CNN's chart, below, shows the number of drug recalls between 2006 and 2009. Over the initial three years, recalls kept inching upward, only to spike dramatically between 2008 and 2009, from 426 recalls to 1,742.

That’s an increase of 309 percent in one year!

A single drug repacker, which has since been shut down, accounted for over 1,000 of those recalls, but even if you discount that one rotten apple, drug recalls still rose by over 50 percent.

Recent Drug Recalls Revisited

As recently as May, drug maker Johnson and Johnson voluntarily recalled all unexpired lots of certain over-the-counter (OTC) pediatric drugs, including Tylenol, Motrin, Zyrtec and Benadryl products, after they discovered “manufacturing deficiencies that could affect the quality, purity or potency of the medicines.”(A full list of the products affected by the recall can be found at this link.)

The recalled products were found to contain either:

1. Higher concentration of active ingredient than specified
2. Inactive ingredients that may not meet testing requirements
3. Tiny particles of unspecified origin

Amazingly, that was the second mass recall of these types of OTC drugs within less than a year.

In September of 2008, 21 children’s and infant’s Tylenol liquid products were deemed potentially unsafe due to bacterial contamination found in one of the inactive ingredients.

With all these recalls occurring, how can any health conscious consumer trust the safety or the effectiveness of any of these drugs?

I find it astonishing that while drug prices in general are soaring, drug manufacturers are still using rising costs as an excuse for failing to produce high-quality, pure products.

How about getting by with a little less profit in order to ensure each product is at minimum free of contamination and contains the specified amount of ingredients?

After all, as of 2007, the pharmaceutical industry was worth more money than the gross domestic product (GDP) – which is the market value of all the output produced in a nation in one year -- of entire COUNTRIES, including Belgium, Sweden and Switzerland, according to statistics from the World Bank.

In fact, if placed on the list ranking the countries of the world according to gross domestic product, the pharmaceutical industry ranked number 17 out of 185 countries in 2007!

But apparently, that’s still “not enough”…

Next Step You Need to be Aware of - - the Switch from Drugs to Vaccines

As the patents on many blockbuster drugs are expiring, and Big Pharma is increasingly found liable for damages from dangerous drugs, drug companies have shifted their focus from drugs to vaccines.

There are currently vaccines against everything from obesity to smoking, and even stress, in the pipelines – health concerns that have precious little to do with bacterial or viral infections, which is the basis for the vaccine theory in the first place (and even that theory is up for discussion).

Aside from being potentially dangerous to the extreme, why is this trend so troubling?

In a nutshell: Lack of liability.

Drug companies have fiercely defended every single drug ever recalled as being safe and effective – until definitively proven dead wrong, and sometimes they still wouldn’t fess up to their culpability.

The same shameless, misleading strategies used for drugs are being used for vaccines.

But with vaccines, not only are the health risks far greater for you and your family, the subsequent liability for the drug company is greatly reduced or even eliminated!

So you take ALL the risk, while the drug companies demand your trust, take your money, and avoids any legal actions should your life be destroyed by one of their vaccines.

From a drug maker’s perspective, vaccines may be one of the absolute “safest” products to make, because their liability is negligible to non-existent, depending on the vaccine.

Pandemic vaccines are 100 percent risk-free for the vaccine maker, as laws ushered in after 9/11 exempt them from ANY liability. And, making matters worse, the laws create a negative incentive to test it for safety, because if they are fully aware of problems, then they could potentially be held liable for willful misconduct! It’s in their best interest to know as little as possible about the adverse reactions their vaccine might cause.

Non-pandemic vaccine injuries fall under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which is a no-fault federal vaccine injury compensation program. But again, very few vaccine injured children ever receive compensation from this program, and as explained in this previous article, the program is so seriously flawed as to be useless.

Getting back to the issue of recalling dangerous medicines, without liability, what incentive is there to voluntarily recall a vaccine when dangers or serious problems are discovered?

None!

The HPV vaccine Gardasil has obvious problems that have led to 53 recorded deaths of vibrant, healthy young girls, and yet everyone is moving on like nothing is the matter. No recall. Not even an official warning.

So should we buy into the promises of safe, pure, effective vaccines, when history has shown us that mistakes occur FAR more frequently than anyone would dare to guess – both in drug and vaccine manufacturing?

The answer, of course, is up to you. But they won’t be getting my vote of confidence anytime soon.

Deception at an All Time High

Adding to this debauched mess is the rise in out-and-out deception, as Prevent Disease describes so well in this recent article.

It’s become very apparent that disinformation operations are at an all-time high – or at least it is the most OBVIOUS campaigning we’ve ever been privy to.

Prevent Disease, in an attempt to demonstrate the outright lies by national governments and the media, highlights three examples from the last year alone — the H1N1 scandal, airport body scanners, and the BP oil disaster.

According to Prevent Disease:

“... [T]he H1N1 scandal reached its pinnacle in the fall of 2009 ... From radio, internet, television, newspapers, magazines, outdoor posters, signage and promotions, you could not escape the flu hype campaigns so diligently pursued by all the malicious agendas at play who only wanted one thing — to promote a dangerous H1N1 vaccine.

After hundreds of reports exposed the criminal activity by all levels of government, we left the same people in power to do it all over again.”

And when news first unfolded about the BP oil disaster, the immediate response was to cover-up, deny, and respond with ignorance. In the end, a private company was permitted to use extremely potent toxins to mask the extent of their environmental crime while putting tens of thousands, if not millions of American’s health at risk.

Prevent Disease goes on to list “25 rules of disinformation,” employed with great success by a number of individuals with the intent to “prevent rational and complete examination of any chain of evidence which would hang them.”

It may be well worth your time to read through them, as being aware of how the con is done will help you avoid being conned in the first place.

Who Do You Trust, and Why, Exactly?

Another interesting article that ties in here was published in the British Guardian, under the headline: “Drug firms hiding negative research are unfit to experiment on people. Another pharmaceutical giant has settled a big compensation claim. So why are they allowed to go on misleading the public?”

That is becoming the ten thousand dollar question…

Why are drug companies ALLOWED to continue maintaining the status quo despite being caught lying, defrauding, even knowingly killing, time and time again?

And perhaps even more intriguing, why is the public still falling for their tactics?

Just how many bizarre and devastating side effects must be rattled off at the end of a drug ad before it grabs your attention and make you question its stated benefit?

I believe that humans inherently want to trust and depend on authority. The question is, at which point does critical thinking and pure self-preservation kick in? It seems we’re still waiting for critical mass to be reached when it comes to this point, but I think we’re getting closer…

One such authority that have been granted full trust are scientists, employing the scientific method to prove or disprove the causes of health, disease, and drug safety, among many things.

But even in these prestigious vestiges of medicine, we’re now finding more and more evidence of corruption that threatens the entire premise of the scientific method. Dr. Beatrice Golomb, MD, PhD has shared shocking information about the underbelly of medical science in this newsletter, as well as Dana Ullman.

If you missed either of those interviews, I highly recommend reviewing them now.

Ullman also has a phenomenal column in the Huffington Post, where he recently wrote:

“Doctors today commonly assert that they practice "scientific medicine," and patients think that the medical treatments they receive are "scientifically proven."

However, this ideal is a dream, not reality, and a clever and profitable marketing ruse, not fact.”

Recent court cases highlight the truth of what Golomb and Ullman discuss. For example, it was discovered that AstraZeneca purposefully “buried” studies with unflattering results for their drug Seroquel.

The Guardian’s Ben Goldacre writes:

“In trial 15, patients with schizophrenia who were in remission were randomly assigned to receive either Seroquel, or a cheap, old-fashioned drug. After a year, the patients on Seroquel were doing worse. These negative findings were left unpublished.

… Here is the opening of another email in that quetiapine case. Richard Lawrence writes in an internal memo to colleagues: "Lisa has done a great smoke and mirrors job on trial 15.””

Smoke and mirrors… Ain’t that the truth! And that is oftentimes what you’re using when making decisions that affect your health.

In the case of Seroquel, this smoke and mirrors job led to tens of thousands of people developing drug-induced diabetes, in addition to not actually working as advertised... Once these buried studies were unearthed, AstraZeneca ended up paying off more than 17,500 patients who had developed diabetes and related illnesses.

Again, I remind you that class action lawsuits against drug manufacturers for vaccine damage is not an option. They rigged the game years ago and effectively lobbied Congress to make it illegal to sue them for any vaccine related injuries.

So, beware jumping on the vaccine bandwagon for every ill.

Healthy Lifestyle – Not Pills or Injections – is the Answer to Your Health Problems

It should be self evident by now that the idea of synthetic chemicals being the answer for your health problems is FALSE.

However, there are certain basic tenets of optimal health that have remained permanent truths, regardless of the claim-of-the-day spouted by modern science, and these include:

1. Eat a healthy diet that’s right for your nutritional type, paying very careful attention to keeping your insulin levels down. This typically involves increasing your consumption of whole (preferably organic) foods, while avoiding processed foods and sugary drinks of all kinds, as they are loaded with fructose, genetically modified ingredients, and chemicals.
2. Drink plenty of clean water
3. Address your day-to-day stress
4. Exercise
5. Get plenty of appropriate sun exposure
6. Limit your exposure to toxins
7. Consume healthy fats
8. Eat plenty of raw food
9. Optimize your insulin and leptin levels
10. Get plenty of sleep

Remember, leading a common sense, healthy lifestyle is your best bet to produce a healthy body and mind, and increase your longevity. Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical industry, the food industry, and even government itself sure won't make it easy for you to avoid the garbage that ruins your health.

The drug industry spends about $15 billion a year manipulating and distorting your perceptions about the proper solutions for your health challenges. And, the food industry spends TWICE that much to brainwash you and your children to choose highly processed convenience foods that will accelerate your path toward death and disease -- and your need to use drugs to control your symptoms.

It’s a vicious cycle of deceit and misinformation!

Fortunately, you can still take self-responsibility, educate yourself, make better, healthier choices, and be a living testament to what the truth of the matter really is.

By adhering to the basic tenets of optimal health – the basics of a healthy lifestyle, not just a temporary fix for a particular ailment -- you are building a healthy mind and body, and thereby safeguarding yourself against a multitude of health problems and serious diseases.