FDA
FDA is looking for your help to determine source of illnesses and deaths related to dog jerky treats
dr. dolittle | October 22, 2013 Image from Vin News Service (http://news.vin.com/VINNews.aspx?articleId=22697)
The FDA is calling for help to determine the source of roughly 580 deaths and over 3600 illnesses (gastrointestinal and kidney) related to jerky treats that were made in China. The mystery dates back to 2007 when illnesses were first being reported by pet owners. Most of the victims have been dogs, although 10 cats have become sick from eating these treats as well.The FDA has tested treats for contaminants including chemical, microbiological/bacterial, antibiotics, metals, and pesticides in addition to DNA and…
lborkowski | October 14, 2013by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
A recent editorial in the New York Times, "Rolling the dice on food-borne illnesses," focused on just one of the many health dangers related to the federal government shutdown. The editorial reminded me of developments in Vermont almost forty years ago, when I was the State Health Commissioner.
Vermont's House Appropriations Committee was threatening to cut the Health Department's budget. After telling the Committee members that they would be hurting the Department’s ability to protect the public, including from foodborne and waterborne illness, I suggested…
oracknows | October 4, 2013No matter how much I try, it seems that I can't escape blogging about Stanislaw Burzynski. Regular readers here are familiar with Dr. Burzynski, the "maverick" cancer doctor (he's not an oncologist) who claims that peptides he's isolated from urine and now synthesizes in his lab and manufacturing facility are highly effective anticancer drugs, so much so that he claims much better results with deadly cancers like glioblastoma than conventional medicine can produce.
There are a number of reasons for my continually being sucked back into the Burzynski orbit, like a spaceship wandering too close…
oracknows | June 2, 2013Well, I've finally seen it, and it was even worse than I had feared. One might even say that watching it was like repeatedly smacking my head into a brick wall. It felt so good when it finally stopped.
I'm referring, of course, to Eric Merola's latest cinematic "effort. Ever since it was revealed that ric Merola's planned to make a sequel to his 2010 propaganda "documentary" about Stanislaw Burzynski, Burzynski The Movie: Cancer Is Serious Business, whose rank stupidity provided me with copious blogging material, I've finally actually seen the finished product, such as it is. Of course,…
oracknows | May 8, 2013I've been very, very critical of a self-proclaimed cancer doctor named Stanislaw Burzynski, who is not an oncologist but somehow has managed over the last 36 years to treat patients with unapproved cancer drugs, list dozens of phase 2 clinical trials in ClinicalTrials.gov but never publish a completed one (at least to this date), and have his patients pay up up to several hundred thousand dollars for the privilege of being treated on one of his clinical trials. Meanwhile, the Burzynski Clinic and Burzynski Research Institute flout the regulations protecting human subjects in research. Even…
oracknows | March 26, 2013Here we go again.
Every time I think I can get away from this topic for a while, I get sucked back in. Indeed, it seems that hardly a week can go by when I don't find myself pulled inexorably back to this horrible, horrible clinic and what I consider to be the abuses of science and clinical trials that go on there on a daily basis. Whether it be the patients who are offered false hope at the cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in the form of a chemotherapeutic drug known as antineoplastons that, contrary to what it is claimed, is not "non-toxic," "natural," or even particularly…
oracknows | March 13, 2013Film producer Eric Merola seems to think that there is a conspiracy of skeptics (whom he calls The Skeptics) hell bent on harassing his hero, Brave Maverick Doctor Stanislaw Burzynski. According to his latest film Burzynski: Cancer Is A Serious Business, Part 2 (henceforth referred to as Burzynski II, to distinguish it from Merola's first Burzynski movie, to which I will refer as Burzynski I), there is a shadowy cabal of Skeptics out there just waiting to swoop down on any Burzynski supporter who has the temerity to Tweet support for him, any cancer patient being treated by Burzynski who…
oracknows | February 8, 2013Earlier this week, there was a very bad, very credulous story was broadcast. Now, I realize that this is not an uncommon occurrence. Indeed, I'm sure that this sort of thing happens pretty much every day somewhere in the country and even on national media, but on this particular occasion the story was about a man who has become a frequent topic of this blog, namely Stanislaw Burzynski. Burzynski, as you recall, is the Polish physician who runs a cancer clinic in Houston that attracts desperate patients with advanced cancer from all over the world to spend huge sums of money for his treatment…
oracknows | January 28, 2013The weekend was busy, and I was working on grants, which meant that I could only come up with one post of Orac-style length and depth. Sadly, it wasn't for this blog. Fortunately, C0nc0rdance came to the rescue with a must-watch video about our old friend Stanislaw Burzynski. He's the guy who claims to treat cancer more successfully than conventional medicine—and not by a little—using chemicals he calles "antineoplastons," which he originally isolated from urine but now synthesizes in a laboratory. More recently, he's been claiming to deliver "personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy" that…
oracknows | November 7, 2012I've been writing about Stanislaw Burzynski again, just yesterday having mentioned a warning letter that the Burzynski Clinic received from the FDA last month. Given Dr. Burzynski's history of promoting a highly dubious cancer therapy that he calls antineoplastons and administering them to patients under the guise of clinical trials for which he charges patients huge sums of money and of also selling an equally dubious form of "personalized gene targeted cancer therapy" that I've referred to as "personalized cancer therapy for dummies," I took a very dim view of his having received yet…
lborkowski | October 9, 2012This post is part of The Pump Handle’s new “Public Health Classics” series exploring some of the classic studies and reports that have shaped the field of public health. Links to past posts in the series are available here. If you have a favorite Public Health Classic to recommend, let us know in the comments. And if you’re interested in contributing a post to the series, email us at thepumphandle@gmail.com (send us a link to the report or study along with a sentence or two about what you find most interesting or important about it).
By Dick Clapp
Between 1940 and 1971, a synthetic form of…
oracknows | September 26, 2012There's an oft-quoted saying that's become a bit of a cliché among skeptics that goes something like this: There are two kinds of medicine: medicine that's been proven scientifically to work, and medicine that hasn't. This is then often followed up with a rhetorical question and its answer: What do call "alternative medicine" that's been proven to work? Medicine. Of course, being the kind of guy that I am, I have to make it a bit more complicated than that while driving home in essence the same message. In my hands, the way this argument goes is that the whole concept of "alternative"…
oracknows | August 15, 2012It's been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.
Well, not really, although it has been a while since I've discussed Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski. Specifically, I last dedicated a post to him following the death of one of his famous patients, Billie Bainbridge, who incidentally had become famous because her family had managed to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds with the help of some U.K. celebrities. Burzynski, as regular readers will recall, became a frequent topic on this blog last fall after one of his lackeys decided to issue vacuous legal threats…
oracknows | July 17, 2012Things are getting back to normal here at Casa Orac. it's always a come down after going to TAM and being able to mingle, argue, and party with people who share my skeptical world view. Yesterday was back to reality, though, at least as much as jet lag and sleep deprivation allowed. Fortunately, Monday is a lab day, and I don't have an scheduled patient care responsibilities, and now I'm pretty much back to normal. Even so, I can't do epics like yesterday's post every day even under the best circumstances; so today I'll take a look at a little wafer thin mint to cleanse the palate.
I've…
lborkowski | April 13, 2012Yesterday, the FDA announced a new program that has the potential to slash the routine use of antibiotics by livestock producers. The routine administration of antibiotics to livestock with no signs of sickness helps animals grow more quickly, but it's also a significant contributor to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. An estimated 70% of the antibiotics sold in the US are given to non-human animals, and most of them are the same drugs that humans rely on to treat our illnesses.
Gardiner Harris's New York Times article about FDA's announcement bears the exciting (to me, anyway)…
egrossman | April 11, 2012By Elizabeth Grossman
While the US Supreme Court was debating the Affordable Care Act, the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee Health Subcommittee held a hearing to examine the current federal oversight of cosmetics and personal care product safety. The hearing revealed that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal agency that oversees the more than eight billion such products now sold annually in the US, knows astonishingly little about these products' ingredients. This data gap - perhaps better described as a data chasm - is compounded by the inadequacy…
denialism | March 9, 2012The safety of soda has been in the news a lot lately. The news even seems bad for diet coke, which hits close to home for me given my diet coke addiction. The worst seems to be this correlative study proposing a link between diet sodas and stroke risk:
The study, which followed more than 2,500 New Yorkers for nine or more years, found that people who drank diet soda every day had a 61 percent higher risk of vascular events, including stroke and heart attack, than those who completely eschewed the diet drinks, according to researchers who presented their results today at the American Stroke…
lborkowski | December 7, 2011During the George W. Bush Administration, one of the prime examples of politics trumping science was the FDA's refusal to approve the emergency contraceptive Plan B (levonorgestrel) for over-the-counter sale without age restrictions. Now, during the Barack Obama Administration, history seems to be repeating itself.
Emergency contraceptives like Plan B can dramatically reduce the risk of an unintended pregnancy if taken within 72 hours after unprotected intercourse, but their efficacy wanes the longer a woman has to wait to take the drug. If a woman has to wait to see a doctor to get a…
lborkowski | June 2, 2011In Germany, 17 people have died and more than 1,500 sickened by a particularly virulent strain of E. coli. Der Spiegel explains that this rare E. coli serotype, O104:H4, is especially virulent; after infection by as few as 100 bacteria, many patients develop hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can result in kidney failure and even death. Cucumbers imported from Spain were initially blamed, although it turns out that the cucumbers' strain of E. coli is not the one implicated in the outbreak. Investigators are racing to identify the source of the infections while hospitals care for those who've…
sastyk | May 9, 2011What do you get when you cross Green, as in Green Markets - those emergent farmer's and craftspeople's markets that have given life to local food - with Black or Grey Markets - ie, illegal sales? Khaki is the color you get, and you get what I call "Khaki Markets" - the growing trend towards producing food, toiletries and other regulated substances outside of regulation. It is a hugely growing trend, from unlicensed sale of everything from produce to herbs to illegal raw milk sales to gourmet restaurants operating out of old school buses and people's apartments. Indeed, there are whole "…