The Blue State

Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act

There's a bill called the Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act which will require Insurance Companies to cover a minimum 48-hour hospital stay for patients undergoing a mastectomy. It's about eliminating the 'drive-through mastectomy' where women are forced to go home just a few hours after surgery, against the wishes of their doctor, still groggy from anesthesia and sometimes with drainage tubes still attached

Lifetime TV (I know "guys", Lifetime hates "us"...but this is a good cause) lays out this issue very well 'The Re-Introduction of The Bipartisan Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act'.

This bill has been introduced during each Congressional session since 1997 (1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2005). Each time, unfortunately, the bill dies in committee. It has been submitted again during the current legislative session as "The Breast Cancer Protection Act of 2007"   

Lifetime does have an online petition (much like an email petition),   however, there is no way to verify signatures or prevent multiple   "signings". A more productive approach to getting this, or any   legislation passed would be for interested voters to contact their elected representatives   directly. Click the following links for contact information for SENATORS   and REPRESENTATIVES.

 

Those interested in tracking the progress of this latest attempt at   passage, can click HERE   for Senate action, and HERE   for the House version.

The above information came from HERE, and in my opinion does not dilute the importance or effectiveness of Lifetime's petition, it's additional "insurance" and "assurance" of getting the JOB done. Our elected officials are getting the best care available, yet when it comes to us "commoners", it's a crap shoot on the crap table of the insurance companies. 

Guest Column: Resolving The Worsening Crisis At the Food and Drug Administration (Part Two)

Part Two in a two-part series by guestcolumnist Stephen Fox about the breakdown of management andresponsibility at the FDA.

(Part One is here -- just in case you have not read that first.)

Resolving the Worsening Crisis at the FDA Despite China's draconian lack of civil liberties and it's unequaled penchant putting its citizens to death, especially rowdy and "seditious" Tibetans, once in a great while, China justly takes an appropriate judicial action, especially when its government officials are embarrassed by two major recent scandals within one month, the pet food fiasco and the substitution of diethylene glycol for glycerine, leading to at least hundreds of deaths in Central America and India, from poisonous toothpaste.

Zheng Xiaoyu, the ex-head of China's FDA, was sentenced to death for accepting $832,000 in drug company bribes. The USA is in the middle of a drug and food safety crisis, which extends to nations which ludicrously depend on the ghastly violations in the "high standards" of the FDA. How is it that FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach, M.D. gets his "get out of jail" card, based on the inherent flaws in our so- called "system?"

Henry Waxman (D-CA), Chairman of House Oversight and Government Reform, forced von Eschenbach this past Wednesday to testify on failures to warn Americans of the cardiovascular risk of death from taking Avandia, a $3 billion-a-year diabetes drug made by GlaxoSmithKline. Statistics obtained from the company's own research predicted that 35,000 people would die taking Avandia last year; FDA chose to ignore these risks! von Eschenbach's testimony will cover up FDA's lies. He will lament a lack of FDA funding, but, truly, the FDA neither is incompetent nor under funded.

The truth is that the FDA does precisely what they want to do, to cater to corporate interests and please their corporate masters. "The point is that we need to look at the role of the FDA in being a bridge to the future, not a barrier to the future," he said recently in his office in Rockville. Responding to a suggestion that promoting collaborations with drug manufacturers, including an attempt to modernize human testing and finding genetic markers to predict suffering from side effects, may not be politic, von Eschenbach said the FDA is not working solely with pharmaceutical companies. "It's with everyone," he said, including government agencies and independent scientists. He defended the Avandia case, saying, "I believe we did it right with regard to Avandia."

Waxman called FDA's failure with Avandia's safety after it went on the market "a major failure of our system. The FDA never required the manufacturer to [conduct] a thorough post-market study of Avandia's heart risks." The hearing was scheduled as a result of a recent report in The New England Journal of Medicine that linked Avandia to increased risk of heart attacks.

The timing couldn't be worse for the FDA as Waxman prepares the House version (HR.1561) of the Senate drug safety bill, and the Senate version is Big Pharma's fake safety bill. Will the House put real teeth in the legislation? Avandia problems are the tips of the FDA iceberg.

The truth becomes progressively more frightening. Collusion with the very industries the FDA is supposed to regulate has reached staggering proportions, and this is no accident during the Bush Administration, resulting in deaths and injuries to millions of Americans, all for drug company profits.

For example, the antibiotic KETEK, which FDA approved, even knowing it would injure children. Von Eschenbach threatened FDA scientists who spoke out.

Iowa's Republican U.S. Senator Charles Grassley stated: "The allegations of misconduct in this case are as bad as I've heard yet. It looks like the FDA caught the drug company red handed and let them get away with it. On top of that, the FDA failed to set the record straight and, in fact, continues to cite a discredited safety study as a principal reason to feel okay about using this drug."

Another example: antipsychotic Zyprexa, which FDA approved for use in adult schizophrenics knowing that the drug caused obesity and diabetes. FDA allows billions of taxpayer dollars to be given to children to treat mild behavioral issues, an unapproved use that leads to poor health and disease.  FDA hides risks of drugs so that drug companies can turn them into best sellers, selling them in ways that were never approved in the first place.  Safety problems are reported; FDA fails to act, partially so it won't look bad for approving the drugs; partially to continue the billions in profit for companies, and partially because FDA employees are jockeying for high-paying jobs in the industry that is being regulated!

However, don't conclude that the FDA is incompetent! In fact, FDA scientists routinely warn the directors of problems, who then intentionally decline to protect consumers. The economic position of drug companies is always placed ahead of human health. This is a dereliction of duty of the highest and most despicable order, and these abuses are just as bad or worse in the context of our adulterated food supply: GMO foods, additives, chemicals allowed in food, and chemicals allowed as flavoring agents and sweeteners. The FDA has no intentions of toxicity of genetically modified food; it already even prevents labels that would give consumers any alarming details, and it suppresses information about natural ways to improve health.

This ghastly business is all entirely intentional. China just gave the death sentence to its former FDA chief. In America we maybe conduct hearings, yet ultimately do nothing. Big Pharma and Big Biotech manipulate the FDA, the White House, and most of Congress, and their profits are above all and sacrosanct. Andrew von Eschenbach has never hidden his agenda; Americans just aren't paying attention!

The top priority of the FDA and von Eschenbach's dream is to bring new biotech drugs to the market with minimal safety testing and then conduct experiments on individuals as the drugs are used in clinical practice.  Something like Dr. Mengele's experiments in the concentration camps, this is called the "Critical Path Initiative." Von Eschenbach states that this is the top priority of the FDA for many years to come (not food or drug safety).

Despite his phony lofty goal of ending cancer by 2015, FDA critics recognize that von Eschenbach is an oncologist who wants to create a cancer industry in which nobody is ever cured; they are just subjected indefinitely to more expensive medications. Von Eschenbach led this effort for many years in Bush I's "C-Change," a group smoothing the development of Big Biotech drugs for profitable cancer "treatment." Von Eschenbach took the top job at the National Cancer Institute to advance this agenda. As its director, he diverted billions of dollars of research funding into C-Change companies, away from basic cancer research.

Tommy Thompson, then head of Health and Human Services, approved a waiver allowing von Eschenbach to remain at C-Change while he headed the National Cancer Institute, the worst conflict of interest imaginable. In October 2006 von Eschenbach was appointed to head the FDA, holding three positions (C-Change, head of National Cancer Institute, and FDA Commissioner). No questions have ever been asked regarding his ties to Big Biotech. Von Eschenbach wants to make the FDA part of the drug development business, including licensing and marketing rights for the drugs the FDA helps develop, resulting in tens of billions of dollars of "conflicting interests."

Senate Bill S.1082 and House bill HR.1561 could result in sweeping FDA "reform." Will this legislation accomplish anything beneficial? Lobbyists from Big Pharma were able to influence the Senate to neutralize any real reform. Buried within this legislation is an attack on dietary supplements. Dietary supplements have always been challenged by FDA because they are safer and more effective than drugs. FDA acts as a police-force bully to crush competition and keep Americans ignorant about proven homeopathic venues to treat and to prevent illnesses.

Bill S.1082 permits FDA to apply drug-related risk benefit analysis to the safety of food and dietary supplements and remove commonly used products from the market at their whim. At least one hundred thousand people tragically and needlessly die per year at the hands of Big Pharma. Several million are injured so seriously they have to go to the hospital.

FDA intentionally withholds from doctors and patients the true risks for drugs despite warnings of its own safety scientists and from independent experts. There is no question that FDA top management deserves the charge of "dereliction of duty."

What if Dr. von Eschenbach were held to the same standards of punishment recently demonstrated in China's condemnation to death of its former FDA director? What will it take to wake the American public and consumers from their state of catatonic indifference?

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Stephen Fox gratefully acknowledges the insights of the New York Times and Gardiner Harris, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, Congressman Henry Waxman of Beverly Hills, Byron Richards, Mike Adams, Kenneth Stoller, M.D., and H.J. Roberts, M.D. in this analysis.

Read Stephen Fox's other column: Richardson's Idea on Boycotting the Olympics Deserves Further Consideration.

Guest Column: Resolving The Worsening Crisis At the Food and Drug Administration (Part One)

Part One in a two-part series by guest columnist Stephen Fox about the breakdown of management and responsibility at the FDA.  Part Two will be posted on Sunday. 

INTRODUCTION:
The FDA has been taken over by the very industries that it was meant to regulate. This is outrageous; this is tragic; at times, this is even criminal. The unholy alliance between corporation and state have bled out even the pretense that the FDA is working for the benefit and safety of the American people. The FDA is a failed bureaucracy under corporate control. This sad litany affects every single American, and is compellingly detailed in this article by Stephen Fox. His analyses are at times horrifying, yet are always medically and legally accurate; his recommendations concerning corrections, especially at the state (rather than Federal level) are insightful.

KP Stoller, MD President, International Hyperbaric Medical Assoc Medical Director, Hyperbaric Medical Center of New Mexico, former Professor of Pediatrics, UNM School of Medicine

______________________________________   

By Stephen Fox

Never before in Human History has food chemistry been so precarious and so critical to the health of billions. This results from multinational corporate biochemical mayhem going unchecked by regulatory bodies in every nation, the worst two being the United States Food and Drug Administration and China's total lack of standards. This crisis is worsening, demonstrated by the FDA failing to discern the imported melamine from China in the wheat and rice gluten additive to pet food that has already killed at least 4000 pets, and the failure to prevent imports of diethylene glycol, the fake
glycerine from China added to medications as a sweetener, which has killed hundreds, especially children, from Panama to India to Bangladesh.

These egregious vignettes, however, pale in epidemiological comparison with harm done by the manufacturing of neurotoxic and carcinogenic food additives in general, which is rapidly destroying health in hundreds of nations. My own theory is that melamine, not normally very toxic, became poisonous when mixed with cyanuric acid in the bottom of the vats in China, a theory also advanced by Richard Goldstein at the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine.

Food-flavoring workers in California were recently diagnosed with bronchiolitis obliterans, a rare and life-threatening form of lung disease, also known as popcorn workers lung, particularly in workers at microwave-popcorn factories; the disease destroys the lungs. Since 2001, studies have shown links between the disease and a chemical used in artificial butter flavor called diacetyl. Flavoring manufacturers have paid out more than $100 million as a result of lawsuits by people sick with popcorn workers lung over the past five years. One death from the disease has been confirmed among workers; how many have gone undetected in the general population?

Lawsuits against Pfizer and Zoloft have resulted in the FDA recently requiring antidepressant manufacturers to add suicide warnings to their products, a belated public relations gesture. Even the normally unflappable Dr. Andrew Von Eschenbach, Commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration, very recently appointed a new Assistant Commissioner for Food Safety and Security, Dr. David Acheson, M.D. A 1980 graduate of University of London Medical School, Acheson trained in internal medicine and infectious diseases then taught at Tufts Medical Center and researched food borne pathogens, focusing on Shiga toxin- producing E.coli. He also participated in FDA discussions about the fact that heating french fries to 425 degrees transforms the starch into the carcinogenic acrylamide. (In 2003 and 2004, then Attorney General of California Lockyer tried to officially label french fries as containing a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer, over the objections of the fast food lobby and the FDA Commissioner at that time. Perhaps the present AG of California, Jerry Brown will continue this vital consumer protection battle).

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Connecticut Democrat and senior member of the House
Appropriations Committee, blasted Acheson's appointment as a mere "reshuffling of management" doing little to prevent future outbreaks. "The agency should have a sense of the barriers, gaps and most critical needs in our food safety system," DeLauro said. "What is needed to adequately protect our food supply is strong enforcement authority that would require mandatory recalls of contaminated products and a commitment from agency management to follow-through with safety investigations." This pet food thing has shown people, including people at the very highest levels of the administration, that something needs to be fixed.

"If this isn't a wake-up call, the people are so asleep they are catatonic," stated William Hubbard, Associate Director of FDA from 1991 to 2005. "As long as the system depends on government inspectors to detect problems and pull dangerous foods, it's a failed system," said Michael Taylor former Director of the Agriculture Departments Food Safety Service. Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler, who served under both Bush I and Clinton, maintained that major improvements were needed from Congress, the industry and the FDA. "The food safety system in this country is broken," Kessler told the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Kessler said the FDA needed more money for food safety efforts and should make it a higher priority. "Food safety can't be delegated to second-tier management within the agency, and the fact is that food is a second-tier priority within the FDA," Kessler said.

More money for more experts? Was Kessler joking? We wantonly add chemicals to almost everything we consume as food, almost none of which existed 101 years ago when the Pure Food and Drugs Act was passed, the precursor of the 1937 FDCA that created the FDA (except for Saccharin from Monsanto, invented in 1904). Ralph Nader published THE CHEMICAL FEAST in 1970. Everything is done for superficial appearance or taste. Sodium hexametaphosphate added to potatoes. Sodium Erythorbate, Sodium Nitrates and Nitrites TBHQ, BHA, and BHT, some of which chemical relatives of embalming fluid routinely added to meats and manufactured food products, result in cancers from heated carcinogenic nitrosamines.

Artificial sweeteners, made by adding chlorine to sugar (Sucralose/Splenda) or Aspartame, metabolized as methanol and formaldehyde. Take coffee beans; add mercurial fungicides during the transport, then mix the coffee with chemicals like artificial sweeteners and non-dairy creamers, or even just the regular old recombinant bovine grown hormones, found in 99% of the USA's milk, all at higher temperatures which release the proven brain tumor causing diketopiperazine from the Aspartame molecule. Ship cases and cases of Diet Sodas to the Middle East, store them out in the sun at 120 degrees, and then are you surprised when the troops drinking 12-15 daily of these come home with neurological impairments conveniently dubbed Gulf War
Syndrome, as if someone else were responsible for these Weapons of Mass Destruction?

Are you surprised when children drinking sodas for breakfast and having manufactured junk food at lunch doled out in the federally funded school lunch programs develop behavioral problems like the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Syndrome, or worse genetic afflictions like Autism? Or when they fail academically or develop criminal pathologies at an early age, and they develop Adult Onset Diabetes at the age of 10 or 11? Add in pesticides, herbicides, fluorine and chlorine in the water, and unburnt hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide in the air, and you have a witch's brew of toxic chemicals that is destroying health in the USA and other nations.

When activists, lawyers, and legislators try to take some tiny incremental step to begin to correct even one of these problems, they are met with a solid wall of bureaucratic intransigence, corporate lobbyists, stonewalling, and idiotic denial of even the basic premises of their arguments, as if that to reveal that critics are paranoiac will somehow defuse their arguments. At the level of the New Mexico Legislature 2005-2007, it became absurd to talk to State Senators about the obvious need to prevent Aspartame from harming our children, while six out of nine of them were obliviously guzzling their own can of Diet Coke!

Only when bodies pile up killed by chemicals, as they did from DDT, Agent Orange, Asbestos, Vioxx, and others, will the corporate clamor and smoke and mirrors evaporate. Only when the massive lawsuits and judgments begin to roll up will regulatory authorities like the FDA be FORCED to rescind the approval for more of these harmful chemicals, and will see state-level FDAs created by legislatures.

Once, I had hope about FDA Commissioner Von Eschenbach, a cancer survivor who proclaimed that he sought to end cancer by 2015.However, in every single case wherein he was contacted by Aspartame victims, physicians treating Aspartame poisoning, citizen activists, and even state and national Senators, he has either ignored them or else diligently toed the line of cranking out corporate-pleasing lies. In his letter responding to 21 New Mexico legislators asking for Aspartame's approval to be rescinded, Von
Eschenbach said FDA has yet to be presented with credible scientific
evidence! Fact: FDA has always completely ignored or discredited evidence
laid before them (just goggle Ramazzini Oncology Foundation, Dr. Russell Blaylock, Dr. H.J. Roberts, Dr. Betty Martini, and others, to read some of the evidence that von Eschenbach has thus far ignored).

I am suspicious of Dr. Acheson, the recently appointed Food Safety and Security Deputy Commissioner. At best, he is a band-aid pasted on to thus far unsolved afflictions, another gutless apparatchik appointed to appease our increasingly angry public, yet not rock the boat of the grander Administration schemes of corporate-driven Halliburton-corrupted plutocracies, health be damned. Acheson has thus far obtained the ringing endorsement of the Grocery Manufacturers of America, who lick his boots and count on him to do absolutely nothing to correct the medical, neurological, epidemiological, and educational harm done by the biochemical mayhem and chemical feast called mainstream American cuisine.

Hillary Clinton very recently called on FDA and the Agriculture Department to strengthen regulations for imported and domestic foods. In a letter to Secretary Mike Johanns of the USDA and to Commissioner Andrew Eschenbach, Clinton wrote that "On top of the direct threat to human health, this contamination also threatens our agricultural industries. It is unconscionable that America does not have proper mechanisms in place to adequately test and track food and feed materials from overseas." She asked: "What procedures you plan to put in place to test food and feed products coming in from overseas, especially countries with lax food safety standards? How you can improve the monitoring and tracking of products once they enter into the United States? How you will alert the public to these problems in the future?"

However, as long as we have current and prior Presidents and the rest of the current Presidential candidates addicted to junk food, unable to recognize the neurological harm done by their own guzzling of aspartame in diet sodas, is there any political resolution possible to curtail general fast food corporate abuses of human health?

Conservatives Are Easily Victimized

Every time there's a tragedyor one of the WH staff are being investigated,the conservatives (andtheir talking heads) are always quick to blame the liberals and the"left wing bias" media. Crooks& Liars posted an interesting study from PsychologyToday "The Ideological Animal" that sheds a little light on their reasoning.

Conservatives: "described by their teachers as easily victimized, easilyoffended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3."

Liberals: "liberals had developed close relationships with peers andwere rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, andresilient."

All people are born alike-except Republicans and Democrats," quippedGroucho Marx, and in fact it turns out that personality differences betweenliberals and conservatives are evident in early childhood. In 1969, Berkeleyprofessors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality,asking nursery school teachers to rate children's temperaments. They weren'teven thinking about political orientation.

Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects' childhoodpersonalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arrestingpatterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers andwere rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, andresilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by theirteachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid,inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blockshypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of traditionand authority, and they found it in conservative politics.

As Crooks& Liars points out "I know our right wing commenters are goingto think this is a cheap shot against conservatives"

It's a shame how the conservatives are victimized.

Harkin and Murkowski take bold approach to nutrition at public schools

Democratic Senator Tom Harkin and Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski are introducing a bill called the Child Nutrition Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act.  The measure would make school venders obliged to follow the Department of Agriculture's nutrition standards.  As the latest edition of Newsweek said, "Move over, French fries. Fruit cups may soon be the side of choice—during school hours, at least."

In a press release two weeks ago, Senator Murkowski announced her motivation in co-sponsoring this bill:

“As a parent of school-age children, I know first-hand of the poordietary temptations that are readily available to children each day atschool.  We all know the problem, and we all know that eating the right amountof healthy foods and getting enough exercise are the answers topreventing overweight, obesity and all the related serious healthproblems and costs."

Senator Harkin, who wrote the bill, agreed:

“Selling junk food in schoolsundercuts our investment in school meal programs, and steers kidstoward a future of obesity and diet-related disease. Congress can'tstand idly by while our kids are preyed upon by junk-food marketers."

From the perspective of a college student that not too long ago ate cafeteria food in high school, I noticed that the classmates of mine who ate candy and pop for lunch were the same individuals who had trouble paying attention in class.  The more we let chemicals like sugar reduce the learning potential of our children, the less output our society will get in our investment in public education.  Obesity is a whole other concern, and a serious one.  But when the foods we feed students are minimizing their learning potential, a bill like the one Tom Harkin and Lisa Murkowski are proposing is needed.