Free Republic

Government health advisers have concerns about lifting a nationwide ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men, despite growing pressure against the policy from gay rights advocates, medical experts and blood banks. The ban dates from the first years of the AIDS epidemic and was intended to protect the U.S. blood supply from exposure to the little-understood disease. …

Again, this is another move under the Obama administration to put the American public in danger while promoting what is clearly an unhealthy lifestyle. The Food and Drug Administration advisors will be meeting the first week in December to talk about lifting a thirty year old prohibition on sodomites donating blood. ------------- Let me ask you America, would you be willing to run that risk of a sodomite donating blood with the slim chance that he may just give you HIV? Wouldn't that be like me offering you a coke with the possibility that it contained only 1% poison? Would...

JimScott wrote:“God is not a divine being or a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life,”In the Italian Pope Francis said "demiurgo" which looks to me like "demiurge". So this should read "God is not a demiurge or a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life".Yeh message to this sad misguided wannabe NYT reporter (i.e John Ransom) the Gnostic heretics of old believed in two gods the "good" god of the New Testament and the evil lesser god of the Old (i.e demiurge).-- --Can the Pope Shut Up Too?Dear Comrade Scott,I'll take a lot of criticism,...

Relax America, all’s right with the world. The Big White “Christmas” tree arrived yesterday to great fanfare. And by fanfare I mean even the dogs came:Too late to grant it amnesty, Lady M prepares to bless the White House Christmas tree. I note that we’re no longer even trying to hide the fact that we’re living through a rerun of the Carter Administration (with apologies to Jimmy Carter); take this 1970’s inspired coat-frock for example:Mod Squad MOTrust me, it could always be worse. We could have worn it with our knee boots.And boob belt – with pearls:So continue to count...

Thanks to the FDA’s calorie labeling regulations announced Tuesday, major changes will soon be coming to the food and restaurant industries. The regulation itself is nothing new; it became law in 2010 as a provision attached to the Affordable Care Act, but final rules were delayed for the past few years, thanks in large part to heavy opposition from grocery stores, pizza chains, vending machines, convenience stores, and movie theaters. Although some concessions were made, none of these industries were fully spared. By November 2015, these establishments will be forced to post calorie information on menus and menu boards, which...

Counting your calories will become easier under new government rules requiring chain restaurants, supermarkets, convenience stores—and even movie theaters, amusement parks and vending machines—to post the calorie content of food “clearly and conspicuously” on their menus. The Food and Drug Administration plans to announce the long-delayed rules on Tuesday. The regulations will apply to businesses with 20 or more locations and they will be given until November 2015 to comply. The idea is that people may pass on that bacon double cheeseburger at a chain restaurant, hot dog at a gas station or large popcorn at the movie theater if...

The federal committee charged with creating nutrition guidelines for Americans is calling for fat interventions at workplaces.During a presentation at the sixth meeting of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) on Friday, the committee said government needs to take “bold action” to fight obesity.The solutions included “comprehensive” obesity interventions in “health care, the community, public health facilities, and work sites.”“The public should monitor body weight and engage with providers in evidence-based approaches aimed at achieving and maintaining healthy body weight,” the panel said in a presentation on “Food and Nutrient Intakes, and Health.”The committee, which is responsible for creating...

Some Ebola Patients Should Get Placebo in Drug Tests: FDA "Edward Cox, director of the FDA’s Office of Antimicrobial Products, said Wednesday that some patients with Ebola need to forgo potentially life-saving treatments so researchers can see how they fare compared to those who receive the experimental drugs .... Cox noted that randomised studies would be "challenging," but they are necessary ..."

Does the FDA have its own independent laboratories or does it farm out the lab testing of drugs to the pharmaceutical companies themselves? I have been unable to find out this information. In other words, does the FDA approval process rely upon completely independent governmentally operated labs? Or does the FDA depend upon test results provided by the pharmaceutical companies themselves? SANDY KRAMER, Ph.D.

We have technology to potentially control Ebola and other viral outbreaks today. But the federal bureaucracy refuses to catch up with 21st-century science. For example, diagnostic startup Nanobiosym has an iPhone-sized device that can accurately detect Ebola and other infectious diseases in less than an hour. Two other companies, Synthetic Genomics and Novartis, have the capacity to create synthetic vaccine viruses for influenza and other infectious diseases in only four days. Both firms can also share data about outbreaks instantaneously and make real-time, geographically specific diagnosis and vaccine production possible. These companies could start producing Ebola vaccine/treatments tomorrow — except...

The Dallas hospital that treated Thomas Eric Duncan had a version of the Ebola-screening device used by the U.S. military in West Africa sitting on a shelf, but FDA guidelines prohibited staff from using it on the patient. A $39,000 machine called FilmArray was available to the Dallas Presbyterian Hospital when Duncan came in with a fever. The device has a high success rate for detecting Ebola in less than one hour, but sat idly because current federal guidelines prevented the hospital from obtaining a specific “kit” needed for screening, the military website Defense One reported Thursday.

The Film Array can screen for Ebola with 90percent accuracy It is being using by US military doctors in West Africa Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital had one of the $39,000 devices but could not use it to diagnose diseases The military has given the Utah-based developer of the machine a $240million grant to perfect deadly virus detection The Dallas hospital that sent home Thomas Eric Duncan the first time he showed up at the emergency room has a machine that could have detected Ebola in less than an hour - but doctors were barred from using it because of federal...

The Food and Drug Administration can make two types of errors. It can approve a drug that has dangerous unanticipated side effects, or it can reject or delay approval of a drug that is safe and effective. Let's look at these errors, because to err on the side of under- or over-caution is costly. It's in an FDA official's self-interest to err on the side of over-caution. People who are injured by incorrectly approved drugs -- and their families -- will know that they are victims of FDA mistakes, or under-caution. Their suffering makes headlines. FDA officials face unfavorable publicity,...

What are the odds? In 2009, Congress passed landmark legislation directing the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products, aiming to cut the toll from the leading preventable cause of disease and death. Three times since, however, cigarette and e-cigarette companies have filed successful legal challenges to thwart rules intended to make their products less appealing to consumers–and less accessible to kids. The three cases, which, among other things, have blocked graphic cigarette warning labels and delayed regulation of e-cigarettes for at least a few years, were decided in favor of industry plaintiffs by the same federal judge, Richard...

Pharmaceutical companies say the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) new social media rules would have a "chilling" effect on the industry and leave consumers in the dark.The FDA in June released draft guidelines for how drug firms should use social networks like Facebook and Twitter. But pharmaceutical companies are concerned the FDA would hold them responsible for misinformation about their products posted online by third parties that the companies have little to no control over. They say the rules would discourage them from interacting on social networks, leaving consumers without useful information about their products."Given the extraordinary growth of the...

Without any objection, the Senate has passed a bill forcing the FDA to speed up the approval process for sunscreen technology, HAPPI reports.Sunscreen technology has stagnated in the United States since the 1990s, not because companies have failed to innovate, but because the Food and Drug Administration has been sitting on proposals submitted 12 years ago without even reviewing them.The proposals include new sunscreen ingredients, and since the FDA has dropped the ball, the Senate has picked it up with the passage of the Sunscreen Innovation Act on Wednesday night.Rates of melanoma have skyrocketed in the last 40 years, giving...

According to The Week, the FDA is out to regulate away our freedom to partake in French cheese: New FDA restrictions on the levels of harmless bacteria found in imported cheese have effectively banned a number of artisan French cheeses, including Roquefort, Morbier, and Tomme de Savoie. The restricted bacteria already exist in the human stomach, and the banned cheeses have not changed their recipes for years. While the restriction is already affecting imports, domestic cheese producers are under the FDA gun, too. Raw milk cheesemakers may be put out of business over a change they say is capricious at...

Stricter rules for the country's most commonly prescribed painkiller were rolled out on Thursday by the FDA, the last step in a policy change that has been coming down the pipeline for years, The New York Times reported on Sunday. Hydrocodone will now be in a more serious and restrictive category. Doctors will be barred from calling in prescriptions by telephone, and patients will not be able to get refills on the same prescription, but will have to return to a physician for a new one. It will also have be to kept in special vaults in pharmacies. The Drug...

The recent death of Robin Williams has put a spotlight on the matters of depression, how it’s treated, and the role of prescribed and illicit drugs. According to the American Psychiatric Association, “Depression is a serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act. Depression has a variety of symptoms, but the most common are a deep feeling of sadness or a marked loss of interest or pleasure in activities.” Three primary types are identified: bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder (clinical depression), and persistent depressive disorder. The Association details typical symptoms… Changes...

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) grades our drinking water a D in their annual report card. Local systems leak an estimated 7 billion gallons of water daily. And more than 850 billion gallons of sewage escape into surface water annually.And I wouldn’t rely too heavily on our electric grid.ASCE gives that a D+ due to outages and disturbances that cost up to $180 billion in annual economic activity. The electric grid is at risk of cascading failures until energy production becomes decentralized.These risks are growing by the day. The government that is supposed to be protecting and serving...