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Men – An Endangered Species due to Endocrine Disruptors.

Byoliveridley

Why, it’s a girl, how surprising!!

Man-made chemicals blamed as many more girls than boys are born in Arctic | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited

Twice as many girls as boys are being born in some Arctic villages because of high levels of man-made chemicals in the blood of pregnant women, according to scientists from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (Amap).
The scientists, who say the findings could explain the recent excess of girl babies across much of the northern hemisphere, are widening their investigation across the most acutely affected communities in Russia, Greenland and Canada to try to discover the size of the imbalance in Inuit communities of the far north.

In the communities of Greenland and eastern Russia monitored so far, the ratio was found to be two girls to one boy. In one village in Greenland only girls have been born.

Why are the upper latitudes especially vulnerable? Two reasons, firstly, atmospheric currents carry pollutants from the Mid-Latitudes (i.e the US, China and Europe) to the higher latitudes of the Arctic. Secondly, the pollutants they measured, PCBs, are persistent and stable (which is why they were used in the first place) and accumulate in the fat tissue of animals. So, predator fish on top of the food chain (the large oily ones) tend to accumulate a lot of these compounds. When you live in the Arctic, you tend to eat a lot of fish. So, these people are getting slammed.

I tell you, Children of Men is not as far fetched as it sounds! Though I think the high levels these people accumulated in their system may not be representative of the rest of the world (vegetarian diets, for instance would be lower in persistent pollutants unless you consumed a ton of milk products), it is still a very scary story.

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Carrboro Screening of "After the Peak"

Byoliveridley

I happened to watch an interesting short film called After the Peak about peak oil, the concept (not that revolutionary unless you ask Messrs  Exxon-Mobil, Shell and Dick Cheney!) that oil production will start declining after a certain peak production event. The docudrama made by local film maker James McQuaid was part of a public meeting on the local (Orange County, NC) responses to the coming energy crisis. Interesting conceptually, it was shown as a 30 minute local newscast, with the usual cast of characters, the too handsome eye candy anchor and his female sidekick, the young and breathless “street reporter”, the gray haired expert, and the uber-energetic sports guy! The newscast is set a year into the future when the price of gas is $10/gallon. The documentary of interviews with various community members about the effects of the price of gas on their business/life. In the 30 minutes, he touched upon food, school buses, sports, NASCAR, the poor, commutes, etc. It was an interesting effort, if a little over the top! The fake interviews with the racing track owner who’s closing his track down, the UNC athletic director who has to cancel all his long distance events, the manager of the local food store who threatens food scarcity.

But is $10 a gallon really a big deal?

gas-prices.png

This simple chart shows income adjusted dollar per gallon gas prices (gas prices from 2006, income from 2004, but it should not change too much.)

Let’s avoid the low income outliers and just compare the U.S and Germany. In April 2006, the U.S was paying $2.95 a gallon and Germany, $8.06 per gallon (ref). If you further adjust that with the per capita income of the two countries, $41,300 for the U.S versus $30,500 for Germany (ref), you will find that the price of gas in Germany is well above $10 a gallon already, they seem to be doing just fine! Maybe they just drive less. The US uses 381 million gallons of gas per day (that’s about 1.2 gallons per day per person). I agree that this comparison is a little flawed because the bulk of the German price is due to taxes, which go back to the government and are presumably used for various good deeds. Also, if the price of gas went up due to shortages, the price differential between Germany and the US would presumably stay constant (unless the Germans lowered taxes). My point is that many countries cope with high gas prices quite well, they just don’t make the same choices the Americans make, 1 acre lots, large SUVs, super long commutes, etc. There are a lot of efficiencies to be had here. The graph below shows the income adjusted gasoline price for a few countries (easy data was available!)

My take: we need to swiftly move away from gasoline by a) Disincentivizing the use of gasoline in transportation b) Incentivizing the use of electricity for transportation. Electricity can be produced more efficiently, and pollution at the source can be controlled more effectively. A combination of a drastic increase in solar and wind power, coupled with aggressive development in battery technology should more than solve our problem without much recourse to biofuels (that great boondongle).

CNN.com – Caribbean coral suffers record die-off – Mar 31, 2006

Byoliveridley

More from the global warming drumbeat, which has by now reached tipping point proportions. I was trying a few months back to predict when global warming would become a “story” in this country, something to be reported on, rather than a “debate”, I guessed middle of the year, well, I think it arrived in March with Time and Newsweek covers, and personally with at least two friends asking me about it. News coverage of climate change has changed completely in the last few months as observations catch up with the modeling, as they do most of the time. But  people like to see proof, not model simulations which can always be explained away, well, here’s more proof…

CNN.com – Caribbean coral suffers record die-off – Mar 31, 2006
The Caribbean is actually better off than areas of the Indian and Pacific ocean where mortality rates — mostly from warming waters — have been in the 90 percent range in past years, said Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance. Goreau called what’s happening worldwide “an underwater holocaust.”

And with global warming, scientists are pessimistic about the future of coral reefs.

“The prognosis is not good,” said biochemistry professor M. James Crabbe of the University of Luton near London. In early April, he will investigate coral reef mortality in Jamaica. “If you want to see a coral reef, go now, because they just won’t survive in their current state.”

For the Caribbean, it all started with hot sea temperatures, first in Panama in the spring and early summer, and it got worse from there.

New NOAA sea surface temperature figures show the sustained heating in the Caribbean last summer and fall was by far the worst in 21 years of satellite monitoring, Eakin said.

“The 2005 event is bigger than all the previous 20 years combined,” he said.

What happened in the Caribbean would be the equivalent of every city in the United States recording a record high temperature at the same time, Eakin said. And it remained hot for weeks, even months, stressing the coral.

China Food Quality Questioned

Byoliveridley

I mentioned briefly that I would not trust anything coming out of China at this point in time, the Post runs with it this morning.

China Food Fears Go From Pets To People – washingtonpost.com

The scandal, which unfolded three years ago after hundreds of babies fell ill in an eastern Chinese province, became the defining symbol of a broad problem in China’s economy. Quality control and product-safety regulation are so poor in this country that people cannot trust the goods on store shelves.

China has been especially poor at meeting international standards. The United States subjects only a small fraction of its food imports to close inspection, but each month rejects about 200 shipments from China, mostly because of concerns about pesticides and antibiotics and about misleading labeling. In February, border inspectors for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration blocked peas tainted by pesticides, dried white plums containing banned additives, pepper contaminated with salmonella and frozen crawfish that were filthy.

China’s development in many areas has been remarkably rapid, but one has to remember that basic infrastructure such as food safety standards, environmental controls, etc. follow along a little later. China being what it is, the U.S government really needs to be more careful and comprehensive with its food testing and safety programs. There’s no sense in blaming China for this, the Chinese government can’t possibly control all this activity. It takes both buyer beware, and seller beware to ensure safety. The U.S should take the European Union’s approach on this issue.

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India's Environmental Portal

Byoliveridley

Home | India Environment Portal

This is a very useful undertaking by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) to gather up a lot of technical information about India’s environmental research and activism.

They have a small multimedia section as well and I found this movie, appropriately titled Faecal Attraction to be an informative watch…

[youtube=’http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=bUlkOLLa31s’]

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FDA decides to breed super bugs

Byoliveridley

Well, what else can you say about it. This is insanely moronic. Read this sierra club release about the overuse of antibiotics brought on by the overcrowding of animals in food production factories (aka “farms”). Read the whole article and see how much everyone will be endangered so that Intervet, Inc. can make money.

FDA Rules Override Warnings About Drug – washingtonpost.com

The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency’s own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous for people. The drug, called cefquinome, belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine’s last defenses against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in animals.

Note, a powerful and potent antibiotic that works well, but is not used much because it’s the last line of defense. But the drug company that manufactures this product cares little about long term efficacy. Their only goal is to maximize short term shareholder value. I don’t blame them, I blame the government for not doing its job, that is, to balance these short term and long term goals and protect the people that pay them a lot of money for this protection.

The wording of “Guidance for Industry #152” was crafted within the FDA after a long struggle. In the end, the agency adopted language that, for drugs like cefquinome, is more deferential to pharmaceutical companies than is recommended by the World Health Organization.

Cefquinome’s seemingly inexorable march to market shows how a few words in an obscure regulatory document can sway the government’s approach to protecting public health.

There’s a reason this present U.S government works in secrecy, so these “obscure” (I am sorry, but nothing that directly affects human health can be called obscure) rule changes will not hit the public eye before it’s too late. Apparently, the FDA can now only consider resistance to food borne diseases in considering an application. That’s like saying that a hospital will only treat victims of food borne diseases, so if you catch the cold, we won’t treat you! This is the Food and Drug Adminstration (all food and all drugs), not the food borne disease protection council.

This drug is absolutely unnecessary for the following reasons:

  1. The disease it treats (respiratory distress in cows) is brought about by insane levels of animal overcrowding
  2. There are currently a dozen antibiotics for this particular problem, none of which are considered susceptible to resistance
  3. The FDA has previous history with similar public health threats with fluoroquinolones
  4. This drug is considered a last resort drug for antibiotic resistant strains of diseases in cancer patients – So strains resistant to this drug will evolve shortly after the antibiotic is overexposed . This is a death sentence for a lot of very vulnerable people.
  5. A similar drug used in Europe for the last 10 years has resulted in an increase in resistant strains of bacteria.

This is what you get when you vote for an ideology that hates government. You get a government that hates itself and is busy pawning parts of itself off to its cronies.