Walgreens

FDA Finds Majority of Herbal Supplements at GNC, Walmart, Walgreens, And Target Don’t Contain What They Claim – Instead Cheap Fillers Like Wheat And Soy Powder

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The lack of regulations in regards to herbal products helps Walmart, Walgreens, Target, and GNC to take full advantage and sell the public supplements that do not contain the herbs on the label.

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The New York State attorney general’s office conducted an investigation into store-brand supplements at four national retailers — GNC, Target, Walgreens and Wal-Mart. The investigation found that these giant retail stores sell dietary supplements that do not contain the herbs specified on their labels. Moreover, many of these supplements included potential allergens which were not identified in the ingredients list.

Normally, all these stores deserved their cease-and-desist letters which requested them to stop selling these products. These letters, first reported today by the New York Times maintained that“Contamination, substitution and falsely labeling herbal products constitute deceptive business practices and, more importantly, present considerable health risks for consumers.”

We will now explain the findings of the investigations of these products in more details below:

Products by Walmart, Spring Valley brand:

Echinacea

  • No echinacea or plant material was found in the supplement

Saw Palmetto

  • Garlic and rice were found in the product
  • Some samples contained small amounts of saw palmetto

Ginseng

  • No ginseng detected
  • Instead, rice, dracaena, pine, wheat/grass and citrus were found in the supplement

Gingko Biloba

  • No gingko Biloba found in the dietary supplement
  • Instead, the product included rice, dracaena, mustard, wheat and radish

St. John’s Wort

  • No St. John’s Wort found
  • Detected garlic, rice and cassava

Garlic

  • One sample showed small amounts of garlic
  • The product included rice, pine, palm, dracaena and wheat

fda-finds-majority-of-herbal-supplements-at-gnc-walmart-walgreens-and-target-dont-contain-what-they-claim-instead-cheap-fillers-like-wheat-and-soy-powder

Products By Walgreens, Finest Nutrition brand

Echinacea

  • No echinacea detected
  • They found garlic, rice and daisy

Saw Palmetto

  • Contained saw palmetto

Ginseng

  • No ginseng found
  • Detected garlic and rice

Gingko Biloba

  • No gingko Biloba detected
  • Rice was found in the product

St. John’s Wort

  • No St. John’s Wort found
  • Detected garlic, rice and dracaena

Garlic

  • No garlic found
  • Detected palm, dracaena, wheat and rice

Products by GNC, Herbal Plus brand:

Echinacea

  • No echinacea found
  • rice found in some samples

Saw Palmetto

  • One sample contained the clear presence of palmetto
  • Other samples contained a variety of ingredients, including rice, asparagus, and primrose

Ginseng

  • No ginseng found
  • detected rice, dracaena, pine, wheat/grass and citrus

Gingko Biloba:

  • No gingko Biloba found
  • Did detect allium (garlic), rice, spruce and asparagus

St. John’s Wort

  • No St. John’s Wort found
  • detected allium (garlic), rice and dracaena (a tropical houseplant)

Garlic

  • Contained garlic

Products By Target, Up & Up brand

Echinacea

  • Most, but not all tests detected Echinacea
  • One test identified rice in the content

Saw Palmetto

  • Most tests detected saw palmetto
  • Some tests found no plant DNA

Valerian Root

  • No valerian root found
  • Detected asparagus, pea family, rice, wild carrot, allium, bean, and saw palmetto

Gingko Biloba

  • No gingko Biloba detected
  • Found garlic, rice and mung/French bean

St. John’s Wort

  • No St. John’s Wort found
  • Found garlic, rice and dracaena (houseplant)

Garlic

  • Contained garlic
  • One test identified no DNA

23 Seniors Have Died So Far This Year After Receiving Flu Shots.

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Package insert for Fluzone flu vaccine marketed to seniors reveals 23 seniors died during drug trial

The annual marketing campaign pushing people to receive flu vaccinations is in full force. CVS Pharmacies is offering a 20% off shopping pass if you purchase a flu vaccine.

As you can see in the screen shot below, taken from the CVS website, senior citizens over the age of 65 are being targeted to get the “high-dose” flu vaccine.

The FAQ at the CVS website defines the “high-dose” flu vaccine: “Containing four times the amount of antigen (the part of the vaccine that causes the body to produce antibody) in regular flu shots, high-dose flu shots, along with the additional antigen produced, are intended to create a stronger immune response.”

The name of this flu vaccine that is marketed for seniors is called “Fluzone.” You can find it being marketed to seniors at all the major pharmacies in the United States.

Package inserts for flu vaccines show a multitude of side effects, including death, and yet they are marketed the same as over-the-counter drugs with no prescription needed. Why?

Because in the United States vaccines enjoy complete immunity from lawsuits in the market place. If you are injured or die from a vaccine, you or your family cannot sue the manufacturer of the vaccine. This law enacted by Congress, was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011.

Therefore, they are marketed with the same marketing techniques as any other high-profit product. With the baby boomer generation moving into their senior years, today’s seniors are seen as an especially lucrative market.

So financial incentives like discounts on other products, as CVS is doing, is quite common in order to boost vaccine sales.

Walgreens has a different program that especially boosts sales of vaccines:

While vaccine rates in the U.S. among children are close to 90%, rates in other parts of the world (where pharmaceutical companies do not have immunity from the law for adverse effects) are much lower. So, in partnership with Walgreens, a non-profit organization (Shot@Life) buys up the vaccines and sends them to these countries for free (who doesn’t want something for free, especially when you live in a poor country??)

This is a brilliant marketing plan for the pharmaceutical companies, as the U.S. government gives the organization buying the vaccines non-profit status, allowing them to receive tax deductible donations to pay for the vaccines. Walgreens is probably a contributor to the program as a tax write off.

With legal immunity to market dangerous products, don’t expect those doing the marketing and making the profits to warn you of the side effects. You need to find this information yourself, usually from the Internet.

For those pro-vaccine forces that warn people how dangerous it is to get information from the Internet, the information we are about to share is directly from the FDA website (at least at the time of this writing – they have been known to remove items from their website if it gets too much publicity and makes them look bad), and you can look it up yourself.

The high-dose Fluzone vaccine being marketed this flu season to seniors, which has four times the amount of antigens that the regular flu shot has, as well as the non-high dose version, had 23 seniors die during drug trials.

In the section documenting adverse effects, this is what is written:

Within 6 months post-vaccination, 156 (6.1%) Fluzone High-Dose recipients and 93 (7.4%) Fluzone recipients experienced a serious adverse event. No deaths were reported within 28 days post-vaccination. A total of 23 deaths were reported during the period Day 29–180 post-vaccination: (0.6%) among Fluzone High-Dose recipients and 7 (0.6%) among Fluzone 1 recipients. The majority of these participants had a medical history of cardiac, hepatic, neoplastic, renal, and/or respiratory diseases. No deaths were considered to be caused by vaccination.

This statement stating that 23 seniors died, which really should be headline news but is buried in a package insert on the FDA website, begs several questions:

1. By what basis can they conclude that “No deaths were considered to be caused by vaccination”??

2. If, as it is implied, these 23 deaths were all caused by pre-existing conditions, why were there no deaths in the first 28 days? Shouldn’t the deaths, if not attributable to the vaccine but pre-existing conditions, be equally spread out through all time periods?
3. How does the medical history for these 23 seniors compare to the medical history of those who did not die? Were there any significant differences? The range of symptoms given in the package insert can very well cover almost all seniors during the flu season.

Besides death, which is just one “serious adverse event,” there were 226 other “serious” adverse events, for a total of 249 serious adverse events, out of only 3,833 participants.

If this does not constitute a dangerous drug that should probably not even be on the market, then I don’t know what does. And yet, it is sold to unsuspecting seniors and others like candy at these drug stores.

One of these other adverse side effects (besides death) is Guillain-Barré syndrome, which has symptoms similar to polio. If you are brought into an emergency room with the paralyzing effects of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), the first question the doctors will ask you is if you just received the flu shot. Read one story here of how one man went from being able to bench-press 275 pounds to struggling how to walk after receiving last year’s flu shot: Miami Man Contracts Guillain-Barré Syndrome, Nearly Dies After Getting Flu Shot.

The CDC would like you to believe that the risk of GBS from the flu shot is only one out of one million. But if that is the case, why is there a warning on package inserts of flu vaccines, and why is it the first question EMTs ask when dealing with GBS emergencies?

The package insert for Fluzone states: “If Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) has occurred within 6 weeks of previous influenza vaccination, the decision to give Fluzone High-Dose should be based on careful consideration of the potential benefits and risks.”

I wonder how many vaccine sales people at these pharmacies give “careful consideration” to this adverse side effect, or any others, before injecting you?

 

Source: undergroundhealth.com

      

This Little Sticker Works Like an Anti-Mosquito Force Field.

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Mosquitos were born to bite us, and aside from lighting worthless tiki candles, haplessly swatting them away, or resorting to spraying toxic DEET all over ourselves, there’s really not a whole lot we can do about it. Imagine then, if you could be encapsulated in an anti-mosquito bubble simply by wearing a small square sticker. Not only would it save mosquito-magnets like myself some really uncomfortable moments, it could be a major game changer in the way we prevent mosquito-borne illnesses like Malaria, Dengue Fever, and West Nile Virus.

kite11

The good news is that a sticker like this is not some far away concept dreamed up by scientists in a lab–it’s actually a real thing that you’ll likely be able to find on the shelves of your local Walgreens sometime in the not-so-distant future.

Essentially, the Kite Patch is a little square sticker that emits a cloak of chemical compounds that blocks a mosquito’s ability to sense humans. According to its developers, users simply have to place the patch onto their clothes, and they become invisible to mosquitoes for up to 48 hours. This is big news for developing countries like Uganda, where residents have little beyond mosquito nets and toxic sprays to combat the illness-spreading insects.

That’s exactly where Kite’s creators, a collaborative team made up of innovation venture capital group ieCrowd and Olfactor Laboratories, intend to ship these off to as soon as they’re done blowing past their second goal on global crowdsourcing site Indiegogo. Launched just last month, the campaign surpassed its original goal of $75,000 in just four days and is now gunning for a new goal of $385,000 (currently at $336,000).

Though the Kite seems a little fantastical, it’s backed by some legitimate technology. Back in 2011, Dr. Anandasankar Ray, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside (and founder of Olfactor Labs), found that certain chemical compounds can inhibit the carbon dioxide receptors in mosquitoes. These smelly compounds, which act like a anti-mosquito force field, are able to disorient the bugs, whose main method of tracking down humans is through our exhalation of CO2.

The findings were considered a breakthrough moment in the field, but the technology was far from ready to be applied to a consumer product mostly because the compounds were toxic and wouldn’t be able to pass through FDA and EPA approval. “It wasn’t ready to be placed into a product that could mean something globally,” explains Grey Frandsen, Vice President at ieCrowd. That’s where his company came in.

kite2

ieCrowd basically functions as the belt of an innovation assembly line, guiding an idea through the necessary steps so it can become a widely distributed, (hopefully) world-changing product. It begins with acquiring the intellectual property, like they did with Dr. Ray’s research. From there they provide all of the business infrastructure, marketing, and general support so subsidiary companies can focus exclusively on developing new technology. In the case of the Kite Patch, ieCrowd worked with a group of scientists at Olfactor Laboratories, a research facility in Riverside, Calif. that developed a new targeted library of chemical compounds based on Dr. Ray’s original research.

Olfactor’s non-toxic compounds work against mosquitoes’ long-range abilities to detect humans through CO2, as well as dampening the insect’s short-range ability to sense us from our basic human odors. These chemicals, which give off a “faint pleasant smell,” will be applied to a small sticker, which Frandsen notes is the cheapest, easiest, and most adaptable way to design a spatial insect repellant. The patches will then be shipped off to Uganda for field testing, which should begin before the end of the year. “Really, what we’re doing is creating a rapid scientific development process, a rapid prototyping process and then a very aggressive go to market strategy,” Frandsen says of ieCrowd’s method.

The product has had a little help along the way, namely from the National Institutes of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. “The big names behind us have helped us advance the science,” Frandsen says. “But those grants do not cover product development.” All of the money raised from the Indiegogo campaign will be funneled into extensive field testing. Originally, the testing was going to provide 20,000 patches (around 1 million hours of coverage) to one district in Uganda. The extra money raised will double the number of Kite Patches shipped and expand the coverage to four million hours in three political districts in the country.

“This technology is too important to just funnel directly to the Walgreens.”

The idea is to refine the Kite as much as possible during the field testing and hone in on three main goals, the first being to analyze the adaptability of the patch. So, is it easy to apply and wear? Does it work well both at morning and at night? Does it fall off people’s clothing at after a certain point? The second is to test the effectiveness of the technology in harsh conditions found in places like Sub-Saharan Africa. Scientists have yet to determine exactly how far the sticker’s spatial radius extends and will be looking to see how it reacts to wind and extreme weather. Lastly, the field testing will evaluate how the sticker interacts with and can supplement current malaria prevention technology like bed nets.

“We’re looking at: What are any shortfalls specifically relating to the design that we can solve for that don’t come from testing it with 100 people in the Canadian Rockies or in Florida?” Frandsen says. “So there’s this real life, real world use and evaluation of that.” The Kite has reportedly performed well inside the highly-controlled confines of a lab, but Frandsen says the most vital evaluation will come from the Kite Patch’s time in Africa.  “It’s a really unique way of doing product development,” he says of the extensive field testing. “It’s a lot easier to deal in private-equity markets or investments and just finish it.” But, he continues, “This technology is too important to just funnel directly to the Walgreens. It needs to be part and parcel of people’s daily lives all over the world.”

Source:weird.com