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Two people in New Mexico died recently after taking ivermectin, a drug typically used to treat livestock for parasites which has not been recommended to fight COVID-19, health officials announced last week. The two people, who were not identified, died after being hospitalized with ivermectin toxicity, Dr. David Scrase, acting cabinet secretary of the New Mexico Department of Health, said Wednesday. The patients included one who was dealing with a serious COVID-19 infection that required them to be on a ventilator and on dialysis. “The ivermectin was basically taken in lieu of or instead of effective treatments,” Scrase said. “It’s...

Woke activists often ruin their own causes with “narcissism” and “self-righteous toxicity,” a left-wing UK think tank said Monday. The Fabian Society, a “democratically governed socialist society” founded in 1884, warned in a pamphlet published Monday that petty infighting often gets in the way of progressives winning what it deems “culture wars.” SNIP Instead of winning support, that often leaves “the watching audience … alienated and confused by jargon-filled debates.”

Many commercial baby foods "are tainted with significant levels of toxic heavy metals," a report released Thursday by a House subcommittee said, raising concerns over the safety of the products industry wide. According to the staff report by the House subcommittee on economic and consumer policy, leading brands of U.S. baby foods contain dangerous levels of inorganic arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury, heavy metals that even at low levels pose particular risk to babies and children, both the U.S. Federal Drug Administration and the World Health Organization have said. The report was based on internal documents and test results voluntarily...

The spread of the pandemic disease COVID-19 caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has now reached almost every country of the world, with over 3.11 million cases and over 217,000 deaths as of April 29, 2020. Clinical features of severe COVID-19 Most patients have mild or asymptomatic disease, but 20% or so of patients have more severe disease. Overall, critical or very severe disease occurs in about 5% of patients. These patients have cardiac arrhythmias, acute kidney disease, pulmonary edema, septic shock, and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Other vital organs are also affected in some...

Introduction: The first-line therapy for the intermittent preventive treatment of malaria in pregnancy (IPTp) is sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP). There is an urgent need to identify safe, well-tolerated and efficacious alternatives to SP due to widespread Plasmodium falciparum resistance. Combination therapy using azithromycin and chloroquine is one possibility that has demonstrated adequate parasitological response > 95% in clinical trials of non-pregnant adults in sub-Saharan Africa and where IPTp is a government policy in 33 countries. Areas covered: Key safety, tolerability and efficacy data are presented for azithromycin and chloroquine, alone and/or in combination, when used to prevent and/or treat P. falciparum, P....

Last week, I discovered Frank Schnell when he wrote a comment on formaldehyde and said it was not a cancer-causing agent and that the EPA had lied about it. His comment was on an American Council on Science and Health posting by Josh Bloom, Ph.D. (organic chemistry), with a 20-year history of pharmaceutical research. Bloom busied himself in the post eviscerating a scare-monger on formaldehyde from the enviro-fanatic group National Resources Defense Council, and did a good job, but in the third or fourth comment, I saw a gem – a brief but insightful discussion by a man who described...

Professor Chrisopher Exley of Keele University claims that aluminium present in everyday items like cosmetics and food may be building up in the brain and causing Alzheimer's disease Aluminium poisoning may be fuelling Alzheimer’s disease, a leading professor has claimed.Professor Chrisopher Exley, of Keele University, said that exposure to the metal causes deposits in the human brain which can exacerbate other problems...Aluminium, he argues, is now added to or used in almost everything we eat, drink, inject or absorb. The metal is abundant in the Earth’s crust and is naturally absorbed from the soil by plants and foodstuffs. But aluminium...

A team of researchers in Germany has brought some good news to the debate on nano-material safety. The team took four materials containing nanoparticles or nanotubes and subjected them to high speed sanding, gentle abrasion and UV radiation, and found that the resulting dust was no finer than that from conventional materials. What's more, rats exposed to the fine dust fared no worse whether the material contained nano-components or not.With an eye on likely consumer exposure, Wendel Wohlleben and his colleagues at German chemical group BASF, in Ludwigshafen, studied two thermoplastic materials - polyoxymethylene (POM) and polyamide - as well...

AP IMPACT: Toxic metal in kids' jewelry from China By JUSTIN PRITCHARD, Associated Press Writer Sunday, January 10, 2010 at 11:22 a.m. LOS ANGELES — Barred from using lead in children's jewelry because of its toxicity, some Chinese manufacturers have been substituting the more dangerous heavy metal cadmium in sparkling charm bracelets and shiny pendants being sold throughout the United States, an Associated Press investigation shows. The most contaminated piece analyzed in lab testing performed for the AP contained a startling 91 percent cadmium by weight. The cadmium content of other contaminated trinkets, all purchased at national and regional chains...

Carbon nanotubes are increasingly being used in everyday products such as sporting equipment, biomedical devices and aeroplanes. But questions remain as to how safe these nanotubes really are. A main factor in nanotube toxicity are the metal contaminants that remain from manufacture, which are typically one to ten per cent by weight, say Martin Pumera and Yuji Miyahara at the National Institute for Materials Science, Ibaraki, Japan. 'Carbon nanotubes are often viewed as homogenous materials, which is of course incorrect - they often contain impurities which are not even listed by the manufacturers,'  says Pumera.  The pair have used an electrochemical...

We won! That is, the forces of science-based public health policy seem to have won -- if not the war, at least a major battle. At long last, federal risk assessors and regulators have come around to the view that administering chemicals to rodents in super-high doses does not reliably predict human risk -- of cancer, or anything else -- and that a better method needs to be employed, if we are to avoid more unnecessary bans, anti-chemical media hysteria, and activist crusades. High dose animal tests on one rodent species don't reliably predict cancer risk in another rodent type,...

"The main reason behind the rising number of cancer cases is that pollution of the environment, water and air is getting worse by day," the paper quoted Chen Zhizhou, a cancer expert at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, as saying.

Of course, the Supreme Court decision has very little to do with wether or not pot is dangerous or helpful as medicine. It basically comes down to the question: Can the federal government tell the states which chemicals they have to ban? And yes, we fought a Civil War so that the federal government could tell the states exactly what to do - regardless of logic or local democracy. So last week the Supreme Court upheld Washington DC's unquestioned authority to create intrusive and illogical laws that are based on prejudiced perceptions above scientific reality. I can't really find any...

SEATTLE (AP) - The Food and Drug Administration identified the substance that killed some dairy cows this month as a chromium compound, and a newspaper reported it contained chromium 6, the chemical investigated by activist Erin Brockovich. The FDA news release Wednesday did not say how the compound - a tacky, reddish-brown substance - might have gotten on the cattle. "It's not something we use in the dairy industry," said Jay Gordon, executive director for the state Dairy Federation. Ten cows became sick and three died after Enumclaw farmer John Koopman found the substance on them June 6. Their backs...

Buckyballs, a spherical form of carbon discovered in 1985 and an important material in the new field of nanotechnology, can cause extensive brain damage in fish, according to research presented yesterday at a national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim, Calif. Eva Oberdörster, an environmental toxicologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said the buckyballs also altered the behavior of genes in liver cells of the juvenile largemouth bass she studied. Buckyballs are part of a group of materials called fullerenes for their structural resemblance to the geodesic domes designed by Buckminster Fuller. Synthetically produced buckyballs, along with...