Pharmageddon: Electroshock, Mercury in Vaccines and the 'Bad Cholesterol' Scam - NewsGrabs 22 July 2007

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NewsGrabs

Health Supreme's News Grabs are a weekly selection of alternative health news and related comment. To follow breaking health trends - watch out for the NewsGrabs ... every weekend.

In this issue:

New Zealand shelves Joint Therapeutic Agency - New Zealand FSA Refuses To Meet Betty Martini - GM Safflower - Toxic Chemicals Building Up - Electroshock Stirs Controversy - Bush To Veto Ban On Mercury In Vaccines - Video: Bad Cholesterol Scam? - CoQ10 helps relieve statin muscle pain - Video: Cure for cancer -
FDA Big Pharma Pusher - Taiwan Targets Pharma, Hospital Collusion - Wyeth Settles Prempro Case - Truth About HPV Vaccine - Pharmageddon? - Book: Web of Debt - Movie: Zeitgeist

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New Zealand: Joint therapeutic agency plans shelved
New Zealand has shelved plans to set up a controversial joint agency with Australia. But perhaps, comments Paul Taylor, the victory for those opposing bureaucratic control of natural health products is not quite so clear cut as one might initially assume....

According to the New Zealand Herald, the NZ Government is set to look at using ministerial powers to create domestic regulations for complementary medicines. Significantly, perhaps, cabinet minister Annette King has apparently passed responsibility for the issue to Health Minister Pete Hodgson, who said yesterday that "the status quo of an unregulated market for medical devices and complementary medicines cannot remain".

New Zealand: Food Safety Authority Refuses To Meet Betty Martini over Aspartame Toxicity
Dr Martini has been refused entry at NZFSA today, even though Alison White of Safe Food Campaign has an aspartame presentation along with aspartame sufferer Abby Cormack. NZFSA have also discounted any future possible meeting with senior staff or scientists by Martini, which calls into question the purpose of NZFSA, said Soil & Health spokesperson Steffan Browning. "The carcinogenic, neurotoxic sugar alternative aspartame has been implicated in many serious illnesses and NZFSA is putting its head in the sand over this issue. Dr Martini has had access to top EU and UK officials so she should be able to get the same access in New Zealand."

GM Safflower with Human Pro-Insulin?
A field trial of genetically modified safflower, a pharm crop intended to produce a precursor to human insulin was approved by US regulators. The decision shows cavalier disregard for the safety of threatened species as well as human beings, says Prof Joe Cummins of ISIS.

Scientists May Be Missing Toxic Chemicals Building Up in Tissues of Mammals
...current tests for the accumulation of toxins focus on foods of aquatic origin, Frank A. P. C. Gobas, an environmental chemist and toxicologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia said in a telephone interview. Researchers have found there are chemicals that do not accumulate in fish, but which do so in air-breathing animals, such as mammals, Gobas reports in a paper in Friday's issue of the journal Science. Bioaccumulation testing is done in the same way in most countries, Gobas said: "We're all basically making roughly the same mistake."

Of course humans, situated as we are at the top of the mammalian food chain, must be accumulating lots of toxins, and we are only just starting to find out what the health consequences are.

Electroshock Therapy Gets a Makeover - Despite Changes, ECT Still Stirs Controversy
Although there are no national reporting requirements for the number of procedures performed, experts estimate that approximately 100,000 patients a year in the United States and several million worldwide receive ECT.

Because unilateral ECT is a shock to the nondominant, nonverbal side of the brain, controls a person's intuition, creativity and emotions, Breggin said patients may have a harder time explaining the side effects they might experience.

"So people when damaged on the nonverbal side can't tell you about it. It's a ruse," Breggin insisted. "Ultrabrief pulse unilateral is still damaging the brain, but it's less obvious. It cures by creating a delirium in which the patient is incapable of normal human emotion."

ECT is a barbaric medical practice that needs to be abolished, no matter how "refined" its current procedures.

Bush To Veto Ban On Mercury In Vaccines
President Bush is to veto a bill that would ban mercury in flu vaccines for children despite its known links to autism and other neurological disorders and despite the fact that he pledged in 2004 to support such a move when campaigning for re-election. Bush is calling for an amendment that would remove the children's safety provision from the bill... he plans to veto a bill that would remove Thimerosal because of "costs". What costs would these be? Do the costs of big pharmaceutical companies and fat government kickbacks outweigh the costs of the healthy brains of every child in America? Seemingly so.

Video: Is Bad Cholesterol a Secret Scam?
The fraud concerning bad cholesterol is finally exposed... Don't be fooled by the deceptive marketing of Big Pharma!

Another video: Cholesterol corporate killers
An English bloke describing his personal experience on cholesterol lowering drugs...

CoQ10 helps relieve statin induced muscle pain
Muscle symptoms commonly occur with statin drugs. In some cases myopathy, or damage to the muscle tissue, can actually occur. Very rarely, if myopathy occurs and statin therapy is not stopped a very dangerous condition called rhabdomyolysis can occur which can sometimes be fatal. According to an article in USA Today, Public Citizen, a consumer watchdog group, “linked 72 fatal and 772 non-fatal cases of muscle breakdown, known as rhabdomyolysis, to all six of the statins sold between October 1997 and December 2000. The study found 29 earlier deaths.”

A study in the May issue of The American Journal of Cardiology examined the use of CoQ10 supplements to improve muscle symptoms in patients being treated with statins. The controlled, double-blind study provided half of 32 patients 100 milligrams (mgs) of CoQ10 a day for a month and the other half 400 IU of vitamin E. At the end of the month the patients who were reporting statin related muscle pain that received the CoQ10 showed “decreased muscle pain by 40% and improved the interference of pain with daily life activities by 38%”.

Video: Canadians have a cure for cancer but you can't have it
Researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada found a cheap and easy to produce drug that kills almost all cancers. The drug is dichloroacetate, and since it is already used to treat metabolic disorders, we know it should be no problem to use it for other purposes. The drug also has no patent, which means it could be produced for bargain basement prices in comparison to what drug companies research and develop.

Scientists tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body where it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but left healthy cells alone. Rats plump with tumors shrank when they were fed water supplemented with DCA.

Cancer cells don't use the little power stations found in most human cells -the mitochondria. Instead, they use glycolysis, which is less effective and more wasteful. Doctors have long believed the reason for this is because the mitochondria were damaged somehow. But, it turns out the mitochondria were just dormant, and DCA starts them back up again.