The Coming PLAGUE will NOT be stopped by DRUGS:

 CDC now admits era of antibiotics at an end as bacteria out-wit drug companies  

(NaturalNews) In a breakthrough moment of truth for the CDC, the agency now openly admits that prescription antibiotics have led to a catastrophic rise in superbugs, causing the death of at least 23,000 Americans each year (an estimate even the CDC calls "conservative").

This is the conclusion of the CDC's new Threat Report 2013, a document that for the first time quantifies the number of fatalities happening in America due to antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

What's truly astonishing about this report is that it admits, in effect, that modern medicine is a failure when it comes to infectious disease. The whole approach of fighting bugs with isolated chemicals was doomed to fail from the start, of course, since Mother Nature adapts to chemical threats far more quickly than drug companies can roll out new chemicals.

Sadly, the very approach of using an isolated chemical to combat disease is rooted in a 1950's mentality that has nearly reached its endpoint in the history of medicine. The CDC all but admits this now, saying the era of antibiotics is nearing its end. "If we are not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era" - Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the CDC.

The admission should send alarm bells ringing across the medical establishment. Because what it really means is the day isn't too far off when doctors and hospitals can no longer offer treatments for common infections.

The rise of alternative medicine... again!

Western doctors, of course, are wildly ignorant of far more effective ways to treat infections. Because of the profit interests in patented antibiotic chemicals, doctors have never been taught how to use herbal antibiotics to which there is virtually no resistance whatsoever.

Doctors have also never been informed of the powerful antibiotic properties of silver, copper, aloe vera gel, garlic (and sulfur compounds), Chinese medicine herbs and many other bacteria-fighting substances from the natural world.

As a result, the day is soon coming when doctors will send patients home to die, not knowing that real cures for their infections already exist and are readily available from the world of natural medicine. That's the real cost of the failure of western medicine: countless numbers of victims will suffer and die due to the incredible ignorance of doctors and their foolish reliance on a system of chemicals that has failed humankind.

Our epitaph [as a species] may well read: "They died of a peculiar strain of reductionism, complicated by a sudden attack of elitism, even though there were ready natural cures close at hand." - Gary Paul Nabhan, author, Cultures of Habitat

Here at Natural News, I estimate that due to the disastrous failure of antibiotics combined with the widespread suppression of human immune function (due to drugs, heavy metals, environmental chemicals and more), superbug deaths will quickly accelerate, reaching 100,000 deaths per year by 2020, nearly rivaling the number of Americans already killed each year by FDA-approved prescription medications.

The top three superbug threats

According to the CDC, the top three superbug threats right now are:

• Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae or CRE (9,000 annual infections, 600 annual deaths)

• Antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea (246,000 infections per year, now only one drug left to treat it)

• Clostridium difficile (250,000 infections per year, 14,000 deaths)

In all, these three superbugs combined with others cause 23,000 total deaths per year in the United States alone, says the CDC.

The CDC, predictably, also says part of the solution is to get more people vaccinated. This makes no sense whatsoever as vaccines only make immune systems weaker while doing nothing to prevent infections of superbugs.

On the positive side, the CDC did say that antibiotic use should be curbed in agriculture (meaning fed to animals for meat production). In truth, more antibiotics are used each year in agriculture than in humans.

CDC still clings to futile hope of failed drug model

Despite having the ability to now see the problem at hand, the CDC still desperately clings to the futile hope that "yet another chemical" will be developed that solves the superbug problem.

This is an exercise in insanity, as you might have guessed, because whatever new chemical the drug companies come up with -- and they've mostly stopped even bothering with new research into antibiotics -- will quickly be rendered useless by microbiological adaptations.

The inconvenient truth about all this is that the CDC will never solve this problem with the same kind of thinking that caused the problem. The never-ending chase for more chemicals is futile. Patented drugs will never conquer drug-resistant bacteria, period. It doesn't matter how many federal subsidies are dumped into drug research.

So what will work, then? For starters, probiotics offer a solid defense against drug-resistant gut bacteria. So the first thing everyone should be doing to shield themselves from deadly infections is to consume probiotics on a regular basis.

Secondly, antibiotics themselves create an "intestinal wasteland" that's ripe for infection with deadly drug-resistant strains. So the very use of antibiotics in a patient is something that needs to be far more comprehensively taught to doctors and explained to patients so that the real risks of antibiotics are more widely understood (and avoided).

Ultimately, the use of antibiotics needs to be sharply limited. There are still cases in which limited, targeted use of antibiotics is a real lifesaver, but the widespread abuse of antibiotics is what has led our medical system to the brink of collapse when it comes to deadly superbugs.

Superbugs and superweeds

Thanks to the widespread use of glyphosate with GMOs in agriculture, farms are now suffering from runaway "superweeds" that pose many of the same problems as superbug infections in humans.

Both problems are caused by the widespread abuse of isolated chemicals, sold by profiteering corporations with complete disregard for the long-term consequences of their products.

Both problems are almost universally swept under the rug by the corporations that gave rise to the problems in the first place.

And both problems are promised to be solved with "yet more chemicals" that overcome the resistance to the previous round of chemicals.

There's a fatal problem with this: each round of chemicals needs to be substantially more toxic than the last round, causing a "spiral of chemical toxicity" that will only lead human civilization to its own destruction.

Even right now, we are very close to the rise of a highly infectious superbug that is resistant to all known antibiotics. Once unleashed, such a superbug could sweet through the population and cause the death of over a billion people across the planet. In such a scenario, the entire system of western medicine has zero tools to deal with it. There is no vaccine, no drug and no FDA-approved treatment that will even touch it.

***I have some powerful alternative options - Are You Ready to Explore Them? ***

Do Antibiotics in Animal Feed Pose a Serious Risk to Human Health?

In countries such as Denmark, antibiotics are used only sparingly on farms, to treat animals that are sick – a novel concept in the US, where antibiotics are used to prevent disease in healthy animals (the farmers simply ‘assume’ the animals are going to get sick otherwise, given their deplorable living conditions).

In the US, animals raised in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are also continuously given low-dose antibiotics in their feed because it makes the animals get bigger, faster.

In other parts of the world, such as the European Union, the use of antibiotics as growth promoters in animal feed has been banned for years, yet in the US this is still a topic of debate, with industry supporters trying to downplay the inevitable fact that this irresponsible use of antibiotics is most likely posing a serious risk to human health and the environment.

Debate Rages on Over Agricultural Antibiotics Use

Writing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), David Wallinga, MD, Senior Advisor in Science, Food and Health with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy argues that the routine addition of antibiotics to animal feed is not a necessary component for animal feed and is contributing to a coming ‘catastrophe’ of antibiotic resistance.

“Enforceable measures to reduce this overuse must be core to any effort to avert the coming catastrophe. Because meat production is global in nature, these measures must be implemented nationally and supranationally,” Wallinga wrote.

He explained that, “based on a growing body of evidence, almost every European and North American public health authority agrees that routine antibiotic use in animal food production likely worsens the epidemic of resistance… Less certain is the political will to act upon that information.”Wallinga continued:

“You cannot dispute the warning of England’s chief medical officer, Sally Davies, that antibiotic resistance is one of modern health’s greatest threats. Also beyond dispute is her analysis of its causes—the lack of new drugs combined with massive overuse of existing antibiotics.”

In contrast, David Burch — who develops antibiotics for use in animal feed — wrote in BMJ that drugs used in agriculture are not those causing problems with resistance in humans, a stance that ignores the big picture. As veterinarian Gail Hansen told NPR:

“If you just look at — does this antibiotic, given to this animal, make this person sick, so we can’t treat them with that same antibiotic — that’s such a very narrow piece of this whole interconnected puzzle.”

Indeed, and this is a much bigger issue, even, than antibiotics simply being left behind in your meat. For instance, bacteria often share genes that make them resistant. In other words, the drug-resistant bacteria that contaminates your meat may pass on their resistant genes to other bacteria in your body, making you more likely to become sick.

Drug-resistant bacteria also accumulate in manure that is spread on fields and enters waterways, allowing the drug-resistant bacteria to spread far and wide and ultimately back up the food chain to us.

Are Antibiotics in Agriculture Feed Contributing to the Spread of MRSA?

Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) infections are on the rise, and have become increasingly deadly as well because it has become resistant to the broad-spectrum antibiotics commonly used to treat it, such as methicillin, oxacillin, penicillin and amoxicillin.

This “super bug” is constantly adapting, and while it was first confined to hospital settings (or those who had recently spent time in a hospital or other health care setting), it’s now becoming increasingly common in people who have picked it up in schools, locker rooms, gyms or other community settings.

A third variety of MRSA has also evolved among livestock animals, and there is increasing concern that this strain could begin to infect humans all over the globe.

According to Burch, the use of antibiotics in animal feed is not associated with an increase in MRSA, but it’s unclear how this assumption can be made since MRSA was first discovered in pigs and pig-farm workers in the Netherlands in 2004. Since then, this livestock MRSA strain has spread across Europe, Canada and the United States, causing both mild and life-threatening infections.

Earlier this year, research was also published showing that CAFO workers were found to be carrying pig MRSA, and that farmers at pig farms that use antibiotics are more likely to contract MRSA from the pigs than workers at antibiotic-free farms. As written in PLOS One:

“Despite similar S. aureus and MRSA prevalence among ILO [industrial livestock operation] and AFLO [antibiotic-free livestock operation]-exposed individuals, livestock-associated MRSA and MDRSA (tetracycline-resistant, CC398, scn-negative) were only present among ILO-exposed individuals.

These findings support growing concern about antibiotics use and confinement in livestock production, raising questions about the potential for occupational exposure to an opportunistic and drug-resistant pathogen, which in other settings including hospitals and the community is of broad public health importance.”

80 Percent of US Antibiotics Use Is for Agricultural Purposes

The US uses nearly 30 million pounds of antibiotics annually in food production. Livestock antibiotic use accounts for 80 percent of the total antibiotics sold in the US. Compare this to the 6 million pounds of antibiotics that are used for every man, woman and child in the US combined. CAFOs, in particular, are hotbeds for breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria because of the continuous feeding of low doses of antibiotics to the animals, which allows pathogens to survive, adapt, and eventually, thrive.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) ruled that antibiotic resistance is a major threat to public health, worldwide, and the primary cause for this man-made epidemic is the widespread misuse of antibiotics.

Unfortunately, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has continually fallen short in this regard. Instead of enforcing stricter regulations, the agency has simply asked food producers to voluntarily limit their use of certain antibiotics. In fact, on December 22, 2011, the agency quietly posted a notice in the Federal Register that it was effectively reneging on its plan to reduce the use of antibiotics in agricultural animal feed – a plan it has been touting since 1977!

Reductions in Agricultural Antibiotics Proven to Reduce Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

Measures to curb the rampant overuse of agricultural antibiotics could have a major impact in the US, as evidenced by actions taken in other countries. For example, Denmark stopped the widespread use of antibiotics in their pork industry 14 years ago. The European Union has also banned the routine use of antibiotics in animal feed over concerns of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

After Denmark implemented the antibiotic ban, it was later confirmed the country had drastically reduced antibiotic-resistant bacteria in their animals and food. Furthermore, the Danish ‘experiment’ proved that removing antibiotics doesn’t have to hurt the industry’s bottom line. In the first 12 years of the ban, the Danish pork industry grew by 43 percent — making it one of the top exporters of pork in the world. But the American Pork Industry doesn’t want to curb antibiotic use, as this would mean raising the cost of producing pork by an estimated $5 for every 100 pounds of pork brought to market…

Help Change the System by Boycotting CAFO Meats and Signing This Petition

You can help yourself and your community by using antibiotics only when absolutely necessary and by purchasing organic, antibiotic-free meats and other foods from local farmers – not CAFOs. Even though the problem of antibiotic resistance needs to be stemmed through public policy on a nationwide level, the more people who get involved on a personal level to stop unnecessary antibiotic use the better.

If you live in the US and want to get involved on a national level, Food Democracy Now! has created a petition against the overuse of antibiotics in livestock production.8 If you care about this issue, I suggest you use this petition to make your voice heard.

Article by Dr Mercola

What Happens When Kids Eat a Fast-Food Diet?

Nutrients from quality foods are critical in helping your child reach his or her fullest potential. Unfortunately, many kids are not getting the nutrients they need, including in the US where:

• Nearly 40% of children's diets come from added sugars and unhealthy fats
• Only 21% of youth age 6-19 eat the recommended five or more servings of fruits and vegetables each day

This is a veritable recipe for disease, and is a primary reason why many of today's kids are arguably less healthy now than most all previous generations. Obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and even liver disease.  These are diseases that once appeared only in middle-age and beyond, but are now impacting children.

Mental health is also at stake. One study from British researchers revealed that kids who ate a predominantly processed food diet at age 3 had lower IQ scores at age 8.5.  For each measured increase in processed foods, participants had a 1.67-point decrease in IQ.

Along with the potential for lowered IQ, a junk-food diet can also set the stage for asthma, eczema, and a variety of allergies, inflammatory conditions and autoimmune diseases.

In fact, most of the leading diseases plaguing the US are diet-related, including heart disease, diabetes Alzheimer’s and cancer. The National Institutes of Health even states that four of the six leading causes of death in the US are linked to unhealthy diets.

Nutritional deficiencies in your child's first years of life can even lead to deficits in brain function that put them at risk of behavioral problems -- from hyperactivity to aggression -- that can last into the teenage years and beyond. This is why the importance of proper nutrition simply cannot be overstated.

Your Child's Taste Preferences are Largely Formed by the Age of 3

The best time to shape your kids' eating habits is while they're still young, as kids learn very quickly to prefer certain tastes and textures. When parents fed their preschool-aged children junk foods high in sugar, salt and unhealthy fats, it had a lasting impact on their taste preferences in one study.  All of the children tested showed preferences for junk foods, and all (even those who were just 3 years old!) were also able to recognize some soda, fast-food and junk-food brands.

The researchers concluded what you probably already suspect: kids who were exposed to junk food, soda and fast food, via advertising and also because their parents fed them these foods, learned to recognize and prefer these foods over healthier choices.

This doesn’t mean there’s no hope for older children raised on junk-food; they, too, can learn to love healthy foods, but it is easierif they instead learn to love such foods right from the start.

Is Your Child Drinking Soda?

Per capita soft drink consumption has increased nearly 500 percent over the past five decades, and children, unfortunately, are a major reason for this staggering increase.

Kids are introduced to soda at very young ages and consumption only increases as they get older. An estimated 56 percent of 8-year-olds drink soda daily, and once the teenage years come, some kids drink at least three cans of soda each day. In the documentary, some of the children featured were drinking 6 glasses of soda a day, and they were well under the age of 5!

Regular soda is, of course, a significant source of sugar (mostly in the form of fructose), with each can containing about 10 teaspoons of sugar. Consumption of sugar-sweetened soda and other beverages has been linked to the rising obesity epidemic, along with other health issues, among kids. And diet sodas are not an acceptable alternative. Diet sodas are actually worse for your health than regular soda, due to the artificial sweeteners they contain, and have been linked to weight gain, obesity, cancer, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, stroke, addiction, and other health issues.

There’s really no reason for children of any age to be drinking soda, but toddlers and young children, especially, should not be wasting valuable calories on this health-damaging beverage.

Tackling the Reasons Why You're Eating Unhealthy is the First Step

The documentary is intriguing because it follows three different families, detailing the reasons why their diets have gone downhill. The top reasons mentioned, which are probably similar for many families, include:

• Too busy or lack of motivation to cook
• Not believing the junk food is harming their children
• Battling with a picky eater and believing it’s better for your child to eat something, even if it’s unhealthy
• Trying to keep mealtime too strict for kids, such that they’re not free to explore and taste new foods
• Parents eating junk foods and teaching this behavior to their kids

Experts were utilized in each circumstance to help the families overcome their unique obstacles, and this is what you’ll need to do in your own home as well. If you feel you’re too busy to cook, for instance, you’ll need to re-examine your priorities so nutritional meals can be made to be a part of your daily life. If motivation is the problem, you may need to consult with a health care practitioner who can tell you what health problems are in store for your kids if their diets don’t change …

Exposing Your Children to Healthy Foods is So Important

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=go_QOzc79Uc

As prominent celebrity British chef and food advocate Jamie Oliver explains in the video above, our food culture has changed so drastically over the last 30 years, a majority of young children of today do not even know what fresh, whole food is.

This is a major setback, as the more different flavors a child is exposed to early on generally the easier time they will have developing a taste for a variety of healthy foods. This actually starts with breastfeeding, as the milk will take on the flavors of whatever the mother eats.

Then, it’s important to keep offering healthy foods to your child, even if they refuse them or seem to not like them. It can take 10-15 food exposures before a child becomes familiar with and likes a certain food, so persistence is important. Food is a part of crucial lifestyle choices first learned at home, so you need to educate yourself about proper nutrition and the dangers of junk food and processed foods in order to change the food culture of your entire family. To give your child the best start in life, and help instill healthy habits that will last a lifetime, you must lead by example.

Are Your Kids Hooked on Junk Food? Taking Action Now Could Save Their Health

Most parents go to great lengths to keep their children safe. You hold their hand when they walk across the street, teach them to stay away from a hot stove and tell them not to talk to strangers. Yet, the majority of parents feed their children potentially harmful food without a thought for the later consequences.

It's not the occasional treat here and there that I'm referring to, either. It's the fact that most toddlers recognize the sign of the "golden arches" long before they are speaking in full sentences.

Why?

Because they are often raised on French fries, fast-food hamburgers and orange soda, or if "raised" is a bit of a stretch, are taught that French fries, chicken fingers and soda is an acceptable meal (worse yet, they may come to think of it as a reward).

If you and your kids are absolutely hooked on fast food and other processed foods, you're going to need some help and most likely some support from friends and family if you want to kick the junk-food lifestyle. 

Article by Dr Mercola

Are You & Your Children Being Poisoned?

(NaturalNews) A new study on dietary toxin exposure found that all the participating children exceeded the cancer benchmark levels for arsenic, dioxins, dieldrin, and DDE, while 95 percent of preschoolers exceeded the non-cancer benchmark for acrylamide. More worrying was that the cancer risk ratios were exceeded 100-fold for arsenic and dioxins.

Children and adults exceed cancer benchmark levels for six toxins

Researchers at the University of California, Davis recently carried out the first-ever study to consider dietary exposure to 11 toxins simultaneously, including acrylamide, arsenic, lead, mercury, dioxins and several banned pesticides (chlordane, DDE, dieldrin). The study's participants included 364 children aged two to seven, 446 parents of young children, and 149 older adults, all living in California. To assess exposure levels, researchers used food-frequency questionnaires along with toxin content datasets from the Environmental Protection Agency. Exposure levels were then compared with the "cancer benchmark" of each toxin, which is the exposure level that would generate one excess cancer per million people over a 70-year lifetime. Non-cancer benchmark levels were also considered, for health effects other than cancer.

The researchers found that average exposure levels of the children and adults exceeded cancer benchmark levels for arsenic, lead, dieldrin, DDE and dioxins, while the children also exceeded cancer-benchmark levels of chlordane. Both children and adults also exceeded the non-cancer benchmark for acrylamide exposure. Most worrying was that for each of these toxins, children showed greater exposure margins than adults. In fact, children exceeded the cancer benchmark levels 10-fold for DDE, nearly 100-fold for dieldrin, and over 100-fold for arsenic and dioxins. Researchers noted that children are most at risk from these toxins because they are still developing.

Health effects of the most prevalent toxins

Arsenic has been linked to liver, lung, kidney, and bladder cancers. Dieldrin is a banned insecticide suspected to cause cancer, Parkinson's disease and low birth weight. DDE is a metabolite of the banned pesticide DDT, and is known to damages cells' genetic material. Chlordane is also a banned pesticide and has been linked to cancer, neurotoxicity and low birth weight. All of these toxins, and especially dioxins, are also suspected endocrine disruptors and may therefore also disturb the development of the children's immune, nervous and reproductive systems.

Top five food sources of each toxin for preschoolers

As a helpful guide, the researchers identified the top five food items responsible for exposure of preschoolers to each toxin:

Arsenic: poultry, cereal, salmon, tuna, mushrooms
DDE: dairy, potatoes, meat, freshwater fish, pizza
Dieldrin: dairy, meat, cucumber, cantaloupe, pizza
Chlordane: dairy, cucumber, meat, popcorn, potatoes
Dioxins: dairy, meat, potatoes, cereal, mushrooms
Acrylamide: crackers, fried potatoes, cereal, graham crackers, chips

Also, foods with the highest pesticide residues were (non-organic): tomatoes, peaches, apples, peppers, grapes, lettuce, broccoli, strawberries, spinach, pears, green beans and celery.

What to do about it - Go organic and reduce animal product consumption

Based on their findings, the researchers in this study made several dietary recommendations for reducing exposure to the main toxins in the general population as follows:

Pesticides: switch to organic fruits, vegetables and dairy products
Acrylamide: reduce intake of chips, cereal, crackers and other processed carbohydrate foods
Persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals: reduce consumption of meat, fish, dairy

It's rare that the authors of a peer-reviewed journal article publicly recommend a switch to organic foods, but that's exactly what these researchers have done. Far from being just for snobs, organic products now appear to be a necessity for anyone wanting to protect themselves and their children from potentially dangerous levels of multiple toxins which now pervade our environment and food supply.

Are Toxins Lurking in Common Personal Care Products?

(NaturalNews) Be careful which facial creams, shampoos, moisturizing soaps and other personal care products you buy and use, as many of them apparently contain a chemical linked to causing what some experts have now dubbed an "epidemic" of skin allergies and other dermal issues. A new report compiled by dermatologists reveals how the preservative chemical methylisothiazolinone, or MI for short, has led to a massive increase in eczema and other skin allergies in recent years, and calls on regulators to ban the chemical.

Long used in many conventional care products as a deterrent for bacteria and other harmful pathogens, and as an alternative to toxic parabens, MI is generally recognized by regulatory authorities in both the U.S. and Europe as safe and non-toxic. But its practical use in the real world tells a much different story, with many people reporting severe allergic and other negative reactions when exposed to it. The situation has gotten so out of control, according to reports, that some dermatologists are now calling for an immediate moratorium.

"We are in the midst of an outbreak of allergy to a preservative which we have not seen before in terms of scale in our lifetime," says Dr. John McFadden, a consultant dermatologist at St. John's Institute of Dermatology in London, as quoted by the Telegraph. "Many of our patients have suffered acute dermatitis with redness and swelling of the face. I would ask the cosmetics industry not to wait for legislation but to get on and address the problem before the situation gets worse."

Levels of MI in personal care products have increased over the years

In years past, MI was mixed with other preservatives, so its concentration was relatively low. But as these other chemicals were phased out due to their own tendencies to cause skin allergies, MI stuck around as an isolated chemical. According to the Telegraph, concentrations of MI in personal care products today are as high as 100 parts per million (ppm), up 2,500 percent from around 4 ppm in previous formulations.

"This new epidemic of allergic contact dermatitis from isothiazolinones is causing harm to European citizens," wrote Margarida Goncalo, President of the European Society of Contact Dermatitis (ESCD), in a recent letter to the European Commission. "Urgent action is required."

According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a consumer watchdog organization, MI is moderately hazardous, having been linked to various allergies and immune disorders. Studies identified by the group also link MI to brain cell damage, and the chemical has been implicated in causing nerve damage in humans.

Avoid products that contain MI by consulting the GoodGuide

Some companies have already begun to quietly and voluntarily phase out the use of MI in their products, but many other brands such as Nivea, Wet Ones, and Dove still use it, according to reports. Even some popular "natural" brands like Seventh Generation and Burt's Bees use MI in their product formulations.

You can view a complete list of known products that contain MI by visiting GoodGuide.com:
 www.goodguide.com

"[A] brief exposure to methylisothiazolinone, a widely used industrial and household biocide, is highly toxic to cultured neurons," explains a 2002 study out of the University of Pittsburgh that was published in the Journal of Neuroscience. "Because of their widespread use, the neurotoxic consequences of both acute and chronic human exposure to these toxins need to be evaluated."

(NaturalNews) Be careful which facial creams, shampoos, moisturizing soaps and other personal care products you buy and use, as many of them apparently contain a chemical linked to causing what some experts have now dubbed an "epidemic" of skin allergies and other dermal issues. A new report compiled by dermatologists reveals how the preservative chemical methylisothiazolinone, or MI for short, has led to a massive increase in eczema and other skin allergies in recent years, and calls on regulators to ban the chemical.

Long used in many conventional care products as a deterrent for bacteria and other harmful pathogens, and as an alternative to toxic parabens, MI is generally recognized by regulatory authorities in both the U.S. and Europe as safe and non-toxic. But its practical use in the real world tells a much different story, with many people reporting severe allergic and other negative reactions when exposed to it. The situation has gotten so out of control, according to reports, that some dermatologists are now calling for an immediate moratorium.

"We are in the midst of an outbreak of allergy to a preservative which we have not seen before in terms of scale in our lifetime," says Dr. John McFadden, a consultant dermatologist at St. John's Institute of Dermatology in London, as quoted by the Telegraph. "Many of our patients have suffered acute dermatitis with redness and swelling of the face. I would ask the cosmetics industry not to wait for legislation but to get on and address the problem before the situation gets worse."