Medical opinion by John F. Ruhland, ND

Do you have health-related questions for Dr. John, the Naturopathic Doctor? Send them to the WA Free Press at 1463 E Republican #178, Seattle WA 98112, or email to WAfreepress@gmail.com. Please keep questions short. Health information in the WA Free Press should not be construed as medical advice. Always make your own choice regarding medical treatment by seeking multiple sources of information and consulting with your personal physician.

Flu Vaccine, Mad Cow Disease

Dear Nature Doc,

With all the hype about the flu vaccination, I am starting to doubt my own instincts that tell me to avoid the flu shot. What do you think?

For a relatively healthy person, there is no reason to have a flu shot. The flu is a relatively mild illness. Immunization is an assault on the immune system, artificially stimulating it, while not improving its function in the long term. Each time you are given a flu shot or any other immunization, I would argue that the artificial stimulation increases the risk for the development of auto-immunity. Mercury that is added to the flu shot as a preservative (called ÒthimerosalÓ) makes the vaccine very dangerous for mercury-sensitive people. There is no way of telling ahead of time which people are mercury sensitive, and I have several patients in my practice who were seriously damaged by the flu shot. It is now illegal to add mercury to childhood immunizations. The vaccine manufacturers continue to add mercury to the flu shot, making the claim that it is not a childhood immunization. They then go on to heavily market to the pediatric population.

Additionally, most of my patients who have had the flu shot developed the flu soon after receiving the immunization. In fact, the flu vaccines that are produced each year are typically effective against only about 20 percent of flu viruses. This seasonÕs flu vaccine has been almost completely ineffective against the major flu strains that have been circulating.

For those people whose immune system is not working optimally, including young children and the elderly, the holistic approach is to strengthen the immune system. Giving these people an immunization is even more likely to cause long-term problems than in the general population. In the future, our departments of public health must do much better in nutrition education, especially for parents of young children and for those people in nursing homes, in order to truly improve the health of our most vulnerable citizens.

Dear Nature Doc:

How worried should I be about mad cow disease?

Truly healthy people are healthy for many reasons. The same thing is true about cows and other animals. When an animal is penned up in a cruel and unnatural manner, as they are in factory farms, and receives all manner of tainted food, it cannot be optimally healthy. In factory farming, the cows are eating all sorts of byproducts, things that normally should be discarded. Besides the byproducts, according to the book ÒFateful HarvestÓ by Duff Wilson, crops grown for animal feed can be heavily contaminated. My recommendation is that if you feel you must eat meat, eat organically certified meat. The animals raised organically are more likely to eat a healthy diet.

During the recent case of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (mad cow disease) in Washington state, the US Department of Agriculture acknowledged that only a small percentage of sick animals are randomly selected to be tested for the disease. This means that there may be many sick animals being consumed without having been tested. Furthermore, parts of the sick animal in Washington were sent to a rendering plant. That means that the BSE prions may now be contaminating products such as lipstick, gelatin, glues on envelopes, and feed for animals other than cows. It is not difficult to imagine prions finding their way into human beings, as they would in fact be ingested if they were to get into such products.

My hope is that this is a wake-up call for the US to finally improve its farming practices, rather than continue pressuring other countries to buy US food containing hormones, antibiotics, and other contaminants.

Go to www.drruhland.com for an updated version of an article on mad cow disease originally published by Dr Ruhland in The Washington Free Press, #51 May/June 2001.

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