Pollution Can Make You Fat

(Alternet.org) - Pollution can make children fat, startling new research shows. A groundbreaking Spanish study indicates that exposure to a range of common chemicals before birth sets up a baby to grow up stout, thus helping to drive the worldwide obesity epidemic.

The results of the study, just published -- the first to link chemical contamination in the womb with one of the developing world's greatest and fastest-growing health crises -- carry huge potential implications for public policy around the globe. They undermine recent strictures from the Conservative leader, David Cameron, that blame solely the obese for their own condition.

A quarter of all British adults and a fifth of children are obese -- four times as many as 30 years ago. And so are at least 300 million people worldwide. The main explanation is that they are consuming more calories than they burn. But there is growing evidence that diet and lack of exercise, though critical, cannot alone explain the rapid growth of the epidemic.

It has long been known that genetics give people different metabolisms, making some gain weight more easily than others. But the new study by scientists at Barcelona's Municipal Institute of Medical Research suggests that pollution may similarly predispose people to get fat.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Alternet.org, Geoffrey Lean, The Independent UK, September 8, 2008 ]

CDC chief states flu pandemic is coming

(Lacrosse Tribune) - Ready or not, a flu pandemic is coming, says Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Gerberding talked about preparing for the pandemic threat at a national conference Thursday at Logistics Health in La Crosse. No one knows when the pandemic is coming or what strain of flu virus will cause it, but it is overdue, she said.

She said she has only two meetings a week at the CDC and one focuses on flu pandemic preparations. “We take it very seriously,” Gerberding said, adding that the national strategy is to “save lives and sustain a civil society” during a pandemic. She said politicians are not talking about a flu pandemic or the bird flu virus, which may or may not be the virus that causes the next pandemic. “No one is talking about it, and it’s not on their radar screen,” Gerberding said. She said CDC officials are closely monitoring the bird flu virus, which has a death rate of 63 percent among the 385 cases reported worldwide since 2003. “It is a moving target, and we have to stay on top of it,” Gerberding said.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Lacrosse Tribune ]

What’s Inside: ‘Just for Men’ Hair Color

Have you ever wondered what exactly are those chemicals you are putting into your hair just to satisfy your vanity or to hide your blading spots? Maybe you had a passing thought about it or you don’t want to think about it…

Start thinking about it! You are turning your head into a chemical waste dump.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Wired Magazine, Patrick Di Justo ]

20,000 natural health products lost

Since 2004, Health Canada’s Natural Health Products (NHPs) Regulations have forced more than 20,000 products off the Canadian market. The US companies shown below used to sell their products in Canada, prior to the 2004 implementation of the Natural Health Products Regulations. Following a seven-year process in which the number one request of Canadians was increased access to more natural health products, and in which NHPs were supposed to have been given their own category separate from either Foods or Drugs, Health Canada came out with the Natural Health Product Regulations.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: CommonGround.ca ]

Study finds long benefit in illegal mushroom drug

NEW YORK (AP) — In 2002, at a Johns Hopkins University laboratory, a business consultant named Dede Osborn took a psychedelic drug as part of a research project….

READ MORE HERE [ Source: The Associated Press ]

Ecstasy Is the Key to Treating PTSD

At last the incurably traumatized may be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And controversially, ecstasy may be key to taming their demons.

An Ecstasy tablet. That's what it took to make Donna Kilgore feel alive again that and the doctor who prescribed it. As the pill began to take effect, she giggled for the first time in ages. She felt warm and fuzzy, as if she was floating. The anxiety melted away. Gradually, it all became clear: the guilt, the anger, the shame.

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How Breast Cancer Became Big Business

You’ve heard the term “greenwashing.” It refers to corporations that try to appear “green” without reducing their negative impact on the environment.

Since 2002, the group Breast Cancer Action has promoted its “Think Before You Pink” campaign. It’s fighting “pinkwashing,” which is when corporations try to boost sales by associating their products with the fight against breast cancer. Pinkwashing is a form of slacktivism — a campaign that makes people feel like they’re helping solve a problem, while they’re actually doing more to boost corporate profits. Pinkwashing has been around for a while, but is now reaching almost unbelievable levels.

READ MORE HERE [ Source: Alternet.org ]

Exposed: Harvard Shrink Gets Rich Labeling Kids Bipolar

Meet the man who got rich by popularizing bipolar disorder for children. Congressional investigators and the NY Times expose the scandal.

What Dick Cheney is to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, psychiatrist Joseph Biederman is to the explosion of psychiatric medications in American children. Recently, Biederman was nailed by congressional investigators and the New York Times for overestimating just how greedy an elite shrink is entitled to be. Beyond a peek into the corruption of psychiatry at its highest levels, the scandal is an opportunity to reconsider the Big Pharma financed view of why kids become disruptive and destructive.

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Could New FDA Rules Curb Drug Profiteering?

The “bully tactics” and “intimidation” of drug industry operatives could cause “thousands of additional cancer deaths,” cries an angry doctor in a May 29 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

But former FDA officer Mark O. Thornton, MD, MPH, PhD, is not talking about the lobbyists and reps embedded in doctors’ and lawmakers’ offices even as patients and constituents wait for access.

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Paxil Babies: The Dangers of Antidepressants

Mothers suffering from depression are increasingly pushed into taking pills, putting them and their infants at great risk.

Today in the United States, 11 percent of women take antidepressants, the use of antidepressants by pregnant women has dramatically increased, and postpartum depression -- rare in those cultures in which women receive high levels of social support following childbirth -- has become so staggeringly common among U.S. women that Congress is legislating increased medical treatment.

Increasing Use of Antidepressants by Pregnant Mothers

Receiving little attention in 2007 was the study "Increasing Use of Antidepressants in Pregnancy," published by the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Medical records of 105,335 pregnant women enrolled in Tennessee Medicaid from 1999-2003 revealed that antidepressant use during pregnancy increased from 5.7 percent in 1999 to 13.4 percent in 2003.

Among Tennessee Medicaid-treated women in 2003, 10 percent took antidepressants during the first trimester, 6.4 percent used antidepressants during the second trimester, and 5.9 percent used them during the third. White women were four times more likely than nonwhite women to have used antidepressants during pregnancy, and older women and those with greater schooling were also more likely to have used antidepressants while pregnant.

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Should Parents Be Forced to Vaccinate Their Children?

The choice of whether or not to vaccinate a child must be made by the parent who will live with the life-long consequences.

This week Time magazine's cover story "The Truth About Vaccines" carries an ominous suggestion ... "worried about autism, many parents are opting out of immunizations. How they're putting the rest of us at risk." (June 2, 2008). Finally, a major periodical puts a spotlight on the most emotionally charged and inaccurately reported medical controversy in modern history. And what does Time do? Blame parents for a crisis in confidence created by public health officials. If you were hoping to learn the "truth" about vaccinations, you are not going to find it in this issue of Time.

In her article, "How Safe Are Vaccines?" Alice Park attempts to address growing concerns about vaccines and asks the million-dollar question that parents around the country really want to know. Unfortunately, Park's version of the "truth" does a disservice to readers when it falls into the same trap that has plagued similar reports: gross inaccuracies, reliance on industry-funded spokesmen whose conflicts are not disclosed, and the all too familiar and constant beat of immunization dogma suggesting doomsday disease scenarios.

READ MORE HERE