Commonplace Corporate Genetic Testing of Employees Harbingers Back to Sci-Fi Flick GATTACA

""In the 1997 science fiction film GATTACA, society is dominated by a system of eugenics, where potential children are conceived through genetic manipulation. The main character, Vincent Freeman, is conceived outside the eugenics system and fights to overcome genetic discrimination in a society that engineers humans to possess the best hereditary traits of their parents.

Nearly 20 years after the film debuted, corporations today are starting to head in the same direction as GATTACA. Eugenics programs could be the way of the future as employers start separating acceptable employees from genetic "invalids" using new genetic testing procedures.

In fact, corporations are looking to new genetic testing programs to see if they can predict the probability of disease in future employees. The technology is said to help companies avoid hiring employees who take extra sick time and is supposed to help the companies cut down health expenses altogether.

Alternatively, the technology could be used to predict when an employee is diagnosed with heart disease or diabetes before the conditions develop. In this way, wellness programs can be adapted to help companies coach employees into nutrition and exercise prevention strategies before the conditions show up.

Important questions concerning the validity and ethics of genetic testing

However well intentioned, could these genetic testing programs actually be the beginning of eugenics programs where valid human workers are separated from "invalids" as seen in the movie GATTACA?

Is genetic testing even a legitimate model for predicting metabolic conditions like diabetes and heart disease anyway?

Since genes are influenced by so many environmental factors throughout one's life, how can one's DNA at birth or at any time during their life be the ultimate deciding factor for their disease risk factor the rest of their life?

Shouldn't wellness programs look at environmental exposures and employee habits before they rely on genetic testing as the excuse for the health problems?

How can we rely on the validity and wherewithal of genetic testing alone if the average infant's genes are influenced by multiple injections of toxins like mercury preservative and aluminum adjuvant from vaccines?

If the study of epigenetics shows that these toxic elements influence a person's DNA, then how can we blame heredity on any kind of disease that shows up in a person's life?

Six large companies about to begin genetic testing of employees

Genetic testing of employees has other hurdles to cross as well. Will employees want to share sensitive heredity and health information with their employer? Everyone has a right to their own privacy. Will privacy be neglected as medical research prepares the population for soft core eugenics programs?

Health insurer Aetna and Newtopia from Canada are already taking strides to create personalized health improvement programs that require physicals and blood tests to determine an employee's risk for certain metabolic syndromes. While the programs aim to eliminate heart disease, stroke and diabetes, they are now incorporating genetic testing into the mix. The tests attempt to analyze bands of genes that may express an employee's likelihood to eat compulsively or whether their body is able to process carbohydrates or fats.

Is genetic testing useful and helpful for individuals or is it just a way to micromanage who is worthy to work in a perfect society and who is not fit or "invalid?"""

http://www.naturalnews.com/049690_genetic_testing_disease_prevention_corporations.html

Mass Animal Deaths Continue as Humans Face Anxieties in Wake of Global Catastrophes

""At first light on June 4, 2013, Steve Fradkin, a National Park Service ecologist, led a small team down a gravel strand called Beach 4 on Washington’s Olympic coast. The group’s destination was a rocky bench known—fatefully, it would turn out—as Starfish Point. There it would carry out an annual count of intertidal life forms as part of a long-term survey of the Pacific shore. Conditions were perfect, the sea calm beneath a blue sky dotted with cotton-ball clouds.

The day’s beauty ended at Starfish Point. “It was a horror show,” Fradkin told me. Instead of the usual spangling of purple, orange, and brick-red on the rocks, many of the starfish, which are known to biologists as sea stars, were contorted, marke­d with white lesions, or seemingly melting into goo. “They were missing arms,” Fradkin said, “and there were even instances of arms walking around by themselves.”

The team’s observations are considered the first official record of an ongoing outbreak of a sea-star wasting disease that has killed millions of starfish from Baja California to southern Alaska, typically wiping out more than ninety per cent of each population it strikes. It’s the greatest wildlife mass-mortality event, or “die-off,” of the present day.

Mass-mortality events are sudden, unusual crashes in a population. On the spectrum of death—mortality’s rainbow, if you will—they fill the space between the cool regularity of background death rates and the hot flare of species burning out into extinction. If you think that you are hearing about them more often these days, you’re probably right. (Elizabeth Kolbert described frog and bat die-offs in a 2009 article; her subsequent book won a Pulitzer Prize this week.) Even mass-mortality experts struggle to parse whether we’re witnessing a genuine epidemic (more properly, an epizootic) of these events. They have also raised another possibility: that we are in the throes of what one researcher called an “epidemic of awareness” of spooky wildlife deaths.

Die-off reports are fertile ground for latter-day anxieties. The events they describe tend to elude explanation, encouraging the notion that our private theories about why they happen are as legitimate as those of the baffled scientists. Of course, mass death also looks like seriously bad news. While we are bombarded with stories of environmental doom and gloom, many of the problems are effectively invisible. It’s mainly mathematical models, for example, that tell us an extinction crisis is underway, mostly involving little-known species in little-known places. In an atmosphere of pervasive human guilt, if not eco-grief, it is easy to assume that wildlife mass-mortality events are cinematically graphic manifestations—melting starfish, birds falling from the sky—of the powerful foundational forces that drive more abstract challenges such as climate change.

The Internet has offered a wellspring of speculation about mass wildlife deaths. A case in point: more than four thousand red-winged blackbirds are found dead on New Year’s Day, 2011, in Beebe, Arkansas. As the story spreads, news of other die-offs is reported from around the world. Dead jackdaws in Sweden. Dead velvet swimming crabs in the U.K. More dead blackbirds in Louisiana. Dead snapper in New Zealand (“many with their eyes missing”). Five days after the initial event, a Washington Post blogger dubs it “the Aflockalypse.” The name sticks, and so does the implication. The Web is soon abuzz with commentators linking these occurrences to end-is-near prophecies, secret government experiments, and the threat of ecological collapse. The National Wildlife Health Center ultimately diagnoses the probable cause of the die-off as avian panic, most likely triggered by loud noises—possibly fireworks—too close to the birds’ nighttime roost. Of course, nobody can say for sure.

Wildlife die-offs are an ancient phenomenon. One fossil site in Chile revealed recurring mass marine-mammal deaths, most likely from toxic algae blooms, dating back at least nine million years. Aristotle, in his “Historia Animalium,” in the fourth century B.C., remarked on mass dolphin strandings as simply something that the animals were known to do “at times.” The earliest written record in American history, from 1542, by the Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, appears to indicate that Native Americans on Tampa Bay, in Florida, understood fish die-offs—which still occur in the area today—as typical of certain seasons.

At least in some quarters, the sudden death of large numbers of wild animals has been read as a dire message to humanity: scientists have pointed out that the first biblical plague of Egypt, a fish die-off in a blood-red Nile, is an apt description of the effects of the acidification of the river’s water. Yet the widespread interpretation of such events as signs, whether ecological or divine, that humankind’s abuse of the planet has gone too far appears to be relatively new.

Even oddball mortalities of the type that trigger apocalyptic anxiety today don’t appear to cause much stir in the historical record. In 1884, hundreds of tons of dead fish bellied up in the lakes that surround Madison, Wisconsin, requiring daily burials by a crew of up to thirty-eight men with horse teams. During the “great bird shower” of 1904 in Minnesota and Iowa, millions of sparrow-like Lapland longspurs fell from the night sky, most of them dead but some hitting the ground as snowballs that then “hatched” live birds in the morning sun. Detailed reports of both events exist; they document public curiosity and conjecture, but very little sense that these die-offs represented any judgment on society.

Even thirty years ago, the public response to an unusually extreme mass-mortality event wasn’t particularly fraught. In 1983, long-spined sea urchins, then a common Caribbean species, began to waste away; their bony casings soon littered shorelines from Panama to Florida. The species had been abundant for a long time, possibly hundreds of thousands of years, but within thirteen months its population had declined by ninety-eight per cent. Even today, the urchins number not much more than ten per cent of their former plenitude. Haris Lessios, a senior staff scientist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, in Panama, studied the urchin crash from the outset. He recalls little news coverage—indeed, the New York Times reported on the die-off only once, a year after it began—and no public interest beyond local residents, who were happy not to contend any longer with the urchins’ painful sting. “I don’t think anyone was particularly worried,” Lessios told me. “I wasn’t. I thought that within a few years things would be back to normal.”

Like the urchin die-off, the 2013 sea-star-wasting-disease outbreak had a terrible impact over an enormous geographic range. By contrast, however, references to melting starfish and their detached zombie limbs appeared everywhere from National Geographic to Fox News to the End Times Prophecy. Starfish are a beloved ocean icon, and the public reaction was twofold: expressions of sadness, often accompanied by offers of help (observations by “citizen scientists” contributed to what is probably the largest data set ever assembled about a marine-animal disease outbreak), and generalized concern that human beings must be responsible—and might be next.

Pete Raimondi, a University of California, Santa Cruz, marine biologist who is the principal investigator with a research group studying the event, said that, after the news broke, he responded to hundreds of reporters and “volumes and volumes” of calls, e-mails, blog posts, and personal contacts from citizens. “That’s the highest level of anxiety I’ve ever seen,” Raimondi said. “People were not only worried about the environment, they were worried about themselves.” Online, speculation about the cause of the die-off soon focussed on radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant, which had been badly damaged by the tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. Raimondi recalled a phone call in which a fearful soon-to-be father asked whether he should immediately move his family away from the West Coast. It was one of many similarly heartfelt calls. Researchers have found no evidence of a link between the ongoing Fukushima disaster and the starfish die-off, Raimondi said—”very massive sampling” indicates that the outbreak began before waterborne radiation reached the coast. Many members of the public remain unconvinced.

Broadly speaking, however, the gap between the public perception of die-offs and the scientific interpretation is not so wide. Until recently, most biologists tended to look at mass-mortality events as isolated incidents with case-specific causes. As a result, it has been the convention among major media sources to present die-offs as at once mysterious and alarming, but also ordinary and even natural. The pattern is not unlike telling ghost stories to children while scolding them for being afraid. Several disquieting tales have already made the 2015 news cycle, most notably hundreds of dying sea-lion pups that began turning up on California beaches in January, and two thousand snow geese that dropped out of the sky to die in Idaho in March. Such phenomena really are relatively commonplace. At the time of this writing, the National Wildlife Health Center had recorded fifty-six mass-mortality events in the U.S. so far this year, among them the sudden deaths of fifty black vultures in Ascension Parish, Louisiana; thirteen hundred waterfowl in Humboldt County, California; and two thousand bats in Pierce County, Wisconsin.

Yet recent research suggests that the perception of wildlife die-offs as more frequent and alarming than ever might have some basis in fact. In January, the first study ever to attempt to track trends in mass-mortality events was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; the authors found that die-offs appear to be increasing in both number and magnitude, even after attempting to correct statistically for the fact that mass deaths are more likely to be documented today than they were in the past. Bird die-offs, for example, have historically been among the best represented in the scientific literature. The study’s authors had expected that an increase in the reporting of such events would add a larger number of less dramatic cases—in which fewer birds die—to the over-all data set, bringing down the average number of deaths per occurrence. Instead, they found the opposite. The typical number of bird deaths per reported die-off has risen, from about a hundred in the nineteen-forties to some ten thousand today. The over-all number of bird die-offs also seems to have increased. “That paper supports a lot of what many of us have been suspecting,” Jonathan Sleeman, a wildlife epidemiologist who heads the National Wildlife Health Center, said. “I do think we’re seeing more catastrophic events.""

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/on-animal-deaths-and-human-anxieties

New Mysterious Mutation of Ebola in Nigeria, or a More Lethal Virus Yet Undiscovered?

""A “mysterious” disease that kills patients within 24 hours has claimed at least 18 lives in a south-eastern Nigerian town, the government said.

“Twenty-three people were affected and 18 deaths were recorded,” the Ondo state health commissioner, Dayo Adeyanju, said on Saturday.

The government spokesman for the state, Kayode Akinmade, earlier gave a toll of 17 dead.

“Seventeen people have died of the mysterious disease since it broke out early this week in Ode-Irele town,” Akinmade told AFP by telephone.

The disease, whose symptoms include headache, weight loss, blurred vision and loss of consciousness, killed the victims within a day of falling ill, he said.

Laboratory tests have so far ruled out Ebola or any other virus, Akinmade said.

The World Health Organisation meanwhile said it had information on 14 cases with at least 12 dead.

“Common symptoms were sudden blurred vision, headache, loss of consciousness followed by death, occurring within 24 hours,” WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told AFP by email, adding that an investigation was ongoing.

Another WHO spokesman, Gregory Hartl, said that according to a preliminary report, all those affected began showing symptoms between 13 and 15 April.

Akinmade said health officials and experts from the government and aid agencies, as well as WHO epidemiologists, had arrived in Ode-Irele to search for answers.""

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/19/mysterious-disease-kills-18-in-nigeria

Healthy Vitality Starts with the Foods You Grow and Purchase in Your Supermarkets and Staying Away From Food Additives

""A class of food additives used in nearly all processed foods may be partially to blame for inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) such as Crohn's disease, and may also lead to obesity and diabetes, according to a study conducted by researchers from Cornell University, Emory University, Georgia State University and Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and published in the journal Nature on February 25.

The study was funded by the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America and the National Institutes of Health.

The researchers found that emulsifiers, detergent-like additives used to improve the texture of food and lengthen its shelf life, alter the composition of the gut's microbiota. This change leads to an increase in inflammation that has been linked with various health conditions.

"These results ... suggest that the broad use of emulsifying agents might be contributing to an increased societal incidence of obesity/metabolic syndrome and other chronic inflammatory diseases," the researchers wrote.

The importance of gut bacteria

The human gut is home to roughly 100 trillion bacteria of a wide variety of different species, collectively known as the microbiota or microbiome. The microbiome is known to play a key role in metabolism and immune function, and prior studies have shown that a disturbed microbiome could play a role in certain chronic inflammatory diseases. Studies have also shown that people who suffer from both IBD and metabolic syndrome have abnormal microbiota.

"A key feature of these modern plagues is alteration of the gut microbiota in a manner that promotes inflammation," said researcher Andrew T. Gewirtz.

Metabolic syndrome is a group of symptoms (such as central obesity and high fasting blood sugar) associated with an increased risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and liver disease. It has been linked with high levels of systemic inflammation. IBD, which includes Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, is a chronic and often debilitating inflammation of the digestive tract that can have serious health consequences. Both conditions have increased in prevalence dramatically since the middle of the 20th century.

"The dramatic increase in these diseases has occurred despite consistent human genetics, suggesting a pivotal role for an environmental factor," researcher Benoit Chassaing said. "Food interacts intimately with the microbiota so we considered what modern additions to the food supply might possibly make gut bacteria more pro-inflammatory."

Disrupted bacteria actually produce overeating

The addition of emulsifiers to foods roughly corresponded with the increase in both conditions. In addition, prior studies have shown that, by dissolving the mucus layer that covers the intestinal wall, emulsifiers can allow gut bacteria access to the epithelial cells lining the intestine - an area that they are normally kept out of. This bacterial migration could in turn produce inflammation of the gut.

To test this idea, the researchers fed mice the common emulsifiers polysorbate 80 and carboxymethylcellulsose at doses comparable to those found in processed foods. They found that as expected, the microbiota of the mice changed to a more pro-inflammatory makeup. In addition, the microbiota gained an increased ability to digest and penetrate the mucus layer of the intestine, and produced more pro-inflammatory chemicals.""

http://www.naturalnews.com/049229_microbiome_obesity_additives.html

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Seeks Mandatory Registry to Track Vaccination Status

""Imagine a world in which the government has free access to your private medical records for the purpose of ensuring your compliance with official vaccination mandates. The United States is on the cusp of such tyranny with an Immunization Information Systems (IIS) program currently being built by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that will make your vaccination status available to health authorities, healthcare providers and "other authorized stakeholders."

The CDC describes the program as a system of "confidential, population-based, computerized databases that record all immunization doses administered by participating providers to persons residing within a given geopolitical area." In other words, it's a vast network of tracking systems that keep tabs on who's getting jabbed in accordance with official guidelines and who's choosing to opt for natural immunity instead.

As explained by The Greater Good documentary writer and director Leslie Manookian, IIS is a vaccine registry system designed to identify and track areas of so-called "undervaccination" for which intervention by government jackboots is necessary to achieve certain vaccination targets -- in this case, that means a 95 percent or higher vaccination rate across the country.

In its infancy, the program was essentially an opt-in system, at least at the individual state level, where parents could choose to have their children's vaccination status voluntarily entered into the system. Over time, it evolved into an opt-out program where parents had to request that their children's vaccination status not be tracked in government databases, and it now appears that the program has expanded even further to be a mandatory tracking system.

"To the casual observer, tracking vaccination status may seem innocuous but this information can be used to bully, pressure, and even coerce people to follow national vaccination guidelines even if those people have educated themselves and chosen a different vaccination schedule or to avoid vaccinations entirely," wrote Manookian back in 2013, long before the current measles vaccine hysteria swept the nation.

"Federal legislation already exists that allows federal health officials to forcibly vaccinate people against their will in the event a flu pandemic is declared. ... This intrusion into our private lives also sets a dangerous precedent to allow further state intrusion into decisions we make for ourselves and our families."

Electronic vaccination status databases will massively expand police state tyranny in US

The language guiding how the CDC's IIS database is to be used is so vague that almost any entity declared to be an "authorized stakeholder" can potentially gain access to you and your children's vaccination records. And if you are found to be non-compliant, you could very quickly become the target of "vaccination squads," which are already being deployed in certain areas to bring more people into compliance with vaccine mandates.""

http://www.naturalnews.com/049236_CDC_police_state_vaccination_status.html

Holistic Health Philosophy and Practice: So How Does Acupuncture Work?

""I was raised, like most everybody else, on the idea that diseases are to be attacked, usually by drugs or surgery. The more serious the disease, the more aggressive the attack should be. If you follow this thinking, minimally aggressive treatment, such as acupuncture, should be helpful only for very minor problems, and most of its effects would be “in the patient’s head.”

But that hasn’t been my experience. I have seen acupuncture help patients with serious problems, including those who were resistant to drugs and surgery: problems ranging from disabling headaches, digestive problems, back pain and sciatica, anxiety and depression — a whole range of conditions. While acupuncture is not the first choice for medical emergencies, it is a very effective and safe treatment for many conditions.

The most common question I get about acupuncture is, how does it work? I usually try to dodge the question by replying, “It works great!” The truth is, while I know how to do acupuncture, the basic concepts are foreign to those of us raised with medical care.

Acupuncture uses a type of healing that we Westerners are not very familiar with: the concept of chi, or life energy. Instead of seeing a disease as an entity that needs to be attacked, acupuncturists see it as an imbalance or blockage of this energy flow. The energy flow then can be restored by treating special points in the body. When the energy flow is restored, the body can finally complete the healing process.

When I put a needle in an acupuncture point in the foot — which, according to ancient principles, is supposed to treat a muscle in the groin — and the chronic spasm in that muscle, which had been resistant to chiropractic care, deep tissue treatment and stretching, relaxes instantly, I recognize there is something going on that defies easy explanation. I have seen similar, sometimes instant results with abdominal pain, headache, even sinus congestion. I have to believe there is a flow of energy from the point in the foot to the muscle in the groin, that this energy flow is very fast and piercing the point restored it — quite similar to electricity, really. Score another point for the chi theory.""

Link to Main Article:

http://bangordailynews.com/2015/01/15/health/blogs-and-columns/how-does-acupuncture-work/

Psychic's Betsy Balega, Tara Greene and Shawn Robbins Tell Health Predictions in the Field of Homeopathy 2015

According to psychics Betsy Balega, Tara Greene and Shawn Robbins, plenty of news will come from the health field in 2015 – some bad but mostly good.

Balega predicts that a link will be found “between negative emotions and poor health.” This is something that many scientists and even common folk thought might be true but in 2015, it will be confirmed, she says. It seems the power of positive thinking will be more vital than ever to maintaining good health.

Balega also predicts, “Ebola will not yet be conquered.” As well she notes, “There will be a vaccine shortage” even in North America. These governments might “mean well but expect a lack of medicines when they are needed.” She adds that there will also be “more outbreaks of viruses moving from animals to people.”

Greene foresees Ebola becoming a “pandemic." Many more new viruses will appear and will threaten travel.” She also predicts that “Mad Cow” disease will surface in England again, which will cause “food scares” related to pork, chicken and other meats. As a result, she says, “more people become vegans.”

Greene also predicts, “Travel may be restricted because of fears of Ebola.”

Robbins predicts that scientist will be “astounded when a compound is found in jellyfish that halts the spread of Cancer cells.” This would signal a major breakthrough in treating this horrid disease.

She also predicted that Turmeric, which is a “common spice used in Indian cooking, will be hailed as the next wonder drug to treat the symptoms of Glaucoma, Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and Crohn’s disease.”

Balega predicts that "energy medicine" will become “a favored way to treat illness” by getting to “the root cause” rather than simply treating the symptoms. She adds, “People like Dr. Zhi Gang Sha and Dr. Eric Pearl will be recognized.”

More inspiring news comes from Robbins who predicts that 3D printers will be used to provide “human organs,” which will bring “new hope to transplant patients by not having to rely upon human organ donors.” This would also eliminate the need to use cadaver organs, which are most prevalent on the black market organ trade.

Robbins predicts more good news for patients who are paralyzed.

“A microchip implanted in the spine will be able to send electrical currents to nerve cells,” she says. This microchip would be “activated by a hand held computer and would allow paralyzed patients to regain a sense of feeling in their arms and legs.”

A June 2014 article in the National Post entitled Science fiction come true: Paralyzed man moves arm with his thoughts using microchip in his brain calls this new technology a “neurobridge.” The microchip, which reads the patient’s thoughts, was created “by doctors at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center,” along with “engineers from a non-profit research center called Battelle.” The Columbus, Ohio man is the first person who has been able to accomplish this.

Greene says that Jupiter in Virgo this year will bring more “grassroots” ways of dealing with health matters. “Learning from the past, herbalism (the use of plants for medical purposes) will become mainstream,” she says adding that “all naturopathic and homeopathic healing methods will surge in popularity. Osteopathy and cranio-sacral therapies also become popular.”

As well Greene predicts, “Spiritual healing will get very mainstream. With Jupiter in Virgo (the body) opposite Neptune in Pisces squared by Saturn” she says, “spiritual healing, sound healing, crystals, color therapy, shamanism, ayahuasca, sacred plants, cleansing diets and positive outlooks will all be factored into any patient’s healing methodology as standard practice.

Many More Predictions Found Here:

http://www.examiner.com/article/health-predictions-cover-ebola-new-inventions-return-to-natural-cures-part-4