Prostate Cancer Screenings Result in False Positives
February 15, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
As many as 50 percent of all prostate cancer diagnoses may be cases of over-diagnosis, according to a study published in the British Medical Journal.
Over-diagnosis refers to the detection of a cancer that, if left untreated, would never have any negative effects on a person’s life. This happens with cancers that grow slowly and do not spread to other organs, so that a patient dies of other causes before ever experiencing any symptoms.
Because prostate cancers tend to be very slow growing, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has recommended against screening men over the age of 74 for prostate cancer. Treatments for the disease can have severe side effects, including impotence and incontinence, and may even increase the risk of early death.
Another paper, published in the same issue of the journal, found that the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test commonly used to assess prostate cancer risk cannot reliably predict this risk in most cases.
The PSA is a marker of prostate inflammation, which in turn is believed to be a risk factor for prostate cancer. Yet in a study on 1,540 Swedish men, researchers found that PSA levels were not correlated with prostate cancer risk. The only exception was levels below 1 nanogram per mililiter, which suggest a prostate cancer risk of almost zero.
The British National Health Service recommends referral for cancer screening such as biopsies for men between the ages of 50 and 59 who have a PSA level of 3 nanograms per mililiter or higher, and for older men who have levels of 5 nanograms per mililiter or higher.
Another recent study found that regular PSA screenings did not decrease men’s risk of dying from prostate cancer.
The British Parliament has been considering promoting more regular PSA screening, but so far has declined to do so. According to general practitioner James Kingsland, a member of the government advisory group on prostate cancer risk management, the new studies lend support to this decision.
“It is using a test for something which it was never designed for, which is always dangerous,” he said.
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Convicted Man Disputes HIV Risk
February 12, 2010
Winnepeg Sun
By Dean Pritchard
An HIV-positive man convicted of not disclosing his health status to his sex partners is seeking to overturn his 14-year prison sentence, arguing he posed no significant health risk to the victims.
Clato Mabior was convicted in 2008 of six counts of aggravated sexual assault in relation to six victims and one count each of sexual touching and sexual interference.
Mabior appeared Wednesday before the Manitoba Court of Appeal, where his lawyer Ian McNair argued Mabior’s “viral load” was so low his sex partners were at no significant risk of infection.
But what constitutes a significant risk, countered Crown attorney Liz Thompson.
“If one complainant is infected, can you say to them ‘Well, the chance was one in 100,000, so you’re out of luck?’
“We’re not criminalizing people with HIV,” Thompson said. “We’re saying as a person, you cannot put anybody in harm’s way.”
One of Mabior’s victims was 12-years-old at the time of the offences and three were 17. None of his victims have been diagnosed with HIV.
McNair said Mabior used a condom every time he had sex with two of the victims.
At the time of his March 2006 arrest, police believed as many as 45 girls and women may have been victimized by him. He stood trial in relation to 11 alleged victims.
Prior to his arrest, the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority issued a public warning Mabior was defying medical advice about his HIV and knowingly having sex with unsuspecting partners.
Police said they believed Mabior had been luring runaways to his Sherbrook Street home with the promise of intoxicants and a place to stay. At his trial, court heard Mabior plied some of his victims with alcohol and drugs.
At his sentencing, Mabior was credited five years for time served. His remaining sentence is just under 71/2 years.
Mabior is from Sudan and is expected to be deported once he has served his sentence.
The appeal court reserved its decision.
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Scrubbing Away Germs Can Backfire on Backsides
January 25, 2010
MedPage
By Chris Emery
Rashes from toilet seats are once again afflicting American children, and the rare condition is often misdiagnosed, which may delay proper treatment.
That’s the conclusion from a report based of five-cases of toilet seat contact dermatitis investigated by researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and reported in the Jan. 25 issue of Pediatrics.
While toilet seat dermatitis is commonly thought to result from allergies to wooden seats, the report concludes that another source is plastic toilet seats cleaned with harsh detergents.
“This case series and previous reports have documented that toilet seat dermatitis is much more common than previously recognized in the United States and around the world,” Bernard A. Cohen, MD, and colleagues wrote.
“Furthermore, the incidence of this condition is rising in North America because of a resurgent popularity of exotic-wood toilet seats and frequent use of detergents that contain highly irritant/sensitizing compounds such as quaternary ammonium compounds, phenol, formaldehyde, etc in public restrooms.”
Of the cases analyzed by the authors, two occurred in the United State and the other three occurred in India.
Both U.S. cases were girls, a six-year-old who had a rash for over two years before it was correctly diagnosed and a 10-year-old whose rash lasted for a year. In both cases, the rashes seemed to worsen during the school year when the girls were using school restrooms. The younger girl’s dermatitis twice became infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and required treatment with antibiotics.
After doctors determined the rashes were the result of contact with toilet seats and instructed the girls to use toilet-seat covers and apply moisturizers and topical steroids to the affected areas, the eruptions cleared up within a few weeks.
The cases in India included a 14-month old boy and two girls, 12 and 10.
The boy and the 12-year-old girl were both initially misdiagnosed with ringworm and unsuccessfully treated with clotrimazole cream. The other girl was unsuccessfully treated with ayurvedic and homeopathic topical medications before doctors diagnosed toilet seat dermatitis. Two of the children were instructed to use soaps that only exacerbated the problem.
In all three cases, the rashes cleared up with some combination of topical steroids, using toilet seat covers, replacing the household toilet seat and limiting time on the toilet.
The authors distinguished between two types of toilet seat dermatitis: allergic contact dermatitis, the better described form of the condition, in which a patient develops allergy to wooden toilet seats, and irritant contact dermatitis, in which the rashes result from contact with harsh detergents used on plastic toilet seats.
They noted that detergents used in public restrooms and in hospitals are potentially more irritating to the skin than those used at home and that alkaline detergents are more likely to cause skin irritation than acidic detergents, because they perturb the body’s natural acidic environment.
Toilet-seat dermatitis was first identified as an external skin rash in 1927. Exposure to wooden toilet seats and associated varnish, lacquers, and paints led to sensitization and development of an allergic contact dermatitis.
The condition nearly disappeared in the United States in 1980s and 1990s, after public facilities and homeowners in the United States changed from wooden to plastic toilet seats and sanitary seat covers became readily available.
However, in recent years the number of cases has grown as a result of homeowners installing toilet seats made of exotic woods and the increased use of harsh toilet seat detergents.
Most reports have focused on adults with rashes, but little previous attention has focused on the condition in children. “In this case series we describe toilet-seat contact dermatitis in children and underscore a typical history and physical findings that we hope will aid clinicians in recognizing this disease,” the authors wrote.
“It is important to underscore that regular use of toilet-seat covers is the key to success in treatment,” the authors wrote. “Such seat covers can be purchased at any major retailer such as Walmart or online.
As an alternative, newspaper cut-outs could be used to provide barrier protection. Although it is possible to develop an allergy to toilet-seat covers, none have been reported thus far in the literature.”
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New Mammogram Recommendations
January 11, 2010
Natural News
By E. Huff
Several years ago, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (PSTF) issued an updated set of recommendations about mammogram screenings, suggesting which and how often women should get them. Since the last time the group issued its recommendations in 2002, new study data emerged that has led to a few changes. Its new guidelines, suggesting that women over 40 only need a mammogram every two years, has led to a firestorm of criticism from professional and advocacy groups as well as politicians.
The American College of Radiology and the American Cancer Society were quick to condemn the new findings, ones that PSTF has explained made the best sense based on current published data. The group consulted the Evidence-Based Practice Center at the Oregon Health and Science University for all current, relevant information about breast cancer screenings and arrived at what it says is a well-informed conclusion concerning routine screenings for older women.
Dr. Heidi Nelson, the lead researcher at the university who compiled the information for the PSTF panel, and her team scoured all available data on the subject and constructed it for review. Fifteen outside scientists were tasked with reviewing the information prior to being presented to panel members.
One of the primary studies was a recent British study that compared 54,000 women who received routine mammograms beginning at age 40 with 107,000 women of the same age who did not receive them. The results of this comprehensive study revealed that there was virtually no difference in breast cancer death rates between the two groups.
A comprehensive analysis of all available studies, including a few that showed some benefit from routine mammograms and others that did not, led to the conclusion that there is only a minimal benefit to receiving routine mammograms.
What researchers have found is that for every 1,900 women between the ages of 40 and 50 that are screened yearly for breast cancer using mammography, one death is prevented in the following two decades. Five women would have died regardless of screenings, so out of six potential deaths, one would have been prevented.
On the other hand, the potential harm induced by mammography screenings includes excessive testing and over-diagnosis, including many false positives. Analysis revealed that women have a 10 percent change of being falsely diagnosed. A significant number of cancers detected are not even malignant, yet mammograms are unable to differentiate between harmful and benign cancers.
Over-diagnosis, which is a growing concern among medical professionals, was not properly assessed or understood in 2002 when the last recommendations from PSTF were published. Many women are needlessly undergoing invasive and harmful surgery, radiation treatment, and chemotherapy for cancers that are not even harmful.
Dr. Russell Harris from the University of North Carolina, one of the panel members, explained that mammography is only effective at diagnosing one type of cancer, the malignant, slow-growing kind that can be effectively treated when diagnosed early. This kind represents only 15 percent of deadly cancers.
Precise numbers of over-diagnosis were not easy to pinpoint since estimates ranged from six percent to upwards of 50 percent. Dr. Timothy Wilt from the University of Minnesota, however, estimated that about 30 percent of cancers detected by mammography are over-diagnosed, meaning that they were either benign or untreatable.
Statisticians from the Anderson Cancer Center in Maryland were tasked with assessing screening intervals. Based on an analysis of a large cross-section of women, the group determined that there is virtually no benefit from mammography screenings for women in their 40s. Thus they determined that these women could reduce their risk of harm from mammography by getting screened every other year rather than annually.
What do these findings ultimately reveal? First, mammography screenings come with a myriad of potentially negative side effects while offering scant benefits. Over-diagnosis being the primary concern among researchers, countless women have undergone and continue to undergo dangerous procedures needlessly. More often than not, benign tumors are improperly diagnosed at the expense of the woman’s health.
The radiation involved in the screening process also contributes to increasing a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer. By subjecting the body continually to low-dose radiation, otherwise harmless cancer cells are encouraged to multiply and spread.
The fact that even mainstream research is now proving that mammograms provide virtually no benefit should be a wake up call to physicians everywhere who embrace the practice. Safer screening methods like thermography confer the same benefits while eliminating radiation exposure.
Since screenings of any kind can still lead to a false diagnosis, a woman’s best bet is to prevent breast cancer nutritionally. Anti-cancer foods and nutrients will prevent malignant cancer cells from ever developing in the first place. When combined with exercise and a healthy lifestyle, there is no reason why any woman should ever develop a deadly form of breast cancer.
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Colloidal Silver Kills Bacteria
December 9, 2009
Natural News
By S.L. Baker
In 1999, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) handed down a dictate against products known as colloidal silver — tiny silver particles suspended in a liquid base. The FDA proclaimed colloidal silver was not recognized as safe and effective by that government agency. Then the FDA sent warning letters to people selling colloidal silver that demanded an end to any claims that the silver products diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent disease. While colloidal silver products have remained on the market, controversy has continued with the mainstream medical establishment attacking any use of colloidal silver while many natural health experts continue to advocate that it has beneficial uses, especially for fighting infections.
In fact, silver has been used for medicinal purposes for centuries and, in modern times, several prescription drugs contain the precious metal. For example, silver nitrate is used to prevent the eye condition conjunctivitis (inflammation of the conjunctiva, the clear membrane that covers the white part of the eye and the inner surface of the eyelids) in newborn babies and it treats corns and warts, too. Another medication, silver sulfadiazine (sold as Silvadene) contains a micronized form of silver that is applied topically to the body to treat burns. And now researchers have found that when silver is used with copper, the combination may offer protection against the majority of serious hospital-acquired infections.
The germ-killing properties of copper, like those of silver, have been recognized for hundreds of years. Scientists have discovered that copper ions are deadly to bacteria because they penetrate the micro-organisms and disrupt molecular pathways that are important for their survival. In fact, in 2008 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officially registered copper alloys and allowed them to be marketed with the label “kills 99.9% of bacteria within two hours”.
Most Prostate Cancers Found in Screening Not Dangerous
December 7, 2009
Reuters
By Anne Harding
The number of prostate cancers diagnosed in UK men each year would jump from 30,000 to 160,000 if the country introduced population-wide screening for the disease, new research shows. However, many of those cancers are low-risk and may not lead to death.
Something similar happened in the United States in the mid-1990s, when giving men prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood tests to detect the disease became standard practice, Professor David E. Neal of the University of Cambridge, one of the new study’s authors, told Reuters Health.
“There was an epidemic of prostate cancer in America,” he said. “The number of cases virtually tripled in five years.”
But many of the cancers detected by PSA testing are slow-growing and may be managed best by “active monitoring or surveillance,” rather than radiation or surgery, which can seriously impact a man’s quality of life by causing incontinence, impotence, and other side effects, he added. “What we don’t want to do is to treat a man at 65 who is destined to die at 85 of a stroke,” Neal said.
Neal and his colleagues are currently conducting a huge study in which they’ve offered prostate cancer screening to a quarter of a million men 50 to 69 years old, roughly half of whom have chosen to take the test. About 10 percent of these men had high PSA levels, while roughly a quarter of these men actually had cancer.
Among the cancers the researchers identified, about 12 percent were locally aggressive, having spread beyond the prostate gland, and about a third were extremely low-risk.
In the current study, Neal and his team used data from this study-the UK Department of Health-funded Prostate Testing for Cancer and Treatment trial (ProtecT)-to estimate how many UK men would be diagnosed with prostate cancer if the country began screening for the disease and half actually agreed to be tested.
Based on these estimates and the findings from ProtecT, the researchers say, a majority of the 160,000 cancers that would be picked up by PSA testing would be low-risk. Some of these low-risk tumors might not be a threat to men’s health, they add, and the best way to treat this type of prostate cancer is still a matter of debate. About one in 10 of the cancers would be advanced.
In the US, Neal said, academic urologists are now beginning to offer more conservative approaches to selected men with low-risk cancers picked up by screening.
While the UK does not offer routine PSA testing as part of standard care, all men can get the test upon request, Neal said. “We’re not trying to in any way stop men coming forward to be tested.”
It’s highly unlikely that the UK would begin doing population-based screening, he added, but research now underway, including the ProtecT trial, is going to begin to identify high-risk populations of men who should be screened, and establish which men with prostate cancer need aggressive treatment with radiation, drugs or surgery, and which can be managed more conservatively.
“I’m quite confident that we will be able to do this much better,” Neal said.
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Facts vs Assumptions in Prostate Cancer
November 23, 2009
Natural News
By Sherry Baker
This may well be remembered as the year medical “facts” about prostate cancer were shown to be riddled with wrong assumptions and downright myths. As readers of NaturalNews know, for example, recent studies have shown little if any benefit to regular prostate cancer screening tests with hundreds of thousands of men being over-diagnosed and over-treated with a potentially deadly malignancy when they actually have no lethal disease. Now comes even more startling news about the wrong-headedness of standard prostate cancer care.
It is common for men with elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels to face biopsies. But scientists at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered that elevated PSA measurements are not necessarily potential signs of prostate cancer at all. Instead, they can simply be caused by a hormone normally occurring in healthy bodies.
According to a study just published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, the researchers discovered that parathyroid hormone, which the body produces to regulate blood levels of calcium, can raise PSA levels in healthy men who do not have prostate cancer. Unfortunately, elevated PSA levels currently set off alarm bells in the mainline medical establishment, leading many men to be biopsied and then treated unnecessarily with surgery, chemo, radiation, and/or emasculating hormones.
“PSA picks up any prostate activity, not just cancer,” said lead investigator Gary G. Schwartz, Ph.D., M.P.H., an associate professor of cancer biology, epidemiology and prevention at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, in a statement to the press. “Inflammation and other factors can elevate PSA levels. If the levels are elevated, the man is usually sent for a biopsy. The problem is that, as men age, they often develop microscopic cancers in the prostate that are clinically insignificant. If it weren’t for the biopsy, these clinically insignificant cancers, which would never develop into fatal prostate cancer, would never be seen.”
The research team investigated data from 1,273 men who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2005 to 2006. At the time of the survey, none of the research subjects reported any current infection or inflammation of the prostate gland, prostate biopsy in the past month, or history of prostate cancer. The scientists adjusted their findings for age, race and obesity because PSA levels rise with age, are higher in African-American men, and lower in overweight males.
The results? The higher the level of parathyroid hormone measured in the blood, the higher the PSA levels. And when men had parathyroid levels that were normal, but at the high end of the normal scale, their PSA measurements were increased by 43% — a range that, when seen by most urologists, would be used to justify immediate biopsies. The bottom line, according to Dr. Schwartz: “It’s likely that there are a lot of men out there with elevated PSAs that may be due to elevated parathyroid hormone rather than prostate cancer.”
The findings are especially important for black men, the researchers stated, because about 20% of them have high parathyroid hormone levels compared to about 10% of Caucasians. And that results in African-American men being placed at a higher risk for unnecessary biopsies and over-treatment.
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Celebrity Breast Cancer Survivors Speak Out Against Recent Screening Guidlines
November 20, 2009
ABC News
By Sarah Sargenti and Andrea Dresdale
Hollywood stars Olivia Newton-John, Jaclyn Smith, and Sheryl Crow — all of whom have survived breast cancer – spoke out this week against the government’s new guNewton-John, the Grammy-winning singer and actress, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992, when she was 43. Since then, she has become a tireless advocate for health issues, especially breast cancer research and the importance of early detection.
She is the spokesperson for the Liv Breast Self Examination Kit, which assists women with the first step to early detection: breast self examination.
In an interview with ABC News Radio, Newton-John said she does not agree with the new recommendation that women not have routine mammograms while they are in their forties.
“It’s ridiculous, I mean, mine actually was found by my own self-examination, not a mammogram, but I have friends whose cancers were found by mammogram and they’re in the forties and so, yeah, we’re all pretty outraged,” she told ABC News Radio.
The controversial new guidelines, released Monday by the United States Preventive Services Task Force, recommend against routine mammograms for women age 40 to 49, and they further suggest that women over 50 only have mammograms once every two years. The recommendations have been criticized by many doctors and breast cancer survivors alike.
Since the announcement, Newton-John has offered her own advice to women who are confused by these new recommendations.
“Well, I would say now is the time to be more vigilant of your own breast health…. Be very vigilant about your own breast health and take note of what’s going on and if you do find something that doesn’t feel right, go get it checked out and insist on a mammogram,” she said.
“We were making good advances in educating women into having regular checkups and particularly doing self-examination and they were even not recommending that, which was really, didn’t make sense at all, it was crazy,” Newton-John said. “It just makes sense that if you take care of your own self and your own breast health that you would self-examine monthly and to suggest that women shouldn’t examine themselves is like disempowering them. It just doesn’t make sense at all.”
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French Woman Gets Disease After H1N1 Vaccine
November 16, 2009
Prison Planet
ByPaul Joseph Watson
A young woman in France has been diagnosed with the crippling illness Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) after a swine flu shot, following reports yesterday about a Virginia teen who was similarly struck down by the disease hours after receiving the H1N1 vaccine.
The woman, identified only as a health worker, was diagnosed with GBS six days after she received the swine flu shot, according to the French health ministry.
Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot said the case diagnosed was light and that the woman was recovering.
“News of the apparently vaccine-related illness is likely to dampen enthusiasm here for getting vaccinated against swine flu,” reports Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
France has been at the center of a Europe-wide resistance to getting the swine flu shot, after authorities initially announced their intention to vaccinate the entire population. Outrage peaked in central Europe following the revelation that German Chancellor Angela Merkel and government ministers, as well as the armed forces there, received a special additive-free H1N1 vaccine that didn’t contain ingredients such as mercury and squalene that were included in shots for the general public.
France’s swine flu vaccination program has barely even begun, with so-called “high risk” individuals starting to receive the vaccine from yesterday. Reports of side-effects this early will do nothing to change the minds of 83 per cent of the French public, who indicated in a Le Monde survey they they would not take the vaccine.
55 per cent indicated they would take the shot in September, but that number has now plunged to just 17 per cent, figures partly influenced by media attention on the case of nine individuals who have filed formal charges in the French courts claiming that the H1N1 mass vaccination campaign is a deliberate attempt to poison the French population.
The drop in numbers willing to take the vaccine mirrors that in Germany where just 13% now say they are willing to take the shot, down from 51% in July.
Similar resistance to taking the vaccine is widespread throughout the continent, from Scandanavia to Bulgaria to the Netherlands, there is barely a country in Europe where a majority of the population have indicated they will take the vaccine and in most countries the vast majority have indicated that they will not get inoculated due to fears of side-effects.
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Eliminate Diet Soda and Excess Salt to Keep Kidney Disease at Bay
November 13, 2009
Natural News
By S.L. Baker
According to the American Society of Nephrology (ASN), the number of people in the US diagnosed with kidney disease has doubled over the past 20 years. About 20 million Americans are at risk for developing kidney disease and the ASN web site states another 20 million Americans already have some evidence of chronic kidney disease. And when chronic kidney disease progresses, it often leads to kidney failure or end stage renal disease (ESRD) — resulting in ongoing, expensive dialysis treatments or even kidney transplants.
But like countless other diseases and conditions, kidney disease doesn’t just strike out of the blue. It is often the result of what people do to their own bodies. And researchers have just reported two direct ways diet appears to be associated with declining kidney function. The culprits? Eating food high in sodium (like the fast foods and processed junk snacks Americans love) and drinking artificially sweetened sodas.
Those are the findings of two new studies, both conducted by Julie Lin, MD, and Gary Curhan, MD, ScD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which were recently presented at the American Society of Nephrology’s annual meeting held in October in San Diego, California. The first study, entitled “Associations of Diet with Kidney Function Decline,” examined the impact of specific dietary components on declining kidney function over 11 years in more than 3,000 women who participated in the Nurses’ Health Study. Dr. Lin and Dr. Curhan found that “in women with well-preserved kidney function, higher dietary sodium intake was associated with greater kidney function decline, which is consistent with experimental animal data that high sodium intake promotes progressive kidney decline.”
In previous research, scientists using information collected from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), a long-term collection of studies designed to assess the health and nutritional status of adults and children in the US, had found a link between sugar containing sodas and urinary protein. However, they did not collect data on any kidney function changes related to drinking sweetened sodas. So, in their second study, Dr. Lin and Dr. Curhan, decided to specifically check for any kidney function decline in women who drink sodas regularly. Once again, they used data from the Nurses’ Health Study.
In a statement for the media, Dr. Lin reported they found “a significant two-fold increased odds, between two or more servings per day of artificially sweetened soda and faster kidney function decline; no relation between sugar-sweetened beverages and kidney function decline was noted.” Moreover, this association persisted even when the researchers accounted for age, obesity, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, physical activity, calorie intake, diabetes and cigarette smoking. Clearly, artificially sweetened sodas are detrimental to kidney health.
“There are currently limited data on the role of diet in kidney disease,” said Dr. Lin in a statement to the press. “While more study is needed, our research suggests that higher sodium and artificially sweetened soda intake are associated with greater rate of decline in kidney function.”
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