Green Options

So who doesn’t love this planet?

Unless you have a few screws loose (or living in extreme poverty or managing to survive in a war zone or some similar predicament), at some basic level, you gotta love living on Earth – for its beauty, sustenance, and mystery. But how are we taking the responsibility to protect, preserve or restore our increasingly degraded planet?

That’s what Dr. Helen Caldicott sets out for her readers of If You Love This Planet: A plan to save the Earth (a revised and updated second edition from W.W. Norton). Climate change, ecological collapse and the damage wrought by the ever expanding global, economic system dominated by big corporations and big government demanded an update of her first edition in 1992.

If You Love This Planet sounds a compelling alarm to the damage one species has managed to cause to the fundamental life-sustaining biological processes on Earth – along with our placid, if not direct, exploitation of our own species for economic gain, power grab, or as a result of omitted (or outright deceptive) information. That species is, of course, homo sapiens. Caldicott’s hard-hitting book dives into the diagnosis and causes, followed by a practical prescription and offers a few simply stated cures.

Dr. Caldicott, a pediatrician, knows her stuff, as the founding president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and a widely recognized champion for nuclear disarmament. She explains how the planet, like a human body, is an organism with “a natural system of interacting homeostatic mechanisms.” If one is diseased, others start to fail.

A cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington recommends avoiding the flu shot and taking vitamin D instead. Donald Miller, MD, says “Seventy percent of doctors do not get a flu shot.”

Health officials say that every winter 5–20 percent of the population catches the flu, 200,000 people are hospitalized, and 36,000 people will die from it. The National Vital Statistics Reports compiled by the CDC show that only 1,138 deaths a year occur due to influenza alone, and more than 34,000 of the “36,000″ flu deaths are what officials estimate are “influenza-associated” pneumonic and cardiovascular deaths.

There is also a lack of evidence that young children benefit from flu shots. A systematic review of 51 studies involving 260,000 children age 6 to 23 months found no evidence that the flu vaccine is any more effective than a placebo (Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2006;1:CD004879).

A randomized trial found that the incidence of influenza in infants whose mothers had a flu shot during their pregnancy was 4%. The incidence of flu in infants whose mothers did not have a flu shot was 10%. (NEJM 2008;359:) In the study, flu shots reduced the relative risk of influenza illness in infants by a seemingly impressive 63%, yet only 6 out of 100 infants actually benefited from the shot. The other 94 received no benefit – 4 got influenza anyway – and all are at risk from being harmed by the vaccine, particularly from the mercury, aluminum, and formaldehyde in it. - Donald Miller, MD

Flu shots contain a number of substances which may have adverse effects on health, especially for children: