Category Archives: Controversial Issues

The U.S. is Not the Leader in the Fight Against Toxicity

In a remarkable book written by Mark Schapiro Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power, he details how the European Union (EU) has supplanted the United States as the leader in the fight against environmental toxicity. On June 1, 2007, the parliament of the EU voted for a new law called REACH Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals.

One part of this law forces companies to prove the safety of chemicals before they come to market. More importantly, it forces previously grandfathered chemicals to be tested for safety which was vehemently opposed by not just the American Chemical Society but by our own government. It scared them so much that they sent in C. Boyden Gray, the heir to the RJ Reynolds tobacco fortune to lobby against it. This is the same Republican operative who worked to eviscerate the EPA under Reagan by applying cost-benefit analysis over risk-based decision making. In other words, make money first, care about peoples health second. According to the magazine the New Republic, “So many different money trails lead to, by and through Gray it is bewildering.”

In retrospect, I’m glad my government in their ultimate arrogance decided to lobby as hard as they did because in the end, this we’re better than you attitude is what pushed the EU parliament to pass the bill. According to one European diplomat quoted in Mr. Schapiro’s book “If their only message is why we should not do anything more than they’re doing in the United States, then why should we listen? The more the United States give the impression of mounting an attack against REACH, the less we listen….. We are not going to ask the United States for permission. If we were to listen to the United States, how would we explain to European citizens where the two hundred chemicals in their bodies came from? What are we doing to them? This is the same not just for Europeans, but for Americans and every country in the world.”

The Bush Administrations steadfast belief that it is more important to make a dollar today for their big buddies than protecting the citizens of the United States is causing us to lose the leadership role we had for decades. He has lost us the respect from the world, not just because of the ill-conceived war, but because the world sees us as only caring for profits, not for people under the guise of jobs. How many jobs could we create by leading the world in the research of safer products? Millions of them. Sad to say, we won’t see a change soon unless there is a change in the White House come this November. We need it to save our children and the billions of children unborn coming to this world in the next hundred years.

Truth about the Tax “Rebates”

Before you become jubilant because you are about to get what the President and Congress claim is a rebate understand that it is nothing of the sort. What the money is really is an advance from the 2008 tax year (the return you file in 2009). Bottom line is that they are giving you your own money back! What a sham.

It is a smoke screen, a scam, a big fat lie. Give us $600 now and take it back next year. Imagine all the hardships that will occur next year when people who are expecting a refund on their taxes won’t get it. It is a shell game economically that will not help our country but hurt it in the long run. But then again, politicians don’t care about our future, they care about the election this year. Shame on Washington D.C. for scamming the American public yet again and shame on the media for not making this issue clearer.

The Deceit Just Keeps Getting Deeper

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any lower, it does. A report published on the Nature magazine website claims that Dr. Steven M. Haffner of the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, forwarded a report to drug manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline warning them about a paper that was about to be published by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) critical of their blockbuster (blockbuster meaning big money maker) drug Avandia. He was supposed to be reviewing the paper and it is highly unethical and against NEJM rules to let anyone else see a paper being reviewed.

To see the full extent of the problem, go to this link at the New York Times. My question is, when do we put a stop to this unbridled greed and deceit?

Does Ethics Play a Role in Drug Trials Anymore?

In the January 19, 2008 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet, author Samuel Lowenberg brings up a number of serious questions relating to ethics and drug trials done by the pharmaceutical industry. After reading his brief two page review, it is apparent that a major overhaul in the way clinical trials are done is in order. The trail of abuse is international in scope and has possibly caused the deaths of innocent children.

According to Tikki Pang, the World Health Organization’s director of Research Policy and Cooperation, “The trials that are being done overseas by drug companies are in a sense secret, because they do not share the information, they site confidentiality and patient protection.” He further goes on to say “Anecdotally, we have heard many, many instances in India, China and other countries of the possibility of ethical safeguards not being followed.” In Nigeria, a number of children died of an experimental anti-meningitis drug Trovan and Pfizer, according to a lawsuit, destroyed data from the trial and gave some of the children a dangerously low dose of Rocephin, a known treatment for meningitis.

It is time for Congress to enact a bill demanding that all drug trial, in the U.S. or abroad, be registered and the results must be shared with the FDA regardless of outcome. The data then must be shared with the public without prejudice and in a timely manner. The nonsense that is pharmaceutical research has got to change. People’s health is at risk and lives are at stake. They are treating third world people like lab rats and this has got to stop.

Four Hundred Scientists Dispute Global Warming – Or Do They?

According to Senator James Inhofe (R – OK), there is no consensus among scientists about global warming. He even goes on to list 400 people he claims are prominent climate scientists. Well guess what?  Baloney. A number of the people on the list are weatherman on television, twenty percent of them are paid by the fossil fuel industry, seventy people on the list have no apparent experience in climate science and twenty of them are economists.

Don’t believe me?  Here is the list of the four hundred and thirteen people who signed this deceptive piece of paper. Even if there are 400 or so scientists who deny global warming, how about the 50,000 members of the American Geophysical Union who do? It is time to stop arguing with the idiots. I no longer believe that we need to prove ourselves to those people who would consistently deny what we know to be the truth. The earth is warming and man has a lot to do with it.

Want more information before making a decision whether to believe it or not? Go to the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change and read the reports.

The deniers keep telling us that fighting global warming will cost jobs and hurt our economy. What utter nonsense. Imagine the jobs we can create if we mobilize our country to develop new technologies to decrease the need for fossil fuels. You know who’s economy will be hurt and whose jobs will be lost? Those executives of fossil fuel companies that rely on polluting our planet for their bloated salaries. The old boys club is hurt economically, not our nation. In truth, our economy will be hurt staying the course, innovation is the way our country became great, stagnation, which is what the current administration wants, is what will put us in the same category as the end of the Roman Empire.

We can only become great again by leading the world, not bleeding it. We have a chance to make a difference, let’s not screw it up.

CME’s – The Pharmaceutical Industries Way to Get at your Doctor

CME’s, aka Continuing Medical Education credits, is supposedly the way to make sure your physician is keeping up with the latest in medicine. Instead, it is the way that the pharmaceutical industry is using this tool as a way of “reallocation of marketing money” according to Dr. Jerome Kassierer former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

In the November 22nd issue of the esteemed science journal Nature, reporter Jim Giles show how drug companies who “sponsor” the CME classes, are getting undue influence over the speakers and topics despite supposed firewalls put in to prevent this. All of the drug companies are up in arms over the research presented by Drs. Jatinder Takhar and Daniel Carlat in separate papers.

The suggestion made in the article that drug companies should pool their CME support money for distribution by an independent body to reduce corporate influence. This would be a good first step.

Another issue that needs to be addressed is the influence these multi-billion dollar companies have in our medical schools. It is my understanding that representitives from these companies continue to infiltrate medical schools influencing the educational process undertaken by the students. This kind of bias building is wrong and needs legislative pressure to come to bear to stop it.

Another Bad Decision by the FDA

A recent decision to allow pharmaceutical companies to circulate pee-reviewd papers about off-label uses of a company’s products is a bad idea that makes one wonder who’s payroll is the FDA on. Ours or the pharmaceutical industries?

The problem with this idea is that the companies can now go after getting FDA approval for very narrow uses and then promote the drugs for more profitable uses without having to go through stringent testing and scrutiny. My understanding is that the FDA is supposed to protect the public, not the interests of the drug industry. This ruling does the exact opposite and Congress needs to step in which it is now in the process of doing, I hope.

Vaccines and Money, It’s All About The Profit

There is quite a bit of controversy surrounding vaccines and autism as well as whether flu shots really benefit anyone. For years, the pharmaceutical industry has bemoaned how vaccines didn’t make them any money so they were really for the benefit of the people. Oh really?  Click on this link to an industry newsletter and find out why this isn’t really the case (you don’t need to buy the report for $1600, just read the abstract).

The “global market” is poised to reach $21 billion dollars by 2010 and they are going from just targeting children to going after adults and the elderly. The U.S. is their biggest market – yeah for us 🙁  – followed by Europe. I guess since they are failing miserably at bringing new, safe and effective drugs to market to deal with real health issues, they need to create a new market to supposedly prevent diseases (cancer being their #1 target). Unfortunately, we won’t know whether these vaccines won’t create other diseases or other problems that will only crop up years from now.

Do you even know what is in the vaccines?  Supplements and foods have to list all their ingredients on the label but for some reason, vaccines don’t. While this video is quite humorous, it is a very serious issues. Would you really want to be injected with formaldehyde, mercury and ether?  I know I don’t.

Cost of Health Care – Time is Running Out To Gain Control

In a recent New England Journal of Medicine article, Drs. Pater Orszag and Philip Ellis talk about the problems with our health care system that no candidate for the Presidency of the United States is truly addressing. It is nice to talk about universal healthcare but we can’t do it on the backs of our children and destroy our economy. They propose  two simple (if that is possible) measures to begin to reign in our medical costs.

First off, there is little strong research on treatment comparisons between expensive and cheaper therapies. One example I always use is how insurers are willing to cover the expense of the drug Nexium® which can run hundreds of dollars a month over Prilosec® which is over-the-counter and runs under $50 a month. Why? For two reasons one is that the pharmaceutical industry is more about profits and less about improving the health of people. The second issue the authors bring up is that there is no incentive to cut costs.

At my last few lectures, I noted that insurance companies have no reason to cut costs as long as payments, in the form of your health insurance premiums are greater than costs. The incentive is actually to perform more expensive procedures because the higher the cost, the higher the premiums charged and the more money there is to enrich the stockholders and meet Wall Street’s expectations. If their profit margin is to make 18% for each dollar they spend because they will only charge you more in premiums, what procedure would you think they would want to pay for, one for $1,000 or $100? Yup, the more expensive one.

While I am not a big fan of government intervention, it is imperative it happens here before economic disaster occurs. The idea that industry and the free market will benefit society and that trickle down economics benefits the greatest number in our society are two ideas who need burial. Trickle down is what George Bush Sr. once called “voodoo economics”. Free market is a nice idea, but the bottom line is that excessive greed does not benefit the greatest number of people when it comes to medical care.

Incentives to cut costs, independently measure efficacy in treatment protocols, not just those limited to pharmaceutical models needs to be put in place. We don’t need another male libido drug, we need better treatment for staph, tuberculosis and other deadly diseases that may not be financially enriching for the pharmaceutical industry.

We need more preventive health care, more dietary interventions to stem the tide of obesity and we need to stop the rampant polluting of our environment by greedy, profit above all businesses. We do these things and bite the bullet and we will save our future. Will we? I seriously doubt it unless we elect a leader with enough personality to have the populace back the reforms necessary.

DNA Testing of Stool for Bacterial and Parasitic Markers – Unanswered Questions

The latest lab test being marketed heavily is a DNA Stool test for bacterial and parasites. While the theory of testing for pathogens using their DNA signatures sounds real good, is it necessarily ready for use, especially as a way of determining treatment protocols?  I for one am not sold on the idea yet.

A couple of issues come up that I haven’t heard adequate answers for.  Here are my main problems with this test:

  • If we find the DNA for a bug, yet it was dead before we ingested it, does this warrant treatment?  Obviously no but how do the labs determine if it is alive or not. An answer I heard was that they deal with it but how?  I’d be interested in knowing.
  • If our body already is dealing with a bacterial or parasitic pathogen and the DNA is picked up, do we deal with it or not?  Remember, overuse of antibiotics or other medications may lead to the development of resistant strains.
  • How accurate and specific is the test? I have not been convinced that it is that accurate as the DNA of pathogenic bacteria is often times very similar to non-pathogenic ones.
  • Quantification of bacteria and parasites is another issue. Does the lab have anyway of saying that the bacteria level is high, low, normal or not. There is a claim that there is a developed reference range but how? What if the infection level is high but not much DNA sloughs off?  What if a lot of DNA from a particular bug is found but there isn’t a high level of infection?

These issues do happen according to the literature I have reviewed so are we ready for the clinical use of this test or do we need more research? My feeling is that more research is needed before we abandon the gold-standard of stool testing, which is culturing. Why drop a very well respected and time-tested methodology for something that has not been shown to actually be superior?  This is akin to trying Nexium® because it has a 3% better efficacy than Prilosec® but is 10 times more expensive.

Another issue I have is that when we treat for a bacteria or parasite, the treatment often times kills more than just the specified “enemy”. When we use antibiotics or even natural treatments, we run the risk, and often times do, kill both beneficial and pathogenic species. Caution is the concept to remember here. The beneficial bacteria are extremely important in a healthy immune response, detoxification of xenobiotics, creation of nutients from food and more.

The use of genetic testing is a sexy concept but some labs seem to be way ahead of the practicality curve here. Just because a test is new and is accompanied by hot marketing doesn’t mean it’s time to abandon what works.

I would be real interested in hearing from the experts who claim DNA stool testing is the best and how they would respond to my concerns.