The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a safety alert advising consumers of a contaminations problem with specific lots of contact lenses by Advanced Medical Optics. Here are the details.

Complete MoisturePLUS Contact Lens Care Products

Audience: Ophthalmologists, optometrists, other healthcare professionals and consumers
Indication: Contact lens care
[Posted 11/22/2006] FDA and Advanced Medical Optics, Inc. informed healthcare professionals and consumers of a nationwide recall of 18 lots of Complete MoisturePLUS multipurpose contact lens care solution and Active Packs distributed in the United States. Certain lots were found to have bacterial contamination which compromised sterility. Non-sterility of a contact lens solution may have serious health consequences, including eye infection and microbial keratitis.

The Health Gazette has been no friend to Big Pharma and the statin drugs con perpetrated on an unjustifiably trusting and inadequately protected population of consumers. There is no doubt about the role played by the FDA in all of this either. Now it appears that cracks are appearing in the claimed foundation of scientific justification for all the misplaced and marketing generated trust in these drugs. They are actually quite damaging to wellbeing and we will doubtless learn more of this in the coming years. Here is an interesting report by Mike Adams.

A Bombshell Drops on Cholesterol Medication's Glass House by Mike Adams

The Mayo Clinic Nicotine Research Program is conducting a research study to help smokers who would like to quit. The study will test whether the drug Chantix (varenicline) helps smokers who have Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) stop smoking.

The Mayo Clinic Nicotine Research Program is looking for adults to participate in this study. Eligible participants must:

• Be 35 years old or older
• Have symptoms of COPD, such as emphysema, chronic bronchitis, reduced lung function, cough with sputum production and shortness of breath, or have been told by a doctor that they may have COPD
• Have a desire to quit smoking

Chantix has recently been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for prescription use. It works by producing effects in the brain similar to those of nicotine. Previous studies have shown that this medication helps smokers successfully quit smoking by lessening the severity of withdrawal symptoms.

In the largest review of "broken heart syndrome" patients ever conducted, Mayo Clinic researchers studied 100 patients and found symptoms recurred in 1 out of 10 patients over a four-year period, and that patients experiencing physical stress had a worse survival rate than those under emotional stress. The information may help physicians manage their heart patients more effectively by providing new details about a recently recognized condition that mimics heart attack symptoms of shortness of breath and chest pain. Because one trigger of the syndrome is severe emotional stress, such as loss of a loved one, the condition several years ago was nicknamed "broken heart syndrome." It is known medically as apical ballooning syndrome (ABS).

A team of Harvard scientists has peered into 23 years of health data on more than 22,000 physicians and concluded that men who are overweight or obese years before being diagnosed with prostate cancer are more likely to die of the disease than those who are of normal weight.

While no studies have definitively shown that obesity and/or higher Body Mass Index, or BMI, which measures body fat, increases the risk of developing prostate cancer, these studies showed that obese men at the time of diagnosis were more likely to have a cancer recurrence.

But according to Jing Ma, M.D., Ph.D., a researcher at the Brigham and Women's Hospital-based Channing Laboratory and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, few studies have focused on obesity and the risk of dying from prostate cancer.