Millions of parents in America have reservations about their child getting the flu shot, but it has nothing to do with developing autism. A recent survey shows that more than a half of parents believe their child can get the flu from the vaccine itself, while a third simply believes it doesn’t work.

The 2017 flu season was one of the most severe on record in the United States, with 180 child deaths blamed on influenza. The consensus in the medical community is that flu shots are safe for use in adults and children, and that — hands down — it is the best way to prevent infection and combat the spread of the virus.

But this survey, conducted by medical researchers at Orlando Health Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children, shows that many parents still feel nervous about the vaccine despite its overwhelming support by doctors.

Today we investigate one of the biggest medical controversies of our time: vaccines. There’s little dispute about this much-- vaccines save many lives, and rarely, they injure or kill. A special federal vaccine court has paid out billions for injuries from brain damage to death. But not for the form of brain injury we call autism. Now—we have remarkable new information: a respected pro-vaccine medical expert used by the federal government to debunk the vaccine-autism link, says vaccines can cause autism after all. He claims he told that to government officials long ago, but they kept it secret.

Yates Hazlehurst was born February 11, 2000. Everything was normal, according to his medical records, until he suffered a severe reaction to vaccinations. Rolf Hazlehurst is Yates’ dad.

Rolf Hazlehurst: And at first, I didn't believe it. I did not think that, I did not believe that vaccines could cause autism. I didn't believe it.

Bayer said on Wednesday that farmers in France and Germany were digging up thousands of hectares of rapeseed fields after traces of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) banned for cultivation were found in seeds sold by the company.

Up to 950 files relating to the contaminated blood scandal were removed by Whitehall officials, an investigation has found.

Although most have since been retrieved, at least 45 documents are still missing and unaccounted for.

The files were ‘checked out’ by civil servants from the Department of Health and, oddly, the Department for Education at intervals over the past three decades.

Although most of the files relating to the contaminated blood scandal have since been retrieved, at least 45 documents are still missing and unaccounted for

Campaigners believe they contain evidence that will incriminate officials over what they knew and when.

American health care kills. And it's because markets for health care services are grossly distorted. That's the assessment of businessman David Goldhill, whose father died of a hospital acquired infection. Goldhill wrote up what he discovered subsequently in an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled, "How American Health Care Killed My Father. One of the key problems in American health care, he says, is that the consumer of health care services or products is rarely paying directly.

Deep underwater, and deeper underground, scientists see surprising hints that gas and oil deposits can be replenished, filling up again, sometimes rapidly.

Although it sounds too good to be true, increasing evidence from the Gulf of Mexico suggests that some old oil fields are being refilled by petroleum surging up from deep below, scientists report. That may mean that current estimates of oil and gas abundance are far too low.

Recent measurements in a major oil field show “that the fluids were changing over time; that very light oil and gas were being injected from below, even as the producing [oil pumping] was going on,” said chemical oceanographer Mahlon “Chuck” Kennicutt. “They are refilling as we speak. But whether this is a worldwide phenomenon, we don’t know.”

A top British surgeon has called for transgender women to get life-changing womb transplants so they can have children of their own.

It comes after doctors in Brazil delivered the world's first baby from a womb transplant that was given to a woman from a deceased donor last year.

Now surgeon Christopher Inglefield, founder of the London Transgender Clinic, believes transgender women deserve a uterus implant.

He says the procedure is 'essentially identical' to the one performed on women.

An incurable, mad-cow-like brain infection nicknamed “zombie deer disease” that causes deer, elk and moose to behave strangely and aggressively has spread through half the US – and some fear it may soon turn up in humans.

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) renders its victims uncoordinated, confused and aggressive, while also causing them to lose weight and – eventually – their lives, giving rise to the nickname “zombie deer disease.” Sick animals walk in repetitive patterns and lose all fear of humans, developing a vacant stare.

Like mad cow disease, CWD attacks the brain and spinal cord and is believed to be caused by prions, infectious proteins that travel in bodily fluids and remain contagious for years after leaving the body of their host. Also like mad cow disease, in its early days at least, some scientists have scoffed at the notion it can be transmitted to humans. Others see history repeating itself.

Olga Naidenko, EWG’s senior science adviser, notes that it is unusual for researchers to detect PFAS chemicals in drinking water above the EPA advisory level. And she believes the agency’s existing advisory levels for PFOS and PFOA “are not sufficiently protective.” Communities with high concentrations, she says, should be informed.

The stakes surrounding studies of PFAS prevalence, concentrations, and human health impacts are immense. Stricter standards could force U.S. drinking water suppliers to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to remove the chemicals. And they could require those who used the chemicals—including industrial facilities, fire fighters, and the U.S. military—to pay for cleanups and potentially even damages for people who can show their health was harmed by the substances.

Prescription drug prices in the United States are insane. It’s such an endemic problem that both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have vowed to address it, albeit in different ways. And as illustrated by Congressional superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), those drug prices are paired with cheating taxpayers on research investments.

Ocasio-Cortez likened taxpayers to an early investor in pharmaceutical research through grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Aaron Kesselheim, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, explained responded to that comparison by explaining the NIH does not receive any licensing fees that would act as a “return” on that investment. Instead, the product of NIH research is just handed off to for-profit companies that then produce high-profit prescription medicine.

In an effort to reduce infections and disease transmission among injection drug users, San Francisco handed out a record 5.8 million free syringes last year - about 500,000 more than in 2017.

“The drugs of choice among the homeless appear to be heroin during the day, and methamphetamine at night - to stay up,” said Eileen Loughran, who heads the city’s syringe access and recovery program. Loughran said on average an addict shoots up three times a day, “but some people do more.”

As of February 6, the county which sits just north of the border from Portland, Oregon has tallied 50 confirmed cases and 11 suspected cases of measles since January 1.

The one thing MSM won’t tell you about the measles outbreaks happening around the country is that those who have been diagnosed brought the disease in from other countries.

Gene Simmons has said he was “wrong” and “not informed” about cannabis as he began his role as “chief evangelical officer” for Canadian cannabis company Invictus. The announcement last week took many fans by surprise since the Kiss star had always been outspoken about the use of any form of drugs, and has always insisted he’d never used anything other than prescription substances.

“I was wrong and I was not informed,” Simmons told the Toronto Sun in a recent interview. “Well, drug abuse, you don’t have to be a genius [to reject it] and alcohol abuse, everybody knows that’s wrong, but I’ve been dismissive of cannabis. And I didn’t know much about it. I just dismissed it out of hand.

“I have to man up and admit," he continued, "in the past, I used to dismiss lots of things because of ignorance and arrogance. About three years ago when I did my own research, I found out astonishing new information that doctors and researchers were talking about with regards to cannabis.”

Experts have created a stunning digital reconstruction of a centuries-old lost city discovered in South Africa.

The ruins of Kweneng were spotted beneath thick vegetation at Suikerbosrand near Johannesburg using sophisticated laser technology.

Karim Sadr, a professor at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, told Fox News that researchers have been hard at work mapping and creating a digital reconstruction of part of the site.

The number of documented cases of a potentially deadly infection caused by a fungus is on the rise in California’s Central Valley.

According to the California Department of Public Health, the number of cases of Valley Fever increased by 11 percent in 2018 compared to 2017.

Valley Fever (coccidioidomycosis) is caused by a fungus that lives in soil mostly found in Arizona and California, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports.

People can get Valley Fever by breathing in microscopic spores found in the air in areas where the fungus is present, which also include parts of Mexico, Central America and South America.

One of the World’s foremost watchdogs for monitoring the threat giant space rocks pose to our planet has upped the risk level for a recently discovered asteroid.

It’s the plot of numerous sci-fi novels and more than a few Hollywood blockbusters. Humans seemingly have a deeply ingrained fear of a big rock from space crashing into Earth and wiping out civilization, so much so that we continuously monitor thousands of objects that float around the solar system.

In its latest update the European Space Agency’s Near Earth Object Coordination Centre moved the asteroid 2018XB4, which was only discovered last year, into its top 10 potentially dangerous Near Earth Objects (NEOs).

The heir to the Sackler billions worked to protect the company while profiting every step of the way according to a lawsuit that was unsealed just last week in the state of Massachusetts.

A complaint filed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts accused the Sackler family of not only knowing about the growing opioid epidemic that was being fueled by the painkiller Oxycontin, but pushing their sales force at Purdue Pharma to get more doctors prescribing the drug.

Once a patient had been prescribed the painkiller, executives urged staff to get those individuals on a higher dosage, thus generating more profit.

The typhus outbreak in Los Angeles County is getting worse...

For awhile now, public health officials have been telling us that the disease was mostly affecting the homeless. But that's just not the case anymore.

Last November, Liz Greenwood was diagnosed with typhus. Liz is a veteran Los Angeles City Hall official, and a Deputy City Attorney that works in City Hall East.

"It felt like somebody was driving railroad stakes through my eyes and out the back of my neck," Greenwood told the NBC4 News I-Team . "Who gets typhus? It's a medieval disease that's caused by trash."
She believes she contracted the disease from fleas in her office. Fleas are known to live on rats, and rats are known to live around the trash bins across the city.

"There are rats in City Hall and City Hall East," she added. "There are enormous rats and their tails are as long as their bodies."

Russian Roscosmos space corporation and the Academy of Sciences think that it is time to start preparing lawyers for the territorial disputes over the Moon, their joint resolution, obtained by Sputnik, read.

This recommendation has been made following the meeting between Roscosmos and the Academy of Sciences on the development of the National program for exploration and colonization of the Moon, held in November, 2018.

“To consider it necessary… to develop a plan for legal support of the interests of Russia in potential territorial disputes and instruct specialized universities (Lomonosov Moscow State University, the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia [RUDN] and others) to train a necessary number of specialists in space law,” the resolution read.

A life-threatening fungal illness is rapidly spreading throughout central California, health officials say.

The number of Valley Fever cases rose eight percent in 2018 from the previous year - up to more than 8,100 from more than 7,500, according to a report released by the California Department of Public Health last week.

The increase from 2016, when cases totaled around 5,700, was even more shocking - an sharp spike of 42 percent.

Kern County, which is about 133 miles from Los Angeles, was hit the hardest by far, documenting a little more than 3.000 cases - up 23 percent from 2017 and 48 percent from 2016.

The FDA is amending their food additive regulations to provide for the “safe” use of Advantame, after receiving a petition from Ajinomoto Co., Inc., a Japanese company which produces most of the world’s MSG as well as being a major supplier of aspartame. . . .

Senior Scientist Lisa Lefferts, at CSPINET (The Center for Science in the Public Interest) shares her concern that “In a key cancer study in mice, the number of mice that survived to the end of the study [of Advantame] was below the FDA’s own scientific recommendations, and is therefore inadequate to provide confidence in the safety of a chemical likely to be consumed by millions of people.”

Japan’s swine fever outbreak has spread to five prefectures including Osaka, and more than 10,000 pigs will be culled as part of measures to prevent further contagion, the government said on Wednesday.

This is a different strain from the deadly African swine fever China has been battling, an agriculture ministry official said.

Pigs in central Japan’s Aichi prefecture have been found with swine fever, the first such case outside neighboring Gifu prefecture since the country’s first swine fever outbreak in 26 years was confirmed in Gifu last September.

Pigs shipped from the Aichi farm in question to pig farms in Osaka and three other prefectures were also found infected with swine fever, the ministry official said, adding some 15,000 pigs at affected farms were being culled and buried.

Residents and officials in the city of Los Angeles, California are horrified that their city has descended into a third world hellscape of poverty and disease. The typhus outbreak raging through the city is a flea-borne disease often reserved for socialist and poverty-stricken dystopias such as Venezuela.

But that’s modern Los Angeles. Typhus is spread by fleas hitching a ride on rats. While the general population struggles under the weight of the government (local, state, and federal in LA’s case) and the homeless population continues to climb up, the same cannot be said for the rats that carry fleas the cause typhus. The rat population in LA is doing just fine, however, as piles of garbage dot the cityscape, making it Thanksgiving Day every day for the city’s fat, happy rodents, wrote the American Thinker.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders has written to a pharmaceutical company asking for a justification on its decision to charge $375,000 annually for a drug that for years has been available to patients for free.

Sanders sent the letter to Catalyst Pharmaceuticals on Monday, in which he asked it to explain both the financial and non-financial factors the company considered when it set the list price for Firdapse in December.

The drug is used to treat Lambert-Eaton Myasthenic Syndrome (LEMS), a rare neuromuscular disorder, according to the letter dated February 4.

The disorder affects about one in 100,000 people in the United States.