Hey guys – this buds’ is for you…welcome to our world…

Natural News

Wednesday, February 01, 2012 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer

Mass vaccination is apparently not the only depopulation strategy being employed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as new research funded by the organization has developed a way to deliberately destroy sperm using ultrasound technology. BBC News reports that the Gates Foundation awarded a grant to researchers from the University of North Carolina (UNC) to develop this new method of contraception.

For their study, the UNC team tested ultrasound on lab rats and found that two 15-minute doses “significantly reduced” both sperm counts and sperm integrity. When administered two days apart through warm salt water, ultrasound caused the rats’ sperm counts to drop below ten million sperm per milliliter, which is five million less than the “sub-fertile” range, and stay that way for up to six months.

The report claims the technology is for contraceptive purposes only and not for causing sterility. However, Dr. James Tsuruta, who led the research, told reporters that it is unclear whether or not the technology can cause long-term damage, and that more research is needed to determine whether or not repeated ultrasounds cause permanent damage.

The Gates Foundation awarded 78 different research projects with $100,000 grants each as part of its “Grand Challenges in Global Health Program.” Ten of these projects specifically addressed new technologies for contraception, according to TIME, including one for a pill that inhibits the growth and maturation of sperm, and another for creating chemical compounds that prevent sperm from reaching the egg (http://healthland.time.com/2010/05/14/male-birth-control-stopping-sperm-with-ultrasound/).

“We think this could provide men with up to six months of reliable, low-cost, non-hormonal contraception from a single round of treatment,” wrote the researchers in their report. “Our long-term goal is to use ultrasound … as an inexpensive, long-term, reversible male contraceptive suitable for use in developing to first world countries.”

Back in 2010, Bill Gates explained to attendees at the TED Conference that year his ideas for culling the world population, one of which involved increasing vaccination rates (http://www.naturalnews.com/029911_vaccines_Bill_Gates.html). Now, his organization is actively funding research into advanced contraceptive methods that could render individuals infertile. Coincidence?

Sources for this article include:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-16756381

http://healthland.time.com/2010/05/14/male-birth-control-stopping-sperm-with-ultrasound/

http://www.naturalnews.com/029911_vaccines_Bill_Gates.html

Read the complete article and related information at Bill Gates funds technology to destroy your sperm

National Public Radio

INDIANAPOLIS February 1, 2012, 06:20 pm ET

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Birth control pills are known to be nearly 100 percent effective when taken properly, but a recall of the drugs could send a shudder through women of childbearing age.

A manufacturing mix-up by Pfizer Inc., the world’s largest drug maker, led to some packets being distributed with the pills out of order. That means a patient could have unknowingly skipped a dose and raised her risk of an accidental pregnancy.

Pfizer has recalled about 1 million packets of Lo/Ovral-28 and its generic equivalent, but the company estimates that only about 30 packets were flawed. The pills were made and shipped last year.

Each packet contains 28 days’ worth of the prescription, with 21 pills containing the active ingredient that prevents pregnancy and seven placebo pills. The pills are normally color-coded to note the difference.

Women are supposed to take the pills in order and not mix the placebos with the active pills. Doctors say taking three placebos or more in a row negates the pregnancy protection.

“Women who are potentially on this particular product need to be aware of (the recall) and take this quite seriously,” said Dr. Steven R. Goldstein, a New York University professor of obstetrics and gynecology.

The packaging mistake worries Kendra Mifflin even though she takes a different brand of the pill.

“You take it for a reason, and if that gets messed up … it could change your life,” she said. “It has a big impact, just a simple mistake like that.”

The student at Butler University in Indianapolis said her pills change color as she gets closer to the placebo. Mifflin, who has been taking them for about six months, said she thinks she would notice if the color were out of order, but she’ll probably pay closer attention now.

The drug is not among the more commonly prescribed brands of birth control. The brand Lo/Ovral ranked 64th in U.S. birth control sales last year. The generic version, called norgestrel and ethinyl estradiol, ranked 30th, according to data firm IMS Health.

Doctors and pharmacists say Lo/Ovral is an older version of the pill that is not as widely prescribed anymore. They do not expect many panicked calls about the mix-up.

“Patients are pretty savvy,” said Dr. Adam R. Jacobs, division director of family planning at Mount Sinai Medical Center. He said most women taking the pill would notice that the colors are out of order.

Company spokeswoman Kristen Neese said the drug maker learned about the problem when a customer called late last year to report finding a pink placebo tablet in the middle of her white birth control pills. The company found a manufacturing problem and fixed it immediately.

It issued a nationwide recall in late December asking pharmacies to pull the affected lots from their shelves. It then announced the recall Tuesday to consumers and the media after the Food and Drug Administration requested that.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at Pfizer Recalls 1M Birth Control Packs After Mix-Up

Gender Across Borders

January 23, 2012

This post is by Aphra Behn of Guerilla Girls On Tour!

While on tour this year, I felt an uncomfortable cramping near my crotch. It was somewhere between Arkansas and Oklahoma that I realized what it was.  The government was tightening its grip on my uterus.

In Kansas, my uterus signed up for a sex education class but the only subject taught was abstinence.  In West Virginia, my uterus got tired of abstinence and got a prescription for birth control, but my health insurance company wouldn’t pay for it. As a result, by Texas my uterus was pregnant and sought pre-natal care, but there wasn’t any because state legislators decimated Planned Parenthood’s funds.

Conservatives proclaim to detest government interference in one’s life. Republicans make careers out of repealing regulations.  Yet, both groups seem obsessed with restricting what goes on inside my uterus. It got so bad this year that at one point, I think Congress believed that controlling my uterus would create more jobs.

Now, my uterus may not see ovary to ovary with other uteruses across the land. But no matter where we reside, we are all American uteri and as such are guaranteed a fundamental human right, the right to privacy.  But without much outcry, my uterine rights are shriveling away.

In the first half of last year, 80 abortion restrictions were enacted in male-dominated legislatures across my country,  more than tripling the 23 enacted in 2010.  The last half of the year was gloomier yet, marked by Mississippi voters pondering an initiative that would have declared a fertilized egg a legal person and Health and Human Services Secretary Katheleen Sebelius overruling the FDA’s decision to make Plan B emergency contraception available over the counter for all women.

In Missouri and eight other states, my uterus is required to receive counseling in person before waiting 24 hours for an abortion, necessitating two separate trips to any clinic.   In Georgia and ten other states, my body must receive verbal information about the ability of a fetus to feel pain. In North Carolina and four other states, it has to be given written materials that show medically inaccurate connections between abortion and infertility and between abortion and the possibility of developing breast cancer.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at The State of My Union is the State of My Uterus

1o9.c0m

January 26, 2012

Nowadays, finding out if you’re pregnant is relatively easy — but it wasn’t always that way. Over the centuries, people have come up with downright strange and sometimes revolting tests to figure out whether or not a person is knocked up. Some of them were useless, some required being a chemist in the bathroom, and some caused major ecological disasters.

Check out the long, strange history of pregnancy tests.

Top image: Carmen Seaby on Flickr.

The thing about pregnancy, as a condition, is most people eventually figure out their status on their own. Pregnancy tests, for much of history, have seemed unnecessary.

Still, people have always tried to find ways to peek inside themselves. Some people want to make an early announcement to family. Some need to put their names on a six-year-long waiting list for a private kindergarten, and hope that a year’s worth of kids drop out of the running. Some just wish to experience the sheer joy of peeing on something scientific. Whatever the reason, all those who grab a stick and run to the ladies’ room are participating in a long, occasionally-destructive, and sometimes outright loony march of scientific progress.

Flim-Flam and Hoo-Hahs

There were many ways said to spot a pregnancy early in ancient times, and they all revolve around various things to do with what is known in scientific circles as a woman’s undercarriage. ‘Babies come out of there,’ the ancient wisdom seems to say. ‘So clearly that’s the first place to check.’ The ancient Egyptians used to have a woman urinate on bags of wheat and bags of barley. If wheat sprouted, it was a girl. If barley did, it was a boy. If neither did, there was no pregnancy. (Incidentally, pregnant women’s urine does make wheat and barley grow faster. Think about that the next time you dip into your whole grain cereal.)

The Greeks figured that they could check by applying perfumed linen to the genitals. The mouth and nose, they said, would take on the odor of the perfume if the woman was pregnant.

Medieval doctors, perhaps with a brief flash of insight or perhaps because they were fond of urine in general, focused their attention on liquid excretions. Any way of measuring urine, any way of mixing it with things, spilling it on things, and dipping things into it, became a way to foretell pregnancy.

A needle put in a woman’s urine would rust red or black, if the woman was pregnant. Sprinkled sulfur on urine would cause worms to suddenly appear, indicating pregnancy. Doctors even mixed urine with wine – thankfully just to observe its appearance. Since wine does react with certain proteins, this was as close as anyone at the time really came to being on the right track.

Rabbits and Frogs and Rats, Oh My!

To be fair, the medieval doctors’ methods don’t really sound sillier than anything that was used in the majority of the twentieth century. If someone told you that an injection of a pregnant woman’s urine would make an adolescent rabbit horny, would you believe it? Doctors certainly wouldn’t, which is why they got to horny bunnies by a roundabout route.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at The Bizarre History of Pregnancy Tests

Vac Truth

By Christina England | January 19th, 2012 

The end of last year was masked with sadness for Belgium parents Raphaël Sirjacobs & Béatrice Dupont, as their nine week old daughter Stacy Sirjacobs lost her fight for life. Stacy died just one week after her first vaccinations and left her twin sister Lesly behind. Devastated by their loss their parents are convinced that vaccines and hospital failures were the cause of their beautiful daughters death.

Stacy and Lesly were born one month premature by Caesarean section and spent the next four days in an incubator. Stacy needed resuscitation at birth.

Following medical advice parents Sirjacobs and Dupont decided to have the twins vaccinated. Stacy was slightly unwell with a cold on the day of her vaccinations but doctors assured her parents that it was safe to give her the vaccinations.

(It is worth noting that there is a history of Sudden Infant Death and allergies in the family. The twins were being prescribed a milk supplement due to a milk allergy at the time Stacy became ill)

The twins received Prevenar, a vaccine against meningitis and pneumonia, Infanrix Hexa, a six in one vaccination for diphtheria, tetanus, polio, pertussis, hepatitis B and Haemophilus type B, and finally the Rotarix, a preventive vaccine for gastroenteritis.

This means that these tiny vulnerable babies received a staggering nine vaccines in one day, vaccines that may have caused one of them to die.

A week after her vaccinations Stacy became unwell with a fever of 39.9 degrees C. Her parents decided to administer Perdolan to lower her fever. As their daughter was still very poorly they called the hospital who advised them to bring their daughter in.

The medical staff diagnosed Stacy with a slight chest infection and infection in her blood and told her parents not to worry as this was “not serious”. Stacy was then given medication and put on a drip feed and kept in for observation.

Stacy’s father informed me that all links to the vaccines were strongly denied.

Despite Stacy having a heartbeat of 200 to 230 beats per minute the pediatrician told her parents that she was fine and that she was probably suffering from gastroenteritis (an illness that this little girl had been vaccinated against!).

The worried couple decided not to leave their daughter and remained by her bedside. During the evening they informed the nurse that their daughter had diarrhea but to their astonishment, they were told that the baby had been changed and they were to let her get some sleep and change her when she woke up.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at Baby Dies After 9 Vaccines in One Day

PR Newswire

Coalition for Mercury-Free Drugs (CoMeD)

SILVER SPRING, Md., Aug. 1, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – CoMeD – On Friday, July 22, 2011, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) distributed a revised text for its comprehensive global treaty on mercury.  Advocates for mercury-free drugs were gratified to see pharmaceuticals listed in “Annex C (Mercury-added product not allowed)” of the proposed treaty.

The Coalition for Mercury-free Drugs (CoMeD) helped initiate this addition through its advocacy efforts at the United Nations (UN) negotiations held in Chiba, Japan, in January 2011.  CoMeD President Rev. Lisa Sykes, the mother of a son diagnosed with vaccine-related mercury poisoning, described to representatives of over 150 participating nations how:  ”… unnecessarily injecting mercury into pregnant women and children, as part of a vaccine or other drug, is an ongoing and often unrecognized crisis.”

Thimerosal (49.6% mercury by weight), still used as a vaccine preservative and in-process sterilizing agent, is an unnecessary, and sometimes undisclosed, component in many vaccines.  Its use is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, cancer, birth defects and miscarriage.  Those harmed most by Thimerosal in vaccines are the unborn and newborn.

Addressing the diplomats attending the UN meeting in Chiba, Dr. Mark R. Geier of CoMeD observed: “For this treaty to be fully effective, it must make clear that the intentional exposure of humans, especially pregnant women and young children, to mercury, will not be tolerated.”

Dr. Geier’s comments were especially well-received by the diplomats from developing nations.  CoMeD representatives met with regional working groups in closed-door sessions and explained the feasibility of using 2-phenoxyethanol, a much less toxic alternative to Thimerosal, in vaccines and other drugs.

Dr. Geier challenged the inequity of providing wealthy nations with vaccines having reduced levels of mercury while poor nations still receive vaccines containing dangerously high levels of mercury: “Children around the world, no matter their place of birth or their income level, deserve safe mercury-free vaccines.  The practice of providing mercury-reduced and mercury-free vaccines to developed countries while insisting that developing nations take mercury-containing ones is wrong.”

By the end of negotiations in Chiba, diplomats from developing countries requested the Secretariat to assess the safety of mercury in drugs.

A team of scientists and advocates from CoMeD will attend the next treaty negotiation in Nairobi, Kenya, from October 31 through November 4, 2011, to support keeping this global ban on mercury-containing drugs in the finalized UN treaty.

SOURCE Coalition for Mercury-Free Drugs (CoMeD)

Back to top RELATED LINKS
http://www.mercury-freedrugs.org/

Read the complete article and related information at Global Mercury Treaty May Include Ban on Mercury in Medicine

PipeLineNews.org

July 25, 2011

By CAMILLE GIGLIO

“HPV does not threaten an imminent and significant risk to the health of others. Mandating HPV would therefore constitute an expansion of the state’s authority to interfere with individual and parental autonomy” - Assessing Mandatory HPV Vaccination: Who Should Call the Shots?¹

July 25, 2011 – San Francisco, CA – PipeLineNews.org – Who has the ultimate say over how your children should be raised? Is it you who conceived and bore or adopted them…or is it the government?

Many in the fields of education, medicine and politics believe that all parents must answer to society for the final product. Many spokespersons for foundations seem to believe that parents are merely the custodial caretakers and that these caretakers must be held accountable to the state for the end product.

In researching the ramifications of AB 499, “Minors: Medical Care; Consent,” one comes across statements that would have been incomprehensible only a few years ago.

As an example, two Harvard researchers, Dr. David Ludwig and Lindsey Murtagh, writing for the Journal of the American Medical Association – JAMA, on the subject of childhood obesity – which they claim is a health problem of epidemic proportions, claim that “inadequate or unskilled parental supervision” is in part, to blame and that “extremely obese children should be placed, temporarily, at least, in foster care.” They further add that, “state intervention may serve the best interests of many children.”

I guess these two have not heard about the problems and scandals in finding adequate foster parents who are any better skilled than the parents whom they scorn.

Dr. Arthur J. Caplan, Director of a Foundation for Bioethics Research, while countering this extreme move, is quoted in BioEdge http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/9633/ as saying “the law gives a lot of authority to parents, and rightly so.”

Wait, read that again. The law gives authority to parents? I thought the purpose of our Constitution was to recognize and codify rights granted to us by God, among which is the tradition that parents have authority over their children? Was there some sort of election that changed all that?

AB 499′s language implies that the guidance and rearing of children is a power which naturally belongs to the state and therefore it’s only through an act of bureaucratic graciousness whereby parents are granted permission to raise the government’s children.

Googling the search term “Affordable care Act” + “school based clinics” brings up grants.gov which lays out the process whereby school based health centers are established and funded. The Santa Barbara Independent reported on July 18 that Congresswoman Lois Capps has obtained a $500,000 ACA grant from the Department of Health and Human Services to expand school-based health centers in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties.

A bill or, actually, Resolution has just gone to the Governor, AJR10, by Julia Brownley, entitled School Based Health Centers [SBCs]. Since this is a Resolution it doesn’t carry the force of law, but rather expresses support for the federal Affordable Health Care along with sufficient funding to expand the number of California’s SBCs from its current 176 schools to over 300. This document declares that school based clinics are “medical homes” for children, thus establishing what is essentially a parent-free zone of control.

From the Resolution’s preamble, “AJR 10, as amended, Brownley. School-based health centers. This measure would memorialize the Legislature’s support for the school-based health center program authorized by the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, an appropriation by the United States Congress to fund this program, policies that include school-based health centers as a partner in creating a medical home for all children, and the inclusion of school-based health centers in the reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act.” [source, So, basically the Democrats in the California legislature just gave Congresswoman Capps the authority to go shopping for federal tax dollars to open school based clinics which, AJR 10 says will become medical homes for your children. This is where their health care decision making will reside, not in your hands or your house.

Never mind that Gardasil is, “the most expensive vaccine in the U.S,” costing approximately $120 for each dose – three required over the span of six months for a total of $360 [see, Discovery Magazine, At best this vaccine will provide limited immunity against only 4 strains of HPV, though the Centers for Disease Control acknowledge that there are as many as 40 strains of HPV.

There are a number of websites to which you can refer for further research on the side effects [see, www.pharmalot.com, http://vaccineresistancemovement.org, Nat'l Vaccine Information Center - www.NVIC.org and Even the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report carried an article that while supportive of Gardasil’s ability as a preventative treatment indicated that it is improper for the government to join in a partnership with a pharmaceutical company, mandating the use of a vaccine without parental input. “There is no urgency, no provocation for this very draconian action.” [see, CDC to STD Vaccine maker: 'Back Off,' World Net Daily, The website of S.A.N.E.vax.org http://sanevax.org [Safe, Affordable, Necessary and Effective] carries this statement about the dangers of HPV infections:

“In fact, most HPV infections in young females are temporary with little long-term significance. Seventy percent of infections are gone in 1 year and ninety percent in 2 years. However, when the infection persists – in 5% to 10% of infected women – there is high risk of developing precancerous lesions of the cervix, which can progress to invasive cervical cancer. This process usually takes 15-20 years, providing many opportunities for detection and treatment of the pre-cancerous lesion. Progression to invasive cancer can be almost always prevented when standard prevention strategies are applied, but the lesions still cause considerable burden necessitating preventive surgeries, which do in many cases involve loss of fertility…”

This site also lists a comparison of the harmful effects of the HPV disease as compared to the harmful effects of the Gardasil shot, as reported by individuals who have experienced the side-effects.

Leslie Botha, spokesperson for SANEVAX admits that some of the hundreds of side effects reported by young girls following Gardasil shots such as nausea, vomiting, tingling sensations in hands and feet, etc are common side effects to many of today’s advertised and marketed drugs, but the scandal is that the young women experiencing these side effects should not be happening to normal, healthy girls aged 12 and up.

Please visit this website to see the full list of contraindications and side effects. http://www.prlog.org/11587655-mercks-marketing-department-declares-hpv-is-disease-sanevax-inc-declares-gardasil-disease.html.

The effect of these intrusive legislative mandates is to destroy health care as we know it, reducing doctors and patient to the status of pawns in a game controlled by agendized lawmakers operating far beyond their [already considerable] pay grade.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at Exploring The Politics Of Mandatory HPV Vaccinations – Whose Children Are These?

LA Times

What should we do about people who decline vaccination for themselves or their children and put the public at risk by fueling the resurgence of nearly eradicated diseases?

What does society do when one person’s behavior puts the greater community at risk? We make them stop. We pass laws, or impose economic rules or find some other way to discourage individual behaviors that threaten the greater common good. You don’t get to drive drunk. You don’t get to smoke in public places. You don’t even get to leave your house if you catch some particularly infectious disease.

Then what should we do about people who decline vaccination for themselves or their children and put the public at risk by fueling the resurgence of nearly eradicated diseases? Isn’t this the same thing: one person’s perception of risk producing behaviors that put others at risk? Of course it is. Isn’t it time for society to say we need to regulate the risk created by the fear of vaccines? Yes, it is.

The evidence is overwhelming that declining vaccination rates are contributing to outbreaks of disease. Take just one example, measles. The World Health Organization reports outbreaks in countries where vaccination rates have gone down, including France (7,000 cases so far this year, more than in all of 2010), Belgium, Germany, Romania, Serbia, Spain, Macedonia and Turkey. There have already been 334 measles cases in England and Wales this year, compared with 33 all of last year. The U.S. has seen 118 cases as of mid-May, compared with 56 cases a year from 2001 to 2008.

Small numbers, you say? True, but consider their cost (beyond the suffering of the patients), as illustrated in this case published this year by the Oxford Journals. When a woman from Switzerland who had not been vaccinated for measles visited Tucson in 2008 and became symptomatic, she went to a local hospital for medical attention. This initiated a chain of events that over the next three months led to at least 14 people, including seven kids, getting measles. Seven of the victims caught the disease while visiting healthcare facilities. Four people had to be hospitalized. The outbreak cost two local hospitals a total of nearly $800,000, and the state and local health departments tens of thousands more, to track down the cases, quarantine and treat the sick and notify the thousands of people who might have been exposed.

Fueling that outbreak? None of the victims had been vaccinated or had “unknown vaccination status,” and remarkably, 25% of the workers in the healthcare facilities where the patients were treated had no immunity to measles (either they had not been vaccinated or the antibodies from an earlier vaccination could no longer be detected). One healthcare worker got the disease and gave it to two other people.

That’s just one example of the growing threat to public health caused by people worried that vaccines will cause autism and other harms, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In many places, particularly in affluent, liberal, educated communities (San Diego, Marin County, Boulder, Colo.,), unvaccinated people are catching diseases that vaccines can prevent, like measles, whooping cough and meningitis. In 2010, as California suffered its worst whooping cough outbreak in more than 60 years (more than 9,000 cases, 10 infant deaths), Marin County had one of the lowest rates of vaccination statewide and the second-highest rate of whopping cough. A 2008 study in Michigan found that areas with “exemption clusters” of parents who didn’t vaccinate their kids were three times more likely to have outbreaks of whooping cough than areas where vaccination rates matched the state average.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at Public health: Not vaccinated? Not acceptable

The Sun

July 14, 2011

A WOMAN who went through the menopause aged 12 has made a desperate appeal for an egg donor after a seven-year struggle to have a baby.

Sarah Johnson is thought to be the youngest woman in Britain to suffer from the change, which usually affects women over 50.

The nursery nurse was just a schoolgirl when she began suffering symptoms, including hot flushes and weight gain.

And she stopped having periods when she was 12, just as her friends were entering puberty.

She told her mum, who booked an appointment with her GP – and, after extensive tests for cancer, thyroid and hormone problems, the youngster was left devastated when she was told she was going through early menopause.

Sarah was diagnosed with the rare genetic disorder Mosaic Turner Syndrome, which means she will never be able to conceive naturally.

She was put on hormone replacement therapy when she was just 14 in a bid to treat the side effects.

But now Sarah, 27, fears she will never fulfil her dream of having a baby.

She said: “Children are a big thing in my family. I have one sister, two brothers, seven nephews and nieces and another on the way. It’s a big family.

“Being told I wouldn’t have a baby aged 12 was especially hard after seeing my nieces being born.

“It wasn’t spoken about by my family so it wouldn’t upset me.

“It knocked my confidence. I have always been interested in boys but I was shy around them because, if I got serious, I would have to tell them about my condition and they would be scared off. I didn’t have boyfriends at school.”

The pretty brunette kept her condition a secret from pals until she turned 17.

She revealed all after she had met her future husband, IT administrator Vinny, now 32, while working as a waitress.

The pair hit it off immediately and Sarah told him about her condition shortly after they started dating. She said: “I was open about my condition with him after our first date.

“I said, ‘If you want to carry on I have something to tell you’.

Read the complete article and related information at I went through the menopause… aged 12

Sydney Morning Herald

smh.com.au

Rachel Browne, Jill Stark
July 17, 2011

HOT flushes, night sweats, mood swings and the end of a woman’s natural fertility – all before age 40. This is the disturbing reality of premature menopause, and a new study shows it may be much more common than doctors realised.

A British study of almost 5000 women, one of the most comprehensive yet into premature menopause, showed that 7.4 per cent of women experienced the condition. Previous international studies suggested only 1 per cent of women were affected.

The average age of menopause is about 51 but premature menopause, or premature ovarian failure, affects women under 40, in what is supposed to be their reproductive prime. The figures have intrigued medical experts. They are unable to say whether the condition is becoming more common – perhaps a result of modern lifestyles – or has previously been under-diagnosed.

The data, presented at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Stockholm, reveal that about 6 per cent of women in the study had unexplained premature menopause. Another 1.4 per cent had had surgery that had brought on the condition.

A co-author of the study, Rumana Islam, from Imperial College in London, said more research was needed into the condition.

In cases of unexplained premature menopause, the study found that smokers and women from a lower socio-economic background were more likely to be affected.

”Most cases of unexplained premature ovarian failure have no identified cause, although a minority are due to genetic or auto-immune problems,” Dr Islam said, adding: ”As we learn more about premature ovarian failure, we should be able to identify which aspects of low socio-economic status are associated with this problem.”

Many women with premature menopause go undiagnosed, as the condition is not widely recognised by GPs.

As well as experiencing symptoms such as hot flushes, mood swings and sleep problems, women who go through premature menopause have an increased risk of cardio-vascular disease, dementia, osteoporosis and premature death.

Read Full Article…

Read the complete article and related information at Mystery of menopause before 40