Our World and Everything in It

The sun is getting brighter and hotter. We’ll feel it again on Friday when the temperature is supposed to hit 89. To stand with bare skin in the sun really burns hot regardless of a breeze. So we’re told to wear sunscreen, lots of sunscreen, and try to stay out of it.   

I do use it, but wondered why my face felt like I have gravel under my skin whenever I applied sunscreen, especially the really good stuff. And I get darker and darker anyway. I’ve got a pretty good tan considering I wear 45 SPF, a big hat, and long sleeve men’s shirts for yard work. I’ve been telling my doctor for years that I do apply sunscreen, lots of it, but I tan anyway. Now I read this article that the FDA was warned to provide more information about sunscreen.

 According to the article on World Wire:

Sunscreens pose scientifically well-documented risks. While well known for over a decade, they remain unregulated by the FDA, and ignored by the industry.

Sunscreens are based on six ingredients, some of which actively penetrate the skin, accumulate in the body, and have been identified in urine and breast milk. More ominously, these ingredients have toxic hormonal effects, known technically as “endocrine disruptive.” Evidence for these effects has been well documented over the last decade. This includes stimulation of human breast cancer cells in test tube experiments, and increased uterine growth in immature female rats following skin painting or feeding.

Of major concern, and still ignored by the FDA, is the increasing addition to sunscreens of unlabeled atom or molecule size zinc oxide or titanium dioxide particles. Technically known as nanoparticles, they increase the durability and effectiveness of these products. However, as reported in over two dozen scientific publications since 2003, including those by an Environmental Protection Agency research team and the International Center for Technology Assessment, nanoparticles can penetrate the skin, invade blood vessels, and produce devastating distant toxic effects.

I think I’ll stick to just the big and big shirt until this mess gets straightened out.

Read more: http://world-wire.com/news/0808070001.html

I’ve complained about an unscrupulous EPA before, showing that some of its exiting hierarchy was tied to the oil industry. I’ve also tried to get the point across that the Bush administration has dismantled the federal government in small increments handing out contracts to for-profit corporations to do the work our agencies used to do, while cutting the budget drastically in many departments across the board. Sound alright? A lot of people think so—less spending. But do we know who is doing the work instead, how the contract was awarded, who is responsible if something goes wrong, or how much the contractor was actually paid for the job?

Cuts are going to happen. We must pay for the war.  But we just don’t know all the things that have been cut, until it’s too late that is. Just last year around this time, the Bush administration planned to cut some $500 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s budget and was met with fierce opposition in congress. The complaint was that it would shortchange vital environmental programs and was unacceptable. Do ya think?

Now it’s the FDA. The cover of the April 2008 Reader’s Digest asks “Can We Trust the FDA?—Must Read Special Report,” and reveals the Food and Drug Administration is in crisis. Most of the article is about the drugs we take, but the department is responsible for regulating $1.5 trillion in food, as well as, animal feeds and drugs. The article stated that insiders say, “it’s [FDA] woefully underfunded, dangerously understaffed and fractured by bitter internal tensions.” I immediately suspected feuding within the department exists because some people have ethics. In 2004, the FDA came under fire for silencing a staff scientist about antidepressants causing suicidal tendencies in teens. Ditto for the EPA, when scientists testified before congress last year that they were tired of being suppressed, and their findings/reports compromised.

The FDA receives only $2 billion in funding, which sounds like a lot but as the article says “is about what Fairfax County, Virginia, pays for its public schools.” It’s really frightening to read words like “chilling new report” in reference to the department in charge of our food and medicine. Worse yet the “chilling” report was commissioned by the FDA’s own advisory Science Board that also describes it as “nearly out of control.”

Congress has just begun to help shore up the FDA, increasing their funding by $145 million, but hey compared to billions, that’s a drop in the bucket. Of course about a quarter of that went to the drug review branch, another reason to read this story to see how much conflict of interest there is within the FDA relative to the drug industry. But special interests and conflict of interest on the food side of this equation cause an equal amount of damage. We start seeing problems like tainted food, beef, and chicken recalls, lax inspection of CAFO’s and runoff from them that may make its way into our tributaries, and of course really lax inspection of imported food. I watched a program where farm raised shrimp in an Asian country were swimming in polluted water with feces from farm animals. I check what I buy now. I steer clear of imports. I know the FDA isn’t checking.

The article said the public needs to weigh in. Weigh in? Scream for Pete’s sake. This is our bread, this is our health and it’s being handled shabbily. This type of decision-making and ethics is repetitive in the EPA, and more than likely throughout our federal agencies at this point. As I read the five key problems in this industry, they were similar to the EPA’s problems:

· The FDA suffers pressure from industry to speed decisions, and soft-pedal problems.
· Safety of New Drugs. Safety decisions are many times based on inefficient industry studies.
· Sloppy Record Keeping
· Conflicts of Interest
· Muzzled Experts

This list just about says it all doesn’t it? From the looks of things, we’re on our own.

Read the article: http://www.rd.com/national-interest/special-reports-and-surveys/problems-in-the-fda/article55513.html

The U.S. just had the largest beef recall in history.  Who can tell? We’ve had so many. Is it slowing anyone down from eating more burgers? Probably not. Most of the beef, 143 million lbs. was heading to school cafeterias. There was enough tainted beef to provide two burgers to every man, woman, and child in the U.S. according to ABC. Finally, ABC news aired film footage showing how sick, downed animals that are too ill to stand are pushed, prodded, even fork-lifted into a slaughterhouse to be hacked into our food. The news said: “It might be disturbing.”

Disturbing? If we really wanted to cure obesity in America, everyone should have to visit a petting zoo and interact with farmyard animals, pet their soft muzzles, feel their innocence, then visit a CAFO and a slaughterhouse. How about inhaling some fumes from the open-air lagoons while we’re there? It just might work to cure our eating disease.

What I saw on TV this morning is why I quit eating pigs and cows. If the average American experienced where our food came from, how it is processed, we would be a much, much thinner nation. We are an absolutely cruel nation in our utilization of Confined Animal Factories or CAFO’s, and are neglectful in paying any attention to the treatment of our farm animals. The only thing we are interested in is putting the feedbag on ourselves. 

Since the average American is not likely to come near a slaughterhouse, the next best thing is to watch the movie, “Fast Food Nation.” The movie gives many ideas as to why our food industry is serving us up tainted meat. We are processing everything far too quickly and completely neglecting what is known as  “Kosher” or clean and humanely raised food. I honestly don’t think that some of the pigs and cows that are sent into the slaughterhouse are completely dead before being cut up into steaks. The cow on this morning’s newscast was so sick it couldn’t stand, yet someone was screaming at it, scaring it, prodding it to actually walk into the slaughterhouse on its own. I sometimes hate the modern world. It progresses but with less and less empathy for other living things.

Thus is our sustenance these days. Not pretty. CAFO’s and industrialized farming should be stopped. We’re all too fat anyway. I could lose ten lbs. and never miss it. How about you and especially in light of the latest link between obesity and cancer? I’ve often thought the two somehow go together, but hey I’m not a scientist. I just know lugging around 20 extra lbs. is a lot of extra heft. I know that every time I buy 20 lbs of cat litter, or topsoil, or landscaping mulch. I can lift it. I can fling it still, but I can’t imagine walking around every day with that excess hanging about.  
 

Just 10 days ago I blogged about cloned meat and that I thought the idea of doing it for food was ludicrous, considering we throw half of all our food produce away in this country. I provided a link to an article with a picture of a stacked pile of dead pigs. We don’t need more meat, so cloning for food is a ruse to get into the research arena.

 And there is it today, in the Associated Press: “Scientists Clone Human Embryos.” Of course, we know this has been done before. As a matter of fact the article said someone from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute couldn’t tell that anything new was being presented. He said the ‘next big advance will be to create a human embryonic stem cell line’ from cloned embryos and that hasn’t been achieved yet.  I figured we didn’t need the food and the push to get cloned beings into research is the real reason we’re hearing cloned, cloned, cloned. Heck, people are still arguing about stem cells. It was a more viable idea to utilize stem cells that were going to be tossed, flushed, buried, or discarded. Now we’re going to end up creating life for stem cells, and eventually allow them to grow to get organs to part out–much worse than using discarded stem cells.  I think there is a whole lotta other expertise involved with creating life anyway. Many scientists concede to a Higher Being when they get so far into something and then can’t figure it out anymore. We haven’t figured out that real animals have emotions, suffer, and more than likely “think,” and we’re onto creating human life? That’s a scary thought, just as I said about meat. We don’t treat real farm animals humanely, what hope do cloned critters have? Ditto for the human clone business.  

The article stated that other doctors agreed that the report was interesting but the ‘real splash’ will about stem cells from cloned embryos. Dr. George Daley of the Harvard Institute and Children’s Hospital Boston said, ‘It’s only a matter of time before some group succeeds.’

There is a really visible push to get cloning in front of people. First, the big announcement about cloned meat being safe, then 10 days later a redundant announcement about cloning human embryos? The only purpose the last announcement serves is to keep cloning in our consciousness–safe cloned meat, cloned humans, cloned, cloned, cloned, until research is cloning away whether we agree with it or not. Real sneaky.

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20080117/478ee0d0_3ca6_15526200801171818674522

Whether or not cloned meat is safe is not an issue. It’s not a good idea based on what the meatpacking business does with real animals on industrialized farms and CAFO’s, the fact that Americans disregarded health warnings and boosted our obesity quotient some 30% last year, and our propensity to waste half of our food supply to begin with. Do we really need to clone animals for food?

It’s highly doubtful looking at these pictures of dead hogs stacked sky high that lived from birth to death confined in a box, chewing on metal bars out of distress, then died for no good purpose whatsoever:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters.

As you look at this stack of pigs, remember that science has declared them to be highly intelligent animals. If we do this to regular farm animals, what will we do with clones? Our cruelty quotient will go up and it’s not all that good now. We turn our heads to all types of cruelty already.

We don’t need to fuel obesity either. Type II diabetes is on the rise and linked with obesity from pounding down too many burgers, 20 oz. steaks, and slabs of ribs. Producing more food from cloned animals is contrary because we’re already stuffed on only half of what we produce. The average family throws away 14% of all their food. If beer and pop counts, I’m surprised it’s not higher. Rounding up cans and bottles from party aftermath is a little unnerving. There are always a bunch of them half empty and a few completely full.

So the push for cloning for more food doesn’t make sense, but the push for cloned animals for research does. We’ll be off and running in that direction all too quickly and with little recourse because we didn’t protest cloning animals for food in the first place. The FDA stated they wanted to get public opinion about cloned animals for food. So let them know.

I like a good shrimp dinner like anyone else that likes shrimp, big, fat meaty mouthfuls of that sweet seafood, add scallops and lots of other types of seafood for that matter. But now I hear that 80% of the seafood we eat is imported. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but the FDA only inspects 1% of that seafood, and what it does inspect will more than likely fail due to unsafe levels of antibiotics, or just plain filth.

Personally, I like to buy fish that says farm-raised in the U.S., even though the fish food contains PCB’s. In Vietnam farm-raised may mean “in sewage.” Eating in restaurants is a little more difficult. There are no labels. It’s a good idea to ask where the seafood comes from. There is a problem with an often used fungicide called Malachite Green found in imported fish. Malachite Green can cause cancer and birth defects over time.

The countries from which we import know what’s legal and what’s not. They do it anyway, and often replace the forbidden material with another that is potentially dangerous. That’s why it’s so important to have better checks on our imports, especially food. President Bush is expected to ask for reforms giving government the power to recall. Who is he kidding? His small government/privatization ideals have fallen flat in the area of imports already. More and more things we rely on as safe through governmental inspections are at risk because there is no government inspecting it. Some states like Alabama run their own inspections, but those states are few.

Be advised. I don’t know about anyone else but I’m going to start to ask where my seafood comes when I dine out. I had no idea that a good shrimp dinner may be the same as getting a big dose of unknown antibiotics. I refuse to eat meat because of CAFO’s. It’s getting very, very vegetarian around here.
Read more about fish inspections: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Consumer/Story?id=3825144&page=2.
 

You know I’m amazed at people that don’t believe man has any hand in global warming. Especially since my house sits in a jet zone. Oh I don’t mean I can hear my house shake when they take off. They are pretty high up there. When I look up, they look to be about inch in size. No one let homeowners know where the flight patterns were going to be when they enlarged Detroit Metro. I got lucky and now the sky above me is full of planes coming and going. I’m listening to one right now. It’s loud because it’s flying lower. I’ve turned down the TV before to see if it’s thunder or a plane.  With all these planes criss-crossing in the sky but doing so way, way up there, most people wouldn’t notice any problem. But just last weekend my husband closed our pool and in 2 short days time without a solar cover on that pool, we could see a gas slick on the surface of the water. We left it off for a week once before and a stain appeared at the bottom. 

I don’t need someone telling me man has created a big pollution problem due to fossil fuel use. I can see it! Out of curiosity I went rummaging around the internet to see just how much jet fuel falls on me everyday and found an article that jet fuel additive is in our food supply. Not a surprise to me. Fuel in my pool, fuel in the protected wetlands marsh behind my house. So it follows it’s in the groundwater, our drinking water, and our food supply. Our population has had 100% exposure to a jet fuel contaminant called perchlorate. The article went on to say: “The shocking thing is that it appears to be very widespread in the food supply. No one knows for sure, because the FDA has not done the studies they need to do to document its complete presence in the food supply.” Gee, I wonder why?

 This is just another way to keep under wraps the real pollution that’s taking place right under our noses in favor of the fossil fuel industry. For more about Jet Fuel Additive you probably ate tonight read: http://www.ewg.org/node/21582.

After all the problems we’ve had with tainted imports from China, the FDA planned to outsource some 322 jobs and shut down 7 of 13 field labs. What is wrong with this picture? This administration’s rush to privatize just about everything in the country is becoming more blatant.

If it weren’t for the National Treasury Employee’s Union that covers the FDA employees, the labs would be shut down right now, at a time when we should have more field labs to ensure imports are safe. That’s what Reps. Dingell and Stupak think also. They sent a letter to the FDA Friday questioning the outsourcing of so many jobs. Both Dingell and Stupak are quoted as saying, ” “It is truly incomprehensible why the agency would again consider reducing the expertise and institutional knowledge of the FDA at a time when FDA’s credibility with the American people is at an all-time low.” Evidently, the FDA doesn’t care what we think.

There is an Import Safety Working Group in place as of last month. Dingell and Stupak called the FDA’s move to outsource the FDA jobs without recommendations from the Import Safety Group, “hasty and injudicious.” That’s being kind. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of connection left between the American public and many of our Federal bureaus. They simply do not care what we think in lieu of privatization everywhere. Privatization is a nice word for the wealthy taking over. Somewhere in my earlier blogs, I said the wealthy have already done that. They just aren’t wearing their gold crowns yet. I plan to blog on the state of this move to privatize everything in the country soon. There is a huge article in Rolling Stone about it, I haven’t read yet and will certainly pass along.

Meanwhile, it is good that union forces that are supposedly breaking America, saw to it that the labs didn’t close. And Reps. Dingell and Stupak are a good pair for being quick with the questions and investigations. This is just another in a string of federal agencies that appear to be inept and out of touch with middle class America. The EPA is a joke with over 400 environmental laws loosened or lost altogether during the past 7 years.  FEMA is questionable, and now the FDA tried to pull a fast one in light of all the bad imports. It looks to me like we need a whole lot more whistleblowers among government workers. We think China is awful and untrustworthy, but it looks like we can no longer have faith in the U.S. agencies that exist for our well-being.

All the ruckus over Chinese imports, especially food, may have caused many of our own food producers to rush to change their packaging to assure the American public that American food is fine. I got a kick out of the packaging on some popular American brands of chicken at the grocery store today. They assure 100% chicken with no antibiotics or additives in big bold letters on the packaging.

Does that mean there were antibiotics and additives in their before? Or is our food industry worried that now that we’re nosey and picky about imports we might be looking over everything with a discerning eye. Like I said, I’ve quit eating pigs and cows until they roam the farm or range as free spirits again, er um, if we have any ranges left. Eleven states are burning now. Up two more states since the last time I blogged about fires.

But chicken and turkey what about them? I’ll tell you, they live horribly in deplorable conditions until they are killed and brought to the store all packaged up with labels assuring us they are without antibiotics or additives. No antibiotics in the conditions I’m going to explain is a little frightening quite frankly. A good dose might go a long way to staving off what might be ailing the poultry we eat after they live their short lives in hell.

Here’s a little excerpt and the website where a lone writer ventured to see for himself what a typical industrial sized chicken farm is like. Brace yourself. It’s not all that much better than the Smithfield Foods expose another reporter from Rolling Stone researched that I blogged about as ” Pig Poo Who Knew?” Michael Specter of the New Yorker said:

‘I was almost knocked to the ground by the overpowering smell of feces and ammonia. My eyes burned and so did my lungs, and I could neither see nor breathe…. There must have been thirty thousand chickens sitting silently on the floor in front of me. They didn’t move, didn’t cluck. They were almost like statues of chickens, living in nearly total darkness, and they would spend every minute of their six-week lives that way.’

Lovely huh? I have to thank China for bringing curiosity about the food we eat to millions of Americans—finally.  Pay attention. Boycott if you feel the need. It would go a long way as a wake up call to the meat packing business in this country. I’ve pretty much gone vegetarian and it doesn’t bother me a bit. My grocery bill is cheaper too. And whenever there is a recall on any meat, I don’t have to sweat. I don’t eat any of it.
 
The FDA only has the capacity to inspect 1% of all our imports. And their funding has been cut, the war you know. So where does that leave them with our food? Specter reported about 30,000 chickens in one spot. You honestly think we have enough FDA to inspect all our farms and do it well?
 
We need some big reforms in this country. Chinese tainted food imports are just the start. The last largest 3 recalls were all home produced meat folks, not imports. Get informed. Contact your reps. Some things gotta change. Myself, I’m having Morning Star Farms Prime Grillers for burgers these days. They’re tasty, and it didn’t require that a living thing suffer in hell before the slaughter. Until chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows are allowed a normal life on a farm again where they have a pen, a pasture, are allowed to bear young in livable conditions, and eat normal food, they won’t be on my plate. For more info on chicken farming: http://www.chickenindustry.com/. 

“Fast Food Nation” may not be a Michael Moore documentary, but it is a movie about some timely topics like why more and more of our food is showing up tainted with E Coli. It covers quite a few subjects, many of which I’ve already written about. I witnessed a lot of true facts in this star studded movie about eminent domain, migrant workers, industrialized farms, and greed in exchange for our healthy food supply. Oh, and yes a lot of mention about the machine that’s at work in this current, less than ethical, administration of ours that is at the core of much that is wrong today.

 Watch it. It is poignant, sometimes funny, sometimes disgusting, but done well and worth seeing. For a public that’s always whining about not getting the truth, this is in your face with it. Just be prepared.