How many generations will suffer before a ‘chemical trespass’ law is passed?

In 2005 the Center for Science and Environment in Delhi checked the blood samples of the people of Punjab and found many different types of pesticides in their blood.

Two years later, the Economist reported: “In Punjabi villages, children and adults are afflicted by uncommon cancers. Some are going blind. The reason is massive and unregulated use of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals in India’s most intensively farmed state. According to an environmental report by Punjab’s government, the modest-sized state accounts for 17% of India’s total pesticide use. The state’s water, people, animals, milk and agricultural produce are all poisoned with the stuff”. (The article is now paywalled but can be sent via email if requested in the comments section)

Sean Gallagher, zoologist, film-maker and journalist quoted the words of Chandra Bhushan, deputy director general of the Center for Science and Environment in 2013: “Punjab is now becoming a hotspot of cancer cases in India. There are a lot of studies which now link cancer in Punjab to use of pesticides. Punjab is one of the largest users of pesticides in India”

In 2017, research published in Nature Plants showed that farmers could slash their pesticide use without losses and quoted from a UNGA report denouncing the ‘myth’ that pesticides are necessary to feed the world.

Prof. Ian Boyd, chief scientific adviser to the UK government, pointed out that regulators around the world have falsely assumed it is safe to use pesticides at industrial scales across landscapes.

In March 2019, the British Medical Journal published Prenatal and infant exposure to ambient pesticides and autism spectrum disorder in children: a population based case-control study, BMJ 2019, 20 March 2019, which noted that common pesticides have been previously shown to cause neurodevelopmental impairment in experimental research. This study’s findings suggested that an offspring’s risk of autism spectrum disorder increases following prenatal exposure to ambient pesticides (including glyphosate, chlorpyrifos, diazinon, and permethrin) within 2000m of their mother’s residence during pregnancy, compared with offspring of women from the same agricultural region without such exposure.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information published a study later that year undertaken in California’s agricultural Salinas Valley by the Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas (CHAMACOS). It reported that many pregnant women are exposed and prenatal organophosphate pesticide (OP) exposure is associated with poorer cognitive function in Mexican American youth – learning, thinking, reasoning, remembering, problem solving, decision making, attention and behaviour problems

Exposure is widespread in the US population, predominantly through diet – pesticide residues on fruits and vegetables. Individuals living near farmland or living with family members working in agricultural settings are also exposed to pesticides from residues on clothing and drift from nearby fields.

How many more research papers will be published before decisive action is taken?

Pesticide sprays near Georgina’s home

In England over 10,000 rural residents have been calling on the Prime Minister via an online petition to ban all crop spraying of poisonous pesticides near residents homes, schools, and playgrounds and the words of many damaged individuals are recorded in an article by pesticide affected Georgina Downs.

Chandra Bhushan goes further. He concludes that this can no longer be allowed. We cannot allow chemicals to trespass in our body. We need a chemical trespass law that says we are not going to allow chemicals into our body to accumulate [where] they might cause numerous diseases in the future.

 

 

 

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Mass-medication 2: the prevention element – a potential revenue stream?

As Andrew Miles, senior UK vice-president of GlaxoSmithKline observed cryptically in the Financial Times recently, “As much as people might think that the prevention element may not be a revenue stream for the company, it provides phenomenal insights.”

In July, the journal Science Translational Medicine published a report of the trial at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts into a treatment, administered as two daily pills. A Times article noted that it was found to cut the number of infections in older people. Stephen Evans, the professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that the study was only an incremental improvement on the treatments already available and there are unanswered questions about the possible side-effects of the drugs.

Mass medication is an iatrogenic catastrophe

In June, this view was expressed in a BMJ article by James Le Fanu, retired GP and journalist. He wrote that ‘profligate’ prescribing has brought a hidden epidemic of side effects and no benefit to most individuals. There is no drug or procedure with its “chance of good” that may not harm some. The more doctors do, the greater that risk. Over the past 20 years there has been:

• a dizzying fourfold rise in prescriptions for diabetes treatments,
• sevenfold for antihypertensives,
• and 20-fold for the cholesterol lowering statins.
• Meanwhile the number of people taking five or more different drugs has quadrupled to include almost half of those aged 65 or over.

He continues: “The consequences of this massive upswing in prescribing? A hidden epidemic of immiserating symptoms such as fatigue, muscular aches and pains, insomnia, and general decrepitude, a 75% rise in emergency admissions to hospital for adverse drug reactions (an additional 30 000 a year) …

Proposals have been made in the past for mass or even universal medication by aspirin and statins

The NHS now concludes that the risk of side effects (particularly the risk of bleeding) outweighs the benefit of preventing blood clots. It has long been known that the pills carry a risk of gastro-intestinal bleeding. But a new University of Oxford study, published in The Lancet, suggests that the danger increases far more sharply with age than was thought, according to Professor Peter Rothwell, lead author. A Telegraph artlcle reports on his 2017 findings, adding that taking a daily aspirin is more dangerous than was thought, causing more than 3,000 deaths a year.

Britain is already the “statins capital” of Europe

The UK has the second highest prescribing levels in the Western world, with aggressive prescribing of the medication by GPs, whose pay is linked to take-up of the pills.

In 2014 it was reported that twelve million people (one in four adults) would be told to take statins under controversial new NHS guidelines. Draft proposals from health watchdogs were that the vast majority of men aged over 50 and most women over the age of 60 are likely to be advised to take the drugs to guard against strokes and heart disease. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) had cut the “risk threshold” for such drugs in half and experts said that the number of patients advised to take the drugs is likely to rise from seven million to 12 million.

And current medical guidance says that anyone with a 20% risk of developing cardiovascular disease within 10 years should be offered statins.

Almost all men over 60 and all women over 75 in England qualify for statin prescriptions under guidelines adopted by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in 2014, a 2017analysis shows – see BMJ.

However, some health experts have questioned the industry forces behind these studies. The first recommendation was put out in 2013 by the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA).  CNN reports that a number of experts who worked on the ACC/AHA guidelines had financial links to drug companies, which they disclosed publicly. No conflicts of interests were reported by the authors of the United States Preventive Services Task Force guidelines, but nearly all of the trials they included in their analysis were sponsored by industry, according to Dr Rita Redberg, who stressed this point in a January 2017 editorial in the journal she oversees. “The ACC did not follow its own conflict of interest guidelines“..

Fluoridation – or any practice that uses the public water supply as a vehicle to deliver medicine – violates medical ethics in several important ways:

• It deprives the individual of his or her right to informed consent to medication.
• It is approved and delivered by people without medical qualifications.
• It is delivered to everyone regardless of age, health or nutritional status, without individual oversight by a doctor and without control of dose.
• The safety of fluoridated water has never been demonstrated by randomized controlled trials–the gold standard study now generally required before a drug can enter the market.

Fluoridating water is a form of mass medication and most western European nations have rejected the practice — because, in their view, the public water supply is not an appropriate place to be adding drugs.

Who profits from all these instances of largescale medication?

 

 

 

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The HPV vaccine – another case for adopting the precautionary principle

The use of HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccines for sexually transmitted diseases has been questioned since its earliest days.

According to a paper in the Annals of Medicine, Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine policy and evidence-based medicine: Are they at odds?: “At present there are no significant data showing that either Gardasil or Cervarix (GlaxoSmithKline) can prevent any type of cervical cancer since the testing period employed was too short to evaluate long-term benefits of HPV vaccination.”

In the US, France, Spain and Denmark, more than 250 court cases are being mounted over HPV vaccinations. Damages have been won in the US and France.

However, the UK medicines watchdog, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and Public Health England say that the HPV jab is the most effective way to protect against cervical cancer, which kills 900 UK women each year and the American government’s CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) recommends the Gardasil vaccine, made by Merck Pharmaceuticals, for all females between 9 and 26 years to protect against HPV.

This conflicts with safety statements made by the American government’s Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) recalled by the Washington News which reported adverse reactions:

”26 new deaths between September 1, 2010 and September 15, 2011 as well as incidents of seizures, paralysis, blindness, pancreatitis, speech problems, short term memory loss and Guillain-Barré Syndrome”. In 2014 6m dollars in compensation was paid and only half the cases had been heard.

The Japanese government withdrew its recommendation of the HPV vaccine in 2013, after highly publicised cases of alleged adverse events in girls who had been vaccinated. 63 women are separately suing the government over claims that the jab causes serious neurological conditions and vaccination rates in the country have collapsed from 70% to less than 1%. In December last year, the Financial Times reported that Shuichi Ikeda, dean of the school of medicine at Shinshu University, one of a group of doctors suggesting a link between the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine and neurological illness, is suing Dr Riko Muranaka, a lecturer at Kyoto University’s school of medicine, for libel as she claimed that he had fabricated research results.

In July this year, a British health professional, whose daughter had been ‘severely disabled by obvious adverse reaction to the HPV vaccine’ for six years, wrote in the BMJ:

“There is ZERO evidence that Cervarix and Gardasil will ever prevent a single case of cancer. The manufacturers, GSK and Merck, only ever state they are ‘intended to’ or ‘expected to’.

Though The Times reported in August that Simon Harris, the Irish health minister, has renewed his drive for girls to receive the vaccination, an online search on the words ‘death’ or ‘disability due to the HPV vaccine’ will bring up many cases reported in the mainstream press – and the precautionary principle may be invoked, according to the European Commission, when a phenomenon, product or process may have a dangerous effect, identified by a scientific and objective evaluation.

There remains such great uncertainty about the safety of this vaccine, surely further investigation is warranted before continuing to administer it.

 

 

 

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Expensive fluoride added to Birmingham’s water did not protect first teeth

Royal College of Surgeons’ dean points to ‘sweet habits’ as first teeth are removed

Today it was reported that NHS data obtained by the Faculty of Dental Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) shows there were 9,206 extractions within the age group in 2015-16 compared with 7,444 in 2006-07 – a 24% rise. The figures prompted calls for parents, the government and the food industry to take action to reverse the alarming trend.

Prof Nigel Hunt, dean of the RCS’s Faculty of Dental Surgery, said: “When you see the numbers tallied up like this it becomes abundantly clear that the sweet habits of our children are having a devastating effect on the state of their teeth.

Hundreds of children are having their first teeth extracted as hospital treatments hit their highest level in six years in Birmingham.

There were 1,464 hospital admissions for teeth extractions for children from the Birmingham CrossCity CCG in 2015/16, the highest number since at least 2010/11, and up from 795 in 2014/15. In Sandwell and West Birmingham, the number of hospital admissions for teeth extractions has also hit a six year high, at 141 in 2015/16, up from 33 in 2014/15.

The numbers have increased sevenfold since 2010/11

In 2010/11 there were 208 hospital admissions for tooth extraction. Included in the admissions were 297 for children aged between one and four to have multiple teeth extracted, the highest number since at least 2010/11, as well as 730 admissions for children aged five to nine, the highest number since at least 2010/11.

Ingesting fluoride at best ‘controversial’: at worst, causing some damage to health

A report by Birmingham Professor of Epidemiology, K.K. Cheng and Dr Trevor Sheldon published in the BMJ deemed the practice ‘controversial’.

More recently, corresponding author Professor Stephen Peckham, University of Kent commented on research he and two co-authors had undertaken and published in the BMJ: “We found that practices located in the West Midlands (a wholly fluoridated area) are nearly twice as likely to report high hypothyroidism prevalence in comparison to Greater Manchester (non-fluoridated area).

Last year Ian Wylie reported that around one million people in Birmingham are supplied with artificially fluoridated water. But its average number of extracted or filled teeth is 1.17, higher than the national average. Across the West Midlands, where water has been fluoridated since 1964, there has been a 300% rise in children under the age of 10 being admitted to hospital for multiple teeth extractions in the last five years. 

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Stop Press: today we read that a representative of leading brands including Mars, Cadbury, Kellogg’s and Nestlé (aka ‘food giants’) told The Times that they would reduce sugar content in food and drink but not to the government’s timescale.

 

 

 

Does Big Pharma put profits before public health? EP to legislate

 A recent report by the Cochrane Collaboration, an independent research network, found no evidence that Roche’s costly Tamiflu antiviral medicine reduced risk of hospitalisation or death from influenza. Tom Jefferson, clinical epidemiologist and co-author of the Cochrane review, said “only the tip of the iceberg” of the evidence was made available to regulators when the drug was approved.

Stocks of antiviral treatment Tamiflu housed in a UK warehouse (picture from French website)

Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the BMJ, which published the report, says the case highlights the “irredeemable conflict of interest” between the need for impartial trial data and the industry’s commercial interests. “We have evidence time and time again that they overestimate the benefits [of new drugs] and underestimate the harm.”

Andrew Ward, in the Financial Times, reports that Roche had long resisted demands from scientists to open its trial data to scrutiny but relented last year. Disputed clinical data was at the heart of controversy over Tamiflu, disclosing questionable efficacy rather than health risks.

In response to such criticism, drugmakers, including Roche, GSK and Johnson & Johnson, have announced steps over the past year to open their clinical trial data to independent scrutiny. Others cite the need to protect intellectual property and patient confidentiality. However, the European parliament has already passed draft legislation requiring detailed summaries of all trial data to be made public.

Other fairly recent cases:

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• $250m verdict against Merck & Co on behalf of a widow who blamed her husband’s fatal heart attack on its Vioxx painkiller;

• $3bn US fine paid by GlaxoSmithKline for marketing abuses in 2012;

• a bribery probe against GSK in Iraq;

• and a French competition inquiry into whether Roche and Novartis colluded to block a cheaper alternative to their blockbuster Lucentis eye treatment.

Ward concludes: “All of them, in one way or another, support the claims of industry critics who say big pharma puts profits before public health – from cherry-picking clinical trial data to conceal health risks to bribing doctors and blocking cheaper medicines”

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Update: Pandemrix H1N1 swine flu vaccine

On 23^rd Jan. we published: Pandemrix H1N1 swine flu vaccine: a “medical tragedy”

“Concerns expressed about GSK’s drug Pandemrix since 2009 have been further substantiated by independent teams of scientists who have published peer-reviewed studies from Sweden, Finland and Ireland, showing the risk of developing narcolepsy after the 2009-2010 immunization campaign was between 7 and 13 times higher for children who had Pandemrix than for their unvaccinated peers . . .”

Now the BMJ reports on a British study which has confirmed ‘a causal association’ – see Risk of narcolepsy in children and young people receiving AS03 adjuvanted pandemic A/H1N1 2009 influenza vaccine: retrospective analysis

BMJ 2013; 346 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f794 (Published 26 February 2013) – Cite this as: BMJ 2013;346:f794