Women Fooled By Untested Hormones From Compounding Pharmacies

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According to a new study, an estimated 28 million to 39 million prescriptions are filled each year for hormone-replacement therapies made by compounding pharmacies. But two large Internet surveys reveal that a staggering 86% of women don’t understand that products sold by compounding pharmacies are not approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.

This is a disturbing but not entirely surprising revelation. Compounding pharmacies have made a rollicking business catering to women in menopause who are seeking relief from symptoms such as hot flashes and insomnia. These pharmacies manufacture their own versions of hormones such as estrogen and progesterone, and then market them as “bioidentical” or “natural” products based on the fact that they are derived from botanical sources like soy and they mirror the hormones that women’s bodies make naturally.

The study, published online in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS), compiled results from two surveys of 3,000 women. When asked “Do you believe that bioidentical hormone therapies compounded at a specialty pharmacy are FDA approved?” only 14% of the women correctly said “no,” according to NAMS. Of the rest, 10% said “yes” and the rest didn’t know.

What this large contingent of misinformed women may not understand is that products made by compounding pharmacies do not have to adhere to the same manufacturing quality requirements and strict oversight that FDA-approved products face. The dangers of that became all too clear in 2013, when contaminated steroid products made by a compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts sickened more than 740 people, 64 of whom died.

The incident prompted the passage of federal legislation giving the FDA more authority—but not complete control—over compounding pharmacies. The Drug Quality and Security Act offers compounders two choices: they can either register as “outsourcing facilities” with the FDA and become subject to quality control rules similar to those governing large drug manufacturers, or they can sidestep that restriction on the condition that they only compound individual prescriptions for one patient at a time. (No mass producing or mass marketing allowed, in other words.)

That may help lower the contamination risk, but compounded drugs often have other shortcomings. Testing of 12 compounded hormones by More magazine found that levels of some hormones were often lower or higher than what was prescribed. In 11 of the samples, progesterone levels were too low. That’s dangerous: progesterone protects the lining of the uterus, which in turn lowers the risk of endometrial cancer in women taking estrogen for hormone replacement.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/arleneweintraub/2015/02/20/women-fooled-by-untested-hormones-from-compounding-pharmacies/

Our Husbands Are Not Satisfying Us In Bed– Kaduna Women Street Protests

A group of women from the Rido community in Kaduna State, took to the streets on Wednesday, February 19, 2015 to publicly complain about their husband’s sexual weakness.

The women, who were assembled at the NDA Junction in the state capital, blamed the Kaduna Refining and Petrochemical Company (KRPC) for their husband’s inability to perform as a result of the chemical waste and fumes from the company into their environment.

Speaking to newsmen during the protest, some of the  married women complained bitterly that some of the men in the Mararaba Rido community were impotent due to the toxic waste from the KRPC.

They revealed that their husbands suffer weak erection and infertility, while the women suffer miscarriage and other health complications.

A married woman, Jummai Isaac, 27, said she has not taken in since she got married in the year 2000.

“I haven’t conceived since I got married in the last fourteen years, and doctors have, on several occasions, confirmed to me absence of any known cause of inability to get pregnant.

Initially, doctors thought I had fibroid in my womb, but after several scans and some medical tests, they dispelled that notion.”

However, a community leader, Mohammed Bashar, explained that, “Most of the complaints could be associated with secondary infertility, because victims have, in the past, given birth to children before they suddenly stopped.

There was widespread belief that smoke and poisonous gases emitted from the refinery have reproductive health effect on people living in the area, but no medical report has confirmed the allegation due to inability of villagers to seek comprehensive medical tests, perhaps owing to lack of awareness and poverty.”

Six Commonly Missed Diagnoses: B12 Deficiency

You’re pretty sure you know your body and you tell your doctor you’re just not feeling right. You’re tired, maybe a little depressed, a bit achy. Maybe your digestion is “off.” The list of foods you can’t seem to enjoy is definitely longer. Your doctor’s empathic, not at all dismissive of your symptoms, but after a physical exam and some apparently appropriate tests she can’t find anything really wrong.

On the surface, this is reassuring. After all, the main reason we do go to doctors is to ascertain that nothing serious is going on. Still, could she be overlooking something?

After decades of treating patients with longstanding but undiagnosed chronic symptoms, here’s the first of six overlooked diagnoses I see most frequently in our patients at WholeHealth Chicago.

Low Levels of Vitamin B-12
One of the eight B vitamins, B-12 is involved in the metabolism of every cell in your body. Years ago B-12 was called “maturation factor” because cells need B-12 to mature from being young and ineffectual whippersnappers to fully functioning and mature.

B-12 deficiencies affect three major systems in your body: your blood, nervous system, and, less often, gastrointestinal tract. These three are targets because their cells either have a high turnover rate (blood and intestinal lining) or need a lot of B-12 to function smoothly (nervous system). The symptoms of low B-12 levels are related to each of these areas.

    Low B-12’s effect on your blood is a specific type of anemia called megaloblastic anemia (as distinct from the more common iron deficiency anemia). A megaloblast is an immature, undeveloped red blood cell, large and bulky (megalo=large, blast=immature form). Remember, B-12 is needed for this cell to mature, so with insufficient B-12 megaloblasts accumulate in your blood. Symptoms are the same as for anemia from any cause, including fatigue, breathlessness, and lightheadedness. Your skin becomes a pale yellow, most likely because the red cells that do make it to maturity are very fragile and easily broken, releasing their yellow bilirubin pigment.

    In your nervous system, B-12 deficiency causes symptoms affecting your nerves (numbness, tingling, tremors, balance problems) and your mind (depression, brain fog, mood swings, and, in rare cases, hallucinations and psychosis).

    In your gastrointestinal tract, you might experience digestive symptoms and weight loss because you’re not absorbing food efficiently.

The irony is that with all these there’s usually just one predominant symptom, and making a connection to low B-12 can easily be delayed until other symptoms start to appear. For example, if your only symptom is tingling in your hands, you might undergo all sorts of diagnostic tests before your doctor thinks “Maybe we should check her B-12 level.”

What causes B-12 deficiency?
The list of causes is lengthy, but by far the most frequent culprit is a dietary one. Vegetarians who aren’t paying attention to the B-12 in their food choices will have downward-drifting B-12 levels, and virtually all vegans not taking Vitamin B-12 supplements ultimately develop deficiencies. Even the various vegan organizations acknowledge it’s not possible to get adequate B-12 while following a strictly vegan diet, and that’s because the richest sources are animal products.

Other causes of B-12 deficiency include pernicious anemia, an uncommon (and spookily named) autoimmune disease that destroys parietal stomach cells. These cells produce a substance called intrinsic factor, necessary for B-12 absorption. Also, since you need stomach acid to absorb B-12, long-term use of acid-suppressing proton pump inhibitors (Nexium, etc.) can lead to B-12 deficiency, as can chronic intestinal conditions like Crohn’s disease, celiac disease, and intestinal parasites.

The missed diagnosis
The main danger of missing this diagnosis is that (while quite rare) the damage to your nerves and even brain can be permanent. Other serious consequences: your anemia can get so severe it causes heart failure and collapse. Or you could be misdiagnosed with a major depressive disorder or even psychosis and take unneeded psychiatric medications for months (or years) before someone notices you look yellow-ish and you’re finally diagnosed with megaloblastic anemia.

There are four reasons why this diagnosis is missed:

    Although it’s not an expensive test, B-12 isn’t measured during routine blood tests. Doctors generally don’t order a B-12 evaluation if there’s no evidence of anemia (which would be picked up on a routine blood test). However, the fatigue and nervous system and gastrointestinal symptoms can precede anemia by months.
    Doctors rarely ask (and patients rarely volunteer) information about their eating habits. In medical school, we’re taught that the US diet is “plenty good enough to prevent any vitamin deficiencies.” To which I now respond, “Ha!” I agree most of us eat plenty of food (obesity levels are still on the rise), but it’s often food whose nutritional value has been castrated. Also, all vegetarians and vegans should be regularly tested for possible B-12 deficiency, but if your doc doesn’t know your eating habits you won’t be tested.
    Like many blood tests, there’s considerable disagreement about normal levels of B-12. Most labs test B-12 levels between 200 pg/ml (picograms per milliliter) and 800 pg/ml. Someone at 250 pg/ml would be classified as normal, but symptoms can start appearing at 350 pg/ml. In Japan, normal B-12 was recently raised to 500 pg/ml and higher. We’ll see this type of erroneous overreliance on “normals” in other frequently missed diagnoses, like hypothyroidism, vitamin D deficiency, gluten intolerance, adrenal fatigue.
    Taking the B vitamin folic acid (folate) or eating a lot of folate-containing foods without adding B-12 can actually mask the symptoms of a developing B-12 deficiency. Although folate will keep your blood count normal even if your B-12 is falling, the folate will not protect your brain and nervous system. You’ll have no evidence of megaloblastic anemia (because of the folate), but your symptoms of numbness, tingling, balance problems, and emotional issues will continue unchecked. By eating so many folate-containing green vegetables, beans, and lentils, vegetarians and vegans inadvertently mask their own slowly developing B-12 deficiency.

Treatment is easy
It’s virtually impossible to take too much B-12 as any excess of this water-soluble vitamin is eliminated via urine. Nutritional guru Alan Gaby, MD, has commented that the only way too much B-12 will kill you is if you fill your bathtub with it and drown.

Foods high in B-12 are animal products: meat, poultry, seafood, dairy, and eggs, with eggs having the least. Because all animals store B-12 in their livers, eating liver is an excellent (though not particularly popular) treatment for B-12 deficiency. Your grandmother or great-grandmother likely remembers a time when her doctor told someone in the family to eat more liver.

And since people with low B-12 are likely to also have gastrointestinal symptoms that interfere with B-12 absorption, the best way to quickly increase (and maintain) B-12 levels are with B-12 injections, chewable tablets, or the recently released nasal sprays and skin patches.

In my own practice, a deficient patient receives a series of four B-12 injections (or four B-12 containing Meyer’s Cocktails) and also starts (and maintains herself on) a daily B-12 chewable tablet. Usually within a month her levels are back to normal.

There’s more to come in the Commonly Missed Diagnoses series. Next week: overlooked diagnosis #2, vitamin D deficiency

Be well,

David Edelberg, MD

Army Captures French Boko Haram Fighters, France Demands Them Back

Military sources have confirmed the arrest of eight French nationals, caught fighting under the terror group Boko Haram.

According to ThisDay Live, The Cameronian army had apprehended these fighters and are insisting on trying them, but France is against this idea.

A Nigerian military insider told reporters that the arrest of these Europeans have caused tensions between France and one of her Francophone allies in the sub-region following the shocking discovery that some French citizens are staunch members of the sect, a throwback to their membership of the terror group, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Findings suggest that France is angry at her former colony for not giving up on the idea of trying them in Africa and wants the French men handed over to the French authorities.

French Foreign Minister, Mr. Lauren Fabuci had ordered for the transfer of the suspects into French hands.

This has angered the Cameroonian authorities, who are dumbfounded by the manner in which France had demanded the release of its nationals.

A Cameroonian minister was quoted to have said: “Mr. Lauren Fabuci, the French Foreign Minister, has ordered Cameroun to release immediately eight Europeans captured by our security men, for being part of Boko Haram terrorists.

“Mr. Fabuci demanded their immediate handover to France so that they can prosecute the terrorists on French soil, ignoring our sovereignty and independence.

“The French are acting as if Cameroun is their errand boy that they can order around and ignore the fact that we have our own laws with which we can try the terrorists.”
The latest revelation has lent credence to strong suspicions in the Nigerian intelligence community that Boko Haram has strong foreign backing.

Nigeria has not revealed her position and it seems the West African giant is just going to back away from this one.

Director of Defence Information, Major-General Chris Olukolade, said that the matter was for France and her former colony to resolve and not ours.

“All I can tell you is that the matter is for Cameronian and French authorities to settle,” Olukolade stated.

One top military source in Nigeria has however revealed that the military had known of boko haram’s foreign collaboration.

He said that foreign soldiers for the sect include, Chadians, Arabs, Malians and other Islamists who have joined the sect.

“Now we have seen evidence of French and European participation. This is one major indication that Boko Haram has very active and sophisticated foreign backing. I advise that the African Union should take this up.

“France is trying to silence the Cameroonians but Africa must rise to the occasion and take this findings seriously. They must not keep quiet,” the military source said.

The Nigerian army has however continued its current onslaught to get rid of the sect before the national elections.

With the help of the Nigerian Air Force, the military’s advance into Boko Haram held areas have been succesful.

This information is coming after sources close to the military revealed that the boundary town of Baga and to some extent Bama are close to being liberated, and the army are just carrying out mop up in some areas.

Major General Olukolade had yesterday said: “A concerted air campaign by the Nigerian Air Force is ongoing in furtherance of the mission to clear terrorists from all their enclaves.

“The air strikes which today (yesterday) targeted the training camps and logistics dumps of the terrorists in Sambisa forest and parts of Gwoza have been highly successful as it achieved the aim with required precision.

“The death of a large number of terrorists has been recorded, while many others are also scampering all over the forest and out of the struck bases. Details of casualty will be determined in subsequent phases of the operation.”

Olukolade had revealed that these recent strikes to strategic boko haram would continue.

This recent resurgence of the army has been buoyed by the advance of the Chadian army who recently liberated Dikwa.

One Bababura Diwa, who lives in the town said that Chadians came from Gamboru with heavy artillery power overpowered a group of militants at Lomani village, 15 kilometres from Dikwa.

“When they came into Dikwa, there was intense fighting but at last they subdued the Boko Haram fighters,” he added.

“They killed many of them, including Abu Ashshe, their commander, who was notorious for seizing cattle in the area.
“I used the opportunity provided by the presence of the Chadian troops to leave the town. I was afraid to leave when Boko Haram took over the town for fear of being branded a traitor and killed,” he said.

The Chadians are part of a four-country coalition mounting a regional fight-back against the Islamists. Source: Thisday Live.

Obasanjo finally leaves PDP, tears membership card in public

Former President, Olusegun Obasanjo has announced that he is no longer a member of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP).
Obasanjo who made this known Monday in Abeokuta, Ogun State before newsmen publicly tore his party membership card.
Obasanjo was elected President on the platform of the party for two terms of four years each. He was also a chairman of the party’s Board of Trustees which he voluntarily resigned after falling out with President Goodluck Jonathan.
He disclosed that he is leaving his former party and not ready to join any other party but wishes to remain a statesman.
The former president who has been reported as supporting the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the 2015 elections, Muhammadu Buhari has been accusing President Jonathan of many wrongdoings including plotting to frustrate the conduct of the upcoming general elections.
Obasanjo had earlier stated that he would always be a member of the PDP regardless of his criticisms of Jonathan and his administration.
Source: TheNigerianTimes

Presidency shops for Jega’s replacement

By Soni Daniel, Regional Editor, North

ABUJA — With the successful postponement of the elections by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, the Presidency has launched a two-pronged war to ensure that President Goodluck Jonathan wins the election convincingly.

The two strategies are to stop Muhammadu Buhari, the All Progressives Congress candidate from contesting the election with Jonathan and the replacement of the INEC Chairman, Prof Attahiru Jega, with a less independent-minded person. Jega, it was gathered, had been described by hawks around the president of being too independent-minded and ‘uncooperative’ despite being given the job on a platter of gold by the president’s men.

Vanguard learnt that Jega might have unwittingly played into the hands of the forces arrayed against him by agreeing to shift the elections.

Legal war to disqualify Buhari

Competent sources said last night that the move to remove Jega and the legal fireworks against Buhari, would be taken up simultaneously with effect from this week given the timeframe made possible by the shift.

The retired general is to be prosecuted by a team of legal luminaries for ‘lying on oath’ that he had a school certificate with the Nigerian Army when he knew that it was untrue. The plaintiffs are said to have settled for trying Buhari for alleged ‘perjury’ instead of outright non-possession of certificate following legal advice that the latter would be more difficult to prove within the time at their disposal.

Vanguard learnt that although Jega reluctantly succumbed to pressure from the Presidency and its security chiefs to shift the polls, he might still not be allowed by the forces to conduct the rescheduled elections between March 28 and April 11. Vanguard gathered from competent sources that the Presidency was no longer comfortable with Jega and was, therefore, working tirelessly to get him out of the commission to pave the way for a more ‘trusted hand’ to conduct the rescheduled elections.

It was learnt that the forces arrayed against the INEC boss had convinced the President not to renew Jega’s tenure, which is expected to lapse on June 13 this year. The forces, it was learnt, felt that Jega was rather too ‘difficult’ to deal with, having not allowed himself to be dictated to by anyone since assuming office like other appointees of the government.

It was learnt that in a bid to sweep off Jega from his seat without raising any dust, he would be asked to comply with the civil service procedure by proceeding on his three months terminal leave with effect from March 1, this year since he is expected to retire on June 13.

S-West gov’s brother may replace Jega

Vanguard gathered that in his place, the Presidency was considering bringing in another academic from the South-West, who is currently heading a tertiary institution in the country. The professor of Political Science and International Relations is said to be a sibling of a serving governor in the South-West, who is a close ally of President Goodluck Jonathan and his party.

Competent sources also told Vanguard last night that although the name of the academic had been made known in security circles, it was not clear whether the man had been cleared by the forces with a view to sending his name to the National Assembly for possible confirmation, as required by law.

Working against Jonathan’s interest

As a prelude to removing Jega from office, some close allies of the President had started accusing him of taking side with the opposition to undermine the success of Jonathan and his party in the next election. Earlier last week, Jonathan’s godfather, Chief Edwin Clark and other prominent politicians from the Southern part of the country had accused Jega of working against the interest of the president and the PDP and asked him to resign from the commission.

Although no evidence was adduced by Clark and his group to support their allegation, they nonetheless called for the arrest of Jega. Similarly, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Affairs, Dr. Doyin Okupe, on Saturday, said Jega had lied about the state of the commission’s preparedness for the conduct of the election.

In the same vein, the National Publicity Secretary of the PDP, Mr. Olisa Metuh, accused INEC of working with the opposition to deny its members of permanent voter cards in some states. He called on the security agents to probe the commission over the development.

 

Source: vanguardngr.com

Bobbi Kristina Brown’s Family Says Their Final Goodbyes

Bobbi Kristina Brown’s family says their final goodbyes as doctors broke the news yesterday that there’s little more they’re able to do for the 21-year-old.

The realization of Bobbi Kristina’s death hasn’t set in for her family members. Bobby Brown is especially devastated after hearing that he must say goodbye to his daughter.
“Bobby has been crying nonstop since yesterday,” a source told People. “We are grieving.”
Doctors feared for Bobbi Kristina’s life earlier this week. They continued to keep her on life support, and transferred her from North Fulton Hospital to Emory Hospital in Atlanta yesterday, but now, they’re positive there’s little left they can do to save her.
Hope prevails in the hearts of some of Bobbi Kristina’s family members, as they continue to pray for a miracle.
“It’s sinking in that this is it, but we’re all still praying that God will intervene and heal her body,” a family member told People.
More to follow on Bobbi Kristina.
UPDATE (2/5 3:50 p.m.): Bobbi Kristina remains on life support, according to Hollywood Life. A source told the site that Bobbi Kristina has “brain trauma,” but it’s unknown how critical the trauma is.