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Saturday, June 25, 2005

Seven months after suspicions were first raised, United States Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns confirmed that a second American cow has tested positive for BSE (also known as ‘mad cow disease’), as determined by a lab in Weybridge, England. The department believes that this cow was born in the United States.

The delay in confirmation followed two conflicting test results from last November. The “Western blot” test, which is a more sophisticated test, could have helped reach a final determination, but the U.S. refused to perform it in November. The department’s inspector general, Phyllis Fong, ordered the Western blot test in June without advising Johanns and by the time Johanns found out about it, the testing was under way.

Johanns was annoyed that the round of testing which confirmed “Mad Cow” had been ordered without him being consulted first.”I was asked by the Senate and the president to operate the department,” Johanns said. “I believe, in this area, very clearly, the secretary should be consulted, whoever the secretary is, before testing is undertaken. From my standpoint, I believe I was put there to operate the department and was very disappointed.”

A senior research associate with Consumers Union, Michael Hansen, said USDA officials “almost sound like some Keystone Kops.”

Johanns reassured Americans that they should not be afraid of eating beef, saying: “This animal was blocked from entering the food supply because of the firewalls we have in place. Americans have every reason to continue to be confident in the safety of our beef.”

On June 17, the Associated Press reported: “American cattle are eating chicken litter, cattle blood and restaurant leftovers that could help transmit mad cow disease — a gap in the U.S. defense that the Bush administration promised to close nearly 18 months ago.”

John Stauber, co-author of “Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?” said: “Once the cameras were turned off and the media coverage dissipated, then it’s been business as usual, no real reform, just keep feeding slaughterhouse waste. The entire U.S. policy is designed to protect the livestock industry’s access to slaughterhouse waste as cheap feed.”

Critics of the U.S. testing regimen said the fumbles this time increase their concerns about America’s screening process.

“How can we be sure they were really negative?” Craig Culp, a spokesman for the Center for Food Safety asked; “After all, (here is a cow that was) negative in November that is positive in June.”

The companies which render slaughter waste say new restrictions are not warranted. “We process about 50 billion pounds of product annually — in visual terms, that is a convoy of semi trucks, four lanes wide, running from New York to L.A. every year,” said Jim Hodges, president of the American Meat Institute Foundation.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Kentucky’s National Guard have been mobilized in the aftermath of what the governor called “the biggest natural disaster that this state has ever experienced”.

An ice storm hit the U.S. state on Tuesday 27 January, bringing down power lines, freezing mains water supplies, bringing down trees and killing at least seven. More than 500,000 homes and business in the state remain without power, with utilities warning that it may take two weeks to restore supplies. State officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been issuing generators to the most vulnerable.

The National Guard are visiting homes in Kentucky to check that residents are well. At Murray State University the campus lost power and the water was turned off to stop pipes bursting. Students were moved to shelters. The state of Tennessee was also affected, with 265 people staying in shelters.

States of emergency have been declared in 92 of Kentucky’s 120 counties, leading Governor Steve Beshear to call FEMA for assistance. FEMA aid is available to states that have suffered for damages and extraordinary costs above $7.4 million.

Ice storms are caused when a layer of warm air is caught between two layers of cold air. Water in the frozen layer is melted by the warmer layer but is then reduced to below freezing by the second cold layer. It falls as water, but freezes on contact with the ground, power lines and trees, leading to a build up of ice.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Figures released by the U.S. 2010 census on Wednesday show that the city of Detroit has lost approximately 238,270 people, one-fourth of its total, since 2000. Detroit, once one of the top five U.S. cities in population, has its lowest number of residents since 1910.

Population numbers affect the the amount of federal and state funding a city receives. In the last few decades, dozens of Michigan state laws have been passed allowing Detroit, because its population was at least 750,000, special measures to raise revenue and allocating it a larger share of Michigan’s state revenue than its population warranted. Now that Detroit’s population has fallen to 713,777, it is no longer eligible for these financial advantages.

The mayor of Detroit, Dave Bing plans to appeal the census results. He says more than 35,000 residents were not counted.

“Every person that’s counted in the census brings approximately $10,000 to Detroit over the next decade for schools, roads, hospitals, and social service programs,” Bing explained. “Additionally, we could lose millions in statutory revenue sharing from the state. We are in a fiscal crisis and we have to fight for every dollar. We can’t afford to let these results stand.”

Detroit was the fifth largest U.S. city in 1950. The decline of the auto industry hastened the population loss already diminished by the 1967 riots that precipitated white flight to the suburbs. Approximately 23 percent of the city’s living quarters are now empty. To reduce the city’s size there is a program in progress to demolish 10,000 abandoned or vacant buildings and turn the land into farms or countryside by 2014.

Detroit’s congressional power has been steadily decreasing. It already lost one congressional seat since the 1980s.

U.S. federal laws forbid drawing congressional district boundaries that dilute minority voting strength. The 2000 redistricting rules for the 2012 elections mandated that Detroit’s two congressional districts must be 60 percent black voters, since four out of five of Detroit’s residents are black. To comply, the two remaining congressional districts will have to expand into Detroit’s mostly white suburbs to attain enough minority voters to meet the 60 percent target, reducing the clout of black Detroit.

Andrew Beveridge, Queens College sociology professor, attributed Detroit’s population decline to the loss of its industrial base. He said: “Except for New Orleans after Katrina, it’s basically the largest drop for a U.S. city in history. They have to find an economic base or the decline will continue.”

Monday, March 20, 2006

Fears of contaminated bone and skin grafts are being felt by unsuspecting patients following the revelation that funeral homes may have been looting corpses.

Janet Evans of Marion Ohio was told by her surgeon, “The bone grafts you got might have been contaminated”. She reacted with shock, “I was flabbergasted because I didn’t even know what he was talking about. I didn’t know I got a bone graft until I got this call. I just thought they put in screws and rods.”

The body of Alistair Cooke, the former host of “Masterpiece Theatre,” was supposedly looted along with more than 1,000 others, according to two law enforcement officials close to the case. The tissue taken was typically skin, bone and tendon, which was then sold for use in procedures such as dental implants and hip replacements. According to authorities, millions of dollars were made by selling the body parts to companies for use in operations done at hospitals and clinics in the United States and Canada.

A New Jersey company, Biomedical Tissue Services, has reportedly been taking body parts from funeral homes across Brooklyn, New York. According to ABC News, they set up rooms like a “surgical suite.” After they took the bones, they replaced them with PVC pipe. This was purportedly done by stealth, without approval of the deceased person or the next of kin. 1,077 bodies were involved, say prosecuters.

Investagators say a former dentist, Michael Mastromarino, is behind the operation. Biomedical was considered one of the “hottest procurement companies in the country,” raking in close to $5 million. Eventually, people became worried: “Can the donors be trusted?” A tissue processing company called LifeCell answered no, and issued a recall on all their tissue.

Cooke’s daughter, Susan Cooke Kittredge, said, “To know his bones were sold was one thing, but to see him standing truncated before me is another entirely.” Now thousands of people around the country are receiving letters warning that they should be tested for infectious diseases like HIV or hepatitis. On February 23, the Brooklyn District Attorney indicted Mastromarino and three others. They are charged with 122 felony counts, including forgery and bodysnatching.

Monday, September 27, 2010

New research published in the journal Nature Medicine has shown a link between a faulty gene and migraines. Scientists hope that this discovery will lead to improved pain management treatments for sufferers, with possible benefits for pain treatment generally.

The breakthrough involves a gene known as TRESK, thought to control the brain’s reaction to pain: if it is defective, then many normal activities and actions will be painful. Migraine sufferers (thought in the United Kingdom to number about eight per cent of men and eighteen per cent of women) often complain that light, noise and touch cause pain. TRESK can potentially be affected by drugs that would change the point at which it reports pain, which would alleviate the suffering of those with migraines. Now researchers will need to find such a drug.

The study involved scientists from the Medical Research Council Functional Genomics Unit at the University of Oxford and from Canada. They looked at the DNA of 110 people with migraine and members of their family, and found that TRESK was a major component in migraines. One of the Oxford researchers, consultant neurologist Zameel Cader, described it as a “once in a generation find” and said that it could “potentially lead to a treatment for pain in general.” Before this study, no genes had been directly linked to migraines, although parts of the DNA that raised the general risk had been found.

Migraines are described by the World Health Organisation as a major worldwide cause of disability. In Britain, it is estimated that migraines affect 20 per cent of the population, with about 190,000 migraines occurring daily and over 25 million lost days from work every year. Lee Tomkin, director of a sufferers’ charity, Migraine Action, described the news as “fantastic” and “genuinely a really great step forward.” Professor Peter Goadsby from the Migraine Trust termed it “a novel direction to consider new therapies in this very disabling condition.”

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