Health Spectator

On Tuesday, August 30 actress and activist Daryl Hanna was arrested in front of the White House for sitting in against the Keystone XL oil pipeline. That pipeline, if built, would transport oil from Alberta, Canada’s tar sands fields to Texas at the Gulf of Mexico.

What does that have to do with our health? you might ask. Indeed, that is a logical question.

First, the oil in question is extremely dirty crude oil. Its carbon content is exceedingly high. In fact, tar sands oil produces 82 percent more greenhouse gas than conventional crude oil. So not only is it much more expensive to convert to, say, gasoline than conventional crude, it also has a far worse effect on the environment even if it doesn’t spill.

But when it spills, it spells disaster. Residents of Michigan can tell you about that. An existing pipeline extends from these same oil fields to refineries in Oklahoma. Now barely a year old, that pipeline has leaked twelve times in twelve months. In July 2010 it spilled one million gallons of tar sands crude into a Kalamazoo River tributary. Forty miles of river are still contaminated with the oil more than a year later. In part, that’s because tar sand sinks in water. Of course, it still coats and kills fish and wildfowl.

So if you don’t want crude oil contaminating your waterways and drinking water or excess carbon, sulfur and mercury polluting your air and soil, there must be cleaner energy alternatives. Or maybe we just have to cut back on our use of energy and our miles of driving, perhaps using electric cars (which still require us to produce that electricity in the first place—we know).

But that soil, air and water pollution don’t really affect us, right? Breast cancer is still on the rise wordwide. Of course, that’s because of “Western” lifestyles, right? According to the World Health Organization (WHO) there will be 20 million new cases of cancer per year by 2030, up from 12 million new cases in  2008. But if the cause were simply our Western lifestyle as so much of the media assure us, shouldn’t the cancer rate reach a steady state, at least in the U.S.? How do we blame a continuing increase in cancer rates worldwide on our Western lifestyle? Has life changed that radically in India and Southeast Asia?

Incidentally, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) reports that the current increase in cancer translates into approximately 56% more cancer in men and 22% more cancer in women over the course of a single generation. The NCI reports that one in two men or women will experience cancer in their lifetime. And it expects the cancer rate to double by 2050. In Ireland, a report just out states that cancer cases have risen 50% since the 1990s. Has Ireland become that much more “Westernized” since 1990?

If this is purely the result of a Western lifestyle, which presumably means inadequate exercise and a diet of processed foods, why do the rates keep rising? Once one does not exercise and one’s diet consists entirely of processed food—which is, unfortunately, the case for many of us—how can you justify further increases in cancer?

The only explanation, we believe, is a continuing deterioration in our environment, with subsequent ill effects on our health. And the  Keystone XL pipeline is one more giant step in that direction.

We’ve grown accustomed to seeing those signs on the local buses that say, “Powered by Clean Natural Gas.” It always gave us a bit of a lift to see that cheerful improvement touted, even knowing that the buses in this area sporting that sign hold fewer seats than the older buses and are less comfortable for travel.

Still… just the price of progress and greenness, we always thought.

Never again. After seeing Josh Fox’s Gasland, we cannot view natural gas (or any fossil fuel, for that matter) in quite the same light. The old natural gas that gushed from an oil well that has just struck a deposit may have been different. Perhaps there are natural gas wells somewhere in this country that are not the result of fracking—hydraulic fracturing—and which we can still view benignly. But we now know that the odds favor fracking as the likely source of natural gas, as fracking wells spread across our national landscape like locusts or the plague.

Josh Fox hails from Pennsylvania (as we do) and happened to be one of those apparently lucky people who received a lease in the mail from a natural gas company. All he had to do was sign the lease in order to receive a check for approximately $100,000. Of course, signing that lease would have enabled teams from the natural gas company to come and drill on his parents’s beloved rural homestead, giving Fox pause.

Fortunately for Fox and the rest of us, he decided to do some research before signing on the dotted line. The result was the documentary film Gasland.

Fox discovered that fracking was a process patented by Halliburtion, and its rapid spread is an artifact of the Bush-Cheney administration. That’s because in 2005, Cheney and friends pushed through the Energy Policy Act, which exempted the oil and gas industries from control by the Safe Drinking Water Act as well as from other legislation normally assuring some degree of public safety. For example, Halliburton and those companies actually performing the fracking need not reveal the chemicals injected into underground shale deposits to break loose natural gas.

We suspect that hasty legislation was undertaken because in 2004 a scientist with the EPA (Weston Wilson, a 30-year agency veteran) blew the whistle on the EPA’s hasty approval of fracking under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Initially, fracking was used in the West—where it has done untold damage—and is now working its way eastward, leaving behind a path of devastation. Fracking not only causes natural gas (mostly methane) to exude spontaneously from streams and meadows, wells and water faucets, it also pollutes the ground, water and air with potentially hundreds of deadly poisons, including but not limited to, polyglycols, napthalene, xylene, benzene and toluene. Residents in areas treated with fracking appear to be quite fond of demonstrating that their tap water can be set afire, a sort of dark humor that provides them temporary relief from the daily horrors of living in a fracking zone, which include death and severe illness of family and livestock.

Need we mention that flammable water raises concerns of cancer, neuropathy and endocrine imbalance?

Gasland not only received a special jury prize for documentary film at the Sundance Film Festival 2010 and other coveted prizes, it was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary as well. To add to its mystique, the oil and gas industry lobbied hard to get the Academy to withdraw the film from competition, saying it was full of factual errors. Apparently there were no factual errors of sufficient merit to warrant an attempt to attack the filmmaker via the courts, however.

Take a look at Gasland below, then click here to buy it.

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.

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.

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

Friday happens to be Malaria Day in the Americas 2009, and while malaria is not much of a problem here in the United States, it does affect our neighbors to the south and is a major problem in Africa. So we thought we’d take the time to acquaint you with the issues.

Malaria kills more than one million people a year, most of them children. (Most of the remaining fatalities are pregnant women.) Somewhere between 350 million and 500 million people are infected with malaria annually, at great economic cost, especially to families, since breadwinners are often unable to work for weeks, even if they eventually recover.

The main efforts being taken to combat malaria involve encouraging the use of bed nets in malaria-infested regions, particularly long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets, which are the state of the art, and combating antimalarial resistance. So far, resistance to antimalarials —the ineffectiveness of malaria medications due to evolving strains of malaria that are not killed by them—has cost us the use of the cheapest and all but the very best antimalarial medications. Indeed, the World Health Organization (WHO) has mandated that artemisinin, the best of the antimalarials available currently, not be given as a monotherapy. In other words, artemisinin must be adminstered with at least one other antimalarial drug to comply with WHO guidelines.

In the Americas, targets for 2015 include:

• Decreasing annual malaria cases from approximately 1.15 million in the year 2000 to 575,000 by 2010 (50% reduction) and to 287,000 by 2015 (additional 25% reduction)
• Reducing malaria deaths from 348 in the year 2000 to less than 174 (50% reduction) by 2010 and to less than 87 (additional 25% reduction) by 2015

The effectiveness of long-term malaria control is governed by the strength of health systems. Strong health systems can deliver effective, safe, high-quality interventions when and where they are needed and assure access to reliable health information and effective disease surveillance. At the same time, integrating malaria treatment, prevention and surveillance into existing health programs and activities in endemic countries will ensure that funding earmarked for malaria control contributes to the development, expansion and continuous improvement of national health systems.

While the malaria situation in Africa is particularly dire, in the Americas there have been some successes since the turn of the century. Specifically, between 2000 and 2008, we have seen

• a 50.4% reduction of malaria cases in the region
• Approximately a 77% reduction in malaria mortality
• Seven countries have witnessed a greater than 75% reduction in annual malaria cases
• Five countries have shown a reduction in annual malaria cases between 50% and 74%
• Six countries have decreased annual malaria cases by less than 50%

Just in the Americas, the investment needed for malaria control and elimination are $227 million in 2009 and $261 million in 2010.

What do you suppose is the number one killer among infectious diseases? Ask a number of people, and you will likely get a number of different answers: AIDS, malaria—maybe even this year, swine flu.

But the answer isn’t among the above: It’s pneumonia. Pneumonia claims more than four million lives annually. Just within the U.S., pneumonia claims more lives in a week than swine flu has from its initial outbreak to this date. Worldwide, it kills more children than any other disease—more than AIDS, malaria and measles combined. Children under five account for nearly half the deaths from pneumonia. And guess what is the number one fatal complication to swine flu? Yep. Pneumonia.

Although it primarily kills those under five or over 65, no one is entirely safe from pneumonia. A strong immune system is of course your best defense. In summertime, see that you get enough sunlight to maintain your vitamin D levels. Supplement with vitamin D3 or high-vitamin cod liver oil in winter. And in all seasons, get plenty of vitamin C—three grams or more daily.