Former case worker accused of falsifying child-welfare records
Man worked for organization contracted by DCF
March 15, 2010|By Gary Taylor, Orlando Sentinel
A former employee of a company that contracted with the state Department of Children and Families faces charges that he falsified records, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said today.
Damion Hall, 29, of Port Orange, was arrested Sunday, accused of five counts of falsification of records and four counts of forgery, the FDLE said.
Hall previously worked as a case manager for Community Partnership for Children, a community agency under contract with DCF, officials said. He was required to conduct weekly and/or monthly visits with children or their caregivers to ensure their safety and welfare.
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2010-03-15/news/os-former-case-worker-arrested-20100315_1_falsifying-fdle-office-of-inspector-general
DCF's Office of Inspector General referred the case to the FDLE after an internal investigation showed Hall had documented contact with children or caregivers when he had never seen them, said FDLE spokeswoman Heather Smith.
An investigation revealed that between April 2008 and April 2009 Hall falsified information on 14 different cases, Smith said.
Hall was fired by Community Partnership for Children in May 2009, she said.
Isabella Brooke Knightly and Austin Gamez-Knightly
In Memory of my Loving Husband, William F. Knightly Jr. Murdered by ILLEGAL Palliative Care at a Nashua, NH Hospital
Monday, March 22, 2010
Epidemic of Vitamin D deficiency sweeping the world
Epidemic of Vitamin D deficiency sweeping the world
Mike Adams
Natural News
March 13, 2010
There is an epidemic of vitamin D deficiency sweeping across our modern world, and it’s an epidemic of such depth and seriousness that it makes the H1N1 swine flu epidemic look like a case of the sniffles by comparison. Vitamin D deficiency is not only alarmingly widespread, it’s also a root cause of many other serious diseases such as cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis and heart disease.
A new study published in the March, 2010 issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that a jaw-dropping 59 percent of the population is vitamin D deficient. In addition, nearly 25 percent of the study subjects were found to have extremely low levels of vitamin D.
Lead author of the study, Dr. Richard Kremer at the McGill University Health Center, said “Abnormal levels of vitamin D are associated with a whole spectrum of diseases, including cancer, osteoporosis, and diabetes, as well as cardiovascular and autoimmune disorders.”
This new study also documents a clear link between vitamin D deficiency and stored body fat. This supports a theory I’ve espoused here on NaturalNews for many years: That sunshine actually promote body fat loss. Vitamin D may be the hormonal mechanism by which this fat loss phenomenon operates.
The research findings on vitamin D, by the way, get even better…
Activator for the immune system
Recent research carried out at the University of Copenhagen has revealed that vitamin D activates the immune system by “arming” T cells to fight off infections.
This new research, led by Professor Carsten Geisler from the Department of International Health, Immunology and Microbiology at the University of Copenhagen, found that without vitamin D, the immune system’s T cells remain dormant, offering little or no protection against invading microorganisms and viruses. But with vitamin D in the bloodstream, T cells become “armed” and begin seeking out invaders that are then destroyed and carried out of the body.
Vitamin D, in other words, acts a bit like the ignition key to your car: The car won’t run unless you turn the key and ignite the engine. Likewise, your immune system won’t function unless it is biochemically activated with vitamin D. If you’re facing the winter flu season in a state of vitamin D deficiency, your immune system is essentially defenseless against seasonal flu. That’s why all the people who get sick are the ones who live indoors, work indoors and exist in a chronic state of vitamin D deficiency.
That’s also why virtually all the people who died from H1N1 were chronically deficient in vitamin D. They had virtually no immune system protection at all and were thus easy targets for the swine flu.
These findings about vitamin D “arming” the immune system were published in Nature Immunology. Commenting on the findings, the researchers said, “Scientists have known for a long time that vitamin D is important for calcium absorption and the vitamin has also been implicated in diseases such as cancer and multiple sclerosis, but what we didn’t realize is how crucial vitamin D is for actually activating the immune system — which we know now.” (UK Telegraph, source below).
It seems the CDC and WHO remain utterly ignorant about this research or they would have been recommending vitamin D to fight the recent H1N1 pandemic rather than vaccine shots. Vitamin D would have been a far more effective (and less costly) defense against the pandemic than vaccine shots, especially given that even vaccines don’t work unless there is an immune response, and that immune response requires the presence of vitamin D!
And while vaccine shots have undesirable side effects such as causing severe neurological damage in a small number of vaccine recipients, vitamin D’s only significant “side effect” is that it prevents 77% of all cancers, too. (http://www.naturalnews.com/021892.html)
The common denominator for disease
What’s becoming increasingly clear from all the new research is that vitamin D deficiency may be the common denominator behind our most devastating modern degenerative diseases. Kidney failure patients are almost universally deficient in vitamin D and diabetes patients are usually in the same category. People suffering from cancer almost always demonstrate severe vitamin D deficiency, as do people with osteoporosis and multiple sclerosis.
In fact, vitamin D deficiency may be the root cause behind so many degenerative diseases that correcting this deficiency across the population could very well devastate the for-profit “sick care industry” that dominates western medicine today.
Teach the population about vitamin D, in other words, and the cancer industry would suffer devastating losses in profits (vitamin D prevents 4 out of 5 of all cancers).
This is perhaps why so many of the businesses and non-profits that depend on cancer (and other diseases) for their authority and power are actively fighting against vitamin D awareness. The National Cancer Institute, for example, which is one of the wealthiest non-profits in the world, actively runs full-page ads that attempt to scare people away from sunlight, thereby causing them to remain in a state of vitamin D deficiency.
This state of deficiency coincidentally serves the power interests of the NCI by making sure that people remain riddled with cancer even though a free cure (sunshine) is readily available.
The FDA, similarly, doesn’t want people to learn the truth about vitamin D because informed consumers would inevitably take more vitamin D supplements and thereby prevent all sorts of diseases that the pharmaceutical industry is counting on for its monopoly profits. Every patient that takes vitamin D is one less patient paying money for cancer drugs, diabetes drugs or heart disease drugs.
Other cancer industry non-profits, likewise, don’t want people to learn the truth about vitamin D. They’d rather just keep selling ridiculous pink-ribbon consumer products that claim to raise money for some highly fictitious “search for the cure” — a search that was obsolete even before it began because sunshine has been curing and preventing cancer for as long as human beings have walked the planet. Our ancestors didn’t have to “run for the cure” or “walk for the cure” through some silly fundraising fiction; they merely walked in the sun and they were cured of cancer by the mere act of being exposed to sunlight. Walking outside is, all by itself, the “cure” for cancer that the industry claims to need billions more dollars to try to find through additional research.
They want you to remain ignorant!
The inescapable truth of the matter is that modern medicine wants people to remain ignorant about the healing effects of vitamin D. The financial survival of the medical industry absolutely depends on it, so the most influential medical organizations systematically downplay the importance of this vitamin while outright refusing to recommend it to patients.
The NCI doesn’t recommend vitamin D, nor does Komen for the Cure. The AHA, AMA, ADA and FDA all refuse to recommend vitamin D, all while strongly promoting synthetic, patented high-profit medications that cure nothing.
There is, in essence, a conspiracy of silence about vitamin D among the sick-care industries that depend on disease to bring them business. And there always will be, of course, because companies are in business to make money, and if you’re in business to make money from disease, you generally don’t go telling people how to heal themselves for free. From a purely profit-minded perspective, teaching people about vitamin D makes absolutely no business sense to the sick care industry. It’s profits over people (as usual).
You can’t keep Vitamin D down
But you can’t keep hiding the truth about vitamin D forever: The science is absolutely compelling. It’s irrefutable, actually. These nine things about vitamin D are inarguably true:
#1) The vast majority of the western population is deficient in vitamin D.
#2) Vitamin D deficiencies promote cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, kidney disease, depression, obesity and heart disease, among other health problems.
#3) Vitamin D deficiencies can be corrected with vitamin D supplementation or through sensible sunlight exposure.
#4) Sunscreen products block the production of vitamin D in the skin, causing further vitamin D deficiencies across the population of consumers who use such products.
#5) Correcting widespread vitamin D deficiencies would greatly reduce degenerative disease across the population, thereby saving nations literally trillions of dollars in collective sick-care costs over the next decade.
#6) Vitamin D supplements are extremely affordable. Preventing disease through vitamin D supplementation is a low-cost investment in health that pays off a hundred fold (or more) through health care cost savings.
#7) Vitamin D is extremely safe. There are virtually no negative side effects from deficient people taking vitamin D supplements, even at seemingly high doses such as 4000 – 8000 IU per day (more than ten times the current U.S. RDA).
#8) Vitamin D deficiency is caused, in large part, by modern society’s indoor lifestyle. People live, work and play indoors under artificial light. This causes severe deficiencies in exposure to natural light (sunlight) through which vitamin D is usually generated.
#9) Vitamin D dramatically reduces susceptibility to infectious disease such as seasonal flu and H1N1. It “activates” the immune system and allows it to function more aggressively in defending against viral invasions.
Better than a vaccine, safer than a drug…
In effect, Vitamin D is a better vaccine than vaccines. It’s a better cancer drug than cancer drugs. It’s a better osteoporosis drug than osteoporosis drugs. Vitamin D is a better treatment for diabetes than diabetes drugs.
Again and again, vitamin D turns out to be safer, more effective and far more affordable than expensive monopoly-priced medications. Plus, it’s obviously innately compatible with the human body since the human body actually manufactures vitamin D when given the opportunity (and exposure to sunlight).
Furthermore, unlike pharmaceuticals, vitamin D is safe for the environment. Flushing excess vitamin D down the drain doesn’t contaminate the fish like pharmaceuticals do (http://www.naturalnews.com/025933_p…).
With all these things being true about vitamin D, it all makes you wonder: Why isn’t health care reform even talking about this nutrient? If you really want to reform the health of a nation, you have to start by correcting the epidemic of vitamin D deficiency across the population.
When it comes to keeping people healthy, all the drugs in the world can’t accomplish what vitamin D can accomplish… simply, affordably and safely.
You can get it for free. No prescription required. No visit to the doctor. You don’t even need to buy supplements to get this. Just walk outside, under the sun, and initiate your own healing.
That very idea — that patients can cure their own cancers by taking a walk in nature — is the most fearful thing in the world to the cancer and vaccine industries. Big Pharma is horrified at the idea of people becoming nutritionally literate and realizing that vitamin D, all by itself, eliminates the need for potentially hundreds of different medications and vaccines. It activates healing, it defends the body against disease, and it’s the single greatest threat to the profitability of the sick-care industry that dominates medicine today.
If modern medicine could ban Vitamin D, they would do so in an instant. They may yet pull that off, in fact, through Sen. McCain’s attempts to destroy nutritional supplements (http://www.naturalnews.com/028257_S…).
Sources for this story include:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/s…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/h…
http://www.prisonplanet.com/epidemic-of-vitamin-d-deficiency-sweeping-the-world.html
Mike Adams
Natural News
March 13, 2010
There is an epidemic of vitamin D deficiency sweeping across our modern world, and it’s an epidemic of such depth and seriousness that it makes the H1N1 swine flu epidemic look like a case of the sniffles by comparison. Vitamin D deficiency is not only alarmingly widespread, it’s also a root cause of many other serious diseases such as cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis and heart disease.
A new study published in the March, 2010 issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that a jaw-dropping 59 percent of the population is vitamin D deficient. In addition, nearly 25 percent of the study subjects were found to have extremely low levels of vitamin D.
Lead author of the study, Dr. Richard Kremer at the McGill University Health Center, said “Abnormal levels of vitamin D are associated with a whole spectrum of diseases, including cancer, osteoporosis, and diabetes, as well as cardiovascular and autoimmune disorders.”
This new study also documents a clear link between vitamin D deficiency and stored body fat. This supports a theory I’ve espoused here on NaturalNews for many years: That sunshine actually promote body fat loss. Vitamin D may be the hormonal mechanism by which this fat loss phenomenon operates.
The research findings on vitamin D, by the way, get even better…
Activator for the immune system
Recent research carried out at the University of Copenhagen has revealed that vitamin D activates the immune system by “arming” T cells to fight off infections.
This new research, led by Professor Carsten Geisler from the Department of International Health, Immunology and Microbiology at the University of Copenhagen, found that without vitamin D, the immune system’s T cells remain dormant, offering little or no protection against invading microorganisms and viruses. But with vitamin D in the bloodstream, T cells become “armed” and begin seeking out invaders that are then destroyed and carried out of the body.
Vitamin D, in other words, acts a bit like the ignition key to your car: The car won’t run unless you turn the key and ignite the engine. Likewise, your immune system won’t function unless it is biochemically activated with vitamin D. If you’re facing the winter flu season in a state of vitamin D deficiency, your immune system is essentially defenseless against seasonal flu. That’s why all the people who get sick are the ones who live indoors, work indoors and exist in a chronic state of vitamin D deficiency.
That’s also why virtually all the people who died from H1N1 were chronically deficient in vitamin D. They had virtually no immune system protection at all and were thus easy targets for the swine flu.
These findings about vitamin D “arming” the immune system were published in Nature Immunology. Commenting on the findings, the researchers said, “Scientists have known for a long time that vitamin D is important for calcium absorption and the vitamin has also been implicated in diseases such as cancer and multiple sclerosis, but what we didn’t realize is how crucial vitamin D is for actually activating the immune system — which we know now.” (UK Telegraph, source below).
It seems the CDC and WHO remain utterly ignorant about this research or they would have been recommending vitamin D to fight the recent H1N1 pandemic rather than vaccine shots. Vitamin D would have been a far more effective (and less costly) defense against the pandemic than vaccine shots, especially given that even vaccines don’t work unless there is an immune response, and that immune response requires the presence of vitamin D!
And while vaccine shots have undesirable side effects such as causing severe neurological damage in a small number of vaccine recipients, vitamin D’s only significant “side effect” is that it prevents 77% of all cancers, too. (http://www.naturalnews.com/021892.html)
The common denominator for disease
What’s becoming increasingly clear from all the new research is that vitamin D deficiency may be the common denominator behind our most devastating modern degenerative diseases. Kidney failure patients are almost universally deficient in vitamin D and diabetes patients are usually in the same category. People suffering from cancer almost always demonstrate severe vitamin D deficiency, as do people with osteoporosis and multiple sclerosis.
In fact, vitamin D deficiency may be the root cause behind so many degenerative diseases that correcting this deficiency across the population could very well devastate the for-profit “sick care industry” that dominates western medicine today.
Teach the population about vitamin D, in other words, and the cancer industry would suffer devastating losses in profits (vitamin D prevents 4 out of 5 of all cancers).
This is perhaps why so many of the businesses and non-profits that depend on cancer (and other diseases) for their authority and power are actively fighting against vitamin D awareness. The National Cancer Institute, for example, which is one of the wealthiest non-profits in the world, actively runs full-page ads that attempt to scare people away from sunlight, thereby causing them to remain in a state of vitamin D deficiency.
This state of deficiency coincidentally serves the power interests of the NCI by making sure that people remain riddled with cancer even though a free cure (sunshine) is readily available.
The FDA, similarly, doesn’t want people to learn the truth about vitamin D because informed consumers would inevitably take more vitamin D supplements and thereby prevent all sorts of diseases that the pharmaceutical industry is counting on for its monopoly profits. Every patient that takes vitamin D is one less patient paying money for cancer drugs, diabetes drugs or heart disease drugs.
Other cancer industry non-profits, likewise, don’t want people to learn the truth about vitamin D. They’d rather just keep selling ridiculous pink-ribbon consumer products that claim to raise money for some highly fictitious “search for the cure” — a search that was obsolete even before it began because sunshine has been curing and preventing cancer for as long as human beings have walked the planet. Our ancestors didn’t have to “run for the cure” or “walk for the cure” through some silly fundraising fiction; they merely walked in the sun and they were cured of cancer by the mere act of being exposed to sunlight. Walking outside is, all by itself, the “cure” for cancer that the industry claims to need billions more dollars to try to find through additional research.
They want you to remain ignorant!
The inescapable truth of the matter is that modern medicine wants people to remain ignorant about the healing effects of vitamin D. The financial survival of the medical industry absolutely depends on it, so the most influential medical organizations systematically downplay the importance of this vitamin while outright refusing to recommend it to patients.
The NCI doesn’t recommend vitamin D, nor does Komen for the Cure. The AHA, AMA, ADA and FDA all refuse to recommend vitamin D, all while strongly promoting synthetic, patented high-profit medications that cure nothing.
There is, in essence, a conspiracy of silence about vitamin D among the sick-care industries that depend on disease to bring them business. And there always will be, of course, because companies are in business to make money, and if you’re in business to make money from disease, you generally don’t go telling people how to heal themselves for free. From a purely profit-minded perspective, teaching people about vitamin D makes absolutely no business sense to the sick care industry. It’s profits over people (as usual).
You can’t keep Vitamin D down
But you can’t keep hiding the truth about vitamin D forever: The science is absolutely compelling. It’s irrefutable, actually. These nine things about vitamin D are inarguably true:
#1) The vast majority of the western population is deficient in vitamin D.
#2) Vitamin D deficiencies promote cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, kidney disease, depression, obesity and heart disease, among other health problems.
#3) Vitamin D deficiencies can be corrected with vitamin D supplementation or through sensible sunlight exposure.
#4) Sunscreen products block the production of vitamin D in the skin, causing further vitamin D deficiencies across the population of consumers who use such products.
#5) Correcting widespread vitamin D deficiencies would greatly reduce degenerative disease across the population, thereby saving nations literally trillions of dollars in collective sick-care costs over the next decade.
#6) Vitamin D supplements are extremely affordable. Preventing disease through vitamin D supplementation is a low-cost investment in health that pays off a hundred fold (or more) through health care cost savings.
#7) Vitamin D is extremely safe. There are virtually no negative side effects from deficient people taking vitamin D supplements, even at seemingly high doses such as 4000 – 8000 IU per day (more than ten times the current U.S. RDA).
#8) Vitamin D deficiency is caused, in large part, by modern society’s indoor lifestyle. People live, work and play indoors under artificial light. This causes severe deficiencies in exposure to natural light (sunlight) through which vitamin D is usually generated.
#9) Vitamin D dramatically reduces susceptibility to infectious disease such as seasonal flu and H1N1. It “activates” the immune system and allows it to function more aggressively in defending against viral invasions.
Better than a vaccine, safer than a drug…
In effect, Vitamin D is a better vaccine than vaccines. It’s a better cancer drug than cancer drugs. It’s a better osteoporosis drug than osteoporosis drugs. Vitamin D is a better treatment for diabetes than diabetes drugs.
Again and again, vitamin D turns out to be safer, more effective and far more affordable than expensive monopoly-priced medications. Plus, it’s obviously innately compatible with the human body since the human body actually manufactures vitamin D when given the opportunity (and exposure to sunlight).
Furthermore, unlike pharmaceuticals, vitamin D is safe for the environment. Flushing excess vitamin D down the drain doesn’t contaminate the fish like pharmaceuticals do (http://www.naturalnews.com/025933_p…).
With all these things being true about vitamin D, it all makes you wonder: Why isn’t health care reform even talking about this nutrient? If you really want to reform the health of a nation, you have to start by correcting the epidemic of vitamin D deficiency across the population.
When it comes to keeping people healthy, all the drugs in the world can’t accomplish what vitamin D can accomplish… simply, affordably and safely.
You can get it for free. No prescription required. No visit to the doctor. You don’t even need to buy supplements to get this. Just walk outside, under the sun, and initiate your own healing.
That very idea — that patients can cure their own cancers by taking a walk in nature — is the most fearful thing in the world to the cancer and vaccine industries. Big Pharma is horrified at the idea of people becoming nutritionally literate and realizing that vitamin D, all by itself, eliminates the need for potentially hundreds of different medications and vaccines. It activates healing, it defends the body against disease, and it’s the single greatest threat to the profitability of the sick-care industry that dominates medicine today.
If modern medicine could ban Vitamin D, they would do so in an instant. They may yet pull that off, in fact, through Sen. McCain’s attempts to destroy nutritional supplements (http://www.naturalnews.com/028257_S…).
Sources for this story include:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/s…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/h…
http://www.prisonplanet.com/epidemic-of-vitamin-d-deficiency-sweeping-the-world.html
Latest Health Care Bill
House Reconciliation Healthcare Bill
AMENDMENT IN THE NATURE OF A SUBSTITUTE
TO H.R. 4872, AS REPORTED
http://docs.house.gov/rules/hr4872/111_hr4872_amndsub.pdf
AMENDMENT IN THE NATURE OF A SUBSTITUTE
TO H.R. 4872, AS REPORTED
http://docs.house.gov/rules/hr4872/111_hr4872_amndsub.pdf
Foster care in Los Angeles: An inconvenient death
THURSDAY, MARCH 18, 2010
Foster care in Los Angeles: An inconvenient death
DID VIOLA VANCLIEF PAY THE PRICE OF PANIC?
If all one knew about child welfare was what one read on the news pages of the Los Angeles
Times, one would think that only birth parents or other relatives kill children, and it's all because the county Department of Children and Family Services supposedly has been bending over backwards to keep families together.
That's been the "master narrative" – to use the late St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor William Woo's wonderful phrase – that guided Times coverage for most of last year and into this year. A master narrative it not something handed down from above. It's not some kind of media conspiracy. (As a former editor of mine liked to say, "there are no media conspiracies; we're not that well organized.")
Rather, the master narrative is simply the preconceived notions reporters bring with them to a story. The best reporters guard against being trapped by a master narrative. They constantly question their own assumptions.
One might think that if anything finally might have prompted Times reporters to question their master narrative it would be the tragic death of two-year-old Viola Vanclief. She died in a foster home overseen by a private agency with a long history of problems. The foster parents are under investigation. The foster mother says it was an accident. The police say it was a homicide. And in a story about the death on Tuesday, the Los Angeles
Times says the equivalent of "move along, move along. Nothin' to see here." A follow-up story today displayed the standard double-standard in child welfare coverage based on where the child dies. I'll get to that below. But let's start with Tuesday's story.
It was written in a way that seems intended to mislead people into thinking that in no way does this case call into question the Times' master narrative, and it's still really birth parents we need to fear. According to the story:
The death comes as [DCFS Director Trish] Ploehn's department is facing scrutiny in the deaths of children under its watch. All but two of the more than 30 cases to come to light in the last two years have involved children killed while in the custody of their own parents
The identical paragraph appears in the follow-up story. Odds are it will become cut-and-paste boilerplate in almost every Times story about this case.
But the reason for that ratio of fatalities is not because foster care is safer, but simply because far fewer children live in foster care than in their own homes.
One could just as easily have said that the rate of child abuse deaths in Los Angeles foster care is nearly ten times the rate in the general population. That would have been equally misleading – for a reason for which we all should be grateful: the number of child abuse fatalities and, especially, fatalities in foster care, is low enough to fluctuate enormously due to random chance. For example, had Viola Vanclief escaped with her life – or if it turns out the death really was an accident – the rate of child abuse deaths in foster care over the past two years suddenly is cut in half.
It is entirely fair to point out, however, that several studies have found the overall rate of abuse in foster care to be alarmingly high, far higher than in the general population, with abuse in at least one in four or one in three foster homes - and probably more. The rate of abuse in institutions is even worse. (For details and citations, see NCCPR Issue Paper #1).
THE STANDARD DOUBLE-STANDARD
But the Times chose to spin the story in a way that swings the focus back to dangerous birth parents, setting up a follow-up story which focuses only on the need for better screening and background checks and tougher licensing standards.
It's the standard double-standard in typical child welfare coverage: Deaths at the hands of birth parents are blamed on a systemic bias toward family preservation, deaths in foster care are written off as aberrations, fixable with some changes in regulations. When newspapers break this pattern, as they did in Maine after the death of Logan Marr and in Missouri after the death of Dominic James, a funny thing happens: child welfare systems actually improve.
But unlike the newspapers in Maine and Missouri, the Times makes no mention of the possibility that the misuse and overuse of foster care itself could have contributed to this death.
The Times coverage also ignores an even more disturbing question: Was Viola Vanclief a victim of a foster care panic set off, in part, by the response to earlier Times stories?
We don't know. But that's never stopped a newspaper from making the points it wants to make by using some variation of "raises questions," so I see no reason for it to stop this Blog.
The first question is whether Viola Vanclief ever needed to be placed in foster care.
The follow-up story reports a series of allegations about Vanclief's birth mother and a series of claims about everything DCFS did to help. If all those allegations and claims are true, than the placement was justified. The problem is, the Times doesn't make clear that these are only allegations and claims – rather the Times uses the phrase "investigators determined," which gives the information in the case files obtained by the Times more credibility than it deserves.
In fact, it is possible that intensive mental health services might have allowed Viola's mother to care for her safely – we don't know that, but it's possible. It's also unlikely that DCFS ever offered that kind of help.
But framing the issue without even considering that the case file might be wrong is crucial to maintaining the standard double-standard; in the public mind, it takes the issue of family preservation off the table, because the issue is framed in terms of, as the Times story puts it "one high-risk home to another."
The follow-up story also mentions that Viola had an adult sister living in Ohio. The story does not explore whether DCFS considered placing Viola with her sister before turning to strangers.
IS THERE A PANIC?
The second question is whether there is, in fact, a foster-care panic. Although the number of children in foster care in Los Angeles County each month is available on the public DCFS website, the number of entries into care – that is, the number of children actually taken away from their parents over the course of a month – is available only on a private, internal site. Ploehn promised to provide me with these figures when she contacted NCCPR on Feb. 5. But she never did. The Times apparently doesn't want to know. So on Tuesday, NCCPR filed a California Public Records Act request in an attempt to obtain these data.
But let's assume, for the moment, that DCFS was absolutely right to take Viola Vanclief from her birth parents. Let's further assume that, unlike just about everyplace else in the country, Los Angeles County really did resist a foster-care panic – and that's not out of the question, thanks to their child welfare funding waiver.
That doesn't change the fact that, even before the Times turned up the heat, Los Angeles County was taking away children at a higher rate than most big cities. And it doesn't change the fact that in most years since 2004, entries into care increased.
For all their faults, child welfare agencies don't like placing children in substandard foster care. And California counties generally don't like subcontracting to private agencies, (known in that state as Foster Family Agencies,or FFAs) at all – because it costs more than when the county does the job itself.
So why does it keep happening?
BEGGARS CAN'T BE CHOOSERS
When you take away too many children, you wind up begging for places to put them. Beggars can't be choosers. So even if the removal was justified and there is no foster care panic, DCFS' failure to curb wrongful removal probably played a role in this tragedy. Even if Viola really should have been taken away, the good foster home she deserved probably was being used by some other child who could have remained safely in his or her own home.
States and counties that don't take too many children don't have to lower standards for foster parents.
Similarly, the Times treats as a mystery the fact that there were so many investigations of alleged abuse by the foster mother of her foster children that never were substantiated (while an earlier allegation, involving one of the foster mother's own children was). In fact, the reason is probably the same reason why official figures for abuse in foster care are so much lower than the numbers found by independent studies: Overloaded agencies don't want to lose foster homes, and they don't want to look bad; after all, when they investigate abuse in foster care they are, in effect, investigating themselves. So there is a strong incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file.
BOYCOTTING REUNIFICATION CELEBRATIONS
The coverage of Viola Vanclief's death is not the only indication of the Times' master narrative at work. Another is how the Times covered events throughout the county earlier this month designed to celebrate successful family reunification: It didn't.
The Los Angeles Daily News did a story. So did KPCC Public radio. So did the Long Beach Press Telegram. But at the Los Angeles
Times, family reunification is only news when it goes wrong.
One could argue of course that, precisely because successful family reunification is the norm, it's not newsworthy – like all those planes that don't crash. But people know that air travel is the safest form of transportation. They don't know that keeping families together is the safest answer in child welfare for the overwhelming majority of children. Since they don't know it, that makes stories about the success of family reunification newsworthy.
Just not at the L.A. Times.
NEXT STOP, THE ORPHANAGE?
So what comes next? Watch the letters to the editor column. Inevitably, there'll be a letter concluding that the only answer is to go back to the orphanage. After all, if you spend a year smearing efforts to keep families together, and then a child dies in foster care, what's left? Indeed, the one "expert" whose voice lead reporter Garrett Therolf regularly allows into his stories, precisely because she won't challenge his master narrative, seems to have some nostalgia for them.
In fact, this is, by far, the worst option. And nowhere is that more obvious than Los Angeles, once home to one of the most hideous child warehouses in America, the notorious MacLaren Children's Center.
The book I wrote about child welfare 20 years ago, Wounded Innocents, begins at MacLaren. This was a place so awful it actually has a self-help group for survivors. Say whatever you want about former DCFS Director David Sanders, but if the only thing he accomplished was closing that hellhole, that alone makes his tenure a success.
The letter writer will specify that she or he doesn't mean places like that, rather she or he wants good orphanages – as though wishing for this magically will make it so. But, of course, any orphanages will be regulated by the same agency that licensed Viola Vanclief's foster parents.
More important, institutionalization is inherently so harmful that there is no such thing as a good orphanage. And orphanages make almost impossible the best alternative for children who truly are not safe in their own homes: adoption. For details, see our Issue Paper on orphanages and our review of the research on residential treatment centers, which is what orphanages generally call themselves today.
If people had a chance to read about what really works in child welfare, they wouldn't even be considering orphanages. Maybe someday, the Los Angeles Times will give them that chance.
Posted by NATIONAL COALITION FOR CHILD PROTECTION REFORM at
http://nccpr.blogspot.com/2010/03/foster-care-in-los-angeles-inconvenient.html
Foster care in Los Angeles: An inconvenient death
DID VIOLA VANCLIEF PAY THE PRICE OF PANIC?
If all one knew about child welfare was what one read on the news pages of the Los Angeles
Times, one would think that only birth parents or other relatives kill children, and it's all because the county Department of Children and Family Services supposedly has been bending over backwards to keep families together.
That's been the "master narrative" – to use the late St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor William Woo's wonderful phrase – that guided Times coverage for most of last year and into this year. A master narrative it not something handed down from above. It's not some kind of media conspiracy. (As a former editor of mine liked to say, "there are no media conspiracies; we're not that well organized.")
Rather, the master narrative is simply the preconceived notions reporters bring with them to a story. The best reporters guard against being trapped by a master narrative. They constantly question their own assumptions.
One might think that if anything finally might have prompted Times reporters to question their master narrative it would be the tragic death of two-year-old Viola Vanclief. She died in a foster home overseen by a private agency with a long history of problems. The foster parents are under investigation. The foster mother says it was an accident. The police say it was a homicide. And in a story about the death on Tuesday, the Los Angeles
Times says the equivalent of "move along, move along. Nothin' to see here." A follow-up story today displayed the standard double-standard in child welfare coverage based on where the child dies. I'll get to that below. But let's start with Tuesday's story.
It was written in a way that seems intended to mislead people into thinking that in no way does this case call into question the Times' master narrative, and it's still really birth parents we need to fear. According to the story:
The death comes as [DCFS Director Trish] Ploehn's department is facing scrutiny in the deaths of children under its watch. All but two of the more than 30 cases to come to light in the last two years have involved children killed while in the custody of their own parents
The identical paragraph appears in the follow-up story. Odds are it will become cut-and-paste boilerplate in almost every Times story about this case.
But the reason for that ratio of fatalities is not because foster care is safer, but simply because far fewer children live in foster care than in their own homes.
One could just as easily have said that the rate of child abuse deaths in Los Angeles foster care is nearly ten times the rate in the general population. That would have been equally misleading – for a reason for which we all should be grateful: the number of child abuse fatalities and, especially, fatalities in foster care, is low enough to fluctuate enormously due to random chance. For example, had Viola Vanclief escaped with her life – or if it turns out the death really was an accident – the rate of child abuse deaths in foster care over the past two years suddenly is cut in half.
It is entirely fair to point out, however, that several studies have found the overall rate of abuse in foster care to be alarmingly high, far higher than in the general population, with abuse in at least one in four or one in three foster homes - and probably more. The rate of abuse in institutions is even worse. (For details and citations, see NCCPR Issue Paper #1).
THE STANDARD DOUBLE-STANDARD
But the Times chose to spin the story in a way that swings the focus back to dangerous birth parents, setting up a follow-up story which focuses only on the need for better screening and background checks and tougher licensing standards.
It's the standard double-standard in typical child welfare coverage: Deaths at the hands of birth parents are blamed on a systemic bias toward family preservation, deaths in foster care are written off as aberrations, fixable with some changes in regulations. When newspapers break this pattern, as they did in Maine after the death of Logan Marr and in Missouri after the death of Dominic James, a funny thing happens: child welfare systems actually improve.
But unlike the newspapers in Maine and Missouri, the Times makes no mention of the possibility that the misuse and overuse of foster care itself could have contributed to this death.
The Times coverage also ignores an even more disturbing question: Was Viola Vanclief a victim of a foster care panic set off, in part, by the response to earlier Times stories?
We don't know. But that's never stopped a newspaper from making the points it wants to make by using some variation of "raises questions," so I see no reason for it to stop this Blog.
The first question is whether Viola Vanclief ever needed to be placed in foster care.
The follow-up story reports a series of allegations about Vanclief's birth mother and a series of claims about everything DCFS did to help. If all those allegations and claims are true, than the placement was justified. The problem is, the Times doesn't make clear that these are only allegations and claims – rather the Times uses the phrase "investigators determined," which gives the information in the case files obtained by the Times more credibility than it deserves.
In fact, it is possible that intensive mental health services might have allowed Viola's mother to care for her safely – we don't know that, but it's possible. It's also unlikely that DCFS ever offered that kind of help.
But framing the issue without even considering that the case file might be wrong is crucial to maintaining the standard double-standard; in the public mind, it takes the issue of family preservation off the table, because the issue is framed in terms of, as the Times story puts it "one high-risk home to another."
The follow-up story also mentions that Viola had an adult sister living in Ohio. The story does not explore whether DCFS considered placing Viola with her sister before turning to strangers.
IS THERE A PANIC?
The second question is whether there is, in fact, a foster-care panic. Although the number of children in foster care in Los Angeles County each month is available on the public DCFS website, the number of entries into care – that is, the number of children actually taken away from their parents over the course of a month – is available only on a private, internal site. Ploehn promised to provide me with these figures when she contacted NCCPR on Feb. 5. But she never did. The Times apparently doesn't want to know. So on Tuesday, NCCPR filed a California Public Records Act request in an attempt to obtain these data.
But let's assume, for the moment, that DCFS was absolutely right to take Viola Vanclief from her birth parents. Let's further assume that, unlike just about everyplace else in the country, Los Angeles County really did resist a foster-care panic – and that's not out of the question, thanks to their child welfare funding waiver.
That doesn't change the fact that, even before the Times turned up the heat, Los Angeles County was taking away children at a higher rate than most big cities. And it doesn't change the fact that in most years since 2004, entries into care increased.
For all their faults, child welfare agencies don't like placing children in substandard foster care. And California counties generally don't like subcontracting to private agencies, (known in that state as Foster Family Agencies,or FFAs) at all – because it costs more than when the county does the job itself.
So why does it keep happening?
BEGGARS CAN'T BE CHOOSERS
When you take away too many children, you wind up begging for places to put them. Beggars can't be choosers. So even if the removal was justified and there is no foster care panic, DCFS' failure to curb wrongful removal probably played a role in this tragedy. Even if Viola really should have been taken away, the good foster home she deserved probably was being used by some other child who could have remained safely in his or her own home.
States and counties that don't take too many children don't have to lower standards for foster parents.
Similarly, the Times treats as a mystery the fact that there were so many investigations of alleged abuse by the foster mother of her foster children that never were substantiated (while an earlier allegation, involving one of the foster mother's own children was). In fact, the reason is probably the same reason why official figures for abuse in foster care are so much lower than the numbers found by independent studies: Overloaded agencies don't want to lose foster homes, and they don't want to look bad; after all, when they investigate abuse in foster care they are, in effect, investigating themselves. So there is a strong incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file.
BOYCOTTING REUNIFICATION CELEBRATIONS
The coverage of Viola Vanclief's death is not the only indication of the Times' master narrative at work. Another is how the Times covered events throughout the county earlier this month designed to celebrate successful family reunification: It didn't.
The Los Angeles Daily News did a story. So did KPCC Public radio. So did the Long Beach Press Telegram. But at the Los Angeles
Times, family reunification is only news when it goes wrong.
One could argue of course that, precisely because successful family reunification is the norm, it's not newsworthy – like all those planes that don't crash. But people know that air travel is the safest form of transportation. They don't know that keeping families together is the safest answer in child welfare for the overwhelming majority of children. Since they don't know it, that makes stories about the success of family reunification newsworthy.
Just not at the L.A. Times.
NEXT STOP, THE ORPHANAGE?
So what comes next? Watch the letters to the editor column. Inevitably, there'll be a letter concluding that the only answer is to go back to the orphanage. After all, if you spend a year smearing efforts to keep families together, and then a child dies in foster care, what's left? Indeed, the one "expert" whose voice lead reporter Garrett Therolf regularly allows into his stories, precisely because she won't challenge his master narrative, seems to have some nostalgia for them.
In fact, this is, by far, the worst option. And nowhere is that more obvious than Los Angeles, once home to one of the most hideous child warehouses in America, the notorious MacLaren Children's Center.
The book I wrote about child welfare 20 years ago, Wounded Innocents, begins at MacLaren. This was a place so awful it actually has a self-help group for survivors. Say whatever you want about former DCFS Director David Sanders, but if the only thing he accomplished was closing that hellhole, that alone makes his tenure a success.
The letter writer will specify that she or he doesn't mean places like that, rather she or he wants good orphanages – as though wishing for this magically will make it so. But, of course, any orphanages will be regulated by the same agency that licensed Viola Vanclief's foster parents.
More important, institutionalization is inherently so harmful that there is no such thing as a good orphanage. And orphanages make almost impossible the best alternative for children who truly are not safe in their own homes: adoption. For details, see our Issue Paper on orphanages and our review of the research on residential treatment centers, which is what orphanages generally call themselves today.
If people had a chance to read about what really works in child welfare, they wouldn't even be considering orphanages. Maybe someday, the Los Angeles Times will give them that chance.
Posted by NATIONAL COALITION FOR CHILD PROTECTION REFORM at
http://nccpr.blogspot.com/2010/03/foster-care-in-los-angeles-inconvenient.html
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Federally Funding The Destruction of Families
Federal. State and Local Spending to Address Child Abuse and Neglect SFY 2006
http://www.childtrends.org/Files//Child_Trends-2009_02_17_FR_CWFinancePaper.pdf
You Get What You Pay For-Real Reform Means Ending the Foster Care Entitlement
http://www.nccpr.org/reports/finance.pdf
The Presidents FY 2010 Budget and Children
according to the Child Welfare League, allocations are given on the average of $660,MILLION toward abuse prevention and family preservation, while they spent $7.4 BILLION on the taking of children.
You can see this in the President's FY here: www.cwla.org/advocacy/FY2010_PresidentBudget_analysis.pdf
http://www.childtrends.org/Files//Child_Trends-2009_02_17_FR_CWFinancePaper.pdf
You Get What You Pay For-Real Reform Means Ending the Foster Care Entitlement
http://www.nccpr.org/reports/finance.pdf
The Presidents FY 2010 Budget and Children
according to the Child Welfare League, allocations are given on the average of $660,MILLION toward abuse prevention and family preservation, while they spent $7.4 BILLION on the taking of children.
You can see this in the President's FY here: www.cwla.org/advocacy/FY2010_PresidentBudget_analysis.pdf
Child protective services in the Calista Springer case: Inexcusable? Yes. Inexplicable? Sadly, no
Viewpoint: Child protective services in the Calista Springer case: Inexcusable? Yes. Inexplicable? Sadly, no
By Viewpoint
March 19, 2010, 1:26PM
This photo of Calista Springer was taken in June of 2005 and provided by her grandmother, Suzanne Langdon. Calista's parents, Anthony and Marsha Springer, were found guilty in February of child abuse and torture in connection to Calista's death in 2008. (Photo Courtesy of Suzanne Langdon)
By Richard Wexler
On Feb. 27, Kalamazoo Gazette columnist Julie Mack described the inaction of child protective services in the case of Calista Springer as “inexplicable.”
That inaction was appalling, tragic, and inexcusable. But inexplicable? No.
Here’s the explanation: CPS failed to act aggressively in the case of Calista Springer precisely because it acts too aggressively in so many other cases.
St. Joseph County takes away children at the second highest rate in Michigan — a rate more than double the state average and nearly four times the rate in Wayne County. So either St. Joseph County is a cesspool of depravity, with four times the rate of child abuse as Detroit, or CPS has a take-the-child-and-run mentality that destroys hundreds of innocent families.
At the same time, this take-the-child-and-run approach so overloads caseworkers that they don’t have time to investigate any case properly. So when a case of real depravity is right under their noses, they may overlook it.
It is inexcusable, but perfectly comprehensible, that in an agency desperate to keep up with a deluge of false reports and trivial cases, a CPS worker might say, in effect, “gee, we really wish you wouldn’t chain your daughter to a bed, but we’re not actually going to stop you.”
St. Joseph County CPS perfectly illustrates the fact that child welfare systems often are arbitrary, capricious and cruel. They leave some children in dangerous homes, even as they take more children from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kinds of help. The consequences are profound:
When a child is needlessly thrown into foster care, he loses not only mom and dad but often brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, friends and classmates. For a young enough child it can be an experience akin to a kidnapping. Other children feel they must have done something terribly wrong and now they are being punished. One recent study of foster care “alumni” found they had twice the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder as Gulf War veterans and only 20 percent could be said to be “doing well.”
Other studies, involving 15,000 typical cases, are even more devastating. Those studies found that even maltreated children left in their own homes with little or no help typically fared better than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.
All that harm can occur even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than generally realized and far higher than in the general population. That same alumni study found that one-third of foster children said they’d been abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home. Switching to orphanages won’t help — the record of institutions is even worse.
But the worst consequence is the one I mentioned at the outset: overloading the system so more children in real danger are missed.
It doesn’t have to happen. Our organization has issued two comprehensive reports on Michigan child welfare, with scores of recommendations for transforming the system — without spending more money, since alternatives to foster care also cost less. The reports are available on the state and local reports page of our Web site.
Real change requires standing conventional wisdom on its head. It requires decisions based on fact, not on what satisfies gut instinct and our desire to vent our rage in response to tragedy. But that seems like a small price to pay for increasing the odds that the next Calista Springer will be saved.
Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.
http://blog.mlive.com/readreact/2010/03/viewpoint_child_protective_ser.html
By Viewpoint
March 19, 2010, 1:26PM
This photo of Calista Springer was taken in June of 2005 and provided by her grandmother, Suzanne Langdon. Calista's parents, Anthony and Marsha Springer, were found guilty in February of child abuse and torture in connection to Calista's death in 2008. (Photo Courtesy of Suzanne Langdon)
By Richard Wexler
On Feb. 27, Kalamazoo Gazette columnist Julie Mack described the inaction of child protective services in the case of Calista Springer as “inexplicable.”
That inaction was appalling, tragic, and inexcusable. But inexplicable? No.
Here’s the explanation: CPS failed to act aggressively in the case of Calista Springer precisely because it acts too aggressively in so many other cases.
St. Joseph County takes away children at the second highest rate in Michigan — a rate more than double the state average and nearly four times the rate in Wayne County. So either St. Joseph County is a cesspool of depravity, with four times the rate of child abuse as Detroit, or CPS has a take-the-child-and-run mentality that destroys hundreds of innocent families.
At the same time, this take-the-child-and-run approach so overloads caseworkers that they don’t have time to investigate any case properly. So when a case of real depravity is right under their noses, they may overlook it.
It is inexcusable, but perfectly comprehensible, that in an agency desperate to keep up with a deluge of false reports and trivial cases, a CPS worker might say, in effect, “gee, we really wish you wouldn’t chain your daughter to a bed, but we’re not actually going to stop you.”
St. Joseph County CPS perfectly illustrates the fact that child welfare systems often are arbitrary, capricious and cruel. They leave some children in dangerous homes, even as they take more children from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kinds of help. The consequences are profound:
When a child is needlessly thrown into foster care, he loses not only mom and dad but often brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, friends and classmates. For a young enough child it can be an experience akin to a kidnapping. Other children feel they must have done something terribly wrong and now they are being punished. One recent study of foster care “alumni” found they had twice the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder as Gulf War veterans and only 20 percent could be said to be “doing well.”
Other studies, involving 15,000 typical cases, are even more devastating. Those studies found that even maltreated children left in their own homes with little or no help typically fared better than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.
All that harm can occur even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than generally realized and far higher than in the general population. That same alumni study found that one-third of foster children said they’d been abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home. Switching to orphanages won’t help — the record of institutions is even worse.
But the worst consequence is the one I mentioned at the outset: overloading the system so more children in real danger are missed.
It doesn’t have to happen. Our organization has issued two comprehensive reports on Michigan child welfare, with scores of recommendations for transforming the system — without spending more money, since alternatives to foster care also cost less. The reports are available on the state and local reports page of our Web site.
Real change requires standing conventional wisdom on its head. It requires decisions based on fact, not on what satisfies gut instinct and our desire to vent our rage in response to tragedy. But that seems like a small price to pay for increasing the odds that the next Calista Springer will be saved.
Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.
http://blog.mlive.com/readreact/2010/03/viewpoint_child_protective_ser.html
New Warning About Everyday Poison Linked to Alzheimer's, ADHD, and Autism
New Warning About Everyday Poison Linked to Alzheimer's, ADHD, and Autism
Posted by Dr. Mercola | March 20 2010
Dr. David Ayoub is a radiologist and a physician, and has become a specialist on the additives and preservatives used in vaccines. He was a presenter at the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) Conference in Washington D.C. last year.
Here he discusses the practice of using aluminum as an adjuvant, and why he believes aluminum may be far more toxic than thimerosal in vaccines.
Dr. Mercola's Comments:
Dr. Ayoub was, as many of you are, very concerned about mercury (thimerosal) in vaccines for a number of years, and attended a number of autism conferences that featured physicians who were highlighting the dangers of mercury.
However, a few personal encounters heightened his interest in another toxic metal frequently used in vaccines, namely aluminum.
Parents of autistic children kept pointing out the fact that their children’s heavy metal toxicity profiles showed high amounts of aluminum, and they wanted to know what that meant.
Secondly, a well respected nutritionist who deals with industrial aluminum toxicity showed him toxicity profiles of middle school children who had ADHD. In his estimate, 90 percent of the children in one particular school had developed ADHD during the course of a single year, and their toxicity profiles showed massive amounts of aluminum.
In addition, he did a pilot study with Dr. Usman, who treats autism with biomedicine, and when he evaluated the aluminum burden of these autistic children, he found that high percentage of them also had very high aluminum burdens.
All of these events led him to look deeper into the aluminum issue, which we discuss at length in this interview.
Why is Aluminum Used in Vaccines?
Mercury (thimerosal) exposure has declined significantly since it was eliminated from the single-dose vials of most childhood vaccines, yet autism rates have continued to skyrocket. This has led many to assume that mercury isn’t a problem, and anyone questioning the safety of vaccines is considered to be a hysterical wingnut.
However, while mercury use has decreased, the use of aluminum additives has increased!
Aluminum, like any other adjuvant, is added to the vaccine in order to boost the host’s immune response to the antigen. The antigen is what your body responds to and makes antibodies against (the virus being injected). By boosting your body’s immune response, the vaccine manufacturer can use a smaller amount of antigen, which makes production less expensive.
Interestingly enough, according to Dr. Ayoub, even our modern medical literature admits that how this happens exactly is still a mystery. And it’s not a consistent finding. He mentions a couple of studies on the more recent HPV vaccine, which found that the aluminum adjuvant had no effect at all on the immune response…
So, although aluminum is frequently added to vaccines for this particular purpose, no one knows with any degree of confidence that it actually makes a more effective vaccine.
Is Aluminum a Heavy Metal?
Aluminum is by many considered to be a heavy metal. However, based on the Periodic Table, it’s just shy of a heavy metal. So it’s called a “light metal.”
But regardless of its precise classification, aluminum is in the metal grouping, and it’s a common compound.
You will find aluminum in the earth’s crust, and in air, soil and water. However, although aluminum is a common, “natural” substance, it’s important to realize that it has absolutely no biological role inside your body.
In fact, we already know that aluminum is a poison.
Which Vaccines Contain Aluminum?
Many vaccines contain aluminum, including:
Hepatitis A
Hepatitis B
DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis)
Hib vaccine
Pneumococcal vaccine
Gardasil (HPV vaccine)
This is NOT an all-inclusive list, however. Your best bet is to read through the package insert of each vaccine in question.
You can find a comprehensive list of approved vaccines on the FDA’s website, with links to each package insert.
The amount of aluminum in each vaccine will vary. However, according to Dr. Ayoub, it’s important to realize that the toxicity is not entirely dependent on dose, but also on how it’s distributed in your body.
For example, a small dose released rapidly from the injection site into your body can cause a rapid rise in blood aluminum levels. So a small dose released quickly may be much more toxic than a large dose that ends up staying longer in the tissue at the injection site.
The variables of personal differences and differences in how the injection is given are too numerous to count, and they may play a role in how toxic a shot ends up being once injected into your body.
How Much Aluminum is Your Child Getting Through Vaccines?
Dr. Ayoub has identified one vaccine in particular as being one of the absolute worst in terms of aluminum content – Pediatrix. It’s a combination vaccine, which contains 850 mcg of elemental aluminum.
The average aluminum content per vaccine ranges between 200 to 400 mcg. Others contain less, such as Prevnar, which has 125 mcg of aluminum.
Adding to the problem, however, is the fact that many children end up receiving multiple vaccines at a time. In effect, children are getting concentrations of aluminum that are 10 to 20 times higher than mercury.
Based on the number of vaccines given, children today are receiving 17 shots that contain aluminum, compared to four vaccines in the 1970s into the mid-80s. According to Dr. Ayoub’s calculations, the milligram dose of aluminum received has more than doubled in that time.
This can have significant implications, as aluminum is not only toxic in and of itself, but it also impairs your body’s ability to excrete mercury, and it impairs glutathione synthesis. As a consequence, aluminum will make whatever amount of mercury you have in your system even more toxic.
Remember, you and your children are exposed to mercury from other sources as well, not just vaccines. Fish and amalgam dental fillings are two major sources of mercury exposure as well.
Problems with the Legal Limits on Aluminum
In the U.S., the FDA sets the guidelines for what and how much aluminum is allowed in vaccines. According to the FDA, the maximum amount of allowable elemental aluminum is 850 mcg per vaccine.
Clearly, it makes a major difference if this amount is injected into a small infant or an adult, but the FDA makes no distinction to that effect.
In fact, when Dr. Ayoub dug deeper into the FDA regulations on aluminum, he discovered that the limitation of 850 mcg per vaccine is based on the effectiveness of the adjuvant role of aluminum and has nothing to do with limitations based on safety whatsoever!
Shocking?
Yes! But not surprising, at this point.
However, it may be wise to keep this fact in mind, as those who argue that the amounts of aluminum in vaccines is a “legally safe dose” are really just citing a regulatory guideline that is based solely on the efficacy of the vaccine, and NOT based on any safety data whatsoever.
Approach to Treatment and Prevention of Aluminum Ttoxicity
1) Avoid/minimize exposures
Test drinking water with and without filter
Avoid cooking with aluminum utensils/pans
Never store food in contact with aluminum
Use non aluminum baking soda, deodorant, toothpaste
Avoid aluminum-containing vaccines, or separate multiple aluminum- containing vaccines by 2-4 weeks, only take single formulas/shots
Avoid drinks in aluminum pouches/cans, especially if they contain citrates/ascorbates which enhance aluminum absorption
Take vitamin C and fruit juices on an empty stomach
Minimize exposure to calcium carbonate-containing medicines
2) Testing for body levels
Blood aluminum only useful in cases of large, acute exposures (i.e., acute vaccine reaction) for chronic exposures: hair analysis, post-provocative (EDTA or DFO) urine metals, urinary porphyrin testing
3) Treatment of deleterious actions of chronic aluminum exposure maintain normal serum vitamin D levels
Melatonin has powerful antioxidant properties and is particularly depleted from aluminum exposure
Curcumin
Supplements or foods that dirve the methylation process (methionine cycle), i.e., B6, B12, folic acid, folinic acid, etc
Natural chelation like cilantro
Medial Chelation:
Calcium disodium EDTA pulls lead and aluminum. It is also contaminated with aluminum, as many calcium-containing products are. Oral dose is easiest but rectal suppository is available.
(Detoxamin) and may have the added benefit of low absorption of the aluminum contaminant that requires iron-transport system found mostly in small bowel as opposed to the rectum. Intravenous EDTA can be used by healthcare professional.
Medical chelation has been performed for many years using deferoxamine (DFO). This is a potent chelator for iron and aluminum and has been used mostly by nephrologists in treating aluminum toxicity from oral phosphate binders once used in patients with chronic renal failure. This is potent enough to reverse severe acute neurotoxicity from aluminum poisoning but has potential serious side effects and can only be used by a physician..
Learn More About the Health Implications of Aluminum!
I strongly urge you to listen to the interview with Dr. Ayoub in its entirely to learn more about the dangers of this common vaccine adjuvant. Clearly, aluminum stands poised to take over mercury as one of the worst offenders against health.
Also, the articles listed below will give you more information about the potentially devastating health effects of this dangerous toxin.
Related Links:
Mercury In Vaccines Was Replaced With Something Even MORE Toxic
Mercury isn't the Only Toxic Item in Vaccines
Five Common Toxic Metals to Avoid, and Where You'll Find Them
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/03/20/david-ayoub-interview-february-2010.aspx
Posted by Dr. Mercola | March 20 2010
Dr. David Ayoub is a radiologist and a physician, and has become a specialist on the additives and preservatives used in vaccines. He was a presenter at the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) Conference in Washington D.C. last year.
Here he discusses the practice of using aluminum as an adjuvant, and why he believes aluminum may be far more toxic than thimerosal in vaccines.
Dr. Mercola's Comments:
Dr. Ayoub was, as many of you are, very concerned about mercury (thimerosal) in vaccines for a number of years, and attended a number of autism conferences that featured physicians who were highlighting the dangers of mercury.
However, a few personal encounters heightened his interest in another toxic metal frequently used in vaccines, namely aluminum.
Parents of autistic children kept pointing out the fact that their children’s heavy metal toxicity profiles showed high amounts of aluminum, and they wanted to know what that meant.
Secondly, a well respected nutritionist who deals with industrial aluminum toxicity showed him toxicity profiles of middle school children who had ADHD. In his estimate, 90 percent of the children in one particular school had developed ADHD during the course of a single year, and their toxicity profiles showed massive amounts of aluminum.
In addition, he did a pilot study with Dr. Usman, who treats autism with biomedicine, and when he evaluated the aluminum burden of these autistic children, he found that high percentage of them also had very high aluminum burdens.
All of these events led him to look deeper into the aluminum issue, which we discuss at length in this interview.
Why is Aluminum Used in Vaccines?
Mercury (thimerosal) exposure has declined significantly since it was eliminated from the single-dose vials of most childhood vaccines, yet autism rates have continued to skyrocket. This has led many to assume that mercury isn’t a problem, and anyone questioning the safety of vaccines is considered to be a hysterical wingnut.
However, while mercury use has decreased, the use of aluminum additives has increased!
Aluminum, like any other adjuvant, is added to the vaccine in order to boost the host’s immune response to the antigen. The antigen is what your body responds to and makes antibodies against (the virus being injected). By boosting your body’s immune response, the vaccine manufacturer can use a smaller amount of antigen, which makes production less expensive.
Interestingly enough, according to Dr. Ayoub, even our modern medical literature admits that how this happens exactly is still a mystery. And it’s not a consistent finding. He mentions a couple of studies on the more recent HPV vaccine, which found that the aluminum adjuvant had no effect at all on the immune response…
So, although aluminum is frequently added to vaccines for this particular purpose, no one knows with any degree of confidence that it actually makes a more effective vaccine.
Is Aluminum a Heavy Metal?
Aluminum is by many considered to be a heavy metal. However, based on the Periodic Table, it’s just shy of a heavy metal. So it’s called a “light metal.”
But regardless of its precise classification, aluminum is in the metal grouping, and it’s a common compound.
You will find aluminum in the earth’s crust, and in air, soil and water. However, although aluminum is a common, “natural” substance, it’s important to realize that it has absolutely no biological role inside your body.
In fact, we already know that aluminum is a poison.
Which Vaccines Contain Aluminum?
Many vaccines contain aluminum, including:
Hepatitis A
Hepatitis B
DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis)
Hib vaccine
Pneumococcal vaccine
Gardasil (HPV vaccine)
This is NOT an all-inclusive list, however. Your best bet is to read through the package insert of each vaccine in question.
You can find a comprehensive list of approved vaccines on the FDA’s website, with links to each package insert.
The amount of aluminum in each vaccine will vary. However, according to Dr. Ayoub, it’s important to realize that the toxicity is not entirely dependent on dose, but also on how it’s distributed in your body.
For example, a small dose released rapidly from the injection site into your body can cause a rapid rise in blood aluminum levels. So a small dose released quickly may be much more toxic than a large dose that ends up staying longer in the tissue at the injection site.
The variables of personal differences and differences in how the injection is given are too numerous to count, and they may play a role in how toxic a shot ends up being once injected into your body.
How Much Aluminum is Your Child Getting Through Vaccines?
Dr. Ayoub has identified one vaccine in particular as being one of the absolute worst in terms of aluminum content – Pediatrix. It’s a combination vaccine, which contains 850 mcg of elemental aluminum.
The average aluminum content per vaccine ranges between 200 to 400 mcg. Others contain less, such as Prevnar, which has 125 mcg of aluminum.
Adding to the problem, however, is the fact that many children end up receiving multiple vaccines at a time. In effect, children are getting concentrations of aluminum that are 10 to 20 times higher than mercury.
Based on the number of vaccines given, children today are receiving 17 shots that contain aluminum, compared to four vaccines in the 1970s into the mid-80s. According to Dr. Ayoub’s calculations, the milligram dose of aluminum received has more than doubled in that time.
This can have significant implications, as aluminum is not only toxic in and of itself, but it also impairs your body’s ability to excrete mercury, and it impairs glutathione synthesis. As a consequence, aluminum will make whatever amount of mercury you have in your system even more toxic.
Remember, you and your children are exposed to mercury from other sources as well, not just vaccines. Fish and amalgam dental fillings are two major sources of mercury exposure as well.
Problems with the Legal Limits on Aluminum
In the U.S., the FDA sets the guidelines for what and how much aluminum is allowed in vaccines. According to the FDA, the maximum amount of allowable elemental aluminum is 850 mcg per vaccine.
Clearly, it makes a major difference if this amount is injected into a small infant or an adult, but the FDA makes no distinction to that effect.
In fact, when Dr. Ayoub dug deeper into the FDA regulations on aluminum, he discovered that the limitation of 850 mcg per vaccine is based on the effectiveness of the adjuvant role of aluminum and has nothing to do with limitations based on safety whatsoever!
Shocking?
Yes! But not surprising, at this point.
However, it may be wise to keep this fact in mind, as those who argue that the amounts of aluminum in vaccines is a “legally safe dose” are really just citing a regulatory guideline that is based solely on the efficacy of the vaccine, and NOT based on any safety data whatsoever.
Approach to Treatment and Prevention of Aluminum Ttoxicity
1) Avoid/minimize exposures
Test drinking water with and without filter
Avoid cooking with aluminum utensils/pans
Never store food in contact with aluminum
Use non aluminum baking soda, deodorant, toothpaste
Avoid aluminum-containing vaccines, or separate multiple aluminum- containing vaccines by 2-4 weeks, only take single formulas/shots
Avoid drinks in aluminum pouches/cans, especially if they contain citrates/ascorbates which enhance aluminum absorption
Take vitamin C and fruit juices on an empty stomach
Minimize exposure to calcium carbonate-containing medicines
2) Testing for body levels
Blood aluminum only useful in cases of large, acute exposures (i.e., acute vaccine reaction) for chronic exposures: hair analysis, post-provocative (EDTA or DFO) urine metals, urinary porphyrin testing
3) Treatment of deleterious actions of chronic aluminum exposure maintain normal serum vitamin D levels
Melatonin has powerful antioxidant properties and is particularly depleted from aluminum exposure
Curcumin
Supplements or foods that dirve the methylation process (methionine cycle), i.e., B6, B12, folic acid, folinic acid, etc
Natural chelation like cilantro
Medial Chelation:
Calcium disodium EDTA pulls lead and aluminum. It is also contaminated with aluminum, as many calcium-containing products are. Oral dose is easiest but rectal suppository is available.
(Detoxamin) and may have the added benefit of low absorption of the aluminum contaminant that requires iron-transport system found mostly in small bowel as opposed to the rectum. Intravenous EDTA can be used by healthcare professional.
Medical chelation has been performed for many years using deferoxamine (DFO). This is a potent chelator for iron and aluminum and has been used mostly by nephrologists in treating aluminum toxicity from oral phosphate binders once used in patients with chronic renal failure. This is potent enough to reverse severe acute neurotoxicity from aluminum poisoning but has potential serious side effects and can only be used by a physician..
Learn More About the Health Implications of Aluminum!
I strongly urge you to listen to the interview with Dr. Ayoub in its entirely to learn more about the dangers of this common vaccine adjuvant. Clearly, aluminum stands poised to take over mercury as one of the worst offenders against health.
Also, the articles listed below will give you more information about the potentially devastating health effects of this dangerous toxin.
Related Links:
Mercury In Vaccines Was Replaced With Something Even MORE Toxic
Mercury isn't the Only Toxic Item in Vaccines
Five Common Toxic Metals to Avoid, and Where You'll Find Them
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/03/20/david-ayoub-interview-february-2010.aspx
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