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1. Number of children who die after vaccination has doubled in three years
Immunisation-associated problems have come to the fore yet again. A Delhi-based report gave the shocking news that the number of children who die soon after being administered vaccine shots more than doubled in the last three years compared with the previous seven years. As vaccine-preventable infectious diseases continue to decline, people have become increasingly concerned about the risks associated with vaccines. Moreover, technological advances and people's awareness about vaccines have led to investigations focused on the safety of existing vaccines, which have created a climate of concern. The concern over the increasing number of deaths among children following vaccination is not confined to India. Japan is a recently affected country. Even before five children were recorded dead soon after vaccination, the government started taking preventive operations.
S. Viswanathan, The Hindu
Related Links:
* Brinda slams unethical HPV vaccine trials
Staff Reporter, The Hindu
* GAVI & WHO - Vaccine Accountability Demanded
Jacob M Puliyel MD, British Medical Journal
* Gates Foundation Diverts Money To Vaccine Manufacturers Whilst Failing The Children
Jacob Puliyel MD, The Lancet
* Global health and the Bill & Melinda GatesFoundation
Tachi Yamada, The Lancet
2. June 13-15 Meetings in D.C. Examine Vaccine Safety System
On June 13-15, 2011, the National Vaccine Advisory Committee (NVAC) will meet in Washington, D.C. to discuss recommendations and options for improving the nation's vaccine safety system. The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) has written and submitted comments supporting independent vaccine safety oversight and is represented on an Advocacy Panel discussion during a June 13 Vaccine Stakeholder meeting. The public can listen to the three days of open meetings via teleconference and offer comments during public comment time June 14-15. Draft recommendations for improving the vaccine safety system have been developed by the Vaccine Safety Working Group (VSWG) of the National Vaccine Advisory Committee(NVAC). The purpose of the June 13 stakeholder meeting is to ask various stakeholders - advocacy groups, organized medicine, pharmaceutical industry, public health, others - for comments regarding the VSWG's draft report and recommendations. The NVAC wil l discuss the recommendations and stakeholder feedback on June 14. The members of the NVAC and health officials at DHHS need to hear from you! This is your opportunity to communicate why and how you want the vaccine safety system to work better.
Information Release, National Vaccine Information Center
3. Vaccine an unethical solution to E. coli
Last week, it was reported that Canadian researchers now hold a solution to E. coli bacteria in cattle - a vaccination that will force the cows to excrete less of the bacteria. Not only is this new vaccine crude, it's unethical to chemically modify cattle crap for the betterment of our beef. How about feeding cattle actual grass instead of the garbage they put in fattening foods to make more money out of the cows? When cows switch from corn and grain feed to grass, it reduces E. coli in meat by more than 75 per cent. Industrial farms are the bane of healthy animals and healthy food for humans. Before we begin injecting cattle with random vaccinations, maybe we should wait to see what type of freak show side-effects result. If the cows weren't raised in such close quarters and were fed properly, taken care of during their lives and slaughtered properly, we wouldn't be having E. coli problems. I worry about all of the antibiotics and drugs being introduced into the food chain. We are quickly losing our ability to fight off micro-organisms naturally, and so is our livestock. It is only since mass production that we have been poisoning ourselves en masse.
Kerri Sculland, Times Colonist
4. Child victims of the chemical cosh: Boy who killed himself after taking Ritalin
Ten year-old Harry Hucknell kissed his mother Jane and older brother, David, goodnight before going upstairs to his bedroom and locking the door. He then hanged himself with a belt from his bunk bed. His father blames Harry’s death on two ‘mind-altering’ drugs that his son had been prescribed by a psychiatrist to cure his boisterous behaviour and low spirits. Now, a distraught Mr Hucknall is to make a formal complaint to the NHS for prescribing his son Ritalin, a cocaine-like stimulant which, paradoxically, is said to calm down a child, and Prozac, a powerful antidepressant. 661,000 prescriptions are dished out annually in Britain to treat childhood ADHD — double the figure of five years ago. These medicines are being given to very young children — one aged just 15 months. ‘I think ADHD is a disease invented by drug companies' - Darren Hucknell. ‘Harry ended up taking two drugs that work against each o ther — the Prozac that fights depression and the Ritalin that can cause it. How can that be right?’
Sue Reid, Daily Mail
5. France Suspends Use Of Actos Over Cancer Risk
While the FDA continues to review the Takeda Pharmaceuticals diabetes drug for bladder cancer risks, French regulators are suspending use of the pill, as well as Takeda’s Competact, after reviewing pharmacovigilance data and the results of new study showed an increased risk. The meds are currently taken by about 230,000 people in France. The FDA, you may recall, last fall disclosed a review of data from an ongoing, 10-year epidemiological study designed to evaluate whether Actos is associated with an increased risk of bladder cancer. Findings from studies in animals and humans suggest this is a potential safety risk that needs further study. But the FDA had not concluded that Actos increases the risk of bladder cancer. Meanwhile, a report in the latest issue of Diabetes Care, identified 93 reports of bladder cancer among Actos patients in the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System database between 2004 and 2009. These reports corresponded to 138 drug-re action pairs (Actos, 31; insulin, 29; metformin, 25; Glimepiride, 13; Byetta, 8; others, 22). The authors wrote that the Reporting Odds Ratio (ROR) was indicative of a definite risk for Actos.
Ed Silverman, Pharmalot
6. Glaxo Antibiotic Scares Taiwan And Hong Kong
Hospitals in Taiwan are suspending use of the Augmentin pediatric antibiotic made by GlaxoSmithKline after detecting high levels of DIDP, a chemical used to make plastics more flexible but was banned for use in food and drinks. And health officials in Hong Kong ordered the drugmaker to recall supplies that were made in France after testing found DIDP levels twice what they say is permitted in Europe. In Taiwan, authorities are looking at whether a strawberry-flavored version of the drug, which is often prescribed to children, might have been contaminated by artificial flavoring, since jam makers were recently under investigation for using materials containing banned chemicals as fixative agents to keep flavoring and fragrances smelling fresh. A spokesman for the Hong Kong Department says this: “DIDP’s safety in man is not well established..."
Ed Silverman, Pharmalot
7. Zoloft Heart Defect Claims Available to Be Reviewed By Zoloft Birth Defect Lawyers
Orlando, Florida -- The Zoloft heart defect lawyers at Morgan and Morgan are available to review claims from women who took Zoloft during pregnancy and delivered children with heart defects. Hypoplastic left heart syndrome, tetralogy of fallot (TOF), and transposition of the great arteries (TGA) are among the Zoloft heart defects which have been reportedly linked to the SSRI drug. If you took Zoloft during pregnancy and delivered children with these or other cardiac defects, you may be entitled to compensation. According to reports, Zoloft and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have been associated with a number of birth defects, including cardiac defects. Zoloft has allegedly been linked to coarctation of the aorta, which refers to a narrowing of a part of the aorta, a major artery leading out of the heart. Other Zoloft heart defects can reportedly include tetralogy of fallot (TOF), a birth defect which leads to bluish purple skin, and hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a condition in which parts of the left side of the heart do not develop completely. Zoloft cardiac defects are not the only type of birth defect which has been linked to the drug. Reportedly, craniosynostosis, spina bifida, club foot and omphalocele, a condition in which the infant’s intestines protrude through the navel, have also been associated as SSRI and Zoloft birth defects. Children who were born with alleged Zoloft heart defects may require surgery and other medical care which can result in costly medical bills for the child’s parents.
Morgan and Morgan, Press Release, MailWire
8. How Drug Companies Corrupt Medical Journals
Remember the tchotchke-cluttered doctors offices of old (i.e. a couple of years ago), with their Vioxx mugs, Viagra pens, stacked Xanax pads, and Lipitor key rings? Drug companies used to lavish doctors with all manner of branded trinkets in hopes they'd prescribe their products, but the whiff of corruption became too strong – was your doctor recommending Xenium on its merits as a gastrointestinal treatment, worried the ethics-minded, or in order to keep the Post-its coming? – and in 2008 they zipped up the goodie bag. Except that now "the $310 billion pharmaceutical industry quietly buys something far more influential," writes Harriet Washington in The American Scholar. That something would be "the contents of medical journals and, all too often, the trajectory of medical research itself," she says. For one thing, journals are chock full of (often inaccurate) pharmaceutical advertising; advertisers shape edit orial decisions; staff get buttered up by way of junkets and well-paid speaking engagements for editorial staff; and drug companies have perfected an array of strategies for using clinical trials to "tart up drugs that are poorly performing, dangerous, or both." All journals are bought – or at least cleverly used – by the pharmaceutical industry. Another calls the contents of most journals "little better than infomercials."
Julian Brookes, Rolling Stone
Related Links:
* Flacking for Big Pharma
Harriet Washington, The American Scholar
9. B Vitamins in Mother’s Diet Reduce Colorectal Cancer Risk in Offspring
Mice born to mothers who are fed a diet supplemented with B vitamins are less likely to develop intestinal tumors, report scientists at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (USDA HNRCA) at Tufts University. Previous research in humans and mice suggests that B vitamins, particularly folate, play a role in the prevention of colorectal cancer. Using a mouse model of naturally occurring colorectal cancer, the USDA HNRCA scientists examined whether a mothers’ B vitamin intake impacts her offspring’s cancer risk. Mothers were fed diets containing supplemental, adequate or mildly deficient quantities of vitamins B2, B6, B12 and folate prior to conception through weaning after which all of the offspring received the same adequate diet. “We saw, by far, the fewest intestinal tumors in the offspring of mothers consuming the supplemented diet,” says Jimmy Crott, PhD, senior author and a scientist in the Vitamins and Carcinogenesis Laboratory at the USDA HNRCA.
Newswire, Tufts University
10. Chicken Little And Food Safety Accountability
From time to time, some health-freedom groups and individuals want to grab attention and publicize what they think they know about Congressional legislation that could seriously impact our health-freedom rights and protections. Unfortunately, too often, they just cross the line in presenting fiction as legislative or FDA policy fact. This is the case with the third version of Senator Leahy's Food Safety Accountability Act, SB 216, which recently passed the Senate and is pending in the Health Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Like "Chicken Little," the claims of others are that “the sky is falling” on dietary supplements and organic/nutritional foods. The NHF follows Congressional legislation closely and lobbies for and against bills on an ongoing basis, not when it is convenient and will draw attention but when it is really needed. The fact is, the sky is not falling on suppl ements or on organic/nutritional foods with SB 216, as some are claiming on this issue. This third version of the Leahy bill is drastically pared back in scope from the original bill, and even the second version of the legislation. As the oldest and best-respected health-freedom group on Capitol Hill, the NHF continues to be the credible source of objective assessment of, and proactive actions on, Congressional legislation and FDA matters that have material impact upon our freedom-of-health choices and access to dietary supplements and nutritional foods.
Lee Bechtel, News Release, National Health Federation
11. Detection of MLV-like gag sequences in blood samples from a New York state CFS cohort
A blinded study was undertaken to determine whether XMRV or MLV-like virus could be detected in peripheral blood from 40 adult subjects divided into three groups: severely ill with CFS, recovered from CFS, and a control group lacking a CFS diagnosis at any time. All patients in the “severe CFS” group currently meet Fukuda criteria. “Recovered CFS” subjects had scores on the SF-36 survey instrument that were significantly lower than the healthy control group, according to Hotelling’s T2 test. Blood was collected in EDTA tubes and cDNA and DNA made from PBMCs. Plasma was incubated with LNCaP cells that were subsequently passaged. Nested PCR with USB Hot-Start IT FideliTaq was performed with gag primers. Any PCR products of expected sizes were sequenced. Samples were tested for mouse contamination with primers to IAP and/or mouse mitochondrial DNA. gag sequences were detected in both severe and recovered CFS subjects’ bloo d as well as in some healthy controls. gag sequences could be amplified from genomic DNA from LNCaP cells of some subjects after 4 or 6 subcultures following incubation with certain subjects’ plasma, indicating the presence of infectious virus in blood. All gag sequences detected in this cohort were more similar to the MLV-like sequences reported by Lo et al. (2010) than to the XMRV sequences reported by Lombardi et al. (2009). Detection of gag sequences in whole blood genomic DNAs that were negative for mouse IAP and mitochondrial DNA provides strong evidence for infection of humans with MLV-like viruses.
Maureen R Hanson et al, Meeting Abstract, Retrovirology
Related Links:
* Detection of MLV-related virus gene sequences in blood of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome and healthy blood donors
Shyh-Ching Loa, Harvey J. Alter et al, PNAS
12. Police brutality at Jefferson Memorial
Screengrab
On May 28, 2011 Television host Adam Kokesh and several other activists participating in a flash-mob were arrested at the publicly-funded Thomas Jefferson Memorial. Their crime? Silently dancing, in celebration of the first amendment's champion; a clear violation of their right to free-expression. In an excessive use of force, video was captured of Adam being body slammed and placed in a choke for his non-crime. "If you demonstrate by dancing, you will be placed under arrest," say the police. "If you make a movement with your body, you will be placed under arrest.". This really happens in America? What is the world coming to.
Adam Kokesh, YouTube
13. How our UK judges deny human rights to children taken into care
Torn apart: the system of child protection is a national scandal
The great black hole at the centre of the edifice of humbug built around Article 8 is the quite astonishing way in which judges and others involved in our peculiar “family protection” system too often manage wholly to disregard the human rights of children. No one can object where agents of the state intervene when children are genuinely in danger. But children may be snatched, far too readily, from loving homes, to be imprisoned in a “care system” where they are not only miserable and confused but are too often truly abused. The taking of children into care has soared in recent months to record levels. Meanwhile, ChildLine reports that the numbers – in their thousands – who annually complain of abuse in local authority care has risen in recent years by 32 per cent. In the dozens of cases I have been following, it is a story I have heard again and again. The way such children are treated makes a mockery not just of the 1989 Children Act, which states that the interests of the child must be paramount, but also of the Human Rights Act.
Christopher Booker, Daily Telegraph
14. Frontline Event: WikiLeaks' Julian Assange in conversation with Slavoj Žižek
Last year, whistleblower website WikiLeaks released three of the biggest ever leaks of classified information in history: the Iraq War Logs, the Afghanistan War Logs and Cablegate. Since then the world has undoubtedly changed. Ambassadors have resigned amid scandals exposed by leaked cables; the UK government has ordered a review of computer security; and, at the same time, a huge wave of protest has swept the Middle East and North Africa – in part fuelled, some believe, by WikiLeaks revelations. Discussing the impact of WikiLeaks on the world and what it means for the future, for this very special event WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange will be in conversation with renowned Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. Focusing on the ethics and philosophy behind WikiLeaks' work, the talk will provide a rare opportunity to hear two of the world’s most prominent thinkers discuss some of the most pressing issues of our time. Date: July 2, 2011 4: 00 PM. Venue: The Troxy.
Information Release, Frontline Club
15. European MEPs slam Assange extradition warrants
The use of fast-track European Arrest Warrants of the type issued against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange came under attack in a debate in the European Parliament , with MEPs branding the EU extradition scheme "disproportionate". The debate, called by European Greens, comes after EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding warned in April that the authority of cross-border EAWs was in danger of being undermined. EAWs have been issued for offences as trivial as bicycle theft, removing car tyres and stealing piglets. A report on EAWs also released in April conceded that the system was "far from perfect". During yesterday's debate, British MEP Gerard Batten, a member of UKIP, asked if "the case against Mr Julian Assange demonstrates the possible abuse of the EAW for political purposes".
James Nixon, thinq_
Related Links:
* European Arrest Warrant: a question of proportion
Press Release, European Parliament
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