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Medicine, clinical, and public health..... In the 1950's and early 60's prescription of an anti-miscarriage drug, DES, was continued for women even after farmers had stopped using it on chickens because it caused genital deformities in offspring. Other indicators should have curtailed the drug's use, including the fact that it was found not to lower the rate of miscarriages. Tragedy arrived in the form of genital cancers in the daughters of women who used the drug, appearing in the daughters when they were young women. Many had to have their vaginas excised. There is a documentary about DES, but we don't know who made it and are asking for information. The danger of DES was covered up, and we would like to develop a page on that coverup.......Heart disease of the clogged-artery type is reversible with exercise and a diet with only (or almost only) non-fat dairy and no red meat (or very little red meat). Many doctors are telling their patients this, but no one will do studies to prove it works. As it is, standard post surgical rehabilitation includes diet and exercise. But the restored blood flow from surgery and the larger event of surgery and rehabilitation put diet and exercise in a helper role, whose benefits are not distinct. By putting the reversal program before surgery, we can see it's effects clearly....Until the mid-1990's no studies were done to see if margarine was safe for the arteries like the poly-unsaturated vegetable oils it was made from, despite the obvious clue that margarine is solid at room temperature, like a saturated fat. Now the medical establishment has discovered the truth. How long had scientists and industry suspected, or known the truth about margarine, without telling the public about their insights? Were there scientists who published their skepticism about margarine in the 50's and 60's. Was there scientific debate? Something went very wrong in the failure of such debate, which had to have gone on to some extent, from reaching the public eye. If industry suppressed the information, like lead paint in the twenties, and/or if the medical establishment kept quiet and refused to do studies, as they now refuse to do studies showing that heart disease is reversible with diet and exercise, the truth should be brought out. And if it was just some kind of non-conspiratorial blindness that happened to prove very lucrative for surgeons, then we should think about that.....AIDS(HIV) in the U.S. and Europe very rarely is transmitted from a woman to a man, unlike other STD's in the U.S. and Europe, and unlike AIDS in the third world, where woman-to-man transmission happens very readily, although not as readily as man-to-woman. We are told that "anyone can get AIDS" but, as has been reported in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, this is a public health window dressing that has a variety of political motivations, and the public health motivation that to say that men have little chance of contracting AIDS from a woman could result in men not wearing condoms. Click here for discussion of these issues and AIDS testing, privacy, and the rate of heterosexual AIDS transmission in the U.S. and Europe....The AIDS virus seems to have political abilities enabling it to paralyze the public health process not unlike its ability to render the immune system powerless. We would like to look at the years 1983-5, when blood bankers and gay leaders joined forces to extort silence from the CDC AIDS team, who wanted to go public with their picture of a new virus, causing AIDS, that would infect hundreds of thousands of gay men before symptoms appeared. The CDC needed gay leaders and blood bankers for research to establish the facts about AIDS. The AIDS antibody test, arriving in '85, showed the CDC had been right. (see: And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts -- the book. The movie is a cover-up.) (See AIDS "83 page at this site) We would like to compare the 83-85 cover-up with ongoing politicization of public health information and AIDS, and study how the past is repeating itself largely because the past is painted over with a politically correct picture...Other issues from this period include the failure of government and industry to stop plasma collectors from buying from I.V. drug users, and the killer dosage protocol for AZT -- did anyone try to stop it? ........... We would like to study the history of hepatitis-B, including "serum" hepatitis, Willowbrook, the failure to deploy HB-core antibody testing in blood banks in the 70's, the stored blood study showing how poorly HB-core antibody would have performed as an AIDS "surrogate" test, (8-25% corrolation with HIV+ blood samples from 1984, NIH, Jim Mosely, USC.).....Tuskeegee, is a horror story of medical racism every American should know about. The Tuskeegee experiment monitored the deterioration of syphilis patients among a group of African-American share croppers, without treating them. As the lesions grew on patients and they died, pictures of them were published in medical journals. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta inherited the program in the 70's and did nothing about it until activists caused the government to shut it down. (Tuskeegee was used by some AIDS-activist writers in the early 80's to discredit the CDC group which was focusing on AIDS. The association was unfair. The CDC AIDS group were motivated and idealistic types and had no connection to the Tuskeegee affair.) |