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Showing posts with label World Health Organization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World Health Organization. Show all posts

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Is This More Junk Science?

Bacon, Processed Meats as Dangerous as Smoking: Report

Image: Bacon, Processed Meats as Dangerous as Smoking: Report(Copyright DPC)
By Nick Tate   |   Friday, 23 Oct 2015 10:27 PM
Maybe you should rethink putting pork on your fork. Global health authorities are issuing a new warning that bacon and other processed meats contain cancer-causing substances with the highest of five possible rankings — making them as lethal as cigarettes.

The World Health Organization is preparing to publish a report by the World Cancer Research Fund International — a leading global authority on cancer prevention research related to diet, weight, and physical activity — that strongly advises limiting the amount of processed meats in the diet to prevent cancer, according to The Telegraph.

"The WCRF advises that people can reduce their bowel cancer risk by eating no more than 500 grams (cooked weight) per week of red meat, such as beef, pork and lamb," the reports states.

It is expected to list processed meat as "carcinogenic to humans" — the highest of five possible rankings, the same classification as cigarettes, arsenic, asbestos, and alcohol.

The WCRF, and other health authorities, have warned for several years that there is "strong evidence" that consuming a lot of red meat can cause bowel cancer. But it now says there is "strong evidence" even small quantities of processed meats increase cancer risk.

In response to the new report, the North American Meat Institute issued a statement that said the new classification " will defy both common sense and dozens of studies showing no correlation between meat and cancer and other studies showing the many health benefits of balanced diets that include meat."

Barry Carpenter, president of the industry trade group, argued that diet isjust one "piece of the puzzle" in health and noted that meat is common to diets in Spain, Italy, and other nations with "some of the longest lifespans" in the world.

"Red and processed meat are among 940 substances reviewed by IARC found to pose some level of theoretical ‘hazard.’ " he added. "Only one substance, a chemical in yoga pants, has been declared by the [WCRF] not to cause cancer.
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"Scientific evidence shows cancer is a complex disease not caused by single foods and that a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle choices are essential to good health ... Risks and benefits must be considered together before telling people what to eat, drink, drive, breathe, or where to work."
The new WHO report echoes many past studies that have shown that meat produces cancer-causing substances, called "polyaroamic hydrocabons," and that preserving it — by smoking, curing, salting, or by adding preservatives — can introduce carcinogens.
Processed meats are also often manufactured with a carcinogenic ingredient known as sodium nitrite, used as a color fixer to turn packaged meats a bright red color so they look fresh. The chemical can result in the formation of cancer-causing nitrosamines in the human body.

Diets high in beef and processed meats are also linked with cardiovascular disease and diabetes, two other leading killers worldwide.

Last summer, the WCRF completed a detailed review of 7,000 clinical studies examining links between diet and cancer. The analysis concluded processed meats are too dangerous for human consumption.

A recent University of Hawaii study also found that processed meats increase the risk of pancreatic cancer by 67 percent. Another study revealed that every 50 grams of processed meat consumed daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 21 percent.

Food items that can include sodium nitrite: bacon, beef jerky, sausages, hot dogs, sandwich meats, frozen meals and canned soups containing meat, pasta foods with meat sauces, and products sold at public schools, restaurants, hospitals, hotels, and theme parks.

Friday, May 22, 2015

The US Should Withdraw All Support From The UN, Confiscate The Property And Boot All The Demagogues, Rapists, Terrorists, Dictators From The US. But It Won't Happen As Obama Agrees With Them 99% Of The Time

UN: Israel is worst violator of health rights in the world








nepal
By: Hillel C. Neuer
© 2015
GENEVA, May 20, 2015 - As Israeli hospitals continue their life-saving treatment for escalating numbers of wounded Syrians fleeing to the Golan from the Assad regime’s barbaric attacks, the U.N. reached new heights of absurdity today by accusing Israel of violating the health rights of Syrians in the Golan.
By a vote of 104 to 4, with 6 abstentions and 65 absent, the Jewish state was singled out as the world’s top violator of health rights by the annual assembly of the U.N.’s World Health Organization.
The resolution, which adopted two reports heaping blame upon Israel for allegedly violating the health rights of both the Palestinians and Druze residents of the Golan, was the 2015 assembly’s only treatment of a specific country situation.
There was no debate on the health of the Yemeni people now under indiscriminate Saudi bombardment, no mention at all of the 1,850 Yemenis killed, the 7,394 wounded, and the 545,000 displaced, many of whom are desperate to find food.
On the contrary, the representative of Saudi Arabia’s theocracy took the floor today, without any sense of shame, to denounce “Israeli intransigence,” and to beseech “all peace loving states” to adopt the distorted and politicized resolution.
The despotic regime must have felt especially emboldened as the gathering took place adjacent to the Human Rights Council, where Saudi Arabia is not only a full member—elected in 2013 by more than two-thirds of the UN General Assembly—but, according to the Tribune de Genève, is actively lobbying to become president next year. If Qaddafi’s Libya won the post in 2003, why shouldn’t King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud get his turn?
All of this while the Wahhabist regime advertises the hiring of eight more executioners to carry out beheadings, which have spiraled this year to more than double the amount in 2014. ISIS can only be jealous of what this UNHRC presidential candidate has achieved.
Nor is this year’s UN health assembly holding a single debate on the health rights of Ukranian civilians caught in a war with Russian-backed militias. The 6,000 people killed, and the one million displaced, are simply of no interest.
Preoccupied by the alleged sins of Israelis, the UN turned a blind eye to the latest warning by health experts, reported in Newsweek, that Ukraine is in imminent danger of experiencing the first polio epidemic Europe has seen for decades. “Millions of children are at risk from a range of crippling or fatal infectious diseases, including measles, diphtheria and rubella,” said the report. Yet the UN couldn’t be bothered—and Russia gleefully voted today for the PLO-drafted condemnation of Israel.
Most absurd of all, though, was that today’s text falsely claimed a dire need for “health-related technical assistance” for “the Syrian population in the occupied Syrian Golan” — who in fact have excellent treatment — and said nothing about the Syrian population being slaughtered in Syria.
Instead, the scapegoating of Israel—in the form of a special debate, two lopsided reports, the resolution, and the publication of country submissions—provided a UN platform for Assad’s murderous regime.
“The Israeli occupation authorities continue to experiment on Syrian and Arab prisoners with medicines and drugs and to inject them with pathogenic viruses,” wrote Syria, in a submission laced with anti-Semitic conspiracy tropes, yet circulated as an official UN document on today’s agenda.
Unable to deny Israel’s medical treatment of wounded Syrians, the regime concocted another plot: Israel deliberately heals regime opponents so that they can “resume their subversive terrorist activities directed against the country’s peaceful citizens and its infrastructure.”
If the European Union—all of whose member states disgracefully joined the jackals by voting for today’s resolution—had wanted, they could have set the record straight, and taken a stand against such base demonization of the Jewish state.
The EU states could have introduced their own resolution about how Syria has killed more than 200,000 of their own people, including 20,000 children, caused three million to flee as refugees, and displaced another six million within Syria itself, amounting to the utter destruction of the health rights of the Syrian people.
Yet the EU was silent. Instead, it justified its vote by claiming that the resolution was “technical.” It’s the old Brussels-Ramallah wink-and-nod game : the PLO drafts a harsher text at the beginning, knowing it will revise it later to allow the Europeans to pretend that they achieved a “balanced” text. Israel is then expected to celebrate that it has been lynched with a lighter rope.
The truth is, the UN health assembly should single out Israel—as a beacon of humanity.
The UN should single out Israel because if you walk into any Israeli hospital or clinic, you will see it replete with Palestinians receiving world-class medical treatment.
And this was true even this past summer while Hamas fired thousands of rockets at Israel, and placed their terrorist command center under the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, a despicable abuse of health rights unmentioned by the world health assembly.
The UN should single out Israel because its doctors have created the amazing “Save A Child’s Heart” program, which has provided life-saving cardiac surgery to more than 3,400 children from 48 different countries, training doctors and nurses from China to Zanzibar. About half the patients are Muslims from the West Bank, Gaza and other Arab countries.
The UN should single out Israel because it was a world leader in responding to the deadly earthquake in Nepal, sending a 260-member army team of medics and search and rescue experts who treated 1,600 victims, including 85 surgeries and eight infant deliveries.
And the UN should single out Israel because its Nobel Prize-winning scientists and innovative biotech companies have become global innovators who create therapeutic products, diagnostic tools and revolutionary drug-delivery techniques benefiting people all over the world.
Yet so long as the UN instead descends into irrationalism, scapegoating the Jewish state for all the world’s health problems just as medieval Europe accused the Jews of poisoning the wells, the organization betrays the cause of humanity and the noble principles upon which it was founded.
Hillel C. Neuer is the executive director of UN Watch.Copyright by United Nations Watch. All Rights Reserved.
© 2015
_________
VOTE COUNT
From the official UN summary for May 20, 2015, 68th World Health Assembly 
Item 20. Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan
The Chairman opened the item and invited the Committee to consider the draft decision contained in document A68/B/Conf./2 Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan.Palestine also made a statement after which the Director of Health of UNRWA gave his report.
In accordance with Rule 72 of the Rules of Procedure, a roll-call vote was taken. The vote resulted in 104 votes in favour to four votes against, with six abstentions and 65 Member States absent, as follows:
Votes in favour: Afghanistan; Albania; Algeria; Angola; Argentina; Austria; Azerbaijan; Bahrain; Bangladesh; Belarus; Belgium; Benin; Bhutan; Bolivia (Plurinational State of); Bosnia and Herzegovina; Brazil; Brunei Darussalam; Bulgaria; Chile; China; Congo; Costa Rica; Croatia; Cuba; Cyprus; Czech Republic; Denmark; Dominican Republic; Ecuador; Egypt; El Salvador; Estonia; Finland; France; Germany; Greece; Guatemala; Hungary; Iceland; India; Indonesia; Iran (Islamic Republic of); Iraq; Ireland; Italy; Japan; Jordan; Kazakhstan; Kuwait; Latvia; Lebanon; Liberia; Libya; Lithuania; Luxembourg; Malaysia; Maldives; Malta; Mauritania; Mauritius; Mexico; Monaco; Mongolia; Montenegro; Morocco; Namibia; Netherlands; Nicaragua; Nigeria; Norway; Oman; Pakistan; Panama; Peru; Philippines; Poland; Portugal; Qatar; Republic of Korea; Republic of Moldova; Romania; Russian Federation; Saudi Arabia; Senegal; Serbia; Singapore; Slovakia; Slovenia; South Africa; Spain; Sri Lanka; Sudan; Sweden; Switzerland; Syrian Arab Republic; Thailand; the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia; Tunisia; Turkey; United Arab Emirates; United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; Uruguay; Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of); Yemen.
Votes against: Australia; Canada; Israel; United States of America.
Abstentions: Armenia; Colombia; Fiji; New Zealand; Papua New Guinea;
Paraguay.
Absent: Andorra; Antigua and Barbuda; Bahamas; Barbados; Botswana; Burkina Faso; Burundi; Cabo Verde; Cambodia; Cameroon; Chad; Cook Islands; Côte d’Ivoire; Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; Democratic Republic of the Congo; Djibouti; Equatorial Guinea; Eritrea; Ethiopia; Gabon; Gambia; Georgia; Ghana; Grenada; Guinea; Haiti; Honduras; Jamaica; Kenya; Kiribati; Lao People’s Democratic Republic; Lesotho; Madagascar; Malawi; Mali; Mozambique; Myanmar; Nauru; Nepal; Niger; Rwanda; Saint Kitts and Nevis; Samoa; San Marino; Sao Tome and Principe; Seychelles; Sierra Leone; Solomon Islands; South Sudan; Suriname; Swaziland; Tajikistan; Timor-Leste; Togo; Tonga; Trinidad and Tobago; Turkmenistan; Tuvalu; Uganda; United Republic of Tanzania; Uzbekistan; Vanuatu; Viet Nam; Zambia; Zimbabwe.
One delegate gave an explanation of vote under Rule 75 of the Rules of Procedure.
The draft decision was approved and the item was closed. The meeting was
adjourned.

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Monday, October 27, 2014

CDC Predicts 1.4 Million Could Be Infected By Ebola By The End Of January. If So, Why Are We Not Blockading That Part Of The World?

CDC: Ebola could infect 1.4 million in Liberia and Sierra Leone by end of January

 September 23    

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa, already ghastly, could get worse by orders of magnitude, killing hundreds of thousands of people and embedding itself in the human population for years to come, according to two worst-case scenarios from scientists studying the historic outbreak.
The virus could potentially infect 1.4 million people in Liberia and Sierra Leone by the end of January, according to a statistical forecast by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published Tuesday. That number came just hours after a report in the New England Journal of Medicine warned that the epidemic might never be fully controlled and that the virus could become endemic, crippling civic life in the affected countries and presenting an ongoing threat of spreading elsewhere.
These dire scenarios from highly respected medical sources were framed, however, by optimism from U.S. officials that an accelerated response can and will contain the outbreak in the weeks and months ahead.
CDC Director Tom Frieden cautioned that the estimates in the new report from his agency do not take into account the actions taken, or planned, since August by the United States and the international community. Help is on the way, and it will make a difference, he said — but time is of the essence.
“A surge now can break the back of the epidemic, but delay is extremely costly,” Frieden said.
The situation in West Africa is bleak, with people dying of Ebola in the streets outside clinics that have no available beds, and other victims remaining at home where they are infecting their caregivers. No Ebola outbreak has ever approached the scale of the present epidemic. The previous worst outbreak, in Central Africa, involved only 425 infections in Uganda from October 2000 to January 2001, and was brought under control by local responders aided by international organizations, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.
The World Health Organization has reported more than 5,800 cases, including more than 2,800 deaths in the current outbreak. The CDC assumes the actual number of cases is 2.5 times higher than what is officially known.
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On graphs showing the rising number of infections and deaths, the lines continue to curve upward. Infections are doubling every 20 days in the coastal nations of Liberia and Sierra Leone, the CDC said. Each infected person is infecting roughly two additional people. The epidemic will begin to subside when the reinfection rate of 2.0 becomes lower than 1.0.
The CDC estimates that in Liberia and Sierra Leone, including unreported cases, there will be about 21,000 total infections by Sept. 30.
“Extrapolating trends to January 20, 2015, without additional interventions or changes in community behavior (e.g., notable reductions in unsafe burial practices), the model also estimates that Liberia and Sierra Leone will have approximately 550,000 Ebola cases (1.4 million when corrected for underreporting),” the CDC wrote.
The CDC report did not include any modeling for Guinea because the disease has struck “in three separate waves,” Frieden said, making it difficult to come up with a valid model to predict what can happen next. The biggest area of uncertainty centers on the heavily forested region where Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia intersect, which has been the center of the outbreak.
Paul Duprex, an associate professor of microbiology at Boston University, cautioned against doomsday thinking, such as wild speculation that the virus could have mutated to become transmissible through the air — something for which there is no credible evidence.
“We need to be careful not to scare people with unrealistic numbers — it’s like this airborne suggestion — where’s the evidence, what’s the precedent, what are such scaremongering suggestions based on?” he said.
Frieden of the CDC said the tool developed by the CDC to make projections about the spread of the disease is an effort to help inform Ebola response planners’ decisions. This presents a what-if case — the nightmare scenario if nothing is done.
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“It is still possible to reverse the epidemic, and we believe this can be done if a sufficient number of all patients are effectively isolated, either in Ebola treatment units or in other settings, such as community-based or home care,” Frieden said. “Once a sufficient number of Ebola patients are isolated, cases will decline very rapidly — almost as rapidly as they rose.”
Paul Farmer, a Harvard professor of global health and a co-founder of the nonprofit Partners In Health, visited Liberia in recent days and said in a telephone interview from Monrovia that, dire as the situation is, the epidemic is not unstoppable.
“It will be brought under control even as we apply these basic interventions. It’s going to work,” Farmer said.
The key is getting sick patients into medical facilities or Ebola treatment units or in other settings where there is reduced risk of transmission. But many hospitals are closed, and treatment centers are so stretched that they must turn patients away.
The CDC report offered a hypothetical scenario for slowing and eventually stopping the epidemic. For that to happen, about 70 percent of infected patients would need to be properly isolated and treated. Frieden said Guinea has available beds in its treatment centers, except for in the heavily forested region. In Sierra Leone, treatment centers are full and patients are waiting outside, but not in large numbers. In Liberia, there are “significant numbers” of patients unable to get into treatment units, Frieden said.
After Sierra Leone instituted a national three-day lockdown that ended Sunday, when nearly 30,000 health workers, volunteers and teachers aimed to visit every household in the country of 6 million to educate residents and isolate the sick, officials confirmed 130 Ebola cases and are awaiting tests on 70 more.
The United States recently launched a $750 million effort that includes treatment facilities in Liberia, and the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously last week to create an emergency medical mission to respond to the outbreak. In addition, the WHO is working on moving infected people out of their homes and into small centers that would provide at least rudimentary levels of care, in hopes of increasing survival rates and slowing the transmission of the disease.
Although the United States plans to build 17 treatment centers, each with 100 beds, in Liberia, U.S. personnel will not staff those facilities, officials have said. Instead, the U.S. plans to train volunteers and others from aid organizations or nonprofits. Some global health experts have said this could slow the response because there aren’t enough volunteers stepping forward.
The virus is extraordinarily lethal, killing about half the people infected, though in some regions it has killed close to 70 percent. The virus is spread by bodily fluids; corpses are viral bombs, and the traditional practice of washing the dead for burial has been implicated in the explosion of the disease.
There is no evidence yet that this strain of the Ebola virus is significantly different from previous strains. Scientists say it is possible that it is slightly less lethal, or replicates slightly more slowly in the human host, and has allowed more sick people to survive the infection and move around with the virus.
“If you have a whole lot more survivors than you normally have, that’s a whole lot more people who are potentially shedding the virus than you would have in a normal Ebola outbreak,” said Tom Geisbert, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. But so far, scientists have had limited ability to study this particular strain of the virus.
The most likely explanations for the scale of the epidemic involve geography, poverty and inadequate health-care systems. West Africa had never been known to have an Ebola outbreak. No one recognized the disease when it appeared late last year in Guinea near the borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia. They are among the world’s poorest countries.
Staff writer Lenny Bernstein in Monrovia, Liberia, contributed to this report.


Lena H. Sun is a national reporter for The Washington Post, focusing on health.

Brady Dennis is a national reporter for The Washington Post, focusing on food and drug issues.

Joel Achenbach writes on science and politics for the Post's national desk and on the "Achenblog."