The Fitzgerald Report

Amazon.com: The Hundred-Year Lie : How Food and Medicine Are Destroying Your Health: Books: Randall Fitzgerald:

"Of those 40 years of increased lifespan during the 20th century, no more than seven years can be credited to modern medicine, with even most of that due to advances in medical technology rather than drugs. That estimate comes from Dr. Dick Jackson, director of the Center for Environmental Health at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Ninety percent of the reduction in the death rate occurred before the introduction of antibiotics or vaccines, adds Dr. Anthony Cortese, a former U.S. Public Health Service official. It was largely due to improved water, food, and milk sanitations; a reduction in physical crowding; the introduction of central heating, municipal sewer systems, and refrigeration; and the move away from highly toxic coal and wood burning to less toxic natural gas and oil.

The scientist who discovered the first two commercially manufactured antibiotics, the microbiologist Rene Dubos, admitted in his book The Mirage of Health: "The introduction of inexpensive cotton undergarments easy to launder and of transparent glass that brought light into the most humble dwelling, contributed more to the control of infection than did all the drugs and medical practices."

...When the drug had earlier been tested on monkeys, their glands swelled up. Because no other adverse symptoms were detected in the lab animals, this drug, which is designed to treat leukemia, MS and rheumatoid arthritis by stimulating the immune system, was approved for testing on human volunteers in London. (The drug called TGN1412 comes from a German biopharmaceutical company.)

Each of the six volunteers administered the drug suffered almost immediate multi-organ inflammation and ended up on life support machines. In a classic understatement, a physician trying to save the men's lives at a London hospital told the news media: "It could be that defects with this drug didn't show up in preclinical data from the tests on primates."

As The Hundred Year Lie documents, animal testing of chemicals cannot predict how these substances will affect human health. To the contrary, we have decades of evidence that animal test results give manufacturers and the public a false sense of security about the safety of synthetic chemicals in food, medicine and consumer products."