Uncooked meat products enhanced with food additives may contain high levels of phosphorous and potassium that are not discernible from inspection of food labels, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society Nephrology (CJASN). This can make it difficult for people to limit dietary phosphorous and potassium that at high levels are harmful to kidney disease patients.

Kidney disease patients on dialysis must watch their intake of dietary phosphate so that their blood phosphate levels do not rise. This is important because high blood phosphate levels may cause premature death in dialysis patients. Kidney disease patients also must limit their intake of potassium, because high blood potassium levels can cause sudden death.

One growing source of dietary phosphorous and potassium is through “enhanced” fresh meat and poultry products. These foods are injected with a solution of water with sodium and potassium salts (particularly phosphates) as well as antioxidants and flavorings. While ingesting phosphates and potassium can be dangerous for dialysis patients, there is no requirement that these ingredients be included in nutrition labels. There also have been no studies on the levels of phosphates and potassium contained in fresh meat and poultry products that have been “enhanced.”

Richard Sherman, MD, and Ojas Mehta, DO (University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School), examined the potassium and phosphate content in a variety of “enhanced” and additive-free meat and poultry products available in local supermarkets. They found that products that were labeled as “enhanced” had an average phosphate concentration that was 28% higher than additive-free products, with some products almost 100% higher. Potassium content was variable. Additive-free products all contained < 387 mg of potassium per 100 gm of protein while 5 of the 25 products with additives that were studied contained at least 692 mg of potassium per 100 gm of protein (maximum 930 mg/100 gm). Most foods with phosphate and potassium additives reported the additives on the labeling; however, 8 of the 25 “enhanced” products included in the study did not list the additives.

“The burden imposed on those seeking to limit dietary phosphorus and potassium could be ameliorated by more complete food labeling by manufacturers,” the authors wrote.

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The study was funded by grants from Genzyme, Inc. and Dialysis Clinics, Inc. The authors reported no other financial disclosures.

The new Food and Drug Administration drug package insert: implications for patient safety and clinical care.

Watson KT, Barash PG.
Department of Anesthesiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8051, USA.

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the scientific, regulatory, and public health agency that regulates many products, including food products, drugs, medical devices, radiation emitting devices, and cosmetics for the federal government of the United States. The FDA’s mission is to assure that consumer products made and sold in the United States are safe, effective, and pure. The purpose of the package insert (also known as prescription drug product insert or professional labeling) is to provide detailed drug information compiled and distributed by the drug manufacturer, after FDA review and approval.

In 2006, the standard format for the package insert was changed in an attempt to make it more user-friendly and a more efficient resource tool for practitioners.

According to the Institute of Medicine, in-hospital adverse drug reactions occur at a rate of 400,000 per year and incur $3.5 billion of extra hospital expense. It is expected that the new package insert format will enhance rapid access to important pharmacologic information and improve patient safety by decreasing medication errors.

India’s Waterways A Toxic Stew of Pharmaceutical Chemicals Dumped from Big Pharma Factories
Monday, January 26, 2009 by: Mike Adams, NaturalNews Editor
http://www.naturalnews.com/025415.html

(NaturalNews) Many of the pharmaceuticals consumed in the United States are made in India, where labor is cheap and environmental laws are lenient on powerful corporations. U.S. drug companies are exploiting this situation to manufacture hundreds of millions of doses of high-profit pharmaceuticals in India, where ingredients purchased for a few cents can be re-sold to U.S. health patients for hundreds of dollars (the markup on some drugs is literally over 500,000%).

There’s something else Big Pharma doesn’t want you to know about its drug operations in India: Big Pharma’s manufacturing facilities dump millions of doses of toxic pharmaceutical chemicals directly into India’s waterways.

Researchers were recently stunned to discover that 100 pounds of a powerful antibiotic called ciprofloxacin was being dumped into a local stream every day! That’s a quantity of antibiotics that could treat an entire city of 90,000 people every day.

But that’s not all: The same waterway contained an astonishing 21 pharmaceutical chemicals reports the Associated Press, some at levels that were 150 times the highest levels of contamination found in U.S. waterways. (And even the levels found in the U.S. were quite alarming.)

Big Pharma as a major chemical polluter

These findings are now added to the revelations of pharmaceutical contamination unveiled by the Associated Press last year, which found that the public water supplies in virtually all U.S. cities tested were contaminated with pharmaceutical chemicals.

What’s emerging from these disturbing discoveries is a picture of Big Pharma as a global corporate polluter that’s dumping chemicals into the world’s sensitive waterways, polluting villages, cities and aquatic ecosystems around the world.

Under the Bush Administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency outright refused to regulate pharmaceuticals as environmental hazards. With Obama in the White House, it remains to be seen whether the new administration will clamp down on pharmaceutical pollution.

Big Pharma now has something in common with Exxon, Cargill, Alcoa and Chevron: The outrageous pollution of the environment with toxic chemicals. But in many ways, Big Pharma’s chemicals are far more dangerous. HRT drugs, for example, are toxic at parts per billion, and they’re now being found in public water supplies around the world.

Municipal water treatment facilities, by the way, don’t remove pharmaceutical chemicals from the water! Whatever HRT drugs, psychiatric drugs or other chemicals that exist in the water are passed right through the water treatment centers which unwisely add yet more chemicals (fluoride and chlorine, typically) to the toxic brew. Citizens drinking public water supplies in India, the U.K., Canada and the United States are now verifiably participating in a grand experiment involving the mass medication of the population with low levels of utterly untested pharmaceutical combinations.

How long will this be allowed to continue before the environmental protection authorities clamp down on pharmaceutical dumping?

So far, environmental regulators have done nothing to stop the dumping of drugs into public water supplies. This is true even in America, where hospitals routinely dispose of drugs by simply flushing them down the toilet (injecting them directly into the water supply consumed downstream).

Consumers also need to realize that the drugs you swallow are also environmental pollutants. Many drugs pass right through the human body unaltered, where they are flushed back into the water supply that’s consumed downstream. (Yes, the toilet water from one city becomes the drinking water of the next city down the river. If you didn’t know this, you have a LOT to learn about the water supply, and you probably won’t like what you learn… especially if you live downstream…)

Big Pharma is contaminating our planet.

It’s becoming quite clear that the pharmaceutical industry is now directly contributing to the mass chemical contamination of our planet. By allowing factories to dump drugs into local waterways, by tolerating a “flush it” mentality at hospitals and pharmacies, and by drugging consumers with an endless brew of vaccines, medications and toxic substances such as chemotherapy agents, the pharmaceutical industry has “achieved” the distinction as a major world polluter.

Those who take pharmaceuticals are, in fact, directly contributing to the chemical contamination of the planet. That’s why getting off medications is not only good for your health; it’s also good for the planet.

You can’t be “green” if you’re taking medications. Consuming pharmaceuticals is simply incompatible with sustainable life on Earth. And the more drugs are manufactured and consumed, the worse this problem will become.

Let me put it this way: The survival of our planet depends on the demise of Big Pharma.
Which would you rather have around for future generations? Living oceans, blue skies, clean water and healthy species? Or sterile oceans, dwindling aquatic life, mutant human babies and widespread cancer, infertility and shortened lifespans?

It’s your choice: Mother Nature, or Big Pharma. The devastating long-term effects of this chemical contamination of our world’s waterways have yet to be truly understood at all. The chemicals being dumped into our environment by Big Pharma today may pollute our planet for hundreds of years, destroying aquatic ecosystems, killing fish populations and causing widespread physical deformities across many species. Combine this with all the pesticide runoff already being used across the planet and it becomes quite clear that the human race has set itself on a path of self destruction.

How’s that? Because humans don’t exist in isolation from the natural world. When we destroy or disrupt the planet’s delicate ecosystems through chemical contamination, we unleash a backlash of effects that put the entire human race in jeopardy: Outbreaks of infectious disease, plummeting fish stocks in ocean waters, rising risks of superbugs across the population and even long-term disruptions in the food supply due to pharmaceutical contamination of food crops and soil microorganisms. (Irrigation water being sprayed on crops is now also contaminated with pharmaceuticals…)

Stated bluntly, what’s happening is that the pharmaceutical industry is poisoning our world — and it’s doing it for profit. While their factories in India are dumping millions of doses of antibiotics (and a brew of twenty other drugs) into the water supply each year, they’re importing those drugs into the U.S. and selling them at monopoly prices to gullible consumers, all while pretending they’re on some sort of humanitarian mission to help people.

The truth is that Big Pharma is committing crimes against Nature, and we’ll all end up paying the price for allowing these crimes to continue under our watch. Every living thing in our world is interconnected: You can’t poison the waterways with a toxic brew of dangerous chemicals and expect to be insulated from the effects of that forever.

Sometimes I stand back in sheer astonishment at how short-sighted human civilization truly is. Today our population demonstrates a striking lack of understanding about the web of life on our planet combined with an outright abandonment of ethics and morals. Companies (and many people) simply do whatever benefits them at the moment, regardless of the long-term consequences. The pharmaceutical industry exemplifies this destructive philosophy best, as it actually works to trap people in a cycle of disease treatment, all while raking in obscene profits for poisoning the people and the planet.

What a shameful business model. It’s beyond shame, really. It’s a crime. And it’s time we put an end to these crimes against the People and against the planet.

Once again, I call for the arrest and prosecution of Big Pharma CEOs and executives for their role in planning and executing these crimes against humanity and Nature. In the U.S., this must be pursued by the Dept. of Justice, since the FDA, EPA and FTC remain in a tight conspiracy with the drug industry and will do nothing to bring their protected corporations to justice.

You can help support the effort to bring these criminals to justice (and end the chemical contamination of our planet by Big Pharma) by contacting your elected representatives (in any country) and let them know your thoughts about the widespread chemical pollution caused by the pharmaceutical industry.

Many people are opting out of lifelong medication. That approach seems to miss the mark on quality care. The Western medical model is helpful, however it is not the only approach that has validity and that can help people. The science as God approach used to validate modern medical is also not fool proof. To wit the large number of adverse events and drug side effects. But, the purpose of the article is not to rant.
Health is freedom. Let the healing continue.

(rest of the story)

Benefits of Homeopathy

One of the benefits of homeopathy is that the remedies work to arouse your vital force to help your body to heal itself. The care itself is less expensive comparatively, so are the medicines, known as “remedies.” The amount of time the remedy is taken is generally much shorter than allopathic medications, with homeopathy less is more. As the body resets itself and healing is taking place the remedy is not taken.

The homeopathic model doesn’t induce additional financial pressures on someone when their energy is best used to heal.

Eleven percent, including Remicade (infliximab), used to treat Crohn’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis, and Avastin (bevacizumab), used to treat cancer, have been issued a “black box” warning.

The findings, from Dutch scientists, are published in the Oct. 22/29 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“This suggests the need for more in-depth investigation before approval and highlights the importance of vigilance in post-marketing surveillance for adverse effects,” Dr. Phil B. Fontanarosa, the journal’s executive deputy editor, said during a a Tuesday teleconference on the themed issue.

“[Adverse effects] generally occurred in general disorders, like serious allergic reaction or cardiac arrest, administration site problems, infections and infestations,” said Fontanarosa. “A lot of these drugs act on the immune system, so infections are common complications of these products.”

“We’ve always known that because biologics were going to modulate the immune system, there would be this risk,” said Lisa Saubermann, associate director of clinical pharmacy services at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

The first biologic treatment, recombinant insulin, was approved in the United States in 1982. Since then, more than 250 biologics have flooded the pharmaceutical market, representing roughly one-quarter of all new drugs approved by U.S. and European Union authorities.

Although all drugs carry risks, biologics are in a special class, because they are derived from biological sources, including antibodies, enzymes and hormones.

Enbrel (etanercept), for instance, is a tumor necrosis factor, a protein made by the body’s immune system. The drug, used to treat various forms of arthritis as well as psoriasis, was also the recipient of a black box warning (for infections and central nervous system disorders).

The authors of this paper, from Utrecht University, reviewed 174 biologics approved in the United States and/or the European Union between January 1995 and June 2007.

Between January 1995 and June 2008, 82 safety-related regulatory actions were issued for 41 of the medications, or almost 24 percent of the total.

Of these 82 actions, 63 were advisory letters to health-care professionals in the United States and Europe, and 19 were black box warnings. None of the drugs were withdrawn from the market.

Findings also show there were additional benefits to acupuncture treatment for breast cancer patients, such as an increased sense of well being, more energy, and in some cases, a higher sex drive, that were not experienced in those patients who underwent drug treatment for their hot flashes.

“Our study shows that physicians and patients have an additional therapy for something that affects the majority of breast cancer survivors and actually has benefits, as opposed to more side effects. The effect is more durable than a drug commonly used to treat these vasomotor symptoms and, ultimately, is more cost-effective for insurance companies,” Eleanor Walker, M.D., lead author of the study and a radiation oncologist at the Henry Ford Hospital Department of Radiation Oncology in Detroit, said.

The reduction in hot flashes lasted longer for those breast cancer patients after completing their acupuncture treatment, compared to patients after stopping their drug therapy plan.

Eighty percent of women treated for breast cancer suffer from hot flashes after being treated with chemotherapy and/or anti-estrogen hormones, such as Tamoxifen and Arimidex. Although hormone replacement therapy is typically used to relieve these symptoms, breast cancer patients cannot use this therapy because it may increase the risk of the cancer coming back. As a treatment alternative, patients are generally treated with steroids and/or antidepressant drugs.

These drugs, however, have additional side effects, such as weight gain, nausea, constipation and fatigue. The antidepressant, venlafaxine (Effexor), a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, is one of the most common drugs used to treat these hot flashes. However, many women decide against this treatment choice because of potential side effects, including decreased libido, insomnia, dizziness and nausea, or because they simply do not want to take any more medications.

The randomized clinical trial compared acupuncture treatment to venlafixine for 12 weeks to find out if acupuncture reduced vasomotor symptoms in breast cancer patients receiving hormonal therapy and produced fewer side effects than venlafaxine. The study involved 47 breast cancer patients who received either Tamoxifen or Arimidex and had at least 14 hot flashes per week. Results show that acupuncture reduces hot flashes as effectively as venlafaxine, with no side effects, and also provides additional health benefits to patients.

The above is a quote from a vaccine blog I just discovered. It is well written and informative. Visit it here.

GARDASIL Vaccine: The Damage Continues
by Barbara Loe Fisher

http://vaccineawakening.blogspot.com/2008/08/gardasil-vaccine-damage-continues.html

www.vaccineawakening.blogspot.com
www.NVIC.org
www.StandUpBeCounted.org

The vaccine reaction reports keep coming into the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) from mothers describing how they took their healthy teenage girls into a pediatrician or gynecologist’s office where they were given a GARDASIL shot and, then, nothing was ever the same again. The reports of HPV vaccine reactions, injuries and deaths continue to roll in, not only to NVIC but also to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (Search HPV4 at http://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/index.html) newspapers, and television stations. And the only response that comes from officials at the CDC, FDA and drug companies when perfectly healthy teenage girls collapse into unconsciousness, suffer a massive seizure, get paralyzed or die suddenly after being injected with GARDASIL is the zombie mantra: “It is a coincidence.”

Last week a nurse who is an administrator in the outpatient department for a group of hospitals in California called and asked if NVIC had been getting reports of unusual collapse after GARDASIL vaccination. I said, yes, we are getting those reports and she said “A lot of our patients are collapsing after the shot is given. It happens with GARDASIL more frequently than with any other vaccine we give.” That same week, NVIC received a report from the mother of a 15 year old daughter who got her first GARDASIIL shot last month. Within 10 minutes of being injected, she collapsed and had her first grand mal seizure, became incontinent, temporarily lost vision in her right eye, suffered uncontrolled vomiting and had to be taken by ambulance to the hospital. Another report to NVIC that week also involved first-time seizures in a 15 year old girl after she got a GARDASIL shot.

Through June 30, 2008, there have been reports that at least 17 to 20 deaths have occurred following GARDASIL and were filed with the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), although the FDA has yet to admit even one death is causally related to the vaccine, suggesting that the girls would have died that day even if no vaccine had been given. Many of the teenage girls ,who die suddenly after vaccination without explanation, were among the brightest and the best and in top physician condition. This was true for 17 year old Jessica Ericzon, a New York softball player, snowboarder and honor roll student who dropped dead within 48 hours of getting a GARDASIL shot. A coroner could find no cause for her death after an autopsy.

There have been so many reports of reactions, injuries and deaths following GARDASIL vaccination (20-25 percent of all vaccine adverse event reports being filed with VAERS are for GARDASIL vaccine reactions) that the FDA and CDC issued a statement defending the vaccine’s safety on July 22.

But one of the vaccine’s developers has urged caution and offers practical advice about the need for continued use of Pap screening to prevent cervical cancer rather than relying on the vaccine to do the job. ” If you are at all concerned, then don’t have the vaccine – have regular Pap smears and you will be equally protected from cervical cancer….Pap screening is still the only proven method we have for cervical cancer prevention,” said Professor Diane Harper, Ph.D. “We don’t know how long the vaccine will protect a woman from HPV infection, and the vaccine does not protect against all types of HPV infection that cause cervical cancer.”

The “coincidence” defense mounted by doctors and drug company officials every time a vaccination is followed by injury and death is as old as it is unscientific. It is amazing that they have been able to get away with it for so long. Babies can’t talk and babies can’t walk so who they will become is still a dream. But young girls and women have already become much of who they will be and, on the cusp of fulfilling the dream, their vaccine deaths and injuries are much more difficult to sweep under the carpet.

It is immoral for doctors in government and industry to continue to look away from the damage done when vaccines cut down the brightest and most physically fit among us. The suggestion that these healthy, high functioning girls were biologically compromised and would have died or been injured that day even if no vaccine had been given is ludicrous. If those in government responsible for protecting the public health and safety look the other way when healthy individuals die and are injured by pharmaceutical products pronounced by government as “safe” for public use, then we cannot be assured that any licensed drug or vaccine is safe.

Last year, the head of the FDA in China was executed for allowing toxic pharmaceutical products to be licensed and released for public use that ended up killing and crippling people.

For information about dihydropyridine calcium channel blockers read here
About Cleviprex:(from Medical News)

Cleviprex is a novel, investigational drug rationally designed to meet the needs of the acute care practitioner for an intravenous hypertensive agent. It is the first third-generation dihydropyridine calcium channel blocker that acts rapidly and reliably, is vascular- and arterial-selective, and has an ultrashort half-life. Cleviprex recently completed Phase III clinical trials.

Approval was based on clinical studies involving 1,406 people. The most common side effects were headache, nausea and vomiting, the company said.

Abstract

Dihydropyridine calcium antagonists play an important role in the treatment of hypertension and angina pectoris. They lower blood pressure by a well-characterized mechanism of blocking L-type calcium channels in smooth muscle cells. Additionally, there is growing evidence that dihydropyridines also modulate endothelial functions by other mechanisms, since macrovascular endothelial cells do not express L-type calcium channels. A number of studies have demonstrated that dihydropyridine calcium antagonists enhance bioavailability of endothelial nitric oxide (NO). (more)

A Number of Marketed Dihydropyridine Calcium Channel Blockers Have Mineralocorticoid Receptor Antagonist Activity (abstract link)
…our data suggest that, in addition to their calcium channel blocking activity, a number of dihydropyridine calcium channel blockers also have mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist activity at high doses, a finding which may thus prove useful for the design of novel antihypertensive drugs in the future.