It seems like the entire month of October has been one big Halloween Trick (not Treat) as the grotesque and blatantly illegal ‘melamine in food’ imported from China horror just keeps getting worse and worse. Some might wonder why all food products from China weren’t immediately banned back when tainted pet food cause the painful deaths of thousands of dogs and cats last year, once it was confirmed that Chinese state-owned food processors were adding the industrial plastic to wheat gluten to fool tests for protein content in this ubiquitous protein additive. Alas, imports were not banned, and now this dangerous adulterant is in hundreds of common food items.

Thousands of Chinese infants were poisoned when melamine was added to infant formulas and milk products. It’s in medicines exported and has caused sickness and death in Central and South America. Now it’s in candy and eggs and almost every wheat product from China. The US does not require country of origin labeling of foods, thus American consumers have no real way of knowing they’re buying poison.

Tainted Chinese Products Criminal Timeline traces the tainted Chinese food scandal back through 2004, and includes many other adulterants Americans have been ingesting. Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical. Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics. Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria. Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides. It is not a pretty picture, and our FDA has been criminally lax in their duty of protecting the safety of our food supply.

As for melamine, here’s an Update: now coffee, Snickers, KitKat, M&Ms and Heinz products such as baby cereals and crackers. The latest contamination is being found in eggs, which got there via tainted animal feed. This has caused United Nations officials to worry that it is also in chicken, pork, farmed fish and other meats.

Melamine causes kidney stones and kidney failure. The Chinese babies who died all died of kidney and organ failure. So it comes as no surprise that doctors are now seeing a rise in kidney stones in US children as young as 5. The situation is very, very serious.

Educate yourself! Fused Report has a cache of reports on melamine contamination from news organizations all over the world, and Food Standards offers a detailed risk assessment of the adulterant. There is a constantly updated list of tainted products available at the Natural Remedies Blog too, and with Halloween coming this Friday pay special attention to the candy list. Also see FDA allowing melamine in Halloween candy.

Protect yourself and your family, because our government’s FDA will not.

Links:

A Rise in Kidney Stones Seen in U.S. Children
Cache of News Reports on Melamine Contamination
Food Standards: detailed risk assessment
List of Contaminated Products
FDA allowing melamine in Halloween candy

I don’t know about you, but in my family there is an unfortunate tendency to develop serious headaches. Two sisters have suffered migraines since childhood, my daughter gets them too, and her son has fairly regular headaches that end up sending him to his bed in pain. Lots of people get headaches not quite so severe, and various headache remedies have become part of urban legend lore as well as accounting for billions of dollars’ worth of pharmaceutical company profits over the years.

Sometimes it’s not just a matter of “take two aspirin, call me in the morning.” Luckily, Stephanie over at the blog One Big Health Nut has researched a total of 23 Ways To Get Rid Of & Prevent Headaches. These have solid science behind them and links to demonstrate that, so it’s definitely a blog post worthy of checking out and keeping in your bookmarks if you or anyone in your family suffers from debilitating headaches.

I was gratified to see that our own long-time “family recipes” are indeed supported by good science. Such as drinking lots of water, dehydration being a cause of headaches. Limiting caffine and alcohol, eating regularly and staying away from fried foods too. The only thing missing that I would add to the list is one that Stephanie semi-includes. She advises that a paste of cinnamon and water applied to the brow and temples can help relieve headaches, and this is supported enough to use if you can. The same idea using hot pepper powder has worked well in my own family, the capsaicin stimulating scalp circulation. Which I presume is the method that works with cinnamon paste.

This very useful resource is excellent, so do keep it on file!

Most parents know very well how heart-warming their baby’s smile can be, to the point where just doing something silly to get that smile-fix becomes a regular way of life. I’ve heard all sorts of weird philosophies about baby smiles – “it’s just gas,” “they’ve got the intelligence of rats,” etc., etc., things that only non-parents would ever think of.

So it’s cool that researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine have finally demonstrated the addictive quality of baby smiles, as reported recently in the journal Pediatrics. Turns out that baby smiles actually ‘light up’ the reward centers of the human brain, particularly in Moms – it’s what they call a “Natural High.”

Baby’s Smile Is A Natural High

The researchers hope their work will help scientists understand the unique mother-infant bonding so critical for proper child development (and mothers’ mental health).

No doubt this is fine research, and it’s gratifying to know that science is actually looking at phenomena they could have known all along if they’d just asked a Mom. Oh, well. That famous scientific skepticism needs physical ‘proof’ of physical phenomena before it will believe anything most regular people know from direct empirical experience. Maybe they’ll now come up with a pill that mimics this high, which will no doubt be a big item on the black market for pharmaceuticals…

Two York University researchers have published a study in the January 3rd issue of PLoS Medicine [Public Library of Science] demonstrating that U.S. pharmaceutical companies spend nearly twice as much money promoting their drugs to doctors and the public than on research and development of new drugs.

Big Pharma Spends More on Advertising than Research and Development puts the lie to the pharmaceutical industry’s self-serving mantra that the cost of drugs in the U.S. has to be higher than anywhere else in the world so that newer, better drugs – and drugs designed to treat relatively rare but deadly diseases – can be developed. High prices for prescription drugs offset this massive expenditure, they tell us, and the U.S. government has tended to accept the lie without challenge.

The study by Marc-André Gagnon and Joel Lexchin used data from 2004 (the latest available to them) from doctors and the pharmaceutical industry itself. Their analysis showed that drug companies spend nearly 25% of every sales dollar on promotion, but less than 13.5% on research and development. Out of domestic expenditures in 2004 on drugs of $235.4 billion.

Back in 2006 the New York Times published an article about another aspect of drug marketing, entitled Doctors Object to Gathering of Drug Data. This article describes the practice of pharmaceutical companies keeping computerized dossiers showing which physicians are prescribing what drugs. This lets drug sales representatives pressure a doctor to write more prescriptions for a name-brand medicine, or offer a means to use high-pressure tactics to convince a doctor to prescribe their company’s version of a drug instead of a competitor’s version or generic alternative.

Seems that so many doctors were complaining about this use of their prescription records to enable high-pressure salesmen to waste their precious clinical time, that Big Pharma became concerned that states would start applying restrictions. So the AMA decided it would be generous and give individual physicians the choice of keeping their prescribing practices off limits to drug companies and their sales forces (90,000 strong, per 2006 estimate).

The Times quotes Jamie Reidy, a former drug salesman for Eli Lilly who was fired for writing Hard Sell, an exposé of pharmaceutical industry sales practices, talking about the use of prescription data…

“It’s the most powerful tool a drug rep has, for sure.” He goes on to describe the targeting of “cowboys,” the term used for physicians who start prescribing a drug as soon as it hits the market. Drug sales reps will go see that doctor in the first week to enlist him in prescribing their newest, most expensive drugs. Reidy revealed that the prescription data for doctors is updated every two weeks.

The high cost of drugs in the U.S. is contributing significantly to our current (and worsening) health care crisis. It’s also limiting availability of Medicaid and other government programs in many states designed to insure the poor, because too much of the funding goes toward expensive, name-brand drugs instead of less expensive or generic alternatives. It’s also contributing to the overall Medicare crisis that is not solved by the maze of prescription drug benefit plans hardly anyone can understand.

There are other issues involved in the crisis related to overprescription generally, the tendency to treat all conditions with drugs rather than actual medical therapies, and the extension of our drug-dependency to increasingly younger and younger patients who may not need drug therapies at all. It’s an issue to keep an eye on for sure!

Links:

Big Pharma Spends More on Advertising than Research and Development

Doctors Object to Gathering of Drug Data

Health Spending Exceeded Record $2 Trillion in 2006

Drug Marketing Fraud: Whistle-Blower Awarded $1.6 Million