Superbugs & Drug Resistance | Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health

FDA Protects Big Pharma Products by Declaring that Silver Has No Therapeutic Value

Tue, 10 Sep 2013 20:29:05 +0000

The EPA, on the other hand, allows its widespread use as a germ killer in clothing, bedding, cosmetics, electric shavers, baby bottles, and food containers.

Silver has been used as an antimicrobial for thousands of years—that’s why forks, spoons, and platters were traditionally made out of silver. Nanosilver, however, sprang out of the new science of nanomaterials, which involves creating objects smaller than 100 nanometers. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.) For example, the period at the end of this sentence is a million nanometers wide.

Objects this small can penetrate parts of the body that larger sizes of silver cannot and thus potentially increase silver’s antimicrobial effect. The new size however also poses potential risks of misuse. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a lawsuit in January 2012 to block the EPA from allowing nanosilver on the market without the legally required data about possible harmful effects. Australian microbiologist Gregory Crocetti adds that important clinical uses of silver “will be diminished by completely hysterical and frivolous uses” such as nanosilver being used in bedding and clothing simply to prevent odors and keep linens fresher longer between washings. He implicitly acknowledges, as the FDA will not, that nanosilver has important therapeutic applications.

Silver kills all kinds of bacteria, attacking them in three distinct ways:

Weakening the cell wall, thus causing the bacteria to collapse or burst;
Interfering with the enzymes the bacteria need to metabolize nutrients, starving them; and
Disrupting the ability of bacteria to replicate.

This triple-pronged attack makes it unlikely that bacteria could develop resistance to silver—although it cannot be completely ruled out. (Bacteria would have to mutate in all three ways.) For this reason, critics of using silver in clothes and similar products are right.

Because silver weakens the wall of the bacteria, it also allows conventional antibiotics to enter more easily. Research on mice at Boston University showed that with silver added, lower doses of antibiotic drugs were needed to kill bacteria. Silver was also able to reverse the antibiotic resistance of E. coli bacteria, making them once more susceptible to tetracycline. The mice were left unharmed by the silver.

This is huge, if only because it may force medical authorities to recognize silver as a therapeutic agent. It could also be the answer to the growing problem of antibiotic resistant diseases that are becoming endemic.

Individual studies have confirmed silver’s powerful therapeutic effects against thrush, pericoronitis (infection of the gums around the back teeth), E.coli, and Staphylococcus aureus. Silver nanoparticles in blood serum from cattle showed “highly potent antibacterial activity” toward certain bacterial strains.

The FDA does not recognize colloidal silver (silver suspended in a liquid) as a safe and effective antibiotic and believes there is no evidence to support its use. This has been the agency’s position since 1996. This led the authors of this study to want to evaluate the mineral’s antimicrobial efficacy (and therefore the FDA’s claim). They found that, contrary to the agency’s claim, ionic colloidal silver is highly effective in killing bacteria.

Another study similarly concluded: “Silver particles could offer a great potential for application as [an] antibacterial agent with low human toxicity.”

An epidemic of tuberculosis is currently ravaging Myanmar, with 9,000 new multi-drug-resistant TB infections every year. The normal strain of TB is easy to treat with a simple and cheap drug regimen, but when patients skip doses, the bacteria can fight back by mutating in ways that sidestep the drugs’ assault. Now, the drugs that are needed to fight this resistant strain of TB are highly toxic, one hundred times more expensive, and must be taken for longer periods of time. As we reported in 2012, the “miracle drugs” and vaccines of the mid-to-late 1900s are not standing the test of time.

Where is silver in the treatment plan for multi-drug-resistant TB in Myanmar? There are no known cases of silver-resistant bacteria, and as more “modern” antibiotics are rendered useless by bacteria that have learned to outsmart them, silver is an obvious answer.

Silver nanoparticles also show promise in fighting viral infections. The Journal of Virological Methods reported in 2011 that silver nanoparticles inhibit the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the hepatitis B virus, and the H1N1 influenza A virus. That was confirmed in studies here and here. Condoms coated with silver nanoparticles have been shown to inactivate the infectiousness of both HIV and the herpes simplex virus. Water disinfection systems using silver nanoparticles were shown to exhibit antiviral properties, and silver applied to a water filter more than doubled its effectiveness in removing viruses from drinking water. Although this is providing important information, using silver in this way is untested and might also jeopardize silver’s continuing use as a potent antimicrobial agent.

How about using silver against fungal infections? There is mounting evidence for its antifungal effects, including four recent studies from universities and research institutes the world over (1) (2) (3) (4). This is heartening news.

Is colloidal silver safe for use by individuals and families? The evidence is that it is, but that care must be taken to follow the manufacturer’s directions in order to avoid an overdose. In general, it is better to avoid using silver for everyday infections such as teenage acne, but instead reserve it for more serious infections.

Meanwhile the FDA continues to keep its head buried in the sand. It ignores mounting evidence that silver is an important general antimicrobial, an important tool especially against resistant infections and pandemic, while ignoring the proliferation of nanosilver in consumer goods.

The agency appears to be trying to protect drug company products. The difference between drug company products and silver is of course that the latter is natural. As such, it is not easily patented, and not being patentable, no one can afford to spend $1 billion on FDA approval. This is a scandalous situation. How many millions of people will have to die as a result?

The post FDA Protects Big Pharma Products by Declaring that Silver Has No Therapeutic Value first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

What’s the Biggest World Pandemic Risk Today—Untreatable by Conventional Medicine?

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 18:00:39 +0000

Hint: It’s not the flu.

Tuberculosis (TB) is one the world’s most common diseases mainly because it is so highly infectious—it’s spread with a mere cough or sneeze. It’s second only to HIV as the leading infectious killer of adults worldwide, and it is the third largest cause of death among women aged 15 to 44.
The World Health Organization estimates that two billion people—that’s one-third of our planet’s population—are infected with the bacteria that cause TB. Ten percent of these carriers will become sick, and if left untreated, half of those will die from the disease.
Conventional medicine is panicking because TB is becoming resistant to multiple drugs and fear it may become “virtually untreatable.”
According to a new study published in The Lancet, among 1,278 patients in eight different countries who were resistant to two or more first-line tuberculosis drugs, 43.7 percent showed resistance to at least one second-line drug. Interestingly, the prevalence of drug resistance correlated with how long the second-line drugs have been available in each country. The countries where the drugs had been available the longest time—twenty years—had the highest resistance rates, while the countries where the drugs had been available for ten years or less had lowest rates.
What does this mean? That the innate effectiveness of drugs diminishes over time, and that an absolute reliance on drugs is unsustainable. Dr. Justin Denholm, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia, put it this way: “The reality is that this one-size-fits-all approach is a major part of what’s led to this drug resistance issue. I think individualized treatment is what we should be aiming for.”
This, of course, is exactly what natural health and integrative medical practitioners have been advocating from the start. Moreover, two studies have now linked vitamin D to the successful prevention and treatment of TB. In the first study, white blood cells converted vitamin D to an active form of the vitamin which helps make a protein that kills the TB bacterium. In the second study, Indonesian scientists compared vitamin D to a placebo, testing them on seventy patients for nine months. The patients who received 10,000 IU of vitamin D (rather than the 400 IU recommended by conventional medicine) led to an astounding 100% cure rate.
Even more exciting, a study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that high doses of vitamin D, administered together with antibiotic treatment, appear to help patients with TB recover more quickly. The vitamin D dampens the body’s inflammatory response to infection, which leads to faster recovery and less damage to lungs.
TB is caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. But there are many foods and supplements that are natural and powerful bacteria killers. Garlic, for example, has antibacterial, antiviral, and antifungal properties. Intravenous vitamin C, the herbs Cat’s Claw and Artemisia, and hyperbaric oxygen have been used to fight various dangerous bacteria, while colloidal silver is a powerful bactericide.
The incidence of TB is high in certain countries, so if you are traveling this year, you may wish to take precautions. Swaziland, South Africa, and a quite a few other countries on the African continent have especially high TB rates, but so do Russia, the Philippines, and Korea. This list will help you assess your potential risk.

For more natural health news,
follow us on Facebook and Twitter

The post What’s the Biggest World Pandemic Risk Today—Untreatable by Conventional Medicine? first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Feedlot Animals Receiving a Double Dose of Antibiotics

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 18:00:11 +0000

FDA doesn’t seem to care.

FDA denied two Citizen Petitions (one filed in 1999 and the other in 2005) to restrict the use of certain antibiotics on farm animals. Last week, a federal judge ordered FDA to reconsider those denials, rejecting FDA’s argument that it was too time-consuming and costly to revoke the approval of antibiotics.
This follows an order from the same judge, which we reported on last March, to reconsider a ban on penicillin and tetracyclines on livestock for non-therapeutic reasons.
Let’s hope the judge can finally get the agency’s attention. According to a new report from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, in 2008 FDA tested forty-five samples of distiller grains (DGs) and found antibiotic residues in 53% of samples, some in high amounts—over .5 parts per million (ppm). Subsequent testing has also found antibiotics in DGs.
Why are the levels so high? Here’s one possible answer: The antibiotics are already in the animals’ feed when the farmers receive it.
Ethanol is an alcohol made from distilled grain. Ethanol producers use antibiotics to keep the tanks from being contaminated with lactobacilli, bacteria that compete with the yeast and lower the ethanol yield. Contamination is common, so tanks are often inoculated as a preventive measure: penicillin, erythromycin, virginaiamycin, or tylosin are added during the distillation process, and the leftover corn mash—a waste product the industry calls DGs —is sold to cattle, dairy, swine, and poultry producers for livestock feed.
Shockingly, FDA has not restricted antibiotic use in ethanol production, but instead decided to treat the antibiotics as “food additives.”
So the animals that may end up on our dinner plates are receiving not only the antibiotics they’re given so they won’t get sick in the CAFOs, but also the antibiotics used by the liquor industry in the production of ethanol.
Food additives generally require FDA pre-approval. However, the report shows that neither the antibiotics companies nor the ethanol producers are following food additive provisions—thereby breaking the law—and that FDA is not enforcing. “Ethanol producers have full discretion over the quantity and frequency with which they dump antibiotics into their plants,” says the report, noting that ethanol production tripled between 2005 and 2010. “Antibiotic use also has undoubtedly increased, although currently the FDA does not appear to track antibiotic sales to ethanol producers, as it does sales for use in animals.”
Reps. Ed Markey and Louise Slaughter wrote to FDA asking what they are doing about enforcing the food additive provision and about the link between DGs and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. “Antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria are a grave public health threat that is growing worldwide,” they write.
As we previously reported, FDA has refused to prevent antibiotic use for animals for non-therapeutic purposes, instead asking industry to restrict use. Now it appears that animals are getting a double dose of antibiotics, and FDA once again is refusing to do anything about it—even though antibiotic resistance in humans is becoming a global crisis that could lead to millions of unnecessary deaths.

The post Feedlot Animals Receiving a Double Dose of Antibiotics first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

New Study: Popular Antibiotic Increases Risk of Death

Mon, 21 May 2012 22:24:12 +0000

That’s on top of the report that antibiotics in general increase the risk of breast cancer.
Azithromycin (marketed as Zithromax) is most often prescribed to treat bronchitis, sinusitis, pneumonia, middle ear infections, and even certain sexually transmitted diseases. It can produce skin rashes, itching, swelling, difficulty breathing or swallowing, and rapid, pounding, or irregular heartbeats. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
A study published last Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine finds that the antibiotic may boost the risk of death by 250 percent. The analysis found there were 47 more deaths per million in those taking azithromycin compared to those on amoxicillin (an antibiotic safer on the heart).
Azithromycin belongs to a class of antibiotics called macrolides. A 2008 study published in the British Medical Journal found that when macrolides are combined with cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, the result can be a debilitating muscle weakness called statin-induced myopathy.
This is not the only instance where antibiotics carry great risk. A 2004 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the use of any kind of antibiotics is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer. The more antibiotics the women in the study used, the higher their risk of breast cancer.
Antibiotics are indiscriminate bactericides: they kill the good bacteria that support digestive health and other systems along with the bad bacteria present in an infection. This is why it is important to take a probiotic sometime after using an antibiotic. Probiotics deliver good bacteria directly to the digestive tract without increasing infectious bacteria; they can also reduce the risk of diarrhea, a common side effect of antibiotics.
Like much of allopathic medicine, antibiotics work in opposition to the body’s natural immune system rather than in concert with it, creating new health problems while attempting to treat the original one. This is ironic since the first antibiotics were found in nature, but they were then modified in order to make them new-to-nature and thus patentable.
As we have pointed out in other articles, today’s antibiotics also create resistant supergerms, some of which threaten uncontrollable pandemic. Drug companies, meanwhile, are reluctant to create new antibiotics because of their potential toxicity, the resulting difficulty in getting them approved, and the fact that they are not taken on an ongoing basis like statins and acid blockers and other real money-makers. In this environment, natural antibiotics such as silver and manuka honey, which do not create resistance, are of critical importance, but not being patentable, are spurned both by drug companies and the FDA.

The post New Study: Popular Antibiotic Increases Risk of Death first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

World’s Oldest Antibiotic Also Shows Promise as an Anti-Cancer Therapy

Tue, 15 May 2012 19:00:06 +0000

Colloidal silver is a powerful healer, despite irrational FDA opposition to it.

Silver has been used medicinally throughout the ages, with great success. And now some very promising research is being done on silver as a cancer treatment. Patients have previously been treated with chemotherapy drugs containing another metal, platinum. In a head-to-head comparison against a leading platinum-based chemo drug, cisplatin, a silver-based drug was found to be just as effective—and far less toxic to normal cells than platinum. Dr. Charlotte Willans, the lead researcher, calls the research an important step in the quest for effective, non-toxic cancer treatments.
Silver also happens to be the world’s oldest known antibiotic. There’s written evidence that the ancient Egyptians made use of it; the ancient Greeks and Romans stored their water, wine, and other liquids in silver vessels to prevent spoiling and contamination; ancient Chinese emperors ate with silver chopsticks, and wealthy Europeans in the Middle Ages used silver utensils to protect themselves from illness (we still call our eating utensils “silverware” despite it being made from other metals these days).
In the 1800s and early 1900s, colloidal silver compounds were widely used to fight infections, though silver fell out of favor in the 1930s with the development of the first modern antibiotics. Even so, silver is still popularly used today to treat water, purify air, and is used in medical dressings prevent infection in burn victims. Very importantly in today’s world, germs cannot develop a resistance to silver.
The big problem with antibiotic drugs, we now know, is that bacteria can become resistant to them, adapting into “superbugs” that are very difficult to treat. The problem, as we noted in January, is exacerbated by overuse of antibiotics—particularly in animals raised for food, where 80% of US antibiotics are used.
Despite the long history of successful silver usage, including its current use in wound dressings and burn salves, the FDA’s official position is that silver is “not safe or effective for treating any disease or condition.” A 1996 FDA rule declared all over-the-counter silver products to be unsafe and “misbranded.”
The government and other skeptics often claim that colloidal silver can cause argyria—a condition in which the skin turns bluish gray. However, argyria has only been found to occur in response to prolonged exposure to or ingestion of silver compounds, especially silver salts, which are not present in true colloidal silver but are found in cheap imitations.
This was demonstrated rather dramatically in 2008 by Paul Karason, the fellow whom the news media dubbed the “Blue Man.” Although the news media continually reported that he was taking colloidal silver, interviews with Mr. Karason indicated that was apparently making his own silver compounds at home and ended up making silver chloride—a silver salt—which he both consumed in excessive quantities and regularly smeared on his skin before using tanning beds! Silver salt compounds are great for making photographic paper—but not for taking internally or applying to the skin.
A study published earlier this year demonstrated that bacteria are now mutating to evade vaccines for childhood pneumonia and meningitis. So we not only have antibiotic-resistant superbugs, we have vaccine-resistant ones as well. This is just the latest indication that the “miracle drugs” and vaccines of the mid-to-late 1900s are not standing the test of time.
Contrast this with colloidal silver, which has been used as a bactericide for over a millennium—and has never produced silver-resistant bacteria! The recent research into silver as an anti-cancer agent is exactly the kind of research that today’s medical experts should be exploring—and would be, but for FDA opposition.
Why is the FDA so stubbornly opposed? Presumably because the agency does not like competition for its approved patented drugs which are derived from natural sources. People dying from resistant bugs does not seem to move the FDA—they’re only interested in new patented drugs that might quell the superbugs, even though such drugs are not being produced much, and even when they are, they often prove to be too toxic to use.

If you enjoyed this article please join us on Facebook and Twitter

The post World’s Oldest Antibiotic Also Shows Promise as an Anti-Cancer Therapy first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

FDA Asks Big Pharma to Please Consider Reducing Routine Use of Antibiotics on Farm Animals

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 21:30:42 +0000

Read it for yourself, and decide if it’s as namby-pamby as we think it is.

The FDA has just released three documents calling on industry to voluntarily stop using antibiotics for non-therapeutic uses, as we expected they would last month:

a final guidance that recommends phasing out non-therapeutic uses of antibiotics;
a draft guidance that assists drug companies in voluntarily removing non-therapeutic use of antibiotics on their labels; and
a draft regulation outlining ways veterinarians can authorize the use of antibiotics in animal feed.

Note that last document: while any antibiotics whose manufacturers voluntarily change their labels to exclude non-therapeutic uses would no longer be available to farmers over the counter—a veterinarian would have to prescribe them—they are still recommended for “preventive” purposes. In other words, the animal can still be perfectly healthy at the time the antibiotic is used.
This makes the regulation rife for abuse. In the Netherlands, for example, meat producers simply started using more antibiotics for what was still allowed: preventing disease or treating it. Dik Mevius, a leading expert on antibiotic resistance at the University of Utrecht, said, “We saw a more- or-less doubling of those drugs that were used for therapy, so the total exposure of animals to antibiotics remained virtually the same from 1999 to 2007.” After many Dutch pig farmers realized they and their families were carrying antibiotic-resistant strains of disease-causing bacteria, the Dutch government clamped down hard. Each farm now has to report how often it uses antibiotics for all purposes. Farms that use a lot are told specifically what they need to do to cut back. The government is funding a good deal of research into farming methods that don’t require antibiotics.
Here in the US, the FDA is trusting Big Farma to voluntarily restrain itself—even though the industry’s own data and research shows that the superbug problem that we’ve been telling you about is a serious public health issue, and industry hasn’t taken any steps so far to fight it. The problem, of course, is that FDA is rife with conflicts of interest, as exemplified by the revolving-door hiring of former Monsanto vice president Michael Taylor as FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Foods. A petition to have Taylor ousted has been gaining steam recently.
FDA must stop allowing all non-therapeutic uses for antibiotics in farm animals—and expecting the rapacious Big Ag industry to stop it voluntarily is absurd. If you have not already done so, please take action and write to the FDA immediately!

If you enjoyed this article please join us on Facebook and Twitter

The post FDA Asks Big Pharma to Please Consider Reducing Routine Use of Antibiotics on Farm Animals first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Surprise: Antibiotics May Be Contributing to the Obesity Epidemic

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:00:46 +0000

Worse, their overuse may also increase our cancer risk.

We’ve been telling you about the global threat of superbugs. Much of it comes from handing out antibiotics like medicinal candy to humans or as dietary supplements to animals. Now there’s new evidence of the negative effect of antibiotics on our weight as well as a potentially devastating effect on our children’s (and children’s children’s) health.
Microbiologists at New York University have published a new study that says the overprescribing of antibiotics could be making us fat! Researchers fed infant mice low doses of penicillin; after 30 weeks, penicillin-fed mice were between 10 and 15 per cent bigger and twice as fat as drug-free mice.
This affirms research from Copenhagen which found that infants given antibiotics within the first six months of life were more likely to be overweight at age 7, even if their mother was of a healthy weight.
In the NYU study, when mice were given short courses of higher dose antibiotics—the kind that young children tend to receive for infections—their immune systems became compromised, producing significantly lower numbers of helper T-cells.
The study also showed that low doses of antibiotics shifted the balance of certain gut microbes, reducing the numbers of Lactobacillus, a “good” bacterium linked to a lower risk of cancer recurrence. A healthy gut that contains a great variety of good bacteria is our best protection against cancer; after all, our intestines are a powerhouse of our body’s immune system.
Researchers at the University of Oklahoma have been studying fossilized feces. This may sound odd but there is a lot to be learned. Among other things they found that ancient feces have more bacterial DNA in common with those of non-human primates and children living in rural Africa than they do with modern, Western gut microbiomes (a word that describes microbes, their genetic elements, and their interactions in a particular environment).
It’s not that the new gut microbiome is better—just the opposite, in fact. Changing the composition of the bacterial colonies lining our intestines has been linked to irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease, asthma, Parkinson’s disease, and many other problems.
Carl Lewis, the lead author of the U of O study, said, “My first hypothesis would be that chlorinated water and antibiotics have fundamentally changed human microbiomes….The association between antibiotics and obesity is important to explore.”
Lewis didn’t make this connection, but if chlorinated water is harming our gut, what about fluoride, a known neurotoxin? As we reported last month, fluoride in our water supply increases the accumulation of lead in bone, teeth, and other calcium-rich tissues, transporting heavy metals into areas of your body they normally would not be able to go—like your brain. Might it not also affect the gut microbiome?
There is an underlying irony to the new questions surrounding antibiotics and other quick fixes to infectious diseases. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, medicine was not a high-prestige profession. It is antibiotics in particular that changed all that. Suddenly, with the emergence of these “wonder drugs,” doctors and conventional medicine were put on a pedestal by most people.
This is still observable among some older people, who express the attitudes they grew up with. But today, with resistant pathogens exploding, the pandemic danger increasing, and the unintended consequences of “wonder drugs” becoming clearer, more and more people are looking for a greater degree of humility and openness to new ideas from the conventional medical community.

The post Surprise: Antibiotics May Be Contributing to the Obesity Epidemic first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Superbug Lawsuit: Court Orders FDA to Do Its Job—After a 35-Year Delay!

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:00:41 +0000

This week a judge told FDA to reverse course regarding antibiotic overuse in livestock and protect the effectiveness of the medicine for humans. Action Alert!

For the past 35 years the FDA has supposedly been reviewing the routine use of antibiotics in animal feed when in fact the agency was simply sitting on its hands. Then, last December, the agency caved to pressure and quietly withdrew any attempt to require the removal of antibiotics from animal feed.
The public was outraged, and a coalition of nonprofit organizations sued FDA to force the agency to reconsider and withdraw approval for most non-therapeutic uses of penicillin and tetracycline in animal feed, unless drug makers can prove in public hearings that the drugs do not harm human health when used this way. The lawsuit was filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Animals Concerns Trust, Public Citizen, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
On March 23, a federal court ruled in their favor!
Back in 1977, FDA concluded that feeding animals low doses of certain antibiotics used in human medicine, namely, penicillin and tetracyclines, could promote antibiotic-resistant bacteria capable of infecting people. Despite this conclusion—and in direct violation of laws requiring that the agency move on its findings—FDA failed to take action for the next 35 years.
“For over 35 years, FDA has sat idly on the sidelines,” said Avinash Kar, a health attorney for the NRDC. “In that time, the overuse of antibiotics in healthy animals has skyrocketed—contributing to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that endanger human health….These drugs are intended to cure disease, not fatten pigs and chickens.”
As we reported in January, the so-called “preventive” use of antibiotics in livestock is routine and widespread—80% of all antibiotics sold in US go into farm animal feed. Factory farms use them to ward off illness in animals that are kept in overcrowded, filthy living conditions, which are a perfect environment for the spread of illness. These antibiotics are also used to promote increased growth in animals.
However, antibiotics given to animals are transferred to humans through direct contact, environmental exposure, and the consumption and handling of contaminated meat and poultry products—making humans vulnerable to antibiotic-resistant superbugs, which are now a global problem. Moreover, a study found that up to half of US meat was contaminated with antibiotic-resistant staph.
If FDA truly wanted to focus on food safety, it would address the filthy, toxic factory farm conditions rather than allowing healthy animals to be fed antibiotics preemptively.
Big Farma stridently opposes legislative and regulatory attempts to curtail antibiotic usage, making the absurd claim that the science is still inconclusive. So to avoid antagonizing Big Pharma and Big Farma on antibiotics, FDA’s has been issuing voluntary compliance standards. For example, in 2010 FDA issued a draft guidance proposing that farmers voluntarily stop the use of low-dose antibiotics in farms animals.
Now, as a result of the lawsuit, FDA is forced to take action on its own safety findings by withdrawing approval for most non-therapeutic uses of penicillin and tetracyclines in animal feed, unless the industry can prove in public hearings that those drug uses do not affect human health. The judge also ruled that FDA must warn drug makers that the government may soon ban the agricultural use of antibiotics for animals that are not sick.
FDA is expected in the next few days to issue draft rules that ask drug manufacturers to voluntarily end the use of antibiotics in animals without the oversight of a veterinarian. But this is not good enough! Please write to FDA today, and tell the agency to stop creating ineffective “window dressing” standards, and finally complete the process they started 35 years ago. Tell them to withdraw approval of non-therapeutic uses of antibiotics in animal feed immediately, as ordered by the court. Take action immediately!

The post Superbug Lawsuit: Court Orders FDA to Do Its Job—After a 35-Year Delay! first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Cancers, Infectious Diseases, and Lifestyle Illnesses: Why “Miracle Drugs” Are the Problem, Not the Solution

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 17:00:24 +0000

The medical industry’s obsession with bigger, more powerful (and above all, patentable!) medicines may lead to killer pandemics.

We frequently discuss the global threat of superbugs—drug-resistant bacteria, which are created in two ways:

If a drug can kill, say, 95% of bacteria, the 5% that remain are by definition much stronger than the others, not killed by current medicines, and can then reproduce without any interference or competition from other bacteria, allowing them to quickly take over.
Drugs target specific bacterial proteins, so any new mutation in these proteins will interfere with or negate the drug’s destructive effect, resulting in antibiotic resistance. Drug resistance is a natural response to pressures imposed on any living organism: you must adapt, or you die. Many adapt. Many become resistant to more than one drug, making them even harder to kill.

A few weeks ago we told you about weeds becoming resistant to the lethal pesticide Roundup, creating strains of “superweeds.” It’s the same principle at work.
Drug resistance has wide-reaching effects. Cancer cells may develop resistance to chemotherapy drugs. And multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is one of the most widespread diseases in the world today.
What is causing this “epidemic” of drug-resistant bugs? For one thing, as we noted two weeks ago, animals in CAFOs are given a steady diet of antibiotics to prevent disease—and then the antibiotics are passed to us in their meat and milk, and run-off from these factory farms puts antibiotics into the water table. At the same time, drug-resistant bacteria can arise from seemingly safe activities such as the use of bleach, hand sanitizers and antibacterial soaps.
Using standard antibiotic regimens, there is a one-in-ten chance that treatment of an E. coli infection will fail because the bacterium is resistant. As more bugs become resistant, there will be increasing pressure to use more powerful antibiotics, called carbapenems, which are the last line currently available—and resistance to those is already emerging: in the last two or three years, some organisms have come along which destroy carbapenems.
The pharmaceutical industry is all too aware of the problem of resistance, and experts openly fear we’re letting ourselves in for diseases that will be impossible to treat. At the same time, drug companies have lost interest in developing new antibiotics—partly because it is so difficult to find new agents, especially ones that can be proven safe. More to the point, it is not commercially viable—antibiotics are taken only for a few days at a time, compared with, say, a heart drug which may be taken for life. To maximize their investment, Big Pharma wants drugs that will give them a constant income stream.
There are exceptions. There is buzz about a compound found in Chilean avocados which lowers the amount of antibiotics needed; they hope it could increase the efficacy of antibiotics against superbugs. So of course researchers are now trying to synthesize and patent it as a drug. Critics fear this synthetic will only create super-superbugs.
This approach—using bigger and bigger guns, to which the bugs also respond by becoming bigger and more lethal—is as wrong-headed as it is possible to be. Natural cures are not only safest, they’re also far more effective.
Look, for example, at the use of intravenous vitamin C as an antiviral and a cancer therapy. Silver is one of the most effective agents against pathogens—and they can’t develop resistance to it. A new study also shows that silver packs as much of a punch against cancer cells as a leading chemotherapy drug, and could reduce the negative side effects that accompany such treatment. Insulin potentiation therapy, or IPT, similarly shows great promise against cancer when coupled with ordinary chemotherapy drugs used in very low doses, and may also be coupled with other natural therapies such as IV-C.
Dr. Frank Shallenberger has been exploring various treatments for hepatitis and liver disease—which more than three million Americans battle—and finds great promise in intravenous vitamin C (he also agrees that IV-C is a good treatment for most major viruses).
Manuka honey has exceptional antibacterial properties, and has been found to be effective against MRSA (staphylococcus aureus), strains of bacteria which are notoriously resistant to antibiotics. Several herbs are powerful antibacterials, and garlic has strong antibiotic and antifungal properties.
And of course vitamin D may be the best tool of all to fight colds, flu, and flu pandemics.
The great difficulty is that there are so many natural treatments available, but most people won’t ever learn of them for two reasons:

Natural substances cannot be patented in their natural form. If they’re not patentable, big companies won’t make big bucks from them, and they won’t shell out the millions and millions of dollars necessary to do the double-blind studies that would prove the substances’ efficacy and safety. The best they can do is to synthesize one element of the substance, patent it, take it through the drug trials, and then prevent everyone else from selling the natural forms of the substance.
Supplement manufacturers and natural product distributors aren’t allowed to talk about why their product is healthy for you. They aren’t allowed to cite even peer-reviewed scientific studies—you may remember that cherry growers and walnut processors were found to be in violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act for daring to mention their health-giving properties, because by saying they prevent, mitigate, or treat disease, you are causing them to be drugs.

At least this second problem is fixable today. Reps. Jason Chaffetz (R–UT) and Jared Polis (D–CO) have introduced the Free Speech about Science Act (HR 1364). This landmark legislation protects basic free speech rights, ends censorship of science, and enables the natural health products community to share peer-reviewed scientific findings about natural health products with the public.
If this bill passes, it has the potential to transform the healthcare field by educating the public about the real science behind natural health. This is a small bill with vast potential leverage. Support the Free Speech About Science Act by writing to your congressional representative and asking him or her to co-sponsor the legislation. Take action today!

The post Cancers, Infectious Diseases, and Lifestyle Illnesses: Why “Miracle Drugs” Are the Problem, Not the Solution first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Conventional Medicine Runs Amok: Prostate, Breast, and Colon Screenings

Tue, 24 May 2011 18:00:50 +0000

Call it the sledgehammer approach to medicine. Rather than catching or curing disease, aggressive cancer screenings and unnecessary biopsies are actually spreading deadly “superbugs” among patients.

Take prostate exams, for example. Millions of men each year are tested for prostate cancer—and an increasing number of them are getting sick from potentially lethal drug-resistant infections. Studies from three countries show that infectious complications from prostate biopsies have more than doubled in less than a decade. As much as five percent of prostate biopsies develop infections from the procedure—or about 50,000 Americans every year, and an equal number in Europe. Nine out of 10,000 men whose tests were negative for prostate cancer died within a month from sepsis and other complications, according to a recent study in the Journal of Urology.

The standard needle biopsy test for prostate cancer sends an ultrasound-guided needle a dozen times through the rectum to collect specimens from the prostate gland. But this also allows the needle to bring bacteria from the bowel into the prostate, bladder, and bloodstream. This is particularly dangerous if the bacteria happen to be “superbugs” which are resistant to antibiotics (please see our article on superbugs in this issue).

Part of the problem is the procedure itself. A 2004 study from the John Wayne Cancer Institute in California indicates that if you do have cancer, getting a needle biopsy may increase the chance that the cancer will spread by as much as 50 percent compared to patients who receive the more traditional excisional biopsies (or “lumpectomies”).

In response to this, it is argued that biopsies save lives too. A Swedish study is cited suggesting that younger men with early prostate cancer have better survival odds if they have surgery right away instead of waiting for treatment. But look more closely at the study. About 95 percent of the cancers in the Swedish study were found because they were causing symptoms. In the United States, however, most of the cancers are found after a PSA (prostate specific antigen) blood test raises a red flag, long before symptoms appear. And that’s the problem: an elevated PSA test almost invariably leads to a needle biopsy, even though false PSA positives are commonplace. A recent study concluded that after 20 years of follow-up with patients, the rate of death from prostate cancer did not differ significantly between men in the screening group and those in the control group.

Also keep in mind that some prostrate cancers are aggressive, while others grow very slowly and many may never cause problems. But the standard surgery and radiation treatment is the same for nearly all of them, and has been known to have nasty side effects like impotence, urinary incontinence, and bowel problems.

A European study on prostate cancer screening indicated that in a sample of 1,400 men, one man’s life would be saved from the early detection and treatment—while 48 others would undergo painful and dangerous treatments like surgery or radiation that would not improve their health because either the cancer was not life-threatening to begin with or because the cancer was too far gone.

Is this the only example of conventional “preventive” medicine run amok? Far from it.

Recent research suggests that the elderly get colonoscopies far too often—creating unnecessary risks to their health, and a waste of money, as Medicare is paying for it. In fact, the US Preventive Services Task Force recommends against routine colon cancer screening for most people 76 to 85—and says for those older than 85, screening risks outweigh the benefits. Complications for older patients include accidental perforation of the colon, bleeding, and complications from sedatives, any of which can lead to death. And most of these colonoscopies for the elderly are completely unnecessary to begin with—a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine says that only 27 percent of all study patients with frequent exams had any symptoms that might have raised suspicion of cancer.

There is big money in cancer screenings. Americans spend $4 billion on mammograms alone, and some of those tests cause false alarms that lead to unnecessary follow-up surgery on normal breasts—at a cost of as much as $70 billion over a decade. The radiation alone from too many mammograms can be a cause of cancer, although CAT scans, with their massive amount of radiation, may be an even bigger risk.

And this isn’t the only “preventive” medicine risk for women who are worried about breast cancer.

The Health Sciences Institute points out that the drug tamoxifen, which was identified as a carcinogen by the California EPA more than ten years ago, is frequently recommended if there is a risk of breast cancer. This synthetic hormone-like drug effectively prevents estrogen from binding to breast cancer cells, making it more effective than chemotherapy in treating estrogen-driven breast cancer tumors—the most common type of breast cancer tumor in postmenopausal women. But the potential dangers range from nausea and vomiting to deep-vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism, not to mention cancer itself. Tamoxifen actually increases the risk of a rarer type of breast cancer that is aggressive and harder to treat.

What is really inexcusable is that animal studies suggest phytoestrogens from foods such as soy do as much or more than tamoxifen to prevent cancer without the side effect risks. But drug companies and the FDA couldn’t care less because these phytoestrogens can’t be patented and thus can’t be brought through the FDA approval process.

There are also other, much safer ways to reduce one’s risk of breast cancer: being as lean as possible without being underweight; exercising for at least 30 minutes a day; limiting alcohol consumption; and, for new mothers, breast-feeding their children for up to six months.

As we noted in March, more is not necessarily better when treating as well as trying to prevent cancer: after years of patient trials and clinical experience, even oncologists are grudgingly agreeing that more chemotherapy does not necessarily produce a better outcome. The side effects of additional aggressive chemo invariably outweigh the benefits. The same goes for radical, disfiguring surgeries like mastectomies with the removal of pectoral muscles and all area lymph glands: for many patients facing breast cancer at an early stage (estimated to be up to 40,000 per year) the removal of area lymph modes is now known to be unnecessary.

The book Death by Medicine by Gary Null et al. documents the fact that the number of people who die each day because of medical errors—physician mistakes, hospital-related illness, and reactions to FDA-approved medications—is the equivalent of six jumbo jets falling out of the sky. More Americans are dying each year at the hands of medicine than all American casualties in WWI and the Civil War combined. The book has recently become an award-winning documentary film.

Health policy expert John C. Goodman discusses the huge economic cost of adverse medical events—between $393 and $958 billion in 2006. He estimates that 6.1 million injuries and 187,000 deaths caused by the health care system: “This is equal to between $4,000 and $10,000 a year for every household in America. Roughly speaking, every time the healthcare system spends a dollar healing us, it causes up to 45 cents worth of harm.”

The post Conventional Medicine Runs Amok: Prostate, Breast, and Colon Screenings first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.