China assured consumers most of the tainted milk products that resurfaced in recent months have been destroyed, saying none had made it to store shelves or been exported.

See the article here:
China says most tainted milk destroyed after new scare.

Q: Is there such a thing as environmentally friendly milk?

A: A simple question with a not-so-simple answer. The short answer is that yes, there is such a thing. But not everyone agrees on which milk is the most eco-friendly.

Read more here:
Environmentally-Friendly Milk: Does It Exist?

China has set up a national food safety commission, headed by a powerful vice premier, who at the watchdog’s first meeting set his sights on the persistent problem of dangerously tainted milk, state media said on Wednesday.

Follow this link:
China sets up national food safety commission.

I tell ya, the FDA is not smelling like a rose lately…

FDA: Is the Tomato to Blame for Salmonella Outbreak? Is It Not?…

Three weeks after the Food and Drug Administration first warned consumers to avoid certain types of tomatoes for fear they would carry an uncommon type of Salmonella, known as Saintpaul, the number of people getting infected is rising with each day passing by, making U.S. health authorities question whether tomatoes are the real or only cause for the outbreak.

Another reason to grow your own!

A recent poll shows that 53 percent of Americans say they won’t purchase foods that have been genetically modified. But many Americans are unaware that they already do.

By LIBBY QUAID AP Food and Farm Writer

WASHINGTON Apr 11, 2006 (AP)— Two soft-drink companies were sued Tuesday by parents complaining that there might be cancer-causing benzene in kids’ drinks.

Attorneys filed class-action lawsuits against the companies in Suffolk Superior Court in Boston and Leon County Circuit Court in Tallahassee, Fla. They accused Polar Beverages Inc. and In Zone Brands Inc. of not taking steps to keep benzene from forming in their beverages.

Benzene, a chemical linked to leukemia, can form in soft drinks containing two ingredients: Vitamin C, also called ascorbic acid, and either sodium benzoate or potassium benzoate.

The presence of those ingredients doesn’t mean benzene is present. Scientists say factors such as heat or light exposure can trigger a reaction that forms benzene in the beverages.

“It’s impossible for parents to know which soft drinks are safe and which contain cancer-causing benzene,” said Timothy Newell, one of the plaintiffs.

Link

New York Times:

By Melanie Warner

WHEN Dr. Morando Soffritti, a cancer researcher in Bologna, Italy, saw the results of his team’s seven-year study on aspartame, he knew he was about to be injected into a bitter controversy over this sweetener, one of the most contentiously debated substances ever added to foods and beverages.

Aspartame is sold under the brand names Nutra-Sweet and Equal and is found in such popular products as Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, Diet Snapple and Sugar Free Kool-Aid. Hundreds of millions of people consume it worldwide. And Dr. Soffritti’s study concluded that aspartame may cause the dreaded “c” word: cancer.

The research found that the sweetener was associated with unusually high rates of lymphomas, leukemias and other cancers in rats that had been given doses of it starting at what would be equivalent to four to five 20-ounce bottles of diet soda a day for a 150-pound person. The study, which involved 1,900 laboratory rats and cost $1 million, was conducted at the European Ramazzini Foundation of Oncology and Environmental Sciences, a nonprofit organization that studies cancer-causing substances; Dr. Soffritti is its scientific director.

The findings, first released last July, prompted a flurry of criticism from the Calorie Control Council, a trade group for makers of artificial sweeteners that has spent the last 25 years trying to quell fears about aspartame. It said Dr. Soffritti’s study flew in the face of four earlier cancer studies that aspartame’s creator, G. D. Searle & Company, had underwritten and used to persuade the Food and Drug Administration to approve it for human consumption. “Aspartame has been safely consumed for more than a quarter of a century and is one of the most thoroughly studied food additives,” read one news release from the council.

At the same time, Dr. Soffritti’s findings have energized a vociferous group of researchers, health advocates and others who say they are convinced that aspartame is a toxin associated with a variety of health troubles, including headaches, dizziness, blindness and seizures.

Link

Discover.com:

A little mercury is all that humans need to do away with themselves quietly, slowly, and surely
By Karen Wright

Let’s start with a straightforward fact: Mercury is unimaginably toxic and dangerous. A single drop on a human hand can be irreversibly fatal. A single drop in a large lake can make all the fish in it unsafe to eat.

Often referred to as quicksilver, mercury is the only common metal that is liquid at room temperature. Alchemists, including the young Sir Isaac Newton, believed it was the source of gold. In the modern era, it became a common ingredient of paints, diuretics, pesticides, batteries, fluorescent lightbulbs, skin creams, antifungal agents, vaccines for children, and of course, thermometers. There is probably some in your mouth right now: So-called silver dental fillings are half mercury.

Mercury is also a by-product of many industrial processes. In the United States coal-fired power plants alone pump about 50 tons of it into the air each year. That mercury rains out of the sky into oceans, lakes, rivers, and streams, where it becomes concentrated in the flesh of fish, shellfish, seals, and whales. Last year the Food and Drug Administration determined there is so much mercury in the sea that women of childbearing age should severely limit their consumption of larger ocean fish. The warning comes too late for many mothers. A nationwide survey by the Centers for Disease Control shows that one in 12 women of childbearing age already have unsafe blood levels of mercury and that as many as 600,000 babies in the United States could be at risk. But that begs a critical question: At risk for what?

TUNA TYPES

One particularly common source of low-level mercury exposure is tuna. Because they are large, long-lived predators, tuna accumulate more mercury in their tissue than smaller, short-lived fish. When tested for mercury in parts per million, flesh from albacore tuna, which take five years to mature, was shown to contain about four times as much mercury as chunk light tuna, which is harvested from younger fish.

Infants born to mothers contaminated by mercury in Japan’s Minamata Bay in 1956 had profound neurological disabilities including deafness, blindness, mental retardation, and cerebral palsy. In adults, mercury poisoning can cause numbness, stumbling, dementia, and death. “It’s no secret that mercury exposure is highly toxic,” says toxicologist Alan Stern, a contributor to a 2000 National Research Council report on mercury toxicity. But high-level exposures like those at Minamata cannot help scientists determine whether six silver fillings and a weekly tuna-salad sandwich will poison you or an unborn child. “The question is, what are the effects at low levels of exposure?” he says.

Data now suggest effects might occur at levels lower than anyone suspected. Some studies show that children who were exposed to tiny amounts of mercury in utero have slower reflexes, language deficits, and shortened attention spans. In adults, recent studies show a possible link between heart disease and mercury ingested from eating fish. Other groups claim mercury exposure is responsible for Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and the escalating rate of autism.

Link

Read the numbers on your fruit – megnut.com

Another little tidbit gleaned from April’s Food & Wine: those sticker numbers on your fruit actually mean something. Here in the US, fruit often comes with stickers on it, sometimes telling you where it’s from and/or what it is. There’s also a number, but I never paid attention to that. But on p. 72 I spotted this interesting bit of information:

“[T]he sticker labels on fruit: The numbers tell you how the fruit was grown. Conventionally grown fruit has four digits; organically grown fruit has five and starts with a nine; genetically engineered has five numbers and starts with an eight.”

Source: ENN: Environmental News Network

August 10, 2005 — By United Steel Workers

PITTSBURGH, Pa. — Citing growing public health concerns, the United Steelworkers (USW) union has informed major carpet cleaning retailers and wholesalers, fast food chains and major retail clothing companies that they may have “a legal duty to warn” their customers about potential harmful effects of products that may contain the chemical perfluorooctanoic acid, also known as PFOA or C8.

PFOA is used to manufacture DuPont’s widely used Teflon non-stick cookware. PFOA is also created when fluorotelomers — which are a family of stain and water resistant chemicals — break down. Fluorotelomers are applied to carpets, clothing, pizza boxes, hamburger wrappers and french fry containers. A recent draft report by the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Science Advisory Board identified PFOA as a “likely human carcinogen.”

DuPont is the only known manufacturer of PFOA in the U.S.

The USW sent letters and information circulars to companies which may sell products containing PFOA or chemicals that break down into PFOA. The correspondence warns company officials that they may have a duty to inform customers of potential health risks associated with exposure to PFOA or they could face legal liability in the event that consumers sue and prove harm to their health.

Courts have found, according to the USW, “a duty to warn” exists where a manufacturer, distributor or retailer had knowledge of the health or safety risks of a product and consumers, due to a lack of warning, were harmed by a dangerous product.

The EPA has launched an investigation to determine if DuPont withheld important information concerning the health and environmental effects of PFOA. The Environmental Crimes Section of the U.S. Department of Justice has issued a subpoena to DuPont about PFOA as part of a federal grand jury investigation.

“We sincerely hope that our efforts will encourage companies selling or distributing potentially carcinogenic products to provide warnings and thereby protect the public,” said Ken Test, chair of the USW DuPont Council.

Some recipients of the USW letters and information circulars include: Rug Doctor, Stanley Steemer, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Papa Johns, Pizza Hut, KFC, California Pizza Kitchen, Levi Strauss, GAP, W.L. Gore, Eddie Bauer, J. Crew, Wal-Mart, Sears, Nordstrom and Dillard’s.

The USW represents over 1,800 workers at DuPont. The union has expressed repeated concerns over worker exposure to PFOA and how DuPont may be endangering jobs by not dealing with the PFOA issue “in an open and responsible fashion.”

“DuPont has a special responsibility to its employees who produce PFOA and fluorotelomers and who may have the highest exposure to possible carcinogens,” said Test.

The union has also written to hundreds of paper companies in the United States expressing concern about another DuPont chemical, Zonyl, present in paper products used by the food industry. Zonyl is also believed to break down into PFOA.

According to a leading environmental organization, the Environmental Working Group, Zonyl may be a major source of how PFOA has entered the bloodstream of most Americans.

About the United Steel Workers
The USW is the largest industrial union in North American and has 850,000 members in the U.S. and Canada. Over 150,000 USW members work in the paper industry.

Contacts
Joseph Drexler
USW Strategic Campaigns
(615) 594-2074 (cell)

Robert Moore
Publicist
(202) 498-6054 (cell)