by S. L. Baker

(NaturalNews) Unemployment is high and retirement accounts have virtually disappeared for many folks in the wake of the current recession. Housing prices have plummeted, too. So it comes as no surprise that data just released by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts shows the total number of U.S. bankruptcies filed during the first three months of 2009 increased 34.5 percent over the same period in 2008. But what is surprising is a new Harvard study published in the August 2009 issue of The American Journal of Medicine which reveals financial woes starting hitting Americans even before the officially recognized economic downturn — and the main culprit was illness and medical bills.

The results of the first-ever national random-sample survey of bankruptcy filers, conducted by researchers at Cambridge Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Harvard Law School and Ohio University, show that in 2007, 60% of all bankruptcies in the United States were driven by sickness and related medical bills. Moreover, the share of bankruptcies attributable to medical woes over the past few years has been on the upswing.

The investigators surveyed a random national sample of 2,314 bankruptcy filers in 2007, studied their court records and then interviewed 1,032 of these financially strapped people. Bankruptcies were designated as "medical" based on the stated reasons a person had for filing, income loss due to sickness and the amount of their medical bills they owed. By relying on identical definitions in both 2001 and 2007, the researchers concluded that the share of bankruptcies caused by medical problems had soared by almost 50 percent during those years. In fact, the chances a bankruptcy had a medical cause were 2.38 fold higher in 2007 than in 2001.

The results of the research revealed that a variety of circumstances pushed many middle-class Americans over the edge into bankruptcy, even when they had health insurance. For example, 92 percent of the medically bankrupt ended up in that financial state due to high medical bills. And countless families who had health insurance were under-insured, leaving them responsible for thousands of dollars in medical bills they couldn't pay. In fact, out-of-pocket medical charges averaged just under $18,000 for those who had private insurance and yet went bankrupt due to medical expenses. Uninsured patients were faced with $26,971 in out-of-pocket expenses.

The study's authors point out that almost all insurance is linked to employment, so a medical illness can trigger both loss of a job and loss of health insurance coverage. Nationally, about a fourth of all companies cancel insurance coverage immediately when an employee suffers a disabling illness, and another 25 percent cancel insurance within a year. Of course, losing a job due to the recession also usually means losing health insurance coverage.

"The US health care financing system is broken, and not only for the poor and uninsured. Middle class families frequently collapse under the strain of a health care system that treats physical wounds, but often inflicts fiscal ones," researcher David U.Himmelstein, M.D., wrote in The American Journal of Medicine article.

Despite the gloom and doom financial news related to medical illness, there is reason to take heart. Bottom line: a change of attitude and a healthier lifestyle can lead to less disease and fewer medical bills — or no medical bills at all. In fact, an editorial previously published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that unhealthy eating habits and sedentary lifestyles represent the most common source of unnecessary death and disease among Americans. Bottom line: most disease is preventable by taking charge of the way you live and how you treat your own body, including what nutrients you put into it.

Unfortunately, according to another study published in the June edition of The American Journal of Medicine, Americans are not following a healthy lifestyle, despite the fact it can save their money and their life. What's more, the research reveals that there's actually a decline in healthy living, especially among people of middle age.

Investigators from the Department of Family Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston compared the results of two large studies of Americans conducted between the years of 1988 and 1994 and between 2001 and 2006. They found that during the intervening years, there was a substantial increase in the percentage of adults between the ages of 40 and 74 who decreased their physical activity level and also gained weight. The research subjects were drinking far more alcohol and eating fewer fruits and vegetables, too, as the years rolled by.

Overall, the number of people practicing healthy lifestyle habits had slipped from 15 percent to only eight percent. And the researchers also found that even having cardiovascular disease, diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol (or risk factors for those conditions) didn't spur people to make healthy lifestyle choices.

"The potential public health benefits from promoting a healthier lifestyle at all ages, and especially ages 40 and 74 years, are substantial. Regular physical activity and a prudent diet can reduce the risk of premature death and disability from a variety of conditions including coronary heart disease, and are strongly related to the incidence of obesity," study author Dana E. King, MD, MS, stated in the article. "In the US, medical costs due to physical inactivity and its consequences are estimated at $76 billion in 2000 dollars. Research indicates that individuals are capable of adopting healthy habits in middle age, and making an impact on cardiovascular risk."

For those who want to make the effort, pursuing a healthy, natural, active lifestyle can reduce the risk of virtually all serious disease. As reported in Natural News(http://www.naturalnews.com/024315_h…), for instance, a previous Harvard study found that following a healthy lifestyle lowers the risk of coronary heart disease by 80 percent and the risk of diabetes by 90 percent. It may also prevent more than half of ischemic strokes.

by Barbara Minton

(NaturalNews) Knowing about the health benefits of raw milk is not enough. In his book The Devil in the Milk, Dr. Kevin Woodford says we have one more lesson to learn: there is a link between the type of milk we drink and a range of serious illnesses, including heart disease, Type 1 diabetes, autism and schizophrenia. Epidemiological evidence from ten countries has demonstrated a strong association between high intake of milk from A1 positive cows and high incidence of these diseases, and has correlated very closely with World Health Organization data on the level of deaths from mental disorders.

Dr. Woodford, Professor of Farm Management and Agribusiness at Lincoln University in New Zealand, points out that milk consists of three parts: fat or cream, whey, and milk solids. The devil resides in the milk solids, composed of many different proteins along with lactose and other sugars. One of these proteins is beta casein.

All proteins are long chains of amino acids that have many branches coming off of the main chain. Beta casein is a chain with 229 amino acids and proline at number 67, at least in old fashioned cows, the ones that are A2. These include Guernseys, Jerseys, Asian and African cows. About five thousand years ago, a mutation occurred in this proline amino acid, converting it to histidine. Cows that have this mutated beta casein are the A1 cows. These are more recent breeds in the span of history, like Holsteins and Friesians.

The side chain coming off this histidine is a protein fragment known as beta-casomorphin-7 (BCM 7). The negative health effects of this fragment can be devastating because it is a powerful opiate or narcotic as well as an oxidant. Dr. Thomas Cowan has thought all along that something was "not quite right" on the milk issue. Writing for the Bovine, he says that many of his patients, in spite of trying to eat only the proper dairy products still have illnesses and are unable to tolerate milk. He has suspected "the story with milk wasn't quite finished."

In his attempt to finish the milk story, Woodford brings together a pile of evidence from more than 100 scientific papers examining population studies and research with both animals and humans. He explains the science underpinning the A1/A2 hypothesis and shows that BCM 7 is associated with milk intolerance and a range of auto-immune diseases including Type 1 diabetes, the diabetes that usually occurs during childhood or young adulthood. In people with Type 1 diabetes, the body destroys its own insulin-producing cells.

There is an important difference between the human beta casein protein and the beta-casein produced by A1 cows. All human beta-casein is more like the A2 type, meaning that human milk releases much less BCM 7 than is released in A1 milk. When New Zealand researchers tested human milk, they found less than 1% of the BCM 7 than was released from the same amount of A1 milk. This means that the narcotic effect from human milk fed to babies is less than one thousandth of that found in A1 milk.

BCM7 has been shown to cause neurological impairment in animals and people, particularly autistic and schizophrenic changes. It also interferes with the immune response. Animals injected with BCM 7 can be provoked into Type 1 diabetes. BCM 7 is pro-inflammatory to blood vessels, and selectively binds to epithelial cells in mucus membranes such as the nose and throat, where it can stimulate excessive mucus secretion.

When BCM 7 is released into the gut, it should be difficult for it to get through the gut wall and into the bloodstream because it is a fairly large molecule. But in people with leaky gut syndrome, it is able to pass easily through the gut wall and enter the bloodstream. Dr. Woodford states that BCM 7 can be detected in urine. According to him there is strong evidence that people with stomach ulcers or untreated celiac disease also absorb BCM 7 in this manner. Babies are likely to absorb it this way too, because their gut walls are able to pass large molecules easily into the blood stream. That is how they are able to absorb their mother's colostrum.

This susceptibility of babies to the effects BCM 7 makes infant milk formula products from A1 cows a very poor choice. Opioids like BCM 7 slow the rate of passage through the digestive tract which explains to Dr. Woodford why babies fed on cows milk formula products rather than human milk are susceptible to constipation and can suffer anal fissures. He suggests it is possible that this slower passage of A1 milk through the digestive system may increase lactose intolerance.

He views early and prolonged exposure to BCM 7 in infant formulas as a significant factor in the rising rates of autism and Asperger's syndrome along with the rest of the range of disease states that can result, and he is pushing for research on the topic. Until this is done, he suggests that mothers breastfeed their babies for as long as possible and insist on breast milk substitutes made with A2 milk.

The reasons for the mutation that produces BCM 7 is unknown, occurring many thousands of years ago. The A1 beta casein gene spread rapidly in many countries in the western world. Speculation has it that the spread of A1 cows resulted from their calves drinking A1 milk and being exposed to the opiate BCM 7, making them more docile than the older breeds. As a result, basically all American dairy cows have mutated beta-casein and are predominantly A1.

It is not known whether BCM 7 is likely to be a problem in cheese, ice-cream, yogurt, or other milk products. The French did not accept the A1 breeds of cows, and the delicious cheeses of France are made with A2 milk. In the U.S. there is only one A2 dairy so far, located in Firth Nebraska.

Absorption of BCM 7 is much less in people with healthy digestive tracts, suggesting that maintaining digestive health should be a priority in anyone drinking milk in countries with predominately A1 cows. One of the best ways to achieve this is with daily use of probiotics.

What can we do about the fact that we have the wrong cows? BCM 7 is not found in goat's or sheep's milk which are A2, so drinking their milk instead of milk from cows is an option. Changing over a dairy herd of cows from A1 to A2 is simple and cheap, and it can be accomplished in less than ten years. It requires only that farmers inseminate their cows, naturally or artificially, with semen from A2A2 bulls. In New Zealand, farmers have already started converting their herds in anticipation of rising consumer demand for A2 milk. An added bonus for them is some recently published research revealing that on average New Zealand A2 cows produce more milk than A1 cows. Dairy farmers in the U.S. may be well advised to begin the switch to A2 as soon as possible to be able to market A2 milk products as consumer demand rises in the face of these findings.

This rosy scenario assumes no politics get in the way of an easy changeover, which could be a big assumption. Since the issue of the link between A1 milk and Type 1 diabetes and heart disease was initially raised in early 2003, the New Zealand Food Standards Authority has demonstrated clearly that in the battle between the interests of the dairy industry and those of public health, the industry always wins. As usual, scientific evidence can be molded and withheld by those with vested interests, and consumer choices can be manipulated by corporate interests.

by Mike Adams

(NaturalNews) With a military rifle in one hand and a bottle of prescription medications in the other, the new "Mr. America" is over-fed, under-nourished, over-medicated, over-spent and "over there" (waging war in the Middle East). And soon, with Obama's new disease care reform proposals, America will find itself destitute and diseased, unable to climb out of the medication dependence pit it has dug for itself.

To understand why this is true from a financial point of view, take a look at these numbers:

If you read the actual federal budget for 2009, it's an astonishing $3.1 trillion. The size of the number itself is mind-boggling, but it's even more disturbing when you realize just how much of the federal budget is spent on these three things:

WAR
DISEASE
DEBT

In fact, let me ask you this question right now: What percentage of the federal budget do you think is spent on these three things? War, Disease and Debt.

Is it 10 percent? Twenty-five percent? Fifty percent?

Keep going…

Of course, if you actually work in Washington, you won't even describe these as "War, Disease and Debt." Instead, you call them:

DEFENSE
HEALTH
THE ECONOMY

It all sounds much nicer when phrased that way. But these terms are intentionally deceptive. We're not really "defending" our way into Iraq, Afghanistan and seventy-five other countries where we have a military presence. Spending on "health care" doesn't have anything to do with health (it's all about disease). And people who say spending more debt money to "help the economy" are mathematical retards. You can't get yourself out of debt by spending more money (even though V.P. Joe Biden insists you can…).

So are you ready for the actual number?

It's an eye-opener. The actual percentage of the U.S. federal budget spent on WAR, DISEASE and DEBT is 87 percent.

Here's how it breaks down according to publicly-available numbers: (Source = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United… )

Total U.S. Federal Budget for 2009: $3.1 trillion

1) WAR: Department of Defense ($515.4 billion) + War on Terror ($145.2 billion) + Dept. of Veterans Affairs ($44.8 billion) + Dept. of Homeland Security ($37.6 billion) = $743 billion

2) DISEASE: Medicare ($408 billion) + Medicaid ($224 billion) + Dept. of Health and Human Services ($70 billion) = $702 billion

3) DEBT: Debt to the people: Social Security ($644 billion), Social Security Administration ($8.4 billion), Welfare ($360 billion) and Interest on National Debt ($260 billion) = $1,272 billion

(Note: This does not even include the financial cost of the War on Iraq or the War in Afghanistan, as those are budgeted separately as appropriations and are not included in the Dept. of Defense budget. So the actual numbers are far worse than what's shown here…)

Combined spending on War, Disease and Debt: $2,717 billion ($2.7 trillion), which is 87% of the total expenditures by the federal government ($3.1 trillion).

How do you dig yourself out of this hole?

For every tax dollar you send to Washington (and it's about to become a whole lot more of 'em), 87 cents gets spent on war, disease and debt. That leaves just 13 cents on the dollar for roads, schools, parks, technology, science, the environment, adult education and other programs.

If you spent 87% of your own household income on war, disease and debt, leaving only 13 cents on the dollar for food, clothing, transportation and entertainment, how long would your own finances stay solvent? Not very long…

It doesn't take a financial genius to realize that the United States of America has dug itself into a financial trench so deep and so infected with really bad planning that there is virtually no way it can get out. As a result, the American people are increasingly bankrupt, diseased and homeless. (I predict a new wave of tent cities springing up across the American landscape as increasing numbers of Americans lose their jobs and their homes.)

"Mr. America" is burned out, stressed out, tapped out and about to be rubbed out.

It is only a matter of time before economic reality sets in and the American people find their currency is phased out, too.

An economic prison to keep you trapped and penniless

It's easy to see this from afar (from South America, in my case, where I live full time): America is living in a fantasy world, where the laws of economics have been (temporarily) suspended. There's no such thing as too much spending. No such thing as too many prescription drugs or vaccines. No such thing as too much war. It's all justifiable by the relentless fools in Washington who claim, "We saved the economy!"

Because, you see, we are past the point of dealing with reality in America. There will be no saving the nation from financial demise. There will be no meaningful health care reform. There will be no real changes that preserve your freedom or your bank account. Instead, one hundred percent of the efforts are now focused on preserving the illusions that keep America artificially propped up like a morbid human puppet.

The new Congressional bills, the financial bailouts, the empty talk of health care reform — these are all designed to distract you from the sobering, unavoidable and simple truth: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind. [Recognize it?]

That prison keeps you working 60-hour weeks. It keeps you paying your taxes. It keeps you medicated and indoctrinated like a slobbering idiot who buys brand-name products because the logos seem somehow emotionally familiar (TV programming). It keeps you slaving away your precious hours, shoveling the fruits of your labor into a mindless, heartless machine of Big Government that has already mortgaged your assets, sacrificed your health and stolen your future.

And there's always a seductive motivation beckoning you to sacrifice more. If you only work another job, you'll be able to afford that giant TV screen you've always wanted. Here's a credit card to make it easy, or you can just sign over your home. Here, take this vaccine shot for your own protection. Vote for me, and I'll give you free health care. I'll stabilize the economy by spending future generations into yet more debt. Don't worry about paying anything back… we'll let the next President deal with that.

The fraud continues, year after year, with new faces and names at the helm, but the same old failed thinking at the core. You cannot spend your way to prosperity, you must SAVE your way there. You cannot make a population healthy by drugging more people. You cannot make peace by waging war. And you cannot make a nation great by abandoning the real needs of the people and selling out to corporations and their lobbyists.

Sadly, while Mr. America was once a healthy, thriving, hard-working individual, he's now a jobless, indebted medicated heart patient with a caffeine habit and an upside-down mortgage on the home he's about to lose. And the worst part is that the lawmakers in Washington are doing everything in their power to make sure Mr. America stays that way.

by Mike Stobbe

ATLANTA – U.S. health officials say swine flu could strike up to 40 percent of Americans over the next two years and as many as several hundred thousand could die if a vaccine campaign and other measures aren't successful.

Those estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mean about twice the number of people who usually get sick in a normal flu season would be struck by swine flu. Officials said those projections would drop if a new vaccine is ready and widely available, as U.S. officials expect.

The U.S. may have as many as 160 million doses of swine flu vaccine available sometime in October, and U.S. tests of the new vaccine are to start shortly, federal officials said this week.

The infection estimates are based on a flu pandemic from 1957, which killed nearly 70,000 in the United States but was not as severe as the infamous Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19. But influenza is notoriously hard to predict. The number of deaths and illnesses would drop if the pandemic peters out or if efforts to slow its spread are successful, said CDC spokesman Tom Skinner.

A CDC official said the agency came up with the estimate last month, but it was first disclosed in an interview with The Associated Press.

"Hopefully, mitigation efforts will have a big impact on future cases," Skinner said.

In a normal flu season, about 36,000 people die from flu and its complications, according to American Medical Association estimates. Because so many more people are expected to catch the new flu, the number of deaths over two years could range from 90,000 to several hundred thousand, the CDC calculated. Again, that is if a new vaccine and other efforts fail.

The World Health Organization says as many as 2 billion people could become infected over the next two years — nearly one-third of the world population. The estimates look at potential impacts over a two-year period because past flu pandemics have occurred in waves over more than one year.

WHO officials believe the world is in the early phase of the new pandemic.

First identified in April, swine flu has likely infected more than 1 million Americans, the CDC believes, with many of those suffering mild cases never reported. There have been 302 deaths and nearly 44,000 reported cases, according to numbers released Friday morning.

Because the swine flu virus is new, most people haven't developed an immunity against it. So far, most of those who have died from it in the United States have had other health problems, such as asthma.

The virus has caused an unusual number of serious illnesses in teens and young adults; seasonal flu usually is toughest on the elderly and very young children.

New swine flu illness have erupted through the summer, which is also unusual, though cases were less widespread this month. Officials fear an explosion of cases in the fall, when children return to school and the weather turns cold, making the virus easier to spread.

by Jane Burgermeister

The WHO has refused to release the Minutes of a key meeting of an advisory vaccine group – packed with executives from Baxter, Novartis and Sanofi – that recommended compulsory vaccinations in the USA, Europe and other countries against the artificial H1N1 “swine flu” virus this autumn.

by Dr. Rebecca Carley
 
Very few people realize that the worst epidemic ever to hit America, the Spanish Influenza of 1918 was the after effect of the massive nation-wide vaccine campaign. The doctors told the people that the disease was caused by germs. Viruses were not known at that time or they would have been blamed.  Germs, bacteria and viruses, along with bacilli and a few other invisible organisms are the scapegoats, which the doctors like to blame for the things they do not understand. If the doctor makes a wrong diagnosis and treatment, and kills the patient, he can always blame it on the germs, and say the patient didn’t get an early diagnosis and come to him in time.

If we check back in history to that 1918 flu period, we will see that it suddenly struck just after the end of World War I when our soldiers were returning home from overseas.. That was the first war in which all the known vaccines were forced on all the servicemen. This mish-mash of poison drugs and putrid protein of which the vaccines were composed, caused such widespread disease and death among the soldiers that it was the common talk of the day, that more of our men were being killed by medical shots than by enemy shots from guns. Thousands were invalided home or to military hospitals, as hopeless wrecks, before they ever saw a day of battle. The death and disease rate among the vaccinated soldiers was four times higher than among the unvaccinated civilians. But this did not stop the vaccine promoters. Vaccine has always been big business, and so it was continued doggedly.

It was a shorter war than the vaccine-makers had planned on, only about a year for us, so the vaccine promoters had a lot of unused, spoiling vaccines left over which they wanted to sell at a good profit. So they did what they usually do, they called a meeting behind closed doors, and plotted the whole sordid program, a nationwide (worldwide) vaccination drive using all their vaccines, and telling the people that the soldiers were coming home with many dread diseases contracted in foreign countries and that it was the patriotic duty of every man, woman and child to get “protected” by rushing down to the vaccination centers and having all the shots.
 
Most people believe their doctors and government officials, and do what they say. The result was, that almost the entire population submitted to the shots without question, and it was only a matter of hours until people began dropping dead in agony, while many others collapsed with a disease of such virulence that no one had ever seen anything like it before. They had all the characteristics of the diseases they had been vaccinated against, the high fever, chills, pain, cramps, diarrhea, etc. of typhoid, and the pneumonia like lung and throat congestion of diphtheria and the vomiting, headache, weakness and misery of hepatitis from the jungle fever shots, and the outbreak of sores on the skin from the smallpox shots, along with paralysis from all the shots, etc.
 
The doctors were baffled, and claimed they didn’t know what caused the strange and deadly disease, and they certainly had no cure. They should have known the underlying cause was the vaccinations, because the same thing happened to the soldiers after they had their shots at camp. The typhoid fever shots caused a worse form of the disease, which they called para-typhoid. Then they tried to suppress the symptoms of that one with a stronger vaccine, which caused a still more serious disease, which killed and disabled a great many men. The combination of all the poison vaccines fermenting together in the body, caused such violent reactions that they could not cope with the situation. Disaster ran rampant in the camps. Some of the military hospitals were filled with nothing but paralyzed soldiers, and they were called war casualties, even before they left American soil. I talked to some of the survivors of that vaccine onslaught when they returned home after the war, and they told of the horrors, not of the war itself, and battles, but of the sickness at camp.
 
The doctors didn’t want this massive vaccine disease to reflect on them, so they, agreed among themselves to call it Spanish Influenza. Spain was a far away place and some of the soldiers had been there, so the idea of calling it Spanish Influenza seemed to be a good way to lay the blame on someone else. The Spanish resented having us name the world scourge on them. They knew the flu didn’t originate in their country.
20,000,000 died of that flu epidemic, worldwide, and it seemed to be almost universal or as far away as the vaccinations reached. Greece and a few other countries, which did not accept the vaccines, were the only ones that were not hit by the flu. Doesn’t that prove something?
 
At home (in the U.S.) the situation was the same; the only ones who escaped the influenza were those who had refused the vaccinations. My family and 1 were among the few who persisted in refusing the high pressure sales propaganda, and none of us had the flu not even a sniffle, in spite of the fact that it was all around us, and in the bitter cold of winter.

Everyone seemed to have it. The whole town was down sick and dying. The hospitals were closed because the doctors and nurses were down with the flu.. Everything was closed, schools, businesses, post office everything. No one was on the streets. It was like a ghost town. There were no doctors to care for the sick, so my parents went from house to house doing what they could to help the stricken in any way they could. They spent all day and part of the night for weeks, in the sick rooms, and came home only to eat and sleep. If germs or viruses, bacteria, or any other little organisms were the cause of that disease, they had plenty of opportunity to latch onto my parents and “lay them low” with the disease that had prostrated the world.  But germs were not the cause of that or any other disease, so they didn’t “catch” it. I have talked to a few other people since that time, who said they escaped the 1918 flu, so I asked if they had the shots, and in every case, they said they had never believed in shots and had never had any of them. Common sense tells us that all those toxic vaccines all mixed up together in people, could not help but cause extreme body-poisoning and poisoning of some kind or another is usually the cause of disease.
 
Whenever a person coughs or sneezes, most people cringe, thinking that the germs are being spread around in the air and will attack people. There is no need to fear those germs any more, because that is not the way colds are developed. Germs can’t live apart from the cells (host) and can’t do harm anyway, even if they wanted to. They have no teeth to bite anyone, no poison pouches like snakes, mosquitoes or bees, and do not multiply, except in decomposed substances, so they are helpless to harm. As stated before, their purpose is useful, not destructive.

The 1918 flu was the most devastating disease we ever had, and it brought forth all the medical bag of tricks to quell it, but those added drugs, all of which are poisons, only intensified the over-poisoned condition of the people, so the treatments actually killed more than the vaccines did.
 
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the
people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”  — Thomas
Jefferson