Steps Taken to Track Radiation Exposure
Febuary 17, 2010
Natural News
By S. L. Baker
Many Americans are exposed to atomic bomb levels of radiation (http://www.naturalnews.com/025767_R…) over their lifetimes, thanks to the medical industry’s determination to push radiation imaging techniques like mammography and CT scans on the healthy as well as the ill. In fact, over the past three decades, Americans’ exposure to radiation through common medical tests has soared six-fold. But although it is a well-known scientific fact that radiation exposure, which is cumulative, increases the risk of cancer, government scientists have failed to warn the public about the dangers of repeated tests involving radiation, claiming the specific risk level is unknown.
Now, finally, researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center have decided radiation dose exposure reports should be included in patients’ electronic medical records. According to an article in the February issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology (JACR), the NIH researchers hope this effort will result in an eventual accurate assessment of cancer associated with low-dose radiation exposure from medical imaging tests.
“The cancer risk from low-dose medical radiation tests is largely unknown. Yet it is clear that the U.S. population is increasingly being exposed to more diagnostic-test-derived ionizing radiation than in the past,” David A. Bluemke, MD, lead author of the article and director of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at the NIH Clinical Center, said in a statement to the press. “One widely publicized appraisal of medical radiation exposure suggested that about 1.5 to 2 percent of all cancers in the USA might be caused by the clinical use of CT alone.”
A new radiation reporting policy
To attempt to document the amount of radiation exposure patients receive from medical tests, the radiology and nuclear medicine experts at the NIH Clinical Center have come up with a radiation reporting policy that involves the major radiation equipment vendors, starting with keeping track of exposures from CT and PET/CT scans. “All vendors who sell imaging equipment to Radiology and Imaging Sciences at the NIH Clinical Center will be required to provide a routine means for radiation dose exposure to be recorded in the electronic medical record. This requirement will allow cataloging of radiation exposures from these medical tests,” said Dr. Bluemke. In addition, the NIH will now require that vendors make sure that radiation exposure can be tracked by patients in their own personal health records.
Dr. Bluemke added that this approach is consistent with the American College of Radiology’s and Radiological Society of North America’s official stance that “patients should keep a record of their X-ray history”. You read that correctly. Patients themselves are currently supposed to keep up with how much radiation they’ve been bombarded with, according to the radiology industry.
What’s more, the NIH’s new pronouncement that requires radiation testing vendors to keep track of how much radiation they expose patients to only applies to people receiving screening or testing through the NIH. “We encourage all medical imaging facilities to include similar requirements for radiation-dose-reporting outputs from the manufacturers of radiation-producing medical equipment,” Dr. Bluemke said.
So the new NIH policy does not mean other medical centers and hospitals that use medical imaging are now required to keep records of how much radiation they are zapping patients with — the government is only encouraging these facilities to follow through on this recommendation. Bottom line: the only real protection from excessive medical radiation is for people to take control of their own health, to ask questions of any doctor who wants to order these tests, and to avoid any and all unnecessary radiation imaging testing.
Click here for the full report.
Study Shows ADHD can be Linked to Lead Poisoning
February 16th, 2010
Natural News
By S. L. Baker
What causes the frequently diagnosed behavioral problem in children known as attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) that leads to countless youngsters being given side-effect laden stimulant drugs? Research has focused on genes and, more recently, on the idea that multiple environmental triggers could be the cause. For example, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a recent British study indicates that certain food additives like artificial colors or preservatives could cause ADHD symptoms in some children.
Now two studies — one published in the January issue of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and the other published in the February issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science — provide the best evidence yet that lead could be one of the biggest culprits behind ADHD.
At very high levels, lead poisoning can cause seizures, coma, and even kill. But it is chronic, long term exposure that is the more common health threat, especially for children. Researchers have previously linked elevated blood levels of lead in kids to problems ranging from mental retardation to learning disabilities. In a statement the media, Oregon Health and Science University researcher Joel Nigg, who co-authored both of the new studies, pointed out that almost all Americans have a low-level exposure to lead, a well-known neurotoxin, making the metal an ideal candidate for causing ADHD.
Although government regulations drastically reduced environmental exposure to lead a generation ago by regulating automobile fuel and paint ingredients, lead is still found in everything from children’s costume jewelry and toys to soil and some imported candies. In fact, Dr. Nigg stated that virtually all U.S. children have measurable levels of lead in their bodies.
Click here for the full report
Baby Born Without Eyes Due to Rare Disorder
January 27th, 2010
Fox News
Brielle Garrison suffers from anophthalmia, which is a disorder that results in the absence of ocular tissue and usually develops during pregnancy.
Dr. Manny Alvarez, managing editor of health at FoxNews.com and Chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive Science at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, said he has delivered several babies with this ocular abnormality.
“The condition can usually be diagnosed by ultrasound – around 18 weeks,” Alvarez, who specializes in high-risk pregnancies, told FoxNews.com.” “The condition can be associated with other birth defects as well, including abnormal brain development.”
Causes of anophthalmia may include genetic mutations and abnormal chromosomes, according to the National Institutes of Health. Researchers also believe that environmental factors, such as exposure to X-rays, chemicals, drugs or viruses may increase the risk, but research is not conclusive, the NIH said on its Web site.
Lori Garrison, Brielle’s grandmother, said this has been incredibly hard on her family.
“For a baby to be born with no eyes is just so cruel, and because my daughter’s 15, it was just mind boggling that such a thing could happen,” Garrison said.
Brielle has a long road ahead of her and will have to have several surgeries so that her face does not become deformed, according to the report.
“It’s hard,” said Taylor Garrison, Brielle’s mother. “I mean, this week we have an appointment every day, and there are always appointments (and) different doctors.”
There is no treatment for severe anophthalmia, however children can be fitted for with an artificial eye for cosmetic purposes and to promote socket growth, the NIH said.
In a recent study in England, one in 10,000 newborns was found to have anopthalmia.
Click here for the full report
High Blood Pressure May Increase Risk of Dementia
January 26, 2010
The Canadian Press
by Lauran Neergaard
If the cardiologist’s warnings don’t scare you, consider this: Controlling blood pressure just might be the best protection yet known against dementia.
In a flurry of new research, scientists scanned people’s brains to show hypertension fuels a kind of scarring linked to later development of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. Those scars can start building up in middle age, decades before memory problems will appear.
The evidence is strong enough that the U.S. National Institutes of Health soon will begin enrolling thousands of hypertension sufferers in a major study to see if aggressive treatment – pushing blood pressure lower than currently recommended – better protects not just their hearts but their brains.
“If you look … for things that we can prevent that lead to cognitive decline in the elderly, hypertension is at the top of the list,” Dr. Walter Koroshetz, deputy director of NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, told The Associated Press.
Age is the biggest risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia that affect about one in eight people 65 or older.
Scientists have long noticed that some of the same triggers for heart disease – high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes – seem to increase the risk of dementia, too. But for years, they thought that link was with “vascular dementia,” memory problems usually linked to small strokes, and not the scarier classic Alzheimer’s disease.
Now those lines are blurring as specialists realize that many if not most patients have a mix of the two dementias. Somehow, factors like hypertension – blood pressure readings of 140 over 90 or higher – that weaken arteries also seem to spur Alzheimer’s disease-like processes.
One suspect: Scarring known as white matter lesions. White matter acts as the brain’s telephone network, a system of axons, or nerve fibres, that allow brain cells to communicate with each other. Even slightly elevated blood pressure can damage the tiny blood vessels that nourish white matter, interrupting those signals.
Among the strongest new studies:
-MRI scans showed women 65 and older with high blood pressure had significantly more white matter lesions in their brains eight years later. The study included 1,403 women who were enrolled in a memory subset of the landmark Women’s Health Initiative that tracked postmenopausal health. The worse their blood pressure, the higher volume of white matter damage, says the study published online last month in the Journal of Clinical Hypertension.
“This is a silent disease in the brain,” says lead researcher Dr. Lewis Kuller of the University of Pittsburgh. “It’s evolving over time and it leads to very bad outcomes.”
-The journal Stroke just published similar evidence from a Johns Hopkins University-led study that tracked 983 people for more than 15 years, starting in middle age. The longer people spent with uncontrolled high blood pressure, the more white matter damage they accumulated. The researchers could see a change with each 20-point jump in too-high systolic pressure, the top number in a blood-pressure reading.
Clearly, hypertension alone doesn’t doom someone to later dementia. Far more people, nearly one in three U.S. adults, have hypertension.
And there are plenty of other reasons to lower blood pressure: Hypertension is a leading cause of heart attacks, strokes and kidney failure.
But while some studies have found hypertension treatment lowered the dementia risk, others haven’t.
Enter the NIH’s SPRINT study, which in a few months is to begin enrolling 7,500 hypertension patients age 55 and older around the country. The test: Whether aggressive treatment to lower systolic blood pressure below 120 – what’s considered normal – will prove healthier than today’s guidelines that urge getting it below 140, or 130 for diabetics.
The main focus is on heart and kidney health. But all participants will be screened for dementia, and a subset will undergo repeated cognitive testing and MRI scans to tell if lowering blood pressure also protects against a slide toward dementia. Another question: If older patients can tolerate bigger than usual blood pressure drops without side effects, such as falls.
With dementia rising fast as the population greys, even a small effect from better blood pressure control could have a big public health impact, says Dr. William Thies of the Alzheimer’s Association.
Other dementia-preventing efforts, such as targeting the sticky amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s patients brains, haven’t panned out so far – while hypertension control has little downside, notes Pittsburgh’s Kuller.
Reporter Finds H1N1 Flu Cases Are Not as Prevelant as Feared
November 25, 2009
Info Wars
In case you didn’t realize it, Sharyl Attkisson is the investigative reporter behind the groundbreaking CBS News study that found H1N1 flu cases are NOT as prevalent as feared.
In fact, they’re barely on the radar screen.
How did this startling information come about, and why is the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) painting a different picture entirely? I spoke directly with Sharyl Attkisson to find out.
The first video is an amazing interview I did with Sharyl about ten days ago and what the bulk of this article is based on.
The second video is brand new and was done at noon yesterday in which I was videoed in the CBS studio in downtown Chicago. Sharyl was gracious enough to invite me to be on with Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former director of the NIH. We both were in agreement about the swine flu and opposed to the stance the CDC is taking, but we had different views on mammograms.
Please also watch the second interview as it is very entertaining.
Getting Started on the Swine Flu Trail
Ms. Attkisson says:
“The reason I looked into this is a couple of months ago, I got tips from three or four different segments of public healthcare, with folks telling me the CDC has recommended that they go ahead and stop testing for and counting swine flu cases.
Each different entity that contacted me was concerned, thinking that this should not be happening. They really felt that it was necessary for the swine flu to continue to be tracked in some details. So I went about trying to find out why this decision was made and what the ramifications would be.
… I started by contacting the CDC and the HHS and asking some basic questions. I felt like I pretty much got stonewalled with some of the information I really needed to get at, especially what I needed from the states data, and information on the rationale behind this decision to stop counting and testing for swine flu.”
Because the CDC did not initially respond to Attkisson’s requests, she contacted all 50 states directly, asking for their statistics on state lab-confirmed H1N1 prior to the halt of individual testing and counting in July. She also asked states, one by one, to help explain the rationale behind the CDC’s decision to stop tracking H1N1 cases.
Attkisson continues:
“One of my good sources within the government said to me that they’re either trying to, in his opinion, over-represent the swine flu numbers or under-represent by not counting them anymore. He said, “You need to find out which it is.” And so to find out which it might be, I really wanted to see the data that the CDC had at the time it made the decision to quit counting the cases.”
Dr. Mehmet Oz is a Fraud
November 11, 2009
NaturalNews.com
By Mike Adams
Dr. Mehmet Oz is a huge promoter of vaccines. He’s been on television reinforcing fear about H1N1 swine flu and telling everyone to get vaccinated. But what he didn’t tell his viewing audience is that he holds 150,000 option shares in a vaccine company that could earn him millions of dollars in profits as the stock price rises. It is in Dr. Oz’s own financial interest, in other words, to hype up vaccines and get more people taking them so that his own financial investments rise in value.
Evidence describing these facts was delivered to NaturalNews by a private investigator named Joseph Culligan (http://webofdeception.com/oprah.html#oz). That evidence includes an SEC document detailing how Dr. Oz. bought options on stocks for SIGA Technologies in 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2009. SIGA Technologies (stock symbol SIGA) is a vaccine technology company with many advanced developments whose success depends on the widespread adoption of vaccines. According to SEC documents, Dr. Mehmet Oz. currently holds 150,000 option shares on SIGA Technologies, purchased for as little as $1.35 back in 2005.
At the time of this writing, SIGA Technologies is trading at $7.10, making those options bought in 2005 worth $5.75 in profits today. If all the 150,000 options purchased by Dr. Oz. were exercised today, they would be worth roughly $180,000 in profits (they were bought at different prices, not all at $1.35). This is all revealed in what the SEC website calls an “insider transaction” document (link below).
These options won’t expire until the years 2015 – 2019, and the higher the stock price of SIGA gets before then, the more profit can be realized when these options are cashed out.
If the stock price of SIGA Technologies could be pumped up even more — say, from someone hyping up vaccines in front of a national audience — these options could mathematically be worth millions of dollars. Just to clarify, by the way, SIGA Technologies doesn’t currently manufacture a vaccine for H1N1 swine flu. It focuses on future vaccine technologies that could be applied to many different vaccines down the road.
Dr. Oz. isn’t merely a holder of SIGA stock options, by the way: He’s on the Board of Directors! As SIGA’s own website explains, Dr. Oz has served on the board since 2001 and continues his role there today. This brings up the obvious question:
Is it right for someone talking about whether vaccines are safe on television to also be carrying stock options and serving on the board of directors of a vaccine company at the same time?
Just to make things a little more interesting, SIGA Technologies recently received a $3 million grant in taxpayer dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The purpose of the grant money? To fund the study of a chemical adjunct named ST-246 to be used in future vaccines. So taxpayer money is now being used to fund a vaccine technology company whose stock price increases will financially benefit the very celebrity doctor who is hyping up vaccines to a national audience.
Something sounds fishy here…
Conflict of interest?
To my knowledge, Dr. Oz. has never disclosed to his viewing audience the fact that he owns 150,000 option shares of SIGA Technologies. And yet, with an audience of millions, Dr. Oz has continued to beat the drum of the vaccine industry, urging people to get vaccinated while implying that vaccines protect people from swine flu (even though there is absolutely no scientific evidence to back up that claim).
The RealAge Big Pharma front group
In addition to holding stock options in a vaccine technology company, Dr. Oz. is also a front man for the RealAge website, a sort of “health front group” for the pharmaceutical industry that uses information provided by RealAge members to solicit consumers with pro-pharma marketing message targeted by age or health condition.
Corporate sponsors of RealAge include most of the major drug companies and their most profitable pharmaceutical products such as Adderall, Ambien and Celebrex. The companies sponsoring RealAge include GlaxoSmithKline, Genentech, Wyeth and many others. RealAge is essentially a marketing platform for Big Pharma, disguised to look like a consumer health information service.
The New York Times calls RealAge “a window for drug makers” and explains, “The test has received widespread publicity because of its affiliation with Dr. Mehmet Oz.”
This NY Times article goes on to explain how the RealAge scheme operates:
People come to the site, then provide an e-mail address to take [the RealAge test]. They are asked throughout the test if they would like a free RealAge membership. If people answer yes to any of the prompts, they become RealAge members, and their test results go into a marketing database.
RealAge allows drug companies to send e-mail messages based on those test results. It acts as a clearinghouse for drug companies, including Pfizer, Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline, allowing them to use almost any combination of answers from the test to find people to market to, including whether someone is taking antidepressants, how sexually active they are and even if their marriage is happy.
RealAge sends the selected recipients a series of e-mail messages about a condition they might have, usually sponsored by a drug company that sells a medication for that condition.
The RealAge ads seen all over the internet do not openly disclose that taking the RealAge test gets you signed up to be solicited by Big Pharma for medication advertisements. Dr. Oz’s continued promotion of this service has exposed tens of millions of health consumers to this deceptive marketing front for Big Pharma.
How much has Dr. Oz earned from his affiliation with RealAge? He isn’t saying.
Front man for Big Pharma?
In my view, Dr. Mehmet Oz. is a front man for Big Pharma and the vaccine industry. He’s pushing vaccines for his own personal financial gain while championing one of the largest internet Big Pharma marketing scams yet concocted.
Dr. Oz. stands to profit millions of dollars from helping creating demand for vaccines, and yet he does not disclose to his audience this huge, blatant conflict of interest. Sadly, by catapulting his career from her own show, Oprah has inadvertently unleashed a vaccine pusher onto the general public and given him influence over millions of people who may now be corralled into services like RealAge that seek to sell more drugs to unsuspecting consumers.
I respect Oprah. She’s an amazing achiever. But I don’t respect all the wannabe celebrity leeches who use her to launch their own careers and then exploit their newfound popularity for financial gain at the expense of the public.
Shame on Dr. Oz. for his financial conflicts of interest and his strong affiliation with the deadly pharmaceutical industry. Through his actions, Dr. Oz. has aligned himself with precisely the evil corporations that are destroying health in America today. Does the man have no shame?
He may not have any shame, but he does have 150,000 stock options that could be worth millions in the years ahead.
Click here for the full report.
