Weekly Roundup - Living On Nothing Edition [Survival Today

>>>He has the best of medical care/you>>>
What a gracious compliment!!
Hubby tells people that I have done a better job in keeping his stoma healthy for eight years than all nurses did for ninety days, but to be fair, they were dealing with staph.

Thanks for the info. Think I can put a thermometer in a pan of water beside the milk and use that as a gauge to maintain the correct temperature. I only have access to pasteurized milk presently as all farmers in the area have stopped selling raw milk because of regulations. Sure do miss the cream on the top of raw milk.

Home made yogurt would be much less expensive and better if I can get the process done correctly. Will give it a try anyway.

4,241 posted on 11/07/2009 11:19:52 AM PST by upcountry miss

Smiling.....

Yes, Orange Cakes always bring Mary to mind, as well as anything with fudge.

She did enjoy fudge making and seeing Bill’s eyes, when she gave him her gift of love.

They were so beautiful together.

4,242 posted on 11/07/2009 12:09:32 PM PST by nw_arizona_granny ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/21813ht92/posts?page=1 [Survival,food,garden,crafts,and more)

To: nw_arizona_granny

Sweetness. Thanks. Love ya.

4,243 posted on 11/07/2009 12:15:01 PM PST by Joya (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior, have mercy on me, a sinner!)

http://www.securitymanagement.com/news/retail-industry-presses-congress-pass-bills-fight-organized-retail-crime-006410

Retail Industry Presses Congress to Pass Bills to Fight Organized Retail Crime
By Matthew Harwood
11/04/2009 -

A congressman, a police officer, and representatives from the retailer sector today called on Congress to pass federal legislation that helps fight organized criminal gangs that resell massive amounts of stolen goods from retailers for hefty profits across state and national boundaries.

[most of report is snipped out of this]

Presently, three separate pieces of legislation have been introduced to fight ORC, two in the House and one in the Senate. One piece of bipartisan legislation in the House, H.R. 1173, introduced by Ellsworth would make online marketplaces keep basic contact information of “high volume sellers” that have sold or attempted to sell $12,000 or more in merchandise on their sites. These online marketplaces would have to keep such information—such as names, e-mail addresses, and physical addresses of high volume sellers—for three years.

continues.

[Something we should all be aware of, for the products that are bought by you, may have been stored incorrectly and unsafely or even be stamped with a new expiration date.

Hezbollah has used this method to raise money for terrorism and one bust showed how they re-stamped the dates on baby formula cans.

granny]

4,244 posted on 11/07/2009 1:18:09 PM PST by nw_arizona_granny ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/21813ht92/posts?page=1 [Survival,food,garden,crafts,and more)

http://www.homesteadernews.com/homesteaderkitchen.htm

Homesteader Kitchen by Krystal Beers

Krystal Beers is an avid heirloom gardener and active heritage livestock breed conservationist. A proud homemaker, Mrs. Beers has been collecting recipes, old-time lore, poetry and prose for 30 years. She presently lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband where they raise rabbits, tend their organic kitchen garden, and are in the process of establishing an off-grid rural ranch.

Two Hunnyz Rabbitry Satin & American

Visit Our Blog- Journey Into The Country!
Clover Creek Mercantile- our on-line homestead store
Domestic Rabbit Meat
Domestic Rabbit Meat

Rabbit is a popular food on all continents and in many cultures around the world. The first recorded rabbitry was in early Roman times. Rabbits were kept in walled gardens and consumed as needed because of no refrigeration. Rabbits were first domesticated in Africa. There are now over 50 breeds of domesticated rabbit. The gulf between European and American consumption is astronomical. Rabbits have been marketed for meat in Europe for over 1,000 years. Yet Americans still think of rabbits as just cute pets. However, many fine restaurants and purveyors of gourmet food across the country have added rabbit to their offerings and are garnering rave reviews. Take a gastronomical leap. Taste for yourself why everyone is getting into the rabbit habit!

Domestic rabbit, also known as the ‘elite meat’, is all white, fine-grained and mild, with no gristle or fat. Most aficionados agree it does not “taste like chicken”, but when cooked correctly is more tender and flavorful than its barnyard companions. Of all meats readily available, rabbit is the most nutritious; being higher in protein, lower in fat and calories, cholesterol, uric acid and sodium (U.S.D.A. circular #549). It meets all human amino acid requirements and is high in Omega-3 fatty acids as well. It is easily digested and recommended by physicians for ones with stomach disorders, the elderly, and heart disease patients.

And a little goes a long way. Years ago the U.S. Navy realized this when they served rabbit to sailors and found that a 6-ounce portion was just as filling as 12-ounces of chicken! Rabbit is also an ideal meat during hot summer months because it does not contain heating properties like most other meats.

Meat Type

% Protein

% Fat

Calories per lb.

Rabbit

20.8

4.5

795

Veal

19.1

840

Chicken

20.0

17.9

810

Turkey

20.1

1,190

Lamb

15.7

27.7

1,420

Beef

16.3

28.0

1,440

Duck

16.0

28.6

1,015

Pork

11.9

45.0

2,050

Rabbit is one of the most versatile meats in the world. It can be dressed up for special occasions or simply added to your favorite soup. It can be used fresh, cured, smoked, soured, roasted, barbecued and substituted for any recipe calling for veal or poultry. In fact, rabbit meat compares very favorably with veal, at half the price. A good fryer size would be 2 to 2-1/2 pounds; larger ones are best if roasted, stewed or ground. Many cooks prefer 4-6 month old roasters for a richer, fuller flavor and more beautiful grain. No matter what the age, rabbit should be cooked thoroughly in all recipes.
Rabbit has no skin or covering of fat to protect its tender meat, it thus requires lower temperatures and longer cooking times. Roasting covered at 250 degrees F until done will assure evenly cooked, moist meat. To pan cook, begin at a low heat and cover for a juicy result. It can also be boiled for 5 minutes and then simmered until well done. To marinate, a very dry wine can be used combined with whatever herbs and spices you like and 2-3 ounces of red wine vinegar. Covering the meat while marinating is not needed, but do turn it periodically for proper marinating. For hundreds of recipes, the American Rabbit Breeders Association publishes the most complete rabbit cookery book in the world. Visit their web site to order a copy.
Rabbit Recipes

Rabbit Recipes
Any of these recipes lend themselves well to other meat, too. Rabbit is so versatile; let your imagination go wild.

Rabbit with Garlic Cream Sauce

Ingredients:
2 fryers, or 1 lg. roasting rabbit, cut into serving pieces
salt & pepper
3 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
3 heads of garlic, or about 40 whole, peeled cloves
3 Tbsp. Cognac
1-1/2 c. dry white wine
1 Tbsp. Thyme
2 Tbsp. all purpose flour
2 Tbsp. heavy cream

Method:
~ Heat a Dutch oven, or other large stock pot, over medium-high, add 1 Tbsp. olive oil and brown the liberally salted and peppered rabbit pieces in batches, adding oil as needed; about 3-5 minutes each side; turn with tongs. Remove and set aside.

~ Lower the heat and add the garlic cloves. Sauté 3-10 minutes, turning often until evenly browned.

~ Add 2 Tbsp. of Cognac and the wine. Bring to a boil. Return meat to the pot and sprinkle with thyme.

~ Cover and simmer on lowest setting for 30 minutes or until the rabbit is done. Remove rabbit from the pot and keep warm.
~ In a small bowl, whisk together 1/2 c. of the sauce with the flour. Whisk back into pot. Raise heat and add remaining Cognac and cream. Boil 3 minutes.

~ Serve rabbit with Garlic Sauce poured over top.
Serve 4-6.

Burritos

Ingredients:
1 whole fryer or roasting rabbit
Salt & pepper to taste
¼ c. ‘Tabasco’ brand Chipotle Sauce, or 2 c. of salsa

Method:
~ Place whole rabbit in slow cooker (Crock Pot).

~ Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and pour Chipotle sauce, or salsa, evenly over top of rabbit.

~ Cover and cook on the Low heat setting for 6 hours.

~ When meat easily pulls away from bone, remove, set aside, and cool long enough to handle without burning yourself. Shred the meat off the bones, taking care to remove the very tiny bones.

~ Serve with your favorite burrito fillings.

Rabbit Stew & Dumplings

Ingredients:
½ c. flour
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper
3 lbs. rabbit cut into serving pieces
2 Tbs. butter
1 onion, sliced
3 carrots, sliced
2 potatoes, diced
4 c. broth
1 tsp. apple cider vinegar

Method:
~ Mix flour, salt, pepper in baking pan. Roll rabbit in flour until well coated; set aside.

~ Melt butter in large pot over med-high heat. Put rabbit pieces into hot fat and brown on all sides.

~ When meat is nicely browned, add the onion and brown slightly.

~ Add other vegetables, broth and apple cider vinegar. Reduce heat to Low, cover and
simmer 45 minutes or until meat is done. As the stew cooks make the Dumplings (recipe below).

~ After simmering, spoon the Dumplings evenly over the top of the stew. Replace the lid and let the Dumplings steam for 15 to 20 minutes. Serve hot. Serves 6

Dumplings

Ingredients:
1 c. flour
½ tsp. salt
1½ tsp. baking powder
½ c. milk
2 Tbs. melted butter

Method:
~ Mix dry ingredients in bowl. Add milk and butter; stir just enough to make soft dough.

~ Spoon over simmering stew divided into around 6-8 portions; cover; let steam.

Chile-Rubbed Rabbit

Ingredients:
2 Tbs. Chile powder
1 1/2 Tbs. ground Cumin
2 Tbs. Paprika
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. black pepper
1- 2 1/2 lb. fryer rabbit, cut into serving pieces
1 Tbs. olive oil
1 lg. purple onion, cut into 1/2 in. thick rounds
1 tsp. thyme

Method:
-Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.
-In a small bowl, combine the spices, salt and pepper. Rub rabbit all over with spice mixture.

-Add olive oil to a large (#10 or 11) cast iron skillet, or other oven-proof skillet; swirl pan to coat bottom with oil. Place the onion rounds on the bottom of skillet in a single layer and then sprinkle with thyme. Then, lay rabbit pieces on top.

-Transfer to oven, bake uncovered until meat is cooked through, about 40 minutes.

Serve with the roasted onion rounds.

To Make Hare Soup

Here’s an old one- dated 1801, from the Receipt Book of Mrs. Dot Drew, Mocollop Castle, Ballyduff, Co. Waterford, Ireland.

“Take a hare, cut it in pieces, get 3 quarts of water and one of cyder, a bit of lean bacon celery inions pepper salt and a little sweet herbs stew it on a slow fire if the soup be not thick enough mix a little flour and water. Fry some toasts in butter and now stir in your soup.”
Herbal Remedies

The Herbal Kitchen
“The path to wellness begins in the garden.”

Fall is here and winter is quickly coming upon us; I thought it an appropriate time to share some natural remedies I’ve learned over the years for keeping healthy during the seasons of change when people seem to succumb more readily to viruses and bacteria. I’m of the school that believes health care begins at home- a diet rich in nutrient-dense, whole foods, produced
without synthetics and medications, and natural herbal remedies. An ounce of prevention is
worth a pound of cure! I’ve also discovered that most homesteaders feel the same way. This
philosophy is practiced in our homestead kitchens. To facilitate my household along the road in
maintaining good health, many hours of research have ensued.

Let me state right now: I am not a physician. Any natural remedies undertaken are done at your own risk; neither I nor Homesteader News bears any responsibility.
That being said, any recipes/methods presented have been learned from those who are
masters/licensed in their various fields of expertise. The following are a few preventatives we
employ. A simple reminder about natural therapies: they don’t work immediately; give them a
few days. The efficacy builds up as used and also seems to have lasting effects. Good health to you and your homestead!

Hand Sanitizer Blend
Here is an all natural sanitizer gel that will kill germs, but not create resistance, unlike the
chemical-laden ones. It’s also gentle on your skin and safe for kids!
Ingredients:
6 drops tea tree essential oil
6 drops lavender essential oil
1 ounce organic aloe vera gel for the base
Method:
-Add essential oils to a 1-oz. plastic pump bottle first, and then add the aloe vera base gel.
-Gently roll to mix oils.
-Pump into hands and rub it in.

Baked Garlic
Lots of health benefits have been attributed to garlic, from boosting the immune system to helping the heart. Plus, it may be the best-tasting “medicine” around!
Method:
Bake one head of garlic at 350 degrees F, for one hour. Use as a spread, or eat as is.

Fire Cider

This is powerful stuff. It doesn’t exactly taste good and it burns like the dickens going down,
don’t be surprised if your family accuses you of trying to kill them with it! Try adding it to hot
water or even making vinaigrette with it. Source: Amanda McQuade Crawford, Herbalist.
Ingredients:
½ gallon glass jar
1- 5 inch fresh Horseradish root, sliced
1 head garlic, cut into ¼’s
1 red onion, sliced
1-5 inch fresh ginger root, sliced
1-5 inch Burdock root, sliced
4 fresh cayenne peppers
Method:
-Layer ingredients; pack down fairly tight. Add apple cider vinegar to just cover, about 16 oz. Let sit 4 weeks.
-Strain. Add raw honey to taste or half volume (8 oz. honey to the 16 oz. of acv). Stir until
dissolved. Store the liquid in a dark glass bottle or dark cupboard. It can be stored up to three
years without refrigeration.
DOSAGE:
Drink 1 tsp. to 1 Tbsp. every 20 minutes at the very first sign of sickness. Use 2-3 doses the
second and third days.

Cough Syrup
Ingredients:
1 qt. glass jar
Red onion, sliced
Elephant garlic, sliced
Fresh ginger, sliced
Dehydrated cane juice
Method:
-Keep layering as listed above until the jar is full; ending with a layer of cane juice.
-Let sit covered for 4 hours. Don’t strain! Keeps for 6 months to 1 year without refrigeration.
DOSAGE:
Use liquid as needed for cough.

Reduced Odor Garlic Cloves
Garlic and raw honey have anti-microbial properties. Be kind to your heart with regular doses of garlic. Be kind to those you love by reducing its odor! Source: Amanda McQuade Crawford, Herbalist.
Ingredients:
2 peeled heads of garlic
Raw (unheated) honey
Method:
-Separate the cloves of garlic and place in a sterile glass jar. Cover with honey. Cover. Age for 10 days at room temperature.
DOSAGE:
Eat one clove per day.

Uplifting Essential Oils
Banish the wintertime blues with pure essential oils! Essential oils are often overlooked in favor
of common scented lotions. But these oils not only replenish the skin’s moisture, they also
promote a sense of calm and wellness while relieving stress. The essential oils below are
especially recommended for their delicate, distinctive scent. It will surround you with an aura of well-being! Source: Noelle Katai, Aromatherapist
Method:
Rose, Chamomile, Geranium, and Lavender essential oils
Add 2-3 drops of your favorite essential oil to a warm bath, a light bulb ring, or apply directly to
your body (particularly at the pressure points). -If you experience any skin sensitivity, do not
apply directly to skin unless diluted with an equal amount of oil such as almond or jojoba.-
Recommended book
“Simply In Season” - by Mary Beth Lind & Cathleen Hockman-Wert
Simply awesome collection of over 1,500 recipes! This book is a must-have for everyone who has a
vegetable garden, frequents the farmer’s market or simply wants to eat by the seasons. There are
recipes for fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy. Beautifully organized by season and type of dish. Many tips,
quotes and facts throughout.
Kitchen Quotes

In my experience it is the countryman who is the real gourmet and for good reason: It is he who has cultivated, raised, hunted, or fished the raw materials and has made the wine himself. – Penelope Gray

For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering together. For nature, it is a time of sowing,
of scattering abroad. - Edwin Way Teale

An onion can make people cry, but there has never been a vegetable invented to make them
laugh. - Will Rogers

4,245 posted on 11/07/2009 2:09:08 PM PST by nw_arizona_granny ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/21813ht92/posts?page=1 [Survival,food,garden,crafts,and more)

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Rabbits for sale

One buck and doe are Californians. Additional doe is New Zealand - Californian cross. 10 months old; ready to breed. $75 for all three. Will offer lots of advice on rabbit care, housing, breeding, etc. They will produce great manure fertilizer - highest nitrogen, no need to compost. Near Chattanooga, TN. WhaleyB@aol.com
Goats for sale!

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Herbs, Herbals, Teas & More
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15,000+ Non GMO Heirloom Seeds
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4,246 posted on 11/07/2009 2:11:17 PM PST by nw_arizona_granny ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/21813ht92/posts?page=1 [Survival,food,garden,crafts,and more)

To: nw_arizona_granny

Field report from Taz’s experimental kitchen.

I took one of the recipe's you posted. Black bean chili.

1 onion, chopped
2 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and minced
6 roma (plum) tomatoes, diced
1 cup fresh corn kernels
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon chili powder
2 (15 ounce) cans black beans, drained and rinsed
1 1/2 cups beef broth
1 teaspoon salt

I precooked and dried the black beans.. Many of them split but that just makes the chili thicker.

Used tomatoes, peppers and onions were dried from my garden this year.Corn was dried from frozen.

Substitued beef bullion for the broth.

The only item used that wasn't dry was fresh chunked beef.

It was cooked in a cast iron dutch oven over an open camp fire.

I'm sure the ambiance helped but it was outstanding chili.

Cooking from dry is very much faster than cooking from raw.

The precooked dry black beans plumped up splendidly.. Good texture, with good flavor.

Giving it 4 thumbs up.

4,247 posted on 11/07/2009 2:13:27 PM PST by TASMANIANRED

[If you think this is not true, listen to any police scanner, one of the first pieces of information given the Officer being sent by the dispatcher, is if the trouble maker is on a prescription and what for/ which it is, maybe even before they warn the Officer of how many guns are owned and where they will be.

I have heard it reported about children, who are wrecking the home or school.....

granny]

http://www.naturalnews.com/011353_drugs_Prozac_antidepressants.html

Psychiatric Drugs: Chemical Warfare on Humans - interview with Robert Whitaker

Saturday, August 27, 2005 by: Terry Messman, citizen journalist
Key concepts: Drugs, Prozac and Antidepressants
View on NaturalPedia: Drugs, Prozac and Antidepressants

Articles Related to This Article:
• The great direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising con: how patients and doctors alike are easily influenced to demand dangerous drugs

• The raw (and ugly) truth about the war on drugs

• The FDA Exposed: An Interview With Dr. David Graham, the Vioxx Whistleblower

The following is a Street Spirit interview with Robert Whitaker, author of Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill. It is reprinted here with permission from the Street Spirit in Oakland, California. The interview is conducted by Terry Messman, editor of Street Spirit.

Investigative reporter Robert Whitaker, author of the groundbreaking book Mad In America, is now pursuing a fascinating line of research into how the mammoth psychiatric drug industry is endangering the American public by covering up the untold cases of suffering, anguish and disease caused by the most widely prescribed antidepressants and antipsychotic medications.

Whitaker exposes the massive lies and cover-ups that have corrupted the Food and Drug Administration’s drug review process, and co-opted research trials in order to spin the results of drug tests and conceal the serious hazards and even deadly side-effects of brand-name drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and Zyprexa.

The story becomes even more frightening when we look at the aggressive tactics these giant drug companies have used to silence prominent critics by defaming them in the press, and by using their money and power to have widely respected scientists and eminent medical researchers fired for daring to point out the hazards and risks of suicide and premature death caused by these drugs.

Whitaker starts by debunking the effectiveness of these massively hyped wonder drugs — antidepressants like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, and the new atypical antipsychotic drugs like Zyprexa. His research shows how they often are barely more effective than placebos in treating mental disorder and depression, despite the glowing adulation they have received in the mainstream media.

But he goes on to make the startling claim that these new psychiatric drugs have directly contributed to an alarming new epidemic of drug-induced mental illness. The very drugs prescribed by physicians to stabilize mental disorders in fact are inducing pathological changes in brain chemistry and triggering suicide, manic and psychotic episodes, convulsions, violence, diabetes, pancreatic failure, metabolic diseases, and premature death.

Whitaker originally was a highly regarded medical reporter at the Albany Times Union and also wrote off and on for the Boston Globe. A series he co-wrote for the Boston Globe on harmful psychiatric research was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. When he began his investigative research into psychiatric issues, Whitaker was still a believer in the story of progress that psychiatry has been telling the public for decades.

He said, “I absolutely believed the common wisdom that these antipsychotic drugs actually had improved things and that they had totally revolutionized how we treated schizophrenia. People used to be locked away forever, and now maybe things weren’t great, but they were a lot better. It was a story of progress.”

That story of progress was fraudulent, as Whitaker soon found out when he gained new insight from his research into torturous psychiatric practices such as electroshock, lobotomy, insulin coma, and neuroleptic drugs. Psychiatrists told the public that these techniques “cured” psychosis or balanced the chemistry of the brain.

But, in reality, the common thread in all these different treatments was the attempt to suppress “mental illness” by deliberately damaging the higher functions of the brain. The stunning truth is that, behind closed doors, the psychiatric establishment itself labeled these treatments as “brain-damaging therapeutics.”

The first generation of antipsychotic drugs created a drug-induced brain pathology by blocking the neurotransmitter dopamine and essentially shutting down many higher brain functions. In fact, when antipsychotics such as Thorazine and Haldol were first introduced, psychiatrists themselves said that these neuroleptic drugs were virtually indistinguishable from a “chemical lobotomy.”

In recent years, the media have heralded the arrival of so-called designer drugs like Prozac, Paxil and Zyprexa that are supposed to be superior and have fewer side effects than the old tricyclic antidepressants and the first antipsychotics. Millions of Americans have believed this story and have enriched drug companies like Eli Lilly by spending billions of dollars annually to purchase these new medications.

Whitaker’s research into the tragic cases of disease, suffering and early deaths caused by these drugs shows that millions of consumers have been misled by a massive campaign of lies, distortions, and bought-and-paid-for drug trials. Eminent medical researchers who have tried to warn us of the perils of these drugs have been silenced, intimidated and defamed. In the process, the Food and Drug Administration has become the lapdog of the giant pharmaceutical industry, not its watchdog.

Street Spirit interviewed Robert Whitaker about this new “epidemic” of mental disorders, and how the giant drug companies have profited from selling drugs that make us sicker.

Street Spirit: Your new line of research indicates that there has been an enormous rise in the incidence of mental illness in the United States, despite the seeming advances in a new generation of psychiatric drugs. Why do you refer to this increase as an epidemic?

Robert Whitaker: Even people like the psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey wrote a book recently in which he said it looks like we’re having an epidemic of mental illness. When the National Institute of Mental Health publishes its figures on the incidence of mental illness, you see these rising numbers of mentally ill people. Some recent reports even say that 20 percent of Americans now are mentally ill.

So what I wanted to do was two-fold. I wanted to look into exactly how dramatic is this increase in mental illness, and particularly severe mental illness. Part of this rise in the number of people said to be mentally ill is just definitional. We draw a big wide boundary today and we throw all sorts of people into that category of mentally ill. So children who are not sitting neatly enough in their school rooms are said to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and we created a new disorder called social anxiety disorder.

SS: So what used to be called simply shyness or anxiety in relating to people is now labeled a mental disorder and you supposedly need an antidepressant like Paxil for social anxiety disorder.

RW: Exactly. And you need a stimulant like Ritalin for ADHD.

SS: This increases psychiatry’s clients, but doesn’t it also increase the number of people that giant pharmaceutical companies can sell their psychiatric drugs to?

RW: Absolutely. So part of what we’re seeing is nothing more than the creation of a larger market for drugs. If you think about it, as long as we draw as big a circle as possible, and expand the boundaries of mental illness, psychiatry can have more clients and sell more drugs. So there’s a built-in economic incentive to define mental illness in as broad terms as possible, and to find ordinary, distressing emotions or behaviors that some people may not like and label them as mental illness.

SS: Your research also shows that there is a real increase in people who have a severe mental disorder. Now, this seems counterintuitive, but is it true that you believe much of this increase is caused by the overuse of some of the new generations of psychiatric drugs?

RW: Yes, exactly. I looked at the number of the so-called severely disabled mentally ill — people who aren’t working or who are somehow dysfunctional because of mental illness. So I wanted to chart through history the percentage of the population who are considered the disabled mentally ill.

Now, by 1903, we see that roughly 1 out of every 500 people in the United States is hospitalized for mental illness. By 1955, at the start of the modern era of psychiatric drugs, roughly one out of every 300 people was disabled by mental illness. Now, let’s go to 1987, the end of the first generation of antipsychotic drugs; and from 1987 forward we get the modern psychiatric drugs. From 1955 to 1987, during this first era of psychiatric drugs — the antipsychotic drugs Thorazine and Haldol and the tricyclic antidepressants (such as Elavil and Anafranil) — we saw the number of disabled mentally ill increase four-fold, to the point where roughly one out of every 75 persons are deemed disabled mentally ill.

Now, there was a shift in how we cared for the disabled mentally ill between 1955 and 1987. In 1955, we were hospitalizing them. Then, by 1987, we had gone through social change, and we were now placing people in shelters, nursing homes, and some sort of community care, and gave them either SSI or SSDI payments for mental disability. In 1987, we started getting these supposedly better, second-generation psychiatric drugs like Prozac and the other selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants. Shortly after that, we get the new, atypical antipsychotic drugs like Zyprexa (olanzapine), Clozaril and Risperdal.

What’s happened since 1987? Well, the disability rate has continued to increase until it’s now one in every 50 Americans. Think about that: One in every 50 Americans disabled by mental illness today. And it’s still increasing. The number of mentally disabled people in the United States has been increasing at the rate of 150,000 people per year since 1987. That’s an increase every day over the last 17 years of 410 people per day newly disabled by mental illness.

SS: So that leads to the obvious question. If psychiatry has introduced these so-called wonder drugs like Prozac and Zoloft and Zyprexa, why is the incidence of mental illness going up dramatically?

RW: That’s exactly it. This is a scientific question. We have a form of care where we’re using these drugs in an ever more expansive manner, and supposedly we have better drugs and they’re the cornerstone of our care, so we should see decreasing disability rates. That’s what your expectation would be.

Instead, from 1987 until the present, we saw an increase in the number of mentally disabled people from 3.3 million people to 5.7 million people in the United States. In that time, our spending on psychiatric drugs increased to an amazing degree. Combined spending on antipsychotic drugs and antidepressants jumped from around $500 million in 1986 to nearly $20 billion in 2004. So we raise the question: Is the use of these drugs somehow actually fueling this increase in the number of the disabled mentally ill?

When you look at the research literature, you find a clear pattern of outcomes with all these drugs — you see it with the antipsychotics, the antidepressants, the anti-anxiety drugs and the stimulants like Ritalin used to treat ADHD. All these drugs may curb a target symptom slightly more effectively than a placebo does for a short period of time, say six weeks. An antidepressant may ameliorate the symptoms of depression better than a placebo over the short term.

What you find with every class of these psychiatric drugs is a worsening of the target symptom of depression or psychosis or anxiety over the long term, compared to placebo-treated patients. So even on the target symptoms, there’s greater chronicity and greater severity of symptoms. And you see a fairly significant percentage of patients where new and more severe psychiatric symptoms are triggered by the drug itself.

SS: New psychiatric symptoms created by the very drugs people are told will help them recover?

RW: Absolutely. The most obvious case is with the antidepressants. A certain percentage of people placed on the SSRIs because they have some form of depression will suffer either a manic or psychotic attack — drug-induced. This is well recognized. So now, instead of just dealing with depression, they’re dealing with mania or psychotic symptoms. And once they have a drug-induced manic episode, what happens? They go to an emergency room, and at that point they’re newly diagnosed. They’re now said to be bipolar and they’re given an antipsychotic to go along with the antidepressant; and, at that point, they’re moving down the path to chronic disability.

SS: Modern psychiatry claims that these psychiatric drugs correct pathological brain chemistry. Is there any evidence to back up their claim that abnormal brain chemistry is the culprit in schizophrenia and depression?

RW: This is the key thing everyone needs to understand. It really is the answer that unlocks this mystery of why the drugs would have this long-term problematic effect. Start with schizophrenia. They hypothesize that these drugs work by correcting an imbalance of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain.

The theory was that people with schizophrenia had overactive dopamine systems; and these drugs, by blocking dopamine in the brain, fixed that chemical imbalance. Therefore, you get the metaphor that they’re like insulin is for diabetes; they’re fixing an abnormality. With the antidepressants, the theory was that people with depression had too low levels of serotonin; the drugs upped the levels of serotonin in the brain and therefore they’re balancing the brain chemistry.

First of all, those theories never arose from investigations into what was actually happening to people. Rather, they would find out that antipsychotics blocked dopamine and so they theorized that people had overactive dopamine systems. Same with the antidepressants. They found that antidepressants upped the levels of serotonin; therefore, they theorized that people with depression must have low levels of serotonin.

But here is the thing that one wishes all of America would know and wishes psychiatry would come clean on: They’ve never been able to find that people with schizophrenia have overactive dopamine systems. They’ve never been able to find that people with depression have underactive serotonin systems. They’ve never found consistently that any of these disorders are associated with any chemical imbalance in the brain. The story that people with mental disorders have known chemical imbalances — that’s a lie. We don’t know that at all. It’s just something that they say to help sell the drugs and help sell the biological model of mental disorders.

But the kicker is this. We do know, in fact, that these drugs perturb how these chemical messengers work in the brain. The real paradigm is: People diagnosed with mental disorders have no known problem with their neurotransmitter systems; and these drugs perturb the normal function of neurotransmitters.

SS: So rather than fixing a chemical imbalance, these widely prescribed drugs distort the brain chemistry and make it pathological.

RW: Absolutely. Stephen Hyman, a well-known neuroscientist and the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, wrote a paper in 1996 that looked at how psychiatric drugs affect the brain. He wrote that all these drugs create perturbations in neurotransmitter functions. And he notes that the brain, in response to this drug from the outside, alters its normal functions and goes through a series of compensatory adaptations.

In other words, it tries to adapt to the fact that an antipsychotic drug is blocking normal dopamine functions. Or in the case of antidepressants, it tries to compensate for the fact that you’re blocking a normal reuptake of serotonin. The way it does this is to adapt in the opposite way. So, if you’re blocking dopamine in the brain, the brain tries to put out more dopamine and it actually increases the number of dopamine receptors. So a person placed on antipsychotic drugs will end up with an abnormally high number of dopamine receptors in the brain.

If you give someone an antidepressant, and that tries to keep serotonin levels too high in the brain, it does exactly the opposite. It stops producing as much serotonin as it normally does and it reduces the number of serotonin receptors in the brain. So someone who is on an antidepressant, after a time ends up with an abnormally low level of serotonin receptors in the brain. And here’s what Hyman concluded about this: After these changes happened, the patient’s brain is functioning in a way that is “qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from the normal state.” So what Stephen Hyman, former head of the NIMH, has done is present a paradigm for how these drugs affect the brain that shows that they’re inducing a pathological state.

SS: So the paradox is there’s no evidence for modern psychiatry’s claim that there is any pathological biochemical imbalance in the brain that causes mental illness, but if you treat people with these new wonder drugs, that is what creates a pathological imbalance?

RW: Yes, these drugs disrupt normal brain chemistry. That’s the real paradox here. And the real tragedy is, that even as we peddle these drugs as chemical balancers, chemical fixers, in truth we’re doing precisely the opposite. We’re taking a brain that has no known abnormal brain chemistry, and by placing people on the drugs, we’re perturbing that normal chemistry. Here’s how Barry Jacobs, a Princeton neuroscientist, describes what happens to a person given an SSRI antidepressant. “These drugs,” he said, “alter the level of synaptic transmission beyond the physiologic range achieved under normal environmental biological conditions. Thus, any behavioral or physiologic change produced under these conditions might more appropriately be considered pathologic rather than reflective of the normal biological role of serotonin.”

SS: One of the SSRI antidepressants that’s widely believed to be a wonder drug is Prozac. Yet your research found that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) received more adverse reports about Prozac than any other drug. What sort of ill effects were people reporting?

RW: First of all, with Prozac and the SSRIs that followed, their level of efficacy was always of a very minor sort. In all the clinical trials of the antidepressants, roughly 41 percent of the patients got better in the short term versus 31 percent of the patients on placebo. Now just one other caveat on that. If you use an active placebo in these trials — an active placebo causes a physiologic change with no benefit, like a dry mouth — any difference in outcome between the antidepressant and placebo virtually disappears.

SS: Weren’t the early drug tests of Prozac so unpromising that they had to manipulate test results to get FDA approval at all?

RW: What happened with Prozac is a fascinating story. Right from the beginning, they noticed only very marginal efficacy over placebo; and they noticed that they had some problems with suicide. There were increased suicidal responses compared to placebo. In other words, the drugs was agitating people and making people suicidal who hadn’t been suicidal before. They were getting manic responses in people who hadn’t been manic before. They were getting psychotic episodes in people who hadn’t been psychotic before. So you were seeing these very problematic side effects even at the same time that you were seeing very modest efficacy, if any, over placebo in ameliorating depression.

Basically, what Eli Lilly (Prozac’s manufacturer) had to do was cover up the psychosis, cover up the mania; and, in that manner, it was able to get these drugs approved. One FDA reviewer even warned that Prozac appeared to be a dangerous drug, but it was approved anyway. We’re seemingly finding all this out only now: “Oh, Prozac can cause suicidal impulses and all these SSRIs may increase the risk of suicide.” The point is, that wasn’t anything new. That data was there from the very first trial. You had people in Germany saying, “I think this is a dangerous drug.”

SS: Even back in the late 1980s, they already knew?

RW: Before the late 1980s — in the early ‘80s, before Prozac gets approved. Basically what Eli Lilly had to do was cover up that risk of mania and psychosis, cover up that some people were becoming suicidal because they were getting this nervous agitation from Prozac. That’s the only way it got approved.

There were various ways they did the cover-up. One was just to simply remove reports of psychosis from some of the data. They also went back and recoded some of the trial results. Let’s say someone had a manic episode or a psychotic episode; instead of putting that down, they would just put down a return of depression, and that sort of thing. So there was a basic need to hide these risks right from the beginning, and that’s what was done.

So Prozac gets approved in 1987, and it’s launched in this amazing PR campaign. The pill itself is featured on the cover of several magazines! It’s like the Pill of the Year [laughs]. And it’s said to be so much safer: a wonder drug. We have doctors saying, “Oh, the real problem with this drug is that we can now create whatever personality we want. We’re just so skilled with these drugs that if you want to be happy all the time, take your pill!”

That was complete nonsense. The drugs were barely better than placebo at alleviating depressive symptoms over the short term. You had all these problems; yet we were touting these drugs, saying, “Oh, the powers of psychiatry are such that we can give you the mind you want — a designer personality!” It was absolutely obscene. Meanwhile, which drug, after being launched, quickly became the most complained about drug in America? Prozac!

SS: What were the level of complaints when Prozac hit the market?

RW: In this county, we have Medwatch, a reporting system in which we report adverse events about psychiatric drugs to the FDA. By the way, the FDA tries to keep these adverse reports from the public. So, instead of the FDA making these easily available to the public. so you can know about the dangers of the drugs, it’s very hard to get these reports.

Within one decade, there were 39,000 adverse reports about Prozac that were sent to Medwatch. The number of adverse events sent to Medwatch is thought to represent only one percent of the actual number of such events. So, if we get 39,000 adverse event reports about Prozac, the number of people who have actually suffered such problems is estimated to be 100 times as many, or roughly four million people. This makes Prozac the most complained about drug in America, by far. There were more adverse event reports received about Prozac in its first two years on the market than had been reported on the leading tricyclic antidepressant in 20 years.

Remember, Prozac is pitched to the American public as this wonderfully safe drug, and yet what are people complaining about? Mania, psychotic depression, nervousness, anxiety, agitation, hostility, hallucinations, memory loss, tremors, impotence, convulsions, insomnia, nausea, suicidal impulses. It’s a wide range of serious symptoms.

And here’s the kicker. It wasn’t just Prozac. Once we got the other SSRIs on the market, like Zoloft and Paxil, by 1994, four SSRI antidepressants were among the top 20 most complained about drugs on the FDA’s Medwatch list. In other words, every one of these drugs brought to market started triggering this range of adverse events. And these were not minor things. When you talk about mania, hallucinations, psychotic depression, these are serious adverse events.

Prozac was pitched to the American public as a wonder drug. It was featured on the covers of magazines as so safe, and as a sign of our wonderful ability to effect the brain just as we want it. In truth, the reports were showing it could trigger a lot of dangerous events, including suicide and psychosis.

The FDA was being warned about this. They were getting a flood of adverse event reports, and the public was never told about this for the longest period of time. It took a decade for the FDA to begin to acknowledge the increased suicides and the violence it can trigger in some people. It just shows how the FDA betrayed the American people. This is a classic example. They betrayed their responsibility to act as a watchdog for the American people. Instead they acted as an agency that covered up harm and risk with these drugs.

SS: In light of the FDA’s failure to warn us about Prozac, what about their recent negligence on the issue of the risk of suicide in children given antidepressants like Paxil? Weren’t England’s mental health officials far better than their American counterparts in the FDA in warning about the dangers of suicidal attempts when antidepressants are given to youth?

RW: Yes. The children’s story is unbelievably tragic. It’s also a really sordid story. Let’s go back a little to see what happened to children and antidepressants. Prozac comes to market in 1987. By the early 1990s, the pharmaceutical companies making these drugs are saying, “How do we expand the market for antidepressants?” Because that’s what drug companies do — they want to get to an ever-larger number of people. They saw they had an untapped market in kids. So let’s start peddling the drugs to kids. And they were successful. Since 1990, the use of antidepressants in kids went up something like seven-fold. They began prescribing them willy-nilly.

Now, whenever they did pediatric trials of antidepressants, they found that the drugs were no more effective on the target symptom of depression than placebo. This happened again and again in the pediatric drug trials of antidepressants. So, what that tells you is there is no real therapeutic rationale for the drugs because in this population of kids, the drugs don’t even curb the target symptoms over the short term any better than placebo; and yet they were causing all sorts of adverse events.

For example, in one trial, 75 percent of youth treated with antidepressants suffered an adverse event of some kind. In one study by the University of Pittsburgh, 23 percent of children treated with an SSRI developed mania or manic-like symptoms; an additional 19 percent developed drug-induced hostility. The clinical results were telling you that you didn’t get any benefit on depression; and you could cause all sorts of real problems in kids — mania, hostility, psychosis, and you may even stir suicide. In other words, don’t use these drugs, right? It was absolutely covered up.

SS: How was it covered up?

RW: We had psychiatrists — some of those obviously getting money from the drug companies — saying the kids are under-treated and they’re at risk of suicide and how could we possibly treat kids without these pills and what a tragedy it would be if we couldn’t use these antidepressants.

Finally, a prominent researcher in England, David Healy, started doing his own research on the ability of these drugs to stir suicide. He also managed to get access to some of the trial results and he blew the whistle. He first blew the whistle in England and he presented this data to the review authorities there. And they saw that it looks like these drugs are increasing the risk of suicide and there are really no signs of benefits on the target symptoms of depression. So they began to move there to warn doctors not to prescribe these drugs to youth.

What happens in the United States? Well, it’s only after there’s a lot of pressure put on the FDA that they even hold a hearing. The FDA sort of downplays the risk of these drugs. They’re slow to even put black box warnings on them. Why? Aren’t kids lives worth protecting? If we know that we have a scientifically shown risk that these drugs increase suicide, shouldn’t you at least warn about it? But the FDA was even digging in its heels about putting that black box warning on the drugs.

SS: If Prozac is the nation’s most complained about drug, if Paxil is shown to be a suicide risk for youth, how do these antidepressants continue to have a reputation as near-magic cures for depression? And why did the FDA failed to warn us about Paxil and Prozac for such a long time?

RW: There’s a couple reasons for that. The FDA’s funding changed in the 1990s. An act was passed in which a lot of the FDA’s funding came from the drug industry: the PDUFA Act, or Prescription Drug User Fee Act. Basically, when drug companies applied for FDA approval they had to pay a fee. Those fees became what is funding a large portion of the FDA’s review of drug applications.

So all of a sudden, the funding is coming from the drug industry; it’s no longer coming from the people. As that act comes up for renewal, basically the drug lobbyists are telling the FDA that their job is no longer to be critically analyzing drugs, but to approve drugs quickly. And that was part of Newt Gingrich’s thing: Your job is to get these drugs to market. Start partnering with the drug industry and facilitating drug development. We lost this idea that the FDA had a watchdog role.

Also, in a human way, a lot of people who work for the FDA leave there and end up going to work for the drug companies. The old joke is that the FDA is sort of like a showcase for a future job in the drug industry. You go there, you work awhile, then you go off into the drug industry. Well, if that’s the progression that people make, in essence they’re making good old boy network connections, so they’re not going to be so harsh on the drug companies. So, that’s what really happened in the 1990s. The FDA was given new marching orders. The orders were: “Facilitate getting drugs to market. Don’t be too critical. And, in fact, if you want to keep your funding, which was coming now from the drug industry, make sure you take these lessons to heart.”

SS: So the giant pharmaceutical companies have a vast amount of power to cook the results of drug tests and make researchers and even the FDA itself bow to their will?

RW: The FDA, in essence, was kneecapped in the early 1990s, and we really saw it with the psychiatric drugs. The FDA became a lapdog for the pharmaceutical industry, not a watchdog. It’s only now that this has become common knowledge. We have Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, write a book in which she says that the FDA became a lapdog. It’s basically now well recognized that you had this decline and fall. As the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, the most prestigious medical journal we have, Marcia Angell is someone who was at the very heart of American medicine, and she concluded that the FDA let down the American people. And she lost her job at the New England Journal of Medicine for starting to criticize pharmaceutical companies.

She was the editor of the journal in the late 1990s and there was a corresponding doctor named Thomas Bodenheimer who decided to write an article about how you couldn’t even trust what was published in the medical journals anymore because of all the spinning of results. So they did an investigation about how the pharmaceutical companies are funding all the research and spinning the trial results, so you can no longer really trust what you read in scientific journals. They pointed out that when they tried to get an expert to review the scientific literature related to antidepressants, they basically couldn’t find someone who hadn’t taken money from the drug companies.

Now, the New England Journal of Medicine is published by the Massachusetts Medical Society which publishes a lot of other journals, and they get a lot of pharmaceutical advertising. So what happens after that article appears by Thomas Bodenheimer and an accompanying editorial by Marcia Angell about the sorry state of American medicine because of this? They both lose their jobs! She’s gone and so is Thomas Bodenheimer. Think about this. We have the leading medical journal firing people, letting them go, because they dared to criticize the dishonest science and the dishonest process that was poisoning the scientific literature.

So we have the FDA that’s acting as lapdogs. You can’t trust the scientific literature. All this shows how the American public was betrayed and didn’t know about all the problems with these drugs and why it was kept from them. It has to do with money, prestige and old boy networks.

SS: It also has to do with the silencing of critics. Eli Lilly uses the media to trumpet Prozac’s benefits and gives perks to doctors to attend conferences to hear about its benefits, and buys off researchers. But don’t they also use their power and money to silence their critics?

RW: An example is Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, a psychiatrist who also works for Harvard University Health Services, and who wrote a book called Prozac Backlash to warn about the dangers of Prozac. He’s finding that the drugs are being overused and cause severe side effects. He even raises questions about long-term memory problems with the drugs and cognitive dysfunction. Well, Eli Lilly then mounted a public relations campaign to try to discredit him. They sent out notices to the media questioning his affiliation with Harvard Medical School, etc. It was all about silencing the critics.

If you sing the tune that the drug companies want, at the very top levels, you get paid a lot of money to fly around and give presentations about the wonders of the drugs. And those who come, and don’t ask any embarrassing questions, get the lobster dinners and maybe they get a little honorarium for attending this educational meeting. So if you want to be part of this gravy train, you can. You sing the wonders of the drug, and you don’t talk about their nasty side effects, and you can get a nice payment as one of their guest speakers, as one of their experts.

But if you’re one of the ones saying, “What about the mania, what about the psychosis?” — they do silence you. Look at what happened to David Healy. Healy is even the best example. David Healy has this sterling reputation in England. He’s written several books on the history of psychopharmacology. He’s like the former Secretary of the Psychopharmacology Association over there. He gets offered a job at the University of Toronto to head up their psychiatry department. So while he’s waiting to assume that position at the University of Toronto, he goes to Toronto and delivers a talk on the elevated risk of suicide with Prozac and some of the other SSRIs. By the time he’s back home, the job offer has been rescinded.

Now does Eli Lilly donate some money to the University of Toronto? Absolutely. So, to answer your question, yes, Eli Lilly silences dissenters as well.

SS: What is the story behind the secret settlement between Eli Lilly and the survivors who sued the company after Joseph Wesbecker shot 20 coworkers after being put on Prozac?

RW: During this trial in which Eli Lilly was being sued, the judge was going to allow some very damaging evidence showing wrongdoing by Eli Lilly in a previous instance. The judge said, “Go ahead and introduce this at the trial.” But next thing you know, they don’t introduce this; and in fact, all of a sudden, the plaintiffs no longer are presenting very damaging evidence to make their case. So the judge wonders why they are not presenting their best case anymore. He smells a rat. He suspects Eli Lilly has settled with the plaintiffs secretly and the deal is that, as part of this settlement, the plaintiffs will go ahead with a sham trial so that Eli Lilly will win the trial. Then Eli Lilly can claim, “See our drug doesn’t cause people to become violent.”

And, indeed, that’s what happened. Eli Lilly felt it was going to lose this trial. They went to the plaintiffs and said they would give them a lot of money. They agreed to go ahead and settle the case, but had the plaintiffs go ahead with the trial. That way Eli Lilly can publicly claim that they won the trial and Prozac doesn’t cause harm.

SS: How did this even come out into the light of day?

RW: We would never have known about this except for two things. One, believe it or not, the judge, in essence, appealed the decision in his own court. He said, “I smell a rat.” And through that, he found out that there was this secret settlement and that it was a sham proceeding that continued on. He said it was one of the worst violations of the integrity of the legal process that he’d ever seen. And second, an English journalist named John Cornwell wrote a book called Power to Harm: Mind, Medicine, and Murder on Trial. He wrote about this case, and yet in the United States, we got almost no news about this secret settlement and this whole perversion of the legal process. It was an English journalist who was exposing this story.

My point here is this: They silence people like Marcia Angell. They pervert the scientific process. They pervert the legal process. They pervert the FDA drug review process. It’s everywhere! And that’s how we as a society end up believing in these psychiatric drugs. You asked the question a while back, “Why do we still believe in Prozac?” One of the reasons is that the story about Prozac is, in effect, maintained. It’s publicly maintained because we do all this silencing along all these lines.

The other thing to remember is that some people on Prozac do feel better. That’s true. That shows up, just in the same way that some people on placebos feel better. And those are the stories that get repeated: “Oh, I took Prozac and I’m feeling better.” It’s that select group that does better that becomes the story that is told out there, and the story that the public hears. So that’s why we continued to believe in the story of these wonder drugs that are very safe in spite of all this messy stuff that gets covered up.

SS: Let’s now move from the antidepressants like Prozac to consider another new group of supposed wonder drugs — the new antipsychotic drugs. You write that long-term use of antipsychotic drugs — both the original neuroleptic drugs like Thorazine and Haldol and the newer atypicals like Zyprexa and Risperdal — cause pathological changes in the brain that can lead to a worsening of the symptoms of mental illness. What changes in brain chemistry result from the antipsychotics, and how can that lead to the most frightening prospect you describe — chronic mental illness that is locked in by these drugs?

RW: This is a line of research that goes across 40 years. This problem of chronic illness shows up time and time again in the research literature. This biological mechanism is somewhat well understood now. The antipsychotics profoundly block dopamine receptors. They block 70-90 percent of the dopamine receptors in the brain. In return, the brain sprouts about 50 percent extra dopamine receptors. It tries to become extra sensitive.

So in essence you’ve created an imbalance in the dopamine system in the brain. It’s almost like, on one hand, you’ve got the accelerator down — that’s the extra dopamine receptors. And the drug is the brake trying to block this. But if you release that brake, if you abruptly go off the drugs, you now do have a dopamine system that’s overactive. You have too many dopamine receptors. And what happens? People that go abruptly off of the drug, do tend to have severe relapses.

SS: So people that have been treated with these antipsychotic drugs have a far greater tendency to relapse, and have new episodes of mental illness, as opposed to people who have had other kinds of non-drug therapies?

RW: Absolutely, and that was understood by 1979, that you were actually increasing the underlying biological vulnerability to the psychosis. And by the way, we sort of understood that if you muck with the dopamine system, that you could cause some symptoms of psychosis with amphetamines. So if you give someone amphetamines enough, they’re at increased risk of psychosis. This is well known. And what do amphetamines do? They release dopamine. So there is a biological reason why, if you’re mucking up the dopamine system, you’re increasing the risk of psychosis. That’s in essence what these antipsychotic drugs do, they muck up the dopamine system.

Here’s just one real powerful study on this: Researchers with the University of Pittsburgh in the 1990s took people newly diagnosed with schizophrenia, and they started taking MRI pictures of the brains of these people. So we get a picture of their brains at the moment of diagnosis, and then we prepare pictures over the next 18 months to see how those brains change. Now during this 18 months, they are being prescribed antipsychotic medications, and what did the researchers report? They reported that, over this 18-month period, the drugs caused an enlargement of the basal ganglia, an area of the brain that uses dopamine. In other words, it creates a visible change in morphology, a change in the size of an area of the brain, and that’s abnormal. That’s number one. So we have an antipsychotic drug causing an abnormality in the brain.

Now here’s the kicker. They found that as that enlargement occurred, it was associated with a worsening of the psychotic symptoms, a worsening of negative symptoms. So here you actually have, with modern technology, a very powerful study. By imaging the brain, we see how an outside agent comes in, disrupts normal chemistry, causes an abnormal enlargement of the basal ganglia, and that enlargement causes a worsening of the very symptoms it’s supposed to treat. Now that’s actually, in essence, a story of a disease process — an outside agent causes abnormality, causes symptoms...

SS: But in this case, the outside agent that triggers the disease process is the supposed cure for the disease! The psychiatric drug is the disease-causing agent.

RW: That’s exactly right. It’s a stunning, damning finding. It’s the sort of finding you would say, “Oh Christ, we should be doing something different.” Do you know what those researchers got new grants for, after they reported that?

SS: No, what? You’d guess they got funding to carry out these same studies on other classes of psychiatric drugs.

RW: They got a grant to develop an implant, a brain implant, that would deliver drugs like Haldol on a continual basis! A grant to develop a drug delivery implant so you could implant this in the brains of people with schizophrenia and then they wouldn’t even have a chance not to take the drugs!

SS: Unbelievable. Designing an implant to provide a constant dose of a drug that they had just discovered causes pathology in the brain chemistry.

RW: Right, they had just found that they’re causing a worsening of symptoms! So why would you go on to a design a permanent implant? Because that’s where the money was. And no one wanted to deal with this horrible finding of an enlargement of the basal ganglia caused by the drugs, and that is associated with the worsening of symptoms. No one wanted to deal with the fact that when you look at people medicated on antipsychotics, you start to see a shrinking of the frontal lobes. No one wants to talk about that either. They stopped that research.

SS: What other side effects are caused by prolonged use of these antipsychotic drugs?

RW: Oh, you get tardive dyskinesia, a permanent brain dysfunction; and akathisia, which is this incredible nervous agitation. You’re just never comfortable. You want to sit but you can’t sit. It’s like you’re crawling out of your own skin. And it’s associated with violence, suicide and all sorts of horrible things.

SS: Those kinds of side-effects were notorious with the first generation of antipsychotic drugs, like Thorazine, Haldol and Stelazine. But, just as with Prozac, so many people are still touting the new generation of atypical antipsychotics — Zyprexa, Clozaril and Risperdal — as wonder drugs that control mental illness with far fewer side effects. Is that true? What have you found?

RW: No, it’s just complete nonsense. In fact, I think the newer drugs will eventually be seen as more dangerous than the old drugs, if that’s possible. As you know, the standard neuroleptics like Thorazine and Haldol have had quite a litany of harm with the tardive dyskinesia and all. So when we got the new atypical drugs, they were touted as so much safer. But with these new atypicals, you get all sorts of metabolic dysfunctions.

Let’s talk about Zyprexa. It has a different profile. So it may not cause as much tardive dyskinesia. It may not cause as many Parkinsonian symptoms. But it causes a whole range of new symptoms. So, for example, it’s more likely to cause diabetes. It’s more likely to cause pancreatic disorders. It’s more likely to cause obesity and appetite-disregulation disorders.

In fact, researchers in Ireland reported in 2003 that since the introduction of the atypical antipsychotics, the death rate among people with schizophrenia has doubled. They have done death rates of people treated with standard neuroleptics and then they compare that with death rates of people treated with atypical antipsychotics, and it doubles. It doubles! It didn’t reduce harm. In fact, in their seven-year study, 25 of the 72 patients died.

SS: What were the causes of death?

RW: All sorts of physical illnesses, and that’s part of the point. You’re getting respiratory problems, you’re getting people dying of incredibly high cholesterol counts, heart problems, diabetes. With olanzapine (Zyprexa), one of the problems is that you’re really screwing up the core metabolic system. That’s why you get these huge weight gains, and you get the diabetes. Zyprexa basically disrupts the machine that we are that processes food and extracts energy from that food. So this very fundamental thing that we humans do is disrupted, and at some point you just see all these pancreatic problems, faulty glucose regulation, diabetes, etc. That’s really a sign that you’re mucking with something very fundamental to life.

SS: There’s supposedly an alarming increase in mental illness being diagnosed in children. Millions are diagnosed with depression, bipolar and psychotic symptoms, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and social anxiety disorder. Is this explosive new prevalence of mental illness among children a real increase, or is it a marketing campaign that enriches the psychiatric drug industry, a bonanza for the pharmaceutical corporations? RW: You’re touching on something now that is a tragic scandal of monumental proportions. I talk sometimes to college classes, psychology classes. You cannot believe the percentage of youth who have been told they were mentally ill as kids, that something was wrong with them. It’s absolutely phenomenal. It’s absolutely cruel to be telling kids that they have these broken brains and mental illnesses.

There’s two things that are happening here. One, of course, is that it’s complete nonsense. As you remember as a kid, you have too much energy or you behave sometimes in not altogether appropriate ways, and you do have these extremes of emotions, especially during your teenage years. Both children and teenagers can be very emotional. So one thing that’s going on is that they take childhood behaviors and start defining behaviors they don’t like as pathological. They start defining emotions that are uncomfortable as pathological. So part of what we’re doing is pathologizing childhood with straight-out definition stuff. We’re pathologizing poverty among kids.

For example, if you’re a foster kid, and maybe you drew a bad straw in the lottery of life and are born into a dysfunctional family and you get put into foster care, do you know what happens today? You pretty likely are going to get diagnosed with a mental disorder, and you’re going to be placed on a psychiatric drug. In Massachusetts, it’s something like 60 to 70 percent of kids in foster care are now on psychiatric drugs. These kids aren’t mentally ill! They got a raw deal in life. They ended up in a foster home, which means they were in a bad family situation, and what does our society do? They say: “You have a defective brain.” It’s not that society was bad and you didn’t get a fair deal. No, the kid has a defective brain and has to be put on this drug. It’s absolutely criminal.

Let’s talk about bipolar disorder among kids. As one doctor said, that used to be so rare as to be almost nonexistent. Now we’re seeing it all over. Bipolar is exploding among kids. Well, partly you could say that we’re just slapping that label on kids more often; but in fact, there is something real going on. Here’s what’s happening. You take kids and put them on an antidepressant — which we never used to do — or you put them on a stimulant like Ritalin. Stimulants can cause mania; stimulants can cause psychosis.

SS: And antidepressants can also cause mania, as you pointed out.

RW: Exactly, so the kid ends up with a drug-induced manic or psychotic episode. Once they have that, the doctor at the emergency room doesn’t say, “Oh, he’s suffering from a drug-induced episode.” He says he’s bipolar.

SS: Then they give him a whole new drug for the mental disorder caused by the first drug.

RW: Yeah, they give him an antipsychotic drug; and now he’s on a cocktail of drugs, and he’s on a path to becoming disabled for life. That’s an example of how we’re absolutely making kids sick.

SS: It’s like society or their schools are trying to make them manageable and they end up putting them on a chemical roller coaster against their will.

RW: Absolutely.

SS: There’s an astonishing number of kids being given Ritalin to cure hyperactivity. But what 10-year-old boy in a confined school setting isn’t hyperactive? You write that the effect of Ritalin on the dopamine system is very similar to cocaine and amphetamines.

RW: Ritalin is methylphenidate. Now methylphenidate affects the brain in exactly the same way as cocaine. They both block a molecule that is involved in the reuptake of dopamine.

SS: So they both increase the dopamine levels in the brain?

RW: Exactly. And they do it with a similar degree of potency. So methylphenidate is very similar to cocaine. Now, one difference is whether you’re snorting it or if it’s in a pill. That partly changes how quickly it’s metabolized. But still, it basically affects the brain in the same way. Now, methylphenidate was used in research studies to deliberately stir psychosis in schizophrenics. Because they knew that you could take a person with a tendency towards psychosis, give them methylphenidate, and cause psychosis. We also knew that amphetamines, like methylphenidate, could cause psychosis in people who had never been psychotic before.

So think about this. We’re giving a drug to kids that is known to have the possibility of stirring psychosis. Now, the odd thing about methylphenidate and amphetamines is that, in kids, they sort of have a counterintuitive effect. What does speed do in adults? It makes them more jittery and hyperactive. For whatever reasons, in kids amphetamines will actually still their movements; it will actually keep them in their chairs and make them more focused. So you’ve got kids in boring schools. The boys are not paying attention and they’re diagnosed with ADHD and put on a drug that is known to stir psychosis. The next thing you know, a fair number of them are not doing well by the time they’re 15, 16, 17. Some of those kids talk about how when you’re on these drugs for the long term, you start feeling like a zombie; you don’t feel like yourself.

SS: Hollowed-out, blunted emotions. And this is being done to millions of kids.

RW: Millions of kids! Think about what we’re doing. We’re robbing kids of their right to be kids, their right to grow, their right to experience their full range of emotions, and their right to experience the world in its full hue of colors. That’s what growing up is, that’s what being alive is! And we’re robbing kids of their right to be. It’s so criminal. And we’re talking about millions of kids who have been affected this way. There are some colleges where something like 40 to 50 percent of the kids arrive with a psychiatric prescription.

SS: It looks like a huge social-control mechanism. Society gives kids Ritalin and antidepressants to subdue them and make them conform. On the one hand, it’s all about social control and conformity. But it also has a huge marketing payoff.

RW: You’re right, it creates customers for the drugs, and hopefully lifelong customers. That’s what they’re told, aren’t they? They’re told they are going to be on these drugs for life. And next thing they know, they’re on two or three or four drugs. It’s brilliant from the capitalist point of view. It does serve some social-control function. But you take a kid, and you turn them into a customer, and hopefully a lifelong customer. It’s brilliant.

We now spend more on antidepressants in this country than the Gross National Product of mid-sized countries like Jordan. It’s just amazing amounts of money. The amount of money we spend on psychiatric drugs in this country is more than the Gross National Product of two-thirds of the world’s countries. It’s just this incredibly lucrative paradigm of the mind that you can fix chemical imbalances in the brain with these drugs. It works so well from a capitalistic point of view for Eli Lilly. When Prozac came to market, Eli Lilly’s value on Wall Street, its capitalization, was around 2 billion dollars. By the year 2000, the time when Prozac was its number-one drug, its capitalization reached 80 billion dollars — a forty-fold increase.

So that’s what you really have to look at if you want to see why drug companies have pursued this vision with such determination. It brings billions of dollars in wealth in terms of increased stock prices to the owners and managers of those companies. It also benefits the psychiatric establishment that gets behind the drugs; they do well by this. There’s a lot of money flowing in the direction of those that will embrace this form of care. There’s advertisements that enrich the media. It’s all a big gravy train.

Unfortunately, the cost is dishonesty in our scientific literature, the corruption of the FDA, and the absolute harm done to children in this country drawn into this system, and an increase of 150,000 newly disabled people every year in the United States for the last 17 years. That’s an incredible record of harm done.

SS: Everyone gets rich — the drug companies, the psychiatrists, the researchers, the advertising agencies — and the clients get drugged out of their minds and damaged for life.

RW: And you know what’s interesting? No one says that the mental health of the American people is getting better. Instead, everyone says we have this increasing problem They blame it on the stresses of modern life or something like that, and they don’t want to look at the fact that we’re creating mental illness.

4,248 posted on 11/07/2009 3:52:37 PM PST by nw_arizona_granny ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/21813ht92/posts?page=1 [Survival,food,garden,crafts,and more)

[Remember Columbine and all the other big school shootings, as far as my memory goes, everyone of the shooters was on one of these drugs....
granny]

http://www.naturalnews.com/027425_drugs_drugs_violence.html

Orlando shooter, US army Fort Hood shooter both linked to psychiatric drugs
Saturday, November 07, 2009 by: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) US Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 13 people and wounded 30 others in a violent attack at a Texas Army base this past week. He reportedly opened fire at the Fort Hood army base without any particular reason or motivation. In fact, as a psychiatrist, he had counseled many other soldiers on how to cope with the consequences of extreme violence (losing limbs, mental anguish, etc.).

As an army psychiatrist, he was also allowed to prescribe powerful psychiatric drugs to both his patients and himself. Many psychiatrists self-medicate, and Hasan was extremely anxious about the possibility of being sent overseas by the army, according to statements from family members (Reuters, below). Although official confirmation will probably never be made, it seems altogether likely that Hasan was treating himself with powerful psychotropic medications.

The mainstream media, not surprisingly, has utterly failed to raise this question. But it’s being raised by independent media like Prison Planet (http://www.prisonplanet.com/was-for...), where writer Paul Joseph Watson says, “Psychiatrists have a history of ‘self-medication’ because of the easy access they have to psychotropic drugs. In almost every major mass shooting over the past two decades, since anti-depressant drugs became popular, the killer has been on SSRI’s – serotonin reuptake inhibitors.”

An informative article in The Examiner also asks the same question: Was Major Hasan on mind-altering prescription medications when he opened fire? (http://www.examiner.com/x-8358-Detr...).

Meanwhile, a study in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics reveals that 16% of psychiatrists self-medicate (http://www.cchrint.org/2009/11/05/w...).

Given all the psych drugs linked to such acts in previous shootings, such a link seems not only probably, but likely.

Orlando shooter confirmed on psych drugs
It’s been a busy week for violent, drug-induced outbursts in the USA. Orlando shooter Jason Rodriguez is now confirmed to have been on psychiatric medications when he went on a shooting spree in an Orlando office building last week, killing one person and wounding five others.

In a televised interview with Fox News, the former mother-in-law of Rodriguez goes on the record saying, “He was under medication ...for control of the brain.” That video segment is available here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_LJ...

Mind-altering medications made Rodriquez “paranoid,” she explains. (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933...)

This paranoia and acting out of violence against others is a classic side effect of SSRI drugs typically used to “treat” depression. These powerful, mind-altering medications have been linked to nearly every major shooting that has taken place in the United States over the last twenty years, including the Columbine, Colorado school shootings.

Listen to my hip-hop song, SSRIs - S.S.R.Lies, which explains more: http://www.naturalnews.com/SSRIs_S_...

Why the shootings will continue until the psych drugs are banned
What’s clear about both the Orlando shooting and the Fort Hood shooting is that there’s a psychiatric drug connection to both. Neither of these men was acting rationally. Something “flipped a switch” in their brains. That something was almost certainly a psychiatric drug.

Until we halt the chemical holocaust being perpetrated against our world by the psychiatric drugging industry, we will continue to see more of these violent, drug-induced shootings take place. Count on it. Psych drugs cause violence. And the more psych drugs are prescribed, the more violence we’ll see.

According to Medwatch statistics, 63,000 people in the U.S. have committed suicide while on antidepressant drugs (that’s more than ten times the number of Americans who have died from H1N1 swine flu, by the way). (http://www.naturalnews.com/022930_d...)

The mainstream media absolutely refuses to tell you the truth about the link between psychiatric drugs and violent killings, but it’s the obvious connection in nearly every single shooting that’s taken place in recent memory: The Virginia Tech shooting (http://www.naturalnews.com/021798.html), the Stephen Kazmierczak Illinois shooting (Stephen Kazmierczak), the Omaha mall shooting (http://www.naturalnews.com/022330.html), and so on.

In December, 2007, I made this public prediction:

“There will be more. I hate to be accurate about this grisly prediction, because I grieve for the families of those lost to pharmaceutically-induced violence, but the truth is that until we stop drugging our children with psychotropic drugs, the shootings are not going to stop.”

And indeed, there have been more. As long as these dangerous, mind-altering psychiatric drugs continue to be prescribed to patients, they will continue to drive people to violence. More innocent lives will be lost while Big Pharma pockets billions of dollars in profits from the very same drugs that are leading people to deadly violence.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (www.CCHR.org) is the leading group fighting this chemical holocaust. Check out the shocking videos on their website to learn more about the dangers of psychiatric medications.

Sources for this story include:
Reuters:
http://www.reuters.com/article/wtMo...

The Examiner:
http://www.examiner.com/x-19632-Sal...

CCHR:
http://www.cchr.org

4,249 posted on 11/07/2009 4:02:32 PM PST by nw_arizona_granny ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/21813ht92/posts?page=1 [Survival,food,garden,crafts,and more)

Laughing, and posting this last on the page post, so I can repost TAZ’s report on the Black Bean Chili on the next page.

Smile everybody, ready, set, go, SMILE!!!

4,250 posted on 11/07/2009 4:12:53 PM PST by nw_arizona_granny ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/21813ht92/posts?page=1 [Survival,food,garden,crafts,and more)

To: TASMANIANRED

Field report from Taz’s experimental kitchen.

I took one of the recipe’s you posted. Black bean chili.

I precooked and dried the black beans.. Many of them split but that just makes the chili thicker.

Used tomatoes, peppers and onions were dried from my garden this year.Corn was dried from frozen.

Substitued beef bullion for the broth.

The only item used that wasn’t dry was fresh chunked beef.

It was cooked in a cast iron dutch oven over an open camp fire.

I’m sure the ambiance helped but it was outstanding chili.

Cooking from dry is very much faster than cooking from raw.

The precooked dry black beans plumped up splendidly.. Good texture, with good flavor.

Giving it 4 thumbs up.<<<<

This sounds so good, it deserves a second posting, in case it gets lost and if this works it will be #1 on the new page.

Thank you for testing the recipe and sharing your results.

I am still adjusting my thoughts to drying beans after they are cooked, one of the many things that I must try.

It sounds delicious and nothing beats a campfire for improving food.

I still don’t consider normal cooking means to be very tasty and always saved my campfire bacon drippings for cooking with in the kitchen at home.

What else got cooked on that fire?

One of the foods that is still in my mind 35 years later, was a couple of parboiled potatoes, that had been split, butter and salt and pepper added, wrapped in tinfoil and put in the edge of the coals.

Common enough to most, but Bill and I had gone too far up the hill, chasing Maple Leaf Obsidian to the source, a lovely rock for jewelry and packed out too many pounds, for being so far from the campsite, out in the middle of the desert.

Mary’s daughter Mabel and her 10 year old daughter were with us, but had stayed closer to camp.

Mabel, had watched us and knew we were going to be tired and very hungry, so she met us with the potatoes, about half way.

We were starved.

4,251 posted on 11/07/2009 4:22:24 PM PST by nw_arizona_granny ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/21813ht92/posts?page=1 [Survival,food,garden,crafts,and more)

To: nw_arizona_granny; JustPiper

Hi there, Granny!

Here's a cut & paste message from the current Threat Matrix messagethread.

Threat Matrix: 2009 11/07/2009 5:38:05 PM PST · 1,469 of 1,470
JustPiper to hennie pennie

We had the best TM crew throughout the years. I miss Laura & Granny too. Mama is my sister from another Mister. Our investigations/research were the most searched on the internet. We built quite a good rep. Glad to know you pennie"

4,252 posted on 11/07/2009 6:02:29 PM PST by hennie pennie

http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/agentlist.asp

Bioterrorism Agents/Diseases

A to Z | By Category

* Anthrax (Bacillus anthracis)
* Arenaviruses

* Bacillus anthracis (anthrax)
* Botulism (Clostridium botulinum toxin)
* Brucella species (brucellosis)
* Brucellosis (Brucella species)
* Burkholderia mallei (glanders)
* Burkholderia pseudomallei (melioidosis)

* Chlamydia psittaci (psittacosis)
* Cholera (Vibrio cholerae)
* Clostridium botulinum toxin (botulism)
* Clostridium perfringens (Epsilon toxin)
* Coxiella burnetii (Q fever)

* Ebola virus hemorrhagic fever
* E. coli O157:H7 (Escherichia coli)
* Emerging infectious diseases such as Nipah virus and hantavirus
* Epsilon toxin of Clostridium perfringens
* Escherichia coli O157:H7 (E. coli)

* Food safety threats (e.g., Salmonella species, Escherichia coli O157:H7, Shigella)
* Francisella tularensis (tularemia)

* Glanders (Burkholderia mallei)

* Lassa fever

* Marburg virus hemorrhagic fever
* Melioidosis (Burkholderia pseudomallei)

* Plague (Yersinia pestis)
* Psittacosis (Chlamydia psittaci)

* Q fever (Coxiella burnetii)

* Ricin toxin from Ricinus communis (castor beans)
* Rickettsia prowazekii (typhus fever)

* Salmonella species (salmonellosis)
* Salmonella Typhi (typhoid fever)
* Salmonellosis (Salmonella species)
* Shigella (shigellosis)
* Shigellosis (Shigella)
* Smallpox (variola major)
* Staphylococcal enterotoxin B

* Tularemia (Francisella tularensis)
* Typhoid fever (Salmonella Typhi)
* Typhus fever (Rickettsia prowazekii)

* Variola major (smallpox)
* Vibrio cholerae (cholera)
* Viral encephalitis (alphaviruses [e.g., Venezuelan equine encephalitis, eastern equine encephalitis, western equine encephalitis])
* Viral hemorrhagic fevers (filoviruses [e.g., Ebola, Marburg] and arenaviruses [e.g., Lassa, Machupo])

* Water safety threats (e.g., Vibrio cholerae, Cryptosporidium parvum)

* Yersinia pestis (plague)

* Content source: National Center for Environmental Health (NCEH)/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), Coordinating Center for Environmental Health and Injury Prevention (CCEHIP)

4,253 posted on 11/07/2009 8:57:12 PM PST by nw_arizona_granny ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/21813ht92/posts?page=1 [Survival,food,garden,crafts,and more)

http://standeyo.com/News_Files/NBC/Bio.Bugs.Botulism.html

Biological Weapons —
Botulism

Clostridium botulinum is a group of bacteria, commonly found in soil. They grow best with little oxygen. The bacteria form spores which allows them to survive dormant until the right conditions come along for growth. There are 7 types of botulism but only 4 make humans sick.

The three main kinds of botulism are:

1) Foodborne botulism - caused by eating foods that contain botulism.

2) Wound botulism - caused by toxin produced from a wound infected with Clostridium botulinum.

3) Infant botulism - caused by eating spores of the bacteria, which then grow in the intestines and release toxin.

Though rare, all forms can be fatal and are considered medical emergencies. On average, 110 cases are reported in the U.S. yearly.

Terrorists have already attempted to use botulinum toxin as a bioweapon. Aerosols were dispersed at multiple sites in downtown Tokyo, Japan, and at US military installations in Japan on at least 3 occasions between 1990 and 1995 by the Aum Shinrikyo. These attacks failed, apparently because of faulty microbiological technique, deficient aerosol-generating equipment, or internal sabotage. The perpetrators obtained their C botulinum from soil that they had collected in northern Japan.
.

Symptoms

Double or blurred vision, drooping eyelids, slurred speech, difficulty swallowing, dry mouth, and muscle weakness. Infants with botulism appear lethargic, feed poorly, are constipated, and have a weak cry and poor muscle tone.

These are all symptoms of the muscle paralysis caused by the bacterial toxin. Untreated, symptoms may cause paralysis of arms, legs, trunk and respiratory muscles.

In foodborne botulism, symptoms generally begin 18 - 36 hours after eating a contaminated food, but can occur as early as 6 hours to 10 days.

How does it spread?

Ingestion, inhalation, or absorption through eyes or break in the skin can cause profound intoxication and death.

Aerosol released botulinum toxin could incapacitate or kill 10% of persons within 0.3 miles downwind or it could be show up in deliberately contaminated food.

Diagnosis Special tests performed at some state health department labs and the CDC are needed to confirm a diagnosis since it mimics other diseases.

Respiratory failure and paralysis may require a breathing machine for weeks plus intensive medical care. After several weeks, paralysis slowly improves. If diagnosed early, foodborne and wound botulism can be treated with an antitoxin, which can prevent symptoms from worsening. Antitoxin is not routinely given to infants. Instead induced vomiting or enemas are used. Wounds should be treated, usually surgically, to remove the source of the toxin-producing bacteria.

Treatment
Specifics on treatment can be found here

Vaccine
Along with state health depts., the CDC maintains intensive surveillance for botulism in the U.S.

Every case of Foodborne botulism is treated as a public health emergency. If antitoxin is needed, it can be quickly delivered to a physician anywhere in the country.

Skin should be tested for hypersensitivity before equine antitoxin is given.

Mortality
Botulism can result in death due to respiratory failure. In the last 50 years, patients who die from botulism have dropped from 50% to 8%.

Patients who survive this poisoning may be tired and shortness of breath for years. Long-term therapy may be needed.

Sources:

CDC; http://www.bt.cdc.gov/
Federation of American Scientists; http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/bw/agent.htm
CBS Bioterrorism Interactive; http://cbsnews.cbs.com/

This information may be used by you freely for noncommercial use with
my name and E-mail address attached.
Holly Deyo, E-mail: hollydeyo@standeyo.com
URL: http://standeyo.com/News_Files/NBC/Bio.Bugs.Botulism.html

4,254 posted on 11/07/2009 9:19:39 PM PST by nw_arizona_granny ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/21813ht92/posts?page=1 [Survival,food,garden,crafts,and more)

http://www.uic.edu/classes/osci/osci590/7_1Germ%20Warfare%20Biological%20Weapons.htm

7.1 Germ Warfare / Biological Weapons

I. WHAT ARE THEY?

There are two basic ingredients used in biological weapons:

* First are the living microorganisms such as the anthrax bacillus, yellow fever virus, or plague bacteria.
* Second are the toxins. The naturally occurring poisons that microorganisms produce. You know one of them from occasional poisoning episodes that hit the news from time to time: botulism. You should recall ergotism in a previous unit.

The targets of biological agents include soldiers, civilians, crops, and livestock. Biological weapons are lethal, ideal for surprise attack, and have tremendous psychological impact. We seem to have an almost primal fear of germ warfare. Above all, such weapons are exceedingly cheap. They are therefore very attractive to terrorists or belligerent nations.

.....

II. AREN’T BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS OUTLAWED?

Many nations, including the USSR and Iraq, signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention which committed the signers to not develop or use them. Rumors abound that many nations have them, including those weapons that we mentioned. Libya, Israel, China and Taiwan are often mentioned as nations with biological weapons. There are others. North Korea is suspected of having its own stockpile of smallpox viruses.

Has the United States used them? Rumors persist that it has. In 1971, several animal and plant diseases mysteriously appeared in Cuba. African swine fever broke out in two places. Blue mold devastated its tobacco crop. Cane smut struck the sugar crop. Some accused the CIA.

A rule of a thumb in warfare is this: it is better to disable enemy population than to kill it. It is far more expensive for the enemy to care for the sick than bury the dead. To cope with African swine fever, Cuba killed 500,000 hogs.

(My note: biologicals have been considered for dealing with the international drug trade. Britain and the United States joined in a study to develop a virulent fungus that destroys opium poppies, the raw material for heroin. See “Fungus to kill drug poppies under study” Chicago Tribune June 29, 1998.)

.....

III. A BRIEF HISTORY OF GERM WARFARE

continues

4,255 posted on 11/07/2009 9:21:39 PM PST by nw_arizona_granny ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/21813ht92/posts?page=1 [Survival,food,garden,crafts,and more)

http://www.medicinenet.com/bioterrorism/article.htm

* Bioterrorism Index
* Glossary

Bioterrorism

Medical Author: Edmond Hooker, MD, DrPH
Medical Editor: Melissa Conrad Stöppler, MD

* What is bioterrorism?
* What are the biological agents that can be utilized for bioterrorism?
* What are the sources for detailed information on bioterrorism?
* How can I prepare myself for a bioterrorism attack?
* What are the warning signs of a bioterrorism attack?
* What should I do if there has been a bioterrorism attack?
* How do I know if I have been exposed to a bioterrorism agent?
* Should I have some antibiotics on hand just in case I get exposed?

[A good site for information, with names you have seen before, but did not expect to see on a bio list.
granny]

4,256 posted on 11/07/2009 9:41:51 PM PST by nw_arizona_granny ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/21813ht92/posts?page=1 [Survival,food,garden,crafts,and more)

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache%3AmRoIUX960zoJ%3Aocw.jhsph.edu%2Fcourses%2FBiologicalAgentsOfWaterAndFoodborneBioterrorism%2FPDFs%2FWaterFoodTerror1.pdf+cdc+biological+weapons&hl=en&gl=us

This is the html version of the file http://ocw.jhsph.edu/courses/BiologicalAgentsOfWaterAndFoodborneBioterrorism/PDFs/WaterFoodTerror1.pdf.

Biological Agents of Water and Foodborne
Bioterrorism

Kellogg Schwab PhD
Johns Hopkins University

Objectives
Outline microbes as biological weapons
Response, exposure, transmission
Microbial characteristics of interest to perpetrators
Availability
Propagation
Stability
Dispersion
CDC biological classifications of bioterrorism microbes
Food and waterborne microbial threats
Microbial properties
Specific microorganisms

Part 1 of 5
Microbes as Biological Weapons

Page 5
Microbes as Biological Weapons

The microorganisms and toxins that could act as biological
weapons are naturally occurring.
The agents that could potentially be used as biological
weapons are diverse and widely distributed in nature and
include
viruses, bacteria, fungi, and protozoa
the toxins produced by many microbes
These microbes are found naturally in soils, waters, plants,
and animals.

Page 6
Infectious Diseases Cause Severe Morbidity and Mortality

Despite all the medical advances that enhance our abilities to
prevent and treat disease, infectious diseases remain the
primary cause of death in the world and are one of the
leading causes of death in the US.

There are over 50,000 cases of infectious diseases in the
United States each day.

Outbreaks of disease from pathogenic microorganisms pose a
threat to global security even without biological warfare or
bioterrorism.

Page 7
Biological Weapons are Living Microorganisms

An important feature that distinguishes biological weapons
from other weapons of mass destruction is that
microorganisms reproduce once inside a host.

It can take only a few hours to go from having 1
microorganism to millions of infectious agents.

In some cases it requires exposure to only a few of these
pathogens to initiate a deadly infection.

Page 8
Delay in Symptoms can Complicate the Response

Typically individuals don’t know they were exposed to an
infectious agent until days or weeks later when the disease
symptoms appear.

This means that the first responders to an attack with
biological weapons may be emergency room workers.

If the agent can be transmitted from person to person
through the air or by direct contact with body fluids these
health care workers can themselves become infected.

If the risk is apparent, steps, such as wearing masks and
gowns, can be taken to protect these first responders and to
limit the spread of infection.

But if the risk is not properly recognized the health care
workers and others may also become victims.

SARS is a classic example of this
Page 9
Biological Exposure Routes

Biological agents vary in how they are transmitted to humans
and how they enter the body.

Transmission of biological agents through the air (aerosol
transmission) is likely to impact the greatest number of
individuals, but transmission by other means—water, food,
insect vectors, etc.—may also be routes of exposure of
individuals to biological agents.

Page 10
Differences in Effects and Transmissibility

Among the viruses, bacteria, and fungi that may be used as
biological weapons, there are significant differences in their
effects and transmissibility.

Not all of the agents that may serve as potential biological
weapons are equally contagious.

They also differ greatly in the rates of morbidity (disease) that
occur following exposure and mortality (death) that occur as
a consequence of disease development.

This has a significant impact on the threat posed by each
specific biological agent and how we might defend against
them.

Page 11
Disease Outcomes

Exposure to biological agents can have various outcomes,
ranging from mild disease with few symptoms to severe
disease and high rates of mortality. Some diseases, like many
of the hemorrhagic fevers (Ebola, Marburg, etc.), can not be
prevented, except by avoiding exposure.

4,257 posted on 11/07/2009 10:06:34 PM PST by nw_arizona_granny ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/21813ht92/posts?page=1 [Survival,food,garden,crafts,and more)

http://www.sunshine-project.org/publications/bk/bk12.html

Emerging Technologies
Genetic Engineering and Biological Weapons

The Sunshine Project
Background Paper #12
November 2003

Contents

Summary

I Introduction

II Single Gene Transfer and Similar Genetic Engineering of BW Agents

III Emerging Technologies I: Novel infectious agents
Pathogenicity factors

IV Emerging Technologies II: Synthesis of biowarfare agents
Artificial poliovirus
Another route to smallpox
Recreating the Spanish flu

V Emerging Technologies III: New types of weapons
Food Weapons
Terminator Technology
Insect fighters

VI Ethnic specific biological weapons
Techniques to translate genetic sequence into a weapons effect
Ethnic specific genetic markers
Conclusions

VII Conclusions and recommendations

VIII References

Footnotes

Summary

continues......

4,258 posted on 11/07/2009 10:23:43 PM PST by nw_arizona_granny ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/21813ht92/posts?page=1 [Survival,food,garden,crafts,and more)

To: hennie pennie

Thanks for the message.

That was another time in a short life, there will never be enough hours for all I have planned.

4,259 posted on 11/07/2009 10:39:53 PM PST by nw_arizona_granny ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/21813ht92/posts?page=1 [Survival,food,garden,crafts,and more)

Salt Lake County’s urban farming initiative

As they sow, so shall they reap. With a progressive and expansive urban farming
initiative, Salt Lake County officials are wisely planting the seeds of community,
economy and healthful, sustainable living.

After getting the green light from the County Council in August, county staffers
identified dozens of sites that may prove suitable for agricultural use, everything
from tiny plots for public vegetable gardens to sprawling expanses suitable for
biofuels production projects.

Honey Bees at the White House

A new type of visitor came to the National Mall this year, flitting past monuments
and museums in favor of trees, flowers and plants. But this wasn’t just some horticultural
tour; no, this was work. Each day they were abuzz, gathering and pollinating before
returning home to modest quarters with tremendous security near Lafayette Park.

Meet the White House honeybee.

Michelle Obama to promote gardening on Sesame Street
U.S. first lady Michelle Obama is to kick off the 40th anniversary season of the
children’s TV show “Sesame Street” with a segment encouraging kids to plant gardens
and eat healthy food.

Obama, who is planting a fruit and vegetable garden on the grounds of the White
House, will appear in the November10 season debut of “Sesame Street” - the educational
show for kids that is broadcast in more than 120 countries around the world.

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All stories here.
City Farmer News [http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102813698328&s=1304&e=001-zoPoM1Dv-ZIHo8U3R604K1b1P6M16OoOxtUJdnHbV6b1lmJZ6-Y1gMBJOQfHSwQUZGWWmgq7jtbqQmpLIzt4h50nhgYOxhXwA3GTIJjaHqpu1bBL6KwOg==]
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Michael Levenston
City Farmer - Canada’s Office of Urban Agriculture

4,260 posted on 11/08/2009 12:13:39 AM PST by nw_arizona_granny ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/21813ht92/posts?page=1 [Survival,food,garden,crafts,and more)

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