Widely Used Cancer Drug Causes Potentially Deadly Holes in GI Tract

S. L. Baker
Natural News
July 2, 2009

Bevacizumab is the generic name for the widely used Genetech cancer drug marketed as Avastin. It inhibits tumor growth by blocking angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels. But according to an article just published in the June edition of The Lancet Oncology, cancer patients treated with Avastin in combination with chemotherapy are at a heightened risk of experiencing a potentially catastrophic side effect. In fact, it’s a side effect that could kill them before their malignancy does — a gastrointestinal (GI) perforation (a hole in the wall of the stomach, small intestine or large bowel).

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), gastrointestinal perforations lead to leakage of intestinal contents into the abdominal cavity, causing an inflammation known as peritonitis. Symptoms of this condition may include severe abdominal pain, chills, fever, nausea and vomiting. Treatment includes antibiotics and sometimes surgery. In a patient already weakened from previous surgery and chemo, additional major surgery and drugs clearly pose serious risks.

There have been concerns about the use of bevacizumab and GI perforation in the past, spurring the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to issue a black-box warning stating the drug should be discontinued in patients who already had a GI perforation. However, a direct link between the drug and perforation hasn’t been firmly established — until now.

A huge hole in your stomach

As reported in The Lancet Oncology, scientist Shenhong Wu and colleagues from Stony Brook University Cancer Center in New York conducted a meta-analysis of 17 randomized trials involving 12,294 patients with a variety of solid tumors to find out whether bevacizumab causes GI perforations. The researchers also investigated whether the dose of bevacizumab is related to an increased risk of developing GI perforations and whether having a specific type of cancer ups the risk, too.

The results of the study showed that the incidence of GI perforation was almost one percent, with two times the increased risk of GI perforation in patients receiving bevacizumab compared with controls. What’s more, the researchers found a mortality rate of 21.7 percent in cancer patients who developed GI perforation.

The chance of developing a GI perforation was found to be dose-dependent. Lower doses of bevacizumab (2.5 mg/kg per week) increased the chance of GI perforation by 61 percent; while at a higher dose (5 mg/kg per week), the risk of a GI perforation increased by 167 percent. The incidence of GI perforation with bevacizumab also varied depending on what type of cancer the patient had. The highest incidence was found among patients with advanced colorectal cancer and renal cell cancer, and the lowest was in patients with pancreatic cancer.

“As bevacizumab is extensively used in routine cancer treatment…it will be increasingly important to recognize symptoms indicating perforation and intervene promptly to reduce morbidity and fatality…our study might help to identify a subset of patients receiving bevacizumab at high risk of bevacizumab-associated perforation,” the study authors concluded in their article.

This is not the first time bevacizumab, a.k.a. Avastin, has had some bad publicity. First approved by the FDA in 2004 for metastatic colon and non-small cell lung cancer, the drug was also approved to treat metastatic breast cancer in 2008. That decision generated controversy because it went against the recommendation of the FDA’s own advisory panel. The reason? FDA approval for late-stage cancer treatments is supposed to be contingent upon data showing a drug extends or improves the quality of patients’ lives. According to Genentech’s own application for the approval of Avastin, this drug does neither.

For more information:
http://press.thelancet.com/tloperfo…
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/b…
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/MEDLINEPLUS/…

USA Patriot Act Defines Chemotherapy Pushers, CPS Aggressors as Terrorists

Mike Adams
Natural News
June 10, 2009

In observing the outrageous acts of doctors who have turned 13-year-old Daniel Hauser and his mom into “fugitives from the law” over their refusal to submit to toxic chemotherapy treatments, I began to wonder whether existing U.S. law covers the crimes being committed against the Hauser family. It turns out the U.S. PATRIOT ACT already defines these cancer doctors and Child Protective Services zealots as “terrorists.”

What is a terrorist? A domestic terrorist is a person who engages in illegal acts that are “dangerous to human life” and which are intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population (among other things).

So let’s examine how this might apply to the forced chemotherapy of Daniel Hauser:

• Chemotherapy is dangerous to human life. There’s no question whatsoever about that. Even the cancer doctors will tell you chemotherapy is poison.

• The fugitive manhunt for the Hauser family, along with the threat of arrest from Child Protective Services, was part of a campaign to intimidate or coerce a civilian population into bowing to conventional cancer treatments (a political and financial aim).

• The kidnapping of Daniel Hauser by state authorities is a violation of United States law, not to mention the 4th and 14th amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

So we actually have all three elements here: Danger to human life, intimidation of a civilian population and the violation of law.

That makes this assault on the Hauser family an act of domestic terrorism!

So why aren’t the cancer doctors and CPS kidnappers being arrested and shipped off to Gitmo for interrogation? I’ll tell you why: Because in a police state, terrorism is really defined as anyone who acts against the State. Those who work for the State while engaging in acts of terrorism are exempt from terrorism laws.

The way these things work is that state authorities fabricate claims that “children are in danger” and then they use that as justification to firebomb a compound, or kidnap a teenage boy, or arrest the parents, or do whatever they wish to do.

They raid Scientology offices, or the Nemenhah Native American group (http://www.nemenhah.org), or home Bible study groups (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index….) or any other group they can target and label as being outside the mainstream. In effect, they criminalize nonconformity, then they use the excuse that children are harmed by such nonconformities as a justification for criminalizing anyone who resists.

And yet I would argue that conformity is more harmful to children than living an “alternative” lifestyle. Conformity means feeding your children hot dogs, injecting them with over a hundred vaccines by the age of six (not a hundred individual shots, but a hundred vaccines combined into far fewer shots), exposing them to thousands of hours of television violence, taking psychiatric drugs and engaging in other destructive acts that ultimately harm children.

Healthy child rearing is, by definition, alternative in nature. Because most children (mainstream children) are not anywhere close to healthy. The truly healthy children are those raised by parents who reject mainstream junk foods (and medicine) and, instead, raise their children on real, unprocessed food made by Mother Nature.