Jon Rappoport - THE FDA IS A ROGUE CRIMINAL AGENCY

The day of the Smoking Gun has arrived.

The discovery of a page, on the FDA’s own website, proves the FDA is fully aware that:

the drugs it certifies as safe have been killing Americans, at the rate of 100,000 per year.

The FDA website page is currently available under the heading, “Why Learn About Adverse Drug Reactions,” and it can be Googled. (Click here to go directly to the FDA page.)

The implications of this Smoking Gun are hard to grasp in any rational way.

The FDA takes no blame, no responsibility for its actions, and yet it admits the death statistics are accurate.

As an investigative reporter, I have been tracking and writing about pharmaceutically-caused deaths for 10 years. I have, on numerous occasions, cited Dr. Barbara Starfield’s report in the July 26th, 2000, Journal of the American Medical Association, in which she presents the figure of 106,000 deaths per year, in America, as a result of these drugs. I have claimed that the federal government and, in particular, the FDA, are aware of these numbers.

And now the page on the FDA’s own website confirms the death toll. Yet, nowhere do we see the FDA taking one shred of responsibility for this ongoing holocaust.

Holocaust? Add up the figures. Medical drugs cause 100,000 deaths in America every year: that means a million Americans are killed every decade.

Understand this very clearly. No medical drug in America can be released for public use until and unless the FDA states it is safe. The FDA is the agency responsible for every such decision on every drug. The buck stops there.

Read More:

http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2012/05/17/hidden-in-plain-view-fda-murder/

Urge The FDA To Stop Targeting DMAA

CITIZENS FOR HEALTH

ACTION ALERT

In April 2012 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a Warning Letter to manufacturers of products containing 1,3 dimethylamylamine, also known as DMAA, claiming that DMAA is a “new dietary ingredient,” one which would require an advance notification to the FDA before marketing. DMAA is a naturally occurring ingredient in the geranium plant that is found in the oil obtained from the steam distillation of the stems and leaves of geranium, a plant that has been consumed as a food for well over a century.

DMAA is also an ingredient in popular weight loss and fitness dietary supplements, and produces a sensation equivalent to drinking two or three cups of coffee. Most DMAA-containing dietary supplements are made with an exact, synthetically produced copy of the naturally-occurring dietary ingredient – as is the case with many widely recognized dietary supplements, such as beta-alanine, vitamin C, beta carotene, lycopene, alpha lipoic acid and various amino acids.

A Shot Across The Bow From FDA

Citizens for Health understands the FDA’s putative interest in protecting all of us from dangerous products. However, the agency is clearly overstepping its bounds in this case by using “nonbinding recommendations” (from a draft guidance document no less) to pressure dietary supplement makers into taking their products off the market with no definitive evidence of risk. The FDA is effectively denying American citizens the right to choose for themselves which products to buy.

Read More:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/750/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=10473

Leeann Brown - Chemical Agriculture Goes to the Mattresses: A Short History of the Pesticide Lobby

The U.S. Department of Agriculture began testing fruits and vegetables for pesticide residues in 1991 after the public became concerned about their potential risks to children. Remember Alar? In 1993, at the request of Congress, several top public health experts released a seminal report, Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children. Three years later, Congress responded by passing unanimously the federal Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA), which required the Environmental Protection Agency to implement health-based standards for all pesticides used in food, with special safeguards for infants and babies.

This flurry of activity grew out of one overarching conclusion embraced by scientists, physicians, policy makers, parents and the public interest community: Pesticides used in the cultivation of fruits and vegetables can cause serious and lasting harm to young children.

That didn't stop conventional agribusiness interests from trying hard to water down or remove provisions of the proposed law designed to protect infants and children. The industry argued that it would cut into their profits if they had to take children's health into consideration.

Read More:

http://www.enviroblog.org/2012/05/chemical-agriculture-goes-to-the-mattresses.html

Yves Smith - Stealth Plan to Shift Costs of Certain Widely-Used Drugs to Consumers

The US healthcare system is wildly overpriced and delivers mediocre outcomes. And while the many of the problems are well known, such as bad incentives for doctors, patients trained to equate over-testing and over-treatment with high quality care, high administration costs, and unrestricted drug pricing (despite lavish public funding of drug research), Obamacare has sided with industry incumbents, namely Big Pharma and health care insurers, at the expense of everyone else.

We predicted that one outcome would be overpriced insurance that didn’t cover much (note for middle class and affluent consumers, it would probably be better to have only catastrophic coverage and self insure for the rest; the worst is pricey insurance that leaves you carrying meaningful costs, particularly for major medical procedures). We seem to be moving in that direction already.

Reader bob alerted me to a news item that also seems to have gone below the radar of most finance and economics bloggers: that of an FDA proposal to have more drugs available on an over-the-counter basis, including ones for diabetes (insulin), high cholesterol, allergies, and migraines.

Read More:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/stealth-plan-to-shift-costs-of-certain-widely-used-drugs-to-consumers.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Paige Winfield Cunningham - FDA may let patients buy drugs without prescriptions

In a move that could help the government trim its burgeoning health care costs, the Food and Drug Administration may soon permit Americans to obtain some drugs used to treat conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes without obtaining a prescription.

The FDA says over-the-counter distribution would let patients get drugs for many common conditions without the time and expense of visiting a doctor, but medical providers call the change medically unsound and note that it also may mean that insurance no longer will pay for the drugs.

"The problem is medicine is just not that simple," said Dr. Matthew Mintz, an internist at George Washington University Hospital. "You can't just follow rules and weigh all the pros and cons. It needs to be individualized."

Under the changes that the agency is considering, patients could diagnose their ailments by answering questions online or at a pharmacy kiosk in order to buy current prescription-only drugs for conditions such as high cholesterol, certain infections, migraine headaches, asthma or allergies.

Read More:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/29/fda-may-let-patients-buy-drugs-without-prescriptio/print/

Dr. Rivkah Roth - The FDA Allows Animal Parts, Excrement, Mold In Our Food

Sure, rub it in—but maybe grind your own spices! The FDA calls them food defects and defines its permissible "Food Defect Action Levels" as listed in their online booklet to be "the levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods that present no health hazards for humans."[1]

The list of "defects" includes rodent feces (excrement), rodent hair, molds, whole insects, insect parts, beetle eggs, beetle larvae, and more. Most defects are defined as "aesthetic" – really?!

Would you like a taste of the foods that we consume according to the FDA standard’s "Protecting and Promoting Your Health"? Here are a few samples of upper acceptable limits (in abbreviated form) gleaned from the publicly available FDA booklet:

Spices

Whole Allspice: 5% berries per weight are allowed to be moldy.

Ground Allspice: 30 insect fragments per 10 grams; 1 rodent hair per 10 grams – Latter with the remark that these defects are "aesthetic"!

Ground Cinnamon: 400 or more insect fragments per 50(!!) grams, 11 or more rodent hairs per 50 grams. – From now on, grind your own!

Crushed Oregano: 300 insect fragments per 10 grams and 2 rodent hairs or excrements per 10 grams. – But…

Ground Oregano: 1250 insect fragments per 10 grams and 5 rodent hair or excreta per 10 grams.

Clearly, the difference of allowable levels between whole or rubbed and ground "defects" lies in the purely "aesthetic" effect. Who coined, "what you don’t see won’t hurt you"?

Read More:

http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/fda-allows-animal-parts-excrement-mold-our-food

Aurora Geib - GMO alert: top 10 genetically modified foods to avoid eating

There is a conspiracy of selling out happening in America. Politics and personal interest it would seem determine government policies over and above health and safety issues. When President Obama appointed Michael Taylor in 2009 as senior adviser for the FDA, a fierce protest ensued from consumer groups and environmentalists. Why? Taylor used to be vice president for Monsanto, a multinational interested in marketing genetically modified (GM) food. It was during his term that GMO's were approved in the US without undergoing tests to determine if they were safe for human consumption.

The danger of GMO's 

The question of whether or not genetically modified foods (GMO's) are safe for human consumption is an ongoing debate that does not seem to see any resolution except in the arena of public opinion. Due to lack of labeling, Americans are still left at a loss as to whether or not what is on the table is genetically modified. This lack of information makes the avoiding and tracking of GM foods an exercise in futility. Below are just some of the food products popularly identified to be genetically modified:

Read More:

http://www.naturalnews.com/035734_GMOs_foods_dangers.html

Richard Schiffman - Scientists Cry Fowl Over the FDA's Regulatory Failure

In 2005, the antibiotic fluoroquinolone was banned by the FDA for use in poultry production. The reason for the ban was an alarming increase in antibiotic-resistant campylobacter bacteria in the meat of chickens and turkeys – "superbugs", which can lead to a lethal form of meningitis that our current antibiotics are no longer effective against.

We create hellish conditions for our livestock, then we drug them to keep them numb. Then we drug them again to wake them from their pharmaceutical stupor. Then we drug them to grow faster. Then we drug them so their flesh will look healthier. Then we drug them to withstand the disease epidemics that our overcrowding has created. Then, of course, we drug ourselves every time we take a bite of factory-farmed poultry.Antibiotic-resistant infections kill tens of thousands of people every year, more than die of AIDS, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America. This problem is on the rise because antibiotics are recklessly overused, especially in the commercial livestock industry, where 80% of all antibiotics manufactured in the US end up.

Read More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/27/scientists-cry-fowl-fda-regulatory-failure

Rady Ananda - Another Way To Kill US Farmers...

Monsanto’s Food and Drug Administration can’t close down small dairies and private food clubs fast enough, bursting on the scene with guns drawn as if the criminalized right to contract for natural foods we’ve consumed for millennia deserves SWAT attention.

Now, Obama has the Dept. of Justice going after small farmers under the post-911 "Bank Secrecy Act" which makes it a crime to deposit less than $10,000 when you earned more than that. "The level we deposited was what it was and it was about the same every week," Randy Sowers told Frederick News. The Sowers own and run South Mountain Creamery in Middletown, Maryland.

Admittedly, when the Sowers earned over $10,000 in February, and learned they’d have to fill out paperwork at the bank for such large deposits, they simply rolled the deposits over to keep them below the none-of-your-f@$!ng-business amount, rather than waste time on bureaucratic red tape aimed at flagging terrorism or other illegal activities.

Read More:

http://foodfreedomgroup.com/2012/04/23/obama-seizes-farmers-money/

FDA Failures Continue to Put Patients at Risk

In 1957, the Upjohn Company launched the antibiotic Panalba.  The drug was administered to thousands of Americans for more than a decade.  By 1968, Panalba sales totaled $18 million.  After years of complaints related to the drug, FDA Commissioner Herbert Ley Jr., reported that roughly one in five patients who received it suffered a serious allergic reaction – a blood reaction that killed twelve patients.  Although several ten-year-old Upjohn-sponsored studies showed that other drugs were safer, they kept it on the market because it generated roughly 12 percent of Upjohn’s domestic gross income.

In 1977, researchers at the Wharton School (U. Penn) wanted to know whether Upjohn’s social irresponsibility was unique within its corporate culture and, if not, how pervasive it was among US companies. Their report (Armstrong 1977) revealed that a “substantial proportion of managers may be expected to bring serious harm to others in situations where they feel it is proper behavior for their role:”

Further evidence was provided by the Panalba role-playing study, where 79% of the groups selected a highly irresponsible decision and none chose the decision that was free of irresponsibility. These results were due to the pressure of the role rather than to differences among individuals; differences in irresponsibility were not related to nationality or to age.

Read More:

http://www.omsj.org/corruption/fda-failures-continue-to-put-patients-at-risk