Month: December 2009

(NaturalNwes) Doctors and researchers are beginning to question the outlandish claims being made by the media in response to alleged breakthroughs in cancer research. In an editorial published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI), several doctors expressed concern that news pieces fail to accurately reflect the truth concerning drugs and scientific studies.

Another report exaggerated study findings concerning alcohol and cancer risk. In response to a study that showed a two-percent increase in breast cancer risk from drinking one alcoholic beverage a day versus not drinking at all, one media source produced a headline that said, "A drink a day raises a women's risk of cancer", with no mention of the important details in the article. Perhaps a simple oversight, the coverage failed to accurately assess the truth and may have needlessly scared readers concerning alcohol consumption.

Coverage concerning pharmaceutical drugs is often the most inaccurate. Aside from the fact that many drug studies are corrupted from the start because of who is bankrolling them, negative findings are often omitted from the results while miniscule benefits are highlighted as breakthroughs. The intensity and rate of severe negative side effects from pharmaceutical drugs is routinely left out of mainstream reports concerning drug study results.

Some of the most common drugs for which exaggerated and inaccurate claims are made include antidepressant medications, statin drugs, and vaccines. Not only are they typically ineffective at performing the task for which they are prescribed, they are highly dangerous and come with significant side effects.

Since many medical journals themselves omit important study details, it is no wonder that coverage problems are occurring. Editorialists at JNCI are encouraging editors of medical journals and journalists to utilize a tip sheet they created that will assist in gathering accurate, thorough information concerning study findings. It offers assistance in knowing what questions to ask, interpreting data and statistics, and indicating the existence of study flaws and limitations in reports. They hope that improvements in the way journalists research information will lead to more accurate reporting.

(NaturalNews) A recent study published in the journal Human Reproduction has found that exposure to high levels of bisphenol A (BPA) is causing various reproductive and sexual problems in men. Funded by the federal government, the study revealed that BPA is detected in the urine of roughly 93% of the U.S. population, a staggering figure when considering the immense harm the chemical inflicts on the body.

Study findings revealed that Chinese males exposed to BPA in their workplaces were four times as likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction and seven times as likely to suffer with proper ejaculation compared to workers who worked in facilities where there was no BPA in the facility. De-Kun Li, a scientist at the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute where the study was conducted, found that sexual dysfunction began to occur only months after new workers were exposed to BPA in the workplace.

The five-year study concluded that BPA, a synthetic form of estrogen that was created in the 1930s, definitively alters the hormonal balance in the human body. Since the study analyzed BPA effects on human beings rather than laboratory animals as has typically been done, BPA apologists can no longer dismiss the serious harm BPA inflicts on human hormonal balance and proper sexual function.

Consumer Reports recently issued its own report that found BPA in cans labeled both "organic" and "BPA-free". The group tested many food products and reported its findings to consumers concerned about BPA contamination of food.

The Food and Drug Administration continues to insist BPA is safe, despite outcry from scientists and consumers who object to the flimsy studies used as the foundation for the consumer protection group's support of the toxic chemical. The American Chemistry Council, a trade association for BPA makers, provided funding for the two studies that were used, a glaring conflict of interest.

Recently, the FDA has allegedly been performing further research into the long-term effects of BPA and is expected to release study findings in response to its prior failure to perform an honest assessment of BPA safety. Federal guidelines on safe upper limits of BPA exposure are based on outdated experiments conducted back in the 1980s, even though newer studies indicate that BPA poses serious threats at much lower levels than the 30 microgram (mcg) limit currently recommended.

Producers and manufacturers of food packaging must be urged to cease the use of BPA in their products due to questionable safety, even at very low levels. The FDA must also be pressed to do the right thing and outlaw BPA from food packaging.

(NaturalNews) The Journal of Hospital Infection is set to publish three papers in its January issue that discuss new research about the antimicrobial properties of copper. Studies are showing that copper is highly resistant to bacteria and that it may be a viable biocide to use in hospitals where superbugs like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) run rampant.

In Scotland, copper-based disinfectants have been used for years to clean hospitals as have micro-fiber mops and towels which are known to attract and draw bacteria from surfaces. Though typically difficult to disinfect, the copper-based disinfectants were found to work remarkably well at disinfecting the micro-fiber cleaning tools and continue their cleansing work throughout the day.

Based on the many reports from various facilities about the antimicrobial power of copper, researchers are convinced that copper has great potential for helping to control bacteria in hospitals and other health-care facilities. They hope that further research will help formulate solutions for preventing the onset of serious hospital infections like MRSA that claim the lives of many patients. Because copper is a natural, non-toxic metal that is highly effective at resisting bacteria, its potential uses are many in the health-care industry.

Comments by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

Modern medicine, sadly, has thrown out all knowledge it didn't discover itself, and that includes these simple truths about the antibacterial properties of certain metals. To this day, the FDA continues its attacks against colloidal silver, and the EPA has even joined the fray to try to outlaw colloidal silver as a "pollutant."

The same tactics will, in time, be used to try to outlaw copper used for medicinal purposes. Why? Because natural metal-based antibacterial substances compete head-on with high-profit antibiotics and anti-bacterial soaps. The drug companies and chemical companies that manufacture such products would much prefer patients and medical staff consume soaps and pills that have to be repeatedly purchased rather than rely on solid-state technology like copper doorknobs that never need to be replaced.

Copper doorknobs, it seems, work so well they're bad for business.

(NaturalNews) When it comes to selling chemicals that claim to treat H1N1 swine flu, the pharmaceutical industry's options are limited to two: Vaccines and anti-virals. The most popular anti-viral, by far, is Tamiflu, a drug that's actually derived from a Traditional Chinese Medicine herb called star anise.

That didn't stop Tamiflu's maker, Roche, from trying to find a multi-billion-dollar market for its drug. In order to tap into that market, however, Roche needed to drum up some evidence that Tamiflu was both safe and effective.

Roche engages in science fraud
Roche claims there are ten studies providing Tamiflu is both safe and effective. According to the company, Tamiflu has all sorts of benefits, including a 61% reduction in hospital admissions by people who catch the flu and then get put on Tamiflu.

The problem with these claims is that they aren't true. They were simply invented by Roche.

A groundbreaking article recently published in the British Medical Journal accuses Roche of misleading governments and physicians over the benefits of Tamiflu. Out of the ten studies cited by Roche, it turns out, only two were ever published in science journals. And where is the original data from those two studies? Lost.

The data has disappeared. Files were discarded. The researcher of one study says he never even saw the data. Roche took care of all that, he explains.

So the Cochrane Collaboration, tasked with reviewing the data behind Tamiflu, decided to investigate. After repeated requests to Roche for the original study data, they remained stonewalled. The only complete data set they received was from an unpublished study of 1,447 adults which showed that Tamiflu was no better than placebo. Data from the studies that claimed Tamiflu was effective was apparently lost forever.

As The Atlantic reports, that's when former employees of Adis International (essentially a Big Pharma P.R. company) shocked the medical world by announcing they had been hired to ghost-write the studies for Roche.

It gets even better: These researchers were told what to write by Roche!

As one of these ghostwriters told the British Medical Journal:

"The Tamiflu accounts had a list of key messages that you had to get in. It was run by the [Roche] marketing department and you were answerable to them. In the introduction …I had to say what a big problem influenza is. I'd also have to come to the conclusion that Tamiflu was the answer."

In other words, the Roche marketing department ran the science and told researchers what conclusions to draw from the clinical trials. Researchers hired to conduct the science were controlled by the marketing puppeteers. No matter what they found in the science, they had already been directed to reach to conclusion that "Tamiflu was the answer."

Now, I don't know about you, but where I come from, we call this "science fraud." And as numerous NaturalNews investigations have revealed, this appears to be the status quo in the pharmaceutical industry.

Virtually none of the "science" conducted by drug companies can be trusted at all because it really isn't science in the first place. It's just propaganda being dressed up to look like science.

Sadly, even the CDC has been fooled by this clinical trial con. As stated by author Shannon Brownlee in The Atlantic:

"…the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention appears to be operating in some alternative universe, where valid science no longer matters to public policy. The agency's flu recommendations are in lockstep with Roche's claims that the drug can be life-saving — despite the FDA's findings and despite the lack of studies to prove such a claim. What's more, neither the CDC nor the FDA has demanded the types of scientific studies that could definitively determine whether or not the company's claims are true: that Tamiflu reduces the risk of serious complications and saves lives. Nancy Cox, who heads the CDC's flu program, told us earlier this year she opposes a placebo-controlled study (in which one half of patients would be given Tamiflu and the other half would be given placebo), because the drug's benefits are already proven."

Did you catch that last line? The CDC isn't interested in testing Tamiflu because "the drug's benefits are already proven." Except they aren't. But this is how the pharmaceutical industry operates:

Step 1) Fabricate evidence that your drug works.
Step 2) Use that fraudulent evidence to get your drug approved.
Step 3) Use fear to create consumer demand for your drug (and encourage governments to stockpile it).
Step 4) Avoid any actual scientific testing by claiming the drug has already been proven to work (and cite your original fraudulent studies to back you up).

This is the recipe the CDC is following right now with Tamiflu. It's a recipe of scientific stupidity and circular logic, of course, but that seems to be strangely common in the medical community these days.

Even the FDA says Tamiflu doesn't work
The FDA, remarkably, hasn't entirely given in to the Tamiflu hoax. They required Roche to print the following disclaimer on Tamiflu lables — a disclaimer that openly admits the drug has never been proven to work:

"Tamiflu has not been proven to have a positive impact on the potential consequences (such as hospitalizations, mortality, or economic impact) of seasonal, avian, or pandemic influenza."

Even further, an FDA spokesperson told the British Medical Journal, "The clinical trials… failed to demonstrate any significant difference in rates of hospitalization, complications, or mortality in patients receiving either Tamiflu or placebo."

It's the same message over and over again, like a broken record: Tamiflu doesn't work. And the "science" that says Tamiflu does work was all apparently fabricated from the start.

The Tamiflu stockpiling scandal
Junk science, though, is good enough for the U.S. government. Based on little more than fabricated evidence and Big Pharma propaganda, the U.S. government has spent $1.5 billion stockpiling Tamiflu. This turned out to be a great deal for Roche, but a poor investment for U.S. citizens who ended up spending huge dollars for a medicine that doesn't work.

As is stated in the Atlantic:

"Governments, public health agencies, and international bodies such as the World Health Organization, have all based their decisions to recommend and stockpile Tamiflu on studies that had seemed independent, but had in fact been funded by the company and were authored almost entirely by Roche employees or paid academic consultants."

Even if Tamiflu did work, there are Tamiflu-resistant strains of H1N1 are now circulating.

The upshot of all this is that governments around the world are flushing billions of dollars down the drain stockpiling a drug that doesn't work — a drug promoted via propaganda and scientific fraud.

This isn't the first time your government has wasted taxpayer dollars, of course (it seems to be what the U.S. government does best), but this example is especially concerning given that this was all done with the excuse that natural remedies are useless and only vaccines and Tamiflu can protect you from a viral pandemic.

But as it turns out, vaccines and Tamiflu are useless and only natural remedies really work. That's why so many informed people around the world have been stocking up on vitamin D, garlic, anti-viral tinctures and superfoods to protect themselves from a potential pandemic that most world governments remain clueless to prevent.

I find it fascinating that the governments of the world are stockpiling medicines that DON'T work, while the natural health people of the world are stockpiling natural remedies that DO work. If a real pandemic ever strikes our world, there's no question who the survivors will be (hint: it won't be the clueless chaps standing in line waiting for their Tamiflu pills…).

Which remedies really do work to boost immune function and protect the body from infectious disease? I've actually published a special report revealing my top five recommended remedies: http://www.naturalnews.com/Report_A…

In addition to the remedies mentioned in that report, I also recommend high-dose vitamin D as well as the Viral Defense product from www.PlantCures.com

I have no financial ties to any of the companies whose products are recommended here, by the way. Unlike the pharmaceutical industry, I don't operate purely for profit. My job is to get valuable information out to the People — information that can help save lives and reduce suffering. This is the job the FDA and CDC should be doing but have long since abandoned in their betrayal of the American people.

(NaturalNews) Big Pharma's pill pushers and natural remedy skeptics are always trying to drill one idea into your brain: "Natural remedies are a ripoff!" they say. "And they aren't even proven to work!"

But here's the best part: Folotyn has never been proven to save lives. That's the complaint about natural remedies from conventional medicine pushers, and it reveals the contradiction in their criticism: When natural remedies aren't proven to work, they call them "quackery." But when their $30,000-a-month medicines aren't proven to work, they don't have any problem with that. Take your medicine and stop asking questions! Who needs scientific proof when they're already so sure they're right?

Folotyn has been proven, by the way, to shrink tumors by 27%. Of course, you can accomplish the same thing with vitamin D, spirulina, green tee, medicinal mushrooms and other anti-cancer nutritional therapies. Even if you went all-out and bought a huge collection of anti-cancer supplements and started taking them aggressively, you'd be hard pressed to consume more than $2,000 worth of product in a single month. That's a $28,000 savings over Folotyn, and the best part is that all those supplements would boost your brain health, heart health, liver health, kidney health and immune health at the same time.

Or, you could just exercise outdoors, getting both vitamin D and exercise for free, saving you $30,000 a month while healing your own cancer. (It also helps to give up all the cancer-causing chemicals in your foods, personal care products, home cleaning products and medicines.)

I don't know about you, but I'd much rather save the $30,000 and just heal the cancer myself. That might be good advice for you and me, but it would spell financial disaster for the cancer industry.

A thousand dollars a day to poison yourself
Reading this news about this $1,000-a-day cancer drug makes me laugh, because lots of people still complain about the cost of a $19 book on cancer cures, or a $20 bottle of superfoods that contains anti-cancer medicine. Somehow, any amount of money seems justifiable for conventional medicine, but even the smallest investments in personal nutrition or wellbeing are met with a lot of resistance.

I remember talking with a couple at an acupuncture clinic a few years back. They were complaining about the price of the $75 acupuncture treatments for infertility. When I asked them what they had tried before, they told me they had spent something like $20,000 on an infertility clinic, with no success. Wow! And $75 is expensive?

Now, if a legitimate cancer cure really was offered by conventional medicine (and it never will be, because such a cure would destroy their business model), it might be worth $30,000 or more. Heck, a one-time cure might be worth a million dollars, but don't hold your breath on that one… no chemical cure is forthcoming.

Not from the world of conventional medicine, anyway. The only cures that exist today are from the realm of natural medicine, where cancer is routinely cured by patients who heal themselves with the help of natural cancer clinics all around the world. And at those cancer clinics, the entire treatment is usually far less than $30,000.

Of course, if you really want to poison yourself while paying somebody $1,000 a day, this high-priced chemotherapy agent might be just what you're looking for. But you can chug wheatgrass shots for less than ten bucks a day and probably get just as much tumor shrinkage — at 1/100th the cost!

Draining you bank account before you die
Conventional cancer treatments are a ripoff. They cost you a fortune and they don't even work. No one has ever been cured by cancer from chemotherapy. Not a single person… ever! There isn't a single documented case anywhere in the medical literature claiming that a person was cured of cancer from chemotherapy. So why do people still fall for the chemo scam?

The answer: Because they're desperate. They're dying, and they're willing to pay anything for hope, even if it's a false hope thrust upon them by their oncologist. It is in this context that these cancer drug companies charge $10,000 a month, $20,000 a month or even now $30,000 a month to treat you with their "breakthrough" cancer drugs.

The purpose of all this isn't to cure your cancer: It's to drain your bank account before you die, extracting every last dollar of your savings and retirement money before you expire. No one out-quacks the cancer industry in terms of exploiting the fears of dying elderly patients.

If this were done in the financial industry, it would be called a swindle. If an investment con man targeted sick, elderly people, promising some miraculous result if they just paid him $30,000 a month, he'd be arrested and locked up as a purveyor of financial fraud. But when the cancer industry perpetrates the same fraud on our nation's elderly, they get away with it! No one questions the fraud. No one realizes the industry is based on fraudulent marketing and fraudulent science combined with a huge financial con that convinces sick, elderly patients to part with their life's savings in exchange for some high-tech quackery that will never save them.

Part of the reason this con continues, I think, is because the victims of it don't live very long. Dead men don't talk, and dead cancer patients don't file complaints with the Better Business Bureau.

(NaturalNews) New findings reported by the Resuscitation Research Group at the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center reveal that the chances of surviving cardiac arrest are improved by instigating chest compressions only rather than standard cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) which includes mouth-to-mouth breathing.

In more severe cases where bystanders witnessed the collapse and in which the heart rhythm was most likely to respond to defibrillator shock treatment once paramedics arrived, as high as 32 percent of victims survive through chest pumping alone. Those who receive no CPR hold a 17-percent chance of survival while conventional CPR victims are 19-percent likely to survive.

Trends have also changed to reflect this reality among those trained in administering CPR. Over the past four years, the number of cases where CPR-trained individuals treated an individual using chest compressions only has increased from 16 percent to 77 percent.

Current estimates suggest that a mere 20 percent of people would be willing to perform conventional CPR if needed. Just 20 years ago, 60 percent of people would have been willing to do it, representing a 40-percent drop in willingness to give a stranger CPR in order to save his or her life.

The American Heart Association has been recommending since 2000 that people exercise compression-only CPR when they witness a collapse in public. Originally designed as an alternative form of CPR for people who were uncomfortable performing mouth-to-mouth on a stranger, the compression-only form of CPR was designed to stem the tide of growing unwillingness among the population to perform CPR.

Experts must now inform the public of the findings and work to shift thought away from the idea of having to perform mouth-to-mouth. Even with recommendation from experts throughout the past decade to perform compression-only CPR, the general public has been slow to adopt the idea. Many CPR certification courses still teach mouth-to-mouth CPR.

In order to help get the word out, the Sarver Heart Center decided to send fliers back in June to all Tucson residents notifying them of the new CPR method. The fliers were included with every resident's electric bill for the month.

(NaturalNews) Carbon dioxide is a threat to human life, says the EPA under the direction of the Obama Administration. With this declaration, the agency has bypassed Congress and can now begin to regulate CO2 as a toxic substance.

Lisa Jackson of the EPA explains the decision "relied on decades of sound, peer-reviewed, extensively evaluated scientific data." But thanks to the recent discovery of leaked emails from climate change scientists (ClimateGate), I'm beginning to wonder how much of that scientific data was distorted in order to achieve a particular political goal.

Green living = population control?
For the record, I've been working hard to spread awareness about reducing our carbon footprint and living sustainably. And unlike many who just talk about it, I'm knee-deep in living it in Ecuador, where I grow roughly 80% of my diet from my own garden while living increasingly "green" off the local land. But even as a green living advocate, I'm more than little concerned how Big Government might twist these climate laws to encroach upon the rights and freedoms of the People.

If CO2 is regulated, for example, it means the very gas you exhale will be considered a hazard to life on Earth. Thus, regulating CO2 could be a sneaky way to start our nation down the road of population control or even population reduction. When a person reaches the age of 65, for example, and they're about to retire and collect social security, they might then be seen as a carbon-producing financial burden, and mass euthanasia programs could begin to be seriously considered. (This isn't science fiction. Nursing home patients are already being routinely euthanized with psychiatric drugs and painkillers right now…)

Of course, most carbon comes not from the respiration of human beings, but rather from the vehicles they drive and the carbon miles underlying the products they consume. There's no question that Americans, in particular, are extremely wasteful when it comes to energy usage. They drive huge, over-powered vehicles for hours a day as a way of life, and they purchase food and other products that have burned up gallons of fossil fuels just to arrive at the local stores. The American way of life is, without debate, extremely wasteful of energy resources. (In most cities, it is also ridiculously non-sustainable…)

There's a lot that can be done to reduce energy consumption in America and therefore reduce the nation's CO2 emissions, but at what cost, exactly? What will Americans have to give up in order to meet the new emissions goals?

The senseless wasting of energy must stop
That idea frightens a lot of people, but on the other hand, as someone who now lives permanently in a developing nation, I can say with rare authenticity that living in America causes you to become addicted to the luxuries of easy energy. There's a whole lot of room for Americans to reduce their carbon footprint, but it means giving up some of the luxuries we all tend to take for granted. Driving to Blockbuster to return a rented DVD, for example, is just plain stupid. Why burn gas to push a 4,000-pound vehicle around town to return a 6-oz. piece of circular plastic? It makes no sense.

Building new homes with poor insulation makes no sense, either. And yet the building codes all across America still favor the short-term profits of home construction companies rather than long-term sustainability and energy efficiency.

For many years, I lived in Tucson, Arizona. Tucson is a desert, with roughly 330 days of sunlight a year. It's the perfect environment for a rooftop-mounted solar hot water heater that would replace all the gas and electricity used to heat hot water for local homes. But how many homes in Tucson are built with rooftop solar hot water heaters? Virtually none. It's the same story in Phoenix, Albuquerque, San Diego and even Los Angeles. KB Home and other builders keep erecting these cookie-cutter homes with no renewable energy components whatsoever. And why? Because it makes the homes a thousand bucks cheaper to sell to someone.

This kind of short-sighted energy nonsense has got to stop in America. Even without the climate change debate, it's still senseless to go on burning up the world's fossil fuels when there's so much renewable energy available for the taking if we only had the foresight to think beyond the next fiscal quarter. There's enough spare sunlight in the deserts of Arizona to power the entire nation with solar, by the way. With enough solar panels, Arizona could position itself as the Middle East of America.

I would much rather see America embrace renewable energy (and some commonsense consumption modifications) than have Big Brother wade into the fray with carbon limits and punitive fines. Government is a crude weapon for social change. It only knows how to criminalize behavior it doesn't like. It's terrible at educating consumers and businesses to change in responsible, sustainable ways. My concern with the EPA's decision today is that instead of getting a push towards a sustainable future powered with more renewable energy, we're going to get a new layer of energy tyranny that smothers the freedoms Americans are already fighting desperately to preserve.

Ask yourself this question: What has Big Government done well?

Big Government = Big failures
Think about Big Government has done for you lately: The H1N1 vaccine program was a total fiasco. The national taxation system is a paperwork nightmare. Health care is a complete joke. The Wall Street investment system is a government-sponsored casino that favors the rich. The prison system is a disaster. Public education has fallen to new lows in both funding and innovation. The war in Afghanistan drags on as a failed imperialist catastrophe. Agricultural policy, farm subsidies and the regulation of food and drugs are all completely off course, causing far more harm than good.

Now imagine Big Government running a carbon trading system — or even personal carbon footprint limits that result in you receiving heavy fines if you exceed the government-mandated personal quota. This is precisely what could happen under a new "energy tyranny" that has just been initiated by the EPA and the Obama Administration.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for reducing our carbon emissions and living more sustainably. I just don't like to be told what to do under the threat of being fined, arrested or imprisoned.

Do I have a better plan? Actually, I do. Implement my radical, money-saving health reform proposals (www.HealthRevolutionPetition.org) and use the hundreds of billions of dollars in savings to invest in solar power generation centers that blanket the nation's deserts. Using CSP technology (Concentrated Solar Power) — or even some of the more innovative stirling engine / solar concentrator inventions — we could provide power for the entire nation for generations to come. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concen…)

Or end the war in Afghanistan (which, strangely, Obama the anti-war President has now chosen to escalate even more), bring the troops home and spend the military budget building solar arrays that power America. Why fight for oil at a million dollars a year per soldier (which is what the war is costing, astonishingly) (http://rawstory.com/2009/10/us-spen…) when you can spend a fraction of that building energy sovereignty right here on American soil?

The solutions to our energy problems and our CO2 problems are found in the same place: Renewable energy technology that exists right now, today! Solar and wind really can provide all the electrical power our country needs, and with electric vehicles coming on line over the next few years, we could see a massive shift away from combustion engines and toward electric vehicles powered by solar energy delivered through the power lines. This isn't radical stuff. It's doable right now.

But if there's one thing that I've learned about Big Government, it's that innovation is the enemy of the status quo. Government rarely likes to innovate. It's more interested in controlling people, and declaring CO2 to be a harmful substance could be just the pretext our bloated, indebted and morally inept national government needs to unleash a new era of carbon controls that suffocate the American people.

Let's reduce our carbon footprint, YES! But let's do it in a way that doesn't increase the reach and power of a government that's already so large and dangerous it poses a far greater threat to the livelihood of the people than climate change ever has.

(NaturalNews) A recent analysis of canned foods revealed that, across the board, the cans contained measurable levels of bisphenol A, also known as BPA, a toxin known to cause hormonal problems, sexual dysfunction, cancer, and other abnormalities. Even among products labeled "BPA-free", tests revealed levels of BPA significant enough to cause problems.

For years, the FDA has denied that BPA is dangerous, basing its non-concern upon flawed studies and incomplete evidence. When compelled to reinvestigate the issue, the FDA began reviewing the evidence once again. When question about the current report, an FDA spokesman had no response other than that the review was almost complete and that a "decision [about] how to proceed" would be made soon.

Manufacturers often use BPA in their food linings because it works as an effective food preservative. Yet the levels found in many of the consumer products tested were high enough to cause serious abnormalities in people, especially children.

Several supposed BPA-free items, including tuna cans that did not have the typical epoxy lining that is the primary source of BPA leeching, is concerning. It is unclear how the BPA made its way into these particular cans. Dr. Urvashi Rangan, director of technical policy at Consumers Union, believes it could have come from the factory where the product was made, from seawater, or from the fish itself. The company's owner has indicated that it will work to find the source and fix the problem.

Public outcry over the dangers of BPA has led to many manufacturers removing the additive from their product containers. Several major retailers have removed all items containing BPA from their shelves as well as six baby bottle manufacturers who eliminated the additive from their bottle ingredients last March. The city of Chicago and Suffolk County, New York, have also made provisions banning all baby bottles and other baby beverage containers made with BPA.

Thanks to consumer advocacy groups who continue to sound the alarm about the dangers of BPA, it is slowly disappearing from product labels. Hopefully, as continued investigation and exposure holds manufacturers' feet to the fire, BPA will be eliminated from "BPA-free" items as well.

(NaturalNews) The same infectious fungus that caused the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s is now spreading across the Northeastern United States, causing alarm among farmers and raising the specter of another spike in food prices.

McGrath referred to the fungus, known as late blight, as "worse than the Bubonic Plague for plants."

Although not harmful to humans, late blight spreads easily between infected plants, whether in fields or on the shelves of a garden supply store. Although fungicides can be used to control it if applied before symptoms appear, it is considered far more reliable to remove and destroy any infected plant as quickly and completely as possible.

Late blight appears in the Northeast with some regularity, but this year the outbreak has been fueled by rainy weather and the proliferation of big-box stores with massive garden sections. The fungus has already been identified in Alabama, Ohio, Vermont, West Virginia and every East Coast state with the exception of Georgia.

In response to the outbreak, Home Depot, Kmart, Lowe's and Wal-Mart have pulled all tomato plants from their New England and New York stores. It is still unclear whether the fungus has gained a significant foothold in agricultural fields, but growers are worried. Because containing a late blight outbreak is expensive, widespread contamination could lead to a significant jump in food prices.

Agricultural investigators are still trying to determine where the outbreak started. They are urging gardeners to keep alert for any signs of late blight in their plants. The first symptoms are usually brown spots on the stems, followed by the development of nickel-sized brown or olive-green spots on the tops of leaves and a fuzzy white growth on leaf bottoms.