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Friday, April 22, 2011

Study: Statins cause memory loss, depression

Study: Statins cause memory loss, depression

(NaturalNews) The growing list of serious negative side effects caused by statin drugs now includes memory loss and depression, according to a new study published in the Cochrane Library. Researchers discovered that the vast majority of drug trials allegedly showing statins to be safe have been conducted by drug companies, and that way too many people are being prescribed the dangerous medications as a result.

Researchers pulled data from 14 drug trials involving 34,000 patients and found that, while statins appeared to help prevent heart attacks and strokes in some patients, there was simply not enough evidence to prove that people with no history of heart disease can safely take the drugs. And yet millions of healthy people needlessly taking statins every day at the direction of their doctors.

"[W]e found that evidence of potential harm is not being taken seriously," said Professor Shah Ebrahim, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "The adverse effects are not included in the trials."

Amy Thompson, a senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, added that "[i]t is still unclear whether statins provide any real benefits for people without heart and circulatory disease and who are at low risk." She and others are thus advising people without any history of heart disease to avoid statins altogether.

But do statin drugs actually provide any real benefit for anyone? According to a study published in theBritish Medical Journalin 2010, for every heart attack allegedly prevented by statins, two people suffer liver damage, kidney failure, cataracts or extreme muscle weakness from taking the drug. And statistically, less than three percent of people experience any benefit at all from taking statins (http://www.naturalnews.com/028988_s...).

Sources for this story include:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/a...

Learn more:http://www.naturalnews.com/032125_statins_memory_loss.html#ixzz1K0A1gvCl

Thursday, April 21, 2011

With superbugs contaminating fresh meat, the truth comes out about the FDA Food Safety Bill

With superbugs contaminating fresh meat, the truth comes out about the FDA Food Safety Bill

(NaturalNews) Remember all the hubbub about the S.510 "Food Safety Bill" and how it would make your food safe to eat? Well, it turns out those expanded FDA powers do absolutely nothing to even address the safety of fresh meat products, and yet new research reveals thatnearly half of all fresh meat and poultry products are contaminated with potentially deadly bacteria, including multiple drug-resistant superbugs (http://www.naturalnews.com/032099_p...).

This research was conducted by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. It was based on 136 samples of fresh meat representing 80 different brands sold in 26 grocery stores from California to Florida.

The research reveals that factory animal farms are breeding grounds for drug-resistant bacteria which are then passed on to humans through the food supply. This happens because factory farm animals are routinely dosed with both antibiotics and vaccines, causing serious imbalances in their own intestinal flora and immune function. This makes these factory farm animals the perfect hosts for breeding drug-resistant superbugs such as S. aureus, a particularly nasty strain that can be fatal if ingested.

It's yet another reason to buy free-range beef, chicken or pork if you eat those meats, by the way. Only free-range animals that are not injected with antibiotics are safe from the kind of chemical abuse routinely used in factory farm operations.


The S.510 Food Safety Bill is a complete joke

What this situation reveals is just how ridiculous all the debate was over the S.510 Food Safety Bill which recently became law in the United States. Remember all those Senators who stood before the American people and insisted S.510 would "make the food supply safe" for everyone?

What they didn't tell you is that S.510 did absolutely nothing to address the safety of meat products. It only attacked vegetables and thinks like raw milk and raw cheese, complete ignoring the safety of meat products altogether.

And now we know why: The meat products sold in America today are so widely contaminated with dangerous, deadly bacteria that if the American people really knew how much bacteria was in their meat, they wouldn't buy it!

So the government, as usual, swept the problem under the rug and pretended thate.coliwas a "vegetable farming" problem. Well, I have news for the federal regulators and geniuses in the U.S. Senate who passed S.510: E.coli grows in animals, not plants. So the only way it can even get onto the plants is if the factory animal farms are releasing e.coli downstream where it contaminates the vegetable farms.

The e.coli problem, in other words, is an animal farm problem, not a vegetable farm problem.

If you can't eat fresh meat, what about packaged meat?

So you might think that if so much of the fresh beef and poultry is so widely contaminated with potentially deadly bacteria, maybe the packaged "processed" meat is safer for you, right?

You might want to reconsider that: Packaged meat is almost always preserved with a dangerous, cancer-causing ingredient called sodium nitrite. It's listed right on the label of packages of bacon, sausage, sandwich meat, beef jerky, pepperoni, ham and many other packaged meat products.Sodium nitrite causes cancer (http://www.naturalnews.com/007024.html), and it's added to meat products primarily to turn them bright red (as a chemical food coloring agent). It also kills botulism, by the way, because it's yet another chemical antibiotic agent.

So if you eatfresh meat, you're likely to be encountering superbugs. If you eatpackaged meat, you're probably eating cancer-causing chemicals.

So what to do?

Solutions for meat eaters

You could always go vegetarian, of course. A largely plant-based diet is not only safer for you; it's also safer for the environment. (Go check out the runoff from the factory cattle farms near Greeley, Colorado, and you'll see what I mean...)

For those who choose to eat meat, here are three things you can do to avoid these dangers:

1) Buy local, grass-fed or free-range meat products from farmers and ranchers you know. Check out the local food co-ops or Saturday farmers' markets.

2) Cook the snot out of your meat products just to be sure you kill absolutely everything that might be living on them.

3) Look for nitrite-free meats at your grocery store or health food store. They're always in the frozen meat section (in the freezers) because without the sodium nitrite chemicals, they have to be kept frozen to avoid spoilage.

And finally, don't believe anything the federal government tells you about so-called "food safety." The federal food safety laws are such a complete joke that they utterly ignore the single largest source of potentially deadly bacteria in the entire food supply: the factory animal farms that have now become superbug breeding grounds.

It's yet another side effect of the widespread abuse of antibiotics. Did you know that in North America, far more antibiotics are given to animals than to people? The flooding of antibiotics into the food supply is a type ofchemical assault on our bodies and our environment. These antibiotics are being found in frogs and fish, rivers and streams. They are an environmental pollutant that threaten ocean ecosystems and wildlife.

And yet, the only reason these antibiotics are even needed in the factory animal farm operations is because animal farms are so filthy and unsanitary in the first place. Have you watched The Meatrix animations yet? If not, visit www.TheMeatrix.com to learn more.

Mindless consumers created the factory animal farms, in a sense

Now, here's another thing to consider: Why do factory animal farm operations even exist? Because mindless consumers buy meat based on the lowest price and nothing else!

If more consumers demanded grass-fed beef and free-range chicken, the factory animal farms would be out of business! It is the mindless shopping habits of consumers who frankly don't even care where their meat comes from that has given rise to these "lowest price" cattle feed lots and factory farms.

If you don't care where your beef comes from, and you only shop price at the big box stores, guess what you're buying? Antibiotic-injected, superbug-infested factory-farmed beef!

Factory farm cattle companies, of course, are only giving consumers what they demand: the absolutely lowest price on beef, regardless of where it comes from or how the cows were treated, fed or medicated. Amazingly, probably 4 out of 5 beef consumerscouldn't care lessabout what they're eating or where it really comes from. They would eat piles of doggy doo if it looked like hamburger and was on sale for 99 cents a pound.

So it's one thing to blame the cattle factory farms for all this, but the truth is that it is the consumers who create the demand that these factory animal farms are merely trying to meet. If food shoppers really cared what they were eating and changed their shopping habits accordingly, the factory animal farms would collapse virtually overnight.

And that's apoint of empowerment for YOU to remember: When you refuse to buy the lowest-price beef (corn fed, factory farmed beef), you deny revenues to that entire model of cow abuse and antibiotics abuse. When you buy local, grass-fed, free-range beef, you support the local cattle ranchers who refuse to participate in the whole system of factory beef operations.

So the choice is up to you, and every dollar you spend makes a difference. If you eat beef or chicken, simply changing your own purchasing habits can have a powerful influence over the entire system. And when enough consumers refuse to buy factory-farmed beef, the beef factories will finally shut down and become yet another sad chapter in the history of food.

Personally, I don't eat beef, but I do buy beef for my dog. And I go to a local farmer's market where I can buy beef bones from locally grown grass-fed, free-ranged cattle.

Learn more:http://www.naturalnews.com/032111_fresh_meat_superbugs.html#ixzz1K05so2QP


Opioids now most prescribed class of medications


Two reports by addiction researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the National Institute on Drug Abuse show a drastic shift in prescribing patterns impacting the magnitude of opioid substance abuse in America. The reports, published in JAMA, recommend a comprehensive effort to reduce public health risks while improving patient care, including better training for prescribers, pain management treatment assessment, personal responsibility and public education.



The JAMA Research Report shows that there has been a drastic increase in opioid prescriptions while prescriptions for non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) have gone down. Prescriptions for hydrocodone and account for 84.9 percent of opioid prescriptions. Over ten years, there has been a fivefold increase in admissions to substance abuse programs for opioid addiction.
While effective at reducing pain symptoms, opioid medications such as hydrocodone and oxycodone are associated with high rates of abuse, particularly among young adults. One in four 18-25 year olds will abuse prescription pain killers in their lifetime.
Researchers suggest targeting the relatively high rate of prescriptions to adolescents and young adults, who received 11.7 percent of the 202 million opioid prescriptions in the United States during 2009. A large share of the prescriptions to young adults was from dentists, and researchers believe there is a need for medical professionals to evaluate alternative pain medications in this particularly vulnerable age group.
"The scope of the problem is vast – opioid overdose is now the second leading cause of accidental death in the United States and the prevalence is second only to marijuana," said Thomas McLellan, PhD, co-author of the studies and director of the new Center for Substance Abuse Solutions, housed in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. "This study provides valuable information about factors contributing to the high rates of opioid analgesics, and identifies areas ripe for intervention."
In the accompanying Commentary, researchers offer recommendations to improve current pain management in primary care while simultaneously decreasing diversion, abuse and overdoses of opioid medication. These recommendations include: 
  • Comprehensive and contemporary training for pain management care providers –including physicians, nurses, dentists and pharmacists – covering the latest research advances on pain and addiction and new drug treatment options. 
  • Supporting the American Pain Society guidelines, which include plans to develop and roll out screening procedures for those at risk for abuse and dependence (e.g. adolescent or young adults, individual or family history of substance abuse history.) 
  • Increasing public awareness and responsibility of the addiction risks, to curb sharing or theft of the medication within families.
The research was conducted by The National Institute on Drug Abuse, of the National Institutes of Health, while Dr. McLellan was serving as Deputy Director of the United States Office of National Drug Control Policy. 
Penn Medicine researchers are already looking into possible solutions to address these issues. Dr. McLellan leads the new Center for Substance Abuse Solutions that will translate addiction research into evidence-based practical applications to be used locally, nationally and globally.
Collaborators from the Penn Pain Medicine Center will partner with Penn's Center for Substance Abuse Solutions and Department of Internal Medicine to develop a "Patient-Centered Medical Home" care model for patients with chronic pain problems. This new process integrates care provided by primary care physicians and specialists in an effort to provide high-quality, comprehensive care to patients. New health care information technology, such as electronic health care records and Internet-based collection of patient outcomes, will be used to improve coordination of care. Researchers hope that Patient-Centered Medical Home model will improve pain care and lower the chances of diversion and abuse of pain medications.
"The research published today clearly demonstrates the risk of harm that pain medications can cause when used incorrectly," said Michael Ashburn, MD, MPH, MBA, professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care and director of Pain Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. "We hope our efforts will demonstrate that improvements can be made to the patient care process and lead to improved pain control and a lower risk of abuse and diversion of these medications."
Provided by University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (news : web)

Tuesday, April 19, 2011



New database to help track quality of medicines in global markets


In the growing global battle against substandard and counterfeit medicines, the Promoting the Quality of Medicines (PQM) program has launched a new, public database of medicines collected and analyzed in collaboration with stakeholders from countries in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. Free of charge and available to anyone with access to the internet, the Medicines Quality Database (MQDB) includes information on the quality of medicines collected from a variety of sources. To date, more than 8700 records of tested samples collected from Ghana, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, Peru, Guyana and Colombia have been entered into the database.



Supported by USAID and implemented by the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP), PQM provides technical assistance to help strengthen quality assurance of medicines in developing countries primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, as well as Russia. PQM has a special emphasis on verifying and improving the availability of quality medications intended to treat life-threatening diseases such as malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. The MQDB will assist in-country health authorities and the general public through evidence-based data on poor-quality medicines circulating in several regions of the world.
Data on the collected and tested samples recorded in the new database include: 
  • Geographic location – country and province/state in which a sample was found 
  • Date of sampling (by year) 
  • Facility from which sample was collected – organized by sector (i.e., public, private or informal) and type (e.g., pharmacy, hospital, clinic) 
  • Medicine information – product name, manufacturer name, therapeutic indication, active pharmaceutical ingredient, dosage form, batch/lot number 
  • Test result (i.e., "passed" or "failed" with regard to authenticity) 
  • Substandard/counterfeit status (i.e., "yes" or "no", depending on a country's classification for substandard or counterfeit medicines).
According to Patrick Lukulay, Ph.D., USP's director of the PQM program: "Pharmaceutical markets operate globally, and sharing information on the quality of medicines among and within countries is crucial to patients, regulatory authorities, pharmacies, and manufacturers as well as agencies and organizations involved in international procurement and distribution of medicines. Having a publicly-available database that provides quick and easy access to information on medicines tested for their authenticity is a vital tool in helping to protect the public against the threat of substandard and counterfeit drugs."
Information in the MQDB is collected from health authorities responsible for testing the quality of medicine samples in a given country. Data on tested samples are included in the MQDB only after verification for accuracy. As a central repository for information sourced from different parts of the world, the database will provide  with an additional tool for surveillance of the quality of locally-acquired as well as imported medicines delivered through a global supply chain. 
As more poor-quality medicines—both substandard and counterfeit—make their way into pharmacies and other outlets in developing countries, there is a higher risk to the health of people exposed to those medicines. Poor-quality medicines may bring little or no relief to patients, and may contribute to resistance to treatments for which there are no foreseeable alternatives in the near future. Additionally, patients may begin to lose confidence in the public health system, making them reluctant to seek proper medical help when most needed.
"While multiple lines of intervention are critical for eliminating diseases like malaria, wide dissemination of information about poor quality medicines and their sources is vital in addressing the threats posed by the development of drug resistance to progress in disease control," said Dr. Jaime Chang, M.D., project management specialist from the Health Office of USAID-Peru and coordinator of the Amazon Malaria Initiative (AMI), supported by USAID. "The new database has broader applicability than malaria, of course, including invaluable data on tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS medications as well. However, in AMI's expanding efforts to contain and eventually eliminate malaria, an easily-accessible and reliable surveillance database like MQDB will be a great support in accomplishing our goals. I'm certain that those combating all three diseases around the world will find this database equally useful."
More information: To access the Medicines Quality Database online, go to:http://www.usp.org … ityDatabase/
Provided by US Pharmacopeia

Monday, April 18, 2011



Predicting serious drug side effects before they occur


All medications have side-effects from common aspirin to herbal remedies and from standard anticancer drugs to experimental immunosuppressants. However, predicting important side effects, serious adverse drug reactions, ADRs, is with current understanding almost impossible. However, a neural network technology trained with past data could give drug companies and healthcare workers a new tool to spot the potential for ADRs with any given medication.



Writing in the International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics, at team from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, has developed a new model that tests show is 99.87 percent accurate in predicting  among 10,000 observations and 100 percent for non-serious ADRs.
Peng-fang Yen and colleagues Dinesh Mital and Shankar Srinivasan explain how obligatory  on medication packaging often serve only to cause concern among patients, while products withdrawn from the market because of repeated ADRs repeatedly undermine the pharmaceutical industry. From the medical industry's point of view and the perspective of patients, this is a growing concern that might be remedied with new technology, saving lives, reputations and healthcare costs.
The Food Drug Administration (FDA) in USA and the World Health Organization (WHO) monitor the safety of medications continuously. However, technology that could identify possible ADRs at the earliest possible stage of drug development, licensing and marketing is urgently needed, especially given the potential risks to patients in emerging areas of healthcare and the potential risks to shareholder confidence.
The team's artificial neural network is a  of the biologic neural network embedded in computer software. It is trained by feeding in structural and physical data associated with known pharmaceutical products and any ADRs. A feedback loop discards those connections where a wrong prediction of a known outcome is made and as data are added the ANN builds up a network of correct "predictions". After sufficient training, the ANN can then be tested on another set of pharmaceuticals and outcomes checked against known ADRs. If confidence is sufficiently high, the ANN can be used to predict ADRs for new drugs.
The team has demonstrated an accuracy of 95 percent in preliminary tests and is now using a much larger data set of 10,000 drug molecules and ADR observations to train the ANN to a much more refined level.
More information: "Prediction of the serious adverse drug reactions using an artificial neural network model" in Int. J. Med. Eng. Informat., 2011, 3, 53-59
Provided by Inderscience Publishers (news : web)

Sunday, April 17, 2011



Other mental health medications no safer than atypical antipsychotics in nursing home residents


Conventional antipsychotics, antidepressants and benzodiazepines often administered to nursing home residents are no safer than atypical antipsychotics and may carry increased risks, according to an article in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).



Psychotropic medications are often used to manage behavioral symptoms in seniors, particularly people with dementing illnesses, with up to two-thirds of dementia patients in nursing homes prescribed these medications. However, the effectiveness of these drugs in this indication is unclear and important safety concerns exist, especially related to antipsychotics.
Psychotropic or psychoactive medications act upon the and are prescribed for the management of mental and emotional disorders. They include, amongst others, first and second generation antipsychotics (also known as conventional and atypical antipsychotics), antidepressants, benzodiazepines and other sedatives. Despite their widespread use, none of these treatments has been approved by the FDA or Health Canada for the management of behavioral symptoms associated with dementia.
A team of researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, undertook the study to evaluate the comparative safety of various psychotropic medication classes, focusing on patients in nursing homes because of the extensive use of these drugs in this setting and the complexity of these patients' illnesses. The study cohort included all BC residents admitted to a nursing home between Jan. 1, 1996 and March 31, 2006 and who received a psychotropic drug within 90 days of admission.
Of the 10 900 patients in the study, 1942 received an atypical antipsychotic, 1902 a conventional antipsychotic, 2169 an antidepressant and 4887 a benzodiazepine. Rigorous methodological approaches were applied to ensure this non-randomized study was not affected by the selective prescribing that tends to occur in routine care.
"In 10 900  newly admitted to nursing homes in BC who began taking, we observed risks of death that were higher among those who initiated conventional antipsychotics, antidepressants and benzodiazepines. We also observed risks of femur fracture that were higher with conventional antipsychotics, antidepressants and benzodiazepines used for anxiety, all compared with atypical antipsychotics. No clinically meaningful differences were observed for risk of pneumonia or heart failure, except possibly a lower risk of pneumonia and a higher risk of heart failure with benzodiazepines," state the authors.
They conclude that a large randomized trial is required to confirm their findings but that clinicians should weigh the increased risks against potential benefits when considering prescribing these medications for their patients in nursing homes.
Provided by Canadian Medical Association Journal (news : web)