Downstrike/health

From the page: "Mounting evidence is confirming the view, long held in the public health community, that antimicrobial use in animals can substantially reduce the efficacy of the human antimicrobial arsenal...

Tetracycline, penicillin, erythromycin, and other antimicrobials that are important in human use are used extensively in the absence of disease for nontherapeutic purposes in today's livestock production...

A study recently released by the Animal Health Institute (AHI) may have severely underestimated animal use of antimicrobials. Our estimate of 24.6 million pounds for animal use is almost 50 percent higher than industry's figure of 17.8 million pounds -- and ours includes only nontherapeutic usage in the three major livestock sectors. AHI's covers all uses -- therapeutic and nontherapeutic -- in all animals, not just cattle, swine, and poultry.
Approximately 13.5 million pounds of antimicrobials prohibited in the European Union are used in agriculture for nontherapeutic purposes every year by U.S. livestock producers.

The European Union has prohibited nontherapeutic agricultural use of antimicrobials that are important in human medicine, such as penicillins, tetracyclines, and streptogramins. Total U.S. agricultural use of these banned antimicrobials is enormous...

Our estimates of 24.6 million pounds in animal agriculture and 3 million pounds in human medicine suggests that 8 times more antimicrobials are used for nontherapeutic purposes in the three major livestock sectors than in human medicine."

From the page: "We don't add antibiotics to baby food and Cocoa Puffs so that children get fewer ear infections. That's because we understand that the overuse of antibiotics is already creating "superbugs" resistant to medication.

Yet we continue to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal feed so that piglets stay healthy and don't get ear infections. Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists -- and that's one reason we're seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.

These dangerous pathogens are now even in our food supply. Five out of 90 samples of retail pork in Louisiana tested positive for MRSA -- an antibiotic-resistant staph infection -- according to a peer-reviewed study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology last year. And a recent study of retail meats in the Washington, D.C., area found MRSA in one pork sample, out of 300, according to Jianghong Meng, the University of Maryland scholar who conducted the study."

I contracted MRSA once, and that's nasty stuff!

From the page: "This, the researchers say, suggests that insomnia may either raise the risk of future anxiety problems, or be a sign that a person is particularly vulnerable to developing anxiety symptoms. "

In other words, you don't know whether the anxiety causes the insomnia, or the insomnia causes the anxiety.

From my point of view - looking at this from the inside out - I'd say both.

From the page: "According to a study reported in the December issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, there is direct association between sleep and plaque in the arteries around your heart. You know when you get enough sleep, you feel healthier and have more energy. But these recent findings document that getting one more hour of sleep per night dramatically reduces your risk of life-threatening clogged arteries around your heart."

From the page: "I had a series of operations to reconstruct various parts of me, particularly the bones of my face.

These operations often required using my own bone for grafting. I noticed that the plastic surgeon would keep going back to the right side of my ribcage, through the same horizontal scar, actually, to get more bone for these procedures. One day, I asked him why he hadn't `run out of bone'. He looked at me blankly, and then explained that he and his team took the whole rib out, each time. `We leave the periosteum intact, so the rib usually just grows right back again'."

How to Fix Something that Isn't Broken

From the page: "Yes, you read this right: The very same psychiatric drugs now linked to violent behavior, suicides and school shootings should now be openly prescribed to everyone, even people who have never been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder!"

From the page: "The FDA alert said that Byetta should be discontinued if pancreatitis is suspected. The FDA also said doctors should consider antidiabetic therapies other than Byetta in patients with a history of pancreatitis. Patients taking Byetta should seek prompt medical care if they experience unexplained persistent severe abdominal pain which may or may not be accompanied by vomiting. "

From the page: "Fifteen of sixteen Likely Mountain RF radiation exposure victims tested to date, have been found to have toxic RF radiation brain damage, i.e., cell death and blood cell damage. How did this happen? The only name we can think to give it, is State and Federal Failure to Follow the Law. But what happened after we notified the State of California, and Modoc National Forest personnel, that we were injured by radiation at Likely Mountain? We have a name for that too, Abuse of Powers. "