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- Superior Biotechnology Leads to Superior Drugs
- The Delusion of Regulating Risk
- Talk of a Greek Exit Gets Louder
- Doug Casey on Taxes and Freedom, Part II
- Is Facebook the Rusty Hinge of the Stock Market?
- Fitch Downgrades Japan
- Doug Casey on Taxes and Freedom
- Greeks Run on Banks as Euro-Confidence Wanes
- To the Class of 2012
We Have the Right To Know – Label GE Foods
92% of Americans want the FDA to label genetically engineered foods. Watch the new video from Food, Inc. Filmmaker Robert Kenner to hear why we have the right to know what’s in our food. Will you join these individuals — and over half a million Americans — in contacting the FDA to require the labeling of genetically engineered (GE) foods?
What are Genetically Engineered Foods / GMOs?
Plants or animals that have had their genetic makeup altered to exhibit traits that are not naturally theirs.
-From the glossary on the Monsanto website.
Organisms in which the genetic material (DNA) has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally.
-World Health Organization
“Genetically Engineered Foods”, “Genetically modified organisms,” or GMOs, are organisms that have been created through application of transgenic, gene-splicing techniques that are part of biotechnology. These transgenic methods for moving genes around are also called “genetic engineering,” or GE.
This relatively new science allows DNA (genetic material) from one species to be transferred into another species, creating transgenic organisms with combinations of genes from plants, animals, bacteria, and even viral gene pools. The mixing of genes from different species that have never shared genes in the past is what makes GMOs and GE crops so unique. It is impossible to create such transgenic organisms through traditional crossbreeding methods.
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How FDA and Big Pharma mislead millions into taking dangerous anti-depressants
(NaturalNews) The anti-depressant fraud toothpaste is out of the tube, at least partly. A Harvard Medical School psychologist, Irving Kirsch, who has been studying placebo effects for three decades, recently came up with the documented conclusion that pharmaceutical anti-depressants don’t work.
This is big news for many Natural News readers and writers. But this conclusion had the prescription-pad psychiatrists and FDA crying foul, loudly. Why? Kirsch’s conclusion was featured in a national CBS 60 Minutes television report.
Even more importantly, Kirsch’s conclusion was evidence based on documents from obtained using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Those documents were trial results from drug companies that were not published and presented to the FDA.
Drug companies pay the FDA for approving their drugs. But the FDA doesn’t do the trials or reports. They simply take them from the drug companies who all do their own trials and decide which reports to publish and submit.
Kirsch discovered that most anti-depressant trials showed no proof of efficacy. Those results were simply hidden from view. So if 12 tests were done, and only two showed any efficacy at all, those two would be submitted to the FDA, and the FDA would essentially say “pay your fee and go to market.”
After analyzing the results of all the tests he was able to procure via FOIA, Kirsch concluded that anti-depressant drugs had only a placebo effect on patients with mild to moderate depression. In other words, a sugar pill would suffice. He went public with this conclusion.
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Twitches Spread at New York School; Parents Urge More Tests
LE ROY, New York (REUTERS) – State health officials have added three more names to a growing list of students in this working-class town who are experiencing mysterious tics and twitching, while authorities on Saturday sought to assure parents the community’s high school is safe.
Although the symptoms are typically associated with Tourette Syndrome, that has been ruled out in all but one case, causing fear and confusion among many residents of Le Roy, N.Y., about 50 miles east of Buffalo.
“The building is safe for the community,” District Superintendent Kim Cox told several hundred residents gathered in the auditorium of Le Roy Junior-Senior High School on Saturday.
The Le Roy Central School District scrambled to conduct environmental testing for air quality and mold when an initial 12 students developed tics and impulsive verbal outbursts last fall. But state health investigators ruled out environmental factors, latent side-effects from drugs or vaccines like Gardasil, trauma or genetic factors.
Instead, doctors say conversion disorder – once called mass hysteria – is to blame among an expanding list of patients. Three more unconfirmed cases have been added to the original list of students exhibiting the symptoms, and others are being examined.
Air quality and mold surveys at the school have all come back negative, according to district officials and representatives of Leader Professional Services Inc., a company hired to conduct environmental testing at the school after the symptoms first surfaced.
Senior Industrial Hygienist Mary Ellen Holvey on Saturday said air and water tests turned up nothing, and recommended follow-up testing of air inside the school.
She said that would help determine whether a soil review will be conducted – a test demanded by those residents who believe environmental factors are to blame.
One parent, Melissa Cianci, said her daughter no longer wants to attend school in light of the outbreak. She said students should be moved to another location as the investigation continues.
“She doesn’t know if it’s safe,” Cianci said, adding her daughter had perfect attendance prior to the incidents. “I’m done listening to you,” she yelled at the panel before storming out, later criticizing the district for being less than candid early in the investigation and demanding that soil tests be conducted of school grounds.
Though there is no evidence of environmental contamination, for some residents environmental concerns were heightened by the district’s recent disclosure of six natural gas wells on school property, as well as possible contamination from the nearby site of a 1970 train derailment and chemical spill.
Regarding the wells on school land, William Albert, of the district’s law firm Harris Beach, said, “It’s not unusual. We’re out in the country.”
Several representatives of renowned environmentalist Erin Brockovich were barred recently from collecting soil samples near the school by local police.
State health officials note that all of the patients have had significant stress factors, which can worsen the condition. Three of them had pre-existing medical conditions, including one confirmed case of Tourette’s Syndrome. Just one of the patients in male.
Congresswoman Kathy Hochul, who represents the district, sent a letter to the environmental Protection Agency on Monday calling for a review of the Superfund site, which the EPA said is regularly monitored, including testing scheduled later this month.
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Sweet Misery
After 7000 miles, and 25 hours of footage, “Sweet Misery” will reveal one of the most pervasive, insidious forms of corporate negligence in the history of the industrial revolution.
The toxic long-term effects of aspartame are often dismissed as a “hoax” by the sweetener industry and at least five other internet websites. The real footwork, however, unravels something less comforting than a mere “Hoax.”
“Sweet Misery” is the title of a documentary released by Sound and Fury in June of 2004. Our primary investigation includes interviews with doctors, lawyers, people who have had health probems which they associate with aspartame usage, advocates, and many others.
“Aspartame is inherently, markedly and uniquely unstable in aqueous media”
is a quote from the congressional record in 1985, and yet it was approved for use in soft drinks and other beverages.
Aspartame
On September 30, 1980, a public Board of Inquiry advised against the approval of aspartame, stating: “The Board has not been presented with proof of a reasonable certainty that aspartame (NutraSweet) is safe for use as a food additive under its intended conditions of use.” In 1981, however, the FDA approved aspartame for consumer use based on studies that seem tainted by heavy financial interest in its approval. To many medical practitioners and consumer interest groups, the approval was a gross betrayal of public trust. “To think that there is even a reasonable doubt that aspartame can induce brain tumors in the American population is frightening. And to think that the FDA has lulled them into a false sense of security is a monumental crime,” writes Dr. Russell L. Blaylock in Excitotoxins. In 2005, twenty-five years after the initial Board of Inquiry’s caution against approval, numerous adults and children consume aspartame-sweetened products on a daily basis, despite reservations regarding its safety.
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Bill Gates Foundation Buys 500,000 Shares of Monsanto
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has purchased 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock. Monsanto is the world’s largest producer of genetically modified food, which has been tied to numerous health ailments such as sterility and infant mortality.
AGRA Watch has issued a press release on the subject:
Monsanto has already negatively impacted agriculture in African countries. For example, in South Africa in 2009, Monsanto’s genetically modified maize failed to produce kernels and hundreds of farmers were devastated. According to Mariam Mayet, environmental attorney and director of the Africa Centre for Biosafety in Johannesburg, some farmers suffered up to an 80% crop failure. While Monsanto compensated the large-scale farmers to whom it directly sold the faulty product, it gave nothing to the small-scale farmers to whom it had handed out free sachets of seeds. “When the economic power of Gates is coupled with the irresponsibility of Monsanto, the outlook for African smallholders is not very promising,” said Mayet.
Monsanto’s aggressive patenting practices have also monopolized control over seed in ways that deny farmers control over their own harvest, going so far as to sue-and bankrupt-farmers for “patent infringement.” Monsanto was declared company of the year by Forbes magazine in 2009, despite its history of agricultural abuses. Monsanto has also been accused of dumping toxic waste in residential areas, resulting in a variety of severe health disorders.
