Polio has broken out in China for the first time since 1999 after being imported from Pakistan, and there is a high risk of the crippling virus spreading further during the annual Haj pilgrimage, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.
Nine cases have been confirmed in China and polio is now considered to have spread nationwide in Pakistan, mainly due to insecurity that has halted vaccination campaigns in areas including the Khyber tribal region, a WHO spokesman said.
“The WHO rates as ‘high’ the risk of further international spread of wild polio virus from Pakistan, particularly given the expected large-scale population movements associated with Umra and the upcoming Haj…in the coming months,” the Geneva-based body said in a statement.
Haj is the main annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, which is due to start in November. Umra refers to other pilgrimages to Mecca, which can take place any time of the year.
An analysis of heart disease and stroke statistics collected in 192 countries by the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that the relative burden of the two diseases varies widely from country to country and is closely linked to national income, according to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
Reporting this week in the journal Circulation, the UCSF scientists found that developing countries tend to suffer more death and disability by stroke than heart disease – opposite the situation in the United States and other countries with higher national incomes.
The number of adults with diabetes in 2008 doubled to 347 million globally since 1980, a study in the journal Lancet says. That is about 10 percent of the world’s adults, and the prevalence of the disease is rising rapidly.
Researchers from Imperial College London and Harvard University in the U.S. looked at data from 2.7 million people worldwide, using statistical techniques to project a global number, according to BBC News. The study found that found that the diabetes rate had either risen or stayed the same in virtually every country.
Although most of the increase was due to population growth and a larger number of elderly people, increased obesity and inactivity, already strong trends in the U.S. and other wealthy western countries, are contributing to the increase in the disease in developing nations including India and countries in Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East, according to the Washington Post.
The study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization, is a more comprehensive calculation of diabetes prevalence than some previous estimates, according to Read more…
NEW DELHI: India on Thursday seriously objected to biological samples in the form of “swabs of seepage water and tap water” being carried out of the country “on the sly” by British scientists to test the presence of the multi-drug resistant superbug.
India said it was a signatory to World Health Organization’s International Materiel Transfer Agreement as per which permission is required to carry out any biological material from the country.
“The way scientists carried out samples from India to be tested in UK does not point to a good scientific motive. It is illegal,” said Dr V M Katoch, director general of Indian Council for Medical Research. “Some people want to keep the heat on India,” he added.
According to him, such multi-drug resistant bacteria — like what is being called a superbug caused by the NDM1 gene — exists in environment across the world. “To keep on pressing India as a hotbed of such superbugs is unfair, and its motive is questionable,” Dr Katoch added.
The scientists had collected 171 swabs of seepage water and 50 public tap water samples Read more…
By MARIA CHENG, AP Medical Writer
LONDON – A gene that can turn many types of bacteria into deadly superbugs was found in about a quarter of water samples taken from drinking supplies and puddles on the streets of New Delhi, according to a new study.
Experts say it’s the latest proof that the new drug-resistance gene, known as NDM-1, named for New Delhi, is widely circulating in the environment — and could potentially spread to the rest of the world.
Bacteria armed with this gene can only be treated with a couple of highly toxic and expensive antibiotics. Since it was first identified in 2008, it has popped up in a number of countries, including the United States, Australia, Britain, Canada and Sweden.
Most of those infections were in people who had recently traveled to or had medical Read more…
Paul Joseph Watson
March 24, 2011
Radioactive yellow rain that fell in Tokyo and surrounding areas last night caused panic amongst Japanese citizens and prompted a flood of phone calls to Japan’s Meteorological Agency this morning, with people concerned that they were being fed the same lies as victims of Chernobyl, who were told that yellow rain which fell over Russia and surrounding countries after the 1986 disaster was merely pollen, the same explanation now being offered by Japanese authorities.
“After two days of rain in Tokyo I woke up to a thick coating of this yellow stuff all over my car. What looks like a glare between the glass and the body of the car is actually pollen. My first thought was Read more…
By MIKE STOBBE,
ATLANTA – Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.
Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government’s apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.
U.S. officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in the United States — studies that often involved making healthy people sick.
An exhaustive review by The Associated Press of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies. At best, these were a search for lifesaving treatments; at worst, some amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results.
Inevitably, they will be compared to the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study. In that episode, U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who already had syphilis but didn’t give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.
These studies were worse in at least one respect — they violated the Read more…
Large biotech agribusinesses like Monsanto control much of the global seed market with genetically modified (GM) crops. This centralization of GM seeds threatens food safety, food security, biodiversity, and democratic ideals.
By Christopher D. Cook / February 23, 2011
I suspect most would scream, “No way!”
Yet, while America seems allergic to public servants – with no profit motive in mind – controlling anything these days, a knee-jerk faith in the “free market” has led to overwhelming centralized control of nearly all our food stuffs, from farm to fork.
The Obama administration’s recent decision to radically expand genetically modified (GM) food – approving unrestricted production of agribusiness biotech company Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” alfalfa and sugar beets – marks a profound deepening of this centralization of food production in the hands of just a few corporations, with little but the profit motive to guide them.
Even as United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials enable a tighter corporate grip on the food chain, there is compelling evidence of GM foods’ ecological and human health risks, Read more…
By Dr. Mercola
Bear in mind that Dr. Hilleman was the developer of Merck’s vaccine program. He developed over three dozen vaccines, more than any other scientist in history. He was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Science, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He received a special lifetime achievement award from the World Health Organization. Hilleman was one of the early vaccine pioneers to warn about the possibility that simian viruses might contaminate vaccines.
According to a documentary on the Bilderberg group by former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, there is a committee of seven men above the Bilderberg group. These seven men make decisions based on what they want to see happen with each country. Deciding which economies flourish and which economies collapse, these industrialists seek to set up a one-world government regulated exclusively by bloodlines, according to the Ventura documentary.
Many questions come to mind when the world’s most powerful men have been conducting meetings since 1954. People become skeptical about the topics discussed in these meetings. Ventura said that one topic among their conversations includes discussing how they can depopulate the world to 500 million people — an amount they can control.
Although just a conspiracy theory, these rumors still give us a reason to be concerned because Read more…