Fish makes infants less vulnerable to allergies

According to a study published in Acta Paediatrica, feeding fish to infants under the age of nine months lowers their chances of developing preschool wheeze and asthma. At the same time, treatments based on broad spectrum antibiotics increase the risk of wheezing, asthma…

Flu vaccine causing infant seizures; FDA to investigate

(NaturalNews) The Sanofi-Aventis flu vaccine known as “Fluzone” is causing febrile seizures in children, the FDA revealed yesterday. According to the FDA, 42 cases of seizures have been reported in children receiving the Fluzone vaccine. Most of the children suffering seizures are under the age of two. The FDA went out of its way to claim that even though these children suffered seizures, they’re all fine now. “All children recovered and no lasting effects have been seen,” the FDA said. Can you imagine them making such a statement about an herb that was found to cause seizures? This is a case where the FDA has clearly put itself in the position of defending the safety of the vaccine and downplaying the risk that it sends children into convulsions. Nearly all the reported seizures occurred within 24 hours after the children received the Fluzone vaccine. This, according to vaccine apologists, is mere “coincidence.” It is well established that only 1% – 10% of vaccine side effects are ever reported to the FDA. This means that potentially thousands of children have suffered seizures due to this flu vaccine. Not surprisingly, the maker of the vaccine claims there’s no proof that the vaccine caused any seizures at all. “At this point no correlation between influenza vaccine and febrile seizures has been established,” said Sanofi-Aventis. “Adverse events after vaccination may be causally related to vaccine or may be coincidental.” Both the drug maker and the FDA take the position that “vaccines are safe until proven dangerous.” This is the opposite of what commonsense precaution would require: That vaccines should be proven safe before being injected into the bodies of children . And yet, as NaturalNews has reported many times, flu vaccines are never tested in randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled studies because the flu industry is unwilling to subject vaccines to actual scientific scrutiny. All flu vaccines are approved by the FDA without adequate safety testing , and then side effects (seizures, etc.) are “monitored” by the FDA to see if anything goes wrong. As the side effects reports begin to pour in, the FDA simply downplays those reports and claims no “causal link has been established.” This is how America’s children are turned into medical experiments by the vaccine industry. Sources for this story include: http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/VaccineSafety/ucm240037.htm

Bill Gates wants to register all new babies on the planet for vaccines

(NaturalNews) Bill Gates is promoting a plan to use wireless technology to register every newborn on the planet in a vaccine database. In a keynote address to the mHealth Summit, which focuses on using mobile technology to improve health care, Gates said that improving survival rates among children under the age of 5 would benefit not just individual families, but societies and the planet as a whole. “The key thing, the most important fact that people should know and make sure other people know: As you save children under 5, that is the thing that reduces population growth,” he said. “That sounds paradoxical. The fact is that within a decade of improving health outcomes, parents decide to have less children.” The number of children who die before their fifth birthday has already dropped from 20 million in 1960 to 8.5 million today, a statistic Gates attributes mostly to vaccination. “About one-third [of that improvement] is by increasing income,” Gates said. “The majority has been through vaccines. Vaccines will be the key. If you could register every birth on a cell phone — get fingerprints, get a location — then you could [set up] systems to make sure the immunizations happen.” Gates suggested using cell phones to record each birth and send the information, including biometric identifiers, to a central database. This database would then send reminders to parents’ phones when it was time to come in for vaccines or other treatments. He said a prime location to implement such programs would be northern Nigeria or northern India, where vaccination rates are less than 50 percent. Acknowledging that registering every single birth has never been done before, Gates called for “1,000 new ideas” to “blossom” in order to make it happen. Such ideas could conceivably involve using the GPS devices inside phones to physically track parents who do not bring their children in for vaccines. Gates also called for use of mobile technology to implement more continuous monitoring of vaccine supply chains. Sources for this story include: http://www.smartplanet.com/people/blog/pure-genius/bill-gates-mobile-health-technology-will-save-lives-help-overpopulation/4908/

Former TSA workers arrested on child pornography charges

(NaturalNews) The very same U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents that grope and naked body scan you and your children when you fly may also be illegally accessing and sharing child pornography. A recent report by WCVB-TV Boston explains that Andrew Cheever, 33, a former TSA agent from Massachusetts, was recently arrested on child pornography charges — and he is not the only one. Investigators found that Cheever had been storing and sharing over 10,000 pornographic videos and images involving children on multiple computers, hard drives and external media storage devices. Authorities charged him on two counts of child pornography possession and restricted him from contacting or working at jobs that involve children under the age of 18. But the Cheever case is just the tip of the iceberg. Earlier this year, former TSA agent Sean Shanahan from Boston Logan International Airport was charged with multiple sex crimes against an underage girl (http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1238602). And in November, Charles Henry Bennett, a former TSA screener at Orlando International Airport, was arrested and charged for molesting a six-year-old girl and planning to make her his “sex slave” (http://beyondthecurtain.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/tsa-worker-arrested-for-molesting-12-year-old-girl/). These are the types of people that TSA jobs attract these days, especially now that “enhanced” pat downs and naked body scans give perverts access to an unlimited stream of duties that feed their deviant behavior. And even though TSA officials insist that employees must undergo criminal background and credit checks before being hired, the process is obviously not working to keep sexual deviants from molesting both adults and children at U.S. airports. Current TSA security requirements for passengers actually encourage sexual deviants to fill TSA agent positions because passengers must either submit to a full naked body image scan that, despite what TSA officials say, can be downloaded and saved by agents (http://www.naturalnews.com/027914_TSA_full-body_scanners.html), or undergo an invasive full-body pat down that involves agents’ “palms and fingers” probing their bodies. Sources for this story include: http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/26165594/detail.html

Mammograms produce more false positives than legitimate tumor detections in young women

(NaturalNews) Mammograms deliver overwhelmingly more false positive results than true positives in women under the age of 40, according to a new study conducted by researchers from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute . In a false positive result, a mammogram detects signs of a tumor that turns out to be non-cancerous or otherwise not dangerous to a woman’s health. “In a theoretical population of 10,000 women aged 35 to 39 years, 1,266 women who are screened will receive further workup, with 16 cancers detected and 1,250 women receiving a false-positive result,” the researchers wrote. “Harms need to be considered, including radiation exposure, because such exposure is more harmful in young women; the anxiety associated with false-positive findings on the initial examination; and costs associated with additional imaging.” The researchers examined the medical records of more than 117,000 U.S. women who got their first mammograms between the ages of 18 and 39. In the ensuing year, not a single woman under the age of 25 was diagnosed with breast cancer. For women between 35 and 39, 12.7 percent were called back for further tests but only 0.16 percent actually had cancer. Because breast cancer rates in young women are so low, screening them is like “looking for a needle in a haystack,” lead researcher Bonnie Yankaskas said. Nonetheless, 29 percent of U.S. women between the ages of 30 and 40 say they have had at least one mammogram. Reacting to the study, the American Cancer Society reiterated that it does not recommend screening in women under the age of 40. “We have been concerned that some have been encouraging that screening begin at younger and younger ages, when the science does not support it as beneficial,” chief medical officer Otis Brawley said. Due to the risks associated with radiation and false positives, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force now only recommends screening for women aged 50 and older. Sources for this story include: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6424VY20100504; http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/03/mammograms-in-your-30s-%E2%80%98a-needle-in-a-haystack%E2%80%99/.

Metal from hip replacements could cause tumors

(NaturalNews) Metal hip replacements may cause soft tissue destruction and even tumors, the British health regulatory agency has warned. The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) recently announced that it would test all 40,000 patients who had received metal hip implants for high levels of metal in their blood. This would indicate that the implants are wearing down and releasing debris into the body, with potentially dangerous consequences. “Any patients who are affected by these recommendations will be contacted by their surgeon,” the MHRA said, and will have their implants replaced. The procedures in question are full metal-on-metal hip implants and hip resurfacing, which involves lining the hip socket and the top of the thigh bone with metal. In both procedures, friction can cause bits of metal to grind loose. This debris can cause soft tissue necrosis (death), which can develop into a small, non-cancerous tumor known as a pseudotumor. Because they last longer than other kinds of implants, metal hip replacements are popular among younger patients. The government warning came after a study conducted by researchers from the Nuffield Orthopedic Center in Oxford found that 4 percent of patients who had received a hip resurfacing operation needed a new operation due to pseudotumors. Women under the age of 40 were particularly at risk, with 13 percent requiring a new operation. Concerns over metal implants had emerged before, with a 2008 MHRA report noting that there “was evidence of genetic damage in patients with certain metal hip implants.” In addition, implant manufacturer DePuy recently issued a warning that its products had a “higher than expected” rate of failure and should not be used “in females of childbearing age.” DePuy has since announced that it will cease manufacturing the products in question, but insists it has no concerns over its products’ safety. “Data about safety were not the basis for this decision,” it said. Sources for this story include: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7603360/Metal-hip-replacements-could-cause-tumours-doctors-warn.html; http://www.onmedica.com/NewsArticle.aspx?id=73dbc176-a7c4-475a-acfe-2e5b8e543077; http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article7100905.ece.

Up to 95 percent of infants are vitamin D deficient but only 1 percent get vitamin D supplements

(NaturalNews) Two studies published in the journal Pediatrics highlight that although vitamin D deficiency is widespread among infants in the United States, most pediatricians remain unaware of the problem. The first study, conducted by researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), found that only 5 to 13 percent of breast-fed infants were receiving at least 400 IU of vitamin D per day, the amount currently recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Human breast milk is actually relatively low in vitamin D, probably because during our evolutionary history most babies got plenty of exposure to sunlight. Although formula-fed infants were not included in the study, researchers noted that an infant would need to drink 32 ounces of fortified formula per day to get 400 IU of vitamin D, an amount that is probably unrealistic for young children. The body produces vitamin D when exposed to UV-B radiation from sunlight. The nutrient is essential for the development and maintenance of bones and the immune system, and deficiency can increase the risk of soft or brittle bones, infection, cancer, heart disease and autoimmune disorders. Yet the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that infants get no direct sunlight at all for the first six months of life, and that they wear protective clothing and sunscreen beyond that age – effectively ruling out the healthiest, most reliable source of this essential nutrient. Making matters worse, according to the CDC study, only 1 to 13 percent of children under the age of one take a vitamin D supplement. A second study in the same issue found a lower (but still high) rate of vitamin D deficiency, with 58 percent of newborns and 36 percent of mothers testing deficient. A full 30 percent of mothers who took prenatal vitamins were still deficient in vitamin D. Although increased sun exposure improved mothers’ vitamin D levels, it did not raise those of their infants. This further suggests that breast milk is a poor source of vitamin D and that infants need to be exposed to sunlight directly in order to synthesize the vitamin for themselves. Sources for this story include: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-03-22-vitamind22_ST_N.htm.