Tag: safety

Suppressed Government Report Finds Fluoride Can Reduce IQ

On March 15th the National Toxicology Program (NTP) report reviewing fluoride neurotoxicity was finally made public under an agreement reached in an ongoing lawsuit brought against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by the Fluoride Action Network (FAN).

The long delayed lawsuit that began in 2017 revealed government attempts to limit the evidence available to be reviewed in court.

Internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by plaintiff attorney Michael Connett indicated the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services secretary Rachel Levine and the National Institute of Health’s director Lawrence A. Tabak intervened to stop the release of the most recent study on fluoride’s toxicity in May 2022.

According to FAN only one historical example exists of an NTP report being blocked from release, a report on the carcinogenicity of asbestos-contaminated talc. Talc industry groups conducted an aggressive lobbying campaign, including enlisting friendly congresspeople to intervene.

FAN was able to force yesterday’s release of the NTP report by using leverage from the ongoing lawsuit against the EPA.

The report was issued in two parts, a monograph, and a meta-analysis. It included comments from external peer-reviewers and internal HHS departments, along with NTP’s responses.

FAN reported the meta-analysis found that 52 of 55 studies found lower IQ with higher fluoride exposures, demonstrating remarkable consistency. Notably, 19 studies of the studies included were rated to be higher quality and 18 of these linked fluoride exposure with lower IQ. The meta-analysis could not detect any safe exposure, including at levels common from drinking artificially fluoridated water.

In a recent press release, FAN says that fluoridation defenders have falsely claimed draft versions of the report had been “rejected” by a National Academies committee. In fact, the committee recommended that NTP clarify their methods and reasoning for reaching their conclusions because the issue was considered so contentious.

In a statement, FAN said the release of the report makes the situation clear.

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Rail boss tells train crew to skip inspections, limit reports in leaked audio

A leaked recording of a manager at one of the nation’s largest rail companies, reveals them telling workers to skip inspections and not report cars with the same type of problem blamed for last month’s massive train derailment in Ohio.

The Norfolk Southern derailment and subsequent investigation into its cause have invited increased scrutiny into the rail industry’s safety practices. 

The audio, obtained by the Guardian, hears the manager telling a former employee of Union Pacific to stop tagging railcars for broken bearings. The manager says doing so delays other cargo.

A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board into the Norfolk Southern derailment found that a wheel-bearing failure was responsible for the catastrophe.

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Bayer Admits It Paid “Millions” in HIV Infection Cases — Just Not in English

To read the English-speaking media, you’d never know that Bayer (BAYRY) just paid “tens of millions” of dollars to end a three-decade long scandal in which the company sold HIV-contaminated blood products to haemophiliacs, thousands of whom later died of AIDS.

Ironically, Bayer’s new haemophilia iPhone app got some coverage, as did Bayer’s haemophilia research grant to the University of Florida. But you have to pick through the French and Italian news media to find out that Bayer is finally writing checks to people who got AIDS because, in the 1980s, the Cutter Biological unit of Bayer ignored federal law to recruit prisoners, intravenous drug users, and high-risk gay men as donors of the blood Cutter then used to make Factor VIII and IX, the clotting product that haemophiliacs need in order to not bleed to death. Agence France Press reported (via a Google translation):

The German group Bayer and three other labs will pay tens of millions of euros to hemophiliacs who accused them of having sold in the 1980s blood products contaminated with HIV, a source close to the deal told AFP.

The figure of tens of millions of euros in compensation “is not totally wrong,” she added. Bayer and the U.S. company Baxter are the two main parties to the agreement, she said.

A company spokesperson said:

However, “the company accepts no responsibility” in this case, and “continues to insist it has always acted responsibly and ethically.”

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‘We Could Eat Malignant Chicken Tumors by the Bucket Load’ – Lab Grown Meat’s Impending CANCER Problem.

Lab-grown meat, touted as the “cruelty-free” food of the future by everyone from the World Economic Forum to Hollywood mega-celebs like Leonardo DiCaprio, may have a fatal problem, according to a new Bloomberg story.

The problem is that the materials used to make the product – “immortalized cell lines” – replicate forever, just like cancer. Which means, in effect, that they are cancer. Although these cell lines are widely used in scientific research, they’ve never been used to produce food before.

“Immortalized cells are a staple of medical research, but they are, technically speaking, precancerous and can be, in some cases, fully cancerous… [but d]on’t worry: Prominent cancer researchers tell Bloomberg Businessweek that because the cells aren’t human, it’s essentially impossible for people who eat them to get cancer from them, or for the precancerous or cancerous cells to replicate inside people at all.”

– Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Industry types are “confident” that eating such products poses no risk – although there isn’t any hard data – but it’s not difficult to see, even if the products are “proven” safe, how people might be put off by the thought they’re eating a glorified tumor.

All the evidence suggests that the most prominent producers of these new products – including the “Big Three” startups, Believer Meat, Eat Just and Upside Foods – are doing their best to avoid confronting the issue in public. But whether they’ll be able to keep do so after this latest blast of high-profile negative publicity, remains to be seen.

The story comes at a time of growing difficulty for new alternatives to traditional animal products, especially so-called “plant-based meats”.

At the beginning of the month, we reported on the ongoing problems faced by Impossible Foods, which is laying off 20 percent of its workforce, or nearly 140 staff.

Plant-based meats have gone from double-digit growth to double-digit decline in the last year, with sales of refrigerated meat alternatives falling by 10.5 percent for the year to September 4 2022.

In response to another cover story from Bloomberg Businessweek, which labelled plant-based meats “just another fad”, Impossible took the bold step of taking out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times to counter the claims. Impossible’s new CEO, Peter McGuiness has put the company in a more confrontational stance, which includes denying the mounting evidence that his company, and others like it, are in serious trouble.

Beyond Meat, by contrast, has barely even been able to put on a brave face. Shares in the company plunged 75 percent in the first three quarters of the last year, and its flagship pilot collaboration with McDonald’s, the “McPlant Burger”, was discontinued by the fast-food giant.

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These Five Lawmakers Received Over $50,000 From Railroad PACs Last Year

Atrain carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3, leading to the evacuation of about 5,000 people.

Rescue workers blew holes in five railway cars carrying vinyl chloride, a potentially dangerous gas, allowing it to be destroyed via controlled burning.

The crash sparked a renewed interest in lobbying and campaign donations from railway-associated political action committees (PACs). It has emerged that the Trump administration rescinded a safety rule in 2017 following pressure from the industry. Steven Ditmeyer, a former senior figure at the Federal Railroad Administration, told investigative news outlet The Lever that this could have increased the “severity” of the accident.

PACs and individuals associated with the rail industry donated $3,190,763 in total to political candidates in 2021-22. This data comes from OpenSecrets, a non-profit organization that tracks the impact of money on American politics. Of this total, $1,764,695 was given to Republican candidates, $1,408,068 to their Democratic rivals.

OpenSecrets identified 16 railway-related PACs that had been donating to candidates, of which three gave at least $500,000 in total. These were the Union Pacific Corp, Norfolk Southern and BNSF Railway.

Newsweek has gone through the OpenSecrets data to list the five members of Congress who received more than $20,000 from railway-related PACs and individuals, during 2021-22. The analysis is based on statistics from the Federal Election Commission, which recorded all campaign donations of $200 or more.

There is no suggestion that any of these lawmakers behaved improperly, either in receiving or recording these campaign donations.

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Rail Companies Blocked Safety Rules Before Ohio Derailment

Before this weekend’s fiery Norfolk Southern train derailment prompted emergency evacuations in Ohio, the company helped kill a federal safety rule aimed at upgrading the rail industry’s Civil War-era braking systems, according to documents reviewed by The Lever.

Though the company’s 150-car train in Ohio reportedly burst into 100-foot flames upon derailing — and was transporting materials that triggered a fireball when they were released and incinerated — it was not being regulated as a “high-hazard flammable train,” federal officials told The Lever.

Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds. The decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials — including the one in Ohio — from the “high-hazard” classification and its more stringent safety requirements.

Amid the lobbying blitz against stronger transportation safety regulations, Norfolk Southern paid executives millions and spent billions on stock buybacks — all while the company shed thousands of employees despite warnings that understaffing is intensifying safety risks. Norfolk Southern officials also fought off a shareholder initiative that could have required company executives to “assess, review, and mitigate risks of hazardous material transportation.”

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How Neonicotinoid Insecticides Adversely Affect Nervous System Health

Research published in Environmental Health Perspectives finds the presence of nine various neonicotinoids, or neonics, and six neonic metabolites within human cerebrospinal fluid (CSF).

CSF is an essential part of the central nervous system (CNS), especially for CNS development.

Specific chemical biomarkers (measurable indicators of biological state), like pesticides, found in CSF are useful for diagnosing and evaluating numerous neurological diseases.

The nervous system is an integral part of the human body and includes the brain, spinal cord, a vast network of nerves and neurons, all of which are responsible for many of our bodily functions — from sensed to movement.

However, mounting evidence over the past years shows that chronic exposure to sublethal (low) levels of pesticides can cause neurotoxic effects or exacerbate preexisting chemical damage to the nervous system.

The impacts of pesticides on the nervous system, including the brain, are hazardous, especially for chronically exposed individuals (e.g., farmworkers) or during critical windows of vulnerability and development (e.g., childhood, pregnancy).

Researchers identify the role agricultural chemicals play in CNS impacts causing neurological diseases, like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, dementia-like diseases such as Alzheimer’s and other effects on cognitive function.

Over 300 environmental contaminants and their byproducts, including pesticides, are chemicals commonly present in human blood and urine samples and can increase neurotoxicity risk when crossing the brain barrier.

Therefore, studies like this highlight the importance of understanding how chemical accumulation in the body can impact long-term health and disease prognosis.

The study explores whether the presence of neonics and their metabolites in CSF is an indicator of adverse CNS effects.

From April 2019 to January 2021, researchers gathered 314 CSF samples from patients aged one month to 89 years in the First Affiliated Hospital of Shantou University, Shantou, China using a clinical lumbar puncture.

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The FAA has very quietly tacitly admitted that the EKGs of pilots are no longer normal. We should be concerned. Very concerned.

In the October 2022 version of the FAA Guide for Aviation Medical Examiners, the FAA quietly widened the EKG parameters beyond the normal range (from a PR max of .2 to unlimited). And they didn’t widen the range by a little. They widened it by a lot. It was done after the vaccine rollout.

This is extraordinary. They did it hoping nobody would notice. It worked for a while. Nobody caught it.

But you can’t hide these things for long.

This is a tacit admission from the US government that the COVID vaccine has damaged the hearts of our pilots. Not just a few pilots. A lot of pilots and a lot of damage.

The cardiac harm of course is not limited to pilots.

My best guess right now is that over 50M Americans sustained some amount of heart damage from the shot.

That’s a lot of people who will be very upset when they realize the vaccine they took to reduce their chance of dying from COVID actually worked in reverse making it:

  1. More likely that people will get COVID
  2. Be hospitalized from COVID and other diseases
  3. Die from COVID (and other diseases)
  4. You also have an excellent chance of getting a lifetime of heart damage for no extra charge.

But don’t worry; you can’t sue them. They fixed the law so none of them aren’t liable (the doctors, the drug companies, the government). After all, you took the vaccine of your own free will. It’s not like you were forced (or coerced) to take it or anything like that! And there were plenty of people warning you not to take the shots (even though they censored most of them).

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Shocking Investigation Finds Widespread Uranium Contamination in US Water Supply

A new investigation looks into the extent to which U.S. water supplies are contaminated with uranium.

Maybe it’s the good kind of uranium that turns you into Spider-Man or the Incredible Hulk and not the bad kind of uranium that turns you into Thyroid Cancer Man – one of the lesser-known Marvel superheroes.

ProPublica has come out with an investigation entitled “The Cold War Legacy Lurking in U.S. Groundwater.” After World War II, the Cold War started between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. because the rich needed to stop the damn Communists from pushing their furry hats on everyone! There was a feverish need to build loads of nuclear weapons. To do that, the U.S. needed uranium, and its ruling class didn’t care how they got it.

More than 50 uranium mines popped up across the Western U.S. But they didn’t just turn our weapons radioactive. They also “dumped radioactive and toxic waste into rivers like the Cheyenne in South Dakota and the Animas in Colorado. … Some of the more than 250 million tons of toxic and radioactive detritus… scattered into nearby communities, some spilled into streams and some leaked into aquifers.”

Luckily for the U.S. government at the time, most of the people having their lives destroyed by radioactive detritus were either Native Americans, poor, or both. And as we know well, none of those groups matter to the ruling class – not then and not now. They don’t care about anybody who doesn’t have enough money to have, at minimum, one backup tax haven for when their first tax haven floods due to climate change.

Providing clean water is the most basic responsibility of a government. The U.S. government – the richest in the world – can’t do that, which puts this country at the level of a failed state.

And this is nothing new. The U.S. government – which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America – has a long history of polluting its own people’s drinking water.

Of course, everyone knows about the lead-tainted water of Flint, Michigan. But did you know that in 2016, excessive lead levels were found in almost 2,000 water systems across all 50 states?

This year, shocking levels of lead were found in Chicago’s tap water. But of course, it goes far beyond lead.

Also this year, as reported by ABC News, “A lawsuit alleged the Navy ‘harbored toxic secrets’ after jet fuel leaked from a storage facility in Red Hill, Hawaii operated by the Navy, contaminating locals’ drinking water and sickening hundreds of families.”

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Walmart on hook over claims of heavy metals in spices

A federal judge advanced claims that some products in Walmart’s Great Value line of spices may contain toxic heavy metals, and that the retail giant failed to warn customers of those metals and potential health risks.

Plaintiffs Susan Gagetta and Traice Gomez say in a class action filed this past June that Walmart failed to tell customers that certain herbs and spices in its Great Value line including basil, chili powder, ground cumin and organic paprika and ginger, may contain lead, arsenic and cadmium. Both plaintiffs are Walmart customers living in California. 

They cited a November 2021 report “Your Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead” from Consumer Reports, which analyzed 126 individual products from national and private-label brands, including Walmart’s Great Value, and determined a third of the tested products had high enough levels of arsenic, lead, and cadmium combined, on average, “to pose a health concern for children and adults when regularly consumed in typical serving sizes.”

Heavy metals in foods can cause cancer and serious, possibly irreversible damage to brain development along with other serious health issues. Exposure to lead may cause anemia, weakness and kidney and brain damage, which affect almost every organ and system and accumulates in the body over time. Arsenic can cause bladder, lung, liver and skin cancer, as well as strokes and diabetes. 

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