" I heard it through the AgLine"

October 18, 2007

 

 

·        Pesticide use spurs free speech flap

·        US food safety warnings hit decade low

·        Lettuce roots lure salmonella – study

·        Assessing global potential for biodiesel

·        EU organic apples yield healthier worms

 

 

 

Pesticide use spurs free speech flap

 

(latimes.com) – If the state and federal governments get their way, night-flying planes will soon resume dousing the Monterey Peninsula with a moth-targeting pesticide, before they move on to other areas of Northern California.

State regulators insist the chemical compound is safe. But they also insist they can't disclose much of what's in it.

"Trade secrets," said Steve Lyle, spokesman for the state Department of Food and Agriculture.

The mystery has opened a free-speech front in California's latest battle over potential health risks associated with aerial assaults on crop-threatening insects, in this case the light brown apple moth.

Experts say the Monterey dustup pits the public's right to know against the needs of pesticide manufacturers to shield the ingredients of their products from competitors.

Similar clashes between the 1st Amendment and trade secrets erupted over unauthorized leaks about an Apple Computer product and Internet postings of DVD decryption codes. Another skirmish came after a former employee tried to write about Oprah Winfrey, in defiance of a confidentiality agreement.

The Monterey fight centers on whether the government, at the behest of a corporation, should refuse to identify the chemicals that it sprays over homes, businesses and schools, as well as orchards and vegetable fields.

"It's outrageous," said David Dilworth, executive director of Helping Our Peninsula's Environment in Carmel. "Democracies don't do that."

But state officials say that, under trade secrets laws, they have no choice. Only the active ingredients in pesticides are routinely disclosed. Other components that make up the formula -- so-called inert ingredients -- are not.

"Product formulation is a classic definition of a trade secret," said Polly Frenkel, chief counsel for the state Department of Pesticide Regulation.

With money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the blessing of the Environmental Protection Agency, state crews last month began applying the chemical blend known as CheckMate over 60 square miles of Monterey County.

A pheromone in the mixture disrupts the apple moth's breeding cycle.

The ensuing controversy has followed a path as twisty as the winged critter in flight.

The Monterey Peninsula environmental group filed suit to stop the spraying after dozens of people said the initial application left them with asthma-like symptoms, burning eyes, rashes and stomach pains.

A Monterey County judge ordered a temporary halt, saying he needed more information about the health effects of an inert substance that was believed to be in the spray -- polymethylene polyphenyl isocyanate, which environmentalists say can be hazardous.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper had published a list of ingredients, including PPI, citing the EPA as its source. The EPA later said it released the list to the paper by mistake and that CheckMate did not contain PPI.

"They had no problem with it for two weeks," said Don Miller, Sentinel managing editor. "The EPA had this strange change of heart."

EPA officials have since stopped talking. The agency did not respond Wednesday to questions that it had asked The Times to submit in writing.

In a statement released earlier, the EPA said that CheckMate's ingredients "have been evaluated for safety and have been found to meet the agency's requirements for the protection of human health and the environment."

If the court permits, the state plans to spray in the Salinas and Santa Cruz areas next month. Lyle said the moth was a danger to scores of crops.

Meanwhile, the pesticide company, Oregon-based Suterra, demanded that the Sentinel remove the ingredients from its website, and the newspaper complied -- but only briefly.

Suterra also went to court in Los Angeles this week to seek an injunction prohibiting the Santa Cruz Sentinel and the Monterey County Weekly from publishing the ingredients. A judge refused to grant an immediate order and set another hearing for December.

At the same time, a Monterey judge has rejected Suterra's request to seal all records referring to the ingredients.

Suterra did not return phone calls.

Roger Myers, a 1st Amendment attorney who represents the Monterey County Weekly, said a federal court in 1996 ruled that pesticide ingredients cannot be withheld from the public as trade secrets, although their specific formulation can be kept under wraps.

Myers said other rulings have decreed that when, in a matter of public interest, a conflict develops between the 1st Amendment and trade secrets, free speech must prevail.

"Nobody understands what Suterra and the EPA are doing," he said.

Peter Scheer, head of the California First Amendment Coalition, said case law on free speech-trade secrets tensions is still evolving. But the EPA's disclosure of the CheckMate ingredients makes Suterra's position "weak."

"You can't protect a trade secret if it is no longer a secret," he said. "They wouldn't be able to get that genie back in the bottle."

But a state pesticide department spokeswoman, Veda Federighi, said her agency remains bound to secrecy. She said her department and the EPA have honored trade secrets for countless pesticide products while making certain they are safe.

"There are some people who just choose not to believe that," Federighi said.

Among them is Dilworth, who has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the EPA for the CheckMate ingredients. "We don't trust anything they say," he said.

An attorney for the peninsula group, Alexander Henson, said trade secrets laws allow the EPA to disclose the identity of pesticide ingredients if the agency has reason to believe they are harmful. Henson said that where CheckMate is concerned, the public can only take the EPA's word that there is no cause for worry.

"It just doesn't seem right that a secret ingredient can be sprayed over an unsuspecting population," he said.

 

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US food safety warnings hit decade low

(Bloomberg) -- U.S. regulators issued 72 letters in the first eight months of the year warning food suppliers of safety violations, the fewest in a decade, even after tainted spinach and peanut butter sickened hundreds of Americans.

The number of Food and Drug Administration warnings was a quarter of the comparable 2001 total, public records analyzed by Bloomberg showed. The agency cut its inspection staff 28 percent from four years ago and visited fewer of the 329,000 facilities in the U.S. and abroad whose food safety for which it is responsible.

In the past 13 months, there have been nationwide recalls of spinach contaminated with E.coli and peanut butter tainted with salmonella. The FDA issued warnings that seafood from China may contain cancer-causing additives. Reduced FDA oversight increases the danger that unsafe food will reach consumers, causing illness or death, former regulators say.

``The potential for greater risk is there,'' Mark McClellan, who was FDA commissioner under President George W. Bush from 2002 to 2004, said in an interview. ``Limited resources are stretching the agency too far'' after managers diverted staff to drugs and medical devices.

The FDA regulates about 80 percent of U.S. food, valued at more than $466 billion a year, and the Agriculture Department 20 percent. The FDA's total budget is more than $2 billion.

Agency officials defend their record and say a plan, soon to be announced, will strengthen safety. Lawmakers have called for revamping the FDA or creating an agency that would take over all food regulation.

`Toothless' Agency

``You've got an agency that is toothless,'' Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who leads a House panel responsible for FDA funding, said in an interview.

The 72 warning letters this year through August compared with a 10-year high of 289 during the comparable period in 2001. For all of 2006, the agency sent 126 food-safety warnings, down 70 percent from 421 in 2001.

The analysis of warning letters excluded citations for improper marketing claims, failure to include allergens and other violations not directly related to safety. The FDA uses the letters to signal possible enforcement action after inspectors find violations such as unsanitary conditions and potentially dangerous additives.

The number of warnings declined partly because Bush appointees barred field offices from issuing letters until they are approved by the FDA's general counsel, said William K. Hubbard, an FDA associate commissioner for 14 years before he retired in 2005.

`Didn't Like Warning Letters'

``The Bush folks didn't like warning letters,'' Hubbard said.

Daniel E. Troy, the former FDA general counsel who put the policy into place, said the purpose was to give the letters legal review and make them more credible, not to reduce the number.

FDA food regulators did 7,783 inspections in the 2006 fiscal year, the fewest since 2000, according to the FDA. The total includes cosmetic and dietary supplement makers, though the agency says it does few of those.

For the fiscal year ended in September, the agency planned 5,600 inspections of domestic food operations whose products pose a ``high risk,'' down 24 percent from 2003, according to FDA documents. The agency wouldn't disclose how many inspections were set for the 136,000 U.S. food suppliers the FDA regulates.

The number of inspectors who focus on food, cosmetics and dietary supplements dropped to 625 in fiscal 2007 from 874 in 2003, according to the FDA.

FDA officials say the U.S. food supply is among the safest in the world. The agency isn't sure why the number of warning letters and inspections fell, spokeswoman Julie Zawisza said in an interview.

Targeting Biggest Risks

The total may have decreased because the FDA is targeting the biggest risks rather than requiring that all companies be inspected, Zawisza said. Producers also are correcting violations, requiring fewer repeat visits, she said. Senior agency officials wouldn't comment for this story.

Typical of warning letters sent by the FDA this year was one to closely held Southwind Foods Co. based in California. The FDA said inspectors found unsanitary conditions in a seafood plant in Salt Lake City. Southwind failed to follow procedures to prevent the spread of listeria, a deadly bacterium, the letter said.

The FDA hasn't received a response and plans another inspection next month, agency spokesman Michael Herndon said in an e-mail. Sebastiano Galletti, the company's president, didn't return phone calls.

Deaths, Hospitalizations

Food-borne illnesses may cause as many as 5,000 deaths and 325,000 hospitalizations each year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

There aren't authoritative statistics documenting whether more people are getting sick from food regulated by the FDA. State reports since the late 1990s indicate an increase in outbreaks, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group.

``When we see a decline in inspections together with increasing outbreaks, it's clear the government isn't providing adequate deterrence,'' said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director for the Washington-based center.

The number of known outbreaks may have increased because of more reporting to health authorities, not because food is more dangerous, said Craig Henry, senior vice president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a trade group in Washington. Factories are ``focused on improving their food safety systems,'' he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Justin Blum in Washington at jblum4@bloomberg.net .

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Lettuce roots lure salmonella

 

(Health Day via Yahoo) – Salmonella, a bacteria that causes tens of thousands of cases of foodborne illness each year, may be especially attracted to lettuce by the prospect of something sweet.

The bug is apparently enticed by a sugar-like substance lying in the leafy green's roots, say a team of Dutch scientists.

They believe the results may help one day find new ways to prevent infection with the potentially deadly germ, but others are not so sure.

"It's a laboratory study and it can't be generalized to anything else," said Dr. Douglas L. Hurley, a professor of internal medicine at the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine and an infectious disease doctor at Scott & White. "It can't be generalized to lettuce growing in a field by a long shot."

"The great majority of human outbreaks of salmonellosis come from chicken or eggs, so the question is what kind of public health import would this have," added Philip Alcabes, an epidemiologist and an associate professor at the School of Health Sciences of Hunter College, City University of New York in New York City.

Indeed, salmonella infection usually comes from eating contaminated ground beef, eggs and pork and, increasingly, poultry, rather than produce.

Some 40,000 cases of salmonellosis are reported in the United States each year. However, because milder cases are not diagnosed or reported, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that the actual number of infections may be 30 or more times greater. Some 600 people die each year after being infected with salmonella. Infection can cause diarrhea, including bloody diarrhea, in humans.

But foodborne illness in general, especially from E. coli, another bacteria, is being increasingly traced back to produce. And in March, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued voluntary guidelines for food industry processors to minimize contamination of ready-to-eat produce.

Reporting online Oct. 11 in The International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal, a team at Wageningen University in The Netherlands maintain that salmonella infections from produce are also becoming increasingly common. In these cases, infection can come from poor hygiene among workers or contamination via soil or water tainted with animal manure.

In this paper, the researchers reveal that salmonella bacteria move towards the roots of the lettuce, apparently attracted by a sugar-like carbon source located there. When the bacteria gets close, the molecule triggers a genetic signal which, in turn, triggers bacterial reproduction

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Assessing global potential for biodiesel

 

(Science Daily) – What do the countries of Thailand, Uruguay and Ghana have in common? They all could become leading producers of the emerging renewable fuel known as biodiesel, says a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

The ease of manufacturing biodiesel from vegetable oils and animal fats has made it one of the most promising, near-term alternatives to fossil fuels. Seeking to understand which nations are best positioned today to enter the burgeoning biodiesel market, researchers Matt Johnston and Tracey Holloway of the Nelson Institute's Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) ranked 226 countries according to their potential to make large volumes of biodiesel at low cost.

Reported online Oct. 17 in Environmental Science and Technology, the analysis uncovered many of the usual suspects, including the United States, a top soybean grower; and Brazil, already a major biodiesel producer. The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Spain also cracked the top ten in overall volume potential.

But the researchers say the study's true motivation was to identify developing countries that already export significant amounts of vegetable oil for profit, but may not have considered refining it into biodiesel. By exporting biodiesel - a higher value commodity - these countries could improve their trade balances, says Johnston, or use the fuel to offset their own energy needs.

"A lot of these countries don't have any petroleum resources and so they're having to import petroleum," he says. "At the same time, they're exporting vegetable oil that they could be turning into biodiesel and using domestically."

Overall, the study ranked Malaysia, Thailand, Colombia, Uruguay and Ghana as the developing nations most likely to attract biodiesel investment, not only because of their strong agricultural industries, but also due to their relative safety and stability, lack of debt, among other economic factors.

Johnston emphasizes, however, that the set of criteria he and Holloway used is just one among many.

"As long as they're profitable and have large volumes of vegetable oils, all the countries on our list - even if they aren't on our top ten list - they could do this," he says.

The idea for the analysis first struck Johnston on a visit to a remote island of Fiji, where people rely primarily on petroleum diesel to run generators for electricity. Transported in by boat, the fuel cost the equivalent of $20 per gallon. Meanwhile, the islanders were growing coconuts and processing them into oil that sold for 50 cents a liter.

"The price disparity was just incredible," says Johnston, "and it prompted me to think about where else in the world countries might have this biofuels potential, but not necessarily realize it."

At the same time, many agencies - chief among them the United Nations - have raised concerns about the biofuel industry's possible impact on the world's poor, as vegetable oils, now used for food, are increasingly diverted to fuel production. Rampant growth of biofuels could also negatively affect the environment; a soaring demand for palm oil, for example, has already led to deforestation in Southeast Asia.

By highlighting the places in the world where biodiesel development will likely happen, Johnston and Holloway hope their analysis will help people foresee these problems and make plans to mitigate them.

"We're not saying, 'There's all this potential out there, go get it,'" says Johnston. "Instead, we're looking at which vegetable oil feed stocks are most likely to be affected and which countries will most likely be doing this at a large-scale. That way, we can anticipate some of the impacts, as opposed to having to react after the fact."

Of all the vegetable oils and animal fats examined in the study, soybean and palm oil were by far the most common. In fact, the world's top five soybean and palm oil producers - Malaysia, Indonesia, Argentina, the United States and Brazil - accounted for 80 percent of the potential global biodiesel production, the researchers found.

Based on current export volumes of vegetable oil from 119 countries, Johnston also estimated that a grand total of 51 billion liters of biodiesel could be produced annually - enough to meet roughly 4-5 percent of the world's existing demand for petroleum diesel. Yet, although interesting, these numbers aren't the main point.

"We're not suggesting that all exported vegetable oil should be converted into biodiesel, because that would fundamentally upset the food supply," says Holloway. "We're looking at this more from each individual country's perspective: They're already exporting one thing, could they be exporting something else?"

Because the study employed data from online, public sources - primarily the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Statistics Division - Holloway points out that any country could repeat the calculations or do its own analysis of the biodiesel opportunity. And she and Johnston hope they will.

"I'd love to see some of these development opportunities come to fruition for some of these countries," Johnston says.

A map is available at:  http://www.sage.wisc.edu/energy/

Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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EU organic apples yield healthier worms

 

(Science Daily) – Insects can catch more than a cold from certain viruses. Some viruses can be lethal to pest species - turning their insides to soup - without harming beneficial insects or other organisms. Hence they are used as an environmentally friendly means of biological crop protection worldwide.

The proverbial worm in the apple, the codling moth caterpillar, has been controlled in European orchards for years with a baculovirus called codling moth granulovirus (CpGV).

But in southwest Germany, some organic apple growers noticed that the virus was losing its effectiveness. Pest resistance to chemical insecticides is common in agriculture, but resistance to viruses had never been a problem in the past.

However, as reported recently in Science magazine, a single gene in the codling moth can make it 100,000 times less susceptible to the granulovirus. This highlights the need to anticipate the risk of resistance in pest control, not only for insecticides but also viruses.

The discovery was reported by a team of insect virologists and geneticists from the Agricultural Service Centre of Rhineland-Palatinate (DLR Rheinpfalz), the German Federal Biological Research Centre (BBA Darmstadt), the University of Hohenheim, and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology (MPICE Jena). Starting in 2005, codling moths collected from 13 organic orchards in southwest Germany were tested in the laboratory to confirm that the insects could tolerate granulovirus amounts more than a thousand times higher than previously. Genetic studies showed that the resistance could be transmitted from parents to offspring via one of the sex chromosomes - which helps to explain how the resistance increased so quickly.

The sex chromosomes in humans are called X and Y, with XX females and XY males. This is reversed in moths, where the sex chromosomes are called Z and W, with ZZ males and ZW females. The researchers found that the gene for granulovirus resistance occurs on the Z chromosome. Female caterpillars need only a single copy of the resistance gene to be nearly 100,000 times less susceptible to granulovirus infection. They stay healthy and survive to reproduce, when most others have been killed.

Sons from matings between these highly resistant females and susceptible males carry a virus resistance gene on just one of their two Z chromosomes. "Our research has shown that such males can pupate normally if they encounter a low dose of the virus" reports Dr. Johannes Jehle of the DLR Rheinpfalz. They survive and pass on their resistance gene to the next generation. "In later generations, there are also males carrying the resistance gene on both Z chromosomes, and these can survive even higher virus concentrations" explains the leader of the research team.

"This means of inheritance offers the quickest possible way for the insects to evolve resistance" says Prof. David Heckel of the MPICE. "If the apple grower increases virus applications to try to control the damage caused by the resistant population, the opposite results. Selection for resistance accelerates and the frequency of the gene on the Z-chromosome increases even faster in the population."

Jehle and his colleagues are planning for the future in response to this alarming result. In parallel with the inheritance studies, several new isolates of the codling moth granulovirus have been screened since 2006 for their ability to overcome the resistance. In 2007, extensive field tests in Germany, Italy, France and Switzerland have been conducted with the most promising viruses. But even if new virus varieties can overcome the Z-linked resistance, the authors caution that their successful use in the longer term will depend on resistance management strategies, similar to those now routinely used for chemical insecticides.

Reference: S. Asser-Kaiser, E. Fritsch, K. Undorf-Spahn, J. Kienzle, K. E. Eberle, N. A. Gund, A. Reineke, C. P. W. Zebitz, D. G. Heckel, J. Huber, J. A. Jehle

Rapid emergence of baculovirus resistance in codling moth due to dominant, sex-linked inheritance, Science, September 28, 2007

Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.

 

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