Health Spectator

Whole Foods is among those companies marketing GMO foods as All Natural

Consumers are still being taken in by alternative phrases used by industry to get around the USDA-certified Organic label. A favorite is All Natural, which implies that the product bearing the label contains wholesome and pure ingredients. Some products bearing that label are in fact 50% or more genetically modified. Whole Foods private-label (store-brand) corn flakes, for example, are in this category, containing 50% or more genetically modified corn, according to a report recently released by the Cornucopia Institute in Cornucopia, Wisconsin. However, other brands long trusted by consumers, such as Kashi GoLean scored even higher, approaching 100% GM ingredients in their breakfast cereals.

What makes it worse is that these products are enrolled in the Non-GMO Project. Isn’t it just a little bit misleading for something labeled Non-GMO Project to be 50% to 100% GMO in content?

We think so.

Some of us, no doubt, choose to ignore what’s going on in Japan whether because it’s too much to bear or because we just don’t care. But for the rest of us, whether we are glued to the TV for the latest update or following it at a distance, the ordeal befalling so much of the Japanese population is unspeakably tragic.

And it’s easy to understand how the Japanese people got there. For an island nation with scant natural resources, nuclear energy was the obvious wave of the future. Nuclear energy made them independent of foreign oil–which they desperately needed to power their automobiles, in any case–and harnessed them instead to one of those pursuits the Japanese people do best: technology. So it’s difficult to fault the Japanese for thinking that nuclear power was the obvious solution to their needs.

What were the odds, after all, that an earthquake followed by a tsunami would turn nuclear facilities into seething death traps? Probably quite slender. Yet, as the Japanese and the rest of the world have just found out, those slim odds do come in on occasion, and when they do, the results are devastating. There was a level 9.0 earthquake and it did lead to a tsunami, and the best-conceived power plant technology of 60 years ago has utterly failed. You can’t depend on electrical cooling systems in times of emergency. Nothing less than a foolproof gravity-fed system would have been good enough, and we doubt there is such a thing as a foolproof system anyway. (The plant first to fail, ironically, was built by GE, not by the Japanese.)

But we’re not here to tear apart the promise of nuclear energy. Plenty of others, we suspect, will be doing that in the months to come, though it remains to be seen whether they will be able to alter a national energy policy that is bent on renewing the licenses of numerous American power plants, many of which are leaking radiation and probably in worse shape than the Fukushima nuclear plant was when its recent troubles began.

No, after several days of watching this drama play out in the news (and predicting that we would see a Chernobyl-style disaster or worse before it was over) we were finally struck by a recollection we thought worth sharing. If you are a frequent visitor to these pages, you know our views on fluoride and fluoridation. Despite the propaganda still proffered by the American Dental Association (ADA) fluoride is as certainly detrimental to human and animal health as it is questionable as an aid to dentition.

As Joel Griffiths and Christopher Bryson put it so succinctly in Fluoride, Teeth, and the Atomic Bomb:

Unfortunately, much of the proof of fluoride’s safety rests on the work performed by Program F Scientists at the University of Rochester. During the postwar period that university emerged as the leading academic center for establishing the safety of fluoride, as well as its effectiveness in reducing tooth decay, according to Dental School spokesperson William H. Bowen, MD. The key figure in this research, Bowen said, was Harold C. Hodge—who also became a leading national proponent of fluoridating public drinking water. Program F’s interest in water fluoridation was not just ‘to counteract the local fear of fluoride on the part of residents,’ as Hodge had earlier written. The bomb program needed human studies, as they had needed human studies for plutonium, and adding fluoride to public water supplies provided one opportunity.

Alas, the origin of the whole fluoridation saga in this country (which is–make no mistake–where it all began) was none other than our own Atomic Energy Commission (originally the Manhattan Project, now the Department of Energy, or DOE). The government found that if it was going to pursue nuclear weapons during World War II or, for that matter, nuclear power in peacetime, it would have to overcome one sizable obstacle that overshadowed all others: the toxicity of fluoride, which is used massively in processing uranium. So it ran secret experiments using an unsuspecting public as the guinea pigs. The Manhattan Project had done this with uranium and plutonium and did it as well with fluoride.

Christopher Bryson recounts further in his excellent book, The Fluoride Deception, that Dr. Howard Hodge was assigned to clean up the image of fluoride while he was secretly both the head of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology and head of the International Association for Dental Research (IADR). Writes Bryson,

So, for example, on behalf of the bomb makers he covertly monitored one of the nation’s first public water fluoridation experiments. While the citizens of Newburgh, New York, were told that fluoride would reduce cavities in their children, secretly blood and tissue samples from residents were sent to his atomic laboratory for study.¹

Bryson also notes that “Adding to water a chemical so toxic that it was once used as rat poison was a uniquely American idea and is, increasingly, a lone American practice.”² He then adds, “So if this tale of how fluoride’s public image was privately laundered sounds eerily familiar, maybe it’s because the very same professionals and institutions who told us that fluoride was safe said much the same about lead, asbestos, and DDT or persuaded us to smoke more tobacco.”³

Sad, but true.

We’ve already written about Hodge and his adventures elsewhere in this publication. We suggest you read the account if you haven’t already. You might also read Christopher Bryson’s book as well.

We do not find it reassuring to know that our own federal government was largely behind the deliberate poisoning of our public water supply as a solution to the problem of how to dispose of all the toxic waste produced by the chemical fertilizer industry–the same industry that burgeoned at the end of World War II when the government discovered it had all those munitions factories on its hands producing frightful amounts of nitrate compounds for weapons manufacture. Someone got the bright idea that all that nitrogen-based pollution could be converted to fertilizer. And the industry took off, subsidized by the American taxpayer.

Industry continues to pour out fluoride in massive quantities as toxic waste, which is packaged up as fluorosilic acid—a substance too toxic to be placed in a landfill—and shipped off instead to be poured by municipalities into the public water supply. Through municipal taxes, we fund our own poisoning.

The brains behind all this are the same folks who brought you high-fructose corn syrup (a source of mercury and lead as well as fluoride) for your food and corn ethanol for your automobile’s gas tank. Of course, the fertilizer industry, as we’ve already said, was not alone in producing fluoride as a by-product. Production of aluminum and zinc are other massive sources of the poison. The atomic energy industry used it abundantly in World War II and still does today.

The U.S. government’s purchase of H1N1 vaccines cost taxpayers $1.6 billion, according to figures reported recently by the Washington Post. Despite the relatively mild effect of the actual swine flu pandemic, the panic by U.S. health officials resulted in big profits for Big Pharma, with a resulting glut of flu vaccine that is now being given away by public health clinics.

According to the Post, as many as 72 million doses of swine flu vaccine are now considered surplus and may end up being discarded.

Figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicate that about one in four Americans were vaccinated against H1N1. Among healthcare workers, the H1N1 vaccination figure was slightly higher—about 37 percent—but well below the record 62 percent of healthcare workers vaccinated against seasonal flu during the 2009-2010 season.

Given that 62 percent compliance is the highest ever seen among healthcare workers, it is clear that this group does not believe strongly in the benefits of flu vaccination. Clearly, no one has easier access to vaccination than they. Indeed, the 62 percent figure is no doubt slightly inflated by the forced vaccination of healthcare workers in New York State in 2009. Even so, a 62-percent vaccination rate indicates considerable apathy—if not downright aversion—towards vaccination on the part of healthcare workers, given that the CDC recommends that all healthcare workers be vaccinated against the flu each year.

The 37-percent figure of healthcare workers who took the H1N1 vaccine shows even less belief in the safety and efficacy of that vaccine compared to the seasonal flu vaccine. The irony is that the vaccination rate for children against H1N1 was the same 37 percent, indicating that children in effect ended up being the guinea pigs for the H1N1 flu vaccine.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are typically over 30 million cases of seasonal flu annually in the US. US government figures put the infection rate for the H1N1 virus at approximately 62 million people. Of those, about 12,000 died—far fewer than the 36,000 the CDC says die from seasonal flu each year. (Other CDC figures show that just between January 1 and April 18 of 2009, more than 13,000 people died of complications from seasonal flu, making it a bigger killer for the year than H1N1.)

Approximately 72 million to 81 million people in the U.S. are believed to have been vaccinated against H1N1 as of February 2010.

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.

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.

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. It has been linked both to breast and testicular cancer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) admits it: H1N1 swine flu is a mild disease for most people, but for those whom it hits hard, it is often fatal.

Approximately a third of those who die from the disease do so because of other complications—generally pneumonia or MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) so that the two primary killers once H1N1 gets involved are S. aureus and S. pneumoniae.¹ In part, this reflects the fact—reported here earlier²—that pandemic H1N1 tends to go deeper into the lungs than seasonal flu. According to Dr. Sherif Zaki, a pathologist at the CDC quoted in the November issue of Nature,³ this particular property of the virus is similar to H5N1 avian flu, a far more virulent form of flu that scientists have feared for years might take on a highly contagious human form.

The good news is that this particular scenario has been slow to develop in nature, and may prove difficult to replicate even in the lab. Researcher Bruno Lina at the Jean Merieux/INSERM biosecurity facility in Lyon, France proposes to try to force recombination of H1N1 and H5N1 in the lab and test the survivability and virulence of any resulting products. Based on some of his previous attempts to reassort H5N1 with seasonal H1N1 and H3N2 and the fact that the two viruses in question are different subtypes, he doesn’t expect to find reassortments that are survivable.

Referring to his previous experiments with reassorting H5N1, Lina told Nature, “After a year we only had three reassortments, and none was fit. They just don’t reassort well.”⁴