USDA to Give Monsanto's New GMO Crops Special "Speed Approval"

from nationofchange.org

If you thought Monsanto’s lack of testing on their current GMO crops was bad before, prepare to now be blown away by the latest statement by the USDA. Despite links to organ damage and mutated insects, the USDA says that it is changing the rules so that genetically modified seed companies like Monsanto will get ‘speedier regulatory reviews’. With the faster reviews, there will be even less time spent on evaluating the potential dangers. Why? Because Monsanto is losing sales with longer approval terms.

The changes are expected to take full effect in March when they’re published in the Federal Register. The USDA’s goal is to cut the approval time for GMO crops in half in order to speedily implement them into the global food supply. The current USDA process takes longer than they would like due to ‘public interest, legal challenges, and the challenges associated with the advent of national organic food standards‘ says USDA deputy administrator Michael Gregoire.

Questioning Alternatives to BPA in Plastics

As evidence mounts of the dangers of bisphenol-A, there is a rising urgency to purge the common chemical from consumer products.

Several states have imposed bans on the use of BPA in baby bottles, and many companies have voluntarily substituted alternatives for the petroleum-based plasticizer, which research has now linked with everything from cancer to attention deficit disorder to asthma.

But does a "BPA-free" label guarantee a safer product? Not necessarily, according to experts, who suggest that while consumers are being misled, regulation continues to go awry.

"Frankly, this is probably just the tip of the iceberg," said Dr. Sheela Sathyanarayana, a pediatric environmental health expert at Seattle Children's Hospital.

Overall, some 80,000 chemicals are currently on the market, with only a small portion tested for safety. Even fewer have been evaluated for specific effects, such as the BPA-induced scrambling of hormone signals, which The Huffington Post reported last week might be contributing to obesity and diabetes epidemics. The consequences of this oversight go back decades. When Congress banned polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the 1970s, manufacturers began employing an alternate flame retardant: polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE). It wasn't until years later that scientists learned this close chemical cousin of PCB was just as harmful, if not more so.

from the Huffington Post

Cadmium, A Widespread Contaminant, Linked to Learning Disabilities. Is It The New Lead?

from scientificamerican.com

It’s a heavy metal. It’s linked to learning problems in school children. And every child is exposed.

Sounds like lead? 

It’s cadmium.

Signs are emerging that cadmium – a widespread contaminant that gets little attention from health experts and regulators – could be the new lead.

Children with higher cadmium levels are three times more likely to have learning disabilities and participate in special education, according to a new study led by Harvard University researchers.

Absorbed from the soil, cadmium is found in certain foods, particularly potatoes, grains, sunflower seeds and leafy greens, as well as tobacco. It also has been discovered in some inexpensive children’s jewelry, prompting new voluntary industry standards last fall.

Dr. Robert Wright, the study’s senior author, emphasized that the links to learning disabilities and special education were found at commonplace levels previously thought to be benign.

“One of the important points of the study is that we didn’t study a population of kids who had very high exposures. We studied a population representative of the U.S. That we found any [effect] suggests this is occurring at relatively low levels,” said Wright, an associate professor of pediatrics and environmental health at Harvard.

Read more.

A Fight for More Scrutiny: The First GMO Animal Built for Human Consumption

Blink and you'll miss a critically important moment in the effort to keep genetically engineered animals out of the food supply. This week three consumer groups (Food & Water Watch, Consumers Union, and the Center for Food Safety) petitioned the FDA to reclassify a genetically engineered salmon and make it subject to more stringent regulatory scrutiny (currently the GMO salmon is classified as a "new animal drug," a designation for animals used to create drug ingredients.)  The salmon in question (called the AquAdvantage salmon, quietly under development in the private sector for 15 years) has been genetically engineered to grow twice as fast as natural salmon in captivity; it eats 5 times as much food as its unaltered counterparts. If approved, AquAdvantage salmon would be the first genetically engineered animal made for human consumption.

One of the differences between GMO and standard fish, according to the report, was the "presence of inflammation of unknown cause in some tissues."

Members of the FDA’s own advisory committee have described the agency’s current review as lacking in rigor. Consumer groups point out that the salmon grower's own studies reveal the transgenic salmon (which would be hatched on Prince Edward Island in Canada and reared in Panama, making it free of some U.S. regulations) may contain increased levels of IGF-1, a hormone that helps accelerate the growth of the transgenic fish and is linked to breast, colon, prostate, and lung cancer.

Mutant Salmon: Grow twice as big in their first year of life as their counterparts in nature according to this chart from Aquabounty Technologies..The salmon's parent company, Aqua Bounty Technologies (located in Waltham, MA) has put a lot of thought into not letting their spawn escape (because that's where regualtory efforts focus under the fish's current classification,) but very little research has been conducted into the potential health effects of eating such fish. A quick look at the technology begs the question: are these animals even salmon? Aqua Bounty's report to the FDA puts it this way, "Studies of AquAdvantage Salmon have demonstrated that they are similar in many ways to their non-transgenic counterparts, but very different in other respects." One of the differences between GMO and standard fish, according to the report, was the "presence of inflammation of unknown cause in some tissues." Not wildly appetizing, we must admit.

 At the inception of the project more than a decade ago a wild salmon was brought into the lab and its DNA was inserted with two genes from other fish (a chinook and an ocean pout.) The new genes control growth rates and increase them to levels beyond standard salmon.  The original wild salmon was mated until successive generations began to express the new gene and grow rapidly in captivity. Not only do the GMO salmon eat a lot, but they are unconcerned about eating in the presence of predators--one of the reasons Aqua Bounty is confident its mutant fish won't take over the world.

One of the weirder aspects of this sci-fi fish is what's been done to stop it from propagating if it does escape. The GMO eggs are all female, and they are subject to a lab process that results in triploidy (giving them three instead of two of each chromosome) rendering them sterile so that even if they escape they can't reproduce. The fish on your plate might have unnaturally elevated levels of growth hormone and an extra chromosome. You want that grilled, poached or baked? 

Environmental Toxin Undermines Childhood Vaccines

From National Public Radio:

The more exposure children have to chemicals called perfluorinated compounds, the less likely they are to have a good immune response to vaccinations, a study just published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association shows.No place on earth pristine enough: Stig Nygaard/Flickr Even in the remote Faroe Islands, some children have high levels of perfluorinated compounds in their blood. The chemicals may interfere with the immune system.

The finding suggests, but doesn't prove, that these chemicals can affect the immune system enough to make some children more vulnerable to infectious diseases.

"We found that the higher the exposure, the less capable the kids were in terms of responding appropriately to the vaccine."

For decades now, PFCs have been used in nonstick coatings, stain-resistant fabrics and some food packaging. And because they persist in the environment for years, they have become common around the globe.

"You can find them in polar bears," says Dr. Philippe Grandjean, the study's lead author who works at both Harvard and the University of Southern Denmark.

 

Studies in animals have shown that PFCs can weaken the immune system.

Grandjean wanted to know whether this was happening in children. So he led a team that studied nearly 600 kids in the Faroe Islands, which lie about halfway between Scotland and Iceland.

The Faroese have levels of PFCs similar to those of U.S. residents. Grandjean figured if the chemicals were having an effect, it would show up in the way kids' bodies responded to vaccinations.

Normally, a vaccine causes the production of lots of antibodies to a specific germ. But Grandjean says the response to tetanus and diphtheria vaccines was much weaker in 5-year-olds whose blood contained relatively high levels of PFCs.

"We found that the higher the exposure, the less capable the kids were in terms of responding appropriately to the vaccine," Grandjean says. The results raise the possibility that "the immune system is not really developing optimally."

The health effects of PFCs are still poorly understood. But in the past decade, government scientists have become increasingly concerned about possible links to developmental problems in children.

As a result, the Environmental Protection Agency has taken steps that have resulted in some PFCs being phased out.

These chemicals aren't as frightening as some found in the environment, says Dr, Alan Ducatman from West Virginia University, which has been part of a large study of a PFC known as C8. "But they are clearly problematic," he says, adding that the C8 study also found some evidence of an effect on the immune system.

Consumers in the U.S. have reason to be concerned about PFCs, Ducatman says, even though exposure to some of them is falling.

The problem is that levels "are not going down in other parts of the world and in fact there are places where they may even be going up," Ducatman says.

One of those places is China, says Grandjean. And that's a problem for countries that buy products from China, he says.

"We may just be importing products with the same compounds," he says. "So I don't think that we have solved the exposure problem yet and I think it needs international attention."

That's beginning to happen. Some global treaties are beginning to include language restricting the use of certain PFCs.

Listen to the NPR report.