Cervical Cancer Vaccine & Coke

Brew of the day: Licorice Tea

GARDASIL - Cervical Cancer vaccine: Just who IS the beneficiary?

Hands off my daughters…

The Lancet (medical journal) came out this week stating that they want all teenage girls vaccinated with the new cervical cancer vaccine, Gardasil. All the usual bullshit in the media about it being ‘good for them’. You’d think they were talking about apples!

Well, they can keep their filthy hands off my daughters, that’s for sure. Personally, I wouldn’t vaccinate my children for all the money in the world, ever. My own choices aside, why on earth is a vaccine that has SHOWN in clinical trials that it can cause birth defects AND has the potential to pre-dispose girls to cancer, being touted as the best thing since sliced bread? Come on!

And where are their LONG TERM studies into fertility? Are they telling these young girls how it might impact on their ability to have children several years after the injection? ‘course not, they won’t give a damn. But hell, you can imagine at a few hundred quid per girl, someone’s gonna be lining their pocket rather handsomely.

Mothers and fathers, know that you have the right to say NO. Know that you can take as long as you need to make an informed decision about this. Don’t allow yourself OR your daughter to be bullied. She’s relying on you to make an intelligent decision, not one based on fear. And most importantly, don’t rely on the government or your local doctor to tell you the whole truth. It’s not in their best financial interests to tell you how unethical it is to inject the virus for (sexually transmitted) genital warts into your not-yet-sexually active daughter.

My beautiful sister sells this vaccine to doctors. It breaks my heart just as it broke my heart when she sold childhood vaccines to doctors. Her car boot full of GIFTS for the doctors who took on the various vaccines kinda paints an interesting picture about what medicine entails these days… Hypocratic oath? Or Hypocrite? No prizes for guessing what I think.

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The front line ~ friend or foe?

This week I heard of a Health Visitor (public enemy no. 1?) telling a new mum that breastfeeding beyond 16 weeks is unnecessary, as there is no nutritional value in breast milk after this time. Excuse me? Women like this are on the front line, their job is to support women to make ‘healthy’ choices, not undermine them!

Quite frankly she should be removed from this position immediately. How many other women has she given this advice to? How many babies were removed from the only food designed to build their brain and immune system, because this woman didn’t know something as basic as what feeds the human mammalian being?

Nobody in the health profession should be giving breastfeeding advice which contradicts the World Health Organisation’s statement that ‘breastfeeding should continue well into the second year, and beyond.’ Nothing about 16 weeks in there!

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On your shopping list?

This week I read an article in Wellbeing magazine which listed the top 25 grocery items bought in Australian supermarkets (from the 1990s). Bear in mind that this result won’t be that different in other so called civilised countries…it to me, incomprehensibly, has coke (or pepsi or diet coke) mentioned seven times (different sized bottles or cans). Other ‘necessary’ food stuffs included chocolate by different companies on several occasions. The only things remotely described as‘food’ on the list were tinned beetroot and baked beans. Out of 25 items?

1. Coca cola 375ml
2. Coca cola 1 litre
3. Coca cola 2 litre
4. Diet coke 375ml
5. Cherry ripe (chocolate)
6. Nestle’s condensed milk
7. Tally ho cigarette papers
8. Mars bar
9. Kit kat
10. Crunchie bar
11. Eta 5 star margarine, salt reduced (must be healthy?)
12. Baked beans
13. Tinned beetroot
14. Diet coke 1 litre
15. Bushell’s tea
16. Cadbury dairy milk
17. Pepsi cola 375 ml
18. Coca cola 1.5 litre
19. Corn flakes
20. Maggie two minute chicken noodles
21. Generic brand lemon drink
22. Panadol tablets (to hide the pain of all the above assaulting the body no doubt)
23. Meadow lea margarine
24. Lemonade
25. Mrs Macregor’s margarine

It doesn’t take a genius to see that out there in the REAL world, we ain’t gonna be here in seven generations. Never fear about the impact of global warming knocking us off through drought or heat, Coca cola will erode all remaining viable brain cells before then.

I heard an interview with Jamie Oliver last week talking about some woman giving him a hard time for his ‘good’ food campaign…he noticed her infant, under 12 months, in a pram with Coke in its bottle. Says it all, really.