Aspartame is a seizure triggering drug, and the FDA and the parent company Searle both knew it right from the beginning. Industry's own study, a 52 week oral toxicity which was done on 7 infant monkeys showed 5 had grand mal seizures and one died.
The studies were so horrible that Jana Marie Kincaid (who shredded them for G. D. Searle years later, yet sent one copy to France) said aspartame killed everything it touched. During the original studies Searle couldn't get studies to show safety, so they did things like excising brain tumors from rats, putting them back in the study; when the rats died, they resurrected them on paper. They got caught and the FDA asked that Searle be indicted for fraud.
However, both FDA lawyers, Sam Skinner [later promoted to U.S. Secretary of Transportation and White House Chief of Staff under President George H. W. Bush] and William Conlon [now Senior Counsel at Sidley Chicago, who was the firm defending Searle, also in Chicago]; both then hired on for the defense team and subsequently allowed the statute of limitations to expire. Then, the FDA set up a Board of Inquiry and voted to revoke the petition for approval:
.wnho.net /fda_petition1.doc
This is when as Searle CEO, Donald Rumsfeld went into high gear, and G. D. Searle sued.
The FDA originally approved aspartame in 1974, but then looked at some studies and told Searle they could not market aspartame.
Thus, the FDA actually banned aspartame twice. However, today, FDA refuses to discuss the fact they never found aspartame to be safe and even tried to have the manufacturer indicted for fraud! If you read the original Board of Inquiry Report of the FDA note they said the reason they revoked the petition for approval is because aspartame couldn't be proven safe and that they believed it triggered brain tumors.
According to Jerome Bressler [former Comptroller and veteran inspector at the FDA], some of the brain tumors were malignant, and some of the tumors were astrocytoma; a four stage astrocytoma is a malignant glioblastoma.
The seizures were so rampant and pandemic that MIT's Dr. Richard Wurtman [Professor of Neuroscience in MIT's Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, and of Neuropharmacology in the Harvard -- MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology] stated that he had received enough cases for aspartame to be removed from the market. He also said he was threatened by the VP of G. D. Searle that if he did studies on aspartame and seizures his research funds would be denied! The VP did not even deny it. Dr. Wurtman no longer speaks out on aspartame, although he was an outspoken and incisive critic for many years.
Here is Gregory Moore's superb UPI 8 month investigation of aspartame discussing these matters: http://www.mpwhi.com/upi_1987_aspartame_report.pdf
A research front group, International Life Sciences Group, called ILSI is one of the vehicles through which research funds are denied.
[tk.org/tag/conflict-of-interest/]
An employee of ILSI who used aspartame and got sick called me one day (unnamed because she chose to remain anonymous). In our conversation she said,
"This is not an independent organization. If you aren't willing to give the result, you get your research funds denied."
Even on the FDA's own list of 92 symptoms from aspartame, please note you see four types of seizures: .mpwhi.com/92_aspartame_symptoms.pdf
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