Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's flagship herbicide Roundup and hundreds of other herbicides, has been found in vaccines. Moms Across America received preliminary screening results from Microbe Inotech Laboratories Inc. of St. Louis, Missouri, which showed:

• MMR II (Merk) vaccine had 2.671 parts per billion (ppb) of glyphosate

• DTap Adacel (Sanofi Pasteur) vaccine had 0.123 ppb of glyphosate

• Influenza Fluvirin (Novaris) 0.331 ppb of glyphosate

• HepB Energix-B (Glaxo Smith Kline) 0.325 ppb of glyphosate

• Pneumonoccal Vax Polyvalent Pneumovax 23 (Merk) had 0.107 ppb of glyphosate.

The MMR II vaccine had levels up to 25 times higher than the other vaccines. Following our test, additional independent tests have confirmed these findings at or above the same levels. The tests were conducted using the ELISA method.

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's flagship herbicide Roundup, has been found in vaccines.

Vaccines contain many ingredients that could be genetically modified (GMO). More than 80 percent of GMOs are genetically engineered to withstand glyphosate-based herbicides and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) allows glyphosate on 160 non-organic food and feed crops. These facts made us wonder if glyphosate could be contaminating not only our water, urine, breast milk, food, soil, beer and wine, but also vaccines.

According to MIT scientist Dr. Stephanie Seneff, "Glyphosate could easily be present in vaccines due to the fact that certain vaccine viruses including measles in MMR and flu are grown on gelatin derived from the ligaments of pigs fed heavy doses of glyphosate in their GMO feed. Gelatin comes from collagen which has lots of glycine. Livestock feed is allowed to have up to 400 PPM [parts per million] of glyphosate residues by the EPA, thousands of times higher than has been shown to cause harm in numerous studies."

French scientist and glyphosate expert Gilles-Eric Séralini has shown in his research that glyphosate is never used alone. It is always used with adjuvants (co-formulants/other chemicals) and he has found those adjuvants to make Roundup 1,000 times more toxic. The detection of glyphosate in vaccines with this methodology would indicate the presence of other co-formulants which are also toxic.

On Aug. 31, Moms Across America sent a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, EPA, National Institutes of Health, California Department of Health and Sen. Barbara Boxer requesting that they make it a priority to test vaccines for glyphosate, recall contaminated vaccines and the EPA revoke the license of glyphosate to prevent further contamination.

"This calls for independent scientists, without financial ties to Monsanto, to investigate these findings, and if verified, immediate regulatory and legislative action," said Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., co-founder of The Mercury Project. "Lawyers litigating against Monsanto should be looking into the company's awareness of this contamination and its effect on children. The public needs to be ready for Monsanto and vaccine manufacturer backlash by their PR machines on this potentially grave information."

Dr. Toni Bark, founder and medical director of the Center for Disease Prevention and Reversal and co-producer of the movie BOUGHT, had this to say after reviewing the test results:

"I am deeply concerned about injecting glyphosate, a known pesticide, directly into children. Neither Roundup nor glyphosate has been tested for safety as an injectable. Injection is a very different route of entry than oral route. Injected toxins, even in minute doses can have profound effects on the organs and the different systems of the body. In addition, injecting a chemical along with an adjuvant or live virus, can induce severe allergic reactions to that substance as vaccines induce the immune system to create antibodies to whatever is included in the vaccine. Since glyphosate is heavily used in corn, soy, wheat, cotton and other commodities, we can expect to see more severe food allergies in the vaccine recipients. In addition, chemicals in ultra-low doses can have powerful effects on physiology behaving almost as hormones, stimulating or suppressing physiological receptors."… Zen Honeycutt is founder and executive director of Moms Across America.

http://www.ecowatch.com/glyphosate-vaccines-1999343362.html

A musical tour of Europe’s great cities: Helsinki.

In the fourth in our series, we look at the Finnish capital and its music.

Sibelius’s work may not be about Helsinki, but the city was central to his life. Photograph: Getty Images/Panoramic Images

I chose Helsinki as our next port of call on a whim. I was just putting the finishing touches to Venice, the third in this series of post-Brexit love letters to Europe’s musical centres, when news came through that the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara had died.

Some recognition of the fact seemed to be in order, though Napoleon Bonaparte – one of the commenters on the Venice article, in which I invited suggestions for Helsinki – immediately saw the flaw in my choice. “The trouble … is that not a lot of Finnish music has an urban feel to it. Of course one can go with the premieres of famous works, but there’s little in, say, Sibelius’s output that says ‘Helsinki’.”

It’s true, of course. The musical Finland we love is all forests and lakes and sleigh rides through frozen landscapes. My number one piece of Finnish music is Sibelius’s Kullervo, an everyday tale (based on the national epic) of incest, murder and suicide. I can’t say I’ve ever got too preoccupied by the dismal story – the music’s epic sweep is what grips me. If ever I need a shot of musical adrenaline, I play the first movement, and there I am bounding through the snow.

Sibelius’s work may not say “Helsinki”, but the city was central to his life. He studied there, premiered many of his works there, and wined and dined to excess there before building a retreat, which he named Ainola, after his wife, 30 miles north of the city. He is synonymous with Finland and Finnish music, and deservedly in any pantheon of great composers.

All seven of his symphonies are masterpieces, and richly varied ones at that – from the Tchaikovskyan First through the majestic Second (which may or may not be an expression of Finnish nationalist fervor), to the unremitting darkness of the Fourth and the affirmatory power of the Fifth and Seventh.

The Third and Sixth are played less often, but they are as essential as the rest. Sibelius’s symphonic cycle loses nothing in a comparison with those of Beethoven, Mahler and Shostakovich: each feels inevitable, like bricks in a great wall that would collapse if you removed any of them. They chart Sibelius’s struggle against illness and disillusion, and it is fitting – if sad – that he burned sketches (perhaps even a full score) of a projected eighth symphony because it failed to meet his exacting standards, and published virtually no new music during the final 30 years of his long life.

Sibelius’s Violin Concerto and the tone poem En Saga are also works that it would be impossible to be without. Beyond these obvious mountain peaks, “thesecretorganist” (one of a small band of devoted commenters to whom these columns owe a great deal) says he wants to “fly the flag” for Sibelius’s lesser-known music, in particular “the massively underrated piano music”: “I especially love the wonderful Romance in D flat, Op 24 No 9, which I once made a rather misguided attempt to learn.” It’s a piece that packs a lot into its four minutes, and I can see (or perhaps hear) why it proved hard to master.

Since Rautavaara was the inspiration for heading north (I really am now sounding horribly like a Radio 3 announcer doing one of their imaginary musical journeys), it is time to engage with his work. The composer sums up much of the difficulty of modern music. He is much played and much recorded, but very few people beyond contemporary music specialists will even have begun to come to terms with his large repertoire – more than 150 works, including eight symphonies, 12 concertos and nine operas.

As with the late Peter Maxwell Davies, the vast output becomes almost self-defeating. What will really stick in the repertoire? Rautavaara’s dreamy Seventh Symphony from 1994, subtitled the Angel of Light, has certainly established itself, tapping into the urge for spiritual fulfilment that also fuelled the success of Górecki’s near-contemporaneous Third Symphony and Tavener’s The Protecting Veil.

Less easily classifiable is Rautavaara’s Piano Concerto No 1, which finds him moving from the serial techniques he embraced in the 1960s towards the romanticism of his later compositions. A wonderful work, as are the monumental (some say Brucknerian) Third Symphony and the lyrical Eighth, “The Journey”, a cliched subtitle that in fact perfectly sums up Rautavaara’s stylistically restless but never faddish career.

Einojuhani Rautavaara photographed in 2014. Photograph: Martti Kainulainen/AFP/Getty Images

This, though, is merely to scratch the surface, and we will be coming to terms with Rautavaara’s oeuvre for decades to come. As long, that is, as orchestras and promoters have the confidence to programme his music. There needs to be a sea change in the way in which we approach “classical” (wretched word) music, to get across the fact that the canon didn’t end with the death of Shostakovich.

Napoleon Bonaparte recommended Uuno Klami’s Suomenlinna Overture (1940) as a more Helsinki-specific composition. I haven’t so far been able to find that, but did listen to the evocative (and oddly un-Finnish) Sea Pictures and Klami’s First and Second Symphonies. The influence of Sibelius is unmistakable, but Klami is a definite find.

It’s also worth reading Napoleon Bonaparte’s immensely detailed and discerning commentary (under the Venice article) on other lesser-known Finnish composers. He makes a particular plea for the piano music of Selim Palmgren, who studied and lived in Helsinki, and it is indeed a delight. Try the Satie-esque Nocturne in Three Scenes and Palmgren’s arresting Piano Sonata No 1.

All of which goes to prove, once again, that the best part of this series are your suggestions, so do keep them coming. I plan to look at Prague next time, so please give me your thoughts on music linked to that city, but also feel free to moot your own favourite musical locations. Vienna, Madrid and Hamburg are already on the stocks for the future.

A final thought about musical productivity. I said that one difficulty for us in getting out heads around Rautavaara was the sheer number of large-scale works to absorb. Where, then, does that leave Leif Segerstam and his 300 symphonies? Probably nowhere, as the works are really frameworks for performers to go their own aleatory way. An interesting idea, but where on Earth do we begin? Those crazy Finns!

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/aug/24/a-musical-tour-of-europes-great-cities-helsinki?CMP=twt_gu 

The sunday sabbath is false!