Carbon Cult: Ban flushing toilets, Pay per dump:
Australians could face 'pay as you dump' charges as part of a Toilet Tax. It's all in the name of "sustainability" - and part of a growing eco-movement to replace flushing conveniences with smelly and unhealthy inconvenience. Water use experts Mike Young and Jim McColl, of Adelaide University and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, respectively, presented new proposals to South Australia state parliament last week. The two renewed their call to create a market in sewerage, with the pricing element controlling scarcity. Such ideas aren't new, but they've been given a boost in recent years by a parallel movement. Sanitation saves lives, but UN-funded quangos which were once dedicated to improving human health now have mixed priorities. Take this example from the "Sustainable Sanitation Alliance": "In order to be sustainable, a sanitation system has to be not only economically viable, socially acceptable, and technically and institutionally appropriate, it should also protect the environment and the natural resources." The quango concludes, somewhat ruefully, that "there is probably no system which is absolutely sustainable". It's a subtle difference in emphasis: from an optimistic vision in which simple technological innovation was used to reshape the planet for human happiness, innovation is now qualified in terms of environmental damage. It becomes a question of "balance", with human health now a factor in a trade-off. Non-flushing are a feature of Britain's "Eco Towns", the harshly regulated and monitored new settlements proposed by the government. Here, where water is in abundance, they're needed to raise "awareness" of resource consumption. But the argument has now become entrenched in development.
Drug data reveal sneaky side effects:
An algorithm designed by US scientists to trawl through a plethora of drug interactions has yielded thousands of previously unknown side effects caused by taking drugs in combination. The work, published today in Science Translational Medicine1, provides a way to sort through the hundreds of thousands of 'adverse events' reported to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) each year. “It’s a step in the direction of a complete catalogue of drug–drug interactions,” says the study's lead author, Russ Altman, a bioengineer at Stanford University in California. Pills in pill boxes. A program predicts the potential side-effects of mixing different pills. Although clinical trials are often designed to assess the safety of a drug in addition to how well it works, the size of the trials needed to detect the full range of drug interactions would surpass even the large, late-stage clinical trials sometimes required for drug approval. Furthermore, clinical trials are often done in controlled settings, using carefully defined criteria to determine which patients are eligible for enrollment — including other conditions they might have and which medicines they can take alongside the trial drug. Once a drug hits the market, however, things can get messy as unknown side-effects pop up. And that’s where Altman’s algorithm comes in. “Even if you show a drug is safe in a clinical trial, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be safe in the real world,” says Paul Watkins, director of the Hamner–University of North Carolina Institute for Drug Safety Sciences in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, who was not involved in the work. “This approach is addressing a better way to rapidly assess a drug’s safety in the real world once it is approved.”
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Altman and his colleagues have been studying drug–drug interactions as a way to understand how a person’s genes influence their response to pharmaceuticals. To do that, he says, you must first have a good picture of the molecular mechanisms that underlie drug responses. “Adverse events are incredibly valuable clues to what these drugs are doing in the body,” Altman says. “They can tell you the other pathways in the cell that are being tickled by these drugs.” But reports of adverse drug events are notoriously prone to bias. For example, cholesterol-lowering treatments are more often taken by older patients, and so conditions associated with ageing, such as heart attack, could be wrongly linked to a drug as a side effect. Altman and his colleagues reduced this bias by adopting an approach sometimes used in observational clinical trials. They developed an algorithm that would match data from each drug-exposed patient to a nonexposed control patient with the same condition. The approach automatically corrected for several known sources of bias, including those linked to gender, age and disease1. The team then used this method to compile a database of 1,332 drugs and possible side effects that were not listed on the labels of those drugs. The algorithm came up with an average of 329 previously unknown adverse events for each drug — far surpassing the average of 69 side effects listed on most drug labels. The team also compiled a similar database looking at interactions between pairs of drugs, which yielded many more possible side effects than could be attributed to either drug alone. When the data were broken down by drug class, the most striking effect was seen when diuretics called thiazides, often prescribed to treat high blood pressure and edema, were used in combination with a class of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, used to treat depression. Compared with people who used either drug alone, patients who used both drugs were significantly more likely to experience a heart condition known as prolonged QT, which is associated with an increased risk of irregular heartbeats and sudden death. A search of electronic medical records from Stanford University Hospital confirmed the relationship between these two drug classes, revealing at roughly 1.5-fold increase in the likelihood of prolonged QT when the drugs were combined, compared to when either drug was taken alone. Altman says that the next step will be to test this finding further, possibly by conducting a clinical trial in which patients are given both drugs and then monitored for prolonged QT. What should the drug regulators do with the thousands of possible side effects Altman and his team uncovered? That is a complex problem, says Watkins, who adds that regulators will have to factor in the availability of alternative treatments and the magnitude and seriousness of the side effect, among other considerations. Altman, who serves as an adviser on the FDA’s Science Board, says that he plans to present his results to the agency. He suggests that the algorithm could be used with the FDA’s existing drug-surveillance programs to remove bias. However, he points out the enormity of the task: “We’ve just released a database with 10,000 or more adverse events,” he says. “I do not expect the FDA to uncritically take these results and add them to every drug label.”
Ten Percent of China is a Steaming Toxic Metal Land Dump:
If you live in China, the ground beneath your feet is probably polluted with heavy metal. We don’t mean the stuff that’s leaking out of Beijing’s awful rock bars. On Monday, Wan Bentai, the chief engineer for China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, stated that about 100,000 of China’s 1.22 million square kilometers, or about ten percent, of farmland is now officially polluted by lead, mercury, cancer-causing cadmium and other harmful heavy metals in levels that go above and beyond global standards. China’s rapid industrialization has grown over the past three decades, and today it is the world’s largest consumer of refined lead, with battery production making up a majority of that consumption. The consequences of this mega-expanding manufacturing system have been enormous. As Zhang Jianxin, a researcher with the Hunan Planning Institute of Land and Resources explains, “From a historical perspective, we see a growing number of land pollution cases associated with heavy metals in China over the past three decades.” Among these metals which pollute land in the form of run-off are lead, mercury, and cadmium. Human exposure to this industrial cocktail can lead to stunted growth as well as damage to the nerves, kidneys, and reproductive systems. These symptoms have been seen at increasing rates in entire villages around China for the past few years. Metal pollution is by no means new on the environmental front, but with the news that ten percent of land in China is now affected, what remains startling is China’s failure to adress the issue. In 2011 alone there have been eleven reported cases of metal poisonings on a village scale, nine of those cases involving lead in the blood. According to a 75-page report issued by Human Rights Watch in June, Chinese officials have reacted to reports of lead poisoning in areas across the country by imposing arbitrary limits for blood testing, failing to shut down harmful illegal operations or enforce waste regulations and encouraging people to eat foods like apples, eggs, milk and garlic. China’s government has since released a plan to cut heavy metal pollution in certain areas by 15 percent by 2015. Unfortunately, when a tenth of the country is filled with deformity-inducing chemical waste, a slight reduction in pollution in a few areas just doesn’t seem like much.
Toxic chemicals linked to the rising rates of endocrine disruption related disease were found in a broad array of consumer products and reported in a peer reviewed article in Environmental Health Perspectives on March 8. The Silent Spring Institute tested 213 consumer products, including cleaning products, cosmetics, sunscreens, shower curtains, air fresheners, drier sheets, and other household goods made by Colgate, Unilever, S.C. Johnson, Johnson and Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Seventh Generation, and Ecover among other manufacturers. “These test results show that both conventional and so-called green products contain hidden toxic chemicals that are not on product labels—so consumers have no way of avoiding them,” says Alexandra Scranton from Women’s Voices for the Earth, who recently conducted their own tests for hidden toxic chemicals in 20 top brand-name cleaning products. “Companies need to phase out these harmful chemicals, and we need a policy that standardizes labeling guidelines for cleaning products, so companies can’t keep these toxic chemicals a secret.” Environmental health advocates across the nation see this new study as confirmation that ubiquitous chemical exposure is playing a factor in adverse health impacts. “Silent Spring used Battelle Labs in Ohio, and they found 55 chemicals associated with endocrine disruption or with asthma, including parabens, BPA, triclosan, Alkylphenols, cyclosiloxanes,” said Martha Arguello, with Physicians for Social Responsibility—Los Angeles. “It is not good science to assume that cumulative exposure to these chemicals is safe.” “This new study found PVC products, including a pillow protector and shower curtain, contained high levels of the toxic phthalate DEHP,” said Mike Schade from the Center for Health, Environment & Justice. “Phthalates have been banned in toys, but are widespread in many PVC products children coming in contact with in schools and even at home. Phthalates have been linked to asthma, adverse impacts on brain development, and reproductive health problems in baby boys. Thankfully, there are safer cost-effective alternatives to phthalate-laden PVC products for our schools and homes.” “Many products are targeted to women of color who suffer from high health disparities that can be linked directly to the endocrine disruptors found in these products. We can only hope that studies like this one inspire better policies and regulations of these dangerous chemicals,” said Janette Robinson-Flint from Black Women for Wellness. “Mother's shouldn’t have to be a biochemist to protect themselves and their families from toxic chemicals in everyday products.” “We know many folks have tested positive for BPA and Triclosan in our human Biomonitoring studies,” said Sharyle Patton, director of the Biomonitoring Resource Center at Commonweal. “One has to wonder if rising rates of associated health problems are linked to these exposures.” Caroline Cox, research director, Center for Environmental Health, said, “These unnecessary, untested and unlabeled chemicals in dozens of everyday products threaten our children’s and families’ health. It’s past time for federal action that calls for evaluating chemicals for safety before they end up contaminating our homes and our bodies.” “This is another example of the failure of federal law to protect workers and consumers,” said Sarah Doll from SAFER States. “States have been acting to protect consumers from toxic chemicals in products for years now, and will continue to move on these issues in the absence of federal reform.” The products were tested in 2008, and the study authors acknowledge that product samples can vary and that some formulations may have changed.
