By David P. Ball - November 8, 2011

Volunteer medics at Occupy Vancouver...are preparing for the worst as political rhetoric over the three-week-old encampment escalates..."There's going to be a need for a medical presence if people are tear-gassed, beaten or shot with rubber bullets...Judging by what's happened in other cities in North America, when they decide to clear out protest camps it's always violent on the side of the police."

By Martha Rosenberg - AlterNet

Big Pharma and the [US Food and Drug Administration] have known for years that formoterol fumarate, found in Symbicort, Dulera and Foradil, and salmeterol, found in Advair Diskus and Serevent Diskus, can paradoxically cause asthma deaths, especially in children and African Americans...But the drugs...are so lucrative...they are marketed despite their estimated US death toll of 4,000 a year. That's equal to or even more than the number who die from asthma!

By Martha Rosenberg - October 31, 2011

How did Abbott Laboratories’ Humira become an $8 billion a year drug, capable of anchoring an entirely new drug company[?]...The same way all expensive, dangerous drugs become blockbusters: an easy touch [Food and Drug Administration], bought doctors and doctor groups, PR firms to establish diseases as “public health threats” and massive direct-to-consumer advertising!

Toban Black on the Media Co-op

( “Clean Harbors” )

Toban Black on the Media Co-op

An audio interview with Zak Nicholls, a human rights activist who lives in Sarnia, Ontario.

By Robert Stevens - 13 October 2011

The austerity measures being forced onto the Greek population by the ruling social democratic PASOK government are literally killing people...Many adults have been thrown out of work and into debt, while a whole generation of youth are unable to find any stable, decent employment. This is leading to an increase in deaths.

By Matthew Taylor - Sunday 9 October 2011

More than 2,000 people staged a sit-down protest on Westminster Bridge from 1pm on Sunday to highlight the health and social care bill, which is due to go before the House of Lords this week..."We are occupying the bridge because the bill would be bad for the [National Health Service], bad for patients and bad for society."

By Martha Rosenberg - Dissident Voice

...Pharma’s stratagems to grow its “mentally ill” franchise are well known. People with occasional anxiety are really depressed, then bipolar, then suffering from an assortment of amorphous “spectrum” diseases...with no known cause, no cure, no diagnostic tests and no turnoff valve on the pharmacy spigot...The situation is even worse for children because they’re given drugs against their will by parents, teachers and doctors.

Toban Black on the Media Co-op

They speak about Canadian asbestos exports, victims of asbestos exposure, a history of asbestos around Sarnia-Lambton's Chemical Valley, and other related topics.

By John Horgan - September 18, 2011

...[O]ver the past few decades the proportion of Americans diagnosed with mental illness has skyrocketed...This epidemic has coincided, paradoxically, with a surge in prescriptions for psychiatric drugs. Between 1985 and 2008, sales of anti-depressants and anti-psychotics multiplied almost fifty-fold, to $24.2-billion. Prescriptions for bipolar disorder and anxiety have also swelled. One in eight Americans, including children and even toddlers, is now taking a psychotropic medication.

By Cathryn Atkinson - rabble.ca

"...Insite has been proven to save lives with no discernible negative impact on the public safety and health objectives of Canada. The effect of denying the services of Insite to the population it serves and the correlative increase in the risk of death and disease to injection drug users is grossly disproportionate to any benefit that Canada might derive from presenting a uniform stance on the possession of narcotics."

- The Supreme Court of Canada, Sept. 30, 2011

By Terry Messman - Natural News

Investigative Reporter Robert Whitaker, the author of the groundbreaking book Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, is pursuing a fascinating line of research into how the mammoth psychiatric drug industry, along with mainstream psychiatry, is endangering the public by covering up the untold cases of suffering, anguish and disease caused by the most widely prescribed anti-depressants, anti-psychotics and other psychiatric medications.

By DAVE LINDORFF - September 21, 2011

The first thing that needs to be said to the heartless boneheads who, at the last Republican presidential debate, cheered at the idea of letting a hypothetical 30-year-old cancer victim who hadn’t bought health insurance die, is that this is no mere hypothetical situation...The morally challenged scum who heartily and heartlessly cheered for the death of a hypothetical 30-year-old were really cheering for the death of my friend, and millions like her.

By Kathy Tomlinson - September 20, 2011

Two B.C. families whose infants died inexplicably are sounding the alarm about mothers taking antidepressants while pregnant...Both mothers took Effexor, which Health Canada has warned can have adverse effects on babies...“I took the pills. I didn’t question. I trusted my doctor...”

By Frazer Merritt - Z Magazine

Most U.S. citizens would be surprised to learn that the side effects and warnings for their prescription drugs...are only a brief summary of the drug manufacturer’s complete label. In addition the pharmaceutical companies don’t design the Patient Inserts, nor are they regulated or tested for accuracy by the [Food and Drug Administration]. Instead, pharmacies pay third-party corporations...to summarize the side effects.