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Al Franken is good for health

Byoliveridley

You know what's in your food and many beauty products. Senator Al Franken wants to make it possible to see exactly what's in your household cleaning products as well.The Minnesota Democrat introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate requiring producers to fully disclose all ingredients on their product labels, including those suspected of causing long-term harm. Currently the warnings on cleansers are designed to prevent immediate harm due to swallowing, splashing in eyes or other unintended uses.

via Kare 11

It would seem common sense to have information on labels, especially on the harsh and powerful chemicals we use every day. You may not understand what they mean, or how to pronounce the chemical names, but you don’t have to! Organizations such as the Environmental Working Group have extensive information on common high volume chemicals so people can match what they see on the label with what they would like to avoid.

But it is not the law of the land in the US, or Canada for that matter. Al Franken, comedian, talk show host and an intelligent man turned senator would like to change that in the US. Of course, we in Canada would benefit as well.

Chemical manufacturers aren’t having any of this.

There’s always a concern about turning labels into encyclopedias,” Brian Sansoni of the Soap and Detergent Association, in Washington, D.C., told KARE Tuesday.

Pretty insulting, claiming that your consumer does not like encyclopedias, or is not capable of reading and googling.

Information helps drive consumers to safer alternatives. If you see two cleaners, both of which claim to work equally well, a quick read of the ingredients will drive you to the safer (or simpler) choice. Clearly, sale by obfuscation is the preferred marketing strategy here.

If I were American, I would call my senator/congressperson and ask them to support Al Franken.

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  • Conflicts of Interest in Bisphenol A Decision Making

    Byoliveridley

    I have written about bisphenol A recently. It’s a chemical found in polycarbonate plastics that has been linked with some crazy effects in mice at ambient levels including disruption of oogenesis (egg production) and effects two generations removed (grandmother effects).

    Public health agency linked to chemical industry – Los Angeles Times

    For nearly a decade, a federal agency has been responsible for assessing the dangers that chemicals pose to reproductive health. But much of the agency’s work has been conducted by a private consulting company that has close ties to the chemical industry, including manufacturers of a compound in plastics that has been linked to reproductive damage.

    In 1998, the Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction was established within the National Institutes of Health to assess the dangers of chemicals and help determine which ones should be regulated. Sciences International, an Alexandria, Va., consulting firm that has been funded by more than 50 industrial companies, has played a key role in the center’s activities, reviewing the risks of chemicals, preparing reports, and helping select members of its scientific review panel and setting their agendas, according to government and company documents.

    This kind of work is too important to be left to contractors like Sciences International (however good they may be), which also has contracts with companies that manufacture and market products containing Bisphenol A. It’s very simple, most companies, for profit entities and even non-profits dependent on funding sources tend to maximize short term gain over long term good. While the political arm of the government does that as well, the institutions stable enough to do reliable work on policy issues that affect our long term well being are few in number. Government run research with stable funding, good employees and good management will do this work well, it’s a good match between the nature of the work and the nature of the organizations.

    The ever excellent Pump Handle has more, I read their post as I was writing this one and so, nothing more to say, really, except, remember Children of Men! Fertility is not to be toyed with, any chemical that has the ability to affect egg production two generations down needs to be handled with care. 

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    Pet Poisonings – A chemistry detective story

    Byoliveridley

    Melamine in pet food may not be accidental – USATODAY.com

    A nitrogen-rich chemical used to make plastic and sometimes as a fertilizer may have been deliberately added to an ingredient in pet food that has sickened and killed cats and dogs across the country, public and private officials say. A leading theory is that it was added to fake higher protein levels.

    Melamine has been found in wheat gluten, rice protein concentrate and, in South Africa, corn gluten, all imported from China, and all meant for use in pet food, the Food and Drug Administration confirmed Thursday.

    “It adds to the theory when you see other products that are labeled as protein supplements, in this case rice protein, and in South Africa corn gluten and in the previous case wheat gluten,” said Stephen Sundlof, FDA chief veterinarian. “That melamine was found in all three of those, it would certainly lend credibility to the theory that this was intentional.”

    Interesting, apparently, melamine was added to increase the nitrogen content of the food so it would show up as protein in the most common protein test, which only looks for nitrogen. When I am not working, I guess I will look up the test details.

    I wonder if this is only the tip of the iceberg? What other techniques do food manufacturers use to fake it? Growing up, food adulteraion was a serious problem in India, and still continues to be an issue in the third world.

    More on this story to come, I am sure.

    One more thing that needs to be said is that the FDA has been very reactive, as opposed to proactive. This is partly because the FDA does not issue recalls, it first “strongly suggests” that the company involved recall whatver product it is that may be having issues. Only if this issue is not addressed can the FDA start seizure proceedings, which could take months. The FDa regulates and monitors on a company level, not at a product level.

    For example, when Japan had one sample of U.S beef test positive for mad cow disease, that was the end of beef imports from the U.S. This is an extreme case because you’re dealing with an infectious disease, but the point is that when you are finding huge levels of pesticide in food from a country, the first thing you need to do is stop everything, troubleshoot, then turn things back on again. Yes, this gets expensive, but so does 1000s of sick pets. The difference is, who pays. In the U.S, it’s always the consumer!

  • EPA chief: Bush climate policy working

    Byoliveridley

    If by working, you mean increasing CO2 is good for the world, a warm place is a better place, right!

    EPA chief: Bush climate policy working – Yahoo News

    The EPA said its annual greenhouse gas assessment showed that 7.26 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases were released by U.S. sources in 2005, an increase of 0.8 percent from the previous year.

    “The Bush administration’s unparalleled financial, international and domestic commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions is delivering real results,” Johnson proclaimed in a statement.

    This statement makes perfect sense and is the complete truth if you assume that increasing GHG emissions demonstrates “unparalleled” commitment to “reducing” greenhouse gas emissions? Unparalleled all right! Nobody’s better at emitting CO2 than the U.S of A! Wohoo!!

  • Pesticide makes rat grandsons unattractive.

    Byoliveridley

    Yes, strained headline!

    A Toxic Hand-Me-Down — Balter 2007 (327): 1 — ScienceNOW

    Environmental contamination can cause cancer and birth defects. Of particular concern are a group of toxic chemicals called endocrine-disrupters, which interfere with reproductive hormones and may cause sterility. A new study, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that these chemicals can change reproductive behavior as well, and that these behavioral changes can be passed on from parents to offspring. If correct, these changes could alter the course of evolution by giving natural selection new targets to act on.

    In 2005, a team led by reproductive biologist Michael Skinner of Washington State University in Pullman reported in Science that the fungicide vinclozolin, an endocrine-disrupter used to spray vineyards and other crops, causes fertility defects in the male offspring of female rats treated with the chemical. These defects are, in turn, passed down to the males of subsequent generations. The toxin did not appear to be altering gene sequences; instead, Skinner and colleagues found, vinclozolin was somehow causing other chemical groups to latch onto certain genes, changing their expression (Science, 3 June 2005, p. 1391). The phenomenon is known as epigenetic inheritance. Last year, Skinner’s group identified 15 epigenetically altered DNA sequences in the sperm of the vinclozolin-treated rats

    More signs of intergenerational effects of low levels of endocrine disruptors. I had blogged recently about Bisphenol A having intergenerational effects (where exposure to a chemical agent causes consequences for offspring and off off spring, etc).

    It’s still early, but remember Children of Men (good movie, see it).

  • Pesticide Screening Using a CD Player and CDs.

    Byoliveridley

    Who said CDs were dead, this is, hands down, the coolest paper on screening techniques I have seen in a while. I haven’t seen the rest of the paper, not Open Access, of course, but the abstract does make it sound cool.

    Microimmunoanalysis on Standard Compact Discs To Determine Low Abundant Compounds

    “High-density competitive indirect microimmunoassays were performed in both sides of compact discs by direct absorption of immunoreagents on polycarbonate surface, using gold- or enzyme-labeled immunoglobulins as tracers for displaying the immunoreaction. The operational principle is based on the use of a low-reflectivity compact disc as analytical platform that allows the reflection/transmission (30/70%) of the CD reader laser beam ( 780 nm). The reflected light is used to scan the disc track keeping it in movement. The transmitted light is detected by a planar photodiode integrated on the CD drive. The variation of the optical transmission of the light caused by the immunoreaction products is related to the sample concentration. As a proof of concept, low abundant compounds, commonly used as pesticides, were detected in a 60-min total assay time, with a limit of detection ranging from 0.02 to 0.62 ug/L for 2,4,5-TP, chlorpyriphos, and metolachlor. The obtained results show the enormous prospective of compact discs in combination with CD players for multiresidue and drug discovery applications.”

    Why are techniques like these important in the world of environmental analysis? Because they change the paradigm from laboratory based techniques to field based analysis. You don’t have to take a bunch of samples, spend a lot of time and money shipping them to a lab and waiting for the results. You can pop your samples into a CD player and one hour later (less than a 74 minute listening time on a CD!), you’ll have results.

    Awesome stuff, I’d love to see it in action, or even try to replicate the work. It looks like you have to make some modifications to the player to make it work, but hey, there are millions of CD players that are going to be obsoleted in the next few years.

  • White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail

    Byoliveridley

    The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

    White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail – NYTimes.com

    No, this headline is not from the Onion, I repeat, this is an accurate account of the workings of the world’s most powerful government as it delays action on climate change!