Health Spectator

We first wrote about bisphenol-A (BPA) about two years ago. In that article, we noted that while parents were shying away from plastic baby bottles containing the substance, they were largely unaware that BPA was actually found in larger quantities in most liquid baby formulas because it leaches from the linings of the cans used to package them. Powdered infant formulas, because they needed to be diluted with water, were deemed likely to be a lower source of the substance, but by no means exempt from suspicion.

We recently came across the video below, which does a good job of explaining the dangers and sources of BPA. This substance is of concern not only for infant formulas, but for food packaging and preparation in general, since BPA is used in many plastics used to store and prepare food and beverages, as well as to line all cans sold in the U.S. Since BPA is a serious endocrine disruptor linked to both breast and prostate cancers and is found in the bodies of 93% of the U.S. population, this is bad news for Americans. Any soda you buy—because it will come stored either in a can or a plastic bottle—is likely to be contaminated with the substance. The same follows for virtually any packaged food or beverage, including, for example, canned vegetables. Yet, independent studies performed on BPA even in extremely low doses indicated that the chemical was disruptive to both male and female reproductive systems.

This video follows the history of BPA and shows how the EPA has spent millions of taxpayer dollars earmarked for screening chemicals such as BPA without apparently doing anything. It also interviews scientists concerned with this toxic pollutant.

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A study recently published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention found an apparent link between consumption of sugary soft drinks and pancreatic cancer. Performed by Mark Pereira and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, the study followed 60,524 participants of the Singapore Chinese Health Study for up to 14 years. Like most such epidemiological studies, however, the study suffers from some inherent flaws and will need to be backed by further research.

This was a first attempt to link consumption of soft drinks and fruit juices—both abundant sources of dietary sugar—to pancreatic cancer in a population of non-European descent. The first 14 years of following the cohort yielded a cumulative 648,387 person-years and 140 pancreatic cancer cases. Individuals who consumed two or more soft drinks per week showed an 87-percent increased risk of pancreatic cancer, the researchers said. Those who consumed fruit juices alone showed no statistically greater risk.

The actual numbers involved are low enough, however, to cast some doubt on their validity. Of the 140 pancreatic cancer cases experienced by the cohort, 18 cases occurred in patients who consumed large quantities of soda, 12 occurred in those who drank soda occasionally, and 110 occurred in non-consumers of the beverage. Thus the claim of an 87% increase in risk of pancreatic cancer through consumption of sugar-sweetened soda is based on slim data.

The data do, however, support the popular theory that sugar feeds cancer cells and encourages formation of cancer tumors.

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According to a story that appeared over the weekend from the Associated Press, the U.S. Solicitor General has been meeting with lawyers representing the tobacco industry’s four largest companies in an effort to forestall an appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court to follow up on a 2006 ruling by U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler that the tobacco industry had concealed the dangers of cigarette smoking over a period of decades. The government has been considering asking the Court to award it $280 billion in past company profits and $14 billion toward a national campaign to limit smoking. Those awards had been denied by lower federal courts, one of which nevertheless denied an appeal by the defendants last May.

Since the lawsuit invovled charges of racketeering under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”), the losing defendants had vowed to pursue an appeal to reverse those charges. The conflicting goals are leading to an interesting stand-off. Both sides may stand to gain from negotiation. Although the companies undoubtedly would like to have the racketeering conviction dropped, there would seem to be little hope of that, giving the preponderance of the evidence.

Tobacco company defendants in the lawsuit are Philip Morris USA Inc. and its parent company, Altria Group Inc.; R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.; British American Tobacco Investments Ltd.; and Lorillard Tobacco Co. A former U.S. subsidiary of British American Tobacco, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., merged with Reynolds in 2004.

Just three of those companies—Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds and Lorillard—supply nearly 90 percent of U.S. retail cigarette sales.

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Johnson & Johnson announced yesterday that it was recalling Tylenol, Motrin, and St. Joseph’s aspirin as well as other over-the-counter drugs because they emit a moldy smell that has sickened some users. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has criticized the New Brunswick, NJ-based company and sent it a warning letter for not taking faster action, as the problem first occurred in early 2008 and recurred less than a month ago, but little has been done by the firm to address the issue.

The New Brunswick, NJ manufacturer has agreed to stop shipping products while it investigates the problem, which apparently has been traced to a chemical used to treat wooden shipping pallets. The Associated Press is reporting that the FDA traced the problem to a facility in Las Piedras, Puerto Rico.

Products affected include both regular and extra-strength Tylenol, children’s Tylenol, eight-hour Tylenol, Tylenol arthritis, Tylenol PM, children’s Motrin, Motrin IB, Benadryl Rolaids, Simply Sleep, and St. Joseph’s aspirin. Consumers can find out exactly which batches have been recalled by going to the McNeil website. (McNeil is the division of Johnson and Johnson responsible for these products.)

These problems come not long after an FDA advisory panel recommended removing acetaminophen-containing narcotic drugs from the market last summer because of the potential harm to the livers of patients caused by acetaminophen. Acetaminophen is the active ingredient in Tylenol. That same panel recommended lowering the largest dose of acetaminophen or Tylenol from 500 mg to 325 mg.

To date, no further action has been taken and Extra Strength Tylenol—available over the counter in any drugstore—still contains 500mg of acetaminophen.

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You may remember the case of Andrew Speaker. He went to Italy to be married and returned with a drug-resistant form of tuberculosis that caused a national furor and was reported on this website. The furor arose because Speaker traveled by plane with a highly contagious, hard-to-cure disease. At one point, Speaker was diagnosed by the CDC as having “extensively drug resistant tuberculosis.” That diagnosis was later downgraded to “multi-drug resistant tuberculosis.” Even so, Speaker was faced with a two-year regimen of drugs or surgery. He chose the surgery and recuperated, we are happy to report, without further complications.

While Speaker’s case became an instant sensation, the CDC and other public health officials managed to keep quiet a much more insidious form of the disease that appeared on our shores just a few months later, around September 2007. A 19-year-old student named Oswaldo Juarez came to the U.S. from Peru to study English. When he found himself coughing up blood, he knew something was very wrong.

He was diagnosed as having “extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis”—two cuts above the variety that Speaker had. After three months of futile treatment by a local hospital in Fort Lauderdale, he found himself living at the A.G. Holley State Hospital, the nation’s last tuberculosis sanitarium, located just south of West Palm Beach.

After approximately a two-year regimen not unlike chemotherapy for cancer, Juarez was pronounced cured and allowed to leave the facility. That was in July of this year. After 19 months of treatment at A.G. Holley, Juarez was now 21 and fluent in English.

The Associated Press reports that the Florida taxpayers paid about $500,000 for his treatment, which nonetheless was money well spent, since had he not been treated he most likely would have infected others and might have started an epidemic of virtually incurable tuberculosis had he continued to live in the U.S. or attempted to return home to Peru. According to AP reports, doctors had apparently told him he might only live about a month if he returned to Peru.

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The Taiwan News is reporting that a gynecologist identified only as Dr. Liu plans to sue the Centers for Disease Control in Taiwan over the death of his seven-year-old son in the wake of an H1N1 vaccination the child was given at school on November 19.

The case has been made public by Chang Yao-tsung, an opposition Democratic Progressive Party member of the Taichung City Council, speaking on behalf of the child’s parents.

The report says the child had no previous history of medical problems. Like many cases linked by parents to vaccinations, this one began with almost immediate symptoms. The child began suffering with red blotches on the soles of his feet the day following the vaccination. A private clinic diagnosed the condition as either an allergy or a reaction to the shot. Over the following two weeks, despite treatment with medications, the blotches spread over the child’s entire body. The frantic parents moved him from hospital to hospital, demanding ever more expensive treatments and tests. Some doctors said that the child’s immune system was not functioning properly. Despite all efforts, the child died yesterday, December 21. The official diagnosis was sepsis, commonly known as blood poisoning.

We cite the following directly from the Taiwan News:

A total of almost 4.8 million people had been vaccinated so far, according to CDC statistics.

Including the boy, a total of four deaths were recorded following inoculation, including men aged 82 and 50 respectively who had difficult health histories, and a high school student, reports said.

Five pregnant women were reported with problems ranging from miscarriage to a stillborn infant.

Of… 331 lighter cases, 43 percent were dizzy after being inoculated, 20 percent registered a fever, 18 percent felt ill, 17 percent had a headache and 11 percent vomited, according to CDC data.

The CDC denies that the boy’s sickness and death had anything to do with the H1N1 vaccination.

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There’s a new report out that says mercury fillings—the so-called “silver” dental amalagam most of us have in our teeth—may not be so harmful after all. Using x-ray analysis, Graham George of the University of Saskatchewan analyzed the surface of mercury-based fillings that were about 20 years old and compared those to the surface of new amalgam fillings.

The old fillings had lost up to 95 percent of their mercury. What’s more, their mercuric composition had changed. While new fillings contain metallic mercury, the old ones contained primarily beta-mercuric sulfide (metacinnabar), according to the paper George and colleagues published in the American Chemical Society journal, Chemical Research in Toxicology in late October.

Over the past week or so, that paper’s conclusions have been finding their way into the scientific press. So maybe those mercury fillings aren’t so toxic after all, the journalists have been saying. At least, not after they’ve been in your mouth for about 20 years.

The only problem is that the harm scientists have been claiming from amalgam fillings comes from the mercury vapors given off by those fillings, not by the direct action of food or saliva against the fillings themselves. Mercury vapor is what put the “mad” in mad hatters, a nineteenth-century reality independent of the writings of Lewis Carroll. Indeed, the primary reason mercury thermometers have become so rare is that if one breaks, despite the low vapor pressure of mercury, the air of a small room such as a bathroom can easily exceed the acceptable limit of the dangerous fumes, even at room temperature. When mercury is heated, the vapors become far more toxic. What’s more, the lungs provide the most efficient path for absorption of mercury.^{1 2 3}

So while we believe the authors of this article had good intentions, we reject the notion that mercury fillings are not harmful. If after 20 years most of the mercury from those fillings is gone, where do you suppose it went? Probably into your body, a substantial portion of it absorbed through your lungs and digestive tract as inhaled fumes.

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Instead, Medicare may open to those 55 and older

In a surprise move to appease moderate Democrats, sources say the Obama health reform plan may drop the public option in favor of extending Medicare to the uninsured who are more than 55 years of age, the Associated Press is reporting. Currently, only those over 65 are eligible to receive Medicare.

At a last-minute news conference in the Capitol Tuesday evening, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) would say only that a “broad agreement” had been reached between liberals and moderates on the issue. The resulting bill is expected to forbid insurance companies to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions and to reduce healthcare costs in general.

However, dropping the public option is seen as a great loss by those who wish to see healthcare needs prevail over insurance-industry profits. And it seems less likely costs will be curtailed if a purely private health insurance solution is formulated. Currently, about 20% of every healthcare insurance dollar the public pays out goes to insurance industry profits and overhead. The competition provided by the public option was seen as a way to lower these costs and see that more of the healthcare dollars coming both from taxes and individual expenditures would go toward providing actual health care. Medicare overhead costs are generally considered to be between two and five percent, with four percent the most popular figure.

One undoubted benefit of increasing the Medicare rolls is that it will increase the scrutiny paid to Medicare and its benefits. Currently, Medicare recipients are saddled with recent additions to the plan that operate like private insurance or require recipients to sign up for private insurance if they wish to receive, for example, payment for drugs. Some recipients claim that the copays under these plans exceed the cost of many generic drugs purchased directly from a low-cost pharmacy.

Increasing the number of people dependent on the program may increase political pressure to return Medicare more to its single-payer roots.

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Represetative Earl Blumenauer has posted an open letter to his fellow members of Congress over on Huffington Post. For your convenience, we’ve posted the text here:

Senators who are filibustering and throwing sand in the gears to delay health care reform desperately need a reality check. It is ironic to me that members of Congress enjoy some of the best health insurance in the world through our government-administered health care, and yet so many are working overtime to deny quality care to Americans – using scare tactics to claim the “government is going to take over their health care.”

Well, for those Representatives and Senators who are so terrified of a government take-over, I say to them NO access to government run programs for you.

Members of Congress should not have access to taxpayer-funded health care when they are actively denying these very people quality care of their own.

So for the 150 members of Congress who qualify for Medicare, a single-payer government insurance plan, you get no access.  For all members who are eligible for the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, no more. And no more access to the attending physician in the Capitol, either. Not until we pass the health insurance reform that millions of Americans so urgently need.

I share with you my open letter to members of Congress:

Dear Colleague,

I invite you to join me in sponsoring the Health Care Reality-Check Act which I will be introducing next week.

It has become clear that some of our colleagues lack proper perspective on the urgency of health reform because, ironically, as members of Congress we enjoy some of the best health security in the world through our government-administered health care:

• All Members of Congress are eligible – and most participate in – the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, which provides all federal employees with a government-negotiated insurance exchange that is subsidized by their employer: the Federal Government;
• Almost 150 Members of Congress qualify for Medicare, a single-payer government insurance plan;
• The 121 Senators and Representatives who served in our armed forces are eligible for the “socialized” health care we provide for all veterans; and
• Members who aren’t veterans can avail themselves to a similar “socialized” program – the Attending Physician in the U.S. Capitol, for an annual fee of around $500.

These government-run health programs have successfully provided countless Senators and Representatives with life-saving medical treatments, but as we all know, most Americans don’t have this kind of protection.

Members of Congress should not have access to taxpayer-funded healthcare when they are actively denying these very people quality care of their own.

Congress needs a reality check.

In 2007, before the economy collapsed, 42% of all adult Americans under 65 were either uninsured or underinsured.  Our dire unemployment rates and escalating health care costs have only made this situation worse.  Today half of all American families delay seeking medical treatment because they have such a tenuous health insurance situation.   Our colleagues do not fully appreciate the plight of 50% of our population, but we can help them understand.

Until health reform is enacted, Members of Congress should get to experience the tender mercies of our fragmented, complex, and exploitative health care system.  My Health Care Reality Check Act terminates all government-administered health benefits for Members of Congress until comprehensive health reform is signed into law:  no more Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, no Medicare, no VA, no attending physician in the Capitol.

Instead, Senators and Representatives may self-insure or they can rely on a spouse’s company having employer-provided insurance, thus tying them –  like millions of Americans- to the employment of a family member. Some will need to buy health insurance on the private market, exposing them to legal discrimination based on age and gender.

By personally dealing with rescissions, pre-existing condition exclusions, the fine-print of insurance contracts and the gaps in coverage from weak consumer protections maybe our colleagues can better grasp the urgency of our health care crisis.

If our own health security were linked to the success of health reform for all Americans, we [would] have a bill enacted within weeks, guaranteed.  I urge you to cosponsor the Health Care Reality Check Act today.

To your health,

Earl Blumenauer

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If you’ve made it this far, chances are better you won’t be getting the swine flu. The fall wave has peaked, experts seem to agree, and while there will surely be more cases to come, they are on the wane. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is warning that another (winter) wave may occur in January, possibly prompted by students returning home from college during the Christmas holidays, but thus far, the flu pandemic has been a relative non-event as flu pandemics go.

So far, pandemic H1N1 is still crowding out other influenzas, such as seasonal H1N1 and H3N2. Since September, the CDC has tested 420 patient samples that were positive for influenza, and of those, only eight were not pandemic H1N1. Indeed, only one was seasonal H1N1.

The dominance of pandemic flu has not been good for the youngest age groups, however. During week 46 of 2009 (the last for which CDC figures have been reported) 35 influenza-related pediatric deaths were reported. Twenty-seven of these deaths were associated with pandemic H1N1 infections, seven were due to an undetermined influenza A virus subtype, and one was associated with a seasonal H1N1 infection that occurred in March.

Clearly pandemic H1N1 has been harder on children and teenagers than on older people. The H3N2 virus, on the other hand, tends to kill the elderly. But only three cases of H3N2 were reported out of the 420 patient samples previously mentioned, meaning that the pandemic flu’s tendency to crowd out other strains has spared the older age groups, relatively speaking.

Since April, the H1N1 outbreak has killed about 4,000 Americans, according to CDC estimates, of which at least 230 were children under the age of 18.

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