Natural Cures Not Medicine: 09/16/13

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California Sues Whole Foods Over All-Natural Pesticides, Ignores Cancer Causing Pesticides

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by Nick Bernabe

The state of California has taken up the noble task of suing natural food retailer Whole Foods over all-natural pesticides the California Department of Pesticide Regulation says it has not approved of. The natural pesticides, including: 365 Natural Pines Pellet Cat Litter, Purely Botanical Cat Flea Spray, Purely Botanical Dog Flea Spray and Enviroman Bugs R Done Bug spray are being sold at Whole Foods markets despite the government reportedly not authorizing permission to sell these products in California.

Perhaps these products would have been readily approved had the companies greased the pockets of California politicians like Monsanto and other large corporations do when legally bribing or 'lobbying' government officials to pass laws that favor their companies and speed up the regulatory approval process. 



One may naturally question the credibility of the California Department of Pesticide Regulation after it willingly disobeyed constituents when it approved the use of methyl iodide pesticides in December 2011, despite even the farmers' unwillingness to use the chemical.

From CaliforniaWatch.org:
The controversy over methyl iodide has simmered for years, but it erupted in 2010 when Department of Pesticide Regulation managers overruled both their own staff scientists and an agency-appointed peer review panel to approve the chemical for use in California agriculture. 
UCLA professor John Froines, who led the peer review committee, appeared at a state Assembly hearing in Sacramento last April and said “science was subverted” in the state’s decision to approve methyl iodide. 
“I would not want my family, my friends or anyone else to live or work or go to school near fields where this methyl iodide will be used,” Froines said after detailing the chemical’s properties that are known to cause cancer and damage nervous systems. “You had the best science you could have had, and the fact that it was ignored is devastating.”
It seems that despite popular opposition, farmer's reluctance to adopt the chemical pesticide, and clear science showing that this chemical would cause drastic negative health and environmental effects, it was still approved by California Department of Pesticide Regulation: making claims of bribery all the more likely.

The pesticide has since been abandoned in the US by the manufacturer Arysta LifeScience Inc. due to questions over the safety and effectiveness of the product and lack of interest from farmers who were afraid to use it due to consumer and political backlash.

As the war on natural health continues to march on, many people are beginning to question the objectivity and even legitimacy of regulatory bureaucracies who often times receive a large portion of their budgets directly from Big Pharma and Big Food. In fact, the FDA's year over year budget increase of nearly 1 billion dollars is 94% funded by Big Pharma, yet the agencies escape any transparency due to the mainstream media's willful ignorance(and perhaps the $2.4 billion the media receives in ad revenue from Big Pharma every year).

So can we trust these unelected bureaucrats, who often times have direct ties to the very companies they are "regulating", to make unbiased decisions on our behalf? Can we trust them to fairly represent industries that do not lobby them? Let us know how you feel about it in the comments below.

Costa Rica Joins the Growing List of Countries Banning GMOs

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In a unanimous vote the Municipal Council of San Jose passed a motion banning transgenic food from the region. The new measure prohibits the sale, consumption and growth of genetically modified food within the municipality.

Image: www.ticotimes.net
The municipality’s decision comes less than a month following the decision from Costa Rica’s National Biosecurity Technical Commission to allow multinational company Monsanto to grow genetically modified corn in the country.

Related: Join the March Against Monsanto on October 12th

More than half of Costa Rica’s local authorities or cantons have voted to ban GM crops in protest against Monsanto gaining a foothold in the country.

Over 2/3rds of Costa Rica has banned GM

Latest reports are that 56 of the 81 cantons have outlawed GM crops in support of popular demonstrations against Monsanto using Costa Rica as a nursery to grow GM seed for export.

The backlash against GMs began in late 2012 when a Monsanto subsidiary, Delta & Pine Land, asked for permission to plant about five acres of maize with four GM seed varieties giving herbicide tolerance and insect resistance.

This sparked a rash of protests across the country, and hundreds of people massed in front of the National Technical Commission of Biosafety (CTNBio) headquarters, the body in charge of the applications for the release of GMOs. CTNBio has been heavily criticised for limiting access to information and participation in discussions about GM seeds.

Eventually, CTNBio said Monsanto could go ahead. Protesters were furious that the decision followed others allowing GM cotton, soybeans, bananas, and pineapples to grow in the country. The acreage is small but the symbolism is huge: allowing Monsanto in could increase large scale commercial exploitation of Costa Rica’s extraordinary environment.

Read the full article

Source: realfarmacy.com

'Forest Boy' Found After 16 Years in Siberian Wilderness

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Image: rawforbeauty.com
Officials in Siberia say they have discovered a 20-year-old man who appears to have lived in the forest for the past 16 years.

Dubbed the “Siberian Mowgli” in a nod to the boy in “The Jungle Book,” the man was found by a woman living near the town of Belokurikha, a famous resort area in Russia’s Altai region, according to UPI.
In delayed but clear speech, the boy told authorities he was born in 1993 and had been living in the forest since 1997, when his parents decided to “abandon society.”

His parents then appear to have abandoned him in May this year, AFP reported.
“I’m living well thank you,” he told The Siberian Times. “We are living well. This is the reality we have that we live here, and it’s quite a good reality.”

After speaking with authorities, the man fled back to forest hut, where RIA Novosti reports he is collecting firewood ahead of winter.

“He has no education, no social skills and no ideas about the world beyond the forest,” local prosecutor Roman Fomin told Russia Today.

source..
HTTP://WWW.CLICKORLANDO.COM/NEWS/FOREST-BOY-FOUND-AFTER-16-YEARS-IN-WILDERNESS/-/1637132/21889478/-/TRKG2/-/INDEX.HTML

http://rawforbeauty.com/blog/forest-boy-found-after-16-years-in-wilderness-man-dubbed-the-siberian-mowgli-left-society-with-his-parents-in-1997.html

GMO Soy Linked to Sterility and Mortality in Hamsters

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“This study was just routine,” said Russian biologist Alexey V. Surov, in what could end up as the understatement of this century. Surov and his colleagues set out to discover if Monsanto’s genetically modified (GM) soy, grown on 91% of US soybean fields, leads to problems in growth or reproduction. What he discovered may uproot a multi-billion dollar industry.

After feeding hamsters for two years over three generations, those on the GM diet, and especially the group on the maximum GM soy diet, showed devastating results. By the third generation, most GM soy-fed hamsters lost the ability to have babies. They also suffered slower growth, and a high mortality rate among the pups.

And if this isn’t shocking enough, some in the third generation even had hair growing inside their mouths–a phenomenon rarely seen, but apparently more prevalent among hamsters eating GM soy.

Related: Join the March Against Monsanto on October 12th

The study, jointly conducted by Surov’s Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the National Association for Gene Security, is expected to be published in three months (July 2010)–so the technical details will have to wait. But Surov sketched out the basic set up for me in an email.
He used Campbell hamsters, with a fast reproduction rate, divided into 4 groups. All were fed a normal diet, but one was without any soy, another had non-GM soy, a third used GM soy, and a fourth contained higher amounts of GM soy. They used 5 pairs of hamsters per group, each of which produced 7-8 litters, totally 140 animals.

Surov told The Voice of Russia,
“Originally, everything went smoothly. However, we noticed quite a serious effect when we selected new pairs from their cubs and continued to feed them as before. These pairs’ growth rate was slower and reached their sexual maturity slowly.”

He selected new pairs from each group, which generated another 39 litters. There were 52 pups born to the control group and 78 to the non-GM soy group. In the GM soy group, however, only 40 pups were born. And of these, 25% died. This was a fivefold higher death rate than the 5% seen among the controls. Of the hamsters that ate high GM soy content, only a single female hamster gave birth. She had 16 pups; about 20% died.

Surov said “The low numbers in F2 [third generation] showed that many animals were sterile.”
The published paper will also include measurements of organ size for the third generation animals, including testes, spleen, uterus, etc. And if the team can raise sufficient funds, they will also analyze hormone levels in collected blood samples.

Hair Growing in the Mouth

Earlier this year, Surov co-authored a paper in Doklady Biological Sciences showing that in rare instances, hair grows inside recessed pouches in the mouths of hamsters.

“Some of these pouches contained single hairs; others, thick bundles of colorless or pigmented hairs reaching as high as the chewing surface of the teeth. Sometimes, the tooth row was surrounded with a regular brush of hair bundles on both sides. The hairs grew vertically and had sharp ends, often covered with lumps of a mucous.”

(The photos of these hair bundles are truly disgusting. Trust me, or look for yourself.)
At the conclusion of the study, the authors surmise that such an astounding defect may be due to the diet of hamsters raised in the laboratory. They write, “This pathology may be exacerbated by elements of the food that are absent in natural food, such as genetically modified (GM) ingredients (GM soybean or maize meal) or contaminants (pesticides, mycotoxins, heavy metals, etc.).” Indeed, the number of hairy mouthed hamsters was much higher among the third generation of GM soy fed animals than anywhere Surov had seen before.
Preliminary, but Ominous

Surov warns against jumping to early conclusions. He said, “It is quite possible that the GMO does not cause these effects by itself.” Surov wants to make the analysis of the feed components a priority, to discover just what is causing the effect and how.

In addition to the GMOs, it could be contaminants, he said, or higher herbicide residues, such as Roundup. There is in fact much higher levels of Roundup on these beans; they’re called “Roundup Ready.” Bacterial genes are forced into their DNA so that the plants can tolerate Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. Therefore, GM soy always carries the double threat of higher herbicide content, couple with any side effects of genetic engineering.

Years of Reproductive Disorders from GMO-Feed

Surov’s hamsters are just the latest animals to suffer from reproductive disorders after consuming GMOs. In 2005, Irina Ermakova, also with the Russian National Academy of Sciences, reported that more than half the babies from mother rats fed GM soy died within three weeks. This was also five times higher than the 10% death rate of the non-GMO soy group. The babies in the GM group were also smaller (see photo) and could not reproduce.

In a telling coincidence, after Ermakova’s feeding trials, her laboratory started feeding allthe rats in the facility a commercial rat chow using GM soy. Within two months, the infant mortality facility-wide reached 55%.
When Ermakova fed male rats GM soy, their testicles changed from the normal pink to dark blue! Italian scientists similarly found changes in mice testes (PDF), including damaged young sperm cells. Furthermore, the DNA of embryos from parent mice fed GM soy functioned differently.

An Austrian government study published in November 2008 showed that the more GM corn was fed to mice, the fewer the babies they had (PDF), and the smaller the babies were.

Central Iowa Farmer Jerry Rosman also had trouble with pigs and cows becoming sterile. Some of his pigs even had false pregnancies or gave birth to bags of water. After months of investigations and testing, he finally traced the problem to GM corn feed. Every time a newspaper, magazine, or TV show reported Jerry’s problems, he would receive calls from more farmers complaining of livestock sterility on their farm, linked to GM corn.

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine accidentally discovered that rats raised on corncob bedding “neither breed nor exhibit reproductive behavior.” Tests on the corn material revealed two compounds that stopped the sexual cycle in females “at concentrations approximately two-hundredfold lower than classical phytoestrogens.” One compound also curtailed male sexual behavior and both substances contributed to the growth of breast and prostate cancer cell cultures. Researchers found that the amount of the substances varied with GM corn varieties. The crushed corncob used at Baylor was likely shipped from central Iowa, near the farm of Jerry Rosman and others complaining of sterile livestock.

In Haryana, India, a team of investigating veterinarians report that buffalo consuming GM cottonseed suffer from infertility, as well as frequent abortions, premature deliveries, and prolapsed uteruses. Many adult and young buffalo have also died mysteriously.

Denial, Attack and Canceled Follow-up

Scientists who discover adverse findings from GMOs are regularly attacked, ridiculed, denied funding, and even fired. When Ermakova reported the high infant mortality among GM soy fed offspring, for example, she appealed to the scientific community to repeat and verify her preliminary results. She also sought additional funds to analyze preserved organs. Instead, she was attacked and vilified. Samples were stolen from her lab, papers were burnt on her desk, and she said that her boss, under pressure from his boss, told her to stop doing any more GMO research. No one has yet repeated Ermakova’s simple, inexpensive studies.
In an attempt to offer her sympathy, one of her colleagues suggested that maybe the GM soy will solve the over population problem!

Surov reports that so far, he has not been under any pressure.

Opting Out of the Massive GMO Feeding Experiment

Without detailed tests, no one can pinpoint exactly what is causing the reproductive travesties in Russian hamsters and rats, Italian and Austrian mice, and livestock in India and America. And we can only speculate about the relationship between the introduction of genetically modified foods in 1996, and the corresponding upsurge in low birth weight babies, infertility, and other problems among the US population. But many scientists, physicians, and concerned citizens don’t think that the public should remain the lab animals for the biotech industry’s massive uncontrolled experiment.

Alexey Surov says, “We have no right to use GMOs until we understand the possible adverse effects, not only to ourselves but to future generations as well. We definitely need fully detailed studies to clarify this. Any type of contamination has to be tested before we consume it, and GMO is just one of them.”

Source: Huffington Post

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