NaturalNews) It’s no secret mercury is a dangerous toxin that accumulates in the human body and can produce disastrous health problems involving multiple organ systems. It’s known to be a risk to unborn babies, too. Unfortunately, as NaturalNews has reported, mercury contamination of our environment and food sources is rampant. For example, scientists have found that fish(http://www.naturalnews.com/025935_m…) and high fructose corn syrup (http://www.naturalnews.com/026528_m…) are often loaded with the dangerous heavy metal. Now comes this worrisome news: deposits of mercury in the bodies of Americans are increasing at an alarming rate and the health repercussions could be staggering.

Mercury especially targets the liver, the immune system and the pituitary gland. Numerous studies have associated chronic mercury exposure with elevated risks for autism, mental impairment and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. Previous research by U.S. Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) researchers estimated that chronic mercury exposure caused between 300,000 and 600,000 American children to be born with elevated risks of neurodevelopmental disorders between 1999 and 2000...read more here…

July 7, 2009 — The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is adding stronger warnings to pain medications that contain propoxyphene, such as Darvon and Darvocet, because of new data on fatal overdoses linked to propoxyphene products. The FDA is requiring the manufacturers of these drugs to strengthen the drug’s boxed warning and to create a medication guide for patients.

The agency is stopping short of a phased withdrawal from the market as demanded by a Public Citizen petition filed in 2006.

To reduce the likelihood of overdose, the FDA will now require that manufacturers of propoxyphene-containing medications strengthen their label and include a boxed warning on the potential for overdose. Manufacturers will also be required to develop a medication guide for patients stressing that they use the medication as directed. Propoxyphene has been on the market since 1957.

Between 1969 and 2005, an FDA database has linked a total of 91 deaths in persons taking propoxyphene related to accidental overdoses and suicide attempts, although a direct link to propoxyphene is difficult to establish because multiple drugs and other conditions were involved, the agency said.

The FDA is currently working with several organizations, including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Veterans Health Administration, to collect data for a new safety study that will assess the cardiotoxic effects of propoxyphene at higher doses, particularly in elderly populations; findings from this study could lead to additional regulatory action. At this time, the FDA is looking at how Americans are using medications containing propoxyphene, and in which combinations.

Janet Woodcock, MD, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, told reporters during a press briefing that propoxyphene is an accepted option for pain treatment at this time. “Pain is an important issue — it’s the fifth vital sign. Millions of people suffer from pain; it is so prevalent that 1 in 10 people have chronic pain, and the FDA is committed to appropriate treatment of pain. At this time, propoxyphene is an acceptable choice for the treatment of mild to moderate pain when taken as directed.”

Dr. Woodcock noted that after last week’s advisory meeting on acetaminophen safety, the FDA heard from hundreds of patients concerned about the availability of their medications that contain acetaminophen.

“When it comes to acetaminophen or opioids, the FDA is constantly balancing benefit vs risk,” she said.

The FDA said that in cases of overdose, propoxyphene can be a fatal medicine; however, most of the deaths connected to the drug in the FDA’s database were in cases of ingestion of multiple drugs.

The consumer group Public Citizen petitioned the FDA in February 2006, asking that propoxyphene-containing products, sold primarily as a generic drug, be removed from the market. The FDA declined today to take action on the petition. The drug was withdrawn from the UK market in 2005, however, when the British government said it was unimpressed with the efficacy of the drug and that the risk of toxicity in cases of overdose — both intentional and accidental — were unacceptable.

The FDA defended its position in not removing the drug from the market, pointing out that there are not a lot of alternative drugs without similar adverse effects...read more here..

In what may be among the longest-running and widest-ranging cases of academic fraud, one of the most prolific researchers in anesthesiology fabricated much of the data underlying his research, said a spokeswoman for the hospital where he works.

The researcher, Dr. Scott S. Reuben, an anesthesiologist in Springfield, Mass., who practiced at Baystate Medical Center, fabricated data in some or all of the 21 journal articles dating from at least 1996, said Jane Albert, a spokeswoman for Baystate Health.

The reliability of dozens more articles he wrote is uncertain, and the common practice — supported by his studies — of giving patients aspirinlike drugs and neuropathic pain medicines after surgery instead of narcotics is now being questioned.

Paul Cirel, a lawyer for Dr. Reuben, said that he could not discuss the case because Baystate had investigated it as part of a confidential peer-review process. Baystate officials “were aware of extenuating circumstances,” Mr. Cirel said.

The drug giant Pfizer underwrote much of Dr. Reuben’s research from 2002 to 2007. Many of his trials found that Celebrex and Lyrica, Pfizer drugs, were effective against postoperative pain.

“Independent clinical research advances disease treatments and improves the lives of patients,” said Raymond F. Kerins Jr., a Pfizer spokesman. “As part of such research, we count on independent researchers to be truthful and motivated by a desire to advance care for patients. It is very disappointing to learn about Dr. Scott Reuben’s alleged actions.”

Drug companies routinely hire community physicians to conduct studies of already-approved medicines. In some cases, prosecutors have charged companies with underwriting studies of little scientific merit in hopes of persuading doctors to prescribe the medicines more often…read here…

Cancer protection secret revealed

Scientists say they have discovered a missing link in the way cells protect themselves against cancer.

They have uncovered how cells switch a gene called p53, which can block the development of tumours, on and off.

The researchers say the finding has important implications for cancer treatment and diagnosis.

The study, published in Genes And Development, was carried out by teams of scientists in Singapore and the University of Dundee.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7861474.stm

Published: 2009/02/01 00:01:01 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Most Kidney Donors Lead Long, Healthy Lives Biggest study of its kind finds no health downside to donation Posted January 28, 2009 By Ed Edelson HealthDay Reporter WEDNESDAY, Jan. 28

(HealthDay News) — Americans who give the gift of life by donating a kidney tend to lead long, healthy lives themselves. That’s the conclusion of the largest, longest follow-up of donors ever conducted. Related News Diets That Promote Health Keeping Your Brain Fit Good Parents, Bad Results America’s Best Hospitals “Their lifespan is comparable to others of the same age, gender and ethnic background,” said study author Dr. Hassan N. Ibrahim, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. “Indeed, it appears that that kidney donors might actually have better survival.” Ibrahim and his colleagues reported their findings in the Jan. 29 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study tracked outcomes for nearly 3,700 people who donated kidneys, some as far back as 1963. It found that “their quality of life was better than 60 percent of the people in the general population of the same age and gender,” Ibrahim said. This is the first U.S. study to compare the survival of kidney donors to that of the general public, he noted. Two previous, smaller studies done in Norway and Sweden found similar results, but they did not measure the health of donors in as much detail or for as long as in this study, he added.

In addition to overall health, the study looked at measures of kidney function such as the glomerular filtration rate (the flow of filtered fluid through the kidney) as well as the presence of conditions such as high blood pressure. “Kidney donors have excellent glomerular filtration rates 85 percent of the time,” Ibrahim said. “Kidney donors are not likely to develop high blood pressure or have protein in their urine.” End-stage kidney failure developed in only 11 of the thousands…read more

Banning fast food advertisements from children’s television programs would reduce the number of overweight children in the U.S. by 18 percent and decrease the number of overweight teens by 14 percent, economists have estimated in a new study.

The researchers used several statistical models to link obesity rates to the amount of time spent viewing fast food advertising, finding that viewing more fast food commercials on television raises the risk of obesity in children. The study appears in this month’s issue of The Journal of Law and Economics.

“There is not a lot of evidence that overweight kids are more likely to watch TV than other kids,” said Michael Grossman, professor of economics at the City University of New York. “We’re arguing the causality is how many messages are aired — seeing more of these messages is leading people to put on weight.” The study’s co-authors are Shin-Yi Chou, an economist at Lehigh College, and Inas Rashad, an economist at Georgia State University.

But the researchers’ estimate relies on older data gathered in the late 1990s, according to Elaine Kolish, a spokesman for the Council of Better Business Bureaus. Since then, two of the largest fast food chains — Burger King and McDonald’s — and more than a dozen other packaged food companies have signed on to the council’s Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, she said, pledging to advertise only their healthier products to children under age 12….read more here..

5 Myths About Our Ailing Health-Care System

By Shannon Brownlee and Ezekiel Emanuel
Sunday, November 23, 2008; B03

With Congress ready to spend $700 billion to prop up the U.S. economy, enacting health-care reform may seem about as likely as the Dow hitting 10,000 again before the end of the year. But it may be more doable than you think, provided we dispel a few myths about how health care works and how much reform Americans are willing to stomach.

1. America has the best health care in the world.

Let’s bury this one once and for all. The United States is No. 1 in only one sense: the amount we shell out for health care. We have the most expensive system in the world per capita, but we lag behind many developed countries on virtually every health statistic you can name. Life expectancy at birth? We rank near the bottom of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, just ahead of Cuba and way behind Japan, France, Italy, Sweden and Canada, countries whose governments (gasp!) pay for the lion’s share of health care. Infant mortality in the United States is 6.8 per 1,000 births, more than twice as high as in Japan, Norway and Sweden and worse than in Poland and Hungary. We’re doing a better job than most on reducing smoking rates, but our obesity epidemic is out of control, our death rate from prostate cancer is only slightly lower than the United Kingdom’s, and in at least one study, American heart attack patients did no better than Swedish patients, even though the Americans got twice as many high-tech treatments.

Moreover, the quality of health care is different in different parts of the country. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have issued a list of 26 measures of quality, such as making sure that heart-attack patients being discharged from the hospital get a prescription for a beta blocker or aspirin to help reduce the risk of a second attack. It turns out that quality is all over the map, and it isn’t necessarily better in the places we might expect, such as academic medical centers. Worse still, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), there appears to be no connection between how much Medicare and other payers spend on patients in different parts of the country and the quality of the care the patients receive. You are no more likely to get that beta blocker or aspirin in Los Angeles than in Portland, even though Medicare spends twice as much per beneficiary in Los Angeles.

2. Somebody else is paying for your health insurance.

Nope. Even when your employer offers coverage, he isn’t reaching into his own pocket to cover you and your fellow employees; he’s reaching into your pocket, paying you lower wages than he would if he didn’t have to pay for your health insurance.

Rising health-care costs are partly to blame for stagnant wages. Over the past five years, health insurance premiums have risen 5.5 times faster on average than inflation, 2.3 times faster than business income and four times faster than workers’ earnings. Four times. That’s why wages have been nearly flat since the 1980s, even as U.S. productivity has been going up. In effect, about half the money you should be earning for being more productive is being sucked up by ever more expensive health-insurance premiums.

If you pay taxes, you’re also paying for the health care provided through state and federal programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration and the military. All told, the average family of four is coughing up $29,000 a year for health care through taxes, lower wages and out-of-pocket medical expenses.

3. We would save a lot if we could cut the administrative waste of private insurance.

The idea that we could wring billions of dollars in savings this way is seductive, but it wouldn’t really accomplish that much. For one thing, some administrative costs are not only necessary but beneficial. Following heart-attack or cancer patients to see which interventions work best is an administrative cost, but it’s also invaluable if you want to improve care. Tracking the rate of heart attacks from drugs such as Avandia is key to ensuring safe pharmaceuticals.

Let’s just say that we could wave a magic wand and cut private insurers’ overhead by half, to what the Canadian government spends on administering its health-care system — 15 percent. How much would we save? Not as much as you may think. Private insurers pay a little more than a third of what we spend on health care, which means that we’d cut a little more than 5 percent from our total budget, or about $124 billion. That’s not peanuts, but it’s not even enough to cover everybody who’s currently uninsured.

More to the point, we only get to save it once. That’s because administrative waste isn’t what’s driving health-care costs up faster than inflation. Most of the relentless rise can be attributed to the expansion of hospitals and other health-care sectors and the rapid adoption of expensive new technologies — new drugs, devices, tests and procedures. Unfortunately, only a fraction of all that new stuff offers dramatically better outcomes. If we’re worried about costs, we have to ask whether a $55,000 drug that prolongs the lives of lung cancer patients for an average of a few weeks is really worth it. Unless we find a cure for our addiction to the new but not necessarily improved, our national medical bill will continue to skyrocket, regardless of how efficient insurance companies become.

4. Health-care reform is going to cost a bundle.

Only if you think that covering the uninsured is our only priority. Yes, making health care available to all citizens is the right thing to do. But it isn’t the only thing to do. We also have to fix the spectacularly wasteful and expensive way doctors and hospitals deliver care.

Our physicians are working within a truly dysfunctional, often chaotic system that prevents them from caring for us properly. Between 50,000 and 100,000 patients die each year from preventable medical errors. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 1.7 million Americans acquire an infection while in the hospital and nearly 100,000 of them die from it. Laboratory imaging tests are routinely repeated because the originals can’t be found. Patients with such chronic illnesses as heart failure and diabetes land in the hospital because their physicians fail to monitor their condition. When patients have multiple doctors, there’s often nobody keeping track of the different medications, tests and treatments each one prescribes.

Our doctors and hospitals are failing to provide us with care we need while delivering a staggering amount that we don’t need. Current estimates suggest that as much as 20 to 30 percent of what we spend, or about $500 billion, goes toward useless, potentially harmful care.

There are two bright spots. One: We can improve the quality of care and cut costs without rationing. There are models out there for how to do it right — the Mayo Clinic, the Geisinger Clinic in Pennsylvania, the Cleveland Clinic and California’s Kaiser Permanente are just a few of the organized group practices that are doing a better job for less. Their doctors are better than average at using the best medical evidence available. They’re more likely to be using electronic medical records, which can help keep track of patients who have multiple physicians and need complex care. And they’re less likely to provide unnecessary care.

Two: Even moderate reform of the delivery system would improve care and save money. The Lewin Group’s analysis shows that a bill proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, calling for a more comprehensive overhaul of the health-care system than either McCain’s plan or Obama’s could actually insure everyone and save $1.4 trillion over 10 years. More reform is cheaper.

5. Americans aren’t ready for a major overhaul of the health-care system.

We may be readier than you think. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that only 7 percent of Americans rate our health-care system excellent. Nearly 40 percent consider it poor. A whopping 70 percent believe it needs major changes, if not a complete overhaul.

Now is not the time to think small, to cover a few million Americans and leave the bigger job of controlling costs and improving quality for another day. We can’t afford not to reform the delivery system as soon as possible. At 17 percent of gross domestic product, health care is the biggest single sector of the economy, and it’s consuming a larger and larger proportion every year. According to CBO projections, health care will account for 25 percent of GDP by 2025 and 49 percent by 2082. That’s simply unsustainable. Any plan that reforms health care has to do more than simply cover the uninsured. The nation’s health and wealth depend on it.

brownlee@newamerica.net

Shannon Brownlee, a visiting scholar at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, is the author of “Overtreated.” Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and author of “Healthcare, Guaranteed,” is chairman of the center’s Department of Bioethics. The views expressed here are the authors’ own.

Perhaps Vitamin D deficiency is directly related to this increase in asthma development more than the infections themselves. It is well established that vitamin D, a hormone, can affect the immune system.

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Your birthday may decide your risk of asthma
By Sue Mueller

Saturday Nov 22, 2008 (foodconsumer.org) — Your birthday may decide your risk of asthma, according to a new study led by Dr. Tina Hartert, director of the Center for Asthma Research and Environmental Health at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tenn.

The study in the first December issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine found babies born in autumn, 4 months before the peak of winter virus season, were 30 percent more likely to acquire asthma.

The researchers speculated that winter viruses like respiratory syncytial virus or RSV may be responsible for the elevated risk of asthma and suggested that preventing these viruses could prevent asthma.

For the study, Hartert and team followed up more than 95,000 infants born between 1995 and 2000 under the Tennessee Medicaid program from birth through early childhood to examine whether the timing of birth and seasonality of winter virus was associated with the development of asthma.

They found that babies born in the fall or autumn, which is about four months before the peak of the winter virus season, had a 29 percent increased risk of asthma.

The speculation as to what causes the elevated risk of asthma is not new.

A study led by Jackson DJ and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and published in the Oct 2008 issue of American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine has already shown that RSV was strongly associated with asthma symptoms like wheezing.

Kackson et al. found “from birth to age 3 years, wheezing with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) (odds ratio [OR], 2.6), rhinovirus (RV) (OR, 9.8), or both RV and RSV (OR , 10) was associated with increased asthma risk at age 6 years.

Hartert was cited as saying that parents should practice good hygiene and take infection-control measures such as washing their hands frequently to prevent viral infections and the development of asthma in their babies.

A health observer affiliated with foodconsumer.org said babies and their mothers in winter are less likely to be outdoors and suffer vitamin D deficiency, which would reduce the immunity and increase the risk of winter virus infection. Because of this, supplements may be taken during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Or eat some oily fish

Boston – A recent study has shown that women who exercise regularly and get a full eight hours of sleep each night helps to bring down the risk of getting cancer.

Lisa Nemcheck, a breast cancer survivor says that she has come to know that exercise and sleep is helping her remain cancer free. She says, “I recently joined a gym. I started swimming, and I exercise five times a week. I listen to my body, and my body tells me that I do have to rest.”

It has been discovered that regular exercise can help to bring down the risk of cancer in women by 20 percent in a study done by the National Cancer Institue. The fact that exercise has many positive effects on your body such as body weight, immune system functions and hormone functions makes researchers believe that exercise is extremely helpful in reducing the risk of cancer even though there hasn’t been an association between exercise and cancer that has been proven.

Dr. Susan Boolbol says, “This is one of the first studies that has shown that in women who do not have a history of breast cancer, they can actually reduce their risk by exercising.”

Research also shows that even if a women exercises it won’t help unless she gets a full nights sleep also. Sleeping and exercising go hand in hand. Without the proper amount of sleep the exercise doesn’t really matter when reducing cancer risk because it fights the benefits of the exercise. It has been shown that inadequate sleep can actually increase the risk of cancer by 50 percent….read more here

Study: Spare tire doubles risk of dying even if BMI is OK

* Story Highlights
* European study finds fat around belly raised risk of dying
* The link was strongest in those who were at a healthy weight, BMI
* Abdominal fat can pad internal organs and is thought to promote inflammation
* iReport.com: Who’s the boss of your diet?

By Kate Stinchfield

Everyone knows that being overweight increases your risk of heart disease, diabetes, and some types of cancer, but new research reveals that even normal-weight people aren’t scot-free. A European study suggests that people with belly fat — even if they’re at a healthy weight — have a higher risk of dying during a 10-year period than their same-weight peers without a spare tire. The report was published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“I was surprised that even people who would be considered normal weight in terms of their [body mass index] have a higher risk of death if their waist circumference is increased,” says Tobias Pischon, M.D., the study’s lead author and a member of the department of epidemiology at the German Institute of Human Nutrition (DIfE).

In one of the largest long-term prospective studies in the world, a team of researchers at the European Prospective Investigation Into Cancer and Nutrition analyzed 359,387 people ages 25 to 70 from nine European countries.

The researchers found that those with a higher body mass index (BMI) were at a greater risk of dying during the 10-year study than normal-weight people. Health.com: Compare more than 40 diet plans

But when they looked at waist circumference and waist-to-hip ratio alone — not just overall weight — they found that those factors were strongly associated with a higher mortality risk too. A 2-inch increase in waist circumference raised the mortality risk by 17% in men and 13% in women, regardless of BMI. The link was strongest in those who were at a healthy weight, compared to their heavier peers. Health.com: Why getting rid of belly fat may lower Type 2 diabetes risk

Men with the biggest girths (about 40.4 inches) were 2.05 times more likely to die during the study than men with waists that were less than 33.9 inches. Women with waists 35 inches or larger had a mortality risk 1.78 times higher than those with waists less than 27.6 inches.

It’s been known for some time that belly fat is bad for one’s health, and it has been linked to a greater risk of erectile dysfunction, memory problems, diabetes, and heart disease, among other health issues. Abdominal fat — unlike fat elsewhere in the body — can pad internal organs; it is thought to promote inflammation by releasing hormones.….read more here..