Hospitals do poorly on breast-feeding support

According to the CDC. I can’t believe so many hospitals are still giving sugar water to newborns! WTF are they thinking?!

By MIKE STOBBE, AP via Yahoo News.

ATLANTA – Most U.S. hospitals don’t do very well when it comes to promoting breast-feeding, according to the first national report to look at the issue. The average hospital scored 63 out of 100, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.

The researchers did not attach letter grades to the scores, but the results were clearly disappointing, said Deborah Dee, a CDC epidemiologist who co-authored the report.

“There is a lot of room for improvement,” said Dee.

States in New England and on the West Coast scored highest, and the South did the worst. Vermont and New Hampshire topped the list, tied with a score of 81. Arkansas had the poorest score, 48.

But practices unfriendly to breast-feeding were common throughout the country, the survey found.

About a quarter of hospitals reported giving formula or some other supplement to more than half of their healthy, full-term newborns. The practice was common even when mothers were able and willing to breast-feed, Dee said.

Of hospitals who gave supplements, 30 percent gave sugar water and 15 percent gave water.

Experts say there are no good nutritional reasons to use those, but it is commonly done to quiet crying babies separated from their mother. Sometimes it’s done to test a baby’s ability to feed — even though such a test is usually not necessary, Dee said.

Breast-feeding is considered beneficial to both mothers and their babies. Breast milk contains antibodies that can protect newborns from infections, and studies have found breast-fed babies are less likely to become overweight that those fed with formula.

But breast-feeding can be frustrating for new mothers because of nipple pain or the misperception that they’re not producing enough milk. It’s crucial that moms get proper breast-feeding advice and encouragement those first few days after birth, said Dr. Sheela Geraghty, a lactation expert at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

“It’s wonderful that hospitals and birth centers are being examined because if moms aren’t helped right there, where are they going to be helped?” Geraghty said.

The research was based on questionnaires filled out last year by about 2,700 U.S. maternity hospitals and birth centers. Hospitals were scored on supportive efforts, like offering breast-feeding tips and keeping the mother and the infant together. They also were evaluated on practices detrimental to breast-feeding, including supplemental feedings or including infant formula samples in gift packs for mothers.

Hospitals may regard the gift packs as benign, but the practice interferes with breast-feeding, said Laurence Grummer-Strawn, chief of the CDC’s nutrition branch.

“They don’t understand they’re implicitly endorsing a product and they’re giving an easy out for when parents are tired” to use the formula, he said.

The highest score for a hospital or birth center was 98; the lowest was 12. The CDC did not release individual scores.

___

On the Net:

CDC report with state list: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr

High Levels of Formaldehyde Found in Baby Furniture

Source: By Dennis O’Brien, Baltimore Sun.

A number of cribs and changing tables commonly sold at retail outlets contain unhealthy levels of formaldehyde, a consumer advocacy group reported yesterday.

A lab tested the furniture in sealed chambers and found formaldehyde levels in four changing tables and two cribs in excess of air quality standards set by California this year, according to Johanna Neumann, director of the Maryland Public Interest Research Group. Six of 21 cribs and other nursery products gave off formaldehyde at levels that increase the risk of asthma and respiratory problems, the group reported.

PIRG posted the report online yesterday after a news conference in Baltimore. The testing was conducted by Berkeley Analytical Associates, an environmental testing firm in Richmond, Calif.

“If anything, their calculations are on the conservative side,” said Thad Godish, an environmental management professor at Ball State University who was not involved in the report.

Newborns and toddlers are more sensitive than adults to formaldehyde in cabinetry and other wood-finished furniture, he said, but cribs may be where babies are the most exposed.

Concerns about formaldehyde vapors were heightened in 2006 after tests conducted on hundreds of trailers supplied to shelter Hurricane Katrina survivors showed excessive levels of the gas.

An additive used in wood products, drapes and home furnishings, formaldehyde is considered a probable carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency. Studies show that excessive exposure increases the risk of asthma and respiratory problems.

The report says the Child Craft Oak Crib, made by Indiana-based Child Craft Industries, had the highest formaldehyde of the 21 items tested, emitting 3,680 micrograms per hour. California’s standards will require building products to emit no more than 259 micrograms per hour by January 2009, Neumann said.

Child Care President Bill Suvak said the firm’s crib meets the latest safety standards established by industry experts and federal consumer protection mandates. He said he is confident the tests he is conducting will refute the advocacy group’s findings.

The report is available at: http://www.marylandpirg.org/report.

Scholar: Democrats Shielding Bush

Source: David Edwards and Mike Sheehan, Raw Story.

Law professor and constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley says that America’s founders “would have been astonished by the absolute passivity, if not the collusion, of the Democrats in protecting President Bush from impeachment.”

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann talked with Turley one day after Kucinich’s historic presentation of 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush that garnered little mainstream media attention but was an Internet sensation.

Despite noting that not all of the articles Kucinich presented were “impeachable offenses” in a strict sense, Turley says “there are plenty of crimes there — this is a target-rich environment.”

This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast June 10, 2008.

U.S. Ranks Dead Last Among 19 Nations in Preventive Medicine

Source: Natural News.

The United States ranks worst among developed nations in the number of preventable deaths, according to a study conducted by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and published in the journal Health Affairs.

Researchers tracked how many preventable deaths took place in 19 developed nations between 2002 and 2003. A preventable death was defined as one that would not have occurred if the patient had access to timely and effective health care.

The United States ranked dead last, with 109.7 preventable deaths for every 100,000 people. France came in first, with 64.8, followed by Japan and Australia, with 71.2 and 71.3, respectively.

Following Australia, in order, were: Spain, Italy, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Greece, Austria, Germany, Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Britain, Ireland, Portugal and the United States.

If the U.S. health care system functioned as well as that of France, 101,000 fewer people would die each year, the researchers found.

According to researcher Ellen Nolte, the poor showing of the United States came largely from the large number of U.S. residents that lack health insurance – 47 million, or more than 15 percent.

“I think health care in the United States is pretty good if you have access,” Nolte said. “But if you don’t, I think that’s the main problem, isn’t it?”

In preventable death data from 1997-1998, France and Japan still ranked first and second, respectively. At that time, the United States ranked 15th.

The drop in the U.S. ranking came from the fact that while preventable deaths decreased an average of 16 percent in the 19 countries between 1998 and 2003, the U.S. decrease was only 4 percent.

“It is startling to see the United States falling even farther behind on this crucial indicator of health system performance,” said Cathy Schoen, senior vice president of the health policy foundation Commonwealth Fund, noting that “other countries are reducing these preventable deaths more rapidly, yet spending far less.”

Where Is FEMA?

Source: Jim Kirwan, Rense.com.

The US Department of Homeland Security has an annual budget of $40 billion. Out of that money FEMA gets about one billion annually. FEMA was created to combine all federal services into one giant agency that was to “manage” ALL national emergencies that happen within the United States. Yet since this mega-agency was created, by combining 22 major government agencies into a single behemoth; the people of this nation have not received real help during any local or national emergency, since the fraudulent creation of the Federal Emergency Mismanagement Agency.

The country is under siege by natural disasters at the moment: From the fires in California to the floods in Iowa and beyond. Freak tornados and record temperatures combine in many places while droughts alternate with floods throughout the nation: And the two things missing in the coverage by the media are any questions about the nation’s total non-response and the lack of National Guard Troops anywhere: Now, when their help is truly needed!

Our taxes paid for State National Guard troops but our Owners sent them to Iraq and Afghanistan to fight in failed political wars for private corporate profits. Just this week $23 Billion of the money appropriated for Iraq has been found in the coffers of some of the largest military contractors in the US. It’s a massive story of waste and abuse, and criminal war-profiteering, but the government scrubbed the video, almost immediately upon its release. That’s what happens in America whenever the owners are uncomfortable; they just kill the story and wait for the pubic to forget about it. (1)

In the current series of disasters; there are no troops here to help with evacuations, and the only help that FEMA is currently offering to victims of the Iowa flooding is: “save all your receipts, because you’ll need to prove what it cost you if you want any help after this is over.” Whatever happened to the Red Cross ­ they never did much, but at least they put in a token appearance, pre-Bush & His Bandits!

Why was the National Weather Service not on top of this and working hand-in-glove with FEMA to provide pre-positioned food and water, for the victims; as well as assisting with evacuations for the tens of thousands now homeless! Doesn’t ‘Emergency management’ mean having the national ability to plan ahead? That was how the Bushwhackers sold this fraudulent concoction to the public when Bush demanded this radical overhaul of the nation’s emergency services. He got his white-elephant but all we got was his militarization of our local police, by private no-bid government contracts (Blackwater & others) combined with the complete absence of the State National Guard units and their very necessary heavy equipment.

FEMA has done nothing but FAIL since it appeared as the largest government agency in history: yet no one in congress is demanding investigations for those that keep on failing. Apparently whatever FEMA does is just fine with congress, as they have never charged anyone for what was and is still being done to the victims of either Andrew, Katrina or any of their other failures, like the fires in Arizona and New Mexico.

FEMA has not tried to assist with either homes or jobs since those storms hit the gulf coast; in fact in New Orleans FEMA was instrumental in destroying 5,000 perfectly good homes, untouched by the floods ­ homes that needed to be destroyed to make way for new housing on land that was deemed to be “too valuable “to house those that were living there” That was FEMA in action then! Where is FEMA now ­ and why has the so-called media not demanded more from this fraudulent government Agency!

Why is the stock market still going up? The country is falling apart and prices haven’t begun to see the top of this nightmare, and yet our money is falling as fast as the price of oil is climbing ­ so why does the market keep on climbing! Some say it’s an oil shortage, but that’s a lie! The United States back in the 50’s found (and sealed) enough oil and gas to fulfill all our needs for at least the next two hundred years ­ it’s SECRET and it’s still in Alaska. (2)

The markets go up because the investor class is getting rich, hell they’ve never had it so good, while the rest of us get crumbs and ashes and are told that “times are tough but our economy is sound.” The rest of the planet knows the truth and they’re making damn sure their governments know they’re angry: so what’s wrong with us? Are we just like stray dogs; not entitled to share in what we have continued to pay for? The Europeans and others are standing up for what they see as ‘highway robbery.” So what’s the matter with us! (3)

The U.S. treasury,supposedly “our” treasury that this government managed to completely empty in the first seven years of perpetual war; was not supposed to have been created to serve only the corporate bankers, but since 1913 that’s exactly who the Federal Reserve is serving, first, last, and always! Here’s the history that no one in authority wants any American to know or understand. (4)

So while you watch the fabulous footage of all the disasters, and listen to the tales of lost possessions and needless deaths ­ remember that your ‘government’ created the Federal Emergency Mismanagement Agency, not to take care of people, but to insure that ordinary people would have no where to turn when disasters of any kind upend our lives! Not true you say?

Silence in the face of adversity is consent ­ and Americans have lost their ability to speak whenever this government acts ­just like we failed to call Nancy Pelosi on her criminal act, when she announced that “Impeachment was off the table.” Since we did not object to that, in her latest bit of treason against us all she decided to block the bill in congress that would have forced Bush to ask congress for a vote before bombing Iran.

Pelosi did this out of her undying loyalty to the American Israeli Political Action Committee; having placed Israel over and above the national interests of the American people and the lives and deaths of American troops for which she, as Speaker of the House of Representatives, is responsible. (5)

Pelosi is also third in line for the presidency, and this is how she treats her constituents and her sacred oath of office! Pelosi belongs in front of the War Crimes Tribunal, and the firing squad that will follow as one of the key members of those that will face prosecution for a whole range of war crimes and crimes against humanity. If there was a congress she would have been censored, for interfering in the Impeachment process-but instead she was elected as “Speaker of the House.” Tells you about all you need to know about your congress, doesn’t it!

Maybe, all things considered, we don’t deserve to have a functioning Emergency Management Agency, because from the facts in play above and below, it appears that we do not care about what happens to us ­ because we have placed our lives in the hands of these criminals without questioning anything they continue to do to those of us that pay them!

kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net

1) BBC Uncovers Lost Iraq Billions http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7444083.stm

2) The Energy Non-crisis
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/videos.php/2008/05/30/ the_energy_non_crisis

3) Factories close, Supermarkets empty, as jets run out of fuel a trucker’s strike bites http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jun/12/oil.spain

4) The USA vs. US
http://www.usavsus.info/

5) Nancy Pelosi Pulled Iran Bill on Request of Israel http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20081.htm

Flashback: Studies show benefit for children with Measles receiving vitamin A

Something you don’t hear about from most pediatricians. They probably don’t even know about this information.

It’s best to give kids high-vitamin cod liver oil daily to bolster their health. The oil should have a 1 to 10 ratio of vitamin D to A. Children from 3 months to 12 years old should get about 5,000 i.u. of vitamin A daily.

“A randomized, controlled trial of vitamin A in children with severe measles.”

Hussey GD, Klein M.

Department of Paediatrics and Child Health, University of Cape Town, South Africa.

BACKGROUND. Measles kills about 2 million children annually, and there is no specific therapy for the disease. It has been suggested that vitamin A may be of benefit in the treatment of measles.

METHODS. We conducted a randomized, double-blind trial involving 189 children who were hospitalized at a regional center in South Africa because of measles complicated by pneumonia, diarrhea, or croup. The children (median age, 10 months) were assigned to receive either vitamin A (total dose, 400,000 IU of retinyl palmitate, given orally; n = 92) or placebo (n = 97), beginning within five days of the onset of the rash. At base line, the characteristics of the two groups were similar.

RESULTS. Although clinically apparent vitamin A deficiency is rare in this population, the children’s serum retinol levels were markedly depressed (mean [+/- SEM], 0.405 +/- 0.021 mumols per liter [11.6 +/- 0.6 micrograms per deciliter]), and 92 percent of them had hyporetinemia (serum retinol level less than 0.7 mumols per liter [20 micrograms per deciliter]). Serum concentrations of retinol-binding protein (mean, 30.1 +/- 2.0 mg per liter) and albumin (mean, 33.4 +/- 0.5 g per liter) were also low. As compared with the placebo group, the children who received vitamin A recovered more rapidly from pneumonia (mean, 6.3 vs. 12.4 days, respectively; P less than 0.001) and diarrhea (mean, 5.6 vs. 8.5 days; P less than 0.001), had less croup (13 vs. 27 cases; P = 0.03), and spent fewer days in the hospital (mean, 10.6 vs. 14.8 days; P = 0.01). Of the 12 children who died, 10 were among those given placebo (P = 0.05). For the group treated with vitamin A, the risk of death or a major complication during the hospital stay was half that of the control group (relative risk, 0.51; 95 percent confidence interval, 0.35 to 0.74).

CONCLUSIONS. Treatment with vitamin A reduces morbidity and mortality in measles, and all children with severe measles should be given vitamin A supplements, whether or not they are thought to have a nutritional deficiency.

PMID: 2194128 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

******************************************************************************

“Vitamin A for treating measles in children“

Huiming Y, Chaomin W, Meng M

Summary

Two megadoses of vitamin A lowers the risk of death from measles in hospitalized children under the age of two years, but not in all children with measles

Measles is caused by a virus and results in a high fever and rash. Possible complications include pneumonia. Measles is a major cause of death in children in developing countries and is particularly dangerous for children with a vitamin A deficiency. This review found that there was no significant reduction in mortality in children receiving vitamin when all the studies were pooled together. However, vitamin A megadoses (200,000 international units on each of two days) lowered the number of deaths from measles in hospitalized children who were under the age of two years. A single dose did not lower death rates.

This is a Cochrane review abstract and plain language summary, prepared and maintained by The Cochrane Collaboration, currently published in The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2008 Issue 2, Copyright © 2008 The Cochrane Collaboration. Published by John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.. The full text of the review is available in The Cochrane Library (ISSN 1464-780X).
This record should be cited as: Huiming Y, Chaomin W, Meng M. Vitamin A for treating measles in children. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2005, Issue 3. Art. No.: CD001479. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD001479.pub3

This version first published online: April 23. 2001
Date of last substantive update: July 01. 2005

Abstract

Background

Measles is a major cause of childhood morbidity and mortality. Vitamin A deficiency is a recognized risk factor for severe measles infections. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends administration of an oral dose of vitamin A (200,000 international units (IU), or 100,000 IU in infants) each day for two days to children with measles when they live in areas where vitamin A deficiency may be present.

Objectives

To determine whether vitamin A therapy, commenced after measles has been diagnosed, is beneficial in preventing mortality, pneumonia and other secondary complications in children.

Search strategy

We searched the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (The Cochrane Library Issue 1, 2005), MEDLINE (1966 to March 2005), EMBASE (1980 to December 2004) and looked for unpublished studies.

Selection criteria

Only randomized controlled trials in which children with measles were given vitamin A or placebo along with standard treatment were considered.

Data collection and analysis

Studies were assessed independently by two authors. The analysis of dichotomous outcomes was done using the StatXact software and results expressed as relative risk (RR) with 95% confidence interval (CI). Subgroup analyses were carried out for dose, formulation, age, hospitalization and pneumonia-specific mortality. Weighted mean differences (WMD) with 95% CI were calculated for continuous outcomes.

Main results

There was no significant reduction in the risk of mortality in the vitamin A group when all the studies were pooled using the random-effects model (RR 0.70; 95% CI 0.42 to 1.15). Using two doses of vitamin A (200,000 IU) on consecutive days was associated with a reduction in the risk of mortality in children under the age of two years (RR 0.18; 95% CI 0.03 to 0.61) and a reduction in the risk of pneumonia-specific mortality (RR 0.33; 95% CI 0.08 to 0.92). There was no evidence that vitamin A in a single dose was associated with a reduced risk of mortality among children with measles. There was a reduction in the incidence of croup (RR 0.53; 95% CI 0.29 to 0.89) but no significant reduction in the incidence of pneumonia (RR 0.92; 95% CI 0.69 to 1.22) or diarrhoea (RR 0.80; 95% CI 0.27 to 2.34) with two doses.

Authors’ conclusions

Although we found no overall significant reduction in mortality with vitamin A therapy for children with measles there was evidence that two doses were associated with a reduced risk of mortality and pneumonia-specific mortality in children under the age of two years. There were no trials that directly compared a single dose with two doses.

Greg Palast: Driving the surge in gas prices? The Bush-McCain surge in Iraq

http://www.gregpalast.com/obama’s-secret-war-profiteering-tax/#more-2026

I can’t make this up:

In a hotel room in Brussels, the chief executives of the world’s top oil companies unrolled a huge map of the Middle East, drew a fat, red line around Iraq and signed their names to it.

The map, the red line, the secret signatures. It explains this war. It explains this week’s rocketing of the price of oil to $134 a barrel.

It happened on July 31, 1928, but the bill came due now.

Barack Obama knows this. Or, just as important, those crafting his policies seem to know this. Same for Hillary Clinton’s team. There could be no more vital difference between the Republican and Democratic candidacies. And you won’t learn a thing about it on the news from the Fox-holes.

Let me explain.

In 1928, oil company chieftains (from Anglo-Persian Oil, now British Petroleum, from Standard Oil, now Exxon, and their Continental counterparts) were faced with a crisis: falling prices due to rising supplies of oil; the same crisis faced by their successors during the Clinton years, when oil traded at $22 a barrel.

The solution then, as now: stop the flow of oil, squeeze the market, raise the price. The method: put a red line around Iraq and declare that virtually all the oil under its sands would remain there, untapped. Their plan: choke supply, raise prices rise, boost profits. That was the program for 1928. For 2003. For 2008.

Again and again, year after year, the world price of oil has been boosted artificially by keeping a tight limit on Iraq’s oil output. Methods varied. The 1928 “Redline” agreement held, in various forms, for over three decades. It was replaced in 1959 by quotas imposed by President Eisenhower. Then Saudi Arabia and OPEC kept Iraq, capable of producing over 6 million barrels a day, capped at half that, given an export quota equal to Iran’s lower output.

In 1991, output was again limited, this time by a new red line: B-52 bombings by Bush Senior’s air force. Then came the Oil Embargo followed by the “Food for Oil” program. Not much food for them, not much oil for us.

In 2002, after Bush Junior took power, the top ten oil companies took in a nice $31 billion in profits. But then, a miracle fell from the sky. Or, more precisely, the 101st Airborne landed. Bush declared, “Bring’m on!” and, as the dogs of war chewed up the world’s second largest source of oil, crude doubled in two years to an astonishing $40 a barrel and those same oil companies saw their profits triple to $87 billion.

In response, Senators Obama and Clinton propose something wrongly called a “windfall” profits tax on oil. But oil industry profits didn’t blow in on a breeze. It is war, not wind, that fills their coffers. The beastly leap in prices is nothing but war profiteering, hiking prices to take cruel advantage of oil fields shut by bullets and blood.

I wish to hell the Democrats would call their plan what it is: A war profiteering tax. War is profitable business – if you’re an oil man. But somehow, the public pays the price, at the pump and at the funerals, and the oil companies reap the benefits.

Indeed, the recent engorgement in oil prices and profits goes right back to the Bush-McCain “surge.” The Iraq government attack on a Basra militia was really nothing more than Baghdad’s leaping into a gang war over control of Iraq’s Southern oil fields and oil-loading docks. Moqtada al-Sadr’s gangsters and the government-sponsored greedsters of SCIRI (the Supreme Council For Islamic Revolution In Iraq) are battling over an estimated $5 billion a year in oil shipment kickbacks, theft and protection fees.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the surge-backed civil warring has cut Iraq’s exports by up to a million barrels a day. And that translates to slashing OPEC excess crude capacity by nearly half.

Result: ka-BOOM in oil prices and ka-ZOOM in oil profits. For 2007, Exxon recorded the highest annual profit, $40.6 billion, of any enterprise since the building of the pyramids. And that was BEFORE the war surge and price surge to over $100 a barrel.

It’s been a good war for Exxon and friends. Since George Bush began to beat the war-drum for an invasion of Iraq, the value of Exxon’s reserves has risen – are you ready for this? – by $2 trillion.

Obama’s war profiteering tax, or “oil windfall profits” tax, would equal just 20% of the industry’s charges in excess of $80 a barrel. It’s embarrassingly small actually, smaller than every windfall tax charged by every other nation. (Ecuador, for example, captures up to 99% of the higher earnings).

Nevertheless, oilman George W. Bush opposes it as does Bush’s man McCain. Senator McCain admonishes us that the po’ widdle oil companies need more than 80% of their windfall so they can explore for more oil. When pigs fly, Senator. Last year, Exxon spent $36 billion of its $40 billion income on dividends and special payouts to stockholders in tax-free buy-backs. Even the Journal called Exxon’s capital investment spending “stingy.”

At today’s prices Obama’s windfall tax, teeny as it is, would bring in nearly a billion dollars a day for the US Treasury. Clinton’s plan is similar. Yet the press’ entire discussion of gas prices is shifted to whether the government should knock some sales tax pennies off the oil companies’ pillaging at the pump.

More important than even the Democrats’ declaring that oil company profits are undeserved, is their implicit understanding that the profits are the spoils of war.
And that’s another reason to tax the oil industry’s ill-gotten gain. Vietnam showed us that foreign wars don’t end when the invader can no longer fight, but when the invasion is no longer profitable.

*****************
Greg Palast is the author of, “Trillion Dollar Babies,” on Iraq and oil, published in his New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse.

Palast is currently working with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on investigation the latest attacks on the right to vote in America. Support this effort and receive a signed copy of Armed Madhouse from the author at Palast Investigative Fund.

View Palast’s commentary on oil and war windfalls on Air America Radio’s Palast Report – on YouTube here.

Bush Executive Order Expands Data Collection, Will Share Data with “Foreign Partners”

Source: The Progressive.

Big Brother wants your irises.

George Bush just issued a directive to expand the acquisition of biometric information, and to ensure that agencies across the executive branch share it.

And the Bush Administration may give it to foreign governments, too.

All this according to National Security Presidential Directive Number 59, also known as Homeland Security Presidential Directive Number 24, which George W. Bush signed on June 5.

The directive is aimed at “known and suspected terrorists,” as well as “other persons who may pose a threat to national security.”

The directive does not say how these other persons who “may pose a threat” are to be defined.

And the directive is so broadly worded that it appears to cover anyone the government has biometric or other personal data on.

“To be most effective, national security identification and screening systems will require timely access to the most accurate and most complete biometric, biographic, and related that are, or can be, made available throughout the executive branch,” the document states.

Bush ordered executive departments and agencies to “use mutually compatible methods and procedures in the collection, storage, use, analysis, and sharing of biometric and associated biographic and contextual information of individuals.” Agencies are supposed to share this information with each other “to the fullest extent permitted by law” whenever “there is an articulable and reasonable basis for suspicion” that an individual poses a “threat to national security.”

The directive does not specify what an “articulable and reasonable basis” might be.

“Known and suspected terrorists,” or KSTs, as the document calls them, are not the only concern of the Bush Administration.

It has whole groups of other people that it wants to gather biometric information on.

Within 90 days, the Attorney General is tasked to “recommend categories of individuals in addition to KSTs who may pose a threat to national security,” and he is ordered to “set forth cost-effective actions and associated timelines for expanding the collection and use of biometrics to identify and screen for such individuals.”

The Attorney General is to coordinate this “with the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Homeland Security, the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], and the Director of Science and Technology Policy.”

The Attorney General is also required to identify “legal authorities” to implement the directive.

The directive states that it wants to expand the use of biometrics on individuals “in a lawful and appropriate manner, while respecting their information privacy and other legal rights under United States law.”

But the directive offers no suggestion about how those rights would be protected.

The directive also says that the Secretary of State “shall coordinate the sharing of biometric and associated biographic and contextual information with foreign partners.”

Under what circumstances the Secretary of State would share such information with “foreign partners” remains unclear. All the directive says is that it would happen “in accordance with applicable law, including international obligations undertaken by the United States.”

Given the Bush Administration’s demonstrated disdain for applicable law and international obligations, and given its record of violating people’s privacy rights, this is not reassuring.

Skype Can’t comply with police wiretap requests

Source: Declan McCullagh, News.com.

One of the more interesting tidbits from News.com’s survey published this morning on instant messaging privacy came from Skype.

The eBay-owned company says it is unable to comply with court-authorized wiretap requests.

We asked Skype: “Have you ever received a subpoena, court order or other law enforcement request asking you to perform a live interception or wiretap, meaning the contents of your users’ communications would be instantly forwarded to law enforcement?”

Jennifer Caukin, Skype’s director of corporate communications replied to us: “We have not received any subpoenas or court orders asking us to perform a live interception or wiretap of Skype-to-Skype communications. In any event, because of Skype’s peer-to-peer architecture and encryption techniques, Skype would not be able to comply with such a request.”

This isn’t entirely a surprise. Skype, which claims something like 300 million user accounts, has said in the past that it “cooperates fully with all lawful requests from relevant authorities” but that it is not subject to the U.S. must-provide-a-wiretapping-backdoor law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. Police in Germany, for instance, already have complained of Skype’s lack of ready wiretappability.

Because the company’s SkypeIn and SkypeOut services send data through the traditional telecommunications network, they presumably can be wiretapped at that point. But voice communications that flow exclusively through the company’s peer-to-peer network–and are encrypted using AES–are a different story.

There’s no guarantee that Skype’s AES encryption is implemented properly or that there aren’t lingering security flaws. A 2006 presentation at the BlackHat Europe conference in March said the right algorithms were being used, but that there’s “no way” to know if a backdoor for eavesdropping exists. A Skype-commissioned independent evaluation, however, gave it a thumbs-up. Here’s more.

The upshot is that if Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, or so on received a wiretap order for text or voice flowing through their IM networks, they could (and would) be able to comply because the services are centralized. Even if the users’ conversations are encrypted through the Off-the-Record Messaging protocol, an eavesdropper still knows who’s talking to whom–this is called a pen register or trap and trace device in wiretapping parlance, and it can still be privacy-invasive.

Skype says it doesn’t permit even that. Which means that it’s the most privacy-protective mainstream method of communicating through voice or instant messaging. To the FBI’s legions of eavesdroppers, that sounds a lot like a challenge.

Flawed St. John’s Wort Study on ADHD Failed to Use Active Form of Herbal Extract

High quality St. John’s wort is extremely powerful; please research thoroughly before taking it, especially if you are taking prescription meds.

Source: Mike Adams, Natural News.

On the heels of shocking revelations that top psychiatric research Dr. Joseph Biederman secretly took $1.6 million from drug companies while conducting psychotropic drug experiments on children, it has been learned that Dr. Biederman is now one of the key collaborators behind the latest efforts to discredit St. John’s Wort. In a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and widely reported in the mainstream media, Dr. Biederman and fellow cohorts “concluded” that the St. John’s Wort herb is useless in treating ADHD in children.

What’s astonishing about this study, as you’ll learn in this article, is that all the children used in the study were given inactive forms of the St. John’s Wort herb where the active ingredients had been oxidized and rendered useless! In other words, this clinical trial, which was widely reported in the mainstream media with headlines like “St. John’s Wort Found Useless!” didn’t test the herb’s active ingredients at all! It sort of makes you wonder about the agenda of the people running the study, doesn’t it?

Keep in mind that one of the study’s authors, Dr. Biederman, is not merely on the take from drug companies that sell competing pharmaceuticals, but that he also lied about how much money he was being paid by drug companies, hiding the truth about his income by underreporting $1.6 million he took from psychiatric drug companies. See my report on that here: http://www.naturalnews.com/023408.html

Dr. Biederman has a clear financial interest in promoting patented prescription drugs for brain chemistry disorders while discrediting competing natural alternatives such as St. John’s Wort. This blatant conflict of interest was not disclosed by JAMA, nor was it mentioned in the text of the study on ADHD and St. John’s Wort. It appears Dr. Biederman would prefer his financial ties to Big Pharma continue to remain secret, even while producing questionable studies that desperately attempt to show that herbs don’t work.

Testing Herbs to Treat Fictitious Diseases

Well, beyond the fact that the herb used in the trial was entirely inactive (meaning it was rendered useless even before the study began), there’s also another burning issue that questions the credibility of the study: ADHD doesn’t exist in the first place!

There is no such thing as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. It’s something that psychiatrists just made up and voted into existence in order to sell more drugs to children. There is no objective test for this “disease,” nor is there any physiological evidence of any kind that it exists at all. Thus, to test an inactive herb on a disease that doesn’t exist, and then declare the herb doesn’t work is an outrageous example of extreme intellectual dishonesty. And yet it’s precisely the kind of sleight-of-hand quackery carried out by modern psychiatry — an industry that has nothing to offer society other than mind-numbing drugs, medication addictions and chemically-induced violence, obesity and diabetes.

But why let modern psychiatry have all the fun inventing diseases? I could just as easily invent a disease called “Stupid Scientist Disease” (SSD) and then test aspirin on SSD. When I demonstrated that aspirin had no effect on SSD, I could submit the paper to JAMA, get it published, and have the national media report with blaring headlines, “Aspirin Doesn’t Work to Treat Stupid Scientist Disease!”

And if they actually print that, then we could move on to test aspirin on “Stupid Journalist Disease,” which also appears to be an epidemic in modern society.

How to discredit natural medicine and spread fear, uncertainty and doubt
All this has the effect of making the medicine being tested look bad, which of course was the whole point of conducting this study on St. John’s Wort in the first place. Modern medical research is not about pursuing science, nor truth, nor objective understanding about health. It is about pushing an agenda, and it’s clear that the agenda of Dr. Biederman and colleagues is about diagnosing more children with more brain chemistry “diseases,” then demanding that they all be put on mind-altering drugs, all while desperately trying to convince the public that herbs are useless.

By the way, you can invent your own psychiatric conditions at the click of your mouse by using my free, highly-entertaining Disease Mongering Engine available here: http://www.naturalnews.com/disease-mongering-engine.asp

I had hoped to create a similar online engine where you can randomly generate fictitious scientific papers filled with psychobabble nonsense, but it appears JAMA has already beat me to it…

St. John’s Wort, for the record, has been clinically proven to be even more effective than antidepressant drugs for treating mild to moderate depression. That makes it better than all the SSRI drugs ever invented, but you don’t hear medical journals reminding anybody about that simple fact, do you? Instead, they go out of their way to test it for the wrong condition — a fictitious condition! — as an excuse to simply say St. John’s Wort doesn’t work for something.

A Disturbing Trend: Bastyr Naturopaths Partner with Dr. Biederman to Discredit Herbs

There’s another disturbing trend in all this. The St. John’s Wort study was led by Wendy Weber, ND, a graduate of Bastyr University. Bastyr is an “integrative medicine” med school that teaches drug-based medicine combined with more natural modalities. It’s one of the top three naturopathic schools in the U.S., and yet to learn that one of its graduates is now collaborating with a psychiatric drug pusher who has been paid $1.6 million by drug companies is more than a bit disturbing.

It indicates that this Bastyr graduate either has no idea about the true agenda of the people she’s working with or that she doesn’t mind that agenda. Either way, she sort of ends up looking rather silly with her name positioned above the scandalous Dr. Joseph Biederman, a widely-hated Big Pharma disease monger who will hopefully soon be arrested and prosecuted as a common criminal for conducting medical experiments on four-year old children.

In the world of naturopathy, by the way, there is quite a chasm between the more “conventional” N.D.s (like Bastyr graduates) and the holistic, natural, salt-of-the-Earth kind of naturopathic healers who have no sponsoring institution. The Bastyrs of the world are working hard to get naturopathic medical practice legalized in many states, but they’re also disliked by the non-accredited naturopaths who end up being labeled criminals for practicing their own brand of natural medicine in those same states.

Many non-accredited naturopaths insist that Bastyr is just a “green” replacement for organized medicine’s tyranny. Without a doubt, when people see Bastyr graduates collaborating with top psychiatric drug pushers on a study that clearly seeks to discredit a valuable herb, it just fans the flames of dissent against Bastyr among more holistic practitioners.

What’s my take on the issue? I think Wendy Weber must be a complete fool to lend her name to such a study, because the very title of the study presupposes something that’s entirely false to begin with: That ADHD is a bonafide “disease” in the first place. She even based the entire scoring of the participants’ symptoms on the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-IV — the tome of psychobabble “disorders” invented by a truly evil industry that seeks to label every person still breathing with some sort of brain chemistry disorder (and then demand that they all be “treated” with mind-altering drugs that just happen to enrich their corporate sponsors, the drug companies!).

Remember, the DSM-IV is the manual that declares fear of public speaking to be a “disorder.” In fact, all the following are “mental health disorders,” according to the DSM-IV manual:

• Questioning authority (i.e. asking questions of medical authorities)
• Feeling overwhelmed by too many tasks (like we all are…)
• Being excitable (WHAT?)
• Frequently taking risks (like every entrepreneur in the world…)
• Inappropriately messy (like my desk…)
• Showing excessive stubbornness (No, I’m not stubborn!)
• Being argumentative (Oh yeah? Say that to my face…)
• Losing things (Where did I park my car, again?)

… and this list continues, including descriptions of virtually every human emotion, thought or behavior. According to the DSM-IV, these are all diseases!

How many of these familiar to you? Don’t we all lose our keys from time to time? Don’t we all have messy desks (except all you clean freaks, but don’t get me started on your cleanliness “disorder” okay?) Don’t we all feel overwhelmed from time to time by too many tasks?

This is the great gimmick of modern psychiatry: They just keep naming symptoms, behaviors and thoughts until they find one that you’ve got! Then they declare you to be “sick” and needing “treatment,” and that’s when the mind-altering medications begin.

Personally, I’m shocked to learn of a Bastyr graduate lending any credence whatsoever to the DSM-IV manual and the fictitious diseases of modern psychiatry. It is shameful that such a well-educated individual would spend her time and effort in such a futile psychobabble exercise that proves nothing, and I can only hope that Wendy Weber refocuses her considerable talents into a more productive direction in the future. (I also hope that she denounces the actions of Dr. Biederman for lying about the $1.6 million he took from Big Pharma while pushing psych drugs for children… but that’s her choice, of course.)

Problems with the trial

Beyond the fatal problem of studying the effects of an herb on a fictitious disease in the first place, this trial suffers from all sorts of other scientific showstoppers. For starters, there were only 54 people used in the results of the trial, with 27 receiving placebo and 27 receiving St. John’s Wort. This is a very small sample size to justify any declaration that St. John’s Wort doesn’t work, especially given the fact that it has been safely and effectively used by tens of millions of people around the world in just the last decade or so.

Secondly, more than 40 percent of the children used in the study had previously used psychiatric medications, so their brains have already been damaged by psych drugs even before the study began! Psych drugs actually cause behavioral disorders and long-term brain damage (which is evidenced by the fact that so many children commit violent acts against themselves and others after taking psychiatric medications). So why would an honest researcher study the effectiveness of an herb on the brains of children that were already damaged by psychiatric drugs in the first place? Unless, of course, they wanted the trial to fail… but we’ll get to that later.

Thirdly, the study contains numerous protocol mistakes that distort the final results. For example, six children who displayed a large response to placebo were supposed to have been dropped from the study to isolate the herb’s effects from placebo effects, but these kids were accidentally randomized and thrown into the mix anyway, thereby distorting the final results in favor of placebo responders, which makes the herb responders look weaker by comparison. This troubling error in the study is never pointed out, of course, in the mainstream media (whose journalists don’t understand science anyway, and can’t interpret statistics with any degree of mathematical competence).

A fourth problem in the study is that young males are far more susceptible to the kinds of behaviors that are labeled as “ADHD,” compared to young females, and yet in this study, the placebo group consisted of only about 50% males while the herb treatment group consisted of nearly 75% males. In other words, the placebo group was predisposed to a positive outcome simply due to its composition of females vs. males, while the herb treatment group was predisposed to a less-than-favorable response.

And finally, it turns out that the children used in this trial may not have been receiving any active St. John’s Wort at all! As stated directly in the JAMA publication for this study:

The product used in this trial was tested for hypericin and hyperforin content at the end of the trial and contained only 0.13% hypericin and 0.14% hyperforin.

Stop the presses! Are you telling me that the St. John’s Wort used in this trial contained barely one-tenth of one percent of the active chemical constituents in the herb? Quality St. John’s Wort supplements typically contain up to five percent hyperforin, or thirty-five times the amount of active ingredient used in this trial! In other words, the St. John’s Wort being tested in this trial was a sub-clinical dose, barely containing any usable St. John’s Wort at all!

It’s kind of like testing a dose of 2mg of aspirin to see if it has any pain-relieving effect. Of course it doesn’t, the dosage is too small!

But it gets even better. As the study text published in JAMA also admits:

Hyperforin is a very unstable constituent that quickly oxidizes and then becomes inactive, which is likely what happened to the product used in this clinical trial.

What the heck? Did the study authors just admit that the St. John’s Wort they used in the trial was INACTIVE because it all oxidized? Yes, that’s exactly what they said!

Absolutely amazing, isn’t it? This study, which was blasted across newspapers, websites and cable news problems, was all based on a study of INACTIVE St. John’s Wort given at sub-clinical doses to a group of placebo-biased children diagnosed with a fictitious disease!

A Classic Case of Junk Science

This, friends, is the state of junk science today in our modern medical industry. It is disgusting to see such papers making headline news, knowing that the whole point of this study was clearly to fabricate scientific-sounding lies about the uselessness of a very useful herb, and thereby misinform consumers and drive more people to take drugs for ADHD. I’m not at all surprised, of course, to see that JAMA gladly published it.

Wendy Weber, you should be ashamed of your role in this junk science fiasco, and your authorship of this obviously politically-motivated study brings great dishonor to the university from which you graduated. If you’re going to push drugs and discredit herbs by using contorted, intellectually dishonest trials that are engineered to fail in the first place, then you might as well just slap the letters M.D. after your name and stop using N.D. to describe your credentials. Don’t parade around as a naturopath if you’re pulling stunts like this that result in consumers being gravely misled about the efficacy of herbs for supporting healthy brain function.

For a Bastyr graduate to even take part in a study that lends any credence whatsoever to the DSM-IV — and all its loopy, made-up descriptions of disorders — really makes me wonder what’s happening in the classrooms over there these days. I’ve interviewed both Joseph Pizzorno and Michael T. Murray on several occasions, and I’ve found them to be extremely well-informed, high-integrity individuals who were highly instrumental in the founding and the success of Bastyr University. I couldn’t imagine Michael T. Murray ever being involved in such a poorly-designed study that seems to have set out — from the very beginning — to obfuscate the efficacy of a valuable herb that’s been used for literally thousands of years to support healthy brain function.

How modern medical researchers use sleight of hand to commit fraud

This is a favorite tactic of modern medical researchers who wish to discredit herbs, vitamins or supplements: They simply use sub-clinical doses or poorly-assimilated nutrients that never make it to the bloodstream, then they declare the herb (or vitamin, or nutrient, or whatever) to be useless!

This is exactly what happened in the recent trials that tested Vitamin D on prostate cancer. The headlines touted the sensationalized conclusion that “Vitamin D Has No Effect on Prostate Cancer!” But what was the truth behind the study?

As it turns out, virtually none of the men used in the study showed any appreciable level of Vitamin D in their blood. That’s because most of the men studied in the trial didn’t take their supplements! It’s no surprise that if you don’t actually take your vitamin D supplements, they probably won’t prevent prostate cancer for you, right? Yet this astonishing fact is NEVER mentioned in the mainstream press reporting on this study. It’s just one fact of many that are routinely ignored by a national media more interested in trashing natural medicine than actually reporting anything based on facts.

We saw this same tactic with one study on women’s bone health and calcium intake, by the way. The headline blared, “Calcium Found Useless in Preventing Osteoporosis!” but what the study actually proved — to anyone who bothered to read it — was that women who don’t take calcium supplements don’t experience any benefits from them.

No kidding? Gee. And people who buy books but don’t read them somehow don’t learn anything from them, either.

Supplements don’t work if they’re still sitting on your shelf. You actually do have to consume them to experience their benefits. This should be obvious to health reporters working in the mainstream media, but sadly, they still don’t grasp this rather obvious fact.

Neither did JAMA, it appears, since they went ahead and published this study about ADHD and St. John’s Wort even when it turns out that none of the children likely consumed any active St. John’s Wort ingredients after all.

By the way, don’t you find it curious that the study authors only tested the potency of the St. John’s Wort supplements AFTER the study was completed, rather than before? It’s almost as if they didn’t want to know the potency before they started the trials.

Bad science conducted under the guise of good science is worse than bad science by itself, because it carries disinformation clothed in the credibility of good science and thereby acts as a virus of the mind that infects consumers. That mental virus is driven even deeper by the illusion of authority, thereby making it ever more difficult for consumers to later purge those lies from their belief systems so that they might awaken to the truth about healing with natural medicine.

It is in this way that JAMA, and Wendy Weber, and the mainstream media all perform a great disservice to the American people and further deepen the epidemics of malnutrition, disease and over-medication that threaten the very future of the western world.

Sample headlines from the mainstream media

By the way, here’s a sampling of the headlines from mainstream media sources. As you read these, realize that nobody bothered to actually read the study! (Or if they did, they didn’t understand it…)

St. John’s wort fails to help kids with ADHD
The Associated Press

St. John’s Wort Doesn’t Work for ADHD
Washington Post

St. John’s Wort No Help in ADHD
ABC News

St. John’s wort no better than placebo for ADHD, Bastyr study finds
Seattle Times

St. John’s Wort No Help for ADHD
TIME Magazine

Herb does not ease ADHD
ZDNet

St. John’s wort doesn’t help ADHD, study finds
Reuters