Agent Orange Exposure Linked to Stroke

Stroke has been added to the growing list of possible health effects Vietnam veterans may face long term after exposure to Agent Orange.

In response to new evidence showing a statistically significant overall increase in stroke associated with exposure to chemical in Agent Orange, a committee examining these health effects has moved stroke to the "limited and suggestive" evidence category.

However, the published data do not permit distinguishing hemorrhagic from ischemic stroke, said the authors of the updated report, Veterans and Agent Orange: Update 2012 : Committee to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides (Ninth Biennial Update).

The evidence already suggested an association between exposure to the chemicals and hypertension, ischemic heart disease, and type 2 diabetes, as well as Parkinson's disease and some cancers.

Elsewhere in the 900-page report, the committee concluded that on the basis of newly reviewed evidence and in previous reports, there is also "limited or suggestive" evidence of an association between exposure to the chemicals of interest and Parkinson's disease.

The committee concluded that on the basis of new evidence and previous reports, evidence is inadequate or insufficient to determine whether there is an association between exposure to chemicals of interest and Alzheimer's disease.

Herbicide Mixtures

The current document was produced by a committee chaired by Mary K. Walker, professor, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. It presents the committee's review of peer-reviewed scientific reports concerning associations between health outcomes and exposure to chemicals in herbicides used in Vietnam that were published from October 2010 to September 2012 and the integration of this new information into the existing database.

From 1962 to 1971, the US military sprayed herbicides over Vietnam to strip the thick jungle canopy that could conceal opposition forces, to destroy crops that those forces might depend on, and to clear tall grasses and bushes from the perimeters of US base camps and outlying fire-support bases.

The herbicide mixtures used were named according to the colors of identification bands painted on the storage drugs. The main chemical sprayed was Agent Orange, a 50-50 mixture of 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T).

Because of continuing complaints and uncertainty about long-term health effects of sprayed herbicides in Vietnam vets, Congress passed the Agent Orange Act of 1991, which directed the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to ask the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to comprehensively evaluate scientific and medical information on the health effects of exposure to Agent Orange and other herbicides used in Vietnam. The legislation also instructed the Secretary to ask the NAS to conduct updates every 2 years for 10 years to draw conclusions from newly available literature.

In response to the first request, the Institute of Medicine convened a committee whose conclusions were published in 1994. The work of later committees resulted in the publication of biennial updates and of focused reports on the scientific evidence regarding type 2 diabetes, acute myeloid leukemia in children, and the latent period for respiratory cancer.

The Veterans Education and Benefits Expansion Act of 2001 mandated that the biennial updates continue through 2014.

In this most recent update, one of the studies the committee looked at was the Prospective Investigation of Vasculature in Uppsala Seniors, a small study (n = 35) that examined the relationship among several chemicals that have dioxin-like activity and stroke incidence.

Contrasting high and low quartiles, the study found a strong (relative risk, 3.8) and statistically significant albeit imprecise (95% confidence interval, 1.2 - 12.2) relationship between exposure and stroke after adjustment for relevant potentially confounding factors. A statistically significant dose-response relationship was also seen across exposure quartiles.

Prior literature shows an overall increase in stroke and cerebrovascular disease associated with exposure to chemicals of interest in environmental, occupational, and Vietnam veteran populations. Human and animal studies have demonstrated biological plausibility of the connection between exposure to chemicals of interest and stroke, which is strongly linked to hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, conditions already in the limited and suggestive evidence category.

After weighing all these factors, the committee voted to move stroke to the limited and suggestive category.

The published data did not permit the committee to distinguish hemorrhagic from ischemic stroke, but given that only a small percentage of strokes are the hemorrhagic type in the Western population, this was not seen as an impediment, according to the report.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/817541 

Monsanto, the TPP and global food dominance

As the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations enter their last few days, Ellen Brown exposes their real purpose - corporate control of the world's food, health, environment and financial systems. Of all these, the greatest is food ...

They are carefully crafting the TPP to insure that citizens of the involved countries have no control over food safety, what they will be eating, where it is grown, the conditions under which food is grown and the use of herbicides and pesticides.

"Control oil and you control nations," said US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. "Control foodand you control the people."

And now global food control has nearly been achieved, by reducing seed diversity with GMO (genetically modified) seeds that are distributed by only a few transnational corporations.

This agenda has been implemented at grave cost to our health. And if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passes, control over not just our food but our health, our environment and our financial system will be in the hands of transnational corporations.

[See also "Avaaz TPP petition sabotaged?"]

Profits Before Populations

Genetic engineering has made proprietary control possible over the seeds on which the world’s food supply depends. According to an Acres USA interview of plant pathologist Don Huber, Professor Emeritus at Purdue University, two modified traits account for practically all of the genetically modified crops grown in the world today.

One involves insect resistance. The other, more disturbing modification involves insensitivity to glyphosate-based herbicides (plant-killing chemicals). Often known as Roundup after the best-selling Monsanto product of that name, glyphosate poisons everything in its path except plants genetically modified to resist it.

Glyphosate-based herbicides are now the most commonly used herbicides in the world. Glyphosate is an essential partner to the GMOs that are the principal business of the burgeoning biotech industry. Glyphosate is a 'broad-spectrum' herbicide that destroys indiscriminately, not by killing unwanted plants directly but by tying up access to critical nutrients.

Because of the insidious way in which it works, it has been sold as a relatively benign replacement for the devastating earlier dioxin-based herbicides. But a barrage of experimental data has now shown glyphosate - and the GMO foods incorporating it at high levels - to pose serious dangers to health.

Compounding the risk is the toxicity of so-called 'inert' ingredients used to make glyphosate more potent. Researchers have found, for example, that the surfactant POEA can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells. But these risks have been conveniently ignored.

The widespread use of GMO foods and glyphosate herbicides helps explain the anomaly that the US spends over twice as much per capita on healthcare as the average developed country, yet it is rated far down the scale of the world’s healthiest populations. The World Health Organization has ranked the US LAST out of 17 developed nations for overall health.

Sixty to seventy percent of the foods in US supermarkets are now genetically modified. By contrast, in at least 26 other countries - including Switzerland, Australia, Austria, China, India, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, Mexico and Russia - GMOs are totally or partially banned; and significant restrictions on GMOs exist in about sixty other countries.

A ban on GMO and glyphosate use might go far toward improving the health of Americans. But the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a global trade agreement for which the Obama Administration has sought Fast Track status, would block that sort of cause-focused approach to the healthcare crisis.

Roundup’s Insidious Effects

Roundup-resistant crops escape being killed by glyphosate, but they do not avoid absorbing it into their tissues. Herbicide-tolerant crops have substantially higher levels of herbicide residues than other crops. In fact, many countries have had to increase their legally allowable levels - by up to 50 times - in order to accommodate the introduction of GM crops.

In the European Union, residues in food are set to rise 100-150 times if a new proposal by Monsanto is approved. Meanwhile, herbicide-tolerant "super-weeds" have adapted to the chemical, requiring even more toxic doses and new toxic chemicals to kill the plant.

Human enzymes are affected by glyphosate just as plant enzymes are: the chemical blocks the uptake of manganese and other essential minerals. Without those minerals, we cannot properly metabolize our food. That helps explain the rampant epidemic of obesity in the United States. People eat and eat in an attempt to acquire the nutrients that are simply not available in their food.

According to researchers Samsell and Seneff in Biosemiotic Entropy: Disorder, Disease, and Mortality (April 2013):

"Glyphosate's inhibition of cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes is an overlooked component of its toxicity to mammals. CYP enzymes play crucial roles in biology ... Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body.

"Consequences are most of the diseases and conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease."

More than 40 diseases have been linked to glyphosate use, and more keep appearing. In September 2013, the National University of Rio Cuarto, Argentina, published researchfinding that glyphosate enhances the growth of fungi that produce aflatoxin B1, one of the most carcinogenic of substances.

A doctor from Chaco, Argentina, told Associated Press, "We've gone from a pretty healthy population to one with a high rate of cancer, birth defects and illnesses seldom seen before." Fungi growths have increased significantly in US corn crops.

Glyphosate has also done serious damage to the environment. According to an October 2012 report by the Institute of Science in Society:

"Agribusiness claims that glyphosate and glyphosate-tolerant crops will improve crop yields, increase farmers’ profits and benefit the environment by reducing pesticide use.

Exactly the opposite is the case ... the evidence indicates that glyphosate herbicides and glyphosate-tolerant crops have had wide-ranging detrimental effects, including glyphosate resistant super weeds, virulent plant (and new livestock) pathogens, reduced crop health and yield, harm to off-target species from insects to amphibians and livestock, as well as reduced soil fertility."

Politics Trumps Science

In light of these adverse findings, why have Washington and the European Commission continued to endorse glyphosate as safe? Critics point to lax regulations, heavy influence from corporate lobbyists, and a political agenda that has more to do with power and control than protecting the health of the people.

In the ground-breaking 2007 book Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, William Engdahl states that global food control and depopulation became US strategic policy under Rockefeller protégé Henry Kissinger. Along with oil geopolitics, they were to be the new 'solution' to the threats to US global power and continued US access to cheap raw materials from the developing world.

In line with that agenda, the government has shown extreme partisanship in favor of the biotech agribusiness industry, opting for a system in which the industry 'voluntarily' polices itself. Bio-engineered foods are treated as "natural food additives", not needing any special testing.

Jeffrey M. Smith, Executive Director of the Institute for Responsible Technology, confirmsthat US Food and Drug Administration policy allows biotech companies to determine if their own foods are safe. Submission of data is completely voluntary. He concludes:

In the critical arena of food safety research, the biotech industry is without accountability, standards, or peer-review. They’ve got bad science down to a science.

Whether or not depopulation is an intentional part of the agenda, widespread use of GMO and glyphosate is having that result. The endocrine-disrupting properties of glyphosate have been linked to infertility, miscarriage, birth defects and arrested sexual development.

In Russian experiments, animals fed GM soy were sterile by the third generation. Vast amounts of farmland soil are also being systematically ruined by the killing of beneficial microorganisms that allow plant roots to uptake soil nutrients.

In Gary Null’s eye-opening documentary Seeds of Death: Unveiling the Lies of GMOs, Dr. Bruce Lipton warns: "We are leading the world into the sixth mass extinction of life on this planet ... Human behavior is undermining the web of life."

The TPP and International Corporate Control

As the devastating conclusions of these and other researchers awaken people globally to the dangers of Roundup and GMO foods, transnational corporations are working feverishly with the Obama administration to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that would strip governments of the power to regulate transnational corporate activities.

Negotiations have been kept secret from Congress but not from corporate advisors, 600 of whom have been consulted and know the details. According to Barbara Chicherio inNation of Change:

"The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) has the potential to become the biggest regional Free Trade Agreement in history ...

"The chief agricultural negotiator for the US is the former Monsanto lobbyist, Islam Siddique. If ratified the TPP would impose punishing regulations that give multinational corporations unprecedented right to demand taxpayer compensation for policies that corporations deem a barrier to their profits ...

"They are carefully crafting the TPP to insure that citizens of the involved countries have no control over food safety, what they will be eating, where it is grown, the conditions under which food is grown and the use of herbicides and pesticides."

Food safety is only one of many rights and protections liable to fall to this super-weapon of international corporate control. In an April 2013 interview on The Real News Network, Kevin Zeese called the TPP "NAFTA on steroids" and "a global corporate coup." He warned:

"No matter what issue you care about - whether its wages, jobs, protecting the environment ... this issue is going to adversely affect it ... If a country takes a step to try to regulate the financial industry or set up a public bank to represent the public interest, it can be sued".

Return to Nature: Not Too Late

There is a safer, saner, more earth-friendly way to feed nations. While Monsanto and US regulators are forcing GM crops on American families, Russian families are showing what can be done with permaculture methods on simple garden plots.

In 2011, 40% of Russia’s food was grown on dachas (cottage gardens or allotments). Dacha gardens produced over 80% of the country’s fruit and berries, over 66% of the vegetables, almost 80% of the potatoes and nearly 50% of the nation’s milk, much of it consumed raw. According to Vladimir Megre, author of the best-selling Ringing CedarsSeries:

"Essentially, what Russian gardeners do is demonstrate that gardeners can feed the world - and you do not need any GMOs, industrial farms, or any other technological gimmicks to guarantee everybody’s got enough food to eat.

Bear in mind that Russia only has 110 days of growing season per year - so in the US, for example, gardeners’ output could be substantially greater. Today, however, the area taken up by lawns in the US is two times greater than that of Russia’s gardens - and it produces nothing but a multi-billion-dollar lawn care industry."

In the US, only about 0.6 percent of the total agricultural area is devoted to organic farming. This area needs to be vastly expanded if we are to avoid the 'sixth mass extinction'. But first, we need to urge our representatives to stop Fast Track, vote no on the TPP, and pursue a global phase-out of glyphosate-based herbicides and GMO foods.

Our health, our finances and our environment are at stake.

---

Sign the Avaaz petition now!

Killing cancer like the common cold

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Nick Wilkins was out of options for battling leukemia
• He is now cancer free after an experimental treatment
• Doctors taught Nick's immune cells to become adept at killing cancer
• Experts hope the treatment will quickly become more widely available
  
  
  In the therapy, doctors first remove the patient's T-cells, which play a crucial role in the immune system. They then reprogram the cells by transferring in new genes. Once infused back into the body, each modified cell multiplies to 10,000 cells. These "hunter" cells then track down and kill the cancer in a patient's body.
  Essentially, researchers are trying to train Nick's body to fight off cancer in much the same way our bodies fight off the common cold.
  Much More Here 

New study presents promising results for treatment of multiple myeloma

A new study conducted by scientists from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School, USA, and Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, presents very promising results for the treatment of the cancer form multiple myeloma. The drug candidate used in the research has been developed by scientists from Karolinska Institutet and a Swedish company following its initial identification at the same university. The findings are so promising that the scientists are teaming up with Harvard to bring the drug to clinical trials on patients.

The journal Blood has published a new study on a drug candidate for multiple myeloma, a form of cancer that affects about one per cent of all tumour patients, with some 600 people a year developing the disease in Sweden. Multiple myeloma is a life-threatening disease and there is a dire medical need for new therapies, especially for the patients whose tumour cells have become resistant to the conventional drugs.

"The discovery that our substance works on multiple myeloma cells resistant to conventional therapy is very promising for the future," says Professor Stig Linder at Karolinska Institutet's Department of Oncology-Pathology. "We're now very hopeful that we and our colleagues at Harvard Medical School will be able to develop an effective treatment."

The study demonstrates that the drug candidate, called VLX1570, inhibits tumour growth and prolongs survival in preclinical multiple myeloma models. The exact mechanism of action of the substance was identified earlier at Karolinska Institutet (Nature Medicine, 2011); put simply, the tumour cells can be said to be more sensitive than normal cells to disruption to the machinery that breaks down defective proteins. When this machinery is blocked, it triggers apoptosis (programmed cell death) in the tumour cells.

"We show that the drug candidate kills multiple myeloma cells from cancer patients," says Professor Linder. "The substance is also effective against myeloma cells that have developed a resistance to the clinically used drug bortezomib."

Dr Dharminder Chauhan at Harvard Medical School says that the mechanism of action is very interesting as regards the development of new cancer drugs and adds, "We're delighted to be able to study the therapeutic potential of this new drug candidate in clinical studies. We hope that the joint research we're doing will lead to improved cancer treatments."

The study also found that the new substance could be combined synergistically with other cancer therapies. Karolinska Institutet and Harvard Medical School are due to launch a large-scale clinical study next year in association with drug discovery company Vivolux AB (Uppsala, Sweden).

"If the study proves successful it will represent a great step forward, mainly for all cancer patients but also for the Swedish drug industry," says Professor Linder.

LINK

Gene therapy scores big wins against blood cancers

In one of the biggest advances against leukemia and other blood cancers in many years, doctors are reporting unprecedented success by using gene therapy to transform patients' blood cells into soldiers that seek and destroy cancer.

A few patients with one type of leukemia were given this one-time, experimental therapy several years ago and some remain cancer-free today. Now, at least six research groups have treated more than 120 patients with many types of blood and bone marrow cancers, with stunning results.

"It's really exciting," said Dr. Janice Abkowitz, blood diseases chief at the University of Washington in Seattle and president of the American Society of Hematology. "You can take a cell that belongs to a patient and engineer it to be an attack cell."

In one study, all five adults and 19 of 22 children with acute lymphocytic leukemia, or ALL, had a complete remission, meaning no cancer could be found after treatment, although a few have relapsed since then.

These were gravely ill patients out of options. Some had tried multiple bone marrow transplants and up to 10 types of chemotherapy or other treatments.

Cancer was so advanced in 8-year-old Emily Whitehead of Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, that doctors said her major organs would fail within days. She was the first child given the gene therapy and shows no sign of cancer today, nearly two years later.

Results on other patients with myeloma, lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL, will be reported at the hematology group's conference that starts Saturday in New Orleans.

Doctors say this has the potential to become the first gene therapy approved in the United States and the first for cancer worldwide. Only one gene therapy is approved in Europe, for a rare metabolic disease.

The treatment involves filtering patients' blood to remove millions of white blood cells called T-cells, altering them in the lab to contain a gene that targets cancer, and returning them to the patient in infusions over three days.

"What we are giving essentially is a living drug" — permanently altered cells that multiply in the body into an army to fight the cancer, said Dr. David Porter, a University of Pennsylvania scientist who led one study.

Several drug and biotech companies are developing these therapies. Penn has patented its method and licensed it to Switzerland-based Novartis AG. The company is building a research center on the Penn campus in Philadelphia and plans a clinical trial next year that could lead to federal approval of the treatment as soon as 2016.

Talking with the researchers, "there is a sense of making history ... a sense of doing something very unique," said Hervé Hoppenot, president of Novartis Oncology, the division leading the work.

Lee Greenberger, chief scientific officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, agreed.

"From our vantage point, this looks like a major advance," he said. "We are seeing powerful responses ... and time will tell how enduring these remissions turn out to be."

The group has given $15 million to various researchers testing this approach. Nearly 49,000 new cases of leukemia, 70,000 cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and 22,000 cases of myeloma are expected to be diagnosed in the United States in 2013.

Many patients are successfully treated with chemotherapy or bone marrow or stem cell transplants, but transplants are risky and donors can't always be found. So far, gene therapy has been tried on people who were in danger of dying because other treatments had failed.

The gene therapy must be made individually for each patient, and lab costs now are about $25,000, without a profit margin. That's still less than many drugs to treat these diseases and far less than a transplant.

The treatment can cause severe flu-like symptoms and other side effects, but these have been reversible and temporary, doctors say.

Penn doctors have treated the most cases so far — 59. Of the first 14 patients with CLL, four had complete remissions, four had partial ones and the rest did not respond. However, some partial responders continue to see their cancer shrink a year after treatment.

"That's very unique to this kind of therapy" and gives hope the treatment may still purge the cancer, said Porter. Another 18 CLL patients were treated and half have responded so far.

Penn doctors also treated 27 ALL patients. All five adults and 19 of the 22 children had complete remissions, an "extraordinarily high" success rate, said Dr. Stephan Grupp at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Six have since relapsed, though, and doctors are pondering a second gene therapy attempt.

At the National Cancer Institute, Dr. James Kochenderfer and others have treated 11 patients with lymphoma and four with CLL, starting roughly two years ago. Six had complete remissions, six had partial ones, one has stable disease and it's too soon to tell for the rest.

Ten other patients were given gene therapy to try to kill leukemia or lymphoma remaining after bone marrow transplants. These patients got infusions of gene-treated blood cells from their transplant donors instead of using their own blood cells. One had a complete remission, and three others had significant reduction of their disease.

"They've had every treatment known to man. To get any responses is really encouraging," Kochenderfer said. The cancer institute is working with a Los Angeles biotech firm, Kite Pharma Inc., on its gene therapy approach.

Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center will report on 13 patients with ALL, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center will report on about two-dozen patients with ALL or lymphoma and Baylor University will give results on 10 patients with lymphoma or myeloma.

Patients are encouraged that relatively few have relapsed.

"We're still nervous every day because they can't tell us what's going to happen tomorrow," said Tom Whitehead, 8-year-old Emily's father.

Doug Olson, 67, a scientist for a medical device maker, shows no sign of cancer since gene therapy in September 2010 for CLL he had had since 1996.

"Within one month he was in complete remission. That was just completely unexpected," said Porter, his doctor at Penn.

Olson ran his first half-marathon in January and no longer worries about how long his remission will last.

"I decided I'm cured. I'm not going to let that hang over my head anymore," he said. 

LINK