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U.N. tells people to eat bugs in order to fight global warming

Reblogged from World Chaos:

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The United Nations urged the citizens of the world to begin eating all types of insects in order to successfully fight global warming among other world problems, according to a statement released by the United Nations this week.
The latest U.N. weapon in the fight against hunger, global warming and pollution could be flying by you right now.
Edible insects…

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Biotech’s next big disaster: seeds that emit multiple pesticides

Reblogged from World Chaos:

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nomorefakenews - Tom Laskawy, writing at Grist, points out how the next generation of GMOs is following in the track of present disasters:

“…the growing pest and weed problems for GMOs have caused farmers to turn to seeds that are coated with a different pesticide—a neonicotinoid. If that name rings a bell, it’s because these pesticides… have been implicated in the increasing epidemic of bee deaths.

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Mangarbani: Delhi's last sacred forest grove

Reblogged from Save Mangar Bani:

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Environmentalists have often voiced their concern about the groundwater depletion in the NCR region. Mindless deforestation is aggravating this problem further. What can be described as possibly the last stretch of virgin forests in the NCR region, the Mangar Bani forests on the Gurgaon-Faridabad highway, also stand the risk of being uprooted.

The forests are marked by the divine presence of the five centuries old cult of Gudariya Baba.

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Double Mastectomy: What We Know About BRCA Mutations and Breat Cancer


English: breast cancer surgery in 18. century ...

English: breast cancer surgery in 18. century Deutsch: Brustkrebschirurgie im 18. Jhd. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dear Reader,

somehow I have the intention to publish this article, so, as it can be important for somebody here.

Curi56: Annamaria

Scooped by Dr. Stefan Gruenwald onto  Amazing Science
Angelina Jolie decided to go for a double mastectomy. She doesn’t have cancer yet, but like many women with breast cancer mutations, she had the radical surgery to lower her risk. Describing her decision as “My Medical Choice,” the 37-year-old actress revealed in an op-ed in the New York Times that she carries the BRCA1 gene mutation, which gives her an 87% risk of developing breast cancer at some point in her life. The abnormal gene also increases her risk of getting ovarian cancer, a typically aggressive disease, by 50%. To counteract those odds, Jolie wrote that she decided to have both her breasts removed. While radical, her decision to pre-empt any future cancer is a common one, and backed by studies. In 2010, Australian scientists found that women with the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations who chose to have preventive mastectomies did not develop breast cancer over the three-year follow-up. What’s more, since the genetic abnormalities increase the risk of ovarian cancer, women who had their ovaries and fallopian tubes removed also dramatically lowered their risk of developing ovarian or breast cancers. They were 89% less likely to develop ovarian cancer and 61% less likely to develop breast cancer over three years than their counterparts who did not have prophylactic surgery. Among the 250 study participants who underwent preventive mastectomies, none developed breast cancer during the study follow-up. Additionally, a patient’s surgical choice affected overall mortality rates, both cancer related and not: only 3 percent of surgery participants died at the time of the study follow-up versus 10 percent of those who avoided the surgery. And while the mutations are inherited – a mother with either aberration has a 50-50 chance of passing it on to her children – women who don’t get the mutation are not at increased risk of developing breast cancer, even if they belong to families with a history of the disease. Previous studies had suggested that women who did not have the mutations but had a mother or sister who did, could have up to a five times greater risk of developing different types of breast cancer, which led them to schedule frequent biopsies and even preventive mastectomies. The latest research, however, suggests that’s not necessarily the case. But the new study counters those findings, concluding that the risk of breast cancer in women from BRCA families, who do not carry the mutations themselves, are no higher than that of women in families with other types of breast cancer. The study involved more than 3,000 families with breast cancer, including nearly 300 who had the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations. The genetic test for the BRCA mutations isn’t done for every woman, or even for every woman who is at risk of developing breast cancer. Doctors recommend it for those who develop cancer at a young age, or have multiple family members with the disease. It’s expensive – up to $3000 – and insurers require that patients meet a threshold for needing the test before they cover its cost. Jolie is fortunate to be able to afford not just the test but the reconstructive surgery following the procedure as well. But she’s aware that not all women are even aware of the genetic screening and may not be able to afford the testing. She wrote that her goal in announcing her choice to remove her breasts prophylactically is to raise awareness of the test and the treatment options that women have if they are positive for the mutations.
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MoJo Tom Philpott: Charts: How Big Pork Screws Small Towns


Satellite image of farming in Minnesota.

Satellite image of farming in Minnesota. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Charts: How Big Pork Screws Small Towns

—By

| Mon Nov. 12, 2012 4:08 AM PST
                    please, watch my blog, too:  www.schweingehabt.wordpress.com/

I’ve argued often that the food system functions like an economic sieve, draining away wealth. Imagine, say, a suburb served by a handful of fast-food chains plus a supermarket or Walmart or two. Profits from residents’ food dollars go to distant shareholders; what’s left behind are essentially low-skill, low-wage clerical jobs and mountains of generally low-quality, health-ruining food.

But the food system’s secret scandal is that it’s economically extractive in farming communities areas, too—and especially in the places where industrial agriculture is most established and intensive. I first learned about this surprising fact from the Minnesota-based community economics expert Ken Meter, specifially this 2001 study on a farm-heavy region of Minnesota. And now Food and Water Watch, working with the University of Tennessee‘s Agricultural Policy Analysis Center, has come out with an excellent new report documenting the food industry’s effect on several ag-intense regions, with the main spotlight on the hog-centric counties of Iowa, the nation’s leading hog-producing state. …

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Greater Risk of Earthquake and Tsunami in Western Indian Ocean


The coastline of Pakistan fronts on to the Ind...

The coastline of Pakistan fronts on to the Indian Ocean (Arabian Sea) and extends for 814 km. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Greater Risk of Earthquake and Tsunami in Western Indian Ocean

Posted: 14 May 2013 04:02 AM PDT

Image Credit: Wikimedia

On Boxing Day of 2004 magnitude 9.1 undersea megathrust earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, sparked a tsunami that took the lives of over 280,000 thousand people. The quake was caused when the Indian tectonic plate subducted underneath the Burma Plate, causing 1,600 kilometres of fault surface slippage in two phases over a period of several minutes.

New research carried out by scientists from the University of Southampton based at the National Oceanography Centre Southampton ( NOC S), and the Pacific Geoscience Centre, Natural Resources Canada, have published research which finds earthquakes in similar magnitude could occur in an area beneath the Arabian Sea at the Makran subduction zone.

This research is important as it sheds light on a previously underestimated tectonic region. The study suggests that the risk of undersea earthquakes and subsequent tsunamis in the region is greater than previously thought. Such a discovery highlights the need for further investigation into the pre-historic tectonic activity of the region, and should be taken note of in hazard assessment for countries that could be affected, including Pakistan, Iran, Oman, and India, amongst others.

1-s2.0-S0029801808000371-gr1The Makran subduction zone (as seen in the image to the left) has shown very little tectonic activity since it erupted earlier last century, first in 1945 with a magnitude 8.1 earthquake, and then in 1947 with a magnitude 7.3 quake. As a result of this minimal historical activity scientists have generally classified the Makran subduction zone as being incapable of producing major earthquakes.

The scientists mapped out the area of a potential fault rupture zone beneath the Makran by calculating the temperatures where the plates meet. Temperatures at these locations are expected to be between 150 and 450 °C if the region is likely to generate rupture generating earthquakes.

“Thermal modelling suggests that the potential earthquake rupture zone extends a long way northward, to a width of up to 350 kilometres which is unusually wide relative to most other subduction zones,” says Gemma Smith, lead author and PhD student at University of Southampton School of Ocean and Earth Science, which is based at  NOC S.

The team also discovered that the sediment thickness found on the subducting plate could be a contributing factor to the magnitude of a rupture.

“If the sediments between the plates are too weak then they might not be strong enough to allow the strain between the two plates to build up,” says Smith. “But here we see much thicker sediments than usual, which means the deeper sediments will be more compressed and warmer. The heat and pressure make the sediments stronger. This results in the shallowest part of the subduction zone fault being potentially capable of slipping during an earthquake.

“These combined factors mean the Makran subduction zone is potentially capable of producing major earthquakes, up to magnitude 8.7-9.2. Past assumptions may have significantly underestimated the earthquake and tsunami hazard in this region.”

Image Credit: National Oceanography Centre Southampton

Image Credit: National Oceanography Centre Southampton

The image above shows the location of the Makran subduction zone of Pakistan and Iran and locations of recorded earthquakes including the 1945 magnitude 8.1 earthquake (red dot to the north indicates the 1947 magnitude 7.3 earthquake). The profile for the thermal modelling of this study is the north-south trending black line, with distance given along the profile from the shallowest part of the subduction zone in the south (0 kilometres) to the most northern potential earthquake rupture extent (350 kilometres).

Greater Risk of Earthquake and Tsunami in Western Indian Ocean was originally posted on: PlanetSave.

Commonly Used …in Chicken Meat


Commonly-Used Poultry Drug Increases Levels Of Toxic Arsenic In Chicken Meat

Posted: 14 May 2013 08:08 PM PDT

The meat from chickens raised with arsenic-based drugs contains considerably higher levels of inorganic arsenic, a very toxic carcinogen, new research from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future at the Bloomberg School of Public Health has found.

Image Credit: Poultry via Flickr CCImage Credit: Poultry via Flickr CC

While it may sound obvious that if chickens are administered drugs containing arsenic than their bodies will retain and contain some of that arsenic, it has actually long been argued that they would not… Especially with regards to the inorganic form of arsenic. And because of, no doubt, a variety of reasons there are now four arsenicals currently approved for use in poultry by the FDA…

With regards to the new research, this is the first study to “show concentrations of specific forms of arsenic (e.g., inorganic arsenic versus other forms) in retail chicken meat, and the first to compare those concentrations according to whether or not the poultry was raised with arsenical drugs. The findings provide evidence that arsenical use in chickens poses public health risks and indicate that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency responsible for regulating animal drugs, should ban arsenicals, experts say.”

 

The press release gets into the specifics of how the research was done:

Conventional, antibiotic-free, and USDA Organic chicken samples were purchased from 10 U.S. metropolitan areas between December 2010 and June 2011, when an arsenic-based drug then manufactured by Pfizer and known as roxarsone was readily available to poultry companies that wished to add it to their feed. In addition to inorganic arsenic, the researchers were able to identify residual roxarsone in the meat they studied; in the meat where roxarsone was detected, levels of inorganic arsenic were four times higher than the levels in USDA Organic chicken (in which roxarsone and other arsenicals are prohibited from use).

Arsenic-based drugs have been used in poultry production for decades. Arsenical drugs are approved to make poultry grow faster and improve the pigmentation of the meat. The drugs are also approved to treat and prevent parasites in poultry. In 2010, industry representatives estimated that 88 percent of the roughly nine billion chickens raised for human consumption in the U.S. received roxarsone. In July 2011, Pfizer voluntarily removed roxarsone from the U.S. market, but the company may sell the drug overseas and could resume marketing it in the U.S. at any time. Pfizer still domestically markets the arsenical drug nitarsone, which is chemically similar to roxarsone. Currently in the U.S., there is no federal law prohibiting the sale or use of arsenic-based drugs in poultry feed. (In January, Maryland became the first U.S. state to ban the use of most arsenicals in chicken feed.)

Lead author Keeve Nachman, PhD, stated, “The suspension of roxarsone sales is a good thing in the short term, but it isn’t a real solution. Hopefully this study will persuade FDA to ban the drug and permanently keep it off the market.”

A large body of previous research has found that chronic inorganic arsenic exposure definitely causes lung, bladder and skin cancers and is strongly associated with a large array of other conditions, including: heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cognitive deficits, developmental disorders, and adverse pregnancy outcomes. As per the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data: at least 75% of all Americans eat chicken regularly.

Perhaps arsenicals are part of what’s contributing to the massive and rapid increase in the occurrence of dementia and other neurological diseases in Western countries during the last 40 years?

“The FDA has not established safety standards for inorganic arsenic in foods, although the agency did, for a brief time in 2011, suggest that concentrations should be well below 1 microgram per kilogram of meat. The levels of inorganic arsenic discovered in the meat where roxarsone was found were two and three times greater than that level.”

But with regards to the maximum level, do you really want ANY arsenic in you food?

Another interesting, and important, finding of the research “is that when roxarsone was present in raw meat, cooking decreased the levels of roxarsone and increased the levels of inorganic arsenic.” That’s certainly something to note….

The new study was just published in the scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

Commonly-Used Poultry Drug Increases Levels Of Toxic Arsenic In Chicken Meat was originally posted on: PlanetSave