Rife Universal Microscope

from Townsend Letter for Doctors

from http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0ISW/is_246/ai_112728032

 

I was reading an interesting article about the feud between Louis Pasteur and Antoine Béchamp over the Germ Theory of Disease, which is the basis of modern allopathic medicine. It was this microbian doctrine that gave birth to the technique of vaccinations and immunizations for whatever ails you. The harder you look at Pasteur’s theories, the easier it is to see where modern medicine makes many mistakes (when you start with a flawed theory, all things that follow will be false because they originated from a falsehood). However, the rumor that Pasteur admitted, on his deathbed, that he was wrong is entirely fabricated by quacks trying to give higher standing to their own beliefs. I believe competing theories should be given fair tests, but outright lying will cause me to suspect everything else you say might also be false. We can discuss that BS later, in detail if you like, but it requires a great deal of intense thought and a lot of large words. In any case, in that article was a mention of a very powerful optical microscope created by a man named Royal Rife. I was intrigued by the claim of its power and started a Google search for this Rife person’s creations (897,000 hits – he must be popular). The following is a mix of a couple different websites (primarily the one cited above) and is presented here in the hopes it will start you questioning the establishment and their “way of doing business.” I do not claim all of this is true, but it fits a pattern and the existence of the microscope in question has been sufficiently substantiated to pique my interest and desire to have one for my own research. <pant pant> J

 

In the early decades of the 20th century, Royal Rife had the respect of eminent medical researchers and physicists and the patronage of Henry Timken Jr., the wealthy president of Timken Roller Bearing Co. Because Rife had developed a device that saved his company millions of dollars each year in production costs, the industrialist provided Rife with a research lab on the Timken estate in San Diego, California. The lab was one of the most advanced in the world at the time. Rife also had the support of Dr. Milbank Johnson, a medical politician affiliated with the University of Southern California and head of the local medical society. Johnson’s networking skill led to Rife’s collaboration with two well-known bacteriologists, Dr. E. C. Rosenow of the Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minnesota) and Dr. Arthur Kendall of Northwestern University (Chicago, Illinois).

 

In 1920, Rife hypothesized that a filterable microorganism caused cancer, and he needed a new kind of microscope to help him in his research. The particles of acid and analine dyes used with standard microscopes are too large to stain virus-sized microorganisms. Because Rife wanted to be able to see living organisms, he thought “outside the box” and developed the Rife Universal Microscope. In one of the restored audiotapes, Dr. Rife described the “unique illumination system” that used monochromatic light to stain microbes. The Universal Microscope rivaled the electron microscope,[1] achieving magnification of up to 31,000X without losing resolution. Over the years Rife built five microscopes, allowing him to view living organisms the size of a virus.

 

Note 1: I must insert here something most people, even many scientists, do not know about the electron microscope. It is great tool for viwing inorganic matter, but you cannot use it to view living matter because, due to the nature of the electron beam, that which was alive at the start of the viewing will not stay that way. This has caused many very tiny things to be misidentified.

 

Figure 1: Rife’s optical microscope, with a power to rival modern electron microscopes

 

The Rife Universal Microscope was the answer to a prayer for bacteriologist Arthur Kendall. His own research had convinced him that Antoine Béchamp had been correct. Béchamp believed that the chemical environment in which a microorganism lives determines the form it takes. Kendall and other biologists had cultured up to 16 distinct organisms from a single source by using different culture media. Rife’s microscope allowed Kendall to see the living organisms change. In turn, the K culture medium developed by Kendall, led to the discovery of the Bx cancer virus that Rife had hypothesized existed years before. At that time, “virus” referred to any filterable organism too small to be seen with a regular microscope. Rife and Kendall followed Koch’s postulates. They isolated the virus from a diseased patient, cultured the organism, caused cancer in lab animals using the culture, and recovered the same organism from the sick animal. Later, Dr. O.C. Gruner of Canada’s McGill University identified a fungus in people with cancer. He and Rife discovered that when the Bx virus was cultured on Gruner’s asparagus agar, it became his fungus. When they cultured the fungus on Kendall’s medium, it became the Bx virus.

 

Dr. Johnson was so impressed with Rife and Kendall’s work that he held a dinner in their honor, inviting prominent doctors to hear about their findings first hand. In 1932, Dr. Thomas Rivers of the Rockefeller Institute announced that he and his colleague at Johns Hopkins had been unable to repeat Kendall and Rife’s work and that Kendall’s work on filtrable bacteria and pleomorphism was [apparently] invalid. Rivers had considerable influence. He is credited with defining “virus” as a microorganism that is able to propagate only by modifying genetic machinery of living host cells. Nonetheless, a USC clinical research study with 16 terminally-ill cancer patients took place in 1934. Rife insisted that a panel of medical experts supervise the study in which he used his Beam Ray Instrument to destroy the cancer-causing organisms. The medical staff pronounced fourteen of the sixteen patients in the study clinically cured within 70 days. The other two required 20 more days of treatment before they, too, were well.

 

Medical orthodoxy stepped in soon thereafter and suppressed Rife’s wondrous healing miracle (another machine, producing an electromagnetic beam, which supposedly killed cancer cells). The head of the American Medical Association at that time was quoted as saying, “How is the individual physician, who knows little or nothing of the physical basis of electricity ... to have any actual knowledge of these modalities? ... physicians ... must begin anew their period of infancy and education, or yield their patients and their livelihood to those better informed.” Or yield their patients and their livelihood? Therefore Rife’s great gift to humanity had to be destroyed to protect doctors’ incomes. His lab was broken into, his microscope stolen, and the lab was burned with all records and research destroyed. The Burnett Lab in New Jersey where Rife's work was being independently validated was also burned to the ground. Dr Milbank Johnson, a supporter of Rife and one of the people who had worked to validate Rife's research was poisoned. Dr. Nemes, who was duplicating Rife's work just 40 miles from Rife's own lab, was killed in a mysterious fire that consumed his lab and all research papers. Rife's closest associate was given a grant from the AMA for $200,000 and quickly vanished (A get out of town bribe? Why not just kill him too?). Royal R. Rife became a non-person. From the heights of scientific renown in the 1930s, with his discoveries paraded and praised in Science magazine, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, medical journals, conferences, and with scientists and doctors from Johns Hopkins, the Mayo Clinic, Northwestern Medical School, McGill, etc. (the cream of the medical world) trooping to Rife’s San Diego laboratory, he was suddenly, ruthlessly destroyed by a cold-eyed medical oligarchy in an unholy alliance with drug company barons. The result was the death of millions of people for decades to come in countless locations around the globe, suffering through traditional therapies when the cure was already available, but withheld in favor of profits for the opposition.

 

So what do we have left here? We have old photos of Rife’s machines, but I would really like to have this microscope (someone else can pursue that beam ray thing). Imagine that large power using only optics, not deadly electron beams. Imagine using the prisms to change the frequency of the light (and, therefore the coloration) on the subject, therefore never having to “stain” any sample (staining also alters the sample being viewed). If this machine no longer exists (or is buried in some never-ending warehouse of banned projects, ala the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark), then how about schematics? I haven’t been able to find any, even though I have discovered an underground following of Rife’s work and various attempts to recreate his devices. What about you guys? Feel like revolutionizing the medical industry? With the power structure of the opposition (AMA, FDA, Big Pharma), this might take a long time.

 

How Advertisers Mess with Your Mind

 

The following is borrowed from Dr. Mercola’s newsletter, but I remember seeing this same article years ago about a teenager using this whole bit at a science fair and scaring the crap out of everyone who stopped by his display. (I also wonder why Mercola always fails to credit the originator of his materials – this one and the Town of Allopath animation his people made from Mike Adam’s story are two examples.) Anyway, on with the data… and please note, this is real; it is not an April Fool’s joke.

 

How Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) is Affecting Your Health

 

Each year, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known causative component in many thousands of deaths and is a major contributor to millions upon millions of dollars in damage to property and the environment. Some of the known perils of Dihydrogen Monoxide are:

 

ˇ         Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities

ˇ         Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage

ˇ         Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects

ˇ         DHMO is a major component of acid rain

ˇ         Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns

ˇ         Contributes to soil erosion

ˇ         Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals

ˇ         Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits

ˇ         Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes

ˇ         Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions

ˇ         Often associated with killer cyclones[2] in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere

ˇ         Thermal variations in DHMO are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect.

 

Note 2: Cyclone is an archaic term for “tornado.” Today, the common use of “cyclone” is to imply a tropical hurricane in the Pacific. In meteorology, cyclone means only that it is a rapid inward circulation of air masses about a low-pressure center; circling counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern.

 

What are some uses of Dihydrogen Monoxide?

 

Despite the known dangers of DHMO, it continues to be used daily by industry, government, and even in private homes across the U.S. and worldwide. Some of the well-known uses of Dihydrogen Monoxide are:

 

ˇ     As an industrial solvent and coolant

ˇ     In nuclear power plants

ˇ     By the U.S. Navy in the propulsion systems of some older vessels

ˇ     By elite athletes to improve performance

ˇ     In the production of Styrofoam

ˇ     In biological and chemical weapons manufacture

ˇ     As a spray-on fire suppressant and retardant

ˇ     In abortion clinics

ˇ     As a major ingredient in many home-brewed bombs

ˇ     As a byproduct of hydrocarbon combustion in furnaces and air conditioning compressor operation

ˇ     In cult rituals

ˇ     By the Church of Scientology on their members and their members’ families

ˇ     By both the KKK and the NAACP during rallies and marches

ˇ     By pedophiles and pornographers (for uses we’d rather not say here)

ˇ     By the clientele at a number of homosexual bath houses in New York City and San Francisco

ˇ     Historically, in Hitler’s death camps in Nazi Germany, and in prisons in Turkey, Serbia, Croatia,

      Libya, Iraq and Iran

ˇ     In World War II prison camps in Japan, and in prisons in China, for various forms of torture

ˇ     By the Serbian military as authorized by Slobodan Milosevic in their recent ethnic cleansing campaign

ˇ     In animal research laboratories

ˇ     In pesticide production and distribution

 

Now, are you sufficiently scared by this text? Oh, all the data above is real and true! This DHMO certainly sounds like a nasty poison. Perhaps if we put the actual chemical notation here for Dihydrogen Monoxide, you will get the picture: H₂O. Yes, it’s plain old water. Go back through those bulleted lists and reinterpret the statements now that you know this is water. For example:

 

ˇ     Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO (that’s obviously ice) causes severe tissue damage (yes, frozen skin dies)

ˇ     Gaseous DHMO (that’s obviously steam) can cause severe burns

 

Obviously, the data about any object/subject can be sufficiently rewritten so as to make it sound either dangerous or harmless, depending on the intent of the marketers. That is true for all drug ads on TV and in magazines (obviously, in those cases, trying to make deadly poisons sound like they are good for you) and I still suspect the hype being shoved down our throats about bird flu (Avian Influenza) falls in exactly the same category. Wow! We are now up to 105 deaths worldwide – yup, sounds like a major pandemic to me. J

 

World Health Organization statistics show that in the year 2000, an estimated 409,272 people drowned (death by water!), which means, statistically, bird flu had killed only 0.008% (eight thousandths of one percent!) of what water kills! (Assumption: bird flu deaths assumed to be 105 in three years and deaths by drowning have stayed static for the same time period, which is unlikely because they have, in fact, risen considerably, meaning the number is more likely to be 0.005% but I have to use the available numbers.) So why don’t we have a massive push to create a vaccine against water? J

 

The Psychology of Statistics: What’s your Point of View on Risk Assessment?

(trust me, this will end up on topic)

 

I’ve been playing with some statistics and I suppose this is a good follow-on to the previous article because we can say just about anything we want by the way we present the numbers. We’ve touched on this before, but here’s some stuff that maybe you didn’t know and perhaps comes closer to home than many of the figures I usually present in these pages. Or, perhaps closer at least to things some of us know well.

 

Let’s start with NEA/NEOs (Near-Earth Asteroids/Objects). The odds of a big asteroid impacting this planet are currently estimated at 1:38 within the next 20 years. That doesn’t raise your fear level? NASA (U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration) estimates that there are approximately 1,100 NEAs, 30% of which haven’t even been identified, and any one of those could hit the Earth with a force greater than all the world’s nuclear arsenal put together. Are you afraid yet? The average interval between hits, according to those who study ancient impacts, is that a rock about 75 meters in diameter will hit once every 1,000 years. That’s big enough to blow New York City off the map, leaving a 2.5 mile diameter hole where the city once stood, also triggering a 6.8 magnitude earthquake in the surrounding area and pretty much turn the tri-state area into toast. Ah, but you aren’t old enough to remember such a thing ever happening. The last one of similar size was almost 100 years ago in Tunguska, Siberia (might even have been a comet fragment there). Well, OK, add to this that an asteroid about seven kilometers across hits this planet about once every 10 million years, producing what has become known as an ELE (Extinction-Level Event). The last biggie was 65 million years ago, which supposedly wiped out all the dinosaurs on this planet. I’d say we are long overdue for that strike. Are you scared now?

 

OK, lets bring this a little closer to home, or at least, closer to things you do in your daily life. Here are some stats from Britain, averaged from 1991-2000, with the number of fatalities per billion kilometers traveled.

 

Airplane travel deaths                          0.02

Boating deaths                                     0.40

Bus-rider deaths                                  0.40

Rail (train/subway)                              0.49

Automobile deaths                               3.10

Bicycle deaths                                  42.00

Pedestrian deaths                               59.00

Motorcycle deaths                            106.00

 

Calculated this way, it seems fairly obvious which mode of transportation is more risky. But that is not necessarily so. That billion kilometers traveled is for all forms together, and airplanes typically go farther per trip than does a motorcycle rider. And what kind of deaths are we talking about here? Supposedly, at the above rates, one person in an airplane will die in an accident for every 50 billion miles flown. Now, was that a British billion or an American billion? They are different, but I’ll let you look that one up in your dictionary (hint: forget “billion”; look up “numbers” or “measurements”). The annual death rate in the U.S.of A. for flying is 0.03 per million passenger miles while the rate for driving your car is 30 times as high (~0.9 per million). Now you know someone who died in a car accident, right? And s/he never drove a million miles in his/her entire life, right? Again, this is figured by guessing how many miles total that all Americans drive and dividing the total deaths per year to calculate these “odds.” In other words, it does not have a direct statistical analysis of you personally, yet you are expected to take it that way. While I am picking on airplanes here, you should note that airline crews also have a higher incidence of cancer than people who stay on the ground. That’s probably because the ionizing radiation at 37,000 feet can be 300 times greater than at sea level (the air up there is too thin to stop it). You should also note that this figure is greater even than working full time at a nuclear power plant. And which one of those gets the most fear mongering on the TV or in newspapers and magazines? So let’s discuss some psychology definitions for why we do the things we do.

 

Risk Homeostasis: Interesting words, which basically mean that the more familiar you are and the better equipped you are for any given task (e.g., your car has antilock brakes or you’ve just bought the latest super helmet to wear while riding your bicycle), that you will tend to take more chances because of your attitude about being able to overcome the risks. Also, the feeling of “control” (being the driver instead of the passenger) provides you with a false sense of security. My personal empirical evidence says that I see more four-wheel drive vehicles upside-down in the ditch than family sedans. I know, from experience, that 4WD does not help you stop on ice, yet those pickups and SUVs (sport-utility vehicles) are always the ones going the fastest down a snowy road. Those drivers exceed the common-sense risk assessments because they feel their equipment is superior and they will automatically be safer just because they have it. Wrong! The TV advertisements told them they could go anywhere and do anything, but they forgot to read the fine print. (Professional driver on closed course. Do not attempt.)

 

Assessing and avoiding risks is an evolutionary imperative (survival of the fittest). The fittest, in this case, might be s/he who thinks quickest, not necessarily he who has the strongest biceps. For example, there are about 800 bicyclists killed in this country every year and 90% of them are men. Of the 500,000 bicyclists injured every year, 80% of them are men. Although males ride their bikes more frequently than females, it has been proven that in almost any endeavor, males will take more risks than females. Do we do that because we have been programmed to spread our wings and do the mating dance to attract a partner (all that macho BS)? If so, why do we also take more risks when no female birds are watching us? Maybe we have to prove ourselves to ourselves… but that’s advance psychology and perhaps we should stick to the introductory stuff for a while longer. In any case, it is well known that men and women assess risk differently.

 

People are far more concerned about risks that are catastrophic and rare than those that involve fewer fatalities but are more frequent. People are worried about radiation from their cell phones giving them brain cancer (a separate rant about cell phone and microwave fear mongering coming in a future issue). People’s judgments are also inappropriately polarized; they fail to recognize that most things carry a mix of risk and benefit. So lets define some more psych phrases.

 

Availability: familiar, easily imagined risks are more feared than long-term, abstract threats. Seriously, are you really worried about that ELE asteroid scenario (odds 1:38)? Or death by bird flu (~1:12,000)?

 

Dread: the idea that rare but acutely horrible fates (e.g., black widow bites, snake or shark attacks) are dwelt upon more than humdrum ones (e.g., heart attacks).

 

Disproportionate Visibility: people believe that if something is highly publicized, it therefore must be highly probable (e.g., the current bird flu pandemic scare tactics).

 

How does your brain process fear? The thalamus usually dominates, reacting quickly and powerfully to potential threats by triggering behavioral, autonomic, and endocrine responses. The cortex, which is responsible for conscious considerations of action/change, steps in later. Therefore, we fear first and think about it later. Risk evokes powerful emotions and your fear level is mostly unaffected by the actual odds. This cognitive error, known as probability neglect, has been well documented by the psychologists.

 

Optimistic Bias: The majority of people in this country think they are better than average at driving, which is a mathematical impossibility. But even if you are an expert, are you safer? No. The more you know, the bigger the risk you are willing to take (e.g., the death rate for experienced whitewater paddlers is four times as high as those of the inexperienced).

 

Social Proof: you witness other people skiing down a slope that you planned to try and automatically assume that means the slope is safe (monkey see, monkey do – oops, dead monkey).

 

Commitment Trap: your need to stick to a decision, even if it was a bad one, in order to appear consistent and decisive to your peers.

 

Familiarity Trap: belief that if you’ve done something before and got away with it, you can do it again with guaranteed safety.

 

Placebo Effect: a 1989 psychology study at Hofstra University placed panic-prone volunteers in a room with a 5.5% carbon dioxide mix in the air (known to produce panic attacks). Half the people were told that they could lower the CO₂ concentration by turning a knob on the console. That group reported fewer and milder attacks, even though the knob was not connected to anything. Also known as “it’s all in your head” or “you get what you expect.”

 

OK, let’s do some more statistics and think of some ways you could manipulate these to say what you want people to believe.

 

Talking while driving (whether cell phone or conversation with a passenger) causes inattentional blindness, a perceptual problem. When you concentrate on one thing, you will miss other things that would otherwise have been completely obvious. (A 1999 Harvard study had people concentrate on basketball passes, and very few even saw the man walking next to them in a gorilla suit. A Carnegie-Mellon University study showed that when listening intently to a sentence, visual processing declines by 29%.) It takes 18% longer to hit the brakes when talking on a cell phone in your car. It has been established that cell phone users drive worse than people who are legally drunk.

 

The New York City murder rate was 2,245 in 1990. It was only 575 in 2004. That would appear to be a 75% decline in murders in NYC and they now claim it is the safest city in the United States. Do you believe that? In the 14 years between those two rates, what was the population change? What is the murder rate per capita?

 

Here’s a brief list of accident statistics that sent people to emergency rooms in 2002.

 

Toilet/shower/tub accidents                     280,190

Shaving with a razor                                  33,522

Hot water (burns?)                                    42,077

Accidents involving the sink                       23,283

Kitchen knives                                        441,250

Drinking glasses (cuts?)                            86,909

Exercise equipment                                   40,000

Money-related injuries (coins/bills)            10,000 (5 per year are killed by falling vending machines)

 

Falls caused 28% of the 30,000 accidental deaths in the home (followed closely by poisoning and fires). Falls are 70 times more likely for the over-75 age group as for the under-44 group. U.S. death rates due to fires is one in 100,000.

 

The number of people who suffocate in their own beds (not murdered) or strangle themselves to death in the bedding is about 400 per year. Is any of this getting closer to home for you?

 

Air pollution can be 50 times as high inside your house as outside. Toxic things that hurt you in your house are carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, gases from household products, mold/mildew, mites, dander, traces of lead, asbestos, pesticides, arsenic, flame retardant chemicals on clothing or furniture, water repellant chemicals on clothing or furniture, product packaging, radon gas (radon alone supposedly causes 20,000 deaths per year) and a few hundred other things, like nearly all the cosmetics you own...

 

In 2003, 80,000 pedestrians were injured by cars and 5,600 were killed. Of all those struck by cars, that’s about a 7% death rate (about 5 per 100,000). The car accident death rate was 26 per 100,000; so driving is over five times as likely to kill you as walking. And we already established the death rate for riding bicycles, which comes out to be 14 times more than driving a car. And you turn your kids loose on the street every day on a bike? Shame on you! J

 

In the 2003-2004 ski season, 41 people died from skiing accidents and 37 more were seriously injured at U.S. ski resorts. Considering the huge number of people who go to ski resorts every year, that probably isn’t such a high number; the odds are figured at less than one in a million. At the same time, back country ski deaths (outside of the resort boundaries and therefore not included in their stats) are about seven people per year, making it a much larger risk, given that only about 300,000 pursue that sport (that calculates out to over 23 per million). So, when someone tries to tell you not to ski outside the boundary line, just know that the probability of death from that risk is 23 times higher than inside. Or is it? Who is most likely to ski beyond the boundary? The more experienced skier or the hot shot stupid teenager showing off? Well, the real odds probably aren’t even matchable. The people who die inside the boundary hit a tree or a ski-lift tower or got drunk and fell off the lodge balcony. Those who died outside were mostly due to avalanches. No correlation.

 

In a book called Social Forces (1992), we find that listening to country music might lead to suicide. The more you listen to country music, the higher the probability you will commit suicide. Country music is known to have predominantly depressing themes, such as marital discord (my wife ran away with my best friend and the worst part is she took my dang dog), alcohol abuse (I’m looking at you through a beer haze, baby), alienation from work (take this job and shove it), among many other crying topics. I believe, however, we must interpret this data very cautiously. Just because there is a statistical correlation, that does not imply direct causation. Perhaps people who already have suicidal tendencies are attracted to country music. That is, they are likely to have killed themselves with or without a radio, but when you are down, you want to associate with someone who has had similar moods. (By the way, I like country music and I don’t think about suicide, but then, I’m not a depressed personality.)

 

Are you getting the drift here? We can say a lot with numbers, but let’s bring it even one step closer to home now. There are over 75,000 chemicals used in industry, agriculture, and in and around your home, yet the CDC has tested the toxicity to humans for only 157 of those. On the other hand, the department of Health and Human Services has added flame-cooked burgers (whether Whoppers or only home-cooked is not certain) to their official list of cancer-causing agents. It seems to be something in the charred meat that piqued their interest and I’ll be talking about that in a future issue along with the microwave rant. (Somehow I doubt it is fire that’s the problem; man has cooked over fire for thousands of years, but cancer seems to be a relatively new problem. Then again, how would we have recognized cancer way back then? What has changed within the cancer timeline? Ah, how about what the meat gets fed while it is still alive?) HHS folks also added a chemical used in moth repellant and a toilet bowl deodorizer to that list.

 

Oh, how about soap scum on your vinyl shower curtains? Testing has shown that they accumulate microbial biofilms (usually Sphingomonas spp. and Methylobacterium spp.), which can lead to serious blood and urinary tract infections, but are usually thought to be harmful only to people with impaired immune systems. Do you feel sorry for those poor folks with impaired immune systems? Hey, go look in the mirror. That would be just about everyone who eats the standard American diet, wouldn’t it? If you follow the USDA food pyramid, I guarantee that your bodily systems are unbalanced. What you should also question here is that they tested only for bacteria. What about the mold/mildew issues in bathrooms? And just a thought… how much of the bacteria from soap scum on the shower curtain was generated by antibacterial soaps? J

 

Then there’s the organic food bit. We’ve already defined, in a previous issue, how badly we screw with the words “organic” and “natural,” but many people whose crops are grown without using artificial pesticides, fungicides, or fertilizers, claim that their products are not only good for the environment, but safer for you. One marketer claims his products are 200 times safer than what you get in a grocery store. They are not! In 1999, the FDA and in 2000, the USDA tested over 10,000 produce samples from grocery stores around the country and less than 2% had pesticide levels higher than what is allowable, and none were high enough to be in the “unhealthy” category. Well, I prefer zero as my number, but here’s another unknown to most people: 99.9% of the pesticides eaten by Americans are “natural.” Lab rats can be given cancers by feeding them the same chemicals that are found in cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, or bananas. But the natural pest repellants found in those plants are never assumed to be a risk factor by people, showing once again that we only get wound up by artificial risks, not natural ones. Maybe we should pay more attention to what goes in our mouths.

 

As a parting shot, note that the ultimate risk is life itself, which has a 100% chance of ending in death. Try to find a pill to correct that one!

 

Miscellaneous BS

 

As more hospitals comply with a pioneering hospital infections reporting law in Pennsylvania, the number of cases reported continues to rise. A state report issued March 29 reveals that 13,711 patients acquired infections in Pennsylvania hospitals during the first nine months of 2005, compared with 11,668 for all of 2004. View the report and track efforts in your state.