Take a look at 6697 reports of issues with the HPVR vaccine, familiarly known as Gardasil. Those are a lot of reports, especially as it is a known fact that not all people follow up with reporting their reactions.

Did you have a reaction from your Gardasil inoculation? If so, l want to know about it.

Now, bear in mind that these reactions include developing hives or a big red spot at the site of the vaccination. In fact, they include pregnancy, headache, dizziness, pain, fainting, shaking, loss of consciousness, pallor, fever, flu, dry eyes–and that is just on the first page. Database reports run the gamut. Ok, to be completely fair, the pregnancy was a “false pregnancy report” apparently caused by the vaccine. Dizziness fainting and pain are not unexpected for anyone with any kind of doctor phobia. (And I’d like to know what is NOT natural about having symptoms of dread about strange people in white coats poking you with sharp needles?)

But to get back to the topic–you can revisit the reports and find 103 events where HPV4 reactions are considered life-threatening. Life threatening reports are a whole other thing. There were some anaphylactic reactions that were life-threatening, and at least 5 deaths–though it isn’t always clear from the report what caused some of those deaths.

But let’s never mind all that.

Let’s go back to the beginning of Gardasil. Let’s go back to Dr. Diane Harper. If you aren’t familiar with her, Harper is the Dartmouth Medical school doctor who helped develop Gardasil. If anyone is an expert on the vaccine, it is she. What does SHE think of how Gardasil is being marketed as a cancer preventative? She’s not a happy camper.

Take at a couple of quotes from this FW Daily News article by CINDY BEVINGTON.
Not only does Harper say that it is silly for states to be mandating Gardasil for younger girls. She says, “Giving it to 11-year-olds is a great big public health experiment.” It isn’t helpful and it might be harmful.

Furthermore, she says the same thing I have been saying all along.

“There also is not enough evidence gathered on side effects to know that safety is not an issue.”

Shouldn’t we be considering safety first? But, remember that Dr. Diane Harper is not a Marketing Whiz. She’s just one of the scientists who created the vaccine which is effective against 4 of 20 strains of HPV. In her opinion, the vaccine is not for 9 year old girls. (Go on, read the article.)

Harper is also concerned about the adults. She goes on to say, “Also, the public needs to know that with vaccinated women and women who still get Pap smears (which test for abnormal cells that can lead to cancer), some of them will still get cervical cancer.”

What? Did I hear that right? Merck has been telling us the vaccine is supposed to make us all “ONE LESS.” You know Merck. Merck & Co., Inc. is a global research-driven pharmaceutical company that tells the world it is all about putting patients first. But if that is the case, why is this vaccine aimed at an age group not recommended by one of the vaccine’s developers; and why is it acting as if it has found the preventative for cancer?

Maybe we need one less Pharmaceutical company. Or at least one less Marketing Department.

Chromium Six has reared its ugly head again. Now it has been found in Ireland, specifically at a former steel plant in Cork, Ireland. The plant has been closed since 2001 after twenty years in operation stockpiling masses of toxins. In 2003, the Irish Department of Environment took over responsibility for the property. Since then, they have been inventorying the site, which is now a toxic chemical dump. Not the healthiest job to do.

Here is something I have heard before, though it was someone other than the Minister for Environment John Gormley saying it:

“People will not be exposed to any health risk because of hazardous waste at Haulbowline in Cork.” He says so because someone in his office says so, according to BBC news.

The statement was in reply to one of the people subcontracted to work on the site who found toxic levels of Chromium Six.

If it isn’t dangerous, why did they stop work? Why close the door if you’re denying the horses are out? But apparently someone has called a stop-work order. Lucky for those subcontractors and locals whose job it is to pick thru the half a million tons of hazardous materials buried at the dump site. I hope someone is heavily insured. Not that insurance, or lawsuits, or settlements help when people are doomed to die of cancer because their very environment is killing them.

We live in a world of such constant change that we are sometimes left ragged and overwhelmed along the sidelines in shell-shock. Alvin Toffler wrote about this in 1970, and termed the phenomenon “Future Shock.” The rate of social change leaves us suffering with “shattering stress and disorientation.”

But that was back in the Seventies. Somehow we have managed to bump along without all of us shattering and losing all of our sanity. I think that is because some things change so slowly they almost seem to stay the same. These things become for us bastions of stability, almost foundations for reality, in the same way the rising and setting of the sun establishes temporal parameters. This is day. This is night.

When a piece of that foundation is abruptly gone, we look up in disorientation from our rapid-fire day to day reality. It’s like that credit card advertisement, where the people are humming along like happy little machines until someone doesn’t pull out the correct plastic, then everything stops.

In a journalistic world where spin and buzz have more impact than fact, and members of the press deliberately obfuscate issues for their own respective agendas, Tim Russert was one of the few who had a great skill. He knew how to ask questions. He knew how to get to the story.

For seventeen years, Tim Russert has been the face of “Meet the Press.” For that weekly public “hour,” he spent many unseen hours in preparation behind the scenes. Americans know his face and name. He is one of those bastions in our daily lives, one of the bricks in the foundation of American life.

I watched with sadness the news of Tim Russert’s heart attack.

What a legacy he left behind. How sadly ironic that he wrote from the heart about fathers (Wisdom of Our Fathers: Lessons and Letters from Daughters and Sons, Big Russ and Me : Father and Son: Lessons of Life) and the timing of his death will forever after tie him to Father’s Day.

How gracious and thoughtful he was even under duress.

They said on the news even though he did have a condition, he had recently passed a stress test (in April.) The unexpectedness of his death left me looking at heart conditions, at how much we all work and get stressed over things, and the importance of exercise, excellent diet and sleep.

It has been no time at all since my Mom died in my arms. Tim Russert’s death tapped into my own wellspring of grief. I’m sure he reminds us all of those empty seats in our lives.

It’s time to remember. It’s time to do.
Time to remember just how short life really is.
Time to notice how much we get wrapped up in work.
Time to take good care of ourselves.
Time to enjoy every day.

We all walk in the shadow of death, so don’t take anything for granted.

Enjoy your family, the earth and all that we have..

Because ultimately all we have is now.

It occurs to me that the environment itself is tired of being polluted, and it is fighting back. That’s one way to look at global warming. I don’t blame it. Theoretically, pollutants inflame me.

Dirty water inflames me. It’s an allergy; I suppose I’m allergic to pollution, or more specifically pollutants. Not just hexavalent chromium, and not just theoretically either. Allergies inflame us all; it’s their “job” to rub us the wrong way; and it’s no wonder that we’re allergic to allergens. No, really, it’s what they do. Allergens are substances in the environment which cause some kind of hypersensitive reaction in us. And allergies are what I wanted to talk about, since Spring is allergy season. For centuries nature has been afflicting human sinuses with all the pollen in the air, but it’s only since the industrial revolution (I think) that we’ve been polluting ourselves.

When we were a primitive species living close to the land, the only allergens we had to worry about were natural biologics like pollen and the common food allergens (proteins in cow’s milk, eggs, peanuts, wheat, soy, fish, shellfish and tree nuts.) When we lived off the land, we knew what went into the food. Maybe there wasn’t that much of it because this was before fertilizers and pesticides–and maybe the produce from those primitive farms was kind of spindly and bug-bitten-but at least we knew that the primary ingredient of our food was…well…food.

Things have changed some. Now there are so many additives in products, even when it is raw produce, that we have to double rinse off the pesticides with a special solution, or scrub off the wax. And some things don’t wash off. Especially if the food we eat may be some weird Franken-fruit or crossbred nouveau veggie hatched in a Monsanto lab by a money-mad scientist. Who knows what the consequences might be to eating this stuff? And then the additives in packaged foods–Disodium EDTA, Nitrates, Formaldehyde, Glutaraldehyde, Ethanol, Methylchloroisothiazolinone . . . just their names are enough to give me hives. Not that I am advocating bacteria infested food. But really, we should be aware of the preservatives lurking in what we consume, and do our best to keep them at a minimum.

The fresher and closer to the earth food is, and the less processing it requires, the healthier it tends to be. I’m sure grocers and canners, and commercial food people would appreciate the benefit in all of our food being as non-perishable as Twinkies. I’m sure it would seem a veritable miracle for a lettuce to last as long in the refrigerator as a preserved cup cake or an Egyptian mummy. But personally speaking as a grocery shopper myself, I’d venture to say that geriatric food does not appeal to the consumer.

This reminds me of a question I just answered in my Ask Brockovich column.

I said it there, and I’ll say it here. I prefer organic fruits, vegetables and protein and good clean water. When that’s what I eat, my body does great. When I focus on eating the right foods which are preservative, additive and pesticide free, I run like a machine. When I eat right, I don’t have puffy swollen eyes, stuffy sinus, I lose weight, my hair grows, my skin looks good, everything works better, and most of all, I FEEL BETTER. I don’t think it is a coincidence.

We see consequences of this commercial food-additive mania in allergies. So think about this when you are sneezing and coughing and scratching, when you reach for your allergy meds, your Kleenex and Benadryl–some of your physical discomfort might be traced back to additives in your food. Try eating fresh for a while, and see if it doesn’t help.