ParfumGigi@aol.com

Politicized FDA is dangerous

Thank you for the recent op-ed piece by the courageous Texas cosmetic surgeon who stopped performing breast implant surgery after seeing too many harmful side effects among his own patients.

While the pharmaceutical companies and most cosmetic surgeons are gleefully toasting the FDA's recent reapproval of silicone breast implants, women are paying the price with painful contractures when the implants harden and health problems when the implants rupture and silicone leaks into their bodies.

How could the FDA approve these implants when so much evidence points to their dangers? The answer lies in the changing role of the FDA under the Bush administration. Once an independent organization whose role was to protect Americans from harmful foods and drugs, now the FDA serves the White House. In this case, corporate profits trumped women's health and safety.

At the same time that the FDA rushed to approve silicone implants, it stalled approving over-the-counter emergency contraception (the morning-after pill) for years, despite its own scientific advisory board's recommendation for immediate approval. In this case, the Bush administration leaned on the FDA to reject the EC proposal because it feared (incorrectly) that EC was an "abortion pill."

Until this administration leaves office, we are all at risk of having our health compromised by an ineffective, politicized FDA.

Phyllis Kernoff Mansfield

State College

Liberal hypocrisy on stem cells

Recent headlines reporting that stem cells discovered in women's wombs could cure diseases and make body parts is not overly revealing seeing that umbilical cord blood and placentas have already proven beneficial in medical progress.

What is amazing is that many liberals have voted against funding adult stem-cell research, which doesn't destroy life and has proven effective, but will vote for embryonic stem cell funding, which deletes life and hasn't provided any benefit to date. This shows that the debate continues to be about protecting abortion, not producing cures.

Abortion is the left's sacred cow, and propaganda against life-supporting findings will be forthcoming and fierce.

What isn't being published is that if embryonic stem cells were productive, private funding would be overwhelming.

If liberals prevail, pro-lifers will be forced via tax dollars to fund research that undermines human dignity and impugns decent morality.

At our fourth child's birth, the midwife displayed and explained the placenta to our holy awe. Not only does the placenta sustain the growing baby, but it can now be used to bless some other hurting person.

Pro-lifers are pro-science, and it is not shocking to know that our future baby is more valuable to science alive than dead.

I hope Congress will remember how fragile the unalienable rights that we enjoy are and that the most important purpose of our government is to protect life and liberty, not concoct excuses for experimenting with and exterminating the most innocent.

Gabriel Morley

Spring Mills

The real pension problem

We should get the facts straight on the state pension "problem."

Over the past 10 years, approximately 83 percent of the retirement fund's revenue has come from the investment earning from the fund. Only 10 percent of the funding comes from the employees and only 7 percent from employers (state, taxpayers, school districts).

The retirement fund has more than $3.6 billion in its investment portfolio and returned 17.1 percent in 12 months ended June 30, 2006, placing the Pennsylvania state fund in the top 10 percent of all pension funds nationwide. Its 92.9 percent funded status is among the best in the country.

How did the pending problem develop? Blame the governor of New Jersey, who wanted new funds but no new taxes.

She took the funds going to the retirement fund and put them in the general fund to pay for new programs. She said the fund would earn enough to cover the loss.

Pennsylvania did the same thing in 2003.

The problem is the same in the private sector. The big bosses are always raiding the retirement funds. They can't keep their hands off the workers' money.

Employers have to start now to gradually increase their contributions to avoid larger balloon payments starting in 2012, or we could tell the employers to find the dollars in their existing budgets -- no new taxes.

Finally, we could pass legislation to stop the bosses from doing what they do best.

Everett P. Tiffany
State College

Espionage lunacy

I have a looney and a double looney -- Canadian $1 and $2 coins, respectively -- sitting on my dresser.

Whoever is tracking their movements ("Pentagon warns Canadian coins pose spy threat") must be bored out of his gourd because they haven't moved in years.

Thomas Thwaites

State College