A task force charged with implementing changes to Maine’s medical marijuana law fine tuned its recommendations to the governor and Legislature on Friday, reaching consensus on several key issues but leaving a handful unanswered.

The task force was formed by Gov. John Baldacci following last November’s vote to expand the state law allowing qualified individuals or their caretakers to grow and possess limited amounts of marijuana for medical treatment.

After five meetings, the group agreed on a recommended process for issuing identification cards to registered users as well a system for licensing and regulating nonprofit dispensaries that would supply medical marijuana to patients.

The majority of members also supported the creation of an advisory board that would review whether to add other debilitating conditions to the list of qualifying conditions for treatment with medical marijuana. A minority of the members had wanted the task force itself to recommend the addition of specific conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

However, members acknowledged that the Legislature and the Department of Health and Human Services will have to resolve lingering questions about the existing language allowing towns to limit the number and location of dispensaries.

The task force, comprising representatives of state government as well as the medical community and patients, is expected to submit a final report to Baldacci within the next two weeks. That report will then form the basis of legislation that will be considered by lawmakers.

Public hearings on the bill will be held later this winter.

I think this is one hurdle that we have cleared,” said Faith Benedetti, one of several members representing patients’ interests on the group. “I’m really optimistic and hopeful that now the Legislature will do the right thing for patients.”

Via CNN (November 10, 2009):

In the year since a U.S. cancer researcher’s warning drew wide attention, more evidence is emerging that long-term cell phone use is associated with cancer, but there’s still not a definitive explanation or proof of cause and effect.

Last summer, Dr. Ronald Herberman, then director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, issued a warning to about 3,000 faculty and staff, listing steps to avoid harmful electromagnetic radiation from cell phones. This included keeping the phone away from the body as much as possible and not allowing children to use cell phones except in emergencies.

“Since I put out that precautionary advisory in July of last year, I believe there is more indication for concern, particularly among children,” he recently said.

A much-anticipated but unreleased report from the World Health Organization on a decade-long investigation called Interphone will show a “significantly increased risk” of some brain tumors “related to use of mobile phones for a period of 10 years or more,” the London Daily Telegraph reported in late October. The study will be published before the end of the year, the newspaper said.

Supporting that conclusion, a recent study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology that looked at 23 case-control studies found that the research with the more scientifically rigorous methodologies suggested cell phones and tumors are linked. The eight strongest studies made sure the investigators did not know which participants had tumors when they conducted the interviews about cell phone use, and they did not receive funding from industry groups.

CHICAGO, Dec. 7, 2005 (UPI) — It’s a far piece from the horse-and-buggies of Lancaster County, Pa., to the cars and freeways of Cook County, Ill.

But thousands of children cared for by Homefirst Health Services in metropolitan Chicago have at least two things in common with thousands of Amish children in rural Lancaster: They have never been vaccinated. And they don’t have autism.

“We have a fairly large practice. We have about 30,000 or 35,000 children that we’ve taken care of over the years, and I don’t think we have a single case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines,” said Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, Homefirst’s medical director who founded the practice in 1973. Homefirst doctors have delivered more than 15,000 babies at home, and thousands of them have never been vaccinated.

The few autistic children Homefirst sees were vaccinated before their families became patients, Eisenstein said. “I can think of two or three autistic children who we’ve delivered their mother’s next baby, and we aren’t really totally taking care of that child — they have special care needs. But they bring the younger children to us. I don’t have a single case that I can think of that wasn’t vaccinated.”

The autism rate in Illinois public schools is 38 per 10,000, according to state Education Department data; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the national rate of autism spectrum disorders at 1 in 166 — 60 per 10,000.

“We do have enough of a sample,” Eisenstein said. “The numbers are too large to not see it. We would absolutely know. We’re all family doctors. If I have a child with autism come in, there’s no communication. It’s frightening. You can’t touch them. It’s not something that anyone would miss.”

No one knows what causes autism, but federal health authorities say it isn’t childhood immunizations. Some parents and a small minority of doctors and scientists, however, assert vaccines are responsible.

This column has been looking for autism in never-vaccinated U.S. children in an effort to shed light on the issue. We went to Chicago to meet with Eisenstein at the suggestion of a reader, and we also visited Homefirst’s office in northwest suburban Rolling Meadows. Homefirst has four other offices in the Chicago area and a total of six doctors.

Eisenstein stresses his observations are not scientific. “The trouble is this is just anecdotal in a sense, because what if every autistic child goes somewhere else and (their family) never calls us or they moved out of state?”

In practice, that’s unlikely to account for the pronounced absence of autism, says Eisenstein, who also has a bachelor’s degree in statistics, a master’s degree in public health and a law degree.

Homefirst follows state immunization mandates, but Illinois allows religious exemptions if parents object based either on tenets of their faith or specific personal religious views. Homefirst does not exclude or discourage such families. Eisenstein, in fact, is author of the book “Don’t Vaccinate Before You Educate!” and is critical of the CDC’s vaccination policy in the 1990s, when several new immunizations were added to the schedule, including Hepatitis B as early as the day of birth. Several of the vaccines — HepB included — contained a mercury-based preservative that has since been phased out of most childhood vaccines in the United States.

Medical practices with Homefirst’s approach to immunizations are rare. “Because of that, we tend to attract families that have questions about that issue,” said Dr. Paul Schattauer, who has been with Homefirst for 20 years and treats “at least” 100 children a week.

Schattauer seconded Eisenstein’s observations. “All I know is in my practice I don’t see autism. There is no striking 1-in-166,” he said.

Earlier this year we reported the same phenomenon in the mostly unvaccinated Amish. CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding told us the Amish “have genetic connectivity that would make them different from populations that are in other sectors of the United States.” Gerberding said, however, studies “could and should be done” in more representative unvaccinated groups — if they could be found and their autism rate documented.

Chicago is America’s prototypical “City of Big Shoulders,” to quote Carl Sandburg, and Homefirst’s mostly middle-class families seem fairly representative. A substantial number are conservative Christians who home-school their children. They are mostly white, but the Homefirst practice also includes black and Hispanic families and non-home-schooling Jews, Catholics and Muslims.

They tend to be better educated, follow healthier diets and breast-feed their children much longer than the norm — half of Homefirst’s mothers are still breast-feeding at two years. Also, because Homefirst relies less on prescription drugs including antibiotics as a first line of treatment, these children have less exposure to other medicines, not just vaccines.

Schattauer, interviewed at the Rolling Meadows office, said his caseload is too limited to draw conclusions about a possible link between vaccines and autism. “With these numbers you’d have a hard time proving or disproving anything,” he said. “You can only get a feeling about it.

“In no way would I be an advocate to stand up and say we need to look at vaccines, because I don’t have the science to say that,” Schattauer said. “But I don’t think the science is there to say that it’s not.”

Schattauer said Homefirst’s patients also have significantly less childhood asthma and juvenile diabetes compared to national rates. An office manager who has been with Homefirst for 17 years said she is aware of only one case of severe asthma in an unvaccinated child.

“Sometimes you feel frustrated because you feel like you’ve got a pretty big secret,” Schattauer said. He argues for more research on all those disorders, independent of political or business pressures.

The asthma rate among Homefirst patients is so low it was noticed by the Blue Cross group with which Homefirst is affiliated, according to Eisenstein.

“In the alternative-medicine network which Homefirst is part of, there are virtually no cases of childhood asthma, in contrast to the overall Blue Cross rate of childhood asthma which is approximately 10 percent,” he said. “At first I thought it was because they (Homefirst’s children) were breast-fed, but even among the breast-fed we’ve had asthma. We have virtually no asthma if you’re breast-fed and not vaccinated.”

Because the diagnosis of asthma is based on emergency-room visits and hospital admissions, Eisenstein said, Homefirst’s low rate is hard to dispute. “It’s quantifiable — the definition is not reliant on the doctor’s perception of asthma.”

Several studies have found a risk of asthma from vaccination; others have not. Studies that include never-vaccinated children generally find little or no asthma in that group.

Earlier this year Florida pediatrician Dr. Jeff Bradstreet said there is virtually no autism in home-schooling families who decline to vaccinate for religious reasons — lending credence to Eisenstein’s observations.

“It’s largely non-existent,” said Bradstreet, who treats children with autism from around the country. “It’s an extremely rare event.”

Bradstreet has a son whose autism he attributes to a vaccine reaction at 15 months. His daughter has been home-schooled, he describes himself as a “Christian family physician,” and he knows many of the leaders in the home-school movement.

“There was this whole subculture of folks who went into home-schooling so they would never have to vaccinate their kids,” he said. “There’s this whole cadre who were never vaccinated for religious reasons.” In that subset, he said, “unless they were massively exposed to mercury through lots of amalgams (mercury dental fillings in the mother) and/or big-time fish eating, I’ve not had a single case.”

Federal health authorities and mainstream medical groups emphatically dismiss any link between autism and vaccines, including the mercury-based preservative thimerosal. Last year a panel of the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academies, said there is no evidence of such a link, and funding should henceforth go to “promising” research.

Thimerosal, which is 49.6 percent ethyl mercury by weight, was phased out of most U.S. childhood immunizations beginning in 1999, but the CDC recommends flu shots for pregnant women and last year began recommending them for children 6 to 23 months old. Most of those shots contain thimerosal.

Thimerosal-preserved vaccines are currently being injected into millions of children in developing countries around the world. “My mandate … is to make sure at the end of the day that 100,000,000 are immunized … this year, next year and for many years to come … and that will have to be with thimerosal-containing vaccines,” said John Clements of the World Health Organization at a June 2000 meeting called by the CDC.

That meeting was held to review data that thimerosal might be linked with autism and other neurological problems. But in 2004 the Institute of Medicine panel said evidence against a link is so strong that health authorities, “whether in the United States or other countries, should not include autism as a potential risk” when formulating immunization policies.

But where is the simple, straightforward study of autism in never-vaccinated U.S. children? Based on our admittedly anecdotal and limited reporting among the Amish, the home-schooled and now Chicago’s Homefirst, that may prove to be a significant omission.

This is the data the drug industry do not want you to see. Here 2 centuries of UK, USA and Australian official death statistics show conclusively and scientifically modern medicine is not responsible for and played little part in substantially improved life expectancy and survival from disease in western economies.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for protecting and advancing public health through the regulation of drugs, food, medical devices, cosmetics, and the blood supply—including products that, according to the FDA, account for 25 cents of every American consumer dollar spent.

In 2006, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) distributed a 38-question survey to 5,918 FDA scientists to examine the state of science at the FDA. The results paint a picture of a troubled agency: hundreds of scientists reported significant interference with the FDA’s scientific work, compromising the agency’s ability to fulfill its mission of protecting public health and safety.

The National Academies Weigh In

In September 2006, the National Academies Institute of Medicine released a report critical of the FDA and its ability to protect the public from unsafe drugs. In a section discussing the poor handling of scientific disagreement, the report mentioned the UCS survey result indicating that hundreds of agency scientists had been pressured to approve a drug despite reservations about safety.

The report describes the acknowledgment of these concerns by acting FDA commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach when questioned about the UCS survey at his Senate confirmation hearing and in a separate meeting with UCS about scientific integrity at the FDA.

The Food and Drug Administration has allowed drugs for cancer and other diseases to stay on the market even when follow-up studies showed they didn’t extend patients’ lives, say congressional investigators.

A report due out Monday from the Government Accountability Office also shows that the FDA has never pulled a drug off the market due to a lack of required follow-up about its actual benefits — even when such information is more than a decade overdue.

A record 106 million infants were vaccinated last year against life-threatening diseases, but nearly 1 in 5 babies still aren’t fully protected, global health authorities reported Wednesday.

To get the full round of first-year vaccinations to children in the poorest countries will take another $1 billion a year, said the report from the World Health Organization, UNICEF and World Bank.

Most of the unprotected babies are in Asia and Africa, particularly in rural or strife-torn areas that are difficult for aid workers to reach.

It’s a good investment, the report argued. Vaccination is preventing 2.5 million child deaths a year. But if 90 percent of the world’s children under age 5 got the vaccinations that are routine in wealthy countries, another 2 million deaths a year could be prevented by 2015.

“We must overcome the divide that separates rich from poor, between those who get lifesaving vaccines and those who don’t,” said Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of the WHO.

The report suggests that overcoming that gap may be a bigger challenge in coming years: In 2000, the world was spending, on average, $6 per live birth on vaccinations in developing countries. That’s expected to be $18 by next year and could rise above $30 as newer, more expensive vaccines become available.