Category Archives: Health

The language of life

vegetables

Within the mechanistic worldview that shapes the way most of us view life, each human being and other living organism is seen as a discrete entity — a form that possesses and is animated by its own life.

Lives come into existence, go out of existence, and between times interact with each other, while all along retaining autonomy in varying degrees.

Human beings, as creatures whose powers have been extended and amplified through technology, supposedly possess the highest degree of autonomy, living lives steered by the exercise of our freewill.

Having become so full of ourselves we have mostly lost the sense of life forming a seamless whole. We fail to see that human being is a conceptual construct fabricated through a leap of imagination.

But this thing called life is unfathomably complex and the more we learn about it, the more we discover its interactive nature.

Just as people talk to each other and those conversations produce societies, it turns out that inside our bodies another kind of conversation — this one through molecular exchanges facilitated by exosomes — allows plant cells to “talk” to our cells and thereby regulate the homeostatic foundations of health.

GreenMedInfo reports: A groundbreaking new study published in Molecular Nutrition & Food Research titled, “Interspecies communication between plant and mouse gut host cells through edible plant derived exosome-like nanoparticles,” reveals a new way that food components ‘talk’ to animal cells by regulating gene expression and conferring significant therapeutic effects. With the recent discovery that non-coding microRNA’s in food are capable of directly altering gene expression within human physiology, this new study further concretizes the notion that the age old aphorism ‘you are what you eat’ is now consistent with cutting edge molecular biology.

This is the first study of its kind to look at the role of exosomes, small vesicles secreted by plant and animal cells that participate in intercellular communication, in interspecies (plant-animal) communication.

The study explained the biological properties of exosomes as follows:

“Exosomes are produced by a variety of mammalian cells including immune, epithelial, and tumor cells [11–15]. Exosomes play a role in intercellular communication and can transport mRNA, miRNA, bioactive lipids, and proteins between cells [16–19]. Upon contact, exosomes transfer molecules that can render new properties and/or reprogram their recipient cells.”

While most of the research on exosomes has focused on their role in pathological states such as tumor promotion, they were recently found to play a key role in stimulating regeneration within damaged cardiac tissue, and are known to be found in human breast milk, further underscoring how irreplaceable it is vis-à-vis synthesized infant formula. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The CIA’s deadly vaccination ruse in Pakistan

An editorial in the New York Times says: The use of a sham vaccination program in the government’s hunt for Osama bin Laden has produced a lethal backlash in Pakistan where dozens of public health workers have been murdered and fearful parents are shunning polio vaccine for their children.

Leaders of a dozen American schools of public health raised an alarm with the Obama administration 16 months ago and finally got a response this month when the White House promised that the C.I.A. will no longer use phony immunization programs in its spying operations.

The fakery — one of an assortment of intelligence stratagems before the successful raid that killed bin Laden — should never have been used in a world where hardworking health care agencies depend on the trust of local communities.

The C.I.A.’s ruse involved phony door-to-door solicitations by a physician promising to deliver hepatitis B immunizations; his real purpose was to confirm bin Laden’s suspected hiding place. The ploy helped fuel a militant backlash against immunization workers, and as many as 60 health workers and police officers have since been killed.

Meanwhile, polio is on the rise, with Pakistan accounting for 66 of the 82 cases reported so far this year by the World Health Organization. Last year, there were 93 cases of polio in Pakistan, where the health organization warns that the disease is endemic, as it is in Afghanistan and Nigeria.

The C.I.A. can no longer seek to “obtain or exploit DNA or other genetic material” gathered this way, according to a promise from the Obama administration. That is small comfort for those suffering the aftereffects of this ruse.

Convincing wary parents to accept polio vaccination — and finding health workers willing to risk violence — has been made more difficult than ever.

Facebooktwittermail

The CIA and the widening threat from polio

The New York Times reports: Until recently, polio was considered a poor man’s problem in Pakistan — a crippling virus that festered in the mountainous tribal belt, traversed the country on interprovincial buses, and spread via infected children who played in the open sewers of sprawling slums.

But since the World Health Organization declared a polio emergency here last week — identifying Pakistan, Syria and Cameroon as the world’s main reservoirs of the virus — the disease has become an urgent concern of the wealthy, too.

A W.H.O. recommendation that travelers not leave Pakistan without a polio vaccination certificate has caused confusion. Doctors, clinics and hospitals have been inundated with inquiries. The association of travel agents has reported “panic” among air travel customers.

“It’s very worrisome,” said Mohammad Akbar Khan, a passenger at the Karachi airport on Thursday, as his family clustered around a desk on the departures concourse normally used to immunize infants. “We just found out about this on the news, and we’re trying to find out what to do.”

The government, which is scrambling to meet the W.H.O. requirement, says it needs two weeks to make arrangements at airports and buy more vaccines. But to most Pakistanis, it is a jolting reminder of the gravity of a crisis that has been quietly building for years, and which is now, according to the W.H.O., spilling into other countries, threatening to undo decades of efforts to eradicate polio across the globe.[Continue reading…]

In July, 2012, the New York Times reported: Did the killing of Osama bin Laden have an unintended victim: the global drive to eradicate polio?

In Pakistan, where polio has never been eliminated, the C.I.A.’s decision to send a vaccination team into the Bin Laden compound to gather information and DNA samples clearly hurt the national polio drive. The question is: How badly?

After the ruse by Dr. Shakil Afridi was revealed by a British newspaper a year ago, angry villagers, especially in the lawless tribal areas on the Afghan border, chased off legitimate vaccinators, accusing them of being spies.

And then, late last month, Taliban commanders in two districts banned polio vaccination teams, saying they could not operate until the United States ended its drone strikes. One cited Dr. Afridi, who is serving a 33-year sentence imposed by a tribal court, as an example of how the C.I.A. could use the campaign to cover espionage.

“It was a setback, no doubt,” conceded Dr. Elias Durry, the World Health Organization’s polio coordinator for Pakistan. “But unless it spreads or is a very longtime affair, the program is not going to be seriously affected.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Antibiotic resistance poses a global threat

Nature: The ‘post-antibiotic’ era is near, according to a report released today by the World Health Organization (WHO). The decreasing effectiveness of antibiotics and other antimicrobial agents is a global problem, and a surveillance system should be established to monitor it, the group says.

There is nothing hopeful in the WHO’s report, which pulls together data from 129 member states to show extensive resistance to antimicrobial agents in every region of the world. Overuse of antibiotics in agriculture — to promote livestock growth — and in hospitals quickly leads to proliferation of drug-resistant bacteria, which then spread via human travel and poor sanitation practices.

“A post-antibiotic era — in which common infections and minor injuries can kill — far from being an apocalyptic fantasy, is instead a very real possibility for the twenty-first century,” writes Keiji Fukuda, WHO assistant director-general for health security, in a foreword to the report.

Perhaps the most worrying trend is the spread of resistance to carbapenems, the ‘antibiotics of last resort’, says Timothy Walsh, a medical microbiologist at Cardiff University, UK, who was an adviser for the report. “That’s taken us by surprise,” he says. “All of us are rather like rabbits in front of the headlights in how quickly this has taken off.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

World Bank wants water privatized, despite risks

Anna Lappé writes: Humans can survive weeks without food, but only days without water — in some conditions, only hours. It may sound clichéd, but it’s no hyperbole: Water is life. So what happens when private companies control the spigot? Evidence from water privatization projects around the world paints a pretty clear picture — public health is at stake.

In the run-up to its annual spring meeting this month, the World Bank Group, which offers loans, advice and other resources to developing countries, held four days of dialogues in Washington, D.C. Civil society groups from around the world and World Bank Group staff convened to discuss many topics. Water was high on the list.

It’s hard to think of a more important topic. We face a global water crisis, made worse by the warming temperatures of climate change. A quarter of the world’s people don’t have sufficient access to clean drinking water, and more people die every year from waterborne illnesses — such as cholera and typhoid fever — than from all forms of violence, including war, combined. Every hour, the United Nations estimates, 240 babies die from unsafe water.

The World Bank Group pushes privatization as a key solution to the water crisis. It is the largest funder of water management in the developing world, with loans and financing channeled through the group’s International Finance Corporation (IFC). Since the 1980s, the IFC has been promoting these water projects as part of a broader set of privatization policies, with loans and financing tied to enacting austerity measures designed to shrink the state, from the telecom industry to water utilities.

But international advocacy and civil society groups point to the pockmarked record of private-sector water projects and are calling on the World Bank Group to end support for private water. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Hunter-gatherers have healthier guts than urban dwellers

Nature Communications reports: The gut microbiota is responsible for many aspects of human health and nutrition, but most studies have focused on “western” populations. An international collaboration of researchers, including researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has for the first time analysed the gut microbiota of a modern hunter-gatherer community, the Hadza of Tanzania. The results of this work show that Hadza harbour a unique microbial profile with features yet unseen in any other human group, supporting the notion that Hadza gut bacteria play an essential role in adaptation to a foraging subsistence pattern. The study further shows how the intestinal flora may have helped our ancestors adapt and survive during the Paleolithic.

Bacterial populations have co-evolved with humans over millions of years, and have the potential to help us adapt to new environments and foods. Studies of the Hadza offer an especially rare opportunity for scientists to learn how humans survive by hunting and gathering, in the same environment and using similar foods as our ancestors did.

The research team, composed of anthropologists, microbial ecologists, molecular biologists, and analytical chemists, and led in part by Stephanie Schnorr and Amanda Henry of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, compared the Hadza gut microbiota to that of urban living Italians, representative of a “westernized” population. Their results, published recently in Nature Communications, show that the Hadza have a more diverse gut microbe ecosystem, i.e. more bacterial species compared to the Italians. “This is extremely relevant for human health”, says Stephanie Schnorr. “Several diseases emerging in industrialized countries, like IBS, colorectal cancer, obesity, type II diabetes, Crohn’s disease and others, are significantly associated with a reduction in gut microbial diversity.” [Continue reading…]

Jeff Leach recently accompanied some Hadza hunters and observed the way they handled a recently killed adult Impala: Before the two Hadza men I was with jumped in to help skin and gut the Impala, I quickly took swabs of each of their hands (and 1 hour after, 3 hours after, and so on) to assess how the skin (palm) microbiota change throughout the day/week of a typical Hadza (We’ve sampled the hands [and stools] of 150+ Hadza men, women, and children so far). As they slowly and methodically dismembered the animal, they carefully placed the stomach and its still steaming contents on the fleshy side of the recently removed hide. In a separate area, they piled the fatty internal organs (which men are only allowed to eat by the way). Once the animal had been processed more or less, I was amazed to see all three men take a handful of the partially digested plant material from the recently removed stomach to scrub off the copious amounts of blood that now covered their hands and foreman’s. This was followed by a final “cleaning” with dry grass for good measure.

While I was fascinated by the microbe-laden stomach contents being used as hand scrubber – presumably transferring an extraordinary diversity of microbes from the Impala gut to the hands of the Hadza – I was not prepared for what they did next. Once they had cleaned out – by hand – the contents of the stomach (“cleaned” is a generous word), they carved pieces of the stomach into bite-sized chunks and consumed it sushi-style. By which I mean they didn’t cook it or attempt to kill or eliminate the microbes from the gut of the Impala in anyway. And if this unprecedented transfer of microbes from the skin, blood, and stomach of another mammal wasn’t enough, they then turned their attention to the colon of the Impala.

After removing the poo pellets (which we collect samples of as well), they tossed the tubular colon onto a hastily built fire. However, it only sat on the fire for a minute at best and clearly not long enough to terminate the menagerie of invisible microbes clinging to the inside wall of the colon. They proceeded to cut the colon into chunks and to eat more or less raw. For myself, I kindly turned down offers to taste either the raw stomach or the partially cooked colon – but did eat some tasty Impala ribs I thoroughly turned on a stick over the fire to a microbial-free state of well done.

The Hadza explained that this is what they always do, and have always done (though I suspect sushi-style eating of innards is not an every-kill ritual. But….). Whether it’s an Impala, Dik Dik, Zebra, bush pig, Kudu or any other of the myriad of mammals they hunt and eat, becoming one with the deceased’s microbes in any number of ways is common place – same goes for 700 plus species of birds they hunt (minus abundant amounts of stomach contents for hand sanitizer!). While less obvious than at the “kill site,” the transfer of microbes continued back in camp when women, children and other men handled the newly arrived raw meat, internal organs, and skin. The transfer continued as the hunters engaged (touching) other members of the camp.

The breathtaking exchange (horizontal transfer) of microbes between the Hadza and their environment is more or less how it’s been for eons until humans started walling ourselves off from the microbial world through the many facets of globalization. Rather than think of ourselves as isolated islands of microbes, the Hadza teach us that we are better thought of as an archipelago of islands, once seamlessly connected to one another and to a larger metacommunity of microbes via a microbial super highway that runs through the gut and skin/feathers of every animal and water source on the landscape (for those of you keeping up with your homework, this is Macroecology 101). The same can be said for plants and their extraordinary diversity of microbes above (phyllosphere) and below ground (rhizosphere) that the Hadza, and once all humans, interacted with on a nearly continuous basis.

Facebooktwittermail

UN brands polio outbreak in Syria and Iraq ‘most challenging in history’

n13-iconThe Guardian reports: A UN agency has described the eruption of polio in Syria as perhaps “the most challenging outbreak in the history of polio eradication” after the number of cases in the war-ravaged country reached 38 and the first case was confirmed in neighbouring Iraq.

According to the World Health organisation (WHO), the Iraqi case – found in a six-month-old unvaccinated child in Baghdad – is related to the outbreak in Syria, fuelling fears that the virus is spreading around the Middle East.

“The current polio outbreak in Syria – now with one confirmed case in Iraq – is arguably the most challenging outbreak in the history of polio eradication,” said a spokesman for the UN relief and works agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA).

“Seriously damaged health infrastructure, poor health access and utilisation because of insecurity inside Syria, and massive movements of vulnerable and at-risk populations in and out of Syria – all make controlling the outbreak and rendering health protection to Palestine refugees in Syria and across the region very challenging.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The toxins that threaten our brains

f13-iconJames Hamblin writes: Forty-one million IQ points. That’s what Dr. David Bellinger determined Americans have collectively forfeited as a result of exposure to lead, mercury, and organophosphate pesticides. In a 2012 paper published by the National Institutes of Health, Bellinger, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, compared intelligence quotients among children whose mothers had been exposed to these neurotoxins while pregnant to those who had not. Bellinger calculates a total loss of 16.9 million IQ points due to exposure to organophosphates, the most common pesticides used in agriculture.

Last month, more research brought concerns about chemical exposure and brain health to a heightened pitch. Philippe Grandjean, Bellinger’s Harvard colleague, and Philip Landrigan, dean for global health at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, announced to some controversy in the pages of a prestigious medical journal that a “silent pandemic” of toxins has been damaging the brains of unborn children. The experts named 12 chemicals — substances found in both the environment and everyday items like furniture and clothing — that they believed to be causing not just lower IQs but ADHD and autism spectrum disorder. Pesticides were among the toxins they identified.

“So you recommend that pregnant women eat organic produce?” I asked Grandjean, a Danish-born researcher who travels around the world studying delayed effects of chemical exposure on children.

“That’s what I advise people who ask me, yes. It’s the best way of preventing exposure to pesticides.” Grandjean estimates that there are about 45 organophosphate pesticides on the market, and “most have the potential to damage a developing nervous system.”

Landrigan had issued that same warning, unprompted, when I spoke to him the week before. “I advise pregnant women to try to eat organic because it reduces their exposure by 80 or 90 percent,” he told me. “These are the chemicals I really worry about in terms of American kids, the organophosphate pesticides like chlorpyrifos.”

For decades, chlorpyrifos, marketed by Dow Chemical beginning in 1965, was the most widely used insect killer in American homes. Then, in 1995, Dow was fined $732,000 by the EPA for concealing more than 200 reports of poisoning related to chlorpyrifos. It paid the fine and, in 2000, withdrew chlorpyrifos from household products. Today, chlorpyrifos is classified as “very highly toxic” to birds and freshwater fish, and “moderately toxic” to mammals, but it is still used widely in agriculture on food and non-food crops, in greenhouses and plant nurseries, on wood products and golf courses. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Monsanto blamed for kidney disease epidemic in Sri Lanka

n13-iconOOSKAnews reports: New research by Sri Lankan medical professionals has identified high amounts of the herbicide glyphosate as the culprit behind the high levels of chronic kidney disease in the country’s North Central province and other key rice-producing areas.

The researchers found that glyphosate, which is widely used in paddy cultivation to prepare the soil, has the capacity to retain arsenic and other heavy metals in water.

Their report was presented to Special Projects Minister S. M. Chandrasena on February 5. The researchers urged the government to take immediate action to ban imports of the harmful agro-chemical. They said the prevalence of end-stage renal failure is reaching epidemic levels in the country.

Dr. Channa Jayasumana, a senior lecturer at the Medical Faculty of Rajarata University and the lead researcher, said: “The chemical glyphosate mixed with hard water lasted for about 20 years.”

“The toxins contained in agro-chemicals are deposited in hard water found in North Central Province, and they will remain in the human body for over six years,” he added.

Jayasumana said that in 2012, Sri Lanka had imported nearly 500,000 metric tonnes of glyphosate, which was developed by US-based international agricultural giant Monsanto. Monsanto’s patent for the broad-spectrum herbicide, marketed under the brand name “Roundup,” expired in 2000.

Jayasumana claimed Monsanto was aware of the health risks, but had not educated poor farmers and people living in areas where rice is cultivated to take precautions to prevent disease. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Barbara Garson: All the president’s middlemen

Every so often, the journalists who cover Washington, D.C., and its maze of federal departments and commissions and bureaus receive a strange sort of invitation. Calling you a “thought leader” or some similarly flattering form of corporate jargon, an agency urges you to attend a briefing about a particular issue — healthcare, the bank bailout, the latest jobs report.  There’s only one catch: the entire briefing is to be conducted on “deep background,” which means nothing said in the meeting can be quoted. It’s a strange little dance: the government asks you to come and hear its side of the story, yet nothing said can be used with the presenting official’s name attached to it. Sometimes you can’t even quote anything said in the meeting.  Then, the information is said to be shared for “informational purposes only.”

This is how the Obama administration regularly pushes its various messages. And from reading reports on these not-for-attribution meetings and chatting with friends and colleagues who have attended (I’ve never been invited), they rarely result in anything journalistically juicy or groundbreaking — with one exception.  That was an August 2010 briefing at the Treasury Department at which bloggers and Treasury officials discussed President Obama’s flagship initiative for aiding homeowners facing foreclosure and those who were “underwater” — that is, owing more on their mortgages than their homes were worth. Remember, the Obama administration had deployed hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue ailing mega-banks and financial firms such as Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. But struggling homeowners? Their lifeline turned out to be Obama’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), a poorly designed, deeply flawed effort to nudge lenders into rewriting the terms of homeowners’ mortgages so that they could remain in their homes.

All along the administration argued that HAMP was designed to help middle-class Americans; Wall Street had gotten its bail out, now this was Main Street’s lifeline. But at that August 2010 briefing, Treasury officials — we’ll never know who — made an incredible admission. Here’s what economics blogger Steve Randy Waldman, who was in attendance, wrote at the time:

“On HAMP, officials were surprisingly candid. The program has gotten a lot of bad press in terms of its Kafka-esque qualification process and its limited success in generating mortgage modifications under which families become able and willing to pay their debt. Officials pointed out that what may have been an agonizing process for individuals was a useful palliative for the system as a whole. Even if most HAMP applicants ultimately default, the program prevented an outbreak of foreclosures exactly when the system could have handled it least… The program was successful in the sense that it kept the patient alive until it had begun to heal. And the patient of this metaphor was not a struggling homeowner, but the financial system, a.k.a. the banks.”

In other words, HAMP wasn’t really about regular working people scraping and clawing to pay their mortgages. It was another way of keeping the banks, not homeowners, afloat as the global financial system slowly recovered.

The people interviewed by TomDispatch regular Barbara Garson for her latest book, Down the Up Escalator: How the 99% Live (the paperback version of which has just been published), know the failings of HAMP all too well. As Garson writes today, the Obama administration’s inclination to rely on the private sector to solve major societal problems can lead to dysfunction, if not chaos, a fact that could spell trouble for Obama’s signature policy achievement. Andy Kroll

The public-private profiteers
If you want to play doctor, don’t hire an insurance company as your receptionist
By Barbara Garson

Health care isn’t the first boon that President Obama tried to give us through a public-private partnership.  When he took office, more than 25% of U.S. home mortgages were underwater — meaning that people owed more on their houses than they could get if they tried to sell them.  The president offered those homeowners debt relief through banks.  Now he’s offering health care through insurance companies.

In both cases, the administration shied away from direct government aid.  Instead, it subsidized private companies to serve the people.  To get your government-subsidized mortgage modification, you applied at your bank; to get your government-mandated health coverage, you buy private insurance.

Let a Hundred Middlemen Bloom

In other countries with national health plans, a variety of independent health care providers — hospitals, doctors, and clinics, among others — deliver medical care, while the government doles out the compensation.  They let a hundred healthcare providers bloom, but there’s only a single payer.  If the U.S. moved to single-payer healthcare, however, what would happen to the private health insurance business?

In the 1990s, the conservative Heritage Foundation floated the idea of extending health coverage to more Americans via government exchanges or “connectors” that would funnel individual buyers to competing, for-profit health insurance companies.  In other words, let a hundred middlemen bloom.

Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail

How American doctors are giving their patients cancer

OpinionRita F. Redberg, a cardiologist and Rebecca Smith-Bindman, a radiologist, write: Despite great strides in prevention and treatment, cancer rates remain stubbornly high and may soon surpass heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States. Increasingly, we and many other experts believe that an important culprit may be our own medical practices: We are silently irradiating ourselves to death.

The use of medical imaging with high-dose radiation — CT scans in particular — has soared in the last 20 years. Our resulting exposure to medical radiation has increased more than sixfold between the 1980s and 2006, according to the National Council on Radiation Protection & Measurements. The radiation doses of CT scans (a series of X-ray images from multiple angles) are 100 to 1,000 times higher than conventional X-rays.

Of course, early diagnosis thanks to medical imaging can be lifesaving. But there is distressingly little evidence of better health outcomes associated with the current high rate of scans. There is, however, evidence of its harms.

The relationship between radiation and the development of cancer is well understood: A single CT scan exposes a patient to the amount of radiation that epidemiologic evidence shows can be cancer-causing. The risks have been demonstrated directly in two large clinical studies in Britain and Australia. In the British study, children exposed to multiple CT scans were found to be three times more likely to develop leukemia and brain cancer. In a 2011 report sponsored by Susan G. Komen, the Institute of Medicine concluded that radiation from medical imaging, and hormone therapy, the use of which has substantially declined in the last decade, were the leading environmental causes of breast cancer, and advised that women reduce their exposure to unnecessary CT scans.

CTs, once rare, are now routine. One in 10 Americans undergo a CT scan every year, and many of them get more than one. This growth is a result of multiple factors, including a desire for early diagnoses, higher quality imaging technology, direct-to-consumer advertising and the financial interests of doctors and imaging centers. CT scanners cost millions of dollars; having made that investment, purchasers are strongly incentivized to use them.

While it is difficult to know how many cancers will result from medical imaging, a 2009 study from the National Cancer Institute estimates that CT scans conducted in 2007 will cause a projected 29,000 excess cancer cases and 14,500 excess deaths over the lifetime of those exposed. Given the many scans performed over the last several years, a reasonable estimate of excess lifetime cancers would be in the hundreds of thousands. According to our calculations, unless we change our current practices, 3 percent to 5 percent of all future cancers may result from exposure to medical imaging. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

When cleanliness kills

The Sunday Mail reports: Using mouthwash is a ‘disaster’ for health, increasing the risk of heart attacks and strokes, scientists are warning.

Swilling kills off ‘good’ bacteria that help blood vessels relax – so increasing blood pressure.

When healthy volunteers used Corsodyl, a brand containing a powerful antiseptic, their blood pressure rose within hours.

Professor Amrita Ahluwalia, who led the study, last night condemned the widespread use of antiseptic mouthwash.

She said: ‘Killing off all these bugs each day is a disaster, when small rises in blood pressure have significant impact on morbidity and mortality from heart disease and stroke.’

More than half of British adults regularly use mouthwash, creating a market worth £180 million a year.

The study compared blood pressure levels in 19 healthy volunteers who started using Corsodyl twice daily. Their blood pressure rose by between 2 and 3.5 units (mmgh).

This effect ‘appeared within one day’ of using the mouthwash, researchers wrote in the journal Free Radical Biology And Medicine.

For each two-point rise in blood pressure, the risk of dying from heart disease rises by seven per cent, according to separate research. Such a rise also increases the risk of dying from stroke by ten per cent. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Christmas food for thought

Shelly Fan writes: The morning before Christmas eve, I’m sitting here in the dining room munching happily on the bits and pieces of what’s left of our gingerbread house that was only erected to its full glory the night before. I have not consumed this amount of carbohydrates in over a year.

Inside, a few species of my extensive gut microbe community are screaming bloody murder.

When you eat, you’re not only feeding your own fleshy vessel, but also the 100 trillion of microbugs that thrive in your intestines. Hardly “along for the ride”, these bugs not only help us digest foodstuff, ferment carbohydrates and proteins but also heavily impact our metabolism and general health. Depending on their composition, they tweak our risk of cardiovascular diseases, Type II diabetes and may even cause obesity in humans. There’s tantalizing evidence that their reach extends to the brain, influencing mood, anxiety and cognition in mice.

However, the gut microbiota* is a fluid, ever-changing beast. In one previous study, researchers transplanted gut-free mice with fresh or frozen human poop to inoculate them with a microbiome of known composition. When researchers switched these mice’s plant-based diet to a high-fat, high-sugar one, the structure of the established microbiome changed within a single day: some species dwindled in number, while others exploded onto the intestinal stage, bringing with them their particular metabolic tricks. (*The word “microbiome” refers to the set of genes in the gut bugs).

Similar diet-induced changes have been found in humans. When babies are weaned from their mothers’ milk and switch to solid food, their gut bug community simultaneously go through tumultuous changes. The gut bugs of African hunter-gatherers vastly differ from those in people grown on a Western diet. But these changes take weeks, even lifetimes. Just how fast can the microbiome adapt and change to a new diet? [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The society of microbes that make us what we are

Earth Island Journal: In your new book, Cooked, you explore the art of cooking through the elements of Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. I’m sure you love all your children equally, but of those four, which taught you the most?

Michael Pollan: Fermentation – without a doubt. I began this education about microbiology. I’ve always been interested in nature and other species, and this symbiotic relationship we have with them, and I have mostly paid attention to it in the plant world. I just had no idea of how rich our engagement with microbes was, and how invisible it is to us. I began it when I was doing the Air section and learning about sourdough cultures. But then I got into that last chapter and started learning about fermentation: how much of our food is fermented, the fact that you could cook without the use of any heat, and the fact that we are dependent on these microbes. They’re using us; we’re using them. For me that was most fascinating.

You point out that our feelings about microbes are an expression of our attitude toward the natural world.

Yeah, and our drive for control, at all costs. Microbes are frightening for a couple reasons. One is, they’re invisible. They’re an unseen enemy. And they are pathogens, I mean some of them. You know, conquering infectious disease was a tremendous achievement for our civilization. But as so often happens, we cast things in black and white. So microbes are all bad because some microbes cause disease, and we fail to realize how dependent we are on them for our health. I think we’re going to get to a point where we will discover the unit in evolution and natural selection is not the species as an individual, but what is called the “holobiont,” the group of species that travel together. And that’s what selection is acting on very often, is the super-organism of humans or cats or plants.

Plants, you know, they, too, have their own microbiome; I didn’t talk about this in the piece, but their microbiome is outside their bodies. It surrounds their roots. It’s in what’s called the rhizosphere. There’s a little ecosystem around the root of every plant, and I think we’re going to come to learn that it’s as important to plant health as our flora is to us. I think we’re going to start looking at all species as collectivities, and microbes will be the part of that. And that changes a lot. It changes how you approach agriculture. It certainly changes how you approach health. So I think we’re really on the verge of a paradigm shift around that. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The pharmaceutical industry and the fight against gun control

The Washington Post reports: One year ago, 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., were gunned down by Adam Lanza. In the aftermath, there was hope among gun-control advocates that the event would spark pro-control reform. They’ve set their eyes on on a few states, but over the past year, more of them have loosened gun restrictions than tightened them. While gun control may face an uphill battle, though, a related policy area has seen change in the wake of the tragedy.

“We think that Sandy Hook opened up the eyes of governors and state legislators and policymakers around the country that mental health has been cut enough,” Andrew Sperling, the director of legislative advocacy at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, told Post TV’s “In Play.”

Some 36 states increased their mental health-care budgets in 2013, according to NAMI. In Colorado, where James Holmes opened fire on a crowded movie theater a little over a year ago, the mental-health budget was increased by 13.5 percent.

State-level efforts have focused on five broad categories — the mental-health system, crisis and inpatient care, community mental health, criminal justice and mental health, and civil rights and stigma reduction — NAMI wrote in a fall report.

The Post fails to note that the innocuously named NAMI, receives most of its funding from the pharmaceutical industry.

It’s not that pharma has a natural alignment with the opponents of gun control, yet what the NRA and its supporters have succeeded in doing in the wake of Newtown is to shift the debate away from gun control onto mental health — a shift which clearly serves the interests of the drug industry.

27% of all mental health services in the United States come through Medicaid and Medicaid is a cash cow for the pharmaceutical industry.

In the 1980s and ’90s, the psychiatric system went through a major transformation as psychiatric medication replaced psychotherapy as the standard of care. This broadened the scope of psychiatry in two ways. With patient care being reduced to medication management, doctors could see more patients. And with a massive growth in the number of Americans receiving disability for mental illness, the market for psychiatric medication has been booming, thanks in part to Medicaid funding.

The pharmaceutical industry has only one interest: selling drugs. It can reasonably be described as the most successful form of organized crime in human history. When companies repeatedly pay billions of dollars in settlements, it is clear that they regard such settlements as simply a component in the operating costs.

That the drug manufacturers are really nothing more than sophisticated drug pushers can be illustrated in numerous ways — consider for instance the way in which attention deficit disorder has become such a profitable diagnosis.

After more than 50 years leading the fight to legitimize attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Keith Conners could be celebrating.

Severely hyperactive and impulsive children, once shunned as bad seeds, are now recognized as having a real neurological problem. Doctors and parents have largely accepted drugs like Adderall and Concerta to temper the traits of classic A.D.H.D., helping youngsters succeed in school and beyond.

But Dr. Conners did not feel triumphant this fall as he addressed a group of fellow A.D.H.D. specialists in Washington. He noted that recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the diagnosis had been made in 15 percent of high school-age children, and that the number of children on medication for the disorder had soared to 3.5 million from 600,000 in 1990. He questioned the rising rates of diagnosis and called them “a national disaster of dangerous proportions.”

“The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous,” Dr. Conners, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Duke University, said in a subsequent interview. “This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”

The rise of A.D.H.D. diagnoses and prescriptions for stimulants over the years coincided with a remarkably successful two-decade campaign by pharmaceutical companies to publicize the syndrome and promote the pills to doctors, educators and parents. With the children’s market booming, the industry is now employing similar marketing techniques as it focuses on adult A.D.H.D., which could become even more profitable.

None of the above considerations should be taken to imply that mental health services are not indeed neglected in this country — simply that drugging and forced treatment are not the answer.

As for the issue of the epidemic of school shootings, ironically this has mostly served as a distraction from the much larger issue of gun violence.

Following the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in 2011, Emily Badger wrote:

Today, gun laws that target the mentally ill — alongside convicted felons — are founded on a series of assumptions: that people with mental illness are particularly dangerous, that legislation restricting their gun ownership will lead to decreased violence, and that this strategy will make a difference in the overall safety of society.

Such laws also assume that the background-check system is an effective means in the first place of keeping guns out of the hands of any type of dangerous person.

“In a society like ours where firearms are so prevalent — there are more handguns than there are people in the U.S. today — that seems like a highly dubious proposition,” [the director of the Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry at Columbia University, Paul] Appelbaum said. “People who really want guns are arguably likely to be able to get them whether they are covered by this statute or not. It’s an empirical question as to whether this actually works in keeping guns out of anybody’s hands, or at least very many people’s hands.”

The best data Appelbaum has found, which dates to the late 1980s and early ’90s, also suggests that, at most, 3-5 percent of violent acts in the U.S. are attributable to serious mental illnesses as a risk factor — and most of those acts don’t involve guns. More recent studies in England and Sweden suggest that number for violent acts may be as low as 1-2 percent.

“To say that another way, if no one with a mental illness committed a violent act, we would still have 95-97 percent of the baseline level of violence,” Appelbaum said. “However you cut it, it looks as though we’re just talking about the tip of the iceberg in terms of problems of violence in our society, which raises the quite reasonable question as to why we’re so focused on the mentally ill?”

Not only is that focus a distraction, he adds, but it comes with the significant downside of further stigmatizing people with mental illness and confusing the public as to the notion that mental illness is a significant cause of violence in this country.

Facebooktwittermail

Worried about terrorism? You should be more afraid of bread!

David Perlmutter, MD writes: While gluten makes up the lion’s share of protein in wheat, research reveals that modern wheat is capable of producing more than 23,000 different proteins, any one of which could trigger a potentially damaging inflammatory response. One protein in particular is wheat germ agglutinin (WGA). WGA is classified as a lectin — a term for a protein produced by an organism to protect itself from predation.

All grains produce lectins, which selectively bind to unique proteins on the surfaces of bacteria, fungi, and insects. These proteins are found throughout the animal kingdom. One protein in particular for which WGA has an extremely high affinity is N-Acetylglucosamine. N-Acetylglucosamine richly adorns the casing of insects and plays an important role in the structure of the cellular walls of bacteria. More importantly, it is a key structural component in humans in a variety of tissues, including tendons, joint surfaces, cartilage, the lining of the entire digestive tract, and even the lining of the hundreds of miles of blood vessels found within each of us.

It is precisely the ability of WGA to bind to proteins lining the gut that raises concern amongst medical researchers. When WGA binds to these proteins, it may leave these cells less well protected against the harmful effects of the gut contents.

WGA may also have direct toxic effects on the heart, endocrine, and immune systems, and even the brain. In fact, so readily does WGA make its way into the brain that scientists are actually testing it as a possible means of delivering medicines in an attempt to treat Alzheimer’s disease.

And again, the concern here is not just for a small segment of the population who happened to inherit susceptibility for sensitivity to gluten. This is a concern as it relates to all humans. As medical researcher Sayer Ji stated, “What is unique about WGA is that it can do direct damage to the majority of tissues in the human body without requiring a specific set of genetic susceptibilities and/or immune-mediated articulations. This may explain why chronic inflammatory and degenerative conditions are endemic to wheat-consuming populations even when overt allergies or intolerances to wheat gluten appear exceedingly rare.”

The gluten issue is indeed very real and threatening. But it now seems clear that lectin proteins found in wheat may harbor the potential for even more detrimental effects on human health. It is particularly alarming to consider the fact that there is a move to actually genetically modify wheat to enhance its WGA content.

Scientific research is now giving us yet another reason to reconsider the merits of our daily bread. The story of WGA’s potential destructive effects on human health is just beginning to be told. We should embrace the notion that low levels of exposure to any toxin over an extended period can lead to serious health issues. And this may well characterize the under-recognized threat of wheat consumption for all humans.

Facebooktwittermail

Google’s plan to prolong human suffering

The idiots in Silicon Valley — many of whom aren’t yet old enough to have experienced adventures of aging like getting a colonoscopy — seem to picture “life-extension” as though it means more time to improve one’s tennis strokes in a future turned into a never-ending vacation. But what life extension will much more likely simply mean is prolonged infirmity.

If it was possible to build an economy around “health care” — which should much more accurately be called disease management — then the prospect of a perpetually expanding population of the infirm might look like a golden business opportunity, but what we’re really looking at is an economy built on false promises.

Daniel Callahan writes: This fall Google announced that it would venture into territory far removed from Internet search. Through a new company, Calico, it will be “tackling” the “challenge” of aging.

The announcement, though, was vague about what exactly the challenge is and how exactly Google means to tackle it. Calico may, with the aid of Big Data, simply intensify present efforts to treat the usual chronic diseases that afflict the elderly, like cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s. But there is a more ambitious possibility: to “treat” the aging process itself, in an attempt to slow it.

Of course, the dream of beating back time is an old one. Shakespeare had King Lear lament the tortures of aging, while the myth of Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth in Florida and the eternal life of the Struldbrugs in “Gulliver’s Travels” both fed the notion of overcoming aging.

For some scientists, recent anti-aging research — on gene therapy, body-part replacement by regeneration and nanotechnology for repairing aging cells — has breathed new life into this dream. Optimists about average life expectancy’s surpassing 100 years in the coming century, like James W. Vaupel, the founder and director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, cite promising animal studies in which the lives of mice have been extended through genetic manipulation and low-calorie diets. They also point to the many life-extending medical advances of the past century as precedents, with no end in sight, and note that average life expectancy in the United States has long been rising, from 47.3 in 1900 to 78.7 in 2010. Others are less sanguine. S. Jay Olshansky, a research associate at the Center on Aging at the University of Chicago, has pointed out that sharp reductions in infant mortality explain most of that rise. Even if some people lived well into old age, the death of 50 percent or more of infants and children for most of history kept the average life expectancy down. As those deaths fell drastically over the past century, life expectancy increased, helped by improvements in nutrition, a decline in infectious disease and advances in medicine. But there is no reason to think another sharp drop of that sort is in the cards.

Even if anti-aging research could give us radically longer lives someday, though, should we even be seeking them? Regardless of what science makes possible, or what individual people want, aging is a public issue with social consequences, and these must be thought through.

Consider how dire the cost projections for Medicare already are. In 2010 more than 40 million Americans were over 65. In 2030 there will be slightly more than 72 million, and in 2050 more than 83 million. The Congressional Budget Office has projected a rise of Medicare expenditures to 5.8 percent of gross domestic product in 2038 from 3.5 percent today, a burden often declared unsustainable.

Modern medicine is very good at keeping elderly people with chronic diseases expensively alive. At 83, I’m a good example. I’m on oxygen at night for emphysema, and three years ago I needed a seven-hour emergency heart operation to save my life. Just 10 percent of the population — mainly the elderly — consumes about 80 percent of health care expenditures, primarily on expensive chronic illnesses and end-of-life costs. Historically, the longer lives that medical advances have given us have run exactly parallel to the increase in chronic illness and the explosion in costs. Can we possibly afford to live even longer — much less radically longer?

At the heart of the idiocy which Silicon Valley cultivates are a host of profound misconceptions about the nature of time.

Having become slaves of technology, we take it as given that time is measured by clocks and calendars. Life extension is thus conceived in purely numerical terms. Yet the time that matters is not the time that can be measured by any device.

That’s why in an age in which technology was supposed to reward us all with extra time, instead we experience time as being perpetually compressed.

Having been provided with the means to do more and more things at the same time — text, tweet, talk etc. — our attention gets sliced into narrower and narrower slivers, and the more time gets filled, the more time-impoverished we become.

For the narcissist, there can be no greater fear than the prospect of the termination of individual existence, yet death is truly intrinsic to life. What it enables is not simply annihilation but more importantly, renewal.

Facebooktwittermail

23andMe’s goal is to hoard your DNA data

Charles Seife writes: If there’s a gene for hubris, the 23andMe crew has certainly got it. Last Friday the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered the genetic-testing company immediately to stop selling its flagship product, its $99 “Personal Genome Service” kit. In response, the company cooed that its “relationship with the FDA is extremely important to us” and continued hawking its wares as if nothing had happened. Although the agency is right to sound a warning about 23andMe, it’s doing so for the wrong reasons.

Since late 2007, 23andMe has been known for offering cut-rate genetic testing. Spit in a vial, send it in, and the company will look at thousands of regions in your DNA that are known to vary from human to human—and which are responsible for some of our traits. For example a site in your genome named rs4481887 can come in three varieties. If you happen to have what is known as the GG variant, there is a good probability that you are unable to smell asparagus in your urine; those blessed with the GA or AG varieties are much more likely to be repulsed by their own pee after having a few spears at Spargelfest.

At first, 23andMe seemed to angle its kit as a fun way to learn a little genetics using yourself as a test subject. (“Our goal is to connect you to the 23 paired volumes of your own genetic blueprint… bringing you personal insight into ancestry, genealogy, and inherited traits,” read the company’s website.) The FDA had little problem with the company telling you why you had dry ear wax (rs17822931) or whether you’re likely to sneeze when you look at a bright light (rs10427255).

That phase didn’t last for long, because there is much more interesting stuff in your genome than novelty items. Certain regions signal an increased risk of breast cancer, the impending onset of metabolic diseases, and sensitivity to medications. 23andMe—as well as a number of other companies—edged closer and closer to marketing their services as a way of predicting and even preventing health problems. And any kit intended to cure, mitigate, treat, prevent, or diagnose a disease is, according to federal law, a “medical device” that needs to be deemed safe and effective by the FDA. Since mid-2009, 23andMe has been negotiating with the agency, and in July 2012, the company finally began the process of getting clearance from the FDA to sell the kit that it had already been selling for five years.

Everything seemed rosy until, in what a veteran Forbes reporter calls “the single dumbest regulatory strategy [he had] seen in 13 years of covering the Food and Drug Administration,” 23andMe changed its strategy. It apparently blew through its FDA deadlines, effectively annulling the clearance process, and abruptly cut off contact with the agency in May. Adding insult to injury the company started an aggressive advertising campaign (“Know more about your health!”), leaving little doubt about the underlying medical purpose of 23andMe’s Personal Genome Service. This left the agency with little alternative but to take action. “As part of our interactions with you, including more than 14 face-to-face and teleconference meetings, hundreds of email exchanges, and dozens of written communications,” the agency complained, “we provided you with… statistical advice, and discussed potential risk mitigation strategies.” It is the tone of a spurned spouse, exasperated and angry that 23andMe is putting no effort into salvaging their relationship.

But as the FDA frets about the accuracy of 23andMe’s tests, it is missing their true function, and consequently the agency has no clue about the real dangers they pose. The Personal Genome Service isn’t primarily intended to be a medical device. It is a mechanism meant to be a front end for a massive information-gathering operation against an unwitting public. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail