UnSymmetrical

Twelve states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, sued the Environmental Protection Agency yesterday for weakening regulations that for two decades have required businesses and industries to report the toxic chemicals they use, store and release.

The suit, filed in the Federal District Court in Manhattan, asks the court to reverse the agency’s move and so restore all the chemical reporting requirements that were previously part of its Toxics Release Inventory program, or T.R.I.

Community groups across the country have used the program to track the amounts of hazardous chemicals in local neighborhoods. Under the program, companies must provide information about the types of toxic chemicals stored at plants and factories in each state, as well as the quantities discharged from each plant.

Besides the states of the New York tristate area, the plaintiffs are Arizona, California, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Vermont.

Their suit takes aim at a change, adopted by the environmental agency last December, that streamlined the T.R.I. process by reducing the amount of information that companies are required to report. The new rules allow them to file shorter, less detailed forms if they store or release less than 5,000 pounds of toxic chemicals. The old rules required a longer, more comprehensive form whenever a company stored or discharged as little as 500 pounds.

Continue reading "E.P.A. Is Sued by 12 States Over Reports on Chemicals" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 11:19 AM | Permalink

In October, 1989, 44-year old Kathy Lorio arrived in the medical office of Dr. Phil Hertzman in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Lorio, who had been healthy and active, was suddenly struck with severe pain and a host of debilitating symptoms. Blood tests revealed that her eosinophil count had skyrocketed. The normal concentration of this white blood cell is about 10 per CC. Allergies or asthma can make it rise to 500. Lorio’s was over 10,000.

In a coincidence that was destined to save lives, Hertzman referred her to Santa Fe rheumatologist James Mayer, who happened to have recently seen another patient, Bonnie Bishop, with similar symptoms. Bishop was in severe pain, her arms and legs were filled with fluid, she had trouble breathing, and her muscles were so weak she couldn’t even sit up. “She slumped like a rag doll.”[1] And her eosinophil count was extremely high.

Patient histories revealed that both Bishop and Lorio were taking the food supplement L-tryptophan. Although it was the only supplement common to both patients, the doctors were hesitant to blame L-tryptophan for the disease. It is an essential amino acid, naturally found in turkey and milk, and in supplement form had been consumed safely for years as a treatment for stress, insomnia and depression.

Continue reading "A Deadly Epidemic and the Attempt to Hide its Link to Genetic Engineering" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 11:09 AM | Permalink

According to a March 2001 report, the Center for Disease Control says that food is responsible for twice the number of illnesses in the U.S. compared to estimates just seven years earlier. This increase roughly corresponds to the period when Americans have been eating GM food.

Posted by Vitamin Z at 08:03 AM | Permalink

Physical barriers, such as regular handwashing and wearing masks, gloves and gowns, may be more effective than drugs to prevent the spread of respiratory viruses such as influenza and SARS, a study has found.

The findings, published in the British Medical Journal, came as Britain announced it was doubling its stockpile of antiviral medicines in preparation for any future flu pandemic.

Trawling through 51 studies, the researchers found that simple, low-cost physical measures should be given higher priority in national pandemic contingency plans.

"Mounting evidence suggests that the use of vaccines and antiviral drugs will be insufficient to interrupt the spread of influenza," they wrote in the report.

The 51 studies compared any intervention to prevent animal-to-human or human-to-human transmission of respiratory viruses, such as isolation, quarantine, social distancing, barriers, personal protection and hygiene, to doing nothing or to other types of intervention. They excluded vaccines and antiviral drugs.

Continue reading " Handwashing More Useful than Drugs in Virus Control" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 01:14 PM | Permalink

In 1936, the world's cancer experts assembled in Brussels to talk shop. The gathering heard a lot about workshop hazards and environmental toxins. A British scientist, who had studied identical twins, argued that cancer wasn't inherited, but mostly the product of early chemical exposures in life. A meticulous Argentine showed how sunlight combined with hydrocarbons could sprout tumours on rats. Others explained how regular exposure to the hormone estrogen prompted male rodents to grow unseemly breasts. Everyone agreed that arsenic and benzene were workplace killers, too.

Since then, the cancer establishment has retreated from the truth faster than Canada's commitment to a greener country. What began as sincere investigation into the economic root causes of a complex set of 200 different diseases, at the turn of the 20th century, quickly degenerated into a single-minded focus on treatments after the Second World War, argues Devra Davis, one of North America's sharpest epidemiologists (her previous book, When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution, was a finalist for the National Book Award).

In the process, industry and its propaganda hit men have used every opportunity to discredit, dismiss or disparage information on cancer hazards in the workplace or at home. So let me warn comfortable readers here and now. This courageous and altogether horrible book is about as unsettling as it can get. It painstakingly documents such a persistently foul pattern of deceit and denial that I often wanted to throw it against a wall and scream.

Continue reading "Andrew Nikiforuk's Review of The Secret History of the War on Cancer, written by Devra Davis, PhD, MPH" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 12:08 PM | Permalink

What's the difference between organic farmed salmon and the much-demonised variety that's kept in cages, stuffed with colours and pesticides, doomed to swim in its own faeces and prematurely slaughtered? Surprisingly little, discovers Joanna Blythman .

I'm eyeing up a fillet of farmed Scottish organic salmon and, to be honest, it doesn't look too enticing. Its colour is pallid pinkish grey, a bit like an old sticking plaster. That doesn't bother me too much because I've been told that organic salmon doesn't contain colouring - a disputable statement, but more of that later - and that the dingy pink is just the price I have to pay for its more natural diet. What does bother me, however, is its herringbone mesh of creamy fatty veins. Palpating the uncooked flesh, it has all the floppy-flaccid muscle tone of a 20-stone couch potato. To remind myself of what wild salmon is like, I've bought a fillet of wild Alaskan silver salmon, not a totally fair comparison since it is a different breed, but it is enough to remind me of the wild Scottish Atlantic salmon and sea trout I ate back in July: firm-fleshed and toned like a prima ballerina.

Once in the pan, the two salmon couldn't be more different. The farmed Scottish organic one is a nightmare to fry - it wants to fall apart like a badly built wall - while the tight-grained, orange-fleshed wild Alaskan fillet is holding its shape nicely. By now I'm not surprised to find that, in the mouth, these two salmons are chalk and cheese. The organic fish, hailed by the Soil Association as 'the Lamborghini of fish', tastes watery and bland with an ever-so-slightly tinny, bitter aftertaste. The wild fish is sweet and juicy. I know which one I want to eat.

Continue reading "Why Organic Salmon is Causing a Nasty Smell" »

Posted by Vitamin Z at 12:41 PM | Permalink