Anesthetics Could Be Linked To Brain Damage, ADHD

February 6, 2012

Natural News

By Alexander Frantzis

Many within the alternative health community believe anesthetics cause brain damage. Evidence for this claim has included innumerable animal studies demonstrating a wide range of side effects from every class of anesthetics.

Clinical observations of patients and in certain instances a physician directly perceiving the neurological damage within themselves following anesthesia have also supported this theory. Unfortunately, while a definite hypothesis is easy to establish with animals, it is difficult to test in humans.

Until recently strong evidence has been lacking either way that anesthetics harm human beings. Thus, safer alternatives such as acupuncture, non-toxic anesthetics and abstaining from the application of anesthesia remain under examination. Recent work by the Mayo Clinic however contradicts the prevailing mindset. Onset of ADHD, an indicator of neurological damage, was strongly correlated to children who had been repeatedly anesthetized.

Aware of the evidence suggesting a connection, Mayo Clinic researchers devised a method to test for a possible link between the two. Comparing the records of a group of children exposed to 2 or more anesthetics before the age of 3 versus a group with 0 exposure, it was found that the former group had over twice the incidence of ADHD as the latter.

Children with no exposure to anesthesia and surgery had a 7.3 percent incidence of ADHD. Equally, for children with only a single surgery and exposure to anesthesia before the age of 3 the rate was nearly the same as no exposure. However for children with two or more exposures to anesthesia and surgery, the rate of ADHD was 17.9 percent. This result remained even after researchers adjusted for other factors, including gestational age, sex, birth weight and comorbid health conditions.

Statistically, this data showed a very large difference between each group and a clear correlation between anesthesia and cognitive impairment. To quote study pediatric anesthesiologist and study investigator Dr. Warner: “We were skeptical that the findings in animals would correlate with kids, but it appears that it does.”

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French Fries Linked to Cancer

March 3rd, 2011

Natural News

By: Ethan A. Huff

When potato products are fried in oil at high temperatures, they produce a chemical called acrylamide that can cause cancer. And a new study in the British Journal of Cancer adds to the mounting evidence against the chemical, showing that acrylamide is associated with a 20 percent increased risk of breast cancer in pre-menopausal women.

Back in July, a study published in the journal Breast Cancer Research and Treatment found that women with the highest intake of acrylamide were 31 percent more likely to develop ER+ breast cancer, 47 percent more likely to develop PR+ breast cancer, and 43 percent more likely to develop ER+PR+ breast cancer, compared to women who consumed the least or no acrylamide.

In 2009, a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that acrylamide intake caused an increase in oxidized low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels, increased inflammation markers in antioxidants, which would otherwise remove acrylamide, and other neurological damage.

And in 2008, a study published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology found that women who eat roughly one serving of potato chips a day are twice as likely as those who do not to develop ovarian or endometrial cancers.

Fried potatoes are not the only foods that contain acrylamide, though. Any starchy foods that are cooked too long or at too high a temperature can form acrylamide, including even grilled meats and vegetables with grill marks on them. Toasted breads and cereals, baked foods, browned meats, and even some dried fruits also contain acrylamide.

“Consumers can reduce their exposure to acrylamide by limiting their intake of potato chips and French fries…and quitting smoking, which is a major source of acrylamide,” said Mary Ann Johnson, PhD, a spokesperson at the American Society for Nutrition.

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Thimerosal-Free Childhood Vaccines Still Suspect In Autism

December 30th, 2010

Natural News

By: Bethany Sciortino

In a recent article in the Chicago Tribune “Link between autism and vaccines discredited,” Dr. Cory Franklin makes the definitive claim that vaccines do not cause autism. The study to which his article refers was published in Pediatrics, the online journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Researchers reviewed the medical records and interviews with parents of 1000 children exposed to an undisclosed amount of thimerosal, the mercury containing preservative once used in childhood vaccines. Because only 25% of these children had autism while the rest claimed to be neuro-typical, Pediatrics claims thimerosal-containing vaccines and immunoglobulins do not significantly increase the risk of autism. This hardly discredits or proves anything, especially given that the study in question lacks any scientific evidence. Should we believe that vaccines don`t cause autism just because only 250 out of 1000 cherry-picked kids in this study have the disorder?

What`s in a childhood vaccine?
Even if thimerosal is no longer used in childhood vaccines, there still remains antibiotics like gentamicin, strepomycin and neomycin.

These vaccines are live viruses cultured in chick embryos, monkey liver cells and fetal cow serum. Some are cultured in human lung cells and almost all vaccines are cultured with human albumin – the plasma from another person`s blood collected from aborted fetuses. Then there are detergents, disguised with difficult-to-pronounce names and used for paints, household and industrial cleaners and metal working fluids.

Some vaccines also contain monosodium L-glutamate (MSG), an excitotoxin known to cause cancer and linked to brain and neurological damage in autism, ADHD and Parkinson`s Disease – not to mention formaldehyde (a known carcinogen), antifreeze, aluminum, emulsifiers and “other buffers.”

This is not information that is readily handed out at your child`s well-baby visits, but you can go to Merck`s website and download the prescribing information for almost all of their vaccines. For example, Merck lists the MMR-II vaccine as “preservative-free” and the ingredients as follows:

Active Ingredient: Weakened virus of measles, mumps and rubella viruses
Inactive Ingredients: sorbitol, sodium phosphate, potassium phosphate, sucrose, sodium chloride, hydrolyzed gelatin, recombinant human albumin, fetal bovine serum, other buffer and media ingredients, neomycin.

Translation as follows:

Active ingredient (the objective): Three live viruses – measles, mumps and rubella cultured in unborn chickens and human lung tissue of an aborted fetus
Inactive ingredient (what they can`t make the vaccine without): sugar alcohol; detergent; a buffer or cell washer to allow chemical reactions to occur; sugar; salt; protein extracted from boiled bones, connective tissues, organs and some intestines of animals such as cattle, pigs and horses; DNA containing protein from human blood plasma created in the human liver; plasma from fetal cow blood often drawn from a live cow fetus after its mother is slaughtered; other stuff; antibiotics.

Most people, if given this information beforehand, would not willingly inject themselves or their children with such a toxic cocktail. It is not surprising that recent studies focus on thimerosal, an ingredient that supposedly has been removed from this vaccine more than seven years ago.

After reading this lengthy list of additives, the question remains – can the ingredients of vaccines increase your risk of autism? Or allergies, or disease, or any condition for that matter?

The truth is simple: there are real risks associated with vaccines and autism is only one. Everyone should be informed before they vaccinate or not vaccinate themselves or their children – after all, this is America and it is your choice.

Click here for the full report from Natural News

Major Celebrities Backing up Dr. Wakefield, Fighting Against Vaccines

February 8, 2010

Natural News

By Mike Adams

When it comes to vaccines, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey get it. They see how the pharma industry is engineering a campaign to silence Dr. Andrew Wakefield in order to suppress the publication of startling new evidence linking vaccines to severe neurological damage.

At great risk to their professional careers, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey have found the courage to dare to tell the truth about vaccines and autism. Despite the vicious attacks by the pro-vaccine zealots who will stop at nothing to destroy anyone who challenges conventional vaccine mythology, McCarthy and Carrey have issued a powerful, inspired statement that reveals the truth behind the Big Pharma smear campaign that is intent on destroying the reputation of Dr. Andrew Wakefield before he can publish the final results of this important new study.

NaturalNews reprints that statement here, unedited:

A statement from Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey
Dr. Andrew Wakefield is being discredited to prevent an historic study from being published that for the first time looks at vaccinated versus unvaccinated primates and compares health outcomes, with potentially devastating consequences for vaccine makers and public health officials.

It is our most sincere belief that Dr. Wakefield and parents of children with autism around the world are being subjected to a remarkable media campaign engineered by vaccine manufacturers reporting on the retraction of a paper published in The Lancet in 1998 by Dr. Wakefield and his colleagues.

The retraction from The Lancet was a response to a ruling from England’s General Medical Council, a kangaroo court where public health officials in the pocket of vaccine makers served as judge and jury. Dr. Wakefield strenuously denies all the findings of the GMC and plans a vigorous appeal.

Despite rampant misreporting, Dr. Wakefield’s original paper (http://www.generationrescue.org/pdf…) regarding 12 children with severe bowel disease and autism never rendered any judgment whatsoever on whether or not vaccines cause autism, and The Lancet’s retraction gets us no closer to understanding this complex issue.

Dr. Wakefield is one of the world’s most respected and well-published gastroenterologists. He has published dozens of papers (http://www.thoughtfulhouse.org/publ…) since 1998 in well-regarded peer-reviewed journals all over the world. His work documenting the bowel disease of children with autism and his exploration of novel ways to treat bowel disease has helped relieve the pain and suffering of thousands of children with autism.

For the past decade, parents in our community have been clamoring for a relatively simple scientific study that could settle the debate over the possible role of vaccines in the autism epidemic once and for all: compare children who have been vaccinated with children who have never received any vaccines and see if the rate of autism is different or the same.

Few people are aware that this extremely important work has not only begun, but that a study using an animal model has already been completed exploring this topic in great detail.

Dr. Wakefield is the co-author, along with eight other distinguished scientists from institutions like the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Washington, of a set of studies that explore the topic of vaccinated versus unvaccinated neurological outcomes using monkeys.

The first phase of this monkey study was published three months ago in the prestigious medical journal Neurotoxicology, and focused on the first two weeks of life when the vaccinated monkeys received a single vaccine for Hepatitis B, mimicking the U.S. vaccine schedule. The results, which you can read for yourself here (http://fourteenstudies.org/pdf/prim…), were disturbing. Vaccinated monkeys, unlike their unvaccinated peers, suffered the loss of many reflexes that are critical for survival.

Dr. Wakefield and his scientific colleagues are on the brink of publishing their entire study, which followed the monkeys through the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule over a multi-year period. It is our understanding that the difference in outcome for the vaccinated monkeys versus the unvaccinated controls is both stark and devastating.

There is no question that the publication of the monkey study will lend substantial credibility to the theory that over-vaccination of young children is leading to neurological damage, including autism. The fallout from the study for vaccine makers and public health officials could be severe. Having denied the possibility of the vaccine-autism connection for so long while profiting immensely from a recent boom in vaccine sales around the world, it’s no surprise that they would seek to repress this important work.

Behind the scenes, the pressure to keep the work of Dr. Wakefield and his colleagues from being published is immense, and growing every day. Medical journals take extreme risk of backlash in publishing any studies that question the safety of the vaccination program, no matter how well-designed and thorough the research might be. Neurotoxicology, a highly-respected medical journal, deserves great credit for courageously publishing the first phase of this vaccinated monkey study.

The press has been deeply misled in the way The Lancet retraction, and Dr. Wakefield’s mock trial, have been characterized. Led by the pharmaceutical companies and their well-compensated spokespeople, Dr. Wakefield is being vilified through a well-orchestrated smear campaign designed to prevent this important new work from seeing the light of day.

What medical journal would want to step in front of this freight train? Moreover, why now, after 12 years of inaction, did The Lancet and GMC suddenly act? Is it coincidence that the monkey study is currently being submitted to medical journals for review and publication?

We urge the media to take a close look at the first phase of the monkey study discussed above and to start asking a very simple question: What was the final outcome of the 14 primates that were vaccinated using the U.S. vaccine schedule and how did that compare to the unvaccinated controls?

The U.S. vaccine schedule has grown from 10 vaccines given to our children in the 1980s to 36 today, perfectly matching the dramatic rise in autism. The work of Dr. Wakefield and his colleagues deserves to be shared with the world to further, rather than censor, scientific progress.

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Your Foods Contain Neurotoxins

January 28th, 2010

Natural News

By David Gutierrez

A neurotoxic flame retardant resists environmental breakdown and builds up in the food chain, a new study conducted by researchers from the Boston University School of Public Health and published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives has found.

“They are persistent in the environment. They don’t get broken down,” lead researcher Alicia Fraser said. “Therefore, it takes a really long time for the contamination to leave our environment and our bodies. Even though we don’t know the health effects at this point, most people would want policies that would stop us from being exposed to them.”

The chemicals, known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), are closely related to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which were banned in the 1970s after evidence emerged that they produced birth defects and neurological damage. Flame-retardant PBDEs were introduced at roughly the same time and soon became popular in a wide variety of household and consumer products.

Since the 1990s, evidence has increasingly emerged linking PBDEs to neurological damage in animals. Furthermore, study after study has shown that the chemicals can build up in the human body, particularly in breast milk. Every human population on Earth currently carries PBDEs in their bodies.

In the new study, researchers tested 2,000 people for PBDEs, finding that meat eaters had body burdens 25 percent higher than vegetarians. This provided still more evidence that the chemicals build up in animal fat, resisting degradation.

“The more meat you eat, the more PBDEs you have in your serum,” Fraser said.

Many PBDEs have already been banned by the European Union, as well as the states of California, Maine and Washington. The new findings suggest that even if the chemicals are banned worldwide, they will continue to plague us for decades to come — just like PCBs.

“The industry is finding new products to use as flame retardants, and we don’t know the health and safety implications of those products either,” Fraser said. “We need to test the health and safety implications of products before they go into use, not after.”

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BPA Exposure Unleashes Agressiveness in Young Girls

November 3,2009

NaturalNews

by S. L. Baker, features writer

How’s this for a B movie sci fi plot: evil scientists use chemicals to transform toddler girls into terrifying little monsters. Unfortunately, researchers have uncovered a real life scenario that has some serious similarities to this creepy fantasy. While there are no evil doing scientists or true monsters involved, there is a scary chance that a common chemical — specifically bisphenol A (BPA) found in many plastics — could be causing unusually aggressive and hyperactive behaviors in some two-year-old little girls.

That’s the conclusion of research by scientists at Simon Fraser University, the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. As NaturalNews previously reported, BPA has been linked to neurological problems in animal studies. But the new research, just published in the October edition of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, is the first to find a possible link between prenatal BPA exposure and behavior problems in human youngsters.

For the study, BPA concentrations were measured from urine samples taken from 249 pregnant women in Cincinnati, Ohio, at 16 weeks and 26 weeks of pregnancy, and also when they gave birth. When the research subjects’ children were two years old, the research team assessed the toddlers’ behavior using the Behavioral Assessment System for Children-2 (BASC-2). What they found is disturbing: if a woman was exposed to BPA during early pregnancy and she had a girl, the baby’s nervous system might be adversely affected by the chemical.

Specifically, daughters of women who had higher concentrations of BPA in their urine samples during pregnancy were more likely to have aggressive and hyperactive behaviors than girls born to women with lower BPA levels, especially if higher exposure occurred in earlier pregnancy. The researchers don’t understand why girls seem to be affected by BPA exposure more or differently than boys.

“In other words, girls whose mothers had higher BPA exposure were more likely to act like boys than girls whose mothers had lower BPA levels, especially if the exposure was seen earlier in pregnancy,” the study’s lead author Joe Braun, a doctoral student in epidemiology at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, said in a statement to the media. “Boys’ behavior did not seem to be affected, although there was some evidence of increased internalizing scores among BPA-exposed boys.”

“We wanted to know if there was a risk in humans for neurodevelopment problems,” he added. “Study results indicate that exposure to BPA early in the pregnancy seems to be the most critical issue. The most damaging exposure might happen before a woman even knows she’s pregnant.”

Concerns about BPA were first raised in recent years following worrisome animal studies. For example, previous research with mice found that the offspring of mothers with high BPA exposure during pregnancy were more aggressive than young mice not exposed to high prenatal levels of BPA.

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Flu Shot Triggers Rare Disorder in Woman

October 15, 2009

WUSA9 News

By Surae Chinn

Many of you have been lining up to get the seasonal flu shot. But there is one Ashburn woman who wants you to hear her story before you do.

Desiree Jennings is trapped in her body. Intellectually she’s all there, but her muscles are fighting each other. She’s been diagnosed with dystonia, an extremely rare and debilitating neurological disease.
FOLLOW UP: Doctors Agree
She says after taking the seasonal flu shot she witnessed her body’s rapid decline. She doesn’t know what else it could be but she has serious questions about the seasonal flu shot. The Centers for Disease Control cannot comment on her case.

Desiree was a healthy 25-year-old up until two months ago, working at AOL and as a Redskins cheerleading ambassador.

But her world has now been turned upside down.

Desiree has trouble talking and speaks in a staccato rhythm.

She says, “It’s a battle every day because when I wake up I think it’s going to be normal, but then I’m quickly reminded that’s not going to be the case.”

She says 10 days after getting a seasonal flu shot at a Reston grocery store in August, and on her second wedding anniversary, she got sick. First, she came down with flu like symptoms, then convulsions and blacking out.

She’s seen more than 60 doctors. She says all of them were stumped until Johns Hopkins diagnosed her with dystonia. She believes her seasonal flu shot triggered it.

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