Streetshot is a photo-essay competition funded and managed by the Hepatitis C Council of New South Wales, Australia. It runs in collaboration with youth services across NSW as part of Hepatitis Awareness Week. video by hepcservices
Dr. Stephen Langer on how the thyroid affects our energy level and how fatigue from low thyroid is different than chronic fatigue syndrome. MORE ABOUT THYMUS EXTRACT, CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME
As the anticipated July release date for Baxter's A/H1N1 flu pandemic vaccine approaches, an Austrian investigative journalist is warning the world that the greatest crime in the history of humanity is underway.
Jane Burgermeister has recently filed criminal charges with the FBI against the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations (UN), and several of the highest ranking government and corporate officials concerning bioterrorism and attempts to commit mass murder.
She has also prepared an injunction against forced vaccination which is being filed in America. These actions follow her charges filed in April against Baxter AG and Avir Green Hills Biotechnology of Austria for producing contaminated bird flu vaccine, alleging this was a deliberate act to cause and profit from a pandemic.
Are clinical trials really the best practice for health and wellness? Can you trust science or are clinical trials skewed to mislead consumers and medical professionals to push drugs for profit.
Jazzy de Lisser was born with hepatitis C and just six months ago heard she was too ill to continue treatment. Here, Jazzy, whose film of her life has won a Daily Mirror competition, tells how she coped.
When Jazzy de Lisser was just 13, doctors told her she had the liver of a middle-aged alcoholic.
The schoolgirl had known for 10 years that her mum passed chronic liver disease hepatitis C to her at birth.
“Mum thinks she got it from intravenous drug use in her early 20s, years before I was born,” explains Jazzy, now 17. “She’s been clean for 25 years.”
Jazzy was three when mum Serena Bute began to worry something wasn’t quite right. The tot’s stomach was painfully bloated and tests showed she had been born with the chronic disease.
It was only then that fashion designer Serena realised she had hep C, too.
At the age of six Jazzy and her family moved to London from Jamaica to begin treatment with Interferon – then the most common drug used to combat the virus. Image 2 for 'jazzy' gallery
“I had to just get on with my life,” says Jazzy, who has just won a film competition backed by the Daily Mirror with a documentary about her long battle with the disease.
“I didn’t really feel the effects of hep C other than being more prone to illness than my school friends and I didn’t tell many people because I didn’t want them to react differently to me.
“But when I was about 13 I started researching websites and found them so unfriendly and negative. I couldn’t get my head around all the ways they described hep C attacks and damages the liver. I began to really worry about what I had.”
Jazzy went to King’s College Hospital in London for an update on her condition where doctors said the scarring on her liver was getting worse.
“The doctor said Jazzy had the liver of a 50-year-old man who had been drinking and taking drugs his whole life,” says mum Serena.
Jazzy tried alternative therapies and even flew to Austria to see a specialist. But at 14 she got sick of restricting her diet and taking dozens of homeopathic pills every day.
So in September 2007, Jazzy switched her treatment back to Interferon but this time combined with another drug, Ribavirin. Together, they have a 48 per cent success rate in curing hep C in children.
Jazzy, whose stepdad is the former Grand Prix driver Johnny Dumfries, was inspired by documentary-maker Mel Agace to record a video diary of her treatment over 15 months.
Then she heard about the launch of the Daily Mirror, MediaBox and Bebo Your Film09 competition. It aimed to find young film-makers to make a documentary about something important in their lives.
Ten people were selected to take part in special workshops with Bafta mentors to transform their ideas into films.
Jazzy turned the diary into her award-winning short film My Story of C, which captures the highs and lows of her treatment – from promising test results, lying in bed in agony, to blazing rows with her mum.
“I’d never met anyone my age going through this and thought I could show people what it’s like,” she says.
The documentary captures Jazzy’s suffering caused by the drugs, as well as her mum’s guilt as she watches her daughter beg for it all to stop.
“The drugs were so invasive,” says Serena, whose own condition is stable. “It was horrifying to watch her suffer knowing I was the reason.”
Jazzy battled with the side-effects of the drugs as she studied for her A-levels.
“They made me exhausted and moody,” she explains. “I had blinding headaches and no energy. I got mouth ulcers and eczema and loads of my hair fell out.”
Jazzy initially responded well to the latest treatment but then tests showed the disease was back – in another form.
In January this year, after 15 months on the dual-drug regime, Jazzy heard the terrible news that the virus had become so bad treatment had to stop.
“I was really angry and upset,” she says. “I felt totally helpless.”
But she wasn’t about to give up and vowed to help others in her situation. Jazzy has built a website (livergoodlife.com) with the British Liver Trust to explain the disease to teenagers like her in a more positive way than the sites she’d seen.
She has also raised cash to pay Oscar-winning animation company Passion Pictures to create a cartoon explaining how hep C damages the liver.
Her next move is to raise money for equipment to help find new treatments. “I’m not going to try another treatment until there’s something with a very high success rate,” she says.
“A liver transplant would be the very last option and my aim is to get rid of this by the time I’m 21.
“One day I want to be able to say I have had hepatitis C and I’ve beaten it.”
A forty-minute documentary about the Hepatitis C epidemic specifically in the UK. It seems like a fairly accurate depiction of the situation with Hepatitis C, though they were unaware of all of the alternatives currently being employed by Alternative Medicine Solutions. In part 2 we follow our subject through his misFortune of taking Interferon & part 3 is mostly a run down of current "standard" & "alternative" treatments. Here's Part 2 & Part 3
Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life's setbacks -- including death itself.
It is my honor to introduce you to Dr. Burt Berkson, one of the few physicians I believe to be a true visionary. In this interview, you will hear the true story of Dr. Berkson's successful use for over thirty years of Alpha Lipoic Acid to regenerate livers and other organs. It is also the story of the unfortunate link between money-driven medicine and medical research.
Dr. Berkson’s story originates in the mid to late 1970s, just as the shift from true scientific research to pharmaceutical-company based (and pharmaceutical-company-controlled) research was beginning to take place.
This is the story of an inexpensive, very effective treatment which initially received support from the National Institutes of Health, but was, in the end, abandoned, because no pharmaceutical company would take up the expensive task of officially studying the drug.
In the meantime, though, several studies were conducted, including one, conducted by Dr. Berkson and the National Institutes of Health’s Dr. Fred Bartter, of 79 people with extreme liver disease. 75 of these people fully recovered. Still, no pharmaceutical company was interested in pursuing this drug.
Dr. Berkson suspects that this lack of interest was because liver transplants were becoming very popular and Big Pharma didn’t want to interfere with the business of making money. (Don’t forget. Big Pharma makes a lot of money producing anti-rejection drugs for patients who have undergone organ transplants.)
Dr. Berkson practices medicine in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Patients come to him from all over the world. I know you'll find Dr. Berkson's story fascinating.
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