XIAM007 - Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Thursday, 12 February 2015

Two people contract Mumps after receiving mumps vaccine - Doctors scramble to reassure public of MMR vaccine safety -

Doctors in Washington are scrambling to explain why two MMR vaccine recipients contracted the mumps virus after being vaccinated.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s foremost health authority, claims the “Mumps vaccine is the best way to prevent mumps,” but two cases in Washington are forcing doctors to ease up on the vaccine protection rhetoric.

CBS affiliate KIRO reports that two people from two separate counties, King and Snohomish, contracted the mumps post-MMR vaccination, blaming the two-person “outbreak” on mumps cases leaking out of the University of Idaho.

The Snohomish County man had received one vaccine, while the King County woman had “received both recommended doses.”

The mumps virus is a particularly nasty, incurable disease that causes headaches, fever and facial swelling.

The cases clearly illustrate how vaccine protection is questionable, yet physicians continue to defend the safety of MMR jabs.

“No vaccine is perfect,” Harborview Medical Center Dr. John Lynch told KIRO. “It doesn’t protect everyone who gets it.”

For victims of adverse MMR events, however, the vaccine is nowhere near perfect.

The Immunization Action Coalition (IAC) admits the MMR vaccine, which contains live measles, mumps and rubella virus strands, “may cause a very mild case of the disease they were designed to prevent.”

Though muddled in legalese, the MMR vaccine insert specifically lists “death” as one of its associated adverse reactions, saying that “Death from various, and in some cases unknown, causes has been reported rarely following vaccination with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines…”

Other MMR vaccine risks and side effects, according to WebMD, include a fever (which affects 1 in 5 children), seizures (which occur in 1 out of 3,000) and encephalitis, or brain inflammation, (which – like some deadly lottery – reportedly affects 1 in a million). To put that number in perspective, the IAC says “hundreds of millions” of MMR doses have been distributed.

A program known as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which receives up to 20,000 reports a year, works to document adverse vaccine reactions, up to and including death, acting as an early-warning service to alert CDC and FDA authorities.

Despite the prevalence of documented adverse events, the IAC and CDC continue to claim the MMR “safety record is excellent.”

Vaccine proponents take health authorities’ recommendations as gospel, yet time and time again their wisdom has proven inaccurate.

In January, a study showed how this year’s flu strain was only 23 percent effective against the flu; in other words it would only protect less than 1 in 4 people.

The CDC has also continually failed to properly inform the public of vaccines’ ill effects.

In 2013, the agency tried to bury a page on its site concerning the polio vaccine’s link to cancer (available here and here), going as far as deleting cached versions of the page on Google’s cache system. This disreputable action alone should give vaccine proponents and anyone blindly taking the agency’s health advice cause for concern.

Read more -

http://www.infowars.com/two-people-contract-mumps-after-receiving-mumps-vaccine/

CDC vaccine whistleblower given immunity to testify re:Black babies with an increased risk for autism after MMR vaccine -

Patrick Howley at The Daily Caller reports that William Thompson, CDC whistleblower, has been given immunity from prosecution, by the federal government, to testify before Congress about vaccine fraud at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Cautionary note: So far, The Daily Caller is the sole source on this story.

On Aug. 27, 2014, Thompson, a long-time researcher at the CDC, published a statement through his lawyer, Rick Morgan, admitting that he and colleagues at the CDC violated the protocol in a study on the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine’s connection to autism.

The study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics in 2004, exonerated the vaccine. However, the study omitted vital data on a group of black babies who showed an increased risk for autism after receiving the MMR vaccine.

Since releasing his Aug. 27 statement, Thompson has maintained silence and has refused to talk to reporters.

Now, it appears he’s ready to step into the light — if there is a congressional hearing. That’s a big “if.”

Thompson is working with Rep. William Posey (R-Fla.). Posey serves on the Committee on Science, Space and Technology’s Subcommittee on Oversight.

A congressional hearing could be explosive, if members of the committee ask Thompson the right questions, probe deeply and find out exactly how an arrangement was made inside the CDC to cover up the MMR vaccine’s connection to autism.

The study in question had several authors, two of whom — Frank DeStefano and Coleen Boyle — are now high-ranking CDC executives in the area of vaccine safety.

If Thompson convincingly shows they were in on the fix, the whole business would explode and the CDC would be exposed as rank liars and threats to human health before the public.

On the other hand, if this is a one-day hearing, at which the testimony devolves into a boring “he said/she said” proposition, and if the press barely takes notice, the outcome (and the truth) will rest entirely in the hands of alternative media.

No congressional hearing has thus far been scheduled.

Another major CDC figure in this scandal is Julie Gerberding, M.D., who was head of the CDC in 2004. Would she be subpoenaed to testify?

In 2004, Thompson wrote Gerberding a letter in which he warned her that he had sensitive and troubling data about the MMR vaccine’s connection to autism. He was due to present the data shortly at a major vaccine/autism conference.

Apparently, Gerberding didn’t answer the letter, and Thompson’s presentation was canceled.

(After Gerberding left the CDC in 2009, she ascended to the position of president of Merck Vaccines. Merck manufactures the MMR vaccine. Get the picture?)

Interestingly, in December 2014, Merck removed Gerberding from her august position and placed her in a new role, a role that never existed within the company before: executive vice president for “strategic communications, global public policy and population health.”

Did Merck make this move to shield Gerberding, to protect her from a possible scandal tying her to the 2004 MMR-autism fraud at the CDC? If there is a congressional hearing, will Gerberding be conveniently unavailable because she is overseas tending to her new international duties at Merck?

Meanwhile, as these developments play out, there is a political battle taking place regarding mandatory vaccination versus parents’ right to choose whether to vaccinate their children.

Presidential candidates Chris Christie and Rand Paul have made statements supporting, to one degree or another, parents’ right to choose. The “medical experts” have invaded television news to slam these statements as grossly irresponsible.

These are the same experts who always answer the call when some element of the medical cartel is under threat of exposure. Their job is to provide cover, sound authoritative and make medical critics into “dangerous people.”

As I’ve documented over the years, these professional experts are actually sitting on a powder keg that threatens to blow the whole medical system sky-high. What’s the issue that must never be revealed?

It’s medically caused death and human destruction.

Here are a few citations and facts that remain state secrets, as far as major news outlets are concerned. Reading them, think about how much credibility the “medical experts” really have whenever they open their mouths about public health in ANY form.

Citation: BMJ June 7, 2012 (BMJ 2012:344:e3989). Author, Jeanne Lenzer.

Jeanne Lenzer referred to a report by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices: “It calculated that in 2011 prescription drugs were associated with two to four million people in the US experiencing ‘serious, disabling, or fatal injuries, including 128,000 deaths.'”

The report called this “one of the most significant perils to humans resulting from human activity.”

And here is the final dagger. The report was compiled by outside researchers who went into the FDA’s own database of “serious adverse [medical-drug] events.”

Therefore, to say the FDA isn’t aware of this finding would be absurd. The FDA knows. The FDA knows, and it isn’t saying anything about it because the FDA certifies as safe and effective all the medical drugs that are routinely maiming and killing Americans.

Previously, I have documented that the FDA knows because the FDA has a page on its own website that admits — without taking blame — 100,000 people are killed every year by medical drugs, and 2 million more people are severely injured by the drugs. (Do an Internet search for “FDA why learn about adverse drug reactions.”)

And for the past five years or so, I have been writing about and citing a published report by the late Barbara Starfield, M.D., that indicated 106,000 people in the U.S. are killed by medical drugs every year. Until her death in 2011, Starfield worked at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Her report “Is U.S. health really the best in the world?” was published in the Journal of American Medical Association on July 26, 2000.

Do an extrapolation: 106,000 people killed every year in the U.S. by medical drugs equals 1 million deaths per decade.

Starfield didn’t stop there. She also attributed 119,000 deaths per year to mistreatment and medical errors in hospitals, bringing the annual total of U.S. medically caused deaths to 225,000.

Here’s another study: April 15, 1998, Journal of the American Medical Association, “Incidence of Adverse Drug Reactions in Hospitalized Patients.” It, too, is mind-boggling.

The authors, led by Jason Lazarou, culled 39 previous studies on patients in hospitals. These patients, who received drugs in hospitals or were admitted to hospitals because they were suffering from the drugs doctors had given them, met the following fate:

In a given year, in the US, 106,000 hospitalized patients die as a direct result of the drugs. Beyond that, 2.2 million hospitalized patients experience serious adverse reactions to the drugs.

The authors write: “…Our study on ADRs [Adverse Drug Reactions], which excludes medication errors, had a different objective: to show that there are a large number of ADRs even when the drugs are properly prescribed and and administered.”

Roughly 1.5 million American soldiers have died in all wars in U.S. history.

In any given 10 years of modern medical treatment, there were 2.25 million deaths, according to Starfield.

Consider how much suppression is necessary to keep the medical-death numbers under wraps.

Now think about these “medical experts” who appear on television news programs and assure the public that modern medicine is perfectly safe.

When they blithely state that vaccines only rarely cause problems of any kind and when they state that vaccines have absolutely no connection to neurological damage in children, what is their level of credibility?

It may interest you to know that the U.S. system of reporting severe adverse effects of vaccines is broken. There are no reliable numbers. That’s because the reporting is done by patients or doctors.

Barbara Loe Fisher of the private National Vaccine Information Center has put together a reasonable estimate.

“But how many children have [adverse] vaccine reactions every year? Is it really only one in 110,000 or one in a million who are left permanently disabled after vaccination? Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler observed in 1993 that less than 1 percent of doctors report adverse events following prescription drug use. [See DA Kessler, ‘Introducing MEDWatch,’ JAMA, June 2, 1993: 2765-2768]

“There have been estimates that perhaps less than 5 or 10 percent of doctors report hospitalizations, injuries, deaths, or other serious health problems following vaccination. The 1986 Vaccine Injury Act contained no legal sanctions for not reporting; doctors can refuse to report and suffer no consequences.

“Even so, each year about 12,000 reports are made to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System [VAERS]; parents as well as doctors can make those reports. [See RT Chen, B. Hibbs, ‘Vaccine safety,’ Pediatric Annals, July 1998: 445-458]

“However, if that number represents only 10 percent of what is actually occurring, then the actual number may be 120,000 vaccine-adverse events. If doctors report vaccine reactions as infrequently as Dr. Kessler said they report prescription-drug reactions, and the number 12,000 is only 1 percent of the actual total, then the real number may be 1.2 million vaccine-adverse events annually.”

Now you have the background to assess what Thompson may say if there is a congressional hearing on CDC vaccine-autism fraud.

Thompson states that he was part of egregious lying in a published study.

Well, how in the world do you suppose the medically caused death and damage I’ve cited in this article is suppressed and covered up and papered over?

Every single medical drug and vaccine that creates the death and damage has been written about and called safe in at least one study published in a “reputable” medical journal.

Get it?

Rank fraud in published medical studies is everywhere all the time.

Indeed, here is a devastating statement from a doctor who has examined more published medical studies than any expert who shows up on television and spouts off about our perfectly safe medical system.

For two decades, she was the editor of one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world.

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine,” stated Marcia Angell, M.D. (“Drug Companies and Doctors: A story of Corruption.” NY Review of Books, Jan. 15, 2009).

Hello, Brian Williams, Scott Pelley, David Muir, Wolf Blitzer, Bill O’Reilly, Jon Stewart, Rush Limbaugh and all the so-called medical reporters for mainstream television and print outlets across America. Do you have the courage, brains and will to cover and hammer on the biggest story of your lives: medically caused death and destruction?

Read more -

http://personalliberty.com/cdc-vaccine-whistleblower-given-immunity-testify/

STUDY: Large condoms to blame for STD spike... - Teens embarrassed to choose correct size... -

Thai health officials Thursday said teenagers who are too embarrassed to choose condoms that fit are partly to blame for a recent spike in sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among their peers.

In a statement ahead of Valentine's Day -- a time when Thai officials often issue a flurry of warnings about the potential pitfalls of young love -- the kingdom's Ministry of Public Health warned that STIs among 10-19 year olds had increased almost five times in the last ten years.

"It is due to the fact that only 43 percent (of teenagers) use condoms -- and also because they choose condoms that are too big for their actual sizes and they are afraid they will be mocked for being too small," the statement said.

The ministry added it planned to spend 47 million baht ($1.4 million) this year to distribute more than 43 million condoms to people across the country.

Despite its anything-goes image, Thailand has a conservative streak, meaning that young people are told to abstain from intercourse altogether instead of being educated about using protection.

Experts say that lack of awareness has led to soaring rates of teenage pregnancy and STIs.

According to the United Nations, the birthrate among Thai teenagers was 47 per 1,000 girls from 2006 to 2010 -- roughly in line with neighbouring Cambodia, but significantly higher than Malaysia's 14.

Doctors have said the true figure is likely to be higher given many Thai teens will seek an abortion, even though the procedure is illegal under almost all circumstances.

Valentine's Day often leads to bouts of concern over these issues. This year officials have called on teenagers to have a special meal or visit temples instead of having sex.

Some Thai officials have called for condom machines to be placed in schools -- a plan that has been rejected so far by education chiefs.

Read more -

http://www.france24.com/en/20150212-big-condoms-partly-blame-thai-teen-sti-spike-ministry/

Wednesday, 11 February 2015

Sex toy injuries rocket after release of Fifty Shades of Grey -

Sex toy injuries have doubled since 2007, with a large increase in 2012 and 2013, after the release of the Fifty Shades of Grey books.
The figures are estimates from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which has tracked casualty admissions since 1991, the Washington Post reported.

The injuries relating to "massage devices and vibrators" were initially low but began to rise steeply from 2005, when around 1500 people across the US received treatment for sex injuries.
Middle aged men were most likely to get such injuries. Male patients accounted for 58 per cent, with the median age in that group being 44 years old. The median aged for women was younger, at 30 years old.

The oldest man recorded as receiving treatment for sex injuries was 85.
There was a large increase in the number of sex injuries in 2012, when 2,500 people received treatment for sex injuries. The first Fifty Shades of Grey book was released in 2011. There is no evidence the two are linked, but the bondage-themed novels have been read by tens of millions of people.

It was reported last week that sex shop owners on both sides of the Atlantic were stocking up on whips, pleasure balls and spanking paddles before the hotly anticipated Fifty Shades of Grey film hits the big screen this weekend.
US retailer Babeland, which has 20 Fifty Shades-branded items, has been stockpiling blindfolds and vibrators. "We're ready to respond," co-founder Claire Cavanah told AFP. The novels fuelled a 40-per cent sales increase at Babeland's New York branch.
Neal Slateford, owner of British company Lovehoney, which worked with EL James to produce the official Fifty Shades range in 2012, is also expecting a run on demand: "We have experienced spikes in sales after each movie trailer has been released which gives us a good indication of just how influential this movie will be."

Read more -

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11404909/Sex-toy-injuries-rocket-after-release-of-Fifty-Shades-of-Grey.html

Why animals eat psychoactive plants - the story of the drunk elephants and the stoned water buffalo -

The United Nations says the drug war’s rationale is to build “a drug-free world — we can do it!” U.S. government officials agree, stressing that “there is no such thing as recreational drug use.” So this isn’t a war to stop addiction, like that in my family, or teenage drug use. It is a war to stop drug use among all humans, everywhere. All these prohibited chemicals need to be rounded up and removed from the earth. That is what we are fighting for.

I began to see this goal differently after I learned the story of the drunk elephants, the stoned water buffalo, and the grieving mongoose. They were all taught to me by a remarkable scientist in Los Angeles named Professor Ronald K. Siegel.

***
The tropical storm in Hawaii had reduced the mongoose’s home to a mess of mud, and lying there, amid the dirt and the water, was the mongoose’s mate — dead. Professor Siegel, a silver-haired official adviser to two U.S. presidents and to the World Health Organization, was watching this scene. The mongoose found the corpse, and it made a decision: it wanted to get out of its mind.

Two months before, the professor had planted a powerful hallucinogen called silver morning glory in the pen. The mongooses had all tried it, but they didn’t seem to like it: they stumbled around disoriented for a few hours and had stayed away from it ever since. But not now. Stricken with grief, the mongoose began to chew. Before long, it had tuned in and dropped out.

It turns out this wasn’t a freak occurrence in the animal kingdom. It is routine. As a young scientific researcher, Siegel had been confidently toldby his supervisor that humans were the only species that seek out drugs to use for their own pleasure. But Siegel had seen cats lunging at catnip — which, he knew, contains chemicals that mimic the pheromones in a male tomcat’s pee —so, he wondered, could his supervisor really be right? Given the number of species in the world, aren’t there others who want to get high, or stoned, or drunk?

This question set him on a path that would take twenty-five years of his life, studying the drug-taking habits of animals from the mongooses of Hawaii to the elephants of South Africa to the grasshoppers of Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia. It was such an implausible mission that in one marijuana field in Hawaii, he was taken hostage by the local drug dealers, because when he told them he was there to see what happened when mongooses ate marijuana, they thought it was the worst police cover story they had ever heard.

What Ronald K. Siegel discovered seems strange at first. He explains in his book Intoxication:

After sampling the numbing nectar of certain orchids, bees drop to the ground in a temporary stupor, then weave back for more. Birds gorge themselves on inebriating berries, then fly with reckless abandon. Cats eagerly sniff aromatic “pleasure” plants, then play with imaginary objects. Cows that browse special range weeds will twitch, shake, and stumble back to the plants for more. Elephants purposely get drunk off fermented fruits. Snacks of “magic mushrooms” cause monkeys to sit with their heads in their hands in a posture reminiscent of Rodin’s Thinker. The pursuit of intoxication by animals seems as purposeless as it is passionate. Many animals engage these plants, or their manufactured allies, despite the danger of toxic or poisonous effects.

Noah’s Ark, he found, would have looked a lot like London on a Saturday night. “In every country, in almost every class of animal,” Siegel explains, “I found examples of not only the accidental but the intentional use of drugs.” In West Bengal, a group of 150 elephants smashed their way into a warehouse and drank a massive amount of moonshine. They got so drunk they went on a rampage and killed five people, as well as demolishing seven concrete buildings. If you give hash to male mice, they become horny and seek out females — but then they find “they can barely crawl over the females, let alone mount them,” so after a little while they yawn and start licking their own penises.

Excerpted from Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Available from Amazon.
In Vietnam, the water buffalo have always shunned the local opium plants. They don’t like them. But when the American bombs started to fall all around them during the war, the buffalo left their normal grazing grounds, broke into the opium fields, and began to chew. They would then look a little dizzy and dulled. When they were traumatized, it seems, they wanted — like the mongoose, like us — to escape from their thoughts.

***
I kept returning to the UN pledge to build a drug-free world. There was one fact, above all others, that I kept placing next to it in my mind. It is a fact that seems at first glance both obvious and instinctively wrong. Only 10 percent of drug users have a problem with their substance. Some 90 percent of people who use a drug—the overwhelming majority—are not harmed by it. This figure comes not from a pro-legalization group, but from the United Nations Office on Drug Control, the global coordinator of the drug war. Even William Bennett, the most aggressive drug czar in U.S. history, admits: “Non-addicted users still comprise the vast bulk of our drug-involved population.”

This is hard to dispute, yet hard to absorb. If we think about people we know, it seems about right—only a small minority of my friends who drink become alcoholics, and only a small minority of the people I know who use drugs on a night out have become addicts.

But if you think about how we are trained to think about drugs, this seems instinctively wrong, even dangerous. All we see in the public sphere are the casualties. The unharmed 90 percent use in private, and we rarely hear about it or see it. The damaged 10 percent, by contrast, are the only people we ever see using drugs out on the streets. The result is that the harmed 10 percent make up 100 percent of the official picture. It is as if our only picture of drinkers were a homeless person lying in a gutter necking neat gin. This impression is then reinforced with the full power of the state. For example, in 1995, the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted a massive scientific study of cocaine and its effects. They discovered that “experimental and occasional use are by far the most common types of use, and compulsive/dysfunctional [use] is far less common.” The U.S. government threatened to cut off funding to the WHO unless they suppressed the report. It has never been published; we know what it says only because it was leaked.

As I write this, I feel uncomfortable. The 10 percent who are harmed are most vivid to me—they are some of the people I love most. And there is another, more complex reason why I feel awkward writing about this. For anybody who suspects that we need to reform the drug laws, there is an easier argument to make, and a harder argument to make.

The easier argument is to say that we all agree drugs are bad — it’s just that drug prohibition is even worse. I have made this argument in debates in the past. Prohibition, I said, doesn’t stop the problem, it simply piles another series of disasters onto the already-existing disaster of drug use. In this argument, we are all antidrug. The only difference is between prohibitionists who believe the tragedy of drug use can be dealt with by more jail cells in California and more military jeeps on the streets of Juárez, and the reformers who believe the tragedy of drug use can be dealt by moving those funds to educate kids and treat addicts.

Read more -

http://boingboing.net/2015/01/20/why-animals-eat-psychoactive-p.html

Tuesday, 10 February 2015

81 Percent of Dollar store products tested contain chemicals linked to Learning Disabilities, Cancer and Serious Illnesses -

HealthyStuff, in collaboration with the Campaign for Healthier Solutions, released a report today about toxic chemicals found in Dollar store products. The report — A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Discount Retailers are Falling Behind on Safer Chemicals — includes testing results for 164 dollar store products such as toys, jewelry, school supplies and other household items, that found over 81% (133 of 164) contained at least one hazardous chemical above levels of concern.

The campaign also sent a letter to the CEO’s of the four largest Dollar store chains — including Family Dollar (tentatively acquired by Dollar Tree on January 22), Dollar Tree, Dollar General, and 99 Cents Only urging them to stop the sale of products with hazardous chemicals to communities of color and low-income families, who already live in more polluted areas and “food deserts,” and adopt policies that will protect both customers and their businesses. Combined these discount chains have sales totaling over $36 billion and operate more stores nationally than Walmart.

“People struggling to make ends meet are confined to shopping at the Dollar stores,” said Jose T. Bravo, National Coordinator for the Campaign for Healthier Solutions. “We are already disproportionately affected by pollution and lack of adequate medical care, and now we know we’re filling our homes and our bodies with chemicals released from Dollar store products. This needs to stop. ”

“We’ve tested 1,000′s of products from dozens of retailers over the last ten years, said Jeff Gearhart, HealthyStuff Research Director. “And on average the dollar store products are some of the poorest peforming from a chemical hazard perspective. I am particularly concerned about the comparatively high percentage of products containing hazardous plasticizers. ”

The chemicals of concern found in Dollar store products tested for this report include: phthalates, linked to birth defects, reduced fertility, cancer, learning disabilities, diabetes, and other health issues; polyvinyl chloride plastic (PVC or vinyl), which creates hazards throughout its life cycle and has been linked to asthma and lung effects; and toxic metals such as lead, which harms brain development, leading to learning disabilities, lower IQ, and cause other serious health impacts, especially in children.

Other key findings from the report include:

49% of products tested (80 of 164) contained two or more hazardous chemicals above levels of concern;
38% of the products tested (63 of 164) contained the toxic plastic PVC (vinyl);
32% of a subset of vinyl products tested for phthalates (12 of 38) contained levels of phthalates above the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) limit for children’s products.
In addition, 40% of sales at Dollar stores go toward food products (not tested for this report) — much of which is highly processed with low nutritional quality, and whose packaging is another potential source of toxic chemicals including bisphenol-A (BPA), a synthetic hormone linked to breast and others cancers, reproductive problems, obesity, early puberty and heart disease.

Fortunately, there is a growing movement by mainstream retail and manufacturing brands — including Target and Walmart — to respond to consumer demand for safer products with publicly-available corporate policies that identify, disclose, and replace priority toxic chemicals with safer alternatives. By failing to address toxic chemicals through comprehensive policies, Dollar chains are not only putting their customers at risk, they are exposing their businesses to the fate of companies like Mattel, which lost 18% of its value after recalling toys with lead paint, and Sigg USA, which went bankrupt after failing to disclose toxic BPA in its water bottles.

The Campaign for Healthier Solutions is asking for a comprehensive set of reforms, including that:

Discount Retailers immediately remove children’s products found to contain regulated phthalates and lead from store shelves; and adopt comprehensive corporate chemical management policies to identify, disclose, and remove hazardous chemicals from their supply chains and from all products in their stores, beginning with their house brands.

Local, State, and Federal Governments ensure that discount retailers comply with all relevant laws and regulations; and adopt public policies (such as Maine’s Kid-Safe Products Law and WashingtReon’s Children’s Safe Products Act) that require manufacturers and retailers to disclose hazardous chemicals in products, research alternatives, and remove hazardous chemicals when alternatives are available, effective, and safer.

Families and Communities let Dollar store chains know that they want safer products, and join local and national efforts advocating for nontoxic products.

Complete test results are available at HealthyStuff.org. The full report and more information about the Campaign are available at www.nontoxicdollarstores.org

Read more -

http://www.ecocenter.org/healthy-stuff/reports/dollar-store-report

U.S. Media Blackout - Italian Courts rule Vaccines cause Autism -

On September 23, 2014, an Italian court in Milan award compensation to a boy for vaccine-induced autism.
(See the Italian document here.)
A childhood vaccine against six childhood diseases caused the boy’s permanent autism and brain damage. While the Italian press has devoted considerable attention to this decision and its public health implications, the U.S. press has been silent.

Like the U.S., Italy has a national vaccine injury compensation program to give some financial support to those people who are injured by compulsory and recommended vaccinations. The Italian infant plaintiff received three doses of GlaxoSmithKline’s Infanrix Hexa, a hexavalent vaccine administered in the first year of life. These doses occurred from March to October 2006. The vaccine is to protect children from polio, diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis B, pertussis and Haemophilus influenza type B. In addition to these antigens, however, the vaccine then contained thimerosal, the mercury-containing preservative, aluminum, an adjuvant, as well as other toxic ingredients. The child regressed into autism shortly after receiving the three doses. When the parents presented their claim for compensation first to the Ministry of Health, as they were required to do, the Ministry rejected it. Therefore, the family sued the Ministry in a court of general jurisdiction, an option which does not exist in the same form in the U.S.

Based on expert medical testimony, the court concluded that the child more likely than not suffered autism and brain damage because of the neurotoxic mercury, aluminum and his particular susceptibility from a genetic mutation. The Court also noted that Infanrix Hexa contained thimerosal, now banned in Italy because of its neurotoxicity, “in concentrations greatly exceeding the maximum recommended levels for infants weighing only a few kilograms.”

Presiding Judge Nicola Di Leo considered another piece of damning evidence: a 1271-page confidential GlaxoSmithKline report (now available on the Internet). This industry document provided ample evidence of adverse events from the vaccine, including five known cases of autism resulting from the vaccine’s administration during its clinical trials (see table at page 626, excerpt below).

GSK autism

As in many other developed countries, government, not industry, compensates families in the event of vaccine injury. Thus GSK’s apparent lack of concern for the vaccine’s adverse effects is notable and perhaps not surprising. In the final assessment, the report states that “[t]he benefit/risk profile of Infanrix hexa continues to be favourable,” despite GSK’s acknowledgement that the vaccine causes side effects including “anaemia haemolytic autoimmune,thrombocytopenia, thrombocytopenic purpura, autoimmune thrombocytopenia, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, haemolytic anemia, cyanosis, injection site nodule, abcess and injection site abscess, Kawasaki’s disease, important neurological events (including encephalitis and encephalopathy), Henoch-Schonlein purpura, petechiae, purpura, haematochezia, allergic reactions (including anaphylactic and anaphylactoid reactions),” and death (see page 9).

The Milan decision is sober, informed and well-reasoned. The Ministry of Health has stated that it has appealed the Court’s decision, but that appeal will likely take several years, and its outcome is uncertain.

Rimini: 2012

Two years earlier, on May 23, 2012, Judge Lucio Ardigo of an Italian court in Rimini presided over a similar judgment, finding that a different vaccine, the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine (MMR), had caused a child’s autism.
(See: Italian MMR Remini decision 2012)
As in the Milan case, the Ministry of Health’s compensation program had denied compensation to the family, yet after a presentation of medical evidence, a court granted compensation. There, too, the Italian press covered the story; the U.S. press did not.

In that case, a 15-month old boy received his MMR vaccine on March 26, 2004. He then immediately developed bowel and eating problems and received an autism diagnosis with cognitive delay within a year. The court found that the boy had “been damaged by irreversible complications due to vaccination (with trivalent MMR).” The decision flew in the face of the conventional mainstream medical wisdom that an MMR-autism link has been “debunked.”

***

Both these Italian court decisions break new ground in the roiling debate over vaccines and autism. These courts, like all courts, are intended to function as impartial, unbiased decision makers. The courts’ decisions are striking because they not only find a vaccine-autism causal link, but they also overrule the decisions of Italy’s Ministry of Health. And taken together, the court decisions found that both the MMR and a hexavalent thimerosal- and aluminum-containing vaccine can trigger autism.

These court decisions flatly contradict the decisions from the so-called U.S. vaccine court, the Court of Federal Claim’s Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. There, from 2007 to 2010, in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding, three decision makers, called Special Masters, found that vaccines did not cause autism in any of the six test cases, and one Special Master even went so far as to compare the theory of vaccine-induced autism to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The Italian court decisions contrast starkly with these U.S. cases based on similar claims.

How do we reconcile the difference between the U.S. and Italian decisions in similar cases? What’s different about Italy? Well, there may be many differences, but a critical one is that in the U.S., if someone loses in the government vaccine injury compensation program, she cannot sue the government in civil court; she can sue only the manufacturer. In the U.S., her family would have to shoulder legal fees in a David and Goliath mismatch, pitting a global pharmaceutical behemoth against a family likely already suffering financially from serious health costs.

Furthermore, since 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court has foreclosed potential cases and class action lawsuits to contest unreasonably dangerous vaccine designs, such as the use of thimerosal as a preservative or the simultaneous administration of multiple live viruses, such as the MMR. Since the Supreme Court’s 2011 Bruesewitz v. Wyeth decision, no court in the U.S. can entertain vaccine design defect claims, the most likely legal actions to aggregate plaintiffs in similar circumstances against large, pharmaceutical defendants.

Unlike American victims of vaccine injury, the Italian plaintiffs didn’t have to sue GSK; they sued the Ministry of Health. In both the Milan and Rimini decisions, the plaintiffs won compensation based on findings that vaccines caused autism. One might say that these cases achieved nothing more than a small payout for injured children. But arguably the families, lawyers and medical experts behind these cases achieved far more. They took the issue of vaccine-induced autism to impartial courts, and they got clear a clear judicial answer based on the evidence: vaccines cause autism.

Are court decisions science? Of course not. There is a desperate need for more science on autism and the role that vaccines play, flimsy industry, medical and government retorts to the contrary notwithstanding. But in the current absence of the necessary science on vaccines and autism, decisions of impartial judicial tribunals, based on extensive evidence and testimony, may be some of the best sources of information and insight we have.

Mary S. Holland is a Research Scholar at the NYU School of Law and chairs the advisory board of the non-profit organization Health Choice.

Read more -

http://www.rescuepost.com/files/vaccine-italia-decision.pdf

Hovering happy face smiles down on us from space - captured by the Hubble Space Telescope -

This smiley face hovering in space looks like it was beamed into the heavens by a celestial keyboard. Captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, it was in fact created by a quirk of general relativity known as gravitational lensing.

The glowing eyes are bright galaxies that are part of a galaxy cluster known as SDSS J1038+4849. The massive structure warps space-time, bending light like a lens to create a stretched image of distant galaxies, called an Einstein ring. The well-positioned circular shape creates the outline of the face and the wry grin.

The happy face was uncovered by amateur astronomer Judy Schmidt in a similar image while hunting for submissions for the Hubble's Hidden Treasures competition. Contestants were asked to search through the space telescope's vast archives for overlooked discoveries.

Read more-

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26939-hovering-happy-face-smiles-down-on-us-from-space.html#.VNo66uZVntc

Monday, 9 February 2015

Old people auctioned off to care homes on the internet: Anger over 'cattle markets for grannies' -

The elderly and disabled are being ‘put up for auction’ by local councils on ‘eBay-style’ websites, with care firms then bidding to offer them a bed.

At least a dozen local authorities are listing vulnerable people’s details – including their age and what care and medication they need – before inviting bids from care homes in the area.

The bidding is sometimes open for only a few hours, at other times it can last for two or three days. The cheapest offer often wins.

Critics last night said the system was akin to ‘auctioning your granny’ and a ‘cattle market’, saying sensitive decisions about an elderly resident’s final years are being made by a computer programme that is only interested in costs.

It also means the patient or their family often does not see the care home, and that those running the home do not see the patient before they arrive.

One council has boasted of reducing care costs by almost a fifth using the system.

The auction-style process allows councils to circulate anonymised details of individuals to a large number of suppliers who then bid in an online auction for the contract.

As many as 100 providers can bid before the software produces a shortlist of the most favourable bids. Shortlisted bidders are then told where they are ranked in the process.

If they are in second position, they can adjust their bid – either by lowering the price or offering extra care services – so that they can move up to first.

Councils say quality is the first consideration, but figures obtained under a Freedom of Information request show 92 per cent of care packages commissioned on the system over a six-month period were awarded to the bidder with the lowest price, BBC 5 Live revealed.

Government adviser Ros Altmann: 'These eBay-style sites highlight the funding crisis for care'
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Government adviser Ros Altmann: 'These eBay-style sites highlight the funding crisis for care'

Ros Altmann, a Government adviser and independent expert on care for the elderly, said: ‘These eBay-style sites highlight the funding crisis for elderly care. It is awful. The idea of bidding for a person is just uncivilised. These are not parcels, they are people.’

Janet Morrison, chief executive of the charity Independent Age, said: ‘Do we really want to treat older people as a “product” to be bought and sold this way? We are concerned that older people’s needs will lose out to price as the main reason for selecting a home.’

At least 12 councils use the auction-style systems. They include Kent County Council, Devon County Council, Southend Borough Council and Birmingham City Council. Dozens more are expected to follow suit.

Care companies bidding to offer a place have to state what services they can provide and at what cost before a computer system decides which company is the winner of the ‘contract’. Councils say the winning home is not forced upon patients, and that it is not always the cheapest bid that wins, with quality of care being the main consideration.

Birmingham has been using an online auction system since 2012 and says it has reduced its spending on care by almost a fifth.

It uses a software called SProc.Net, which has been devised by Matrix SCM, a company based in Milton Keynes which last year said it was in talks with 30 other councils.

Radio 5 Live also found that in some cases in Birmingham elderly people were being sent to homes which won the online auction despite being ‘zero-rated’ by the council on its own 0-100 scale of care quality – where scores under 60 are ‘poor’.

Les Latchman, chairman of the Birmingham Care Consortium, which represents care homes in Birmingham and commissioned the FOI request, said the system was forcing providers to offer lower and lower prices to secure the contract.

Read more -

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2945079/Old-people-auctioned-care-homes-internet-Anger-cattle-markets-grannies-councils-accept-lowest-bids-save-cash.html

Sunday, 8 February 2015

SAMSUNG warns not to discuss personal info in front of TV... -

As the number of connected devices — aka the Internet of Things, aka the sensornet — proliferates so too does the number of devices leaning on voice recognition technology as an interface to allow for hands free control.

Last fall, for instance, Amazon revealed a connected speaker with a Siri-style assistant that can perform tasks like adding items to your ecommerce shopping basket on command. Internet connected ‘smart TVs’ which let couch-potatoes channel-hop by talking at their screen, rather than mashing the buttons of a physical remote control are even more common — despite dubious utility to the user. The clear consumer electronics trajectory is for more devices with embedded ears that can hear what their owners are saying. And, behind those ears, the server-side brains to data-mine our conversations for advertising intelligence.

The potential privacy intrusion of voice-activated services is massive. Samsung, which makes a series of Internet connected TVs, has a supplementary privacy policy covering its Smart TVs which includes the following section on voice recognition (emphasis mine):

You can control your SmartTV, and use many of its features, with voice commands. If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service that converts speech to text or to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you. In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.

As an Electronic Frontier Foundation activist pointed out earlier today, via Twitter, the concept of a TV screen that might be snooping on your private conversations — and thus broadcasting a chilling effect by inculcating self-censorship within its viewers — is straight out of George Orwell’s 1984:

Left: Samsung SmartTV privacy policy, warning users not to discuss personal info in front of their TV Right: 1984 pic.twitter.com/osywjYKV3W
— Parker Higgins (@xor) February 8, 2015

The Samsung example is just the latest privacy-related concern involving smart TVs — many of which routinely require users to agree to having their viewing data sent back to the TV maker and shared by them with advertisers and others simply in order for them to gain access to the service. But the clarity of wording in Samsung’s privacy policy is impressive — given it amounts to a warning not to talk about private stuff in front of your telescreen because multiple unknown entities can listen in.

Creepy, tech-fueled privacy intrusions are rarely detailed as clearly as that. So full marks to Samsung for clarity. Albeit, as per usual, these warnings are contained within the most overlooked type of document on the Internet so will easily go unnoticed by the average user.

If the SmartTV owner does realize how ridiculous this is, Samsung does at least allow them to disable the eavesdropping voice recognition ‘feature’, and instead use a more limited set of predefined ‘voice commands’ — and in that instance says it does not harvest their spoken words.

However it will still gather usage info and any other text-based inputs for data mining purposes, as it also notes further down in the policy. So an entire opt-out of being tracked is not part of this very expensive package.

If you do not enable Voice Recognition, you will not be able to use interactive voice recognition features, although you may be able to control your TV using certain predefined voice commands. While Samsung will not collect your spoken word, Samsung may still collect associated texts and other usage data so that we can evaluate the performance of the feature and improve it.

You may disable Voice Recognition data collection at any time by visiting the “settings” menu. However, this may prevent you from using all of the Voice Recognition features.

An Internet connected TV that eavesdrops on the stuff you say when you’re sitting on the sofa is just the latest overreaching privacy intrusion to come to light in the tech sphere.

It’s unlikely to be the worst, and sure won’t be the last. But as more of these egregious, overreaching policies come to light — and as more of the objects with which we are surrounded in our homes, cars and lives are networked up and brought online, and thus given (at very least) the technical ability to snoop on us — there is a growing imperative to clean up the darker corners of the digital commerce sphere. To set some boundaries on what is and is not acceptable. Or risk growing consumer mistrust.

When all the objects in your home have networked ears that are fine-tuned for commercial intelligence gathering, where will you go to talk about “personal” or “sensitive” stuff?

Read more -

http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/08/telescreen/