Free Republic

Is there a bigger pig at the government trough than Stacey Abrams? After EPA chief Lee Zeldin uncovered a massive $2 billion cash haul earmarked for a coalition of five NGOs called Power Forward Communities, one of which was closely linked to Stacey Abrams, Abrams decided to sue the government to get "her" money back. No hiding from embarassment at the revelations of how pop-up NGOs were scarfing up government cash in a "gold brick" pork-barrel scheme in the wretched days after President Trump was re-elected, trying to grab as much cash as possible as they headed out the door....

Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal 🚨EX-USAID CHIEF SAMANTHA POWER’S NET WORTH SKYROCKETS—FROM $6.7M TO $30M ON A $180K SALARY Samantha Power, Biden’s ex-USAID chief, saw her wealth explode while earning just $180K per year. Where did the extra $23.3M come from? And all of this in just 3 years! USAID oversees billions in global funding—was she cashing in? The public deserves answers. Follow the money. Source: vBulletin, Inside Biden's Basement --- Elon Musk @elonmusk Replying to @amuse How did she accumulate wealth that is 100 times her after tax salary? --- Not a bad gig if you can get it. Her husband,...

House Republicans on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday ended the panel's Democrats' efforts to subpoena Elon Musk over his Department of Government Efficiency's (DOGE) latest moves regarding federal agencies and their workforce. Musk is considered the brains behind a recent buyout offer the White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent to federal employees last week, and sent some of his department's employees to several different agencies to tap into the Treasury Department and OPM, according to The Hill. DOGE staff also reviewed information from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) where some employees have been...

Let’s get this straight. Dr. Fauci’s NIAID and USAID handed over $41 million in U.S. taxpayer funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—the same lab now linked to Ben Hu, the likely Patient Zero of COVID-19. And the kicker? That funding ended right before the pandemic started. (source here) [embedded image] This isn’t a conspiracy theory—it’s all right there in FOIA-obtained documents exposing how EcoHealth Alliance acted as a middleman, shuffling money from the U.S. government to Chinese scientists working on gain-of-function experiments—the kind that make viruses deadlier and more transmissible. And where was all this happening? In a...

A single injection of a new, off-the-shelf stem cell therapy for knee osteoarthritis significantly improved pain and function for up to 12 months in 75% of participants involved in a clinical trial. The treatment also has the potential to halt the disease’s progression. In 2020, 7.6% of the global population had the painful degenerative condition osteoarthritis, an increase of 132.2% in total cases since 1990. It’s expected that by 2050, cases will have increased by 74.9% for knee, 48.6% for hand, and 78.6% for hip osteoarthritis. Current treatment includes pain relief, usually with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), exercise as tolerated,...

Fenoprofen, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), successfully alleviated pain and inflammation in a rodent model of endometriosis, according to researchers. They chose the drug after using a computer algorithm to evaluate nearly 1,300 existing compounds for their ability to reverse gene expression related to endometriosis disease. Analysis by researchers using publicly available data from people with endometriosis, returned 299 candidate compounds with seven considered top candidates. These drugs included commonly used treatments for the disease, such as aspirin, as well as those not yet studied for this purpose. The researchers chose fenoprofen for further evaluation because it returned the highest...

Ibuprofen works wonders for your headaches, joint pain, muscle aches, and menstrual cramps, so it's probably no surprise that it's the second most common over-the-counter (OTC) drug behind paracetamol (Tylenol), according to a 2023 article https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36876700/ in the European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences. You might get a prescription for ibuprofen if you have rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis to reduce the pain and swelling from these conditions. Ibuprofen might also be used for psoriatic arthritis, arthritis of the spine, and gouty arthritis. Like other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), ibuprofen works by blocking an enzyme that makes prostaglandins that cause...

Short-term use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) is associated with a first-time hospitalization for heart failure in patients with type 2 diabetes, according to research. This study investigated the association between short-term NSAID use and the risk of first-time heart failure hospitalization in a nationwide cohort of patients with type 2 diabetes. Information was collected on prescriptions for oral NSAIDs (celecoxib, diclofenac, ibuprofen, and naproxen) claimed prior to first-time heart failure hospitalization. Using a case-crossover design in which each patient acted as his or her own control, associations between short-term NSAID use and the risk of first-time heart failure hospitalization...

The five-year survival rate for someone with stage I colon cancer is 92%. But the five-year survival rate for someone with stage IV is just 12%. Beth McCaw-McKinney did everything right. "She ate healthy. She exercised. She always did her breast cancer examinations, pap smears. All that was on time," said Cathy McCaw-Engelman, Beth's sister. But then at age 53 she had her first colonoscopy. "They found a grapefruit-sized tumor in her colon. It was already in her lymph nodes and basically had spread," McCaw-Engelman said. Doctors gave Beth 3 months to live. She lived 3 years. Professor Annette Khaled...

A team of researchers from Denmark and France has found that taking regular doses of the pain reliever ibuprofen over a long period of time can lead to a disorder in men called compensated hypogonadism. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their study, which involved giving the drug to volunteers and monitoring their hormones and sperm production. To learn more about the possible impacts of the popular anti-inflammation drug Ibuprofen on male fertility when taken for long periods of time, the researchers asked 31 men between the ages of 18 and...

Doctors have been told to stop prescribing to patients with a heart condition or circulation problems one of the most commonly used anti-inflammatory drugs in the UK . Britain's drug watchdog said the painkiller diclofenac could significantly increase the risk of a heart attack or stroke for some patients. Millions of people take the drug for a range of conditions including arthritis, headaches, back pain and gout.

Aspirin-related drugs suggest a way towards more effective stem-cell transplants. Aspirin-like drugs could improve the success of stem-cell transplants for patients with blood or bone-marrow disorders, a study suggests. The compounds coax stem cells from bone marrow into the bloodstream where they can be harvested for use in transplantation — and they do so with fewer side effects than drugs now in use. For patients with blood disorders such as leukaemia, multiple myeloma or non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, transplantation of haematopoietic stem cells — precursor cells that reside in the bone marrow and give rise to all types of blood cell —...

Even short-term use of some painkillers could be dangerous for people who've had a heart attack, according to research published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. Researchers analyzed the duration of prescription non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) treatment and cardiovascular risk in a nationwide Danish cohort of patients with prior heart attack. They found the use of NSAIDs was associated with a 45 percent increased risk of death or recurrent heart attack within as little as one week of treatment, and a 55 percent increased risk if treatment extended to three months. The study was limited by its observational...

Men who take non- steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs three times a day for more than three months are 2.4 times more likely to have erectile dysfunction compared to men who do not take those drugs regularly, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published online in The Journal of Urology. While previous research showed a trend toward this same finding, this observational study used electronic health records, an automated pharmacy database and self- reported questionnaire data to examine NSAID use and ED in an ethnically diverse population of 80,966 men aged 45 to 69 years throughout California. 80,966 men aged 45 to...

When I strained a back muscle playing tennis not long ago, my doubles partner, who happened to be a doctor, pulled a tube of cream from her gym bag and told me to rub it on. It wasn’t Bengay or one of those instant ice gels. It was a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, like Advil or Motrin, in a cream applied to the skin. She raved about the stuff, which she buys over the counter when she goes to Europe, and lamented that it is so hard to find in the United States. In fact, Europeans have long been able to...

With flu vaccination season in full swing, research from the University of Rochester Medical Center cautions that use of many common pain killers – Advil, Tylenol, aspirin – at the time of injection may blunt the effect of the shot and have a negative effect on the immune system. Richard P. Phipps, Ph.D., professor of Environmental Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology, and of Pediatrics, has been studying this issue for years and recently presented his latest findings to an international conference on inflammatory diseases. (http://bioactivelipidsconf.wayne.edu/) “What we’ve been saying all along, and continue to stress, is that it’s probably not a...

Brigham Young University has accused pharmaceutical giant Pfizer of cheating the school out of profits and credit for the development of Celebrex, a blockbuster anti-inflammatory drug that has earned the company billions of dollars. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City against Pfizer and several of its predecessor companies after years of unsuccessful negotiations, BYU said. The suit seeks unspecified actual and punitive damages, but notes Celebrex sales have exceeded $20 billion. It also seeks corrections in 75 patents in order to credit Professor Daniel L. Simmons for his discoveries. The suit alleges Simmons...