Feb/March 2001
It
Does Pay to Fight
by Jackie Alan Guiliano
Bipartisanship
at the Expense of the Citizenry
by Howard Zinn
The
Greens Great Opportunity
by Blair Bobier
DLC
Says Gore's Presidential Bid Ruined by Populist Message: Others Disagree
by Brian Hansen
Letter
from Porto Alegre
by Norman Solomon
Doing
the Right Things, Without Making Someone Wrong
by John Darling
Globalization
From Below
by Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello & Brendan Smith
Book
Review by Suzi Aufderheide
No Logo: Money, Marketing and the Growing Anti-Corporate Movement
by Naomi Klein
Book
Review by Gerry Cavanaugh
Hannibal
by Thomas Harris
Money
Talks
by Kayla Starr
America's
Food Safety Crisis Intensifies
by Ronnie Cummins
Coming
Home
by Jesse Wolf Hardin
The
Secret of the Valentines Angel
by Peter Melton
A
Prescription for Well-Being
by Peter Moore
Age-old
Concepts Benefit Modern Babies
by Pamela Jorrick
Cancer:
An Unexpected Way to the New Being
By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.
Book
Review by Kent Shew
Quantum Touch
by Richard Gordon
Cosmic
Calendar
By Salina Rain
(continued)
America's Food Safety Crisis Intensifies
By Ronnie Cummins
-
Scientists have warned for years that conventional soybeans contain low levels of 14 proteins that can potentially set off food allergies in humans and that genetically engineering soybeans could possibly cause the level of one or more of these 14 proteins to significantly increase. However, hiding behind the doctrine of "substantial equivalence," the FDA did not require Monsanto to submit comprehensive data on herbicide resistant Roundup Ready soybeans before they were brought on the market. In effect this means that RR soybeans may already be setting off food allergies among large numbers of people, given that 54% of America's soybean crop is genetically engineered, while 60% of all processed foods contain soy or soy derivatives. In 1999 the York Nutritional Lab in the UK, commenting on a mysterious 50% rise in soy allergies among British consumers, attributed the increase in food allergies to the fact that consumers the previous year had begun ingesting large amount of imported GE soybeans.
- On Nov. 11, speaking to a massive crowd at the Vatican, Pope John Paul II urged extreme caution concerning genetically engineered food, stating that the use of biotechnology in agriculture, "cannot be evaluated only on the basis of immediate economic interests. It is necessary to subject it in advance to rigorous scientific and ethical checking to prevent it ending up in disaster for … the future of the earth." On Nov. 14, the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism passed a resolution on labeling of genetically engineered food. The Commission called on the government to "monitor the health, ecological and religious liberty implications of genetic engineering." Among Protestant denominations the United Methodist Church recently called for mandatory labeling of all GE foods, with pre-market safety testing required. According to Jaydee Hansen of the UMC, "We call for policies that encourage the gradual transition to sustainable and organic agriculture."
Factory Farm
Practices Threaten Public Health
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released an important study in Washington,
DC by Charles Benbrook and Margaret Mellon showing that 70% of all antibiotic
drugs in the US are being fed to farm animals as growth promoters or production
aids. The study, which generated significant headlines and TV coverage across
the nation, points out that 25 million pounds of valuable antibiotics—roughly
70 percent of total US antibiotic production—are fed to chickens, pigs,
and cows every year for non-therapeutic purposes like growth promotion. The
drug-dependent US meat industry has tried to downplay its massive use of antibiotics—a
practice which is now starting to be banned in Europe—claiming that it
was using "only" 18 million pounds a year of antibiotics in animal
feed each year. Recent research has shown that the overuse of medical prescriptions
and the routine agribusiness practice of adding antibiotics to animal feed
are giving rise to virulent antibiotic-resistant strains of disease—such
as salmonella, campylobacter, pneumonia, meningitis, and ear and blood infections—in
millions of Americans every year, According to statistics released by the
Centers for Disease Control several years ago approximately 6% of all hospital
infections are now showing signs of antibiotic resistance. The figure today
is probably closer to 10%.
"The excessive use of antibiotics by the livestock industry is sobering," said Dr. Charles Benbrook, an independent economist and co-author of the report. "Feeding antibiotics to animals from birth to slaughter may modestly improve meat industry profits, but it puts everyone's health at risk. It is time to rethink how pigs, cattle and poultry are raised in the United States."
The Factory Farm lobby counterattacked with a series of op-ed pieces and editorials of its own, claiming that the UCS were exaggerating the problem and that European-type measures to ban the feeding of antibiotics to animals would cause unnecessary economic hardships to modern agribusiness. Meanwhile sales of organic meat, eggs, and dairy products, which ban the use of antibiotics, are booming, not only across the US, but in the entire industrialized world. A full copy of the UCS report can be found at www.ucsusa.org.
Mad Cow Disease:
Will the Nightmare Spread to the US?
Mad Cow panic has once again swept across the European continent, provoking
drastic declines in beef sales, economic insecurity among farmers, trepidation
in the meat, drug, cosmetic, and plasma industry, and near-hysteria among
consumers. Recent revelations of cattle testing positive for Mad Cow disease
(also known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or BSE) in Germany, France,
Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Ireland, Portugal, and Italy, and
the reports that thousands of tons of BSE-infected cattle feed were exported
from Britain to other nations over the past decade, have set off the largest
food scare in history.
Although only 92 Europeans have thus far officially died since 1996 from new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), the human equivalent of Mad Cow, British scientists admitted last year that, due to the long latency period of the disease (up to 30-40 years in humans), and due to the fact that the majority of meat eaters have probably been exposed to Mad Cow, several hundred thousand Britons (and an indeterminate number of Europeans from other countries) and perhaps many more may die from the incurable brain-wasting disease over the next few decades. Trying to keep the situation under control, German officials have proposed mandatory testing for all cattle over 24 months old for BSE, while EU authorities have placed a complete ban on the feeding of animal parts (in industry terminology, rendered animal protein) back to animals, a controversial practice still routine in US agriculture.
The Mad Cow crisis in Europe has been a significant factor contributing to opposition to genetically engineered foods. Seeing how industry and government scientists have systematically lied to them about the dangers of feeding animals to animals has made many consumers lose faith in industrial agriculture altogether. Noting that the same government officials who have repeatedly tried to reassure them that the BSE crisis in under control are now saying that genetically engineered foods are safe has brought on a profound skepticism and anger at the grassroots level. Now a similar crisis of confidence may start to develop in the United States as well.
Sandra Blakeslee of the New York Times reported on Jan. 11 that the US Food and Drug Administration's supposed 1997 ban on feeding rendered animal protein to cows and other ruminant animals is full of loopholes, and moreover that the so-called ban is not being enforced among the thousands of companies involved in the $3.2 billion dollar rendering industry and the $20 billion dollar animal feed industry. As Blakeslee wrote: "Among 180 large companies that render cattle and another ruminant, sheep, nearly a quarter were not properly labeling their products and did not have a system to prevent commingling, the FDA said. And among 347 FDA-licensed feed mills that handle ruminant materials—these tend to be large operators that mix drugs into their products—20 percent were not using labels with the required caution statement, and 25 percent did not have a system to prevent commingling."
In other words millions of US cows, sheep, game farm deer and elk, and pigs (pigs and cow's blood were inexplicably exempted in the so-called FDA feed ban of 1997), not to mention household pets, are still being fed billions of pounds of animal feed or pet food containing meat and offal from ruminant animals—despite the obvious danger to human and animal health and despite the fact that the FDA and the USDA for the past three years have been reassuring the public that this was no longer happening.
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