Cancer Alert: Beware of These 5 Home Appliances

By Dr. Mercola

Alasdair Philips is qualified in both Electrical- and Electronic Engineering, as well as Agricultural Engineering.

In 1998, he started the British organization Power Watch, which is committed to uncovering the specific details of how electromagnetic fields (EMFs) affect our health and how we can practically protect ourselves against detrimental effects.

Mr. Philips is also a member of SAGE (the UK Department of Health Stakeholder Group on ELF EMFs) and a member of the UK Health Protection Agency's EMF Discussion Group.
Another early group he became involved with was called Electronics and Computing for Peace.

In the 1980s, they were asked to go to Greenham Common Airbase, where a group of women claimed the American military were "zapping" them.

"We went down and we measured, basically, early non-lethal microwave weapons working at the same sort of frequencies that cell phones operate at (about 1800-1900 MHz) [which were being] pulsed at the women...
That's what got me interested in the biological effects of electromagnetic waves," Mr. Philips says.
"... Ten years or so later, I was invited to talk a lot about the first mobile phones and other health concerns, through a series of international [industry] conferences in the late 1990s. I was the token outsider saying, 'Yes, I think there is a problem.'"

Avoid using Wi-Fi routers in your home. Instead, install cable or Ethernet cable. If you need portability, you can use a dLAN device that allows you to access your Ethernet without laying extra wires or irradiating yourself with pulsing microwaves from a router.

"I did a BBC Panorama program a few years ago on Wi-Fi... We were comparing Wi-Fi levels with the levels you get 100 meters from a cell phone tower. They're roughly the same! If you're a yard away from a Wi-Fi router, or sitting next to a Wi-Fi laptop, it's about the same as what's coming from a mast 200 yards away. The UK government gave the UK Health Protection Agency 300,000 pounds sterling to go and do the work to just prove us wrong. Actually they found slightly higher levels than we reported on the Panorama program..."

"There is without doubt an approximate doubling in the incidence of childhood leukemia with magnetic fields above 4 milliGauss, or 0.4 microTesla in U.S. units," Philips says. "It's been confirmed in over 20 studies. Most of the studies are showing a doubling at a level between 3 and 4 milliGauss."

This is a tiny fraction of the international standard, set at 1,000 milliGauss (100 microTesla). They know acute effects may occur at twice the standard limit, at 2,000 milliGauss, but to think the current standard actually protects health is a grave mistake... Unfortunately, according to Mr. Philips, no progress at all has been made in changing the standards for power frequencies to take into account the effects on biological health.

And with respect to microwaves; standing a foot away from your microwave oven while it's running can expose you to upwards of 400 milliGauss, and remember, a mere 4 milliGauss has been firmly linked to leukemia. It would certainly be wise to avoid letting your children stand near the microwave when it's running, and avoid it yourself as much as possible—especially if you're pregnant.

"We recommend you put your microwave oven either in the far corner of your kitchen or ideally in the utility area where you can just go through and put it in and go back a few minutes later. You don't actually use it right next to where you're working on the work surface," Mr. Philips says.

Story at-a-glance

• The British organization Power Watch, founded by Alasdair Philips, is committed to uncovering the specific details of how electromagnetic fields (EMFs) affect your health and how you can practically protect yourself against detrimental effects
• While the international safety standard for power fields, such as those emitted from overhead power lines, is set at 1,000 milliGauss, more than 20 studies have linked exposure at a mere 4 milliGauss to childhood leukemia
• Certain home appliances are particularly troublesome, in terms of the EMF emitted, such as electric heaters, electric stove rings, microwave ovens, electric blankets, and hair dryers
• Under current guidelines, we are now allowed to expose ourselves to one billion-billion-billion-fold more energy within a particular part of the electromagnetic spectrum than our ancestors were exposed to 100 years ago. Therefore, it is prudent to reduce your EMF exposure as much as you can, particularly where you sleep, and to try to make your home into an “EMF safe zone” to allow your body to rest and restore from the daily assault of radiation

Read more about this important danger HERE

"Pharmageddon" is Here - How Doctors Do Harm

By Dr. Mercola

It’s a widely held tenet in our society that if you get sick, you should visit your doctor to “get well.”

But many physicians are relatively clueless about “wellness care,” they are in the business of disease treatment.

This is why the vast majority of physicians’ visits end up with a medication being prescribed, or if that is not appropriate, a surgery or invasive medical test is often recommended.

What is blatantly missing from many of these appointments is a discussion of what is causing your ailment ... which often means hope for a real “cure” is forsaken in favor of expensive and often dangerous symptom management.

"Pharmageddon" is Here

Pharmageddon is "the prospect of a world in which medicines and medicine produce more ill-health than health, and when medical progress does more harm than good" -- and it is no longer a prospect but is fully upon us.

Last year an analysis of data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that deaths from properly prescribed drugs now outnumber traffic fatalities in the United States! And when you add in deaths attributable to other medical care modalities, like hospital admissions and surgery, the modern medical system becomes the leading cause of death and injury in the United States.

Authored in two parts by Gary Null, PhD, Carolyn Dean, MD ND, Martin Feldman, MD, Debora Rasio, MD, and Dorothy Smith, PhD, the comprehensive Death by Medicine article described in excruciating detail how everything from medical errors to adverse drug reactions to unnecessary procedures caused more harm than good. That was in 2003. In 2010, an analysis in the New
England Journal of Medicine found that, despite efforts to improve patient safety in the past few years, the health care system hasn't changed much at all.i Researchers noted:

“In a study of 10 North Carolina hospitals, we found that harms remain common, with little evidence of widespread improvement.”

They revealed that 18 percent of patients were harmed by medical care (some repeatedly) and over 63 percent of the injuries could have been prevented. In nearly 2.5 percent of these cases, the problems caused or contributed to a person's death. In another 3 percent, patients suffered from permanent injury, while over 8 percent experienced life-threatening issues, such as severe bleeding during surgery. In all there were over 25 injuries per 100 admissions! In other words you have a one in four chance of getting injured if you are admitted to the hospital -- not very good odds by any stretch.

Story at-a-glance

• Americans spend more on health care than citizens of any other country, up to 1.5 times more per person -- but we rank 50th in life expectancy and 47th in infant mortality
• A large number of Americans are dying avoidable deaths because of inappropriate medical care, including medical errors, unnecessary surgeries, adverse drug reactions, and more
• Medical treatments are often ordered because of the providers’ financial interests -- even though evidence to support their effectiveness is lacking, and oftentimes they end up doing more harm than good, sometimes even causing the patient to die
• The more you take responsibility for your own health -- in the form of nurturing your body to prevent disease -- the less you need to rely on the "disease care" that passes for health care in the United States

Read the rest of this important article at Mercola.com

Some African Sex Workers Are Naturally HIV Resistant

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2012

Some African sex workers are naturally HIV resistant.  The women are protected by a weak inflammatory response in their vaginas

 A research team lead by Dr. Michel Roger of the University of Montreal Hospital Centre and the university’s Department of Microbiology and Immunology has found that HIV-resistant sex workers in Africa have a weak inflammatory response in their vaginas – a surprise for the researchers, who were expecting the contrary considering the women’s high exposure to the virus. 

HIV

Credit: Wikipedia

“In this part of the world, women represent over 60% of HIV cases, and this proportion continues to increase,” Roger said. “Studying women who are naturally resistant to the virus enables researchers to identify interesting information in terms of developing vaccinations or microbid gels that could prevent transmission of HIV.” The word microbid refers to something that is able to destroy microbes.

Roger has been working with women from Benin and Zimbabwe over the course of the past fifteen years in order to get a better idea of the immune and molecular mechanisms involved in the transmission of HIV. These countries were targeted because of the high number of infected women and the existence of natural resistance in some of them. The researchers found that when these women come into contact with the virus, the immune system cells in their vaginas produced fewer inflammatory molecules (cytokines and chemokines) than the same cells in HIV-infected women.

These molecules play a role in activating and recruiting “lymphocyte T-cells” that normally attack and destroy viruses. However, HIV is cunning and actually uses the T-cell to invade the body. “Fewer T-cells means fewer target cells available for the virus to use,” Roger explained.

Intriguingly, the researchers discovered that the immune response was very different in the women’s blood than in their vaginal mucous membrane. The findings show that it would undoubtedly be more effective to develop vaccinations that would block the virus at the entry point to the body rather than try to fight it once it is already established within the body’s system. “AIDS vaccination research has entirely focused on the blood stream and this approach has been a failure,” Roger said. “Our research shows that the immune response is different at the site of the infection, and that we should turn to the entry points in order to find a means for blocking the virus.” A vaccination of this kind could be administered via the nose and would immunize all mucus membranes in the body.

Research will continue in order to better understand the molecular mechanisms involved in the vaginal immune response. Scientists suspect that genetic factors may be at play, as it has been discovered that sisters living in similar circumstances have the same HIV-resistant profile.

Dr. Michel Roger’s latest published research in this area appeared in the September 2011 edition of PLoS One. The study “High Level of Soluble HLA-G in the Female Genital Tract of Beninese Commercial Sex Workers Is Associated with HIV-1 Infection” received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Réseau SIDA of the Fonds de la Recherche en Santé du Québec. The University of Montreal and the University of Montreal Hospital Centre are officially known as Université de Montréal and Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM), respectively.

Contacts and sources:  W. Raillant-Clark
Université de Montréal  
Citation: Thibodeau V, Lajoie J, Labbé A-C, Zannou MD, Fowke KR, et al. 2011 High Level of Soluble HLA-G in the Female Genital Tract of Beninese Commercial Sex Workers Is Associated with HIV-1 Infection. PLoS ONE 6(9): e25185. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0025185
Read more at Nano Patents and Innovations

British Medical Journal Reveals That Academics Admit Data Falsification

27 January 2012

Just days after the nutrition science world was rocked by allegations that a famed veteran resveratrol researcher fabricated data in 26 articles over seven years, a British Medical Journal survey reveals the practice is disturbingly widespread.



The survey of 2700 doctors and scientists found one in seven (13%) had, "witnessed colleagues intentionally altering or fabricating data during their research or for the purposes of publication". Those are only the doctors that admitted the findings. Critics suggest the actual percentage may be higher than 30%.

That manipulation included, "inappropriately adjusting, excluding, altering, or fabricating data".

Many respondents said they were aware of possible misconduct within their own institution that had not been investigated sufficiently.

"Not all scientific misconduct is these gross violations like falsifications, plagiarism and fabrication," said Raymond De Vries, an associate professor of medical education and a member of the Bioethics Program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

"A lot of us aren't making up data and stealing data," he said. However, he believes that intense competition within the sciences is having a negative effect on researchers.

The researchers then sell out to the highest bidders if it will mean further funding and grants to continue research initiative.

Since the 1960s, the FDA has had the authority to disqualify or remove from FDA-regulated trials any clinical investigators who have "repeatedly or deliberately" ignored regulations designed to protect human research participants or who have repeatedly or deliberately submitted false information to the agency or the sponsor of their research. But this process often took years to complete and to this day, the ability for the FDA to disqualify and clinical investigator appears to be extremely biased based on that investor's ties to the pharmaceutical industry, something the FDA denies.

Deserve Better

"...science and medicine deserve better. Doing nothing is not an option," said Dr. Fiona Godlee, BMJ editor in chief.

"While our survey can't provide a true estimate of how much research misconduct there is...it does show that there is a substantial number of cases and that...institutions are failing to investigate adequately, if at all."

"The BMJ has been told of junior academics being advised to keep concerns to themselves to protect their careers, being bullied into not publishing their findings, or having their contracts terminated when they spoke out."

Committee on Public Ethics (COPE) chair, Dr. Elizabeth Wager, added: "This survey chimes with our experience from COPE where we see many cases of institutions not cooperating with journals and failing to investigate research misconduct properly."

BMJ noted the survey mirrored one conducted in 2001 that found similar levels of fabrication awareness.

Dr. Godlee and Dr. Wager issued a joint BMJ editorial recently that stated: "There are enough known or emerging cases to suggest that the UK's apparent shortage of publicly investigated examples has more to do with a closed, competitive, and fearful academic culture than with Britain's researchers being uniquely honest."

Many papers showing that non-steroidal anti-inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs) reduced the risk of oral cancer, turned out to be completely false. Databases of study participants were fabricated, with many people sharing the same birth date. An example was the author of one study, Dr. Jon Sudbo, of the Norwegian Radium Hospital in Oslo, Norway, who confessed to faking data for mouth-cancer studies published in 2004 and 2005.

More and more evidence is suggesting that medical journals are increasingly having to retract reports due to fabricated, erroneous or misleading data from Doctors and Scientists. Although fraud is clearly on the rise in Drug studies which serve the pharmaceutical industry, they are also increasing in the natural health industry.


Resveratrol Research Scandal

Dr. Dipak Das, a longtime researcher of the red wine antioxidant, resveratrol, was accused this month by his former employer, the University of Connecticut, of fabricating data on at least 145 occasions, in 26 research papers published in 11 journals over seven years.

The University had taken part in a three-year investigation before going public this month with its allegations that Dr. Das enagaged in systematic alteration of a type of data called Western Blot images which plot data - usually by Photoshop manipulation on his computer.


Those allegations are refuted on the grounds of a racist conspiracy by Dr. Das, but aside from a statement from his lawyer, the Doctor has remained largely silent on the affair as he recovers from a heart complaint in India.

Professor Lindsay Brown, professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Southern Queensland, was at a Free Radical Society conference in Kolcatta, India, where Dr. Das spoke two weeks ago on January 13 about Western Blots before being struck down by a stroke and hospitalised.

"This is the end of his career. He will be remembered for this scientific fraud and for little else," Professor Brown told The Australian newspaper.

Commenting on the website Retraction Watch , someone known as Mallika observed: "I am a grad student at UCHC. I did know a couple of people in Dr. Das's lab and interacted with them outside the lab. I was always surprised at how rapidly they seemed to produce data and got tons of publications where we struggle to get our experiments and papers out."

Original article can be found HERE

Science Is Not Really Science Anymore

African Twitter Analysis -

57% of Tweets are sent from mobiles &
60% of Africa's most active Tweeters are aged 20-29.

http://pic.twitter.com/7bMNgHv5
See Larger Image HERE