The Lancet

Fluoride Officially Classified as a Neurotoxin in World’s Most Prestigious Medical Journal.

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In recent years, many have protested to have industrial sodium fluoride removed from the water supply, as evidence states it is harmful from many scientific sources.

The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, had labeled fluoride as a neurotoxin alongside lead, arsenic and mercury. 

Author, Stefan Smyle, broke the news and explained by the Facebook page “Occupy Food,” which linked the published report from The Lancet Neurology, Volume 13, Issue 3, in March 2014, by authors Dr. Philip J. Landrigan and Dr. Phillippe Grandjean.

Industrial Chemicals Identified

In the summarization of the report, a review examined and found five different neurotoxicants: polychlorinated biphenyls, arsenic, lead, toluene, and methylmercury. The summary further states that 6 other developmental neurotoxicants were identified: fluoride, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, manganese, chlorpyrifos, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, and tetrachloroethane.
ADHD, Dyslexia, and other cognitive impairments

In the report from The Lancet, the authors came up with a global prevention strategy stating, “Untested chemicals should not be presumed to be safe to brain development, and chemicals in existing use and all new chemicals must therefore be tested for developmental neurotoxicity.”

Included in the report, it was noted that neurodevelopment disabilities, including dyslexia, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and many various cognitive impairments, are on the rise in millions of children around the world, in what is called a “pandemic of developmental neurotoxicity.” They further say: “To coordinate these efforts and to accelerate translation of science into prevention, we propose the urgent formation of a new international clearinghouse.”

The report correlates with the 2013 findings that was found in a Harvard University meta-analysis funded by the National Institutes of Health. It found that children who lived in highly fluoridated water have “significantly lower” IQ scores than children who live in areas with low levels of fluoride in their water supply.

Fluoride also linked to Cancers

Fluoride has been linked to various forms of cancer, and has been in our drinking water. It is different in comparison with the natural calcium fluoride, that is used in dental offices and in drinking water supplies.

Across all of North America, fluoride is in the water supply, but in Europe it is banned and is the case in many other countries.

This South American Tribe Has the Healthiest Arteries Ever Seen

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We could learn a lot from them.

A new study has found that the Tsimané people in Bolivia have less heart disease than any other population ever recorded. In fact, an 80-year-old Tsimané person has healthier arteries than a 55-year-old American.

The Tsimané are an indigenous society living in the tropical forests and savannas of north-eastern Bolivia. They are classified as forager-horticulturalists, which means they rely on both subsistence farming and foraging and hunting for their food.

 For the past 15 years, coronary artery disease and stroke have remained the two biggest causes of death worldwide. Scientists look to pre-industrial populations such as the Tsimané for clues on how modern lifestyles are affecting public health.

While we can’t all get back to fields and forests to maintain our health, we can definitely learn from what these indigenous cultures are getting right.

Researchers visited 85 Tsimané villages between 2014 and 2015 and took CT scans of nearly every Tsimané person older than 40 years. Measurements from 705 adults (aged 40-94) showed that a remarkable 85 percent of them had no risk of heart disease whatsoever.

Only 13 percent were at a low risk, and a mere 20 people out of 705 (or 3 percent) had moderate or high risk of heart disease.

“Most of the Tsimané are able to live their entire life without developing any coronary atherosclerosis. This has never been seen in any prior research,” saidone of the researchers, Gregory Thomas from Long Beach Memorial Medical Centre.

Atherosclerosis happens when cholesterol plaque and fats clog up the walls of the arteries, eventually causing blood flow problems and leading to heart attacks or strokes.

By contrast, a study of 6,814 participants in the US shows that more than 50% of all Americans have a moderate or high risk of heart disease, which makes it five times more common than amongst the Tsimané.

“By these findings, an 80-year old Tsimané possesses the ‘vascular age’ of an American individual in their mid-fifties,” the scientists write in the paper.

So why are the Tsimané so spectacularly healthy?

The study was observational, so we can’t draw a firm conclusion, but the researchers do point out that their diet and exercise levels are significantly different from what we see in sedentary industrialised societies such as the US.

First of all the Tsimané diet is nothing like what you would expect from the proponents of the ‘paleo diet’ shtick (all meat, no carbs.) In fact, it’s exactly the opposite, which actually brings it in line with recent science on the topic.

As James Gallagher writes for the BBC:

  • 17% of their diet is game including wild pig, tapir, and capybara (the world’s largest rodent)
  • 7% is freshwater fish including piranha and catfish
  • Most of the rest comes from family farms growing rice, maize, manioc root (like sweet potato), and plantains (similar to banana)
  • It is topped up with foraged fruit and nuts.

It means:

  • 72% of calories come from carbohydrates compared with 52% in the US
  • 14% from fat compared with 34% in the US, Tsimane also consume much less saturated fat
  • Both Americans and Tsimane have 14% of calories from protein, but Tsimane have more lean meat.

They also get excellent levels of exercise. Hunting, gathering, fishing, and farming keeps Tsimané men and women on their feet for the majority of the day, and they average between 4-7 hours of physical activity.

But we don’t exactly know how much diet and exercise we need to slow down the clogging up of arteries that naturally happens with age – for all we know, running around for 6 hours a day could be overkill.

“Future studies addressing this issue might have strong implications on defining healthy behaviours for heart disease prevention,” write the researchers.

These latest results are not entirely shocking, as previous research on the indigenous society has indicated their heart health to be excellent indeed. A 2012 study found that the Tsimané have better blood pressure when they get older.

“The Tsimané living conditions are similar to those of our ancestors, with greater exposure to pathogens, active lifestyle, high fertility and traditional diet. Studying chronic diseases in these populations can be very insightful,” anthropologist Michael Gurven from University of California at Santa Barbarasaid in 2012.

Subsistence living is by no means a stroll in tropical paradise. The Tsimané lifestyle comes with its own risks, including more frequent infections. One of the intestinal worms that commonly affects Tsimané women could even be responsible for influencing their fertility.

Still, scientists think that insights from this study give us important clues on how to stay healthy in an increasingly sedentary world.

“[W]e believe that components of this way of life could benefit contemporary sedentary populations,” says senior researcher Hillard Kaplan from the University of New Mexico.

“Their lifestyle suggests that a diet low in saturated fats and high in non-processed fibre-rich carbohydrates, along with wild game and fish, not smoking and being active throughout the day could help prevent hardening in the arteries of the heart.”

Source:The Lancet.

Syria: Health in Conflict

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The Lancet and the American University of Beirut have together established the concept for a Commission on Syria: Health in Conflict. The aim of the Commission will be to describe, analyse and interrogate the calamity before us through the lens of health and wellbeing. With this Commission, we aim to examine five priority areas: health of people inside Syria; health of refugees and host communities; health systems, which includes the pillars of health professionals, delivery, infrastructure, and transition to rebuilding; challenges of the international response to the crisis particularly health-related international law violations and humanitarian aid design and delivery; and policy options and next steps, including those that can strengthen the role of global health in conflict and health more broadly. The Commission will develop concrete recommendations to address the unmet current and future health needs.

Source: Lancet

Evaluating industry’s role in vaccine access – The Lancet

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On March 6, 2017, the Access to Medicine Foundation released its first Access to Vaccines Index, a baseline analysis of industry activities to improve access to vaccines worldwide. Two targets for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 3.8 and SDG 3.B) explicitly mention vaccines. Yet, despite the global consensus on the centrality of vaccines to modern health systems, access is highly variable, and in 2016 there were 19 million unvaccinated and under-vaccinated children in the world.

Large image of Figure.

Challenges to universal and sustainable access to vaccines include development of new vaccines, financing, affordability, supply, and implementation. Recognising the vital role of the pharmaceutical industry—as innovators, manufacturers, and suppliers—the index examines the behaviour of eight companies across 69 diseases, 107 countries, and three areas: research and development (R&D), pricing and registration, and manufacture and supply. Although most companies were found to make some consideration of affordability when setting vaccine prices, a more systematic approach is required, particularly for middle-income countries. For the most part, current R&D activities are linked to commercial incentives, with vaccines for seasonal influenza, pneumococcal disease, and human papillomavirus receiving the most attention. Although a third of R&D projects targeted a disease for which no vaccine exists, the report also identified 32 important diseases with no current R&D projects, including yaws, cytomegalovirus, and schistosomiasis. While detailing recent successes in the development of new vaccines for diseases of global health importance (specifically, dengue and malaria), the report highlights the ongoing need to improve vaccines once they reach the market to ensure they address usage needs in resource-limited settings.

Overall, the index paints a mixed picture of industry efforts. But in setting clear benchmarks it shows a path forward for industry to take a conscious and leading role in ensuring that every person, regardless of geography or income, has access to effective and affordable vaccines.

Fluoride Is Now Listed In ‘The Lancet’ (Medical Journal) As Being A Neurotoxic Poison

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The Lancet medical journal has official designated fluoride as a nerotoxicant; so why is it in our tap water?

After many years of campaigning by those who already real-eyes-ed the toxic potential of ‘fluoride’ and the crime against world health that has been perpetrated by forced fluoridation of our waters – the oldest and most known ‘scientific’ medical journal – the lancet, has recently published a paper which documents the neurotoxic / poisonous reality of fluoride and other industrial chemicals.

despite the criminal activities of establishment hierarchies – claiming that fluoride is ‘safe’ and ‘healthy’ for decades – the denied and suppressed research was always being done and the toxic health effects of fluoride was known for decades. so this clearly amounts to a ‘soft war’ of suppression being waged against the majority, by the few.

toxic effects of fluoride include cellular damage to brain and neurological pathway deficiencies (equating to drops in IQ and overall loss of healthy evolution of the life form), plus direct cell death if exposure is high enough. thus the effect of fluoride is far from health giving – the effects are anti-life.
if this were not enough, the so-called ‘fluoride’ that is to be found in water and dental products is often not even true fluoride, since the chemical that has actually been used for many years is a toxic waste material from fertiliser and even nuclear industrial activity – which would be challenging and expensive to dispose of – if it were not being sold to so many government agencies and water processing groups to be inserted into your water and body!

despite this, even now, many are still PAYING to buy so-called ‘fluoride’ and not so long ago a judge in ‘the area commonly known as england’ ‘ruled’ that the people there did not have the ‘right’ to determine whether fluoride is added to their water or not. this raises the issue of who exactly ‘owns’ the water? the answer to that is in our hearts – no-one OWNS the waters, since we ARE the waters – any attempt to own, control and ‘sell’ the waters to each other is a direct act of denial and slavery.

Hyperthermia in paediatric germ-cell tumours.

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Survival rates for children with malignant germ-cell tumours have improved with the advent of platinum-based therapy. However, some patients are refractory to treatment or relapse. Extragonadal germ-cell tumours are more common in children than in adults; many patients are very young, with tumours localised to abdominal or pelvic sites that might be difficult to eradicate. The most common extragonadal germ-cell tumours in this population are sacrococcygeal teratomas. These tumours are usually diagnosed at birth when external lesions predominate. Presacral lesions containing malignant germ-cell tumor elements, such as yolk sac tumours, are noted later in the first years of life.

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Although most benign neonatal sacrococcygeal tumours can be treated with resection and observation, malignant tumours require a multidisciplinary approach including chemotherapy with platinum-based compounds and surgery. Survival rates of 80—90% have been achieved with this method.2—4 But surgery, which is essential to survival, is often very difficult to do in these young patients. Long-term longitudinal studies, after initial surgery, have shown that patients are at risk of developing neurological deficits such as bowel and urinary incontinence.5, 6

There are two basic strategies for treating sacrococcygeal tumours with malignant elements: resection, followed by adjuvant chemotherapy4 or neoadjuvant chemotherapy before resection.2 But refractory disease and recurrence are possibilities. These are rare events and patients can respond to further treatment. In The Lancet Oncology, Rüdiger Wessalowski and colleagues7 present a study in which most patients had sacrococcygeal tumours with malignant elements. Patients in this trial7 who had received previous intensive therapy, and whose tumours were refractory or recurrent, received deep regional hyperthermia in conjunction with chemotherapy. The investigators postulate that high-dose intensive therapy alone was not sufficient to treat patients because better local control was needed.

Several studies have assessed hyperthermia in conjunction with radiation and chemotherapy, although significant trials have not been done. In adult trials,8 hyperthermia in the range of 41—43°C in combination with radiation has shown responses in sarcomas. But temperature control is often difficult for deep-seated tumours, and skin burns are often an issue for superficial tumours. In this German MAKEI trial,7 an innovative method was developed. Different sizes of electromagnetic heat applicators were placed in three lucite cylinders (based on patients’ size). The temperature could be safely well maintained.

In paediatric embryonal tumours such as retinoblastoma, localised hyperthermia (laser) has been used successfully in precise approximation with carboplatin.9, 10 Currently, platinum-based compounds are being studied as radiation sensitisers in other paediatric embryonal tumours such as medulloblastoma. Two populations in this study7 might have benefited from this therapy: patients with refractory disease and patients with initial relapse. An aggressive chemotherapy approach is warranted but not sufficient. Surgery is essential, but when? Three therapeutic strategies emerge: surgery followed by hyperthermia and chemotherapy; hyperthermia and chemotherapy followed by surgery; and the addition of external beam radiation therapy. Some patients—for which imaging probably suggested the tumour could be easily resected—had surgery before hyperthermia and chemotherapy. These patients were assessed separately. For the remainder of patients, the question of whether regional hyperthermia improves local control is difficult to answer because of the small population. Moreover, a randomised trial with or without regional hyperthermia would be difficult to do because of the low incidence of this tumour and a much lower incidence of recurrence. Development of evidence-based therapy for many rare paediatric tumours is also complicated in view of their low incidence.

If the nine patients who had surgery before hyperthermia and chemotherapy are excluded, the remaining patients were at higher risk for failure of local control. About half of these patients had no viable tumour at time of surgery. Finally, patients with a viable tumour were salvaged with external beam radiation. These results suggest local control might include stepwise escalation of therapy. Although radiation should be avoided in young children, it may be a viable option if local control has not been achieved.

In summary, these are interesting findings and the investigators have developed a precise delivery method for regional deep hyperthermia and chemotherapy administration. Relapsed and refractory tumours did respond when regional hyperthermia was given with chemotherapy that was identical to that received before recurrence. The procedures were well tolerated with minimal local toxic effects. Therefore, this regimen might be an option for treating rare paediatric tumours. Whether the same technology can be exported to other paediatric centres is not clear, however. The essential element in hyperthermia is temperature control, and until appropriate thermal dosimetry methods are developed and widespread, this procedure might be restricted to a small number of centres.

Source: Lancet

Glioblastoma: bridging the gap with gene therapy.

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Adult glioblastoma is the most common primary brain tumour. It is characterised by substantial morbidity and mortality despite multimodal therapy with surgical resection and adjuvant radiochemotherapy as standard care.1 The poor prognosis is largely due to the disease’s high frequency of recurrence, which is indicative of its intrinsic invasive properties into the peritumoral zone.2 Consequently, an unmet need exists to improve local control of glioblastoma beyond the margin of resection and to explore new treatment options targeted peritumouraly. Local therapies that can be applied during surgery are therefore well-suited to bridge the gap between initial surgical resection and subsequent radiochemotherapy. In The Lancet Oncology, Manfred Westphal and colleagues3 explore the use of so-called suicide gene therapy to address this treatment gap, describing the results of a randomised, open-label phase 3 trial (ASPECT) for the treatment of operable high-grade glioblastoma. This trial was based on previous phase 1 and phase 2 trials4—6 and relies on local injection into the resection cavity of a replication-deficient adenoviral vector encoding a herpes simplex virus thymidine kinase (HSV-tk) gene to selectively eliminate any residual glioblastoma cells. The HSV-TK catalyses the conversion of a non-toxic ganciclovir prodrug into a toxic nucleotide analogue that is incorporated into the DNA of dividing cancer cells, prompting apoptosis. This approach overcomes the typical inaccessibility of glioblastoma tumour, and brain-infiltrating, cells to most systemic therapies. Moreover, preclinical studies indicate that both the HSV-tk gene-modified cells and adjacent, non-modified dividing cells are eliminated through a so-called bystander effect that enhances the overall anti-tumour effect. This bystander effect is probably mediated by intercellular trafficking of the toxic ganciclovir metabolites through gap junctions or immune mechanisms.7, 8 Another advantage is that normal neurons do not proliferate and are therefore resistant to the ganciclovir metabolites, which improves the tumour selectivity of this treatment strategy.

The specific objective of the ASPECT trial was to determine whether ganciclovir with adenoviral HSV-tk gene therapy was better than standard care, with time to death or re-intervention as the composite primary endpoint. After the ASPECT trial had begun, temozolomide emerged as a new and effective treatment for glioblastoma and was included in both the treatment and control groups. Consequently, this invalidated the initial statistical analysis strategy. A post-hoc multivariate statistical analysis based on a Cox’s proportional hazards model was therefore needed for the composite primary endpoint, which took into consideration the use of temozolomide as a time-dependent covariate. The methylation status of the MGMTpromoter is a prognostic factor and was therefore also taken into account as a covariate in the Cox analysis. MGMT encodes a DNA-repair enzyme that removes alkyl groups from DNA. High levels of MGMT activity in glioblastoma annihilate the therapeutic effect of alkylating agents, including temozolomide, creating a temozolomide-resistant phenotype. Conversely, epigenetic silencing of the MGMT gene by promoter methylation in glioblastoma cells is associated with loss of MGMTexpression, diminished DNA-repair activity, and increased sensitivity to temozolomide. Consequently, patients with glioblastoma containing a methylated MGMT promoter benefit from temozolomide, whereas the drug has no therapeutic effect in those with an unmethylated MGMT promoter.9

In the multivariate statistical analysis of the ASPECT trial, patients in the experimental group had a favourable outcome in terms of the primary composite endpoint—time to death or re-intervention—compared with those in the standard care group (hazard ratio 1·53, 95% CI 1·13—2·07; p=0·006). One of the intriguing findings of this trial is that a post-hoc subgroup analysis showed an even more pronounced effect in a subgroup of patients with an unmethylated MGMT promoter (hazard ratio 1·72, 1·15—2·56; p=0·008). Hemiparesis, hyponatraemia, and seizures were more common in the experimental group and were mainly transient. Despite the statistically significant effect on the composite primary endpoint, the difference in overall survival between gene therapy and standard care was not statistically significant. Nevertheless, there seemed to be improved overall survival in the experimental group versus the control group in a subgroup of patients with non-methylatedMGMT, although this difference was not statistically significant. This finding needs substantiation in larger trials. The investigators recorded no between-group difference in tumour sizes at the time of re-intervention, suggesting that the time to re-intervene was not biased in favour of the treatment group.

Findings from the ASPECT trial raise several interesting hypotheses and questions. Most importantly, the post-hoc multivariate analysis suggests that patients with a glioblastoma containing an unmethylated MGMT promoter might benefit most from the proposed gene therapy strategy. This difference in regards to methylation status might ultimately create new perspectives for the treatment of patients who do not benefit from temozolomide treatment. Methylation status of the MGMTpromoter was not prespecified at the time of treatment, ruling out a possible treatment bias. Post-hoc analysis also showed that the effect of the treatment seemed to be greater in patients with a higher baseline titre of adenovirus-specific neutralising antibodies, suggesting a possible immunological bystander effect resulting from previous infection with wild-type adenovirus.8 Further studies are needed to address these different hypotheses. Findings from the ASPECT trial also indicate a need to develop new approaches that augment transduction efficiency, improve vector spread within the residual tumour tissue, and enhance bystander effects. The continuous development of these multipronged strategies represent the new for patients and their families.

Source: Lancet