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Health Supreme's NewsGrabs - a selection of contrary and underprivileged news in health and a wide range of (mostly) related sectors. Find what trends you may have missed - watch out for the weekly News Grabs.
Here is this week's selection for you.
Video: Open source medicine: Artesunate-mefloquine brings new hope in fight against malaria
In what appears to be one of the first cases of where a cutting edge important pharmaceutical product is being "open-sourced", the Brazilian government and the non-profit Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, or DNDI announced that their new combination malaria drug will not be patented, so as to make it more widely accessible than previous anti-malarial treatments.
In contrast... "the US government has not shown itself to be particularly open to alternatives, and certainly its primary role in forums like the World Trade Organization has been to just go to bat for the brand name, multinational pharmaceutical industry and to insist on the sacrosanct status of the current intellectual property regime."
Mercury Fillings Banned In Norway
Announcing the ban, Norway’s Minister of Environment and Development Erik Solheim said: “Mercury is among the most dangerous environmental toxins. Satisfactory alternatives to mercury in products are available, and it is therefore fitting to introduce a ban.”
Norway is concerned that mercury in our teeth and in the environment is extremely dangerous, and can harm the development of children.
United Methodist Church Passes Resolution Against Mercury In Medicine
The Rev. Lisa K. Sykes, President of CoMeD, Inc, mother of a mercury-toxic child and a United Methodist clergywoman who has helped to shepherd this activist movement within The United Methodist Church, declared:
"This is the start of a Second Great Temperance Movement. More than a hundred years ago, our church fought widespread alcohol intoxication. With this resolution, we begin to fight widespread and, until now, unrecognized mercury intoxication from unsafe mercury-containing medicines."
Video: About the Fluoridation of Your Drinking Water
In this video, award-winning journalist Christopher Bryson examines one of the great secret narratives of the industrial era; how a grim workplace poison and the most damaging environmental pollutant of the cold war was added to our drinking water and toothpaste.
Europe may ban 120 food nutrients
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has rejected dossiers backing 120 nutrient sources for ongoing use within the European Union because they were deemed "not to be adequate".
While this may lead to the removal of nutrients including forms of boron, selenium, magnesium and calcium from supplements and foods, industry sources said they were unconcerned by EFSA's rulings.
The more important question in this regard is the eventual fate of 180 or so dossiers that are still to be decided, the ones for nutrients used more frequently in supplements. What will happen when - before the end of next year - EFSA has to make a decision on those?
Also - what will happen with "upper safe levels" of nutrients in supplements, which must be decided within the same time frame, if not earlier.
Actually, the food supplements directive was an act of cowardice. The legislators avoided to touch the hot issues (formulation and dosage) and diluted them in time. But now the chickens will come home to roost.
Those decisions must be made and it will be interesting to see what consumers say when they can't find their supplements in their local health shop any more. I predict angry reaction ... but then, I have tried to tell that to the regulators before. No one apparently listened.
Former Soviet Dissident Warns For EU Dictatorship
Vladimir Bukovksy, the 63-year old former Soviet dissident, fears that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union. In a speech he delivered in Brussels last week Mr Bukovsky called the EU a “monster” that must be destroyed, the sooner the better, before it develops into a fullfledged totalitarian state.
Raw Milk Criminalized: Mennonite Farmer Arrested
Cumberland County, Pennsylvania - Mark Nolt, a Wenger Mennonite (Horse and Buggy Mennonite) dairyman, threatened for months with arrest for selling raw milk without a permit was removed from his property by state troopers.
Medical marijuana user who was denied liver transplant dies
A man who was denied a liver transplant largely because he used marijuana with medical approval to ease the symptoms of hepatitis C has died.
His death came a week after a doctor told him a University of Washington Medical Center committee had again denied him a spot on the liver transplant list. The team had previously told him it would not consider placing him on the list until he completed a 60-day drug-treatment class.
Aspartame and Other Health Frauds
It was many years ago that others - wiser than I - urged me to avoid aspartame-sweetened drinks. My brother's wife Norlene was especially adamant that it was a poison that would not do my body one bit of good. I must confess that at the time I thought that any sweetener, artificial or not, would be better than sugar. And aspartame, composed of two amino acids, seemed innocent enough. How wrong I was...
NHF opposes Aspartame, Aluminum at Beijing Codex meeting
Representing consumers at the recent meeting of a Codex Alimentarius Food Additives Committee meeting in Beijing, the National Health Federation opposed the inclusion of Aspartame and similar artificial sweeteners in an upcoming Codex standard, as well as aluminum based 'food additives'. Predictable, the assembled health bureaucrats and food/chemical industry representatives did what they could to go on ... business as usual.
Nutrasweet - the History of this Toxic Chemical and Its Promotion
G.D. Searle has spent the last 40 years aggressively and recklessly promoting their accidental discovery with total disregard to the evidence they have gathered that show how dangerous and toxic this chemical is to human beings.
India: Aspartame - The silent killer
“Aspartame is extremely poisonous, and here is why: one of the toxic ingredients of it is wood alcohol. When the temperature of Aspartame exceeds 86 degrees Fahrenheit, the wood alcohol in it is converted to Formaldehyde, and then to formic acid, which in turn causes folicacidosis.
Curtain Fall on the Aspartame Follies
On February 5, 2008, the New York Times reported in an article entitled “Symptoms: Metabolic Syndrome Is Tied to Diet Soda” that, “Researchers have found a correlation between drinking diet soda and metabolic syndrome – the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels and elevated blood pressure.”
Mass Protests against GM Crops in India
As India edges closer to what is probably the last year of field trials for Bt Brinjal (eggplant, aubergine) before commercial approval may be granted, large scale resistance has been building up all over the country.
Bt Brinjal, if allowed in India, would be the first food crop in the world with the Bt gene inserted into it that is to be directly consumed by human beings. Indians feel that they are about to be made guinea pigs by USAID, and by Monsanto and Cornell University that have developed this crop.
Agrobacterium & Morgellons Disease, A GM Connection?
Preliminary findings suggest a link between Morgellons Disease and Agrobacterium, a soil bacterium extensively manipulated and used in making GM crops; has genetic engineering created a new epidemic?
US Patent Office rejects company's claim for bean commonly grown by Latin American farmers
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today rejected all of the patent claims for a common yellow bean that has been a familiar staple in Latin American diets for more than a century.
“We are happy that the patent office has reached a final decision in this case but remain concerned that the ex partes patent reexamination procedure meant that these patent claims remained in force for such a long time,” said Geoffrey Hawtin, Director General of CIAT, which has been fighting the patent since 2001. “For several years now, farmers in Mexico, the USA and elsewhere have unnecessarily endured legal threats and intimidation for simply planting, selling or exporting a bean that they have been growing for generations.”
Silver nano-particles can rein in replication of hepatitis B virus
Silver nano-particles with an average diameter of 5 to 50 nanometers can rein in the in vitro replication of hepatitis B viruses (HBV) through direct interaction with its DNA and viral particles, researchers said Monday.
"The finding provides a new direction for developing new anti- HBV drugs, with nano-particles used as drug carrier to enhance the antiviral efficacy while minimizing the undesirable side effects," Lu told a press conference Monday.
The study on silver nano-particles is still in the laboratory stage and any drugs it may lead to are still 3 to 5 years away from clinic use, Lu said.
Hospital Infections in America - CDC fails the test
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention consistently understate the size of the problem, and their lax guidelines give hospitals an excuse to do too little," says Betsy McCaughey, Ph.D., Chairman of the national Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths.
Hospitals used to routinely test equipment and surfaces for bacterial contamination. The CDC (and the American Hospital Association) advised them to stop, saying it wasn't necessary. The infection toll proves that advice was wrong.
Meta-Analysis shows ALL Blood Substitutes Increase Death
A meta-analysis of the data from all clinical trials testing artificial blood products has just been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It confirms and quantifies the unsustainable lethal risks of ALL artificial blood products tested in humans.
Inexplicably, the FDA is very much in complicity - having helped manufacturers conceal the findings for years from the medical community and the public-while continuing to approve one after another HBBS trial with similar dire results.
Cholesterol-drug rejection rips new gash in Merck
Merck for years has touted the drug, which it had planned to call Cordaptive, as one of its most important experimental medicines and a major new weapon to prevent heart attacks and stroke. But the Food and Drug Administration late on Monday slapped the product down with a so-called not-approvable letter.
"The issuance of a not-approvable letter suggests a serious deficiency in the new drug application" by Merck for the medicine
New Jersey’s Attorney General Investigates Antipsychotics Spending
New Jersey’s Medicaid program spent more than $73 million on several antipsychotic meds for children less than 18 years old between 2000 and 2007, according to state records, even though the drugs weren’t approved by the FDA for treating kids. A state official acknowledges the drugs may have been prescribed for conditions other than schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, the approved uses.
EU rejects widow’s complaints over Seroxat risk concerns
Ms O’Mahony said GlaxoSmithKline failed to release all its clinical trial data on Seroxat to medical licensing authorities and complained the commission and EMEA had failed to inform her how much of this data had been seen before they issued their recommendations.
Video: GENERATION RX
This is a trailer for an upcoming movie by Kevin Miller. The film explores how children have been caught in the middle of an unprecedented change in Western culture: that of drugging children with psychiatric medications earlier — and more often than ever before.
If you like the idea of the film and know a film distributor, you can perhaps help getting it into the movie circuits...
Medical School Group Urges Freebie Ban
“Over recent decades, medical schools and teaching hospitals have become increasingly dependent on industy support of their core educational missions,” the r
