Vermont is set to legalize adult use of marijuana. The House of Representatives voted on the 11th of Janurary to legalize possession and home cultivation of marijuana plants. The measure would not allow marijuana sales, but the Green Mountain State is poised to make history as the first state in the nation to legalize marijuana by legislation, as opposed to being done by the popular vote. Vermount will become the ninth state in the country to allow recreational marijuana.

Every other state, California, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Maine and Massachusetts, along with Washington, D.C., bypassed reluctant lawmakers to legalize recreational marijuana via ballot initiative.

Republican Gov. Phil Scott is planning to sign the bill this week. The legislation would allow adults (21 and up)  to possess up to one ounce of marijuana or five grams of hash, and for the cultivation of up to two mature and four immature plants in one’s home. It would remain illegal to smoke cannabis in a public place or while operating a vehicle.

The bill doesn’t permit commercial sales.

All eight states that legalized marijuana via ballot initiatives have or will soon have regulated sales and cultivation up and running. Only Washington D.C., which legalized adult use in 2014, doesn’t have a regulated market. While selling cannabis products is technically not permitted in D.C., a thriving ‘gift economy’ has emerged thanks to a loophole: A store can sell a T-shirt for $45, and give some cannabis as a ‘gift’ with the purchase.”

Sources:

• Vermont Senate gives final OK to marijuana bill, governor’s desk next – USA Today
• Vermont Is the First State to Legalize Marijuana Through Legislation – Freedom Leaf

Scientists from Baylor University in Texas have found compelling evidence linking the recent rise of virulent Clostridium difficile infections to a widely used sugar additive, trehalose. Antibiotic-resistant C. diff infections are one of the biggest challenges facing the healthcare industry, with the Centers for Disease Control reporting that in a year, the bacteria kill 15,000 people within thirty days of infection. Baylor researchers noticed that the C. diff epidemic exploded within two years of trehalose’s FDA approval and determined that two particular bacteria strains, RT027 and RT078, were capable of using trehalose as their sole carbon source.

Recommended: Sugar Leads to Depression – World’s First Trial Proves Gut and Brain are Linked (Protocol Included)

Why Trehalose?

Trehalose is a disaccharide sugar found naturally in mushrooms, shrimp, and many insects. Prior to 2000, trehalose as an alternative food additive was too expensive to be widely used. However, a Japanese company introduced a way to extract the sugar, and it is now added to a wide range of food products, like ice cream, fruit, frozen foods, baked goods, and various beverages.

Researchers were not able to identify trehalose as the reason for the C. diff epidemic. After all, only two strains of C.diff thrived on trehalose. Those strains, RT027 and RT078, didn’t experience an increase in the number of bacteria. However, the RT027’s enhanced ability to metabolize trehalose resulted in more C. diff toxins, making the bacteria more virulent.

Related: Healthy Sugar Alternatives & More

We Know What Doesn’t Work

Not all C. diff develops into a serious or life-threatening infection.  But the link between trehalose and the virulence of C. diff bacteria makes the case that these infections are of our own making. When we eat sugar or processed food (trehalose is almost always both), we feed potentially harmful bacteria and overwhelm beneficial bacteria. Previous research has also linked serious cases of C. diff with antibiotic use, a treatment methodology that wipes out the beneficial bacteria necessary for gut balance.

Related: Sugar Industry Has Had Evidence Linking Sugar to Heart Disease for Nearly Half a Century

This new study appears to confirm the information we already have – the standard Western diet of processed, sugary foods has serious consequences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpRUfv-ioNU

Sources:

• How C. Diff Infections Decrease with Fewer Antibiotics – Organic Lifestyle Magazine
• A popular sugar additive may have fueled the spread of not one but two superbugs – LA Times
• Food Additive May Be Worsening Clostridium Difficile Epidemic – American Council on Science and Health
• Nearly half a million Americans suffered from Clostridium difficile infections in a single year – CDC.gov

United States children are 70 percent to die before adulthood than kids born into modern, wealthy democratic countries, according to the new Health Affairs study.

The research indicates that since 1961, more than 600,000 children would have been saved by having been born in another wealthy country.

In all the wealthy, democratic countries we studied children are dying less often then they were 50 years ago. But we found that children are dying more often in the United States than in any similar country.” – Ashish Thakrar, the study’s lead author

It really seems to be the impact of our fragmented health care system,” Thakrar says. “Mothers who are qualifying for Medicaid for the first time because they’re mothers might be seeing doctors for the first time. They might not have a family physician, or a clear support system.”

Between 2001 and 2010, researchers found a 76 percent increased of death for infants in the U.S. compared to 19 peer countries. The US also maintains an infant death rate from extreme prematurity three times that of its peer countries. Read more at Vox.com

Must Read:

• How To Detoxify and Heal From Vaccinations – For Adults and Children
• Common Bad Parenting Advice You Should Ignore
• SIDS and SUID
• Shaken Baby Syndrome – Child Abuse or Vaccine Injury?
• A History of Bad Medical Advice
• A Burden of Guilt – Learning About Vaccine Dangers the Hard Way

Honey bees seem to be attracted to the chemicals that are killing them. based on experiments showing the bees preferred sugar water laced with chemicals known to cause problems for bees over sugar water alone. These findings published in the journal Scientific Reports suggest that herbicides and fungicides pose a greater risk to pollinators than previously assumed.

Scientists found that forager bees were drawn to the fungicide chlorothalonil and the herbicide ingredient glyphosate, found in Monsanto’s Roundup, at certain concentrations.” – Honey bees Love Chemicles That Are Killing Them

The nectar that a bee brings back to the hive will effect on the health of the entire colony. Insecticides have been shown to shorten the lifespans of exposed bees and disrupt organization of the hive. Past research shows that chlorothalonil can inhibit a fungal parasite called Nosema bombi that affects bumblebees. Glyphosate has been shown to potentially affect the ability of bees to navigate.

Recommended: Fungal Infections – How to Eliminate Yeast, Candida, and Mold Infections For Good

The bees are not only not avoiding this fungicide [chlorothalonil], they’re consuming more of it at certain concentrations. People assume that fungicides affect only fungi, but fungi are much more closely related to animals than they are to plants. And toxins that disrupt physiological processes in fungi can also potentially affect them in animals, including insects.” – May Berenbau

The bees in the study were given the choice between a plain sugar syrup and a sweet mixture blended with several fungicides and herbicides at different concentrations. There were also feeders with the sugar water mixed with naturally occurring chemicals.

Recommended: Detox Cheap and Easy Without Fasting – Recipes Included

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQkIeN56dt0

A healthy wildlife population is likely to slow the spread of diseases carried by ticks, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Conducted by researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara in Kenya, this study found that tick populations rose by 130 percent to 225 percent in areas where large wildlife was excluded. Drier areas were more likely to experience an increased tick population. Ticks are responsible for the spread of several different types of pathogens like babesiosis, ehrlichiosis, and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, though the most reported and well-known of these is Lyme disease.

This study showed that large mammal conservation can reduce the abundance of some ticks, including in this case the abundance of ticks infected with pathogens that negatively impact the health of both humans and wildlife in the region…Finding this ‘win-win-win’ scenario in which conservation benefits both human health and wildlife health can, we hope, really motivate further conservation and ultimately help protect landscapes and wildlife health.” – Dr. Hillary Young, Assistant Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Must Read: Lyme Disease – Holistic Protocol to Completely Rebuild the Immune System

Increased Chances of Lyme Disease and Others

This study also tested captured ticks for disease-causing bacteria. The increase in tick population didn’t lead to a higher prevalence of diseases, but a larger tick population offers opportunistic pathogens a larger number of hosts. That could be one explanation for the rise in tick-borne diagnoses. Lyme disease cases have doubled over the last 30 years, and the Center for Disease Control reports that those numbers are underreported.

Must Read: Do I have Lyme Disease? Symptoms and Latest News

It Continues

All signs point to the increase in tick populations and the diagnosis of tick-borne diseases continuing for the foreseeable future. Ticks are more prevalent in drier areas and can survive all year in warmer weather. Researchers found that they are also more populous in areas with decreased wildlife. Which means our current state of affairs will likely lead to optimal conditions for ticks. Higher temperatures, less wildlife…more Lyme for us?

Recommended:

• Holistic Guide to Healing the Endocrine System and Balancing Our Hormones
• Sugar Leads to Depression – World’s First Trial Proves Gut and Brain are Linked (Protocol Included)
• How to Detoxify and Heal the Lymphatic System

Sources:

• Study shows importance of wildlife in controlling ticks – Phys.org
• Lyme disease is vastly under-reported, CDC says – CBS News
• Climate Change Indicators: Lyme Disease – EPA

In a Collective Evolution article Robert F. Kennedy Jr reported that that out of the 16 HPV vaccine randomized trials only two used an inert saline placebo. Ten of the trials for the HPV vaccine were done against a neurotoxic aluminum adjuvant, and four of the trials used another aluminum-containing vaccine as the comparison.

Recommended: How Plumbing (Not Vaccines) Eradicated Disease

Researchers from Mexico’s National Institute of Cardiology pored over 28 studies published through January 2017—16 randomized trials and 12 post-marketing case series—pertaining to the three human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines currently on the market globally. In their July 2017 peer-reviewed report, the authors, Manuel Martínez-Lavin and Luis Amezcua-Guerra, uncovered evidence of numerous adverse events, including life-threatening injuries, permanent disabilities, hospitalizations and deaths, reported after vaccination with GlaxoSmithKline’s bivalent Cervarix vaccine and Merck’s quadrivalent or nine-valent HPV vaccines (Gardasil and Gardasil 9). Pharmaceutical company scientists routinely dismissed, minimized or concealed those injuries using statistical gimmicks and invalid comparisons designed to diminish their relative significance.

Of the 16 HPV vaccine randomized trials, only two used an inert saline placebo. Ten of the sixteen compared the HPV vaccine against a neurotoxic aluminum adjuvant, and four trials used an already-approved aluminum-containing vaccine as the comparison.

Scientific researchers view double-blind placebo trials as the gold standard for testing new drugs. To minimize bias, investigators randomly assign patients to either a “treatment” group or a “control” (placebo) group and then compare health outcomes. The standard practice is to compare a new drug against a “pharmacologically inert” placebo. To minimize opportunities for bias, neither patients nor researchers know which individuals received the drug and which the placebo. However, in clinical trials of the various HPV vaccines, pharmaceutical researchers avoided this kind of rigor and instead employed sleight-of-hand flimflams to mask the seriousness of vaccine injuries.

Recommended: How To Detoxify and Heal From Vaccinations – For Adults and Children

Using aluminum-containing placebos will obviously obscure comparison of the control groups. Those concerned with the HPV vaccine have argued that aluminum adjuvants are one of the most likely causes of adverse reactions. The placebos with aluminum caused adverse reactions among the “presumably unwitting patients who received them,” allowing the pharmaceutical companies to hide similar adverse reactions among people who received the vaccines. Although both placebo and study groups suffered numerous adverse events in these studies, there were minimal differences between the two groups. The similar adverse health reactions indicated to industry researchers and government regulators that the vaccines were not causing damage.

Recommended: The MMR Vaccine – A Comprehensive Overview of the Potential Dangers and Effectiveness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuJAqtQRhMs

Drug deaths for 2016 were tallied at 63,600, up from 52,000 in 2015. This year is likely to continue the trend. Fentanyl is being blamed. In other words, drug manufacturers, the companies supposedly in the business of saving lives, have been so negligent with our health that they are responsible for a drop in the life expectancy of the entire United States. Let that sink in. These are the companies that produce cough medicine, baby shampoo, and vaccines for us and our children.

I think we should take it very seriously. If you look at the other developed countries in the world, they’re not seeing this kind of thing. Life expectancy is going up.” – Bob Anderson, chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch at the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the CDC

Since 1962 and 1963 influenza caused an inordinate number of deaths. Since then, the U.S. has only had a one-year drop in our life expectancy, which was during the worst of the AIDS epidemic. The number of people who fatally overdosed on fentanyl and other synthetic opiates rose from 9,580 in 2015 to 19,413 the following year. Deaths due to heroin increased almost 20 percent, and deaths from other opioid painkillers such as hydrocodone and oxycodone went up to 14 percent. At least 42,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses in 2016, which is reported to be a 28 percent increase from the previous year.

Keith Humphreys, an addiction specialist at Stanford University, says it’s even worse than it looks. Keith says that the research has shown official figures could be undercounting the true number of opioid deaths by 20 percent or more,

…we could easily be at 50,000 opioid deaths last year,” he said. “This means that even if you ignored deaths from all other drugs, the opioid epidemic alone is deadlier than the AIDS epidemic at its peak.”

The opioid addiction in the U.S. is affecting other countries too.

The biggest challenge China faces in cracking down on the smuggling of opioids is the huge demand from the US. The United States should strengthen its educational and publicity campaigns to reduce domestic demand, intensify its crackdown on internet-based drug crimes, and share more lab data with China to improve our detection and verification capabilities.” – Yu Haibin, a senior official with the Narcotics Control Bureau of the Ministry of Public Security, the country’s top law enforcement agency.

Recommended Reading:

• Besieged by Guilt: Ex-Pharmaceutical Employees Speak Out Against the Industry
• How To Detoxify and Heal From Vaccinations – For Adults and Children
• Why I Stopped Taking Prescription Drugs

Sources:

• Fueled by drug crisis, U.S. life expectancy declines for a second straight year – The Washington Post
• China says US not doing enough to cut demand for opioids – CNN