More Flu Shot Reactions

Desiree Jennings: A Flu Shot Gone Wrong

Courtesy of Desiree Jennings

By Mary Kearl

You may have heard news reports about 25-year-old Desiree Jennings, the girl with the severe reaction to the seasonal flu shot. Her symptoms — the inability to walk forward, but the ability to run forward and walk backwards — even appeared as Google Trends, with searches related to her condition. Some believed it was all just a hoax. Her story is garnering celebrity attention, too — Generation Rescue, the organization founded by Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy to raise awareness about health and safety issues related to vaccines — has reached out to support Jennings.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) advises against getting a flu shot if you’ve ever had a severe allergic reaction to eggs or to a previous flu shot. Additionally, if you have a history of Guillain-Barré Syndrome — a condition which includes symptoms of fever, nerve damage and muscle weakness — that occurred after receiving influenza vaccine, you shouldn’t get the seasonal flu shot. The risk of “serious harm” or death from a flu shot, the CDC’s Web site explains, “is extremely small. However, a vaccine, like any medicine, may rarely cause serious problems, such as severe allergic reactions. Almost all people who get influenza vaccine have no serious problems from it.”

Jennings, a Northern Virginian and AOL Employee (Full disclosure: This reporter and Desiree Jennings have never worked together before this interview.), who was healthy, training for a half marathon and a Washington Redskins Ambassador preparing to become a cheerleader, never suspected the health complications she is living with now. She is suffering from acute, viral post immunization encephalopathy and mercury toxicity with secondary respiratory and neurological deficits, which she believes is the direct result of the seasonal vaccination she received from her local grocery store chain in August 2009.

Initial reports and diagnoses indicated Jennings had dystonia, a neurological disorder characterized by involuntary muscle contractions that are sometimes painful. But, as of the most recent interview, Jennings’s treating physician believes she has acute, viral post immmunization encephalopathy, or a disease of the brain that alters brain function or structure and can include memory loss and personality changes.

In an interview with AOL Health, Jennings, she explains her diagnosis and how her life is forever changed. Watch the video below to hear Jennings talk about her condition.

Click Here to see Entire Interview:

http://www.aolhealth.com/health/fall-health/flu-shot-desiree-jennings?icid=webmail|wbml-aol|dl5|link3|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aolhealth.com%2Fhealth%2Ffall-health%2Fflu-shot-desiree-jennings

Is soda killing your Kidneys?

That Diet Soda Habit Might Be Killing Your Kidneys

Getty Images

By Deborah R. Huso

If you think you’re doing yourself a favor by drinking diet soda instead of the real deal, think again. It’s true you may be protecting your waistline from empty calories, but new research suggests you may be beating up your kidneys instead.

Over the weekend, researchers from the Nurses’ Health Study in Boston released findings that indicate women who drink two or more diet sodas a day experienced a 30 percent drop in kidney function over the course of a two decades long study. More than 3,000 women participated in the study, the median age being 67. Lead researcher Julie Lin, MD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, says the outcomes were especially startling because the women surveyed all had health kidney function at the start of the research.

After critically analyzing the beverage intake of study participants, researchers found those who drank two or more diet sodas daily had a significant dip in the kidneys’ glomerular filtration rate, which measures kidney function. Natural aging generally results in a decreased filtration rate of about 1 mL per minute per year after age 40. In contrast, the rate of those who consumed diet soda significantly decreased by 3mL per minute per year. The study showed no link between decreased kidney function and other beverages or any decreased function in women who had less than two diet sodas a day.

This doesn’t mean your kidneys are safe, however, if you opt for regular sodas. A study published earlier this year in PLoS ONE, a journal of the Public Library of Science, showed that women drinking two or more cans of regular soda a day are nearly twice as likely to suffer from early signs of kidney disease as non-soda drinkers. Researchers don’t understand the cause for certain but suspect it has to do with the intake of large amounts of high fructose corn syrup.

With some 26 million Americans suffering from chronic kidney disease, it’s obviously become a national health problem. While studies to date on the relationship between kidney function and soda (diet or regular) have been small, they add more fuel to the fire for cutting soda intake, even if you’re a diet drinker. When it comes to your health, water is always the best beverage.

HPV vaccine “a great big public health experiment” according to Dr. who developed it

HPV Vaccine Researcher Blasts Mandatory Marketing

Tuesday, 13 March 2007

From the Alliance for Human Research Protection

Dr. Diane M. Harper, a lead researcher in the development of the humanpapilloma virus vaccine, who says giving the drug to 11-year-old girls “is a great big public health experiment.”
AHRP’s stated rationale for objecting to a policy mandating Merck’s HPV vaccine in 11 year old girls  http://ahrp.blogspot.com/2007/03/nyt-vital-discussion-clouded-mandatory.html is validated by an internationally recognized expert in the field who tested the vaccine in clinical trials.

Dr. Harper, a lead researcher who spent 20 years developing the vaccine for humanpapilloma virus, says the HPV vaccine is not for younger girls, and that it is “silly” for states to be mandating it for them.

Not only that, she says it’s not been tested for effectiveness in younger girls, and administering the vaccine to girls as young as 9 may not even protect them at all. And, in the worst-case scenario, instead of serving to reduce the numbers of cervical cancers within 25 years, such a vaccination crusade actually could cause the numbers to go up.Dr. Harper, a scientist, physician, professor and the director of the Gynecologic Cancer Prevention Research Group at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire, said: “It is silly to mandate vaccination of 11- to 12-year-old girls There also is not enough evidence gathered on side effects to know that safety is not an issue.”

All of her trials have been with subjects ages 15 to 25.
“This vaccine has not been tested in little girls for efficacy. At 11, these girls don’t get cervical cancer – they won’t know for 25 years if they will get cervical cancer.”

Dr. Harper said, Merck was required to put together a database on the efficacy in children before Gardasil was approved. But instead, the company put together four study sites that “are not necessarily representative, and may not even have enough numbers to determine what they need to know.”

She believes the ideal way of administering the new vaccine is to offer it to women ages 18 and up. At the time of their first inoculation, they should be tested for the presence of HPV in their system. If the test comes back negative, then schedule the follow-up series of the three-part shots.

But if it comes back positive?
“Then we don’t know squat, because medically we don’t know how to respond to that,” Harper said.

She said that vaccinating little girls now is not going to protect them later. Since it can take a decade or more to even manifest itself as dysplasia, the HPVs against which this vaccine works may infect a little girl at the age she needs the vaccine most – meaning she will have to have a booster at the right point in time or she will not be protected. And, remember, it won’t work at all if she was positive for the virus when she was inoculated in the first place.

Merck knows this, Harper said. “To mandate now is simply to Merck’s benefit, and only to Merck’s benefit,” she said.

Dr. Harper said, she’s been trying for months to convince major television and print media to listen to her and tell the facts about the usefulness and effectiveness of this vaccine.  “But no one will print it,” she said.

Something is very wrong with this commerically driven frenzied marketing which all those who shape public policy and public opinion were caught shilling for Merck.

Independent advocates need to take to the streets to protect our children from irresponsible pharmaceutical companies whose financial largesse buys public officials, government agencies that are supposed to protect us from potentially harmful drugs and vaccines, and the uncritical transcribers of hype in the press!

Dr. Scott Ratner and his wife, who’s also a physician, expressed similar concerns as Dr. Harper in an interview with CBS News last year. One of their teenage daughters became severely ill after her first dose of Gardasil. Dr. Ratner says she’d have been better off getting cervical cancer than the vaccination. “My daughter went from a varsity lacrosse player at Choate to a chronically ill, steroid-dependent patient with autoimmune myofasciitis. I’ve had to ask myself why I let my eldest of three daughters get an unproven vaccine against a few strains of a nonlethal virus that can be dealt with in more effective ways.”

READ MORE ABOUT IT HERE from CBS News:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/08/19/cbsnews_investigates/main5253431.shtml

HPV VACCINE TOO RISKY?

Please note that the following story was Reprinted from Natural News. Though I fully agree that many vaccines, including the HPV and the Swine Flu vaccines, are rushed to market without adequate safety trials I also believe that some vaccines, such as the Polio vaccine (not the live strain) have been miracles. Many of the opinions in this piece are solely those of the author, Mike Adams, and not necessarily shared by me, though I do not believe in censorship and so am reprinting the article in full.

Teen girl suffers permanent brain damage after cervical cancer vaccine

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) As the cervical cancer vaccine continues to maim or kill even more teenage girls across the UK, 18-year-old Stacey Jones is the latest victim to suffer severe harm. Previously in a state of apparent health, Stacey began to suffer severe seizures and brain inflammation within days after receiving the Cervarix vaccine injection. The swelling of her brain was so severe that it cause permanent brain damage, and today Stacey Jones is an “empty shell” of a girl.

Her mother isn’t fooled by Big Pharma. “I really feel she has been used as a guinea pig,” she said in a DailyMail news article (source below). “I don’t think there is enough evidence that the vaccination programme is safe – this all happened days after Stacey was given the vaccine, and we don’t have any other explanation for what triggered her brain injury.”

Just last week, 14-year-old Natalie Morton died within hours after receiving the same vaccine injection. Medical authorities insisted Natalie suddenly died of a previously undiagnosed tumor in her chest, but NaturalNews was the first to suggest fraud in the pathology report, pointing out that Natalie’s real cause of death had to be covered up to protect the lucrative vaccine industry.

Vaccines = the new holocaust

As the deaths mount, vaccines are becoming the new chemical holocaust of our time. Children and teens are lined up to be injected with chemicals made by some of the very same companies that once conducted medical experiments on Jewish concentration camp prisoners during the Nazi era (http://www.naturalnews.com/019189.html).

Did you know, for example, that one of the chemotherapy drugs still used in cancer centers today was originally developed under the chemical weapons program of Nazi Germany? (http://www.naturalnews.com/News_000…)

Vaccines don’t kill as many people as the Nazi gas chambers, but the number of people being targeted by the vaccination holocaust is many times larger than the number imprisoned in Nazi Germany.

The corporations behind all this, of course, are much the same. So are the people. A 10-year Chairman of Bayer, for example, was a convicted Nazi war criminal. As explained on another NaturalNews article:

“Dr. Fritz ter Meer, a director of IG Farben who was directly involved in developing the nerve gas, Zyklon-B, which killed millions of Jews, was sentenced to seven years in prison but was released after four years through the intervention of Rockefeller and J.J. McCloy, then U.S. High Commissioner for Germany. An unrepentant Fritz ter Meer, guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity, returned to work in Bayer where he served as Chairman for more than 10 years, until 1961.
(http://www.naturalnews.com/024534_h…)

Whether we’re talking about Nazi war crimes or mass vaccination campaigns, the intent is the same: power and control over people. If you’re a new reader on NaturalNews and not yet familiar with the historical involvement of the pharmaceutical industry in Nazi Germany, read the above article link to get up to speed.

Being injected with a vaccine is a lot like being branded with an identification number tattoo in a prison camp. They are both administered via threats and intimidation (a mandatory vaccine push is now under way in the U.S.), they both involve government power over the freedoms of the people, and they both seek to control and corral the people into narrowly-defined realms of “acceptable” state-approved behavior.

When you allow yourself to be injected with a vaccine, you are in effect labeling yourself a medical slave of the Big Pharma-dominated system of western medicine. You are making a statement that you don’t believe in your own body’s immune system and you don’t believe in health freedom. You are, in effect, acting like “a good little Nazi” with a hail to the Big Pharma fuhrer.

Human guinea pigs

I stand firm on the belief that anyone who truly knew the details of the history of Big Pharma would never allow their bodies to be invaded with vaccines. The only people who are allowing themselves to be injected are those who are utterly ignorant of the last hundred years of human medical experimentation that has been undertaken by the pharmaceutical industry.

Did you know, for example, that Pfizer used Nigerian children for medical experiments? (http://www.naturalnews.com/023654.html)

Did you know that Pfizer also pleaded guilty to a felony crime in the fraudulent marketing of one of its top drugs?
(http://www.naturalnews.com/026963_P…)

Were you aware that GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), one of the key manufacturers of the swine flu vaccine, ordered the continuation of a vaccine trial even after 12 babies died?
(http://www.naturalnews.com/023669.html)

Did you also know that GSK was sued for price-fixing fraud by 40 states?
(http://www.naturalnews.com/019947_G…)

Read more shocking (but true) reports about GSK here:
http://www.naturalnews.com/GlaxoSmi…

There’s an undeniable pattern of behavior in the pharmaceutical industry that simply must be acknowledged: It is a greed-driven corporate monstrosity that routinely commits fraud, kills children, engages in monopolistic marketing behavior, intimidates scientists and conducts pharmaceutical medical experiments on human patients (among other crimes).

In fact, takers of the swine flu vaccine are unwittingly taking part in the largest global medical experiment ever conducted. The results of that experiment won’t be known for many years, but they will almost certainly include neurological impairment, seizures, and many deaths. Watch for reports on the side effects of the swine flu vaccine at www.SwineFluVaccineReport.com

In future history books, today’s mass vaccination campaigns will be seen in much the same way as the Nazi holocaust: A terrible, avoidable atrocity that suckered in almost everyone (including lots of intelligent people). One day, I truly believe the CEOs of drug companies will be arrested and tried for their crimes against humanity, perhaps in a venue similar to the Nuremberg Trials (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremb…).

Sources for this story include:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art…

Vaccines and Big Business

WHO Admits to Releasing Pandemic Virus into Population via ‘Mock-Up’ Vaccines
Posted by: Dr. Mercola
September 03 2009 4,160

The document on the WHO website linked below states that it is common procedure to release pandemic viruses into the population in order to get a jump ahead of the real pandemic, so as to fast track the vaccine for when it is needed.
In Europe, some manufacturers have conducted advance studies using a so-called “mock-up” vaccine. Mock-up vaccines contain an active ingredient for an influenza virus that has not circulated recently in human populations and thus mimics the novelty of a pandemic virus.

According to the website, “Such advance studies can greatly expedite regulatory approval.”

Sources:

World Health Organization

Dr. Mercola’s Comments:

On June 11 the World Health Organization (WHO) raised its swine flu pandemic alert from a 5 to a 6. Phase 6 is the highest level alert, and reflects the speed with which a virus is spreading — not its severity.

This classification also allows for a vaccine to qualify for a “fast-track” procedure for licensing and approval, and this process is now ongoing for the swine flu vaccine.

What you may not know, however, is that WHO, together with health officials, regulatory authorities and vaccine manufacturers, have been working since 2007 – long before this new “threat” of swine flu emerged – to “explore a broad range of issues surrounding the regulatory approval of pandemic vaccines.”

According to the WHO website:

“Ways were sought to shorten the time between the emergence of a pandemic virus and the availability of safe and effective vaccines.”

One such method used in Europe is to conduct advance studies using a “mock-up” vaccine that contains an active ingredient for an influenza virus that has not circulated recently in human populations.

When testing these mock-up vaccines, it is very possible to release the novel influenza virus into the population, as its purpose is to “mimic the novelty of a pandemic virus” and “greatly expedite regulatory approval.”

Government officials have other tricks up their sleeves to ensure these new, barely tested vaccines easily make it to market as well, such as:

Labeling the vaccine a “strain change” rather than an entirely “new” vaccine. This method states the new vaccine has built on technology used to produce vaccines for seasonal influenza, and the change for the pandemic vaccine is similar to a strain change used to produce a new seasonal vaccine each flu season.

In the United States, vaccine manufacturers are required to submit fewer data if they already have a licensed flu vaccine and will use the same manufacturing process for the pandemic vaccine.

Using a “rolling review procedure.” This allows manufacturers to submit sets of data for regulatory review “as they become available.” In other words, they’re free to distribute the vaccine and then submit the safety data later on.

Would You Want a Fast-Tracked Vaccine Injected Into Your Body?

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE HERE:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/09/03/WHO-Admits-to-Releasing-Pandemic-Virus-into-Population-via-MockUp-Vaccines.aspx

New rules allow more Pesticides in “ORGANIC” labeled foods

 

(Thanks to Rebecca for the heads up, I’ve been away from here too long)

 

 

 Organic Food: Outcry Over Rule Changes that Allow More Pesticides, Hormones

by Carol Ness

 

 

A showdown is taking shape over the nation’s organic food standards, triggered by a spate of recent rule changes that some producers and activists say are setting a pattern that could eventually render the organic label meaningless.

 

The changes in the National Organic Program standards, made in April, expand the use of antibiotics and hormones in organic dairy cows, allow more pesticides in the organic arsenal and for the first time let organic livestock eat potentially contaminated fishmeal.

 

Program administrators also reversed themselves and said seafood, pet food and body care products can use “organic” on their labels without meeting any standards at all.

 

 

Signs assure customers at the Ibarra Farms stand at the San Rafael Farmers’ Market that the produce is organically grown. Chronicle photo by Kim Komenich

And in what the $11 billion organic food industry, consumer and farm groups call a dangerous precedent, program administrators made last month’s changes in three “guidances” and one “directive” without seeking public comment or consulting with their own advisers on the National Organics Standards Board.

 

“This is hugely terrible for the organic industry,” said Nancy Hirshberg, a vice president at Stonyfield Farm, a New Hampshire organic dairy whose yogurts are sold in the Bay Area. “It’s a real weakening of the standards. And it could have the effect of weakening consumer confidence in the organic label. “

 

A coalition of organic interests, including the powerful Consumers Union, says the interpretations represent major changes that could threaten the integrity of the program, which set a high standard for what products qualify as organic. And they say administrators risk undermining trust in the program by leaving the public, including its own advisory board, out of the decision- making.

 

Sounding a national alarm, the coalition is pressuring the U.S. Department of Agriculture to retract the changes and keep the public involved.

 

In both the House and Senate, letters calling on Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman to withdraw the documents are gathering bipartisan support. And businesses that will lose money because of the changes are said to be considering lawsuits.

 

“We are drawing a line in the organic soil,” said Bob Scowcroft of the Organic Farming Research Foundation in Santa Cruz, who helped write the organic standards.

 

Read the whole article HERE:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0522-09.htm

 

 

Fiji Water: THE Dirty Truth

Fiji Water: So cool, so fresh, so bad for the environment?

Sarah Gilbert
Aug 24th 2009 at 2:00PM

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Filed under: Economy

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 The story of Fiji Water, as detailed in a startling and detailed investigative piece inMother Jones magazine this month, seems familiar. Leafing through the story, I found myself trying to remember where I’d read this tale before; like an old melody at the back of my brain, it hovered, just beyond memory. 

Suddenly it came to me: it’s Dole, it’s West Indies Sugar Corporation, it’s the old, old story. A company located in a lush, tropical location with a totalitarian government that welcomes foreign interests with deep pockets. It doesn’t tax them, gives them access to the country’s most precious natural resources, and stands by with heavy artillery in hand, protecting them while they strip the country.

Read the whole article HERE: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/08/24/tale-of-fiji-water-too-familiar-sounds-like-industrial-colonial/?icid=main|main|dl5|link3|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailyfinance.com%2F2009%2F08%2F24%2Ftale-of-fiji-water-too-familiar-sounds-like-industrial-colonial%2F

Animals & Cancer: Our fault??

 

The Wild’s Creeping Killer

The great outdoors is a dangerous place for animals, who often die from hunger, predator attacks, or infections. But cancer can also be a culprit, and human pollution may be making it worse.

The Wild’s Creeping Killer

The great outdoors is a dangerous place for animals, who often die from hunger, predator attacks, or infections. But cancer can also be a culprit, and human pollution may be making it worse.

In 1999, wildlife disease specialist Thierry Work looked over the bow of his small whaler as it cut through a lagoon on the south side of Molokai, an island in Hawaii. On an emergent rock he saw a listless sea turtle, waiting to die.

“This guy was so weak that he just let us pick him up,” says Work, who runs the National Wildlife Health Center’sHonolulu field station. “He was so emaciated that his ventral was completely disked in. You could fill him up with water and use him as a bowl.” Like more than quarter of the green turtles Work has plucked from the water or found stranded on Hawaii’s beaches, this one was covered with tumors on its eyes and mouth, dying from a poorly understood form of cancer.

READ the whole excellent Newsweek article HERE:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/208917

 

 

BPA Found in Glass-Jarred Baby Food

 

Way to go food processors!. You’ve managed, once more, to put health so far below cost that even glass jars are now designed in ways that let the nasty toxin leach into food.

 

According to a report in the Globe and Mail this weekend, a study done on jars of baby food in Canada resulted in eighty-four percent of the samples testing positive for BPA. The percentages were low, low enough that Canadian health officials say they’re safe, but that’s singular exposure. Remember – kids are eating lots and lots of this stuff, and we’ve already been warned by researchers that BPA may not be disappearing from our bodies as quickly as once though. Can you say baby’s building up BPA?

 

BPA was banned from baby bottles last year in Canada, and a group of U.S. bottle manufacturers have promised to go BPA-free.

 

But as parents try to move away from plastics (BPA is used to harden plastics) and formula cans that have BPA in the lining, they’ve largely gone to glass. The National Institutes of Health, in its warnings about what BPA can do the body, specifically suggests that glass is the way to go. That’s given parents a false sense of security . . . because they forget what’s used to make the TOPS of the glass bottles of baby food. Yup, plastic hardeners . . . aka BPA.

 

Does this make you want to make it all yourself?

 

Image: Organic Mania

 

Adapted from StollerDerby

Lipstick: A Kiss of Death?

From the New York Times:

A Simple Smooch or a Toxic Smack?

By ABBY ELLIN
Published: May 27, 2009
THE debate seems to resurface every few years. Do some lipsticks contain lead? If so, is the amount so negligible that consumers have nothing to be concerned about? Or will all those years of applying lipstick several times a day add up to a worrisome accumulation of a dangerous substance?

On one side are advocacy groups and doctors who insist that, over time, those who wear lipstick containing lead are at risk of absorbing high levels of a neurotoxin that may cause behavioral, learning and other problems. On the other side are the Food and Drug Administration and outside experts who say that any traces of lead that do exist are too minute to cause harm.

In February, the debate reared its head again when the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, a coalition of health and environmental groups, issued a plea to the F.D.A. to release information the agency had accumulated on the amount of lead in lipstick. The study was conducted in response to an independent analysis in 2007, paid for by the safe cosmetics group, which found that one-third of 33 lipsticks had lead in excess of 0.1 parts per million, the federal limit for candy.

Among the worst offenders were L’Oreal Colour Riche “True Red” lipstick (with a lead content of 0.65 parts per million) and Cover Girl’s Incredifull Lipcolor “Maximum Red” (0.56 p.p.m.). Price had nothing to do with lead levels: less expensive brands, like a $1.99 tube of Wet and Wild Mega Colors “Cherry Blossom,” contained no lead, whereas a $24 tube of Dior Addict “Positive Red” contained 0.21 p.p.m.

In response to the study, L’Oreal said: “Each and every ingredient used in our products has been thoroughly reviewed and tested by our internal safety team made up of toxicologists, clinicians, pharmacists and physicians.” Parfums Christian Dior, which said it no longer makes the Positive Red shade, said, “we are confident that our products meet the highest standards and are entirely safe to be used by consumers every day.”

Cover Girl said, “Our perspective is that our cosmetics products meet the rigorous safety standards set by the U.S. F.D.A. and are safe.”

Stacy Malkan, a founder of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, said that lead is often present in the pigment of the reddest lipsticks. The campaign urged manufacturers to reformulate their products and called for the F.D.A. to set a safety standard for lead in lipstick. Last November, Senators John Kerry, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein asked the F.D.A. to do the same.

“The F.D.A. now says they are waiting for a peer-reviewed journal to publish their study of lead in lipstick,” Ms. Malkan said. “That could take years.”

Read the whole article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/fashion/28skin.html?ref=health