Tag: safety

National probe into whether products sold as Botox are causing botulism

The Tennessee Department of Health (TDH) is collaborating with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and multiple other states to investigate botulism-like illness after reported botulinum toxin injections for cosmetic purposes. Joint investigations have identified concerns about use of counterfeit products or products with unclear origin administered in non-medical settings such as homes or cosmetic spas.

TDH recently identified four patients who experienced botulism-like signs and symptoms. All persons reported receiving botulinum toxin injections for cosmetic purposes. All four patients were seen by a healthcare provider and two were hospitalized. Similar botulism-like illnesses have been reported by multiple states. Ongoing investigation suggests that the product administered was counterfeit.

Classic botulism is a rare, potentially fatal illness caused by a nerve toxin that is produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum or related species. Initial botulism symptoms might include double or blurred vision, drooping eyelids, slurred speech, difficulty swallowing, dry mouth, and difficulty breathing. These symptoms are typically followed by descending, symmetric muscle weakness that progresses over hours to days requiring hospitalization and specialized treatment with anti-toxin.

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Cancer-causing forever chemicals found in BAND-AIDS where they can get directly into blood through open wounds, report warns

Bandages from some of the most well-reputed brands, including Band-Aid and Curad, contain dangerous levels of forever chemicals, a shock report shows.

Testing by a leading watchdog found the chemical fluorine in over two dozen different bandages that can be found in millions of medicine cabinets across the country. 

PFAS chemicals are sometimes used to make adhesives, and investigators believe they are products of the normal manufacturing process. Fluorine, which is also used to make rocket fuel, can lead to skin burns and eye damage, but it is most dangerous when inhaled. 

Dr Linda Birnbaum, a toxicologist and former head of the National Toxicology Program who co-led the lab testing, said the fact that risky chemicals come in direct contact with open wounds was ‘troubling’. 

PFAS chemicals can easily enter the bloodstream after a person drinks water or eats food laced with them. Once in the bloodstream, PFAS can lodge themselves within healthy tissue where it can begin to damage the immune system, the liver, the kidneys, and other organs. 

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Wuhan on the Rockies? Biosafety committee found dozens of accidents at NIH-funded lab in 3 years

Bats and hamsters and cats, and mice!

Fort Collins, Colorado, could have become the next Wuhan, China, with dozens of lab accidents just this decade involving outbreak-prone pathogens in animals including coronaviruses, Zika and tuberculosis, according to a group that fights taxpayer-funded animal testing.

The “incident reports” from Colorado State University’s Institutional Biosafety Committee minutes, obtained by Colorado Open Records Act request, detail 64 lab accidents from 2020 through 2023, the White Coat Waste Project said this week.

The National Institutes of Health chipped in more than $8 million in 2021 and 2023 to build a new CSU bat lab and import bats with Nipah virus and SARS-related coronaviruses via the EcoHealth Alliance, WCW discovered last fall, dubbing the campus “Wuhan West.”

The 2023 grant came months after the Agriculture Department found CSU committed animal cruelty by subjecting rabbits to temperatures above “the humane endpoint” and failed to report “a protocol for [26] rabbits that required the withholding of anesthetics and analgesics for scientific purposes.”

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United Airline Pilots Know Safety Is An Serious Matter – Now The Public Knows

CDM has been covering United Airlines Covid-19 policies, and exposing its business plan, which financially incentivized covid 19 shots and then when that plan failed, Scott Kirby and the rest of management mandated the shots for all employees, but not for those based overseas. 

When employees filed for religious and medical exemptions when the covid-19 vaccinations were mandated, those who received exemptions were put on “indefinite unpaid leave,” meaning they had no pay checks, no health insurance, no medical insurance and no access to their 401(K) even for financial hardship. 

CMD has hosted two American Conversations with United Airline employees and other airline employees and even some alum who graduated from the Air Force Academy because United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is an USAF alum. 

Today, one of our sources from another airlines gave us a heads up to a communication from one of United Airlines Pilot Association chapters on the east coast that made management so mad, it was retracted when it reached the C-Suite. 

We are disclosing it in full because it is in the public’s interest to regarding safety measures. 

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Does wireless tech cause cancer or is it just another “coincidence” being propagated by tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists?

Do cell phones, Bluetooth devices, WiFi and other wireless tech cause cancer or is it just another “coincidence” that tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists are sharing on their smartphones?

Let me tell you about such a “coincidence” I witnessed firsthand…

Many years ago, I hired a young lady to help out around the apartment and in the office, as my wife was quite ill and I was already working seven days a week (still am, I guess). The new assistant came in six days a week for a few hours and completed a long list of items in record time. The whole time she’d be singing and was a joy to have around.

Until, after about six months, she began slowing down and making mistakes. I asked her what was up. She said she was having trouble getting to sleep and staying asleep at night.

I asked her a few questions about her sleeping arrangements. It turned out to be an EMF nightmare: She and her husband both slept in a small, loft room, upon a large futon on the floor with a tin roof above them. On either side of their bed, they each had their laptops and their smartphones active, recharging and certainly not in airplane mode. They also kept their WiFi blasting all night.

I suggested that maybe they should experiment and get all the tech out of their sleeping chamber and kill the WiFi at night.

She looked at me like I had suggested they move out to the wilderness and live in a cave.

I then told her about the $30 million, ten-year study the US Department of Health and Human Services conducted, exposing rats to 2G and 3G cellphone radiation. I believe the scientists were trying to prove that wireless tech was harmless.

Their experiment failed.

The study concluded “there is clear evidence that male rats exposed to high levels of radio frequency radiation (RFR) like that used in 2G and 3G cell phones developed cancerous heart tumors, according to final reports released today. There was also some evidence of tumors in the brain and adrenal gland of exposed male rats.”

She told me that she wasn’t worried about that and Jesus would heal her if she got cancer.

Well, you can’t argue with faith. So I didn’t mention it again.

Fast forward a few months and she’d become quite sick — throwing up and having to lie down after an hour of work. She had to quit.

A week later, she emailed to let us know that she had cancer and was beginning chemotherapy. The doctors found one tumour on her heart (just like the rats in the study) and the other in her neck.

Coincidence? Sure. Just like getting vaccinated and dying suddenly is a coincidence.

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Experts Warn Mass Migration Threatens US Food Security

Mass migration exposes the United States’ food supply to diseases and parasites that could ultimately affect national security, animal health experts told The Epoch Times.

With unfettered illegal immigration—some 9 million encounters since 2021—the normal guardrails for inspection are ignored, raising the likelihood of unwanted diseases being brought across the border.

Dr. Michael Vickers has been a veterinarian for about 50 years and served on the Texas Animal Health Commission (TAHC),

The threat to the food supply is already apparent from the past cases of tuberculosis (TB) transmitted from illegal immigrants to dairy cows in Texas, he said.

Concerns are growing that it’s only a matter of time before U.S. agriculture experiences a fresh disaster on a grand scale, Dr. Vickers said.

“These people are just destroying our country. And our food supply is going to be a real critical issue,” he told The Epoch Times.

In recent years, thousands of Texas cattle have been slaughtered after being infected with drug-resistant TB through contact with illegal aliens who end up working in dairies, Dr. Vickers said.

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Hackers can unlock over 3 million hotel doors in seconds

When thousands of security researchers descend on Las Vegas every August for what’s come to be known as “hacker summer camp,” the back-to-back Black Hat and Defcon hacker conferences, it’s a given that some of them will experiment with hacking the infrastructure of Vegas itself, the city’s elaborate array of casino and hospitality technology. But at one private event in 2022, a select group of researchers were actually invited to hack a Vegas hotel room, competing in a suite crowded with their laptops and cans of Red Bull to find digital vulnerabilities in every one of the room’s gadgets, from its TV to its bedside VoIP phone.

One team of hackers spent those days focused on the lock on the room’s door, perhaps its most sensitive piece of technology of all. Now, more than a year and a half later, they’re finally bringing to light the results of that work: a technique they discovered that would allow an intruder to open any of millions of hotel rooms worldwide in seconds, with just two taps.

Today, Ian Carroll, Lennert Wouters, and a team of other security researchers are revealing a hotel keycard hacking technique they call Unsaflok. The technique is a collection of security vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to almost instantly open several models of Saflok-brand RFID-based keycard locks sold by the Swiss lock maker Dormakaba. The Saflok systems are installed on 3 million doors worldwide, inside 13,000 properties in 131 countries.

By exploiting weaknesses in both Dormakaba’s encryption and the underlying RFID system Dormakaba uses, known as MIFARE Classic, Carroll and Wouters have demonstrated just how easily they can open a Saflok keycard lock. Their technique starts with obtaining any keycard from a target hotel—say, by booking a room there or grabbing a keycard out of a box of used ones—then reading a certain code from that card with a $300 RFID read-write device, and finally writing two keycards of their own. When they merely tap those two cards on a lock, the first rewrites a certain piece of the lock’s data, and the second opens it.

“Two quick taps and we open the door,” says Wouters, a researcher in the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography group at the KU Leuven University in Belgium. “And that works on every door in the hotel.”

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The last days of the Boeing whistleblower

Saturday March 9 dawned as a gusty gray morning in Charleston, S.C. with thunderstorms rolling across the historic city and daggers of lightning lighting up the skies. Just after 10 AM, Rob Turkewitz was sitting in a tony lawyers’ office downtown, waiting for his client John Barnett to testify—and further his crusade for safety in the skies. “My co-counsel Brian Knowles and I were gathered around a conference table alongside Boeing’s in-house counsel, and its trial lawyer from Ogletree, Deakens. It was in Ogletree’s offices, much fancier than ours, what you’d call a ‘grand door.’”

Turkewitz wasn’t totally surprised that Barnett was late for this round of depositions. “Downtown Charleston was flooded by one of the worst rainstorms I’ve ever seen,” he recalls. “I’d called John’s room at the Holiday Inn where he was staying at 9 AM to see if he wanted me to pick him up, but he didn’t answer.”

Turkewitz was especially buzzed about this session because Barnett was slated to continue the account of the production gaffes he’d allegedly witnessed up-close on the Boeing factory floor, a dramatic narrative that he’d started the previous day. Barnett, 62, had worked from 2011 to 2017 as a quality manager at the North Charleston plant that assembles the 787 Dreamliner. In that role, he’d alerted senior managers to what he called violations of legally required processes and procedures, and maintained that his warnings were being ignored. In the years following his departure, Barnett emerged as arguably the most renowned Boeing whistleblower, recounting the quality abuses he’d claimed to have witnessed to multiple media outlets.

Barnett’s charges had drawn fresh attention in the wake of the January 737 MAX door-plug blowout on Alaska Airlines flight 1282 just after takeoff from Portland, Ore., followed by a string of other mishaps on Boeing aircraft. In interviews after the big bang over Portland, Barnett had been scathing in his criticism of Boeing’s safety lapses, and attributed the catastrophe to the types of sloppy practices he said that he’d witnessed and flagged years earlier at the North Charleston plant.

In the action that brought Barnett across the table from Boeing’s attorneys in Charleston, he was suing the planemaker in a so-called AIR21 case. His charge: Boeing had violated U.S. Department of Labor statutes stipulating that it’s unlawful to retaliate against a whistleblower. Barnett was seeking compensation for allegedly being forced to retire ten years before he planned to leave Boeing, getting blackballed from the promotions he deserved because of what he argued were justified warnings that his bosses failed to heed, and undergoing harassment on the job that left him suffering from PTSD and panic attacks.

The previous day, Barnett had been on a roll as a video camera recorded the event. “John testified for four hours in questioning by my co-counsel Brian,” says Turkewitz. “This was following seven hours of cross examination by Boeing’s lawyers on Thursday. He was really happy to be telling his side of the story, excited to be fielding our questions, doing a great job. It was explosive stuff. As I’m sitting there, I’m thinking, ‘This is the best witness I’ve ever seen.’” At one point, says Turkewitz, the Boeing lawyer protested that Barnett was reciting the details of incidents from a decade ago, and specific dates, without looking at documents. As Turkevitz recalls the exchange, Barnett fired back, “I know these documents inside out. I’ve had to live it.”

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Cellphone Radiation Research Was Halted After Worrisome Findings, Expert Questions Why

Decades of animal research point to serious health risks from cellphone radiation exposure, but examining a possible link stops now.

The National Toxicology Program (NTP), tasked with studying potential toxins, recently announced it would no longer investigate evidence that cellphone radiation can harm animals or people. The move stunned scientists like Devra Davis, a former senior adviser to the assistant secretary for Health in the Department of Health and Human Services, who called the abrupt reversal scientifically unjustified.

There’s “no scientific explanation or justification for this sudden reversal,” Ms. Davis told The Epoch Times.

Unpublished NTP Research Undermines Decision to Halt Cellphone Radiation Studies

The NTP recently claimed that additional radiofrequency radiation (RFR) studies are not planned, stating the research was “technically challenging and more resource-intensive than expected.”

Ms. Davis criticized this decision, noting that technical challenges are not a reason to avoid studying something that appears to cause cancer in animals. “Everything that we know for sure causes cancer in people will produce it in animals when adequately studied,” she added.

Despite admitting to developing a novel small-scale RFR exposure system in 2019 to clarify earlier findings, the NTP canceled further investigations. This system only studied older 2G and 3G devices, not newer 4G or 5G technologies.

Ms. Davis, a former NTP advisor, said she helped recommend smaller test chambers. The agency takes years to plan studies, so scrapping this project is “beyond my comprehension at this point,” given millions of children’s daily exposure, she noted.

In an emailed statement, the NTP confirmed that although work on the small-scale exposure system and accompanying research has been completed, the results will be publicly available and posted on the agency’s webpage only “when internal reviews are finished.” As of this writing, the 2019 research remains unpublished.

Court Finds FCC Illegally Ignored 5G Health Risks

The NTP published results in 2018 from two-year toxicology studies showing “clear evidence” of associations between 2G/3G cellphone radiation and tumors in male rats. Follow-up research in 2019 revealed DNA damage in the brains, livers, and blood cells of exposed rats and mice.

Despite originally requesting and overseeing these studies, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has since dismissed the NTP’s findings, Ms. Davis said.

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Ground cinnamon sold at discount stores is tainted with lead, FDA warns

Ground cinnamon sold by U.S. discount retailers is contaminated with high levels of lead and should be discarded, federal health officials said Wednesday.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said cinnamon sold by stores including the Dollar Tree and Family Dollar contains lead at levels that could be unsafe for people, particularly children, with prolonged exposure to the spice. The agency urged suppliers to recall the products voluntarily.

Cinnamon products included in the agency’s safety alert include the La Fiesta brand sold by La Superior and SuperMercados; Marcum brand sold by Save A Lot stores; MK brands sold by SF Supermarket; Swad brand sold by Patel Brothers; El Chilar brand sold by La Joya Morelense; and Supreme Tradition brand sold by Dollar Tree and Family Dollar stores.

“Removing the ground cinnamon products in this alert from the market will prevent them from contributing elevated amounts of lead to the diets of children,” the alert said.

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