Day: 10/16/2014

Two FDA drug approvals for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) .

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Pulmonary fibrosis is a disease in which tissue deep inside the lungs becomes thick, stiff, and scarred, decreasing the lungs’ ability to expand to take in air, and making it difficult to breathe. This is a progressive disease in which scarring and lack of elasticity in the lungs continues to increase until the patient can no longer breathe enough to sustain life.

Until recently, patients in the U.S. suffering from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a form of pulmonary fibrosis in which the cause is unknown, had no drug treatment  approved by FDA for this debilitating, incurable, and terminal condition. However, this month, FDA approved Ofev (nintedanib) and Esbriet (pirfenidone), two important new therapies for the treatment of patients with IPF. Both drugs are “first-in-class” products that offer new hope for patients in the U.S. with IPF.

Researchers don’t understand exactly how Ofev and Esbriet work in the body against IPF, but the drugs seem to inhibit important pathways that help to prevent scarring. Neither drug is a cure. IPF may still progress after patients use these drugs. However, each drug has been shown to significantly slow the progression of the disease.

There is much work to be done, but this is a valuable start. In our continuing efforts to advance drug development for IPF, FDA recently hosted a Public Meeting on Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis Patient-Focused Drug Development to obtain patients’ input on the impact of IPF on their daily life and their views on currently available therapies to treat the condition.

Many patients in the U.S. with IPF will now have effective treatments for their condition. We are addressing the input received from our public meeting on IPF and will continue to support the development and approval of new drugs, especially those that help patients with serious or life-threatening conditions for which no drug treatments are available.

 

How Working Longer Hours Can Make You Obese .

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Working_obese

The more hours you put in at the office, the more likely you are to become obese, according to a new paper written by Joelle Abramowitz, an economist at the US Census Bureau. Abramowitz found that for every ten additional hours spent at the office each week, a higher body-mass index of 0.2 in men and 0.4 in women was the result. That translates to an average weight gain of 1.4 and 2.5 pounds respectively. While those in more active professions do not experience the same results, the trend of more sedentary work is a broad one:

“Only 20% of American jobs are even mildly strenuous, compared to 50% in 1960. In 1960 a tenth of the American workforce was involved in agriculture, but today it’s more like 1%. More time at the desk means less movement. Busy people may have less time to prepare good meals, instead choosing a take-away. … They exercise less. And workaholics sleep less: inadequate shut-eye is associated with weight gain.”

As sleep psychologist Shelby Harris explains in her Big Think interview, reaching deeper stages of sleep is essential to restoring your body. In this way, poor sleeping habits contribute largely to weight gain and obesity.

When are colds and the flu the most contagious?

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Myths about contagion are a regular part of life. Remember when AIDS could be transmitted by a handshake? Most fictions regarding how you can catch diseases aren’t quite that bizarre and off the mark — they usually sound pretty reasonable, which is how a lot of them get passed through generations as unquestioned truths. Many of us understand that when it comes to a coldor the flu, we’re most contagious before we start feeling sick; that by the time we’ve got a runny nose, sore throat and achy muscles, the damage to the people around us has already been done. In fact, many of us are completely wrong.

If you think about how a virus works, it makes sense that we’re most contagious when our symptoms are at their worst. Viruses like influenza and those that cause the common cold (there are a couple of hundred of them) have anincubation period once they get into your body. The virus gets into a group of healthy cells and then goes about requisitioning their survival apparatus from the inside. During this incubation period, while the virus is multiplying inside those infected cells, you have no symptoms — no sore throat, no runny nose, no achy muscles — and no virus spreading like wildfire throughout your body so that every drop of saliva or mucous you produce contains it. And that’s how a virus spreads from one person to another: By a healthy person coming into contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, whether those fluids are airborne (as from a sneeze) or left on a doorknob by a sick person who just wiped his nose. So if you have no symptoms yet, it’s a lot less likely that you’re going to spread the virus to another person.

Once the cells that have been taken over by the virus start to die, that’s when all hell breaks loose. Here’s when you start having symptoms, and you start spreading it to everyone you know if you’re not careful. Some of those symptoms are caused by the virus itself (runny nose and sore throat, for example), and others are caused by your immune system(fever and exhaustion, for instance). When the virus breaks out of those dead cells and starts infecting tons of other cells throughout your body, your immune system recognizes that something is wrong and begins its counterattack. All of this can take days to happen. With the flu in particular, the time between exposure and the onset of symptoms is usually between one and four days.

So, when are you most contagious? Most experts agree that adults with a cold or the flu start being contagious about a day before they start experiencing symptoms. For the flu, the contagious period then lasts five to seven days into the illness. For children, the contagious period for the flu can last up to two weeks after they start feeling sick, even if they start feeling better before that. The contagious period for a cold lasts about three to four days into the illness. As a general rule, people with a cold are mostcontagious about three days after their initial exposure to the virus.

Could Vitamin D Make Childbirth Less Painful?

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Low vitamin D levels could make childbirth more painful, according to a new study.

Vitamin D deficiency is common during pregnancy, especially among high-risk women, including vegetarians, those with little sun exposure, and members of ethnic minorities, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says.

The new study included 93 pregnant women whose vitamin D levels were checked before childbirth and who received an epidural for pain during labor. The researchers measured how much pain medication each of the women required during delivery.

Taking Too Many Vitamins? Side Effects of Vitamin Overdosing

Women with lower vitamin D levels required more pain medication than those with higher vitamin D levels, according to the study scheduled for presentation Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists in New Orleans.

“Women often experience lower than normal levels of vitamin D during pregnancy. We found that patients with low levels of vitamin D experienced an increase in pain during childbirth,” senior author Dr. Andrew Geller, an anesthesiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said in a society news release.

Denying Women Access to Mammography Screening

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In observance of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, MedPage Today is publishing editorial contributions that address various aspects of the disease and the month-long awareness campaign. The following contribution is by Daniel B. Kopans, MD, senior radiologist in breast imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Mammography screening and the reduction in breast cancer deaths in the U.S. rank among the major advances in healthcare over the last 50 years, but you would never know it, given all of the controversy that has arisen.

Women and their physicians are unaware that there has been a consistent effort to reduce access to mammography screening that goes back decades and is based on faulty science and flawed analyses that have made their way into an uncritical medical literature, and on to the public by media that find it too complicated to unravel.

Randomized, controlled trials (RCTs) are the only way to prove that an intervention like breast cancer screening is efficacious. Multiple RCTs have proven that screening, statistically significantly, saves lives.

In the U.S. the death rate from breast cancer had been unchanged going back to 1940. Mammography screening began in the mid-1980s at a national level, and, as predicted, the death rate began to fall, for the first time in 50 years, in 1990. There are now more than 30% fewer women who die each year from breast cancer than would have died had screening not been available.

Arguments Against Screening

It is significant that the major arguments against screening are being made by those who do not even provide care for women with breast cancer. They claim that therapy is completely responsible for the decline in deaths since 1990. In fact, there are no direct data to support this contention. Whereas, there are numerous studies showing that when women have access to screening, the death rate declines. A few studies have looked at access to modern therapy, and the death rate does not decline until mammography screening is instituted.

Approximately 2,000 men are diagnosed with breast cancer each year. Men have access to the same therapies as women, but, in 1990, instead of our death rate going down, it went up and stayed up until 2005. It then returned to 1990 levels, where it has remained while the death rate for women has continued to fall, as more and more women participate in screening. Men are not screened for breast cancer. Therapy has improved, but therapy saves lives when cancers are treated earlier.

The effort to reduce access to screening goes back decades. In this short space I cannot possibly cover all of the misinformation that has been promulgated over the years.

For example, as someone who was invited to review the quality of the mammography in the Canadian National Breast Screening Study, I can attest to the fact that it was poor to unacceptable for most of the study. The “randomization” process violated the fundamental rules for RCTs (CBE before allocation and then assignment on open lists) leading to a loading of the sides against mammography. Despite the fact that it was a completely corrupted trial whose results are not reliable, it is being touted, by those who do not know the facts, as proving that there is no benefit from screening.

Early-Detection Argument

Years ago it was argued that you could not find breast cancers early enough to make a difference. Once the RCTs proved a benefit, the argument was raised that you could not possibly screen all the women in the U.S. The Breast Cancer Detection Demonstration Project proved that it was possible. Then opponents tried to claim, using inappropriate statistical methods, that screening did not save lives until the age of 50.

Once it became clear that they were incorrect and that the most lives are saved by annual screening beginning at the age of 40, they claimed that they wanted to protect women from“false-positives.” These sound ominous until you know that the vast majority of so-called “false-positives” are simply being recalled from a screening mammogram for additional evaluation.

Approximately 10% of women being screened will be recalled (the same rate as for a Pap test by the way). The vast majority of these are resolved by a few extra pictures or an ultrasound. Only 1% to 2% of women screened will be advised to have an imaging-guided needle biopsy using local anesthesia, and 20% to 40% of these will reveal cancer.

In the past when surgeons biopsied women based a palpable lump, only 15% were cancer and most were large and later stage and less curable than those found by mammography. Opponents do not explain what they mean by “false-positives.” I think most women would agree that the anxiety and inconvenience of being recalled for additional evaluation are not comparable to dying from breast cancer.

Undeclared Biases

Unfortunately, a few high profile medical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), Annals of Internal Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, and Journal of the National Cancer Institute (which by the way is NOT the National Cancer Institute’s journal) have undeclared publication biases against screening mammography and, in particular, screening for women ages 40 to 49. They have refused to publish papers in support of screening and will only publish material that cast doubt on screening.

One paper in the NEJM from Norway claimed that mammography had little effect on deaths following the start of their screening program. Deaths are expected to begin to fall 5 to 7 years after a program begins; yet this paper had only 2.2 years of follow-up. Furthermore, the authors neglected to explain that more than 40% of women were already being screened on their own before the program began, so that deaths had already declined.

The NEJM, subsequently, published a paper claiming that mammography screening was leading to massive “overdiagnosis” of cancers that if left alone would regress or disappear. Not only did one of the authors, subsequently, admit that since they had no idea which cancers were detected by mammography, they really could not fault mammography (oops ??). They claimed that in 2008 alone, there were 70,000 of these cancers. Not only had the authors never seen an invasive breast cancer disappear on its own, but no one else has ever seen one do this — 70,000 in one year and not single example!?

Even more egregious, instead of using 40 years of data from 1940 to 1980, the authors used their “best guess” to arrive at their conclusions. “Best guesses” are not the best way to determine healthcare guidelines. Using real data and their methods, there has been no evidence of “overdiagnosis” of invasive breast cancers. Yet the conclusions of this paper have been picked up as the major reason to deny women access to screening.

Recently, the NEJM published a paper entitled “Abolishing Mammography Screening Programs?” with the very official sounding “A view from the Swiss Medical Board.” It turns out that this was simply a small group with no official standing that chose an official-sounding name to pass on misinformation that suggested that Switzerland was likely going to stop all breast cancer screening. Incredibly, a letter to the editor from breast cancer experts explaining that this was false was refused publication by the NEJM.

Not Perfect

Unfortunately, I have only been able to scratch the surface of the misinformation that has been irresponsibly promulgated about mammography screening. No one has ever said that mammography screening is the ultimate answer to breast cancer. It is far from perfect. It does not find all cancers and does not find all cancers early enough to result in a cure.

We all hope for a safe way to prevent cancer or a universal cure but none is on the horizon, and wishful thinking is no substitute for the facts. Thousands of lives are being saved each year. Even the CISNET models used by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force show that the most lives are saved by annual screening, beginning at the age of 40.

The “nonscience” should stop. While we work day and night to find a cure or prevention, women should be advised that the scientific evidence strongly supports mammography screening each year beginning at the age of 40.

5 Reasons Why Women Live Longer Than Men .

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Life expectancy in the U.S. is at an all-time high, according to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And while the news that we’re living, on average, to the ripe old age of 78 years and 9 ½ months isn’t that surprising, there is one stat that is: A girl born in 2012 can expect to live to 81.2 years—almost 5 years longer than a boy baby born the same year, who’s likely live to age 76.4. Weaker sex, indeed.

Females are tougher in utero

Two and a half as many boys are conceived as girls, Dr. Legato says, but they’re so much more likely to succumb to prenatal infection or other issues in the womb that by the time they’re born, the ratio is close to one to one. “They’re also slower to develop physically than girls prenatally, which means they’re more likely to die if they are preemies due to underdeveloped lung or brain development,” Dr. Legato explains.

Women are less likely to be daredevils

Unintentional injuries are the third leading cause of death in men, according to the CDC; for women it’s only the sixth. Again, you can blame it on biology: The frontal lobes of the brain—which deal with responsibility and risk calculation—develop much more slowly in males than females, Dr. Legato says.

The result: Guys often take many more risks (which you probably already realize if your small son has taken one too many spins off his bike handlebars). “Almost inevitably, a male will take risks that a woman of his same age wouldn’t take,” Dr. Legato says.

Women succumb to heart disease later

Heart disease is the leading killer of both men and women, but men are more likely to develop it—and die from it—as early as their 30s and 40s. Women, on the other hand, typically develop heart disease 10 years later than men. They’re protected from it until menopause, since their bodies churn out estrogen, which helps keep arteries strong and flexible, says Dr. Legato.

Women have stronger social networks

Friends make good medicine: People with strong social connections have a 50% lower chance of dying than those with few social ties, according to a 2010 study at Brigham Young University. “Most men tend to hold their stress and worries close to their chest, while women tend to reach out and talk to others,” Dr. Legato explains. The one exception: married men, which also explains why so many studies show that they’re likely to be healthier and live longer.

Women take better care of their health

Men are 24% less likely than women to have visited a doctor within the past year and are 22% more likely to skip out on cholesterol testing, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. In fact more than a quarter (28%) of men don’t have a regular physician and about one in five didn’t have health insurance in 2012, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

You can blame it on the so-called John Wayne syndrome: “Men often deny illness; they minimize symptoms because they don’t want to go to a doctor and find out something is wrong,” Dr. Legato notes.

Stanford engineers develop tiny, sound-powered chip to serve as medical device | Stanford News Release

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Using ultrasound to deliver power wirelessly, Stanford researchers are working on a new generation of medical devices that would be planted deep inside the body to monitor illness, deliver therapies and relieve pain.  

Stanford engineers can already power this prototype medical implant chip without wires by using ultrasound. Now they want to make it much smaller. (Arbabian Lab / Stanford School of Engineering)

Medical researchers would like to plant tiny electronic devices deep inside our bodies to monitor biological processes and deliver pinpoint therapies to treat illness or relieve pain.

But so far engineers have been unable to make such devices small and useful enough. Providing electric power to medical implants has been one stumbling block. Using wires or batteries to deliver power tends to make implants too big, too clumsy – or both.

Now, Stanford engineers are developing a way to send power – safely and wirelessly – to “smart chips” programmed to perform medical tasks and report back the results.

Their approach involves beaming ultrasound at a tiny device inside the body designed to do three things: convert the incoming sound waves into electricity; process and execute medical commands; and report the completed activity via a tiny built-in radio antenna.

“We think this will enable researchers to develop a new generation of tiny implants designed for a wide array of medical applications,” said Amin Arbabian, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford.

Arbabian’s team recently presented a working prototype of this wireless medical implant system at the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference in San Jose.

Sound-powered implants

The researchers chose ultrasound to deliver wireless power to their medical implants because it has been safely used in many applications, such as fetal imaging, and can provide sufficient power to implants a millimeter or less in size.

Now Arbabian and his colleagues are collaborating with other researchers to develop sound-powered implants for a variety of medical applications, from studying the nervous system to treating the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

“Tiny, wireless nodes such as these have the potential to become a key tool for addressing neurological disorders,” said Florian Solzbacher, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Utah and director of its Center for Engineering Innovation.

  The Stanford medical implant chip is powered by “piezoelectricity,” a word that means electricity caused by pressure.

In a piezoelectric material, pressure compresses its molecular structure much like a child jumping on a bed compresses the mattress. When the pressure abates, the piezoelectric material’s molecular structure, like the mattress, springs back into shape.

Every time a piezoelectric structure is compressed and decompressed a small electrical charge is created. The Stanford team created pressure by aiming ultrasound waves at a tiny piece of piezoelectric material mounted on the device.

“The implant is like an electrical spring that compresses and decompresses a million times a second, providing electrical charge to the chip,” said Marcus Weber, who worked on the team with fellow graduate students Jayant Charthad and Ting Chia Chang.

The piezoelectric effect is the power delivery mechanism. In the future, the team plans to extend the capabilities of the implant chip to perform medical tasks, such as running sensors or delivering therapeutic jolts of electricity right where a patient feels pain.

Finally, the “smart chip” contains a radio antenna to beam back sensor readings or signal the completion of its therapeutic task.

Next steps

The current prototype is the size of the head of a ballpoint pen. In order to design a next-generation implant one-tenth that size, team members have been collaborating with two additional Stanford colleagues who are experts in ultrasonics: Butrus (Pierre) Khuri-Yakub, a research professor of electrical engineering, and Amin Nikoozadeh, a research associate with the E.L. Ginzton Laboratory. The goal is to produce smaller devices that could be used to create a network of electrodes to study the brains of experimental animals in ways not currently possible.

“U.S. and European brain initiatives are pushing for a more complete understanding of the central nervous system,” Solzbacher said. “This requires being able to interface with cells using arrays of micro implants across the entire 3D structure of the brain.”

Arbabian’s team wants to test many other applications using this basic technology to wirelessly power small implants deep inside the body.

“Many biosensing and stimulation applications require small, deep medical implants,” he said. “We believe our platform provides the recipe for building small devices that can be powered wirelessly and programmed to perform a wide array of tasks.”

Remove Radioactive Particles from Your Body in 5-7 Hours .

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Fukushima may soon become the greatest environmental disaster site the world has ever seen. If the more than 1300 fuel rods from the badly damaged reactor 4 fuel pool, that is perched 100 feet in the air, are not brought to the ground with absolute precision it could spew out the radiation equivalent of more than 15,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. The pool rests on a badly damaged building that could easily come down in the next earthquake, if not on its own.[1]

Spent fuel must be kept under water because each rod is coated with zirconium alloy, which will spontaneously ignite if exposed to air. Zirconium has long been used in flash bulbs for cameras, and burns with an extremely bright hot flame.

“According to Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with forty years in an industry for which he once manufactured fuel rods, the ones in the Unit 4 core are bent, damaged and embrittled to the point of crumbling. Cameras have shown troubling quantities of debris in the fuel pool, which itself is damaged.

The engineering and scientific barriers to emptying the Unit Four fuel pool are unique and daunting, says Gundersen. But it must be done to 100% perfection.

Should the attempt fail, the rods could be exposed to air and catch fire, releasing horrific quantities of radiation into the atmosphere. The pool could come crashing to the ground, dumping the rods together into a pile that could fission and possibly explode. The resulting radioactive cloud would threaten the health and safety of us all.”[1]

– Harvey Wasserman, senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service

According to long-time expert and former Department of Energy official Robert Alvarez, there is more than 85 times as much radioactive cesium on site as was released at Chernobyl.[1]

With Cesium-137 the main issue is that it is mistaken for potassium by living organisms, and absorbed into almost all tissues emitting gamma and beta radiation. Although it is removed by the body fairly quickly, the damage to cells and to DNA can be devastating.[2]

Of much greater concern is strontium-90, as described by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

“Strontium-90 is chemically similar to calcium, and tends to deposit in bone and blood-forming tissue (bone marrow). Thus, strontium-90 is referred to as a “bone seeker.” Internal exposure to Sr-90 is linked to bone cancer, cancer of the soft tissue near the bone, and leukemia.”[3]

Not to mention the genetic mutations that can occur as a result of radiation exposure.

“Teratogenic mutations result from the exposure of fetuses (unborn children) to radiation. They can include smaller head or brain size, poorly formed eyes, abnormally slow growth, and mental retardation. Studies indicate that fetuses are most sensitive between about eight to fifteen weeks after conception. They remain somewhat less sensitive between six and twenty-five weeks old.” [4]

We can still see the devastating long term effects from Chernobyl. The facts below are taken from the Chernobyl Children’s Project International document.

Chernobyl: The Facts

Here are some facts you need to know, almost 20 years after the Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine.[5]

Thyroid Cancer: The World Health Organisation predicts 50,000 children will develop the disease in their lifetime. “Throughout Belarus, the incidence of this rare disease in 1990 was 30 times higher than in the years before the accident.”

Leukemia: In the Gomel region of Belarus, incidences of leukemia have increased 50% in children and adults since the disaster.

Other Diseases in Children: In addition to thyroid cancer and leukemia, UNICEF reports that between 1990 and 1994, nervous system disorders increased by 43%; cardiovascular diseases by 43%; bone and muscle disorders by 62%; and diabetes by 28%.

Other Cancers: Swiss Medical Weekly published findings showing a 40% increase in all kinds of cancers in Belarus between 1990 and 2000. Some tumor specialists fear that a variety of new cancers may emerge 20-30 years after the disaster. Cases of breast cancer doubled between 1988 and 1999.

Birth Defects: Maternal exposure to radiation can cause severe organ and brain damage in an unborn child. Five years after the disaster, the Ukrainian Ministry of Health reported three times the normal rate of deformities and developmental abnormalities in newborn children, as well as an increased number of miscarriages, premature births, and stillbirths.

Cardiac Abnormalities: Heart disease in Belarus has quadrupled since the accident, caused by the accumulation of radioactive cesium in the cardiac muscle. Doctors report a high incidence of multiple defects of the heart – a condition coined “Chernobyl Heart.”

Removing Radiation in 5-7 Hours

In today’s nuclear world, detoxing radioactive materials from the body is vital to our ongoing good health. And zeolites are extremely effective at absorbing radioactive material.

Zeolite was used at the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident. During the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in 1986, 500,000 tons of zeolite was dumped on and around the site to absorb the radioactive metals. It was also given to cattle to stop the radioactive particles ending up in milk supplies. In Bulgaria, zeolite pills and cookies were prepared for human consumption to counteract Chernobyl fallout.[6]

At the Hanford Nuclear Facility in Richland, Washington, strontium-90 and cesium-137 have been removed from radioactive waste solutions by passing them through tanks packed with the natural Zeolite Clinoptilolite.[7]

The addition of clinoptilolite to soils contaminated with Strontium-90 markedly reduced the strontium uptake by plants, and the presence of clinoptilolite inhibited the uptake of Cesium in contaminated Bikini Atoll soils.[6]

Natural Clinoptilolite is the safest and most commonly used form of zeolite for health and healing, as it has the unique ability to absorb and remove large amounts of heavy metals, volatile organics and radioactive particles with no side effects. It does this without removing the needed metals and minerals like iron or calcium, which is just astounding. Clinoptilolite Zeolite has a net negative charge as well as a unique cage like structure that captures the small highly charged toxins like mercury or strontium-90 and can quickly remove them from the body.

Once heavy metals have been captured by the negative charge of the zeolite, they are effectively neutralized and can be removed from the body without damaging the surrounding tissue. The best part is that it can do this in 5-7 hours. Clinoptilolite is incredibly fast acting and is removed from the body in under 7 hours.

NCD2 (Natural Cellular Defence) clinoptilolite zeolite is absorbed almost immediately into the blood and travels throughout the body absorbing toxins like a magnet. NCD2 is able to do this as the zeolite is properly micronized giving it the largest surface area possible.

Zeolites are natures detoxifiers and absorb lots of heavy metals and volatile organics while in the ground. Biochemist Rik Deitsch and his team spent 7 years developing NCD, and coming up with their proprietary activation process that removes these toxins, so the cage is clean and has the highest charge possible. In turn this gives NCD the ability to absorb a much greater amount of toxic material.

During this time Rik and his team found that if the zeolite was in a colloidal suspension (suspended in water) the absorption rate to the blood was much higher. They found NCD to be up to 20 times more effective at absorbing toxins than zeolite powder. Not all the zeolite in NCD will be absorbed into the blood. Some stays in the gut cleaning out toxic material before it can be absorbed.

Want more information? Click here to read 3rd party data and studies on NCD.

Chlorophyll: The Radiation Protector

In his book Conscious Eating, Dr. Gabriel Cousens states: “Foods containing chlorophyll have long been known to protect against radiation. Generally speaking, any green foods have chlorophyll. From 1959 to 1961, the Chief of the U.S. Army Nutrition Branch in Chicago found that high-chlorophyll foods reduced the effects of radiation on guinea pigs by 50 percent. This includes all chlorophyll foods: cabbage, leafy green vegetables such as kale, spirulina, chlorella, wheatgrass, as well as any sprouts.”[8]

There was also a pilot study conducted by Dr Cousens, to remove the toxins from prospective mothers in order to help bring forth non-toxic babies. He used high dose NCD Zeolite in conjunction with green vegetable juice fasting and the results were just fascinating. It showed the removal of 88% of over 800 toxins measured in only 1 week, and for those that continued for another week there was 100% toxin removal.

Depleted Uranium testing and removal was also part of the study.

“18 people were tested for depleted uranium (DU), a very serious worldwide radioactive contamination resulting from the use of DU armaments, especially used in Iraq.

Sixteen of the 18 people tested initially had DU in at least the liver, the breast, or the brain, and 13 of the 18 people had started with it in all three organs, the liver, the breast, and the brain. In one week on this protocol, all the people became DU-free except for one person, who still had DU in the liver.” ~ Dr Gabriel Cousens[9]

Radiation toxicity is fast becoming one of the most pressing issues throughout the modern world. We need to take charge and assist our bodies in protection and removal of these horrific substances, and introduce chlorophyll rich foods in massive doses, not just for radiation protection but for overall health and nutrition.

Zeolites have been used throughout Asia for over 800 years for health and healing, and will play a key role both in the clean-up of radioactive substances at Fukushima and in the clean-out of the humans and animals effected by its radiation. Taken in conjunction with a green diet, this is also your best way to naturally protect yourself from the extraordinary damage radiation can have on the human body.

But more importantly, it is time for renewable non-toxic energy implementation. Rather than simply learning to detoxify radioactive substances from our bodies and environment when things go wrong, we must learn from our mistakes. We must stop and listen to our ancestors and learn from what mother earth is telling us. For what befalls the earth befalls the children of earth.

Article references:

(1) Humankind’s Most Dangerous Moment: Fukushima Fuel Pool at Unit 4. “This is an Issue of Human Survival.” By Harvey Wasserman

Global Research, September 20, 2013 http://www.globalresearch.ca/humankinds-most-dangerous-moment-fukushima-fuel-pool-at-unit-4/

(2) No Name or Date Given http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/fisfrag

(3) Environmental Protection Agency, Strontium, April 2012 http://www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuclides/strontium.html#healtheffects

(4) Environmental Protection Agency, Radiation Health Effects August 7 2012 http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/health_effects

(5) Chernobyl: The Facts What You Need to Know Almost 20 Years After the Disaster, No Date Given http://www.chernobyl-international.org/documents/chernobylfacts2.pdf

(6) La roca magica: Uses of natural zeolites in agriculture and industry, Frederick A. Mumpton, March 30 1999 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC34179

(7) Zeolites, Peter B. Leavens, No Date Given http://www.chemistryexplained.com/Va-Z/Zeolites

(8) Dr Gabriel Cousens, Conscious Eating, North Atlantic Books, 2000

(9) Pure Liquid Zeolite, Natural Cellular Defense removes heavy metals, pesticides, toxic chemicals from body – study, No date given.

This new nuclear reactor could bring carbon-free power to 80,000 homes, and fit in the back of a truck

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Scientists in the US are developing a new nuclear fusion power source that’s smaller, cleaner and more powerful than current nuclear reactors, and they aim to have it on the market in 10 years.

reactor

American aerospace and technology company Lockheed Martin has announced that they’re working on a new nuclear fusion reactor that’s 10 times smaller than any other reactor on the market. Their 100-megawatt reactor measures just 3 metres by 3 metres, which makes it compact enough to fit in the back of a truck.

Called a compact fusion reactor (CFR), researchers at Lockheed Martin say this small device will be able to power warships, spaceships, aeroplanes, and even a city filled with 80,000 homes. This means no more reliance on fossil fuels, which is significant, because according to Andrea Shalal at Reuters, it’s been predicted that there will be a 40 to 50 percent increase in energy use over the next generation.

“Crucially, by being ‘compact’, Lockheed believes its scalable concept will also be small and practical enough for applications ranging from interplanetary spacecraft and commercial ships to city power stations,” says Guy Norris at Aviation Week. “It may even revive the concept of large, nuclear-powered aircraft that virtually never require refueling – ideas of which were largely abandoned more than 50 years ago because of the dangers and complexities involved with nuclear fission reactors.”

Lockheed Martin is also building this new energy source to be much safer and more efficient than current nuclear reactors, and more environmentally friendly. It runs on just 25 kg of deuterium-tritium fuel per year, which can generate nearly 10 million times more energy than the same amount of fossil fuels.

The key to the success of this system is a new design that allows it to hold way more plasma than current systems. Tom McGuire, who is heading up the project, told Aviation Week that current nuclear reactors only have a plasma ratio of about 5 percent, and they have to be enormous just to achieve this much. The CFR, on the other hand, is predicted to increase this ratio to at least 100 percent.

The team says they’ve tested the system out in the lab already, and they’ll have a prototype up and running within five years. They predict their reactors will be operational and on the market in 10 years.

It might sound too good to be true, and these things often are, but the fact that Lockheed Martin is one of the biggest aerospace and military companies in the world makes this a promising announcement. But not everyone is impressed. Thermonuclear plasma physicist at the University of Texas, Swadesh M. Mahajan, told James West at Mother Jones, “we know of no materials that would be able to handle anywhere near that amount of heat,” for a device as small the CFR.

And Tom Jarboe, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington, told Jessica Orwig at Business Insider, “The nuclear engineering clearly fails to be cost effective.”

Lockheed announces major breakthrough in nuclear fusion .

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Screenshot from YouTube user LockheedMartinVideos

The largest military contractor in the United States is developing a nuclear fusion reactor that is small enough to fit on the back of a truck but has the ability to produce the energy required to power a warship.

Lockheed Martin said in a statement released on Wednesday this week that its secretive Skunk Works division — the unit responsible for the U-2 spy plane and F-117 stealth jet — has already applied for several patents related to the high-tech reactor it has in the works, and expects it to be deployed during the next decade if interested industry and government partners sign on to help starting soon.

“Our compact fusion concept combines several alternative magnetic confinement approaches, taking the best parts of each, and offers a 90 percent size reduction over previous concepts,” Tom McGuire, the compact fusion lead for the Skunk Works’ Revolutionary Technology Programs, said in a statement.“The smaller size will allow us to design, build and test the CFR in less than a year.”

According to an article published by Reuters on Wednesday, McGuire told reporters that Skunk Works has already successfully shown the company can build a 100-megawatt reactor that measures seven by 10 feet, or around 10 times smaller than what is currently available. Next, the Lockheed division wants to have a prototype ready within five years and then, within ten years, have the unit ready to be deployed.

“A small reactor could power a US Navy warship,” Andrea Shalal wrote for Reuters, “and eliminate the need for other fuel sources that pose logistical challenges.”

The energy created through nuclear fusion can be up to four-times more powerful that the energy released by fission, Lockheed claims on its website, and a small-enough reactor like the one being developed now by Skunk Works could provide enough power for a town of 100,000 people, according to the contractor.

Screenshot from YouTube user LockheedMartinVideos

Screenshot from YouTube user LockheedMartinVideos

“To mimic the energy created by the sun and control it here on earth, we’re creating a concept that can be contained using a magnetic bottle. The bottle is able to handle extremely hot temperatures, reaching hundreds of millions of degrees. By containing this reaction, we can release it in a controlled fashion to create energy we can use,” Lockheed explains on its own site. “The heat energy created using this compact fusion reactor will drive turbine generators by replacing the combustion chambers with simple heat exchangers. In turn, the turbines will then generate electricity or the propulsive power for a number of applications.”

If successful, Lockheed’s latest effort “could change civilization as we know it,” Gizmodo predicted on Wednesday, by giving the world a portable power source unlike anything already available.

“It’s one of the reasons we think it is feasible for development and future economics,” Skunk Work’s McGuire told Aviation Week recently with regards to the reactor’s size. “Ten times smaller is the key. But on the physics side, it still has to work, and one of the reasons we think our physics will work is that we’ve been able to make an inherently stable configuration.”