My friend, David, was perplexed. A flurry of articles appeared in the U.S. media on April 7,2005 about a ‘superbug’- a deadly staph germ that has become terrifyingly resistant to most antibiotics.

Today, the pediatric advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration met to discuss new reports of serious skin reactions, neuropsychiatric events and deaths associated with taking Tamiflu, Roche’s drug for treating influenza. According to IMS Health, approximately 24.4 million prescriptions for Tamiflu (oseltamivir) were dispensed in Japan between 2001 and 2005; about one-fifth that number — 5.5 million — were filled in the U.S. during the same period. Pediatric prescriptions accounted for 11.6 million in Japan versus 872,386 in the U.S. 

Forget Vioxx. What is now gradually emerging is a disaster several levels of magnitude more destructive. However, for a number of interconnected reasons, this disaster is unlikely to feature as even the tiniest blip on the radar screens of the mass media. Indeed, so far, it hasn’t registered at all.

Hardly a day seems to go by without hearing about another unfortunate town being targeted for fluoridation. It is almost as if Tom Reeves at the CDC, Mike Easley at his propaganda institute at the University of Buffalo, and various minions at the ADA, sit around a huge map of the USA and throw darts to find their next targets. They continue, oblivious to the fact that at the last election their efforts were bloodied in nearly every city where a vote was held.

More than 250 people from all over the United States and Canada gathered together in Farmington Connecticut on May 7, 2005, to learn about Lyme Disease and its co-infections.  Sponsored by The Greater Hartford Lyme Disease Support and Action Group, the main theme was misdiagnosis and the interconnectedness of our many chronic autoimmune illnesses. 

A recent research report published in the Journal of Pathology questions the prion-only hypothesis of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). TSE diseases include Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in humans, bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle (mad cow disease), scrapie in sheep, and Chronic Wasting Disease in elk and deer. Abnormally misfolded prion proteins are considered to be the transmissible agents in TSEs. A Nobel Prize was awarded for this idea. The Jeffrey et al. study points out flaws in the prion-only hypothesis. It concerns us that there was very little coverage by the lay press and that this very important paper was only described on a few medically related web sites.

I rely on common sense perhaps more than I should when it comes to matters of health. I don’t smoke, for example, even though for years there was no “hard evidence” that definitively established a cause-and-effect link between cigarettes and cancer. But my instinct was that it’s less than ideal to blast my lungs with a vaporous cocktail containing thousands of toxic chemicals. The mountains of epidemiological data connecting the nicotine habit to diseases of the lungs also persuaded me not to light up.

European livestock farmers dread the day when their cattle succumb to a tuberculosis breakdown. The implications are severe: a ruthless cull of infected cattle and badgers with all remaining healthy cattle impounded behind an iron curtain of government-mandated movement restrictions and red tape. The effects have pushed small farming businesses into a state of financial melt down.