Manufacturers are always searching for the next improvement that then become standard in each industry. These new standards are often detrimental to our health such as the case of antibacterial soaps. Standard soaps sufficiently remove bacteria without these harsh chemicals that may not even help.

http://health.howstuffworks.com/skin-care/cleansing/myths/question692.htm

Antibacterial soaps contain a chemical, triclosan, that must sit on the skin for two minutes to kill bacteria which can include good bacteria that our body needs.

The chemical has now been linked to causing allergies in teenagers.

Being too clean ‘causes allergies in teenagers’ | Metro.co.uk.

Vinyl Flooring & Wallpaper Presents Major Health Threat for Children | Inhabitots.

Spooked by the half-billion salmonella-tainted eggs floating around the United States, some consumers might be tempted to skip the egg salad and opt instead for a “deli sandwich.”

But that could be a painful mistake, especially for Walmart shoppers. Get this, from the USDA’s meat-industry watchdog, the Food Safety and Inspection Services:

Zemco Industries, a Buffalo, N.Y., establishment, is recalling approximately 380,000 pounds of deli meat products that may be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes.

Yikes. And what, pray tell, is “Listeria monocytogenes”? According to FSIS, “listeriosis can cause high fever, severe headache, neck stiffness, and nausea.” Worse still, it can also cause miscarriages and stillbirths, as well as “serious and sometimes fatal infections in those with weakened immune systems, such as infants, the elderly and persons with HIV infection or undergoing chemotherapy.”

And where did this massive cache of dangerous luncheon meat end up? “The products were distributed nationwide to a single retail chain,” the FSIS press release states demurely, too polite to call out retail mammoth Walmart, the largest seller of groceries in the United States. It also refrained from fingering Tyson Foods, the globe’s second-largest meat company, as the ultimate source of the bad meat. Tyson, it turns out, owns Zemco Industries.

You’d never know it from the USDA’s meat-industry watchdog, but this massive recall amounts to a joint venture between two of the largest players in the global food system.

Walmart transformed Tyson’s meat into “Marketside Grab and Go sandwiches,” which included “the Ham and Swiss Sandwich, Italian Hero Sandwich, Roast Beef and Cheddar Sandwich, and Smokehouse Hero Sandwich,” according to a company press release. And not just a few of them; assuming about four ounces of meat per unit, I estimate that Walmart cranked out some 1.5 million sandwiches.

There are several unnerving things about this recall:

• Most recalls involve products that are meant to be cooked, like ground beef or eggs. The main risks involve cross-contamination — say, handling raw chicken before making a salad — or undercooking. If you buy E. coli-tainted burger meat, handle it carefully, and cook it to well done, you won’t get sick. But no one cooks a store-bought “deli sandwich.” Consumers who play by all the rules can still get sick.

• I find it disturbing that the recall involves both pork and beef products (“hot ham,” “roast beef,” etc.) Tyson is the largest U.S. beef packer; it slaughters and processes one of every four cows raised in America. It also wraps up the meat of one-fifth of all U.S. pigs, making it our second-largest pork processor. (For good measure, it also stands as our largest poultry producer.) Its Buffalo-based Zemco unit is where Tyson sends some portion of its vast annual meat output to be transformed into “value-added” products like ham and roast beef. One trembles to consider what about the Zemco factory’s processes caused such an array of products to become tainted.
• Listeria is just creepy stuff. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, the group of bacteria known as listeria “are very resistant to common food preservation agents such as heat, salt, nitrite, and acids. It can also multiply in refrigerated foods.” The agency says that listeria is killed by pasteurization and cooking, but “in certain ready-to-eat foods such as hot dogs and deli meats, contamination may occur after cooking but before packaging.” The Alabama Extension Service, weighing in after a 2004 outbreak, describes “ideal conditions” for listeria multiplication that sound very much like industrially produced, wrapped, and refrigerated sandwiches: the bacteria thrives in “low-oxygen environments and colder temperatures.” Oooh.

Walmart is claiming that the bad sandwiches “have a sell by date of August 25, 2010 or before.” But the FSIS press release states that “the meat products were produced on various dates from June 18 to July 2, 2010, and have various ‘Use By’ dates ranging from August 20 to September 10, 2010.”

Why the discrepancy? And was it the sandwiches that were made between June 18 and July 2, or the lunch meats? It would be pretty gross if sandwiches made July 2 had a use-by date of Sept. 10, no?

The FSIS press release directs media with questions about the recall” to call Gary Mickelson of Zemco Industries. Putting offending companies in charge of information management of recalls reminds me of the great power federal authorities gave BP in shaping media coverage of of the Gulf oil spill. I called Mickelson, who, it turns out, works at Tyson’s corporate headquarters. His assistant told me to email him my question about the use-by dates, and I’ll update this post when I’ve heard back.

FSIS claims it has received “no reports of illnesses associated with consumption of this product”; and that’s great, because the sell-by dates suggest that many of those sandwiches have already been consumed. But a lack of reported cases does not mean that no one has been made sick. According to the Centers for Disease Control, only a small fraction of food poisonings end up being diagnosed and reported.

Here in the United States, a vast population relies on cheap food from the like of Walmart in tough economic times; and millions of people still lack access to affordable health care — among them many of Walmart’s own employees. I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant number of people got sick from those tainted sandwiches, but didn’t have the resources to do anything but wait it out.

At any rate, when a single plant in Buffalo can produce enough meat for a million sandwiches sold through a single retail chain nationwide, you’re looking at food system leveraged for maximum efficiency. You’re also looking at one able to inflict lots and lots of pain — to us, and to the economy.

by Tom Philpott

via Walmart, Tyson recall 380,000 pounds of tainted ‘deli meats’ | Grist.

The research results will be published online on the American Thoracic Society’s Web site ahead of the print edition of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

“This study has identified that the reported use of acetaminophen in 13- and 14 year old adolescent children was associated with an exposure-dependent increased risk of asthma symptoms,” said study first author Richard Beasley, M.D., professor of medicine, at the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand on behalf of the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood ISAAC.

As part of the ISAAC program, two written questionnaires and one video questionnaire were administered to more than 300,000 13- and 14 year old children in 113 centers throughout 50 countries, asking them to quantify their use of acetaminophen (none, “medium” — at least once in the last year, or “high” — at least once in the last month) and their asthma, eczema and allergy symptoms.

There was a significant association between acetaminophen use and risk of asthma and eczema. For medium users the risk of asthma 43 percent higher than non-users; high users had 2.51 times the risk of non-users. Similarly, the risk of rhinoconjunctivitis (allergic nasal congestion) was 38 percent higher for medium users and 2.39 times as great for high users compared to non-users. For eczema, the relative risks were 31 percent and 99 percent respectively.

As this was a cross-sectional study, causality could not be determined. However, there is mounting evidence that suggests a causal link.

A longitudinal study on a small population in Ethiopia that examined the risk of asthma and allergies associated with acetaminophen use elucidated a temporal relationship between acetaminophen usage and the development of asthma and allergy symptoms, lending greater evidence to the possibility that acetaminophen usage may indeed cause the increased risk. This study will also be published online in advance of publication of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Moreover, in an earlier study from the United States, 13 and 14-year-old children with asthma were randomized to take either acetaminophen or ibuprofen after a febrile illness. For those whose illness was respiratory, there was an increased risk of a subsequent outpatient visit for asthma.

There are a number of biologically plausible explanations for how acetaminophen might increase risk of asthma and allergy. Acetaminophen may have a systemic inflammatory effect, possibly increasing oxygen stress resulting from the depletion of glutathione-dependent enzymes, which may in turn lead to enhanced TH2 allergic immune responses. Furthermore, acetaminophen may suppress the immune response to, and prolong the symptomatic illness from, rhinovirus infections, which are a common cause of severe asthma exacerbations in childhood.

Given the increased risk associated with acetaminophen usage, Dr. Beasley and colleagues calculated that the population attributable risks — the percentage of cases that might be avoided if the risk factor were to be eliminated — were indicative of a remarkable impact from acetaminophen usage.

“The overall population attributable risks for current symptoms of severe asthma were around 40 percent, suggesting that if the associations were causal, they would be of major public health significance,” said Dr. Beasley. “Randomized controlled trials are now urgently required to investigate this relationship further and to guide the use of antipyretics, not only in children but in pregnancy and adult life.”

via Acetaminophen use in adolescents linked to doubled risk of asthma.

Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks | Video on TED.com.

Sue Crump braced as the chemo drugs dripped into her body. She knew treatment would be rough. She had seen its signature countless times in the ravaged bodies and hopeful faces of cancer patients in hospitals where she had spent 23 years mixing chemo as a pharmacist.

At the same time, though, she wondered whether those same drugs – experienced as a form of “secondhand chemo” — may have caused her own cancer.

Chemo is poison by design. It’s descended from deadly mustard gas first used against soldiers in World War I. Now it’s deployed to stop the advance of cancer.

Crump knew she had her own war on her hands. She wanted to live long enough to see her 21-year-old daughter, Chelsea, graduate college.

And she wanted something else: She wanted young pharmacists and nurses to pay attention to her story.

Crump, who died of pancreatic cancer in September at age 55, was one of thousands of health care workers who were chronically exposed to chemotherapy agents on the job for years before there were even voluntary safety guidelines in place.

Now some of those workers are being diagnosed with cancers that occupational health specialists say could be linked to exposure to the same powerful drugs that have saved hundreds of thousands of patient lives. Experts believe that’s because when nurses, pharmacists, technicians and increasingly, even veterinarians, mix and deliver chemo, accidental spills, sprays and punctures put them in close, frequent contact with hazardous drugs.

Yet an InvestigateWest investigation has found that the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration does not regulate exposure to these toxins in the workplace, despite multiple studies documenting ongoing contamination and exposures. Studies as far back as the 1970s have linked increased rates of certain cancers to nurses and physicians.

Exposures continue to occur. A just-completed study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 10 years in the making and the largest to date, confirms that chemo continues to contaminate the work spaces where it’s used, and in some cases is still being found in the urine of those who handle it, despite knowledge of safety precautions.

Chemo agents have been classified as hazardous by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration OSHA. since the mid-1980s. Hazardous drugs are those known, or suspected to cause cancer, miscarriages, birth defects, or other serious health consequences.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA Jordan Barab said in written response to questions from InvestigateWest that the agency doesn’t have resources to regulate workplace drug exposures, although it is concerned about the issue. “Although this is an important safety and health issue, OSHA has not considered a standard to specifically address hazardous drugs in the healthcare setting,” he wrote.

OSHA has no regulatory authority to enforce safety practices with fines or sanctions, other than under its “General Duty” clause – a catch-all regulation that allows OSHA inspectors to warn an employer if they see something that concerns them.

According to documents obtained by InvestigateWest through the Freedom of Information Act, OSHA has only used the General Duty Clause once in 10 years to cite any health care institution, including hospitals, clinics, dental and veterinary offices, for their handling of hazardous drugs.

In contrast, there are enforceable standards, including “permissible exposure limits” to protect workers from other known cancer-causing hazards, such as benzene, or asbestos. The government also has standards for healthcare workers handling radiation and certain chemicals, such as sterilizing agents.

But not for drugs.

“There is no other occupation population that handles so many known human carcinogens,” said Thomas Connor, a research biologist with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Connor has spent 40 years studying the effect of chemo agents on workers, and is one of the lead authors on the latest study.

Tracing an individual’s cancer to a particular exposure is difficult. It’s one of the main reasons safety advocates have been thwarted in their efforts to get stricter regulations. But the ranks of those who have became symbols for increased safety includes pharmacists Bruce Harrison of St. Louis and Karen Lewis of Baltimore, veterinarian Brett Cordes of Scottsdale, and nurse Sally Giles of Vancouver, B.C.

All of them eventually got cancer, or in Lewis’ case, a pre-cancerous condition. Cordes was diagnosed four years ago at age 35. Giles was in her 40s, and Lewis and Harrison were in their 50s when diagnosed. All but Lewis and Cordes are now dead.

via Lifesaving Drugs, Deadly Consequences | InvestigateWest.

Antibiotics are used in agriculture for three reasons: to promote animal growth, prevent illness and treat sickness.

This continuous use of antibiotics enables bacteria to build an immunity over time and in turn creates super-bugs that can no longer be managed with traditional medication.

About 100,000 people die every year from hospital-acquired infections caused by bacteria that, because of overuse of antibiotics, have developed resistance to the usual remedies and cannot be killed with them. Many others die from superbugs contracted outside hospitals.

The F.D.A has released a policy document which may signal a renewed effort to limit these practices to only therapeutic uses.

This still seems to be a small fix for a much larger problem. Factory farms create the harsh conditions that require common use of antibiotics that free-range livestock would rarely use.

Antibiotic Use in Animals Should be Limited, F.D.A. Says – NYTimes.com.

FDA Urging Limited Antibiotics in Meat – NYTimes.com

Agricultural Antibiotics May Be the Cause of Super-Bugs – Natural News.

Sunday 27 June 2010
by: Mickey Z., t r u t h o u t | Interview

Journalist and filmmaker
Marie-Monique Robin.
(Photo: Razak / Ségolène Royal)

Award-winning French journalist and filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin is the author of “The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption and the Control of Our Food Supply” (The New Press) and the creator of the film by the same name.

In a review of these two projects, Leslie Thatcher writes: “What Marie-Monique Robin most effectively documents are the perverse effects – the moral, social, technological, economic and market failures – of Western society’s economic organization, most specifically with respect to science and the products of science and, ultimately, with respect to the preservation of the public commons and human life on the planet.”

Marie  Monique-Robin received the 1995 Albert-Londres Prize, awarded to investigative journalists in France, and is the director and producer of over 30 documentaries and investigative reports filmed in Latin America, Africa, Europe and Asia.

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE >

via t r u t h o u t | Monsanto, Big Brother of the New World Agricultural Order: An Interview With Marie-Monique Robin.

Watch an interview with director Josh Fox and find out more. You do not want to miss this. It is imperative for U.S. citizens to be aware of the detrimental effects hydraulic fracturing is directly causing our people, animals and to our environment as a whole.

Watch the full episode. See more NOW on PBS.

The fact that humankind is becoming a geological agent indicates the beginning of a new geological era — one baptized by some scientists as “Anthropocene.” With the recent devastating earthquakes in the interior of China, this notion of the Anthropocene has acquired a new actuality. The construction of the gigantic Three Gorges Dam, which resulted in large new artificial lakes, put additional pressure on the surface, thus contributing to the earthquakes.
However, this readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us at least in the West to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs—whatever—just so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game’s outcome.
The typical form of fetishist disavowal apropos ecology goes like this: “I know very well that we are all threatened, but I don’t really believe it so I am not ready to do anything really important like changing my way of life.” But there is also the opposite form of disavowal: “I know very well that I cannot really influence the process that can lead to my ruin like a volcanic outburst, but it is nonetheless too traumatic for me to accept this, so I cannot resist the urge to do something, even if I know it is ultimately meaningless.”
The ongoing volcanic outburst is thus a useful reminder that our ecological troubles cannot be reduced to our hubris, to our disturbing the balanced order of the Mother Earth. Nature is chaotic in itself, prone to the wildest disasters, to meaningless and unpredictable catastrophes. We are mercilessly exposed to nature’s cruel whims. There is no Mother Earth watching over us.

By Slavoj Žižek

via ‘O Earth, Pale Mother!’ — In These Times.

I was going to write more on this topic.  On how our actions are increasingly more devastating and terrifying.  On how the consequences of our actions are exponentially horrifying when in concert with Mother Nature’s own as she lashes back, proving time and again our semblance of control is delusive.  It turns out, when we cause gross alterations to our environment we aren’t prepared for a most imminent backlash.  History has shown this time and again over the span of our cursory existence.  I just happened to come across an article in an email today which corners on this very issue:

John Feffer | BP and Sado-Messochism

Tuesday 22 June 2010

by: John Feffer  |  Foreign Policy in Focus

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t;
Adapted: Aaron Escobar ♦ (the spaniard)™, zen, Reto Stöckli / NASA)

Have the messes we’ve been making finally reached a point where they can’t be cleaned up?

Aside from the occasional asteroid and volcanic outburst, human beings are responsible for the greatest messes on the planet. We’ve polluted the air and water, punched holes in the ozone, and pumped enough carbon into the atmosphere to overwhelm the global thermostat. Nor is this merely a modern attribute of homo sapiens. As Jared Diamond points out in his book Collapse, we’ve repeatedly taxed the limits of our environment, from the heart of the Mayan civilization to far-flung Easter Island. We’ve hunted countless species into extinction and exhausted the soil to feed burgeoning populations. And what we once did on a local basis, we are now applying on a global scale.

There is certainly an element of sadism in how humans have behaved toward other species. But the messes we have created throughout our relatively brief reign on Earth have also been self-inflicted. We are consummate sado-messochists: We specialize in inflicting messes on ourselves. Has any other species been so thoroughly successful in fouling its own nest?

Which brings me to BP and the latest oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

READ MORE >