Political Bunker

America, land of the poisoned...

NPR - Investigative reporter Mark Schapiro explains in a new book that toxic chemicals exist in many of the products we handle every day — agents that can cause cancer, genetic damage and birth defects, lacing everything from our gadgets to our toys to our beauty products.

TheScientist - US President George W. Bush on Tuesday (Nov 13) vetoed a spending bill that aimed to boost federal funding for the National Institutes of Health. The bill, which was passed by Congress last week, sought to increase NIH funding by about $1 billion from a 2007 budget of about $29 billion to a 2008 budget of about $30 billion.

NYT - President Bush on Tuesday vetoed a major spending measure that would have funded education, health care and job training programs, saying it contained money for too many of the special projects known as earmarks. But he signed a $459 billion bill to increase the Pentagon’s nonwar funding.

Menstrual Poetry - Universal Health care. What sends chills down the spines of Republicans everywhere, but what could ultimately make the United States a more respected country–A country that takes care of it’s people, including the poor. It doesn’t have to be such a distant dream, however, the world of health does not have to be dictated by insurance companies whose CEO’s know nothing about dying or losing a loved one because they simply did not have sufficient medical insurance.

Instead of lying about foreign health care systems, Giuliani might want to try addressing the problems of our own.

1. We spend the most.
2. We don't pay doctors according to the quality of their care.
3. Our wait times are low because many of us aren't getting care at all.
4. Most of us don't have a regular physician.
5. Our care isn't particularly convenient.
6. Our doctors don't listen to us.
7. We have high rates of chronic conditions.
8. … But we're not treating them properly.
9. We're frequent victims of medical, medication, and lab errors.
10. Most of us are dissatisfied with our current system.

Read more at prospect.org

Guardian - In a radio ad that his campaign prepared for New Hampshire voters, Giuliani tells listeners that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000 and goes on to say: "My chance of surviving cancer - and thank God I was cured of it - in the United States: 82%. My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England: only 44% under socialised medicine."

George W Bush's Food and Drug Administration (FDA), stacked with insiders from the industry that literally carried him to Washington, has stooped to a new low to protect the obscene profits of the multi-billion dollar cancer industry by blocking the approval of a new class of immunotherapies that can extend the lives of dying cancer patients with minimal side effects.

In the May 14 Wall Street Journal, a former medical officer in the FDA Office of Oncology Products, Dr. Mark Thornton, denounced the FDA's decisions, and stated, "May 9, 2007, should be cited in the annals of cancer immunotherapy as Black Wednesday."

"Within an eight-hour period that day," he wrote, "the FDA succeeded in killing not one but two safe, promising therapies designed and developed to act by stimulating a patient's immune system against cancer." from Online Journal