Tag: safety

Powdered whole milk may be culprit in botulism outbreak that sickened dozens of babies

Powdered whole milk used to make ByHeart infant formula could be the source of contamination that led to an outbreak of botulism that sickened dozens of babies.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported the details on Friday.

Powdered whole milk may be culprit in botulism outbreak

What we know:

Testing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found that bacteria in an unopened can of formula matched a sample from a sick baby — and it also matched contamination detected in samples of organic whole milk powder used to make ByHeart formula and collected and tested by the company, officials said. 

FDA testing also found contamination in a sample of whole milk powder supplied to ByHeart — and it matched the germ in a finished sample of the company’s formula.

What they’re saying:

A ByHeart official said the finding helps shed light on what has become a “watershed moment” for the company.

“We are focused on the root cause and our responsibility to act on what we’ve learned to help create a safer future for ByHeart and infant formula,” said Dr. Devon Kuehn, ByHeart’s chief scientific and medical officer.

What we don’t know:

While these results advance the agency’s understanding of the outbreak, the FDA said the findings are not conclusive, and the investigation continues “to determine the source of the contamination.”

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Supreme Court Poised to Grant Chemical Warfare Immunity: How Glyphosate Legal Shield Would Poison American Justice

Introduction: The Supreme Court’s Glyphosate Gamble: Corporate Immunity Over Human Life

The U.S. Supreme Court has stepped onto a dangerous precipice, agreeing to hear a case that could grant chemical manufacturers a staggering new power: blanket immunity from lawsuits for poisoning the American people. Agro-chemical giant Bayer, owner of Monsanto, is appealing a $1.25 million Missouri jury verdict, arguing that because federal regulators claim its flagship weedkiller Roundup is safe, the company should be shielded from all state-level failure-to-warn lawsuits brought by cancer victims. A ruling in Bayer’s favor would dismantle legal recourse for thousands of citizens and establish a perilous precedent where captured federal agencies, not independent science or juries, dictate corporate accountability for public harm. This case represents nothing less than a corporate coup against the constitutional right to a trial by jury, placing profits above the sanctity of human life.

The Glyphosate Deception: A Chemical Assault on Human Health

At the heart of this legal battle is glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and the most heavily used herbicide in the world, with approximately 300 million pounds applied annually in the United States alone. For decades, Monsanto marketed Roundup as safe for humans and animals, a claim now exposed as a profound deception by a mountain of independent research.

Despite the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) repeated assertions that glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic,” science tells a horrifically different story. A major 2025 international carcinogenicity study found that low doses of glyphosate-based herbicides cause multiple types of cancer in rats, with tumors appearing in blood, skin, liver, and other organs even at levels regulators consider safe. This research adds to a substantial body of evidence linking glyphosate exposure to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and other chronic diseases in humans. As investigative journalist Carey Gillam notes in her book, the truth about such public health dangers often only emerges through “lawyers, lawsuits, journalists, and the occasional whistleblower” when regulators fail. The EPA’s fraudulent safety claims stand in direct contradiction to this independent science, blessing a chemical poison while natural, non-toxic agricultural solutions are suppressed and ignored.

Corporate Capture: How Regulatory Agencies Betray the Public Trust

Bayer’s legal strategy hinges on a doctrine known as federal preemption, which posits that federal regulatory approval should override state-level consumer protection laws and common-law tort claims. This argument reveals the deep and dangerous corruption of federal health agencies, which now serve as puppets for the very industries they are supposed to regulate.

This phenomenon, known as regulatory capture, is systemic. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explains in his work on corporate influence, agencies like the FDA become “sock puppets” for Big Pharma and chemical interests, with a significant portion of their budgets coming from the companies they oversee. The glyphosate case is a textbook example. The EPA has consistently parroted the industry line on glyphosate’s safety, ignoring robust independent evidence of carcinogenicity. This betrayal was further underscored when the Trump administration’s Solicitor General, in a December legal brief, urged the Supreme Court to take Bayer’s side, arguing that a manufacturer “should not be left subject to 50 different labeling regimes.

This move represents a blatant political manipulation of the justice system to insulate a powerful corporation from accountability. If the Court rules for Bayer, it would effectively nullify state-level consumer protections and constitutional rights, centralizing power in the hands of a corrupted federal bureaucracy. As a NaturalNews.com report on the case warns, this gambit “silences victims and overrides the rule of law,” completing the transformation of public health agencies into immunity-granting enablers of corporate malfeasance.

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Texas Air-Drops Live Virus-Containing Edible Rabies Vaccines Over Cities from Aircraft—’Leaving Persons at Risk for Vaccine Exposure and Vaccine Virus Infection’: CDC

The Texas Department of Health and Human Services (DHS) has begun its annual distribution of RABORAL V-RG®, an oral rabies vaccine (ORV) bait—dropping the live laboratory-made virus from airplanes over Texas, as well as distributing it by hand.

The $2 million annual project is funded by the State of Texas and the United States Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service/Wildlife Services.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has known for over a decade that the RABORAL edible vaccine leaves “persons at risk for vaccine exposure and vaccine virus infection.”

Yet the department still allows millions of live genetically modified virus baits to be dispersed over communities, forests, and waterways each year without public notice, informed consent, or comprehensive biosafety oversight—posing potential risks to human health, wildlife, and national biosecurity.

Americans are being involuntarily exposed to laboratory-engineered pathogens capable of infecting multiple species, with no transparent risk disclosure or opt-out mechanism.

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Vaccine Hesitancy Reflects Appropriate Concerns

The World Health Organization (WHO) considers vaccine hesitancy one of the top ten threats to global health. If that is the case, is it always a bad thing? AlterAI assisted with this analysis.

The Lancet manuscript “Profiling vaccine attitudes and subsequent uptake in 1.1 million people in England: a nationwide cohort study” (Whitaker et al, 2026) presents one of the most exhaustive longitudinal analyses of COVID‑19 vaccine hesitancy ever conducted. Using data from the Real‑time Assessment of Community Transmission (REACT) study, the researchers tracked English adults’ views and actions surrounding vaccination between January 2021 and March 2022, linking survey responses with verified NHS vaccination records.

  • Population: Over 1.1 million adults (aged ≥ 18 years; 57% female).
  • Initial hesitancy: At the beginning of 2021, 8% were hesitant about vaccination.
  • Hesitancy decline: By early 2022, the hesitant fraction dropped to roughly 1%.
  • Behavioral outcome: Among those initially hesitant, 65% later received at least one vaccine dose.

This significant attitudinal shift demonstrates that while early-stage doubts about vaccine safety and efficacy were widespread, the majority were transient and susceptible to persuasion, propaganda, and mandates.

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We’re Losing the Human Touch in Food

Food, which generally originates with a farmer, gardener, or orchardist, is fast losing its hands-on persona and increasingly gaining a mechanical, chemical platform.

Over the last decade, the United States has lost about 28,000 farms annually. While some of the loss is due to urbanization, most of the land remains farmland, either managed by other farmers or simply abandoned. While there are 1.3 million farmers over age 65, only 300,000 are 35 or younger. In 2022, the average American farmer was 58—years older than the average age in other vibrant economic sectors.

The American business landscape is largely anti-people. The current rush to artificial intelligence reflects how eagerly most businesses seek to eliminate people. The farming sector illustrates this trend better than most.

Between 1960 and 2019, the percentage of disposable personal income spent on food dropped from 17 percent to 9.5 percent. Meanwhile, health care spending rose from about 9 percent in 1980, to 18 percent today. Could the two possibly be related? One more data point: In the last 80 years, the farmgate share of the retail food dollar fell from around 40 percent to just 15.9 percent in 2023.

Farming is out of sight and out of mind for most people. Food appears on grocery store shelves. It’s treated as a pit stop between life’s more important activities. Fortunately, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement is beginning to shine a spotlight on food, including revised and more truthful dietary guidelines.

For decades, American agriculture policy and practice have replaced farm labor with machines, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. This raises the question: Is food a living thing, or simply an inanimate pile of protoplasmic matter to be manipulated like wheel bearings or bottle caps?

As technological sophistication pulls our culture away from its biologically vibrant roots, it jeopardizes our functional microbiomes. Yes, that’s a packed sentence. You might need to reread it—slowly. The point is, our internal systems are more aligned with the ancient world than with Star Trek. Do we really want machines, chemicals, and drugs to be the medium in which our food is grown?

Wes Jackson, co-founder of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has long advocated for a healthy “eyes-to-acres” ratio. He suggests that when fewer people interact with the land and the growing of food, both land stewardship and food integrity suffer.

Per-person agricultural output—the number of people one farmer feeds—has increased dramatically over the past century. Cyrus McCormick’s invention of the reaper in the 1830s launched the agricultural industrial revolution, enabling farmers to produce far more than ever before. Replacing the scythe with the reaper was revolutionary.

While technology brought many agricultural efficiencies, without ecological ethics, it may have gone too far. The introduction of subtherapeutic antibiotics in chicken waterers enabled the rise of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). With feed augers, water pumps, and massive barns, individual farmer output soared. And along came super bugs, C. diff, MRSA, avian influenza, polluted water, and fecal-stench air in surrounding neighborhoods.

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FDA Removes Web Content Saying Cellphones Are Harmless – HHS Launches Study

Without fanfare, the Food and Drug Administration has deleted multiple web pages asserting that cellphones are not dangerous. First reported by the Wall Street Journal, the move comes as the Department of Health and Human Services has begun a new investigation into potential health effects of cellphone radiation.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has previously declared that cellphones are causing harms that are not yet fully acknowledged. “There’s cellphone tumors. I’m representing hundreds of people who have cellphone tumors behind the ear. It’s always on the ear that you favor with your cellphone…We have the science,” Kennedy said in a 2023 appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience. “You should never put one next to your head… I put it on speakerphone or use earphones.” 

Responding to a Journal inquiry about the change to the FDA website, HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said, “The FDA removed webpages with old conclusions about cellphone radiation while HHS undertakes a study on electromagnetic radiation and health research to identify gaps in knowledge, including on new technologies, to ensure safety and efficacy.” 

One of the deleted pages included a passage declaring that “the weight of scientific evidence has not linked exposure to radio frequency energy from cellphone use with any health problems.” There may be more scrubbing of the site to come: The Journal notes that the FDA’s site still has summaries of the deleted pages, but the links redirect to other generalized content about the agency’s regulatory mission. 

Kennedy, who had a career as an environmental litigator, has long engaged on this issue. Kennedy represented people suing phone companies for allegedly causing brain tumors, and won a 2020 case that compelled the Federal Communications Commission to reassess its wireless-radiation regulations. He was also chairman of Children’s Health Defense, which has been involved in litigation over 5G technology, and a case blaming an Idaho man’s cardiac issues on a cellphone tower. He has also pointed to radiation as a prime suspect in the mystery of widespread chronic illnesses among America’s children, “Our children are swimming around in a toxic soup, the Wi-Fi radiation is a lot worse than people think it is…yeah, from your cellphone,” Kennedy told Rogan in 2023.  

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Top US court to review suit against German chemicals giant

The US Supreme Court will hear an appeal by German chemical company Bayer on a Roundup-related case in which a man was awarded $1.25 million, claiming the herbicide gave him blood cancer.

The court made the announcement regarding Monsanto Co. v. Durnell in a statement on Friday, with a verdict expected by July. Bayer is currently facing thousands of similar lawsuits.

Roundup originally belonged to the now-defunct American agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation Monsanto, which was purchased by Bayer in 2018.

At the heart of the case is whether Bayer and other manufacturers should be held liable if they comply with the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) rulings on product warnings, while still running afoul of state laws requiring warnings on goods that may be carcinogenic.

Bayer argues that the EPA has determined that glyphosate, the main component of the controversial herbicide, is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, and approved Roundup labels without cancer warnings.

In a statement on Friday, Bayer CEO Bill Anderson said that “it is time for the US legal system to establish that companies should not be punished under state laws for complying with federal warning label requirements.”

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Imports contaminated with radioactive isotope likely to continue for foreseeable future: US bulletin

Commodities from Indonesia beyond shrimp will almost certainly test positive for a radioactive isotope in the coming weeks and months, according to a new intelligence bulletin that follows a recall last month of 84,000 bags of frozen raw shrimp imported from Indonesia.

Federal regulators announced the recall on Dec. 19, after finding the shrimp may have been prepared, packed or held under conditions that could have exposed them to cesium-137, a radioactive isotope.

The new Homeland Security bulletin, a copy of which was obtained by ABC News, said the contamination is “very likely” to continue for the foreseeable future and spread beyond Indonesian imports that have already been interdicted — including shrimp, as well as spices and sneakers.

“Due to the high number of factories and wide variety of goods produced at facilities in the area of the contamination, additional commodities from Indonesia will almost certainly test positive for Cs-137 in the coming weeks and months,” the bulletin said. “While improbable, we cannot rule out the potential that Cs-137 contaminated goods will arrive in the United States via tourism or passenger travel.”

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Pesticides Derived From World War II Nerve Agents — Still Sprayed on Fruits and Vegetables — Found in Pregnant Women

A study in the International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health finds peak concentrations of organophosphate pesticide (OP) metabolites in the urine of pregnant mothers 6-12 hours after consuming contaminated fruits and vegetables.

“High detection rates were observed for dimethylthiophosphate (DMTP, 96%), dimethylphosphate (DMP, 94%), diethylphosphate (DEP, 89%), and diethylthiophosphate (DETP, 77%) among 431 urine samples taken from 25 pregnant women, over two 24-hr periods, early in pregnancy,” the researchers reported.

The levels of metabolites within the urine correlate to the consumption of foods treated with organophosphate pesticides, highlighting the importance of adopting an organic diet — particularly for pregnant individuals and their children.

“In 2009-2010, 80 pregnant women were recruited from Ottawa, Canada for the Plastics and Personal-care Product use in Pregnancy (P4) Study,” the authors said.

“A subset (n = 25) collected multiple spot urines (up to 10 each; total n = 431) over two 24-h periods in early pregnancy — one weekday and weekend day — while logging their food consumption beginning 24 h prior to the first urine void and continuing through the following 24-h urine collection period.”

This is the first study looking at the variability of organophosphate metabolites within 24 hours in maternal urine, giving insight into “the primary sources of exposure and the temporal variability in a population of Canadian pregnant participants.”

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Majority Of North Carolina Trucking Licenses Issued To Foreigners Are Illegal: Duffy

A review of non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) granted in North Carolina found that 54 percent were issued illegally, the Department of Transportation (DOT) said in a statement on Jan. 8.

The review was conducted by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and is part of its ongoing nationwide audit of trucking licensing systems, the department said.

DOT warned that if North Carolina does not “fix their serious failures” and revoke licenses issued illegally to foreign nationals, the department will withhold almost $50 million in federal funding.

“North Carolina’s failure to follow the rules isn’t just shameful—it’s dangerous. I’m calling on state leadership to immediately remove these dangerous drivers from our roads and clean up their system,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said.

According to audit findings, North Carolina illegally issued non-domiciled CDLs to drivers whose lawful presence in the United States had expired, and some of those drivers were found to be ineligible to hold a non-domiciled commercial license.

FMCSA sent a letter to North Carolina Department of Transportation Commissioner Paul Tine and Gov. Josh Stein, outlining audit results and the corrective actions that must be taken to prevent funding from being withheld.

The agency asked North Carolina authorities to “immediately” pause the issuance of non-domiciled CDLs, identify unexpired CDLs that fail to comply with FMCSA regulations, and conduct a comprehensive internal audit to identify errors, practices, quality assurance, and other issues that led to such CDLs being granted.

“The level of noncompliance in North Carolina is egregious,” FMCSA Administrator Derek D. Barrs said. “Under Secretary Duffy, we will not hesitate to hold states accountable and protect the American people.”

The Epoch Times reached out to the North Carolina Department of Transportation and Stein’s office for comment, but did not receive a response by publication time.

North Carolina is one of the latest states the DOT has warned regarding the illegal issuance of CDLs to foreign nationals.

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