Dr. Shiv Chopra is a modern-day Canadian hero-a "whistleblower" who exposed the corruption and corporate influence within Health Canada that systematically compromised the safety and health of the Canadian public. In 2004, after decades of opposing the use of antibiotics and hormones in food production, Dr. Chopra was fired from his post at Health Canada. He has spent the past four years writing the fascinating, narrative, insider's account of his many years of attempting to hold Health Canada to the policies and regulations of the Food and Drugs Act.

An expert in immunology, bacteriology, virology, and manufactured and standardized vaccines, Dr. Chopra began his work with the Drug Advisory Bureau in the Canadian Department of National Health and Welfare. His main task was to conduct regulatory evaluations under the then new Food and Drugs Act. He worked in a subsection of the Division of Medicine and Pharmacology (DMP) enforcing the veterinary portion of the Food and Drugs Act to ensure no drugs for food-producing animals could be sold in Canada unless proven they would pose no direct or indirect health risks to humans.

Initially, he was welcomed at the DMP for his strong knowledge and relevant experience. But then the Biologics Control Division who were dissatisfied with 1967 revisions to the Food and Drugs Act started lodging complaints against the DMP, saying the Drug Advisory Bureau scientists lacked qualifications. The vaccine manufacturers exploited these complaints by lobbying to acquire unjustified approvals.

What Dr. Chopra first thought to be racism turned out to be something much worse, and completely shocking. In his book, Chopra describes the systematic removal of qualified scientists, the repression of their research and advice, the strategies used by bureaucrats to retain control of drug approvals, influence by powerful drug industry lobbyists, corruption, greed and political subversion.

Despite research and recommendations from their own scientists, Health Canada refused to ban harmful growth hormones that were used to stimulate extra yields of beef and milk production, and antibiotics that had already been banned in Europe. The hormones Health Canada was deeming safe were, in fact, recognized to cause cancer, reproductive disorders and other ailments in people. Hormone-laced beef produces precocious puberty in girls and reduced sperm count in young men, for example. The antibiotics are known to cause antimicrobial resistance with a serious potential impact on public health. 

At great personal cost, Dr. Chopra acted on his lifelong beliefs while faced with the corruption within Health Canada. Chopra believes, as Mahatma Gandhi said, "Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt" and that "the first step in fighting injustice is to make it visible."

He continues to make the dangerous corruption within Health Canada visible with the offering of his book.

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