An Unexpected Prayerful OUCH!

Three days ago I took my thirteen year old son out to a few local lakes to do community service for one of his classes. The next morning I felt like an elephant had fallen asleep on my chest. Checking my local weather channel I see the pollen levels are out the roof.. Wonderful. Well, at least I now know that it's just allergies and I'm not in the throes of a heart attack.

Oak, cedar, and nettle(an herb/weed) pollen have taken over the area I live. Just like the past two years this has happened I dare not even open the windows. I huddle inside like a hermit waiting for the evil stuff to go away.

I was ready for it this year. I already had my doc give me a prescription for Benzonatate and I already had it filled. These cough suppressant pills looks like yellow caviar. I'd first taken Benzonatate last Spring when allergies turned into pneumonia and I had excellent results with it. This year, however, something peculiar occurred. 

I'm laying in bed, out of breath. Can't breathe, although I'd taken the Benzonatate over twenty minutes ago. It's pretty fast acting stuff. In so much pain, I try to pray. Typically it takes me about thirty seconds to connect with the All. I have to push aside extraneous stuff in my head and relax. Not that night! As soon as I began I connected and immediately slammed into a wall of pain so horrifying I nearly blacked out. My right eye hurt so badly I thought I could have had a stroke. Scared, I crawled in bed with my husband. (We sleep apart because he snores.) After a while my heart slowed and the pain in my eye subsided. So I tried connecting again. The same thing happened! 

Every time I take Benzonatate I cannot pray without nearly giving myself a brain bursting headache. But it's not a migraine. It's a bright spasm which occurs only when trying to pray. It's like there's a chemical barrier there that cannot be breached. Needless to say, this is not my favorite drug but right now it's either take the stuff or end up with pneumonia from hacking myself into a frenzy and/or pulling muscles in my chest.

There are a few other drugs which make it impossible for me to connect, but this Benzonatate has given me the most terrifying upset. What would happen if I kept trying? Would I give myself a stroke? I don't know. 

What I do know is that the pineal gland has a great deal to do with our connection with the divine and this particular drug can cause dizziness. That's about the only connection I've made so far. If the pineal gland is upset then dizziness and an overall disconnected feeling will take over. A lot of things in our everyday environment can cause this, fluoride is one of the most prevalent. 

Has anyone else ever experienced unease from having certain chemicals in their body while trying to connect to him?

Back to School Time and Vaccines

Both my boys (11 and 12) got their physicals today and of course we were shown their vaccine records so they could be updated. Now up until three years ago I had no problems with vaccines except for making that decision about my own body(I got pneumonia from a flu and chickenpox vaccine which put me in the hospital for three weeks). About my stepsons, though, this was of course a bit more tricky. Hubby had his own ideas and I had mine.

Through time, reading, and much deliberation, I decided to broach the topic with my husband about discontinuing vaccines with the boys. He fought me hard last year but gave in. This year, after all the ranting I'd done about all the new research on Gardasil killing pubescent girls he finally woke up. The trigger was, I think, that they started pushing it so hard toward BOYS and for the most inane thing: genital warts. Gimme a freaking break. Warts never killed anyone. 

"Son, I'm terribly sorry but if you don't get this potentially deadly vaccine your penis may not be as attractive to a woman." 

I hope that sounded just as ridiculous to you as it does to me. 

Cervical cancer? Ok, yeah. I can agree with there being a need for a vaccine-- if one did exists which was SAFE!-- to protect our girls. But when you give a girl the Gardasil vaccine, she gets WARTS on her body, and after a lot of other complications then drops dead-- well. I have to say that there's a sick sort of irony in there somewhere. 

If you see a sudden surge in adolescent boys with genital warts in the next decade or so ehh... I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about why and how that might be coming about. This puts me in mind of our  dear ex-president saying emphatically, "I. Did. Not. Have. Sex. With. That. Woman." (But he did ruin her dress.)

Also, if they can come up with a vaccine for cervical/penile/anal cancers and genital warts then why the hell can't they cure breast cancer yet? With as much money thrown at the Komen foundation I have to wonder where all that money is going. They have a vaccine for several cancers but can't kill it? 

A vaccine for CANCER but we still can't cure the common cold? I do not believe for a minute that the science behind this is based in reality. Wishful thinking, maybe, for those who have been affected by these cancers or warts in some way but realistically speaking: what is the gain here? You can't cure the people who are already sick besides irradiating them and injecting them with poisons and then hope their immune system reboots. It's a crapshoot. 

Getting back to my boys being hounded to get their vaccines today. The nurse was nervous and shoved a pile of papers at me when I informed her we were declining. The doctor, however, was more composed and wanted a specific reason. I was pretty blunt. I told her that when the companies which are making these vaccines remove four items then we'll get vaccinated again. 

1. Thiomersal 
2. Squalene
3. Aluminum
4. Polysorbate 80

She said that all of these ingredients serve a purpose in the vaccine and that they can't remove them. I told her that I don't recall reading in my multivitamin information insert that the human body has a deficiency of any of those ingredients. 

"Well, I give my kids these same vaccines and I feel comfortable doing so." 

"I'd like my documentation on the physical so we can leave." 

She left the room and got me the paperwork and that was that. Here's the list of vaccines she wanted to give my twelve year old boy: 

1. HPV(Gardasil)
2. Meningococcal
3. Hepatitis A
4. TD or Tdap
5. Chickenpox

Five. That's FIVE vaccines with all of those insidious ingredients that he would have gotten today if I hadn't spoken up. That's five shots of thiomersal, five shots of squalene, five shots of aluminum, and five shots of polysorbate 80. 

Considering the fact that this twelve year old is probably going to be in college by the time he's fourteen or fifteen he certainly doesn't need all this crap floating around in his brain! Although some days I am tempted to gag him to protect him from himself and his ever-eloquent and comedic smart mouth, the truth is that at some point he's going to outgrow this phase and learn how to not sound like such a snot. I'm willing to wait. But I certainly don't want to deprive him of the chance to do that by turning him into another stupefied sheep. We've got too many already. 

The whooping cough vaccine(Tdap) certainly hasn't helped all those people the past few years which have contracted it. Seventy percent of the people who've contracted it were vaccinated! Herd immunity theory is debunked with that alone. 

The more I read about school districts trying to force the Gardasil vaccine on children in their school clinics even without parental consent the more strongly I began to feel about refusing further vaccines for the boys. You have to ask yourself why these pharmaceutical companies are so gosh darn insistent that our little boys shouldn't have genitial warts and our little girls have to be protected from cervical cancer-- especially when it's now shown that the only thing the Gardasil vaccine can positively do is give a false negative on a Pap smear. Congratulations. They just killed another woman. If that's not proof of a soft kill operation then I don't know what more people need to see.

Vital Drug Shortages- Who is to blame??

I find this news topic intriguing on a number of levels. First, why wouldn't the FDA slap a 'negligent attitude' type lawsuit against Big Pharma? Because that's exactly what they are, negligent. Second, can anyone else read between the lines here? We're being exterminated, one sick population segment at a time. I smell something in the air.... could it be.. maybe? .... a newly formed underground black market for these types of 'discontinued' or 'unavailable drugs.' Either way, the company gets it's money.

When vital drugs run out, patients pay the price

150 medications in short supply so far this year; deaths, injuries have followed

By JoNel Aleccia Health writer

msnbc.com msnbc.com

updated 10/27/2010 8:24:19 AM ET

Cancer patient Bob Dierker had just finished eight of 12 chemotherapy sessions when technicians broke the news.

Next time, they said, he'd get no leucovorin, the generic medication long used to battle his type of aggressive Stage 3 colorectal cancer. The drug was in short supply across the nation and he'd have to go without.

“It was like getting shot in the stomach,” said Dierker, 64, a lawyer from Fairfax, Va. “My odds just dropped dramatically because I can’t get this drug.”

Exactly how Dierker’s chances of beating the cancer will be affected is unclear, said his oncologist, Dr. Alexander Spira. Leucovorin has been used to boost the effectiveness of cancer drugs for decades, so no one knows how badly patients will fare without it. But Dierker is not alone.

Across the United States, life-saving or medically necessary drugs are running low — or running out — endangering care and increasing the odds of medication mistakes for a broad swath of patients.

Health officials say drug shortages pose a growing public health crisis, fueled in large part by financial motives of drugmakers who’ve watched low-cost generics erode their profits.

Numerous drugmakers contacted by msnbc.com either refused to comment on the shortages or confirmed only that they exist. None would discuss financial considerations.

Unprecedented numbers

“It’s disaster management, daily,” said Erin Fox, manager of the Drug Information Service at the University of Utah Health Care, who has tracked drug shortages for a decade. “The numbers are unprecedented.”

In 2005, Fox recorded 74 drug shortages in the U.S. By 2009, the number had jumped to 166. As of Sept. 10 this year, Fox had logged 150 new shortages — in addition to 30 drug shortages still unresolved and more being reported every week.

Worse, the drugs that are in short supply are often the ones needed most. This year has seen shortages of common drugs used for basic treatments: morphine for pain relief, propofol for sedation, Bactrim injections for infections.

Sterile injectables, including the pre-filled epinephrine syringes used in emergencies for heart attacks and allergic reactions, have been particularly hard to get.

“Our usual, everyday workhorse drugs are no longer available,” said Fox. “It’s just the unavailability of everything that we need every day.”

About 40 percent of the shortages are caused by manufacturing problems, including safety issues, said Valerie Jensen, associate director of the Food and Drug Administration's drug shortage program. Nearly 20 percent are caused when firms simply stop making drugs and another 20 percent are due to production delays. The rest are chalked up to raw material shortages, increased demand, site issues and problems with parts such as syringes or vials.

But underlying them all is the profitability problem, said Jensen.

“Normally, it’s a business decision. That does lead to shortages,” said Jensen. "These are just not usually money-makers."

FDA can't require drug production

Despite the concerns of doctors and pharmacists — and the distress of patients — no one can force the drugmakers to address the problem.

The FDA has no authority to compel drugmakers to continue producing a certain drug, or to require them to make a drug that’s in short supply, Jensen confirmed. And companies aren’t required to inform the agency about impending shortages unless the drugs don't have an alternative. Even then, there are no sanctions if they don’t.

When firms do tell FDA about a problem, the agency can’t publicly divulge proprietary information, Jensen said. Shortages on the FDA’s website are often chalked up to mysterious “manufacturing delays,” or frequently, no reason at all.

That has created a system in which pharmacists, doctors and patients may not know that a shortage exists until a drug is needed — and even then they don’t know how long it will last.

“There has been a lot of 11^th hour scrambling,” said Dr. Richard L. Schilsky, a professor of medicine and chief of hematology/oncology at the University of Chicago. “We literally don’t know from week to week who’s going to be able to be treated.”

The problem has reached such a peak that four leading groups representing cancer doctors, anesthesiologists, pharmacists and safety advocates have convened an invitation-only meeting in Bethesda, Md., on Nov. 5. They’re asking drugmakers and supply chain representatives to join health experts and observers from the FDA to hammer out solutions.

“I’m going to give these folks the benefit of the doubt and assume they don’t know the impact at the patient care level,” said Bona Benjamin, director of medication-use quality improvement at the American Society of Health System Pharmacists.

But a nationwide survey of 1,800 health care workers conducted this summer by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices left little doubt about the impact on patients.

Two deaths blamed on morphine shortage

“It’s really a mess out there,” said Michael Cohen, director of ISMP, a nonprofit group that aims to reduce medical errors. “It is making us compromise the way we do things normally.”

More than half of the respondents to ISMP said that in the past year they had “always” or “frequently” encountered shortages of a list of common drugs.

One in three reported that the shortages caused medication errors that could have harmed patients and one in four said the mistakes reached patients. One in five said patients were actually harmed.

“We had two deaths where there was a morphine shortage,” Cohen said, explaining that a much more potent replacement drug, hydromorphone, was given at the level of the original, overdosing the patients.

Another patient woke up mid-way through surgery because medical crews trying to conserve the sedative propofol had given too little medication for the patient’s weight.

Such critical mistakes are bound to happen when shortages of so many drugs start to add up, said Thomas Burnakis, clinical coordinator of pharmacy services at Baptist Medical Center in Jacksonville, Fla.

“If I am the best centerfielder in the world, you can hit me a pop fly and I’ll catch it. You can hit me two or even three and I’ll catch them,” he said. “If you start hitting me 15, I’m going to start dropping them.”

It’s not just the mainstream drugs that are the problem. Shortages of niche drugs or those used for rare conditions have occurred, too.

In January, sufferers of a potentially blinding condition called birdshot retinochoroidopathy uveitis learned that Zenapax, the best drug for keeping symptoms at bay, had been discontinued by drugmaker Roche.

“I cannot tell you the panic I felt,” said Lynn Shaw, a 60-year-old nurse from Franklin, Mass., who was diagnosed with the disease 2 ½ years ago. “I was positive I was going to lose my vision. I thought, ‘Oh, my god, I’m going to go blind because of these jerks.'”

Chris Vancheri, a spokesman for Roche, said the company decided to stop making the drug, which is normally used in kidney transplant patients, because there were alternative treatments available. The problem, Shaw and other patients said, is that alternative drugs are either less effective or pose unacceptable side effects such as life-threatening high blood pressure and liver damage.

Drug companies won't talk

Shaw believes that Roche, like many manufacturers, stopped production when generics undercut the brand name price. Vancheri would not comment on the profitability of Zenapax.

Nor would representatives for Teva Pharmaceuticals and Bedford Laboratories, the makers of leucovorin, discuss the reasons for the shortage of the generic drug that has left Bob Dierker, the Virginia lawyer, with depleted cancer treatments.

Bedford representatives did not return repeated calls and e-mails from msnbc.com. Teva representative Denise Bradley would only confirm what patients have known for months, that the drugmaker halted production at its Irvine, Calif., plant in April.

"I do not have an estimated date of when we will resume manufacturing at this time," Bradley wrote in an e-mail.

Representatives for the drug manufacturers’ trade group, PhRMA, declined to discuss the largest-ever drug shortage in the nation, referring questions to individual manufacturers.

But Dierker thinks he knows what’s behind the recent shortage of generic leucovorin, the second since 2008. In some regions, a 50-milligram dose of generic leucovorin costs 98 cents; a newer brand-name alternative called Fusilev costs $184.08. But many insurance companies, including Dierker's, won't pay for it.

“It’s money, pure and simple,” said Dierker, a new grandfather who fears he won’t see 6-month-old Rhett grow up.

He’d like to do something about the shortage: organize a class action lawsuit, get a colleague to pursue a criminal case. But for now, he’s just angry.

“To have some faceless, nameless coward running a pharmaceutical lab decide he wants a bigger BMW and isn’t going to make your drug — I feel helpless,” Dierker said. “That’s the really frustrating thing, not to be able to do anything about it.”

Sterilization of Populations- The Akha, WHO, UNPF, & Obama's Science Advisor

The Sterilizations of Populations is going to be an ongoing series here on GU as I find more info.

Info about the Akha people.

The video's poster says, "Akha women are made to take the tetanus toxoid vaccination repeatedly during pregnancy despite the fact that we have documented cases of spontaneous abortion as a result. The Akha are told if they don't agree to the vaccination they will not be given an ID card for the baby. We just LOVE what the Thai government does to the Akha!"(that last bit was sarcasm on part of the poster.)

Vid #2: Forced vaccinations of Akha women during pregnancy cause miscarriages.

People commenting to these vids on YouTube are saying, "where's your documentation? Where's your proof? What does the World Health Organization(WHO) say about it?"

The answer is that they don't have anything to say about it except denial. Who(pun intended) do you think funds the research for these vaccines? The Rockefeller Foundation. "The foundation also has traditionally held a major portion of its shares portfolio in the family's oil companies, beginning with Standard Oil and now with its corporate descendants, including Exxon Mobil.[20]

And how about the United Nations Population Fund? Pay careful attention to the last section "Relations to the US Government." Forced abortions and sterilizations. The US cut off funding so EU stepped up. How nice. And now Obama gives thumbs up to money once again being sent to China to fund god-knows-what other kinds of reproductive atrocities.

Obama also hired John Holdren as Science Adviser. This article will horrify you.

Oh, and we can't forget about Bill Gates and his family's wonderful legacy in Africa and other third-world countries.

Corporate Watch Organizations

http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/

This is a link which has been added to the Human Rights Sites & Organizations section of the blog. In doing research on the pharmaceutical company Pfizer I tripped across this organization and the articles are stunning. Wikileaks has links to it as well.

The chronic pain ailment I live with is confusing enough to live with on a daily basis. Add in doctors and all the expensive medications they push at me and I think I damn near went nuts the first year trying to figure it all out. I was spending upwards of $350 a month on meds which were making me feel worse. I couldn't even walk down stairs in my house without passing out from vertigo. Couldn't cook for myself because I left the burners on and nearly burned the house down. My husband was terrified to leave me at home by myself to go to work. He still calls me three times a day to make sure I'm ok. Habits like that are hard to break, I guess.

The main medication I am on now which does me the most good and keeps me functional is, get this--- over-the counter! not a script at all. I can purchase it at any pharmacy section of a store. It is a natural powdered extract of a tree which has been pressed into pill form. Wow. How 'bout that? Big Pharma lost out on ripping me off because I find better treatment in what Mother Nature offers.

Every time I see an advertisement for the meds I was originally put on in the beginning I feel the impulse to throw something heavy and damaging at my television. The actresses they hire for the ads can't even pronounce the illness correctly for crying outloud!

In researching my own illness and medications I have been thrust down into a rabbit hole and seen such unimaginable depths of depravity it's hard to describe. I know more than my doctor about my illness and the dangerous effects of medications he's pushed at other patients of his, not knowing any better.

After every appointment I walk out of his office feeling both lighter and freer but at the same time more depressed at the state of things. Our lives are worth more to corporate monsters if we are suffering than if we are living happy, healthy, fulfilling lives.

I'm currently researching a particular large organization and their illegal insertions of ingredients into vaccines(like the tetanus) which sterilizes the people who are given the vaccines. These ingredients have even been found in the swine flu vaccines, particularly the nasal spray given to children. Mass sterilizations are happening right under our noses.

I only wonder how much longer it'll be before Wikileaks founder is hunted down and finally killed by our government.