Sandra Finley

2017-11-16 Tax Fairness Canada (offshore tax havens). “Tell your MP amd Finance Minister . . . “

 Corruption  No Responses »
Nov 162017
 

 

Le français suit

Dear Sandra,

Canada’s Top 60 public companies have over 1000 tax haven subsidiaries or related companies. Canadians for Tax Fairness just published a report documenting Bay Street’s Addiction to Tax Havens.

Many of those companies use these subsidiaries to shift profits offshore in order to pay less tax. A popular practice is selling a patent or trade mark to an offshore subsidiary and then charging itself licensing fees for the use of that same patent or logo.

How does our tax system let this boondoggle happen?

Here’s how: Canada’s Income Tax Act is riddled with loopholes that legally allow companies to get away with paying less than their fair share. And tax treaties Canada has signed with tax havens facilitates Canadian companies shifting profits and allows them to bring money back tax free. The Paradise Papers leaks and our recent report show how extensively Canada’s large corporations use tax havens.

Tell your MP and the Finance Minister to stop corporate tax dodging.

Tell them a good first step is to support Victoria MP, Murray Rankin’s Private Member’s Bill (Bill C-362) that would require that offshore subsidiaries be required to have economic substance to be considered a separate legal entity for tax purposes. This amendment to the corporate tax law would go a long way to helping the CRA and the courts to crack down on corporations that game the tax system.

And ask them to press the government to re-negotiate tax treaties with tax havens to stop corporate tax dodging.

Send a message to your MP now, asking him/her to support Bill C-362, An Act to Amend the Income Tax Act (economic substance). Let’s make sure corporations play by the same rules as the rest of us.

Thanks.

Dennis Howlett
Executive Director, Canadians for Tax Fairness

PS:  If you could send a donation to help us continue to raise issues like corporate tax avoidance, it would be greatly appreciated.

Please note: Canadians for Tax Fairness is not registered as a charitable organization because charities are not allowed to spend more than a small percentage of their time lobbying for policy changes. Since our primary focus involves trying to change government policies that cause inequality, we’re not eligible for charitable status and are therefore unable to provide a charitable receipt for income tax purposes. We hope you understand. Thank you.

Madame, Monsieur Finley:

Les 60 plus grandes entreprises canadiennes ont plus de 1000 paradis fiscal filiales ou sociétés liées.

Plusieurs de ces entreprises utilisent ces filiales de transférer les bénéfices afin de payer moins d’impôts. Une pratique populaire consiste à vendre un brevet à une filiale à l’étranger et à se facturer ensuite à elle-même des frais pour l’usage de ce même brevet.

Comment notre régime fiscal permet-il de tels stratagèmes?

Voici comment: La Loi de l’impôt sur le revenu du Canada est farcie d’échappatoires qui permettent aux entreprises de s’en tirer à bon compte en payant moins que leur juste part. Et Canada a signé les conventions fiscales avec les paradis fiscaux quelees facilitent le déplacement des bénéfices des entreprises canadiennes et leur permettent d’apporter l’argent a Canada hors-taxes.

Certains de nos politiciens semblent avoir perdu leur volonté politique de sévir contre les grandes sociétés. Et c’est vous, moi et nos voisins qui nous retrouvons coincés avec la facture parce qu’ils ne font rien.

Dites à votre député de prendre au sérieux l’évitement fiscal des entreprises.

Dites-lui qu’une bonne première étape est de soutenir le projet de loi émanant d’un depute, par Victoria MP, Murray Rankin (Bill C-362), modifiant la Loi de l’impôt sur le revenu (substance économique), qui exigerait que les filiales offshore soient tenus de posséder une substance économique pour être considéré comme une entité juridique distincte aux fins de l’impôt. Cet amendement à la Loi de l’impôt sur les sociétés irait un long chemin à aider l’ARC et les tribunaux à faire son travaille de freiner l’évitement fiscal des multinationales.
Dennis Howlett,
Directeur exécutif

P.S. Besoin d’un complément d’information sur cette mesure législative proposée? Voici le site de Parliament du Canada sur le project de loi C-362 qui en parle plus en détail.

Help us spread the word. Click here to forward this message to others.

Make a donation to support Canadians for Tax Fairness.

2017-11-04 What’s happening? Some highlights.

 Corruption, Energy, Freedom of Speech. (Remove some wrong postings from category), Genetically Modified, Mercury poisoning, dental amalgams. See also Vaccinations., Propaganda, Trade Deals, PPPs, Integration Canada-U.S., Vaccinations (incl corruption of science & govt)  2 Responses »
Nov 042017
 

EU on brink of historic decision on pervasive glyphosate weedkiller  (Monsanto, roundup),  The Guardian.

Oct 24, very good article.  Update, Oct 25, the EU temporarily dodged the bullet (again).

AVAAZ and other organizations have successfully campaigned, mobilizing millions of people to stop the poisoning.  We have been active on this file through the years.

There will be more actions.  Pitch in, if you can. An historic decision indeed.  Revolutionary!

Related:

    New Book: “Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science”  by Carey Gillam   (glyphosate, roundup, Monsanto)

    2017-03-14  Monsanto Weed Killer Roundup Faces New Doubts on Safety in Unsealed Documents,  New York Times

 

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Oil giants pay billions less tax in Canada than abroad,  The Guardian

 

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NZ joins the trend for countries to say no to ISDS  (Investor State Dispute Settlement, NAFTA and other trade deals.)

 

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Liberals table budget bill to join China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank,  Globe & Mail

 

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I was a statistic that helped establish “epidemic” status for polio in 1952-53.

But was it polio?   Among other considerations, I had a mercury dental filling a couple of months prior to the diagnosis.  And vaccinations prior to that.

 

I wrote the overview  Heavy metals in vaccinations, Mercury in dental amalgams years ago.  With no thought that it might also be my own story.  By 2010 I had started collecting information because I was very concerned about poisoning by mercury.

 

I am trying to piece together objective data related to my specific case;  it might be possible to figure out whether it was polio, or something else.   And become better informed in the process.

 

Vaccinations began at age 1, in the early fifties when I got them.   I get side-lined by questions:

Why do the Americans administer the Hepatitis B vaccine to newborns?   How long does it take for a newborn’s liver to mature?   What are the consequences of a damaged liver?

I think everyone should look at that posting.  It’s pretty short.

Then, there’s    How Much Money Do American Pediatricians Really Make From Vaccines?

(Understand what’s happening in the U.S. and you’ll see the direction Canada will take, if we aren’t engaged and sharing information.)

 

Thank you Janet M who writes:

You must check this out!

New Web site,  “Got your flu shot?”

“Educate before you vaccinate” — videos of Drs talking about vaccines,, business cards we can buy & drop anywhere. Hand to friends. Leave on streetcar seats.

http://www.gotyourflushot.ca/  has it all!

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I clicked on “Videos”.  The bottom, right-hand one is:  Haley vs Offit Debate.

In it are the graphs of the incidence of various infectious diseases like polio, on a timeline.   I stopped the video, to be able to read the source of the research – – Dr. Suzanne Humphries.  I’ll look for an on-line copy of the graphs.   In the meantime,  here’s from Amazon about her book:

Not too long ago, lethal infections were feared in the Western world. Since that time, many countries have undergone a transformation from disease cesspools to much safer, healthier habitats. Starting in the mid-1800s, there was a steady drop in deaths from all infectious diseases, decreasing to relatively minor levels by the early 1900s. The history of that transformation involves famine, poverty, filth, lost cures, eugenicist doctrine, individual freedoms versus state might, protests and arrests over vaccine refusal, and much more. Today, we are told that medical interventions increased our lifespan and single-handedly prevented masses of deaths. But is this really true? Dissolving Illusions details facts and figures from long-overlooked medical journals, books, newspapers, and other sources. Using myth-shattering graphs, this book shows that vaccines, antibiotics, and other medical interventions are not responsible for the increase in lifespan and the decline in mortality from infectious diseases.

I’ll get the book, for my own project to figure out whether I was legitimate data for the establishment of an epidemic.   It’s possible that the combination of a dental filling that contained heavy metals, and vaccinations with God-knows-what in them, resulted in symptoms that were identified as polio but which weren’t.

Note also, from the video: you can say that an ingredient (thimerasol, for example) is not used in a vaccination as a “preservative”.  That does not mean that it is not used in the vaccine for some other purpose.

You’ll see the link:  I looked at the “product insert” for just one of the flu vaccines listed.   A Canadian manufacturer.   I had to laugh!   They state emphatically that there is NO thimerasol in their vaccine.  And its is stated more than once, that their flu shot is ONLY for people age 65 and up!   (people already on their way to the grave!  Ha ha!)   If you get that flu shot, and if you’re under age 65,  and if you have adverse effects,  you would have no claim.

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From Janet’s blog:     AIR FARCE skit about what flu vaccine contains

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There is a connection between the vaccination debate and

2010-04-08  The Dr. Who Drank Infectious Broth, Gave Himself an Ulcer, and Solved a Medical Mystery, Discover Magazine.

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The BC Deputy Minister of Environment replied to my submission about the Bowswer Sewage Treatment Plant.

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Enough for now!

2010-04-08 The Dr. Who Drank Infectious Broth, Gave Himself an Ulcer, and Solved a Medical Mystery, Discover Magazine.

 Change, Health  No Responses »
Nov 032017
 

The story of Barry Marshall has a number of lessons for us.   The article from Discover Magazine, below,  tells his story well.

More? . . .  A search on his name, or “barry marshall youtube” turns up lots of interesting information.

Barry James Marshall  is an Australian physician, Nobel Prize Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, and Professor of Clinical Microbiology at the University of Western Australia.

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The medical elite thought they knew what caused ulcers and stomach cancer. But they were wrong—and did not want to hear the answer that was right.

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/mar/07-dr-drank-broth-gave-ulcer-solved-medical-mystery

By Pamela Weintraub

April 08, 2010

For years an obscure doctor hailing from Australia’s hardscrabble west coast watched in horror as ulcer patients fell so ill that many had their stomach removed or bled until they died. That physician, an internist named Barry Marshall, was tormented because he knew there was a simple treatment for ulcers, which at that time afflicted 10 percent of all adults. In 1981 Marshall began working with Robin Warren, the Royal Perth Hospital pathologist who, two years earlier, discovered the gut could be overrun by hardy, corkscrew-shaped bacteria called Helicobacter pylori. Biopsying ulcer patients and culturing the organisms in the lab, Marshall traced not just ulcers but also stomach cancer to this gut infection. The cure, he realized, was readily available: anti­biotics. But mainstream gastroenterologists were dismissive, holding on to the old idea that ulcers were caused by stress.

Unable to make his case in studies with lab mice (because H. pylori affects only primates) and prohibited from experimenting on people, Marshall grew desperate. Finally he ran an experiment on the only human patient he could ethically recruit: himself. He took some H. pylori from the gut of an ailing patient, stirred it into a broth, and drank it. As the days passed, he developed gastritis, the precursor to an ulcer: He started vomiting, his breath began to stink, and he felt sick and exhausted. Back in the lab, he biopsied his own gut, culturing H. pylori and proving unequivocally that bacteria were the underlying cause of ulcers.

Marshall recently sat down with DISCOVER senior editor Pam Weintraub in a Chicago hotel, wearing blue jeans and drinking bottled water without a trace of Helicobacter. The man The Star once called “the guinea-pig doctor” can now talk about his work with the humor and passion of an outsider who has been vindicated. For their work on H. pylori, Marshall and Warren shared a 2005 Nobel Prize. Today the standard of care for an ulcer is treatment with an antibiotic. And stomach cancer—once one of the most common forms of malignancy—is almost gone from the Western world.

Having rid much of the globe of two dread diseases, Marshall is now turning his old enemy into an ally. As a clinical professor of microbiology at the University of Western Australia, he is working on flu vaccines delivered by brews of weakened Helicobacter. And in an age when many doctors dismiss unexplained conditions as “all in the head,” Marshall’s story serves as both an inspiration and an antidote to hubris in the face of the unknown.

You grew up far from big-city life. What was it like?
I was born in Kalgoorlie, a gold mining town about 400 miles east of Perth. My father was a fitter and turner, fixing steam engines and trains. My mother was a nurse. All the miners owed a lot of money and drank a lot of beer, so Mom said, “We’ve got to get out of here before we go the way of everybody else.” In 1951 we headed for Rum Jungle, where a uranium boom was on, but halfway there we stopped in Kaniva, another boomtown, with a whaling station and high-paying jobs. Then my father started managing chicken factories in Perth. We never wanted for anything. It was like the TV show Happy Days.

What sparked your interest in science?
My mother had nursing books around. I had three brothers, and we always had electronics and gunpowder and explosions and welding. All I can say is that some things you get from your parents through osmosis. In high school I had Bs and Cs, not too many As, but I must have done well on that medical school test and I must have had some charisma in the interview, so I ended up in medicine. Being a general practitioner was all I aspired to. I was good with patients and very interested in why things happened. Eventually I developed a more mature approach: I realized that at least 50 percent of patients were undiagnosable.

You found yourself confronting unexplainable diseases?
In medical school it’s quite possible to get taught that you can diagnose everybody and treat everything. But then you get out in the real world and find that for most patients walking through your door, you have no idea what’s causing their symptoms. You could slice up that person into a trillion molecules and study every one and they’d all be completely normal. I was never satisfied with saying that by ruling out all these diseases, a person must have a fake disease, so I accepted the fact that lots of times I couldn’t reach a fundamental diagnosis, and I kept an open mind.

Is that how you came to rethink the cause of ulcers?
Before the 20th century, the ulcer was not a respectable disease. Doctors would say, “You’re under a lot of stress.” Nineteenth-century Europe and America had all these crazy health spas and quack treatments. By the 1880s doctors had developed surgery for ulcers, in which they cut off the bottom of the stomach and reconnected the intestine. We’re pretty certain now that by the start of the 20th century, 100 percent of mankind was infected with Helicobacter pylori, but you can go through your whole life and never have any symptoms.

What was the worst-case scenario for ulcer patients?
An ulcer with a hole in it, called a duodenal ulcer, is acutely painful due to stomach acid. When you eat a meal, the food washes the acid away temporarily. When the meal is digested, the acid comes back and covers the raw base of the ulcer, causing pain to start up again. These problems were so common that the Mayo Clinic was built on gastric surgery. After that surgery, half the people would feel better. But about 25 percent of these cured patients became so-called gastric cripples, lacking appetite and never regaining complete health.

With so much physical evidence of a real condition, why were ulcers routinely classified as psychosomatic?
Eventually doctors realized they could see the ulcers with X-ray machines, but, of course, those machines were in big cites like New York and London—so doctors in those cities started identifying ulcers in urban businessmen who probably smoked a lot of cigarettes and had a high-pressure lifestyle. Later, scientists induced ulcers in rats by putting them in straitjackets and dropping them in ice water. Then they found they could protect the rats from these stress-based ulcers by giving them antacids. They made the connection between ulcers, stress, and acid without any proper double-blind studies, but it fit in with what everybody thought.

How did you come to challenge this prevailing theory?
I was in the third year of my internal medicine training, in 1981, and I had to take on a project. Robin Warren, the hospital pathologist, said he had been seeing these bacteria on biopsies of ulcer and stomach cancer patients for two years, and they were all identical.

What was distinctive about these infections?
The microorganisms all had an S-shaped or helical form, and the infections coated the stomach. Warren had found them in about 20 patients who had been sent to him because doctors thought they might have cancer. Instead of cancer, he had found these bacteria. So he gave me the list and said, “Why don’t you look at their case records and see if they’ve got anything wrong with them.” It turned out that one of them, a woman in her forties, had been my patient. She had come in feeling nauseated, with chronic stomach pain. We put her through the usual tests, but nothing showed up. So of course she got sent to a psychiatrist, who put her on an antidepressant. When I saw her on the list, I thought, “This is pretty interesting.”

Then another patient turned up, an old Russian guy who had severe pains. Doctors gave him a diagnosis of angina, pain that occurs when blood to the heart can’t pass through a narrowed artery. It’s rare, but you can theoretically get that in your gut, too. There was no treatment for an 80-year-old man in those days, so we put him on tetracycline and sent him home. He goes off, and two weeks later he comes back. He’s got a spring in his step, he’s practically doing somersaults into the consulting room. He’s healed. Clearing out the infection had cured him. I had one more year to go, so I did the paperwork to set up a proper clinical trial with 100 patients to look for the bacteria causing the gut infection; that started in April of 1982.

But at first nothing was turning up, right?
Yes—not until patients 34 and 35, on Easter Tuesday, when I got this excited call from the microbiologist. So I go down there and he shows me two cultures, the grand slam, under the microscope. The lab techs had been throwing the cultures out after two days because with strep, on the first day we may see something, but by the second day it’s covered with contamination and you might as well throw it in the bin. That was the mentality of the lab: Anything that didn’t grow in two days didn’t exist. But Helicobacter is slow-growing, we discovered. After that we let the cultures grow longer and found we had 13 patients with duodenal ulcer, and all of them had the bacteria.

When did you realize H. pylori caused stomach cancer, too?
We observed that everybody who got stomach cancer developed it on a background of gastritis, an irritation or inflammation of the stomach lining. Whenever we found a person without Helicobacter, we couldn’t find gastritis, either. So as far as we knew, the only important cause of gastritis was Helicobacter. Therefore, it had to be the most important cause of stomach cancer as well.

How did you get the word out about your discovery?
I presented that work at the annual meeting of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in Perth. That was my first experience of people being totally skeptical. To gastroenterologists, the concept of a germ causing ulcers was like saying that the Earth is flat. After that I realized my paper was going to have difficulty being accepted. You think, “It’s science; it’s got to be accepted.” But it’s not an absolute given. The idea was too weird.

Then you and Robin Warren wrote letters to The Lancet.
Robin’s letter described the bacteria and the fact that they were quite common in people. My letter described the history of these bacteria over the past 100 years. We both knew that we were standing at the edge of a fantastic discovery. At the bottom of my letter I said the bacteria were candidates for the cause of ulcers and stomach cancer.

That letter must have provoked an uproar.
It didn’t. In fact, our letters were so weird that they almost didn’t get published. By then I was working at a hospital in Fremantle, biopsying every patient who came through the door. I was getting all these patients and couldn’t keep tabs on them, so I tapped all the drug companies to request research funding for a computer. They all wrote back saying how difficult times were and they didn’t have any research money. But they were making a billion dollars a year for the antacid drug Zantac and another billion for Tagamet. You could make a patient feel better by removing the acid. Treated, most patients didn’t die from their ulcer and didn’t need surgery, so it was worth $100 a month per patient, a hell of a lot of money in those days. In America in the 1980s, 2 to 4 percent of the population had Tagamet tablets in their pocket. There was no incentive to find a cure.

But one drug company did provide useful information, right?
I got an interesting letter from a company that made an ulcer product called Denel, which contained bismuth—much like Pepto-Bismol in the United States. The company had shown that it healed ulcers just as quickly as Tagamet, even though the acid remained. The weird thing was that if they treated 100 patients with this drug, 30 of them never got their ulcer back, whereas if you stopped Tagamet, 100 percent would get their ulcer back in the next 12 months. So the company said: “This must heal ulcers better than just removing the acid. It must do something to the underlying problem, whatever that is.” They sent me their brochure with “before” and “after” photographs. On the “before” photograph they had Helicobacter in the picture, and in the “after” picture there was none. So I put their drug on Helicobacter and it killed them like you wouldn’t believe. They helped me present at an international microbiology conference in Brussels.

The microbiologists in Brussels loved it, and by March of 1983 I was incredibly confident. During that year Robin and I wrote the full paper. But everything was rejected. Whenever we presented our stuff to gastroenterologists, we got the same campaign of negativism. I had this discovery that could undermine a $3 billion industry, not just the drugs but the entire field of endoscopy. Every gastroenterologist was doing 20 or 30 patients a week who might have ulcers, and 25 percent of them would. Because it was a recurring disease that you could never cure, the patients kept coming back. And here I was handing it on a platter to the infectious-disease guys.

Didn’t infectious-disease researchers support you, at least?
They said: “This is important. This is great. We are going to be the new ulcer doctors.” There were lots of people doing the microbiology part. But those papers were diluted by the hundreds of papers on ulcers and acid. It used to drive me crazy.

To move forward you needed solid experimental proof. What obstacles did you encounter?
We had been trying to infect animals to see if they would develop ulcers. It all failed; we could not infect pigs or mice or rats. Until we could do these experiments, we would be open to criticism. So I had a plan to do the experiments in humans. It was desperate: I saw people who were almost dying from bleeding ulcers, and I knew all they needed was some antibiotics, but they weren’t my patients. So a patient would sit there bleeding away, taking the acid blockers, and the next morning the bed would be empty. I would ask, “Where did he go?” He’s in the surgical ward; he’s had his stomach removed.

What led up to your most famous and most dangerous experiment, testing your theory on yourself?
I had a patient with gastritis. I got the bacteria and cultured them, then worked out which antibiotics could kill his infection in the lab—in this case, bismuth plus metronidazole. I treated the patient and did an endoscopy to make sure his infection was gone. After that I swizzled the organisms around in a cloudy broth and drank it the next morning. My stomach gurgled, and after five days I started waking up in the morning saying, “Oh, I don’t feel good,” and I’d run in the bathroom and vomit. Once I got it off my stomach, I would be good enough to go to work, although I was feeling tired and not sleeping so well. After 10 days I had an endoscopy that showed the bacteria were everywhere. There was all this inflammation, and gastritis had developed. That’s when I told my wife.

How did she react?
I should have recorded it, but the meaning was that I had to stop the experiment and take some antibiotics. She was paranoid that she would catch it and the kids would catch it and chaos—we’d all have ulcers and cancer. So I said, “Just give me till the weekend,” and she said, “Fair enough.”

Your personal experience convinced you that Helicobacter infection starts in childhood. Can you explain?
At first I thought it must have been a silent infection, but after I had it, I said, “No, it’s actually an infection that causes vomiting.” And when do you catch such infections? When you’re toddling around, eating dirty things and playing with your dirty little brothers and sisters. The reason you didn’t remember catching Helicobacter is that you caught it before you could talk.

You published a synthesis of this work in The Medical Journal of Australia in 1985. Then did people change their thinking?
No, it sat there as a hypothesis for another 10 years. Some patients heard about it, but gastroenterologists still would not treat them with antibiotics. Instead, they would focus on the possible complications of antibiotics. By 1985 I could cure just about everybody, and patients were coming to me in secret—for instance, airline pilots who didn’t want to let anyone know that they had an ulcer.

So how did you finally convince the medical community?
I didn’t understand it at the time, but Procter & Gamble [the maker of Pepto-Bismol] was the largest client of Hill & Knowlton, the public relations company. After I came to work in the States, publicity would come out. Stories had titles like “Guinea-Pig Doctor Experiments on Self and Cures Ulcer,” and Reader’s Digest and the National Enquirer covered it. Our credibility might have dropped a bit, but interest in our work built. Whenever someone said, “Oh, Dr. Marshall, it’s not proven,” I’d say: “Well, there’s a lot at stake here. People are dying from peptic ulcers. We need to accelerate the process.” And ultimately, the NIH and FDA did that. They fast-tracked a lot of this knowledge into the United States and said to the journals: “We can’t wait for you guys to conduct these wonderful, perfect studies. We’re going to move forward and get the news out.” That happened quite quickly in the end. Between 1993 and 1996, the whole country changed color.

You have since devised tests for H. pylori. How do they work?
The first diagnostic test, done after a biopsy, detected Helicobacter that broke down urea to form ammonia. More recently I developed a breath test for Helicobacter based on the same principle. That test was bought by Kimberly-Clark, and they sell it all over the world. That one little discovery set me up for the rest of my career.

Is it possible to create a vaccine against Helicobacter?
After 20 years and a lot of hard work by companies spending millions, we have still been unable to make a vaccine. The reason is that once it’s in you, Helicobacter has control of your immune system. Once I realized this, I said, well, if it’s too difficult to make a vaccine against H. pylori, what about loading a vaccine against something else onto the Helicobacter and using it as a delivery system? So that is my vaccine project, and it is my life at the moment. I’m making a vaccine against influenza. We’ll find a strain of Helicobacter that doesn’t cause any symptoms. Then we’ll take the influenza surface protein and clone that into Helicobacter and figure out how to put it in a little yogurt-type product. You just take one sip and three days later the whole surface of your stomach is covered with the modified Helicobacter. Over a few weeks, your immune system starts reacting against it and also sees the influenza proteins stuck on the surface, so it starts creating antibodies against influenza as well.

How would this be better than current flu vaccines?
Right now it takes a year to make 50 million doses of flu vaccine, so you only get vaccinated against last year’s flu. Whereas we are building swine flu vaccine as we speak. We know the sequence of the swine flu virus. You can make the DNA. You can put it in Helicobacter—with a home brew kit, I can make 100,000 doses in my bathtub. Using the same method, a Helicobacter vaccine against malaria would be dirt cheap. You could make 100 million doses in the middle of Africa without a refrigerator. You could distribute it at the airport through something like a Coke machine.

Based on this experience, should we be taking a fresh look at other diseases that do not have well-understood causes?
Helicobacter made us realize that we can’t confidently rule out infectious causes for most diseases that are still unexplained. By the 1980s, infectious disease was considered a has-been specialty, and experts were saying everyone with an infectious disease could be cured by antibiotics. But what about when your kids were 2 years old? Every week they’d come home with a different virus. You didn’t know what the infections were. The kids had a fever for two days, they didn’t sleep, they were irritable, and then it was over. Well, you think it is over. It might be gone, but it has put a scar on their immune system. And when they grow up, they’ve developed colitis or Crohn’s disease or maybe eczema. There are hundreds of diseases like this, and no one knows the cause. It might be a germ, just one you can’t find.

How can we track down these mystery pathogens?
What we would like to do, hopefully with funding from NIH, is launch big, long-term programs. You would enter your baby into a trial the day he is born. We would have his genome decoded. We’d survey your microbiome [all the microorganisms in the body and their DNA] and maybe your husband’s microbiome, and all that would go in a database. Then we would come along and take a feces culture from your baby each month. And if ever he got a fever, we would swab his cheek and save that. We would do 10,000 kids like this. Then, in 20 years’ time, we would find that 30 of them developed colitis, and we would go back. If we could get all of that material out of the deep freeze and run it through the sequencing machine, we would find the answer. In the last 20 years, people have been so focused on linking disease with environmental factors like chemicals and pollution. But the environmental factor could be an infectious agent that you had in your body at some time in your life. Just because somebody ruled out an infectious cause in the 1980s or ’90s doesn’t mean this was correct. Technology has moved forward a long way.

Even now, though, isn’t it hard for new ideas to be heard when medical journals are gatekeepers of the status quo?
It’s true, but they have their ears pricked up now because every time a paper comes to them, they say: “Hang on a minute, I had better make sure that this is not a Barry Marshall paper. I don’t want to have my name on that rejection letter he shows in his lectures.” Now they might say, “It’s so off-the-wall….Is it true?”

2017-09-29 Lab report on hair analysis (childhood vaccinations, amalgam dental filling, polio diagnosis)

 Mercury poisoning, dental amalgams. See also Vaccinations., Vaccinations (incl corruption of science & govt)  No Responses »
Nov 022017
 

Copy of the Lab Report:     Childhood Hair Element Anaylsis- Sandra Sept 2017

 

The Lab Report is one in a set of postings:

 

2017-11-02 Diagnosed with childhood polio, but was it polio or heavy metal poisoning? (includes chronology)

 Health  No Responses »
Nov 022017
 

This posting is one in a set:

 

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I was a statistic that helped document the 1952-53 polio epidemic, diagnosed with polio in November 1952 (age 3 years, 7 months).

Less than 2 months prior to the diagnosis, I had my first dental filling (mercury amalgam).  Prior to that I had the series of childhood vaccinations administered by the Health Dept. (details below).  Was mercury being used as a preservative in vaccinations, in the early 1950’s?   What were the ingredients in the vaccinations at that time?

ASIDE:  At that time, the vaccinations started when you were one year old.   Today, there are jurisdictions where they begin at birth,  when, in addition to other factors, some parts of the immune system are net yet fully developed.  . . .

I was curious.  If you have the same questions as I had, I’ll save you some time: 3 short paragraphs in answer to:

  • How long does it take for a newborn’s liver (part of the immune system) to mature? 
  • What are the consequences of a damaged liver?
  • Why do the Americans administer the Hepatitis B vaccine to newborns?   (Hepatitus B is a sexually transmitted disease, also transmitted through needle exchange, or when body fluids from an infected person come into contact with another’s body fluids.  If mothers are drug users they would normally be tested for Hep B prior to the birth of their at-risk baby. (Hep B is like HIV.)  During birth, or in the hospital,  is a newborn at risk of coming into contact with blood infected with Hep B?. . . to the degree that ALL newborns should be vaccinated for Hep B (mandatory), at a time when their immune systems are not yet fully developed?   . . .  is this rational?)
  • Additional food for thought:     How Much Money Do American Pediatricians Really Make From Vaccines?

If I was making a decision whether or not to vaccinate a newborn, or a toddler, I would want to have some inkling of the answers to the preceding questions.

BUT!  back to this posting.

Today, there is controversy over the polio epidemics.   Were they epidemics, were the diagnoses accurate, were the trend-lines for polio already on the way down, were other factors at play?

My Mother kept pretty good records, including hair from our first hair cuts.

I recently sent it for analysis because I  am curious whether my “polio” might have been poisoning by heavy metals,  maybe not polio?

I know that ancient hair samples are tested for levels of heavy metals  (e.g. the Inuit:   https://books.google.ca/books?id=mWkYGpmzQXMC&pg=PA166&lpg=PA166&dq=lead+in+ancient+hair+samples&source=bl&ots=FsX0cytTMK&sig=GZw8HpVT-90V8MnT5ZGUxX-nU6k&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjbmfKGlqHXAhVF7mMKHdyDCQcQ6AEIODAD#v=onepage&q=lead%20in%20ancient%20hair%20samples&f=false)

My childhood hair isn’t quite “ancient”, but I wondered if an analysis might be helpful.  It would at least be interesting.

Copy of the results of the hair analysis, Sept 29,  2017.    (Mercury isn’t the stand-out heavy metal in the 65-year-old hair sample.  Other heavy metals are.)

I have more work to do,  in sorting out what the analysis might mean, if anything.   (Note to self:  take a look at Measuring Our Mercury Exposure Through Hair Samples)

CHRONOLOGY

(Tedious details below are because there is more research to do (e.g. what ingredients were in the vaccines), in order to arrive at any clear understanding.)

 

1948-49,  In utero exposure to mercury.   Input from Valerie Finley, my mother, she had a “pile of fillings”.  Her mouth was full of them.  “Would have 6 or 7 done at a time.”   In the spring of 1951 (at age 23) she and a friend had all of their teeth extracted at one time.   My Aunt did the same.  The three of them got false teeth.  They have had good health and good minds to this day.  My mother is 90 years old.

1949, April 1: I was born

1949:  Exposure to mercury through mother’s breast milk.

1949 – 1958:   Exposure to lead from (almost certain) lead water pipes and lead soldering.  (Water was piped to our first house from my Uncle’s, two houses away.  Generally, copper started to replace lead pipes in the 1960’s.)

1950,  IMMUNIZATION RECORD, original card:

DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH

R.M. #351, Luseland, Saskatchewan  (Canadian prairies, rural)

DIPHTHERIA TOXOID

Dose 1.  March 31

Dose 2.  April 22

Dose 3.  May 25

SMALLPOX VACCINE    –  blank

SCARLET FEVER TOXIN  – blank

PERTUSSIS VACCINE  (whooping cough)

Dose 1. March 31

Dose 2. April 22

Dose 3. May 25

1951,  re-designed card stapled on top of the 1950 card:

The column for DIPHTHERIA TOXOID is blank.   The dates for the 1950 Diphtheria shots, doses 1, 2, and 3, are written in on the revised card,  in the column

DIPH. TOX. & PERT. V. (Comb).   Added to the record:

Dose 4.   June 25, 1951   (Mother’s handwriting on backside of original card says Booster – June 25 – 1951)

In pencil on front of 1951 card, Mother’s handwriting:   Polio May, June 25   Oct?   No date.

Other Blank columns on the 1951 card:

  • D.  Txd, P.  V.  & TET.   TXD.
  • PERTUSSIS VACCINE  (record on the 1950 card)
  • SCARLET F. TOXIN
  • DICK TESTED    SCHICK TESTED
  • SMALLPOX VACCINATION

 

1952 – Polio epidemic in the U.S.  Fear.

1952 –  (Mother’s record):  Sandy’s talking was very hard to understand until she was three & even then she talked so fast & inarticulate that many had a time understanding her til she repeated a couple of times & she thought the listeners very dumb at not understanding her.  

(I record this because the majority of accounts of vaccine-damaged children report language delay or regression.  It may have nothing to do with my case.)

1952, Sept – Mother’s handwriting,  Had her first filling in Sept. ’52 by Dr. Sills at Unity (Dentist in another town).

1952 – November 6  –  Mother’s handwriting,  . . . we took her into Dr. Kinnear in Saskatoon (closest major city, 3 hours away) because she complained of pains in her right leg & he diagnosed it as polio.  Had affected muscles in the right knee & she had a bit of a sidle in her walk.  Skating seemed to be the answer in helping it.   (At age 3+, I was taken to the skating rink in the wintertime, almost daily, as I understand.)

1953 – March 2 –  Sandy’s hair cut .  ..  short  . . .  (hair sample, age 4.  Sent for analysis in 2017.)   (Note: The average hair growth rate of Caucasian females is  a little more than 5 inches (13 cm) per year.  I don’t know if the rate is different for child vs adult.)  So, mercury filling in Sept (don’t know the day),  and hair cut on March 2; the hair sample was taken between 5 and 6 months after the filling.   Let’s say 6 months which means one half a year of new hair growth = approximately 2.5 inches (6.5 cm).

The mercury from the one source (the filling) that may have made its way to the hair for excretion would be captured in the hair sample,  IF the sample included hair taken from within (approximately) 2.5 inches (6.5 cm)  of the scalp.   Can’t know if it did.   Affects the results.  2017-09-29:  Lab Report on the hair analysis

1953 – Polio epidemic in Winnipeg, Manitoba.  Fear.

1954 – tonsils removed

1955, Oct – Mother’s record:  First permanent tooth (lower front) came thru in Oct 55.  This was a deformed tooth both in shape & in enamel.  Removed in 1959.   (I record this because, see 19?? below,  the Macklin dentist said that another dental abnormality was related to the polio.   But was it?   Are there other causes?

1956, Dec – (Mother’s record)  Sandy had x-ray treatments thru Dr. Scharf to do away with adenoids that had grown back in & were causing earaches.

19?? –  Dentist in Macklin said that the missing permanent tooth in upper front right quadrant was because of the polio.  See 1955 above, also re dental.

2016-06-20 How Much Money Do American Pediatricians Really Make From Vaccines?

 Vaccinations (incl corruption of science & govt)  No Responses »
Nov 022017
 

https://wellnessandequality.com/2016/06/20/how-much-money-do-pediatricians-really-make-from-vaccines/

 

If you want to be sure your pediatrician has your child’s best interest, this is mandatory reading. Pediatricians around the country have begun refusing to accept families who opt out of some or all vaccines. Thanks to a tip sent to Wellness & Equality by a reader, now we know why.

When my friend’s child suffered a life-threatening reaction to a vaccine a week after her first birthday, my friend assumed her pediatrician would write her a medical exemption from future vaccines. Shortly after receiving a routine set of vaccines, the happy, vibrant one-year-old spiked a 106 degree fever, began having seizures, and was hospitalized. When the unexplained “illness” passed after a week in the hospital, the little girl had lost her ability to walk. My friend describes how her daughter, who had learned to walk several months earlier at 9 months, suddenly “stumbled around like a drunk person” for weeks following the vaccines. My friend met with a team of pediatricians, neurologists, and naturopathic doctors, and they agreed: Her daughter had suffered a brain injury caused by a reaction to one of the vaccines. Hoping the injury would be temporary and that she might recover and ease her brain inflammation if they could help her small body quickly eliminate the vaccine additives that caused the reaction, my friend’s daughter underwent an intensive detoxification program overseen by a nutritionalist. Slowly, her daughter relearned to walk.

My friend is a practicing attorney who graduated from a Top 10 college. The evidence was overwhelming that her daughter’s reaction had been caused by vaccines, she told me.

But a few months later, when she took her daughter back into the pediatrician for a visit, he wanted to vaccinate her daughter again. She was baffled. Why?

After a reader sent us a link to a PDF file of Blue Cross Blue Shield’s Physician Incentive Program available online, Wellness & Equality learned that insurance companies pay pediatricians massive bonuses based on the percentage of children who are fully vaccinated by age 2. 

BCBS_ProviderIncentiveProgram.png

So how much money do doctors really make from vaccines? The average American pediatrician has 1546 patients, though some pediatricians see many more. The vast majority of those patients are very young, perhaps because children transition to a family physician or stop visiting the doctor at all as they grow up. As they table above explains, Blue Cross Blue Shield pays pediatricians $400 per fully vaccinated child. If your pediatrician has just 100 fully-vaccinated patients turning 2 this year, that’s $40,000. Yes, Blue Cross Blue Shield pays your doctor a $40,000 bonus for fully vaccinating 100 patients under the age of 2. If your doctor manages to fully vaccinate 200 patients, that bonus jumps to $80,000. 

But here’s the catch: Under Blue Cross Blue Shield’s rules, pediatricians lose the whole bonus unless at least 63% of patients are fully vaccinated, and that includes the flu vaccine. So it’s not just $400 on your child’s head–it could be the whole bonus. To your doctor, your decision to vaccinate your child might be worth $40,000, or much more, depending on the size of his or her practice.

If your pediatrician recommends that your child under the age of 2 receive the flu vaccine–even though the flu vaccine has never been studied in very young children and evidence suggests that the flu vaccine actually weakens a person’s immune system over the long term –ask yourself:  Is my doctor more concerned with selling me vaccines to keep my child healthy or to send his child to private school?

Sources:

The Physician Alliance Blue Cross Blue Shield Incentive Program [Please read our update below to find out how you can access the pamphlet.] 

Update 4/30/2017: After Wellness & Equality published this article, Blue Cross Blue Shield locked online access to their incentive program and then removed the page altogether. Clearly this incentive program was never intended to be public knowledge and created a bit of PR issue for them. Fortunately, another website managed to save the entire BCBS incentive program booklet and has published it in entirety online… You can read it here:  Blue Cross Blue Shield Physician Incentive Program

Getting A Flu Shot Every Year? More May Not Be Better

Distribution of Pediatric Practice: Size, Age, Sex 

2017-11-02 How long does it take for a newborn’s liver to mature? What are the consequences of a damaged liver? Why do the Americans administer the Hepatitis B vaccine on day 1 of birth?

 Vaccinations (incl corruption of science & govt)  No Responses »
Nov 022017
 

Three short paragraphs:

QUESTION 1:  HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE FOR A NEW BORN’S LIVER TO MATURE?

ANSWER:   up to 2 years after birth

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15001122

U.S. National Library of Medicine

2003-10-08

Hepatic function and physiology in the newborn.
Beath SV1.

Author information

Abstract

The liver develops from progenitor cells into a well-differentiated organ in which bile secretion can be observed by 12 weeks’ gestation. Full maturity takes up to two years after birth to be achieved, and involves the normal expression of signalling pathways such as that responsible for the JAG1 genes (aberrations occur in Alagille’s syndrome), amino acid transport and insulin growth factors. At birth, hepatocytes are already specialized and have two surfaces: the sinusoidal side receives and absorbs a mixture of oxygenated blood and nutrients from the portal vein; the other surface delivers bile and other products of conjugation and metabolism (including drugs) to the canalicular network which joins up to the bile ductules. There is a rapid induction of functions such as transamination, glutamyl transferase, synthesis of coagulation factors, bile production and transport as soon as the umbilical supply is interrupted. Anatomical specialization can be observed across the hepatic acinus which has three distinct zones. Zone 1 borders the portal tracts (also known as periportal hepatocytes) and is noted for hepatocyte regeneration, bile duct proliferation and gluconeogenesis. Zone 3 borders the central vein and is associated with detoxification (e.g. paracetamol), aerobic metabolism, glycolysis and hydrolysis and zone 2 is an area of mixed function between the two zones. Preterm infants are at special risk of hepatic decompensation because their immaturity results in a delay in achieving normal detoxifying and synthetic function. Hypoxia and sepsis are also frequent and serious causes of liver dysfunction in neonates. Stem cell research has produced many answers to the questions about liver development and regeneration, and genetic studies including studies of susceptibility genes may yield further insights. The possibility that fatty liver (increasingly recognized as non-alcoholic steatohepatitis or NASH) may have roots in the neonatal period is a concept which may have important long-term implications.

PMID:
15001122
DOI:
10.1016/S1084-2756(03)00066-6
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QUESTION 2:  WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES OF A DAMAGED LIVER?

ANSWER: Know a bit about the function of the liver and you’ll grasp the significance of damaging it

from  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1534580710000559

(Skip the too-technical parts.)

The liver is the largest gland in the body exhibiting both endocrine and exocrine properties. Endocrine functions include the secretion of several hormones such as Insulin-like growth factors, Angiotensinogen, and Thrombopoietin, while the major exocrine secretion is in the form of bile.

The liver is also essential for glycogen storage, drug detoxification, control of metabolism, regulation of cholesterol synthesis and transport, urea metabolism, and secretion of an extensive array of plasma proteins including Albumin and Apolipoproteins.

Since the liver is such an important regulator of normal physiological processes, liver disease, such as hepatic fibrosis, cirrhosis and hepatitis, and hepatocellular carcinoma, results in high rates of morbidity and mortality, so much so that liver disease is the fourth leading cause of death among middle-aged adults in the United States.

The high economical and health burden resulting from liver disease has prompted a call to increase understanding of the basic developmental mechanisms that control liver cell differentiation and function (Action Plan for Liver Disease Research: http://www2.niddk.nih.gov/).

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QUESTION 3:  WHY DO THE AMERICANS ADMINISTER THE HEP B VACCINATION SHORTLY AFTER BIRTH?

ANSWER:  You decide.   Personally,  I have a large problem with the idea that you would inject a newborn with toxins when the liver is still in its infancy,

far from being fully developed.

(Hepatitus B is a sexually transmitted disease, also transmitted through needle exchange, or when body fluids from an infected person come into contact with another.  If mothers are drug users they would normally be tested for Hep B prior to the birth of their at-risk baby. (Hep B is like HIV.)

 

From the Centre for Disease Control,   https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/diseases/child/hepb.html

Doctors recommend that your child get 3 doses of the hepatitis B shot for best protection. Ask your doctor when your child should get the next shot. Typically, children get one dose at each of the following ages:

  • Shortly after birth
  • 1 through 2 months
  • 6 through 18 months

Your child may get a 4th dose depending on the brand of vaccines the doctor uses.

– – – – – – – – –

We are dealing with Big Pharma,  transnationals.  What they get in one jurisdiction, they get in another.   Americans are fighting hard for CHOICE in vaccinations.   Canadians should be doing the same.

Note:

  • families of vaccine-injured children are not challenged by the Vaccine Injury Court if there is, for example, video evidence of a perfectly healthy toddler, who, within a day or few days of vaccination, regresses dramatically, developmentally.   Cause and effect cannot be denied, in the face of the evidence.
  • if newborns are vaccinated,  and injured, there will be no evidence of developmental milestones with which to challenge the vaccinations.  That may be seen as  cynicism,  however,  I’m not saying it’s a reason that newborns are vaccinated.  I am just pointing out a consequence.

Also note:  (U.S.)  a rationale provided for administering multiple vaccinations all at the same time comes down to,  a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.   You have the subject right there, in your office. Take advantage of the opportunity.  American pediatricians collect healthy incentives if they meet vaccination quotas.   See   How Much Money Do American Pediatricians Really Make From Vaccines?

UPDATE:

2018-02-06 Indian Study Reveals Birth Dose of Hepatitis B Vaccine Unnecessary

2017-10-24 EU on brink of historic decision on pervasive glyphosate weedkiller (Monsanto, roundup), The Guardian

 Corruption, Food, Genetically Modified  No Responses »
Nov 022017
 

Oct 24, good  article below:   EU is on the brink of historic decision . . 

Oct 25,  BRUSSELS (Reuters):  EU delays decision on herbicide glyphosate  …– EU countries failed on Wednesday to vote on a license extension for weedkiller glyphosate, delaying again a decision on the widely used herbicide that critics say could cause cancer.

Glyphosate is found in 60% of UK bread and environmentalists welcome a ban but industry warn of uproar among farmers if herbicide is phased out

Glyphosate is a weedkiller so pervasive that its residues were recently found in 45% of Europe’s topsoil and

in the urine of three quarters of Germans tested. Photograph: Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images

 

A pivotal EU vote this week could revoke the licence for the most widely used herbicide in human history, with fateful consequences for global agriculture and its regulation.

Glyphosate is a weedkiller so pervasive that its residues were recently found in 45% of Europe’s topsoil  – and in the urine of three quarters of Germans tested, at five times the legal limit for drinking water.

Since 1974, almost enough of the enzyme-blocking herbicide has been sprayed to cover every cultivable acre of the planet. Its residues have been found in biscuits, crackers, crisps, breakfast cereals and in 60% of breads sold in the UK.

But environmentalists claim that glyphosate is so non-selective that it can even kill large trees and is destructive to wild and semi-natural habitats, and to biodiversity.

The CEO of the Sustainable Food Trust, Patrick Holden, has said that a ban “could be the beginning of the end of herbicide use in agriculture as we know it, leading to a new chapter of innovation and diversity”.

But industry officials warn of farmers in open revolt, environmental degradation and crops rotting in the fields if glyphosate is banned.

Alarm at glyphosate’s ubiquity has grown since a 2015 study by the World Health Organisation’s IARC cancer agency found that it was  “probably carcinogenic to humans”. More than a million people have petitioned Brussels for a moratorium.

On Tuesday, MEPs will vote on a ban of the chemical by 2020 in a signal to the EU’s deadlocked expert committee, which is due to vote on a new lease the next day.

Anca Paduraru, an EC spokeswoman, said that a decision was needed before 15 December or “for sure the European commission will be taken to court by Monsanto and other industry and agricultural trade representatives for failing to act. We have received letters from Monsanto and others saying this.”

France is resisting a new 10-year licence. Spain is in favour. Germany is in coalition talks and likely to abstain. The UK would normally push for a new lease of the licence but is less engaged due to Brexit. There may not be a qualified majority for any outcome.

A mooted French phase-out of glyphosate was “not realistic”, Paduraru said, although a shorter authorisation might be possible.

Several famers’ associations have threatened lawsuits if the weedkiller is not given a new licence, while the NFU has warned has warned it would entirely “change the way we farm”.

Some research indicates that the surfactants mixed with glyphosate in Monsanto’s Roundup may increase the pesticide’s toxicity by a factor of up to 100. Photograph: Stephanie Lecocq/EPA

Glyphosate is now so widely used in Europe that any ban would have radical consequences. Most herbicides sold in the UK are glyphosate-based and it is integral to the GM industry. The broad spectrum weedkiller makes up a quarter of global herbicide sales. It is mostly used on maize, cotton, soya bean, oilseed and sugar beet crops genetically engineered to resist it.

Industry voices say that the no-tillage system encouraged by glyphosate reduces soil emissions and protects against more environmentally damaging alternative herbicides. Its desiccant qualities are highly convenient for farmers.

A spokesman for the European Crop Protection Agency said: “The longer a crop remains in the ground to dry, the more chance there is that it is exposed to rain and wind and rots.”

Scott Partridge, Monsanto’s VP for corporate strategy, forecast “uproar in the agricultural community” and “a whole host of detrimental effects to crops in the fields” if glyphosate were phased out.

“You would see increased costs for farming and decreased productivity, increased greenhouse gas emissions, loss of topsoil, loss of moisture,” he said. “There would be some significant reaction by farmers through Europe. They would be very upset that a very effective and safe tool had been taken out of their hands.”

Renewal, though, would stoke fears among environmentalists of another decade of increasing toxic chemical use, threatening environmental safety, entrenched regulatory capture and public health. Monsanto insists Roundup is safe to use and points to various studies by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other national agencies that have deemed the product safe.

In a Brussels hotel room, Teri McCall, in her new life as a campaigner, has come to lobby against renewal of the licence as she has no doubt that glyphosate causes cancer. After her late-husband, Jack, contracted non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) in 2015 she became one of 500 US plaintiffs suing Monsanto, claiming that exposure to its Roundup brand was responsible – a claim Monsanto denies.

“Jack was a farmer since 1975,” says McCall. “For 40 years he used Roundup to keep the weeds down around his newly planted trees. He must have sprayed thousands of gallons of it. He believed it was safe.”

Jack did not smoke or drink, exercised regularly and had no family history of cancer. After lumps appeared on his neck in July 2015, he was diagnosed with NHL aged 69.

“It was an astonishingly swift illness,” McCall says. “I had no idea I was going to lose him. He just kept getting sicker and sicker.” On Christmas day in 2015, the family turned off his life support machine.

Jack’s six-year-old dog Duke also died from the same type of cancer, McCall says. “He was a beautiful black labrador, the most gorgeous dog. He followed Jack around when he was spraying and was also exposed to a lot of Roundup.”

However, Baskut Tuncak, the OHCHR’s special rapporteur on hazardous substances and wastes, says there are “serious questions” about glyphosate’s carcinogenicity, while its regulation evinces “a conflict of interest between politics and the pesticide industry”.

“The chemical industry’s oligopoly has enormous power,” he said. “The pesticide industry has prevented reforms and has blocked the introduction of restrictions on the use of such products in various countries and globally.”

While the EPA has judged glyphosate safe for public use, its methodology was challenged by several of its own scientific advisers last December. They noted an increased NHL risk of between 27-50% when epidemiological data that the EPA had disregarded was considered, sparking criticism of the agency.

Numerous non-industry studies linking glyphosate exposure to tumour development have been ignored by the EPA and other regulators in favour of secret industry reports, conservationists say.

Glyphosate is also tested by regulators in isolation, even though some research indicates that the surfactants it is mixed with in Roundup may increase its toxicity by a factor of up to 100.

The copy and pasting of Monsanto studies into official reports by the European food safety authority (Efsa) has only added to campaigners’ concerns over revelations in the Monsanto papers, unsealed documents released in the US NHL lawsuit.

On her deathbed, an award-winning EPA scientist, Marion Copley, wrote that the original findings of an EPA glyphosate review in 1983 made it “essentially certain that glyphosate causes cancer”.

The question for many farmers is what could take its place. Glyphosate has reduced the need for more toxic alternative herbicides and also for deep tillage – or ploughing – which can be highly damaging to soil fertility.

But its use has also been associated with an increase in farm size and monoculture systems. Environmentalists say that glyphosate is congruous with continuous arable cropping and an acceleration of the “pesticide treadmill”.

Any benefits from a glyphosate ban would come too late for farmers such as Johnny Bob Barton, another non-smoker diagnosed with NHL after 40 years of manually spraying diluted Roundup, on his family farm.

“We were farming a thousand acres of crops and we’d spray using a hose. By the end of the day, you would be saturated down to your pants, boots and socks,” he said. “I never had a choice to say no to this product. There was no warning. Now as a father I have to live with the fact that I exposed my sons to the same thing.”

Monsanto, though, fiercely defends the safety of its product and points to the findings of several regulatory agencies, which dispute the IARC findings.

Farmers say glyphosate has reduced the need for deep ploughing which can be highly damaging to soil fertility. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

“Glyphosate is the safest herbicide that has ever been invented,” Partridge said. “While my heart goes out to those suffering from cancer, there is no medical or scientific evidence whatsoever that links the exposure of glyphosate to cancer.”

A report by Pesticide Action Network last week linked the broad spectrum herbicide to dramatic declines in earthworm populations and damaging soil microbial communities. The paper said its use also destroyed food sources for pollinators, and made crops more vulnerable to pathogens and disease.

Dispensing with it would require “a significant redesign of our farming systems”, according to the sustainable food trust, which supports such a move.

Shallow tilling at soil depths limited to 25cm has been shown to reduce weed density and improve long-term soil quality and biodiversity in some studies. Combined with greater crop diversity and rotation, crop rollers, and the use of green manure to raise nitrogen levels, conservationists say that crop yields, soil fertility and carbon storage could all be kept at levels close to today’s.

One firm hoping to benefit from any glyphosate ban is Weedingtech, whose foam and hot water weed treatment is already being used by half of the UK’s water companies and several glyphosate-free councils, including Glastonbury, Hammersmith and Fulham, Southwark and Lewes.

Leo de Montaignac, the firm’s CEO, says the estimated £940m cost to British farmers of a glyphosate ban should be weighed against the substantially higher cost of litigation and environmental and public health damage which may result from herbicide use.

“Companies like ours are already optimising our technology for use in the agricultural sector and we aim to have a production machine for it available before the end of next year,” De Montaignac says.

“There is a huge amount of scaremongering which says that viable alternatives are not available and it is simply not true.”

2017-03-14 Monsanto Weed Killer Roundup Faces New Doubts on Safety in Unsealed Documents, New York Times

 Freedom of Speech. (Remove some wrong postings from category), Genetically Modified, Health  No Responses »
Nov 022017
 

By DANNY HAKIM

 

The reputation of Roundup, whose active ingredient is the world’s most widely used weed killer, took a hit on Tuesday when a federal court unsealed documents raising questions about its safety and the research practices of its manufacturer, the chemical giant Monsanto.

Roundup and similar products are used around the world on everything from row crops to home gardens. It is Monsanto’s flagship product, and industry-funded research has long found it to be relatively safe. A case in federal court in San Francisco has challenged that conclusion, building on the findings of an international panel that claimed Roundup’s main ingredient might cause cancer.

The court documents included Monsanto’s internal emails and email traffic between the company and federal regulators. The records suggested that Monsanto had ghostwritten research that was later attributed to academics and indicated that a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency had worked to quash a review of Roundup’s main ingredient, glyphosate, that was to have been conducted by the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

The documents also revealed that there was some disagreement within the E.P.A. over its own safety assessment.

The files were unsealed by Judge Vince Chhabria, who is presiding over litigation brought by people who claim to have developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma as a result of exposure to glyphosate. The litigation was touched off by a determination made nearly two years ago by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, that glyphosate was a probable carcinogen, citing research linking it to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Court records show that Monsanto was tipped off to the determination by a deputy division director at the E.P.A., Jess Rowland, months beforehand. That led the company to prepare a public relations assault on the finding well in advance of its publication. Monsanto executives, in their internal email traffic, also said Mr. Rowland had promised to beat back an effort by the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct its own review.

Dan Jenkins, a Monsanto executive, said in an email in 2015 that Mr. Rowland, referring to the other agency’s potential review, had told him, “If I can kill this, I should get a medal.” The review never took place. In another email, Mr. Jenkins noted to a colleague that Mr. Rowland was planning to retire and said he “could be useful as we move forward with ongoing glyphosate defense.”

The safety of glyphosate is not settled science. A number of agencies, including the European Food Safety Agency and the E.P.A., have disagreed with the international cancer agency, playing down concerns of a cancer risk, and Monsanto has vigorously defended glyphosate.

But the court records also reveal a level of debate within the E.P.A. The agency’s Office of Research and Development raised some concern about the robustness of an assessment carried out by the agency’s Office of Pesticide Programs, where Mr. Rowland was a senior official at the time, and recommended in December 2015 that it take steps to “strengthen” its “human health assessment.”

In a statement, Monsanto said, “Glyphosate is not a carcinogen.”

It added: “The allegation that glyphosate can cause cancer in humans is inconsistent with decades of comprehensive safety reviews by the leading regulatory authorities around the world. The plaintiffs have submitted isolated documents that are taken out of context.”

The E.P.A. had no immediate comment, and Mr. Rowland could not be reached immediately.

Monsanto also rebutted suggestions that the disclosures highlighted concerns that the academic research it underwrites is compromised. Monsanto frequently cites such research to back up its safety claims on Roundup and pesticides.

In one email unsealed Tuesday, William F. Heydens, a Monsanto executive, told other company officials that they could ghostwrite research on glyphosate by hiring academics to put their names on papers that were actually written by Monsanto. “We would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak,” Mr. Heydens wrote, citing a previous instance in which he said the company had done this.

Asked about the exchange, Monsanto said in a second statement that its “scientists did not ghostwrite the paper” that was referred to or previous work, adding that a paper that eventually appeared “underwent the journal’s rigorous peer review process before it was published.”

David Kirkland, one of the scientists mentioned in the email, said in an interview, “I would not publish a document that had been written by someone else.” He added, “We had no interaction with Monsanto at all during the process of reviewing the data and writing the papers.”

The disclosures are the latest to raise concerns about the integrity of academic research financed by agrochemical companies. Last year, a review by The New York Times showed how the industry can manipulate academic research or misstate findings. Declarations of interest included in a Monsanto-financed paper on glyphosate that appeared in the journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology said panel members were recruited by a consulting firm. Email traffic made public shows that Monsanto officials discussed and debated scientists who should be considered, and shaped the project.

“I think it’s important that people hold Monsanto accountable when they say one thing and it’s completely contradicted by very frank internal documents,” said Timothy Litzenburg of the Miller Firm, one of the law firms handling the litigation.

The issue of glyphosate’s safety is not a trivial one for Americans. Over the last two decades, Monsanto has genetically re-engineered corn, soybeans and cotton so it is much easier to spray them with the weed killer, and some 220 million pounds of glyphosate were used in 2015 in the United States.

“People should know that there are superb scientists in the world who would disagree with Monsanto and some of the regulatory agencies’ evaluations, and even E.P.A. has disagreement within the agency,” said Robin Greenwald, a lawyer at Weitz & Luxenberg, which is also involved in the litigation. “Even in the E.U., there’s been a lot of disagreement among the countries. It’s not so simple as Monsanto makes it out to be.”

2017-11-01 NZ joins the trend for countries to say no to ISDS (NAFTA and other trade deals)

 Corporatocracy or Democracy or Administrative State or WHAT?  No Responses »
Nov 012017
 

For immediate release

 

NZ joins the trend for countries to say no to ISDS, must hold firm in the TPPA

 

‘Yesterday’s announcement that the new government has heeded widespread concerns and taken investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) off the table in future trade and investment negotiations is a major step forward’, says University of Auckland law professor Jane Kelsey.

‘New Zealand joins a growing number of countries who have rejected the controversial process whereby foreign investors can enforce special protections against governments in private offshore tribunals and claim huge compensation for new regulations or even court decisions that significantly affect their commercial interests’.

‘The Prime Minister’s stronger language regarding the exclusion of ISDS from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is also welcome, but leaves too much wriggle-room to claim it has failed to convince others, and proceed with the original deal’, Professor Kelsey warns.

Both Viet Nam and Canada are known to want changes to the investment enforcement rules in the TPPA. There are plenty of precedents and mechanisms available.

The government would also have strong support from the legal community. In 2012 more than a hundred jurists, including senior retired judges from Australia and New Zealand, signed an open letter calling for ISDS to be excluded from the TPPA. (https://tpplegal.wordpress.com/open-letter/)

The main rationale for leaving the TPPA intact has been to make it easy for the US to re-join.

While no one currently thinks that likely, Professor Kelsey points to a deeper irony: ‘if the current US administration did re-engage with TPPA, it would require the ability to exempt itself from ISDS!’

‘In the current renegotiation of NAFTA, the US has proposed that each party should be able to opt out of ISDS altogether. The US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told US corporations they should act like all other business and take out risk insurance to protect their commercial interests.’

Professor Kelsey called on the new government to stand firm in excluding ISDS from the Agreement, but points out there are many other aspects that remain problematic, including Labour’s own recognition before the election that the economics of the TPPA did not stack up, and that a broader review of the costs and benefits of the TPPA was necessary.

 

Prof Jane Kelsey

Faculty of Law

The University of Auckland

New Zealand

J.kelsey  AT   auckland.ac.nz

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