The 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez disaster has brought critical new evidence that petro-pollution is destroying our global ecosystem. Continue reading
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Category Archives: Health
Mefloquine, a nightmare drug given to military personnel and civilians
The malaria drug Lariam (mefloquine) is linked to grisly crimes like Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales’ 2012 murder of 16 Afghan civilians, the murders of four wives of Fort Bragg soldiers in 2002 and other extreme violence. Continue reading
The nuclear omnicide
In the 35 years since the March 28, 1979, explosion and meltdown at Three Mile Island, fierce debate has raged over whether humans were killed there. In 1986 and 2011, Chernobyl and Fukushima joined the argument. Whenever these disasters happen, there are those who claim that the workers, residents and military personnel exposed to radiation will be just fine. Continue reading
A cross-cultural look at depression and how to recover
Interview with Gayathri Ramprasad, author of ‘Shadows in the Sun: Healing from Depression and Finding the Light Within’
The just published memoir, Shadows in the Sun, is a first-of-its-kind, cross-cultural lens to mental illness through the inspiring story of the author’s thirty-year battle with depression. Continue reading
Japan stops treating radioactive water
Can it ever be treated? Is it even possible?
SAN FRANCISCO—It is time to call it what it is: It’s a Scam. It’s a Con Job. There is no solution, never was and never will be. That’s the whole Con and you, like most people, probably fell for the notion hook, line and sinker that radioactivity can be removed from water. Continue reading
Medicare madness: How Americans can lose benefits in a hospital
Tuck away the many horror stories of the wrong limbs being amputated, things being left in surgery patients, terrible infections picked up in hospitals and totally wrong diagnoses. More relevant is a bureaucratic hospitalization horror that far too few Americans covered by Medicare are aware of. Continue reading
Disposable assets in the fracking industry
The oil and gas industry, the nation’s Chambers of Commerce, and politicians, who are dependent upon campaign contributions from the industry and the chambers, claim fracking is safe. Continue reading
Was mom given dangerous drugs in the nursing home? It’s part of Big Pharma’s marketing plan
The Obama administration is finally addressing the expensive, dangerous and usually unnecessary psychiatric drugs that are footed by taxpayers in federal health insurance programs. It has proposed that insurers may limit Medicare coverage of certain classes of drugs that include Wellbutrin, Paxil and Prozac for depression and Abilify and Seroquel for schizophrenia. Continue reading
Direct to consumer drug advertising works so well, they are now selling radiation treatment directly to consumers
Seventeen years after direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising was instituted in the US, 70 percent of adults and 25 percent of children are on at least one prescription drug. Continue reading
Five unsavory ingredients hidden in your food
Two years ago, the nation’s collective stomach churned when people learned they were eating a meat product called “pink slime.” Lean finely textured beef as the industry wanted called, it was meat scraps that were once earmarked for pet food repurposed for the human dinner table, especially the National School Lunch Program. While the product looked like human intestines, what caused the national revulsion was that it was treated with puffs of ammonia to kill the bacterium E. coli. Yum. Continue reading
Big Pharma and its bad karma
The noted Peter C. Gotzsche, MD, wrote in September 2013, “There are many good books about the crimes in the drug industry and the widespread corruption of the profession to which I belong: doctors. I had therefore promised myself that I would not write one.” But two things in particular made the good doctor change his mind in the summer of 2012. The sins of Big Pharma and the bad karma it never ceases to emit. Continue reading
South-central US poisoned by New Mexico nuke garbage dump
Enough to kill 35,5000 people released so far
SAN FRANCISCO—Carlsbad, New Mexico is the site of the nation’s only nuclear weapons program garbage dump. Plutonium is used in making The Bomb, it melts at 640 Deg C or 1,184 Deg F, and is made in reactors. It is not mined anywhere on Earth. Reactors exist to make bombs. Continue reading
Documents say Navy knew Fukushima dangerously contaminated the USS Reagan
A stunning new report indicates the U.S. Navy knew that sailors from the nuclear-powered USS Ronald Reagan took major radiation hits from the Fukushima atomic power plant after its meltdowns and explosions nearly three years ago. Continue reading
Curbing the diagnosis of ADHD
In the Feb. 23 The New York Times, Stephen P. Hinshaw and Richard M. Scheffler point to “the writing is on the chalkboard” with their op-ed Expand Pre-K, Not ADHD: “Over the next few years, America can count on a major expansion of early childhood education. We embrace this trend, but as health policy researchers, we want to raise a major caveat: Unless we’re careful, today’s preschool bandwagon could lead straight to an epidemic of 4- and 5-year-olds wrongfully being told that they have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.” Continue reading
How Pharma got doctors to prescribe Risperdal, Wellbutrin, Bextra, Neurontin, Prempro & more
Until 2010 when the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which requires disclosure of Pharma payments, passed, the only thing better than working for Pharma was being a doctor wined and dined by Pharma. Continue reading
U.S. sailors sick from Fukushima radiation file new suit against Tokyo Electric Power
Citing a wide range of ailments from leukemia to blindness to birth defects, 79 American veterans of 2011’s earthquake/tsunami relief Operation Tomadachi (“Friendship”) have filed a new $1 billion class action lawsuit against Tokyo Electric Power. Continue reading
American men worried about their low-T?
It took the New York Times to take a look at a serious symptom befalling men all over the United States in the last few decades. Men’s average testosterone levels have been dropping, it noted, by at least 1 percent a year, according to a 2006 study in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. Continue reading
Salt and terror in Afghanistan
Two weeks ago in a room in Kabul, Afghanistan, I joined several dozen people, working seamstresses, some college students, socially engaged teenagers and a few visiting internationals like myself, to discuss world hunger. Our emphasis was not exclusively on their own country’s worsening hunger problems. The Afghan Peace Volunteers, in whose home we were meeting, draw strength from looking beyond their own very real struggles. Continue reading
50 reasons we should fear the worst from Fukushima
Part One of a two-part series
Fukushima’s missing melted cores and radioactive gushers continue to fester in secret. Continue reading
More drugs whose dangerous risks emerged only after Big Pharma made its money
In recent years, Hollywood has been perturbed by the “tweet factor.” If a movie is a dog, people leaving the theater tweet other people that it is a dog and it fails at the box office. Unfortunately, when a prescription drug is a dog that causes risky side effects, the word often doesn’t get out for years, allowing Big Pharma to make money anyway. Continue reading
Seven drugs whose risks surfaced after they made billions
Hit and run pharma marketing makes money at consumers' expense
Have you ever noticed how warnings about dangerous prescription drugs always seem to surface after the drug is no longer marketed and its patent has run out? As in after the fact? Whether it’s an FDA advisory or a trial lawyer solicitation about harm that may have been done to you, the warnings are always belated and useless. If a drug people took four years ago may have given them liver damage, why didn’t the FDA tell them then? Why didn’t the FDA recall the drug or better yet, not approve it in the first place? Continue reading
Toll of U.S. sailors devastated by Fukushima radiation continues to climb
The roll call of U.S. sailors who say their health was devastated when they were irradiated while delivering humanitarian help near the stricken Fukushima nuke is continuing to soar. Continue reading
Read this before you take that statin
The American Heart Association (AHA) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC) recently released new cardiovascular disease prevention guidelines. They are an egregious example of much that is wrong with medicine today. Continue reading
Monsanto, the TPP, and global food dominance
“Control oil and you control nations,” said US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. “Control food and you control the people.” Continue reading
What turkey producers won’t tell you
Thanks to humane scandals at Butterball, Aviagen Turkeys and House of Raeford, many are aware of the cruel handling in commercial turkey production. Fewer people are aware of the food additives and fast-growth methods that put both turkeys and the people who eat them at risk. Continue reading
Obama’s real crimes are ignored while the GOP and corporate media go ape over the Obamacare website
The ceaseless brouhaha over the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, and President Barack Obama’s “sinking” approval ratings is comparable to a parent telling a child he must do something and when the child does, he is ridiculed and punished for doing it. Continue reading
The Affordable Care Act—no gain without pain
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, aka the Affordable Care Act, often referred to as “Obamacare” in derisive, scurrilous tones, is a complex piece of legislation having significant consequences for millions of people. Continue reading
Why Obama shouldn’t have trusted the healthcare industry
The industry keeps putting profits before serving the public as President Obama has become the health insurance industry’s top salesperson. In Massachusetts, he urged Americans to take a long view on implementing the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. While it may provide coverage to millions who now lack it, the evidence is mounting that Obama never should have trusted the private health insurance industry to begin with. Let’s look at why. Continue reading
Masters of disaster bring cholera to Haiti and polio to Syria
Haiti and Syria are victims of their rescuers. The two nations are now sites of major disease outbreaks. Cholera in Haiti and polio in Syria didn’t just happen. Through negligence, those who claim to rescue the people imported the disease entities and fostered the conditions for wider outbreaks. Continue reading
A meat additive few Americans realize they are eating
If you eat commercial US beef, pork or turkey, it was probably grown with ractopamine
Have you ever heard of ractopamine? Neither have most US food consumers though it is used in 80 percent of US pig and cattle operations. The asthma drug-like growth additive, called a beta-agonist, has enjoyed stealth use in the US food supply for a decade despite being widely banned overseas. It is marketed as Paylean for pigs, Optaflexx for cattle and Topmax for turkeys. Continue reading
What’s really in chicken products?
You don't want to know
Could there be anything worse for the chicken industry than this month’s outbreak of an antibiotic-resistant strain of salmonella that hospitalized 42 percent of everyone who got it—almost 300 in 18 states-? Yes. The government also announced that China has been cleared to process chickens for the US dinner plate and that all but one of arsenic compounds no one knew they were eating anyway have been removed from US poultry production. Thanks for that. Also this month, some food researchers have revealed the true recipe for chicken “nuggets” . . . just in time for Halloween. Continue reading
Privatization and the Affordable Care Act
Posted on December 4, 2013 by Jerry Mazza
One of the main problems with the Affordable Care Act web site began with the Reagan administration, which has adversely affected government performance since then. At that time, the management habit of concentrating on your core capabilities and contracting out other processes was applied to government. Government, it was decided, should contract out such non-core capabilities as logistics, food services and information technology (IT). Continue reading →