Mad cow watch goes blind
USA Today.com
8/3/2006

Creekstone Farms, a Kansas beef producer, wants to reassure customers that its cattle are safe to eat by testing them all for mad cow disease. Sounds like a smart business move, but there's one problem: The federal government won't let the company do it.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture — invoking an obscure 1913 law intended to thwart con artists from peddling bogus hog cholera serum to pig farmers — is blocking companies from selling the testing kits to Creekstone.

USDA is doing the bidding of large cattle barons afraid that Creekstone's marketing will force them to do the same tests to stay competitive. It's true that the incidence of mad cow disease is quite low. But there's little logic in stopping a company from exceeding regulations to meet the demands of its customers, or protecting its rivals from legitimate competition.

Not only is USDA blocking Creekstone, the department said last month that it's reducing its mad cow testing program by 90%. The industry and its sympathetic regulators seem to believe that the problem isn't mad cow disease. It's tests that find mad cow.

The department tests only 1% of the roughly 100,000 cattle slaughtered daily. The new plan will test only 110 cows a day.

By cutting back on testing, USDA will save about $35 million a year. That's a pittance compared with the devastation the cattle industry could face if just one human case of mad cow disease is linked to domestic beef.

The brain-wasting disease — known formally as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE — is extremely rare but extremely deadly. Since 1986, it has killed more than 150 people worldwide, mostly in Britain, who ate infected meat.

Scientists don't know the exact cause of BSE but think it's spread when cows are fed ground-up parts of cattle and other cud-chewing animals. The government has tightened cattle-feed rules, but loopholes still permit cattle blood as a milk substitute and chicken waste as a protein supplement.

Canada has found four cows with BSE this year, and at least one was born after similar cattle feed rules were imposed that should have prevented the animal from being infected. Acting out of an abundance of caution, U.S. plans to increase Canadian beef and cattle imports have been put on hold until the new cases are investigated. That makes sense, but it's hard to justify cutbacks on U.S. testing at the same time we demand other nations provide greater assurances.

Sixty-five nations have full or partial restrictions on importing U.S. beef products because of fears that the testing isn't rigorous enough. As a result, U.S. beef product exports declined from $3.8 billion in 2003, before the first mad cow was detected in the USA, to $1.4 billion last year. Foreign buyers are demanding that USDA do more.

"In a nation dedicated to free market competition," says John Stewart, CEO of Creekstone, which is suing USDA, "a company that wants to do more than is required to ensure the quality of its product and to satisfy customer demand should be allowed to do so."

When regulators disagree with reasoning like that, you know the game is rigged.

Idaho probes nine Creutzfeldt-Jakob cases.
Higher-than-normal incidence of infectious brain disease puzzles officials.
Oct 17 11:56 AM US/Eastern
By REBECCA BOONE
Associated Press Writer
BOISE, Idaho

From the moment Joan Kingsford first saw her husband stagger in his welding shop, she wanted two things: His recovery and to know what made him sick.

She got neither. Alvin Kingsford, 72, died recently of suspected sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the fatal brain-wasting illness. The disease can be conclusively diagnosed only with an autopsy, which did not take place.

State and federal health officials are trying to get to the bottom of nine reported cases of suspected sporadic CJD in Idaho this year. Sporadic, or naturally occurring, CJD differs from the permutation dubbed variant CJD, which is caused by eating mad-cow-tainted beef and has killed at least 180 people in the United Kingdom and continental Europe since the 1990s.

"One thing is very clear in Idaho _ the number seems to be higher than the number reported in previous years," said Dr. Ermias Belay, a CJD expert with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "So far, the investigations have not found any evidence of any exposure that might be common among the cases."

Normally, sporadic CJD only strikes about one person in a million each year, with an average of just 300 cases per year in the United States, or just over one case a year in Idaho. Over the past two decades, the most cases reported in Idaho in a single year has been three.

Until this year.

Of the nine suspected cases reported so far in 2005, three tested positive for an infectious disease of the nervous system, though more tests are pending to determine if the fatal illness was in fact sporadic CJD. Four apparent victims were buried without autopsies. Two suspected cases tested negative.

Still, federal and state health officials are stopping just short of calling the Idaho cases a "cluster," waiting for final test results from the victims who got autopsies.

The best tool of investigators to pin down the diagnosis _ the autopsy _ is sometimes hard to get, said Tom Shanahan with the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare.

Pathologists are often reluctant to perform the procedures, the cost of an autopsy can be high and some families are reluctant to give their consent, officials say.

Joan Kingsford wanted an autopsy done on her husband, but no mortician in the area would agree to handle Alvin's body after his brain cavity had been opened. They feared they would catch the rare disease, Kingsford said.

Ultimately, she opted to skip the autopsy and have a traditional funeral service.

"A week before he passed away, the funeral homes said they wouldn't take the blood out" if an autopsy was done on him, she said. "They just put some embalming in him and told me I had to have a funeral in three days."

CJD is transmitted through a malformed prion found primarily in the brain and spinal fluid of those infected, Belay said. Standard sterilization procedures don't eliminate the risk of infection; instead equipment must be soaked in a chemical solution for more than an hour and then heated, according to the World Health Organization.

Mortuary procedures _ including embalming _ can be done safely on intact bodies of CJD victims as long as extra precautions are taken, but the World Health Organization does not recommend embalming patients who have had autopsies.

Larry Whitaker, a Beaverton, Ore.-based regional salesman for the embalming chemical and equipment manufacturer Dodge Company, offers workshops to his clients on safe handling of CJD-infected bodies.

"When the brain has been removed, it is an extraordinary risk," Whitaker said. "This is one time I think that cremation has to be more than mildly considered."

A member of the Mormon Church, Joan Kingsford's church discourages cremation. She was thrown into making a decision about her husband's remains much sooner than she expected.

"It was two and a half months before we knew what was wrong with him, and by that time he was in the hospital," she said. "I wish we could have done the autopsy, because I think people need to know about this."

"We definitely have a problem in Idaho," she added.

Listeria monocytogenes--Bon Appeitite.

The manifestations of listeriosis include septicemia, meningitis (or meningoencephalitis), encephalitis, and intrauterine or cervical infections in pregnant women, which may result in spontaneous abortion (2nd/3rd trimester) or stillbirth. The onset of the aforementioned disorders is usually preceded by influenza-like symptoms including persistent fever. It was reported that gastrointestinal symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea may precede more serious forms of listeriosis or may be the only symptoms expressed. Gastrointestinal symptoms were epidemiologically associated with use of antacids or cimetidine. The onset time to serious forms of listeriosis is unknown but may range from a few days to three weeks. The onset time to gastrointestinal symptoms is unknown but is probably greater than 12 hours.

Colorado Firm Recalls Sausage Products For Possible Listeria Contamination
Recall Release CLASS I RECALL
FSIS-RC-002-2007 HEALTH RISK: HIGH
usda.gov
Congressional and Public Affairs
(202) 720-9113
Tara Balsley

WASHINGTON, Jan. 5, 2007 - Gold Star Sausage Co., Inc, a Denver, Colo., firm, is voluntarily recalling approximately 15,514 pounds of sausage products that may be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service announced today.

The following products are subject to recall: [View Labels, PDF Only]

* One-pound packages of "MAVERICK RANCH BEEF FRANKS, 6 SKINLESS FRANKS." Each package bears a "sell by" date of "2/14/07," "2/21/07" or "2/28/07."
* One-pound packages of "MAVERICK RANCH BUFFALO FRANKS, 6 SKINLESS FRANKS." Each package bears a "sell by" date of "12/27/06," "1/3/07," "1/10/07," "2/14/07," "2/21/07" or "2/28/07."
* Five-pound packages of "BEEF FRANKS, PRODUCT CODE MF55-0606-15." These products were packaged on "12/09/06."

Each package bears the establishment number "EST. 1106" inside the USDA mark of inspection. The sausage products were distributed to retail and institutional establishments in Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee
and Utah.

The problem was discovered through microbiological testing completed by a non-government laboratory. FSIS has received no reports of illnesses associated with consumption of this product.

Consumption of food contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes can cause listeriosis, an uncommon but potentially fatal disease. Healthy people rarely contract listeriosis. However, listeriosis can cause high fever, severe headache, neck stiffness and nausea. Listeriosis can also cause miscarriages and stillbirths, as well as serious and sometimes fatal infections in those with weakened immune systems, such as infants, the elderly and persons with HIV infection or undergoing chemotherapy.

Beef recall expanded millions of pounds
Jun 10, 2007

LOS ANGELES - A meat supplier has greatly expanded a ground beef recall, which now includes about 5.7 million pounds of fresh and frozen meat that may be contaminated with
E. coli.

David Goldman, acting administrator of the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, announced on Saturday that the recall would be expanded to include products with sell-by dates from April 6-April 20. The beef, sold in 11 Western states, was distributed by California-based United Food Group LLC.

Goldman said that none of the latest batch of suspect beef is in stores now because the product would be well past its expiration date, but consumers may still have some of the meat at home.

"It is important for consumers to look in their freezers," Goldman said.

The meat has been blamed for an E. coli outbreak in the Western states that resulted in 14 illnesses, spanning April 25 through May 18. All the patients have recovered.

On Wednesday, United Food Group expanded an initial recall of 75,000 pounds of ground beef, adding another 370,000 pounds based on "unspecified concerns" raised by the California State Department of Health Services. This meat had sell-by dates from April 29-May 6.

The recalled products were shipped to stores in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. They were sold under the brand names Moran's All Natural, Miller Meat Company, Stater Bros., Trader Joe's Butcher Shop, Inter-American Products Inc. and Basha's.

The affected grocery stores included Albertson's, Basha's, Grocery Outlet, Fry's, "R" Ranch Markets, Save-A-Lot, Save-Mart, Scolari's Wholesale Markets, Smart and Final, Smith's, Stater Bros. and Superior Warehouse.

E. coli is a potentially deadly bacterium that can cause stomach cramps and diarrhea that may turn bloody. E. coli can sometimes lead to complications including kidney failure.

Customers with questions about the recall can call United Food Group's hot line at 1-800-325-4164. Those with recalled products should either throw the product away or return it to the point of purchase for a refund.

Toxic Toothpaste Made in China Is Found in U.S.
By WALT BOGDANICH
Published: June 2, 2007


Consumers were advised yesterday to discard all toothpaste made in China after federal health officials said they found Chinese-made toothpaste containing a poison used in some antifreeze in three locations: Miami, the Port of Los Angeles and Puerto Rico.


Although there are no reports of anyone being harmed by the toothpaste, the Food and Drug Administration warned that the Chinese products had a “low but meaningful risk of toxicity and injury” to children and people with kidney or liver disease.

The United States is the seventh country to find tainted Chinese toothpaste within its borders in recent weeks.

Agency officials said they found toothpaste containing a small amount of diethylene glycol, a sweet, syrupy poison, at a Dollar Plus retail store in Miami, sold under the brand name ShiR Fresh Mint Fluoride Paste. The F.D.A. also identified nine other brands of Chinese toothpaste that contain diethylene glycol, some with concentrations of 3 percent to 4 percent.

Previously, only a few brands had been identified by health officials around the world as containing diethylene glycol and all of them listed the chemical on the label.

But diethylene glycol was not listed on the label of the toothpaste found in the Miami store. Its presence was detected only because the F.D.A. began testing imported Chinese toothpaste last month. That precaution was prompted by the discovery in Latin America of tens of thousands of tubes of tainted toothpaste made in China.

Over the years, counterfeiters have found it profitable to substitute diethylene glycol for its chemical cousin, glycerin, which is usually more expensive. Glycerin is a safe additive commonly found in food, drugs and household products. In toothpaste, glycerin is used as a thickening agent.

Chinese regulators said Thursday that their investigation of toothpaste manufacturers there had found they had done nothing wrong. Chinese officials also said that while small amounts of diethylene glycol could be safely used in toothpaste, new controls would be imposed on its use in toothpaste.

The F.D.A. said diethylene glycol in any amount was not suitable for use in toothpaste.

The agency said two Chinese companies, Goldcredit International Trading and the Suzhou City Jinmao Daily Chemicals Company, made the tainted brands found in the United States.

In a statement yesterday, federal health officials called diethylene-glycol poisoning “an important public safety issue.” The Panamanian government last year inadvertently mixed the poison made in China into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine, killing at least 100 people, prosecutors there said.

In that case, Chinese regulators acknowledged on Thursday that two companies in China had “engaged in some misconduct” in the way they labeled and sold the diethylene glycol, but they said a Panamanian importer bore most of the blame.

Last month, after publicity over the poisoning deaths from the cold medicine, a consumer in Panama noticed that toothpaste in a store listed diethylene glycol as an ingredient and notified the authorities. Eventually it was traced to China, and since then countries around the world have been on the lookout for the product.

In addition to the United States and Panama, tainted toothpaste has been found in Australia, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Chinese exports of toothpaste to the United States account for $3.3 million out of a $2 billion-dollar market in America, F.D.A. officials said. “The scope of this is fairly small when you look at all the toothpaste that is consumed in the U.S.,” Doug Arbesfeld, an agency spokesman, said.

The agency said Chinese-made brands with diethylene glycol were typically sold at low-cost, “bargain” retail outlets. A man answering the phone at the Dollar Plus store in Miami, identified by federal officials as selling the Chinese toothpaste, said he did not want to be interviewed because his English was poor. The man, who did not give his name, said federal inspectors came to his store yesterday.

Mr. Arbesfeld said that six tubes were confiscated there and that several more were found at the store’s distributor. Those tubes were destroyed. F.D.A. officials also said they had confiscated several brands of toothpaste at the Port of Los Angeles and at a retail store in Puerto Rico.

The agency said toothpaste containing diethylene glycol was sold under the names Cooldent Fluoride, Cooldent Spearmint, Cooldent ICE, Dr. Cool, Superdent, Clean Rite, Oralmax Extreme, Oral Bright, Bright Max, and ShiR Fresh Mint.

Munitions Dumping at Sea
June 11, 2007
by CR McClain


It is no secret that the U.S. military has used the ocean as trashcan for munitions in the past. Peter discussed at the Old DSN how federal lawmakers were pressing the US Army to reveal everything it knows about a massive international program to dump chemical weapons off homeland and foreign shores. "The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste - either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels." Brian pointed me to the Daily Press's in depth coverage of this whole issue. Registration is free and only takes a minute or two and is extremely worthwhile. Included at the site are maps of disposal sites (downloadable as pdfs), stories, descriptions of items dumped including nerve and musturd gas, and rather depressing pictures some are below the fold (all from Daily Press).

Hundreds of dolphins washed ashore in Virginia and New Jersey shorelines in 1987 with burns similar to mustard gas exposure. One marine-mammal specialist suspects Army-dumped chemical weapons killed them. (Photo courtesy of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in New Jersey)



The SS William Ralston filled with 301,000 mustard gas bombs and 1,500 1-ton canisters of Lewsite -- sinks in the Pacific off San Fransico in 1958 (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army)

Plastic Ocean:Our oceans are turning into plastic...are we?
By Susan Casey, Photographs by Gregg Segal
Feb 20, 2007

Bottle caps and other plastic objects are visible inside the decomposed carcass of this Laysan albatross on Kure Atoll, which lies in a remote and virtually uninhabited region of the North Pacific. The bird probably mistook the plastics for food and ingested them while foraging for prey.

A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility...and worse.

Captain Charles Moore Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

It happened on August 3, 1997, a lovely day, at least in the beginning: Sunny. Little wind. Water the color of sapphires. Moore and the crew of Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea.

Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita’s course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. For one thing, it was becalmed. “The doldrums,” sailors called it, and they steered clear. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.

The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had grown up in Long Beach, 40 miles south of L.A., with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba diver, surfer, and finally captain. Moore had spent countless hours in the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors. He’d seen a lot of things out there, things that were glorious and grand; things that were ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre.

It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.

How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so, and that his discovery had dire implications for human—and planetary—health. As Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the “Eastern Garbage Patch,” Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.

“Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” This Andy Warhol quote is emblazoned on a six-foot-long magenta and yellow banner that hangs—with extreme irony—in the solar-powered workshop in Moore’s Long Beach home. The workshop is surrounded by a crazy Eden of trees, bushes, flowers, fruits, and vegetables, ranging from the prosaic (tomatoes) to the exotic (cherimoyas, guavas, chocolate persimmons, white figs the size of baseballs). This is the house in which Moore, 59, was raised, and it has a kind of open-air earthiness that reflects his ’60s-activist roots, which included a stint in a Berkeley commune. Composting and organic gardening are serious business here—you can practically smell the humus—but there is also a kidney-shaped hot tub surrounded by palm trees. Two wet suits hang drying on a clothesline above it.

This afternoon, Moore strides the grounds. “How about a nice, fresh boysenberry?” he asks, and plucks one off a bush. He’s a striking man wearing no-nonsense black trousers and a shirt with official-looking epaulettes. A thick brush of salt-and-pepper hair frames his intense blue eyes and serious face. But the first thing you notice about Moore is his voice, a deep, bemused drawl that becomes animated and sardonic when the subject turns to plastic pollution. This problem is Moore’s calling, a passion he inherited from his father, an industrial chemist who studied waste management as a hobby. On family vacations, Moore recalls, part of the agenda would be to see what the locals threw out. “We could be in paradise, but we would go to the dump,” he says with a shrug. “That’s what we wanted to see.”

Since his first encounter with the Garbage Patch nine years ago, Moore has been on a mission to learn exactly what’s going on out there. Leaving behind a 25-year career running a furniture-restoration business, he has created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to spread the word of his findings. He has resumed his science studies, which he’d set aside when his attention swerved from pursuing a university degree to protesting the Vietnam War. His tireless effort has placed him on the front lines of this new, more abstract battle. After enlisting scientists such as Steven B. Weisberg, Ph.D. (executive director of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project and an expert in marine environmental monitoring), to develop methods for analyzing the gyre’s contents, Moore has sailed Alguita back to the Garbage Patch several times. On each trip, the volume of plastic has grown alarmingly. The area in which it accumulates is now twice the size of Texas.

At the same time, all over the globe, there are signs that plastic pollution is doing more than blighting the scenery; it is also making its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic: things like bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. All sea creatures are threatened by floating plastic, from whales down to zooplankton. There’s a basic moral horror in seeing the pictures: a sea turtle with a plastic band strangling its shell into an hourglass shape; a humpback towing plastic nets that cut into its flesh and make it impossible for the animal to hunt. More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from being ensnared in it and drowning.

Bad enough. But Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled balls of trash were only the most visible signs of the problem; others were far less obvious, and far more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as a manta trawl, he discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye, swirling like fish food throughout the water. He and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and arrived at the following conclusion: By weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.

This statistic is grim—for marine animals, of course, but even more so for humans. The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more likely it will end up inside us. And there’s growing—and disturbing—proof that we’re ingesting plastic toxins constantly, and that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene activity. “Every one of us has this huge body burden,” Moore says. “You could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100 industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950.” The fact that these toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they’re benign: Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.

In simple terms, plastic is a petroleum-based mix of monomers that become polymers, to which additional chemicals are added for suppleness, inflammability, and other qualities. When it comes to these substances, even the syllables are scary. For instance, if you’re thinking that perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) isn’t something you want to sprinkle on your microwave popcorn, you’re right. Recently, the Science Advisory Board of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) upped its classification of PFOA to a likely carcinogen. Yet it’s a common ingredient in packaging that needs to be oil- and heat-resistant. So while there may be no PFOA in the popcorn itself, if PFOA is used to treat the bag, enough of it can leach into the popcorn oil when your butter deluxe meets your superheated microwave oven that a single serving spikes the amount of the chemical in your blood.

Other nasty chemical additives are the flame retardants known as poly-brominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). These chemicals have been shown to cause liver and thyroid toxicity, reproductive problems, and memory loss in preliminary animal studies. In vehicle interiors, PBDEs—used in moldings and floor coverings, among other things—combine with another group called phthalates to create that much-vaunted “new-car smell.” Leave your new wheels in the hot sun for a few hours, and these substances can “off-gas” at an accelerated rate, releasing noxious by-products.

It’s not fair, however, to single out fast food and new cars. PBDEs, to take just one example, are used in many products, incuding computers, carpeting, and paint. As for phthalates, we deploy about a billion pounds of them a year worldwide despite the fact that California recently listed them as a chemical known to be toxic to our reproductive systems. Used to make plastic soft and pliable, phthalates leach easily from millions of products—packaged food, cosmetics, varnishes, the coatings of timed-release pharmaceuticals—into our blood, urine, saliva, seminal fluid, breast milk, and amniotic fluid. In food containers and some plastic bottles, phthalates are now found with another compound called bisphenol A (BPA), which scientists are discovering can wreak stunning havoc in the body. We produce 6 billion pounds of that each year, and it shows: BPA has been found in nearly every human who has been tested in the United States. We’re eating these plasticizing additives, drinking them, breathing them, and absorbing them through our skin every single day.
Most alarming, these chemicals may disrupt the endocrine system—the delicately balanced set of hormones and glands that affect virtually every organ and cell—by mimicking the female hormone estrogen. In marine environments, excess estrogen has led to Twilight Zone-esque discoveries of male fish and seagulls that have sprouted female sex organs.

On land, things are equally gruesome. “Fertility rates have been declining for quite some time now, and exposure to synthetic estrogen—especially from the chemicals found in plastic products—can have an adverse effect,” says Marc Goldstein, M.D., director of the Cornell Institute for Repro-ductive Medicine. Dr. Goldstein also notes that pregnant women are particularly vulnerable: “Prenatal exposure, even in very low doses, can cause irreversible damage in an unborn baby’s reproductive organs.” And after the baby is born, he or she is hardly out of the woods. Frederick vom Saal, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia who specifically studies estrogenic chemicals in plastics, warns parents to “steer clear of polycarbonate baby bottles. They’re particularly dangerous for newborns, whose brains, immune systems, and gonads are still developing.” Dr. vom Saal’s research spurred him to throw out every polycarbonate plastic item in his house, and to stop buying plastic-wrapped food and canned goods (cans are plastic-lined) at the grocery store. “We now know that BPA causes prostate cancer in mice and rats, and abnormalities in the prostate’s stem cell, which is the cell implicated in human prostate cancer,” he says. “That’s enough to scare the hell out of me.” At Tufts University, Ana M. Soto, M.D., a professor of anatomy and cellular biology, has also found connections between these chemicals and breast cancer.

As if the potential for cancer and mutation weren’t enough, Dr. vom Saal states in one of his studies that “prenatal exposure to very low doses of BPA increases the rate of postnatal growth in mice and rats.” In other words, BPA made rodents fat. Their insulin output surged wildly and then crashed into a state of resistance—the virtual definition of diabetes. They produced bigger fat cells, and more of them. A recent scientific paper Dr. vom Saal coauthored contains this chilling sentence: “These findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contributing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world, associated with the dramatic increase in the amount of plastic being produced each year.” Given this, it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that America’s staggering rise in diabetes—a 735 percent increase since 1935—follows the same arc.

This news is depressing enough to make a person reach for the bottle. Glass, at least, is easily recyclable. You can take one tequila bottle, melt it down, and make another tequila bottle. With plastic, recycling is more complicated. Unfortunately, that promising-looking triangle of arrows that appears on products doesn’t always signify endless reuse; it merely identifies which type of plastic the item is made from. And of the seven different plastics in common use, only two of them—PET (labeled with #1 inside the triangle and used in soda bottles) and HDPE (labeled with #2 inside the triangle and used in milk jugs)—have much of an aftermarket. So no matter how virtuously you toss your chip bags and shampoo bottles into your blue bin, few of them will escape the landfill—only 3 to 5 percent of plastics are recycled in any way.

“There’s no legal way to recycle a milk container into another milk container without adding a new virgin layer of plastic,” Moore says, pointing out that, because plastic melts at low temperatures, it retains pollutants and the tainted residue of its former contents. Turn up the heat to sear these off, and some plastics release deadly vapors. So the reclaimed stuff is mostly used to make entirely different products, things that don’t go anywhere near our mouths, such as fleece jackets and carpeting. Therefore, unlike recycling glass, metal, or paper, recycling plastic doesn’t always result in less use of virgin material. It also doesn’t help that fresh-made plastic is far cheaper.
jar of plastic pulled from ocean

Moore routinely finds half-melted blobs of plastic in the ocean, as though the person doing the burning realized partway through the process that this was a bad idea, and stopped (or passed out from the fumes). “That’s a concern as plastic proliferates worldwide, and people run out of room for trash and start burning plastic—you’re producing some of the most toxic gases known,” he says. The color-coded bin system may work in Marin County, but it is somewhat less effective in subequatorial Africa or rural Peru.

“Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists,” Moore says, describing how the material’s molecular structure resists biodegradation. Instead, plastic crumbles into ever-tinier fragments as it’s exposed to sunlight and the elements. And none of these untold gazillions of fragments is disappearing anytime soon: Even when plastic is broken down to a single molecule, it remains too tough for biodegradation.

Truth is, no one knows how long it will take for plastic to biodegrade, or return to its carbon and hydrogen elements. We only invented the stuff 144 years ago, and science’s best guess is that its natural disappearance will take several more centuries. Meanwhile, every year, we churn out about 60 billion tons of it, much of which becomes disposable products meant only for a single use. Set aside the question of why we’re creating ketchup bottles and six-pack rings that last for half a millennium, and consider the implications of it: Plastic never really goes away.

Ask a group of people to name an overwhelming global problem, and you’ll hear about climate change, the Middle East, or AIDS. No one, it is guaranteed, will cite the sloppy transport of nurdles as a concern. And
yet nurdles, lentil-size pellets of plastic in its rawest form, are especially effective couriers of waste chemicals called persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, which include known carcinogens such as DDT and PCBs.

The United States banned these poisons in the 1970s, but they remain stubbornly at large in the environment, where they latch on to plastic because of its molecular tendency to attract oils.

The word itself—nurdles—sounds cuddly and harmless, like a cartoon character or a pasta for kids, but what it refers to is most certainly not. Absorbing up to a million times the level of POP pollution in their surrounding waters, nurdles become supersaturated poison pills. They’re light enough to blow around like dust, to spill out of shipping containers, and to wash into harbors, storm drains, and creeks. In the ocean, nurdles are easily mistaken for fish eggs by creatures that would very much like to have such a snack. And once inside the body of a bigeye tuna or a king salmon, these tenacious chemicals are headed directly to your dinner table.

One study estimated that nurdles now account for 10 percent of plastic ocean debris. And once they’re scattered in the environment, they’re diabolically hard to clean up (think wayward confetti). At places as remote as Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, 2,100 miles northeast of New Zealand and a 12-hour flight from L.A., they’re commonly found mixed with beach sand. In 2004, Moore received a $500,000 grant from the state of California to investigate the myriad ways in which nurdles go astray during the plastic manufacturing process. On a visit to a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe factory, as he walked through an area where railcars unloaded ground-up nurdles, he noticed that his pant cuffs were filled with a fine plastic dust. Turning a corner, he saw windblown drifts of nurdles piled against a fence. Talking about the experience, Moore’s voice becomes strained and his words pour out in an urgent tumble: “It’s not the big trash on the beach. It’s the fact that the whole biosphere is becoming mixed with these plastic particles. What are they doing to us? We’re breathing them, the fish are eating them, they’re in our hair, they’re in our skin.”

Though marine dumping is part of the problem, escaped nurdles and other plastic litter migrate to the gyre largely from land. That polystyrene cup you saw floating in the creek, if it doesn’t get picked up and specifically taken to a landfill, will eventually be washed out to sea. Once there, it will have plenty of places to go: The North Pacific gyre is only one of five such high-pressure zones in the oceans. There are similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Each of these gyres has its own version of the Garbage Patch, as plastic gathers in the currents. Together, these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. “That corresponds to a quarter of the earth’s surface,” Moore says. “So 25 percent of our planet is a toilet that never flushes.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In 1865, a few years after Alexander Parkes unveiled a precursor to man-made plastic called Parkesine, a scientist named John W. Hyatt set out to make a synthetic replacement for ivory billiard balls. He had the best of intentions: Save the elephants! After some tinkering, he created celluloid. From then on, each year brought a miraculous recipe: rayon in 1891, Teflon in 1938, polypropylene in 1954. Durable, cheap, versatile—plastic seemed like a revelation. And in many ways, it was. Plastic has given us bulletproof vests, credit cards, slinky spandex pants. It has led to breakthroughs in medicine, aerospace engineering, and computer science. And who among us doesn’t own a Frisbee?
Plastic has its benefits; no one would deny that. Few of us, however, are as enthusiastic as the American Plastics Council. One of its recent press releases, titled “Plastic Bags—A Family’s Trusted Companion,” reads: “Very few people remember what life was like before plastic bags became an icon of convenience and practicality—and now art. Remember the ‘beautiful’ [sic] swirling, floating bag in American Beauty?”

Alas, the same ethereal quality that allows bags to dance gracefully across the big screen also lands them in many less desirable places. Twenty-three countries, including Germany, South Africa, and Australia, have banned, taxed, or restricted the use of plastic bags because they clog sewers and lodge in the throats of livestock. Like pernicious Kleenex, these flimsy sacks end up snagged in trees and snarled in fences, becoming eyesores and worse: They also trap rainwater, creating perfect little breeding grounds for disease-carrying mosquitoes.

In the face of public outrage over pictures of dolphins choking on “a family’s trusted companion,” the American Plastics Council takes a defensive stance, sounding not unlike the NRA: Plastics don’t pollute, people do.

It has a point. Each of us tosses about 185 pounds of plastic per year. We could certainly reduce that. And yet—do our products have to be quite so lethal? Must a discarded flip-flop remain with us until the end of time? Aren’t disposable razors and foam packing peanuts a poor consolation prize for the destruction of the world’s oceans, not to mention our own bodies and the health of future generations? “If ‘more is better’ and that’s the only mantra we have, we’re doomed,” Moore says, summing it up.

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Ph.D., an expert on marine debris, agrees. “If you could fast-forward 10,000 years and do an archaeological dig…you’d find a little line of plastic,” he told The Seattle Times last April. “What happened to those people? Well, they ate their own plastic and disrupted their genetic structure and weren’t able to reproduce. They didn’t last very long because they killed themselves."

Wrist-slittingly depressing, yes, but there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Green architect and designer William McDonough has become an influential voice, not only in environmental circles but among Fortune 500 CEOs. McDonough proposes a standard known as “cradle to cradle” in which all manufactured things must be reusable, poison-free, and beneficial over the long haul. His outrage is obvious when he holds up a rubber ducky, a common child’s bath toy. The duck is made of phthalate-laden PVC, which has been linked to cancer and reproductive harm. “What kind of people are we that we would design like this?” McDonough asks. In the United States, it’s commonly accepted that children’s teething rings, cosmetics, food wrappers, cars, and textiles will be made from toxic materials. Other countries—and many individual companies—seem to be reconsidering. Currently, McDonough is working with the Chinese government to build seven cities using “the building materials of the future,” including a fabric that is safe enough to eat and a new, nontoxic polystyrene.

Thanks to people like Moore and McDonough, and media hits such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, awareness of just how hard we’ve bitch-slapped the planet is skyrocketing. After all, unless we’re planning to colonize Mars soon, this is where we live, and none of us would choose to live in a toxic wasteland or to spend our days getting pumped full of drugs to deal with our haywire endocrine systems and runaway cancer.

None of plastic’s problems can be fixed overnight, but the more we learn, the more likely that, eventually, wisdom will trump convenience and cheap disposability. In the meantime, let the cleanup begin: The National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is aggressively using satellites to identify and remove “ghost nets,” abandoned plastic fishing gear that never stops killing. (A single net recently hauled up off the Florida coast contained more than 1,000 dead fish, sharks, and one loggerhead turtle.) New biodegradable starch- and corn-based plastics have arrived, and Wal-Mart has signed on as a customer. A consumer rebellion against dumb and excessive packaging is afoot. And in August 2006, Moore was invited to speak about “marine debris and hormone disruption” at a meeting in Sicily convened by the science advisor to the Vatican. This annual gathering, called the International Seminars on Planetary Emergencies, brings scientists together to discuss mankind’s worst threats. Past topics have included nuclear holocaust and terrorism.

The gray plastic kayak floats next to Moore’s catamaran, Alguita, which lives in a slip across from his house. It is not a lovely kayak; in fact, it looks pretty rough. But it’s floating, a sturdy, eight-foot-long two-seater. Moore stands on Alguita’s deck, hands on hips, staring down at it. On the sailboat next to him, his neighbor, Cass Bastain, does the same. He has just informed Moore that he came across the abandoned craft yesterday, floating just offshore. The two men shake their heads in bewilderment.

“That’s probably a $600 kayak,” Moore says, adding, “I don’t even shop anymore. Anything I need will just float by.” (In his opinion, the movie Cast Away was a joke—Tom Hanks could’ve built a village with the crap that would’ve washed ashore during a storm.)

Watching the kayak bobbing disconsolately, it is hard not to wonder what will become of it. The world is full of cooler, sexier kayaks. It is also full of cheap plastic kayaks that come in more attractive colors than battleship gray. The ownerless kayak is a lummox of a boat, 50 pounds of nurdles extruded into an object that nobody wants, but that’ll be around for centuries longer than we will.

And as Moore stands on deck looking into the water, it is easy to imagine him doing the same thing 800 miles west, in the gyre. You can see his silhouette in the silvering light, caught between ocean and sky. You can see the mercurial surface of the most majestic body of water on earth. And then below, you can see the half-submerged madhouse of forgotten and discarded things. As Moore looks over the side of the boat, you can see the seabirds sweeping overhead, dipping and skimming the water. One of the journeying birds, sleek as a fighter plane, carries a scrap of something yellow in its beak. The bird dives low and then boomerangs over the horizon. Gone.

Spill closes bay beaches as oil spreads, kills wildlife
Jonathan Curiel, Jane Kay,Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writers
Thursday, November 8, 2007

58,000-gallon spill shuts beaches

(11-08) 17:30 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- Heavy-duty bunker fuel oil has washed up on beaches throughout the San Francisco and Marin coastlines all day, leaving purplish sheens on the water, ugly black blobs in the sand, and hundreds of injured or dead birds.

Some 9,500 gallons of oil have been contained since a container ship rammed the Bay Bridge and spilled 58,000 gallons of its fuel Wednesday morning, U.S. Coast Guard Capt. William Uberti said this afternoon. But as he spoke, questions were swirling about why it took so long for emergency officials to contain the mess - and who will be to blame for the environmental disaster building by the hour.

Oil began leaking into the water after the Cosco Busan, an 810-foot container ship that weighs 65,131 tons, crashed into a tower of the Bay Bridge's western span in heavy fog at about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Within an hour, six emergency vessels from the Coast Guard and Marine Spill Response Corp. were on the scene, officials said. Yet even by 4 p.m. Wednesday, officials apparently believed only 140 gallons of oil had leaked into the water.

They later learned that the actual spill amount was 58,000 gallons, Uberti said. The new total was not announced to the public until 9 p.m.

Asked why they didn't release the higher spill count until five hours after they learned about it, Uberti said, "We were kind of busy...we were busy figuring this stuff out."

The Coast Guard and other agencies are investigating why the container ship hit the bridge. The bar pilot at the controls, John Cota, and the crew underwent drug and alcohol testing after the crash.

None of those tested had been drinking, the Coast Guard said. Results of the drug tests will not be available until next week, the agency said.

This is the first time in memory that an oceangoing ship has run into the bridge, which did not suffer major damage. The last big spill in the bay was in 1996, when a valve broke on the Cape Mohican ship at San Francisco's southeastern waterfront and dumped 40,000 gallons of heavy bunker oil into a floating dry dock.

By late afternoon, the oil from Wednesday's accident had spread south to Hunters Point and north to Brook Island off Richmond, the Coast Guard said. In the ocean, oil was reported from Stinson Beach to Ocean Beach.

As the scope of the disaster became known, anger and sadness grew.

"It's just heartbreaking," said Sally McFadden, 49-year-old birdwatcher from Larkspur. She went to Kirby Cove in the Marin Headlands to help and was shocked when she saw the oil-slathered rocks and sand.

"This is peak migration season for birds, and all the birdwatchers are excited about it - so it's at a particularly bad time," she said. Voice breaking with emotion, she added, "It's disturbing. These are all beaches that I love and spend a lot of time at."

The state Department of Fish and Game says 26 live, oiled birds have been recovered. Hundreds more are likely injured.

Coast Guard officials said 16 beaches have so far been contaminated and closed off, and large patches of oil are floating on the bay. Beaches closed include including Baker Beach, China Beach, Keller Beach, Point Isabel, Ferry Point, Caesar Chavez, Crissy Field and Fort Point.

Along Rodeo Beach in the Marin Headlands, National Park Service ranger Robert Del Secco kept visitors away from the beach, which is covered in dark clumps of oil.

The pungent oil scent can be smelled around the Bay Area.

Chris Godley, emergency services manager for Marin County, said slicks had appeared in the water near the North Bay shoreline.

One slick, 50 yards long and 20 yards wide, was seen off Paradise Drive in Tiburon. Another was seen in Richardson Bay near Bayfront Park in Mill Valley, Godley said.

Representative from 13 agencies met at Fort Mason to discuss the next steps.

The ship's owners called in a private cleanup company, O'Brien's Group of Southern California, immediately after the accident, Uberti said.

Barry McFarland, incident commander with the company, said that in addition to the fouled beaches, cleanup crews are concentrating on three main sheens of oil in the bay - one west of Treasure Island, a second north of the Bay Bridge and a third south of Angel Island.

Five vessels are in the bay and three are outside the Golden Gate looking for additional oil patches, he said. The company has laid down about 18,000 feet of containment boom, and about 115 people are at work in the field scooping up the oil.

McFarland could not say how long the effort would take.

"It's too early to tell any timeline," he said. "We'll be here for quite some time."

Wildlife officials said finding birds and other animals covered in oil is a high priority.

The spill threatens to coat the birds' feathers, making it impossible for them to stay warm when they get into the chilly bay water, said Dr. Mike Ziccardi, director of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network. The UC Davis program organizes the wildlife aid response for the state Department of Fish and Game. The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito is also part of the network.

The most common species feeding at the Golden Gate at this time of year include western grebes and scoters.

"The birds' first response is to get out of the water (during a spill)," Ziccardi said. "They have a high metabolism and need to eat frequently. Because they're out of the water, they can't eat. They can become severely debilitated and can die unless brought into rehabilitation."

At the International Bird Rescue Research Center in Fairfield, "we get them warm, we get them rehydrated and we get the oil off of them. The more quickly we can respond, the better it will be," Ziccardi said.

Some of the injured birds are being taken to a recovery station at Fort Mason in San Francisco.

Residents who spot birds covered with oil should call (877) 823-6926. People interested in volunteering should not call this number. Would-be volunteers should check for opportunities at www.owcn.org.
Staff Writer Peter Fimrite contributed to this report.

Toys linked to a date-rape drug recalled. Mom describes 48 hours of 'horror' after her toddler ingested Aqua Dots

Toys tied to date-rape drug recalled
Nov. 8: The U.S. recalls Chinese-made Aqua Dots, which contain a chemical that converts into a "date rape" drug when ingested.

WASHINGTON - A mother said Thursday she knew something was terribly wrong when her 20-month-old son began to stumble and started vomiting. He had just ingested a popular toy that contains a chemical that turns into a powerful “date rape” drug when eaten.

It was the latest Chinese-made toy pulled from shelves in North America.

Shelby Esses, 30, said her son Jacob fell and went limp after getting into his older sister’s Aqua Dots set, which was recalled Wednesday by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

“That’s when we knew what he had eaten and that things were pretty bad,” she told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Aqua Dots, a highly popular holiday toy sold by Australia-based Moose Enterprises, are beads that can be arranged into designs and fused when sprayed with water. The toy was pulled from shelves in North American and Australia after scientists found they contain a chemical that converts into the so-called date rape drug when eaten. Two children in the U.S. and three in Australia were hospitalized after swallowing the beads.

Scientists say a chemical coating on the beads can metabolize into the drug gamma hydroxy butyrate. When eaten, the compound — made from common and easily available ingredients — can induce unconsciousness, seizures, drowsiness, coma and death.

Dr. Matt Jaeger, of Arkansas Children’s Hospital, treated Jacob and said he was very worried when he saw him.

“It was pretty dramatic,” he told ABC. “He was unconscious in this coma for about six hours. And then over the course of just a few minutes, went from being completely asleep to wide awake and playing like nothing ever happened.”

Before the toddler was released from the hospital, his military pilot father crawled around his Jacksonville home, near Little Rock, making sure every Aqua Dot was gone. Buying the toy, popular this Christmas season, turned into a 48-hour “horror” for the toddler and his family, they said.

Meanwhile, toy sets seized in Hong Kong were being tested Thursday, a customs official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of policy. If the tests come back positive for the chemical, suppliers in Hong Kong could face a year in jail and fines of $12,877, she said.

A spokeswoman for the CPSC said Thursday that parents should keep the toy out of children’s’ hands.

“If a child ingests them the glue turns into a toxic substance and it’s very serious,” Julie Vallese, a spokeswoman for the CPSC, said on CBS’ “Early Show.” “We want parents very much to heed this warning.”

Vallese said two U.S. children had fallen into “comatose” conditions from the Aqua Dots. The children have since recovered, she said.

In Australia, the toys were ordered off store shelves Tuesday when officials learned that a 2-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl were hospitalized after swallowing the beads. A 19-month-old toddler also was being treated.

China’s toy industry came under closer scrutiny earlier this year when Mattel Inc. recalled more than 21 million Chinese-made toys worldwide. Products including Barbie doll accessories and toy cars were pulled off shelves because of concerns about lead paint or tiny detachable magnets that could be swallowed.

Aqua Dots, which are called Bindeez in Australia, were named toy of the year at an industry function in that country.

Retailer Toys “R” Us Inc. said it issued a “stop sale” on the entire Spin Master Aqua Dots product line Tuesday in its North American stores and on its Web site. “We understand that Spin Master and U.S. regulatory authorities are investigating this product and we have asked Spin Master to fully explain what it believes happened,” it said.

Toys “R” Us also pulled the toys in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia after officials in Australia ordered them off shelves.

A company spokeswoman for Moose Enterprises’ Hong Kong office said the production of the toy was outsourced to a mainland Chinese factory. She refused to elaborate and referred all further requests for comment to the company’s head office in Australia.

“Our Hong Kong office is only responsible for operations such as logistics and shipping arrangements, we don’t have any firsthand information,” the employee, who would only give her surname, Lo, told The Associated Press.

Moose Enterprises said Bindeez and Aqua Dots are made at the same factory, which is in Shenzhen in southern Guangdong province. Last week, the government announced an export ban on more than 700 toy factories in the region because of shoddy products.

Frustrated Oil Spill Volunteers Turned Away
Many didn't have proper training
KGO By Tomas Roman

MUIR BEACH, Calif. Nov. 10, 2007 (KGO) - Right now, a total of 18 beaches remain closed across the bay area. The closures stretch from Point Richmond in the north, down to Crown Memorial Beach in Alameda.

Contract workers are still in Muir Beach in Marin county trying to clean up the oil spill mess. The beach is still closed and about 50 of them have been working all day.

About 100 volunteers wanted to help but they were told they didn't have the proper training to be able to help.

On Saturday morning, more than 250 people showed up at the Bill Graham Auditorium. They came they thought to get trained on how to volunteer to clean oil off local beaches like Muir, China and Ocean Beaches and also rescue oil laden birds.

But frustration mounted as people learned that 40 hours of training was needed in order to help out. None of them were going to be allowed on these beaches to clean up anything.

"It does seem that there are a lot of people who are ready to help and it would be great if they could get involved sooner but they have a process," said volunteer Gavin Archibald.

Beth Brown of San Francisco who with a group tried to help clean up Ocean Beach this morning says she was almost arrested.

"They confiscated our stuff told us to keep our hands where they could see them and told us we could get arrested if we didn't get off the beach," said volunteer Beth Brown.

The California department of fish and game says the clean up crews up are not volunteers like these people but rather trained contractors hired by the shipping company whose ship spilled the oil into the bay.

On Muir Beach, about 50 workers picked up oily residue from the each and rocks. The same kind of work was going on at ocean and china beaches.

"They have the obligation to clean up the spill. they pay for the skimmers and boats on the water and have 500 people cleaning up the beaches as of this morning," said Steve Sawyer from the California Department of Fish and Game.

Sigward Moser decided to clean up Muir Beach when no other crews showed up.

"It's probably better than not doing anything and leaving it there," said Muir Beach resident Sigward Moser.

But he was cited for being on a close beach and not following a policeman's orders to leave.

A lot of people from as far away as Sacramento and Walnut Creek have come out to the beaches in order to try and help. Volunteers have been turned away by park rangers who say that all the beaches are closed and they've got all the help they need.

According to the contractor the O'Brien Group, they have about 560 individuals, not only on the ground but in the water as part of the clean up, but we are not told that they have any idea how long this entire clean up is going to take.

Loophole lets you eat E. coli meat
By STEPHEN J. HEDGES
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Sunday, November 11, 2007

One federal inspector calls it the "E. coli loophole." Another says, "Nobody would buy it if they knew."

The officials are referring to the little-discussed fact that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has deemed it acceptable for meat companies to cook and sell meat on which E. coli, a bacteria that can sicken and even kill humans, is found during processing.

The "E. coli loophole" affects millions of pounds of beef each year that tests positive for the presence of E. coli O157:H7, a particularly virulent strain of the bacteria.

The agency allows companies to put this E. coli positive meat in a special category -- "cook only."

Cooking the meat, the USDA and producers say, destroys the bacteria and makes it safe to eat as pre-cooked hamburgers, meat loaf, crumbled taco meat and other products.

But some USDA inspectors say the "cook only" practice means that higher-than-appropriate levels of E. coli are tolerated in packing plants, raising the chance that clean meat will become contaminated. They say the "cook only" practice is part of the reason for this year's sudden rise in incidents of E. coli contamination.

"All the product that is E. coli positive, they put a 'cooking only' tag on it," said one inspector, who like other federal inspectors interviewed asked to remain anonymous for fear they would lose their jobs. "They (companies) will test, and everything that's positive, they slap that label on."

'We've just covered it up'

There is no evidence that "cook only" meat has directly sickened consumers. But some inspectors contend that the practice conceals significantly higher levels of E. coli bacteria in packing plants than the companies admit to. That's because companies that find E. coli are allowed to shift that meat immediately into "cook only" lines, without reporting it to the USDA.

USDA regularly conducts tests for E. coli in slaughtering plants, but only on meat that packing companies have already deemed free of E. coli, the agency inspectors say. USDA officials say they do not track how much meat is put into "cook only" categories, but interviews with a half-dozen inspectors suggested it is a significant amount.

"The government keeps putting out that we've reduced E. coli by 50 percent and all of that," said an inspector. "And we haven't done nothing. We've just covered it up."

USDA denied this. In answers to written questions from the Chicago Tribune, department officials said USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service "collects its own random samples without waiting for test results from the plant."

Meat industry representatives and the USDA also said there is no risk from beef that is fully cooked, since cooking meat above 160 degrees Fahrenheit kills pathogens such as E. coli. Meat companies also said they have taken significant steps to eliminate E. coli in meat during the slaughtering process, including lactic acid washes of carcasses and steam treatments in which carcasses are heated to kill the bacteria.

Meat found with E. coli, they said, isn't worth as much.

"If raw ground beef has to go into a 'cook only' category, it loses value," said Randall Huffman, senior vice president for scientific affairs at the American Meat Institute, an industry group. "There's not as big a market for that."

Most of the major meat packing companies offer their own cooked meat products, such as meat loaf, pre-cooked hamburgers and taco meat crumbles. They also sell "cook only" meat to food processing companies.

Some cooked beef products end up in programs like the National School Lunch Program, which is administered by the USDA.

The agency bought 2.8 million pounds of cooked beef in 2006, according to USDA records. Officials, however, were not sure whether the total included beef that had tested found positive for E. coli.

School lunch requirements

USDA said in a written statement that "procurement of ground beef and certain other products for distribution through the National School Lunch Program is governed by additional quality requirements, like mandatory microbiological testing."

School lunch programs have increased the use of cooked beef in recent years, especially hamburger patties and taco meat, as a way to prevent E. coli poisoning from undercooked beef, according to Jeannie Sneed, a food service consultant formerly at Iowa State University.

But Sneed said she and most school lunch program managers did not know that the cooked beef they use in school lunches could have come from cattle contaminated with E. coli.

"I did not know that's a common practice,"she said. "Most people are probably not aware that it occurs. But it probably does not create a great amount of concern because if meat is cooked at a little less than 155 degrees, the E. coli is killed."

Regarding the safety of cooked beef, USDA said it "does collect and sample some cooked, ready-to-eat products for E. coli O157:H7."

E. coli can be difficult to detect and prevent. The bacteria live in intestines of cattle, which tolerate it. It can contaminate meat during the slaughter process if fecal matter comes in contact with the meat portions of a carcass. That can happen in several ways, such as when workers accidentally puncture the digestive tract during removal, or when a cow's hide, which might carry fecal dust, is taken off.

In humans, E. coli poisoning can cause severe stomach cramps, bloody urine, diarrhea, kidney failure and even death.

Befuddled meat industry

The American meat industry is bewildered by this year's increased findings of E. coli contamination. Theories about the causes range from dry conditions in cattle feedlots, where cattle stand in manure, to changes in feed caused by high corn prices.

Whatever the reason, the result has been sick consumers. The largest recall so far this year involved the Topps Meat Co. of Elizabeth, which went out of business after it recalled 21.7 million pounds of ground beef due to E. coli contamination. About 40 people fell ill from Topps meat.

More recently, Cargill, the Minneapolis-based grain and foods giant, has recalled nearly 2 million pounds of ground beef due to E. coli concerns. And more than 3 million pounds of General Mills' Totino's and Jeno's pizzas have been recalled because of E. coli in pepperoni.

The inspectors interviewed for this story contended that the E. coli increase is due to the methods used to slaughter cattle, as well as the practice of designating affected meat "cook only."

That practice means companies can profit from meat that they would otherwise lose. But while the practice is clearly spelled out in USDA regulations, it is not widely publicized. "If you knew this was all E. coli positive, would you buy that product?" asked one inspector. "That's very hush-hush."

The American meat industry produced 26.3 billion pounds of beef in 2006, from 33.7 million cattle. Meat companies summarily reject the inspectors' charges that corners are being cut in preventing E. coli contamination.

Gary Mickelson, a spokesman for Tyson Foods, one of the nation's largest beef producers, said his company has developed a special testing program, Tyson Total N60, to detect E. coli. The program is so effective, Mickelson said, that other companies now use it.

"Tyson tests all raw beef components we know are destined for ground beef production," Mickelson said, adding that the program provides a 95 percent or greater assurance of finding E. coli.

Mickelson also said USDA inspectors have access to Tyson's records on its E. coli tests.

Cargill declined to comment for this story. Another large meat packing firm, Swift Foods Co., did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Some inspectors said that USDA should eliminate the "cook only" category to force companies to work harder to eliminate E. coli or face the prospect of destroying beef that can't pass inspection.

But the American Meat Institute's Huffman said that would be a waste of food.

"You're talking about throwing away a significant volume of product, which to any food safety person, that doesn't make sense because the product can still be put through a validated cooking process and be made safe," said Huffman. "A lot of food products right now are cooked."

'A smoke screen'

USDA performed nearly 11,000 E. coli tests at 1,653 meat plants in 2005, according to the agency's inspector general. From 2004 through 2006, the agency says, 0.17 percent of ground beef samples tested positive for E. coli.

Inspectors interviewed for this story, however, challenged the suggestion that it's a small problem. One USDA inspector said a large meat packing plant where he worked produced a half million pounds a week of E. coli positive beef that was tagged "cook only."

"It's a smoke screen," the inspector said. "The agency says, 'Look at all this testing.' They (the meat companies) are still producing a half-million pounds a week of E. coli product, and we're patting them on their back." :horseass:

Today's TASER Travesty
Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Sigward Moser, a 45-year-old resident of Muir Beach, California, was threatened with a TASER, and then was subsequently handcuffed and forced to lie on a wet beach for an hour by a National Park Ranger.

What was he doing?

Cleaning up balls of oil that had washed up on the beach behind his home, the result of a fuel oil spill.

To add insult to injury, Moser was then given two tickets, "one for entering an emergency area and another for refusing a lawful order."

Remember, the "emergency area" was his own back yard, and he was only picking up the sand balls that were contaminated with the oil, as no one else had shown up to do it at the time that he started.

The National Park Service, questioned about the incident, came up with this ridiculous statement:

"'They were upset, but we tried to reassure them why trained professionals are needed to do this work,' said National Park Service publicist Rich Weideman, citing health hazards and unintended injuries to wildlife by untrained volunteers"

I'd be upset too, Rich, if I had been threatened with a shocking for merely helping to clean up an environmental disaster. That sure doesn't seem to be bad enough behavior to get the jackboot routine done to someone, don't you think?

I guess that they're the only ones "professional enough" to perform beach cleanup. I suppose that we can be grateful that they didn't bring out the old "for security reasons" pap.

This is yet another in a very long line of examples of TASERS being used as compliance tools to get people to do whatever law enforcement "professionals" want them to do, whether justified or not, as opposed to their intended use as less lethal self defense tools.

TASERS - The cattle prods of a new generation of law enforcement officers.

Muir Beach man threatened with a Taser gun for refusing to stop cleaning up the beach
Sunday 11 Nov 2007,

The man and a group of Buddhist monks in training were down cleaning up the beach beneath his home when oily globs began showing up, and no clean up crews were present. He was threatened with a taser, forced down to the wet, oily beach, handcuffed there for an hour, and cited, all for refusing to quit the cleanup, three times.

No good deed goes unpunished.

At least that’s how Muir Beach resident Sigward Moser felt Friday after he says he was threatened with a Taser gun, forced to the ground and handcuffed by a National Park Service ranger for refusing to stop cleaning up the oily beach beneath his home.


Moser, a 45-year-old communications consultant, said he was forced to sprawl handcuffed on the wet sand for an hour before he was released and given two misdemeanor citations, one for entering an emergency area and another for refusing a lawful order.


“It was pretty wet and uncomfortable,” he said Saturday. “This is very frustrating, and it was completely avoidable.”

Moser’s Pacific Way home overlooks Muir Beach, where cleanup crews with 100 professionals in white and yellow protective coveralls were at work yesterday.

But there was no one cleaning up Friday when oily globs the size of bowling balls began washing up on shore from Wednesday’s disastrous fuel oil spill.

Moser, a neighborhood liaison on the Muir Beach Disaster Council, went out on the oily beach with an impromptu crew of Buddhist monks in training at the nearby Green Gulch Zen Center.

He said they scooped up 7,000 pounds of solidified oil and put it in plastic bags before park service officials arrived in the afternoon to size up the situation.

“You don’t have to be trained to do this,” he said. “We had on gloves and we didn’t feel there was a health risk. It just lifted up from the sand like it was in kitty litter. They came late with only five people. We felt that anything we could do is better than nothing.”

Moser said he declined three orders to halt his activities before he was cited.

Park service officials held a conference call on Saturday about the incident with members of the Muir Beach Community Services District.

“They were upset, but we tried to reassure them why trained professionals are needed to do this work,” said National Park Service publicist Rich Weideman, citing health hazards and unintended injuries to wildlife by untrained volunteers.

“These kinds of things are awkward for us, but they seemed to be pretty pleased with our explanation.”

Paul Liberatore can be reached at liberatore@marinij.com

The people trying to clean up the beach should count themselves lucky that they were not"tuned up" by the officers, then sent to a cell with a group of sexual psychopaths, all of which would further the cause of "justice".

Cloned Livestock Poised To Receive FDA Clearance.
By JANE ZHANG in Washington, JOHN W. MILLER in Brussels and LAUREN ETTER in Chicago
January 4, 2008

Get ready for a food fight over milk and meat from cloned animals and their offspring.

After more than six years of wrestling with the question of whether meat and milk from them are safe to eat, the Food and Drug Administration is expected to declare as early as next week that they are.

The FDA had asked producers of cloned livestock not to sell food products from such animals pending its ruling on their safety. It isn't clear whether the FDA will lift this voluntary hold.

While many consumer groups still oppose it, the FDA declaration that cloned animal products are safe would be a milestone for a small cadre of biotech companies that want to make a business out of producing copies of prize dairy cows and other farm animals -- effectively taking the selective breeding practiced on farms for centuries to the cutting edge.

Because of the price tag -- cloned cattle cost $15,000 to $20,000 per copy -- most of the cloned animals will be used for breeding, and it will be three to five years before consumers see milk and meat from their offspring. Some animal breeders in the U.S. have already been experimenting with cloning animals. ViaGen Inc., the largest animal-cloning company in the nation, has cloned animals, such as a cow named Peggy Sue.

Consumer wariness toward cloned food may lead to a backlash from opponents in Congress and other markets, such as the European Union, who are concerned that not enough data are available for a viable study on the safety of the products. There are also ethical worries because cloned animals tend to have more health problems at birth than conventionally bred animals.

The food industry appears to be divided over the issue. Some big food companies say they're not interested in trying to market products from cloned animals or their offspring.

"Most consumers do not find this appealing," says Marguerite Copel, vice president of corporate communications at Dean Foods Co., one of the nation's largest milk producers, which says it won't sell any milk from cloned animals.

Dean and others in the food industry are also worried that there is no mandatory tracking system in place for products from clones or their progeny. The Food Marketing Institute, which represents food retailers and wholesalers, says its members tend to "strongly believe" that they must be notified if any of their suppliers intend to introduce cloned animals into the food supply.

"Whole Foods Market is committed to providing consumers with clone-free products," says Margaret Wittenberg, global vice president of quality standards and public affairs for grocer Whole Foods Market Inc. "The lack of effective governmental oversight and tracking could mean consumers will lose the ability to choose clone-free products."

ViaGen and Trans Ova Genetics, another of the three livestock-cloning companies in the U.S., recently announced a voluntary tracking system that will help food makers, slaughterhouses and marketers to prove, if they choose, that they aren't selling such foods. The program doesn't cover the offspring of clones, however.

Jeffrey Barach, vice president at the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the largest trade group for the food and beverage industry, says that as consumers become more educated, they'll become more accepting of such products, if they even notice them.

The meat industry is more bullish on cloned products than the dairy industry. The American Meat Institute Foundation, which represents large meat companies like Smithfield Foods Inc. and Hormel Foods Corp., thinks consumers might even come to appreciate the technology when they find superior products in the grocery-store freezer, like leaner and larger cuts of meat. For producers it might mean cows that have fewer calving problems or greater milk production.

"These animals are not some kind of freaks of nature," says James Hodges, president of the group.

But Tyson Foods Inc., also a member of the institute and one of the nation's largest producers of beef, says the company "currently has no plans to purchase cloned livestock, especially since it will likely be a long time before such animals" are available for market.

The FDA tentatively ruled in 2006 that milk and meat from cloned cattle, swine and goats are no different from healthy, conventionally bred adult animals. The agency has called cloning merely "a more advanced form of" breeding technologies already widely used in the cattle industry, such as artificial insemination, embryo transfer and in vitro fertilization.

Consumers, however, have a long history of turning up their noses at technological innovations in food. It took years for consumers to accept pasteurized milk as safe. Some consumers and consumer groups still refer to genetically altered foods, like those that contain genetically modified corn or soybeans, as "Frankenfood" even though such products have been on the market for more than a decade.

Many consumer groups and some members of Congress are vehemently opposed to cloned foods reaching grocery shelves. The Senate version of the proposed farm bill contained an amendment from Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D., Md.,) that would mandate that the FDA wait until further studies are done before releasing its final assessment of food from cloned animals.

Joseph Mendelson, legal director of Center for Food Safety, a consumer-advocacy group, said his group has filed a petition for the FDA to regulate cloned animals as an animal drug, as it is considering with genetically modified animals. (Clones are genetically identical copies and the sequence of their genes are not modified.)

"Once the FDA says these products are safe and that they are out there, it's very hard to turn it back," Mr. Mendelson said.

The FDA's decision has been closely watched by regulators around the world. There are already livestock clones in countries such as Australia, Canada, France, Japan and New Zealand, but they have rarely entered the food supply.

The European Food Safety Authority, the European Union's version of the FDA, will likely deliver its initial assessment on food from cloned animals next week, but the final decision won't come for several months. In addition, a special commission called the European Group for Ethics is conducting its own studies on the question of whether cloning is inhumane.

U.S. food companies could face more trouble from European Union regulators and consumers, who are unlikely to respond favorably to the idea of eating cloned animals or their offspring. According to a recent poll, 55% of Italians think the EU should ban food made from cloned animals.

The EU already bans most meat imported from the U.S. because it's often raised using hormones. (It imports only $70 million worth of meat a year from the U.S.) Similarly, trade rules allow the EU to ban the import of cloned animal food if it's for health and safety reasons.

Different regulatory approaches across the Atlantic may affect trade, especially in the EU dairy sector. The EU is the world's biggest dairy exporter, at $33 billion a year, and farmers need the best producing cows to stay competitive. Currently, the best breeders are in the U.S., and the EU buys $23 million worth of bull semen from the U.S. every year.

European breeders are worried that a ban on any derivatives of cloned animals would limit their access to the world's most productive cows. The European Forum of Farm Animal Breeders is lobbying the EU to make an exception for bull semen, even if it bans other types of cloned animal products.

"Product from cloned animals cannot be distinguished from non-cloned," it wrote in a recent letter to the EU Commission.

Write to Jane Zhang at Jane.Zhang@wsj.com3, John W. Miller at john.miller@dowjones.com4 and Lauren Etter at lauren.etter@wsj.com5

Who's Behind the Bible of Mental Illness.
Critics say that touted efforts against conflicts fall short.
By Kent Garber
December 20, 2007

In what is arguably the most important mental-health development since the early 1990s, the American Psychiatric Association will spend the next five years producing a new edition of the psychiatrist's "bible," the official guidebook for diagnosing mental problems. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, as it is known, is hugely influential because it determines what is and is not a mental disorder. In turn, it is responsible for much of the sales growth in prescription drugs.

The most recent edition of the DSM, published in 1994, drew controversy because it turned what had once been a thin guidebook into an 886-page tome that significantly expanded the definition of mental illness. Traits once associated with shyness, for example, became symptoms of "social anxiety disorder." And drug companies went on to spend millions promoting medicines for those problems. Eyebrows were further raised in 2006 when a study showed that more than half of the researchers who worked on the manual had at least one financial tie to the drug industry.

Transparency. This time around, pledging to avoid even the appearance of conflicts, the APA has instituted screening procedures for the 27 members of its DSM task force, asking them for detailed financial information about stocks, honoraria, and consulting fees from drug interests. It calls the effort the "most transparent" in the medical industry. Yet the summaries of the disclosure statements that were recently released to the public are remarkably spare; they show only the existence of corporate connections, not their dollar amount or their duration. The result is a document that even an APA board member suggested is not very revealing. In a 2006 memo to the board obtained by U.S. News, William Carpenter wrote: "Simple listing of all relationships is not very informative and does not identify potential conflicts that may need to be resolved."

Critics say the limited information violates the spirit of disclosure. "There is disclosure, and then there is disclosure," says Daniel Carlat, a psychiatrist and former consultant to drug companies. "There is a big difference between $500,000 and $500. It is one thing to disclose in a generic way, to say that a psychiatrist has had some consulting with a company, but that doesn't tell you a number of things."

Documents reviewed by U.S. News, including sec filings and patent requests, also show connections between doctors and drug companies that don't necessarily turn up in the disclosures. In general, the disclosures paint an incomplete picture of the degree to which the corporate and clinical worlds are increasingly enmeshed. In other cases, they simply reflect mistakes.

For example, Dilip Jeste, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California-San Diego, had consulting ties that did not appear on his disclosure form. Yet during the reporting year of 2003, he was a consultant to Pfizer and AstraZeneca and received honoraria from Pfizer, according to documents. Jeste called the error "unintentional," saying he had relied on memory. The APA said that Jeste would submit a new disclosure. APA President Carolyn Robinowitz said that task force nominees "were on the honor system" and acknowledged that the association had made no effort to check their accuracy.

The APA itself erred in its public summary for Jan Fawcett, a professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico and chair of the DSM's mood disorders work group. The summary lists no directorships or corporate positions for Fawcett. But a 2005 sec filing shows that he was a member of the board of directors for Berman Health and Media, a company that is poised to "exploit opportunities in the female sexual medicine industry." [He has since resigned from the board.] The APA said that Fawcett had disclosed the connections in private filings but that its staffers accidentally omitted them from the public disclosure form.

Critics say the APA's disclosures are inadequate in other ways. Carpenter, for instance, is listed as a "co-inventor" on two patents filed in the past three years for "methods for screening, diagnosing and treating schizophrenia." The applications list pharmaceutical giant Novartis as the holder of at least one of the patents. The APA said, and Carpenter confirmed, that Carpenter did not need to disclose the connection because he has pledged to receive no financial benefit from the patents at any time.

Likewise, David Kupfer, the task force chair, reported multiple consulting arrangements with communications companies that "sponsored pharmaceutical meetings & editorial work." His public form, however, does not reveal that income from two of these companies, Prescott Communications and Innovative Medical Education, came from work for Forrest Pharmaceuticals and Pfizer, respectively. The APA said Kupfer did not need to disclose the ties because he was not paid directly by drug companies.

Industry support. The existence of drug company links does not necessarily mean the individuals reporting them are biased. In most instances, the APA says, the relationships merely underscore a simple truth: that in the absence of adequate government support, more than two thirds of all medical research funding comes from pharmaceutical companies.

Yet studies have repeatedly shown a connection between authors who received income from drug companies and published papers favoring the firms' products. The papers also tend to underreport negative side effects.

In acknowledgment of such problems, the APA's vetting procedures are stronger than those of other medical organizations. And the sacrifices required of task force members are hardly insignificant: Before being appointed, members pledged to limit their aggregate income from pharmaceutical sources to $10,000 a year. If their income exceeded that amount, they were required to reduce it or sever ties.

But critics say that loopholes weaken the policy. One is that task force members can undertake new financial arrangements after being appointed. Second, task force members are not asked to disclose "unrestricted research grants," which often go straight to one's department or institution. Lisa Cosgrove, a clinical psychologist at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, describes such grants as a "hollow open-door policy" giving pharmaceutical companies strong influence. "If your department has a $500,000 unrestricted grant from a drug company, with the potential of getting $2 million, it is disingenuous to assume that there are no potential conflicts."

Some APA members have asked association officials to strip voting privileges from all DSM committee members with industry ties. "If someone's expertise is deemed necessary, they can serve as consultant but not as a voting member," says Amy Brodkey, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. Of the 27 task force members, eight had no ties to the industry.

APA officials say such changes are unnecessary since several APA groups have to approve the DSM before it's published. "What you've got is several layers of protection," says APA Medical Director James Scully. One layer to watch: the more than 150 people who will fill out the DSM work groups. Scully said the appointments should be complete by early 2008. And they will be asked to disclose ties.

Internal Memo Discloses an Unprecedented Decline
The Collapse of Central Valley Salmon
By DAN BACHER
http://counterpunch.org/bacher01302008.html
January 30, 2008

The latest federal government data on 2007's salmon run on the Sacramento River point to an "unprecedented collapse" in the fishery considered for years to be one of the most healthy on the West Coast.

If the data is verified in upcoming meetings of the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC), commercial and recreational salmon fishing in California and Oregon ocean waters and recreational salmon fishing in Central Valley rivers could be closed or severely restricted in 2008. This alarming news couldn't come at a worse time, since recreational and commercial fishermen are already reeling from draconian restrictions on rockfish, lingcod and other groundfish in California.

"The magnitude of the low abundance, should it be confirmed in verification efforts now underway, is such that the opening of all marine and freshwater fisheries impacting this important salmon stock will be questioned in the upcoming Council process to set 2008 ocean salmon seasons," according to an internal memo of the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) by Donald O. McIsaac, Ph. D, Executive Director. "This is particularly disconcerting in that this stock has consistently been the healthy 'work horse' target stock for salmon fisheries off California and most of Oregon."

According to McIssac, the Salmon Technical Team (STT) met last week at the Council office to tabulate total counts of West Coast salmon stocks, including spawning escapements and catches. Two areas of bad news emerged relative to the 2008 abundance level for this important stock:
o The adult spawning escapement for this stock in 2007 failed to meet the goal for the first time in 15 years and only the second time in 35 years. This unexpected result indicates the carry-over of older fish in the ocean that might contribute to 2008 abundance will probably also be weak.
The adult salmon escapement was only 90,000 fish, down from about 275,000 a year earlier. The Sacramento River returns were 88,000 fish, while the San Joaquin River returns were only 2,000 adult chinooks.
o The count of jacks in the Central Valley fall Chinook return this past fall, which are used to predict adult abundance in 2008, was--by far--a record low: an order of magnitude less than average and less than a fourth of the previous record low.

The return of Central Valley fall Chinook jacks in 2007 was about 2,000 compared to a long term average of about 40,000 and the previous record low of 10,000.

"It is also noteworthy that this low jack return is outside the range of the current tool used to predict abundance for a given year, calling into question the reliability of its utility for use in 2008," he said. "Obviously, two consecutive jack returns at the lowest (2007) and second lowest (2006) levels on record represent a severe situation."

McIssac said there "were informed discussions" last week about whether a reasonable forecast of abundance in 2008 could rise to the point of achieving the spawning escapement goal in the absence of any commercial or recreational salmon fishing anywhere on the West Coast that Central Valley fall Chinook are typically found in significant abundance.

"It is important to note that the current information needs to be verified and validated, and that it is three or four weeks before the documents are finalized that the Council will use in its deliberations," explained McIssac. "However, it is typical that the estimates at this stage do not vary much from the finalized values."
McIssac also noted the potential collateral effects of this "unprecedented salmon fishery" situation to groundfish recreational fisheries, open access commercial groundfish and albacore fisheries, other fisheries, and research planning.

"What is not clear at this time is the reason for the apparent collapse, although it is notable that both hatchery and naturally produced fish have been negatively affected," he concluded.

The federal and state governments will probably try to blame "ocean conditions" for the unprecedented collapse of salmon fisheries. Others will cite the increase of sea lion and harbor seal populations along the coast, the invasion of the highly predatory Humboldt squid, the change in forage fish populations off the coast and other factors.

Although ocean conditions and other factors are important to consider, I believe that unprecedented water exports out of the California Delta in recent years play a major role in the collapse of Sacramento and San Joaquin chinook populations.

The salmon are apparently the victims of the Delta food chain crash that has resulted in record low numbers of delta smelt, longfin smelt, juvenile striped bass and threadfin shad in the California Delta since 2005. During 2005, an unprecedented 6.4 million-acre feet of water was exported out of the Delta by the state and federal governments.

The salmon that returned in 2007 as "jacks and jills" two year old fish - would have migrated downriver in 2005 at the same time that record water exports were taking place. Those smolts may have starved from lack of food as they migrated through the Delta, never making it to the ocean. Or they may have ended up stranded in South Delta sloughs and channels, sucked in by powerful reverse flows caused by export pumping, if not destroyed in the pumps themselves.

Another factor that probably played a role was the fact that the pen release program of the Fishery Foundation of California was not in place in 2004 and 2005. Through this program, the salmon smolts are released into brackish water after being acclimated for 1 to 2 hours. This program cuts down greatly on smolt mortality.

The absence of the pens apparently contributed to increased salmon mortality when the DFG released them into San Pablo Bay those years. Fortunately, the program will be in place this year when the salmon are released into the bay.

"This news about the salmon population collapse is not surprising considering the decline of the California Delta food chain caused by increased export pumping by the state and federal governments," said Dick Pool, owner of Pro Troll products and coordinator of Water4Fish.org. "We need the state and federal governments to solve this problem."

After receiving word of the low abundance of Central Valley salmon forecasted in 2008, Jim Martin, West Coast Coast Regional Director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance, said he hoped that the PFMC was able to keep a recreational chinook season open because of the minimal impact of recreational anglers on the overall salmon population.

"If the Council closes salmon fishing completely, it will put more pressure on the rockfish population," said Martin.

For more information, contact the PFMC, 7700 NE Ambassador Place, Suite 101, Portland, Oregon 97220-1384, Phone: (503) 820-2280, Fax: (503) 820-2299, Web: www.pcouncil.org
Dan Bacher can be reached at: danielbacher@fishsniffer.com

Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her.

"This is Dick Cheney," said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. "I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at -- hmm, I guess I don't know my own number. I'm over at the White House." Leaving No Tracks

Because of Cheney's intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.
Leaving No Tracks

Did Dick Cheney kill 70,000 salmon? Committee to probe
Nick Juliano
June 29, 2007


A Congressional committee is preparing to investigate Vice President Dick Cheney's role in water-management decisions that killed more than 70,000 salmon in Oregon.

Three dozen West Coast Democrats requested the Resources Committee investigation after the Washington Post reported of Cheney's involvement in managing flows from the Klamath River in 2002.

The Post reported that Cheney personally contacted the Interior Department official in charge of the program to push for more irrigation water be delivered from the river to drought-striken farmers and ranchers.

Environmentalists and officials in California and Washington blame the federal policy, which critics say violated the Endangered Species Act, was responsible for the deaths of 70,000 salmon, whose corpses lined the banks of the river. The Post said the plan was enacted "because of Cheney's intervention."

Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W. Va., told the Associated Press that the committee is investigating the Bush administration's "penchant to favor politics over science in implementation of the Endangered Species Act."

"It certainly appears this administration will stop at nothing to achieve political gain from natural resources disasters," Rahall added. "Ultimately, it will be hardworking Americans and their healthy environment that will lose if we fail to act."

Democrats say the salmon kill devastated the commercial fishing industries in Oregon and California, with fishermen still feeling the economic effects today.

Excerpts from AP report:

"The ramifications of that salmon kill are still being felt today as returns to the Klamath River are so low that commercial, sport and tribal fishing seasons have been curtailed for the past three years," 36 House Democrats said in a letter to Rahall calling for the hearing.

Commercial fishing in California and Oregon was cut by more than 90 percent last year — the largest commercial fishing closure in the history of the country — resulting in more than $60 million in damage to coastal economies, the letter said.

Megan McGinn, a spokeswoman for the vice president's office, said late Wednesday she had not seen the letter and could not comment.

Drug Tied to China Had Contaminant, F.D.A. Says
By GARDINER HARRIS and WALT BOGDANICH
Published: March 6, 2008

WASHINGTON — Federal drug regulators said Wednesday that a critical blood thinner that had been linked to at least 19 deaths and whose raw components were produced in China contained a possibly counterfeit ingredient that mimicked the real drug.

Routine tests failed to distinguish the contaminant from the drug, heparin. Only sophisticated magnetic resonance imaging tests uncovered that as much as 20 percent of the product’s active ingredient was a heparin mimic blended in with the real thing. Federal officials said they did not know what the contaminant was.

“At this point, we do not know whether the introduction was accidental or whether it was deliberate,” said the Food and Drug Administration’s deputy commissioner, Dr. Janet Woodcock.

Heparin is made from pig intestines. Scientific Protein Laboratories, based in Waunakee, Wis., bought raw heparin produced in some cases in small, unregulated family workshops in China and processed it in plants in Wisconsin and China, according to heparin traders and producers in China. Baxter International purchased the active ingredient from Scientific Protein and sold the finished drug.

Wayne Pines, a spokesman for Scientific Protein Laboratories, said that nothing sinister about the contamination had been proved. “There is no evidence of counterfeiting or tampering or anything of that nature,” Mr. Pines said. “No one really knows what happened here.”

Beginning in November, public health officials received reports of patients experiencing severe allergic reactions after being given Baxter’s product. Baxter initiated a series of recalls that culminated last week in a withdrawal of nearly all of Baxter’s heparin production.

The F.D.A. has now received 785 reports of serious injuries associated with the drug’s use. Forty-six deaths have also been reported to the agency, but Dr. Woodcock said that just 19 of these appeared related to the suspect heparin. Baxter executives said that the total death toll was actually four.

APP Pharmaceuticals, which previously split the heparin market with Baxter, has been ramping up production to meet demand. So far, APP’s products show no signs of similar contamination, Dr. Woodcock said, although some of APP’s production is also based in China.

Most of the world’s heparin supply originates in China, according to Baxter. The F.D.A. will soon make public the test used to distinguish between real heparin and its mimic in hopes that regulatory bodies around the world will adopt the test. “We don’t know if any of the heparin products worldwide might contain this contaminant, and that is something we are going to be looking into,” Dr. Woodcock said.

The F.D.A. has yet to prove that the heparin contaminant is the cause of the deaths and illnesses now associated with the use of Baxter’s product. But heparin batches associated with illnesses, all of which were produced with ingredients made in China, were found to contain the contaminant while batches not linked to illnesses proved to be untainted. In a written statement, Scientific Protein said that “it is premature to conclude that the heparin active pharmaceutical ingredient sourced from China and provided by S.P.L. to Baxter is responsible for these adverse events.”

Since tainted batches were produced by Scientific Protein’s plants in both Wisconsin and China, “either both plants have problems with processing or there’s something wrong further up the stream,” said Peter Arduini, president of Baxter’s medication delivery business.

The F.D.A. admitted last month that it had violated its own policies by failing to inspect Scientific Protein’s China plant before approving the drug for sale. The agency sent inspectors to the plant last month who found that at least some heparin was made from “material from an unacceptable workshop vendor.”

Baxter undertook its own inspection of the China plant last fall. “A few of our observations touched on the same areas as F.D.A.’s inspectional findings,” said Ray Godlewski, vice president for quality at Baxter’s medication delivery business. Mr. Godlewski refused to be more specific because, he said, of a confidentiality agreement with Scientific Protein.

Mr. Pines of Scientific Protein said he did not know what problems Baxter uncovered last fall or why those problems were not corrected by the time federal inspectors arrived last month.

China has become by far the largest supplier of pharmaceutical ingredients in the world, but there is growing concern about the quality of the products made there. Last year, the F.D.A. discovered that a pet food ingredient shipped from China contained toxic levels of melamine, which was added to make it appear higher in protein. Many pets became ill, and some died.

In addition, Panamanian investigators have concluded that at least 174 people were poisoned, 115 of them fatally, by counterfeit cold medicine linked to an unlicensed Chinese chemical plant.

A series of independent assessments, including one by the agency’s own Science Board, have found that the F.D.A. is increasingly overwhelmed by its many responsibilities and is incapable of protecting the public from unsafe drugs, medical devices and food — particularly from China.

The Government Accountability Office recently discovered, for example, that over a six-year period, the F.D.A. inspected just 64 of the nearly 700 medical device plants registered in China. Medical devices can include items like stents and spinal screws.

There is a growing bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill that the agency needs a rapid infusion of money. The Bush administration has proposed an increase in the agency’s budget next year of just 3 percent — not enough to keep up with increased expenses. But the F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach, said in a recent interview that the agency needed more money.

Dr. von Eschenbach said Wednesday that, even if the agency had adequately inspected the China plant, it might not have caught a problem resulting when “someone either intentionally or unintentionally manipulates a product.” He said that the agency needed to approach its inspections program “in a more strategic way” and that it needed “good surveillance” of adverse events a