UnSymmetrical

Dr. Shiv Chopra, PhD, must be fire-proof. As a vaccine and drug regulator for Health Canada for nearly forty years, he evaluated every red-hot topic in public health and tried to protect us from unsafe drugs, vaccines, and agricultural practices. Over the years, he tried (sometimes successfully) to stop our government from allowing Canadians to be exposed to ineffective and harmful vaccines, genetically modified foods, pesticides, carcinogenic antibiotics and hormones used in food-producing animals, and agricultural practices that promote Mad Cow Disease. He even went public with his findings, supported by Canada’s public service union, which resulted in legal battles initiated against him by a government determined to shut him up. The courts, however, tended to find in favour of Dr. Chopra, and instead ordered the government to shape up.

This support by the courts, various tribunals, and Senate committee hearings of Dr. Chopra and his fellow scientists at Health Canada was highly unfavourable to corporate interests and, therefore, irksome to those prime ministers and ministers of health dependent upon corporate support. So Drs. Chopra, Margaret Haydon, and Gerard Lambert were fired from Health Canada in 2004 by then PM Paul Martin for “insubordination”. The reason provided was true, in a sense: they had steadfastly refused for more than three decades to subordinate themselves to corporate and government pressure to pass unsafe substances which were in direct contravention to Canada’s Foods and Drugs Act.

Dr. Chopra has now written a book on his decades of struggle to have the law recognized as being above political policy. His book, Corrupt to the Core, tells of what crimes our government knowingly committed against public health in order to serve corporate financial interests. The book has been three years in the making and is at the press now.

Continue reading "Whistleblower Report" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 05:08 PM | Permalink

For years, the Food and Drug Administration has marched arm in arm with the American Dental Association and unflinchingly maintained the joint position that mercury fillings are perfectly safe, despite ever increasing evidence to the contrary. But on June 3rd, they finally broke ranks. However, before you give a big round of applause to the FDA, understand that their statement was not voluntary. It resulted from the settlement of a lawsuit brought by the Mercury Policy Project, Mom's Against Mercury, Consumers for Dental Choice, et al. And although the statement itself was weak and highly qualified, it certainly represents a breaking of the ranks, and it absolutely signals the beginning of the end for amalgam fillings -- even if the ADA can't see it yet.

The Lawsuit and the FDA

On June 3rd, the FDA posted an announcement on its website warning that mercury-based amalgam fillings "may" pose a safety risk for pregnant women and young children. The FDA posted this precaution on its Website as the result of a settlement of the lawsuit I mentioned above. Also, as I mentioned earlier, the warning is not strong; it's highly qualified; and it limits itself to two groups, pregnant women and children, both of which are already urged to limit their mercury intake from seafood because of concerns that too much mercury can harm developing brains. Entertainingly, the FDA also recommends that "women and young children, in particular, should include fish or shellfish in their diets due to their many nutritional benefits." Whoever said FDA policy needs to be consistent?

Continue reading "FDA Cracks the Amalgam Filling Cabal" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 05:22 PM | Permalink

Pfizer has started settling cases over its Celebrex and Bextra painkillers, a New York lawyer said on Friday.

The company has begun negotiating settlements with individual plaintiff’s firms, David S. Ratner, a lawyer with Morelli Ratner, said in a phone interview. “It’s been going on for a few weeks,” he said.

Mr. Ratner, a member of a steering committee of lawyers for the drugs’ users, said he did not know which specific firms were involved in the settlements.

More than 3,000 patients have claimed that the drugs caused heart attacks and strokes. Celebrex, in the same class of medicines as Merck’s recalled Vioxx, is Pfizer’s third-best-selling drug. The product, which is still on the market, generated $2.3 billion in sales in 2007, a 12 percent increase from the previous year.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Pfizer had reached settlements with three law firms representing more than 200 of the thousands who sued over the drugs. Firms have been offered $40,000 to $50,000 a client to resolve Bextra cases and as much as $200,000 a client for Celebrex, The Journal reported, citing an unidentified lawyer.

Pfizer withdrew Bextra in April 2005 after it was tied to a potentially fatal skin condition.

Continue reading "Pfizer Begins Settling Painkiller Cases" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 03:23 PM | Permalink

Researchers can gather all the hard-nosed evidence they want about the effectiveness of a particular drug or treatment. But there's one figure doctors don't much talk about despite its importance. It's called number needed to treat, or NNT, a new measure developed in the past 20 years that's one of the best-kept statistical secrets in medicine.

The idea of NNT is simple enough. Most, if not all clinical trials look at how much better people do on a particular medicine compared with how they would do without it or whether they should be on a different medicine. Take statins, drugs that aim to reduce bad cholesterol. A typical trial might give one group of men a statin for, say, five years and give a second group a placebo, or fake pill.

Generally, you will see fewer heart attacks in the statin group (about 30% fewer in one real-world trial). Reducing the risk by a third sounds like a lot, which is one reason many hundreds of thousands of men with no sign of heart disease take statins. But that number is meaningless unless you take into account the percentage of men in both groups who have heart attacks in the first place. If those people represent only a tiny fraction of the two populations, an improvement of 30% isn't much--maybe one heart attack fewer in a group of thousands.

Continue reading "Medicine's Secret Stat" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 12:18 PM | Permalink

On April 2, 2008 CNN spent the day bringing awareness to the problem of autism. Larry King's segment, which included Jenny McCarthy along with a panel of guests, was particularly enlightening. My hat is off to Jenny, a celebrity mother who is making it quite uncomfortable for the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to ignore parents of autistic children seeking answers. Why does a mom have to do the work of the CDC? The answer is rather simple: our government's zeal to insist on too many vaccines while ignoring the actual risks is the driving force behind the autism tragedy. Sure there are many related factors – but the bottom line is that our government is causing disease at an alarming and devastating pace.

It is an interesting comment on our society that an outspoken and impassioned mother of an autistic child, along with her partner (actor Jim Carrey), are the catalysts that are likely to cause a warped empire to crumble. Many before them have tried; and typically been burned at the stake. Jenny and Jim are the government's worst nightmare. They can't shut down their medical practice because they don't have one. They can't financially damage them into silence. And as they lead their autism March on Washington D.C. this June 4th it is quite clear that they haven't a prayer of shutting them up. A powder keg is about to blow.

Jenny, to her credit, takes a diplomatic view on vaccines. Here main point is that there are too many vaccines given too soon and that the vaccines contain too many toxic components. As both a leading defender of health freedom in this country and a top nutritionist who has helped numerous autistic children, I am more than happy to put the entire problem into perspective and give insights that will help many parents.

Continue reading "CNN Helps Autism Debacle Blow Up in Government's Face; Vaccine-Autism Link No Longer in Question" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 12:47 PM | Permalink

It is easy to point our fingers at greedy pharmaceutical companies when it comes to the rising costs of our prescription meds. However, the average citizen probably isn't aware of just how much these companies control our lives.

A perfect example of this control can be found on every other page in a leading medical journal. I'm speaking, of course, about the copious amounts of ad space.

It is easy for people to presume that the scientific evidence presented in various medical journals is based on unbiased information. Nothing could be further from the truth, unfortunately. Just as a network television channel strives to please their sponsors at the expense of a program's content, a medical journal that is filled with ads will always be at the mercy of its financial backers.

In his article "Under the Influence: Drug Companies, Medical Journals, and Money," Kent Sepkowitz writes:

Continue reading "Who's Bankrolling Your "Trusted" Medical Journals?" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 08:29 PM | Permalink