This
message
is available online at http://www.WantToKnow.info/070624healthnews
Dear friends,
Below are
many highly revealing one-paragraph excerpts of important health news
articles from the mainstream media. These articles graphically demonstrate
how all too often the government and drug companies are placing profit
above our health in the decisions they make.
These key articles
can help you to avoid major health risks and dangers of which government
is failing to inform us for reasons of profit. Links are provided
to the full articles on major media websites. If any link should fail to
function, click
here. By choosing to educate ourselves on these important issues and
to spread the word,
we can and will build a
brighter future.
With
very best wishes of good health for all,
Tod Fletcher and Fred
Burks for PEERS and the WantToKnow.info Team
The Lowdown on Sweet?2006-02-12, New York Timeshttp://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/business/yourmoney/12sweet.html?ex=12974004...
When Dr. Morando Soffritti ... saw the results of his team's
seven-year study on aspartame, he knew he was about to be injected into a
bitter controversy over this sweetener. Aspartame is sold under the brand
names Nutra-Sweet and Equal and is found in such popular products as Diet
Coke, Diet Pepsi, Diet Snapple and Sugar Free Kool-Aid. Hundreds of
millions of people consume it worldwide. Dr. Soffritti ... oversees 180
scientists and researchers in 30 countries. Dr. Soffritti's study
concluded ... that the sweetener was associated with unusually high rates
of lymphomas, leukemias and other cancers. The study ... involved 1,900 laboratory rats and cost $1
million. Soffritti said he was inspired to look at aspartame because of
what he calls "inadequacies" in the cancer studies done by Searle in the
1970's. Others have also challenged Searle's studies.
Years before
the F.D.A. approved aspartame, the agency had serious concerns about the
accuracy and credibility of Searle's aspartame studies. From 1977 to 1985
-- during much of the approval process -- Searle was headed by Donald H.
Rumsfeld, who is now the secretary of defense. Searle was acquired
by Monsanto in 1985. Dr. Soffritti said ... more research and open debate
were needed on whether aspartame was a carcinogen. "It is very important
to have scientists who are independent and not funded by industry looking
at this."
Note: If you want to understand the influence of
big money on your health, this article is well worth reading. Our Health
Information Center Health Information
Center has lots more. And for an incredibly eye-opening documentary on
this that could very well improve the health of you and your friends, click here.
A dangerous dose2004-09-05, Boston Globehttp://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2004/09/05/a_dangerous_dose
Marcia Angell
[is] a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School [and one of the] former
editors of The New England Journal of Medicine. Her new book, "The Truth
About the Drug Companies," is a sober, clear-eyed attack on the excesses
of drug company power. How does the drug industry deceive us? It plies
attending physicians with expense-paid junkets to St. Croix and Key West,
Fla., where they are given honoraria and consulting fees to listen to
promotional presentations. It promotes new or little-known diseases
such as "social anxiety disorder" and "premenstrual dysphoric disorder"
as a way of selling the drugs that treat them. It sets up phony front
groups disguised as "patient advocacy organizations." It hires
ghostwriters to produce misleading scientific articles and then pays
academic physicians to sign on as authors. It sends paid lackeys and
shills out onto the academic lecture circuit to ''educate" doctors about a
drug's unapproved uses. It hires multinational PR firms to trumpet
dubious studies as scientific breakthroughs while burying the studies
that are likely to harm sales. It buys up the results of publicly
funded research. It maintains a political chokehold on the American
public by donating more money to political campaigns than any other
industry in the country. For many years the drug industry has reaped the
highest profit margins of any industry in America. In 2002, the top 10
American drug companies had profit margins of 17 percent; Pfizer, the
largest, had profit margins of 26 percent.
So staggeringly
profitable is the drug industry that in 2002 the combined profits for the
top 10 drug companies in the Fortune 500 were greater than those of all
the other 490 companies combined.Note:For an excellent 10-page summary of this revealing book written by the
esteemed author, click here.
For additional reliable information on the health cover-up, click here.
A New Way to Fight Cancer?2007-01-23, Newsweekhttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16776882/site/newsweek
There are
no magic bullets in the fight against cancer: that's the first thing every
responsible scientist mentions when discussing a possible new treatment,
no matter how promising. If there were a magic bullet, though, it might be
something like dichloroacetate, or DCA, a drug that kills cancer cells by
exploiting a fundamental weakness found in a wide range of solid tumors.
So far, though, it kills them just in test tubes and in rats infected with
human cancer cells; it has never been tested against cancer in living human
beings. DCA ... is an existing drug whose side effects are well-studied and
relatively tolerable. Also, it's a small molecule that might be able to
cross the blood-brain barrier to reach otherwise intractable brain tumors.
Within days after a technical paper on DCA appeared in the journal Cancer
Cell last week, the lead author, Dr. Evangelos Michelakis of the
University of Alberta, was deluged with calls and e-mails from prospective
patients -- to whom he can say only, "Hang in there." DCA is a remarkably
simple molecule. It acts in the body to promote the activity of the
mitochondria. Researchers have assumed that the mitochondria in cancer
cells were irreparably damaged. But Michelakis wondered if that was really
true. With his colleagues he used DCA to turn back on the mitochondria in
cancer cells -- which promptly died.
One of the great things about
DCA is that it's a simple compound, in the public domain, and could be
produced for pennies a dose. But that's also a problem, because big drug
companies are unlikely to spend a billion dollars or so on large-scale
clinical trials for a compound they can't patent. (Anyone interested
in helping can click here.)Note:Thank you
Newsweek for publishing this important article. Why
haven't any other
U.S. media reported this major story?
Notice how even
Newsweek acknowledges that the drug companies are not interested
in finding a cure for cancer if they can't make a profit from it.Some suspect that the pharmaceutical industry has even suppressed cancer
cures found in the past. For one amazing example of this, click here.
UCSF study questions drug trial
results2007-06-05, San
Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/05/DRUGS.TMP
Money talks
-- and very loudly -- when a drug company is funding a clinical trial
involving one of its products. UCSF researchers looked at nearly 200
head-to-head studies of widely prescribed cholesterol-lowering
medications, or statins, and found that
results were 20 times more
likely to favor the drug made by the company that sponsored the
trial. "We have to be really, really skeptical of these
drug-company-sponsored studies," said Lisa Bero, the study's author and
professor of clinical pharmacy and health policy studies. The trials
typically involved comparing the effectiveness of a drug to one or two
other statins. UCSF researchers also found that
a study's
conclusions -- not the actual research results but the trial
investigators' impressions -- are more than 35 times more likely to favor
the test drug when that trial is sponsored by the drug's maker.
Bero said drug companies fund up to 90 percent of drug-to-drug clinical
trials for certain classes of medication. The researchers found other
factors that could affect trial results. For example, pharmaceutical
companies could choose not to publish results of studies that fail to
favor their drugs, or they could be designed in ways to skew results. The
study found the most important weakness of trials was lack of true
clinical outcome measures. In the case of statins, some trials focused on
less-direct results such as lipid levels but failed to connect the results
with key outcomes such as heart attacks or mortality. "None of us really
care what our cholesterol level is. We care about having a heart attack,"
Gibson said. "For the drug to be worthwhile taking, it has to be directly
related to prevent a heart attack."
Note:For lots more reliable information about corruption in the pharmaceutical
industry, click here.
Doctors Reap Millions for Anemia
Drugs2007-05-09, New
York Timeshttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/business/09anemia.html?ex=1336363200&en=b68...
Two of the
world's largest drug companies are paying hundreds of millions of dollars
to doctors every year in return for giving their patients anemia
medicines, which regulators now say may be unsafe at commonly used doses.
The payments are legal, but very few people outside of the doctors who
receive them are aware of their size. The payments give physicians an
incentive to prescribe the medicines at levels that might increase
patients' risks of heart attacks or strokes.
At just one practice
in the Pacific Northwest, a group of six cancer doctors received $2.7
million from Amgen for prescribing $9 million worth of its drugs last
year. [A] report prepared by F.D.A. staff scientists said
no evidence indicated that the medicines either improved quality of life in
patients or extended their survival. Several studies suggested
that the drugs can shorten patients' lives when used at high doses. The
medicines ... are among the world's top-selling drugs. They represent the
single biggest drug expense for Medicare. Since 1991 ... the average dose
given to dialysis patients in this country has nearly tripled. About 50
percent of dialysis patients now receive enough of the drugs to raise
their red blood cell counts above the level considered risky by the F.D.A.
Unlike most drugs, the anemia medicines do not come in fixed doses.
Therefore, doctors have great flexibility to increase dosing – and
profits. The companies have [failed] to test whether lower doses of the
medicines might work better than higher doses. There is little evidence
that the drugs make much difference for patients with moderate anemia, and
federal statistics show that the increased use of the drugs has not
improved survival in dialysis patients.
Note:For lots more on major corruption in health care, click here.
Dim 24 Juin - 21:10 par mihou