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We’re Eating Less Meat—But Using More Antibiotics on Farms Than Ever

by GeorgettaEmmons Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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The meat industry’s massive appetite for antibiotics just keeps growing. That’s the takeaway from the Food and Drug Administration’s latest annual assessment of the issue, which found that agricultural use of “medically important” antibiotics—the ones that are prescribed to people when they fall ill—grew a startling 23 percent between 2009 and 2014. Over the same period, the total number of cows and pigs raised on US farms actually fell a bit, and the number of chickens held steady. What that’s telling us is that US meat production got dramatically more antibiotic-dependent over that period.

Even more disheartening, medically important antibiotic use crept up 3 percent in 2014 compared to the previous year—despite the FDA’s effort to convince the industry to voluntarily ramp down reliance on such crucial medicines. True, the FDA’s policy, which was first released in 2012, contained a “three-year time frame for voluntary phase-in.” One might have hoped, however, that by 2014, the needle would point downward, not implacably upward.

Note, too, that the last time the FDA saw fit to release numbers on human antibiotic use, in 2011, the total stood at about 3.3 million kilograms. The chart below tells us that farms now using nearly 9.5 million kilograms—nearly three times as much. The news comes in the wake of warnings from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Health Organization, and the Centers for Disease Control that the meat industry’s drug habit contributes to a growing crisis in antibiotic-resistant pathogens that kill 23,000 people each year in the United States and 700,000 globally. Then there was the recent news that in China—which has patterned its meat industry on the antibiotic-ravenous US model—a strain of E. coli had evolved on hog farms that can resist a potent antibiotic called colistin, considered a last resort for pathogens that can resist all other drugs.

Here are the numbers:

FDA

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We’re Eating Less Meat—But Using More Antibiotics on Farms Than Ever

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While OPEC Meets, Oil Prices Continue to Plummet

by TrinidadLording Posted on December 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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With oil prices plummeting below $40 per barrel, OPEC is meeting to decide what to do. The answer is…. probably nothing:

Oil prices dropped Friday as traders braced for official word out of a highly anticipated meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Prices slid following conflicting media reports that OPEC had either kept its oil-output target unchanged or increased it. There was also confusion as to whether production in Indonesia, which just rejoined the group, will be included in the target.

….An internal OPEC document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal showed that, if current production remains unchanged, markets will still be oversupplied by 700,000 barrels a day in 2016….The key issue for OPEC is Iran, which is expected to return to the global oil market after the lifting of the international sanctions early next year. Analysts say the country could quickly ramp up production by around 500,000 barrels, adding to the oversupply of crude.

Between fracking, Iran, and slow demand growth thanks to the sluggish global economy, oil prices just aren’t likely to increase in the near future. This is:

Good news for consumers, who get cheaper gasoline.
Probably bad news for global warming, since it makes cleaner fuel sources uncompetitive with oil.
Bad news for OPEC members, which might be bad news for the rest of us. Low prices probably mean cutbacks in government services, which in turn could lead to more widespread unrest. Needless to say, this is not something the Middle East needs right now.
Good news for Hillary Clinton, since the fortunes of the incumbent party have historically been better when gas prices are lower.

Oh: and bad news for us peak oil folks. I don’t have any worries that we’ll hit peak oil eventually, but the Great Recession sure put off the date. I had long figured that 2015 was going to be the peak date, but it now looks like it will probably be 2020 at the earliest, and maybe more like 2025 or so.

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While OPEC Meets, Oil Prices Continue to Plummet

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The Government Buried Some Really Important Herbicide News Right Before Thanksgiving

by JohnBorowski Posted on November 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, the Environmental Protection Agency revoked its controversial approval of a novel herbicide mix, sending shares of its maker, chemical giant Dow, down nearly 3 percent in Wednesday trading.

The product, Enlist Duo, is the signature weed-killing cocktail of Dow AgroScience, Dow’s ag subsidiary. It’s composed of two endocrine-disrupting chemicals, 2-4-D and glypohosate, that have landed on the World Health Organization’s lists of “possible” and “probable” carcinogens, respectively. Dow markets it for use alongside corn and soybean varieties that have been genetically engineered to withstand the combined herbicides, to counter the rapid rise of weeds that have evolved to resist glyphosate alone. Approved by the EPA last year, Enlist Duo is the company’s “crown jewel,” a Wall Street analyst recently told The Wall Street Journal. The US Department of Agriculture thinks farmers will embrace it rapidly—it will boost 2,4-D use by as much as 600 percent by 2020, the agency projects.

How inconvenient for Dow’s shareholders, then, that the EPA has changed its mind. Last Tuesday, the agency petitioned the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals to revoke its approval of Enlist Duo, temporarily barring farmers from using it.

The reason for the reversal is fascinating. The decision hinges on the so-called “synergistic” effects of combined pesticides. When you combine two or more herbicides, do you merely get the weed-slaying properties of each—or do you also get something new and greater than the sum of the parts? There’s not a lot of data on that. Generally, pesticides are tested for safety in isolation, even though farmers tend to use several at once in the field. Yet studies have repeatedly shown—see here and here—that chemical combinations can be much more toxic than you’d expect from analyzing each of their components.

When the EPA reviewed safety data supplied by Dow, it found “no indication of synergism between the two Enlist Duo ingredients for mammals, freshwater fish, and freshwater invertebrates,” its court petition states, and thus it concluded that the “mixture of the two ingredients does not show a greater toxicity compared to either parent compound alone.”

But later, agency officials looked at Dow’s application to the US Patent Office for Enlist Duo, originally filed in 2013, and found something quite different: “claims of ‘synergistic herbicidal weed control.'” The EPA was not amused. “Specifically, Dow did not submit to EPA during the registration process the extensive information relating to potential synergism it cited to the Patent Office,” the agency complained to the court. “EPA only learned of the existence of that information after the registrations were issued and only recently obtained the information.”

In others words, Dow was assuring the EPA that its proposed cocktail was really nothing new—just the combination of two already-approved agrichemicals—while simultaneously telling the patent office that Enlist did indeed bring new and different weed-leveling properties to the farm field. In short, two different messages for two different audiences—the EPA sees potentially heightened toxicity from synergistic effects, while the investors who pore over patents might see a potential blockbuster in an herbicide mix that’s more than just the sum of its two components.

Dow has now handed that “extensive information” on Enlist Duo’s synergistic effects to the EPA. In a press release, Dow AgroSciences President and CEO Tim Hassinger vowed to resolve the EPA’s issues “in the next few months, in time for the 2016 crop use season.” Given that the EPA relies on company-supplied data to make these decisions, he’s probably right—the EPA’s action last week will amount to a speed bump on the road to Enlist Duo’s conquering of the nation’s vast corn/soybean belt. But considering the confusion so far, now might be the time for the EPA to demand independent testing of this powerful and potentially soon-to-be ubiquitous mix.

Meanwhile, last Wednesday’s action marks the second time in November the EPA has seen fit to revoke registration of a would-be blockbuster Dow pesticide. Just a week before, the agency nixed its approval of the insecticide sulfoxaflor, months after a federal appeals court found that Dow had delivered the agency “flawed and limited data” about the chemical’s impact on honeybees.

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The Government Buried Some Really Important Herbicide News Right Before Thanksgiving

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The Supreme Court Just Agreed to Hear a Case that Could Destroy Roe v. Wade

by Brenton1405 Posted on November 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it will hear its first abortion case in nine years. At issue in Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole is HB 2, an omnibus Texas abortion law that made national headlines in 2013 after Texas Sen. Wendy Davis spent 11-hours filibustering the bill that eventually passed anyway.

Since 1992, the court has ruled on three abortion cases, each time affirming further abortion restrictions. In 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a divided court upheld the right to abortion, but left it to the states to set abortion restrictions, saying that these regulations can’t put an “undue burden” on abortion access. This broad ruling opened the door for the hundreds of so-called Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers or TRAP laws that states have passed in recent years—onerous regulations placed on abortion providers, often purporting to protect women’s health. In its last ruling in 2007, the court upheld a law outlawing dilation-and-extraction second-trimester abortions. If the court continues its pattern of voting against abortion rights and rules to allow Texas to move forward with several burdensome abortion restrictions, it will open the door for other states to do the same, dealing a serious blow to the right to legal abortion guaranteed by Roe v. Wade.

“The Court now has the opportunity to decide whether we will continue to allow elected officials to play politics with women’s health,” wrote Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, in a statement. “This case represents the greatest threat to women’s reproductive freedom since the Supreme Court decided Roe vs. Wade over 40 years ago. Laws like the ones being challenged in Texas are designed to subvert the Constitution and end the right to a safe and legal abortion.”

In this case, the justices are expected to focus on two of the Texas law’s most onerous requirements: that abortions be performed in ambulatory surgical centers, hospital-like facilities that specialize in outpatient surgery, and the requirement that abortion providers obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. Many medical professionals argue that these restrictions put unnecessary burdens on abortion providers: Building and maintaining an ASC is expensive, given the strict requirements regarding features like hallway width and ventilation. Nor do ASCs enhance the standard of care for abortion; the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other medical groups have repeatedly noted that the procedure can be safely performed in a typical doctor’s office. The admitting privileges’ provision gives hospitals in conservative communities or with a religious affiliation the power to effectively stop abortions by denying the necessary admission privileges to doctors.

“The common-sense measures Texas has put in place elevate the standard of care and protect the health of Texas women,” wrote Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a statement released following Friday’s Supreme Court’s announcement. “We look forward to demonstrating the validity of these important health and safety requirements in Court.”

The number of abortion clinics in Texas has already been cut by more than half, as elements of HB 2, such as restrictions on medication abortion, a 20 week abortion ban, and the admitting privileges requirement, have gone into effect over the last two years. Before the law, there were 41 clinics in Texas. Today, there are 18. As my colleague Molly Redden reported in September, this has created large swathes of the state where women must travel hundreds of miles to get abortion care. If the Supreme Court upholds HB2 in full, including the ambulatory surgical center requirement, the number of abortion clinics in Texas could fall to ten.

The Supreme Court has intervened on HB 2 twice before. In October 2014, the court reinstated a district court’s ruling that blocked the ambulatory surgical center provisions of HB2 from going into effect and triggering more clinic closures while the Fifth Circuit court considered the case. At that time the high court also overturned the admitting privileges requirement for two Texas facilities. In June 2015, after the Fifth Circuit ruled to allow the HB2 provisions to go forward, the Supreme Court put an emergency stay on these requirements, to remain in effect while the court decided whether to take on Whole Woman’s Health for a full review.

Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers in Texas have been preparing to comply with HB2’s new requirements since mid-2014, when the law was originally slated to go into effect. Planned Parenthood, for instance, has spent millions to build or refurbish several ambulatory surgical centers in the state. Mother Jones traveled to Texas to observe these preparations for HB2. Check out our video footage below. (Some of the video numbers have since changed slightly.)

The court has not yet announced whether it will also take Jackson Women’s Health Organization v. Currier, a case that centers on a Mississippi law that requires abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, but given that they’ve taken the Texas case, it is unlikely. Mississippi currently has only one abortion clinic, and its abortion providers are board-certified OB-GYNs. But because hospitals in the area have been unwilling to grant—or sometimes even process—the doctors’ applications for admitting privileges, if this law stands, it will close down Mississippi’s last abortion clinic. In July 2014, the fifth circuit court of appeals ruled that the law was unconstitutional, upholding a lower court’s ruling.

A decision in the Texas case will come down in the first half of 2016, likely making reproductive rights a central issue in the presidential election. “Although this is the first step in a much longer process,” said Amy Hagstrom-Miller, the president and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, the main plaintiff in the case. “I am hopeful that the Supreme Court will uphold the rights that have been in place for four decades and reaffirm that every woman should be able to make her own decision about continuing or ending a pregnancy.”

This is a breaking story. We will update this post as the story develops.

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The Supreme Court Just Agreed to Hear a Case that Could Destroy Roe v. Wade

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Stop Blaming Suburbia for Killing Off Friendships

by PhilippHampden Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Dave Roberts is unhappy with the fact that we struggle to make new friends after college:

I read a study many years ago that I have thought about many times since, though hours of effort have failed to track it down. The gist was this: The key ingredient for the formation of friendships is repeated spontaneous contact. That’s why we make friends in college: because we are, by virtue of where we live and our daily activities, forced into regular contact with the same people. It is the natural soil out of which friendship grows.

….But when we marry and start a family, we are pushed, by custom, policy, and expectation, to move into our own houses. And when we have kids, we find ourselves tied to those houses. Many if not most neighborhoods these days are not safe for unsupervised kid frolicking. In lower-income areas there are no sidewalks; in higher-income areas there are wide streets abutted by large garages. In both cases, the neighborhoods are made for cars, not kids. So kids stay inside playing Xbox, and families don’t leave except to drive somewhere.

This is a common critique, but I don’t think it holds water. For starters, read The Organization Man. As William Whyte reports, spontaneous new friendships were quite common in 1950s suburbia—which was architecturally quite similar to today’s suburbia. This was certainly true of my stucco tract house neighborhood when I was growing up. Second, New Urbanists have been trying for a long time to create communities that encourage spontaneous friendships, and they routinely fail. Build houses with stoops, and everyone stays inside anyway.

Or take my current suburban neighborhood. It’s pretty typical. Everyone is friendly, and we know our near neighbors. Some close friendships have developed, but that’s about it. Across the street there’s a nearly identical neighborhood, but this one is far more close-knit, throwing Halloween parties and July 4th bashes and just generally socializing in a way that mine doesn’t. Why?

I’m not entirely convinced that the nature of friendships has actually changed all that much during the past few centuries of civilization. Some people are sociable and some aren’t. But if I’m wrong, I still don’t think it’s primarily because of changes in the built environment. Maybe it’s due to the fact that women don’t routinely stay home during the day and socialize with neighbors. Maybe it’s because of air conditioning and TV. Maybe we all figured out that picking friends by random location (i.e., living next door) didn’t make much sense once we had other options. Or maybe it’s just that smart verbal types tend to be a little introverted, and we hear from them more often than anyone else.

And stop blaming graduation from college! Half the country never went to college, but I’ll bet they have as many (or more) friends than the rest of us. How do they manage that if they skipped college and live in the same kinds of places as us overeducated types?

Anyway, consider this is a challenge. Do modern Americans really have fewer close friends than in the past? Establish that before you go any further. If it turns out to be true, why? I don’t think the evidence really supports the idea that it’s mostly due to the nature of suburban living. (Do apartment dwellers have more friends than homeowners?) This becomes a much more interesting question when we get over our obsession with the evils of suburbia.

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Stop Blaming Suburbia for Killing Off Friendships

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Breaking: Planned Parenthood Stops Taking Money for Fetal Tissue Donation

by Leona19Cnqta Posted on October 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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A handful of Planned Parenthood clinics across the country allow patients to donate their fetal tissue following an abortion, a practice that is legal in the United States and has contributed to medical research breakthroughs like the polio vaccine. And as part of their fetal tissue donations programs, Planned Parenthood typically gets reimbursed for the cost of getting the donation to researchers—about $60 per case.

But that will soon change: in a move announced Tuesday, Planned Parenthood president announced that the organization will no longer accept reimbursement to cover the cost of fetal tissue donations and will instead pay out of pocket for all donations going forward.

The change, announced in a letter to the National Institutes of Health, comes following the onslaught of conservative attempts to completely de-fund and attack the women’s health care organization on the basis of its fetal tissue donation programs.

In the letter, Richards writes that the policy change is intended to “completely debunk the disingenuous argument that our opponents have been using,” against abortion and fetal tissue donation. She continues:

Planned Parenthood’s policies on fetal tissue donation already exceed the legal requirements. Now we’re going even further in order to take away any basis for attacking Planned Parenthood to advance an anti-abortion political agenda…Our decision not to take any reimbursement for expenses should not be interpreted as a suggestion that anyone else should not take reimbursement or that the law in this area isn’t strong. Our decision is first and foremost about preserving the ability of our patients to donate tissue, and to expose our opponents’ false charges about this limited but important work.

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Breaking: Planned Parenthood Stops Taking Money for Fetal Tissue Donation

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Eco-Friendly Decluttering Tips to Give you Peace of Mind (Part Two)

by ChanteNLYI Posted on October 9, 2015

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Eco-Friendly Decluttering Tips to Give you Peace of Mind (Part Two)

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This Company Gave Away a Drug That Just Won the Nobel Prize and Helped Millions

by Adan051292979 Posted on October 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Earlier today, the Nobel committee awarded its renowned prize for medicine to the discoverers of two anti-parasitic drugs — one that fights malaria and one that treats two lesser-known devastating diseases.

The latter, ivermectin, treats lymphatic filariasis and river blindness, which are parasites that have plagued humans for centuries and currently threaten 1.35 billion people around the world. Developing drugs to treat infectious diseases and making them available to the often-impoverished people who need them is extremely difficult. But because of a breakthrough and an unprecedented move by one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, these diseases might soon be eradicated.

Satoshi Omura Kyodo/AP

Lymphatic filariasis, which can develop into a condition known as elaphantiasis, is a mosquito-transmitted worm that lodges in the lymphatic system, impairing it along with the victim’s immune system and kidneys. In the worst cases, the worm causes extreme swelling and disfigurement of tissue, limbs, and genital parts. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) 40 million people, mostly in African and South Asian countries are incapacitated by the disease, and shunned because of their disfigurement.

Onchocerciasis, or river blindness, is a worm spread through the bite of a blackfly, which breeds in rivers. The parasite produces larvae that move through human tissue, causing sever itching and skin rashes, as well as eye lesions, which can lead to severe visual impairment. An estimated 270,000 people are currently blinded by the disease. The vast majority of people at-risk live in Africa, where it has taken a huge economic toll on rural communities, which have had to move away from rivers to less productive land in order to avoid the disease.

William Campbell Mary Schwalm/AP

In the late 1970s, Satoshi Omura, a scientist at the Kitasato Institute in Tokyo found a component of a soil-dwelling bacteria (that’s right, he literally found it in the dirt) called Streptomyces that was very effective at killing parasites. He then sent cultures of this bacteria to William Campbell in New Jersey who worked for Merck & Co., the fourth largest pharmaceutical company in the world. There, Campbell successfully developed a drug called ivermectin from a compound in the bacteria culture. The discovery was a huge pharmaceutical breakthrough and the drug was determined to be extremely safe for humans and easily distributed.

But, as with many infectious disease drugs, the vast majority of people who needed it lived in the developing world and could not afford it.

What happened next was unprecedented.

In 1987, Merck announced it would partner with the WHO and donate Mectizan, the drug’s brand name, to any country who requested it for as long as they needed it. Before this, no large pharmaceutical company had ever given away a drug they developed to eradicate a disease. At a news conference after Merck’s announcement, the late Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy said, “Merck’s gift to the World Health Organization is more than a medical breakthrough–it is truly a triumph of the human spirit.”

Since 1987, the Mectizan Donation Program has given out more than a billion treatments for onchoceriasis and lymphatic filariasis to people in 33 countries (in the late ’90s GlaxoSmithKline contributed another drug for lymphatic filariasis to the program). As a result, the transmission of onchoceriasis has been stopped in many countries. Last year Ecuador became the second affected country, after Colombia, to entirely eradicate the disease. Lymphatic filariasis cases have dramatically decreased, as well. The WHO forecasts that both diseases could be eliminated by 2020.

Omura and Campbell were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work.

The Nobel committee said ivermectin’s importance was “immeasurable” for the health of many in the world’s poorest regions.

“Treatment is so successful that these diseases are on the verge of eradication, which would be a major feat in the medical history of humankind,” the committee said.

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This Company Gave Away a Drug That Just Won the Nobel Prize and Helped Millions

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Infographic: How Renewable Fuel Combats Climate Change

by Posted on September 18, 2015

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Infographic: How Renewable Fuel Combats Climate Change

Posted 18 September 2015 in

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Simply put: the Renewable Fuel Standard is the only law on the books combating climate change. According to a recently released study by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the RFS has significantly lowered carbon emission levels and displaced nearly 1.9 billion barrels of foreign oil in the decade since it’s passage.

With so much progress on the line, the United States can’t afford to turn its back on renewable fuel.

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Infographic: How Renewable Fuel Combats Climate Change

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Irradiated Food Sounds Like a Terrible Thing. It’s Actually Really Good.

by BrettBible Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Mattias Mackler

In 2002, the East Coast supermarket chain Wegmans introduced a line of packaged ground beef that had been irradiated with an electron beam to kill bacteria. Company executives expected the product to do well; a series of foodborne illness outbreaks had rendered Americans’ confidence in food safety dismally low. The launch came at the start of grilling season, and executives thought it would be a hit with people who liked their burgers rare but didn’t want to get sick from undercooked meat. The slogan: “Cook it the way you like it!”

But to their surprise, sales were unimpressive—and they remain so today, says Wegmans’ meat merchandising manager, Mark Spagnola. One reason might be the higher price: Irradiated beef can cost as much as 80 cents more per pound. But Wegmans’ customers are willing to pay a premium for other special foods, like organics. So more likely, it’s irradiation itself that put shoppers off. Many consumer surveys have found that people consider irradiation—which the federal government approved for some foods as early as the 1960s—creepy and unsafe. “Some people even think their food is going to be radioactive,” Spagnola says, “which is just totally not how this works.”

Here’s how it does work: At a special irradiation plant—there are just a handful in the United States—workers zap food with a machine similar to the kind that administers radiation to cancer patients. Most facilities use electron beams, but some irradiate with X-rays or gamma rays. While the dose of radiation is high, it doesn’t stay with the food—and workers are protected from it with safety gear and massive concrete walls. The result, says Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota foodborne illness expert who has studied irradiation extensively, is that it kills as many bacteria as cooking at high temperatures—but without any loss of taste. “Food irradiation shows absolutely no detrimental impact on the food,” he says.

Hundreds of studies have proved that irradiation neither adds compounds to food nor takes nutrients away—and that it can help prevent the foodborne illnesses that sicken 48 million Americans and kill 3,000 every year. The World Health Organization and the US Department of Agriculture have deemed the technology safe for food, as has the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which asserts that in addition to eliminating dangerous bacteria in human food, the technique could also be used to prevent the spread of disease in livestock through its feed.

Yet some food advocacy groups have campaigned vociferously against the technique. Food and Water Watch, for example, argues that it might induce manufacturers to zap food instead of maintaining a clean plant. “This could be a gateway to faster line speeds at meat facilities and sloppier handling practices,” says Patty Lovera, the organization’s assistant director. But Rick Holley, a food microbiologist and irradiation expert at the University of Manitoba, sees the technique as an extra tool, rather than a crutch; irradiation, he points out, doesn’t get rid of all bacteria, just most. “You can’t make bad food good using irradiation,” he says. “If your plant is dirty and not inspected and overtaxed, the food is going to be bad in a way that irradiation can’t fix.”

In fact, you’re probably already eating irradiated products. About a third of dried herbs and spices are irradiated to prevent salmonella, and imported fruits like mangoes and papayas are sometimes zapped to kill invasive insects. The technique is also used to sterilize medical equipment like gloves, bandages, and syringes, as well as personal-care products like contact lens solution and baby bottle nipples. Several European countries regularly irradiate all kinds of food; the French even do it to Camembert cheese so as to cut down on pathogens from raw milk. In South Africa, safari operators eat irradiated meat because it has a long shelf life, even in hot climates.

To be sure, the technology isn’t cheap—but that, says Harlan Clemmons, who runs an irradiation facility in Sioux City, Iowa, is mostly because it costs a lot of money to ship all that meat to the special plants. Although the equipment is expensive (about $18 million up front), Clemmons calculates that if meat processors did irradiation in-house, over time they could bring the cost down “to next to nothing.”

But that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon unless consumers start embracing the technique—which might require more public attention. In a 2005 study, 484 shoppers at grocery stores in four Texas towns were asked about their opinion of irradiated foods. Then they read material about how an electron beam works and watched a short video on the topic. Initially, about 18 percent of the shoppers described themselves as “doubters” or “rejecters” of irradiation. But after the statements and video, that number dwindled to just 3.8 percent. Osterholm likens the public mistrust of irradiation to the anti-vaccine movement. “We know that we could eliminate many food safety problems with this technique,” he says. “And yet people are still fighting it.”

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Irradiated Food Sounds Like a Terrible Thing. It’s Actually Really Good.

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