A man found unconscious in his hotel room in February 2023 became the first recorded case of brain disease caused by fentanyl inhalation.
Evidence bags containing fentanyl are displayed during a news conference at Surrey RCMP Headquarters, in Surrey, B.C., on Sept. 3, 2020.
A 47-year-old Seattle man who had been visiting Oregon on business became the first recorded case of brain disease as a result of fentanyl inhalation. Although the incident happened in February 2023, the report of toxic leukoencephalopathy (disease of white brain matter) was just published in BMJ Case Reports.
Reports Due to Heroin Inhalation, but Not Fentanyl
On Feb. 25, 2023, the man was found unresponsive in his hotel room. While he had no known previous medical issues, the man had been unconscious for an unknown period before he was found. He was discovered close to unidentified crushed pills and white residue on a nearby table.
When he arrived at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) emergency department, he could not follow commands or answer questions. He could respond to pain stimuli in his legs but not his arms.
A hospital brain scan revealed that the white matter in his brain was inflamed and swollen, and his cerebellum—responsible for gait and balance—was injured.
While an initial drug screening produced negative results, a subsequent urinalysis showed a very high level of fentanyl, prompting a diagnosis of toxic leukoencephalopathy due to fentanyl inhalation.
Medical experts have previously documented cases of brain disease caused by heroin inhalation, but this is the first case involving inhalation of illicit fentanyl.
Alleged 1st-Time Use
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid known to be 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). While it can be prescribed for pain, it is often sold through illegal drug markets for its heroin-like effect. As a result, rates of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids, including fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, increased by more than 22 percent between 2021 and 2022. The overdose death rate was nearly 22 times higher in 2021 than it was in 2013, the CDC reports.
“Opioid use, especially fentanyl, has become very stigmatized,” Dr. Chris Eden, lead author of the case study, said in a news release. “This is a case of a middle-class man, in his late 40s, with kids, who used fentanyl for the first time. It demonstrates that fentanyl can affect everyone in our society.”
Eighteen days after he was brought to the hospital, the man was still bedridden and required a feeding tube. He received multiple medications to treat urinary incontinence, kidney injury, cognitive impairment, suspected opioid withdrawal, pain and agitation, and pneumonia.
“We know very well the classic opiate side effects: respiratory depression, loss of consciousness, disorientation,” Dr. Eden said. “But we don’t classically think of it causing possibly irreversible brain damage and affecting the brain, as it did in this case.”
‘Miraculous’ Recovery
After 26 days, the man was discharged from the hospital to a rehabilitation facility, where he spent another month. He returned home with the support of an outpatient physiotherapist and occupational therapist. He fully recovered and returned to work after less than a year.
“This case involved internal medicine, neurology, neuroradiology and palliative care physicians, in addition to nurses, social workers, discharge planners, physical therapists, dieticians and pharmacists,” Dr. Eden said in the press release. “I’m proud of these multidisciplinary teams at OHSU working together to take care of complex patients, both from a medical and social perspective.”
Today, the man has no recollection of the episode but expressed gratitude for his “miraculous” recovery.
“Early on it was looking like I would need 24 hour care after being discharged, but I focused and worked hard in my therapy session and was determined not to leave the hospital only to be checked into a group facility for ongoing care,” he said in a news release. “I have regrets often about what I did to myself, my wife, and my family.”
The news comes as speculations about her whereabouts reach new heights online.
Kate Middleton, 42, has been diagnosed with cancer.
The Princess of Wales revealed in a statement Friday that she is undergoing chemotherapy.
She is asking for “time, space, and privacy,” while she and her family navigate the diagnosis.
Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, has been diagnosed with cancer. The royal revealed in a statement Friday that she is undergoing chemotherapy treatments and asks for privacy during this difficult time. The news comes after weeks of speculation about her health reaches a fever pitch online, and after she underwent abdominal surgery in January.
While the specifics of the 42-year-old’s diagnosis are not yet known to the public (she did not specify the type of cancer nor the stage), she did make a statement.
“In January I underwent major abdominal surgery in London and at the time it was thought that my condition was non-cancerous. The surgery was successful, however, tests after the operation found cancer had been present,” the Princess of Wales said in a video updating fans on her health released by Kensington Palace.
She then explained that her medical team advised “a course of preventative chemotherapy,” which she is undergoing. “I am now in the early stages of that treatment,” she said in a palace statement. She asked for “time, space, and privacy” while finishing treatment.
The Princess noted that she, too, was surprised by the diagnosis. “This, of course, came as a huge shock, and William and I have been doing everything we can to process and manage this privately for the sake of our young family. As you can imagine, this has taken time. It has taken me time to recover from major surgery in order to start my treatment,” she said.
Depending on the type of cancer and surgery, which again, is unknown to the public at this time, it can take up to six weeks to heal, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
“But, most importantly, it has taken us time to explain everything to George, Charlotte, and Louis in a way that is appropriate for them, and to reassure them that I am going to be OK.”
Chemotherapy is a drug treatment that uses powerful chemicals to kill fast-growing cells in your body, and is most often used to treat cancer, since cancer cells grow and multiply much more quickly than other bodily cells, the Mayo Clinic notes. Many different chemotherapy drugs are available, and can be used alone or in combination to treat a variety of cancers.
The Princess relayed a message of hope to others affected by similar diagnoses. “At this time, I am also thinking of all those whose lives have been affected by cancer,” she said. “For everyone facing this disease, in whatever form, please do not lose faith or hope. You are not alone.”
Energy drinks could pose a risk to young brains, said UK researchers.
New research revealed that energy drinks could pose a greater risk to children’s and younger people’s brains than previously thought.
Those who consumed energy drinks were shown to have a higher risk of mental health problems such as depression, suicidal thoughts, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and anxiety, according to a study from Fuse, the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health at Teesside University, and Newcastle University in the UK. It was published in the Public Health journal last month.
Researchers said they looked at data from 57 studies of more than 1.2 million children and younger people from more than 21 countries to come up with their conclusions.
It found that boys consumed more energy drinks than girls, while “many studies” reported an association between energy drink consumption and alcohol use, binge drinking, and smoking, as well as other substance use.
“Additional health effects noted in the updated review included increased risk of suicide, psychological distress, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder symptoms, depressive and panic behaviors, allergic diseases, insulin resistance, dental caries, and erosive tooth wear,” an abstract of the paper said.
Regarding the impacts on mental health, it found that “frequent” drinking of energy drinks “was associated with suicide attempts and severe stress,” while there “were also higher rates of suicide ideation and attempts with [energy drink] intake greater than once per day.
“Longitudinal analysis reported that [energy drink] consumption was related to increased ADHD inattention, conduct disorder, depressive, and panic symptoms,” it continued to say.
A co-author, Shelina Visram, with Newcastle University, said in a news release that she is “deeply concerned about the findings that energy drinks can lead to psychological distress and issues with mental health.”
“These are important public health concerns that need to be addressed,” she added. “There has been policy inaction on this area despite [UK] government concern and public consultations. It is time that we have action on the fastest growing sector of the soft drink market.
The researchers, who are based in the UK, also called on the government to either ban or restrict the energy drinks for younger people and children.
“This evidence suggests that energy drinks have no place in the diets of children and young people,” author Amelia Lake, professor of public health nutrition at Teesside University, told Fox News on Thursday. “Policymakers should follow the example from countries that have placed age restrictions on their sales to children.”
It’s because, their study shows, the researchers have “found an even greater list of mental and physical health outcomes associated with children and young people consuming energy drinks,” she said.
“We repeated [the review] only to find an ever-growing evident space that suggests the consumption of these drinks is associated with negative health outcomes,” Ms. Lake continued.
Several countries have already tried to regulate energy drinks, including bans on sales to minors in Latvia and Lithuania. Other countries such as Finland and Poland are also reportedly looking to ban the products from being sold to people under the age of 18.
The study, meanwhile, drew a response from UK officials. A spokesperson for the UK Department of Health and Social Care told the BBC that “we consulted on a proposal to end the sale of energy drinks to children under 16 in England, and will set out our full response in due course” and that “in the meantime, many larger retailers and supermarkets have voluntarily introduced a ban on the sale of energy drinks to children under 16.”
But several years ago, Christopher Snowdon, the head of Lifestyle Economics at the UK-based Institute of Economic Affairs, found that such bans unfairly target teenagers and said there is a lack of evidence to link the drinks to negative behaviors.
“The current scientific evidence alone is not sufficient to justify a measure as prohibitive as a statutory ban on the sale of energy drinks to children,” he wrote in an article published in 2020.
The findings support a controversial hypothesis that proteins related to the neurodegenerative disease can be ‘seeded’ in the brain through material taken from cadavers
A coloured computed-tomography scan of a brain affected by Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers say they have uncovered more evidence to support a controversial hypothesis that sticky proteins that are a signature of Alzheimer’s disease can be transmitted from person to person through certain surgical procedures.
The authors and other scientists stress that the research is based on a small number of people and is related to medical practices that are no longer used. The study does not suggest that forms of dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease can be contagious.
Still, “we’d like to take precautions going forward to reduce even those rare cases occurring”, says neurologist John Collinge at University College London who led the research1, which was published in Nature Medicine on 29 January.
For the past decade, Collinge and his team have studied people in the United Kingdom who, during childhood, received growth hormone derived from the pituitary glands of cadavers to treat medical conditions such as short stature. The latest study finds that, decades later, some of these people developed signs of early-onset dementia. The dementia symptoms, such as memory and language problems, were diagnosed clinically, and in some patients appeared alongside plaques of the sticky protein amyloid-β in the brain, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. The authors suggest that this protein, which was present in the hormone preparations, was ‘seeded’ in the brains and caused the damage.
Contaminated hormone
The work builds on the team’s previous studies of people who received cadaver-derived growth hormone, a practice that the United Kingdom stopped in 1985. In 2015, Collinge’s team described2 the discovery at post-mortem of amyloid-β deposits in the brains of four people who had been treated with the growth hormone. These people had died in middle age of the deadly neurological condition Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, which is caused by infectious, misfolded proteins called prions. The prions were present in batches of the growth hormone.
The four people analysed in that study died before clinical signs related to the amyloid-β build-up might have been observed. But the presence of these amyloid plaques in blood vessels in their brains suggested that they would have developed a condition called cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) — which causes bleeding in the brain and is often a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease.
Collinge’s team also located and studied archived batches of the cadaver-derived growth hormone. In a 2018 study3, they reported that certain batches of the hormone preparation contained amyloid-β proteins, and that when such preparations were injected into mice, this led to the development of amyloid plaques and caused CAA in the animals.
This led the team to wonder whether the contaminated hormone preparations might also have resulted in people who received it developing Alzheimer’s disease, in which amyloid plaques are thought to cause the loss of neurons and brain tissue.
In the latest study, the researchers found that five out of eight people who had received the hormone treatment in childhood — but did not develop Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease — developed behavioural signs of early-onset dementia later in life, between the ages of 38 and 55. Collinge’s team argues that these five people — whom the researchers studied in the clinic or through medical records and brain scans — met the diagnostic criteria for early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
Gene test
Early-onset Alzheimer’s is usually caused by certain genetic variants, but the researchers did not find these variants in three of the people who showed signs of Alzheimer’s and whose DNA samples were available for testing. “This is consistent with these patients having developed a form of Alzheimer’s disease resulting from childhood treatment with this contaminated pituitary hormone,” says Collinge. Taken together, the studies suggest that, in rare cases, Alzheimer’s disease could be transmitted through the transfer of biological material, the authors argue.
However, the study’s small size limits the strength of the findings, says neuroscientist Tara Spires-Jones at the UK Dementia Research Institute at the University of Edinburgh. “Are the amyloid-β seeds from the hormone treatment playing a role in the development of dementia? It’s hard to know with just eight people,” she says.
It cannot be excluded that some of the people might have developed dementia regardless of the hormone treatment, says neuroscientist Mathias Jucker at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Tübingen. “These people had many different medical conditions which could have increased the risk of developing a neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer’s disease,” he says.
Researchers including Spires-Jones also question whether the people with dementia actually had Alzheimer’s, despite the clinical diagnoses.
“There are often errors in diagnosing the type of dementia someone has while they’re alive,” agrees neuroscience researcher Andrew Doig at the University of Manchester, UK.
From a public-health perspective, there is no need to be concerned about ‘transmissible’ dementia today, says Spires-Jones. “This treatment doesn’t exist anymore.”
Despite the study’s limitations, the research furthers our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases, scientists say. “I’m glad that people are doing amazing research to help us better understand seeding of neurodegenerative disease by amyloid-β,” says Spires-Jones.
“I think many other scientists will now look for additional evidence to explore the idea of transmissible Alzheimer’s,” says Jucker.
Upside Foods, a leader in the fake meat market, has failed to scale up its production to produce meaningful amounts of synthetic meat. Meanwhile, the company has been plagued with contamination issues, including rodent DNA found in one of its chicken cell lines and samples that contained 20 times more lead than conventional ground chicken.
Upside Foods, a leader in the fake meat market and one of two companies allowed to sell cultured meat in the U.S. has failed to scale up its production to produce meaningful amounts of synthetic meat.
Plagued by contamination issues, Upside had problems with rodent DNA found in one of its chicken cell lines.
While parading its expensive stainless-steel bioreactors for the press, Upside is actually growing only small amounts of fake meat bits inside small, single-use plastic bottles.
Fake meat, presented as a solution to save the environment, may end up being worse for the planet than real meat.
Lab-grown meat is often made using animal components, so it’s not really animal-free, and when Upside tested its fake meat for heavy metals, some samples contained 20 times more lead than conventional ground chicken.
Silicon Valley is banking on cultured meat taking off, providing animal-free “meat” to satisfy the carnivorous appetites of the world’s more than 8 billion people — most of whom eat meat.
But what started out with grandiose fanfare and backing from billionaire investors like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos is falling flat.
The dream of creating cultured “chicken” breasts or animal-free “beef” fillets is turning out to be nothing more than a fairy tale.
Upside Foods, a leader in the fake meat market and one of two companies allowed to sell cultured meat in the U.S. has resorted instead to “growing just minuscule numbers of chicken skin-type cells in small plastic bottles, then scraping them out gram by gram to compress and mold them into a single forkful of flesh.”
It’s not only unappetizing. Even if it succeeds, fake meat, presented as a solution to save the environment, may end up being worse for the planet than real meat, while presenting consumers with another highly processed food product that may further devastate human health.
What happens when Silicon Valley gets mixed up in food production?
Putting faith in Silicon Valley to produce wholesome food was the first mistake in the race to create cultured food.
While regenerative farmers raising grass-fed cows and free-range chickens work in concert with nature to provide food in the form humans have thrived on since the beginning of time, Silicon Valley does just the opposite.
In a process completely removed from nature, venture-backed startups are using precision fermentation based on genetically engineered microbes to create synthetic food products in a lab.
At Upside, which has received backing from Richard Branson, Kimbal Musk and even meat giants Tyson Foods and Cargill, stainless steel bioreactors are paraded as a measure of progress at media events, but it’s nothing more than careful public relations, or PR.
Inside reports from employees, uncovered by The Wall Street Journal, claim that the bioreactors are plagued by contamination and rodent DNA was once found in a chicken cell line.
Illustrating the contradiction that is the fake meat industry, the “sustainable” lab-grown chicken is in actuality being grown in two-liter plastic bottles — hundreds of which are required to produce a few fillets.
In the U.S., a limited amount of Upside’s lab-grown chicken is available as part of a tasting menu at Bar Crenn in San Francisco.
But even Bloomberg reported this “sustainable” solution makes no sense:
“The company is growing them in small, single-use plastic bottles, in amounts so piddling that a single night at Bar Crenn, a ‘certified plastic-free’ establishment, according to its website, could require the use of more than a hundred such bottles.”
Upside’s expensive fake chicken bits aren’t made from muscle cells
To make fake meat, cell lines are taken from a living organism. They’re then manipulated to grow quickly and consistently. While myoblasts are the type of cells that grow into muscle meat, they’re the most difficult for fake meat companies to grow and “immortalize.”
“A regular cell extracted from an animal, known as a primary cell, won’t replicate forever. Eventually, it stops, entering a phase known as senescence. If a company wants to grow significant amounts of meat and doesn’t want to have to keep taking cells from live animals or embryos, it needs to turn primary cells into immortal ones,” Bloomberg reports.
Because myoblasts are difficult to immortalize, fibroblasts, which grow easily, are often used in cultured meat products.
“But when it comes to food, they’re not what most people would consider delectable. They can develop into fat and other cells, but they’re most known for their role in making connective tissue, like cartilage or what’s found in skin,” according to Bloomberg’s report.
Adipocytes, or fat cells, are also sometimes used, often mixed with plant proteins. In a dossier for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Upside named genetically engineered immortalized fibroblasts and a naturally immortalized myoblast cell line as options for its fake meat.
But Samir Qurashi, a former Upside employee, shared doubts the company had a myoblast cell line capable of being used in production.
“It’s next to near impossible,” he told Bloomberg, and, indeed, the fake meat Upside is serving at upscale Bar Crenn is made from fibroblasts, the type that typically forms connective tissue.
“The chicken doesn’t even include immortalized cells; it’s made of primary fibroblast cells that at some point will stop replicating and at best grow only into connective tissue.
“This means that to make more chicken, scientists will eventually have to go back to an embryo and remove more cells, a process that, even when it works, also kills the embryo. (Bar Crenn didn’t provide comment.)
“It’s an admission that has left experts both confused and amused. ‘I scratch my head,’ says David Kaplan, director of the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture. ‘Why would you ever use primary cells?’”
The myth of animal-free meat
One of the foundational principles behind cultured meat is the ability to produce food without killing animals. But fake meat is often made using animal components, negating this principle.
Normally, cells grow in a structure in your body.
The cell lines being grown in labs are grown in a thin film or growth medium. In the body, the growth medium is your blood, Dutch investigative journalist Elze van Hamelen reports a complex substance that laboratories try to replicate using fetal bovine serum (FBS) — blood taken from living calf fetuses.
“It’s really gruesome how this is harvested,” she says, pointing out that this contradicts the narrative that lab-grown meats are made without animals. FBS is often used to grow cultured cells because of the proteins and vitamins it contains.
A 2013 study stated, “In many common culture media, the sole source of micronutrients is fetal bovine serum (FBS).”
When lab-grown chicken made by U.S. startup Eat Just debuted in Singapore in 2020 — marking the first cultured meat to be sold at a restaurant — it was produced using FBS.
Upside stated in 2021 that it had developed a way to grow fake meat without animal components, yet its first chicken filets still depended on animal compounds.
Part of Qurashi’s role at Upside was to harvest cells from crustaceans, a process that killed them. reported by Bloomberg:
“Qurashi had the extremely challenging task of procuring cells from live crustaceans — a job that always led to their untimely demise, costing two or three animals their life each week. ‘Literally, people cried when they saw me,’ Qurashi says of his colleagues.”
To develop synthetic “blood” instead, precision fermentation and artificial hormones may be used. Micronutrients and minerals must also be sourced, making the process “insanely expensive,” van Hamelen says.
The use of FBS-free medium may cause cultured meat to cost over $20,000 per kilogram.
A report from the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit group behind the alternative protein industry, suggested that if the cost of FBS-free mediums could be reduced, it would drive down the cost of cultured meat by 90%. This, however, is unlikely.
“The report provides no evidence to explain why these micronutrient costs will fall,” Joe Fassler, The Counter’s deputy editor, wrote in an in-depth exposé about the actual science behind lab-grown meat.
Fake chicken contains more lead than real chicken
Adding to the controversy over lab-grown meat, when Upside tested its fake meat products for heavy metals, some samples contained 20 times more lead than conventional ground chicken, along with about eight times more cholesterol compared to conventional chicken.
There are other concerns as well.
Writing in Frontiers in Nutrition, it’s speculated that “with this high level of cell multiplication, some dysregulation is likely as happens in cancer cells. Likewise, the control of its nutritional composition is still unclear, especially for micronutrients and iron.”
Synthetic dairy products, including milk made from genetically engineered yeast, are also raising concerns about the health risks of fake food.
Along with missing important micronutrients that are abundant in real milk, fake milk contains compounds that have never before existed in the human diet.
The other myth that’s part of the fake meat narrative is that it’s better for the environment than real meat.
Even with the use of renewable energy factored in, lab-grown chicken would have the same carbon footprint as conventional chicken, according to a report by CE Delft.
When global average energy mixes were used, lab-grown meat had a higher carbon footprint than pork and chicken.
A preprint study from the University of California, Davis researchers also found that the environmental impact of lab-grown meat is “likely to be orders of magnitude higher than median beef production,” again highlighting the myth that fake foods are more sustainable than real foods, especially when they’re produced regeneratively.
The reality is that fake foods are far from sustainable.
John Fagan, Ph.D., a molecular biologist who worked with the U.S. National Institutes of Health for 8.5 years, explains:
“The reality is that many of the carbon footprint calculations have been done starting with the fermentation process and going forward, but where did the high fructose corn syrup come from that is the primary energy component that goes into these fermentations?
“And you look at that industrial agriculture and you add that carbon footprint on to what they have been using in their calculations and suddenly it goes way in the wrong direction. And so we can’t even use the sustainability arguments to justify what’s being done. It just doesn’t work.”
This is about controlling the food supply
Sustainability, animal rights and human health are all buzzwords being floated around fake meat. But this isn’t about saving the planet or animals, and it’s certainly not about making people healthier.
The globalists are trying to replace animal husbandry with lab-grown meat, which will allow private companies to effectively control the entire food supply.
Just as was the case with genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, raising awareness about the dangers of fake meat is important, especially in this early and aggressively expanding phase.
Tell your social circle that to save the planet and support your health, it’s necessary to skip all the fake meat and dairy alternatives and opt for real food instead.
When you shop for food, know your farmer and look for regenerative, biodynamic and/or grass-fed farming methods, which are what we need to support a healthy, autonomous population.
Aspartame, one of the most widely used artificial sweeteners in the world, will be declared as a possible carcinogen by the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization (WHO), Reuters reports.
The upcoming July ruling from the WHO group, the International Agency on Cancer Research (IARC), will list aspartame as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” According to the report, the assessment considers all published evidence, but does not account for the amount a person can safely consume.
It’s ample cause for alarm. The sugar substitute has long been a staple of low or zero calorie drinks like Diet Coke, and is also used in thousands of other products including ice cream, chewing gum, and cereal.
But it’s worth noting that the classification of “possibly carcinogenic” only denotes that there is some evidence that a substance can cause cancer, and that the findings are overall considered inconclusive. There are still two categories above this: “probably carcinogenic,” indicating strong evidence, and simply “carcinogenic,” meaning there is consensus on a proven link.
Those are important distinctions. But no matter the technicalities involved, putting a “possibly” next to cancer is always ominous.
As such, the IARC has repeatedly faced criticism for causing alarm from its rulings. Over the years, it’s faced backlash for categorizing eating red meat or working night shifts as “probably carcinogenic,” as well as using cell phones as “possibly carcinogenic.”
Given the stakes involved, the food industry has already began to speak against the IARC’s impending ruling.
“IARC is not a food safety body and their review of aspartame is not scientifically comprehensive and is based heavily on widely discredited research,” said Frances Hunt-Wood, the secretary general of the International Sweeteners Association, as quoted by Reuters.
Though aspartame has been deemed safe by regulators worldwide for decades, including the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the substitute has never shaken off its stigma.
For its part, the FDA has repeatedly reviewed aspartame’s safety since it was first approved in the 1970s. In 2021, the agency deemed that “no valid conclusion” could be derived from a major Ramazzini Institute study that supposedly found a link between aspartame and cancer in rodents.
That study, along with a large observational study in France involving 100,000 people that also linked aspartame to cancer, have both been criticized for their methodologies. By and large they’re both outliers among an extensive body of research, but in the IARC’s view, it’s enough to warrant concern.
All in all, it’s a bold decision from the WHO group — but according to Reuters, the intent is to encourage more research into aspartame, not to stoke panic.
There’s still a lot we don’t understand about artificial sweeteners.
According to a new study, some of the most commonly used artificial sweeteners could potentially cause serious health issues by making the bacteria in our gut invade our intestinal walls.
The study underlines that there’s still a lot we don’t understand about the sweeteners being added to many diet products — and demonstrates that further research is needed.
“There is a lot of concern about the consumption of artificial sweeteners, with some studies showing that sweeteners can affect the layer of bacteria which support the gut, known as the gut microbiota,” said Havovi Chichger, senior lecturer in Biomedical Science at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, lead author of a paper about the research published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, in a press blurb.
The sweeteners — including the ultra-popular saccharin, sucralose, and aspartame — were shown for the first time to cause two types of gut bacteria, E. coli and E. faecalis, to go pathogenic.
These pathogenic bacteria were then able to attach themselves to, take over, and subsequently kill Caco-2 cells, which are the cells that line the walls of the intestines.
All it took was the concentration equivalent of two cans of a diet soft drink. In fact, all three artificial sweeteners increased the adhesion of both kinds of bacteria to the cells of the intestinal walls.
All three sweeteners also increased the formation of biofilms, which made them less sensitive to antimicrobial resistance treatment.
Pathogenic gut bacteria attacking the intestinal walls could be really bad news. Previous research has shown that E. faecalis bacteria that cross the intestinal wall can cause a number of infections, including septicaemia, more commonly known as blood poisoning.
“These changes could lead to our own gut bacteria invading and causing damage to our intestine, which can be linked to infection, sepsis and multiple-organ failure,” Chichger said.
In other words, soft drinks with actual sugars in them may be the healthier option after all.
Polioviruses can come from the oral polio vaccine used in a number of countries, but not the United States. CDC/Dr. Joseph J. Esposito; F. A. Murphy
New York State reported Thursday that it has detected a case of vaccine-derived polio in an unvaccinated adult in Rockland County, north of New York City, the first such case in the United States since 2013.
The unidentified individual developed paralysis, said Beth Cefalu, Rockland County’s director of strategic communications. Polio paralysis is irreversible.
The area where the case was detected was the epicenter of a large measles outbreak in 2018-2019 that was fueled by low vaccination rates among communities of Hasidic Jews. The outbreak went on for so long that the country almost lost its measles-free status. The memory of that episode is provoking concern that the area might be ripe for additional vaccine-derived polio cases to occur.
“I think it’s concerning because … it can spread,” said Walter Orenstein, a polio expert at Emory University. “If there are unvaccinated communities, it can cause a polio outbreak.”
“The inactivated polio vaccine we have is very effective and very safe and could have prevented this,” he said. “We need to restore our confidence in vaccines.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement that while the risk is low for people who are vaccinated, there is risk for those who have not had the recommended three doses of injectable polio vaccine.
“Most of the U.S. population has protection against polio because they were vaccinated during childhood, but in some communities with low vaccine coverage, there are unvaccinated people at risk,” the statement said. “Polio and its neurologic effects cannot be cured, but can be prevented through vaccination.”
The New York State department of health said in a statement that the person was infected with a type 2 vaccine-derived poliovirus, which would have come from oral polio vaccine used in a number of countries, but not the United States. The U.S. stopped using oral polio vaccine in 2000.
Cefalu told STAT the case is still being investigated, but it is believed the individual had not recently traveled outside the country to a place where type 2 vaccine-derived polio viruses are spreading. If that is the case, that would indicate someone else inadvertently imported the virus, suggesting there may be additional undetected transmission. Only a small portion of people infected with polioviruses will go on to be paralyzed.
Kimberly Thompson, a polio expert who is president of the nonprofit organization Kid Risk, said it’s not a surprise to see a vaccine-derived case pop up in this country, noting public health authorities in the United Kingdom recently discovered vaccine-derived polioviruses in sewage in London, indicating some transmission there.
“With Covid having disrupted immunization (even in the U.S.) and travel now having resumed and much more type 2 poliovirus transmission happening … it’s been only a matter of time before we’d have some detection of polioviruses in sewage, as happened recently in the U.K, or more tragically, a case,” Thompson told STAT in an email. “There’s just a lot more polio going around than there should be.”
The oral vaccine contains live but weakened polioviruses, which immunized children excrete in their stools. In places where hygiene is poor, these viruses can spread from child to child, immunizing others as they do. But as they spread, the vaccine viruses can regain the power to paralyze. Such cases are called vaccine-derived polio.
The United States uses injectable polio vaccine that contains killed viruses to teach the immune system to recognize and fight off polio. It cannot cause paralysis.
Mary Bassett, New York State’s health commissioner, said people who are vaccinated against polio do not face a risk from the newly discovered case. But children who are not immunized against the virus should receive the vaccine.
“Based on what we know about this case, and polio in general, the Department of Health strongly recommends that unvaccinated individuals get vaccinated or boosted with the FDA-approved IPV polio vaccine as soon as possible,” Bassett said.
Rockland County will host vaccine clinics on Friday and Monday, the department’s statement said.
The United States used to have upwards of 20,000 paralytic polio cases a year in the early and mid-1950s, Orenstein said, recalling that as a 7-year-old in 1955 he was reluctant to be vaccinated when the Salk polio vaccine — the injected form — was released. “My mother said to me: ‘Better you should cry than I should cry,’’’ he said.
With the advent of effective polio vaccines, the disease retreated in much of the developed world. The last recorded case of domestically acquired wild polio was in 1979, though there was an imported case in 1993.
But over the years there have been rare imported cases of vaccine-derived polio, from countries where the oral vaccine is still in use.
Following the flow of money through the health care industry.
Orenstein said detecting where the virus in the New York case came from is critical. That work can be done by comparing the genetic sequence of the individual’s virus with others in a database the polio eradication program maintains.
The world has been trying to eradicate polio for decades, with two of the original three types of polio — types 2 and 3 — having been driven out of existence. But the remaining version, type 1, has defied efforts to end its spread to date.
Wild-type polio cases are at low numbers; the viruses are only endemic at this point in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which have recorded a total of 12 cases this year. But recently it was discovered that viruses from Pakistan had made their way to Malawi and Mozambique, a highly unwelcome development.
Meanwhile, the numbers of vaccine-derived cases have exploded in Africa and some other parts of the world after the failure of an effort in 2016 to take type 2 viruses out of the oral vaccine.
It was felt that given the fact that wild type 2 viruses no longer existed, it was not ethical to use oral vaccine containing type 2 viruses, because of the risk they would regain the power to paralyze.
In a coordinated move called “the switch,” countries around the world were told to stop using trivalent oral vaccine — vaccine that contained all three types of polioviruses — and begin to use a bivalent form that did not include type 2. In the years since, chains of transmission of type 2 vaccine-derived virus have spread to more than 40 countries around the world and the polio eradication program has struggled to contain the spread.
So far this year 167 children in 12 countries have been paralyzed by type 2 vaccine viruses, not including the individual in New York.
The Global Polio Eradication Program, which leads the effort to rid the world of polio, said in a statement that the discovery highlights the importance of countries continuing to be on the lookout for polio, noting “any form of poliovirus anywhere is a threat to children everywhere.”
“It is vital that all countries, in particular those with a high volume of travel and contact with polio-affected countries and areas, strengthen surveillance in order to rapidly detect any new virus importation and to facilitate a rapid response,” the statement said. “Countries, territories, and areas should also maintain uniformly high routine immunization coverage … to protect children from polio and to minimize the consequences of any new virus being introduced.”
The polio eradication program is a partnership involving the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the service group Rotary International, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Canadian state news outlet CTV Newsis reporting that the number-one killer of people in Alberta right now are “ill-defined and unknown causes,” which of course means Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccines.”
The collective of data from 2021 shows that compared to every other primary cause of death, ill-defined and unknown causes (3,362) topped them all, followed by:
Dementia (2,135)
“COVID-19” (1,950)
Chronic ischemic heart disease (1,939)
Malignant neoplasms of trachea, bronchus and lung (1.552)
Acute myocardial infarction (1,075)
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (1,028)
Diabetes mellitus (728)
Stroke (612)
Accidental poisoning by and exposure to drugs and other substances (604)
As you will notice, nowhere in this list are Fauci Flu shots even mentioned. That is because the Canadian government, like most governments, refuses to acknowledge any link between the jabs and excess deaths – which are off the charts.
As we reported earlier this year, the government of Alberta has been going out of its way to scrub any trace of cause and effect between the jabs and the sharp increase in deaths the province has been seeing ever since the launch of Operation Warp Speed.
Up until 2021, dementia was the leading cause of death in Alberta for six straight years
Since 2016, dementia held the top spot as the number-one cause of death in Alberta – that is, until Donald Trump released his “vaccines,” which have been killing people left and right ever since.
“I think it’s probably multifactorial, so there’s probably many things playing into that,” says Dr. Daniel Gregson, an associate professor in the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary who specializes in infectious diseases and microbiology, deflecting from Fauci Flu shots as the cause of all these deaths.
“We have this impression of surviving COVID and that’s the end of it, and that’s not necessarily true,” he added in a statement to CTV, the suggestion being that the alleged “virus” is making some kind of comeback – even though covid is listed as the number-three cause of death in Alberta.
According to Gregson, people who previously tested “positive” for covid could now die at any moment from a number of things, including heart disease, stroke and pulmonary embolisms – all things that are caused by the injections, it turns out.
“We do expect that there will be deaths that aren’t directly related to COVID, but indirectly related to COVID to occur after the diagnosis in patients after the first month of infection,” he further said.
“One would expect that some of those patients are going to survive the COVID and then die at home from other complications.”
Both Alberta Health and the province’s medical examiner’s office are likewise playing dumb about the issue, pretending as though all these excess deaths are just one big mystery that cannot be solved.
“COVID still is quite high up there as we expected,” Gregson further added, admitting that the jabs are not “working” to save lives as expected.
“Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to actually eliminate COVID deaths in the province, despite our availability of vaccines. So, that’s a bit disappointing.”
Amazingly, Gregson went on to suggest that a lack of lockdowns could be responsible for all these excess deaths.
“I think the fact that that number (covid deaths) is not in the top spot is essentially a medical miracle in us being able to get out vaccines in less than 18 months to the average person in Canada,” he further stated in all seriousness.
In other words, Gregson wants Canadians to believe that the jabs are responsible for keeping covid in the number-three top killer position as opposed to the number-one position – even though the number one position is the injections.
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