Adoro te devote

Are we a Judeo-Christian nation?

Vaccines and autism

Glad to see science is starting to take this seriously.

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Tuesday July 21, 2009
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Is Aborted Fetal DNA in Vaccines Linked to Autism?
By Theresa A. Deisher, Ph.D.
July 21, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Just when the pharmaceutical industry thought the vaccine-autism controversy had been resolved, the National Vaccine Advisory Committee has recommended further study of vaccine safety. A perceived fear of the safety of the U.S. vaccination schedule has led increasing numbers of parents to opt out of full compliance. The numbers of children who are not fully vaccinated has now reached a point where "herd" immunity may be compromised, compelling the Centers for Disease Control to hold town-hall meetings and convene a Vaccine Safety Working Subgroup. Despite research ruling out mercury (Thimerosal) or the measles portion of one specific vaccine, autism continues to rise to a level of one in every 64 children in the UK.
The NVAC draft report recommends further study of the potential for vaccines to contribute to autism in children who have underlying mitochondrial disease, a worthwhile study given the clinical history of such children developing autism after vaccinations (see Poling case). What the NVAC has overlooked, however, in their recommendations, is that epidemic regressive autism is associated with the switch from using animal cells to produce vaccines to the use of aborted human fetal cells for vaccine production. Now when we vaccinate our children, some vaccines also deliver contaminating aborted human fetal DNA. The safety of this has never been tested.
Autism and autism spectrum disorder are polygenic diseases, meaning that multiple genes have been shown to be associated with these diseases. Studies have also clearly shown that there is an environmental component, a trigger, that is required. Vaccines are an obvious potential environmental trigger for autism because of the almost universal childhood exposure to vaccines in first world countries. The vaccine-autism connection was first hypothesized following the introduction of a new measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to the U.S. in 1979, with complete U.S. market share by 1983, and to the UK in 1988. Autism rates began to rise in the U.S. after 1979 and rose dramatically after 1983, and likewise rose in the UK after 1988, leading physicians to suspect a link. Initially, the measles component of this vaccine, MMR II, was suspected to be the culprit. Subsequent studies have also focused on the presence of mercury in vaccines, which incidentally, the MMR II vaccine did not contain.
Those studies have largely ruled out the new measles portion of the MMR II or mercury as the environmental trigger for autism. However, the compelling temporal association between this new MMR vaccine and autism cannot be ignored or explained away. What has been ignored is the fact that this new MMR vaccine introduced the use of aborted fetal cells for vaccine production. At one point, as much as 94 percent of children in the U.S. and 98 percent of children in the UK were given this vaccine.
Today, more than 23 vaccines are contaminated by the use of aborted fetal cells. There is no law that requires that consumers be informed that some vaccines are made using aborted fetal cells and contain residual aborted fetal DNA. While newer vaccines produced using aborted fetal cells do inform consumers, in their package inserts, that the vaccines contain contaminating DNA from the cell used to produce the vaccine, they do not identify the cells as being derived from electively aborted human fetuses.
In other words, they tell you what is in the vaccine, but they don't fully inform you where it came from. The earliest aborted fetal cell-produced vaccines such as Meruvax (rubella) and MMR II do not even inform consumers that the vaccines contain contaminating DNA from the cell used to produce them. Furthermore, it is unconscionable that the public-health risk of injecting our children with residual contaminating human aborted fetal DNA has been ignored.
How could the contaminating aborted fetal DNA create problems? It creates the potential for autoimmune responses and/or inappropriate insertion into our own genomes through a process called recombination. There are groups researching the potential link between this DNA and autoimmune diseases such as juvenile (type I) diabetes, multiple sclerosis and lupus. Our organization, Sound Choice Pharmaceutical Institute (SCPI), is focused on studying the quantity, characteristics and genomic recombination of the aborted fetal DNA found in many of our vaccines.
Preliminary bioinformatics research conducted at SCPI indicates that "hot spots" for DNA recombination are found in nine autism-associated genes present on the X chromosome. These nine genes are involved in nerve-cell synapse formation, central nervous system development and mitochondrial function.
Could genomic insertion of the aborted fetal DNA, found in some of our childhood vaccines since 1979, be an environmental trigger for autism? Could the fact that genes critical for nerve synapse formation and nervous system development are found on the X chromosome provide some explanation of why autism is predominantly a disease found in boys? Could the "hot spots" identified in these autism-associated genes be sites for insertion of contaminating aborted fetal DNA?
These questions must be answered, and quickly. Recent literature suggests that autism spectrum disorder may now impact one out of every 100 children. The pharmaceutical industry is also currently moving to replace more animal-produced vaccines with aborted-fetal-cell production and also to produce biologic drugs using aborted fetal cells.
The practice of using aborted fetal cells for vaccine and drug production creates wrenching moral dilemmas for parents and consumers, ignores informed consent rights, and exposes our children and ourselves to contaminants lacking safety evaluations. We cannot ignore this issue in good conscience, and we cannot afford to wait.
(Dr. Deisher is president of Sound Choice Pharmaceutical Institute (www.soundchoice.org), as well as a cofounder and the research and development director for Ave Maria Biotechnology Company (www.avmbiotech.com), which promote pro-life biotechnology. This article is an adaptation and update of SCPI's June 2009 newsletter and is published with its kind permission.)
URL: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/jul/09072106.html

Kerri Strug's 1996 vault; Mary Lou Retton 1980 vault

Sotomayor: abortion rights "settled law"

The next one in the parade of pro-abortion Catholics who do not consider the unborn to be objects of their charity.

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Sotomayor calls abortion rights 'settled law'

Jul 14 11:34 AM US/Eastern
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WASHINGTON (AP) - Supreme Court aspirant Sonia Sotomayor said Tuesday that she considers the question of abortion rights "settled law" and says there is a constitutional right to privacy.
The federal appeals court judge was asked at her confirmation hearing Tuesday to state how she felt about the landmark Roe versus Wade ruling legalizing abortion in 1973.

Sotomayor told the Senate Judiciary Committee that "there is a right of privacy. The court has found it in various places in the Constitution." She said this right is stated in the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure and in the 14th Amendment guaranteeing equal protection of the law. She declined to say pointblank if she agreed with the high court's precedent on this volatile issue.


Answering a question later from Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Sotomayor said that "all precedents of the Supreme Court I consider settled law," subject to the possibility of subsequent reversal, such as when the court last month renounced a previous precedent in a reverse discrimination case. It ruled 5-4 on the side of white firefighters from New Haven, Conn., who challenged a decision by the city to discard the results of an employee test in which they fared better than minorities who took the examination.

Dr Regina Benjamin: pro-abortion Catholic?

One blog says this:

In December 1996, Benjamin spoke in favor of a vote by the AMA's governing body to "urge medical schools to expand their curriculum" to teach "more about abortion."

If this is true, this means the Pope erred when giving her an award, and Obama misled the Pope last week when they met in person and Obama said he was interested in reducing abortions in America. It is bad form to misleed the Pope.

A new politics for Generation "M"

I can agree with just about everything this guy says. It's very fascinating because it doesn't cut down across traditional liberal/conservative lines. This kind of viewpoint could be a game changer.

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Umair Haque Edge Economy RSS FeedThe Generation M Manifesto
8:01 AM Wednesday July 8, 2009

Tags:Economy, Generational issues, Global business

Dear Old People Who Run the World,

My generation would like to break up with you.

Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.

You wanted big, fat, lazy "business." We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce.

You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.

You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.

You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.

You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today's markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.

You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better.

You didn't care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.

You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.

You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.

You wanted more money, credit and leverage — to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters.

You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We're not for sale: we're learning to once again do what is meaningful.

There's a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I'm going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation "M."

What do the "M"s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It's a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth "M"s.

Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday's way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government. Who's Gen M? Obama, kind of. Larry and Sergey. The Threadless, Etsy, and Flickr guys. Ev, Biz and the Twitter crew. Tehran 2.0. The folks at Kiva, Talking Points Memo, and FindtheFarmer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Jeff Sachs are like the grandpas of Gen M. There are tons where these innovators came from.

Gen M isn't just kind of awesome — it's vitally necessary. If you think the "M"s sound idealistic, think again.

The great crisis isn't going away, changing, or "morphing." It's the same old crisis — and it's growing.

You've failed to recognize it for what it really is. It is, as I've repeatedly pointed out, in our institutions: the rules by which our economy is organized.

But they're your institutions, not ours. You made them — and they're broken. Here's what I mean:

"... For example, the auto industry has cut back production so far that inventories have begun to shrink — even in the face of historically weak demand for motor vehicles. As the economy stabilizes, just slowing the pace of this inventory shrinkage will boost gross domestic product, or GDP, which is the nation's total output of goods and services."

Clearing the backlog of SUVs built on 30-year-old technology is going to pump up GDP? So what? There couldn't be a clearer example of why GDP is a totally flawed concept, an obsolete institution. We don't need more land yachts clogging our roads: we need a 21st Century auto industry.

I was (kind of) kidding about seceding before. Here's what it looks like to me: every generation has a challenge, and this, I think, is ours: to foot the bill for yesterday's profligacy — and to create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity.

Anyone — young or old — can answer it. Generation M is more about what you do and who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: do you still belong to the 20th century - or the 21st?

Love,

Umair and the Edge Economy Community