Citing a wide range of ailments from leukemia to blindness to birth defects, 79 American veterans of 2011’s earthquake/tsunami relief Operation Tomadachi (“Friendship”) have filed a new $1 billion class action lawsuit against Tokyo Electric Power. Continue reading
It took the New York Times to take a look at a serious symptom befalling men all over the United States in the last few decades. Men’s average testosterone levels have been dropping, it noted, by at least 1 percent a year, according to a 2006 study in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. Continue reading
Two weeks ago in a room in Kabul, Afghanistan, I joined several dozen people, working seamstresses, some college students, socially engaged teenagers and a few visiting internationals like myself, to discuss world hunger. Our emphasis was not exclusively on their own country’s worsening hunger problems. The Afghan Peace Volunteers, in whose home we were meeting, draw strength from looking beyond their own very real struggles. Continue reading
Fukushima’s missing melted cores and radioactive gushers continue to fester in secret. Continue reading
In recent years, Hollywood has been perturbed by the “tweet factor.” If a movie is a dog, people leaving the theater tweet other people that it is a dog and it fails at the box office. Unfortunately, when a prescription drug is a dog that causes risky side effects, the word often doesn’t get out for years, allowing Big Pharma to make money anyway. Continue reading
Have you ever noticed how warnings about dangerous prescription drugs always seem to surface after the drug is no longer marketed and its patent has run out? As in after the fact? Whether it’s an FDA advisory or a trial lawyer solicitation about harm that may have been done to you, the warnings are always belated and useless. If a drug people took four years ago may have given them liver damage, why didn’t the FDA tell them then? Why didn’t the FDA recall the drug or better yet, not approve it in the first place? Continue reading
The roll call of U.S. sailors who say their health was devastated when they were irradiated while delivering humanitarian help near the stricken Fukushima nuke is continuing to soar. Continue reading
The American Heart Association (AHA) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC) recently released new cardiovascular disease prevention guidelines. They are an egregious example of much that is wrong with medicine today. Continue reading
“Control oil and you control nations,” said US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. “Control food and you control the people.” Continue reading
Thanks to humane scandals at Butterball, Aviagen Turkeys and House of Raeford, many are aware of the cruel handling in commercial turkey production. Fewer people are aware of the food additives and fast-growth methods that put both turkeys and the people who eat them at risk. Continue reading
The ceaseless brouhaha over the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, and President Barack Obama’s “sinking” approval ratings is comparable to a parent telling a child he must do something and when the child does, he is ridiculed and punished for doing it. Continue reading
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, aka the Affordable Care Act, often referred to as “Obamacare” in derisive, scurrilous tones, is a complex piece of legislation having significant consequences for millions of people. Continue reading
The industry keeps putting profits before serving the public as President Obama has become the health insurance industry’s top salesperson. In Massachusetts, he urged Americans to take a long view on implementing the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. While it may provide coverage to millions who now lack it, the evidence is mounting that Obama never should have trusted the private health insurance industry to begin with. Let’s look at why. Continue reading
Haiti and Syria are victims of their rescuers. The two nations are now sites of major disease outbreaks. Cholera in Haiti and polio in Syria didn’t just happen. Through negligence, those who claim to rescue the people imported the disease entities and fostered the conditions for wider outbreaks. Continue reading
Have you ever heard of ractopamine? Neither have most US food consumers though it is used in 80 percent of US pig and cattle operations. The asthma drug-like growth additive, called a beta-agonist, has enjoyed stealth use in the US food supply for a decade despite being widely banned overseas. It is marketed as Paylean for pigs, Optaflexx for cattle and Topmax for turkeys. Continue reading
Could there be anything worse for the chicken industry than this month’s outbreak of an antibiotic-resistant strain of salmonella that hospitalized 42 percent of everyone who got it—almost 300 in 18 states-? Yes. The government also announced that China has been cleared to process chickens for the US dinner plate and that all but one of arsenic compounds no one knew they were eating anyway have been removed from US poultry production. Thanks for that. Also this month, some food researchers have revealed the true recipe for chicken “nuggets” . . . just in time for Halloween. Continue reading
DALARNA, Sweden—It’s been some days since the United Nations Population Fund report emerged, an elderly advocacy group called HelpAge International partnering in the effort to highlight the well-being of elderly in 91 countries. Continue reading
Recently the US Department of Agriculture announced plans to “relax” federal meat and poultry inspections, allowing meat processors greater leeway in policing themselves, already the agricultural trend. But most food activists ask how standards could be relaxed any further when drug residues, heavy metals, cleaning supplies, gasses, nitrites, hormones and other unwanted guests contaminate the meat supply. They are almost all unlabeled. Continue reading
The other day there was this guy in a chicken suit on Pennsylvania Avenue protesting outside the White House. Silly, but the reason the chicken and other demonstrators had crossed the avenue was to deliver a petition of more than half a million names, speaking out against new rules the US Department of Agriculture wants to put into effect—bad rules that would transfer much of the work inspecting pork and chicken and turkey meat from trained government inspectors to the processing companies themselves. Talk about putting the fox in the henhouse! Continue reading
There’s a maxim in Washington that says never do anything simply when you can complicate or convolute it and make it deviously complex and impractical. Continue reading
In 2008, the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation reported that just one egg a day increased the risk of heart failure in a group of doctors studied. And in 2010, the Canadian Journal of Cardiology lamented the “widespread misconception . . . that consumption of dietary cholesterol and egg yolks is harmless.” The article further cautioned that “stopping the consumption of egg yolks after a stroke or myocardial infarction [heart attack] would be like quitting smoking after a diagnosis of lung cancer: a necessary action, but late.” Continue reading
Bisphosphonates, to prevent postmenopausal osteoporosis, have been linked to jawbone death (osteonecrosis) and atypical fractures. Recently, Dr. William Banks Hinshaw, a gynecologist and chemist in North Carolina, likened their actions to an affliction seen 100 years ago. Continue reading
If one picture is worth 1,000 words, then the pile of petroleum coke, petcoke, which sits along the Detroit River tells quite a story. Beginning in November 2012, the Koch Carbon company began dumping the petcoke, which is a byproduct of tar sands oil production and also a cheap fuel. Koch Carbon is owned by those Kochs, Charles and David, the incredibly wealthy right wing industrialists who play a very public role in bringing union busting Right to Work laws, Stand Your Ground, and other horrors to state legislatures across the country. Continue reading
It’s only been ten years since estrogen replacement was huckstered as a sexual fountain of youth. Women don’t lose their hormones because they get old, they get old because they lose their hormones was the lucrative sales pitch. Hormone replacement therapy was practically a rite of passage for US women—promised as the way to keep their looks and husbands, making billions for Wyeth which is now Pfizer. Continue reading
The meat and seafood you buy probably looks and smells fine. But processors may be using unsavory drugs to retard bacterial growth and the drugs do not appear on the label. Continue reading
Texas men need protection: When will Governor Perry and the state legislature enact TRED laws for Erectile Dysfunction sufferers? Continue reading
Many people know–or suspect–that farmed salmon is not naturally pink. They are right. Farmed salmon are dyed with the chemicals astaxanthin and canthaxanthin to produce an appealing, though unnatural, pink. In the wild, it is the crustaceans and algae that salmon eat that makes them pink; on the farm they would turn gray. Salmon farm operators can even choose the exact color they want. Continue reading
Was Jose Navarro, a federal poultry inspector who died two years ago at the age of 37, a victim of increasingly noxious chemicals used in poultry and meat production? Chemicals like ammonia, chlorine and peracetic acid that are frequently employed to kill aggressive bacteria in meat and poultry? Continue reading
You know things are bad in the pork industry when the whistleblowers aren’t animal rights activists but the government itself. In May, the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Office of the Inspector General exposed extreme sanitation and humane violations in 30 US swine slaughterhouses it visited and in records of 600 other US plants slaughtering pigs.[1] Continue reading
World sales of Merck’s blockbuster asthma drug, Singulair, were about $5 billion a year until last year when its patent expired in the United States. But the drug also has a darkening cloud over it. The Australian medicine watchdog has received 58 reports of adverse psychiatric events in children and teenagers taking Singulair since 2000 and reports have also surfaced in the US. Continue reading
A study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives found detectable levels of arsenic in chicken from grocery stores in 10 American cities, including in organic chickens. If the drug were fed to all chickens, over 100 US deaths would result from arsenic-related lung and bladder cancers, report the authors. Continue reading
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Privatization and the Affordable Care Act
Posted on December 4, 2013 by Jerry Mazza
One of the main problems with the Affordable Care Act web site began with the Reagan administration, which has adversely affected government performance since then. At that time, the management habit of concentrating on your core capabilities and contracting out other processes was applied to government. Government, it was decided, should contract out such non-core capabilities as logistics, food services and information technology (IT). Continue reading →