Looking for Answers to the Autism Epidemic in All the Wrong Places

By Autism-Warrior-Parent -  Joan Swirsky  -  The Independent Sentinel

Just last week, on March 24, 2014, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta (CDC) released its latest data on autism. After surveying medical and school records from 11 states, the CDC found that autism has more than doubled since the new century began only 14 years ago. Today the condition affects one out of 68 children – five times as many boys as girls. Alarmingly, there was a 30 percent climb in its incidence between 2008 and 2010.

Maybe you missed the story, since the day it broke, and the following day, the media –TV, radio, print – devoted about 30 seconds and just a few articles to this horrific report, significantly less time than is still spent endlessly speculating on Flight 370 or debating the use of the word “bossy,” both of which pale in comparison to the marathon of unendurable daily ads for Cialis and Viagra! Exhibit Number One in America’s priority system!

The powers-that-be at the CDC once again trotted out the age-old rationales to explain this bizarre finding:

• Greater awareness and therefore earlier and more accurate diagnoses
• The role that being an older parent plays not only in the incidence of autism but also Down syndrome and other developmental disabilities
• Genes
• “Something” in the environment

The study found that the incidence of autism in blacks “continues to lag behind whites and Hispanics,” which some experts attributed to racial bias (i.e., blacks lack equal access to medical care), but other experts said that blacks may simply be less vulnerable to autism for some unknown reason.

What is consistently omitted, however, is the role that ultrasound exams during pregnancy may and probably do play not only in this seeming black/white disparity, but in the rapidly-escalating incidence of the condition. More about that below.

WHAT WE KNOW TODAY

Autism is a neurological disorder that affects the normal development of the brain, causing self-defeating behaviors and an inability to form social relationships. It usually appears before the age of three. Most scientists believe that autism is strongly influenced by genetics but allow that environmental factors may also play a role.

To be diagnosed on the autistic spectrum, a child must have deficits in three areas:

1. Communication (most children can’t make eye contact; others can’t speak)
2. Social skills (typified by disinterest in both people and surroundings)
3. Typically “normal” behavior (many autistic children have tics, repetitive behavior, inappropriate affects, et al)

Those diagnosed on the autistic spectrum range from high-functioning, self-sufficient people, even geniuses, to those who need lifelong supportive help.

Newsday reporter Delthia Ricks interviewed Coleen Boyle, the Director of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (a division of the CDC), who said that “8-year-olds [were chosen for the study] because, by that age, everyone with an autism-spectrum disorder usually will have been diagnosed.”

According to NY Times writer Benedict Carey, the study revealed “a huge range in autism prevalence… from one child in 175 found with autism in Alabama, to one in 46 in New Jersey.”

Other sites in the study, Carey reported, were in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Utah and Wisconsin.

After the CDC announced the horrifying results of its study, several members of Congress and advocacy groups called for more funding for research and support services.

A LARGELY-DEBUNKED THEORY

The increased incidence of autism has been attributed by legions of parents and a number of professionals to the mercury-containing preservative thimerosol, used to prevent bacterial or fungal contamination in the vaccines babies and children routinely receive.

This is not backed up by hard science.

Thimerosol, which has been used in vaccines since the 1930s, has not been used in the U.S. since 2001 and the vaccine dosages containing the preservative that were given before then had about the same amount of mercury found in an infant’s daily supply of breast milk.

Numerous studies – by the Centers for Disease Control, the Institute of Medicine, American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Health Organization, and the National Academy of Sciences, among others – have found no autism-vaccine link, while other studies have shown an increase in autism in countries that have removed thimerosal from vaccines.

Nevertheless, aided by salivating personal-injury lawyers, parents have filed thousands of lawsuits claiming that thimerosol “caused” their children’s autism. Between late 1999 and late 2002, mercury was removed from most childhood vaccines, including DPT (Diphtheria, Tetanus, Pertussis), Hepatitis B, and Hib [Haemophilus influenza b]. The MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella), which is a live vaccine, is not compatible with thimerosal.

Also abetting the quack science are figures like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who wrote an article, “Deadly Immunity,” for Rolling Stone magazine, which was reprinted in Salon.com. But Salon ended up removing the article from its website because of the scorn it received from the scientific community. Kennedy’s articles were “rife with factual errors and distortions,” wrote Robert V. Fineberg, M.D, president of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.

What appears significant, however, is the degree to which diagnoses of mental retardation and learning disabilities throughout the country have decreased at the same time as diagnoses of autism have risen, as reported in a May 2006 issue of Behavioral Pediatrics. Some experts theorize that “diagnostic substitution” may explain this phenomenon. Diagnostic Substitution means that children who were diagnosed with other conditions – including ADHD and learning disabilities – are now diagnosed with autism.

MY THEORY

In the early ‘70s, I worked as a delivery-room nurse at a university-affiliated hospital near my home on Long Island. It was a revolutionary time in obstetrics, when the Lamaze method of “prepared childbirth” and the use of sonograms to visualize fetuses were gaining popularity.

Actually, ultrasound technology was first developed in Scotland in the mid-1950s by obstetrician Ian Donald and engineer Tom Brown to detect industrial flaws in ships. By the end of the ‘50s, ultrasound was routinely used in Glasgow hospitals, but it was well into the 1970s before it was used in American hospitals to check that the developing baby, placenta, and amniotic fluid were normal and to detect abnormal conditions such as birth defects and ectopic pregnancies, et al.

At the end of the ‘70s, I became a certified Lamaze teacher and spent the next 22 years giving classes in my home. In a very real way, I had my own laboratory, as I learned directly from my clients about the increasing escalation of sonogram exams they had as the decades elapsed.

In the early 1980s, it was common for only one or two out of the 10 women in my classes to have a sonogram. In just a few years, every woman in my classes had had a sonogram. And in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, almost every woman had not one sonogram, but often two or three or four or five – starting as early as three or four weeks gestation and extending, in some instances, right up to delivery!

It was in the ‘90s, in fact, that it began to occur to me that the scary rise in the incidence of autism might be linked to the significant rise in ultrasound exams. Over the years, I’ve posited my theory to a number of people, written letters to the editors of newspapers – including the NY Times, for which I wrote for over 20 years, but they still refused to publish my letter – and e-mailed my idea to one of the top news people at the Fox News Network, but the we report/you decide powers-that-be on that station strangely decided not to report on this subject.

I contacted autism researchers Dr. Marcel Just and Dr. Diane L. Williams, who told me via e-mail that Dr. Pasko Rakic at Yale was, indeed, exploring the autism-ultrasound link.

Then, in 2006, I found an article in Midwifery Today, “Questions about Prenatal Ultrasound and the Alarming Increase in Autism,” by writer-researcher Caroline Rodgers.

“The steep increase in autism,” Rodgers wrote, “goes beyond the U.S.: It is a “global phenomenon”… that “has emerged…across vastly different environments and cultures.”

“What do countries and regions with climates, diets and exposure to known toxins as disparate as the U.S., Japan, Scandinavia, Australia, India and the UK have in common?” Rodgers asked.

“No common factor in the water, air, local pesticides, diet or even building materials and clothing can explain the emergence and relentless increase in this serious, life-long neurodevelopmental disorder,” she stated.

However, Rodgers added: “What all industrial countries do have in common is …the use of routine prenatal ultrasound on pregnant women. In countries with nationalized healthcare, where virtually all pregnant women are exposed to ultrasound, the autism rates are even higher than in the U.S., where due to disparities in income and health insurance, some 30 percent of pregnant women do not yet undergo ultrasound scanning.” Aha! Could this be why blacks and Hispanics in America continue to lag behind whites in the development of autism?

Even in remote, rural regions of developing countries like China, ultrasound is in common use because sex determination is so important to their one-child – preferably male – policy.

The cause of autism, Rodgers continues, “has been pinned on everything from `emotionally remote’ mothers…to vaccines, genetics, immunological disorders, environmental toxins and maternal infections – a far simpler possibility…is the pervasive use of prenatal ultrasound, which can cause potentially dangerous thermal effects.

ENTER HARD SCIENCE

In August 2006, Pasko Rakic, M.D., chair of Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Neurobiology, announced the results of a study in which pregnant mice underwent various durations of ultrasound. The brains of the offspring showed damage consistent with that found in the brains of people with autism.

The research, funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, also implicated ultrasound in neurodevelopmental problems in children, such as dyslexia, epilepsy, mental retardation and schizophrenia, and showed that damage to brain cells increased with longer exposures.

Dr. Rakic’s study, Rodgers said, “… is just one of many animal experiments and human studies conducted over the years indicating that prenatal ultrasound can be harmful to babies.”

In thedailybeast.com, Jennifer Margulis, author of Business of Baby: What Doctors Don’t Tell You, What Corporations Try to Sell You, and How to Put Your Baby Before Their Bottom Line, writes that Dr. Rakic “concluded that all nonmedical use of ultrasound on pregnant women should be avoided.”

In her research, Margulis said, she discovered that “there is mounting evidence that overexposure to sound waves – or perhaps exposure to sound waves at a critical time during fetal development – is to blame for the astronomic rise in neurological disorders among America’s children.”

PROBLEMS WITH SOUND AND HEAT

A 2009 article in Scientific American by John Slocum explains that sonar (Sound Navigation And Ranging) systems, which were first developed by the U.S. Navy to detect enemy submarines, “generate slow-rolling sound waves topping out at around 235 decibels; the world’s loudest rock bands top out at only 130. These sound waves can travel for hundreds of miles under water, and can retain an intensity of 140 decibels as far as 300 miles from their source.”

This is relevant because many mass deaths and strandings of whales and dolphins have been attributed to the sonar waves emitted from Navy ships. Slocum writes that a successful 2003 lawsuit against the Navy brought by the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to restrict the use of low-frequency sonar in waters rich in marine wildlife was upheld by two lower courts, but the Supreme Court “ruled that the Navy should be allowed to continue the use of some mid-frequency sonar testing for the sake of national security. “

There are hundreds if not thousands of cases that point to the dangers of sound waves. As many as 3,000 dead dolphins were found in Peru during the summer of 2012.  Researchers at the Organisation for the Conservation of Aquatic Animals (ORCA), a Peruvian marine animal conservation organisation, attributed the mass deaths to the use of deep water sonar by ships in nearby waters. In June of 2008, four days after a Navy helicopter was using controversial sonar equipment during training exercises off the Cornish coast in Great Britain, 26 dolphins died in a mass stranding.

Two quick questions: If sonar beams can kill fully-developed dolphins, what effect, then, do they have on the developing brains of in-utero embryos and fetuses? And why is this never discussed or debated or mentioned on TV broadcasts like the ones last week that reported the CDC’s latest and quite disastrous findings?

Getting back to those embryos and fetuses, Rodgers explains that an ultrasound used in fetal imaging emits short pulses of high-frequency sound waves that reflect off the tissues of the fetus, and the return echoes are converted into images. In addition to vibration, ultrasound waves can cause heating of the tissue and bone.”

“When the transducer from the ultrasound is positioned over the part of the fetus the operator is trying to visualize,” she continues, “the fetus may be feeling vibrations, heat or both.”

Rodgers then cites a warning the Food and Drug Administration issued in 2004: “…even at low levels, [ultrasound] laboratory studies have shown it can have…”jarring vibrations” – one study compared the noise to a subway coming into a station – “and a rise in temperature.”

Imagine how these assaults affect the developing brain of a fetus!

Just as concerning, as far back 1982, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) study, “Effects of Ultrasound on Biological Systems,” concluded that “…neurological, behavioral, developmental, immunological, hematological changes and reduced fetal weight can result from exposure to ultrasound.” Two years later, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) reported that when birth defects occurred, the acoustic output [of sonograms] was usually high enough to cause considerable heat.

And yet, in 1993, the FDA approved an eight-fold increase in the potential acoustical output of ultrasound equipment! Ostensibly, this increase was done to enhance better visualization of the heart and small vessels during microsurgery. Clearly, the health and well-being of developing fetuses was not a consideration!

“Can the fact that this increase in potential thermal effects happened during the same period of time the incidence of autism increased nearly 60-fold be merely coincidental?” Rodgers asks.

Pregnant women are always warned to avoid steam rooms and saunas, based on studies published in numerous prestigious journals in which an irrefutable relationship between elevated maternal temperature and the development of brain defects in their infants has been established.

Again, Rodgers asks the question every woman must be asking herself after hearing of the disastrous results of the new CDC study:

“Using common sense, why would anyone think that intruding upon the continuous, seamless development of the fetus, which has for millions of years completed its work without assistance, be without consequences?”

KEEPING THE HEAT ON (so to speak)

In October of 2010, Ms. Rodgers participated in a forum sponsored by the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In PDF format, she presented a lecture about autism and ultrasound entitled “The Elephant in the Room,” which included the following information:

• Worldwide autism boom identified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began with children born only 22 years ago in 1988-1989.
  • Since the FDA approved an allowable eightfold increase in acoustic output in the early ‘90s, only one prospective study has been undertaken. The study design did not expose fetuses to the first-trimester scans that are common today.
  • Ultrasound use and autism are more prevalent among higher socioeconomic groups.
  • Several studies have shown increased prevalence of autism among better-educated, more affluent communities. Women in these communities undoubtedly have health insurance and other resources to allow access to good nutrition, prenatal vitamins and excellent prenatal care, which, according to current practice, includes more ultrasound.

Autism surveys and studies have found the following groups of women are at higher risk of bearing children with autism:

• Mothers who receive first-trimester care
• Mothers with higher educations
• Mothers with private health insurance
• Older mothers

Rodgers concludes: Only increased exposure to prenatal ultrasound can explain all of the above.

Rodgers also elaborates on how things have changed since the FDA approved an eight-fold increase in the potential acoustical output of ultrasounds in 1993.

• The number of ultrasound scans conducted during each pregnancy has increased, with women often receiving two or more scans even in low-risk situations
• The development of the vaginal probe, which positions the beam of sound much closer to the embryo or fetus, may put it at higher risk
• The use of Doppler ultrasound, which is used to study blood flow or to monitor the baby’s heartbeat, has increased. According to the 2006 Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, “routine Doppler ultrasound in pregnancy does not have health benefits for women or babies and may do some harm.”

Currently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are researching this issue in their Study to Explore Early Development (SEED).

There is a vast human tragedy – a true man-made disaster – taking place before our eyes.

For whatever reasons – follow the money? – the mountain of evidence that points to a causal relationship between prenatal ultrasound exams and an escalating pandemic of autism is being systematically ignored.

Could it have anything to do with the huge investments doctors and scientists have made in ultrasound technology, which, according to Jennifer Margulis, “adds more than $1 billion to the cost of caring for pregnant women in America each year”?

Could it have anything to do with the revenue now pouring like an avalanche into the coffers of diagnostic and treatment centers and classrooms?

Could it have anything to do with modern journalism’s almost complete abandonment of hard-nosed reporting and life-saving exposés?

As Caroline Rodgers said, there is an elephant in the room when it comes to the subject of autism – and that elephant is the worldwide blitzkrieg of ultrasound exams on pregnant women, exams that have bombarded the babies they’re carrying with the brain-warping sound waves and heat that will affect them every second of their autistic lives..

Related: 

A Genetic Clue to Why Autism Affects Boys More

83 percent of brain injury vaccine compensation payouts were for autism caused by vaccines 

Book Review and Giveaway: Make Your Worrier a Warrior by Dan Peters, PhD 

WHY IS THE GOVERNMENT NOW RECOMMENDING THE HPV VACCINE FOR BOYS?

Technorati Tags: Autism-Warrior-Parent,Autism,Epidemics,Wake-Up,Boys,Patterns

At 102 Years Old, Birthday Girl Finally Stops Smoking

Council and Heal: Birthday girl Clara Cowell has proved that it's never too late to change bad habits. At 102 years old, she finally quit smoking after picking up the habit in 1931. She did not even quit smoking because of her health - she finally stopped the habit because her family was worried that falling ash would set her house on fire.

According to the Daily Mail, Ms. Cowell has smoked two to three cigarettes a day since picking up the habit - amounting to about 60,000 cigarettes in her lifetime. But the centenarian finally quit at the urges of her family, who worried about the safety of her habit.

Ms. Cowell lives independently. Her daughters say that the secret to her success may be rooted in hard work and poverty, but also something more surprising: her cigarettes and her daily habit of a cup of tea with whiskey.

Indeed, Ms. Cowell's life has been rather tough. When her husband, a coal worker, was called in to fight during World War II, Ms. Cowell tasked herself with raising their four children by herself and working in an ammunition factory. A tailoress by trade, Ms. Cowell sewed parachutes. She says that, like many of the other girls, she took some silk for herself to sew some underwear. She says that the war was hard, that there was never enough to eat or time to sleep, but they did not suffer from the experience.

Ms. Cowell suffered from tuberculosis as a child, but does not believe in medication. At her age, she is now so sprightly that she wowed crowds at her 101^st birthday as she performed a waltz. She says that she used to love to dance when she was young, particularly the waltz and the foxtrot.

Ms. Cowell appears to still have quite a bit of life left. Her daughters reported that they spent her birthday at a pub.

In addition to her four children, Ms. Cowell has nine grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren.

*We are certainly not encouraging people to smoke or to continue their negative habits until late in life.  Some of us are blessed with great genes and they can do everything wrong… and still live into their 100’s with overall good health.  But  most of us aren’t that lucky.  And with the cuts before us, especially for seniors, the better you live throughout your life, the better chance you have for living longer in the future.

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Meet Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel: Deny Coverage to Elderly an Disabled for the Greater Good – But don’t forget… Sarah Palin was crazy…

Complete Lives System by Ezekial Emanuel

Soylent Green Anyone???

Checkout: ObamaCare Survival Guide

Technorati Tags: Aging,smoking,aging,seniors,ObamaCare,death panels,rationing,Complete Lives System,Soylent Green,healthy living,growing old

This Is What We Are Facing

Video: This Is What We Are Facing

At this very moment, your body is under direct assault. At the cellular level, your biology is being attacked in such a manner that it is actually altering your very genetic coding. Your DNA is under consistent bombardment through not only the food you are eating, but by environmental factors that are literally ripping apart your DNA. Fragmenting your genetic blueprint, the ‘fingerprint’ of your humanity.

It’s all been admitted in peer-reviewed research that is continually ignored by the mainstream medical establishment. In fact, major government groups backed by financial corporate interests are actually streamlining the very biology-crushing technology that is to blame for an explosive rate of disease across the nation. Despite being linked to sterility, infant mortality, organ damage, depletion of micro-organisms within the biosphere (essential for the cultivation of food on our planet), mutant insects and ‘super’ weeds, the USDA has actually decided to fast-track biotechnology giant Monsanto’s approval process.

Upwards of 90 plus percent of many different crops are already genetically modified and placed on your dinner plates — a number that is not satisfactory for Monsanto, who now seeks to dominate 100% of the entire agricultural industry with its genetic manipulation.

Chemicals like BPA line the plastics used by millions worldwide, and despite being linked in hundreds of studies to cancer (particularly breast cancer), the FDA has repeatedly sided with the multi-billion dollar BPA industry, who will generate over 8 billion dollars by creating more than 4.7 million metric tons of death-linked BPA this year. This is a chemical that has peer-reviewed research has tied to diabetes, heart disease, cancer, behavioral disorders, and many other conditions.

The healthcare juggernaut that is the mainstream medical establishment also continues to pump out pharmaceutical drugs that are now known to kill more people per year than traffic-related fatalities. In 2009, it was conservatively estimated that pharmaceutical drugs trumped traffic fatalities with around 37,485 deaths nationwide. The overall death toll regarding known pharmaceutical drug deaths and medical mistakes alone, only around 10% of which are believed to accurately be reported, comes in at 783,936 per year.

On average, a pharmaceutical drug contains 70 side effects. Many contain around 525. These side effects may include death, or in the case of drugs like Prozac, suicidal thoughts and tendencies. Of course the link between Prozac and suicide was covered up for decades by the drug maker Eli Lilly & Co. In 2005 it was revealed by a Harvard-based whistle blower who released the information to the public, proving to the world that Eli Lilly lied for over 15 years and covered up studies linking Prozac use to suicide. In his own words, he said the public was being treated like ‘guinea pigs’.

The same events can be interchanged with virtually any drug company, many of which are now being forced to pay millions for false advertising and the resulting deaths that came from the use of their products.

In the realm of chemotherapy, it is now being admitted that the procedure actually kills patients more quickly and destroys the body itself.

I am not here to scare you into isolation. I am not here to sell you a solution in a bottle. This is what we are facing.

It is up to YOU to sound the alarm and restore order to the medical paradigm. We now have the opportunity to either sit idly by and allow ourselves to succumb to the healthcare juggernaut that lives within the United States or take back our health. The information surrounding the healing power of natural herbs and whole food items is bountiful, with studies finding that turmeric and ginger alone shrink tumors by anywhere from 50-81% in a number of weeks. Alternative cancer treatment centers are being targeted by the United States government and natural healers are being imprisoned for selling organic herbs from their own farms.

The time is now to reclaim our health freedom, and it requires YOUR involvement.

This post first appeared at Natural Society – Cross-Posted at Alex Jones – h/t to MJ

Technorati Tags: fingerprint of your humanity,DNA,DNA projet,DNA damage,genetics,Fragmenting the genetic blueprint,biology-crushing technology,Monsanto,Big Brother,Big Pharma,Big Government,humanity,biotechnology,watch the other hand,wake-up,stand-up,science,1984,genetic code,whistleblowers

ELECTROMAGNETIC ENERGY ALTERING MORAL JUDGMENT

Moral judgments can be altered ... by magnets

By disrupting brain activity in a particular region, neuroscientists can sway people’s views of moral situations.

By Anne Trafton, MIT News Office - Graphic: Christine Daniloff  -  Originally Posted - March 30, 2010

To make moral judgments about other people, we often need to infer their intentions — an ability known as “theory of mind.” For example, if one hunter shoots another while on a hunting trip, we need to know what the shooter was thinking: Was he secretly jealous, or did he mistake his fellow hunter for an animal?

MIT neuroscientists have now shown they can influence those judgments by interfering with activity in a specific brain region — a finding that helps reveal how the brain constructs morality.

Previous studies have shown that a brain region known as the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is highly active when we think about other people’s intentions, thoughts and beliefs. In the new study, the researchers disrupted activity in the right TPJ by inducing a current in the brain using a magnetic field applied to the scalp. They found that the subjects’ ability to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people’s intentions — for example, a failed murder attempt — was impaired.

The researchers, led by Rebecca Saxe, MIT assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences, report their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of March 29. Funding for the research came from The National Center for Research Resources, the MIND Institute, the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, the Simons Foundation and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.

The study offers “striking evidence” that the right TPJ, located at the brain’s surface above and behind the right ear, is critical for making moral judgments, says Liane Young, lead author of the paper. It’s also startling, since under normal circumstances people are very confident and consistent in these kinds of moral judgments, says Young, a postdoctoral associate in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

“You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior,” she says. “To be able to apply (a magnetic field) to a specific brain region and change people’s moral judgments is really astonishing.”

Thinking of others

Saxe first identified the right TPJ’s role in theory of mind a decade ago — a discovery that was the subject of her MIT PhD thesis in 2003. Since then, she has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that the right TPJ is active when people are asked to make judgments that require thinking about other people’s intentions.

In the new study, the researchers wanted to go beyond fMRI experiments to observe what would happen if they could actually disrupt activity in the right TPJ. Their success marks a major step forward for the field of moral neuroscience, says Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, professor of philosophy at Duke University.

“Recent fMRI studies of moral judgment find fascinating correlations, but Young et al usher in a new era by moving beyond correlation to causation,” says Sinnott-Armstrong, who was not involved in this research.

The researchers used a noninvasive technique known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to selectively interfere with brain activity in the right TPJ. A magnetic field applied to a small area of the skull creates weak electric currents that impede nearby brain cells’ ability to fire normally, but the effect is only temporary.
In one experiment, volunteers were exposed to TMS for 25 minutes before taking a test in which they read a series of scenarios and made moral judgments of characters’ actions on a scale of one (absolutely forbidden) to seven (absolutely permissible).

In a second experiment, TMS was applied in 500-milisecond bursts at the moment when the subject was asked to make a moral judgment. For example, subjects were asked to judge how permissible it is for a man to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knows to be unsafe, even if she ends up making it across safely. In such cases, a judgment based solely on the outcome would hold the perpetrator morally blameless, even though it appears he intended to do harm.

In both experiments, the researchers found that when the right TPJ was disrupted, subjects were more likely to judge failed attempts to harm as morally permissible. Therefore, the researchers believe that TMS interfered with subjects’ ability to interpret others’ intentions, forcing them to rely more on outcome information to make their judgments.

“It doesn’t completely reverse people’s moral judgments, it just biases them,” says Saxe.

When subjects received TMS to a brain region near the right TPJ, their judgments were nearly identical to those of people who received no TMS at all.

While understanding other people’s intentions is critical to judging them, it is just one piece of the puzzle. We also take into account the person’s desires, previous record and any external constraints, guided by our own concepts of loyalty, fairness and integrity, says Saxe.

“Our moral judgments are not the result of a single process, even though they feel like one uniform thing,” she says. “It’s actually a hodgepodge of competing and conflicting judgments, all of which get jumbled into what we call moral judgment.”

Saxe’s lab is now studying the role of theory of mind in judging situations where the attempted harm was not a physical threat. The researchers are also doing a study on the role of the right TPJ in judgments of people who are morally lucky or unlucky. For example, a drunk driver who hits and kills a pedestrian is unlucky, compared to an equally drunk driver who makes it home safely, but the unlucky homicidal driver tends to be judged more morally blameworthy.

Related?:

Meteor Streaks Across North Texas Sky

NORTH TEXAS (CBSDFW.COM) – The FAA has confirmed a meteor likely passed across the sky of the Southwest United States Wednesday night, with many people in the Dallas/Fort Worth area hearing and feeling the sonic boom.

The meteor, which was reported from everywhere from San Antonio to Oklahoma City, was spotted around 8:00 p.m. Wednesday.

Kevin Palivec, a former television photographer in the Abilene area captured video of the meteor on two remote cameras 60 miles apart. Images from the cameras show a bright streak passing overhead. See Video Here and Here.

TUNGUSKA GENETIC ANOMALY AND ELECTROPHONIC METEORS
http://www.actaphys.uj.edu.pl/vol36/pdf/v36p0935.pdf

Obama appoints Monsanto's vice president Michael Taylor as senior adviser to the commissioner at the FDA...

Who Owns Obama and FDA... None Other Than Monsanto!

Obama appoints Monsanto's vice president Michael Taylor as senior adviser to the commissioner at the FDA... Folks, it just keeps getting more insane... ~ Jeffrey Smith

Michael Taylor was just appointed senior adviser to the commissioner of the FDA!

This is the same man that was in charge of FDA policy when GMO's were allowed into the US food supply without undergoing a single test to determine their safety.

He "had been Monsanto's attorney before becoming policy chief at the FDA [and then] he became Monsanto's Vice President and chief lobbyist. This month [he] became the senior adviser to the commissioner of the FDA.

He is now America's food safety czar! This is no joke."
The person who may be responsible for more food-related illness and death than anyone in history has just been made the US food safety czar. This is no joke.

Here's the back story.

When FDA scientists were asked to weigh in on what was to become the most radical and potentially dangerous change in our food supply -- the introduction of genetically modified (GM) foods -- secret documents now reveal that the experts were very concerned.

Memo after memo described toxins, new diseases, nutritional deficiencies, and hard-to-detect allergens. They were adamant that the technology carried "serious health hazards," and required careful, long-term research, including human studies, before any genetically modified organisms (GMOs) could be safely released into the food supply.

But the biotech industry had rigged the game so that neither science nor scientists would stand in their way. They had placed their own man in charge of FDA policy and he wasn't going to be swayed by feeble arguments related to food safety. No, he was going to do what corporations had done for decades to get past these types of pesky concerns. He was going to lie.

Dangerous Food Safety Lies...

When the FDA was constructing their GMO policy in 1991-2, their scientists were clear that gene-sliced foods were significantly different and could lead to "different risks" than conventional foods. But official policy declared the opposite, claiming that the FDA knew nothing of significant differences, and declared GMOs substantially equivalent.

This fiction became the rationale for allowing GM foods on the market without any required safety studies whatsoever! The determination of whether GM foods were safe to eat was placed entirely in the hands of the companies that made them -- companies like Monsanto, which told us that the PCBs, DDT, and Agent Orange were safe.

GMOs were rushed onto our plates in 1996. Over the next nine years, multiple chronic illnesses in the US nearly doubled -- from 7% to 13%. Allergy-related emergency room visits doubled between 1997 and 2002 while food allergies, especially among children, skyrocketed. We also witnessed a dramatic rise in asthma, autism, obesity, diabetes, digestive disorders, and certain cancers.

In January of this year, Dr. P. M. Bhargava, one of the world's top biologists, told me that after reviewing 600 scientific journals, he concluded that the GM foods in the US are largely responsible for the increase in many serious diseases.

In May, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine concluded that animal studies have demonstrated a causal relationship between GM foods and infertility, accelerated aging, dysfunctional insulin regulation, changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system, and immune problems such as asthma, allergies, and inflammation
In July, a report by eight international experts determined that the flimsy and superficial evaluations of GMOs by both regulators and GM companies "systematically overlook the side effects" and significantly underestimate "the initial signs of diseases like cancer and diseases of the hormonal, immune, nervous and reproductive systems, among others."

The Fox Guarding the Chickens...

If GMOs are indeed responsible for massive sickness and death, then the individual who oversaw the FDA policy that facilitated their introduction holds a uniquely infamous role in human history.

That person is Michael Taylor. He had been Monsanto's attorney before becoming policy chief at the FDA. Soon after, he became Monsanto's vice president and chief lobbyist.
This month Michael Taylor became the senior advisor to the commissioner of the FDA. He is now America's food safety czar. What have we done?

The Milk Man Cometh...

While Taylor was at the FDA in the early 90's, he also oversaw the policy regarding Monsanto's genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (rbGH/rbST) -- injected into cows to increase milk supply.
The milk from injected cows has more pus, more antibiotics, more bovine growth hormone, and most importantly, more insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). IGF-1 is a huge risk factor for common cancers and its high levels in this drugged milk is why so many medical organizations and hospitals have taken stands against rbGH.

A former Monsanto scientist told me that when three of his Monsanto colleagues evaluated rbGH safety and discovered the elevated IGF-1 levels, even they refused to drink any more milk -- unless it was organic and therefore untreated.

Government scientists from Canada evaluated the FDA's approval of rbGH and concluded that it was a dangerous facade. The drug was banned in Canada, as well as Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

It was approved in the US while Michael Taylor was in charge. His drugged milk might have caused a significant rise in US cancer rates. Additional published evidence also implicates rbGH in the high rate of fraternal twins in the US.

Taylor also determined that milk from injected cows did not require any special labeling. And as a gift to his future employer Monsanto, he wrote a white paper suggesting that if companies ever had the audacity to label their products as not using rbGH, they should also include a disclaimer stating that according to the FDA, there is no difference between milk from treated and untreated cows.

Taylor's disclaimer was also a lie. Monsanto's own studies and FDA scientists officially acknowledged differences in the drugged milk. No matter. Monsanto used Taylor's white paper as the basis to successfully sue dairies that labeled their products as rbGH-free.

Will Monsanto's Wolff Also Guard the Chickens?...

As consumers learned that rbGH was dangerous, they refused to buy the milk. To keep their customers, a tidal wave of companies has publicly committed to not use the drug and to label their products as such.

Monsanto tried unsuccessfully to convince the FDA and FTC to make it illegal for dairies to make rbGH-free claims, so they went to their special friend in Pennsylvania -- Dennis Wolff...

As state secretary of agriculture, Wolff unilaterally declared that labeling products rbGH-free was illegal, and that all such labels must be removed from shelves statewide. This would, of course, eliminate the label from all national brands, as they couldn't afford to create separate packaging for just one state.

Fortunately, consumer demand forced Pennsylvania's Governor Ed Rendell to step in and stop Wolff's madness. Rendell allowed Wolff to take a compromised position that now requires rbGH-free claims to also be accompanied by Taylor's FDA disclaimer on the package.
President Obama is considering Dennis Wolff for the top food safety post at the USDA. Yikes!

Rumor has it that the reason why Pennsylvania's governor is supporting Wolff's appointment is to get him out of the state -- after he "screwed up so badly" with the rbGH decision. Oh great, governor. Thanks.

Ohio Governor Gets Taylor-itus...

Ohio not only followed Pennsylvania's lead by requiring Taylor's FDA disclaimer on packaging, they went a step further. They declared that dairies must place that disclaimer on the same panel where rbGH-free claims are made, and even dictated the font size.

This would force national brands to re-design their labels and may ultimately dissuade them from making rbGH-free claims at all. The Organic Trade Association and the International Dairy Foods Association filed a lawsuit against Ohio.

Although they lost the first court battle, upon appeal, the judge ordered a mediation session that takes place today. Thousands of Ohio citizens have flooded Governor Strickland's office with urgent requests to withdraw the states anti-consumer labeling requirements.
Perhaps the governor has an ulterior motive for pushing his new rules. If he goes ahead with his labeling plans, he might end up with a top appointment in the Obama administration!

Jeffrey Smith - August 15, 2011 - posted at ConspiracyPlant

*** Jeffrey M. Smith is the author of Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies About the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You're Eating  and Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods from Chelsea Green Publishing (GMO Set). Smith worked at a GMO detection laboratory, founded the Institute for Responsible Technology, and currently lives in Iowa—surrounded by genetically modified corn and soybeans. For more information, visit Chelsea Green.

Also checkout: The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of the World's Food Supply

Submitted by SadInAmerica on Fri, 08/19/2011 - 5:51pm.

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A Genetic Clue to Why Autism Affects Boys More

Ten year-old Tristan Bonnert, who has autism, with his mother Delilah at their home in Columbia, S.C. - Mary Ann Chastain / AP

Among the many mysteries that befuddle autism researchers: why the disorder affects boys four times more often than girls. But in new findings reported online today by the journal Molecular Psychiatry, researchers say they have found a genetic clue that may help explain the disparity.

The newly discovered autism-risk gene, identified by authors as CACNA1G, is more common in boys than in girls (why that's so is still not clear), and the authors suggest it plays a role in boys' increased risk of the developmental disorder. CACNA1G, which sits on chromosome 17, amid other genes that have been previously linked to autism, is responsible for regulating the flow of calcium into and out of cells. Nerve cells in the brain rely on calcium to become activated, and research suggests that imbalances in the mineral can result in the overstimulation of neural connections and create developmental problems, such as autism and even epilepsy, which is also a common feature of autism. (See six tips for traveling with an autistic child.)

"Our current theories about autism suggest that the disorder is related to overexcitability at nerve endings," says Geri Dawson, chief science officer of Autism Speaks, an advocacy group that provided the genetic data used by the study's authors. "It's interesting to see that the gene they identified appears to modulate excitability of neurons."

For the new study, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), combed the genetic database of the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange (AGRE), a resource of DNA from 2,000 families with at least one autistic child. The scientists focused on the more than 1,000 genetic samples of families in which at least one son was affected by the disorder, prompted by the results of an earlier study using the same database, which identified a rich autism-related genetic region on chromosome 17 that contained genetic variants more common in boys than in girls. While nearly 40% of the general population has the most common form of CACNA1G, one variant of the gene was more prevalent in autistic boys, researchers found. "There is a strong genetic signal in this region," says Dr. Daniel Geschwind, director of UCLA's Center for Autism Research and Treatment and one of the study's co-authors. "But this gene doesn't explain all of that signal or even half of it. What that means is that there are many more genes in this region contributing to autism." (See pictures of inside a school for autistic children.)

That's not surprising for a disorder as complex as autism — actually, a spectrum of developmental disorders involving impairment in language, social behavior and certain physical behaviors — with symptoms that range widely in number and severity. So far, studies have linked a handful of genes, all of which play a role in the way nerve cells connect and communicate, with autism spectrum disorders. It's likely not only that a large number of genes contribute to the disorder, but also that a different combination of genes — as well as unique interactions between genes and environment — are responsible for each individual case of autism.

So it's certainly a daunting challenge to begin teasing out the individual genes that may contribute to autism, as the UCLA team has with CACNA1G, but databases like AGRE make the job slightly easier. The next step will be to try to use known autism genes to help develop screening tools or early interventions. "We are going to have a much better understanding of the causes of autism over the next five to 10 years," says Dawson. "We're in a period of great discovery."

By ALICE PARK Tuesday, May. 19, 2009

Source: Time Magazine

Posted: Ask Marion – TrueHealthisTrueWealth

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