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September 19, 2011
· Dr. Oz blasted for apple juice claims
· Guilty plea in Dow trade secret theft
· Clever virus kills hungry caterpillars
· New lab offers scientists food safety training
· Analysis: Resistant weeds and crop rotation
Dr. Oz blasted for apple juice claims
(Associated
Press) – Arsenic in apple juice! Fed to babies! And it probably came from
Oz, one of TV's most popular medical experts, said on his
Fox show last week that testing by a
The Food and Drug Administration said its own tests show no such thing, even on one of the same juice batches Oz cited.
"There is no evidence of any public health risk from drinking these juices. And FDA has been testing them for years," the agency said in a statement.
The flap escalated Thursday, when Oz's former medical school classmate Dr. Richard Besser lambasted him on ABC's "Good Morning America" show for what Besser called an "extremely irresponsible" report that was akin to "yelling 'Fire!' in a movie theater."
Besser was acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before joining ABC news as health and medical editor several years ago.
Arsenic is naturally present in water, air, food and soil in two forms — organic and inorganic. According to the FDA, organic arsenic passes through the body quickly and is essentially harmless. Inorganic arsenic — the type found in pesticides — can be toxic and may pose a cancer risk if consumed at high levels or over a long period.
"The Dr. Oz Show" did not break down the type when it tested several dozen juice samples for total arsenic. As a result, the FDA said the results are misleading.
Furthermore, the agency's own tests found far lower total arsenic levels from one of the same juice batches the Oz show tested — 2 to 6 parts per billion of arsenic versus the 36 that Oz's show had claimed.
Tests of the same batch conducted by two different food
testing labs for the juice's maker, Nestle
In a letter published on the Oz show's website, Nestle said it told the program's producer in advance that the method the show's lab used was intended for testing waste water, not fruit juice, and "therefore their results would be unreliable at best."
The FDA also sent a letter in advance to the show and threatened to post its findings and the letters online if the program proceeded.
Oz went ahead.
"American apple juice is made from apple concentrate,
60 percent of which is imported from
The show tested three dozen samples from five brands, and Oz claimed that 10 had more arsenic than the limit allowed in drinking water — 10 parts per billion.
However, the FDA said the arsenic in water tends to be inorganic, justifying the strict limit. In contrast, organic arsenic is the form usually found in food and juices. Tests over the last 20 years show apple juice typically has fewer than 10 parts per billion total arsenic.
The mercurial Oz is a heart surgeon at
This is the first week of a new TV season, the first in two decades without Winfrey dominating the talk show scene.
Tim Sullivan, a spokesman for Oz's show, said in an interview: "We don't think the show is irresponsible. We think the public has a right to know what's in their foods."
Sullivan said Oz does not agree that organic arsenic is as safe as authorities believe. The show will do further tests to distinguish organic from inorganic arsenic in juice samples, he said.
"The position of the show is that the total arsenic needs to be lower," he said. "We did the tests. We stand by the results and we think the standards should be different."
In an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday, even Oz said he wouldn't hesitate to keep giving his four children apple juice.
"There's no question in my mind folks can continue drinking apple juice. ... There have been no cases at all of kids being harmed by elevated levels of arsenic, and the kinds of numbers we are talking about are not high enough to cause acute injury," he said.
He said he was concerned instead about the possible ill effects from drinking apple juice for many years.
An independent lab agreed with the FDA's contention that the form of arsenic matters.
Oz's testing "certainly begs the question how much of that is inorganic," the type of arsenic that is of prime concern, said Dr. Tod Cooperman, president of ConsumerLab.com. The company tests dietary supplements and publishes ratings for subscribers, much as Consumer Reports does with household goods.
However, Cooperman and others have long called on the FDA to strengthen regulation of contaminants.
Guilty plea in Dow trade secret theft
A federal judge in
Huang could face up to 15 years in prison if the judge accepts his guilty plea. Huang agreed to plead guilty to one count of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets to benefit a foreign government and instrumentality in a document filed last month in U.S. District Court.
Attorneys for Huang did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment.
In the plea agreement, the 46-year-old Huang, who was born
in
Dow Agrosciences is a subsidiary of Midland, Mich.,-based Dow Chemical Co.
Huang, who was born in
Huang was indicted in June 2010 but it was kept secret until August 2010. The indictment charged Huang with 12 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets to benefit a foreign government and instrumentality under the Economic Espionage Act. He also was charged with five counts of foreign transportation of stolen property.
The Economic Espionage Act was passed in 1996 after the
Officials say the Department of Justice has only filed economic espionage charges seven times. Two cases in 2009 resulted in trials, with one ending in a conviction and the other with a deadlocked jury.
The other cases were settled before trial.
Clever virus kills hungry caterpillars
(NPR) – Scientists say they have figured out how a very clever virus outwits a very hungry caterpillar.
The caterpillar is the gypsy moth in its larval stage, and
the invasive species damages roughly a million acres of forest in the
But the damage would be greater if it weren't for something called a baculovirus that can infect these caterpillars and cause them to engage in reckless, even suicidal behavior, scientists say. The virus is so effective that the government actually sprays it on trees to help control gypsy moth outbreaks.
Now, a team of scientists thinks it has discovered how the baculovirus takes control of gypsy moth caterpillars. The key is a special gene that's carried by the virus and affects the caterpillar's eating behavior, according to the team's new study in Science.
The discovery explains a phenomenon scientists have wondered about for decades.
Normally, gypsy moth caterpillars feed on tree leaves at night when predators including birds and squirrels can't see them. Then during the day, the caterpillars climb down and hide in the tree bark or even under leaves on the ground.
But caterpillars abandon that sensible strategy when they're
infected with a baculovirus, says Kelli Hoover, an entomologist at
"As they get sick, they climb up to elevated positions and stay there and die," she says. What happens next is pretty gruesome. "The inside of the caterpillar gets pretty much converted to millions and millions of virus particles. Then there are other enzymes that cause the exoskeleton to melt. And that liquefies the caterpillar, and then it can rain virus down on the leaves below."
When other caterpillars eat those leaves, they get infected, too.
A Clever Pathogen
Hoover and a team of researchers suspected that the virus was taking control of the caterpillar by using a gene involved in molting, which the gypsy moth larvae must do several times as they grow. The gene also affects eating behavior because in order to molt, larvae must stop eating.
To test their hypothesis, the scientists infected some caterpillars with a baculovirus that carried the normal version of this gene, and other caterpillars with a baculovirus carrying an inactivated version of the gene. Then they put the caterpillars in tall plastic containers lined with a screen.
"Every time the caterpillars were infected with the
normal gene, they would die at an elevated position in the container,"
Caterpillars infected with baculovirus climb to the tops of trees, where they melt and drip the virus onto the foliage below. There, it's eaten by other caterpillars.
Enlarge Michael Grove/Science/AAAS
Caterpillars infected with baculovirus climb to the tops of trees, where they melt and drip the virus onto the foliage below. There, it's eaten by other caterpillars.
That's probably because this gene disrupts a hormonal system
that tells the caterpillar when to stop eating," says
The result is devastating for the gypsy moth but great for
the virus, says David Hughes, an entomologist and biologist at
"The most important challenge for a virus is outcompeting other viruses," Hughes says. So a virus that could make its host die in a place that spread the infection to other hosts would have a big advantage, he says.
Other scientists say the finding reveals just how clever a pathogen can be.
"Who knew that a virus would be able to manipulate the behavior of its host?" says Jim Slavicek, a research biologist with the U.S. Forest Service, who also contributed to the new study.
Virus As A Weapon Against Outbreaks
Slavicek says knowing precisely how baculovirus overwhelms the gypsy moth could help scientists develop more potent strains of the virus. It could also help them determine when in the gypsy moth's life cycle it is most vulnerable to infection.
And he says all that could help bring down the cost of spraying with baculovirus. Right now, he says, land managers often use cheaper methods, such as insecticides or a deadly fungus.
"The advantage of the virus is that it is specific for gypsy moth larvae, and so it will impact no other animal, insect, plant in the treatment zone."
Gypsy moth outbreaks in the
During an outbreak, Slavicek says, there are so many caterpillars that their remains make some roads so slippery that road crews have to apply sand.
And if you drive on those roads at night, he says, "millions of moths will fly to the car, and it can be so dense that it's like a snowstorm. You can't see what's in front of you."
New lab offers scientists food safety training
(AFP) – Global food trade is a big and risky business.
About one trillion dollars worth of food is traded every
year around the world, but only a tiny portion gets tested for contaminants --
ranging from about one percent of imports in the
And yet, at least 1.8 million people die from diarrheal disease caused by contaminated food or water annually, and "developing countries bear the brunt of the problem," according to the World Health Organization.
Considering the high costs of an outbreak -- both in human lives and in money lost -- world governments are searching for ways to improve food safety without actually boosting their surveillance of what enters their borders.
A new approach to the dilemma was unveiled this week at a
university campus on the outskirts of the
The IFSTL is based in a handful of rooms on the campus of
the
Lab manager Janie DuBois said it is the first lab of its kind in the world to tackle a variety of techniques year round, ranging from pesticide residue to microtoxins and bacterial pathogens like salmonella and E.coli.
"Everybody wants to know what the regulation is and understand how they are supposed to implement their scientific program to meet that regulation," DuBois said.
"The
Such practices are needed because food imports into the
While deadly outbreaks -- such as the recent spread of
E.coli in
Instead, it was a change to
The law requires the
So now, for a cost of about $2,500 per week per student,
governments and private businesses can send their food safety scientists to the
"We learned many things here we didn't know before," said Jackie Han, a Chinese food additives testing supervisor at Qingdao Hr-Qau Inspection Limited, who donned a white lab coat and spoke to AFP during a break in between sessions this week.
"There is not much information in
"Our goal is to be the bridge between
It may be good business for
To act otherwise when up to 60 percent of produce and 80
percent of seafood consumed in the
"Testing at import, while it is important for sure, is not the solution. The solution needs to be built into the production systems in the country of origin."
Waters provided equipment to the new lab, including a state of the art mass spectrometer.
The sophisticated machine enables scientists to test for "very large numbers of potential contaminants in a very short period of time and also to be able to detect them at exquisitely low concentrations," said Young.
Lab planning for the rest of this year is still under way, but organizers are aiming for 15-20 courses annually, with an eye to eventually replicating the model in other countries.
"The next step is building a global network of interconnected laboratories so they can share curricula and best practices," said Young.
Analysis: Resistant weeds and crop rotation
(yankton.net) – Ah, I remember just a few years back when glyphosate, or Roundup Ready, resistance in weeds was considered one of those silly urban myths, thought up by some crop farmer who was inept at controlling his weeds, at least that’s what the herbicide manufacturers seemed to be saying as they balked at the idea. Just like Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster, they might have said — except that this urban myth has actually proven real in time.
The problem is, for the time it took for crop scientists to establish glyphosate resistance exists and then herbicide manufacturers to wake up, one of the main methods of effective weed control has been forgotten among many of the conventional crop producers. Crop rotation is almost a has-been, a nearly lost art of crop production.
More or less to save its financial butt, pardon my language, Bayer CropScience has started a new initiative to bring crop rotation back into the works. “Respect the Rotation” is intended to reintroduce producers to the age-old concept of integrated weed management. Ironic, since glyphosate was once touted as the “be all-end all” of weed management.
Here’s the scenario: Producers, led to believe that glyphosate is actually the “be all-end all” to weed woes, abandoned their top non-chemical tools of weed management and did rely completely on the herbicide. And as glyphosate resistance caught hold in the weed world — especially during the many years when herbicide manufacturers were in straight-up denial about the whole thing — these producers did nothing to curb the trend. The weeds began having parties in their fields, leaving producers scratching their heads wondering why glyphosate wasn’t working but continuing to use it anyway, because of course, their herbicide consultant waved off the idea of resistant weeds. By the time producers began to see the light, they were experiencing reduced yields or even complete fields swallowed up by these weeds that their glyphosate arsenal just would not kill.
Where did that leave companies like Bayer CropScience? Scared to death of a major lawsuit, that’s where. Hence, the so-called community service of launching the educational initiative, “Respect the Rotation.”
Andy Hurst, product manager with Bayer CropScience, calls the initiative a way to encourage producers the proper stewardship of glyphosate. David Shaw, chair of the Weed Science Society of America’s Herbicide Resistance Education Committee, calls it something else: “At this point, glyphosate resistance is a reality. Our challenge now is to take steps — to adopt specific practices — that will slow the spread of resistance and possibly extend the lifespan of glyphosate.” He’s being rather generous with that last bit about extending the use of glyphosate — Bayer CropScience should be breathing a sigh of relief. Shaw didn’t come right out and say publicly that glyphosate was to blame, but rather that it might have a chance in the future still.
So what’s “Respect the Rotation” about? Well, tillage, using various herbicides rather than just one, and, as the name implies, a big part of it is crop rotation. I don’t know about you, but I remember the days when farmers actually grew more than one or two crops. Shaw says that, mostly because of the “be all-end all” illusion, many producers abandoned these long-held practices and are hesitant to take them up again because of the mistaken perception that adopting these management practices will cost growers more — not to mention, a bit of denial that their seemingly oh-so-easy weed control, glyphosate, is actually what is causing the problem!
Here’s the truth, though: In a four-year study in six key agricultural states, researchers are comparing the economics of various weed management practices with the use of glyphosate as the exclusive treatment for weed control. At the end of the third year, the results show that net returns on fields managed with non-glyphosate practices are equal to, and in some cases greater than, the returns on those where glyphosate is used alone. It’s all about the yield difference, which no matter how conservation-minded we hope producers are, it really does boil down to what makes the most money. Thankfully, time is proving that the best choice, i.e. most profitable, for producers is actually the right choice.
End Transmission