HR 875 - Monsanto's agriculture bill - NewsGrabs Sunday, 29 March 2009

HR 875 - What might the so-called "Monsanto bill" really do?

HR 875, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, is a limited-vision attempt by moderate Democrats and Republicans to craft food safety legislation to address the out-of-control filth and contamination that are inherent in our industrialized, now globalized, "profit-at-any-cost" food system. If the bill's regulations were applied in a one-size-fits-all manner to certified organic and farm-to-consumer operations, it could have a devastating impact on small farmers, especially raw milk producers who are already unfairly targeted by state food-safety regulators.



The Empire Strikes Again - Controlling Food from Growth to Table

Last month, the so-called Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 was introduced by Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) as House Resolution 875. The bill calls for the creation of a Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services. This new agency would empower the government to regulate food production at all levels, up and down the chain of production.

As if that were not enough, last September, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) placed before the U.S. Senate another “food safety” bill (S.425) called the Food Safety and Tracking Improvement Act. Also supported by Monsanto, this bill would – as with H.R.875 – establish an electronic “traceability system” for the FDA to track food production, manufacturing, processing, and distribution.

NHF’s Scott Tips: “Congress never seems to learn. The NHF opposes these two bills as unconstitutional in their usurpation of States rights, far-too burdensome in their scope, wildly overbroad, largely unnecessary, and so discriminatory against small businesses as to be almost certainly intended deliberately to drive small food businesses out of the marketplace. As with typical government action, these bills – if passed into law – would fail in their stated purpose as they would make food less safe, not safer. Remember, the failed War on Cancer, the failed War on Drugs, the failing War on Terror were all launched by the Federal Government. Are we so naïve as to think that centralizing food safety in the hands of the Federal government will be any different in result?”



Pesticide mixtures are more toxic than predicted

Certain pesticide mixtures are more toxic to young fish than would be predicted based on the potencies of the individual compounds, according to study appearing in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

Since pesticides occur in the environment as mixtures, it is often difficult to understand and predict their risks. Synergy is the term used to describe a situation where the toxicity of mixtures is greater than the additive toxicities of the compounds that make up that mixture. Synergism is of concern because chemical safety in the US is based on toxicity evaluations of single chemicals.



The bacteria boom - implications of the Human Microbiome Project

human beings serve as communities in which prodigious numbers of bacteria can thrive. Since the average human is currently outnumbered by the pathogens they harbor, the genes produced by these bacteria outnumber human genes as well. According to Mullard, “Between them [the pathogens in our bodies], they harbour millions of genes, compared with the paltry 20,000 estimated in the human genome. To say that you are outnumbered is a massive understatement.”

So by sequencing only human genes, the Human Genome Project has failed to take into account a vast number of bacterial genes that also have the potential to affect the progression of human disease. The fact that many researchers are interpreting genetic data while leaving bacterial genomes and bacteria in general out of the picture is a serious issue.



Drink diet soda; develop diabetes

A daily diet soda drinking habit is associated with significantly greater risks for select incident components of the metabolic syndrome (MetSyn) and type 2 diabetes, according to the results of an observational study reported online in the January 16, 2009 edition of Diabetes Care.



Looking For a Job in Pharma? Get Ready for a Headache!

When college grads don their gowns and mortarboards this June, hopefully they won't be dreaming about jobs pertaining to mortar and pestles. Pharma is melting down as badly as Wall Street--and for the same reasons!

Think about it.

Toxic assets? Unsafe drugs. Ponzi schemes? Safety studies that were never there to begin with. Indecent profits footed by taxpayers? Medicaid fraud and "patent drugs." Mayday mergers? Pfizer/Wyeth; Merck/Schering-Plough. New "business models"? Biologics and vaccines.



Hundreds of deaths linked to schizophrenia drug clozapine

Fifty people die each year and hundreds more suffer serious side-effects as the result of taking powerful tranquillisers prescribed by the NHS, The Times has learnt.

Data from the medicine watchdog’s own reporting scheme suggests that clozapine, a drug taken by schizophrenia patients, has been linked to 950 deaths since being licensed in 1990 — equivalent to nearly one fatality a week.

These figures are only for the UK- the article is only about use of the drug there. Wonder how many people that drug kills world wide...



Patient Advocacy Group Calls For Suspension Of JAMA Editors, Investigation

"We are deeply concerned about the unbecoming and unethical conduct of the Editor-in-chief and Executive Deputy Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, who were reported to have used unprofessional and intimidating tactics against a conscientious academic, Dr. Jonathan Leo. Their behavior undermines the integrity of the JAMA peer review process, first, by failing to properly vet a manuscript for the accuracy of scientific reporting and for author conflict of interest and bias and, second, by launching an ad hominem attack on the scientist who was attempting to correct the record...."



Nonprofit Hits JAMA Editors, Urges Inquiry

This is an article on Wall Street Journal about the same mess at JAMA. It requires subscription to read, but I am anyway linking it as there was an interesting comment:

"Funding of experimental studies should be randomized, just like sample selection and assignment to case and control groups."

Great idea I say - it could conceivably eliminate the nefarious control of funders on study results and their presentation.



Antipsychotics Now Top Revenue Producers In US, Topping Cholesterol Drugs

IMS Health reports that in 2008, sales in the US of antipsychotics (used for absolutely every alleged mental disorder under the sun) in 2008 reached $14.6 billion, topping lipid regulators (ie, statins, etc.) which hit $14.5 billion in US sales.

I can assure one and all that America didn't suddenly develop millions of more people with psychotic disorders. These drugs are being used for depression now and that's where I bet the sales boost came from. America is no longer "Prozac Nation." It's "Atypical Nation." And that ain't good.



Florida: Approval process lowers the number of kids on atypical prescriptions

Nudged by public pressure, Florida health officials took a baby step last year toward reining in the use of power­ful antipsychotic drugs among children: They began requiring that doctors get approval before giving these drugs to kids under 6 on the Medicaid program.

That simple step prompted a seismic change in doctors' prescribing habits.



CDC Finances Bogus Italian Study To Support Vaccine Safety Claims

Documents disclosed under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spends U.S. tax dollars in foreign countries on studies to claim the vaccination programs they promote for U.S. children are safe when they know the results of the studies will produce false and misleading negative results.

What the U.S. public is not being told is that the study was certain to be unable to detect any effect. The CDC internal email exchange obtained under FOIA shows that, to be able to detect any effect in children with the methods used, the dose applied by the age of three months had to be more than 50 millionths of a gram of mercury and more than 100 millionths of a gram by the age of six months.

Table 1 of the paper shows Italian children received by the age of three months two-thirds of that minimum amount, or no more 37.5 millionths of a gram. By four months they had only three-quarters of that minimum: 75 millionths of a gram and the maximum by six months was 100 millionths of a gram, not enough to hit or exceed the threshold...



Vaccine refusals spur outbreak fears

Hundreds of thousands of fearful Ukrainians have refused vaccines for diseases such as diphtheria, mumps, polio, hepatitis B, tuberculosis, whooping cough and others this year, according to official estimates. Authorities have cancelled a UN-backed measles and rubella vaccination campaign funded by U.S. philanthropist Ted Turner, and will have to collect and incinerate nearly nine million unused doses in coming months.

“I never thought I'd see the day where perfectly good vaccines are being destroyed,” said Michael Bociurkiw, a spokesman for UNICEF.

Around the world, health officials say they are struggling with the repercussions of vaccine fears they call unwarranted and dangerous.

Perhaps those health officials should start taking an honest look at what vaccines actually do cause, rather than blocking any claim that links vaccines to subsequent health problems for fear of losing vaccines as an "effective prevention"...



Why we are spending so much on HIV/AIDS?

Compare just the research funding for HIV/AIDS with that for other diseases:

Why are we spending nearly 100 times as much on HIV/AIDS research, per patient and per death, than on research into heart disease? $2800 compared to $29 per patient, $207,000 compared to $2700 per death?

Or compared to diabetes, 15 times as much per patient and 70 times as much per death?



Hitching TB to the AIDS bandwagon

Tuberculosis is one of dozens of conditions that can cause a so-called HIV antibody test to react “positive”. In Africa the symptoms of TB can be easily misdiagnosed as “AIDS”, based on the Bangui definition which defines African AIDS as a collection of symptoms caused by poor nutrition and lack of clean water, including diarrhea, fever and weight loss.

Now the World Health Organization only adds to the confusion by blaming TB rates on HIV infection.



AIDS: A Treatable Combination of Nutritional Deficiencies

Clinical reports from Zambia, Uganda and South Africa indicate that AIDS may be stopped by nutritional supplementation. A number of members of the medical profession have observed that high doses of the trace element selenium, and of the amino acids cysteine, tryptophan, and glutamine can together rapidly reverse the symptoms of AIDS, as predicted by Dr. Harold D. Foster’s nutritional hypothesis.



The Human Brain Is On The Edge Of Chaos

Self-organized criticality (where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate at a critical point between order and randomness), can emerge from complex interactions in many different physical systems, including avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes, and heartbeat rhythms.

According to this study ... the dynamics of human brain networks have something important in common with some superficially very different systems in nature. Computational networks showing these characteristics have also been shown to have optimal memory (data storage) and information-processing capacity. In particular, critical systems are able to respond very rapidly and extensively to minor changes in their inputs.



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The only thing that remains constant in this universe, apparently, is change. Health supreme's newsgrabs are no exception - I am starting to publish more often but less regularly.

Instead of every Sunday as I have been doing for some time now, I may now be posting more unpredictably ... whenever I feel I have a sufficient number of stories and news. So please do subscribe by RSS or by email (see top of right hand column) or check back more often to see the latest posts...





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More information out there...

There is much I cannot cover but other sources for this kind of information exist and are active.

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Dr Mercola's health blog, Mike Adams' Natural News and the One Click Group in the UK have good health information. The Dr Rath Foundation is also putting out a weekly collection of health related news. Here is the link to their Newsletter Archive.

The Alternative Medicine Yahoo Group and the healthfreedom ning group are places to discuss and exchange information on what is happening in the world of natural health.

For the influence of electromagnetic waves from radio, mobile phones and other radio emitting devices, check out the emr-updates group on Yahoo. Genetic modification and issues around agriculture and foods are reported on the Organic Consumers Association site.

A few sites to keep up to date with the other side of world affairs, the stuff you won't necessarily find on your tv or in the papers:

http://therealnews.com/

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com

http://www.commondreams.org

http://www.globalresearch.ca/

http://www.truthout.org/

The individual is supreme and finds its way through intuition