NightBlogger

(NaturalNews)
The FDA has announced that beginning today, spinach and lettuce sold across the United States may now be secretly irradiated before it reaches grocery store shelves. What’s “secret” about it? The FDA previously decided that irradiation warning stickers would not be required on any food items because it would be “too confusing to consumers.” (The word IRRADIATION apparently has too many letters to be understood to food buyers.) Thus, irradiated foods will not be labeled as such, and consumers are going to be left in the dark about all this (except for those who actually eat the irradiated food, in which case they will glow in the dark). More

(NaturalNews) Watching the FDA trip over its own clumsy self while groping for answers on Salmonella is a sad affair. Following the FDA-encouraged destruction of tens of millions of dollars of perfectly good tomatoes, this confused, bewildered agency admits that tomatoes may not have been the problem after all, and it has now set its sights on destroying the peppers industry. Is there no vegetable safe from the destruction of the FDA?

Tomatoes don’t harbor salmonella, by the way. Neither do peppers, onions, cilantro or spinach. Salmonella only festers in factory-farmed animals, folks, and that means the real source of contamination is no doubt some animal factory upstream from the vegetable processing centers. So why isn’t the FDA going after the animal factories that likely caused this whole fiasco? Because making Americans scared of their vegetables is a great way to advance the FDA’s food irradiation agenda which would destroy virtually all the medicinal phytonutrients in plants. More

WASHINGTON — Drug safety officials Tuesday imposed the government’s most urgent safety warning on Cipro and similar antibiotics, citing evidence that they may lead to tendon ruptures, a serious injury that can leave patients incapacitated and needing extensive surgery. The Food and Drug Administration ordered makers of flouroquinolone drugs - a potent class of antibacterials - to add a prominent “black box” warning to their products and develop new literature for patients emphasizing the risks. More

Because the FDA was too quick to draw conclusions, they have ruined the tomato industry. “The U.S. tomato industry has taken a US$100 million hit as restaurants temporarily dropped tomatoes from their menus, and farmers have had to plow under their fields or leave crops to rot in packinghouses.”

CBS…the U.S. Food and Drug Administration appears no closer to finding the source of a mysterious salmonella outbreak that has sickened more than 900 people nationwide. The FDA is not even 100 percent sure that tomatoes are the cause, adding peppers and cilantro Saturday to its list of foods under investigation in the outbreak. Since April, there have been 943 infections in 40 states, mostly concentrated in Texas, New Mexico, Illinois and Arizona, reports CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston. At least 130 people have been hospitalized, with one known death associated with the outbreak. Eighty percent of the people who became ill reported they had eaten tomatoes. More

“The federal agencies are now collecting samples of foods typically consumed with tomatoes.”
This means lettuce, onions, cilantro, cucumbers, you could go on and on…

USA TODAY — The Food and Drug Administration activated its Food Emergency Response Network on Tuesday, adding as many as 100 laboratories to its efforts to trace the source of the salmonella outbreak that has sickened more than 800 since April. The extra labs are needed because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) over the weekend expanded its investigation of the outbreak originally blamed on contaminated tomatoes. The federal agencies are now collecting samples of foods typically consumed with tomatoes. More

CHICAGO, June 14 (UPI) – Two eateries belonging to the same restaurant chain have been linked to nine cases of salmonella poisoning, U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials say. FDA Associate Commissioner for Foods David Acheson said the nine cases involved fresh tomatoes served at the two restaurant chain locations in Chicago, adding the chain’s identity would remain confidential, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.

An FDA spokeswoman said in an e-mail that the confidentiality was due to the fact investigators were more concerned about the tomatoes causing the outbreak rather than the sites serving them. “The restaurants are not the problem. The tomatoes are what is making people sick across the country, and we don’t know where they came from,” spokeswoman Julie Anne Zawisza said.

The Times said in addition to the nine Chicago cases, none of which resulted in hospitalization, there have been a total of 228 salmonella cases in 23 U.S. states since mid-April. Acheson told the newspaper most of the tomatoes carrying the rare Salmonella Saintpaul strain were likely from either Florida or Mexico.

It’s real simple: Drug companies own doctors and the federal agencies in charge of protecting the public. They all should be charged convicted and jailed for criminal negligence.

A physician and top smoking cessation researcher says U.S. regulators and a drugmaker brushed aside his concerns a year ago about possibly dangerous side effects from longer-term use of the stop-smoking drug Chantix. Spangler says the safety study by researchers employed by Pfizer and published in a relatively obscure medical journal looked at far too few subjects — a total of only 251 taking the drug — to determine whether or not the drug is safe when used over that duration.

Yet, the conclusion of the study reads, “Varenicline 1 mg BID can be safely administered for up to 1 year” — a conclusion, Spangler says, that is not supported by the data. “[Making this conclusion] would be like me balancing my checkbook without looking at any of the checks I wrote or the deposits I made,” Spangler says. “They’ve got to look at the data.” Furthermore, Spangler says when he analyzed the data in the Pfizer study, he found that the authors ignored possible signals of safety concerns. More

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - U.S. health officials on Wednesday said they are still receiving reports of people falling ill from eating Salmonella-tainted tomatoes and that they now have 167 reported cases from 17 states. Representatives from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they are continuing to search for the source of the Salmonella outbreak, which has hit hardest in New Mexico and Texas. David Acheson, FDA associate commissioner for food protection, said the latest onset of illness reported to the agency was May 27. More

Many dentists and Holistic practitioners have known this for decades.
(Reuters) - Silver-colored metal dental fillings contain mercury that may cause health problems in pregnant women, children and fetuses, the Food and Drug Administration said on Wednesday after settling a related lawsuit.

As part of the settlement with several consumer advocacy groups, the FDA agreed to alert consumers about the potential risks on its website and to issue a more specific rule next year for fillings that contain mercury, FDA spokeswoman Peper Long said. Millions of Americans have the fillings, or amalgams, to patch cavities in their teeth.

“Dental amalgams contain mercury, which may have neurotoxic effects on the nervous systems of developing children and fetuses,” the FDA said in a notice on its Web site. More

Seattle Times
Old-fashioned asthma inhalers that contain environment-harming chemicals will quit selling at year’s end - and the government is urging patients not to wait until the last minute to switch to newer alternatives. Patients use inhalers that dispense airway-relaxing albuterol during asthma attacks.

Chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, once were widely used to propel the drug into the lungs. But CFC-containing consumer products are being phased out because CFCs damage the Earth’s protective ozone layer. As of Dec. 31, CFC-containing asthma inhalers can no longer be made or sold in the U.S. - and inhalers are being powered instead by ozone-friendly HFAs, or hydrofluoroalkanes.

…the Food and Drug Administration is issuing an advisory Friday saying anyone still using CFC inhalers should ask their doctor about switching now. More

We’re always told information consolidation is for OUR safety
Los Angeles Times
Medicare and the Food and Drug Administration have announced a joint venture that promises to improve prescription drug safety and potentially reduce wasteful spending on medications.

The agencies said Thursday they have agreed on rules for using information from Medicare’s giant claims databases to create a computerized early warning network for problems with medications and medical devices that come to light after they go on the market.

Medicare will not turn over individual patient data to the FDA, but the two agencies’ computers will be able to “talk” to each other, to pose and answer questions that may reveal potentially risky side effects in new drugs. Since pre-market testing usually involves a limited number of patients, serious problems sometimes become evident only after hundreds of thousands of people begin using a product. More

Rob Stein
Washington Post
Federal health officials yesterday announced plans to begin mining the medical records of millions of patients to try to identify safety problems from drugs and medical devices more quickly.

The Sentinel Initiative will enable the Food and Drug Administration and others to analyze the growing number of databases of health records compiled by the government, health insurers and HMOs to try to identify drug- and device-related problems sooner than does the current system, which relies primarily on voluntary reporting by individual doctors. Read more

Photo azrainman

Sonia Shah
The Nation
With hardly a word in the mainstream press, the FDA has gutted the rules restraining drug companies from exploiting clinical trial subjects in developing countries. Now that 80 percent of clinical trials fail to recruit sufficient numbers of test subjects on deadline, drug companies increasingly export their trials to developing countries, where sick, undertreated patients abound. It’s faster, it’s cheaper and it’s easier to conduct the placebo-controlled trials that companies and the FDA prefer.

There is precious little oversight of these trials. Unlike for domestic trials, the FDA does not require advance notice before drug companies take their trials outside US borders. And with 90 percent of trials failing to gain FDA approval, a massive number of trials are conducted, fail and then vanish with no agency review at all–and little public record, if any. Read more

Pic courtesy of Will Palmer
Lawmakers Say Contaminated Blood Thinner Illuminates Problems With Drug Supply

Under the cloud of contaminated heparin deaths, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach received a rude welcome from Congress Tuesday, accused by Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., of “carrying the water” for the Bush administration, “toe-dancing around the hard facts,” and making promises that turn out to be nothing more than “hooey.”
Read more

Photo by Hi yAAvA
Cimzia Approved to Treat Crohn’s in Adults Who Don’t Respond to Other Treatments

The FDA has approved a new prescription drug called Cimzia to treat Crohn’s disease in adults who haven’t responded to other conventional therapies. Cimzia, given by injection, targets an inflammatory chemical called tumor necrosis factor (TNF) alpha. Patients would get a shot of the drug once every two weeks at first, and then get a monthly injection if the first three shots are beneficial. Cimzia “works to reduce the signs and symptoms of Crohn’s, but it also carries risks that will require patients on it to be closely monitored by their physicians or other health care professionals.”
Read more

Photo courtesy of chichacha

In January of this year, the FDA ruled that meat and milk from cloned cows, pigs, goats and their offspring is safe to eat. Since then, websites and blogs have echoed the FDA’s ruling, serving up titles like, “Cloned Beef Hash”, “Send in the Clones”, “Your burger on biotec”, “Where is the cloned beef?”, “Cloned beef: It’s what’s for dinner”, “Would you like fries with your frankenburger”, “FDA: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell on Cloned Meat”, and “Some Cloned beef with those GMO vegatables”?

Some have pointed out that “Unlike genetic engineering, which changes the DNA make-up of an animal, cloning produces a genetic replica of the original”, while others claim limiting the gene pool for beef and pigs creates an inherent danger of spreading mad cow or other diseases. Polls suggest the majority of Americans oppose cloning, in fact, “a recent Gallup poll “found that 60 percent of Americans find cloning morally indefensible, and yet The FDA declared cloned products have no essential difference from regular products, so consumers don’t need to know the difference.

Thirteen states, including California, Tennessee, New Jersey and Kentucky, have proposed bills requiring labels on cloned food. The beef industry is suppose to be adhering to a voluntary moratorium on cloned beef but in an article posted as early as 2005 in Organic Consumers Association “…cloned beef will go into the food chain, no question, in six or eight months”, says Don Coover, a vet and semen broker, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, Feb 10, 2005. “I’m selling hundreds - maybe thousands - of units of semen from bulls that were cloned,” he said. “They’re going to be slaughtered, and the FDA can’t do anything about it.” Not that they would anyway.

Wired writes”

“Rapidly evolving technology and increasing concern about the environmental impact of meat production are signs that vat-grown meat is moving from scientific curiosity to consumer option. In vitro meat production is a specialized form of tissue engineering, a biomedical practice in which scientists try to grow animal tissues like bone, skin, kidneys and hearts. Proponents say it will ultimately be a more efficient way to make animal meat, which would reduce the carbon footprint of meat products.”

Eating natural beef is bad enough as it is, considering the links to colon cancer. Who knows what effect animal flesh gown in a test tube will have on us all.

A piece in Popsci.com sums it up well:

“If the biotech industry has its way, ordering a hamburger might soon sound something like this: ‘one charbroiled cloned-beef patty, with genetically modified cheese, lab-grown bacon and vitamin-C-fortified lettuce, on a protein-spiked bun.”’

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