Agriculture Chemical Linked to Serious Birth Defects
February 22, 2010
Natural News
By S.L. Baker
Gastroschisis is a birth defect in which the intestines, and sometimes other organs, develop outside the fetal abdomen and poke out through an opening in the abdominal wall. Long considered a rare occurrence, gastroschisis has mysteriously been on the rise over the last three decades. In fact, the incidence of the defect has soared, increasing two to four times in the last 30 years. But why?
Researchers think they’ve found the answer. The culprit behind the suffering of babies born with this condition appears to be the agricultural chemical atrazine. That’s the conclusion of a study just presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM) held in Chicago.
Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle were alerted to a higher than normal number of cases in of the birth defect in babies born in eastern Washington. So they began investigating to see if the increased incidence was due to some kind of environmental exposure in that area.
“Our state has about two times the national average number of cases of gastroschisis,” Dr. Sarah Waller, one of the study’s authors, said in a statement to the media. “The life expectancy for fetuses with this diagnosis is better than 90 percent; however it requires delivery at a tertiary care center with immediate neonatal intervention which often separates families and can cause serious financial and emotional stress.”
The condition can lead to poor function of the bowel after delivery and potential long term feeding problems. Bottom line: babies with this birth defect must undergo the trauma of surgery right after birth. And while most survive, some babies with gastroschisis have significant damage to the bowel due to direct contact between the intestine and amniotic fluid or because the intestine was twisted. These infants may develop a condition known as “short gut” which can lead to stunted growth and a host of feeding and other problems.
For the new study, Dr. Waller and her research team went to work investigating all cases of live born infants with gastroschisis during the period between 1987 and 2006. They matched birth certificates with databases from the U.S. Geological Survey that revealed where agricultural spraying took place and what chemicals were used. It turns out the chemicals atrazine, nitrates, and 2, 4 dichlorophenoxyacetic acid were heavily sprayed in the area.
Of the 805 cases and 3,616 controls in the study, gastroschisis developed far more frequently among babies whose mothers lived less than 25 km from the site of high surface water that was specifically contaminated with one of the chemicals — atrazine. What’s more, the risk of gastroschisis was found to especially rise in babies of women who conceived in the spring, from March through May. Those are the months when use of the chemical is the most prevalent.
The problem with atrazine
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), atrazine is applied to crops (especially corn, sorghum, and sugarcane) before and after planting to control broadleaf and grassy weeds. It is used most heavily in the Midwest on agricultural crops but it is also applied to residential lawns, particularly in Florida and the Southeast.
Problems linked to atrazine have been in the news previously. Earlier research showed it causes sexual abnormalities in frogs and the chemical has also been linked to prostate cancer in workers at an atrazine manufacturing plant.
So why is it still widely used? Unfortunately, the EPA has done little to address the mounting evidence that atrazine is harmful to humans as well as animals. Last fall the agency announced it was going to start a new assessment of the chemical in 2010 that could take months to years to complete. In the meantime, tons of atrazine will continue to be sprayed on crops and lawns — and mothers and their unborn babies will continue to be exposed to this chemical now linked to a serious and potentially deadly birth defects.
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Three Simple Steps to Healthy Weight in Children
February 8, 2010
Time
By Alice Park
To curb the childhood-obesity epidemic, health experts have long urged parents to make healthy changes to their family’s lifestyle — such as eating nutritiously, reducing TV time, exercising and getting a good night’s sleep.
Individually, these behaviors have been linked to a lower risk of obesity in kids, but researchers at Ohio State University were interested in learning whether their effect might be cumulative — that is, whether families who adopted not just one but two or more of these behaviors could reduce their children’s risk of obesity even further.
Led by epidemiologist Sarah Anderson, researchers analyzed data on 8,550 4-year-olds in a national study, and found that indeed children who practiced two healthy lifestyle behaviors were slimmer than those who adopted only one behavior, while youngsters who implemented three beneficial habits were the least likely to be overweight. “The more of these routines the children had, the lower was their risk of obesity,” Anderson says. “If children had all three routines, their risk of obesity was 40% lower than children who had none of the routines.”
The three behaviors that Anderson studied were eating dinner regularly with the family, limiting the amount of time in front of the TV, and getting enough sleep. The children who were least likely to be obese ate dinner with their families six or seven times a week, slept for at least 10.5 hours each night and watched less than two hours of television per day.
The protective effect of these routines remained strong even after Anderson accounted for other factors that can contribute to childhood obesity, such as mother’s obesity or low family income. The findings suggest that adopting these routines can be a powerful way for families to encourage healthy weight in their children, regardless of socioeconomic background, she says.
In addition, says Dr. David Ludwig, director of the Optimal Weight for Life Program at Children’s Hospital Boston, the routines are relatively easy for most families to adopt. “This is a beautifully simple study. It makes a very important point, and one that needs to be re-emphasized time and again. These are all behaviors that are within the reach of us all.”
The data Anderson used came from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Birth Cohort, a government-sponsored study of a cross section of children born in the U.S. in 2005. The children were enrolled in the study at birth, and their parents answered questions about the children’s daily routines — including how much television they watched, when they went to bed each night and when they woke up each morning — at 9 months, 2 years and 4 years old.
Anderson focused her attention on the 4-year-olds, and found that families who had layered on the routines tended to have the slimmest kids. “We know that it’s going to be more difficult for some families than for others to adopt these routines,” she says. “But we can feel comfortable recommending them and encouraging parents to consider them, because not only do they offer protection against obesity, they are also likely to have other positive benefits in terms of children’s social, emotional and cognitive development.”
Obesity experts stress that the key is to start somewhere, and these routines are as good a place as any. “We don’t have to be running marathons every day,” says Ludwig. “Even moderate improvements in these three key behaviors can translate into a marked effect on body weight.” And when it comes to controlling weight, especially in youngsters, every pound counts.
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Traditional Chinese Medicine Coming to the Forefront
February5, 2010
Straight.com
By Charlie Smith
Vancouver library worker Todd Wong knows better than most that life occasionally delivers a rude surprise. In 1989, Wong came back from a trip to New York feeling rundown. At first, his doctor diagnosed a recurrent viral flu. Only after visiting an oncologist did Wong, then 29 years old, learn that he had a germ-cell tumour related to testicular cancer. It required emergency chemotherapy to deal with a growth in his chest the size of a large grapefruit.
“The first night I’m in the hospital, the doctor tells my parents, ‘There is a 60-percent chance your son will survive because we only discovered this very, very late,’ ” Wong told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview. “I was 29 years old, really active, and the doctors never suspected anything.”
Wong, a fifth-generation Chinese Canadian, was visited regularly by his mother, who wanted to give her son therapeutic touching to help him heal. She asked about doing energy work known as Reiki, because this is what she had practised at home. “The doctor told her, ‘If you want to do that, you can take your son out of the hospital,’ ” Wong recalled.
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His mother kept coming to the hospital every night to surreptitiously practise Reiki on her son, and Wong’s grandmother brought affirmations from a book by Louise Hay called You Can Heal Your Life. Later, he called a psychology instructor at Capilano College (now Capilano University) to learn how to practise visualization. When he was well enough to attend Simon Fraser University, every course he took had a focus on illness and health. “I did directed studies on the relationship between stress and illness,” Wong said. “I learned that psychoneuroimmunology [study of the interaction between psychological processes and the nervous and immune systems] was only coined as a term in 1980.”
Two decades after Wong’s recovery, he sees much greater cooperation taking place between allopathic and complementary health practitioners. The B.C. Cancer Agency is backing a complementary medicine education and outcomes program, which is examining how to safely combine complementary approaches with traditional cancer treatments. The team, led by principal researcher and UBC nursing professor Lynda Balneaves, is exploring the most effective ways to support cancer patients in making decisions in this area. In addition, the researchers hope to enhance health professionals’ understanding of this area.
Meanwhile, the U.S.–based National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which is part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, has been conducting scientific research on complementary and alternative healing practices for 10 years. It also trains researchers in this area and disseminates information to allopathic practitioners. For example, it has noted that acupuncture has demonstrable therapeutic benefits for low back pain, and that tai chi may benefit older adults with osteoarthritis in the knee.
During his recovery, Wong visited naturopath and acupuncturist Larry Chan, one of the founders of Integrative Healing Arts on Vancouver’s West Side, who helped him think “outside the box” about the origins of illness. Wong is convinced that health is about finding balance and looking at the body system in a holistic framework rather than focusing exclusively on germs or viruses. Integrative is one of several facilities—including the Broadway Wellness Centre, Cross Roads Clinics, and Finlandia Natural Pharmacy and Health Centre—that offer an interdisciplinary and complementary approach to health care.
Chan’s niece, Karen Lam, started working at Integrative as a receptionist in 1986. Some family members were horrified when she began studying traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in the early 1990s. They demanded to know if Lam, a fifth-generation Vancouverite, was going to spend the rest of her life working in a herbal-medicine shop in Chinatown. “It’s only been in the last three years that I’ve shaken off that self-imposed doubt about what I do in the eyes of the medical profession,” she said during an interview in her office.
She describes acupuncture as “attuning the body to healing itself”, and said it shouldn’t be described as a “cure”. In addition to acupuncture, TCM also focuses on a proper diet, lifestyle, and herbal remedies to enhance the body’s capacity to heal itself. “I assess somebody by their posture, their demeanour, their expression, the light in their eyes, the colour of their skin, their hair—just their overall vitality,” Lam said, adding that she uses TCM in the areas of conception, fertility, and stress.
There’s no shortage of skeptics who are quick to pounce on alternative treatments. In their 2008 book Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial, complementary-health critics Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst reported that acupuncture burst into western consciousness after New York Times reporter James Reston received the treatment as an anesthetic in China in 1971. Reston later wrote a laudatory article about it in his newspaper. “The American physicians who visited China in the early 1970s were not accustomed to deception or political manipulation, so it took a couple of years before their naive zeal for acupuncture turned to doubt,” Singh and Ernst wrote. “Eventually, by the mid-1970s, it had become clear to many of them that the use of acupuncture as a surgical anesthetic in China had to be treated with skepticism.”
Wong, however, attributed his cancer recovery, in part, to his mother’s reliance on TCM. “We did it all on our own because there were no support programs back then,” he noted.
The Kevin Trudeau Show: 2-2-10
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Obama Breaks Transparency Promise
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Global Information Network
Household Chemicals Cause Reduced Fertility
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Study: Doctors are Using and Addicted to Drugs
February 1, 2010
Telegraph
By Kate Devlin
In its first year the clinic has treated NHS staff hooked on drugs including heroin, ketamine, a horse tranquilliser, and methadrone, a drug linked to amphetamines, said Dr Clare Gerada, medical director of the Practitioner Health Programme.
The service also uncovered six cases of undiagnosed psychosis, in which sufferers see things or hear voices.The clinic was set up amid fears many health professionals were treating themselves or avoiding their local GP or hospital because of worries colleagues could learn of their health problems.
Overall, two of the doctors and dentists treated were reported to to the General Medical Council (GMC), because of fears that they could be putting patients in danger.
Another six were encouraged to report themselves to the regulator.
So far the service has operated only in London but there are plans to roll it out across the country, starting initially in Newcastle.
Two thirds of the 184 treated in the first 12 months had mental health problems, while one in three who came to the specialist service had some form of addiction.
Of these 51 were alcoholics and 16 drug addicts.
Dr Gerada said: “We are seeing every drug under the sun.
“Ketamine, methadrone, amphetamines, heroin, every drug you have ever heard of is coming through the door.”
The service has also treated unexpectedly high numbers of pediatricians, anaesthetists and psychiatrists.
The stress of the jobs, easy access to drugs, and the extra stigma attached to psychiatrists suffering from mental health problems could be reasons for the high demand, Dr Gerada said.
More than 80 per cent of those treated for drug or alcohol addictions were now sober, the first report on the service shows.
Prof Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer for England, praised the success of the scheme.
“It has uncovered problems that would otherwise not have been seen and the interventions been highly effective,” he said.
Click here for the full report
Alternative Medicine Sales Increase as Cynicism Lessens
February 1, 2010
Daily Mail
Sales of alternative medicines are booming as consumers shake off their cynicism.
Analysts say the market has grown by 18 per cent in two years and is worth £213million a year.
And they predict sales will increase by 33 per cent to £282million over the next four years as more patients reject prescription drugs in favour of natural remedies.
Even relatively unknown treatments such as ayurveda – the Indian holistic system of diet, yoga, massage and herbs – are picking up in popularity.
Analysts Mintel said the rise can be explained by growing official acceptance of many treatments such as acupuncture, which is available on the NHS.
A rise in the number of patients diagnosed with depression and stress has also led to more people exploring holistic approaches in favour of potentially addictive prescription drugs.
Around 1.5million Britons bought St John’s Wort last year, predominantly for depression.
Click here for the full report
Electro-Accupuncture Relieving Knee Pain
January 22, 2010
Reuters
The study, published in the journal Pain, looked at the effects of electro-acupuncture among 40 adults with knee osteoarthritis — the common “wear-and-tear” form of arthritis in which the cartilage cushioning the joints breaks down.
Electro-acupuncture is similar to traditional acupuncture, where fine needles are inserted into specific points in the skin. What’s different is that the practitioner fits the needles with clips that are attached to a small device that delivers a continuous electrical impulse to stimulate the acupuncture point.
Among the patients in the current study, those who had a daily electro-acupuncture session for 10 consecutive days reported greater improvement in their pain compared with patients who received a “sham” version of the therapy.
Patients in that latter group received acupuncture, but the needles were inserted at random points on the skin rather than traditional acupuncture sites. And while the needles were attached to the electrical device, it was not actually turned on.
The findings suggest that true electro-acupuncture may offer at least short-term pain relief to knee arthritis sufferers, according to the researchers, led by Dr. Sadia Ahsin of the Army Medical College Rawalpindi in Pakistan.
Acupuncture has been used for more than 2,000 years in Chinese medicine to treat a wide variety of ailments. According to traditional medicine, specific acupuncture points on the skin are connected to internal pathways that conduct energy, or qi (“chee”), and stimulating these points with a fine needle promotes the healthy flow of qi.
Modern research has suggested that acupuncture may help ease pain by altering signals among nerve cells or affecting the release of various chemicals of the central nervous system, such as pain-killing endorphins.
In their study, Ahsin and colleagues found that electro-acupuncture appeared to raise patients’ blood levels of endorphins and lower their levels of the hormone cortisol, which tends to rise during physical or mental stress. So it’s possible that these changes explain the greater pain relief, according to the researchers.
Larger, longer-term studies are still needed to see whether electro-acupuncture can have lasting benefits — and to find out how often patients would need treatment to gain those benefits.
For now, Ahsin’s team writes, the current findings suggest that, for people who are interested in trying it, electro-acupuncture can be added to conventional treatment for knee arthritis.
Acupuncture and electro-acupuncture are generally regarded as low-risk therapies. Among patients in this study, there were no major side effects apart from bruising at the needle site in three patients, the researchers note.
Click here for the full report
Stress Really Can Cause Heart Attacks
January 18, 2010
DailyMail.co.uk
Getting stressed really is bad for your heart, according to new research.
For years, stress has been linked to heart attacks and other heart complaints but with very little medical evidence to back it up.
Now a major trial by doctors at University College London has proved for the first time that people who get stressed are also likely to have heart disease.
The study involved 514 men and women, with an average age of 62. None had signs of heart disease.
Each underwent stress tests and then levels of cortisol – a chemical produced by the body at times of stress and which causes arteries to narrow – were measured. Their arteries were also scanned for any signs of furring and narrowing.
Those people who were stressed by the tests were twice as likely to have furred arteries as those who remained calm, the study in the European Heart Journal found.
Cardiologist Professor Avijit Lahiri said: ‘This study shows a clear-cut relationship between stress and silent coronary artery disease. This is the first clear proof.’
Click here for the full report.
Running Shoes Could Cause Joint Strain
January 13, 2010
FoxNews.com
Running shoes, decked out with the latest cushioning, motion control and arch support technologies, may not be as beneficial to your feet and joints as you might think.
A new study finds that running shoes, at least the kind currently on the market, may actually put more of a strain on your joints than if you were to run barefoot or even to walk in high-heeled shoes, and the increased pressure could lead to knee, hip and ankle damage. The scientists don’t recommend ditching your high-tech sneaks, however, as going barefoot on man-made surfaces could also prove harmful.
While exercise is no doubt beneficial for overall health, running and walking put stresses on your joints that may predispose you to getting osteoarthritis in those areas, said Dr. D. Casey Kerrigan, who conducted the study while at the University of Virginia, where she was a professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation. Osteoarthritis is the breakdown of cartilage in your joints, which can lead to bone rubbing on bone, causing pain, Kerrigan explained. Walkers and runners should try to minimize forces on their joints to prevent this damage, she said.
In pervious work, Kerrigan and colleagues had shown that women’s high-heeled shoes cause an increase in pressure on the knee joint, specifically in areas where osteoarthritis typically develops, compared with walking barefoot. Since cushioning in running shoes can also create a slightly elevated heel, Kerrigan decided to investigate whether or not these shoes also increase these potentially damaging forces.
Running on a “bathroom scale”
The study enrolled 37 women and 31 men who ran recreationally, at least 15 miles (24 km) per week. The subjects were then studied in a “gait laboratory,” running either barefoot or with a typical running shoe. The subjects had markers on their knees, hips and ankle joints, and as they ran, cameras picked up these markers, allowing the researchers to see how the joints moved.
The subjects ran on a treadmill that contained a forceplate, a device Kerrigan describes as a “glorified bathroom scale.” With each step, the forceplate provided measurements of the magnitude of their bodyweight forces on the joints, and the direction of those forces.
They specifically looked at torque, twisting force, which in this case mainly came from the participants’ bodyweight, For example, if you stand on one leg, your bodyweight would put more pressure on the inside part of your knee than on the outside part, causing a torque at the knee, Kerrigan explained.
The researchers found an increase in this torque for the knees, hips and ankles when the participants were wearing running shoes as compared with when they were running barefoot.
Specifically, they saw a 38 percent increase in torque in areas of the knee where osteoarthritis develops, Kerrigan said. Such a large increase was surprising, she said, because it was greater than the increase in knee torque she had observed for women wearing high heels, which was only 20 percent to 26 percent.
Kerrigan noted the study only provides an estimate of the joint forces, and not the exact forces, because the methods used do not directly measure the forces inside the knee and other joints. However, there are other studies to support that these types of estimates do match up fairly well with the actual forces inside the joints.
Is barefoot better?
Should you ditch your running shoes altogether? While the results might seem to suggest that you should go barefoot – a way of running that has recently become popular thanks to the best-selling book “Born to Run,” by Christopher McDougall, in which the author argues that barefoot running is better for you – Kerrigan says that’s not the case.
“I’m concerned, I don’t think this study should promote running barefoot,” she said. “I think people should run in what they feel most comfortable running in … and whether that’s in a pair of running shoes or in a minimum kind of running shoe, that’s just fine.”
The problem with running sans shoes is that most of the man-made surfaces we run on are not “compliant” – they don’t give, or compress, at the right time to absorb the peak forces on your joints, Kerrigan said.
“We’ve evolved to run on compliant surfaces, not on asphalt or concrete,” she said. “You run on something hard, your body has to work that much harder to help absorb those forces, and that can lead to stresses and strain, wear and tear, really throughout the whole body.”
Also, while certain aspects of shoes, such as arch support, may not be the best for your knee joints, they do protect the foot itself, and may help prevent other injuries, such as shin splints, Kerrigan said.
Kerrigan does have what she believes is a better running shoe system in mind that she thinks would help to minimize the harmful joint torques. She is currently developing her patented shoe design through JKM Technologies, LLC, a manufacturing and information technology service company of which Kerrigan is chairman.
The results were published in the Dec. 2009 issue of the PM&R, the journal of American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.
Click here for the full report.
Swine Flu False Pandemic Seems To Be Biggest Pharma Fraud of Century
January 13, 2010
RT
The Council of Europe will launch a probe into pharmaceutical companies after reports that vaccine manufacturers pressured the World Health Organization into declaring swine flu pandemic seeking increase in profits.
It was supposed to be a deadly pandemic, but is so far is nothing more than a serious cold.
And it has left a lasting headache as a debate rages over whether pharmaceutical companies deliberately misled governments about the seriousness of swine flu to make them stockpile vaccines.
Read more
The legal standards organization, the Council of Europe, will gather the arguments.
“Britain has spent a fortune on preparations,” says Paul Flynn, Vice Chairman at the Council of Europe Health Committee. “We have caused a great deal of stress to the population, people are very anxious about it, and we’ve distorted the priorities of our health service. I believe when we have a thorough investigation, and we look at this, we’ll discover that’s the story – the world has been subjected to a stunt for the own greedy interests of the pharmaceutical companies.”
European countries bought billions of dollars worth of vaccine from pharmaceutical companies including Baxter, GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi-Pasteur. Some of the contracts included a clause where governments could get out of buying the drugs if they were no longer needed. But some, notably ones with GlaxoSmithKline, did not.
“We continue to support governments in managing the H1N1 influenza pandemic. This includes ongoing discussions about existing orders for our pandemic vaccines,” reads the officials statement from the company.
Governments all over Europe are now saddled with billions of dollars worth of unnecessary swine flu vaccine. They are trying to sell it, but supply now far exceeds demand. So because governments wanted to be seen to be acting decisively, the European taxpayers have found themselves seriously out of pocket.
Health expert Gawain Towler says pharmas will be pharmas, and it’s governments who should have been less gullible.
“Pharmaceutical companies of course have a huge economic interest in encouraging concern over health,” Towler says. “I think you have to blame the governments for going along with it, for not having natural scepticism of the claims of someone who has a financial interest. The government itself wanted to be seen to be doing something. And in that way, they encouraged the fear that then forced them to act.”
At the height of the pandemic, it was predicted that around 65,000 people in Britain would die. So far, there have only been 360. Critics of the World Health Organisation, which dubbed swine flu a pandemic, say it was clear from early on that the illness wouldn’t be as serious as first thought.
Also, it was initially believed that two vaccinations would be needed to protect against the virus. Later, it was found that one was enough. Now European governments are coming under fire for wasting billions of dollars on vaccines that would never be used.
