U.S. COMPLETELY RELIANT ON CHINA FOR LIFE-SAVING ANTIBIOTICS

By Christopher Bedford, Managing Editor of The Daily Caller

 

“The crucial ingredients for nearly all antibiotics, steroids and many other lifesaving drugs are now made exclusively in China,” The New York Times reported in the 32nd paragraph of a Friday article entitled “Medicines made in India set off safety worries.”

 

Indeed, 2014 marks the tenth anniversary of Bristol-Myers Squibb — the last American plant that manufactured the key ingredients for penicillin and other drugs — shuttering it’s upstate New York factory.

 

“Like other manufacturing operations, drug plants have been moving to Asia because labor, construction, regulatory and environmental costs are lower there,” the Times reported in 2009.

 

As China has grown economically, it has also grown more bellicose.

 

An October Washington Free Beacon article highlighted the Chinese military’s “political warfare against the United States,” including "funding" pro-China activities abroad, recruiting intelligence sources, spreading propaganda, engaging in media activities, funding front groups that promote Chinese strategy and goals and supporting perceived ‘friends’ of China.”

 

In November, China announced a new air zone over the South China Sea, requiring commercial airlines to identify themselves. An angry American response, including a nearly six-hour January meeting with Vice President Joe Biden, has failed to sway China to abandon the unilateral move.

 

In December, India and Japan began conducting joint naval exercises in response to China engaging the two countries in territorial-water disputes.

 

And speaking on tensions between China and Japan, including a dispute over islands, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told a February audience that “Asia is more in a position of 19th-century Europe, where military conflict is not ruled out. Between Japan and China, the issue for the rest of us is that neither side be tempted to rely on force to settle the issue.”

 

The comments played off of a speech by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who in late January warned that China and Japan should work to avoid repeating the mistakes of WWI.

 

The United States is a close ally to Japan, maintains military bases on the archipelago, and is pledged to defend the island nation if it is attacked. The U.S. and Japan broadened their security alliance in October to include stationing drones at American military bases in the country.

 

China’s economy is completely at the mercy of the ruling Communist Party in Beijing.

Source - http://dailycaller.com/2014/02/17/report-americans-completely-reliant-on-china-for-antibiotics/


NOTE:  Readers may be interested to know that almost all their vitamins and supplements are also manufactured in China.

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NEW DRUG IS SAID TO CURE HEPATITIS-C IN THREE MONTHS

 

Experts have declared the end of hepatitis C, thanks to a three-month course of tablets that could see the killer blood disease eradicated from Britain.  The development of Sovaldi (sofosbuvir) has been hailed as a ‘game-changer’ in the treatment of the illness.

 

‘This new drug gives us the opportunity to clear hepatitis C from the UK,’ says Graham Foster, professor of hepatology at Queen Mary, University of London.

 

Hepatitis C is a blood-borne virus that was first identified in 1989. Many of those affected received contaminated blood from transfusions or medical procedures prior to 1989, or by sharing needles or having tattoos.  Famous sufferers include Body Shop founder Dame Anita Roddick, who died of a brain haemorrhage in 2007, and former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson.  The virus is estimated to affect 215,000 adults in the UK, of whom more than half remain undiagnosed.

 

Untreated, it rots the liver and, over a period of 30 to 40 years, leads to cirrhosis and liver cancer. Death rates have been rising rapidly. In 2011 there were 381 deaths from hepatitis C, but  it now kills more people than diseases related to HIV.  Until now, treatments, which can last up to a year, have been fairly effective, with a 60 to 70 per cent cure rate. But they have unpleasant side effects.

 

Sofosbuvir, when taken in combination with the current treatment options – injections of interferon and ribavirin tablets – cures up to 90 per cent of patients in just 12 weeks, and is tolerated by almost everyone.  Prof Foster says: ‘If we treat 20,000 patients every year for the next ten years, nobody will transmit the virus and it will be gone.

 

Hepatitis C mutates every time it copies itself, making treating it like hitting a moving target.  ‘Sofosbuvir hits at the enzyme at the very heart of the virus, stopping it from mutating or becoming resistant.’

SUPERBUGS BREEDING IN WASTE WATER TREATMENT PLANTS - WATER USED FOR DRINKING, IRRIGATION

IT HAPPENS AT WASTE WATER TREATMENT PLANTS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD
 

Tests at two wastewater treatment plants in northern China revealed antibiotic-resistant bacteria were not only escaping purification but also breeding and spreading their dangerous cargo.

 

Joint research by scientists from Rice, Nankai and Tianjin universities found "superbugs" carrying New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1), a multidrug-resistant gene first identified in India in 2010, in wastewater disinfected by chlorination.

 

They are everywhere, in every country.

 

They are growing by eating garbage, and no antibiotic can kill them.  They are the perfect survivors.

 

Worse.  They are transferring their antibiotic resistant genes to other less harmful bacteria. 

 

"It turns out that they transfer these genetic determinants for antibiotic resistance to indigenous bacteria in the environment, so they are not only proliferating within the wastewater treatment plant, they're also propagating and dispersing antibiotic resistance," said a scientist.

Read more - http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Superbugs_found_breeding_in_sewage_plants_999.html


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THE END OF ANTIBIOTICS - SUPERBUGS HAVE WON

 

CDC official says

'We've reached the end of antibiotics'

 

By Rick Moran for The American Thinker

They've been predicting this for years and it looks like it's finally come to pass.

In our human hubris, we think we can outsmart or defeat Mother Nature. It's things like this that remind us how our pitiful efforts to control the natural world usually go for naught.

Daily Mail:

A high-ranking official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared in an interview with PBS that the age of antibiotics has come to an end.

'For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about "The end of antibiotics, question mark?"' said Dr Arjun Srinivasan. 'Well, now I would say you can change the title to "The end of antibiotics, period."  The associate director of the CDC sat down with Frontline over the summer for a lengthy interview about the growing problem of antibacterial resistance.

Srinivasan, who is also featured in a Frontline report called 'Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria,'  said that both humans and livestock have been overmedicated to such a degree that bacteria are now resistant to antibiotics.   'We're in the post-antibiotic era,' he said. 'There are patients for whom we have no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years ago even we could have treated, but now we can't.'.  Dr Srinivasan offered an example of this notion, citing the recent case of three Tampa Bay Buccaneers players who made headlines after reportedly contracting potentially deadly MRSA infections, which until recently were largely restricted to hospitals.

About 10 years ago, however, the CDC official began seeing outbreaks of different kinds of MRSA infections in schools and gyms.  'In hospitals, when you see MRSA infections, you oftentimes see that in patients who have a catheter in their blood, and that creates an opportunity for MRSA to get into their bloodstream,' he said.  'In the community, it was causing a very different type of infection. It was causing a lot of very, very serious and painful infections of the skin, which was completely different from what we would see in health care.'

I remember in the early 90's being prescribed some antibiotics and the doctor telling me to finish taking the pills even after I feel better. He said at the time that because so many people are not taking the drugs correctly, that there will come a day when most bugs are resistant to antibiotics - and we'll only have ourselves to blame.

 

If we have, indeed, reached the end of an era with antibiotics, even the smallest cuts could mean death. I don't think we're anywhere near that point, but that's certainly in our future unless Big Pharma can bail us out by developing drugs that can counter the resistant strains of viruses.

Source - http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/10/cdc_official_says_weve_reached_the_end_of_antibiotics.html

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When We Lose Antibiotics,

Here’s Everything Else We’ll Lose Too

 

• By Maryn McKenna - Wired Magazine

 

If we really lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance — and trust me, we’re not far off — here’s what we would lose. Not just the ability to treat infectious disease; that’s obvious.

 

But also: The ability to treat cancer, and to transplant organs, because doing those successfully relies on suppressing the immune system and willingly making ourselves vulnerable to infection. Any treatment that relies on a permanent port into the bloodstream — for instance, kidney dialysis.

 

Any major open-cavity surgery, on the heart, the lungs, the abdomen. Any surgery on a part of the body that already harbors a population of bacteria: the guts, the bladder, the genitals. Implantable devices: new hips, new knees, new heart valves. Cosmetic plastic surgery. Liposuction. Tattoos.

 

We’d lose the ability to treat people after traumatic accidents, as major as crashing your car and as minor as your kid falling out of a tree. We’d lose the safety of modern childbirth: Before the antibiotic era, 5 women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth. One out of every nine skin infections killed. Three out of every 10 people who got pneumonia died from it.

 

And we’d lose, as well, a good portion of our cheap modern food supply. Most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised.

 

Without the drugs that keep livestock healthy in concentrated agriculture, we’d lose the ability to raise them that way. Either animals would sicken, or farmers would have to change their raising practices, spending more money when their margins are thin. Either way, meat — and fish and seafood, also raised with abundant antibiotics in the fish farms of Asia — would become much more expensive.

 

And it wouldn’t be just meat. Antibiotics are used in plant agriculture as well, especially on fruit. Right now, a drug-resistant version of the bacterial disease fire blight is attacking American apple crops. There’s currently one drug left to fight it. And when major crops are lost, the local farm economy goes too.

 

Read more - http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/11/end-abx/

 

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ONLY HALF OF DRUGS REMOVED BY SEWAGE TREATMENT

 

Maybe that explains why you have not be feeling yourself for a while.

 

Only about half of the prescription drugs and other newly emerging contaminants in sewage are removed by treatment plants.

 

That’s the finding of a new report by the International Joint Commission, a consortium of officials from the United States and Canada who study the Great Lakes.

 

“The compounds show up in low levels – parts per billion or parts per trillion – but aquatic life and humans aren’t exposed to just one at a time, but a whole mix,” said Antonette Arvai, physical scientist at the International Joint Commission and the lead author of the study.

 

More than 1,400 wastewater treatment plants in the United States and Canada discharge 4.8 billion gallons of treated effluent into the Great Lakes basin every day, according to the study.

 

Six chemicals were detected frequently and had a low rate of removal in treated effluent: an herbicide, an anti-seizure drug, two antibiotic drugs, an antibacterial drug and an anti-inflammatory drug.

 

Caffeine, acetaminophen and estriol (a natural estrogen) also were frequently detected in sewage but had high removal rates.

 

Triclosan, an antibacterial and antifungal compound found in some soaps, toothpastes and other consumer products, has proven acutely toxic to algae and can act as a hormone disruptor in fish. Triclosan was found frequently, according to the new report and plants had “medium removal efficiency.”

Read more - http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=only-half-of-drugs-removed-by-sewage-treatment


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CONTRACEPTIVE PILL DOUBLES RISK OF GLAUCOMA

Women who take the contraceptive pill for more than three years are twice as likely to suffer from glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness, a study has found.

The hormone oestrogen, a crucial component of oral contraceptives, could play a role in the development of the condition which causes irreversible damage to the optic nerve, scientists said.

Long-term users of the Pill should be routinely screened for glaucoma and monitored regularly by eye doctors for any changes in their condition, they claimed.

The contraceptive pill has previously been linked to a host of eye conditions, with some studies suggesting oestrogen could play a role in the development of glaucoma.

Read more - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10458175/Contraceptive-pill-doubles-glaucoma-risk.html

Dangers of birth control pills - a woman tells her personal story
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-hergenrader/the-dangerous-side-of-birth-control_b_3667093.html

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THOUSANDS OF CITIZENS FROM INDIA KILLED BY PHARMA DRUG TRIALS

(NaturalNews) The second largest country in the world, India, has become a hotbed of pharmaceutical fraud, as unscrupulous drug companies, mostly from the West, continue to use India's generally poorer populations as human guinea pigs in unethical and flat-out inhumane clinical trials.

 

And India's Supreme Court is finally taking action against this massive organized crime ring by ordering India's health ministry to justify its approval of 162 global clinical trials to take place in the country.

 

Because it is a rapidly developing nation with lax regulatory protocols, India has been a primary target of the pharmaceutical cartel in its never-ending quest to dominate the medical systems of the world.

 

Major drug companies have been largely successful in swindling the Indian government to approve trials for all sorts of "new chemical entities" (NCEs), many of which have been tested on rural Indians in poorer communities, where there is minimal access to proper medical care.

 

The situation has apparently gotten so out of control in India that several human rights advocacy groups have taken to the legal system for a remedy, filing a petition back in February pressuring government officials to take action.

 

India's Supreme Court listened and, following a recent hearing, agreed to give the government an ultimatum that forces it to provide evidence backing the science behind its approval of these trials. The health ministry reportedly has just two weeks to comply with this order.

Read more - http://www.naturalnews.com/042580_India_Big_Pharma_drug_trials.html

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TYLENOL'S INGREDIENT KILLS ALMOST 500 AMERICANS EVERY YEAR

Acetaminophen, Tylenol's Active Ingredient, Kills Nearly 500 Americans Every Year

 

Presently, the drug manufacturer is defending itself in federal court from at least 85 different lawsuits from consumers

 

Nearly 500 Americans die yearly from acetaminophen overdoses, with 2,600 hospitalizations and some 56,000 emergency room visits, according to a 2004 study from the University of Texas.

 

The drug is also implicated in nearly half of all cases of liver damage, researchers say. At the same time, the Tylenol brand makes more than $1 billion in revenue every year, aside from competitors.

 

Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) refers to acetaminophen overdose as a “persistent, important public health problem,” regulatory oversight of the drug — safe for adults, children, and infants in the right doses — has been criticized by some as too lax, compared to other developed countries from Europe to Asia.

 

U.S. regulators ruled in 2009 to require a label warning of “severe liver damage” after convening an expert panel in 1977 — 32 years later.

 

Moreover, the FDA is still finalizing safety rules for acetaminophen as part of that panel’s recommendations, nearly two generations later.

 

Upon ruling to require that warning label in 2009, regulators decided also to introduce new regulations to enhance consumer safety with regard to over-the-counter sales of the drug.

 

Those rules have yet to be implemented.

 

Rather than restricting sales of acetaminophen or requiring it to be sold over-the-counter only by pharmacies, the FDA has continued a decades-long discussion on the safety of this highly effective drug, with regard to maximum recommended daily dosage.

 

Likewise, the manufacturer has spurned efforts during the past few decades to enhance safety warnings, according to company memos and other court documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by journalists.

 

Johnson & Johnson’s McNeil unit has also opposed the idea of a government information campaign to educate the public about the drug’s risk, fearing for lost sales revenue, according to investigative work by ProPublica, a non-profit corporation dedicated to public service journalism.

 

In response to queries about acetaminophen’s safety, the manufacturer issued a written statement: “McNeil takes acetaminophen overdose very seriously, which is why we have taken significant steps over the years to mitigate the risk.”

Read more - http://www.medicaldaily.com/acetaminophen-tylenols-active-ingredient-kills-nearly-500-americans-every-year-257654

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