Flu Prevents Asthma - Health Supreme NewsGrabs 17 December 2010
Study shows how flu infections may prevent asthmaThe findings, published online December 13 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, provide a potential immunological mechanism in support of the "hygiene hypothesis," an idea that attributes the increasing rate of asthma and allergies to the successful reduction of childhood infections with vaccines and antibiotics. The hygiene hypothesis is also supported by epidemiological studies associating certain childhood infections, such as respiratory viral infections or gastrointestinal infection with H. pylori, with a lower risk of developing asthma.
Image credit: www.thewheelchairbabe.com
"Some infections appear to result in important protective effects against asthma," says Dale Umetsu, MD, PhD, of Children's Division of Immunology, a senior author of the paper, and Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. "But we certainly don't want to give people dangerous infections to prevent asthma. So if we can understand how infections prevent asthma, we may be able to replicate the good parts and avoid the bad parts of infection and develop new treatments for children to prevent asthma."
It used to be that "a cold" was nothing to even think about, it passed and that was it. The same thing with childhood diseases. One got them, was sick for a few days, and life went on.Things changed when we declared war on microbes and started to use weapons of mass destruction (mass vaccination, widely used antibiotics) against them. Now we are starting to find out that we are missing the friendly infections. When will we start to realize that most vira and bacteria are actually our friends, that we are highly symbiotic organisms that collaborate with vira and bacteria, that need them for our proper body functions?
The article linked just above, Study shows how flu infections may prevent asthma set me thinking. I know several people who suffer from asthma, so I set out to reduce the problem in my mind to the simplest concise statement I could come up with. The result is posted ason my facebook page. The article is public, you should not have trouble accessing it, even if you do not have a facebook account.
Of course what I say is a gross simplification of the matter, but there is so much science that for all the data, often we cannot see the basic elements any more. Getting back to those basics offers us a possible solution that goes beyond pharmaceutical symptomatic intervention, which is not without serious side effects. We can individually learn to regulate our breathing and as a society we might find ways to eliminate two major environmental factors - pollution and vaccines - which clearly are contributing to the ongoing explosion of asthma cases.
Just as an example of our insane insistence of "fighting the flu"...
Fighting flu in newborns begins in pregnancy
A three-year study by Yale School of Medicine researchers has found that vaccinating pregnant women against influenza is over 90 percent effective in preventing their infants from being hospitalized with influenza in the first six months of life.The vaccine might prevent the flu, but is that really worth suffering from life-long asthma?And another one...
Study finds older people with severe asthma need higher H1N1 vaccine dose
And one on those asthma medications...
Inhaled corticosteroids increase diabetes risk
Inhaled corticosteroids are widely used in the treatment of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, these drugs may be associated with diabetes development and progression. In a study published in the most recent issue of The American Journal of Medicine, researchers found that inhaled corticosteroids were associated with a 34% increase in the rate of diabetes onset and in the rate of diabetes progression. At the highest inhaled doses the risk increased by 64% in diabetes onset and 54% in diabetes progression.
And another thing about the hygiene hypothesis - parasites...
Eat worms - feel better
Before gut worms were eradicated in the West 50 or so years ago allergies - caused by the overreaction of the immune system - were virtually unheard of, now in the UK one third of us suffers from some sort of allergy.So scientists are looking to see if there's a connection between gut worms and allergies, they are wondering if gut worms can somehow damp down the immune system to make it easier for them to live in the intestine without coming under attack.
He said: "Worms require humans to survive. In essence the worms are part of us and it's possible that we've become interdependent and removing worms has resulted in an imbalance to our immune systems.
A Healthy Environment Should Be a Human Right
In most legal systems, you have a right to freedom of speech or religion, but you don't have a right to breathe clean air or drink safe water.Activists in Cancůn and Mexico City are rallying behind the idea of environmental rights. Many support a document called the "People's Agreement on Climate Change," which includes a "Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth." It's an idealistic name for a proposal that would sound either visionary or improbable, or both-if not for the fact that the declaration represents the work of representatives from 56 countries and of tens of thousands of people who attended a climate conference in Cochabamba, Bolivia, last April. The document declares that everybody has rights to basics like clean water and clean air, but it also says something even more extraordinary: that the planet's ecosystems themselves have rights.
World Hunger and Poverty - Facts and Statistics 2010
Does the world produce enough food to feed everyone?The world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day (FAO 2002, p.9). The principal problem is that many people in the world do not have sufficient land to grow, or income to purchase, enough food.
This implies that our current economic system is directly implicated in the causation of hunger and starvation. How this happens is the subject of a video link "Taking Back Our Lives from the Wall Street Mafia" further down the page...
Seattle-led coalition tells Gates Foundation to change approach
A coalition of groups led by Seattle-based activists has sent a letter and online petition to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, saying its current approach to agriculture in Africa is unlikely to solve problems of hunger, poverty and climate change, and may make them worse.The groups signing the letter, including environmentalists, academics and groups opposed to genetic engineering of food crops, said they're concerned the foundation's grants are "heavily distorted in favor of supporting inappropriate high-tech agricultural activities, ignoring scientific studies that confirm the value of small-scale agroecological approaches."
The petition urged the foundation to redefine its funding priorities in favor of small-scale agroecological agriculture, citing the findings of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, initiated by the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
None of your Beeswax - Honey in Medicine
In the abstract, if one reads between the lines, it says in as polite and scientific a language as one can generally get away with in such a milieu, "why the heck are you ignoring this?"Some clinicians are under the impression that there is little or no evidence to support the use of honey as a wound dressing. To allow sound decisions to be made, this seminar article has covered the various reports that have been published on the clinical usage of honey. Positive findings on honey in wound care have been reported from 17 randomized controlled trials involving a total of 1965 participants, and 5 clinical trials of other forms involving 97 participants treated with honey. The effectiveness of honey in assisting wound healing has also been demonstrated in 16 trials on a total of 533 wounds on experimental animals. There is also a large amount of evidence in the form of case studies that have been reported. It has been shown to give good results on a very wide range of types of wound. It is therefore mystifying that there appears to be a lack of universal acceptance of honey as a wound dressing. It is recommended that clinicians should look for the clinical evidence that exists to support the use of other wound care products to compare with the evidence that exists for honey.
US FDA to reexamine metal dental fillings
The FDA in July 2009 declared the fillings, known as dental amalgam, posed no risk. A year earlier, it had cautioned against their use in certain more vulnerable people such as pregnant women and children, noting mercury's risks.The agency is revisiting the issue after four groups questioned its assessment and petitioned for a second look. On Tuesday and Wednesday next week, the panel of outside experts will consider available data as well as the agency's interpretation before offering recommendations.
The review is a reaction to increasing pressure from natural health groups that believe the toxic heavy metal contained in dental fillings (mercury) has serious long term consequences for the health of those whose teeth have been repaired with "dental amalgam".
It remains to be seen whether the review is being undertaken only to provide a fig leaf and placate the opposition to dental amalgam use, or whether there will be actual changes to protect people's health.
If changes are advised, they are likely going to be timid and gradual, considering the vast implications of legal liability for any damage ascertained to have been done by dentists (and to dentists) over the years.
Study finds statin use linked to rare autoimmune muscle disease
Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered how statins, the most commonly prescribed class of medication in the United States, appear to trigger a rare but serious autoimmune muscle disease in a small portion of the 30 million Americans who take the cholesterol-lowering drugs.Statin drugs interfere with the body's own cholesterol production in the liver. Cholesterol, by the way, is an important substance needed for our normal metabolic activity. Cholesterol has been connected with heart disease, but whether it is a CAUSE or an INDICATOR of something else being wrong is still in dispute. Meanwhile, we have widely used medications that not only interfere with our body's biochemical pathways, but in doing so can cause a rare (but perhaps not so rare, if we really care to look) autoimmune disease attacking muscle tissue.The linked article is highly promotional of statin drugs. To get the other side of the story, check out two earlier articles on this site:
Lipitor: Side Effects And Natural Remedy
Lipitor - The Human Cost
and pay attention especially to the number and the content of spontaneous comments posted by readers of those articles.
Prescription Drugs Associated with Reports of Violence Towards Others
After two decades of contentious denials about the suicidal risk posed by certain psychoactive prescription drugs, numerous drugs now carry label warnings about suicidal behavior.Now, a new study in PLoS One , identifies 31 drugs in FDA's MedWatch adverse drug reports that are disproportionately linked to 1,527 acts of violence--defined as "Homicide," "Physical assault," "Physical abuse," "Homicidal ideation" or "Violence-related symptom."
The violence cases included 387 reports of homicide, 404 physical assaults, 27 cases indicating physical abuse, 896 homicidal ideation reports, and 223 cases described as violence-related symptoms.
Of all currently marketed prescription drugs, those linked to most of the violent events reported to the FDA are drugs that increase dopamine and /or serotonin in the brain-- irrespective of the patient population.
The worst offender with the strongest association to uncontrollable, murderous violence--within days of ingesting the drug--is the smoking cessation drug, Chantix...
WHY DO AMERICANS (and some Europeans) HAVE SUCH POOR HEALTH?
In order to understand the current status of medical care in the U.S., Canada and Europe it is vital to understand that health care in these 3 regions is nearly completely under the control of the pharmaceutical industry. All major pharmaceutical firms have interlocking boards of directors so there is no real competition among these companies. In the United States the primary function of the Federal Drug Administration is to ensure the profitability of pharmaceutical firms, chemical firms and large agricultural conglomerates.The "war" on cancer has been lost as chemotherapy and radiation are no more successful now than they were 25 years ago. Fortunately a few people have heard about natural approaches to malignancies and are recovering without the terrible side effects of conventional cancer therapy. When the general public learns that most oncologists would refuse to undergo chemotherapy in the event they developed cancer more persons will look for far safer natural treatments of malignancy which provide better results.
Immense amounts of money are expended on pharmaceutical drugs that are heavily publicized but have no ability to cure a disease. A good example of this is the use of expensive toxic anti-retroviral drugs for HIV when the simple repletion of selenium, niacin, tryptophane and glutamine appears to be very successful in stopping this nutrient consuming illness from progressing. Conventional medicine has no good therapy for the common lung disease emphysema. The effective alternative therapies for emphysema of nebulized glutathione, intravenous hydrogen peroxide, and cetyl myristolate remain unknown to most practitioners.
Why Retroviruses Appear in AIDS, Cancer and Autoimmune Diseases
This is an older article, re-linked here because I just integrated it with all its links and I believe some of you may be interested...Fintan Dunne, who has done the editing of the article and published it on his site, says the following by way of introduction:
Cal Crilly's devastating analysis of AIDS ... highlights the outdated science behind current treatments and shows the true causes and cure.
He takes us on a densely referenced tour through the largely unknown mechanisms underlying viruses, retroviruses, cancer and autoimmune diseases. So this has implications far beyond AIDS.
Cal's treatise is based on existing mainstream scientific and medical research. The kind of research the vendors of medicine's magic pills simply ignore in hope it will just go away. Crilly makes it impossible to ignore. An eye opener!
CDC allegedly falsifies reports–ignoring up to 3,587 Miscarriages from H1N1 Vaccine
The corrected estimate for the total number of 2009-A-H1N1-flu-shot-associated miscarriages and stillbirths during the 2009/10-flu season is 1,588 (95% goodness-of-fit confidence interval, 946 to 3587). That is, the lower and upper range-probability of miscarriage and stillbirths due to the H1N1 vaccine was as low as 946 and as high as 3,587.
Video: Taking Back Our Lives from the Wall Street Mafia
David Korten, author of "AGENDA FOR A NEW ECONOMY - From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth" discusses what's wrong with a Wall Street dominated economy, and how to take back our lives..."Trying to fix Wall Street is like trying to fix the Mafia so it's not quite so destructive..."
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You can, as many others do, contribute to these newsgrabs...
just tell me about a link to an article or a site you think is particularly interesting.
You can email me at (sepp@lastrega.com).
You can also find me on facebook (facebook.com/hasslberger)
and on Twitter
and if you like physics and technology, check out my site on physics, economy and new energyMore information out there...
There is a lot I cannot cover but other sources for this kind of information exist.
Dr Mercola has a good health blog
Mike Adams publishes Natural News.
In the UK we have the One Click Group.
The Dr Rath Foundation campaigns for a New Healthcare System.
Natural health and nutrition on La Leva di Archimede
Food, Agriculture and more on the Organic Consumers Association site.
"The individual is supreme and finds the way through intuition"
posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Friday December 17 2010
updated on Tuesday December 13 2011URL of this article:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2010/12/17/flu_prevents_asthma_health_supreme_newsgrabs_17_december_2010.htm
