MRIs: What Your Doctor May Not Warn You About

They are typically safer than other imaging technology, but there are dangers you need to know about. Action Alert!

We’ve previously written about the massive amount of radiation that patients are exposed to in CAT and PET scans, which make MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging) a generally safer diagnostic imaging procedure. MRIs produce a strong magnetic field followed by radio waves that create cross-sectional images of our organs.

Often doctors want an improved image—an enhanced MRI—and prescribe a shot of gadolinium as a contrast agent to make the image clearer. For years, there was no package warning about this chemical. Now there is a black box warning—but how many patients ever see the package?

Gadolinium is a rare earth element with paramagnetic properties—that is, it does not retain any permanent magnetism, but is weakly attracted to the poles of a magnet. In the 1980s, researchers discovered that it could be bound to other molecules, administered intravenously, and used to enhance images on MRI scans. Because gadolinium is toxic, it is bound with non-metal ions to facilitate easy and rapid elimination from the body after it is administered.

Patients with impaired kidney function are at special risk from any exposure to gadolinium. In these patients, the use of this contrast agent has been linked to the development of Nephrogenic Systemic Fibrosis (NSF), which can lead to kidney damage requiring dialysis, or even death. It is not a good trade-off for doctors to get a clearer image but destroy your kidneys in the process. But despite the warning label updated in 2010, nobody is talking about this, least of all radiologists who administer the shot.

Evidence also shows that gadolinium could pose dangers to a broader set of patients. One study compared brain images of patients who had undergone six or more enhanced MRIs with patients who had undergone six or fewer “regular” MRIs—and found that gadolinium can persist in the body. Other research suggests that a small amount of gadolinium persists in the body after every enhanced MRI, meaning patients who receive multiple enhanced MRIs are at increased risk for accumulating the metal in their bodies—even the brain.

In some cases, the contrast agent isn’t actually necessary but may be used anyway. For example, blood flow from cancer is still hard to distinguish on an MRI even with a contrast agent, yet gadolinium is still used regardless.

As was recently pointed out in a weekly bulletin by the International College of Integrative Medicine, MRI technology has had a tremendous impact on medical diagnosis in the past twenty years, but this has come at too great a cost for thousands of patients—and those are just the ones we know about. Countless patients may have been misdiagnosed with skin disorders, fibromyalgia, or kidney failure when NSF is the real culprit.

Action Alert! Send a message to radiologist associations with a copy to FDA, urging them to stop using gadolinium. Please send your message immediately.

 

Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health

As Bad as Glyphosate?

US Department of Monsanto (a.k.a. USDA)

MRIs: What Your Doctor May Not Warn You About

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Action Alert: Tell USDA to Do Its Job

Related article: US Department of Monsanto (a.k.a. USDA)

Trouble Taking Action? Click here.

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Action Alert: Ban Atrazine

Related article: As Bad as Glyphosate?

Trouble Taking Action? Click here.

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Action Alert: No Gadolinium for MRIs!

Related article: MRIs: What Your Doctor May Not Warn You About

Trouble Taking Action? Click here.

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As Bad as Glyphosate?

The world is focused on glyphosate, but another commonly used farm herbicide could be just as poisonous. Action Alert!

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is required to review pesticides and herbicides approved for use in the US every fifteen years. The agency just completed its updated environmental impact assessment of atrazine, the second most widely used herbicide.

Atrazine is a chlorine-based chemical just like DDT—the once-popular insecticide—and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl). It can persist in soil for twenty-two years. Lots of evidence shows the extent to which atrazine is contaminating our food supply, which is little surprise given that as much as 70 million pounds of the stuff is used by farmers each year, mostly on corn.

In its 500-page draft report, the EPA found that atrazine, which is produced by biotech giant Syngenta, can be dangerous to animals and fish—and leaves behind a troubling amount of residue. According to the report, atrazine exceeds the agency’s “levels of concern” for chronic risks to animals and fish by 198 times and 62 times, respectively. Despite the length of the report, the EPA found it convenient to omit all discussion of atrazine’s risk to humans, promising to return to that subject in the future.

What the EPA did report, however, vindicates the research of Tyrone Hayes, PhD, who found that atrazine exposure was chemically castrating male frogs. At the time, he was working for Novartis, which is now owned by Syngenta—which of course refused to publish his research. Hayes quit, obtained independent funding, and published the research, but was then the victim of what seemed clearly to be a smear campaign by Syngenta.

Atrazine does not typically kill animals outright, but has been shown to adversely affect their developmental, hormonal, and reproductive systems. In its draft report, the EPA also acknowledges that adverse effects on animals can occur at exposure levels much lower than previously thought.

Heavy atrazine use can cause dire consequences for plant life. The EPA found that atrazine runoff and spray drift reduces land-based plant biodiversity, among other problems.

The EPA is expected to release its assessment of atrazine’s impact on human health later this year. But the risk to farm children is already known to be particularly severe. One analysis of towns in the “corn belt” found that tap water in some communities contained fourteen times the legally allowed amount of atrazine. In some towns, infants reached their maximum lifetime safe dosage of atrazine in less than four months. This analysis was done in the late 1990s—and levels are almost certainly worse, since more and more of the stuff is being dumped on crops each year.

Beyond farm families, there is already plenty of evidence of the dangers of atrazine:

• An independent panel of scientists convened by the EPA in 2011 concluded that there is “suggestive evidence of [atrazine’s] carcinogenic potential” for ovarian cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, hairy-cell leukemia, and thyroid cancers, though it found “inadequate evidence” at this time to determine whether the chemical can cause prostate cancer, breast cancer, liver cancer, esophageal cancer, or childhood cancers.

• Another study found that “higher concentrations of atrazine in drinking water” are associated with birth defects.

• Evidence also shows that atrazine could be making us fat. A rat study found that long-term treatment with low concentrations of atrazine induced insulin resistance and weight gain. Obesity was induced in the rats without changing food intake or physical activity, suggesting that atrazine lowered energy metabolism.

• Atrazine is also an endocrine disruptor, interfering with the hormones in the brain that trigger ovulation.

We shouldn’t wait for the EPA to produce another weighty and hard-to-understand report on whether atrazine poses human health problems. It clearly does, and decisive steps need to be taken to remove this product from the market.

Action Alert! Write to the EPA and tell the agency to revoke its approval of atrazine. Please send your message immediately.

 

Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health:

US Department of Monsanto (a.k.a. USDA)

MRIs: What Your Doctor May Not Warn You About

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US Department of Monsanto (a.k.a. USDA)

This particular crony alliance isn’t even secretive about it. Action Alert!

We think of Monsanto and other companies as developers and promoters of GMOs. But thanks to passage of the Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986, as well as President Reagan’s Executive Order #12591—“Facilitating Access to Science and Technology”—the USDA is also directly in the business of developing, patenting, and promoting biotechnology inventions. The difference is that the USDA slips the patents, developed from government research and paid for by US taxpayers, into the hands of private companies such as Monsanto and Syngenta.

You read that right. According to the USDA’s own Agricultural Research Service (ARS), about sixty new patents are issued for USDA inventions each year. These patents are then transferred through licenses to the private sector—mostly to biotech companies. ARS has released more than 400 new crop germplasm lines since 2000, and the USDA spends about $220 million taxpayer dollars on biotechnology research each year.

A cursory search through the recent inventions of the USDA reveals nearly two dozen inventions in the “plant genes” and “crop protection” categories. These patents range from the use of RNA interference to control gypsy moth populations, to genetically altered citrus plants that protect the plant from citrus greening and citrus canker. The USDA’s research into plant genes includes isolating genes in peach, plum, almond, and apricot trees that can be manipulated to affect tree shape with “desired branch angles.” Another patent uses double-stranded RNA constructs to inhibit the expression of certain proteins and kill aphids. There are many more such examples.

The biotech industry is a young industry. The potential for destroying the ecosystem of the planet is ever-present—not to mention the potential for genetically altering the human species. That the USDA, in concert with Monsanto and others, is rushing into inventing and marketing genetically altered organisms, and bragging about this collaborative effort, tells us all we need to know about this crony alliance.

Nineteen members of the EU have already rejected GMO crops in their countries. The Center for Food Safety, a Washington-based nonprofit environmental advocacy group, reports that the overwhelming majority of Americans in all demographics support GMO labeling on all food products. Yet in response, Congress just handed us a fake labeling law that would actually protect Big Food from having to label GMOs at all.

The USDA’s involvement in genetic engineering goes beyond developing technologies and licensing them to the biotech industry. In delineating its role in agricultural biotechnology, the agency actually admits that its primary function is to “provide regulatory oversight of organisms derived through genetic engineering.” However, the agency seems to have “reinterpreted” this job out of existence. Once again, as with vaccines, we see a government agency promoting and making money from what it is supposed to regulate.

By its own admission, the USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) “conducts research on the economic aspects of the use of genetically engineered organisms, including the rate of and reasons for adoption of biotechnology by farmers. ERS also addresses economic issues related to the marketing, labeling, and trading of biotechnology-derived products.” Translated, this means the intended regulator is also the cheerleader and promoter.

None of this is surprising when we consider the revolving door between biotech giants like Monsanto and the federal government. For instance, a few years ago, the Obama administration appointed Roger Beachy, director of the Monsanto-owned Danforth Plant Science Center, to head the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which has the power to grant or reject agricultural research grants. And a Monsanto lobbyist was appointed to be the agriculture trade representative. This revolving door between the private and the public sector is facilitated by what are called cooperative research and development agreements.

This degree of cronyism between the biotech industry and the USDA is truly an insult to the American public. It is time for the American public to speak up, because nobody else will.

Action Alert! Write to your senators and representative in Congress—and send a copy of your message to the USDA—and tell them to protect consumers, not the profits of the biotech industry! Please send your message immediately.

 

Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health:

As Bad as Glyphosate?

MRIs: What Your Doctor May Not Warn You About

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MRIs: What Your Doctor May Not Warn You About

They are typically safer than other imaging technology, but there are dangers you need to know about. Action Alert!

We’ve previously written about the massive amount of radiation that patients are exposed to in CAT and PET scans, which make MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging) a generally safer diagnostic imaging procedure. MRIs produce a strong magnetic field followed by radio waves that create cross-sectional images of our organs.

Often doctors want an improved image—an enhanced MRI—and prescribe a shot of gadolinium as a contrast agent to make the image clearer. For years, there was no package warning about this chemical. Now there is a black box warning—but how many patients ever see the package?

Gadolinium is a rare earth element with paramagnetic properties—that is, it does not retain any permanent magnetism, but is weakly attracted to the poles of a magnet. In the 1980s, researchers discovered that it could be bound to other molecules, administered intravenously, and used to enhance images on MRI scans. Because gadolinium is toxic, it is bound with non-metal ions to facilitate easy and rapid elimination from the body after it is administered.

Patients with impaired kidney function are at special risk from any exposure to gadolinium. In these patients, the use of this contrast agent has been linked to the development of Nephrogenic Systemic Fibrosis (NSF), which can lead to kidney damage requiring dialysis, or even death. It is not a good trade-off for doctors to get a clearer image but destroy your kidneys in the process. But despite the warning label updated in 2010, nobody is talking about this, least of all radiologists who administer the shot.

Evidence also shows that gadolinium could pose dangers to a broader set of patients. One study compared brain images of patients who had undergone six or more enhanced MRIs with patients who had undergone six or fewer “regular” MRIs—and found that gadolinium can persist in the body. Other research suggests that a small amount of gadolinium persists in the body after every enhanced MRI, meaning patients who receive multiple enhanced MRIs are at increased risk for accumulating the metal in their bodies—even the brain.

In some cases, the contrast agent isn’t actually necessary but may be used anyway. For example, blood flow from cancer is still hard to distinguish on an MRI even with a contrast agent, yet gadolinium is still used regardless.

As was recently pointed out in a weekly bulletin by the International College of Integrative Medicine, MRI technology has had a tremendous impact on medical diagnosis in the past twenty years, but this has come at too great a cost for thousands of patients—and those are just the ones we know about. Countless patients may have been misdiagnosed with skin disorders, fibromyalgia, or kidney failure when NSF is the real culprit.

Action Alert! Send a message to radiologist associations with a copy to FDA, urging them to stop using gadolinium. Please send your message immediately.

 

Other articles in this week’s Pulse of Natural Health

As Bad as Glyphosate?

US Department of Monsanto (a.k.a. USDA)

MRIs: What Your Doctor May Not Warn You About

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