Superfund 25th Anniversary Report Finds America’s Safety Net is Weakest When Needed Most

Silver Valley Community Resource Center Calls on EPA to keep communities safe from toxins

Contact: Barbara Miller

Silver Valley Community Resource Center

PO Box 362, Kellogg, Idaho 83837

Phone/Fax: 208-784-8891

Kellogg, Idaho. The Silver Valley Community Resource Center joined with over 50 organizations across the country to release the"25th Anniversary of Superfund: America’s Safety Net in Crisis," a national report which finds the program is at its weakest, at a time when it is needed most to respond to the toxic emergencies.

On the 25th anniversary of Superfund, and the upcoming 2nd anniversary on October 1st of Superfund’s depletion by the loss of polluter pays fees, the report finds that the once-robust and successful toxic waste safety net is now in crisis.

Since its creation in 1980, Superfund has cleaned up 936 sites protecting hundreds of communities. EPA has secured over $22 billion from polluters who have funded approximately 70% of the site cleanups (the remaining 30% are cleaned up with Superfund monies).

Since polluter pays fees expired in 1995, and Congress refused to reinstate them, the burden on taxpayers to support the Superfund Trust Fund has increased by 300%. Taxpayers now fully shoulder the burden of the program’s $1.2 billion annual appropriation to clean up abandoned sites. "This unfair situation has occurred since the Bush Administration made a policy decision to give polluters a free ride and pass the bill on to taxpayers," noted Lois Gibbs, Executive Director of the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, a co-author of the report. It is the first and only administration to oppose the reinstatement of polluter pays fees. When the fees expired in 1995, Superfund had a surplus of $3.8 billion—but on October 1, 2003 all industry fee monies were spent shifting the burden totally to taxpayers.

Superfund has a weakened Trust Fund with a decrease in funding of $600 million annually—from $1.8 billion in 1993 to $1.2 in 2004—according to a recent federal report.

Consequently, Superfund cleanups have slowed to a crawl with an approximate 80% reduction in annual site cleanups—from 88 sites in 1997 to just 16 sites cleaned up in 2005. *

The report includes a Superfund Site Profile for every state in the U.S. with community updates describing health problems, including birth defects and cancer.

"The Bunker Hill Superfund site in North Idaho and Eastern Washington was first designated in 1983. Interior of homes and schools have yet to be remediated and there remains a grave concern with all the mine pollution remaining in yards and Coeur d’Alene Lake and river banks of the Coeur d’Alene and Spokane rivers", says Cass Davis, SVCRC Board member. Recently in an order to close the gap of resources being eliminated because of the Bush Administration not replenishing the polluter pays tax, SVCRC has affiliated with a Clear Corps USA a national organization for lead education and outreach. "Superfund is supposed to be our safety net when toxic emergencies occur," said Gibbs. "Now on its 25th anniversary, it is time for Congress to restore the hazardous waste fees on polluting industries. The core principle is that polluters—not taxpayers—should pay to clean up these toxic waste sites. The ailing Superfund is at its weakest when we need it most to quickly respond to the horrific pollution from toxic and oil waste releases and flooded toxic waste sites resulting from Hurricane Katrina."

For more information, please visit www.besafenet.com/superfund

[* As of September 14, 2005, 16 sites have been remediated in Fiscal Year 2005, which ends on September 30, 2005

Decisions, decisions

"When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we, in essence, accept that the state owns our bodies."

~U.S.Representative Ron Paul, MD

Dr. Paul has said a few good words which are quite timely. The publicity and marketing campaign is underway again to coddle you into beleiving the adminstration's drug plan is a winner.

The only winner in this campaign is the drug lobby and their members, BIG PHARMA.

NOT IN MAINSTREAM NEWS

As an "Herbalist for Peace" I wholeheartedly support Camp Casey.

As an American and descendant of signers of the Declaration of Independence, I wholeheartedly support Camp Casey.

Remember that war is not healthy for children or other living things.



Love and Peace,

YODA

The Long Forgotten Art of Medicine

Today, mainstream media reported, just two days after the death of Peter Jennings from lung cancer, that Dana Reeve, widow of actor Christopher Reeve, is being treated for the same dis-ease.

In healing there are four basic levels at which things operate. The four principles are, starting at the basic level, physical, mental emotional and spiritual.

Decades, when medicine was still very much an art, the emotional and spiritual planes were not so avidly avoided. This changed, I'd say, in the 70s when all medical education was moved forward (or really backward) to a cause and effect model. If you have A then you get treated with B, or maybe it should be called rote medicine. I'm not so sure about what it should be called, but I'd guess that "illness care" is a much better term.

I'm not a follower of Andy Weil mainly because I see that he gives rather superficial information to the masses, and he is in favor of fluoridation and vaccination. I don't favor giving out superficial information, nor do I support fluoridation or vaccination. I do however have one point that I share wholeheartedly with Dr. Weil and that is the belief called " placebo effect". Dr. Weil states that the placebo effect is the most underutilized tool in medicine. I agree, yet I know that it was such a strong point for doctors of days gone because it touched on the emotional and spiritual levels of care. And, it worked!

So here we have a young, grieving widow in the throws of chemotherapy, radiation and possibly surgery to treat her dis-ease.

I wonder, dear Dana, did you doctor ever take the time to mention that cancer is, at the forgotten level, a deep hurt? Did he mention that lungs speak to the issue of not being able to take life in fully?

Maybe you'll see this, maybe a friend will and will tell you about it.

For your sake I hope so.

What You Might Not Know About Drugs and Death

In US Healthcare today drugs have become the leading cause of death-
The Leaflady has addressed this issue over many years, going back to the time about a decade ago when drugs were the fourth leading cause of death. Here is an update on this issue:

According to the latest government statistics from the Center for Disease Control, there are over 130 million drug prescriptions written in this country each year. Studies indicate that 90% of these prescriptions are unnecessary, or even worse, are causing great harm to the public health in the form of adverse drug reactions, prescription errors, and harmful side effects. Conservative research has shown that close to half a million people suffer adverse drug effects each year, that serious medication errors occur in over five (5%) percent of all prescriptions, and that one in four individuals using prescription medications will sustain observable side effects. Every year over 100,000 Americans die from adverse drug reactions.

Multi-billion dollar profit motives drive the pharmaceutical industry to expand its market of prescription-based revenue streams, regardless of the consequences to true health. Pharmaceutical sales reps and doctors are provided with lucrative rewards to generate ever greater numbers of prescriptions. These pecuniary rewards have created inherent conflicts of interest throughout the whole trillion-dollar health care delivery system.

The FDA, which should be protecting public health, has actually become the leading advocate for the pharmaceutical industry, and consistently approves drugs that have been proven to be unsafe and even deadly. The revolving door between the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry, the problem with former drug executives acting as government regulators, and how the unwary American public has been left with a hungry fox guarding the henhouse is now well known because of the efforts of Dr. David Graham. How and why the pharmaceutical industry, in tandem with the FDA, seeks to suppress, limit, and ban natural dietary supplements, and other methods of improving health, as competitive threats to their monopoly of patented drugs is a keen concern.

In current times modern medicine has become focused entirely on treating diseases through toxic medications instead of preventing the conditions that breed disease in the first place.

You have a stake in your health and in this issue. Act to keep your representatives and your doctors aware of these issues and call for accountability.

CHI has for years offered educational programs to medical professionals and general public on how to safely use natural approaches to health. Classes are available on-line and in your location, just contact us at www.leaflady.org for more information. Keep up-to-date by visiting our website, sign up for our newsletter and read our BLOG.

Is CODEX for Killing the Elderly?

This morning, as is fairly ususal, I start my day reading emails and posts to my website, www.leaflady.org. While perusing the mail I came across a note from a fellow who offered up a great comment. That comment stirred my thinking for this BLOG post.

I felt pretty strongly about his ideas because I have a large number of Elders who are clients and attend my educational programs. So here is what 'Deacon Elurby' has to say -

Codex is for saving social security systems!

All we have to do in the U.S. to stop CODEX is mobilize the elderly.

How? By explaining to those vitamin-popping seniors that CODEX's bottom-line purpose is not to make Big Pharma and doctors and pharmacists rich, but to reduce socialist nations' elderly populations, and to the reduce the life expectancy of the next crop of old people (you and me).

In other words, HIGH doses of vitamins, as nutrition-science journalist Bill Sardi would put it, SAVES AND EXTENDS LIVES!

CODEX is about killing off people who would otherwise live longer and strain the socialists' social security systems.

Who has contacted the AARP on the matter, to get those seniors mobilized against CODEX?

Again, CODEX is about killing people who would live more healthily and longer by taking LARGE DOSES of vitamins.

CODEX is about killing-off the elderly.

Who'll get the message to them (I've written to AARP magazine editors, have you?).

D.E.

P.S. I've been harping on this matter for months, and nobody - note even Bill Sardi - has thought to pick up on that tactic for saving us from tyrannical regulation of life-saving/life-extending vitamins.

Go figure!

I've written AARP a few times myself about their failure to address health issues with good natural health care information. Nothing ever came of that, not even a thank you. But AARP has a way of getting around this by saying "well you know we have millions of members." I don't think that is good enough but it's their way.

AARP is also selling vitamins. The ingredients are low quality, the prices are too high, but then it's all about money. Remember that AARP supported the Bush drug plan for Elders. This plan is about the biggest corporate welfare plan to come along in years; it surely doesn't do much for health.

I'm not sure why Bill Sardi no longer is the outspoken health writer he once was. Might be because he is supported by a large global corpoaraion that just happens to be in the vitamin business.

I'm for vitamins, I'm against CODEX. I'm against killing people with pharmaceutical drugs, GM food, and a whole list of other health restricting measures. Gee aren't a lot of these Members of Congress on the right pro-lifers?

Don't think I can think of something more pro-life than your right of freedom of choice and your right of access to vitamins and minerals to protect your health.

Hope you'll get mobilized when you read this!

Visit the leaflady on the net and see what you can learn for yourself to stay well and be well in these toxic times. Thank you for supporting our work with your donations and purchases.

New JAMA Study Unfairly Attacks Vitamin E

In the typical biased slant of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), an article published in the July 6th edition bashes vitamin E once again. In the latest report from the Women’s Health Study – a long-term analysis of the health of female health-care professionals that has been ongoing since 1992 – the authors state that women who took 600 I.U. natural source vitamin E (alpha-tocopherol) every other day for 10 years had no reduction in major cardiovascular events (heart attack, stroke) or incidence of cancer during the trial. However, vitamin E supplementation DID result in “decreased cardiovascular mortality in healthy women.” This result is a significant finding and should have been emphasized in the article’s conclusion. Instead of stating that women who took vitamin E for 10 years had a 24-percent reduction in risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, the authors concluded, “These data do not support recommending vitamin E supplementation for cardiovascular disease or cancer prevention among healthy women.” Even though their data can substantiate their conclusion regarding cancer, the beneficial cardiovascular data is very important and highly significant, and should have been emphasized.

Learn more about the health promoting aspects of vitamin E by clicking on the link

JAMA itself is not without fault. In their weekly press release they put forth the “negative” aspects of the study with the headline “ Long-Term Vitamin E Supplementation Shows No Overall Benefit For Major Cardiovascular Events Or Cancer In Women.” The positive aspects of the study (the long-term safety of vitamin E and a 24-percent decreased risk of cardiovascular death) were buried in paragraph four with no commentary about these findings. Of course, the television networks and newspapers ran with the negative aspect of the story as spoon-fed to them by the JAMA press release.

JAMA has a long and inglorious history of publishing negative studies regarding the use of nutrients, and this latest article shows that even a positive result can be turned into a negative by biased researchers and/or publishers.

The bottom line – vitamin E supplementation has not been shown to be harmful for healthy human beings, and decreases the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.