Posts Tagged ‘ FDA ’

Oct.10.11-FDA Finally Admits Chicken Meat Contains Cancer-Causing Arsenic!

Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) After years of sweeping the issue under the rug and hoping no one would notice, the FDA has now finally admitted that chicken meat sold in the USA contains arsenic, a cancer-causing toxic chemical that’s fatal in high doses. But the real story is where this arsenic comes from: It’s added to the chicken feed on purpose!

Even worse, the FDA says its own research shows that the arsenic added to the chicken feed ends up in the chicken meat where it is consumed by humans. So for the last sixty years, American consumers who eat conventional chicken have been swallowing arsenic, a known cancer-causing chemical. (http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/loc…)

Until this new study, both the poultry industry and the FDA denied that arsenic fed to chickens ended up in their meat. The fairytale excuse story we’ve all been fed for sixty years is that “the arsenic is excreted in the chicken feces.” There’s no scientific basis for making such a claim… it’s just what the poultry industry wanted everybody to believe.

But now the evidence is so undeniable that the manufacturer of the chicken feed product known as Roxarsone has decided to pull the product off the shelves (http://www.grist.org/food-safety/20…). And what’s the name of this manufacturer that has been putting arsenic in the chicken feed for all these years? Pfizer, of course — the very same company that makes vaccines containing chemical adjuvants that are injected into children.

Technically, the company making the Roxarsone chicken feed is a subsidiary of Pfizer, called Alpharma LLC. Even though Alpharma now has agreed to pull this toxic feed chemical off the shelves in the United States, it says it won’t necessarily remove it from feed products in other countries unless it is forced by regulators to do so. As reported by AP:

“Scott Brown of Pfizer Animal Health’s Veterinary Medicine Research and Development division said the company also sells the ingredient in about a dozen other countries. He said Pfizer is reaching out to regulatory authorities in those countries and will decide whether to sell it on an individual basis.” (http://www.usatoday.com/money/indus…)

Arsenic? Eat more!

But even as its arsenic-containing product is pulled off the shelves, the FDA continues its campaign of denial, claiming arsenic in chickens is at such a low level that it’s still safe to eat. This is even as the FDA says arsenic is a carcinogen, meaning it increases the risk of cancer.

The National Chicken Council agrees with the FDA. In a statement issued in response to the news that Roxarsone would be pulled from feed store shelves, it stated, “Chicken is safe to eat” even while admitting arsenic was used in many flocks grown and sold as chicken meat in the United States.

What’s astonishing about all this is that the FDA tells consumers it’s safe to eat cancer-causing arsenic but it’s dangerous to drink elderberry juice! The FDA recently conducted an armed raid in an elderberry juice manufacturer, accusing it of the “crime” of selling “unapproved drugs.” (http://www.naturalnews.com/032631_e…) Which drugs would those be? The elderberry juice, explains the FDA. You see, the elderberry juice magically becomes a “drug” if you tell people how it can help support good health.

The FDA has also gone after dozens of other companies for selling natural herbal products or nutritional products that enhance and support health. Plus, it’s waging a war on raw milk which it says is dangerous. So now in America, we have a food and drug regulatory agency that says it’s okay to eat arsenic, but dangerous to drink elderberry juice or raw milk.

Eat more poison, in other words, but don’t consume any healing foods. That’s the FDA, killing off Americans one meal at a time while protecting the profits of the very companies that are poisoning us with their deadly ingredients.

Oh, by the way, here’s another sweet little disturbing fact you probably didn’t know about hamburgers and conventional beef: Chicken litter containing arsenic is fed to cows in factory beef operations. So the arsenic that’s pooped out by the chickens gets consumed and concentrated in the tissues of cows, which is then ground into hamburger to be consumed by the clueless masses who don’t even know they’re eating second-hand chicken sh*t. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027414_c…)


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To Download this Article: Arsenic FDA Finally Admits Chicken Meat Contains Cancer

 

Oct.3.11-FDA Approves Computer Chip for Human

Devices could help doctors with stored medical information

The VeriChip, the size of a grain of rice, is inserted under the skin with a needle in a procedure that takes less than 20 minutes to complete.

updated 10/13/04
WASHINGTON — Medical milestone or privacy invasion? A tiny computer chip approved Wednesday for implantation in a patient’s arm can speed vital information about a patient’s medical history to doctors and hospitals. But critics warn that it could open new ways to imperil the confidentiality of medical records.
The Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday that Applied Digital Solutions of Delray Beach, Fla., could market the VeriChip, an implantable computer chip about the size of a grain of rice, for medical purposes.
With the pinch of a syringe, the microchip is inserted under the skin in a procedure that takes less than 20 minutes and leaves no stitches. Silently and invisibly, the dormant chip stores a code that releases patient-specific information when a scanner passes over it.
Think UPC code. The identifier, emblazoned on a food item, brings up its name and price on the cashier’s screen.
Chip’s dual uses raise alarm
The VeriChip itself contains no medical records, just codes that can be scanned, and revealed, in a doctor’s office or hospital. With that code, the health providers can unlock that portion of a secure database that holds that person’s medical information, including allergies and prior treatment. The electronic database, not the chip, would be updated with each medical visit.
The microchips have already been implanted in 1 million pets. But the chip’s possible dual use for tracking people’s movements — as well as speeding delivery of their medical information to emergency rooms — has raised alarm.
“If privacy protections aren’t built in at the outset, there could be harmful consequences for patients,” said Emily Stewart, a policy analyst at the Health Privacy Project.
To protect patient privacy, the devices should reveal only vital medical information, like blood type and allergic reactions, needed for health care workers to do their jobs, Stewart said.
An information technology guru at Detroit Medical Center, however, sees the benefits of the devices and will lobby for his center’s inclusion in a VeriChip pilot program.
“One of the big problems in health care has been the medical records situation. So much of it is still on paper,” said David Ellis, the center’s chief futurist and co-founder of the Michigan Electronic Medical Records Initiative.
‘Part of the future of medicine’
As “medically mobile” patients visit specialists for care, their records fragment on computer systems that don’t talk to each other.
“It’s part of the future of medicine to have these kinds of technologies that make life simpler for the patient,” Ellis said. Pushing for the strongest encryption algorithms to ensure hackers can’t nab medical data as information transfers from chip to reader to secure database, will help address privacy concerns, he said.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday announced $139 million in grants to help make real President Bush’s push for electronic health records for most Americans within a decade.
William A. Pierce, an HHS spokesman, could not say whether VeriChip and its accompanying secure database of medical records fit within that initiative.
“Exactly what those technologies are is still to be sorted out,” Pierce said. “It all has to respect and comport with the privacy rules.”
Applied Digital gave away scanners to a few hundred animal shelters and veterinary clinics when it first entered the pet market 15 years ago. Now, 50,000 such scanners have been sold.
To kickstart the chip’s use among humans, Applied Digital will provide $650 scanners for free at 200 of the nation’s trauma centers.
Implantation costs $150 to $200
In pets, installing the chip runs about $50. For humans, the chip implantation cost would be $150 to $200, said Angela Fulcher, an Applied Digital spokeswoman.
Fulcher could not say whether the cost of data storage and encrypted transmission of medical information would be passed to providers.
Because the VeriChip is invisible, it’s also unclear how health care workers would know which unconscious patients to scan. Company officials say if the chip use becomes routine, scanning triceps for hidden chips would become second nature at hospitals.
Ultimately, the company hopes patients who suffer from such ailments as diabetes and Alzheimer’s or who undergo complex treatments, like chemotherapy, would have chips implanted. If the procedure proves as popular for use in humans as in pets, that could mean up to 1 million chips implanted in people. So far, just 1,000 people across the globe have had the devices implanted, very few of them in the United States.
The company’s chief executive officer, Scott R. Silverman, is one of a half dozen executives who had chips implanted. Silverman said chips implanted for medical uses could also be used for security purposes, like tracking employee movement through nuclear power plants.
Such security uses are rare in the United States.
Meanwhile, the chip has been used for pure whimsy: Club hoppers in Barcelona, Spain, now use the microchip to enter a VIP area and, through links to a different database, speed payment much like a smartcard.
© 2011 The Associated Press.

To Download this Article:FDA Approves Computer Chip for Humans

Aug 1.11-FDA Says Farm Antibiotics Must Be Reined In

FDA Says Farm Antibiotics Must Be Reined In

Source: http://www.healthmall.com/newsletter.cfm?type=article=1391=

Escalating rates of antibiotic-resistant human diseases demand a sweeping re-examination
of the ways that such drugs are now used on the nation’s farms, the Food and Drug Administration warned Monday. In proposing new regulations that could, for the first time, suspend farmers’ use of any antibiotics found to promote the spread of resistant human pathogens, the agency said the link between farm use of such drugs and some human diseases is now indisputable. (emphasis added – SAS)

Although the spread of resistant microbes from the farm to human populations has been
documented in only a few of the 106 antibiotics used in animals, FDA officials said the risks are serious enough that the agency’s role in assuring “an abundant and affordable supply of meat, milk and eggs” will have to take a back seat to human health concerns.

“FDA’s primary goal must be to protect the public health by preserving the long-term effectiveness
of antimicrobial drugs for treating diseases of humans,” said Stephen Sundlof, director of the agency’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, at a three-day public hearing on the proposal in Rockville,
Md.

Under the new rules proposed by the FDA, the agency would create a regulatory framework that would
set specific thresholds at which the appearance of resistance would trigger an automatic
apply to new drugs developed for agricultural use after the laws go into effect and could also apply to drugs already in use.

The new rules aired Monday could require congressional approval and will take at least a year to
be enacted, officials said. New information from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta shows, for the third year in a row, elevated levels of resistant strains of
the country’s two leading bacterial causes of food borne illness: Campylobacter and Salmonella.

Although health officials can’t be sure how much of the increase in resistant gastrointestinal
illness is due to the farm – and how much is due to heavy prescribing of the drugs by doctors – they say farm use is contributing significantly to the problem.

Estimates of total farm use of antibiotics range from one-third to two-thirds of all antibiotics
used in the United States.

To Download this Article: SaysFarmAntibioticsMustBeReinedIn

Mar.24.11-FDA Pulls 500 Cold Medicines from the Market

FDA Pulls 500 Cold Medicines From the Market
March 2, 2011
The FDA today announced steps to remove more than 500 prescription cold, cough, and allergy products from the market because of potential safety concerns.
The FDA asked companies to stop manufacturing the 500 products within 90 days and stop shipping them within 180 days. Some manufacturers must stop making and shipping their products immediately, the FDA warns.
There are no data on how often these now-banned medications are prescribed today, but many doctors may be unaware that they contain unapproved ingredients because these drugs are listed in the Physicians’ Desk Reference and may be advertised in medical journals.
Questions on Drug Safety
The FDA does not know if these prescription drugs are safe or not largely because they were grandfathered in before changes to the FDA’s drug approval process were enacted.
“We don’t know what they are, whether they work properly, or how they are made,” said Deborah M. Autor, director of the FDA’s Office of Compliance at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) in Silver Spring, Md., during a teleconference. “The problem is that we don’t know what the problem is.”
For example, some of these cough, cold, and allergy drugs are labeled as “time-release.” These are complicated to manufacture, and the FDA has not reviewed whether the active ingredient is released in a consistent matter over a period of time, she says. “They may be released too slowly, too quickly, or not at all.”
Kids Under Age 2
Others contain an “irrational” combination of the same types of products, such as two or more antihistamines, and some are inappropriately labeled for use by infants and young children, she says. Many contain the same ingredients as the over-the-counter cough and cold products that are no longer supposed to be used in kids under 2.
Yolandra Hancock, MD, a pediatrician at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., praises the FDA’s move.
“The new FDA decision supports modern-day pediatric practice to avoid cough syrups in children under 2 because they do more harm than good,” she says. Some may slow down breathing, and others decrease cough and allow mucus to sit in the chest, where it can cause other problems such as lung infection, she says.
“I fully support the FDA’s move in controlling access to these medications in children; it is highly appropriate and long overdue,” she says.
As to the risks these drugs pose, “for the most part, [these adverse reactions] are not serious,” says Charles E. Lee, MD, medical officer of the division of new drugs and labeling compliance at the CDER.
After the FDA crackdown on the use of over-the-counter cough and cold medicine in children younger than 2, the number of emergency room visits for adverse events decreased by 50%, he says.
“We also know that 15% of these events came from prescription cough, cold, and allergy products and included sedation/drowsiness and irritability,” Lee says.
Dr.Bob’s Comments:
“DRUGS DO NOT HAVE BRAINS TO CONTROL THEIR ACTIONS”

To Download this Article: FDA Pulls 500 Cold Medicines From the Market