The United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has amended the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act), and now children can receive their childhood vaccines at pharmacies in all 50 states. This action is a direct response to the drop in vaccination rates due to COVID-19. A Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report from May of 2020 found that less than half of children aged 5-16 months were up to date on their vaccinations. The HHS plans to increase those rates by making vaccines more readily accessible, especially for those who are unable to go to the doctor’s office.

Today’s action means easier access to lifesaving vaccines for our children, as we seek to ensure immunization rates remain high during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Trump Administration has worked to allow pharmacists—alongside all of America’s heroic healthcare workers—to practice at the top of their license, empowering the public with more options to protect their health and well-being.”

Alex Azar, HHS secretary

Related: Natural Coronavirus Prevention

Any FDA approved vaccines will be available at pharmacies, where they will be administered to children aged 3-18 by a licensed pharmacist or a supervised, licensed pharmacy intern. Prior to this amendment, pharmacists were able to administer vaccines in 28 different states. Another factor in lower vaccination rates is the lack of access to health care for many individuals who have lost their jobs. Perhaps a government showing concern about the potential for a public health crisis due to low vaccination rates should also be concerned about giving the public free access to the services it deems necessary.

Related: How To Detoxify and Heal From Vaccinations – For Adults and Children

The pandemic has been stressful for Americans, especially those who are working class, and a new study finds that stress reflected in our mental health. Available on JAMA Network Open, the study finds that rates of depression have tripled in the United States, rising from 8.5% before the pandemic to 27.8%. The data was collected from a survey with 1,441 participants conducted in April of 2020.

Spikes in depression are common during and after large scale trauma events. Researchers also evaluated the impact of stressors on the survey takers’ mental health. Lower-income individuals with less than $5,000 in savings who were exposed to a greater amount of stressors were most at risk for depression. This group was the most vulnerable before the pandemic and experienced a 50% increase in depression risk.

Related: Sugar Leads to Depression – World’s First Trial Proves Gut and Brain are Linked (Protocol Included)

While further data will be needed to assess the trajectory of depression in the US population and potential treatment for affected populations, it seems important to recognize the potential for the mental health consequences of COVID-19 to be large in scale, to recognize that these effects can be long-lasting, and to consider preventative action to help mitigate its effects.²⁸ In particular, this burden is being borne by economically and socially marginalized groups, suggesting that individuals with low income and with fewer resources may benefit from particular policy attention in coming months

Prevalence of Depression Symptoms in US Adults Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Much of the uproar surrounding the herbicide has focused on the active ingredient, glyphosate. But for glyphosate to penetrate plant cells, it needs an adjuvant. If you’re familiar with vaccine adjuvants like mercury or aluminum, you probably have a sinking feeling in your gut. And guess what?

You’re right!

Say hello to polyethoxylated tallow amine or polyoxyethyleneamine (POEA). POEA is derived from tallow, or animal fat (usually beef or sheep). It’s a detergent that constitutes 15% of Roundup formulations, and it’s one of the reasons roundup works as well as it does. When glyphosate-based products that don’t contain an ethoxylated tallow amine (ETA) formulation are used, water is more easily able to wash the herbicide off the plant. This renders the formula 6% effective.

Related: How to Eliminate IBS, IBD, Leaky Gut 

So why would farmers have to do without that extra 6% effectiveness? Easy answer there – the European Union banned POEAs in 2016. In their scientific assessment, the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) said,

Therefore the exposure assessment for operators, workers, bystanders, residents and consumers could not be performed. Compared to glyphosate, a higher toxicity of the POE-tallowamine was observed on all endpoints investigated.”

Statement of EFSA

According to another study in 2004,

As a result, human poisoning with this herbicide is not with the active ingredient alone but with complex and variable mixtures. Therefore, It is difficult to separate the toxicity of glyphosate from that of the formulation as a whole or to determine the contribution of surfactants to overall toxicity. Experimental studies suggest that the toxicity of the surfactant, polyoxyethyleneamine (POEA), is greater than the toxicity of glyphosate alone and commercial formulations alone.”

Glyphosate Poisoning

To be clear, POEA and other similarly formulated adjuvants are more toxic than glyphosate, yet regulators have no way of measuring how much exposure you’ve had because it isn’t the formula’s active ingredient. Yet studies that were done on fish and aquatic animals have found that Roundup formulations are significantly more toxic than glyphosate alone. Original Roundup was 10-40 times more toxic than glyphosate alone in fish species and 10-50 times more toxic in frogs. A fruit fly study in January 2020 found that fruit flies exposed to less than lethal amounts of both Roundup Concentrate Plus and POEA had decreased fertility.

POEA isn’t the active ingredient in Roundup, which is the reasoning used to explain why this substance has not been tested to the extent glyphosate has been. All that companies need to do is provide documentation saying an ingredient doesn’t kill weeds or insects for regulating agencies to see no need to ask for safety studies. Much of media coverage of the dangers of Roundup has focused on glyphosate because it has been labeled a probable carcinogen by a major worldwide health organization. What would POEAs be labeled if regulators actually looked into it?

Sources:

• Ignoring Adjuvant Toxicity Falsifies the Safety Profile of Commercial Pesticides – Frontiers in Public Health
• Ethoxylated adjuvants of glyphosate-based herbicides are active principles of human cell toxicity – National Library of Medicine

The Trump Administration has rolled back a regulation requiring oil and gas companies to detect and fix methane gas leaks from pipelines, storage facilities, and wells. The director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cited the economic benefits of relieving the burden of reducing air pollution on small-medium sized energy companies.

E.P.A. has been working hard to fulfill President Trump’s promise to cut burdensome and ineffective regulations for our domestic energy industry. Regulatory burdens put into place by the Obama-Biden administration fell heavily on small and medium-sized energy businesses.”

Andrew Wheeler, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency

This decision could have serious effects on climate. Methane makes up 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, but according to the EPA, methane is 28 to 36 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Methane gas emissions are at an all-time high globally, and fossil fuel leaks in the U.S. play a significant role in that.

Recommended: How to Eliminate IBS, IBD, Leaky Gut 

Over the past few years there has been an explosion of new research on this, and the literature has coalesced — 80 percent of papers show that methane from oil and gas leaks is two to three times higher than the E.P.A.’s estimates…” 

Robert Howarth, an earth systems scientist at Cornell University

Historically speaking, the United States government has proven it is more than happy to put business and profits before protecting the environment while paying lip service to climate concerns. The current administration clearly follows in those footsteps.

An increased number of google searches for gastrointestinal issues corresponded with an increase in COVID-19 cases, according to a new study published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. Researchers were inspired to look into this phenomena by the tendency of patients with COVID-19 to report symptoms like abdominal pain and diarrhea.

Our data underscore the importance of GI symptoms as a potential harbinger of Covid-19 infection and suggests that Google Trends may be a valuable tool for prediction of pandemics with GI manifestations…”

Kyle Staller, director of Mass General’s gastrointestinal motility laboratory

Related: Natural Coronavirus Prevention

Researchers used Alphabet Inc.’s Google Trends online tool to compare searches for diarrhea and loss of taste and appetite with reported COVID-19 cases. They found a positive correlation. Areas that experienced a high volume of gastrointestinal symptom searches, like New York, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts and Illinois, became states with high-disease burdens three to four weeks after the searches.

Related: How To Heal Your Gut

This study comes on the heels of another study that COVID-19 patients often have prolonged viral intestinal infections. Patients with gut infections continued to have positive stool tests, even after respiratory tests came back negative.

Cases of colon cancer are on the rise in young people, and a study found that people with gum disease are at a significantly higher risk of developing colorectal cancers. Those with gum disease had a 52% higher chance of developing colon cancer and a 43% higher chance of developing throat cancer. The study also found that people who had lost two or more teeth were also at a higher risk for stomach (33%) and throat (42%) cancer.

Participants with periodontal disease and a higher number of teeth lost had a higher risk of developing the two gastrointestinal cancers, even after adjusting for other major risk factors…” 

Mingyang Song, Harvard assistant professor of clinical epidemiology and nutrition

The world was shocked when Chadwick Boseman, the 43-year-old actor who portrayed Black Panther, died of colon cancer recently, but he was part of the growing group of young adults who have been diagnosed with colon cancer. From 2011 to 2016, the rate of colon cancer diagnoses in the United States rose by 1% every year in people aged 50 to 64 and 2.2% in people under age 50. After excluding skin cancers, colorectal cancer is the third most diagnosed cancer in the U.S.

Your gums are indicative of your body’s overall health.

Recommended:

• Best Supplements To Kill Candida and Everything Else You Ever Wanted To Know About Fungal Infections 
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada will ban “harmful” single-use plastics by the year 2021. The precise list of products that will be banned will be available after scientific evaluation.

As parents we’re at a point when we take our kids to the beach and we have to search out a patch of sand that isn’t littered with straws, Styrofoam or bottles…That’s a problem, one that we have to do something about.”

Justin Trudeau

Related: How to Detox From Plastics and Other Endocrine Disruptors

This new legislation is based on bans passed in the European Union and other nations last year. During a G7 summit in Quebec in 2019, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom, and Italy, and the European Union signed a new letter against plastic pollution in the oceans. Those countries and the EU have committed to making 100% of plastics recyclable, recoverable, or reusable by 2030.