By Frank Dobson
The government's expert advisers assume that as many as 15,000 people in this country are infected with the prion infection agents that cause the lethal brain disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob (vCJD), the human form of BSE or "mad cow disease". The experts don't know if this is the right figure. It could be a lot higher but ministers are refusing to fund trials of a new test to find out.
So far just 200 of our fellow citizens have developed the disease. But the prions that cause the disease can lie dormant for decades and people who are infected pose a risk to others if they are blood or organ donors, or if surgical instruments used on them are then reused on other patients.
The Medical Research Council Prion Unit at the UCL Institute of Neurology, led by Professor John Collinge, was set up at my behest to come up with ways to treat vCJD and, better still, prevent it. They were also asked to devise a test to identify vCJD in the general population. They recently announced a new blood test that does just that. This is a great breakthrough. It should enable our doctors and scientists, for the first time, to assess accurately the incidence of vCJD infection so policy decisions on how best to protect patients can be based on evidence, not guesswork.
As health secretary, the day I became aware in 1998 that it might be possible to transmit vCJD by blood and blood products, I got the experts together. Their advice was that infection through blood and blood products was likely but not certain and that the infection, if any, would probably be carried in the white blood cells. "What should we do?" I asked.
Showing posts with label Human. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Human. Show all posts
Thursday, 29 September 2011
Tuesday, 19 July 2011
The Worlds Largest Human Experiment: GMOs, Roundup, and the Monsanto Monstrosity
By Madison Ruppert
Informed consent is one of the most basic aspects of patient-physician relations, as well as subject-researcher relations in the case of research studies. This involves making the patient aware of and verifying that they understand the risks, benefits, facts, and the future implications of the procedure or test they are going to be subjected to.
In the case of genetically modified organisms we have not been made aware of the risks. In fact, the GMO industry has deliberately hidden the real dangers behind the seeds and herbicides they peddle.
The Food and Drug Administration of the United States of America has defined informed consent in the following bureaucratic jargon:
Except as provided in 50.23 and 50.24, no investigator may involve a human being as a subject in research covered by these regulations unless the investigator has obtained the legally effective informed consent of the subject or the subject's legally authorized representative. An investigator shall seek such consent only under circumstances that provide the prospective subject or the representative sufficient opportunity to consider whether or not to participate and that minimize the possibility of coercion or undue influence. The information that is given to the subject or the representative shall be in language understandable to the subject or the representative. No informed consent, whether oral or written, may include any exculpatory language through which the subject or the representative is made to waive or appear to waive any of the subject's legal rights, or releases or appears to release the investigator, the sponsor, the institution, or its agents from liability for negligence.
Under all of these definitions, including the exceptions which you can peruse at the above linked official website, what Monsanto is doing with GM crops and their Roundup products are ethically wrong and illegal.
Some might say, "So what? It doesn't matter since genetically modified products are perfectly safe! Why would I care, if it helps farmers, and it is safe, then what is wrong with doing it without informed consent?"
Informed consent is one of the most basic aspects of patient-physician relations, as well as subject-researcher relations in the case of research studies. This involves making the patient aware of and verifying that they understand the risks, benefits, facts, and the future implications of the procedure or test they are going to be subjected to.
In the case of genetically modified organisms we have not been made aware of the risks. In fact, the GMO industry has deliberately hidden the real dangers behind the seeds and herbicides they peddle.
The Food and Drug Administration of the United States of America has defined informed consent in the following bureaucratic jargon:
Except as provided in 50.23 and 50.24, no investigator may involve a human being as a subject in research covered by these regulations unless the investigator has obtained the legally effective informed consent of the subject or the subject's legally authorized representative. An investigator shall seek such consent only under circumstances that provide the prospective subject or the representative sufficient opportunity to consider whether or not to participate and that minimize the possibility of coercion or undue influence. The information that is given to the subject or the representative shall be in language understandable to the subject or the representative. No informed consent, whether oral or written, may include any exculpatory language through which the subject or the representative is made to waive or appear to waive any of the subject's legal rights, or releases or appears to release the investigator, the sponsor, the institution, or its agents from liability for negligence.
Under all of these definitions, including the exceptions which you can peruse at the above linked official website, what Monsanto is doing with GM crops and their Roundup products are ethically wrong and illegal.
Some might say, "So what? It doesn't matter since genetically modified products are perfectly safe! Why would I care, if it helps farmers, and it is safe, then what is wrong with doing it without informed consent?"
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
Maude Barlow: A Healthy Environment Should Be a Human Right
Maude Barlow is a member of OCA's Policy Board. Yes! Magazine is a great publication that you should subscribe to if at all possible by clicking here.
In most legal systems, you have a right to freedom of speech or religion, but you don't have a right to breathe clean air or drink safe water.
Maude Barlow-author, activist, and former senior advisor on water to the United Nations-believes that those rights should be recognized. This past summer, she helped engineer a landmark victory: The U.N. formally adopted a resolution recognizing the human right to water (though the United States abstained).
Now, Barlow is part of an international movement-of governments, scientists, and activists-working to bring a focus on environmental rights to the ongoing United Nations climate negotiations. This week, she is attending the United Nations climate meeting in Cancún, Mexico.
The negotiations are thus far getting scant press attention, but thousands of people from all over the world are turning out in Cancún to voice their political views and hold alternative meetings and demonstrations outside the U.N. conference. Early this week, the international grassroots organization La Via Campesina led Barlow and hundreds of other grassroots leaders on a tour across the Mexican countryside to witness how climate change is already affecting rural communities. The tours converged in Mexico City where a few thousand people held a march to the Zócalo, the city's central plaza.
Activists in Cancún and Mexico City are rallying behind the idea of environmental rights. Many support a document called the "People's Agreement on Climate Change," which includes a "Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth." It's an idealistic name for a proposal that would sound either visionary or improbable, or both-if not for the fact that the declaration represents the work of representatives from 56 countries and of tens of thousands of people who attended a climate conference in Cochabamba, Bolivia, last April. The document declares that everybody has rights to basics like clean water and clean air, but it also says something even more extraordinary: that the planet's ecosystems themselves have rights.
It's unlikely that the Cochabamba proposals will end up in any formal agreements to emerge from Cancún. But the idea of environmental rights is taking hold. In September 2008, Ecuador formally recognized the rights of nature in its new constitution. In the United States, a handful of local governments have passed resolutions recognizing that nature has rights, including, recently, the city of Pittsburgh.
In most legal systems, you have a right to freedom of speech or religion, but you don't have a right to breathe clean air or drink safe water.
Maude Barlow-author, activist, and former senior advisor on water to the United Nations-believes that those rights should be recognized. This past summer, she helped engineer a landmark victory: The U.N. formally adopted a resolution recognizing the human right to water (though the United States abstained).
Now, Barlow is part of an international movement-of governments, scientists, and activists-working to bring a focus on environmental rights to the ongoing United Nations climate negotiations. This week, she is attending the United Nations climate meeting in Cancún, Mexico.
The negotiations are thus far getting scant press attention, but thousands of people from all over the world are turning out in Cancún to voice their political views and hold alternative meetings and demonstrations outside the U.N. conference. Early this week, the international grassroots organization La Via Campesina led Barlow and hundreds of other grassroots leaders on a tour across the Mexican countryside to witness how climate change is already affecting rural communities. The tours converged in Mexico City where a few thousand people held a march to the Zócalo, the city's central plaza.
Activists in Cancún and Mexico City are rallying behind the idea of environmental rights. Many support a document called the "People's Agreement on Climate Change," which includes a "Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth." It's an idealistic name for a proposal that would sound either visionary or improbable, or both-if not for the fact that the declaration represents the work of representatives from 56 countries and of tens of thousands of people who attended a climate conference in Cochabamba, Bolivia, last April. The document declares that everybody has rights to basics like clean water and clean air, but it also says something even more extraordinary: that the planet's ecosystems themselves have rights.
It's unlikely that the Cochabamba proposals will end up in any formal agreements to emerge from Cancún. But the idea of environmental rights is taking hold. In September 2008, Ecuador formally recognized the rights of nature in its new constitution. In the United States, a handful of local governments have passed resolutions recognizing that nature has rights, including, recently, the city of Pittsburgh.
Saturday, 13 November 2010
Taking the 'Waste' Out of Human Waste
We do it every day.
But how many of us think about what happens after we pull the toilet lever?
Increasingly, people in Chicago and across the world are. They're questioning the sustainability of a system built on using clean water and a lot of energy to process waste, and reimagining the possibilities for what we flush away.
Call it taking the "waste" out of human waste - a movement that includes transforming sewage sludge into fuel, heating buildings with it, using composting toilets to produce fertilizer. It all adds up to a major point: Change is on the horizon, even if that horizon seems far away.
The United States used about 410 billion gallons of water each day in 2005, according to a U.S. Geological Survey report. More than 30 percent of those gallons flush our toilets, which we do five times a day on average, according to the nonprofit American Water Works Association and its Research Foundation in Denver.
Dick Lanyon, executive director of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, said it costs $747 per million gallons to treat the water. The district serves 5.25 million people.
Added Reed Dring, operations manager for Stickney Water Reclamation Plant, blowers have to pump almost 500,000 cubic feet of air per minute using 20,000 horsepower. "That takes a lot of energy," Dring said. "Our monthly electric bill is $1.8 million."
Though the plant offsets some of its costs by using methane gas generated by sewage sludge to heat its buildings, receiving less water would make the job easier, Dring said. "The less (wastewater) to pump, the less motors I have to run."
Rose George, author of "The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters," said one of the problems with the current sanitation model, one she and others believe is unsustainable, is thinking of "human waste as waste and not a resource."
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