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Anthrax Vaccine - A Long and Troubled History
By Ray Rivera
Army Spc. Sandra Larson never objected to the anthrax vaccinations she was ordered to get during her first overseas assignment in Korea.
But a month after receiving her sixth injection — the last in an 18-month regimen the military says is safe and necessary to protect against biological attacks — the 32-year-old Army cook began to hemorrhage.
Her body had stopped producing the blood cells and platelets needed to control bleeding and fight disease.
Three months later, she died.
"It was as if there was something in her that was killing her immune system," said her sister Nancy Rugo of Spokane. Rugo said her sister died last year at Madigan Army Hospital at Fort Lewis.
No medical evidence has linked Larson's illness to the anthrax vaccine, but Rugo is convinced it killed her sister and has filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the Lansing, Mich., lab that makes it.
The case has become another rallying point in a long simmering revolt by current and former soldiers who fear the forced inoculations are ineffective and, worse, toxic — despite repeated assurances from the Pentagon of the vaccine's safety.
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Carnivora: Pharmacology and Clinical Efficacy of a Most Diverse Natural Plant Extract
© Copyright 2001 by Richard Ostrow, USA, Authored by Helmut Keller, M.D., Germany
(Explore Issue: Volume 10, Number 6 Winter 2001)
Carnivora, a patented phytonutrient and extract of the venus flytrap plant, Dionaea muscipula, has been used clinically for over 25 years.* Biologically active compounds in the extract are essential to healthy immune systems and support healthy cardiovascular functions in the body. At higher doses, the extract has been shown to have immodulatory, tumorcidal, antimicrobial, antiviral, antiparasitic and antibiotic properties.
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DECODING THE HUMAN GENOME: SECOND THOUGHTS
Larry Dossey, MD
Alternative therapies, September 2000, VOL.6, NO. 5
On June 26, along with millions of other Americans, I watched the televised White House ceremony at which President Bill Clinton and Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair announced the nearly complete mapping of the human genome. The president spoke in superlatives, and he was justified in doing so.
To grasp the magnitude of the accomplishment, think of the human genome as an encyclopedia made of chapters, sentences, words, and letters. The encyclopedia is divided into 23 chapters, which are the chromosome pairs made of DNA. The chapters are made of gene sentences, each of which is composed of words spelled by 4 molecular letters called nucleotides: adenine (A), thymidine (T), guanine (G), and cytosine (C). We're talking big numbers here. Each of the 2 sets of chromosomes contains around 3 billion of the ATGC units, arranged into approximately 50000 genes.
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What are Stealth Viruses?
W. John Martin, M.D., Ph.D.
Center For Complex Infectious Disease, Rosemead, CA.
Viruses are submicroscopic infectious agents that replicate inside cells. Viral illnesses are normally controlled by the body’s immune system acting primarily through white blood cells called lymphocytes. These cells recognize certain viral proteins that provide the antigens targeted by specific lymphocytes, leading to an anti-viral inflammatory response. Not all viral proteins, however, can function as antigens for effective anti-viral immunity. Indeed, for many viruses, only a very few proteins are involved in lymphocyte recognition of virally infected cells. Loss of these critical antigenic proteins can allow a virus to essentially go unrecognized by the cellular immune system. When such viruses have managed to retain the capacity to damage cells, they can potentially cause a persistent infection resulting in a prolonged illness. The viral nature of such an illness is usually overlooked because of the absence of overt inflammation. Atypically-structured cell-damaging (cytopathic) viruses were initially identified by W. John Martin, M.D., Ph.D., who introduced the term “stealth viruses” to highlight their basic property of evading effective immune recognition.
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The Prion Diseases
Stanley Prusiner
Prions, once dismissed as an impossibility, have now gained wide recognition as extraordinary agents that cause a number of infectious, genetic and spontaneous disorders.
Fifteen years ago I evoked a good deal of skepticism when I proposed that the infectious agents causing certain degenerative disorders of the central nervous system in animals and, more rarely, in humans might consist of protein and nothing else. At the time, the notion was heretical. Dogma held that the conveyers of transmissible diseases required genetic material, composed of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA), in order to establish an infection in a host. Even viruses, among the simplest microbes, rely on such material to direct synthesis of the proteins needed for survival and replication.
Later, many scientists were similarly dubious when my colleagues and I suggested that these "proteinaceous infectious particles"-or "prions," as I called the disease-causing agents-could underlie inherited, as well as communicable, diseases. Such dual behavior was then unknown to medical science. And we met resistance again when we concluded that prions (pronounced "pree-ons") multiply in an incredible way; they convert normal protein molecules into dangerous ones simply by inducing the benign molecules to change their shape.
Today, however, a wealth of experimental and clinical data has made a convincing case that we are correct on all three counts. Prions are indeed responsible for transmissible and inherited disorders of protein conformation. They can also cause sporadic disease, in which neither transmission between individuals nor inheritance is evident. Moreover, there are hints that the prions causing the diseases explored thus far may not be the only ones. Prions made of rather different proteins may contribute to other neurodegenerative diseases that are quite prevalent in humans. They might even participate in illnesses that attack muscles.
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Inherited Virus May Play Role In Breast Cancer
Aug 12, 2000 Reuters Health
An inherited virus may be one of the factors that triggers breast cancer in humans, researchers report. Scientists say that a primitive retrovirus, human mammary tumor virus (HMTV), has been identified in human breast cancer tissues.
'If a definitive link to this retrovirus is established, HMTV may become a target for a vaccine to prevent breast cancer and a target for new treatments for breast cancer,' explained study lead author Dr. Robert Garry of Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.
A retrovirus similar to HMTV has already been linked to malignant breast tumors in mice. Speaking to attendees at the 11th International Congress of Virology in Sydney, Australia, Garry explained that vertebrate species other than mice -- including some humans -- carry similar viruses.
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Human Herpesvirus Six and Multiple Sclerosis:
Knox KK, Brewer JH, Henry JM, Harrington DJ, Carrigan DR.
Clinical Infectious Diseases, October 2000
The results of a breakthrough investigation published in the October issue of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases demonstrate that central nervous system (CNS), lymphoid, and peripheral blood samples from patients with clinically definite multiple sclerosis (MS) were found to have a significantly greater incidence of active human herpesvirus six (HHV-6) infection compared to controls. With respect to type of MS disease (relapsing remitting or progressive), no significant difference was found between HHV-6 viremia positive and HHV-6 viremia negative MS patients. In contrast, the patients with active HHV-6 infection were significantly younger and had a shorter duration of disease than those who did not have active infection with HHV-6.
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Women Make Up an Increasing Percentage of HIV-Infected Patients
By Brian Boyle, MD
Journal of the American Medical Association
A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicates that HIV disease is increasingly becoming a disease of women and that further research is needed on HIV pathogenesis and therapy in women. The study reviewed surveillance and prospective cohort studies published between 1981 and 2000 and scientific conference presentations from January, 1999 to July 2000 in which at least 20 women were enrolled. The purpose of this review was to provide epidemiologic, clinical, psychosocial and behavioral information about HIV in women and to provide recommendations for future efforts.
The study found that over the past 15 years, women account for an increased percentage of HIV-infected persons. In 1986, 6.7% of HIV-infected persons were women, whereas by 1999 that proportion had risen to 18%. Further, by 1999, 32% of newly reported HIV diagnoses were in women and women accounted for 23% of new AIDS diagnoses. Newly reported cases of HIV in women were predominantly in the South (41%), among black women (61%), and as a result of heterosexual transmission (38%).
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'First Do No Harm' Barbara Loe Fisher
Neenyah Ostrum
Chronicillnet.org
Photographs of three beautiful children are the first images encountered by a visitor to the website of the National Vaccine Information Center. Each child is a victim of immunization gone almost unimaginably awry: Two of the children are now paralyzed -- one following a polio shot, the other following the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine -- and the third, a chubby baby in a blue knitted hat, died in infancy, only 33 hours after receiving the whooping cough (DPT) vaccine.
It is just such vaccine-related hospitalizations, injuries, and deaths that Barbara Loe Fisher, a cofounder and President of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), wants to prevent.
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FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE'S MESSAGE FOR TODAY©
Barbara Dossey, RN, MS, HNC, FAAN
History is one of the most important aspects of any profession. Modern
nursing has a proud heritage through the founder, Florence Nightingale(1820-1910), amystic, visionary, healer,
environmentalist, feminist, practitioner, scientist, politician, and reformer.1 She left nurses a legacy in over 14,000 letters and over 100 books and pamphlets.
Nightingale's achievements are astounding when considered against the backdrop of the Victorian era. Her contributions to nursing theory, research, statistics, public health, and health care reform even today are foundational and inspirational. As a bold and brave risk-taker, Nightingale had vision, dedication, and commitment.
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AZT Doesn't Protect Infants Against AIDS
By Neenyah Ohstrom
JULY 2000 — The day before the opening of the 13th International Conference on AIDS, the New York Times published a front-page article projecting a grim prognosis for continued use of a widely-endorsed AIDS preventative. The article, by Times reporter Lawrence K. Altman, quoted a new United Nations-sponsored study which determined that giving AZT to pregnant women often does not prevent the development of AIDS in their infants, even when the babies continue to receive AZT immediately after birth. While the treatment of pregnant women with AZT (sometimes combined with another antiretroviral drug, like 3TC) or the antiviral drug Nevirapine reduces the number of infants who test positive for HIV at birth, according to Altman, “the therapy appears to leave children vulnerable to infection from breast milk.”(1).
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Lamivudine accumulates in amniotic fluid (HIV)
Reuters Health
Dr Laurent Mandelbrot of the Service de Gynecologie-Obstetrique in Paris, France, and a multicenter team measured levels of lamivudine in amniotic fluid, maternal blood, and cord blood of 57 mother-infant
pairs. "All women were infected with HIV type 1 and were receiving lamivudine at the time of delivery," they write in the January issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
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Spiroplasma And Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy
Ed Gehrman
Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE) is identified by the plaques
of mutated amyloid protein that form within the brain tissue and destroy
synapses and neurotransmitter functions and take on a characteristic sponge
or Swiss cheese appearance. CJD, Scrapie and Kuru are all members of this
degenerative disease family, afflictions known about for over two hundred
years but not studied intently until the early sixties when they were found
to be transmissible.
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