Gardisil Bombshell ... "will do little to reduce cervical cancer rates"

The first paragraph which I bolded says it all!


http://thebulletin.us/articles/2009/10/25/top_stories/doc4ae4b76d07e16766677720.txt

Gardasil Researcher Drops A Bombshell

Harper: Controversal Drug Will Do Little To Reduce Cervical Cancer Rates

By Susan Brinkmann, For The Bulletin

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Dr. Diane Harper, lead researcher in the development of two human papilloma virus vaccines, Gardasil and Cervarix, said the controversial drugs will do little to reduce cervical cancer rates and, even though they're being recommended for girls as young as nine, there have been no efficacy trials in children under the age of 15.

Dr. Harper, director of the Gynecologic Cancer Prevention Research Group at the University of Missouri, made these remarks during an address at the 4th International Public Conference on Vaccination which took place in Reston, Virginia on Oct. 2-4. Although her talk was intended to promote the vaccine, participants said they came away convinced the vaccine should not be received.

"I came away from the talk with the perception that the risk of adverse side effects is so much greater than the risk of cervical cancer, I couldn't help but question why we need the vaccine at all," said Joan Robinson, Assistant Editor at the Population Research Institute.

Dr. Harper began her remarks by explaining that 70 percent of all HPV infections resolve themselves without treatment within a year. Within two years, the number climbs to 90 percent. Of the remaining 10 percent of HPV infections, only half will develop into cervical cancer, which leaves little need for the vaccine.

She went on to surprise the audience by stating that the incidence of cervical cancer in the U.S. is already so low that "even if we get the vaccine and continue PAP screening, we will not lower the rate of cervical cancer in the US."

There will be no decrease in cervical cancer until at least 70 percent of the population is vaccinated, and even then, the decrease will be minimal.

Apparently, conventional treatment and preventative measures are already cutting the cervical cancer rate by four percent a year. At this rate, in 60 years, there will be a 91.4 percent decline just with current treatment. Even if 70 percent of women get the shot and required boosters over the same time period, which is highly unlikely, Harper says Gardasil still could not claim to do as much as traditional care is already doing.

Dr. Harper, who also serves as a consultant to the World Health Organization, further undercut the case for mass vaccination by saying that "four out of five women with cervical cancer are in developing countries."

Ms. Robinson said she could not help but wonder, "If this is the case, then why vaccinate at all? But from the murmurs of the doctors in the audience, it was apparent that the same thought was occurring to them."

However, at this point, Dr. Harper dropped an even bigger bombshell on the audience when she announced that, "There have been no efficacy trials in girls under 15 years."

Merck, the manufacturer of Gardasil, studied only a small group of girls under 16 who had been vaccinated, but did not follow them long enough to conclude sufficient presence of effective HPV antibodies.

This is not the first time Dr. Harper revealed the fact that Merck never tested Gardasil for safety in young girls. During a 2007 interview with KPC News.com, she said giving the vaccine to girls as young as 11 years-old "is a great big public health experiment."

At the time, which was at the height of Merck's controversial drive to have the vaccine mandated in schools, Dr. Harper remained steadfastly opposed to the idea and said she had been trying for months to convince major television and print media about her concerns, "but no one will print it."

"It is silly to mandate vaccination of 11 to 12 year old girls," she said at the time. "There also is not enough evidence gathered on side effects to know that safety is not an issue."

When asked why she was speaking out, she said: "I want to be able to sleep with myself when I go to bed at night." 

Since the drug's introduction in 2006, the public has been learning many of these facts the hard way. To date, 15,037 girls have officially reported adverse side effects from Gardasil to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). These adverse reactions include Guilliane Barre, lupus, seizures, paralysis, blood clots, brain inflammation and many others. The CDC acknowledges that there have been 44 reported deaths.

Dr. Harper also participated in the research on Glaxo-Smith-Kline's version of the drug, Cervarix, currently in use in the UK but not yet approved here. Since the government began administering the vaccine to school-aged girls last year, more than 2,000 patients reported some kind of adverse reaction including nausea, dizziness, blurred vision, convulsions, seizures and hyperventilation. Several reported multiple reactions, with 4,602 suspected side-effects recorded in total. The most tragic case involved a 14 year-old girl who dropped dead in the corridor of her school an hour after receiving the vaccination.

The outspoken researcher also weighed in last month on a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that raised questions about the safety of the vaccine, saying bluntly: "The rate of serious adverse events is greater than the incidence rate of cervical cancer."

Ms. Robinson said she respects Dr. Harper's candor. "I think she's a scientist, a researcher, and she's genuine enough a scientist to be open about the risks. I respect that in her."

However, she failed to make the case for Gardasil. "For me, it was hard to resist the conclusion that Gardasil does almost nothing for the health of American women."

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/24/anarchist.twitter.raid/

 

Twitter anarchist raided under 'riot' laws

By Ryan Singel

(WIRED) -- An anarchist social worker raided by the feds wants his computers, manuscripts and pick axes back. He argues that authorities violated the U.S. Constitution and the rights of his mentally ill clients while searching for evidence that he broke an anti-rioting law on Twitter.

In a guns-drawn raid on October 1, FBI agents and police seized boxes of dubious "evidence" from the Queens, New York, home of Elliott Madison. A U.S. District Judge in Brooklyn has set a Monday deadline to rule on the legality of the search, and in the meantime has ordered the government to refrain from examining the material taken in the 6 a.m. search.

Madison, who counsels more than 100 severely mentally ill patients in New York, seems to have first drawn attention from the authorities at September's G-20 gathering of world leaders in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There he was arrested on September 24 at a motel room for allegedly listening to a police scanner and relaying information on Twitter to help protesters avoid heavily-armed cops -- an activity the State Department lauded when it happened in Iran.

A week later, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, armed with a search warrant and backed by a federal grand jury investigation, raided Madison's house, which he shares with his wife of 13 years and several roommates. The squad seized his computers, camera memory cards, books, air-filtration masks, bumper stickers and political posters -- all purportedly evidence that the 41-year old social worker had broken a federal anti-rioting law that carries up to five years in prison.

But a closer look at the court documents leaves the unmistakable impression that Elliott Madison is yet another casualty of the government's nasty, post-9/11 habit of considering political dissidents as threats to national security.

Madison, his wife and his lawyer Martin Stolar say the search violates the Constitution's protections against general searches and prosecution for political speech. The police also seized mobile phones, citizen emergency kits, manuscripts, posters and even the couple's marriage license.

In a motion to throw out the search, Stolar called the search unconstitutional:

In this day and age, federally authorized agents entered the private home of a writer and urban planner and seized their books and writings. The warrant's vagueness and lack of specificity encouraged the agents to use their own discretion and their own views of the political universe to seize, or not to seize, items which they thought were evidence of a violation of the federal anti-riot statute. The law and the Constitution do not allow this. If there really is a grand jury investigation with possible future prosecution under [a federal anti-rioting law], the use of this statute as applied to demonstrations, demonstrators, and their supporters has profound 1st Amendment implications.

If Madison were an Iranian using Twitter to coordinate government protests, he'd likely be considered a hero in the West. Instead, the self-identified anarchist -- who volunteered in Louisiana after Katrina -- is now facing up to five years in prison for each count a grand jury cares to indict him on.

Oddly, Madison was in jail during the most dramatic of the G-20 confrontations.

The day after his arrest by Philadelphia State police on September 24, hundreds of police officers chased protesters around the city, using sonic weapons, pepper spray, batons, projectile weapons and tear gas, and arrested a reporter and bystanders. Some self-styled anarchists broke windows of chain stores and pushed a dumpster towards a phalanx of cops in riot gear.

The connection between the federal and state investigation remains unclear, though the feds say they will turn evidence over to the state, if any is found.

The affidavits justifying the raid remains under seal, but court documents reveal a grand jury is investigating whether Madison, and possibly his wife, violated 18 U.S.C. �2101, the federal anti-rioting law.

That obscure law was famously used to prosecute the Chicago 7 after the 1968 Democratic Convention's police riot. Five of the so-called Yippies were initially found guilty of of inciting a riot, though the convictions were eventually thrown out.

Madison and his wife both volunteered as paralegals for the People's Law Collective, their lawyer Martin Stolar said, and he'd worked with them before defending protesters.

In fact, he suggests that work might have sparked this entire incident.

"If you do your job effectively, then you draw the government's attentions," Stolar said.

Madison also belongs to the "Curious George Brigade," which published a book called Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs. The group was at work on a follow-up, until 50 copies of the first book and the electronic manuscript of the second were confiscated in the raid. On Monday, Madison described the book in an affidavit to the court as a book of "political theory and practice."

The published book seems sympathetic to the tactic of confronting police and destroying property of companies considered harmful, usually -- though not always -- multinational companies. Writing such a book is not a crime, though, and many of the other books cited by the police as evidence justifying the search after the fact can be bought on Amazon.com.

Madison, who has no prior convictions, works as a counselor at a mental health facility. He says some of the records seized by the government include confidential information that should be covered by a shield law protecting mental health records. The U.S. Attorney's office disputes that contention, saying the shield doesn't apply since Madison isn't a registered social worker.

Moreover, the government says, Madison's house was chock full of incriminating materials, including gas masks, pickaxes and air-filtration masks.

But Madison says that he'd become a believer in civil defense after the 2003 blackouts in New York and that the seized pickaxes are specialty, anti-sparking devices to be used in emergencies to shut off water mains. In fact, Madison and his wife told the court they'd made a YouTube video about what to put in a rescue pack. A review of the video by Threat Level confirms the pickaxe in the video matches the one seized by police.

The government countered that his reading material is also very suspicious. "As an initial matter, the government notes that a publication entitled 'Manifesto of Rioting' was seized from the Weisses' bedroom," the U.S. Attorney's office told the court last week.

Some of the other evidence the feds seized that shows he promotes riots? Steampunk magazine, for one. Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs. Anarchist political-theory books. A needlepoint depiction of Lenin that belonged to Madison's wife's grandmother. (Not surprisingly, the police don't seem to grasp the irony of an anarchist owning a Lenin bust in any form, given the hatred between the two ideologies since the Spanish Civil War, when the Communists turned on the anarchists and murdered their ostensible allies.)

His books on poison looks pretty incriminating, too. But his lawyer wonders why the police seized The Poisons and Antidotes Sourcebook and left the book Deadly Doses: A Writer's Guide to Poisons, both of which he says Elliot Madison uses for his fiction writing.

The feds also found caltrops -- four-pronged metal defensive weapons that always land with a pointy side up, used to give flat tires or hobble horses. Neither Madison nor his attorney has mentioned them in their filings. They are not illegal to own.

When the feds also found nine packages of fireworks at the rear of a closet, a JTTF agent took him downtown to book him for the infraction -- a ticketable offense. The bomb squad took care of the fireworks, which one supposes must have been impervious to dousing by a regular police officer.

Federal agents also seized camera memory disks, Madison's journals, computers and hard drives. These contained his fiction manuscripts, his wife's urban planning work and other writings. The police also confiscated a housemate's laptop that belonged to the Labor Department.

How did all of this get taken? Doesn't a search warrant have to specify what exactly is to be seized?

According to the U.S. Attorney's office, the warrant was legitimate. Signed by Judge Honorable Viktor V. Pohorelsky on September 26, it authorized the government to seize:

Computers, hard-drives, floppy discs and other media used to store computer-accessible information, cellular phones, personal digital assistants, electronic storage devices and related peripherals, black masks and clothing, maps, correspondence and other documents, financial records, notes, ledgers, receipts, papers, photographs, telephone and address books, identification documents, indicia of residency and other documents and records that constitute evidence of the commission of rioting crimes or that are designed or intended as a means of violating the federal rioting laws, including any of the above items that are maintained within other closed or locked containers, including safes and other containers that may be further secured by key locks (or combination locks) of various kinds.

The list of what was taken stretches pages.

The Madisons' lawyers are trying to overturn the search on the grounds that the warrant wasn't specific enough to pass constitutional muster. They also argue the feds have no business collecting the names of people Elliot communicated with, and that records from the People's Law Collective, as well as his work notes, are protected under confidentiality rules.

But the U.S. Attorney's Office defended the search in court, arguing that the broad search was just like those used in drug warrants, which were increasingly broadened over the last quarter century's ill-fated War on Drugs.

The affidavits that supported the search warrant are under court seal, because the grand jury investigation is "complex and multi-state," according to the prosecution.

The federal anti-rioting statute is serious business, and is seemingly easy to violate. For instance, it is a felony to "organize, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on a riot; or [...] to aid or abet any person in inciting or participating in [...] a riot." By that token, simply telling a person fleeing cops with batons which way to run makes you a felon.

One wonders how the Southern Christian Leadership Council and Martin Luther King, Jr. would have fared under that law, when he was in a Birmingham jail, writing letters urging people to support the direct-action program of sit-ins and marches. Those protesters were later attacked by police using dogs and fire hoses on the orders of Birmingham Sheriff Bull Connor.

A spokesman for the New York U.S. Attorney's office, Bob Nardoza, declined to comment on the matter, citing rules forbidding officials to speak about grand jury investigations.

Copyright 2009 Wired.com.

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/19/nih-funds-study-of-teen-firearms/?feat=home_top5_commented

 

U.S. quietly begins to study gun safety

Jim McElhatton

More than a decade after Congress cut funding for firearms research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), another federal health agency has been spending millions of dollars to study such topics as whether teenagers who carry firearms run a different risk of getting shot compared with suffering other sorts of injuries.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) also has been financing research to investigate whether having many liquor stores in a neighborhood puts people at greater risk of getting shot.

Such studies are coming under sharp scrutiny by Republican lawmakers who question whether the money could be better spent on biomedical research at a time of increasing competition for NIH funding. They're also leery of NIH research relating to firearms in general, recalling how 13 years ago the House voted to cut CDC funding when critics complained that the agency was trying to win public support for gun control.

"It's almost as if someone's been looking for a way to get this study done ever since the Centers for Disease Control was banned from doing it 10 years ago," Rep. Joe L. Barton, Texas Republican, said of one of the NIH studies. "But it doesn't make any more sense now than it did then."

The NIH, which administers more than $30 billion in taxpayer funds for medical research, defended the grants.

"Gun related violence is a public health problem - it diverts considerable health care resources away from other problems and, therefore, is of interest to NIH," Don Ralbovsky, NIH spokesman, wrote in an e-mail responding to questions about the grants.

"These particular grants do not address gun control; rather they deal with the surrounding web of circumstances involved in many violent crimes, especially how alcohol policy may reduce the public health burden from gun-related injury and death," he said.

Mr. Barton and Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the ranking member on the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, respectively, first questioned the NIH about the gun-related grants in a letter Friday to NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins.

The letter sought information about grants for current projects and for others starting as far back as 2002, totaling nearly $5 million. The lawmakers called the study of criminal behavior "a laudable endeavor which consistently benefits the American people, often in ways that people do not see."

"And yet we have trouble understanding the administration's desire to spend, for example, $642,561 in taxpayer funds to learn how inner-city teenagers whose friends, acquaintances and peers carry firearms and drink alcohol on street corners could show up in emergency rooms with gunshot wounds.

"The day-follows-night quality of this question and its potential answer simply do not seem to justify the expense that would be borne by people who work and pay their taxes," the lawmakers wrote.

Special interests on both sides of the gun-control issue differ on the question of whether the NIH ought to be conducting firearms-related research.

"This kind of research does concern us, and we're going to be watching it closely," said Erich Pratt, a spokesman for the Gun Owners Association of America. "You'd think that after the CDC had their money revoked, we wouldn't be dealing with this."

But Peter Hamm, spokesman for the Washington-based Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said Republican lawmakers were "blaming the messenger" by criticizing the research.

"Burying the evidence is what the gun lobby is best at," he said. "Whether the members of Congress like it or not, gun violence is a public health problem in America today."

NIH records show that one study being questioned by lawmakers aimed to "investigate whether adolescents who consume alcohol and/or carry firearms, and/or whose daily activities occur in surroundings rich in alcohol and/or firearms, face a differential risk of being shot with a firearm or injured in a non-gun assault."

A separate study on child safety looked at the decision-making process by couples on whether to own firearms, in part trying to identify whether women are less supportive of firearms compared with their partners.

The questions about whether the NIH should fund such research are being raised more than a decade after the House voted against restoring $2.6 million to the CDC's budget, money that the agency was spending on gun studies. The move, backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA), was made after Republicans and some Democrats complained that the CDC was pushing for gun control.

The money was eventually restored to the CDC budget but with a spending restriction that has remained in place ever since, mandating that funds cannot be used "in whole or in part to advocate or promote gun control."

Mr. Barton and Mr. Walden, both of whom have received political contributions from the NRA over the years, requested more information on the NIH firearms research funding a month after they separately raised questions about several other NIH grants.

Their earlier letter to the NIH cited questions about grants that "do not seem to be of the highest scientific rigor," including one on whether participating on dragon-boat paddling teams helped cancer survivors more than taking part in an organized walking program.

Manna Storehouse Sues Government

"SWAT raid on food storehouse heading to trial

Family sues over confiscation of supplies, computers"

http://www.wnd.com/index.php/index.php?pageId=112110

CA: Ammunition Bill Signed into Law

http://www.news10.net/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=68596&catid=2

 

Ammunition Bill Signed into Law

 

Posted By: Trevor Tamsen, Multimedia Producer  

SACRAMENTO, CA - Before the midnight deadline, Gov. Schwarzenegger acted on 685 bills that were on his desk. He signed 456 and vetoed 229.

One of the bills that he signed was Assembly Bill 962.  It requires handgun ammunition to be kept behind the counter where customers cannot access it without assistance. It also requires gun shop owners to thumbprint people who buy handgun ammunition, as well as record their identification and provide that information to police.

Schwarzenegger released a statement explaining why he signed the bill.

"To the Members of the California State Assembly: I am signing Assembly Bill 962.

This measure would require vendors of handgun ammunition to keep a log of information on handgun ammunition sales, store ammunition in a safe and secure manner, and require the face to-
face transfer of ammunition sales.

Although I have previously vetoed legislation similar to this  measure, local governments have demonstrated that requiring ammunition vendors to keep records on ammunition sales improves public safety. These records have allowed law enforcement to arrest and prosecute persons who have no business possessing firearms and ammunition: gang members, violent parolees, second and third strikers, and even people previously serving time in state prison for murder.

Utilized properly, this type of information is invaluable for keeping communities safe and preventing dangerous felons from committing crimes with firearms.

Moreover, this type of record keeping is no more intrusive for law abiding citizens than similar laws governing pawnshops or the sale of cold medicine. Unfortunately, even the most successful
local program is flawed; without a statewide law, felons can easily skirt the record keeping requirements of one city by visiting another. Assembly Bill 962 will fix this problem by
mandating that all ammunition vendors in the state keep records on ammunition sales.

As Governor, I have sought the appropriate balance between public safety and the right to keep and bear arms. I have signed important public safety measures to regulate the sale and transfer of .50 caliber rifles, instituted the California Firearms License Check program, and promoted the use of microstamping technology in handguns. I have also vetoed many pieces of legislation that sought to place unreasonable restrictions and burdens on firearms dealers and ammunition vendors.

Assembly Bill 962 reasonably regulates access to ammunition and improves public safety without placing undue burdens on consumers. For these reasons, I am pleased to sign this bill."

IN: Wabash Valley woman didn’t realize second cold medicine purchase violated drug laws

This is what I mentioned the last time I was on the air:

http://www.tribstar.com/local/local_story_246225916.html

Wabash Valley woman didn't realize second cold medicine purchase violated drug laws
By Lisa Trigg
The Tribune-Star

CLINTON — When Sally Harpold bought cold medicine for her family back in March, she never dreamed that four months later she would end up in handcuffs.

Now, Harpold is trying to clear her name of criminal charges, and she is speaking out in hopes that a law will change so others won't endure the same embarrassment she still is facing.

"This is a very traumatic experience," Harpold said.

Harpold is a grandmother of triplets who bought one box of Zyrtec-D cold medicine for her husband at a Rockville pharmacy. Less than seven days later, she bought a box of Mucinex-D cold medicine for her adult daughter at a Clinton pharmacy, thereby purchasing 3.6 grams total of pseudoephedrine in a week's time.

Those two purchases put her in violation of Indiana law 35-48-4-14.7, which restricts the sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, or PSE, products to no more than 3.0 grams within any seven-day period.

When the police came knocking at the door of Harpold's Parke County residence on July 30, she was arrested on a Vermillion County warrant for a class-C misdemeanor, which carries a sentence of up to 60 days in jail and up to a $500 fine. But through a deferral program offered by Vermillion County Prosecutor Nina Alexander, the charge could be wiped from Harpold's record by mid-September.

Harpold's story is one that concerns some law-abiding citizens who fear that innocent people will get mistakenly caught in the net of meth abuse roundups.

But the flip side of the story comes from the law enforcement arena, which is battling a resurgence in methamphetamine production in the Wabash Valley.

As the 12th-smallest county in the state, Vermillion County ranked as the state's fifth-largest producer of methamphetamine just a few years ago.

"I don't want to go there again," Alexander told the Tribune-Star, recalling how the manufacture and abuse of methamphetamine ravaged the tiny county and its families.

While the law was written with the intent of stopping people from purchasing large quantities of drugs to make methamphetamine, the law does not say the purchase must be made with the intent to make meth.

"The law does not make this distinction," Alexander said.

If the law said "with intent to manufacture methamphetamine," no one could be arrested until it was proven that the drug actually was used to make meth, the prosecutor said.

And that certainly wasn't the intent of the law, either. It was written to limit access to the key ingredient in meth — pseudoephedrine — and thereby to stop the clandestine "mom and pop" meth labs that were cooking drugs throughout the area.

Just as with any law, the public has the responsibility to know what is legal and what is not, and ignorance of the law is no excuse, the prosecutor said.

"I'm simply enforcing the law as it was written," Alexander said.

Pharmacies post "Meth Watch" signs, alerting customers that their purchases of drugs containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine are being monitored. Pharmacies also are required to submit a list of purchase records to police, who then examine the lists for violations of the law.

It is up to customers to pay attention to their purchase amounts, and to check medication labels, Alexander said.

"If you take these products, you ought to know what's in them," she said.

While many people know that Sudafed, Actifed and Claritin-D contain pseudoephedrine, there are many more over-the-counter medications that also contain the key meth ingredient.

Ron Vencel, a pharmacist with JR Pharmacies in Terre Haute, said consumers should check all drug labels, and notes that any drug that has a "D" after it, for "decongestant," has a likelihood of containing pseudoephedrine, or PSE.

Vencel has worked with area police to help curb the sale of over-the-counter pseudoephedrine to people buying it as a meth ingredient, and he offered insight into some of the purchasers.

As authorities and retailers have limited the sale of PSE, some meth-makers have resorted to asking their relatives and friends, who are unaware of the intended use of the product, to go buy the cold medicine. That has put some innocent people unwittingly into the cycle of meth production. And a buyer may call five or six different people to go buy the cold medicine, thereby circumventing the law.

Harpold, who is employed at the Rockville Correctional Facility for women, feels her reputation has been damaged by the arrest, and that she has been wrongly labeled as someone who makes meth.

Her police mug shot ran on the front page of her local newspaper, she wrote, in a letter to the Tribune-Star, "with an article entitled, '17 Arrested in Drug Sweep.'"

"That is something I have never been involved in," she said of meth.

When she told her co-workers about the arrest, she said, they could not believe it. They have been supportive of her, she said, and other friends in the community have tried to help stop the misinformation that has spread because of the arrest.

The morning she was arrested, Harpold and her husband were awakened by police officers banging on the front door of their home at Midway along U.S. 36. She was allowed to get dressed, and was then taken in handcuffs to the Clinton Police Department, where she was questioned about her cold medicine purchases. She was later booked into jail, and her husband had to pay $300 bail to get her released.

Harpold said she did go talk to the prosecutor about the situation, and Alexander offered her the deferral program, in which Harpold is required to pay the court costs, abide by all laws and not be arrested for 30 days. At the end of 30 days, the class-C misdemeanor will be erased from her record.

Alexander said she is working with Harpold about the charge, but the prosecutor asserts that Harpold did break the law with her purchases and is being held accountable.

"I do want people to know that we will check the pharmacy records and we will prosecute people who violate this law," Alexander said.

Vermillion County Sheriff Bob Spence said he also is willing to help Harpold overcome the negative situation.

"If there's any way we can help her, we will," Spence said.

He explained that the process leading to Harpold's arrest involved an officer checking area pharmacy purchase records, and coming up with about 40 purchases that violated the law.

That information was then taken to the prosecutor, whose staff drew up the probable cause affidavits to be filed in court. A judge then found probable cause and issued arrest warrants, and the sheriff's department is required by statute to see that the warrants are served.

Harpold was not arrested by Vermillion County officers, Spence stressed, since her residence is in Parke County. But she was returned to Clinton where she was questioned and processed.

Spence agreed with pharmacist Vencel's scenario that the people making the meth often send other people to buy the medicine. And Vigo County Sheriff Jon Marvel, who recently renewed efforts to track pseudoephedrine sales in the Wabash Valley, understands Harpold's arrest is embarrassing for her.

"Sometimes mistakes happen," Marvel said. "It's unfortunate. But for the good of everyone, the law was put into effect.

"I feel for her, but if she could go to one of the area hospitals and see a baby born to a meth-addicted mother …"

For now, Harpold is hoping to raise public awareness so others will avoid the stress she is going through. She has written to state lawmakers and to U.S. Sens. Richard Lugar and Evan Bayh and Congressman Brad Ellsworth about changing the law.

So far, only Lugar has responded to her letter, she said, but she will continue to pursue the issue.

"I just don't want this to happen to other people."



Lisa Trigg can be reached at (812) 231-4254 or lisa.trigg@tribstar.com.

The Sky is Not Falling - Cochrane Collaborator on H1N1 andvaccination

----- Original Message -----

The Cochrane Collaboration is an organization that runs meta-analyses
of pooled data on clinical trials. They are the most prestigious group
in the world for this kind of data analysis.They have done several on
influenza vaccines, all of which show flu vaccines are of no benefit
on influenza endpoints like mortality, serious illness, days lost at
work, etc. This fellow, Dr Tom Jefferson, is one of their influenza
experts. He states (after observing the full flu season in Australia)
that H1N1 is milder than normal seasonal influenza and presents very
little risk of severe complications and advises against vaccination,
which he says is not supported by science.

See full interview:
http://medicalconsumers.org/2009/09/24/why-the-h1n1-virus-is-not-a-major-threat/

Some points

--Mortality in Australia, the flu season ending there now, is 131
deaths out of 20,000,000 population. They have pretty good
surveillance down there.

--[This is about the same percentage of the population as Brazil,
whose season is also ending]

--As it became evident that H1N1 was not a major public health threat,
the WHO changed its definition of "pandemic"

OLD: "An influenza pandemic occurs when a new influenza virus appears
against which the human population has no immunity, resulting in
epidemics worldwide with ENORMOUS NUMBERS OF DEATHS AND ILLNESS
[emphasis in the original document]." May 2009.

NEW: Who dropped the "enormous numbers of deaths and illness" part of
the definition. NOW

--the safety test of the a new H1N1 vaccine was run on just 240 people
without a control group. Results were measured by antibody level
rather than real outcomes. About 1/3 of the group developed headache
and sore throat from the vaccination.

--Vaccines may include mercury Thimerosal and aluminum, another neurotoxin.

--
Paul Bergner
North American Institute of Medical Herbalism http://naimh.com
Medical Herbalism Journal http://medherb.com