OLEAN -- Over the weekend, I opened a small box with my quarterly shipment of vitamins and other dietary supplements from a well-known national supplier, expecting some plastic jars of Vitamin E, Vitamin C and Vitamin B-12 to fall out.
Instead, the first thing tumbling from the carton was a crumpled newsletter from the National Nutritional Foods Association (NNFA), informing me of Senate Bill No. 722.
Seems like the big pharmaceutical lobby is at it again.
The four-page broadside warned of a new bill erroneously titled the "Dietary Supplement Safety Act" recently introduced in the U.S. Senate by Illinois Democrat Richard Durbin.
Basically, this proposed law would violate the old governmental maxim, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Under S. 722, if even one consumer of the scores of millions of Americans who use vitamins, minerals, herbal products and other dietary supplements complains about any aspect of their ingestion, the mighty Food and Drug Administration could question the safety of such supplement and remove it from the marketplace.
This, says the NNFA, would make "products that have been used safely for hundreds -- and in some cases, thousands -- of years" subject to the complete discretion of the much-criticized FDA bureaucrats, regardless of whether the product was used under conditions cautioned against by the manufacturer on the label.
This, in a day and age when Americans are keeling over from subjection to badly contaminated food and water, bogus weight-loss concoctions, widespread pollution, dubious vaccines, carcinogenic substances, and dangerous anti-cholesterol drugs mistakenly approved by the FDA -- none of which attracts much corrective zeal from the current federal government.
This, in a day and age when 218 million Americans live within 10 miles of polluted water, and when 40 percent of the nation's waters fail to meet Clean Water Act standards.
This, in a day and age when the United States Department of Agriculture allows chicken and beef suppliers to market a certain percentage of cancer-infested and sore-ridden meats to the public.
"By almost every measure," observes the NNFA, "and by a wide margin, dietary supplements can be used more safely than conventional foods and OTC (over-the-counter) drugs."
The proposed legislation even exempts certain foods in certain influential product categories from being included -- such as stimulants. It specifically excludes in some categories the most common "stimulant" ingredient in foods and many supplements -- caffeine.
Alert consumers, and most of Congress, thought this was all addressed about a decade ago, when the FDA was given sufficient common-sense powers to protect us from bad herbs, vitamins and minerals under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. That law has worked well for a decade, but now the FDA seeks a boost in oversight power to the nth degree.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who helped shape the first act with logic and legislative restraint, said recently, "As far as safety is concerned, consider that virtually no one has died from the use of uncontaminated dietary supplements, whereas in the pharmaceutical industry thousands die every year -- even using prescription medications as prescribed."
Dietary supplements, he continued, "are basically preventative in nature, and consumers need access to preventative medicine -- because of the stresses of modern life -- chemicals in our water, contaminates in our air, processed food in our diets. We can help avoid problems by taking natural health products to aid our physical systems."
Critics of the bill note that no one is trying to remove bug spray -- and other powerful organophosphate pesticides -- from the marketplace just because thousands of Americans have serious reactions to them. No one is trying to outlaw peanuts, despite the fact so many Americans have potentially fatal allergic reactions to them that schoolchildren no longer get peanut products in their lunches. Same with shellfish. Same with lots of foodstuffs.
Some think it's the "preventative" part in dietary supplements that rankles the big pharmaceutical firms suspected of being behind the bill.
Dr. Mathias Rath, an activist member of the New York Academy of Sciences who runs a global health foundation, puts it bluntly: "The right to health and life for billions of people is being threatened by the financial interests of the largest investment industry on earth -- the multi-trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry. The marketplaces of this industry are diseases and its future growth is dependent on the further expansion of the disease market."
All this reminds me of almost 40 years ago, when I was a young reporter in Niagara Falls, and Vitamin E was newly in the news about health. Canadian doctors were singing its praises as a new and helpful dietary additive in fighting heart disease and other afflictions. They made note that heart disease was virtually unknown in North America until the husks of wheat were removed from bread-making ingredients for efficiency purposes in the early 20th century. Those husks were rich in Vitamin E, about the only source in the average American's diet.
The American medical community -- including the FDA and other governmental agencies -- pooh-poohed the new vitamin, made fun of the historical research, and decried any beneficial effects. Users were ridiculed as eternal optimists, gullible boobs, or desperate wackos.
In Niagara Falls, N.Y., one doctor, my doctor, decided to investigate. The late Dr. Peter Battaglia, one of the very best internists who ever walked the face of the earth, was initially skeptical himself. But he was used to reaching his own conclusions after conducting his own research. He traveled to Toronto to witness a demonstration of Vitamin E salve on the legs of a hideously burned fire victim.
The Vitamin E salve was applied to the right leg. Common remedies and over-the-counter ointments were applied to the left leg. The right leg -- furnished with increased circulation and oxygen carried by an enriched blood supply as effects of the Vitamin E -- healed in five weeks. The left leg remained afflicted with open and infected burn wounds. It made a believer out of Doc Battaglia. He started recommending Vitamin E for his patients.
Today, Vitamin E is universally praised as a powerful antioxidant, defending cells against damage on a daily basis -- a naturally occurring substance that holds promise for many other health uses besides preventing heart disease. The National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Aging now believe Vitamin E holds promise in delaying the progression of Alzheimer's disease and in slowing the rate of functional decline in older persons with Down Syndrome.
Researchers also think it may allay some of the serious side effects of radiation therapy, and may alleviate menopausal harm.
The bill is currently before the Senate Health, Education, and Labor committee, which may take it up when Congress returns from August recess.
But, warns the NNFA, it could be quietly added to existing Senate legislation at any time.
Speaking of Reactions -- Last issue's column on the Big Blackout and President Bush's dunderheaded reaction to it in trying to pin it on a nonexistent lightning strike in Niagara Falls, N.Y., on a pristine, cloudless day triggered a bunch of gratifying e-mails. But it also moved a Penn State engineering professor to label me a "typical professor of journalism who looks for conspiracy to further create, not report, a story."
He added that my "political bias shows through this message. This is not reporting, but creation of stories with nothing but opinion."
Putting aside the fact -- apparently obvious to most readers who aren't academics -- that this is an OPINION column and does not reflect a news story format, and putting aside the fact I voted for George W. Bush and often defend him, I want to assure readers that I'm not alone in suspecting American intelligence sources haven't ruled out terrorist hackers as a cause of the still-mysterious blackout.
Dr. Sam Hamod, a retired Princeton University professor and former State Department adviser, e-mailed me to state, "I think it may have been a cyber-attack on our grid system. It may have been a symbolic attack on Bush and our vaunted 'Homeland Security' operation."
Dr. Hamod continued, "What makes me wonder even more if this was a cyber-attack is that all the top-level experts in the Electricity Reliability Group can't figure out why the circuit breakers failed during the overload. These experts are embarrassed and can't come up with any answers yet. None of them has even uttered a word about a possible cyber-attack; this absence of any talk of a cyber-attack indicates that there is to be silence about such a possibility so that the public doesn't panic.
"I have a hunch that this was a cyber-attack by a group that wanted to create the blackout in order to show Bush and the world that none of Bush's attempts at 'homeland security' were worth a damn and could not stop intelligent attacks on our technological infrastructure. Thus, it makes sense that these cyber-attackers would push the grid into overload and then disable, by computer, the circuit breakers so they wouldn't work."
Hey, down there in State College, here's another opinion from me: Princeton 1, Penn State 0.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | August 26 2003 |