Day: 08/25/2013

Whooping Cough Vaccine Can Cause Brain Damage And Death.

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 In July, the state of Missouri began offering for free a vaccine aimed at preventing, among other ailments, whooping cough. According to officials, the TDap vaccine, which reportedly prevents tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis, was necessary because “of the rising incidence of whooping cough is reported to be related to the vaccine wearing off if given more than ten years earlier,” says an online report.

Citing a St. Louis Post Dispatch article, Michelle Goldstein of VacTruth.com says some 41,000 cases of pertussis occurred in the U.S. in 2012, compared to less than 19,000 cases in the previous year – thus the need for the new vaccine.

“The news story emphasized that whooping cough is highly dangerous and can lead to vomiting and death, especially in children. The report indicates that diphtheria is a bacterial disease that is highly contagious and can also lead to death,” Goldstein writes, adding that tetanus can cause severe muscle spasms.

Natural remedies, treatments can work without risk

What the paper failed to report, however, is that there are serious health risks associated with the Tdap vaccines. Also, there are relatively benign health implications that are commonly associated with the diseases the vaccine is intended to prevent – “along with the important fact that vaccines have never been proven to prevent any disease,” Goldstein said.

She adds:
The risks that WHOOPING COUGH, diphtheria and tetanus pose to health are low compared to the potential, serious dangers reported as a result of this vaccine. Whooping cough can be treated successfully through a vitamin C protocol developed by Dr. Suzanne Humphries which has been shown to greatly reduce symptoms. In contrast, antibiotic treatments, given routinely by conventional, allopathic physicians to treat whooping COUGH, have never been shown to positively impact the course of the illness.
Whatever the standard medical treatments, most people fully recover from whooping cough, which then gives them lifetime immunity from it. If they should become re-infected, Goldstein writes, subsequent episodes are generally “quite mild.”

Meanwhile, tetanus can be prevented in a number of ways without ever receiving a VACCINE. For instance, simply thoroughly washing and cleaning cuts can prevent the disease. And in actuality, contracting the disease in the first place is rare; just “233 cases of tetanus were reported to the Center for Disease Control between 2001 and 2008,” Goldstein points out, citing the federal agency’s own figures. “The incidence of tetanus declined by more than 95% between 1947 and 2008.”

Finally, diphtheria is also a low-risk disease, and one that is not seen widely in the U.S. since an outbreak in the 1970s. Over the 30-year period between 1980 and 2010, just 55 cases of the disease were reported to the CDC.

Vaccine dangers outweigh risk of actually getting the disease

The dangers of getting a Tdap vaccine can also be significant. According to Goldstein:

Health consequences resulting from the Tdap vaccine include encephalitis, BRAIN DAMAGE and death. A comprehensive report made by the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) documents clearly the widespread health dangers associated with the Tdap vaccine. Tdap and DTap vaccines are currently used in the United States, replacing the DTP vaccine in 1996, but all three vaccines contain the dangerous pertussis toxin with unsafe additives.

Furthermore, experts note, the fact that whooping cough even occurs in “vaccinated” populations is a sign that vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease.

Sources: Raw For Beauty

 

Orange Juice May Soon Contain Pig DNA.

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The future of orange crops are at risk and pig genes may be considered part of the solution.

On July 27, the New York Times (NYT) officially staked its flag into Big Ag’s garden and into the soil of the GMO camp with its wildly controversial piece, “A Race to Save the Orange by Altering Its DNA.”
The feature highlights the story of a highly influential orange grower and his undying quest to stave off Asian jumping lice and the bacteria that they carry, which has been devastating Florida’s orange crop since 2005.
Committed to engineering the world’s first genetically modified orange tree, the article centers on Ricke Kress, the president of Southern Gardens Citrus who is in charge of two and a half million orange trees and a factory that squeezes juice for Tropicana and Florida’s Best. According to NYT, Kress’s GMO savior would fight C. liberibacter and citrus psyllids through whatever means science determines necessary. As for public acceptance, Kress told his industry colleagues, “We can’t think about that right now.”

Rick Kress’ mission to save oranges by whatever means necessary

Kress’ crusade has led him along a path, the past several years, widely out of public view. His work has tested potential DNA donors from two vegetables, a virus, a pig, and a synthetic gene manufactured in a laboratory. Unbeknownst to the world, the NYT reports that later this summer Kress “will plant several hundred more young trees with the spinach gene, in a new house.

In two years, if he wins regulatory approval, they will be ready to go into the ground. The trees could be the first to produce juice for sale in five years or so.”

According to the NYT, whether it is his transgenic tree or someone else’s, Kress insists, “Florida growers will soon have trees that could produce juice without fear of its being sour, or in short supply.”

What is the danger of the “Greening” disease?

C. liberibacter, the bacterium that has all but annihilated Florida’s citrus crop, chokes off the flow of nutrients and are spread by Asian citrus psyllids that can carry the germ a mile without stopping, and the females can lay up to 800 eggs in their one-month life. It was first detected more than a century ago in China and has earned a place, along with anthrax and the Ebola virus, on the Agriculture Department’s list of potential agents of bioterrorism.

When it first hit, Florida growers attempted to subdue the contagion known as “Greening” by chopping down hundreds of thousands of infected trees and by spraying a broad spectrum of pesticides on the lice that carries it. However, the disease could not be contained. It has thus been determined by University of Florida agricultural analysts that the Asian bug and bacteria has cost Florida $4.5 billion and 8,000 jobs between 2006 and 2012.

Presently, there is no known cure for Greening disease. “In all of cultivated citrus, there is no evidence of immunity,” the plant pathologist heading a National Research Council task force on the disease said.

Does the New York Times really care about the health of its readers?

Although our hearts break for the thousands of people who have lost their jobs and for the unknown impact this orange crop devastation will have on the world as it continues to spread, our tempers boil against the New York Times for their highly biased representation of GMOs to their readers, of whom many are ignorant to the harmful realities related to GMOs.

Astoundingly, the NYT attempts to compare genetically modifying oranges to ancient breeding practices, something that they call “genetic merging.”

Because oranges themselves are hybrids and most seeds are clones of the mother, new varieties cannot easily be produced by crossbreeding – unlike, say, apples, which breeders have remixed into favorites like Fuji and Gala. But the vast majority of oranges in commercial groves are the product of a type of genetic merging that predates the Romans, in which a slender shoot of a favored fruit variety is grafted onto the sturdier roots of other species: lemon, for instance, or sour orange. And a seedless midseason orange recently adopted by Florida growers emerged after breeders bombarded a seedy variety with radiation to disrupt its DNA, a technique for accelerating evolution that has yielded new varieties in dozens of crops, including barley and rice.

Completely ignoring the inherent dangers of GMOs and confusing the process with conventional crossbreeding, the NYT states,

Even in the heyday of frozen concentrate, the popularity of orange juice rested largely on its image as the ultimate natural beverage, fresh-squeezed from a primordial fruit. But the reality is that human intervention has modified the orange for millenniums, as it has almost everything people eat.

In addition, the NYT times argues that, “Even conventional crossbreeding has occasionally produced toxic varieties of some vegetables.” The famed news source even insists that,

Oranges are not the only crop that might benefit from genetically engineered resistance to diseases for which standard treatments have proven elusive. And advocates of the technology say it could also help provide food for a fast-growing population on a warming planet by endowing crops with more nutrients, or the ability to thrive in drought, or to resist pests. Leading scientific organizations have concluded that shuttling DNA between species carries no intrinsic risk to human health or the environment, and that such alterations can be reliably tested.

Sources: RawForBeauty.com

Study Suggests Oregano Oil Works for Weight Loss and Inflammation

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A new animal study shows that carvacrol, the active component of oregano oil, can actually prevent diet-induced obesity by modulating genes as well as reducing inflammation in white adipose tissue. Carvacrol (2-methyl-5-isopropylphenol) is a monoterpene phenolic constituent of the essential oil produced by numerous aromatic plants and spices such as oregano oil.

The main objective of the study was to investigate effects of carvacrol in mice fed with a high-fat diet, which is an important model and cause of modern day obesity, and to study the potential underlying mechanisms focusing on the gene expression involved in adipogenesis, thermogenesis and inflammation.

Male mice were divided in three groups: 1) those who were fed a normal diet, 2) those fed a high-fat diet,  and 3) those fed with a 0.1% carvacrol-supplemented diet. Body weight, visceral fat-pads (known as organ fat or intra-abdominal fat) and biochemical parameters were determined. Adipose tissue (connective tissue which stores fat) genes and protein expression levels were also assessed.  The mice fed with the  carvacrol-supplemented diet exhibited significantly reduced body weight gain, visceral fat-pad weights and plasma lipid levels (trygliceride and cholesterol levels) compared with mice fed with a high-fat diet.  Furthermore, the high-fat-diet induced up-regulations of adipose tissue genes and protein associated with the signaling cascades that lead to adipogenesis and inflammation but were significantly reversed by dietary carvacrol supplementation.

In summary, under experimental conditions carvacrol prevented obesity in high fat-diet fed mice by decreasing body weight, visceral fat-pad weights and lowering plasma lipid levels. The evidence obtained in this study suggests that carvacrol appears to inhibit visceral adipogenesis most likely by suppressing bone morphogenic protein-, fibroblast growth factor 1- and galanin-mediated signaling, and it also attenuates the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines in visceral adipose tissues by inhibiting toll like receptor 2 (TLR2)- and TLR4-mediated signaling.

It is significant to note that the amount of carvacrol used in the study is a typical amount that one would use when supplementing with oregano oil.  A 1500 calorie diet would need approximately 1.5 calories of carvacrol and a 2000 calorie diet would need approximately 2 calories.  If one is consuming 1500 calories per day he or she would need 166 mgs of carvacrol, or 222 mgs for a 2000 calorie diet.

According Byron Richards, CCN, “a key part of the weight gain problem for any person is that immune cells start having an inflammatory party within white adipose tissue, attracting even more immune cells and causing progressive inflammation.  This problem locks in the dysfunction of white adipose tissue and contributes to stubborn weight issues.  This is the first study showing that carvacrol can directly improve this difficult problem, helping break a vicious cycle.”

Five Scientific Studies Demonstrating that Oregano Oil is Effective in Alleviating Inflammation

The first study, published in the journal Experimental and Toxicologic Pathology, discovered that oregano oil significantly improved rat colitis, or inflammation of the colon. When compared to the control group, the oregano-treated rats showed much greater success in terms of visual disease signs such as ulceration and swelling,

In a second study, reported in the journal Mediators of Inflammation, thyme and oregano oils were used in conjunction and found to benefit colitis in mice. The oils reduced the levels of cytokines, biochemical traditionally associated with inflammation. The results found oil treatment led to lower mortality and reduced tissue damage in the animals.

A third study an investigation reported in the journal Phytomedicine examined the effects of carvacrol on liver regeneration. Carvacrol is one of the key active ingredients in oregano oil. Rats with their livers surgically removed were assigned to two different groups. One group was treated with carvacrol and the other served as the control group. The carvacrol group experienced noticeably increased liver-weight gain.

A fourth study found in Phytomedicine discovered that carvacrol protected the livers of rats that also had blood supply restricted to those organs. The investigators found that carvacrol was nontoxic to rat livers used in the study.

In the fifth and final study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that an active ingredient in oregano can cure additional instances of inflammation. This ingredient, known as beta-carophyllin (E-BCP), was administered to mice with inflamed paws. In seven out of ten experiments, there was a subsequent improvement in inflammation symptoms. Researchers believe E-BCP might be of possible use in treating osteoporosis and arteriosclerosis.  Beta-carophyllin works by docking on specific receptor structures in the cell-membrane – the so-called cannabinoid-CB2 receptors. The result is a change in cell behavior, inhibiting the cell’s production of phlogogenic signal substances. According to investigator Dr. Jürg Gertsch, E-BCP has been used to treat mice with swollen paws due to inflammations. In 70 percent of cases where the treatment had been administered, the swelling subsequently subsided.

Many of the oils available in today’s market are derived from non-oregano species, such as various types of marjoram as well as species of thyme. Julia Lawless, author of The Encyclopedia of Essential Oils, says that the vast majority of oregano oil is not labeled correctly, because it is derived from thyme, that is Spanish thyme.  I  highly suggest using a cold-pressed pharmaceutical grade formula of Wild Organic Mediterranean Oregano with at least 79-80% carvacrol content such as  Oregasil.  This is the oregano oil that I suggest to clients as well as the one that our family uses.

Source: oawhealth.com

Patent confirms that aspartame is the excrement of GM bacteria.

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In 1999, The Independent published an article entitled “World’s top sweetener is made with GM bacteria,” which revealed that Monsanto was knowingly adding aspartame to soft drinks in the United States – and that aspartame is made from GM bacteria. This report, which remains one of the earliest disclosures on aspartame in a mainstream newspaper, received little attention after its publication – possibly because its implications were underestimated at the time – and it has long been forgotten.

Since 1999, the world has become a little more attentive to Monsanto and aspartame, but ignorance still abounds about the latter’s genesis. While more and more people are starting to awaken to aspartame’s destructive effects on our health, do they know how it is actually made? Fortunately, a 1981 patent for aspartame production, once confined to the drawers of patent offices, is now available online for everyone to see – and it confirms everything that Monsanto was happy to tell us in 1999 before their meteoric growth necessitated greater prudence.

The patent, which is entitled Process for producing aspartame and is credited to Bahl, Rose, and White, summarizes the process as follows:

“The artificial sweetener aspartame, a dipeptide with the formula Asp-Phe-me, is produced using a cloned micrcorganism [sic]. A DNA which codes for a large stable peptide comprised of the repeating amino acid sequence (Asp-Phe)n is inserted into a cloning vehicle which in turn is introduced into a suitable host microorganism. The host microorganism is cultured and the large peptide containing the repeating Asp-Phe sequence is harvested therefrom. The free carboxyl group of the large peptide is benzylated and then hydrolysed to benzyl Asp-Phe dipeptides. This dipeptide is methylated and then debenzylated to form aspartame.”

Source: RealFarmacy.com

 

Radioactive Bluefin Tuna Caught Off California Coast.

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Every bluefin tuna tested in the waters off California has shown to be contaminated with radiation that originated in Fukushima. Every single one.

Over a year ago, in May of 2012, the Wall Street Journal reported on a Stanford University study. Daniel Madigan, a marine ecologist who led the study, was quoted as saying, “The tuna packaged it up (the radiation) and brought it across the world’s largest ocean. We were definitely surprised to see it at all and even more surprised to see it in every one we measured.”

Another member of the study group, Marine biologist Nicholas Fisher at Stony Brook University in New York State reported, “We found that absolutely every one of them had comparable concentrations of cesium 134 and cesium 137.”

bluefin-tuna

That was over a year ago. The fish that were tested had relatively little exposure to the radioactive waste being dumped into the ocean following the nuclear melt-through that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in March of 2011. Since that time, the flow of radioactive contaminants dumping into the ocean has continued unabated. Fish arriving at this juncture have been swimming in contaminants for all of their lives.

Radioactive cesium doesn’t sink to the sea floor, so fish swim through it and ingest it through their gills or by eating organisms that have already ingested it. It is a compound that does occur naturally in nature, however, the levels of cesium found in the tuna in 2012 had levels 3 percent higher than is usual. Measurements for this year haven’t been made available, or at least none that I have been able to find. I went looking for the effects of ingesting cesium. This is what I found:

When contact with radioactive cesium occurs, which is highly unlikely, a person can experience cell damage due to radiation of the cesium particles. Due to this, effects such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and bleeding may occur. When the exposure lasts a long time, people may even lose consciousness. Coma or even death may then follow. How serious the effects are depends upon the resistance of individual persons and the duration of exposure and the concentration a person is exposed to.

The half life of cesium 134 is 2.0652 years. For cesium 137, the half life is 30.17 years.

The Fukushima disaster is an ongoing battle with no signs that humans are gaining the upper hand. The only good news to come out of Japan has later been proven to be false and was nothing more than attempts by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to mislead the public and lull them into a sense of security while the company searched vainly for ways to contain the accident. This incident makes Three Mile Island and Chernobyl pale in comparison. Those were nuclear meltdowns. A nuclear melt-through poses a much more serious problem and is one that modern technology doesn’t have the tools to address. Two and a half years later and the contaminants are still flowing into the ocean and will continue to for the foreseeable future.

The FDA assures us that our food supply is safe, that the levels of radiation found in fish samples are within safe limits for consumption. But one has to question if this is true and, if it is true now, will it remain true? Is this, like the statements issued from TEPCO, another attempt to quell a public backlash in the face of an unprecedented event that, as yet, has no solution and no end in sight?

1,600-Year-Old Goblet Shows that the Romans Were Nanotechnology Pioneers.

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Researchers have finally found out why the jade-green cup appears red when lit from behind

The colorful secret of a 1,600-year-old Roman chalice at the British Museum is the key to a super­sensitive new technology that might help diagnose human disease or pinpoint biohazards at security checkpoints.

phenomenon-Glow-With-Flow-631

The glass chalice, known as the Lycurgus Cup because it bears a scene involving King Lycurgus of Thrace, appears jade green when lit from the front but blood-red when lit from behind—a property that puzzled scientists for decades after the museum acquired the cup in the 1950s. The mystery wasn’t solved until 1990, when researchers in England scrutinized broken fragments under a microscope and discovered that the Roman artisans were nanotechnology pioneers: They’d impregnated the glass with particles of silver and gold, ground down until they were as small as 50 nanometers in diameter, less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt. The exact mixture of the precious metals suggests the Romans knew what they were doing—“an amazing feat,” says one of the researchers, archaeologist Ian Freestone of University College London.

The ancient nanotech works something like this: When hit with light, electrons belonging to the metal flecks vibrate in ways that alter the color depending on the observer’s position. Gang Logan Liu, an engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has long focused on using nanotechnology to diagnose disease, and his colleagues realized that this effect offered untapped potential. “The Romans knew how to make and use nanoparticles for beautiful art,” Liu says. “We wanted to see if this could have scientific applications.”

When various fluids filled the cup, Liu suspected, they would change how the vibrating electrons in the glass interacted, and thus the color. (Today’s home pregnancy tests exploit a separate nano-based phenomenon to turn a white line pink.)

Since the researchers couldn’t put liquid into the precious artifact itself, they instead imprinted billions of tiny wells onto a plastic plate about the size of a postage stamp and sprayed the wells with gold or silver nanoparticles, essentially creating an array with billions of ultra-miniature Lycurgus Cups. When water, oil, sugar solutions and salt solutions were poured into the wells, they displayed a range of easy-to-distinguish colors—light green for water and red for oil, for example. The proto­type was 100 times more sensitive to altered levels of salt in solution than current commercial sensors using similar techniques. It may one day make its way into handheld devices for detecting pathogens in samples of saliva or urine, or for thwarting terrorists trying to carry dangerous liquids onto airplanes.

The original fourth-century A.D. Lycurgus Cup, probably taken out only for special occasions, depicts King Lycurgus ensnared in a tangle of grapevines, presumably for evil acts committed against Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. If inventors manage to develop a new detection tool from this ancient technology, it’ll be Lycurgus’ turn to do the ensnaring.

Rattling ions limit heat flow in materials used to reduce carbon emissions.

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A new study published today in the journal Nature Materialss has found a way to suppress the thermal conductivity in sodium cobaltate so that it can be used to harvest waste energy.

Led by scientists at Royal Holloway University, the team conducted a series of experiments on crystals of sodium cobaltate grown in the University’s Department of Physics. X-ray and neutron scattering experiments were carried out at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility and in the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, using the UK’s national supercomputer facility HECToR to make their calculations.

They believe their approach can easily be applied to other substances, since they only require tiny crystals and will, therefore, guide the design of the next generation of thermoelectric materials.

“The global target to reduce carbon emissions has brought research into thermoelectric materials centre stage,” said Professor Jon Goff from the Department of Physics at Royal Holloway.

“If we can design better thermoelectric materials, we will be able to reduce the energy consumption of cars by converting waste heat in exhausts into electrical power, as well as cooling hot spots on computer chips using solid state refrigerators.”

Thermoelectric coolers are also used in air conditioners and in scientific equipment where a rapid response to changes in temperature is required. Energy harvesting is also important in miniaturised electronic devices, including “systems on a chip“, and power recovery using this method is useful for any off-grid electricity applications, including in space.

“The development of thermoelectric oxides offers an environmentally clean alternative to current materials that contain elements that are harmful, such as lead, bismuth or antimony, or those that are in limited supply, such as tellurium,” added Professor Goff.

Source: http://phys.org

Frontotemporal dementia.

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  • Frontotemporal dementia refers to a diverse group of conditions that collectively are a major cause of young onset dementia
  • Frontotemporal dementia produces selective brain atrophy involving the frontal and temporal lobes, requiring brain magnetic resonance imaging for accurate diagnosis
  • Clinically, these diseases present chiefly as progressive aphasia or as disintegration of personality and behaviour that may be misdiagnosed as a psychiatric disorder
  • Up to around a quarter of cases arise from dominant mutations in one of three major causative genes
  • Frontotemporal dementia is commonly associated with other neurological impairment, in particular parkinsonism or motor neurone disease
  • Treatment remains supportive, but patients and families need extensive counselling, future planning, and involvement of social and mental health services

 

Source: BMJ

 

 

When EMA and FDA decisions conflict: differences in patients or in regulation?.

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Are Americans more resistant to the risks and more likely to benefit from certain drugs than Europeans or, on the contrary, is the European Medicines Agency (EMA) more resistant than the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to the drug industry’s desire to get approval for drugs with unique risks but without compensating benefits?

This question arises because the FDA has recently approved two diet drugs, heralded by the agency as “the first drugs for long-term weight management that FDA has approved in 13 years”1 but rejected by the EMA. In both cases FDA advisory committees earlier rejected approval but later supported the FDA’s and the companies’ desire for approval. Similarly, the FDA has also failed to ban the diabetes drug rosiglitazone (Avandia), banned three years ago by the EMA.2

In June 2012 the FDA approved lorcaserin (marketed in the United States as Belviq). The weight loss drugs dexfenfluramine and fenfluramine were banned in 1997 because of many post-approval cases of heart valve damage, attributed to adverse effects on the 2B serotonin heart receptor.3 Lorcaserin has minimal 2B serotonin receptor activity, but the FDA approved the drug despite a 16% increase in heart valve damage in randomized trials, not statistically significant but with an upper confidence interval of 67%.4 The reduction in weight loss, beyond that of placebo, was 3% to 3.7%.5 The chairman of the FDA advisory committee reviewing the drug stated, “There’s probably not sufficient data at this time to rule out a clinically meaningful increase in the risk for valvular heart disease.” The cardiologist Sanjay Kaul, a committee member who voted against approval, said, “Given the totality of evidence, the potential benefits of lorcaserin do not, in my opinion, outweigh the potential risks when used long term in a population of overweight and obese individuals.”6

Despite its approval of the drug, the FDA required the company to do post-marketing randomized trials to better evaluate cardiovascular risk, including heart valve damage.7

Before the EMA had formally rejected the application for lorcaserin, but after withdrawal of the marketing application by the drug’s sponsor, Arena, the EMA stated that “at the time of the withdrawal the CHMP [the EMA’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use] . . . was of the provisional opinion that Belviq could not have been approved for weight control in obese and overweight patients” because “the benefits of Belviq did not outweigh its risks.” The committee’s safety concerns included “the potential risk of psychiatric disorders (such as depression) and valvulopathy.”8

Shortly after it approved lorcaserin, the FDA approved a combination of phentermine and topiramate (now marketed as Qsymia in the US) despite concerns about its cardiovascular risk. In studies the proportion of patients with pulse increases exceeding 10 beats per minute, a risk factor for cardiovascular disease,9 was significantly higher in the high dose Qsymia group than in the placebo group.10 In patients in the mid-dose Qsymia group, the incidence of arrhythmia related adverse events was 4.2%, compared with 1.8% in the placebo group.11 Metabolic acidosis—significantly higher in patients taking Qsymia—can be a risk factor for cardiac arrhythmias.12 Metabolic acidosis resulted in increased nephrolithiasis: 22 cases in the Qsymia groups, five in the placebo group.13 Cognitive related adverse events, including memory impairment and reduced concentration or attention, occurred in 1.7% of placebo patients and 5.6% of mid-dose Qsymia patients.14

An FDA analysis of serious adverse cardiovascular outcomes in randomized clinical trials of Qsymia found six events in 743 patients taking Qsymia but none in 227 placebo patients. These events included myocardial infarction or acute coronary syndrome in four patients.15 However, patients in the mid-dose Qsymia groups in the randomized trials lost 6.7% more weight than patients in the placebo groups.16

When Qsymia was approved in July 2012, the FDA hailed it as another treatment option but decided that a study was needed to clarify the risks of major adverse cardiac events such as heart attack and stroke—but only after it was on the market. The FDA also required training of prescribers and certification of pharmacies and a patient leaflet giving important safety information.17

The EMA rejected Qsymia for the second time in February 2013, noting that “the main studies showed clinically relevant weight loss following treatment with Qsiva [the European name for Qsymia]” but that it had “concerns about the medicine’s long-term effects on the heart and blood vessels” and “about the long-term psychiatric effects (depression and anxiety were reported in the studies) and cognitive effects (such as problems with memory and attention).”18 It concluded that “the benefits of Qsiva did not outweigh its risks and recommended that it be refused marketing authorisation.”18

Thus, two more diet drugs, following in the footsteps of the now banned phenylpropanolamine, dexfenfluramine, sibutramine and others, were found by the EMA to be too dangerous to be used for weight loss but are considered by the FDA to be “safe enough” for Americans.

This safe diet drug delusion recalls the editorial by the UK endocrinologist Gareth Williams after sibutramine was removed from the European market by the EMA but was, unfortunately, still available for many more months in the US until it was banned. He wrote, “The fate of sibutramine reminds us how little antiobesity drugs have had to offer—at best, a reduction of a few per cent in the total burden of excess weight carried until death. With energy homoeostasis so deeply enmeshed in physiology, it has always seemed unlikely that a magic bullet could ever switch off food intake without hitting something vital.”19

This is not to say that the EMA is perfect but rather that its recent record on drugs such as these puts the FDA to shame. It is not the resistance of Americans to the risks of these drugs but the intermittently dangerous malleability of the FDA that is the problem in the cases discussed here.

Source: BMJ

The Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity.

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A Meta-Analysis and Some Proposed Explanations

A meta-analysis of 63 studies showed a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity. The association was stronger for college students and the general population than for participants younger than college age; it was also stronger for religious beliefs than religious behavior. For college students and the general population, means of weighted and unweighted correlations between intelligence and the strength of religious beliefs ranged from −.20 to −.25 (mean r = −.24). Three possible interpretations were discussed. First, intelligent people are less likely to conform and, thus, are more likely to resist religious dogma. Second, intelligent people tend to adopt an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style, which has been shown to undermine religious beliefs. Third, several functions of religiosity, including compensatory control, self-regulation, self-enhancement, and secure attachment, are also conferred by intelligence. Intelligent people may therefore have less need for religious beliefs and practices.

  • Source: SAGE