http://thechronicleherald.ca/Front/9013781.html

Right...as if the regular seasonal flu kills a healthy 13-year-old within a couple of days.

By the way, where is data that you used to make this claim?:

I want to know how you arrived at that conclusion. Please post the source of the relevant statistical data.

Genetics play a huge role in this. In fact, genetics play a huge role in how a person responds to any disease. Your genome has a whole set of genes called the Major Histocompatibility Complex that determines a great deal of how your immune system recognizes and reacts both to potential threats and to yourself. However, saying that genetics plays a role is a gross oversimplification. Genetics causes predispositions towards getting a disease and those predispositions can be affected by a huge variety of factors such as diet, overall health and previous exposure to things. One of the likely reasons that young people are being hit so hard by H1N1 is that us geezers have been exposed to a lot more flu varieties and at least one of those exposures has given us at least some immunity to H1N1.

Hey, take a look, more interesting articles:

Boy rushed to hospital after swine flu jab (diagnosed w/ swine flu)
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ne...-14543347.html

As for the earlier complaints about herbal medicine, take a look at this:

Curry kills gullet cancer cells
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/64...cer-cells.html

This is not the herbal "medicine" (or should I say, tasty food spice) that Mercola is peddling. You have no idea what his crap is made of.
And you still haven't said a word about a real traditional "medicine" known as ayurveda which is loaded with heavy metals.

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/vaers/

Still waiting on those statistics. But from your silence I guess it is safe to say you have nothing to backup your BS.

Excellent -- I eat enough curry (and consume enough coffee) to hopefully fend off more than just 'gullet' cancer and therefore, it's safe for me to continue smoking.

For those further interested in another healthy natural consumable: eating a clove of raw garlic every day is supposed to be good too, for such things as fighting off infections like those associated with abcesses, incision sites, etc. And you don't have to chew it, just swallow it whole; you don't even taste it.

As for the 'special needs' angle mentioned in the other article above, I wonder what exactly that has to do with the swine flu situation in that story? Does having special needs make one more susceptible to flu? Hmm..

Sasha

From the article:This is why nespapers should not be allowed to talk about science unless they have their hands held. The scientists would have put the agent directly into the cells - in a real life cure situation, it is highly unlikely that a surgeon would do this on a human being. So while this is a massive breakthrough, they still have to go through years of R&D and testing to design a way for it to be as effective when delivered through an injection or in pill format or whatever.

As to coffee giving you cancer (and similar) it normally means that a scientist has taken a very concentrated form of caffeine and then injected it directly into a rat (and remember rats != humans) - the equivalent of drinking souble espresso continually for 20 years. The increase is also a small percentage increase on the likelihood of getting cancer - likely to be statistically indignificant.

For more discussion on this, read Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (www.badscience.net) as he discusses this sort of thing in greater detail.

I was implying that coffee is beneficial for evading stomach cancer, not causing cancer. Whether there's truth to this or not, I'm not really absolutely certain-- but it works for me (I'll probably get got by a stomach ulcer & colon cancer instead :/)

Sasha

It seems to me that if you believe the newspapers everything causes and cures and prevents cancer. I found that as soon as I stopped reading them the likelihood of my getting cancer shrank to almost zero!

Lovely!
The moment I stopped reading newspapers the war in Afghanistan stopped as well :P
</irony>

We can't live our lives and follow all this stupid research results. Everything we do is wrong anyway. In the end, it seems like everything cause cancer. Perhaps we should just assume everything cause cancer, and make a whitelist

I think your greatest weapon against ANY enemy you face is your mind. You must be Neo. If you believe you can do something, then you can.

Also, what if AIDS and cancer were just things that are made up by Big Pharma to make more dough ? What if your greatest enemy was the thought "I have cancer, and I'm going to die" ... because often, that's what really kills you, instead of fighting you give up mentally, and so your body dies.

http://www.healingcancernaturally.co...eatment-4.html

Ok, definitely trolling.

Well, see, that's just it -- all other things being equal. But they never are. You have a different background and a different perspective than I have. So you see and understand things differently than I do. That means that there are certain things that you will get, perhaps intuitively, that I just won't get. Explain them to me in enough detail and I might. Or if I spend enough time studying and trying. Conversely, there are things that I have put an enormous amount of energy into learning and understanding over many years. After having done that, I understand those things intuitively. You probably wouldn't care to replicate the effort necessary to do the same. You have other things you would prefer to spend your time on.

I think it's rude of someone to come straight out and say, "you wouldn't understand." I heard one instance of a student saying something like that to a famous Professor. The Professor corrected him by saying, "You shouldn't say, 'You don't understand.' Rather, you should say, 'I haven't made myself clear.'" But that's in a context where the subject matter should have been common to the two individuals in question. There are some cases where the gap between two individual's background and knowledge on a particular topic is too wide to span without a lot of effort on both sides. It may be that one side or the other or both are not willing to put in that kind of effort. Which can get abbreviated into, "you wouldn't understand."

There used to be more good science reporters employed by newspapers. However, as newspapers lose out to the internet, lose circulation and advertising dollars, cut back staff, and go out of business, there are fewer of them able to maintain the higher standards. In many of their online editions, when someone tries to write a story that has a political edge, the commentary that follows from readers turns into drivel as trolls on both sides descend into name calling.

Of course, anecdotal evidence (e.g. "works for me") is the least reliable form of scientific evidence. But, hey, lots of good things have been turning up about coffee. Want to know what's in it? Check out the article in Wired. Want to enhance some of those things that are in it? Check out Kopi luwak.