via http://www.disinfo.com/

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration plans to announce a new policy on Wednesday to curb the spread of biological weapons, but it will reaffirm the Bush administration’s opposition to an international regimen for verifying stockpiles of anthrax, smallpox and other agents.

The policy, to be disclosed in a speech in Geneva by the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, Ellen O. Tauscher, will focus on increasing health security to reduce the impact of outbreaks of infectious disease, whether natural or man-made, administration officials said Tuesday. Read the full story

Painkillers are causing twice the number of overdose deaths in Ontario than they were two decades ago, a precedent-setting study has found. Most of the people these opioid-related drugs are killing got them through a prescription and had seen a doctor in the month before they died.

The increase mirrors a dramatic rise in prescriptions for oxycodone, a potent opiate found in OxyContin and Percocet that has proliferated in an epidemic of chronic pain that has turned Canadians into a nation of pill-poppers – using more prescription opioids per capita than any country but the United States and Belgium. Read the full story

Just as the Manhattan Project was conceived in 1942 to beat the Germans to the atomic bomb during World War II, the “Manhattan Beach Project” was founded as an “all-out assault on the world’s biggest killer – aging,” according to project organizer David A. Kekich.

An end to aging may be just as explosive as the atomic blast that occurred at Alamogordo, New Mexico during the predawn hours of July 16, 1945. It’s serious enough that members of the Obama Administration consider it to be one of the major global destabilizing forces of the next 25 years. It will require the political mastery of a scientific and societal transition built around the Nano-Info-Bio-Cogno (NBIC) roadmap.

After nine years of research and collaboration, a group of entrepreneurs and scientists – many known to h+ readers –- are disclosing their plan “to start saving up to 100,000 lives lost to aging every day, by 2029.” A Longevity Summit in November 2009 — organized by Kekich — brought together a number of researchers on human aging and longevity for a discussion on the state-of-the-art research, the implications of their discoveries, and round table, cross-disciplinary discussions that may lead to new and accelerated results. Here’s a video of Kekich explaining the project: Read the full story

2009 will go down as the beginning of the end of the United States drug war. I have worked at the Drug Policy Alliance promoting alternatives to the war on drugs for 10 years, and I can say without a doubt that there was more debate and movement toward sensible drug policies this year than in the last 9 years combined! Here are 10 stories that contributed to the unprecedented momentum to end America’s longest running war.

1) Three Former Latin American Presidents Call Drug War a Failure (February) Read the full story

It’s a classic tale of how mediocrity is maintained. Evolutionary biologists in California have discovered that when males shower attractive females with attention, it actually undermines those females’ fitness as mothers. That means fit females don’t pass their genes on.

Today PLoS Biology published a study of fruitflies, a species where the male flies show a marked preference for mating with larger females because they are more fecund. The problem is that the males show such aggressive preferences that they basically badger the females constantly to mate. What this means is that the females are so harried that they have less time to search for food, which degrades their health. Also, among fruitflies, the mating process is itself damaging to the health of the females – fruitfly sperm is toxic. Read the full story

In September, ladymag Marieclaire ruffled some feathers when it published a piece about women who smoke weed. But its most interesting effect was not the “marijuana moms” chatter it unleashed, and instead the fact that it brought to the mainstream media a more open discussion of the fact that women can be avid tokers, too.

Public acceptance of pot is at an all-time high, and the fact that women have drastically changed their attitudes may be what is most fascinating about the sea change in public opinion — and policy — regarding marijuana. In 2005, only 32 percent of polled women told Gallup they approved legalizing pot, but this year 44 percent of them were for it, compared to 45 percent of men. In effect, women have narrowed what had been a 12-point gender gap. Read the full story

Scientific Link to Autism Identified

Read the full story

ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N.J. – All canned Slim Fast drinks are being voluntarily recalled by the company over fears of bacterial contamination that could cause diarrhea, nausea and vomiting. The recall affects all 10 million products currently on the market.

The products could possibly be contaminated with the microorganism Bacillus cereus. Unilever says the probability of serious health problems is remote, and the Food and Drug Administration says there have been no deaths or injuries associated with the recall.

An unknown number of people have gotten sick about six to 15 hours after consuming the diet drink, but have recovered within about 24 hours. Read the full story

WASHINGTON — A third of the most popular children’s toys in the United States this year contain harmful chemicals including lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury, a US consumer group said Wednesday.

The Ecology Center, which published its findings on the website HealthyStuff.org, tested nearly 700 toys ahead of the Christmas shopping season and found that 32 percent contained one or more toxic chemical. Read the full story

PALMVIEW, Texas (CBS/AP) President Barack Obama’s approval rating may be hovering in the 50 percent range, but that doesn’t mean America’s Commander-in-Chief isn’t catching on with new constituents.

There is now a line of Ecstasy pills made in the image of the 44th president of the United States, according to Texas police who have snatched a batch off the streets. Read the full story

Malware authors are impersonating the CDC in a new scheme to propagate a trojan horse. Fraudulent e-mails sent by a botnet claim that the recipient must register for a fake state vaccination program but really link to a malware-infested phishing website.

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) issued a statement this week to warn citizens about a recent wave of phishing e-mails that deceptively claim to be from the government organization. The e-mails refer to a state vaccination program and tell recipients that they have to create a personal H1N1 vaccination profile. Read the full story

Deadly job? Funeral workers risk cancer

High rate of leukemia in undertakers using formaldehyde for embalming

WASHINGTON – Morticians who use formaldehyde to embalm bodies have a higher risk of leukemia, researchers reported on Friday.

They found deaths from one particular kind of leukemia, myeloid leukemia, increased the longer the workers were involved with embalming.

Their study of more than 400 funeral workers is the first to look carefully at the association, they reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Read the full story

CAIRO – A 26-year-old doctor who exposed the torture of jailed protesters in Iran died of poisoning from a delivery salad laced with an overdose of blood pressure medication, prosecutors say. The findings fueled opposition fears that he was killed because of what he knew.

Investigators are still trying to determine whether his death last month was a suicide or murder, Tehran’s public prosecutor Abbas Dowlatabadi said, according to the state news agency IRNA.

The revelations of torture against prisoners in Iran’s postelection turmoil angered even government supporters and deeply embarrassed the country’s clerical leadership and security forces. Read the full story

NEW YORK — A home movie purporting to show Marilyn Monroe smoking a marijuana joint has surfaced some five decades after being shot at a gathering with friends in New Jersey.

Collector Keya Morgan uncovered the color footage while researching an documentary which he says will prove Monroe was murdered in August 1962.

The reel-to-reel film, which has no sound, shows Monroe relaxing with female friends in a house and smoking. Read the full story

Marijuana’s addiction potential may be no big deal, but it’s certainly big business.

According to a widely publicized 1999 Institute of Medicine report, fewer than 10 percent of those who try cannabis ever meet the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of “drug dependence” (based on DSM-III-R criteria). By contrast, 32 percent of tobacco users and 15 percent of alcohol users meet the criteria for “drug dependence.”

Nevertheless, it is pot — not booze or cigarettes — that has the federal government seeing red and clinical investigators seeing green. As I reported for AlterNet last year, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which overseas more than 85 percent of the world’s research on controlled substances, recently appropriated some $4 million in taxpayers’ dollars to establish the nation’s first-ever Center for Cannabis Addiction. Its mission: to “develop novel approaches to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of marijuana addiction.” Read the full story

Slovenian health authorities say a 77-year-old woman was hospitalized when her heart stopped minutes after she received a swine flu shot.Health Minister Borut Miklavcic said late Thursday that authorities are still investigating whether the patient’s heart problem was caused by the vaccination.

The patient, whose identity has not been published in line with privacy laws, is being treated at the hospital.

Two people have died in Slovenia from swine flu and hundreds of others tested positive so far.

The country launched a free vaccination program two weeks ago with a vaccine from Glaxo Smith Kline. So far, about 30,000 people in the country of 2 million have been vaccinated.

http://www.etaiwannews.com/

Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) — Adrian Gibbs, the virologist who said in May that swine flu may have escaped from a laboratory, published his findings today, renewing discussion about the origins of the pandemic virus.

The new H1N1 strain, which was discovered in Mexico and the U.S. in April, may be the product of three strains from three continents that swapped genes in a lab or a vaccine-making plant, Gibbs, and fellow Australian scientists wrote in Virology Journal. The authors analyzed the genetic makeup of the virus and found its origin could be more simply explained by human involvement than a coincidence of nature. Read the full story