Month: June 2010

by: Kim Evans

(NaturalNews) According to a report from Florida's Department of Health there's no amount of lead in the blood that's safe. Yet last year, the FDA tested for lead in 22 brands of lipstick and found lead in every single one of them. It's estimated that the average woman inadvertently consumes four pounds of lipstick in her lifetime and even low levels of lead in the body have been linked to developmental delays, aggression, hyperactivity, irreversible brain damage, being antisocial, and having attention and learning problems. Newborns are regularly found to have lead in their umbilical cord blood, so this neurotoxin is affecting them long before their blood brain barrier has even formed. All this, and the FDA says the lead in lipstick isn't a problem.

One study found that children with higher levels of lead in their blood were more apt to be arrested later in life. This is because having lead in the body regularly makes people violent and aggressive. But who'd think that by applying lipstick each day while you're pregnant you'd be even slightly increasing the chances that your child will behave aggressively with playmates – or increasing the chances that your child will end up behind bars later in life? It sounds farfetched, but if you connect the dots, it's really not.

To be fair, lead in lipstick is far from the only source of lead that most people are exposed to. Lead is found in paints, plastics, PVC, inks, dyes, building materials, fishing tackle, and consumer products – and it also makes its way into our bodies from these sources. But, lipstick is a product that women apply directly to their lips and our lips are porous. In fact, our lips may be more porous than our skin. So, in addition to the four pounds of lipstick that most women inadvertently consume, they're likely absorbing much more. And if you're absorbing lead into your body before becoming pregnant or while pregnant, you're exposing your child to this known poison at a critical stage in his/her development.

The lipstick with the highest level of lead had 34 times more lead than the lipstick with the lowest level – and the highest lead levels came from common, well-known brands that are often purchased at drugstores. Lead is known to build in the body with time and some of it is incorporated into our bones. Because it's stored in our bones, blood lead levels have been found to be higher in pregnant women because their bodies are breaking down the calcium in their bones to provide it to their children. But at the same time, pregnant women are also releasing their stored lead.

It's interesting to watch the FDA's position on lead when it's in toys from China and how it flips dramatically when it's brought to us from U.S. companies. But the truth is: A poison is a poison, no matter who's manufacturing it.

by: David Gutierrez

(NaturalNews) Hundreds of kangaroos have been euthanized due to acute fluoride poisoning in the Australian state of Victoria, the country's Environment Protection Authority (EPA) has announced.

The poisonings appear to be occurring due to emissions of fluoride from the Alcoa aluminum smelter at Portland and the Austral Bricks factory at Craigieburn, the state's first and second biggest emitters of fluoride dust, respectively. According to Bruce Dawson of the EPA, the toxic chemical is being absorbed by nearby plants that kangaroos and other animals forage on. The animals may also be breathing in the chemical directly.

The levels of fluoride being emitted by Alcoa and Austral are fully legal under Australian law. The smelter emits 120 tons of the dust per year, while the factory emits 66 tons.

Fluoride can produce discoloration and deformity of teeth and bones, a problem known as "fluorosis" that has been well documented in cattle and humans. According to the Sunday Age, more than 200 kangaroos in Victoria have been euthanized after suffering from lameness caused by fluorosis.

The EPA was first alerted to the problem in 2005, although wildlife workers had noticed lameness in kangaroos in the area as early as 2001. According to Jenny Charles of Melbourne University, 90 percent of 130 kangaroos living near the Alcoa smelter showed signs of dental fluorosis, and 25 percent had visible lumps in their legs or arms.

Forty-eight of 49 kangaroos autopsied after being culled from the smelter area in a single day were suffering from excessive bone growth and lesions on their ankles, calves and paws.

''They were in real pain,'' said wildlife shelter operator Manfred Zabinskas, recounting his horror at seeing so many sick kangaroos.

Although the kangaroos at the brick factory site had lower levels of fluoride in their bodies, their fluorosis symptoms were even worse than those seen near the smelter.

by: David Gutierrez

(NaturalNews) Modern psychiatry went wrong when it embraced the idea that the mind should be treated with drugs, says Edward Shorter of the University of Toronto, writing in the Wall Street Journal.

Shorter studies the history of psychiatry and medicine.

Modern U.S. psychiatry has adopted a philosophy that psychological diseases arise from chemical imbalances and therefore have a very specific cluster of symptoms, he says, in spite of evidence that the difference between many so-called disorders is minimal or nonexistent. These "disorders" are then treated with expensive drugs that are no more effective than a placebo.

"Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications," he writes.

Shorter calls for U.S. psychiatry to abandon its emphasis on "psychopathology" and instead adopt the European approach, which focuses on the symptoms and needs of people as individuals. Yet the draft of the latest edition of psychiatric diagnostic "Bible," the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), shows that U.S. psychiatry has no intention of changing course.

"With DSM-V, American psychiatry is headed in exactly the opposite direction: defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs," Shorter writes.

U.S. psychiatry was not always obsessed with psychopharmacology, he notes. Its early years were marked by a psychoanalytic approach that categorized mental disorders in broad, fluid categories such as "nerves," "melancholia" or "manic-depressive illness." These categories sufficed because similar treatments would work for people suffering from any version thereof: lithium treated both mania and severe depression, for example, while the specific symptoms experienced by an anxious person had little influence on the therapies needed.

"Our psychopathological lingo today offers little improvement on these sturdy terms," Shorter said. "A patient with the same symptoms today might be told he has 'social anxiety disorder' or 'seasonal affective disorder.' … The new disorders all respond to the same drugs, so in terms of treatment, the differentiation is meaningless and of benefit mainly to pharmaceutical companies that market drugs for these niches."

In the 1950s and '60s, a new wave of psychiatrists sought to turn away from psychoanalysis — perceiving it as focusing excessively on "unconscious psychic conflicts" — and toward a more "scientific" model instead. As a result, the DSM-III introduced the vague new categories of "major depression" and "bipolar disorder," even though evidence suggests that there is no substantial difference between the two conditions. At the same time, "major depression" absorbed what Shorter calls two very different conditions, "neurotic depression" and "melancholia."

"This would be like incorporating tuberculosis and mumps into the same diagnosis, simply because they are both infectious diseases," he writes.

DSM-V only continues the trend of extending the disordered label to more and more normal people, Shorter warns: "To flip through the latest draft of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in the works for seven years now, is to see the discipline's floundering writ large."

For example, the new disorder of "psychosis risk syndrome" associates a whole new class of people with full-blown schizophrenia, under the logic, Shorter says, that "even if you aren't floridly psychotic with hallucinations and delusions, eccentric behavior can nonetheless awaken the suspicion that you might someday become psychotic." The implication, of course, is that such people should be treated with antipsychotics.

Symptoms of "psychosis risk syndrome" include such vague descriptors as "disorganized speech."

Other new "disorders" include hoarding, mixed anxiety-depression and binge eating. "Minor neurocognitive disorder" describes a reduction in cognitive function over time, such as that normally experienced by people over the age of 50, while "temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria" refers to children who suffer from outbursts of temper.

"DSM-V accelerates the trend of making variants on the spectrum of everyday behavior into diseases," Shorter says, "turning grief into depression, apprehension into anxiety, and boyishness into hyperactivity."

Texas tops Iowa, Washington and California in wind energy generation, harboring a capacity of nearly 10,000 megawatts in 2009. According to data, roughly five percent of Texas energy is now produced by wind, an impressive statistic considering that it has been achieved in less than a decade.

When Texas first deregulated electricity in 1999, it established a requirement that 2,000 megawatts of power be derived from wind by 2009. It was the first state to make such a move. Texas achieved – and exceeded – this goal by 2005, and is set to reach production of 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy by 2025.

Texas' Public Utility Commission is currently working on constructing a matrix of new transmission lines across the state that will accommodate the full capacity of the state's wind power potential. Since the grid can only handle a certain amount of wind energy in its current format, the system has to be expanded in order to handle the load.

The network is expected to be finished sometime between 2013 and 2015, and by the time it reaches completion, it will be able to handle up to 18,000 megawatts of wind power at its peak output.

But because wind energy can be fickle, literally "changing with the wind," it is difficult to rely solely on it for energy production. But Texas is forging the way in developing technologies that help to forecast the weather and control the storage of wind energy to accommodate changing weather patterns.

Interestingly, Texas is having considerable success with wind because it cut itself off from the rest of the nation during the New Deal of the 1930s. While other states were partnering to share energy and transmission lines with one another, Texas exempted itself from partnerships and remained independent.

Other energy providers in Texas are not so pleased with the success of wind power, particularly because it is heavily subsidized by federal grants that keep it artificially inexpensive. Many of them, including natural gas providers, are having a tough time competing and think that wind energy should have to survive on its own without the need for subsidies.

They also believe that wind energy providers should help pay for the cost of meeting reserve requirements when the wind is not blowing. Basically, the consensus is that the wind industry should have to abide by the same standards as everyone else in the energy sector.

The good news is that legislators are working with the industry to establish fair guidelines that will keep everyone happy and allow for the continued growth of clean, renewable energy.

More than three-and-a-half million people tune in to Dr. Oz's daily television show, and his columns are published in magazines like Esquire and Time. He has a large following that appreciate the time he gives to differing points of view about health, and the fact that he is actually a doctor himself.

But the mainstream establishment is upset because they claim that only their point of view is correct, and that Dr. Oz is deviating from "accepted" science. According to them, Dr. Oz is peddling dangerous ideas when he and his guests suggest things like investigating the safety of certain vaccines or trying alternative methods to treat disease.

Spokesmen for Dr. Oz responded to the allegations by emphasizing that the goal of Oz's work is to offer his audience a variety of information from different sources and points of view so that they can make up their own minds about an issue. His web site even prioritizes topics based on popularity, pushing unpopular ones towards the bottom and bringing popular ones to the top.

But some do not agree with this independent approach.

"Science is not a democracy where people's votes decide what is right," explained Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "Look at the data, look at science and make a decision based on science that has been published."

Oz's critics think it is irresponsible of him to warn new parents about the potential dangers of the rotavirus vaccine, which can cause a rare intestinal disorder called intussusception. They claim that because the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization all recommend the vaccine, that Oz is out of line for even questioning.

Oz has also dared to give airtime to authors, books and protocols that recommend natural, dietary change approaches to treating autism. This is a major no-no because such treatments are allegedly "unproven". Yet an article about this very subject remains at the number two slot on Oz's web site, indicating that people are very interested in hearing these ideas.

Interestingly, Dr. Oz is not necessarily pro-alternative medicine in every category. He simply allows for differing ideas to be heard by his viewers. But to the establishment, this is crossing the line and unacceptable.

The HPV vaccine is designed to prevent infection by the strains of the virus that are responsible for the majority of cervical cancer and genital warts cases.

The study recounts the case of a previously healthy teenage girl who developed a headache on the left side of her head and began to lose vision in her right eye eight days after receiving her second HPV vaccine shot. Over the course of the following 48 hours, the pain spread across her head and she began to lose sight in her left eye as well.

At this point, the girl went to the emergency room, where doctors found her vital signs to be normal with no indication of infection or systemic illness. While under supervision, her vision continued to deteriorate until she was able to identify light and movement only from the left eye, and then only inconsistently. She reported no symptoms prior to the onset of headache and vision loss and had not experienced any recent disease or trauma.

Further examination revealed demyelination in her brain and along her optic nerves. In demyelination, characteristic of multiple sclerosis and similar diseases, the protective myelin sheath around nerve cells degrades, leading to interrupted nerve signaling.

Eighteen months after her initial visit, the teenager had recovered from her weakness but her vision had not improved.

Although the HPV vaccine is widely promoted for teenage girls, its safety and effectiveness have primarily been tested in women over the age of 18. No evidence yet exists that vaccination reduces rates of genital warts or cervical cancer, or deaths from cervical cancer.

by: David Gutierrez

(NaturalNews) The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation continues to throw its support behind risky genetically modified (GM) seeds as a means for feeding hungry Africans, ignoring safer and more reliable technologies that already exist.

Not long after publicly blaming GM critics for prolonging hunger in Africa, Gates announced that his foundation is partnering with DuPont subsidiary Pioneer Hi-Bred to develop higher yield GM strains of corn. Two years ago, the Gates Foundation also partnered with Monsanto to develop drought-tolerant GM corn.

The companies claim that these GM seeds will be delivered to small farmers free of charge. Yet Monsanto says its drought-tolerant corn will not be ready until 2012, at which point it will be introduced into the commercial market. It will not be made available to poor African farmers until 2016.

Pioneer is using conventional (non-GM) breeding techniques to produce higher yielding corn by 2014. There is no projected date for when a GM version of this new strain will be developed.

"It's hard not to think that Monsanto, Dupont and their ilk are turning into the Bernie Madoff of agriculture," writes "Grist" blogger Tom Laskawy. "Convince gullible foundations along with the federal government to send billions in research dollars their way based on a promise of magically awesome results. Sometime down the road, of course."

As Laskawy notes, the Nigeria National Variety Release Committee has already developed — without the use of biotechnology — various new corn strains that are resistant to drought, pests, disease, and poor soil fertility. These conventionally bred seeds do not pose any of the well-documented risks of GM crops, such as toxic health and environmental effects; the production of "super-weeds" and contamination of organic crops through cross-pollination; increased pesticide use; or encouraging monocultures and a loss of seed diversity.

"If only Bill Gates, not to mention USDA Chief Tom Vilsack or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, would spend some of their money getting those Nigerian seeds into farmers' hands today," Laskawy writes. "Instead, they'd prefer to funnel billions of dollars to biotech giants because, well, 2016 isn't really so long to wait."

These telling transactions at the highest levels of business, politics and finance coincidence very meaningfully with the multiple accounts from inside BP, the oil platforms in the Gulf, and the related lawyers that demonstrate a willful negligence towards the conditions of the oil assets which would later explode and spill.

Thus, Alex Jones is urging activists and concerned citizens everywhere to take a proactive approach to dealing with the looming consequences of the massive oil leak that started 62 long days ago. He suggests calling on Governors and State Legislators in the Gulf Region to assert 10th Amendment rights– refute the Federal Government’s inaction, and institute measures to resolve the situation as best as can be. Victims of the crisis should used the courts to challenge roadblocks and seek retribution for negligent action on the part of both BP and the Obama Administration. The pined-over $20 billion secured ‘personally’ by Obama from BP is no assurance of justice to come, and the oil that has leaked and is still flowing amounts to less than 2-3 percent of the total reserve, so waiting only do harm.

Alex also alerts awakened people everywhere to the renewed efforts from the “Global Warming & Climate Change” Disaster camp. President Obama and certain allies are adamant about raming through Carbon Taxes and other Climate Change measures via stealth measures, and using the crisis of the BP Oil Spill to justify such fascist “green” policies– when the Obama Administration’s bewildered response (much like the Bush Administration’s delayed response at Katrina) exacerbated the scale and depth of the crisis BP may have let happen. It’s another case of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s maxim to “never let a serious crisis go to waste.” Indeed.