Health Info.
No tuna, no salmon. No oysters, no skate. No cod and chips
Imagine a world without seafood for supper. It's nearer than you think.
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2The Observer, Sunday 26 April 2009
Are fish to disappear from our plates entirely?
Photograph: Romas Foord
As I step off the train at Heysel, in the shadow of the notorious football stadium, the vast art deco structure of the Palais du Centenaire rises like a cathedral. With its four soaring buttresses topped by statues, the Palais forms the centrepiece of the Parc des Expositions in Brussels - a trade-fair complex built in the 1930s to commemorate a century of independence from the Netherlands. This is the temporary home of thousands of fish products from around the world as 23,000 delegates descend from 80 countries for the annual European Seafood Exposition - the world's largest seafood trade show and a grim reminder of man's dominion over the oceans.
"If I wanted people to understand the global fishing crisis, I would bring them here," says Sally Bailey, a marine programme officer with the World Wide Fund for Nature, one of the more moderate NGOs combating the exploitation of the seas. Last year, one of the more militant groups - Greenpeace - managed to "close down" five exhibitors trading in critically endangered bluefin tuna, by deploying 80 activists to drape their stands in fishing nets, chain themselves to fixtures and put up banners that read: "Time and tuna are running out".
Their main target was the Mitsubishi Corporation, the Japanese car manufacturer that is also the world's largest tuna trader, controlling 60% of the market and accounting for 40% of all bluefin tuna imported into Japan from the Mediterranean. The other companies were Dongwon Industries (Korea), Moon Marine (Taiwan/ Singapore), Azzopardi Fisheries (Malta) and Ricardo Fuentes & Sons (Spain).
The day I am there, Greenpeace activists are stalking EU fisheries ministers and waiting for a chance to unfurl their banners - but the security guards thwart them. However, the gargantuan catch on display speaks for itself. At the stand run by the Sea Wealth Frozen Food Company of Thailand, the shelves are groaning with jauntily designed packets of frozen squid, surimi (minced fish) dumplings, spring rolls, samosas and deep-fried cones with shrimp tails poking out of them. In the next aisle, a frenetic chef is wok-frying prawns from Madagascar, dipping them in little square dishes of cumin, coriander, chilli powder, salt, cinnamon and garlic. At the Taiwan Pavilion, the cabinets are full of chilled and frozen tilapia, barramundi, sushi, eel and vacuum packs of tobiko - orange flying-fish roe, salty, crunchy as granola and served by a young woman in national dress who literally has not heard of sustainability. "All the boats are out there catching fish with roe," she tells me. "With so many after the same species, this is a very difficult business for us."
These halls take several hours to negotiate, and the stands seemingly go on forever - 1,650 businesses in all, together peddling most of the 147m tonnes of seafood produced globally every year. Of this, 100m tonnes is caught in the wild while the rest is farmed to satisfy an insatiable demand. Already, 1.2bn people depend on fish in their diet - and in Europe we each consume 20kg per year on average, compared to 5kg per person in India. However, as the emergent middle classes in Asia develop a taste, and a budget, for seafood - considered a luxury item until now - demand will rocket further.
What the organisers must know, but are keeping mum about, is that the oceans are in a parlous state. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that 70% of the world's fisheries are now fully exploited (ie, fished to the point where they can only just replenish themselves), overexploited or depleted. The majority of fish populations have been reduced by 70-95%, depending on the species, compared to the level they would be at if there were no fishing at all. In other words, only five per cent of fish are left in some cases. In more practical terms, fishermen are catching one or two fish per 100 hooks, compared to 10 fish per 100 hooks where a stock is healthy and unexploited - a measure of sustainability once used by the Japanese fleet. In England and Wales, we are landing one fish for every 20 that we landed in 1889, when government records began, despite having larger vessels, more sophisticated technology and trawl nets so vast and all-consuming that they are capable of containing 12 Boeing 747 aircraft.
Where have all those other fish gone? In short, we have eaten them. "Tens of thousands of bluefin tuna used to be caught in the North Sea every year," says Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at the University of York. "Now, there are none. Once, there were millions of skate - huge common skate, white skate, long-nosed skate - being landed from seas around the UK. The common skate is virtually extinct, the angel shark has gone. We have lost our marine megafauna as a consequence of exploitation."
Then there are the devastating effects of bottom trawling around our coasts, which began with the advent of the steam trawler 130 years ago. "Sweeping backwards and forwards across the seabed, they removed a whole carpet of invertebrates," Professor Roberts says, "such as corals, sponges, sea fans and seaweeds. On one map, dating from 1883, there is a huge area of the North Sea roughly the size of Wales, marked 'Oyster beds'. The last oysters were fished there commercially in the 1930s; the last live oyster was taken in the 1970s. We have altered the marine environment in a spectacular way."
Worse still, after stripping our own seas bare, we have "exported fishing capacity to the waters of developing countries", Professor Roberts warns. Off Mauritania, Senegal and other West African countries, fleets from the rich industrial north are "fishing in a totally unsustainable way with minimal oversight by European countries". In return for plundering the oceans, which deprives local people of food, and artisanal fishermen of their livelihood, these vessels pay minimal fees that impoverished countries are happy to accept. "It is a mining operation," Professor Roberts says, "a rerun of the exploitation of terrestrial wealth that happened in colonial days. This is colonialism in a new guise, albeit with a respectable cloak in the form of access agreements."
Such is the human feeding frenzy, there may come a time when there are no fish left to catch. In 2006, a study in the US journal Science warned that every single species we exploit would have collapsed by 2048 if populations continued to decline as they had since the 1950s. By 2003, nearly a third of all species had collapsed, the study found - meaning their numbers were down 90% or more on historic maximum catch levels. Extrapolate that on a graph, and the downward curve reaches 100% just before 2050.
That prognosis - now disputed - was based on a four-year study of fish populations, catch records and ocean ecosystems. "We really see the end of the line now," said the author Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the time. "It will be in our lifetime. Our children will see a world without seafood, if we do not change things." Many imagined a world where there would be no fish protein left to eat apart from jellyfish and marine algae.
What the study did not make sufficiently clear was that some fish populations had bounced back as a result of drastic measures by the authorities. In countries such as Iceland, Norway, the United States, New Zealand and Australia, fisheries management has been strengthened by controls that limit fishing effort (the number of boats out there, the time they spend at sea and the areas where they are allowed to fish). Another management approach, especially in Europe, is to control output (the amount of fish landed) using Total Allowable Catch quotas, or TACs. These are designed to maintain a stock's biomass - the estimated weight of fish left in the sea after fishing and natural deaths are taken into account. It should never be allowed to fall so low that a species is unable to spawn a healthy generation the following year.
Drawn up by scientists and organisations such as Ices (the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea), these quotas are discussed by fisheries ministers and fishermen at forums such as the EU. Both have vested interests, whether political or commercial. "If you put the fox in charge of the henhouse," Professor Roberts says, "decisions will be based on short-term constraints, such as paying the mortgage on the boat. Politicians, too, make choices that are beneficial to them or their constituents in the short term."
In other words, such gatherings often ride roughshod over the scientists' recommendations - as happened at a meeting of ICCAT (the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas) in Luxembourg in 2007, where quotas were being thrashed out for bluefin tuna from the Mediterranean. Scientists recommended an annual catch of 15,000 tonnes a year, with a preference for 10,000 tonnes - but EU ministers agreed a quota of 29,000 tonnes, enough to guarantee the collapse of the species. (Last year, quotas for 2009 were again set far higher than scientists were advising.)
In fact, the real amount of bluefin landed was 61,000 tonnes - four times what scientists had recommended - due to illegal and unreported fishing. Last month, the European Commission implemented a two-year control and inspection programme for bluefin tuna fisheries in seven Mediterranean countries, to clamp down on things such as illegal spotter planes used to track down tuna schools. Globally, black-market fishing is worth US$25bn (£17bn) a year. In Europe, 50% of the cod we eat has been caught illegally.
Those figures, and the Luxembourg debacle, are recorded in The End of the Line - the documentary, based on Charles Clover's book of that name, to be screened in UK cinemas from 8 June. However, the blatant disregard for science it portrays is not an isolated case. "We have analysed the decision-making of European fisheries ministers over the past 20 years," says Professor Roberts, "and systematically, year on year, they have set quotas that are 25 to 35% higher than the levels recommended by scientists."
How can our politicians get away with it? "There is no obligation upon them to take scientific advice," Professor Roberts explains. "What they will tell you is that it is only one of the things they have to consider. While they might be protecting a fisherman's livelihood in the term of one or two years, short-term decision-making like that guarantees stock collapse. It is not just a possibility, it is a certainty. The only uncertainty is how long it will take."
According to Professor Roberts: "What politicians should be deciding is how the catch is allocated within different nations. That is politics. What they shouldn't be deciding is how big the catch should be in the first place. That is science."
In Norway and the US, "they respect the advice of scientists", he adds - the best example being New England, where stocks of ground fish were in serious decline in the mid-1990s, but enlightened management brought them back. "At Georges Bank, they created a closed area of 20,000 square kilometres that was off-limits to mobile fishing gear [such as trawl nets]," Professor Roberts explains. They also cut fishing effort by a draconian 50% - putting many fishermen out of business. In the past 10 years, however, there has been "a spectacular recovery" of key economic species, Roberts says. "The haddock has bounced back, the flounder has bounced back, the scallops have bounced back, so it has been a great success story."
What this demonstrates is that, where there is political will, the tide can be turned on overfishing. In the US, a piece of 1976 legislation called the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act has recently been reauthorised, requiring the industry to end overfishing in all federal waters by 2011. There is no such legislation in Europe. Under the existing Act, fisheries in Alaska and the North Pacific are already well managed - which is why wild Pacific salmon, Pacific cod and pollock from Alaska were prime candidates for certification by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), the international NGO that created a standard for sustainable fisheries in the late 1990s and upholds it. Why do these US fisheries tick all the boxes?
"They have very progressive management under the North Pacific Fishery Management Council," Professor Roberts says, "with precautionary targets - so they go for a relatively low fraction of the fish population each year. They have closures to protect habitats and valued species such as Steller sea lions and sea otters [which can get caught in fishing gear] plus extensive areas that are closed to protect deep-water corals from destruction by bottom trawling. "The authorities also impose quotas for bycatch - other species caught by mistake - to protect them from exploitation.
These are the kinds of issues the MSC is looking at when certifying fisheries. So far, 43 have been certified, including 10 in Britain, while more than 100 are under assessment - but what exactly does that mean? "Right from the start, the idea was that fisheries would be independently assessed by a third party," says James Simpson, communications officer at the MSC, "so although we set the standard, we don't carry out the assessments. That is important, because it means we don't have any influence over the results."
Instead, marine scientists from certifying bodies such as Food Certification International and Moody Marine do the work, delving into every aspect of sustainability and producing a report up to 900 pages long. "They look at stock levels, based on historical records," says Simpson, "at the impact fishing is having on the environment and at the management plan for the fishery."
A score of 80 or more must be achieved against each of these three criteria for a fishery to be certified.
The initial assessment is peer-reviewed by fellow scientists, stakeholders such as environmental groups have their say - and the fishery gets to carry the eco-label on its products. "To do that, you have to be able to trace the fish all the way through the supply chain," says Simpson, "because you don't want any non-certified species or illegally caught fish slipping into an MSC batch."
The science may be rigorous, but will the MSC label change the world?
With some species, the label is making a big difference: 42% of the world's wild salmon catch is MSC-certified, and 40% of its prime white fish catch. Altogether, five million tonnes of seafood are certified by the MSC every year.
However, that is just five per cent of the wild-caught seafood market, which is why Professor Roberts believes the label itself "can only change a small number of well-informed people who actually care". The big effect, he says, is that supermarkets "have taken on board what the MSC is saying and have developed better fish sourcing policies of their own. They are the ones who can buy or not buy from a particular supplier, so they have a lot of power."
Sainsbury's - the largest retailer of MSC-certified seafood in the UK - has pledged that, by the end of 2010, it will source 80% of its seafood from MSC-certified fisheries or from the "green list" of species approved by the Marine Conservation Society. Marks & Spencer has promised that, by 2012, all its seafood will be either MSC-certified or from other independently certified fisheries. In May, it will launch a new range of prepared meals for outdoor eating and barbecues, based around gurnard, John Dory and black bream. Caught in season in British waters, these are a more sustainable choice than the "Big Five" overfished species - the cod, haddock, prawns, tuna and plaice that account for 80% of all seafood sold in Britain. If we take the pressure off these overexploited stocks, they will hopefully recover.
However, the MSC programme is about far more than shopping. In Europe, the growing number of certified fisheries has transformed the mood of EU fishing negotiations. The Dutch based Pelagic Freezer-Trawler Association (PFA) was the first North Sea herring fishery to be MSC-certified in May 2006, and the Swedish, Danish and Scottish herring fleets followed. Their representatives meet regularly in Brussels to talk about fisheries management. "All the major herring players in Europe are MSC-certified or under assessment," says Gerard van Balsfoort, president of the PFA, "and this has led to a certain kind of behaviour in the advisory process. From the point of view of stocks, you can't just ask for a higher quota if it isn't scientifically based. You can't just shout for what you want. "
In the seas around South Georgia - a remote Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom 1,300km from the Falkland Islands - the Patagonian toothfish fishery was required by MSC certifiers to initiate research that would locate deep-coral areas vulnerable to damage by trawl gear. If such areas were found, efforts to protect them "should be considered", the certifiers said. In fact, the fishery went further. It identified three deep-coral areas that needed protecting and closed them to fishing vessels entirely. That way, fish and fragile habitats would have a chance to recover.
In South Africa and New Zealand, too, MSC-certified fisheries (for hake and hoki respectively) have helped create Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) where trawling is banned, either by funding research or by lobbying the government. In New Zealand, 30% of the Exclusive Economic Zone - an area extending 220 miles out to sea over which it has rights - has been closed with fishing industry approval.
Such closures could provide the answer to the fishing crisis, allowing our children and our grandchildren to eat fish with a clear conscience. In Iceland, Canada and the US, the creation of MPAs "has brought real increases in fish populations and real recovery of seabed habitats", Professor Roberts reports. "Populations of exploited species have increased five-, 10- or even 20-fold within five, 10 or 20 years," he says. "What you see is the flourishing of life."
Over time, this explosion of fecundity spreads to other parts of the ocean. "The benefits of protection flow to the surrounding fishing grounds through the emigration of animals from protected areas, and the export of their offspring on ocean currents," Professor Roberts says. "The eggs and larvae of these protected animals are transported to fishing grounds and can replenish them."
In his view, 30% of the world's oceans should be protected "to set the clock back 200 years" and reverse the fishing crisis. After that, responsible fisheries management "in the North Pacific mould" could avert the 2048 scenario. The trouble is, only 0.8% of the oceans are currently closed to fishing - despite the efforts of former President George W Bush, who "single-handedly created MPAs, dotted throughout the Pacific Ocean, which now constitute 31% of all MPAs worldwide", Professor Roberts says.
In Britain, too, MPAs are seen as part of the solution. The Marine Bill is grinding its way through Parliament, with a provision to create MPAs in territorial waters up to 12 nautical miles from our coast. Britain and Europe have pledged to create networks of MPAs by 2012.
Far from campaigning for a total ban on fishing, Professor Roberts believes it should be allowed. If properly regulated, it will increase global fish production rather than decimate it. "Fisheries science suggests that a species is healthiest when you reduce its population size by 50%," he says. "That way, you remove the larger, older, slower-growing animals and the population becomes dominated by smaller, faster-growing fish. For them, the availability of food increases and they thrive. That gives you a boost in population growth rate, which gives you a higher rate of production to exploit."
Perversely, fishing could swamp the world with fish protein rather than starve it - but it has to be done differently. "We should abandon quotas," Professor Roberts believes, limiting fishing effort rather than output. "If you're not out there catching fish, they're not going to die." At present, EU vessels that exceed their quota have to dump fish overboard dead, rather than land it illegally. "You've got one or two times as many fish being killed and discarded, sometimes, as are being landed," Professor Roberts says. "That is no way to manage a fishery; that is not sensible at all. You have to land all your catch."
Reforms such as this will require "a major change of political direction on this side of the Atlantic", Professor Roberts warns - "but if we have that, we can turn back the clock within 20 years, to the point where a lot of species are in a far more productive state. None of this is rocket science. Perhaps we need good old George W Bush back... the world's greatest marine conservationist!"
• Read more from Andrew Purvis about fish on OFM's food blog, Word of Mouth. Go to www.observer.co.uk/foodblog. The End of the Line was released and is a must see. Go to www.endoftheline.com.
ARTICLE #3:
Here’s a good reason to become an aquaponic farmer if there ever was one. This article came out of the UK Observer very recently, dated Sunday, April 26, 2009. It makes one of the most convincing cases for culturing your own organic fish we’ve seen yet. To substantiate this information, go to www.endoftheline.com and order the eye-opening Video describing how our world wild fish populations are being decimated.
Check the Articles to your left daily. It’s an ever-changing RSS VIDEO NEWS FEED from the BBC NEWS PLAYER.
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ARTICLE #1:
Here’s an extensive article on Mad Cow disease that was written early in 2004. You can bet nothing significant has occurred since then to deter the Cattlemen’s Association from protecting the Big Agricultural Animal Businesses from making as much money as possible. No laws have been enacted to stop the feeding of slaughter-house waste to other animals like chickens and pigs and replacing that gory food source with healthy natural protein. Those of us who quit eating red meat when reports of Mad Cow first surfaced should take special note of what this article says about chickens in regard to this disease. It’s actually possible we’re at greater risk than red meat eaters these days.
Could Mad Cow Disease Already be Killing Thousands of Americans Every Year?
by Michael Greger, M.D.
January 7, 2004
October 2001, 34-year-old Washington State native Peter Putnam started losing his mind. One month he was delivering a keynote business address, the next he couldn't form a complete sentence. Once athletic, soon he couldn't walk. Then he couldn't eat. After a brain biopsy showed it was Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, his doctor could no longer offer any hope. "Just take him home and love him," the doctor counseled his family.[1,2,3] Peter's tragic death, October 2002, may have been caused by Mad Cow disease.
Seven years earlier and 5000 miles away, Stephen Churchill was the first in England to die. His first symptoms of depression and dizziness gave way to a living nightmare of terrifying hallucinations; he was dead in 12 months at age 19.[4] Next was Peter Hall, 20, who showed the first signs of depression around Christmas, 1994. By the next Christmas, he couldn't walk, talk, or do anything for himself.[5] Then it was Anna's turn, then Michelle's. Michelle Bowen, age 29, died in a coma three weeks after giving birth to her son via emergency cesarean section. Then it was Alison's turn. These were the first five named victims of Britain's Mad Cow epidemic. They died from what the British Secretary of Health called the worst form of death imaginable, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a relentlessly progressive and invariably fatal human dementia.[6] The announcement of their deaths, released on March 20, 1996 (ironically, Meatout Day[7]), reversed the British government's decade-old stance that British beef was safe to eat.[8]
It is now considered an "incontestable fact" that these human deaths in Britain were caused by Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or Mad Cow disease.[9] Bovine means "cow or cattle," spongiform means "sponge-like," and encephalopathy means "brain disease." Mad Cow disease is caused by unconventional pathogens called prions--literally infectious proteins--which, because of their unique structure, are practically invulnerable, surviving even incineration[10] at temperatures hot enough to melt lead.[11] The leading theory as to how cows got Mad Cow disease in the first place is by eating diseased sheep infected with a sheep spongiform encephalopathy called scrapie.[12]
In humans, prions can cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a human spongiform encephalopathy whose clinical picture can involve weekly deterioration into blindness and epilepsy as one's brain becomes riddled with tiny holes.
We've known about Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease for decades, since well before the first mad cow was discovered in 1985. Some cases of CJD seemed to run in families; other cases seemed to just arise spontaneously in about one in a million people every year, and were hence dubbed "sporadic." The new form of CJD caused by eating beef from cows infected with Mad Cow disease, though, seemed to differ from the classic sporadic CJD.
The CJD caused by infected meat has tended to strike younger people, has produced more psychotic symptoms, and has often dragged on for a year or more. The most defining characteristic, though, was found when their brains were sampled. The brain pathology was vividly reminiscent of Kuru, a disease once found in a New Guinea tribe of cannibals who ate the brains of their dead.[13] Scientists called this new form of the disease "variant" CJD.
Other than Charlene, a 24 year old woman now so tragically dying in Florida, who was probably infected in Britain, there have been no reported cases of variant CJD in the U.S.[14] Hundreds of confirmed cases of the sporadic form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, however, arise in the United States every year,[15] but the beef industry is quick to point out these are cases of sporadic CJD, not the new variant known to be caused by Mad Cow disease.[16] Of course, no one knows what causes sporadic CJD. New research, discussed below, suggests that not hundreds but thousands of Americans die of sporadic CJD every year, and that some of these CJD deaths may be caused by eating infected meat after all.
Although the fact that Mad Cow disease causes variant CJD had already been strongly established, researchers at the University College of London nevertheless created transgenic mice complete with "humanized" brains genetically engineered with human genes to try to prove the link once and for all. When the researchers injected one strain of the "humanized" mice with infected cow brains, they came down with the same brain damage seen in human variant CJD, as expected. But when they tried this in a different strain of transgenic "humanized" mice, those mice got sick too, but most got sick from what looked exactly like sporadic CJD! The Mad Cow prions caused a disease that had a molecular signature indistinguishable from sporadic CJD. To the extent that animal experiments can simulate human results, their shocking conclusion was that eating infected meat might be responsible for some cases of sporadic CJD in addition to the expected variant CJD. The researchers concluded that "it is therefore possible that some patients with [what looks like]... sporadic CJD may have a disease arising from BSE exposure."[17] Laura Manuelidis, section chief of surgery in the neuropathology department at Yale University comments, "Now people are beginning to realize that because something looks like sporadic CJD they can't necessarily conclude that it's not linked to [Mad Cow disease]..."[18]
This is not the first time meat was linked to sporadic CJD. In 2001, a team of French researchers found, to their complete surprise, a strain of scrapie--"mad sheep" disease--that caused the same brain damage in mice as sporadic CJD.[19] "This means we cannot rule out that at least some sporadic CJD may be caused by some strains of scrapie," says team member Jean-Philippe Deslys of the French Atomic Energy Commission's medical research laboratory.[20]
Population studies had failed to show a link between CJD and lamb chops, but this French research provided an explanation why. There seem to be six types of sporadic CJD and there are more than 20 strains of scrapie. If only some sheep strains affect only some people, studies of entire populations may not clearly show the relationship. Monkeys fed infected sheep brains certainly come down with the disease.[21] Hundreds of "mad sheep" were found in the U.S. in 2003.[22] Scrapie remains such a problem in the United States that the USDA has issued a scrapie "declaration of emergency."[23] Maybe some cases of sporadic CJD in the U.S. are caused by sheep meat as well.[24]
Pork is also a potential source of infection. Cattle remains are still boiled down and legally fed to pigs (as well as chickens) in this country. The FDA allows this exemption because no "naturally occurring" porcine (pig) spongiform encephalopathy has ever been found. But American farmers typically kill pigs at just five months of age, long before the disease is expected to show symptoms. And, because pigs are packed so tightly together, it would be difficult to spot neurological conditions like spongiform encephalopathies, whose most obvious symptoms are movement and gait disturbances. We do know, however, that pigs are susceptible to the disease--laboratory experiments show that pigs can indeed be infected by Mad Cow brains[25]--and hundreds of thousands of downer pigs, too sick or crippled by injury to even walk, arrive at U.S. slaughterhouses every year.[26]
A number of epidemiological studies have suggested a link between pork consumption and sporadic CJD. Analyzing peoples' diet histories, the development of CJD was associated with eating roast pork, ham, hot dogs, pork chops, smoked pork, and scrapple (a kind of pork pudding made from various hog carcass scraps). The researchers concluded, "The present study indicated that consumption of pork as well as its processed products (e.g., ham, scrapple) may be considered as risk factors in the development of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease." Compared to people that didn't eat ham, for example, those who included ham in their diet seemed ten times more likely to develop CJD.[27] In fact, the USDA may have actually recorded an outbreak of "mad pig" disease in New York 25 years ago, but still refuses to reopen the investigation despite petitions from the Consumer's Union (the publishers of Consumer Reports magazine).[28]
Sporadic CJD has also been associated with weekly beef consumption,[29] as well as the consumption of roast lamb,[30] veal, venison, brains in general,[31] and, in North America, seafood.[32,33] The development of CJD has also, surprisingly, been significantly linked to exposure to animal products in fertilizer,[34] sport fishing and deer hunting in the U.S.,[35] and frequent exposure to leather products.[36]
We do not know at this time whether chicken meat poses a risk. There was a preliminary report of ostriches allegedly fed risky feed in German zoos who seemed to come down with a spongiform encephalopathy.[37] Even if chickens and turkeys themselves are not susceptible, though, they may become so-called "silent carriers" of Mad Cow prions and pass them on to human consumers.[38] Dateline NBC quoted D. Carleton Gajdusek, the first to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on prion diseases,[39] as saying, "it's got to be in the pigs as well as the cattle. It's got to be passing through the chickens."[40] Dr. Paul Brown, medical director for the US Public Health Service, believes that pigs and poultry could indeed be harboring Mad Cow disease and passing it on to humans, adding that pigs are especially sensitive to the disease. "It's speculation," he says, "but I am perfectly serious."[41]
The recent exclusion of most cow brains, eyes, spinal cords, and intestines from the human food supply may make beef safer, but where are those tissues going? These potentially infectious tissues continue to go into animal feed for chickens, other poultry, pigs, and pets (as well as being rendered into products like tallow for use in cosmetics, the safety of which is currently under review[42]). Until the federal government stops the feeding of slaughterhouse waste, manure, and blood to all farm animals, the safety of meat in America cannot be guaranteed.
The hundreds of American families stricken by sporadic CJD every year have been told that it just occurs by random chance. Professor Collinge, the head of the University College of London lab, noted "When you counsel those who have the classical sporadic disease, you tell them that it arises spontaneously out of the blue. I guess we can no longer say that."
"We are not saying that all or even most cases of sporadic CJD are as a result of BSE exposure," Professor Collinge continued, "but some more recent cases may be--the incidence of sporadic CJD has shown an upward trend in the UK over the last decade... serious consideration should be given to a proportion of this rise being BSE-related. Switzerland, which has had a substantial BSE epidemic, has noted a sharp recent increase in sporadic CJD."[43] In the Nineties, Switzerland had the highest rate of Mad Cow disease in continental Europe, and their rate of sporadic CJD doubled.[44]
We don't know exactly what's happening to the rate of CJD in this country, in part because CJD is not an officially notifiable illness.[45] Currently only a few states have such a requirement. Because the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) does not actively monitor the disease on a national level,[46] a rise similar to the one in Europe could be missed.[47] In spite of this, a number of U.S. CJD clusters have already been found. In the largest known U.S. outbreak of sporadic cases to date,[48] five times the expected rate was found to be associated with cheese consumption in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley.[49] A striking increase in CJD over expected levels was also reported in Florida[50] and New York (Nassau County)[51] with anecdotal reports of clusters of deaths in Oregon[52] and New Jersey.[53]
Perhaps particularly worrisome is the seeming increase in CJD deaths among young people in this country. In the 18 years between 1979 and 1996, only a single case of sporadic CJD was found in someone under 30. Whereas between 1997 and 2001, five people under 30 died of sporadic CJD. So five young Americans dying in five years, as opposed to one young case in the previous 18 years. The true prevalence of CJD among any age group in this country remains a mystery, though, in part because it is so commonly misdiagnosed.[54]
The most frequent misdiagnosis of CJD among the elderly is Alzheimer's disease.[55] Neither CJD nor Alzheimer's can be conclusively diagnosed without a brain biopsy,[56] and the symptoms and pathology of both diseases overlap. There can be spongy changes in Alzheimer's, for example, and senile Alzheimer's plaques in CJD.[57] Stanley Prusiner, the scientist who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of prions, speculates that Alzheimer's may even turn out to be a prion disease as well.[58] In younger victims, CJD is more often misdiagnosed as multiple sclerosis or as a severe viral infection.[59]
Over the last 20 years the rates of Alzheimer's disease in the United States have skyrocketed.[60] According to the CDC, Alzheimer's Disease is now the eighth leading cause of death in the United States,[61] afflicting an estimated 4 million Americans.[62] Twenty percent or more of people clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, though, are found at autopsy not to have had Alzheimer's at all.[63] A number of autopsy studies have shown that a few percent of Alzheimer's deaths may in fact be CJD. Given the new research showing that infected beef may be responsible for some sporadic CJD, thousands of Americans may already be dying because of Mad Cow disease every year.[64]
Nobel Laureate Gajdusek, for example, estimates that 1% of people showing up in Alzheimer clinics actually have CJD.[65] At Yale, out of a series of 46 patients clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer's, six were proven to have CJD at autopsy.[66] In another study of brain biopsies, out of a dozen patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's according to established criteria, three of them were actually dying from CJD.[67] An informal survey of neuropathologists registered a suspicion that CJD accounts for 2-12% of all dementias in general.[68] Two autopsy studies showed a CJD rate among dementia deaths of about 3%.[69,70] A third study, at the University of Pennsylvania, showed that 5% of patients diagnosed with dementia had CJD.[71] Although only a few hundred cases of sporadic CJD are officially reported in the U.S. annually,[72] hundreds of thousands of Americans die with dementia every year.[73] Thousands of these deaths may actually be from CJD caused by eating infected meat.
The incubation period for human spongiform encephalopathies such as CJD can be decades.[74] This means it can be years between eating infected meat and getting diagnosed with the death sentence of CJD. Although only about 150 people have so far been diagnosed with variant CJD worldwide, it will be many years before the final death toll is known. In the United States, an unknown number of animals are infected with Mad Cow disease, causing an unknown number of human deaths from CJD. The U.S. should immediately begin testing all cows destined for human consumption, as is done in Japan, should stop feeding slaughterhouse waste to all farm animals (see http://organicconsumers.org/madcow/GregerBSE.cfm), and should immediately enact an active national surveillance program for CJD.[75]
Five years ago this week, the Center for Food Safety, the Humane Farming Association, the Center for Media & Democracy, and ten families of CJD victims petitioned the FDA and the CDC to immediately enact a national CJD monitoring system, including the mandatory reporting of CJD in all 50 states.[76] The petition was denied.[77] The CDC argued that their passive surveillance system tracking death certificate diagnoses was adequate. Their analysis of death certificates in three states and two cities, for example, showed an overall stable and typical one in a million CJD incidence rate from 1979 to 1993.[78] But CJD is so often misdiagnosed, and autopsies are so infrequently done, that this system may not provide an accurate assessment.[79]
In 1997, the CDC set up the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center at Case Western Reserve University to analyze brain tissue from CJD victims in the U.S. in hopes of tracking any new developments. In Europe, surveillance centers have been seeing most, if not all, cases of CJD. The U.S. center sees less than half. "I'm very unhappy with the numbers," laments Pierluigi Gambetti , the director of the Center. "The British and Germans politely smile when they see we examine 30% or 40% of the cases," he says. "They know unless you examine 80% or more, you are not in touch."[80] "The chance of losing an important case is high."[81]
One problem is that many doctors don't even know the Center exists. And neither the CDC nor the Center are evidently authorized to reach out to them directly to bolster surveillance efforts, because it's currently up to each state individually to determine how--or even whether--they will track the disease. In Europe, in contrast, the national centers work directly with each affected family and their physicians.[82] In the U.S., most CJD cases--even the confirmed ones--seem to just fall through the cracks. In fact, based on the autopsy studies at Yale and elsewhere, it seems most CJD cases in the U.S. aren't even picked up in the first place.
Autopsy rates have dropped in the U.S. from 50% in the Sixties to less than 10% at present.[83] Although one reason autopsies are rarely performed on atypical dementia cases is that medical professionals are afraid of catching the disease,[84] the primary reason for the decline in autopsy rates in general appears to be financial. There is currently no direct reimbursement to doctors or hospitals for doing autopsies, which often forces the family to absorb the cost of transporting the body to an autopsy center and having the brain samples taken, a tab that can run upwards of $1500.[85]
Another problem is that the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center itself remains underfunded. Paul Brown, medical director for the National Institutes of Health, has described the Center's budget as "pitiful," complaining that "there isn't any budget for CJD surveillance."[86] To adequately survey America's 290 million residents, "you need a lot of money." UK CJD expert Robert Will explains, "There was a CJD meeting of families in America in which... [the CDC] got attacked fairly vigorously because there wasn't proper surveillance. You could only do proper surveillance if you have adequate resources."[87] "I compare this to the early days of AIDS," says protein chemist Shu Chen, who directs the Center's lab, "when no one wanted to deal with the crisis."[88]
Andrew Kimbrell, the director of the Center for Food Safety, a D.C.-based public interest group, writes, "Given what we know now, it is unconscionable that the CDC is not strictly monitoring these diseases."[89] Given the presence of Mad Cow disease in the U.S., we need to immediately enact uniform active CJD surveillance on a national level, provide adequate funding not only for autopsies but also for the shipment of bodies, and require mandatory reporting of the disease in all 50 states. In Britain, even feline spongiform encephalopathy, the cat version of Mad Cow disease, is an officially notifiable illness. "No one has looked for CJD systematically in the U.S.," notes NIH medical director Paul Brown. "Ever."[90]
The animal agriculture industries continue to risk public safety, and the government seems to protect the industries' narrow business interests more than it protects its own citizens. Internal USDA documents retrieved through the Freedom of Information Act show that our government did indeed consider a number of precautionary measures as far back as 1991 to protect the American public from Mad Cow disease. According to one such document, however, the USDA explained that the "disadvantage" of these measures was that "the cost to the livestock and rendering industries would be substantial."[91]
Plant sources of protein for farm animals can cost up to 30% more than cattle remains.[92] The Cattlemen's Association admitted a decade ago that animal agribusiness could indeed find economically feasible alternatives to feeding slaughterhouse waste to other animals, but that the they did not want to set a precedent of being ruled by "activists."[93]
Is it a coincidence that USDA Secretary Veneman chose Dale Moore, former chief lobbyist for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, as her chief of staff?[94] Or Alison Harrison, former director of public relations for the Cattlemen's Association, as her official spokeswoman?[95] Or that one of the new Mad Cow committee appointees is William Hueston, who was paid by the beef industry to testify against Oprah Winfrey in hopes of convicting her of beef "disparagement"?[96] After a similar conflict of interest unfolded in Britain, their entire Ministry of Agriculture was dissolved and an independent Food Safety Agency was created, whose sole responsibility is to protect the public's health. Until we learn from Britain's lesson, and until the USDA stops treating this as a PR problem to be managed instead of a serious global threat,[97] millions of Americans will remain at risk.
PLEASE FEEL FREE TO FORWARD OR REPRINT ANY PART OF THIS REPORT.
For updates on this evolving crisis, visit
http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow.htm or send a blank email to
mailto:DrGregerMadCowUpdates-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
For background on this important issue, read the excellent book Mad Cow U.S.A., the full text of which is available free online at http://www.prwatch.org, or my article "U.S. Violates WHO Guidelines for Mad Cow Disease" at http://organicconsumers.org/madcow/GregerBSE.cfm.
Michael Greger, M.D., has been the Chief BSE Investigator for Farm Sanctuary since 1993 and the Mad Cow Coordinator for the Organic Consumers Association since 2001. Dr. Greger has debated the National Cattlemen's Beef Association before the FDA and was invited as an expert witness at the infamous Oprah Winfrey "meat defamation" trial. He has contributed to many books and articles on the subject, continues to lecture extensively, and currently runs the Mad Cow disease website http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow.htm. Dr. Greger is a graduate of the Cornell University School of Agriculture and the Tufts University School of Medicine. He can be reached for media inquiries at (206) 312-8640 or mhg1@cornell.edu.
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(Full text of specific articles available by emailing
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83
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and Other Deadly Prion Diseases. New York: Springer-Verlag Press,
2003.
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Here? Common Courage Press; (September 1997):149-50. Full text
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96 http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1998Q1/oprah.html
97 "World Health Organization says BSE is a major threat"
http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/BSE7601.cfm
--
Michael Greger, M.D.
Chief BSE Investigator for Farm Sanctuary
Mad Cow Coordinator for the Organic Consumers Association
http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow.htm
(617) 524-8064
(206) 312-8640
185 South St #6
Boston, MA 02130
For periodic updates on the Mad Cow crisis send a blank email to mailto:
ARTICLE #2:
Here are more important matters regarding food. Government intervention via several Bills. At this point, summer 2010, I’m really confused as to what’s happening with the various Bills disguised as Food Safety that are attempting to restrict our use of supplements, place even backyard farmers under a pile of paperwork so deep, he/she won’t be able to see his/her corn crop and subject roadside agricultural vendors to the same rules and regulations as Big-Agri Corporations. It seems a myriad of bills have culminated into one, S.510. The following links and following article on HR 875, will give you some history; but I highly recommend you go to the top-listed link for the most up-to-date information about how the Government is trying to control Food. Also go to our Big Picture page and watch the Video under Article #3, which explains what’s happening in Congress as of May 2010.
http://www.healthfreedomusa.org/?p=4608
Coming Government Takeover of Food
Lose Your Property for Growing Food?
Will Congress Wipe Out Home Gardens, Growers Markets?
Myths and Facts: HR 875 - The Food Safety Modernization Act
Response to "Myths and Facts H.R. 875 – The Food Safety Modernization Act"
Myths and Facts: .R. 875 The Food Safety Modernization Act
Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009
March 30, 2009
The Nourished Kitchen
HR 875, also known as the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, was introduced by Rosa Delauro - a democratic party member of the United States House of Representatives from Connecticut - in February of 2009. The title of HR 875, The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, sounds innocuous enough - even comforting, but its implications yield a much, much different story.
HR 875 as it is written today, could very well mean the end of the vibrant and growing local foods movement. Yes - if it passes - it could herald the death of farmers markets, most CSAs, farmstands and even small family-run farms altogether.
Ostensibly, HR 875 or the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 would bring greater accountability to our imperiled food system. Indeed, with salmonella-infected peanuts and spinach laced with e-coli, who isn’t crying out for improvements in food safety?
However, HR 875 fails miserably in promoting food safety. Rather, than promoting true accountability and proper farming techniques that minimize the risk of introducing pathogens into the food supply, it simply will create greater barriers for our already struggling small farms and farmers markets.
HR 875 mandates that anyone who produces food of any kind - meat, milk, fruit, vegetables et cetera - and transports that food for sale be subject to warrantless government inspections of their farms and food production records. These random inspections can be conducted at the whim of federal agents without regard to farmers rights or property rights. Further, the law would allow federal agents to confiscate records, product as they see fit as part of the inspection process.
Agents could also implement draconian restrictions regarding how farm animals can be fed, how fields can be managed and the end result of these restrictions could mean the end of organic, biodynamic and sustainable agriculture practices if these practices are deemed “unsafe.” Farmers refusing to comply would be subject to penalties.
The penalty for denying federal agents unlimited, random access to a farm’s fields, properties, products and records is $1,000,000. The penalty for not registering is $1,000,000.
Remember, this law would affect every farmer or food producer who must transport his goods to sell them - in effect, every single farmer. That means that an orchard that sells fresh fruit at a roadside stand would be affected; a farmer who delivers CSA boxes would be affected, even a home gardener who brings excess harvest to a farmers market’s community booth would have to register or be subject to $1,000,000 fines and that garden plot would be subject to inspection by federal agents. Ridiculous, isn’t it? But it’s true.
HR 875 is such a massive bill, with such massive requirements and restrictions that, in effect, only huge agribusinesses would be able to effectively meet all its requirements. The small family farm would be history and, along with it, farmstands, farmers markets, most food cooperatives and CSAs.
Now, let’s get back to Rosa Delauro who introduced HR 875 in February. Ms. Delaura is married to Stanley Greenberg. Stanley Greenberg is a political consultant whose clients include Monsanto – Monsanto, the same corporation, who blessed us with RBGH and genetically engineered seeds. Should we really trust Ms. Delauro or her husband to make these kinds of decisions for the American people?
My husband and I run a farmers market - a vibrant and growing farmers market in the heart of ski country. Now, it’s taken our blood, sweat and tears (and I do mean real blood, real sweat and real tears) to make our market succeed. Were this bill to pass, it would mean the end of our market as our farmers - some of whom grow on as little as a single acre - would be forced to close their gates. It would also mean the end of our local CSAs - all of which are delivered from the farm after a winding trip through the mountains.
The bill has not passed yet, so you still have time to act. Remember, eating is now a political act so exercise your rights.
One of our missions is to stay abreast of all the latest important information regarding Health, Nutrition and Health Freedom. We will be sharing our latest discoveries as well as our Event Locations, Tour and Workshop schedules and New Products like the Solar Kit Add-On via emails to all our Subscribers. So take a moment and sign up here. This is more than a little web-based business, it’s a MOVEMENT! Your information is Secure and we will not share it or sell it for any reason.
Article #4: Blowing the Whistle on GMO. This is a must read article about the dangers of GMO’s in our food. We also recommend a great book that explains exactly how GMO’s got into our food chain in the first place. Read “Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies About the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You’re Eating” by Jeffrey M. Smith. The following is an article by the same author entitled: Doctors Warn Avoid GMO Food printed 7/22/09.
The American Academy of Environmental Medicine states,"Genetically Modified foods have not been properly tested and pose a serious health risk. There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation."
Last May the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) called on "Physicians to educate their patients, the medical community, and the public to avoid GM (genetically modified) foods when possible and provide educational materials concerning GM foods and health risks." They called for a moratorium on GM foods, long-term independent studies, and labeling.
AAEM's position paper stated, "Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food," including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. They conclude, "There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation," as defined by recognized scientific criteria. "The strength of association and consistency between GM foods and disease is confirmed in several animal studies."
More and more doctors are already prescribing GM-free diets. Dr. Amy Dean, a Michigan internal medicine specialist, and board member of AAEM says, "I strongly recommend patients eat strictly non-genetically modified foods." Ohio allergist Dr. John Boyles says "I used to test for soy allergies all the time, but now that soy is genetically engineered, it is so dangerous that I tell people never to eat it."
Dr. Jennifer Armstrong, President of AAEM, says, "Physicians are probably seeing the effects in their patients, but need to know how to ask the right questions." World renowned biologist Pushpa M. Bhargava goes one step further. After reviewing more than 600 scientific journals, he concludes that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are a major contributor to the sharply deteriorating health of Americans.
Among the population, biologist David Schubert of the Salk Institute warns that "children are the most likely to be adversely effected by toxins and other dietary problems" related to GM foods. He says without adequate studies, the children become "the experimental animals."
The experience of actual GM-fed experimental animals is scary. When GM soy was fed to female rats, most of their babies died within three weeks-compared to a 10% death rate among the control group fed natural soy. The GM-fed babies were also smaller, and later had problems getting pregnant.
When male rats were fed GM soy, their testicles actually changed color-from the normal pink to dark blue. Mice fed GM soy had altered young sperm. Even the embryos of GM fed parent mice had significant changes in their DNA. Mice fed GM corn in an Austrian government study had fewer babies, which were also smaller than normal.
Reproductive problems also plague livestock. Investi-gations in the state of Haryana, India revealed that most buffalo that ate GM cottonseed had complications such as premature deliveries, abortions, infertility, and prolapsed uteruses. Many calves died. In the US, about two dozen farmers reported thousands of pigs became sterile after consuming certain GM corn varieties. Some had false pregnancies; others gave birth to bags of water. Cows and bulls also became infertile when fed the same corn.
Food Designed to Produce Toxins
GM corn and cotton are engineered to produce their own built-in pesticide in every cell. When bugs bite the plant, the poison splits open their stomach and kills them. Biotech companies claim that the pesticide, called Bt (produced from soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis) has a history of safe use, since organic farmers and others use Bt bacteria spray for natural insect control.
The Bt-toxin produced in GM plants, however, is thousands of times more concentrated than natural Bt spray, is designed to be more toxic, has properties of an allergen, and unlike the spray, cannot be washed off the plant.
Moreover, studies confirm that even the less toxic natural bacterial spray is harmful. When dispersed by plane to kill gypsy moths in the Pacific Northwest, about 500 people reported allergy or flu-like symptoms. Some had to go to the emergency room. The exact same symptoms are now being reported by farm workers throughout India who have handled Bt cotton. In 2008, based on medical records, the Sunday India reported, "Victims of itching have increased massively this year related to BT cotton farming."
American Academy of Environmental Medicine states, "Multiple animal studies show significant immune dysregulation," in-cluding increase in cytokines, which are "associated with asthma, allergy, and inflammation"-all on the rise in the US.
According to GM food safety expert Dr. Arpad Pusztai, changes in the immune status of GM animals are "a consistent feature of all the studies." Even Monsanto's own research showed significant immune system changes in rats fed Bt corn. A November 2008 study by the Italian government also found that mice have an immune reaction to Bt corn.
GM soy and corn each contain two new proteins with allergenic properties, GM soy has up to seven times more trypsin inhibitor-a known soy allergen-and skin prick tests show some people react to GM, but not to non-GM soy. Soon after GM soy was introduced to the UK, soy allergies skyrocketed by 50%. Perhaps the US epidemic of food allergies and asthma is a casualty of genetic manipulation.
In India, animals graze on cotton plants after harvest. But when shepherds let sheep graze on Bt cotton plants, thousands died. Post mortems showed severe irritation and black patches in both intestines and liver (as well as enlarged bile ducts). Investigators said preliminary evidence "strongly suggests that the sheep mortality was due to a toxin most probably Bt-toxin." In a small follow-up feeding study by the Deccan Development Society, all sheep fed Bt cotton plants died within 30 days; those that grazed on natural cotton plants remained healthy.
In a small village in Andhra Pradesh, buffalo grazed on cotton plants for eight years without incident. On January 3rd, 2008, the buffalo grazed on Bt cotton plants for the first time. All 13 were sick the next day; all died within 3 days. Bt corn was also implicated in the deaths of cows in Germany, and horses, water buffaloes, and chickens in the Philippines.
In lab studies, twice the number of chickens fed Liberty Link corn died; 7 of 20 rats fed a GM tomato developed bleeding stomachs; another 7 of 40 died within two weeks. Monsanto's own study showed evidence of poisoning in major organs of rats fed Bt corn, according to top French toxicologist G. E. Seralini.
Worst Finding of All-GMOs Remain Inside Us
The only published human feeding study revealed what may be the most dangerous problem from GM foods. The gene inserted into GM soy transfers into the DNA of bacteria living inside our intestines and continues to function. This means that long after we stop eating GMOs, we may still have potentially harmful GM proteins produced continuously inside of us. Put more plainly, eating a corn chip produced from Bt corn might transform our intestinal bacteria into living pesticide factories, possibly for the rest of our lives.
When evidence of gene transfer is reported at medical conferences around the US, doctors often respond by citing the huge increase of gastrointestinal problems among their patients over the last decade. GM foods might be colonizing the gut flora of North Americans.
Scientists at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had warned about all these problems even in the early 1990s. According to documents released from a lawsuit, the scientific consensus at the agency was that GM foods were inherently dangerous, and might create hard-to-detect allergies, poisons, gene transfer to gut bacteria, new diseases, and nutritional problems. They urged their superiors to require rigorous long-term tests. But the White House had ordered the agency to promote biotechnology and the FDA responded by recruiting Michael Taylor, Monsanto's former attorney, to head up the formation of GMO policy. That policy, which is in effect today, denies knowledge of scientists' concerns and declares that no safety studies on GMOs are required. It is up to Monsanto and the other biotech companies to determine if their foods are safe. Mr. Taylor later became Monsanto's vice president.
American Academy of Environmental Medicine states, "GM foods have not been properly tested" and "pose a serious health risk." Not a single human clinical trial on GMOs has been published. A 2007 review of published scientific literature on the "potential toxic effects/health risks of GM plants" revealed "that experimental data are very scarce." The author concludes his review by asking, "Where is the scientific evidence showing that GM plants/food are toxicologically safe, as assumed by the biotechnology companies?"
Famed Canadian geneticist David Suzuki answers, "The experiments simply haven't been done and we now have become the guinea pigs." He adds, "Anyone that says, 'Oh, we know that this is perfectly safe,' I say is either unbelievably stupid or deliberately lying."
Dr. Schubert points out, "If there are problems, we will probably never know because the cause will not be traceable and many diseases take a very long time to develop." If GMOs happen to cause immediate and acute symptoms with a unique signature, perhaps then we might have a chance to trace the cause.
This is precisely what happened during a US epidemic in the late 1980s. The disease was fast acting, deadly, and caused a unique measurable change in the blood-but it still took more than four years to identify that an epidemic was even occurring. By then it had killed about 100 Americans and caused 5,000-10,000 people to fall sick or become permanently disabled. It was caused by a genetically engineered brand of a food supplement called L-tryptophan.
If other GM foods are contributing to the rise of autism, obesity, diabetes, asthma, cancer, heart disease, allergies, reproductive problems, or any other common health problem now plaguing Americans, we may never know. In fact, since animals fed GMOs had such a wide variety of problems, susceptible people may react to GM food with multiple symptoms. It is therefore telling that in the first nine years after the large scale introduction of GM crops in 1996, the incidence of people with three or more chronic diseases nearly doubled, from 7% to 13%.
To help identify if GMOs are causing harm, the AAEM asks their "members, the medical community, and the independent scientific community to gather case studies potentially related to GM food consumption and health effects, begin epidemiological research to investigate the role of GM foods on human health, and conduct safe methods of determining the effect of GM foods on human health."
Citizens need not wait for the results before taking the doctors advice to avoid GM foods. People can stay away from anything with soy or corn derivatives, cottonseed and canola oil, and sugar from GM sugar beets-unless it says organic or "non-GMO."
If even a small percentage of people choose non-GMO brands, the food industry will likely respond as they did in Europe-by removing all GM ingredients. Thus, American Academy of Environmental Medicine's non-GMO prescription may be a watershed for the US food supply.
Jeffrey M. Smith, Executive Director of the Institute for Responsible Technology, is the leading spokesperson on the health dangers of GMOs. His first book, Seeds of Deception is the world's bestselling book on the subject. His second, Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, identifies 65 risks of GMOs and demonstrates how superficial government approvals are not competent to find most of them. He invited the biotech industry to respond in writing with evidence to counter each risk, but correctly predicted that they would refuse, since they don't have the data to show that their products are safe. Spilling the Beans, the institute's monthly column, is available at <http://www.reliabletechnology.org>www.reliabletechnology.org. The website also offers eater-friendly tips for avoiding GMOs at home and in restaurants. Contact American Academy of Environmental Medicine at (734) 213-4901; environmentalmed@yahoo.com; <http://www.aaemonline.org>www.aaemonline.org/gmopost.html.
http://www.sentienttimes.com/09/June_July_09/doctors.html
“Small Organic” Companies owned by Big Food
It gives us a warm and fuzzy feeling to know that we are supporting local and/or smaller “mom and pop” organizations when we fork out the extra scratch for said products. If you think you are supporting smaller, independent organic companies, however, you may be disappointed to find that many of your favourite brands are actually owned by massive multi-billion dollar operations.
Burt’s Bees – Clorox
Tom’s of Maine – Colgate-Palmolive
Stoneyfield – Danone
Odwalla – Coca-Cola (Coke no longer sells the freshly squeezed juice that made Odwalla famous).
Naked Juice – Pepsi Co.
Horizon Organic Dairy, The Organic Cow of Vermont – Dean Foods
After The Fall, R.W. Knudsen and Santa Cruz Organic – Smuckers
Kashi, Garden Burger, Bear Naked – Kellogg’s
Back to Nature, Boca – Kraft
Cascadian Farms – General Mills
Health Valley and Arrowhead Mills – Hain Celestial (Partially owned by Heinz)
Green and Blacks Organic Chocolate – Cadburry-Schweppes
Dagoba Chocolate – Hershey’s
Seeds of Change – M & M/Mars
Body Shop – L’Oreal
It is very difficult to know in most cases who actually owns the products as the parent company’s stamp is rarely on these products.
Article #5: Here’s a bit of a Bubble Popper: Hate to be the bearer of bad news but you really need to know from whom you’re buying what you believe to be small, company created “organic” products. Read this list of products and follow the bouncing ball to their real owners.
This is an informative page about your Health and the latest in what’s happening with the GMO debate, the state of our wild fish due to overfishing and lots more.
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