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The Associated Press
A report from the state Department of Human Resources says an industrial waste plant is likely responsible for sickening more than 600 residents in Fairburn and nearby communities by exposing them to a toxic chemical used in crop pesticides.
Germ levels in Blue River and Indian Creek surge to 1,000 times more than state permits.
The Kansas City Star
By KAREN DILLON
Here’s a sign you don’t see along the Blue River or Indian Creek: Don’t go near the water. But a recent six-year study by the U.S. Geological Survey showed that the Blue River and its tributaries can be cesspools that some experts say are dangerous not only to wildlife but also to humans who wade or fish.
The Korea Times
By Kim Rahn
The more mercury pregnant women are exposed to, the greater chance they have of giving premature birth to babies, according to a study. Research on 85 pregnant women conducted by Ha Eun-hee, a professor of Ewha Womans University's preventive medicine department, showed that women with high levels of mercury in cord blood are three to five times more likely to give premature birth, which is to deliver a child in less than 37 weeks of pregnancy.
The Times
By Nigel Hawkes, Health Editor
Acupuncture can ease the pain and disability caused by arthritis, a study in Germany has indicated.
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
New York Times
In New York City, air pollution levels have typically been monitored by inanimate objects, at more than a dozen locations around town. But in the South Bronx, from 2002 to 2005, air pollution monitors went mobile. They went to the playground, to the gritty sidewalks, even to the movies.
Every Friday at the Hippocrates Health Institute the guests who arrived three weeks before with serious illnesses get to tell their stories of health transformation.
Brandon from Vancouver, British Columbia, arrived with a golf ball sized tumor on his neck, but three weeks later he is standing in front of us pointing to his neck and describing how the tumor has shrunk to the size of a marble.
"When my doctor in Vancouver told me I needed immediate surgery, I told him no, I was going to Florida and check into Hippocrates for their raw foods diet treatment. He shook his head and said, 'if they can do anything for you, it would be a miracle.'
Brandon proudly points to the miracle happening on his neck and fights back the tears. He brought along his entire family --wife, son and daughter-in-law-- to stay with him during the three weeks and experience the daily wheatgrass juice, raw vegetables, fasting, colonics, and other aspects of the Hippocrates program.
They don't claim to cure anyone here, they only provide the tools that enable people with illness and disease to heal themselves with their own immune systems. The detox regimen everyone goes through here is what unburdens their immune system from toxic overload and enables it to regenerate itself.
I am here this Friday on a research project and every time I have sat through one of these Friday graduations, I never fail to be emotionally moved by the heartfelt stories and dramatic steps toward health many of these guest have taken. (Hippocrates calls its clients 'guests' rather than patients to emphasize the important role that each person plays in their own healing process.)
Next up was a man in his forties from Ireland, diagnosed with cancer, who also came with his entire family-- a wife, a son, and four daughters ranging in age from three to twelve. Normally a talkative fellow, he choked up with emotion and was unable to speak beyond expressing his appreciation for Hippocrates having saved his life.
After all 22 graduates have had an opportunity to describe their experiences with the program, Hippocrates Director Brian Clement speaks: "We are each the only ones who can guide ourselves on our healing journeys. It sounds burdensome to be taking responsibility for your own health. But it you respect yourself, you will find healthy food to eat and positive people to be around."
During my weeklong stay here I have met many wonderful people from all over the world, which was true for me as well last year, when I spent three weeks here doing a detox for the Afterword of The Hundred Year Lie. This time Ted and Simmi Brodie from New York made a special impression.
Ted suffers from type 2 diabetes and heart problems. He is retired from the clothing apparel business. He and Simmi have a daughter named Lisa, who is a physician in Florida specializing in rheumatoid arthritis. Her husband is a cardiologist. Both came to visit the Brodies and we all had a conversation together about the Hippocrates program.
I was rather surprised when the two physicians told me that they not only sent some of their patients to Hippocrates, but they had personally changed their own diets until they are now vegans. "We both read The China Study and we even looked up Professor Campbell's medical references to verify his sources. It was so convincing that we made a choice to become vegans."
The effectiveness of the Hippocrates program has so impressed these two physicians that they have opened a wellness clinic in Florida and operate it parallel with their private practices. This wellness clinic focusses on the role that nutrition plays in healing and in maintaining immune system health.
These are all hopeful if only small signs of the healthcare awakening that is happening in this country and throughout the industrialized world.
AlterNet
By Michael Blanding
The corporations that sell bottled water are depleting natural resources, jacking up prices, and lying when they tell you their water is purer and tastes better than the stuff that comes out of the tap.
By Erik Eckholm
The New York Times
Unable to afford health insurance, Dee Dee Dodd had for years been mixing occasional doctor visits with clumsy efforts to self-manage her insulin-
dependent diabetes, getting sicker all the while.
In one 18-month period, Ms. Dodd, 38, was rushed almost monthly to the emergency room, spent weeks in the intensive care unit and accumulated more than $191,000 in unpaid bills.
The world's natural ecosystems are being degraded at a rate unprecedented in human history.
World Wildlife Fund
WWF's Living Planet Report 2006, the group's biennial statement on the state of the natural world, shows that we are currently using the planet's resources far faster than they can be renewed. On current projections, this means that as a whole, humanity will need at least two planets' worth of natural resources by 2050.
An aging population and our growing addiction to pharmaceuticals may have disastrous consequences for our water supply.
On Earth Magazine
Elizabeth Royte
Norman Leonard moved to Heritage Village, a sprawling retirement community in western Connecticut, 11 years ago. Its green-gabled condominiums and Capes were well maintained, and the landscapers hadn't skimped on the rhododendrons. A retired CPA, Leonard considers himself, at age 80, to be in pretty decent shape: He plays platform tennis on the grounds and hikes often in nearby forests and reserves. But still, he takes five different drugs a day to manage his blood pressure, acid reflux, and high cholesterol. Heritage Village is home to about 4,000 residents with similar medical profiles, who take an average of six drugs a day.
Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets' worth of natural resources every year by 2050 on current trends
Reuters
By Ben Blanchard
"For more than 20 years we have exceeded the earth's ability to support a consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable and we cannot afford to continue down this path," WWF Director-General James Leape said, launching the WWF's 2006 Living Planet Report.
By Jeff Milchen and Stacy Mitchell
TomPaine.com
When Wal-Mart recently issued a press release announcing discounts on some generic drugs at Tampa area stores, its executives probably hoped for some favorable publicity in Florida media. So Bentonville surely was festive the next day when sweeping headlines like "Wal-Mart to sell generic drugs for $4 a month" ran nationwide - often on page one of newspapers.
Experts estimate 200 worldwide, up from 149 just two years ago
MSNBC News Service
NAIROBI, Kenya - The number of “dead zones” in the world’s oceans may have increased by a third in just two years, threatening fish stocks and the people who depend on them, the U.N. Environment Program said on Thursday.
Fertilizers, sewage, fossil fuel burning and other pollutants have led to a doubling in the number of oxygen-deficient coastal areas every decade since the 1960s.
A food additive found in most fast foods and junk foods may trigger violence and depression later in life if the fetus absorbs its mother's toxic habits.
New research conducted at the National Institutes for Health outside Washington, D.C. has turned up persuasive evidence that junk food diets can cause depression, violence, and other anti-social behaviors.
A group of 80 volunteers, many of them with criminal records of violence, went through a double-blind study in which half had their omega-6 fatty acids (found in fast foods and junk foods) drastically reduced and replaced with more healthy omega-3 fatty acids as found primarily in fish oil. The result was a startling drop in anger and aggression and depression.
The clinician in charge of the study, Dr. Joseph Hibbein, says our modern diets are "changing the very architecture and functioning of the brain." For those of you who have read The Hundred Year Lie, you will recognize this sort of language as fitting into my argument that we are becoming a mutant species.
The key finding of the NIH research is that omega-6 fatty acids, found in everything from margarine and ice cream to snack foods such as potato chips, have replaced the healthy omega-3s and that has produced severe disruptions of serotonin and dopamine in the brains of junk food addicts. Low serotonin is known to be linked to depression, the risk of suicide, and violent and impulsive behaviors. Dopamine is crucial to decision-making.
When these deficiencies occur as the human brain is in rapid development -- as a fetus, in the first five years of life, and at puberty -- the brain's architecture can be permanently altered. That means a mother's diet while pregnant can help predict whether her child will grow up to suffer depression or be prone to anti-social acts.
Dr. Hibbein and other researchers have compared statistics of omega-6 consumption since the 1960s in 38 industrialized countries to the increase in murder rates in those countries during the same period. They are a perfect match! Depression and suicide rates, if measured the same way, will probably prove a match as well.
These toxic changes in our diets, Dr. Hibbein told The Guardian in Britain on Oct. 17, "are a very large uncontrolled experiment that may have contributed to the societal burden of aggression, depression and cardiovascular death."
New research that tells us synthetic chemicals may 'express' genes in a way that can cause autism also points to pioneering revelations ahead.
A 'vulnerability' gene has been isolated that can cause autism after a child has been exposed to unknown chemicals.
That conclusion comes from a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team of researchers from Vanderbilt University.
This gene doesn't actually cause autism, it raises the risk of autism after being 'expressed' by contact with something in the environment. This could occur while the child is still in its mother's womb.
If the cause is a chemical or combination of chemicals, "it is a long list of everything from food additives to mercury to fertilizers," says Dr. Pat Levitt, a co-author of the study. "It may be more than one thing."
While Levitt and other scientists dismiss the idea that some childhood vaccines can trigger the gene, this latest study does seem to raise the prospect that methyl-mercury, used as a preservative in some vaccines, may still play a role, even if indirect. Maybe the methyl-mercury absorbed by mothers after taking vaccines themselves ends up in the fetus where it triggers the vulnerable gene to express itself once the child is born.
This is exciting research, folks! If feels like a doorway into answering a range of provocative questions about the interplay between dormant genes or genetic susceptibility and the chemical triggers that release an illness or disease.
Washington Post Staff Writer
By RICK WEISS
Three years after the Food and Drug Administration first hinted that it might permit the sale of milk and meat from cloned animals, prompting public reactions that ranged from curiosity to disgust, the agency is poised to endorse marketing of the mass-produced animals for public consumption.
The Chicago Sun-Times
BY JESSE JACKSON
It gets little attention, but it is deadly nonetheless. More than 200,000 women will get breast cancer in America this year. More than 40,000 will die from it. In comparison, we lost more than 50,000 men and women in Vietnam, and nearly 3,000 in Iraq.
By Lisa Stiffler
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
A federal program to safeguard poor and racially diverse communities from pollution and other environmental harm is at risk of being dissolved, activists say.
Confronting the possibility of a global catastrophe.
The New Yorker
by MICHAEL SPECTER
Most mornings, the line begins to form at dawn: scores of silent women with babies strapped to their backs, buckets balanced on their heads, and in each hand a bright-blue plastic jug. On good days, they will wait less than an hour before a water tanker rumbles across the rutted dirt path that passes for a road in Kesum Purbahari, a slum on the southern edge of New Delhi. On bad days, when there is no electricity for the pumps, the tankers don’t come at all. “That water kills people,’’ a young mother named Shoba said one recent Saturday morning, pointing to a row of battered pails filled with thick, caramel-colored liquid. “Whoever drinks it will die.’’ The water was from a community standpipe shared by thousands of the slum’s residents. Women often use it to launder clothes and bathe their children, but nobody is desperate enough to drink it. Instead, they take their buckets to a tanker stop, sit in the searing heat, and wait. Shoba found a spot in the shade next to a family of sleeping hogs. She wore a peach-colored sari and, to ward off the sun, a thin purple scarf around her head. Two little girls played happily in piles of refuse that lined the road.
A problem created by one of the dangerous excesses of modern drug-dependent medicine is being rescued by an ancient remedy.
Drug-resistant strains of bacteria are taking people's limbs and lives, thanks to the over-prescribing of antibiotics by physicians who choose profits over social responsibility. If you have ever had antibiotics prescribed for the flu or any other viral ailment, then you know exactly what I am talking about.
Long disparaged by Western medical science as 'folk quackery,' the use of honey to treat infections immune to antibiotics is making a big comeback. Superbugs are causing thousands of deaths each year and countless more amputations and disfigurements, so honey truly is the remedy of last resort for many patients and physicians.
More than 3,000 years ago, physicians in Egypt and Sumeria used honey as a common treatment for ulcers and wounds that would have otherwise gotten infected. Those treatments worked because, unknown to ancient physicians, honey contains hundreds of active chemical components that work together to create an antibacterial compound.
Modern medical science still has not been able to identify the active chemical components that make honey effective, which, of course, is the 'magic bullet' fixation and overlooks the role that a synergy of all these hundreds of natural chemicals plays. At least 20 science studies, however, involving 2,000 people, have conclusively demonstrated that honey is effective at fighting superbugs, and does so more cheaply and with many fewer side effects than drugs.
"The more we keep giving patients antibiotics, the more we breed these suberbugs," Professor Jennifer Eddy, of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, recently told Wired News. "I've used honey in a dozen cases and I've yet to have one patient that didn't improve. By eradicating these superbugs, honey could do a great job for society and to improve public health."
At least two dozen hospitals in Germany now use honey in treatments, as do hospitals in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Yet, in the U.S. medical practitioners lag far behind in accepting the medicine value of honey. One reason often given -- a lame excuse, really -- is they remain skeptical because most of the research on honey's healing value comes from Europe.
Here is another casebook example of American medical arrogance costing people their limbs and personal savings, if not their lives.
The New York Times
By MICHAEL POLLAN
Soon after the news broke last month that nearly 200 Americans in 26 states had been sickened by eating packaged spinach contaminated with E. coli, I received a rather coldblooded e-mail message from a friend in the food business. “I have instructed my broker to purchase a million shares of RadSafe,” he wrote, explaining that RadSafe is a leading manufacturer of food-irradiation technology. It turned out my friend was joking, but even so, his reasoning was impeccable. If bagged salad greens are vulnerable to bacterial contamination on such a scale, industry and government would very soon come looking for a technological fix; any day now, calls to irradiate the entire food supply will be on a great many official lips. That’s exactly what happened a few years ago when we learned that E. coli from cattle feces was winding up in American hamburgers. Rather than clean up the kill floor and the feedlot diet, some meat processors simply started nuking the meat — sterilizing the manure, in other words, rather than removing it from our food. Why? Because it’s easier to find a technological fix than to address the root cause of such a problem. This has always been the genius of industrial capitalism — to take its failings and turn them into exciting new business opportunities.
Associated Press
By Juliana Barbassa, Associated Press
Baskets overflow with fresh greens. Tomatoes blush a deep red. The competition for customers' attention is fierce at the Heirloom Organics farm stand during the lunch-hour rush.
Despite a recent E. coli outbreak, shoppers at this farmers market are reaching with confidence for spinach, reassured that the food is grown nearby, by farmers they can talk to, on land they can visit.
Experts predict that as awareness of farming methods grows, interest in farmers markets, restaurants that buy locally and direct farm-to-consumer sales is bound to grow as well.
"Does the agro-food industry know how to control GMO?"
Le Monde
The question presents itself as the General Directory for Competition, Consumption and Fraud Repression (DGCCRF) publicized its annual audits account on Wednesday October 11. In 2005, out of 69 food product samples taken, 17 contained traces of genetically modified organisms. Their quantity was, however, inferior to the regulatory threshold of 0.9%. That publication comes at a time when transgenic rice had been discovered this summer in trade channels, as the DGCCRF confirms. But this episode is only the most recent in a series that began several years ago.
So you want pretty nails? What is the invisible pricetag?
Did you know that of 10,000 chemicals used in the manicure industry, 89 percent have never been tested for safety or impact on human health by an independent testing facility?
That finding comes from a new study by the National Asian-Pacific American Women's Forum, which began examining the health issue because so many women of Asian or Pacific descent now work in the nail polish business.
These findings aren't surprising given previous statistics, detailed in The Hundred Year Lie, about the cosmetics industry as a whole. With more than 25,000 chemicals appearing in the entire range of cosmetics products, including nail polish, only about 4 percent have ever been submitted to safety testing.
Starting this January, the state of California will require cosmetics manufacturers to reveal whether they use chemicals that have been linked to cancer or birth defects. This Safe Cosmetics Act will enable California consumers to learn for the first time what trade secrecy laws had previously protected from scrutiny.
If we as consumers are to be able to exercise choice about the chemicals we allow into our lives, we must all have this sort of access to the identity of ingredients in ALL products, not just cosmetics.
Public pressures can have an impact on whether known toxins appear in products. In August, for example, three nail polish manufacturers -- Orly International, OPI Products, and Sally Hansen brand -- responded to consumer groups and agreed to reformulate products to remove some chemicals that individually have already been shown to cause cancer or reproductive harm,
including toluene, DBP, and formaldehyde.
Environment Committee backs the substitution of hazardous chemicals in REACH
WECF
By Daniela Rosche
The Environment Committee today voted for a host of rules which will in the future make chemicals and their us much saferthan they currently are. As part of the Parliament's second reading process of the draft REACH regulation, the Environment Committee strengthened key passages of the draft law such as:
MedPage Today
By Peggy Peck
With the echoes of the Institute of Medicine's unrestrained critique of the FDA last month still resounding, two more broadsides advocating major reform were fired today at the beleaguered agency.
The New England Journal of Medicine delivered an editorial that gave a ringing endorsement to the IOM's scathing indictment of the FDA. At the same time, a paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine paper pushed the FDA reform chorus loudly.
The Independent
By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent
Today is a bleak day for the environment, the day of the year when mankind over-exploits the world's resources - the day when we start living beyond our ecological means.
By Martha Groves
The Los Angeles Times
Malibu's coastline is considered the Riviera of California, but the celebrity-studded city's famed beaches are often among the most dangerously fouled in the state.
The Hundred Year Lie draws a wide colllection of health conscious people who ask provocative questions....and, on occasion, a hardened skeptic or two.
Just did presentations about the book before an audience of 40 people at a wellness center in suburban Portland, Oregon and a few days prior to that, in front of a group of 20 or so people at a bookstore in northern California.
Most of the questions have been about self-protection. People want to know what steps they can take to integrate into their daily lives the various strategies for the detoxification of body burden chemicals.
Last night a woman rather indignantly queried me about why I didn't co-author the book with a recognized authority, such as a toxicologist or prominent physician. Apparently, the fact that I was a journalist made her automatically cynical about the book, its message, and me.
I replied that many authorities are quoted and referenced in the book and there was no need for me to seek a 'Good Housekeeping Seal Of Approval' from authority figures by having one co-author the book.
After all, Rachel Carson wasn't a physician or a toxins expert before she wrote Silent Spring. And besides that, most of mainstream medicine is captive to the synthetics belief system that I deconstruct in the book.
Fortunately, my journalistic background didn't dissuade the physicians who run the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine from inviting me to speak before their annual Anti-Aging Congress in Las Vegas this December. Several thousand physicians from dozens of nations will be in attendance and the speech I intend to give about The Hundred Year Lie won't vary from the presentations I routinely give to ordinary people. Everyone deserves to hear the same message delivered in simple, straightforward language.