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Millions of people worldwide take statins for heart and artery problems caused, we’re told, by high cholesterol. The side effects of these drugs can be alarming. Nevertheless, it’s a huge market for Big Pharma, and anything that might cause a drop in the sales of statins would not be welcome to Pzifer, Merck, and AstraZeneca, the leading manufacturers.

Despite the marketing hype for these drugs, there’s doubt over their real effectiveness in combating heart disease. As far back as 2011, the Telegraph reported:

Pfizer’s Lipitor was the world’s top-selling medicine last year, according to IMS, raking in sales of $13.3billion. AstraZeneca’s Crestor, which garnered $5.38billion in sales during 2009, is one of the company’s best selling medicines.
Total sales last year of cholesterol-treating medicines – including statins – were $35billion, according to IMS.
Dr Navid Malik, a pharmaceuticals analyst at Matrix Partners, said the global statin market has grown significantly over the past ten years.
“Statins enjoyed superior growth in the market because they could be shown to lower bad cholesterol whilst raising good cholesterol,” he added…
…Despite the commercial success of statins, Dr Malik pointed out that the peristence of heart disease does raise questions about the drugs’ value for money.
“Statins have been the fairy tale story in the industry. But heart disease is still the number one killer in the western world, so one could argue how much value for money have we really got out of their use,” he said.”^[1]

Now there’s a new kid on the block, which could knock the statins off the dispensary shelves. UK company, OptiBiotix, has produced a tablet that could do just that.

According to the Pharmaceutical industry newsheet, Pharmaletter:

…the company released further details this month on a 12-week double blind placebo controlled study of the tablet, which is made up of hundreds of millions of freeze-dried and compressed bacteria. The trial recruited 50 volunteers and was designed to establish safety, compliance, and the extent of the cholesterol lowering potential of OptiBiotix’s Lactobacillus plantarum strain in mildly hypercholesterolemic adults.

When triallists took one pill daily for three months, their cholesterol level fell by an average of 37%. There was on average a 5.1% reduction in systolic blood pressure. No safety, compliance, or tolerance issues were reported by volunteers during the study in either group.

OptiBiotix stated that the study showed its strain has commercial potential as a safe, easy to use, low cost, cholesterol reducing supplement, and The Times reported that the company was in talks with food and pharma giants about putting the formula into yoghurts and cereal bars….”^[2]

For the millions who take statins and suffer the side effects, as well as those of us who have refused to take them and feel ill, OptiBiotix may well have the solution.

It could be a revolution in heart medicine – that is, if Big Pharma allow it to survive!

^{[1] “Statins: the drug firms’ goldmine” Telegraph, January 19th 2011}

^{[2] “OptiBiotix interesting big pharma with statin-free cholesterol pill” Pharmaletter, April 26th 2016}

It’s thirty years since Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear plant blew up, spreading its poisonous radiation over much of the western hemisphere. One unintended consequence of that disaster is that the site now attracts the morbid fascination of tourists from all over the world.

Much of the dangerous radioactive material is still inside Reactor 4, including (it’s thought) the body of one man never found after the explosion. The town of Chernobyl was home to 60,000 people. Now, thirty years on, it’s a ghost town.

Much was hushed-up in the aftermath of the disaster. In Britain, radiation from the Russian plant was found in the grass growing on Welsh mountains. For a while, Welsh lamb was off the menu for many, to the consternation of Welsh sheep farmers.

Everywhere, including in Russia, folks were told not to worry, it had been contained, there were no health concerns. Today, children in the region around the disaster area have grown up. They are having children themselves. Many are deformed, with missing limbs. At least one was born with two heads. In western countries childhood thyroid cancer is rare; in Belarus, as many as fifty percent of children develop the disease. Many die at a young age.^[1]

We live in a dangerous world. It seems the “Law of Unintended Consequences” is at play all the time. There was a time when lead was considered a wonder metal: it prevented car engines from ‘knocking’; it helped paint to adhere to surfaces. It was decades before the dangers of lead, or asbestos, or many other ‘wonder’ products of the industrial, and later ‘technological’ eras, made themselves known, with the resultant suffering that no-one had envisaged.

The internal combustion engine, a wonder of the 19th and 20th centuries, transformed the lives of virtually every human being on the planet. The cost is only now being gradually realized through global climate change.

It seems that almost everything we do as a species to make our lives better has a long-term detrimental effect on ourselves, and/or the environment and the species that share this planet with us.

Global warming demands we stop using fossil fuels for energy. The ‘natural’ alternatives of wind, wave, and solar power, will never be able to meet our requirements quickly enough to make significant difference. The only energy source we have, capable of supplying sufficient for our needs, is nuclear.

Even the greenest of conservationists have come to realize this fact. Nuclear power is the only alternative available. Does this mean we risk another ‘Chernobyl’, on an even greater scale?

“No!” cry the ‘experts. “We’ve come a long way technologically since 1986. Nuclear power is now completely safe.”

Of course, that was before Fukushima.

We don’t hear much about Fukushima. One of the deadliest problems with radiation is its invisible, silent, invasion of the body tissues. No-one knows it’s there, or what it’s doing, until the cancer is diagnosed, or the deformed child is born.

Governments are silent on Fukushima, just as they were with Chernobyl. When questioned, assurances are quick to be vocalized. No danger! Nothing to worry about. It’s all under control.

We have to build more nuclear power stations to stand any chance of averting the worst effects of climate change. It would be ironic, if by so doing we destroyed ourselves and much of the planet by radiation poisoning from our own creations, rather than the sun doing it for us.

That old “Law of Unintended Consequences” can sometimes be a real bummer.

^{[1] “Chernobyl’s legacy 30 years on” BBC, April 26th 2016}

Politicians are amazing people. They are born with an innate ability to lay the blame for their failures on others. It’s never them, it’s the unions, or the workers, or the ‘other political party’, or possibly ‘Mrs Jones down at number 37’.

Health minister Jeremy Hunt tops them all. His attacks on the junior doctors of the UK’s National Health Service are vitriolic, simply because they refuse to comply with an unfair contract he’s trying to force upon them.^[1]

That old standby, “Patients will suffer”, is trotted out on every occasion, as though the doctors have suddenly turned into cold-blooded, unfeeling, automatons overnight.

It’s time Jeremy Hunt realised the blame for the state of the NHS lies at his door. He’s an out and out failure. He couldn’t even sell marmalade to the Japanese^[2]. It’s time he resigned, and was replaced by someone who actually has a knowledge of how a national health service should be properly run. Jeremy Hunt knows less about hospital management than a cashier at Argos.

It’s time the staff made a real stand against Hunt’s demolition of the NHS and joined doctors in an all-out walk-out. It’s about the only way to persuade David Cameron to get rid of this pretentious idiot once and for all.

There’s only one person to blame for the present state of the NHS and the buck stops at Jeremy Hunt.

^{[1] “Junior doctors’ strike risks patient safety – Jeremy Hunt” BBC, April 25th 2016}

^{[2] ““La La La La – Not Listening” – Says Jeremy Hunt”}