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1. HPV Vaccine Safety and Efficacy: Answers Needed from Government Health Ministers

Judy Wilyman MSc
In Australia, as in some other countries, the HPV vaccine - Gardasil® - is being promoted to adolescents, woman and now boys, as a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. Government health departments are not addressing the concerns of parents. There are many scientific and ethical concerns about this vaccine and governments need to address the issues raised. Why has this vaccine been marketed so aggressively to Australian women when cervical cancer is a very low risk in Australia (indeed in all developed countries) and the vaccine contains chemicals linked with infertility? The community would like some answers regarding this vaccine. A summary of the evidence showing how this vaccine has been dishonestly marketed to women is included in the poster.
Judy Wilyman MSc, PhD candidate
Related Links:
* Controversy over lack of data for cervical cancer vaccines
Aimee Kuvadia, Concord
* Senior Researcher airs doubt over safety of HPV vaccines Gardasil, Cevarix
Ramesh Shankar, Pharmabiz
* Calls For Cervarix HPV Vaccine To Be Suspended In The UK
Daily Mail Reporter, Daily Mail

2. Angry residents gather as babies die from vaccines

Little Tyler with mom Nikita
A Cape Flats community is shocked and enraged after the sudden mysterious death of two infants. Manenberg residents say the three-month-old babies died within a few hours of each other after receiving their routine vaccination injections at the local clinic. As news of the two deaths quickly spread through the community, other mothers and grandmothers had growing concerns about the safety of their own little ones. Late on Wednesday afternoon, scores of concerned and angry residents gathered outside the Manenberg clinic demanding answers. Resident Lillian Pearce says, “No one is telling us anything and we can’t trust that the same’s not going to happen again.”
Megan Baadjies, IOL News

3. Bad pharma drug reactions have reached epidemic levels

Britons swallow millions of deadly tablets on doctor's advice
Bad reactions to drugs have reached epidemic levels, according to a group of doctors and scientists. Around one in 15 hospital admissions each year, more than a million patients, is due to adverse drug reactions, says the Safer Medicines Trust, based on official figures. They say the current system is failing and animal testing of drugs is exposing patients to ‘dangerous’ treatments. The trust, which campaigns for alternative ways of testing the safety of medicines, said the drug industry is over-dependent on animal testing. In an open letter to the Prime Minister and Health Secretary, published in The Lancet, it said animal testing has failed to protect patients. It wants new technologies based on human biology to be used instead, after an official assessment of their fitness for purpose.
Daily Mail Reporter, Daily Mail
Related Links:
* Drug regulators accused of risking patient safety by not publishing clinical trial data
Independent.ie
* Adverse reactions lead US patients to ask just how safe are antibiotics?
Carey Purcell, Ecologist

4. Commercially-Driven Medicine: Implant Device Sales Tactics

Medicine has been derailed from its Hippocratic tradition, science has been utterly corrupted by commercial interests, and doctors are disregarding patients' interests. Patients are losing ground, no longer do they have a choice about the medical treatments that they get, or finding an ethical doctor whose recommendations are not tainted by his /her competing financial interests. According to The New York Times, Biotronic documents show that the medical implant device industry and the numerous doctors and surgeons who serve as the company's paid consultants, are disregarding safety and efficacy data when pitching their brand of implant. Indeed, even cardiologists who do no implants will refer their patients only to surgeons who use the device whose maker pays them a hefty referral fee. A lawyer representing Biotronik, Christopher Myers, said Mr. Brown’s e-mail was sent around the same time that some Biotronik sales officials were asking the company to design “unscientific studies" to compete with producers offering sham studies “as a means of funnelling money to doctors.”
Vera Hassner Sharav, AHRP

5. Victory of sorts: Labeling of GMO Foods Moves Forward at Codex Level

After some eighteen years and seemingly interminable debates between two sharply divided camps, the Codex Committee on Food Labelling (CCFL), at its 39th session held in Quebec City, Canada, the week of May 9-13, 2011, finally reached a consensus on a watered-down labelling guideline for GMO foods. No thanks to the blocking efforts of the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, and Australia, this Guideline does not require mandatory labelling of GMO foods. However, what it does accomplish is to provide protection from the World Trade Organization (WTO) for those countries that require genetically modified organism (GMO) foods to be labelled as such. In that sense, it is a huge victory.
Scott C. Tips, Press Release, National Health Federation

6. Human cost of UK welfare reform

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan-Smith
Who will stand up for the welfare state? Not the Conservative Party, whose mantra - "Making work pay" - has turned out to be a cruel euphemism for slashing already meagre welfare payments and steering the long-term sick into the magical land of jobs. Not Labour, which declined a second reading of the Welfare Reform Bill; after all, its attacks on disability and sickness benefits when in power laid the groundwork for the coalition's planned destruction of the Attlee settlement. And it won't be the press. With most official statistics indicating that gutting welfare on the brink of a second recession will leave millions in penury, the government has resorted to stoking tabloid hysteria, feeding the weekend papers a ready-boxed scare story tied with a thick ribbon of prejudice. Details of the most ersatz claims used by fraudulent welfare claimants have been distributed to build the growing consensus that the poor are simply not worth looking after. This is a consensus that nobody in opposition seems to have the guts to challenge. In reality, benefit fraud rates remain stubbornly low, at 1 per cent. For every person who claims that a fear of ladders prevents them from cleaning windows, there are 99 others for whom incapacity or unemployment benefits are a vital lifeline. So vital that staff at jobcentres have been issued a six-point plan for how to deal with rejected claimants at risk of suicide. Threatening the workless with destitution may make good headlines but it is no way to increase employment when there are no jobs to go to. As the Welfare Reform Bill oozes unchallenged through the Commons, the real scandal is not that the government is lying through its teeth in order to justify its evisceration of the welfare state. The scandal is that no one in Westminster is prepared to make a moral case for welfare provision as the honest heart of social democracy.
Laurie Penny, The New Statesman

7. Beware: UK benefits check could cost you thousands

In this newsletter edition we’re warning members about a nationally advertised benefits checking service (members only) which could charge you thousands of pounds – possibly without getting you a penny extra in benefits. The service has close connections with a claims management company which went bust owing around £100,000 and is very reticent indeed about who does its benefits checks, though we have our suspicions. And in order to avoid raising the suspicions of your spam filter, we are unable to use a three letter word beginning with ‘s’ and ending with ‘x’ in this newsletter. However, if you substitute the ‘sex’ word for ‘serious physical assault’ in the paragraph below, it will make complete sense. Because Benefits and Work can exclusively reveal that a company which specialise in helping the police catch serious physical assault offenders (members only) is interviewing hun dreds of benefits claimants across the UK as part of the move to abolish disability living allowance (DLA) and replace it with personal independence payment (PIP). (Members only) Without their prior knowledge, the DWP has passed the names of many hundreds of DLA claimants to the company, which then contacts them directly. Benefits and Work is urging members to be very cautious if invited to take part in the trial, not least because of concerns over how wise it is to accept the £30 in vouchers being offered for doing so.
Steve Donnison, Benefits & Work

8. UN: Britain’s Repugnant Digital Economy Act Violates Human Rights

The Digital Economy Act with its ability to cut off Internet access violates our human rights, says the UN. A report from the United Nations has labelled some aspects of the UK’s controversial Digital Economy Act as disproportionate, and warned they should be repealed. The Digital Economy Act is not only unpopular with ISPs, but has also faced consistent criticism from open rights campaigners. “Cutting people off the Internet for copyright infringement is clearly the wrong thing to do,” said Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group. “The Digital Economy Act is so bad that highly respected institutions are calling on the UK to repeal it,” he added. “Jeremy Hunt should take heed, and ditch this embarrassing and repugnant legislation.”
Tom Jowitt, eWeek Europe

9. Veterans and supporters rally for Bradley at Fort Leavenworth

Approximately 250 supporters —including many veterans—converged today at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to rally for Bradley Manning. Supporters arrived from across the country and held large colorful signs that said, “Free Bradley Manning, Hero, Whistle-Blower.” During the rally, speakers called on the Obama Administration to protect whistle-blowers and to drop all charges against the Army private. This was the first large public rally to support Bradley Manning since he was transferred to Fort Leavenworth. “Bradley Manning is a fellow soldier,” said Brian Wolfe, a Lawrence Kansas-based Army Veteran who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom. “If a fellow soldier is punished for taking his oath to defend the constitution seriously, what does that mean for our military and for our democracy?” The information that Bradley Manning is accused of revealing includes the videotaped massacre of Reuters journalists and Iraqi civilians, as well as diplomatic cables that experts believe helped to catalyze democratic revolts across the Middle East this spring.