward a dust bowl in many parts of the country if nothing changes.”
Despite these concerns, Janet Brill, PhD, RD, a nutritionist and author of Cholesterol Down, it’s still critically important to eat lots and lots of fruits and vegetables, and these developments shouldn’t discourage you from doing just that. “People should be concerned about one area of fruits and vegetables and one area only: to eat lots more of them each day, cooked and raw,” she says. “After we have solved that problem [of consumption], then we can move on to any nutrition concerns about growing them.”
5 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Fruits and Veggies
There are still many steps you can take to ensure a healthy nutrient punch every time you include fruits and vegetables in your diet.
Go with locally grown. The key to getting more nutrients is eating food that spends less time traveling from the field to your table. The way to accomplish that goal is with locally grown produce, either from your own garden or from a local farmer’s market. “Buy fresh, whole, and locally grown seasonal produce,” Brill suggests. “Try to purchase produce with the least amount of time from farm to table, as vitamins and minerals are lost over time as well as with cooking and handling.”
Choose frozen. Your natural instinct when eating produce is to think that fresh is always better than frozen. But Brill says that this isn’t necessarily the case. “Sometimes the veggies frozen right after harvest have retained more nutrients than those ‘fresh’ veggies that have taken forever to get to your plate,” she explains.
Don’t judge a book by its cover. Big, shiny fruits and vegetables sure look good and grab your attention in the supermarket, but just because they’re beautiful doesn’t mean they’re better for you. For example, organic apples may be smaller and not quite as pretty, but their pesticide levels are likely to be lower.
Keep them rough. When it comes time to prepare those fruits and vegetables for eating, bigger, rougher pieces of produce may have the nutritional edge over finely chopped and sliced options. “Keep chopping to a minimum,” Brill advises. “The greater the exposure of the fruit or vegetable to air, the greater the loss of nutrients.”
Minimize cooking time. Though there are some exceptions (the lycopene in tomatoes, for example), the less most fruits and vegetables are cooked, the more nutrients they retain. So eat your fruits and vegetables raw whenever possible. When you do cook them, keep the cooking time to a minimum and avoid too much contact with water. “Cooking methods that are quick, with a minimum amount of liquid, will help to preserve nutrients,” Brill says. “Steaming, blanching, and stir-frying are all great ways to cook vegetables quickly and retain valuable nutrients. Keep veggies crisp — never overcook or boil in water until soggy.”
It may take a bit more effort to find fruits and vegetables as nutrient-rich as they were 50 years ago, but with more local farm stands cropping up, seasonal choices are getting easier to find and are certainly more delicious.
Click here for the full report from EverydayHealth.com
It’s Easier To Get Prescription Drugs Than You Think!
August 22nd, 2011
Daily Finance
By: Melly Alazraki
Does the market have you thinking about getting a little pharmacological help to ease your jitters and lift your mood? Getting a prescription for Prozac is easier than you think. In fact, you can skip the appointment with a psychiatrist altogether.
A study released last week in Health Affairs journal found a growing trend of doctors who aren’t psychiatrists offering antidepressants to patients. The meds often get prescribed without any psychiatric diagnosis, simply to boost someone’s mood, relieve mild anxiety, or improve sleep. Worse yet, there’s no evidence these drugs actually help such patients.
All these questionable prescriptions helped make this class of drugs one of the most commonly prescribed in the U.S. In 2010, according to IMS Health data, antidepressants spending grew to $11.6 billion. The class was the second most prescribed after cholesterol regulators and heart meds, with nearly 254 million prescriptions.
It’s No Secret Who’s Really Smiling
The growth in antidepressant use brings a smile to at least one group of people: Big Pharma.
While Eli Lilly’s (LLY) Prozac has long lost its patent protection, U.S. Cymbalta sales for 2010 grew 9% to $2.8 billion, topping the $758 million mark in the most recent second quarter. Bristol-Myers Squibb’s (BMY) Abilify U.S. sales grew by 5% in the recent quarter, to 517 million. AstraZeneca’s (AZN) second-quarter U.S. sales of Seroquel XR grew 14% to $205 million. (Both Seroquel XR and Abilify are atypical antipsychotics approved by the FDA as adjunct treatments for depression that doesn’t respond to a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor like Prozac or Zoloft alone.)
The study made no mention of any illegal marketing practices by pharmaceuticals that may have contributed to this trend, although such allegations regarding off-label marketing are certainly not foreign to AstraZeneca or Eli Lilly, among many others.
However, the study said that direct-to-consumer advertising could be causing patients to request the drugs. The U.S. and New Zealand are the only countries that allow advertising for prescription medications.
Do We Have a Drug Problem?
The researchers are concerned that this growing trend of non-psychiatrists prescribing antidepressants could mean that the drugs get prescribed inappropriately. They worry that patients who haven’t been properly diagnosed are not receiving the best care they need. The study suggests starting by educating physicians on mental disorders, the drugs, and their appropriate use.
The researchers also encourage patients to ask questions — lots of them, including questions about the diagnoses, the side effects, possible alternative treatments, and whether antidepressants are the right treatment for their problems in the first place.
Click here for the full report from Daily Finance
Chipotle Admits Major Menu Mistake
August 22nd, 2011
The Huffington Post
Chipotle has always advised on its website that vegetarian and vegan customers should avoid its pinto beans. The beans are cooked with “a small amount of bacon,” unlike the Mexican chain’s black beans, which are vegan. But in-store menus do not indicate the porkiness of the pinto, and Chipotle’s burrito assemblers are instructed to inform customers of the bacon inclusion only if they order a burrito without other meat.
This policy meant that at least one regular Chipotle eater, Maxim senior editor Seth Porges, unwittingly ate lots of bacon over the past several years. Porges does not eat pork, as he said in a letter to Chipotle, “for religious and cultural reasons,” and so was shocked to discover, after years of eating Chipotle’s pinto beans, that it contained bacon. Consumerist reports that Porges tweeted about the shocking discovery, and also emailed Chipotle CEO Steve Ells, to complain. Ells responded immediately. He told Porges that the chain would change its menu to include a mention of the bacon in its pinto beans.
The timeframe for the menu change is unclear, but perhaps Chipotle will add the bacon notice when it starts offering brown rice and breakfast burritos nationwide — or maybe as it rolls out its vegan-friendly garden blend option or its delicious new chorizo filling. Ells should also be thankful that Porges isn’t a Hindu in need of costly spiritual cleansing after his irreligious consumption.
Click here for the full report from The Huffington Post
Are Vitamin D Levels Linked to Certain Cancers?
August 22nd, 2011
HealthDay.com
By: Amanda Gardner
The higher a person’s vitamin D levels, the higher the risk of non-melanoma skin cancer, such as basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma, finds new research.
But the study, appearing in the Aug. 15 issue of the Archives of Dermatology, stops short of saying that high vitamin D levels might actually cause these types of cancer, the most common malignancies in the United States.
And because ultraviolet (UV) radiation exposure is necessary for vitamin D production in the body, it might simply mean that people with more sun exposure tend to develop more non-melanoma skin cancers. It’s unclear whether it’s the damage from UV rays that accounts for the risk, or rising vitamin D levels that accompany exposure to the rays.
“This adds to the murky water [surrounding the relationship between vitamin D and skin cancer],” said Dr. Vijay Trisal, assistant professor of surgical oncology at City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte, Calif. “Is it vitamin D or sun exposure? The two go hand-in-hand.”
Other scientists have investigated a possible relationship between vitamin D and skin cancer, but so far the results have been limited and conflicting.
One study suggested that higher vitamin D levels might actually protect against skin cancer. This could be because vitamin D may inhibit a pathway involved in cancer, said Dr. Melody Eide, a dermatologist with Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, and lead author of the current study.
But two other studies had results suggesting the opposite.
Eide and colleagues based their findings on 3,223 mostly female, white patients in a Detroit health maintenance organization who had visited a doctor either because they had osteoporosis or low bone density.
Many more patients (2,257) had too-low levels of vitamin D than had adequate levels (966).
Over a follow-up period of almost 10 years, 163 participants developed basal cell carcinoma, 49 developed squamous cell carcinoma, and 28 developed both.
Those with vitamin D levels above a certain threshold had a 70 percent greater risk of developing one of these cancers. (That threshold was 15 nanograms per milliliter; people with less than that were considered deficient in vitamin D.)
People with higher vitamin D levels also tended to develop their skin cancer on parts of the body not typically exposed to sunlight, like the arms and legs, but that finding was not statistically significant, the researchers reported.
At this research stage, it’s difficult to untangle the possible mechanisms behind this.
“It’s a triangular relationship between UV light with the production of Vitamin D and the induction of skin cancer,” Eide said. “That makes it difficult to know.”
The study didn’t take into account lifetime sun exposure, family history of skin cancer, vitamin D supplementation, exercise, smoking or several other factors that might have influenced the outcome of the study. In addition, the study authors noted that it was “highly likely” that the participants’ exposure to sunlight might have skewed the results.
“We need some measure of lifetime cumulative UV exposure, which is very difficult to measure,” Eide said. “We tend to move around a lot; people go on vacations. There could be critical windows during our life.”
Click here for the full report from Health Day News
Cancer Expert Blames Agencies For Losing War Against Cancer
August 22nd, 2011
Natural News
By: Neev M. Arnell
A new book by leading cancer expert, Dr. Samuel S. Epstein, skewers the National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society and blames the organizations for America losing the war against cancer.
In the book, “National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society: Criminal Indifference to Cancer Prevention and Conflicts of Interest,” Epstein argues that the NCI and ACS have spent tens of billions of taxpayer and charity dollars focusing on treatment to the exclusion of prevention, which has allowed cancer rates to skyrocket, with the disease now affecting nearly one in two men and more than one in three women. Furthermore, the author claims that not only do numerous conflicts of interest exist within the NCI and ACS, but the NCI and ACS are also withholding a mass of information on avoidable causes of cancer.
Epstein, who has served as a consultant for the U.S. Senate Committee on Public Works, is an internationally recognized authority on avoidable causes of cancer, particularly carcinogen exposure through conduits such as food, air, water, household products, cosmetics, prescription drugs or industrial carcinogens in the workplace.
Epstein is professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health and chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition. He has published more than 270-peer reviewed articles and 20 books, including the prize-winning 1978 The Politics of Cancer, and has appeared on national media, including NPR, 60 Minutes, Face the Nation, Meet the Press, The McNeil/Lehrer News Hour, Good Morning America and The Today Show. He was a key expert in the banning of hazardous products including DDT, chlordane and aldrin. In his new book, he is now the leading critic of the cancer establishment for its indifference to prevention of the disease, which, for the ACS, he claims, borders on hostility.
Cancer funding skyrockets along with cancer rates, followed by exaggerated claims of progress
The cancer industry has made a series of misleading claims about the advances in the war against cancer over the past three decades, wrote Epstein.
Some of the false claims, according to Epstein, include the industry’s 1984 announcement by the NCI that cancer mortality would be halved by 2000, the 1998 NCI and ACS Report Card announcement of a reversal in the almost twenty-year trend of increasing cancer incidence and death, and the 2003 pledge by NCI Director and former ACS president-elect Andrew von Eschenbach to “eliminate suffering and death from cancer by 2015.”
The NCI, ACS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also claimed that “considerable progress has been made in reducing the [number of people with cancer] in the U.S. population” in its 2003 “Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, 1975-2000.”
The claim, however, is not consistent with NCI’s own data, Epstein said, which shows the overall number of people with cancer and incidence rates actually increased by 18 percent. The data also shows a dramatic increase in nonsmoking-related cancers, according to Epstein, including a 104 percent increase in liver cancer, an 88 percent increase in prostate cancer, a 54 percent increase in thyroid and testicular cancer, a 29 percent increase in breast cancer and a 14 percent increase in brain cancer. Epstein also notes the overall cancer mortality rates have remained unchanged and have increase by 6 percent for blacks.
It seems that the more we spend on cancer, the more cancer we get, Epstein said, because while the number of people with cancer goes up, so does the NCI budget paid for by tax payers and charity. The NCI budget has increased 25-fold, from $220 million to $4.6 billion, between 1971 and 2000.
Prevention is the key
The fixation on “damage control” instead of prevention is the root cause of the booming cancer rates in the face of billions of dollars aimed at elimination of the disease, according to Epstein.
He claims the NCI priorities are all wrong. The opening statement of the NCI’s 2001 Cancer Facts report says that “cancer prevention is a major component and current priority — to reduce suffering and death from cancer.” Meanwhile the report claimed that only 12 percent of the NCI’s then $3.75 billion budget was allocated to prevention.
Epstein shows that the actual attention to prevention is probably even less, by citing an analysis of a 1992 NCI budget showing that less than 2.5 percent of its then $2 billion budget was spent on prevention.
Epstein further crucifies NCI stating that prevention tactics defined by NCI only covered the value of avoiding smoking and a bad diet, while wholly ignoring the myriad of environmental and occupational carcinogens.
Click here for the full report from Natural News
