Empowering Better Health

Drug Firm Investigated FDA Officials

mercola.com "For more than two months in late 2008, private investigators working for a drug company gathered information on Janet Woodcock, a high-ranking official at the Food and Drug Administration -- unearthing details about her husband, two daughters, and in-laws, and re-tracing her steps on a business trip she took to Thailand," Politico reports.

"The drug company, Amphastar Pharmaceuticals, paid more than $100,000 to Kroll, the New York-based private investigative firm, to uncover the information about Woodcock, the director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, who oversees the agency’s new-drug approvals.

Kroll also investigated a second FDA official on behalf of the drug company -- Moheb Nasr, director of the FDA’s Office of New Drug Quality Assessment, creating a file on him that included his birth date, the price he paid for his home, and details of his education and professional background.

At one point, the investigators hired a freelance reporter to use her status as a journalist to request Woodcock’s emails, phone records, voicemails, calendar and expense reports, among other documents -- without mentioning that she was being paid for her efforts by a private investigative firm."

For more details unearthed by Politico, please read the full article by clicking on the source link below.

Sources: Politico March 30, 2010

Stevia still banned: The Stevia FDA Conspiracy

www.ewg.org We are being hoodwinked again by the FDA and Big Business – the Coca Cola Company, feeling the heat of an increasing consumer rebellion against carcinogenic sweeteners like Aspartame, managed to beg, bribe and bully the FDA into approving Truvia™, also-known-as Rebiana.

Why was Stevia banned by the FDA?

Perhaps for the same reason that Aspartame (NutraSweet) was unbanned? The non-patentable, natural Stevia is the main competitor for a multi-billion dollar sweetener industry. If this sounds far-fetched, watch this excerpt from the documentary "Sweet Misery" on how the FDA initially banned Aspartame for 16 years, but Donald Rumsfeld – President of Searle and member of Reagan's transition team – fired the FDA chief and put a puppet in his place who overturned Aspartame's ban who overturned Aspartame's ban during his first day in office. Aspartame-patentholder Searle was sold to Monsanto – a major Aspartame producer.

Former FDA Commissioner 'Ordered' Agency
Not to Enforce DSHEA

From: nutritionnews.com It turns out that all the critics who have claimed the dietary supplement industry was ‘unregulated' may have been right but not for the reasons they thought.

In an article written for Natural Products INSIDER, Peter Barton Hutt, Senior Partner at Covington & Burling LLP and former FDA Chief Counsel (1971-75), states that the FDA took virtually no enforcement action under DSHEA for nearly a decade as the result of an order from then-commissioner David Kessler, M.D., to not enforce the new law. Hutt writes: "Kessler was so infuriated by the enactment of DSHEA, however, that he ordered FDA not to enforce the new law. Initially, this was not widely understood. As time has gone on, however, former FDA enforcement officials have admitted that, for the first full decade under DSHEA, FDA took virtually no enforcement action because of Kessler's policy. Kessler was convinced that, if the law was not enforced and the worst elements of the dietary supplement industry were allowed to run wild, Congress would repeal the law."

For anyone interested in the back story of how we came to this, read on. The article is part of an ongoing series compiled by Natural Products INSIDER called "DSHEA @ 15" that includes articles and interviews looking at the 15 years since DSHEA was passed in 1994. To read the complete article by Hutt, click here.

So the industry was unregulated because the FDA chose to not do their mandated job of consumer protection. Instead, the nutritional products industry developed "Good Manufacturing Practices" and policed itself.

FDA Video

Much of the Food Industry Runs on Bribes

mercola.com Robert Watson, a top ingredient buyer for Kraft Foods, needed $20,000 to pay his taxes. So he called a broker for a California tomato processor that for years had been paying him bribes to get its products into Kraft's plants.

Days later, federal agents descended on Kraft's offices near Chicago and confronted Mr. Watson. He admitted his role in a bribery scheme that has laid bare a startling vein of corruption in the food industry.

Since the scheme also involved millions of pounds of tomato products with high levels of mold or other defects, the case has raised serious questions about how well food manufacturers safeguard the quality of their ingredients.

Over the last 14 months, Mr. Watson and three other purchasing managers, at Frito-Lay, Safeway and B&G Foods, have pleaded guilty to taking bribes. Five people connected to one of the nation's largest tomato processors, SK Foods, have also admitted taking part in the scheme.

SK Foods shipped its customers millions of pounds of bulk tomato paste and puree that fell short of basic quality standards, with falsified documentation to mask the problems. Often that meant mold counts so high the sale should have been prohibited under federal law.

Sources: New York Times February 24, 2010

What Happened to Good Medicine?

angelfire.com Despite the yearly claims of great new pharmaceutical drugs, the percentage of Americans who die each year from cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other disease names has not decreased. Every year in the US, more people die from the side effects of pharmaceutical drugs than die in car accidents. Clearly this is not good medicine. All of this begs the question - What happened to good medicine?

Where Is The Good Medicine?

Did you know that the herbs astragalus and elderberry, and the amino acid; L-Lysine, are powerful broad-spectrum antiviral agents? Did you know that garlic is a powerful natural antibiotic? There are many safe and effective natural remedies for the multitude of maladies that effect mankind but your doctor will never recommend them. Conventional medicine has nothing to combat the vast majority of viruses (they only suppress the symptoms), but still doctors will not recommend astragalus, elderberry, or any of the other natural anti-virals because they are plant based.

Plant-based treatments cannot produce huge profits because they cannot be patented. Huge profits are needed to pay for the expensive FDA approved clinical trials. So, plant-based treatments never get FDA approval to treat a disease. Your doctor can only prescribe treatments that are FDA approved. If your doctor prescribes treatments that are not FDA approved, he or she can be sued or lose their license.

The End of Plant-based Medicine

Around the begining of the last centruy, Rockefeller and Carnegie obtained control over medical school education through the use of the Flexner Report which was written by Henry Pritchett, who was in the employ of Rockefeller. This report favored only the medical schools that concentrated on using drug-based treatments. (See also: "THE DRUG STORY") These schools started to receive large amounts of money from Rockefeller and Carnegie. In 1905, 160 medical schools were in operation. By 1927, 17 years after the Flexner Report, the number had dropped to 80. From then on, pharmaceutical company control of medical school curriculums was assured by the large amounts of money they would "give" to the schools for approved research. That research of course was approved or disapproved by the pharmaceutical companies. Only research that would lead to treatments that could be patented received approval. That eliminated any treatments derived from plants.

Treatment derived from plants are more safe than chemical based treatments that can be patented.

The Nanotech Gamble

(March 24) -- Along with two Pulitzer Prizes, senior public health correspondent Andrew Schneider's decades of groundbreaking investigative reporting have earned him countless sources. When a number of those sources began bringing up nanotechnology -- and not in the laudatory language that usually accompanies the topic -- this project was born.

Schneider, whose reporting accomplishments include being first to reveal the asbestos poisoning of Libby, Mont., ultimately spent 15 months delving into nanotech. He interviewed more than 450 scientists, safety advocates and government officials in the U.S. and seven foreign countries. He pored over what he estimates were 15,000 pages of reports and studies.

"The Nanotech Gamble" is the result of that effort. But in a way, it too is just a beginning, as Schneider will continue to dig into this evolving story. Subsequent reports will rest on the key findings from this series, which include the following:

• Once confined to cutting-edge labs, nanotechnology has an increasingly pervasive place in everyday life -- the National Science Foundation, for instance, estimates that up to $70 billion of nano-containing items are sold in the U.S. each year. But at the same time, a growing body of research is showing that nanomaterials pose significant and potentially fatal health risks, including lung, heart and brain damage, cancer and birth defects. And as Schneider documents, the federal government as a whole is doing little about this emerging threat.

• The nanomaterial most widely used in consumer products is nano-titanium dioxide. It's an ingredient in a number of drugstore items rubbed onto bodies and faces and put into mouths, among them cosmetics, sunblock and toothpaste. A UCLA study found that ingesting nanotechnology can damage and destroy DNA and chromosomes to a degree that can be linked to "all the big killers of man," as one of the scientists there told Schneider.

• Carbon nanotubes are the most commonly used nanomaterial in industrial applications. Research shows that they can penetrate the lungs more deeply than asbestos and appear to cause asbestos-like, often-fatal lung damage more quickly, thanks to their tiny size.

• The Food and Drug Administration, which does not regulate cosmetics or nutritional supplements containing nano-titanium dioxide, says no nano-containing food is sold in this country. But some of the agency's own risk assessors say that's not true, pointing to growing evidence that the particles are already showing up on grocer's shelves in a number of products.

• Schneider also found a U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist who has first-hand knowledge of Latin American food packers that dip U.S.-bound produce in a nanocoating to increase its shelf life. "We found no indication that the nanocoating, which is manufactured in Asia, has ever been tested for health effects," the researcher says.

• The Environmental Protection Agency has been trying to impose some controls on the use of carbon nanotubes and mandate that any company that uses nanomaterials disclose that practice. But industry interests have pushed back and have so far successfully stymied the implementation of those safeguards.

• Though the Obama administration argues that it has increased the federal government's investment in nanotech safety efforts, the 2011 budget shows a continued and striking disparity between funding for nanotech development and risk assessment. Just $117 million, or 6.6 percent, of the $18 billion allotted for nanotech overall is for safety-related initiatives.

• Experts Schneider spoke with expressed alarm at Washington's collective indifference to the potential hazards nanotech presents. These experts fear a repeat of a pattern that played out with breakthroughs such as asbestos, DDT and PCBs, in which government authorities, wary of getting in the way of innovation, ignored the warning signs until a full-blown public health problem was at hand. "How long should the public have to wait before the government takes protective action?" asks one. "Must the bodies stack up first?"