Investigate This! With Alex Roslin

Cleaning Up the Woodstove: How to enjoy the fire while reducing harmful smoke

2011-10-17T15:43:00.001-04:00

by Alex Roslin

Cottage Life

October 2010

[AR: This story just won an award of merit in the environment category from the International Regional Magazine Association.]

We heat with wood eight months of the year at our home in the rolling Appalachians of Quebec’s Eastern Townships. How could we not love it? The crackle, the dancing flames, the smoky bouquet, the snug ambience—no wonder sparking a fire is the first thing cottagers do on an off-season weekend.

So we followed the news closely when, in April 2009, the City of Montreal banned all new installations of fireplaces and woodstoves. (Wood-pellet stoves are still legal.) In BC, where constricted mountain valleys collect thick clouds of woodsmoke, the Town of Golden prohibits new installations of woodstoves and fireplaces, and replacements for existing devices must be high-efficiency, low-emission models certified by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or the Canadian Standards Association (CSA). Houston, BC has gone a step further, requiring removal of non-certified units by the end of 2010.

The problem is the toxins that stoves and fireplaces exhaust outside, which then make their way back inside. Woodsmoke contains at least 100 dangerous pollutants, including particulate matter (commonly called soot), carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and other toxins, that can lead to headaches, asthma, and lung cancer. Environment Canada says burning wood in a non-EPA-compliant stove for nine hours releases as much particulate matter as a car driven 18,000 km. The question is, how can cottagers enjoy the fire while reducing health hazards?

Read the entire story at the Cottage Life website here.

Tiny Nanoparticles Could be a Big Problem

2011-08-03T15:59:00.004-04:00

July 21, 2011

by Alex Roslin

The Georgia Straight

Nanotechnology was supposed to revolutionize the world, making us healthier and producing cleaner energy. But it’s starting to look more like a nightmare.

Nanomaterials—tiny particles as little as 1/100,000 the width of a human hair—have quietly been used since the 1990s in hundreds of everyday products, everything from food to baby bottles, pills, beer cans, computer keyboards, skin creams, shampoo, and clothes.

But after years of virtually unregulated use, scientists are now starting to say the most commonly used nanoproducts could be harming our health and the environment.

One of the most widespread nanoproducts is titanium dioxide. More than 5,000 tonnes of it are produced worldwide each year for use in food, toothpaste, cosmetics, paint, and paper (as a colouring agent), in medication and vitamin capsules (as a nonmedicinal filler), and in most sunscreens (for its anti-UV properties).

In food, titanium-dioxide nanoparticles are used as a whitener and brightener in confectionary products, cheeses, and sauces. Other nanoparticles are employed in flavourings and “nutritional” additives, and to reduce fat content in “health” foods.

In the journal Cancer Research in 2009, environmental-health professor Robert Schiestl coauthored the first comprehensive study of how titanium-dioxide nanoparticles affect the genes of live animals. Mice in his study suffered DNA and chromosomal damage after drinking water with the nanoparticles for five days.

“It should be removed from food and drugs, and there’s definitely no reason for it in cosmetic products,” said cancer specialist Schiestl, who is also a professor of pathology and radiation oncology at UCLA’s school of medicine.

...

[Read the rest of the story here. See the Straight's website version here.]

Home-School Hurdles

2011-05-30T06:52:00.005-04:00

BY ALEX ROSLIN

The Montreal Gazette

Saturday, May 27, 2011

MONTREAL - Christine Gauthier is a home-schooling mom in rural Val des Monts in the Outaouais, but she is anything but isolated.

She and her five kids, ages four to 18, are heavily involved in the region’s home-schooling support group, which has 180 families.

“Home-schooling is growing exponentially,” says Gauthier, a non-practising lawyer.

The families have near-daily get-togethers at each other’s houses for educational and social activities, including workshops on history, geography, theatre and tai chi. They also organize “school field trips” to apple orchards, museums and the science fair. They even hold their own Olympiads.

“It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it,” Gauthier says.

[Read the full story here. View the story at The Gazette's website here.]

Little-Noticed Heroin Revival Hits Close to Home

2011-05-20T17:28:00.003-04:00

NATO's presence in Afghanistan has coincided with a sharp rise in opium production, leading to a global revival of heroin use.

by Alex Roslin

The Georgia Straight

May 12, 2011

[See the Georgia Straight site's version of this story here.]

In a nondescript three-storey building on Cambie Street in the Downtown Eastside, Sherry Grant is at ground zero of a little-noticed heroin revival.

She hasn’t seen so many kids doing heroin since the Nexus substance-abuse program, which she runs, started tracking detailed statistics in 2005.

Nearly two times more of the program’s young clients aged 14 to 24 say they’re using heroin—35 percent today compared to 19 percent in 2005. “It’s crazy. We have definitely noticed an increase in heroin use among youth we work with,” said Grant, whose program is part of the Boys and Girls Clubs of South Coast B.C. “It’s cheaper and more accessible.”

The clients are getting younger, too. “It used to be their first time was 18 or 20,” she said. “Now it’s somebody who’s 15.”

After years of declining use, smack is back. A new generation of addicts—many younger than before—are getting hooked on a rising tide of heroin pouring into Canada from strife-ridden Afghanistan.

In Vancouver, the number of heroin-related criminal charges has shot up more than sixfold, from 72 in 2003—the year Canada sent its first large military contingent to Afghanistan—to 445 in 2009, according to Vancouver Police Department figures.

The B.C. Coroner’s Office warned on May 5 that the province saw 20 heroin-related overdose deaths in the first four months of 2011, more than twice the number last year for the same period. The coroner said that unusually potent heroin may be to blame. But other provinces are also seeing more heroin and more ODs. And the story is similar across the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

Canada-wide, police seizures of opium shot up threefold between 2001 and 2008, from 31.5 kilograms to 96.9 kilos, according to Health Canada, which tests seized drugs for police forces. Seizures of heroin, an opium derivative, doubled from 66.6 kilos in 2001 to 133.4 kilos in 2008.

According to UN figures, much of the blame lies with a 15-fold increase in Afghan opium production since 2001, the year Canadian soldiers helped the U.S. overthrow the country’s Taliban government. Afghanistan now supplies 90 percent of the world’s opium.

Increased heroin supply worldwide and falling prices are the little-noticed side effects of the western presence in Afghanistan.

Opium, banned under the Taliban regime, now flourishes in Afghanistan under the noses of Canadian and U.S. personnel—and often directly under the boots of Canadian soldiers, who are occasionally pictured in newspapers walking through poppy fields while on the prowl for Taliban rebels.

Opium generates $1.5 billion to $4 billion for Afghanistan’s economy each year and accounts for 10 to 50 percent of the country’s GDP, depending on harvests, according to reports from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Depending on various factors, the poppy employs between 1.5 million and 3.3 million Afghans at different times of the growing season.

A big part of all those billions goes into the pockets and Dubai bank accounts of Afghan officials and warlords who are our allies. The Taliban rebels, who are widely accused of profiting from the opium trade, take in only two to 12 percent of total opium revenue, mostly by taxing shipments, according to an April 2011 analysis by the journal Foreign Policy.

One of the most conspicuous manifestations of opium’s huge role is the Kabul neighbourhood of Sherpur, the country’s wealthiest enclave. An empty hillside as recently as 2001, Sherpur now boasts extravagant mansions that Afghans dub “poppy palaces” and “narcotecture”.

All this prompted Hillary Clinton to call Afghanistan a “narco state” during the confirmation hearing prior to her appointment as U.S. secretary of state.

But that hasn’t stopped Canadian and other western governments from cultivating friendly ties with Afghan officials and warlords known or strongly suspected to be involved in the flourishing opium trade.

One of Canada’s closest allies in Afghanistan is the so-called King of Kandahar—Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half brother of President Harmid Karzai. Often known by his initials, AWK, he is the powerful head of the provincial council in Kandahar province, where Canada’s 2,800 soldiers are headquartered.

He is also widely suspected of being linked to opium trafficking. An October 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable released by the whistle-blowing group WikiLeaks in November 2010 said AWK “is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker”.

Reports about Wali Karzai go back years. A 2006 Newsweek investigation quoted sources saying AWK was a “major figure” in the opium trade. One Afghan Interior Ministry official said he “leads the whole trafficking structure” in the country’s south.

(Wali Karzai has denied the claims of drug involvement, saying there’s no proof.)

He has also been accused of vote-rigging in the 2009 Afghan presidential election and engaging in widespread corruption.

And despite it all, U.S. and Canadian officials have entertained cozy ties with Wali Karzai. He has reportedly received payments from the CIA, the New York Times stated in 2009. He was also said to be renting a large compound outside Kandahar to the CIA and U.S. special forces. “He’s our landlord,” one U.S. official was quoted as telling the newspaper.

Wali Karzai has denied he’s on the CIA payroll, but he acknowledges passing intelligence to coalition forces. “I’m the only one who has the majority of intelligence in this region,” he told the Times last year. “I’m passing tons of information to them.”

That intel seems to have helped shield Wali Karzai from awkward questions about his alleged drug ties. “U.S. and Canadian diplomats have not pressed the matter, in part because Ahmed Wali Karzai has given valuable intelligence to the U.S. military, and he also routinely provides assistance to Canadian forces, according to several officials familiar with the issue,” the Washington Post reported in 2009.

Wali Karzai is far from being the only Karzai with seemingly dirty hands. Another U.S. diplomatic cable, from April 2009, also released by WikiLeaks last November, said that President Karzai has personally intervened in several drug cases. In one, he reportedly pardoned five Afghan policemen convicted of transporting 124 kilos of heroin.

President Karzai also raised eyebrows in 2007 when he appointed a convicted heroin dealer, Izzatullah Wasifi, as his government’s anticorruption chief. “The Kabul government is dependent on opium to sustain its own hold on power,” wrote Thomas Schweich, the former U.S. counternarcotics coordinator in Kabul, in a New York Times Magazine story in 2008.

Canada’s largest development project in Afghanistan may actually be fuelling the opium boom. Ottawa calls it Canada’s “signature project” in the country: a $50-million scheme to rebuild the country’s second-largest dam, the Dahla Dam, and a long-neglected network of irrigation canals in Afghanistan’s main breadbasket region.

This region of fertile farmland also happens to be Kandahar’s main opium-growing belt, according to the UN’s 2010 Afghan Opium Survey.

One of the districts that have benefited from the Canadian irrigation scheme is Zhari, just west of Kandahar City. Since 2008, when the Canadian project began, Zhari has emerged as one of Afghanistan’s key opium-growing areas. Opium cultivation there shot up by 70 percent from 2,923 hectares in 2008 to 4,978 in 2010, according to the UN survey.

The Dahla Dam itself is located in a district called Shah Wali Kot, just northeast of Kandahar City. Opium cultivation there has risen 45 percent since the Canadian project started, from 560 hectares in 2008 to 813 hectares last year.

In Kandahar province as a whole, opium production remained flat from 2005 to 2008, averaging about 14,000 hectares. Then it suddenly shot up to 20,000 hectares in 2009 and almost 26,000 last year.

Findings from the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime show that opium growers are benefiting from the rebuilt irrigation canals and ditches. Its 2007 Afghan Opium Survey reported that 37 percent of villages getting irrigation aid or other external assistance were cultivating opium.

Halfway around the world, more and more of this opium is finding its way to Canada. Our heroin used to come mostly from Southeast Asia’s “golden triangle”: Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. That started to change after 2001 when Afghanistan emerged as Canada’s number one supplier, according to the RCMP’s annual drug reports.

By happy coincidence, B.C. has been partially buffered from the impacts. Vancouver Coastal Health had already started to ramp up spending on addiction treatment due to a spike in heroin overdoses in the 1990s.

VCH also funds and operates (with the PHS Community Services Society) the Downtown Eastside’s Insite supervised-injection facility, which cut OD deaths in the surrounding area by more than one-third, according to a study published on April 18 in British medical journal the Lancet. (That hasn’t stopped the Harper government from trying to close Insite. The Supreme Court of Canada is expected to rule later this year on whether or not Ottawa can revoke Insite’s permit to operate, which has been upheld in two lower-court decisions.)

Meanwhile, there are signs of a heroin comeback. “Heroin is making a bit of a resurgence,” Sgt. Shinder Kirk of the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit–B.C. said by phone from his office in Surrey.

The number of Native people in Vancouver who died of illicit-drug overdoses went up from eight in 2001 to 14 in 2005 (the latest available data), according to a 2007 report for the Canadian Community Epidemiology Network on Drug Use.

B.C. students saw a “small but significant increase” in heroin use between 2003 and 2008, the nonprofit McCreary Centre Society’s “Adolescent Health Survey” reported in 2008.

Despite the extra money for addiction services, fewer heroin users are getting treatment. In 2001, only 18 percent of injection-drug users in Vancouver had access to services like detox, a recovery house, counselling, or a treatment centre. That number fell to seven percent in 2007, according to a 2009 report from the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.

The centre’s report also found that more injection-drug users were homeless (13 percent in 2001 versus 24 percent in 2007), and more had HIV (0.6 percent in 2001 compared to 2.4 percent in 2007).

The numbers underscore growing problems for heroin users, said Dave Murray, a volunteer at the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. Murray himself used heroin for 15 years. “I lost everything I owned. I generally went into a ditch,” he said, speaking over his cellphone as he walked through the Downtown Eastside, where he lives.

He gave up heroin three or four years ago and now advocates for better services for heroin users.

Based on what he sees on the streets, Murray said, he believes that more young people have been doing heroin in Vancouver in recent years. And he said it’s getting harder for them to find help, especially since the closure of the Miracle Valley substance-abuse treatment centre outside Mission last year. “There are not enough treatment spaces, that’s for sure,” he said.

Heroin users typically wait one to three months for a spot in a provincially funded treatment centre, Murray said. “What do we do with the person while they’re waiting?” he asked. A user who has gone through detox should have a “seamless” entry into a residential treatment facility to have any chance of getting clean, he said. “If the person goes back out into the community, chances are he will fail.”

After finishing a treatment program, users can stay at a recovery house—a residence where they can try to get back on their feet, find a job, and get away from old habits. But Murray said many recovery houses in B.C. are “terribly run”, and recovering users there live in “poor conditions”. Instead of closing, Murray said, Insite should be expanded. The centre has room for only 12 injectors at a time—hardly enough for the neighbourhood’s estimated 5,000 injection-drug users.

Murray is also troubled by the fast-rising number of heroin-related arrests by Vancouver police. He thinks it suggests there’s a new generation of heroin users out there who aren’t showing up yet in other data. It also means the city is flouting its Four Pillars drug strategy of prioritizing treatment, prevention, and harm reduction rather than criminalizing users, he said.

“They’re putting more money into enforcement; they’re building more prisons. Vancouver talks about Four Pillars. It’s one pillar and three toothpicks. Three-quarters of the money goes to enforcement,” he said.

Vancouver police didn’t respond to a Straight request for comment.

Other provinces in Canada are also seeing a growing heroin problem. In Toronto, the portion of Grade 7 to 12 students who reported using heroin in the previous year almost doubled, from 0.6 to 1.1 percent, between 2001 and 2007, according to the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

But Canada’s heroin woes pale beside those of Afghanistan itself. It has an estimated one million opiate addicts—eight percent of the population. It’s another way the fates of ordinary Canadians and Afghans have become joined in the past 10 years. After all, a poppy palace doesn’t come cheap.

This story was done with research support from the Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting.

The Meat of the Matter

2011-05-20T17:24:00.004-04:00

Insiders say Canada's meat-inspection system isn't keeping consumers safe from food-borne illnesses.

by Alex Roslin

The Georgia Straight

October 21, 2010

[This story won the Canadian Association of Journalists award for best investigative reporting in a Canadian magazine in 2010. See the Georgia Straight site's version of the story here.]

At the end of a gravel road 20 kilometres east of Fort St. John, Arlene Laughren’s house used to be her little piece of heaven.

Now it’s like a prison.

Laughren moved here six years ago with her husband, Keith Holmes, to raise horses, llamas, sheep, and chickens and to grow vegetables on a 66-hectare hobby farm amid the picturesque coulees, hills, and ravines by the Peace River.

Now most of the animals are gone and her garden is overgrown with tall weeds. Laughren, 53, is stuck at home while her husband is away at work. She has brain damage, memory loss, and poor balance. She can no longer drive and hasn’t worked in more than two years—ever since she got two brain abscesses after eating a bad ham sandwich.

It was July 2008 when Laughren ate the ham produced by Maple Leaf Foods while at the Fort St. John hospital. She was getting treatment related to Crohn’s disease, which she has had since childhood. Her medication suppressed her immune system and made her more vulnerable to the Listeria monocytogenes bacteria on the ham.

Four days after the fateful meal, violent headaches started and she began to feel dizzy. After two falls, hospital staff gave her a CAT scan and saw something abnormal in her brain. Laughren was flown by air ambulance to Vancouver, where she had brain surgery. Doctors traced the abscesses to the ham, and she was diagnosed with the bacterial infection listeriosis. She remained in a Vancouver hospital for five months of treatment, followed by six weeks of rehabilitation.

Two years later, Laughren says doctors told her she will never work again. She used to counsel youth with difficulties at the Fort St. John high school. “I really miss them,” she says.

Laughren was one of hundreds of Canadians sickened—many with gastroenteritis—in the 2008 Maple Leaf listeria outbreak, which caused 57 confirmed cases of listeriosis. Twenty-three died, including one in B.C., and many, like Laughren, suffered permanent disabilities. A government inquiry into the fiasco placed much of the blame on numerous shortcomings in the government’s food-safety system.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency was especially singled out. The so-called Weatherill inquiry said it didn’t have enough meat inspectors and was poorly managed. For four years, inspectors had failed to do all of the required audits of the Toronto Maple Leaf plant that produced the tainted meat. The inquiry made 57 recommendations for improvements.

But more than a year later, food scientists and the CFIA’s own meat inspectors say that most of the recommendations have yet to be adopted and that Canada’s food supply may not be safer than before.

If anything, they say the level of inspection of deli meats—the kind involved in the Maple Leaf episode—may actually have declined. Meanwhile, the numbers of food poisonings and recalls are rising. And new, controversial methods of producing meat are increasing the risk of food-borne illnesses even more while raising other questions about the meat on our plates.

“The rates of listeria recalls in recent years are amazing. It’s one after the other. The rates are going up; recalls are going up. Something is fundamentally wrong,” says Kevin Allen, an assistant professor of food microbiology at the University of British Columbia.

“It’s safe to say some of the sanitation methods are not working as they should,” he says in a phone interview from his office. “There is a lack of control in the food-production process.”

Since the 2004 fiscal year, Canada has seen a steady rise in the number of meat and poultry recalls each year, according to data provided by the CFIA (which would not grant an interview to the Georgia Straight). The number has more than doubled, from 44 in 2004 to 91 in 2008. B.C. has been especially hard hit by food recalls. It experienced 605 recalls of all types of food, including meat and poultry, between 2004 and 2008—or 26 percent of the national total. Yet B.C. has only 13 percent of Canada’s population.

And because most food-borne illnesses never come to the government’s attention, the reported cases represent just a tiny fraction of all the food poisonings—only one out of every 300 to 350 actual cases, according to the Maple Leaf inquiry. In fact, food-borne illnesses sicken a whopping 11 to 13 million Canadians each year, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada, and as many as 500 may die as a result.

Why are food poisonings skyrocketing? Bob Kingston has a good idea why: a hobbled meat-inspection system that’s a shadow of its former self and that struggles to keep up with the fast-changing food industry. If anything, he says, meat inspectors are even more taxed now than before the Maple Leaf disaster.

Kingston worked for almost 30 years as a federal quarantine inspector in Burnaby before becoming president of the 9,500-member Agriculture Union, which includes federal meat inspectors. Earlier this year, his union gave Canada’s food-safety system a failing grade for heeding so few of the Maple Leaf inquiry’s recommendations.

“You’re up to five or six plants per inspector. I know inspectors who have told me they are responsible for 10 plants. If they actually want enforcement, it’s way over the top,” he says.

“All you have time to do is glance at the paperwork, see if it’s fine, and race to the next plant. If you have to do an enforcement action, good luck finding time to do it.”

The problem comes down to time. It takes about 800 hours (or 20 weeks of full-time work) to meet inspection requirements for a single processed-meat plant, according to union estimates. That doesn’t include hundreds of additional hours needed for certifying imports and exports, plus leave or vacation time.

“I feel for the inspectors,” says UBC’s Allen. “Many are faced with an unruly workload. They’re really taxed right now.”

According to the Weatherill inquiry, government inspectors assigned to the Toronto Maple Leaf plant “appear to have been stressed due to their responsibilities at other plants”. In September 2009, with a possible federal election looming, Ottawa promised to hire 70 new meat inspectors to fill shortfalls identified in the inquiry. A year later, only 40 of the new positions have been filled. Much of the money for the new hires was simply taken out of other CFIA operations, Kingston says; penny-pinching at the agency is so tight that it has cancelled training initiatives and some offices have no money for pens or paper.

Even our neighbours are taking notice. Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture told Canada it wasn’t meeting U.S. standards for inspecting processed meat destined for export south of the border. It demanded that Canadian meat inspectors check up on exporting plants once every 12 hours, as U.S. standards require.

Canada increased the level of checks to that standard. Meanwhile, plants making processed meat for Canadians are inspected at the far more leisurely pace of only once a week. The CFIA says inspectors spend more time during each of their weekly inspections of the plants with Canadian-destined meat, so the total amount of inspection time is the same as for U.S.–destined meat.

Kingston says this is “highly unlikely”. He notes that the CFIA would have needed the equivalent of 50 extra full-time inspectors to meet the greater frequency of USDA-mandated inspections. If the level of inspection was really the same, he says, no new hires would have been needed.

He also says plants visited more often tend to have better safety records. “If an inspector comes once a day, a plant behaves totally differently than when they know the inspector is coming only once a week,” he says.

Because there is little money for the new hires, the extra USDA-mandated inspections have resulted in astronomical levels of overtime for the CFIA’s existing 260 processed-meat inspectors, Kingston says. The additional burden means many inspectors are now faced with an even greater workload than before 2008, he says.

It wasn’t always like this. The food-safety system and meat industry have both undergone a sea change since 1981, when Kingston became a union rep for federal agriculture department employees, including meat inspectors. (He moved to the CFIA when it was created in 1997.)

In the 1980s, beef was usually butchered by hand in a large number of small meat-processing plants spread across the country. Each one had a federal meat inspector assigned to oversee it full-time. Mechanization of slaughterhouse operations and processing started to transform the industry in the late 1980s and 1990s. Machines run by low-wage operators started to replace trained butchers. The small plants were consolidated into fewer, large operations—some on a massive scale. One plant in Alberta processes 2,000 beef carcasses in a single day. Another in Manitoba goes through 10,000 pigs daily.

The machines might be more efficient, but they’re also less able than a human hand to butcher an animal in a way that avoids contaminating it with bacteria-laden feces, Kingston says. Also, when there was a bacteria outbreak at one of the smaller plants, it was usually pretty limited in scope. “Now if you do half a day’s run [of tainted product] out of one of these big plants, you’ve contaminated half the continent,” Kingston says.

These were also the lean years of Brian Mulroney’s budget cutbacks and deregulation. Ottawa was only too happy to acquiesce to industry demands to reduce the burden of meat inspection. Inspectors now found themselves responsible for several facilities each, as opposed to one, even as the plants ballooned in size.

At the same time, inspectors got go-easy marching orders. Previously, when inspectors saw a problem—like unsanitary conditions—they’d pull the plug on operations or slow production until the issue was fixed.

Starting in 2005, the federal government took the deregulation a step further by quietly implementing a new food-safety system that shifted much of the burden of policing to the meat industry. Instead of shutting down a dirty facility, inspectors were instructed to issue a “corrective action request”. A meat processor would now usually have 14 days to respond with an explanation of how it would deal with the issue—and would, in most cases, have another 60 days to implement changes. Companies can request time extensions past the initial 60 days. They are routinely granted, Kingston says.

An inspector who shuts down a meat plant today “would probably be disciplined unless he has approval from five levels of management. He would be accused of being overzealous,” Kingston says.

The new meat-inspection regimen was slammed in the Maple Leaf inquiry, which said it was plagued by a shortage of inspectors, poor planning, mismanagement, and lack of training for supervisors. The Weatherill inquiry called on the CFIA to audit its new system; it is not clear if that audit is still under way.

At the same time as Canada deregulated meat production, other innovations were altering the very composition of the meat we eat and creating new challenges for food safety. One of the greatest changes was finding a profitable new use for fatty layers at the outer surfaces of a cow carcass, known in the industry as “bench trim”.

Once used mostly for pet food and cooking oil, the fatty trimmings are now widely used in hamburger in Canada and the U.S. The trimmings are combined with leaner cuts from many different cows, frequently from various countries, the New York Times reported in an October 2009 investigation. Author Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) wrote in Rolling Stone back in 1998 that one U.S. fast-food burger patty may contain meat from 40 to 100 different cows raised in as many as six different countries.

The low-grade cuts are more susceptible to E. coli bacterial contamination because they come from parts of the cow that are more likely to come into contact with feces. Trimmings were at the centre of controversy in the U.S. last year after illness outbreaks linked to tainted hamburger. The outbreaks prompted U.S. authorities to tighten inspection of bench trim.

More controversy has surrounded “meat glue”. The “glue” is a natural protein derived from cow or pig blood. It allows meat processors to stick together various lumps of meat into a regular-looking steak, roast, or kebab. In the meat business, it’s known as “restructured beef”.

Canada allows the product to be sold here, but the European parliament rejected it for sale in the EU in May because of concerns that artificial steaks could mislead the public. “Consumers in Europe should be able to trust that they are buying a real steak or ham, not pieces of meat that have been glued together,” Jo Lienen, chair of the parliament’s environment committee, said during debate on the issue.

The glue also raises food-safety issues, says Keith Warriner, an associate professor of food science at the University of Guelph, in a phone interview from his office. If there is a bacteria outbreak, it’s much harder to figure out the source when chunks of meat from multiple cows were combined.

Also, the products need to be fully cooked, like ground beef, to kill bacteria. A regular steak is safe to eat medium-rare because only its surface has bacteria. But when different cuts of meat are blended together, the product may have contaminated surfaces on the inside, and it has to be cooked to an internal temperature of 71 ° C (160 ° F). This, Warriner says, could lead to confusion among consumers used to cooking their steaks medium-rare (63 ° C, or 145 ° F).

Yet another innovation is “modified atmosphere packaging”, the widespread practice of filling meat packaging with adjusted levels of oxygen and other gases. The gases can keep meat from losing its fresh-looking red hue. Shiv Chopra, an Ottawa food-safety expert and retired Health Canada scientist, said in an e-mail that the technique is “dangerous” because it may prevent shoppers from seeing when meat has gone bad. UBC’s Allen agreed: “This can be misleading to consumers.”

It all adds up to huge challenges for a tattered food-safety system. Kingston predicts more Maple Leaf–type incidents. “It’s inevitable that more of this comes along if nothing changes.”

Back at her home outside Fort St. John, Laughren is disheartened. “The one thing I thought would come from this is they would improve food safety. But I don’t think there has been much of anything done.”

She gazes longingly at the horse saddle hanging on a saddle rack in her living room. She used to ride in amateur competitions, but now she doesn’t have enough coordination to ride a horse. She is still waiting to receive part of a $27-million payout that Maple Leaf agreed to make last year to settle several class-action lawsuits related to the listeria outbreak. With thousands of claimants expected, the processing of claims has been a time-consuming task.

Meanwhile, the Canada Revenue Agency is hounding her husband for writing off his stay in Vancouver while he helped Laughren recover from her brain surgery. Despite a doctor’s letter saying her husband’s presence “was imperative for her treatment”, the taxman nixed the write-off and is demanding back taxes.

“You just expect the government to be watching our backs. But that’s silly,” Laughren says.

Her memory loss means she sometimes forgets things like friends’ names and her phone number, but there’s one thing she always remembers: her decision to never eat processed meat again.

Global Warming Impacts Health

2010-10-07T12:04:00.011-04:00

Climate change threatens to trigger a widespread and devastating health crisis in Canada. Why are medical professionals and policy-makers slow off the mark?

by Alex Roslin

Canadian Geographic

October 2010

[This article won a gold prize from the National Magazine Awards in the Editorial Package category and was a finalist for a second National Magazine Award in the Health & Medicine category.]

Monday, July 5, 2010, was the kind of sticky, pavement-shimmering Montréal day that only kids at a water park could appreciate. And that is just where 14-year-old Mathieu Thibodeau-Ross found himself, heading for the whitewater rafting ride at the Mont Saint-Sauveur Water Park, 75 kilometres northwest of Montréal.

The humidex was approaching 40°C a little after 11 a.m. when Mathieu started up the stairs to access the ride. He never made it to the top. Witnesses would later report that the teen started to wheeze and then collapsed. He was pronounced dead at the hospital, a victim of cardiac arrest.

It will likely take several months for the Quebec coroner’s office to determine what role the high heat and humidity may have played in Mathieu’s fate. But it is already clear that the number of deaths spiked to unusually high levels during the hot spell which began on that blazing July day. By Thursday, Environment Canada was calling it the most intense heat wave on record in Montréal. With thick smog blanketing the city all week, 80 people died in Montréal from various causes on that Thursday alone — double the typical daily total. ...

[Read the rest of this story here.]

Who Dares to Speak...

2010-09-04T22:56:00.005-04:00

BY ALEX ROSLIN

THE MONTREAL GAZETTE

Saturday, August 28, 2010

[See story at Gazette site here and sidebar here.]

Dr. Shiv Chopra still remembers the words his friend spoke a few days before he died. "Every time I come here, I vomit," Dr. Chris Basudde, a fellow Health Canada doctor, had said. "I feel sick. I can't take this."

Chopra told his friend to see a doctor and take some time off work. Days later, he was stunned to learn that Basudde had died of a suspected heart attack.

Chopra said he, Basudde and two other Health Canada doctors were living under enormous stress and had seen their careers and lives turned upside down after they had protested against plans to approve bovine growth hormone -which was eventually banned from dairy production in 1999 -and other drugs they considered to be unsafe.

The four doctors were subjected to harassment and isolated from each other in different buildings, Chopra said. He got shingles that he attributes to the stress and went on sick leave. Health Canada fired Chopra and the two other surviving doctors in 2004, citing insubordination.

They have been fighting ever since to overturn their firings before a labour tribunal.

Chopra's story shows the intense personal and professional stress whistleblowers frequently face when they expose wrongdoing. Critics say it also shows how the Harper government, which was first elected promising openness and transparency, has failed to protect whistleblowers and, instead, has become obsessed with stamping out criticism.

So what is a lone whistle-blower to do in times of ever-greater government secrecy? Why, harness the magic of the Internet, of course.

As official channels of complaint fail, some whistleblowers in other countries are exposing wrongdoing by turning to websites like WikiLeaks, which has published leaked U.S. military footage of a massacre of Iraqi civilians and thousands of pages of classified U.S. military reports.

And whistle-blower advocates warn that Canadian government and corporate secrets may also start turning up on such websites if Canada doesn't do more to protect whistle-blowers.

We've come a long way since 1969 when Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg painstakingly photocopied 7,000 pages of a classified U.S. military study on the Vietnam War and smuggled them out in his briefcase -only to spend more than a year trying to find a way to make the damning information public.

Nowadays, the Pentagon Papers could have gone viral minutes after Ellsberg hit "send."

***

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper created an independent Public Sector Integrity Commissioner to protect whistleblowers in 2007, Chopra was cautiously optimistic. Here finally was someone who might investigate the doctors' claim that Health Canada managers had pressured them to approve questionable drugs.

Three years later, however, integrity commissioner Christiane Ouimet's office is getting a failing grade from whistleblowers.

"None feel they have actually had satisfaction from the system. They're told to go away and that their case won't be dealt with," said David Hutton, the executive director of the Federal Accountability Initiative for Reform, an Ottawa-based advocacy group that says it is in contact with about 90 Canadian whistle-blowers.

Hutton is calling on Harper to overhaul Canada's "fatally flawed" whistle-blower protection system and to replace Ouimet, a career federal civil servant, with someone more independently minded, noting that she has dismissed almost every complaint she's got.

Hutton said his group has heard from 15 federal government whistle-blowers who have dealt with the integrity commissioner's office. "What we hear from whistle-blowers is that her office is like a black hole. They feed all this information, and they never hear back," he said.

It's part of a broader dysfunction in Canadian governments of stamping out internal criticism and jealously guarding government secrets -a culture that has only accelerated under Harper, Hutton said.

Harper is under fire over silencing a long list of high-profile critics. They include veterans ombudsman Pat Strogan and crime-victims ombudsman Steve Sullivan (whose terms weren't renewed after they criticized the government), Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission president Linda Keen (who was fired after she shut down the Chalk River reactor due to safety concerns) and Statistics Canada boss Munir Sheikh (who resigned recently after clashing with the government over changes to the census).

The integrity commissioner's office acknowledges it's launched few investigations. Out of 156 complaints about wrongdoing or reprisals from potential whistle-blowers reviewed in its first two years of operations, her office decided only five of the cases warranted an investigation.

Ouimet didn't find any wrongdoing or reprisal in a single case, according to her office's first two annual reports.

Brian Radford, senior counsel in Ouimet's office, defended the commissioner's record. "I don't think we are surprised by the numbers ... when you look at the complexity of the act and its precise jurisdiction."

But Hutton is flabbergasted at the lack of results. "It's hard to believe there has been no wrongdoing whatsoever, and that no one's suffered any reprisals for reporting it, when her jurisdiction is 400,000 federal employees."

Three whistle-blowers told The Gazette they were disillusioned by how the integrity commissioner's office handled their complaints of misconduct and punishment for speaking out.

One manager said he experienced severe reprisals after reporting fraud involving several million dollars in his department. Speaking on condition of anonymity because an internal departmental investigation is still ongoing, he said he was demoted, harassed, relocated to an isolated area and told not to speak to his own supervisor.

He said extreme stress from the situation led to heart palpitations and memory loss, forcing him to take an unpaid leave of absence.

When he informed the integrity commissioner's office, he said, he was told it sounded "like a textbook case" of reprisal, but that his case wouldn't be accepted because he had already filed an ongoing union grievance.

"There was a brick wall dealing with her office. They refused to communicate. I have no confidence that she is there to do anything for me. Accountability just doesn't exist," he said.

A now-retired regional director in another federal department said he, too, is disillusioned with the integrity commissioner. Speaking anonymously because his wife still works for the government, he said he faced reprisals after he reported to superiors that department officials weren't following ministerial policies.

He said he filed complaints about the wrongdoing and reprisals to the integrity commissioner. After several months without results and suffering from depression, he said, he withdrew his complaints and took early retirement.

"They were not helpful in anything," he said of the commissioner's office.

***

Chopra said he has also gotten nowhere fast with the integrity commissioner.

At his five-acre spread in Manotick, 30 kilo-metres south of Ottawa, Chopra, 76, bides his time tending to a large organic garden with his five grandchildren and speaking out about food safety.

He chronicled his battle with Health Canada in a 2008 book titled Corrupt to the Core: Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistle-blower.

In it, Chopra tells a cautionary tale of how a whistle-blower can get bogged down in years of grinding legal and bureaucratic wrangling.

Chopra and his colleagues first filed complaints in 2002 about the wrongdoing and reprisals they say they witnessed at Health Canada. The complaints went to the Public Service Integrity Officer, a predecessor to the current integrity commissioner who was widely seen as too cozy with the government because he worked at the Treasury Board.

The integrity officer agreed that one of the doctors had experienced a reprisal but rejected their complaints about wrongdoing. The doctors appealed to the Federal Court of Canada.

In 2005, the court sided with the doctors, saying the integrity officer's bureau had erred in law and "failed to conduct the investigation in accordance with its mandate."

The court ordered the integrity officer to reexamine the complaints. The new integrity commissioner took over the case in 2007.

Her office dismissed the reprisal complaint last year, Chopra said.

The integrity commissioner's Radford said he can't comment on specific cases, citing confidentiality concerns. But his office's annual report last year mentions a reprisal complaint known simply as "Case 4" that was rejected and involves the same details as that of Chopra and his colleagues.

"It was not in the public interest for the tribunal to hear this reprisal complaint," the report said. "There was a need for finality in this matter."

"That's complete nonsense," Chopra says of the decision. "We're talking about pressure to pass questionable drugs. How can that not be in the public interest? Our lawyers sent them tons of stuff that was in the public interest."

The integrity commissioner is dealing separately with the doctors' complaint of wrongdoing at Health Canada. Its decision could come in its third annual report due after Parliament resumes sitting in September.

Radford refused to reveal the commissioner's decision, but he hinted that his office feels Case 4 is really about a public-policy issue rather than misconduct. "We felt the subject matter of the disclosure really concerns an issue of public policy. Our office cannot substitute itself for a political decision-maker."

Chopra is reserving comment until he sees the commissioner's report, but he was unhappy about Radford's take. "If they say it's public policy, that's just kicking the ball back and forth. Our complaint is we were being pressured not to apply the law. Someone's going to have to be responsible to the public."

Even starting an investigation at the commissioner's office seems at times to be a major ordeal. Its annual report last year gives one especially telling example.

Three different complaints surfaced at the same time "alleging gross mismanagement in the form of widespread and recurring contracting irregularities. Given the responsibilities of the organization, the allegations raised serious concerns about potential danger to public health and safety."

The allegations were further "supplemented by corroborating information from other sources, and it strongly suggested the possibility of wrongdoing."

At some point, however, the three complainants got cold feet and didn't want to help the commissioner's office any further. The commissioner, despite having all the powers to subpoena witnesses of a full royal commission of inquiry, decided not to investigate.

"It did not cross the threshold of evidence in law to require a formal investigation," Radford said of the case.

"The disclosers never disclosed to us precise facts. Based on that, we did not see anything irregular that would justify further investigation. ... We didn't identify any deficiencies."

Radford said his office prepared a list of best practices it submitted to the organization, but it didn't bother to follow up to see if anything changed. "I don't think they adopted our best practices," he said.

"We did not request that they follow up with us. We do not know if they amended their policies."

***

Other countries have taken far bolder steps to protect whistle-blowers and ferret out wrongdoing.

Sweden has some of the best legal protection for those who leak stories to the media. Its constitution says authorities can't investigate a journalist's sources, except in exceptional cases of national security. A confidential source can even seek criminal charges against a journalist who reveals his or her identity without consent.

Britain has a whistle-blower-protection law covering virtually the entire workforce (not just federal civil servants, like Canada's law). Whistle-blowers there filed 1,761 complaints last year. Of those that went to a public hearing, the whistle-blower won 22 per cent of the time.

Hutton said that's far better than in Canada, where the rate is zero per cent.

The U.S. is in some ways seen as a mecca for whistle-blowers because of a culture of celebrating the little guy who stands up to wrongdoing. Some whistle-blowers have got Hollywood treatment, like New York cop Frank Serpico, who exposed police corruption, and Erin Brockovich, who exposed industrial pollution.

The U.S. pioneered some of the world's first whistle-blower-protection laws in the 1970s and 1980s, but one of its strongest tools dates back to the Civil War. Under the False Claims Act, created after the Union Army was sold faulty rifles and ailing donkeys, a whistle-blower can sue a federal contractor believed to be defrauding the U.S. government and pocket part of any court-awarded payout.

Such cases have become a major tool for fighting fraud in the pharmaceutical industry. False Claims Act suits led to $6.3 billion (U. S.) in settlement payments to the U.S. government related to fraudulent marketing of drugs between 2001 and 2009, according to a New England Journal of Medicine study in May.

Whistle-blowers received an average $3 million in each case.

"The U.S. is so different from us in terms of the openness in government. There is all kinds of stuff our government hides from us that you'll actually find on websites in the U.S.," Hutton said.

But even the U.S. is far from perfect. Most whistle-blowers say that even the money from the False Claims cases was not worth the personal cost of coming forward, including divorce, ruined careers and stress-related health problems, the New England journal study found.

In July, Congress boosted the protection of corporate whistle-blowers as part of its Wall Street Reform Law.

But the measures don't protect government employees, and critics say the Obama administration has actually retreated on helping them.

The Obama justice department has vowed to aggressively pursue unauthorized leaks, and according to a Newsweek report, even boasts of being more zealous than it was under George W. Bush. It prosecuted three leaks in its first 17 months in office. Previously, such prosecutions were rare.

Back in Ottawa, Hutton said the clampdowns and failed protections are not in the public's interest. "Most whistle-blowers get into this situation because they're simply trying to do their job honestly."

Chopra, for his part, said he wouldn't hesitate to do it all over again despite the hardships. "It was my duty to do so under Canadian law. One cannot think of hardships when it is part of one's duty."

His advice to other whistle-blowers: "Never do it for glory. Once you do it, you will be riding a tiger. It will be him or you."

***

Wikileaks: Hitting "send" to expose a dirty secret

Faced with mounting secrecy and the failure of official channels of complaint, whistle-blowers seem to be turning increasingly to the Internet and websites pledged to expose government and corporate secrets, in the public interest.

For whistle-blowers, the sites allow them to expose secrets as fast as they can hit "send." Critics argue the sites may endanger lives by posting national security information.

The best known is WikiLeaks, a nonprofit site run by Julian Assange, an Australian-born former teen hacker.

WikiLeaks shot to prominence in April when it posted classified military footage of a U.S. Apache gunship killing 12 Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists, and wounding two children.

In Ottawa, whistle-blower advocate David Hutton is watching WikiLeaks with growing fascination.

Hutton, the executive director of the Federal Accountability Initiative for Reform, said sites like WikiLeaks could be a powerful new tool for whistle-blowers as they face growing government secrecy, while official channels for complaints seem to be failing.

"WikiLeaks could turn out to be the norm in the future. It may make it harder for governments and corporations to keep dirty secrets," he said.

WikiLeaks caused more sensation in July when it published 77,000 classified U.S. military documents painting a dismal picture of the war in Afghanistan. The reports revealed details of U.S. commando units assigned to kill or capture insurgents, secret Pakistani support for the Taliban and abusive and corrupt Afghan authorities. The site promises to release another 15,000 Afghan-related files in coming weeks along with a video showing a U.S. airstrike on Afghan civilians.

The Pentagon has reacted with fury, demanding the return of the documents. In July, U.S. army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was charged with leaking classified information to WikiLeaks. The FBI is still exploring charges against WikiLeaks itself.

Nonetheless, the site could herald a new culture of whistle-blowing on steroids, free of dependence on journalists or integrity commissioners to right wrongs.

At the same time, WikiLeaks could create a new model for gumshoe investigative reporters who collaborate with websites to reveal whistle-blower information. WikiLeaks gave early access to its Afghan files to the New York Times, the Guardian of London and Germany's Der Spiegel, which analyzed the documents and published lengthy reports.

The models are still experiencing growing pains. Human-rights groups slammed WikiLeaks for not deleting the names of Afghan civilians who helped Western forces. Assange seems to have taken the criticism to heart, pledging to remove civilian names from his next release.

Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, for his part, has called Assange his "hero" and praised his work as "exemplary."

"For 40 years I've hoped that someone would put out information on the scale that I did, but in a more timely way than I did," he said in a PBS interview.

Hutton notes, "People are concerned about WikiLeaks, but what level of concern should we have that access to information is just a joke in this country?"

Plenty to Carp About

2010-06-02T10:29:00.002-04:00

CLIMATE FILES

Trying to hold the line against a big, hungry fish that would thrive in our ever-warmer waters

By Alex Roslin

Canadian Wildlife

May/June 2010

A highly invasive fish that could devastate the Great Lakes ecosystem has penetrated into Lake Michigan for the first time, and fish biologists say climate change will likely exacerbate its onslaught.

“It’s a potential knockout blow for the Great Lakes,” says Scott Parker, a Parks Canada biologist who monitors invasive species at the Fathom Five National Marine Park in Georgian Bay. “They’ll dominate (native species) and have a huge impact.”

The notorious Asian carp, a voracious plankton-eater sometimes called the aquatic vacuum cleaner, grows to 45 kilograms and consumes up to 40 per cent of its weight daily. It has already decimated the ecosystems of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers and their once-diverse fisheries. Carp, which are virtually worthless commercially, now make up 90 per cent of the fish caught in those rivers.

While a live Asian carp has yet to be found in Lake Michigan, a test used to detect the species’ DNA in water indicates a live fish was very likely present in the immediate area, says Jennifer Nalbone, an invasive species specialist at Great Lakes United, a joint Canada-U.S. environmental group. This despite the fact that American authorities put up an underwater electric barrier in April 2009 in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, the only link between the carp-infested Mississippi River and the Great Lakes, to prevent the species from reaching the Great Lakes.

Carp DNA was first detected beyond the barrier in August. In subsequent months, more of it was found further down the canal and in two rivers that drain into Lake Michigan. This past January, the DNA was detected in Chicago’s Calumet Harbor in the lake itself. [See the carp's progress on this map.]

The discoveries have set off panic among Canadian and U.S. fish scientists, environmentalists and the $7-billion Great Lakes fishery. In mid-February, the White House hosted a summit on ways to stop the carp invasion. And Michigan and Ontario authorities have gone to court to get the state of Illinois to block the canal. Illinois opposes the idea, saying it would hurt the state’s economy.

“The DNA evidence has certainly raised the sense of urgency,” says Nalbone, who faults authorities for not moving quickly enough and calls for a “very aggressive monitoring and eradication plan.”

Asian carp—a term that encompasses several invasive species of the fish such as bighead and silver carp—were imported to control nuisance algae in the southern states, but escaped into the Mississippi River during floods.

Apart from displacing native fish, silver carp are infamous for jumping out of the water when startled by watercraft [see video], something Becky Cudmore, a biologist and invasive species expert with the Fisheries and Oceans Canada, experienced first-hand when she and other carp scientists headed out on the Illinois River. Carp started flying out of water all around, some soaring as high as three metres and many landing in the boat.

One five-kilogram specimen smashed into Cudmore’s calf. “It left a good mark and numbed my leg for four hours,” she says. “It was very sobering. We really wouldn’t want them in Canada.”

Asian carp are a temperate-water fish, well suited to existing climactic conditions in the Great Lakes, even without global warming. But climate change will likely make the lakes even more susceptible to a carp invasion, says Bryan Neff, a biologist at the University of Western Ontario.

“Climate change can destabilize the natural ecosystem in the lakes and make it more susceptible to invaders,” he says. “The ability of a native ecosystem to repel invaders would diminish.”

With climate change, for example, Great Lakes water levels will likely fall, which could in turn “cause native species to become more sensitive and susceptible to invasive species,” Neff says.

Cudmore agrees. “Climate change will certainly help—not hinder—invasive species like the Asian carp.”

Alex Roslin is an award-winning journalist in Lac Brome, Qc., and writes a blog on investigative reporting at AlBloggedUp.Blogspot.com.

WARM UNWELCOME

Invasive species of wildlife and plants, which already cost $120 billion annually in the United States alone, are far more able to adapt to climate change than native species, a new study in the journal PLoS One says.

Two Harvard scientists studied plant-flowering data going back 150 years in Massachusetts, including information collected by conservationist Henry David Thoreau around the famed Walden Pond.

As the average temperature increased 2.4 degrees Celsius over this period, invasive plant species were able to advance their flowering time to be 11 days earlier than native species.

As a result, invasive species have significantly increased their population significantly more than native plants like lilies and orchids, with nearly two-thirds of the species Thoreau documented seeing sharp declines or disappeared.

“These results demonstrate for the first time that climate change likely plays a direct role in promoting non-native species success,” co-author and Harvard biologist Charles Davis told ScienceDaily.com.

The New Home-schooling

2010-05-18T09:46:00.001-04:00

It's twice as common today as it was a decade ago. But can "regular" families do it?

Alex Roslin

Today’s Parent

May 2010

It had been snowing for a week straight in Mansonville, a mountain village nestled in the Appalachians, 150 kilometres east of Montreal. But there was no hope of a snow day for 10-year-old Kira Nichols — she’s home-schooled. So she doesn’t even need to get out of her PJs to hit the books.

Besides, Kira doesn’t need cajoling to start school. Before breakfast, she’s already spent an hour engrossed in Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls. After reading for a while in French, Kira turns her attention to math, practising fractions on some worksheets that her mom, Kim, printed from an educational website. Then she works on a short story that she’s writing about mythical creatures, plays Scrabble with Mom (building Kira’s vocabulary) and plays outside.

School’s done for the day and it isn’t even time for lunch; Kira virtually never needs to spend more than two hours a day on academics to stay ahead of the school curriculum for her grade.

Kira and Kim are part of a fast-growing movement: In Canada, the number of home-schooled kids has doubled in a decade to an estimated 60,000 to 80,000, or two percent of this country’s school-aged population. In the US, 1½ to 2 million kids are home-schooled — about 3½ percent of all school-agers — and that number is growing seven percent a year.

What is home-schooling?

Home-schooling — once considered fringe or “granola” — has come of age. Many universities are now courting home-schoolers and designing special admissions rules to allow them to enter without a high school diploma. And home-schooled kids are showing they can compete with their more traditionally educated peers on the academic playing field. Studies of Canadian and US home-schoolers found they outperform their public-school counterparts by solid margins in math, language ability, reading, social sciences and science. They even tend to beat private-schoolers, whose scores average in the 65th to 75th percentile in these areas, versus the 75th to 85th percentile showings of home-schoolers.

Still not impressed? A study of more than 20,000 home-schoolers found that in grade four they are, on average, a grade ahead academically of their public and private school peers. By grade eight, they’re almost four grades ahead, even though the average home-schooler spends only three hours a day on academic learning, compared to the typical six-hour school day.

Presented with statistics like these, and the idyllic impression made by Kira and Kim, few would argue home-schooling is intriguing. But how doable is it really? And how can you tell if it’s a good fit for your family?

Home-schooling parents and even some education professionals say the first question is easy to answer. “It’s less daunting for parents than they might think,” Kim says assuredly. You don’t need to know how to develop a lesson plan or have any teaching experience. Parents can get all the curriculum materials they need from the Internet, by mail order or through swaps with other home-schooling families. (SeeResources for a list of helpful home-schooling websites.)

You can choose an existing teaching philosophy that reflects your family’s values and goals, or develop your own by combining teaching materials from several different sources. Approaches range widely, from the so-called traditional or school-at-home method, using the same textbooks and tests as your child would see in a public school setting, to “unit studies,” which encompass self-directed learning through books, worksheets, online resources and field trips, all the way to “unschooling,” where the idea is that learning opportunities are everywhere; a walk in the woods can turn into biology class and an evening walk, an astronomy lesson.

Abbi Miller’s parents were early proponents of unschooling, visiting places like the Grand Canyon in Arizona and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota to teach their children geography and history. “The world is your school” is how Abbi, now 25, sums up the approach. Looking back on her experience, she believes the more freedom kids are given to learn what interests them, the more likely they’ll be to retain their love of learning. A self-proclaimed “math geek,” Abbi was allowed to teach that subject to herself — something she did with great enthusiasm. “I would be like ‘Mom, I want more workbooks!’” she recalls.

Home-schooling successes

That kind of motivation and energy are a big part of home-schooling success. “The kid has to be not just willing, but highly motivated to do this,” says Gary Knowles, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education who’s worked as a school principal and a teacher of teachers for 30 years. He notes that chances of home-schooling success are better when families draw strongly on learning opportunities in the community — libraries, art galleries, museums, farms — and are open-minded and curious about the world.

Kim Nichols’ approach is to let her daughter, Kira, take the lead regarding what she wants to study. Mom helps set goals of how many hours should be devoted to various subjects each week, and answers questions when Kira gets stuck. Otherwise, she says, “Her schedule is pretty much her own.”

That kind of flexibility can be a boon to kids who like to dig deep into topics that interest them; a class doesn’t have to stop after the usual 45 or 60 minutes if a child is enthralled. And parents can custom-fit learning to nurture a young person’s interests and adapt to special needs, whether a child is gifted or having difficulties. Interestingly, a 2003 study of Canadian home-schoolers with cognitive limitations found they were performing at the same academic level as the average public-schooled kid.

What the critics say

Still, home-schooling isn’t for everyone. Knowles has been keeping tabs on several dozen home-schoolers for nearly three decades, as research for a book. He’s seen that home-schooling does not often work well when parents have major personality conflicts with their kids, or if a child isn’t fully on board for the experience. Cloistered environments in which children are taught intolerance or don’t get to meet a lot of other kids are also problematic.

Even two children from the same family may be differently suited. Kim Nichols’ son, Jordan, 12, wanted to stop home-schooling last fall. Part of the reason for the switch was wanting to spend more time with male pals his age, of which there are few among home-schoolers in their remote area. Now, despite a two-hour round-trip commute by school bus to the regional high school he now attends, Kim says Jordan looks forward to school all weekend, has quickly made new friends there, and is doing “very well” academically. Meanwhile, Kira is still happy to learn at home with their mom, and she hooks up with a group of home-schooling buddies for regular educational and social get-togethers.

Some critics say that this is where home-schooling falls down — in offering fewer opportunities for children to be with other children. “The best place for socialization and education is a public school,” insists Réjean Parent, president of Centrale des syndicats du Québec, the province’s largest teachers’ union.

Education professor Knowles disagrees. Socialization, he says, can be learned and not all school contexts are ideal for gaining these skills. “If you are a 13-year-old, who is to say that 1,300 other 13-year-olds are the best people to be responsible for socializing you?”

Home-schooling parents must work to ensure their kids are in contact with peers, but it can be done. Hamilton mom Kristy Crawford, who home-schooled three of her five children, connected with other families through a local home-schooling association that organized “really cool” outings almost every day of the week — bowling, rock climbing, French lessons, visits to orchards, museums, libraries, historic villages. Similar groups exist in cities across Canada, and they are easy to find online.

Because children’s social — and academic — successes aren’t expressed in regular report cards, parents who home-school also need to take a different perspective on their children’s progress. “Don’t expect linear development,” Knowles advises. “Kids might go a long time without seeming to make progress. Parents who home-school have to take a more fluid or open view of kids’ learning.”

If that thought fills you with parental panic, perhaps home-schooling isn’t for you. But for parents like Kim Nichols, the rewards are numerous. “Being there when they learn something new — it’s like a miracle,” she says. “I want to be there for those times.”

Home-schooled kids, happy adults?

What are home-schooled kids like once they’ve grown up? According to a study by the US National Home Education Research Institute, three-quarters of them will have at least some post-secondary education, compared to half the general population. That’s thanks, in part, to a fast-growing number of universities that accept home-schooled applicants, including Harvard, MIT and the West Point military academy in the United States, and the University of Toronto, York and McGill in Canada.

The study also found that those who were home-schooled are nearly twice as likely to volunteer as others their age.

And a Canadian study found home-schoolers scored an average of 4.9 out of six on a life satisfaction test (with six being the best), compared to 4.2 for public-schoolers.

Home-schooling and the law

Across Canada, it’s perfectly legal to pull your child out of the public school system and teach her at home. However, provincial regulations (and individual school boards) impose varying conditions on home-schooling families.

British Columbia is seen as a home-schooling mecca because its School Act gives parents the right to educate children at home in any way they choose, so long as they follow some kind of “educational plan.” Parents do need to register with a public or independent school, or a distance-learning institution. The province provides funds to the schools for each registered home-schooler, creating incentive for schools to work together with home-schooling families. Home-schoolers can even borrow computer equipment and textbooks from the schools. Policies are also quite liberal in Ontario and Alberta.

At the other end of the spectrum is Quebec, whose provincial Education Act allows home-schooling, but says parents must provide education “equivalent to what is provided in school” and gives school boards power to scrutinize home-schoolers’ progress.

The remaining provinces and territories mostly fall somewhere in between.

Resources

Click on these websites for home-schooling tools and info:

• lifelearning.ca Excellent Canadian home-schooling resource info and articles from Life Learning magazine, started by Canadian home-schooling pioneer Wendy Priesnitz.

• flora.org The Canadian Home Based Learning Resource Page lists hundreds of links for learning resources, home-schooling support groups, as well as province-by-province info on legal issues.

• homeedmag.com Home Education Magazine’s website has hundreds of free articles about home education, several blogs and a nice links library.

• en.wikibooks.org Access nearly 36,000 pages of educational textbooks for free. Click on Wikijunior for books about math, science, social studies and more for babies to preteens.

• happyhomeschooling.blogspot.com Quebec mom Kim Nichols blogs about her home education adventures and offers a great set of links to resources.

US Military Psychics

2009-12-28T14:15:00.001-05:00

BY ALEX ROSLIN

The incredible tale of how the CIA and American military spent $20 million trying to read people's minds.

November 23, 2009

MAISONNEUVE

Spies and psychics. They are as different as chocolate and peanut butter, and conspiracy theorists love them both. Throw them together, however, into the same story, and you've got a whole new level of fun and insanity—Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup on a millennial, almost Biblical scale.

So when word got out in 1995 that US military intelligence had been funding efforts to read people's minds for more than twenty years, the strange news inspired all sorts of excitement and derision—particularly when some of these same psychics expressed their belief in UFOs, time travel and alien-human hybrids.

One of the first military mentalists to disclose details of the program was David Morehouse. In his 1996 book Psychic Warrior, he recounts how, as a soldier, he started to have strange visions and out-of-body experiences after a stray bullet hit his helmet during a training exercise. Instead of getting psychiatric treatment, Morehouse, a decorated Ranger and airborne captain, was enrolled in the military’s highly secretive Stargate program.

Stargate had begun at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the early 1970s, in conjunction with a couple of laser scientists from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a body affiliated with Stanford University that did a lot of research for the U.S. government. One of the SRI scientists, Hal Puthoff, had already been dabbling in parapsychology when he was approached by CIA agents looking for a lab that could handle “a quiet, low-profile, classified investigation” outside normal academic lines.

According to Puthoff, the boys from Langley believed that the Russkies might be getting ahead in psychic experiments and felt that the CIA, too, needed to get involved—if only to figure out if the Soviets were capable of mind-controlling American generals.

Puthoff, a high-level Scientologist, claimed that he could “remotely view” things that he couldn’t physically see—such as information on a building directory inside a locked building. The boys at Langley grew interested and, in 1972, the CIA started funding Puthoff and his “empaths” (often fellow Scientologists).

These were heady, psychedelic times. The previous year, a US Army intelligence official, quoting an astrologer, had warned that “there is great danger that within the next 10 years the Soviets will be able to steal our top secrets by using out-of-body spies.” Soviet efforts at mind-reading would later be largely discredited as hoaxes, but fears of a psychic cold war had a receptive audience in the fringes of the US national security establishment. Stargate possessed a veneer of science as well as the possibility of gaining formidable advantage over the enemy.

The military’s foray into crystal-ballism was also part of a broader attempt by US spies and solders to reinvent themselves in the dog days after Vietnam. Within the CIA, there had always been tension between factions accustomed to more hard-edged tactics (such as the Phoenix program, which tortured and assassinated suspected Vietnamese peasant leaders) and those staff who favoured softer techniques—such as dusting Fidel Castro’s shoes with poisonous thallium to make his beard fall off. Now, in the earlier 1970s, the kooky coalition seemed to gain the upper edge.

One of the gurus of this rethink was Jim Channon, an army lieutenant-colonel assigned to study ways of creating a more “spiritual” army. According to Jon Ronson in The Men Who Stare at Goats, Channon attended a retreat at the Esalen Institute for the Advancement of Human Potential in Big Sur. Led by mentor Michael Murphy, a founder of the New Age movement, Channon engaged there in Reichian rebirthing, primal arm wrestling (regular arm wrestling combined with guttural screaming) and naked hot-tub encounter sessions. When he emerged, Channon wrote a confidential report in 1979 that started: “The U.S. army doesn’t really have any serious alternative than to be wonderful.”

Channon’s report proposed the creation of a First Earth Battalion of Zen-master super soldiers with telepathic powers. These “warrior monks” would carry ginseng regulators in their uniforms, divining tools and a loudspeaker to play indigenous music and words. They would also give their enemies “an automatic hug” and carry lambs into hostile countries, a symbol of their peaceful intent. They would learn how to fast, sense plant auras, pass through walls and “stop using mindless clichés.” “It is America’s role to lead the world to paradise,” he wrote.

(Channon’s idea of using loud music to confuse the enemy was tested out a few years later on Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega. In 2003, in Iraq, US Army soldiers forced detainees to listen to children’s songs like “I Love You” from Barney and Friends. The technique continues to be used on al-Qaeda prisoners today—some of them, according to Ronson, locked blindfolded in burning hot metal shipping containers, forced into crouching positions and surrounded by barbed wire while the music plays loudly non-stop for days.)

Far from being ridiculed, Channon’s report deeply moved a group of senior army officers, some brought nearly to tears, writes Ronson, because they held so many pent-up emotions from Vietnam. Channon’s report also would serve as a vision for Stargate.

Mind-reading by psychics was, in a sense, a logical extension of earlier and more invasive mind-control experiments that had been going on since World War Two. The MKULTRA project, started in 1953, attempted to emulate mind-control techniques used on U.S. prisoners by the Soviets, Chinese and North Koreans during the Korean War. Under the MKULTRA aegis, pregnant women were blasted with radiation, US army soldiers were dosed with LSD to study panic, US Navy sailors were exposed to sub-aural frequency blasts to erase memory, and a group of Oregon prison inmates had their testicles irradiated—invariably without full knowledge or consent by the subjects. In all, more than 150 individually funded research sub-projects—most of which, due to deliberately destroyed records, we know nothing about—existed within MKULTRA and related CIA programs.

Soon after being founded, the Stargate remote viewing program was cancelled by the CIA and ended up in the hands of the US military. The transfer was prompted by the 1975 Watergate scandal and ensuing Congressional investigation of the CIA, which scuttled many of its more controversial programs (including MKULTRA).

Many at the CIA were happy to see Stargate go. According to The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, one CIA man tells author Jeffrey Richelson that the official who had approved the program had been “out of his mind.” As a means of intelligence, he felt, Stargate was “useless” and “absolute bullshit.”

Indeed, those early experiments had led to mixed results for spying purposes, Richelson reports. The psychics had some accurate visions, but a very large percentage of what they envisioned was vague or plain wrong. In one operation, the early program’s leading psychic, Pat Price, was given coordinates of a Soviet military base in Kazakhstan, which Air Force intel thought could be a centre for particle-beam research. In four sessions spanning four days, Price gave what an evaluator judged to be “an almost perfect description of someone’s first look at the Operations Area” of the facility—low one-storey buildings partially dug into the ground, with a large crane. But other specifics given by Price—a 500-foot antenna, an outdoor pool, a nearby airstrip—were completely inaccurate.

Puthoff later touted the experiment as a success by pointing to the description of the large crane. But CIA officials didn’t agree, saying it amounted to lucky guessing. When Puthoff published some of his unclassified results in the journal Nature in 1974, an accompanying editorial comment called the paper “weak in design and presentation” and “disconcertingly vague” on details about the research methodology. A consistent problem was a lack of controls to ensure there had been no fraud.

The psychic research was a “dumb exercise” that produced “lots of laughing,” according to a senior CIA scientist quoted by Richelson, but it was justified because of the psychic research gap with the Soviets. When the Washington Post reported on CIA support for paranormal research in 1977, Richelson reports CIA director Stansfield Turner acknowledged the agency had had a man gifted with “visio-perception” of places he had never seen—a reference to Pat Price—but, Turner said with a smile, the man had died two years earlier, “and we haven’t heard from him since.”

Stargate’s new master, the US Air Force and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), quietly chipped in funds to keep the experiments going in the mid-1970s and eventually set up its own in-house psychic spying unit, funded by the US Army Intelligence and Security Command. Stargate’s headquarters was a run-down block of buildings at the Fort Meade Army base in Maryland.

By the 1980s, remote viewers had participated in dozens of intelligence-finding missions. Military sessions usually involved five to ten viewers with months of training all focusing on the same target in several sessions in order to make up for the limited accuracy of each viewer. The focus of viewing attempts included foreign buildings, Soviet submarines, Americans held hostage in Iran during the crisis of 1979-80, and in 1981, Brigadier General James Dozier, who had recently been kidnapped in Italy. The unit was praised by President Jimmy Carter for finding a downed Soviet bomber in Africa in 1979 after other spies had failed. Other missions of the psychic unit, according to a 1995 story in the Washington Post, include attempts to locate plutonium in North Korea and Muammar Gaddafi before the US raid on Libya in 1986.

Viewers also apparently tried their hand at some spacier stuff. One psychic took to trying to find the Loch Ness monster when there wasn’t any military work to do. (He determined that Nessie was actually a dinosaur’s ghost.) Another claimed to have killed a goat and his pet hamster by staring at them for days on end. And according to Ronson, a general in the program kept trying to walk through walls.

But members of the program tended to belie the stereotyped image of flaky New Agers. One psychic, Paul Smith, was a young US Army intelligence officer, Arab linguist and a devout Mormon. Analytical and clipped in both his writing and personal manner, Smith had no previous interest in extrasensory perception. As he writes in Reading the Enemy’s Mind: Inside Star Gate, America’s Psychic Espionage Program, Smith was recruited into Stargate in 1983 in part because of his skepticism about remote viewing. The program apparently didn’t want the true believers. Early research had also uncovered something surprising: “remote viewing” (a fancy military term for clairvoyance, or sending your “mind’s eye” to see things far away) wasn’t the exclusive domain of a few gifted psychics. Anybody could learn how to do it.

Although initially dubious, Smith says over the next seven years he became one of the army’s premier “remote viewers” and the main author of its extrasensory training manual. He would later serve as a tactical intelligence officer in the 101st Airborne Division in Operation Desert Storm/Shield. (David Morehouse, also a Mormon, entered the program in 1988 and trained under Smith.)

“My success rate was around 28 percent,” said one spy, Joe McMoneagle, to the Daily Mail newspaper this past January. “That may not sound very good, but we were brought in to deal with the hopeless cases. Our information was then cross-checked with any other available intelligence to build up an overall picture.” McMoneagle’s work eventually earned him the Legion of Merit, America’s highest military non-combat medal.

By one tally, of eighty-one projects between 1979 and 1982, twenty-one produced positive results, six were mixed, another six were terminated or not completed, and twelve were unsuccessful. The remaining thirty-eight received no evaluation or the results were not disclosed, according to Smith in Reading the Enemy’s Mind.

Even investigative journalist Jack Anderson, one of the first reporters to expose Stargate in a Washington Post column as a misuse of government funds, became a believer in the program’s value. “In concept if not always in execution, it was worth taxpayers’ dollars,” he wrote in the foreword to Smith’s book.

But many in the military remained skeptical. Fundamentalist Christians in the Army considered Stargate the Devil’s work. Nor was Stargate a well-supported program: lack of funds for renovations meant staff relied on scrap furniture to furbish much of their office. When one senator toured the program at Fort Meade, he apparently asked “where all the winos were” as he ascended the rickety steps.

In 1995, the program’s enemies finally won. In the throes of downsizing after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the DIA decided to kill Stargate. But remote viewing had a few friends in Congress, who pressed the CIA to take back the program it had started 20 years earlier. Urged on by supporters like Senator Claiborne Pell—sometimes referred to as “The Senator from Outer Space”—Congress mandated the CIA to review the usefulness of the 20-year psychic program, which had cost $20 million. The CIA, unhappy at the prospect of welcoming home the controversial mentalists, contracted out the study to the nonprofit American Institutes of Research (AIR), which in turn brought in two outside experts, statistician Jessica Utts and psychology professor Ray Hyman.

As a visiting scientist in the SRI program in the 1980s, Utts was a true believer in remote viewing, while Hyman was a longstanding debunker of all things paranormal, and a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. They had butted heads over remote viewing before and this study would ultimately only reinforce their positions.

Utts reviewed 26,000 remote viewing trials done in 154 experiments at SRI. Her conclusion: “The statistical results were so overwhelming that results that extreme or more so would occur only about once in every 10 to the 20th such instances if chance alone is the explanation… Obviously some explanation other than chance must be found.”

Utts also studied 445 other trials in six more recent remote viewing experiments overseen by an internationally reputed panel of scientists (including a Nobel winner for physics) at Science Applications International Corporation. She claims to have found statistically significant results supporting psychic phenomena in four of the six experiments and calls the evidence for remote viewing “a lot stronger than for many effects we accept in everyday life. It’s on par with the effect of aspirin in preventing heart attacks.”

Hyman was less charitable to Stargate than Utts. He admitted that the case for psychic functioning seemed better than ever, and conceded that the data was puzzling—“I do not have a ready explanation for these observed effects”—but remained unconvinced, primarily because “it is impossible in principle to say that any particular experiment or experimental series is completely free from possible flaws… especially [ones] that have not yet been discovered.”

English psychologist Richard Wiseman summed up the problem nicely in a recent article in the Daily Mail: “If I said that there is a red car outside my house, you would probably believe me. But if I said that a UFO had just landed, you’d probably want a lot more evidence. Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionize the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions. Right now we don’t have that evidence.”

Hyman also noted a practical issue: remote viewers were said to be accurate about 20 percent of the time, but this wasn’t good enough for intel purposes. “Without any way to tell which statements of the views are reliable and which are not, the use of this information may make matters worse rather than better.”

The final report submitted by AIR to the CIA was damning and recommended against pursuing the program. Remote viewing had “failed to produce the concrete, specific information valued in intelligence reporting,” it said. The CIA pulled the plug in 1995.

But far from dying a quiet death, remote viewing gained a new life. Shutting down Stargate meant that formerly employed military psychics could now go public with their knowledge of the program itself—at length and in best-selling books—and set up private practices to continue their experiments.

Paul Smith and David Morehouse have both started private remote viewing training businesses. Remote Viewing Instructional Services, Inc. in Austin, Texas, founded by Smith, offers a 50-hour Basic Remote Viewing Course ($2,000) that includes a lecture from Hal Puthoff, the guy who helped kick off the whole thing back in the seventies.

In San Diego and San Marcos (north of San Diego), David Morehouse Productions offers a series of classes, from two to five days in length ($495 to $1,290). Classes are co-taught by Morehouse’s wife, Patty, and fellow psychic Jason Appleby. Students include police officers, border guards and medical professionals interested in becoming more perceptive about people they deal with on the job. Practising their techniques “heightens your intuition almost immediately. Once you do it more, you start to notice it more in a waking state too, learning to trust your gut more,” Appleby said.

What about using remote viewing for evil—cheating at cards or figuring out a bank’s layout? Appleby says some students start off wanting to use it to make money, but quickly drop the notion because remote viewing has significant limitations and is hard work.

Besides, Appleby said, students are quickly awakened to a spiritual side of remote viewing. “There’s something really profound about looking at the paper record of a session, having proof that there is more than just the physical body. People spend their entire lives in different faiths looking for just a glimpse of something like that, and here it is. It’s really something extraordinary. I think it’s the most profound story of history.”

(Reprinted from Issue 28, Summer 2008)

What’s in Your H1N1 Flu Vaccine?

2009-11-26T12:19:00.008-05:00

By Alex Roslin

November 19, 2009

The Georgia Straight

[see the story at the Straight website]

Chris Shaw wasn’t always skeptical about vaccines. The neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia had his teenage son vaccinated with most of the recommended shots. But then he started studying some of the ingredients commonly found in vaccines.

What he discovered caused him to go cold turkey on all shots for his six-year-old daughter. And that includes the vaccine for the H1N1 flu.

“I am not convinced H1N1 is sufficiently hazardous to most people to risk the potential downside of the vaccine,” Shaw said over the phone from his office in the research pavilion at the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority.

Shaw isn’t an easily dismissed vaccine conspiracy theorist. He is a leading expert on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease) and Parkinson’s disease. While investigating unusually high rates of ALS and other neurological disorders among veterans who have Gulf War syndrome, he found evidence that the cause may have been aluminum salt, an ingredient in the cocktail of vaccines given to soldiers before deployment [see sidebar, below].

Although aluminum salt isn’t present in the H1N1 vaccine, Shaw’s discovery made him concerned about other vaccines, including the swine-flu shot. He isn’t alone in his thoughts.

Despite a full frontal assault of news about the dangers of the flu and the importance of vaccination, a survey in late October revealed that only 36 percent of Canadians said they would get the shot. Lack of trust in the vaccine was cited as the main reason for vaccine opposition. Another poll in November found that 65 percent of Canadians believe the media has overreacted to the threat of swine flu.

Even many health workers aren’t convinced. In two separate surveys, in the U.K. (Pulse) and Hong Kong (British Medical Journal), published in August, half of health-care professionals said they didn’t intend to get the vaccine.

Canadian health officials and some newspaper columnists have reacted by accusing vaccine opponents of being conspiracy mongers or just plain irresponsible.

Who is right? Is the cure really worse than the disease? Let’s look at some numbers.

First, the disease. Swine flu had killed 161 Canadians as of November 12. That works out to one death per 200,000 Canadians in the past six-and-a-half months. Over the same period of time, major cardiovascular diseases typically claim 240 times more Canadian lives (about 39,000), cancer claims 230 times more (37,000 deaths), pneumonia kills 18 times more (2,800), and accidental falls claim eight times more (1,260), according to calculations based on 2005 Statistics Canada figures.

H1N1 has about the same death rate as hernias. But we don’t see scary front-page headlines for months on end about hernias, pneumonia, or falling down.

“It’s really not causing—and is not going to cause and nowhere has caused—significant levels of illness or death,” Dr. Richard Schabas, Ontario’s former chief medical officer of health, told the CBC on November 12.

Schabas said H1N1 “has ultimately turned out to be, from a pandemic perspective, a dud”.

What about the vaccine? Is it safe? Despite the onslaught of confident pronouncements from health officials and doctors, Shaw says he hasn’t seen enough information on the safety of the vaccine. “If the science were there, we could make a rational decision. But it’s a coin toss.”

Looking for answers, Shaw turned to the 24-page product-information leaflet on the vaccine released by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline. Health Canada used this document in approving the shot.

The leaflet leaves Shaw cold. “You couldn’t turn this in as a master’s thesis anywhere I know of and get a passing grade,” he said, calling the leaflet a “shocking document”.

Shaw said the material lacks basic information. For example, there is no safety data at all for several groups of people—pregnant women, people aged over 60, kids aged 10 to 17, and children under three. For kids three to nine years old, there is only “very limited” data.

“Where is the safety data that the government used to license the vaccine?” Shaw asked.

Health Canada would not talk to the Straight, and the Public Health Agency of Canada did not respond to a request for an interview.

The H1N1 vaccine includes a component called an adjuvant—which is used to boost the drug’s effectiveness—that has raised a lot of questions.

GlaxoSmithKline says the adjuvant has been tested on 45,000 people worldwide and that clinical trials are now being done on children. In an e-mail, spokesperson Melanie Spoore said the company is planning 25 trials of its various H1N1 vaccines before November 2010.

She also said a different but closely related vaccine made by the company, for the H5N1 flu, includes the same adjuvant and “is generally well-tolerated and has an acceptable safety profile” in both kids and adults.

But Shaw has concerns about the company’s trial results for the H5N1 vaccine. The product leaflet mentions a study in which the company injected the vaccine into pregnant rats. It found “an increased incidence of fetal malformations” and “delayed neurobehavioural maturation”. Another study did not produce the same outcome.

But Shaw says the rat results deserve more study. “Anytime you observe such outcomes, it is a concern,” he said.

The leaflet also mentions a study on ferrets. The animals were given adjuvanted and nonadjuvanted H5N1 vaccines and then exposed to the flu. The ferrets that got the adjuvanted vaccine were protected by the vaccine. But those that got the nonadjuvanted vaccine all died.

This result could be a concern, Shaw said, because Canadian authorities are telling pregnant women to get the nonadjuvanted H1N1 vaccine since the adjuvanted version hasn’t ever been tested on pregnant women. Shaw also said the animal-study information in the leaflet lacks many important details and would be “unpublishable” as presented. “Any [medical-journal] referee would kick this out the window.”

The company’s leaflet also paints a picture of the vaccine’s side effects in humans somewhat different than the usual line from health authorities. The Public Health Agency of Canada says on its Web site that the adjuvanted vaccine is as safe as the nonadjuvanted shot. It also says the rate of “serious adverse events” from vaccination is extremely low—typically “about one for every 100,000 doses of vaccine”.

What we don’t often hear is that the adjuvanted vaccine caused dramatically more side effects than the nonadjuvanted version. Ninety percent of 62 subjects reported pain (versus 37 percent of 62 people for the nonadjuvanted vaccine), 34 percent had muscle soreness (compared to 8 percent with the nonadjuvanted shot), and 14 percent experienced a headache (as opposed to 8 percent for the nonadjuvanted shot), according to the product-information sheet.

Although these reactions are minor, the leaflet also says four of 253 people studied experienced “severe adverse reactions”. Three of the four were deemed to be unrelated to the vaccine, but one case of hypersensitivity (which can mean anything from an allergic reaction to autoimmune disease) was determined “to be related to vaccination”.

That one serious reaction might not sound like a lot, but it actually translates into a rate of 395 cases per 100,000 people. That’s more than 50 times the rate of hospitalization due to H1N1 itself: 7.3 per 100,000 Canadians.

Sucharit Bhakdi is concerned some serious vaccine reactions could go unnoticed. He is a professor of medical microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany. In October—in a coauthored paper in the journal Medical Microbiology—he warned of a possible increase in the risk in heart problems due to mass H1N1 vaccination.

Speaking by phone from his office, Bhakdi cited the higher rate of heart problems when 1.4 million U.S. soldiers were vaccinated for smallpox before the 2003 Iraq war.

Soldiers who received the vaccine had almost 7.5 times the rate of heart inflammation of nonvaccinated personnel, according to a study by U.S. military medical researchers in 2004 in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

“Unexpected serious adverse effects thus may follow in the wake of a general vaccination program,” Bhakdi’s paper said.

Yet health authorities and doctors are urging people with heart problems to get the H1N1 vaccine on a priority basis and do not appear to be monitoring them for possibly elevated risks, he said.

Shaw is also concerned about Canada’s monitoring of the side effects of vaccinations, calling the system “flimsy”.

What especially worries Shaw is the possibility of longer-term side effects from the vaccine. Most vaccine safety studies monitor patients for a few days or, at most, several months.

That isn’t enough, Shaw says. With some vaccines, the most serious reactions have taken years to surface. “Neurological problems don’t happen overnight,” he said. “It took five to 10 years to see the bulk of the Gulf War–syndrome outcomes.”

One of the best examples involves a controversial ingredient present in the H1N1 vaccine: thimerosal. Thimerosal is a form of mercury used in some vaccines as a preservative. Drug makers agreed to phase it out of most vaccines after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found in 1999 that mercury levels in children who had gotten multiple shots often exceeded safety levels set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Nonetheless, thimerosal still remains in many flu vaccines.

Controversy has raged for years about whether or not thimerosal is behind soaring childhood autism rates. While that debate continues, a 2008 study in the U.K. journal Toxicological and Environmental Chemistry found that boys who were given a vaccine containing thimerosal were nine times more likely to have developmental problems than unvaccinated boys.

The Public Health Agency of Canada says on its Web site that thimerosal is safe and that the amount in the H1N1 vaccine is below Health Canada’s daily safety limit set for mercury. “There’s significantly less mercury in the vaccine than you would find in a can of tuna fish,” the site states.

In fact, the amount of mercury in the nonadjuvanted H1N1 vaccine does actually exceed the daily safety level for pregnant women. Health Canada has established the safe dietary level of mercury for pregnant women at 0.2 micrograms (millionths of a gram) per kilo of body weight. The nonadjuvanted H1N1 vaccine contains 25 micrograms of mercury.

Simple math tells us an average Canadian pregnant woman—weighing 80 kilograms at term—gets about 56 percent more than the daily safe level of mercury when given a dose of the nonadjuvanted vaccine. By the EPA’s stricter standards, that same dose is actually triple its daily safe level.

What’s more, Shaw notes, those daily safety levels were set for consumption of mercury in food, not for injection directly into the body. Injecting a neurotoxin like mercury has much more impact than eating it, he said.

Squalene is another controversial component of the swine-flu vaccine. It’s an oil found in animal livers and is used as an adjuvant in vaccines and also as a moisturizer in cosmetic products. It is primarily gotten from shark livers—a fact that has upset conservation groups worried about endangered shark populations. Some companies, like Unilever and L’Oréal, have agreed to stop using squalene in cosmetic products.

Debate has raged for years about whether or not squalene is responsible for Gulf War syndrome. Most research suggests that’s not the case, but in recent years much more solid evidence [see here, here, here and here] has found squalene can cause autoimmune diseases like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis in animals.

Still other questions have been raised about polysorbate 80, another component of the H1N1 vaccine adjuvant. Studies have found it can cause severe allergic reactions and hypersensitivity [see here, here and here].

In the end, we might only get a good picture of the vaccine’s side effects long after swine flu has run its course. Then again, with Canada’s lax monitoring system for side effects, we may never know which was worse.

Chris Shaw's Key Findings

UBC neuroscientist Chris Shaw’s research raises serious questions about a substance used in many vaccines for decades and long thought to be safe—aluminum salt.

Shaw started out looking for an explanation for high rates of ALS among soldiers with Gulf War syndrome.

He found that mice injected with aluminum salt showed symptoms similar to ALS—motor-neuron loss and neuroinflammation in parts of the spinal chord.

His studies [see here and here] conclude the soldiers may have gotten ALS from the aluminum present in the cocktail of vaccines they were given before being deployed to the Mideast in 1991.

Aluminum salt isn’t present in the H1N1 vaccine, but it is present in nearly half of all vaccines licensed in Canada.

Yet, Shaw said no one has followed up on his study to his knowledge. “It’s one of those topics that’s seen as problematic,” he said. “The lack of official curiosity is kind of disturbing.”

TAGS: H1N1, health

Creeping Desert

2009-10-23T10:52:00.002-04:00

Will climate change push fertile prairie to desolate wasteland?

By Alex Roslin

Canadian Wildlife

September/October 2009

Water is the lifeblood of the Canadian Prairies—essential for its ecosystems, drinking and economy. But water experts say life could be turned upside down there as climate change brings severe drought, dried-up rivers and near-desertification to the Prairies in coming decades. Some of the impacts are already well underway.

“There is going to be tremendous stress on ecosystems,” says James Byrne, chair of the geography department at the University of Lethbridge. “It’s going to require substantial adjustment.”

“There will be a fair amount of problems in terms of agricultural production,” says Suren Kulshreshtha, an agricultural economist at the University of Saskatchewan. Impacts could include a 10 to 30 per cent drop in crop yields across the Prairies, according to Environment Canada.

Temperatures across the Prairies have already gone up by between one and four degrees Celsius in the past century, depending on the region. By 2100, they’re expected to go up a further 6.5 degrees under a median climate-change forecast in a landmark study coauthored by University of Alberta biologist David Schindler in 2006. He found that temperatures in northern Fort McMurray will be warmer than they are now in Lethbridge, 1,000 kilometres to the south.

Warmer temperatures, in turn, are behind a few parallel trends that are combining to imperil the Prairie water supply: melting glaciers and diminishing snowpacks in the Rocky Mountains, and increased evaporation of soil moisture.

Some of the hardest hit glaciers are in Montana’s Glacier National Park, which also sprawls into British Columbia and Alberta. Ice fields there help feed the South Saskatchewan River, whose waters meander across the Prairies and ultimately drain into Lake Winnipeg. This watershed is the main source of freshwater in a vast expanse of the southern Prairies.

But high up in the Rockies, rising temperatures over the past century have slowly melted 67 per cent of Glacier National Park’s icesheet. Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey now estimate the last glaciers there will disappear by 2020—a decade earlier than initial estimates because warming is happening faster than expected.

“All of a sudden the park needs to be renamed because there are no glaciers,” says Stefan Kienzle, a University of Lethbridge hydrologist who studies climate-change impacts in the Prairies and in the mountain headwaters of the region’s rivers. Kienzle worked with other leading Canadian scientists to coauthor a landmark review of those impacts for Natural Resources Canada in 2007. They concluded that rising temperatures will bring widespread drought to the Prairies, especially in late summer, and that there will also be more frequent severe droughts.

Many rivers and streams will dry up, and wildlife that depends on them will be devastated. “A large number of Prairie aquatic species are at risk of extirpation,” the review said.

Byrne, who was one of the lead authors of the study, says the Prairies will eventually turn into an arid tropical zone like Arizona, especially in summertime, with near-desert conditions in some areas. “Overall, the biggest concern is we’re going to see a big increase in variability (of the Prairie climate),” he says.

River flows in the three Prairie provinces are already down substantially. A severe drought in 2001 and 2002 caused an estimated $5.8-billion drop in Canada’s gross domestic product and 41,000 lost jobs, mostly in the Prairies. A study commissioned for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada tied it to climate change and called for better preparedness to counter “the increasing threat of drought risk."

One of the key unanswered questions is the fate of the massive Columbia Icefield straddling the Alberta and B.C. border. This 365-metre-thick chain of glaciers is the largest mass of ice and snow in the Rockies and helps feed a watershed that spans the central and northern Prairies.

But this icefield is also retreating. One of its main components, the Saskatchewan Glacier, which is the primary water source for the North Saskatchewan River, has retreated 1.4 kilometres in the last 100 years. Another component, the Athabaska Glacier, has lost half its volume.

Low river flow in the late summer will have significant implications for wildlife in the watershed, says Kienzle. “It will put more stress on the ecosystem and on all species that depend on the rivers.”

LOW FLOW

Climate change is already affecting rivers in the Canadian Prairies. Summer river flows are 20 to 84 per cent lower than 100 years ago, according to a 2006 study coauthored by University of Alberta biologist David Schindler, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We were shocked by how extreme the changes in river flows had been,” a profile of Schindler in the journal quoted him saying. He added that the decline of Canada’s freshwater “might be the largest crisis facing that nation in the upcoming century,” the article said.

Free Lunches Come at a Price

2009-09-14T11:42:00.012-04:00

In the end, “it’s the patient who pays”
Critics say doctors should be forced to disclose goodies they receive from drug company reps

Alex Roslin

Saturday, September 12, 2009

The Montreal Gazette

Adam Hofmann is used to getting teased about his lunch. It’s not because his mom gave him something uncool to eat. It’s because he paid for it.

Hofmann is a doctor and fifth-year medical resident at McGill University. Lunchtime is often when residents attend talks on medical topics organized by various disciplines in the three teaching hospitals where Hofmann works—the Montreal General, Royal Victoria Hospital and the Jewish General.

Sales reps from pharmaceutical and medical-equipment companies provide the food and sponsor the speaker at many of the talks, he said.

The sessions, known as “rounds” among doctors, occur two to four times a month within any given hospital discipline like cardiology or internal medicine, Hofmann said.

Drug reps also frequently provide food and sponsor speakers at monthly “grand rounds”—talks to entire hospital departments like pediatrics or family medicine—and “journal clubs,” meetings at restaurants or doctors’ homes at which medical papers are discussed, he said.

While his coworkers partake in sushi takeout or a catered spread, Hofmann sticks to cafeteria fare and braces for the funny looks. He is virtually always the only attendee to pay for his meal. “I have occasionally gotten sarcastic remarks. I’ve been called a ‘pinko’ and a ‘communist’,” he said with a laugh.

With 10 to 20 rounds taking place each day in an academic hospital, Hofmann said staff are able to eat lunch for free all week if they want to, and some do. “A few residents have made it a game to never pay for lunch if at all possible, even going to the length of seeking out lectures they would not otherwise be interested in,” he said.

He estimated that the average resident in academic hospitals eats for free two or three times a week.

For Hofmann, brown-bagging it is a small price to pay to avoid the cozy interactions that many medical professionals have with pharmaceutical sales reps.

Questions about drug marketing practices are coming under growing scrutiny in Canada and the U.S. In August, McGill professor Barbara Sherwin was embroiled in questions about a journal article that was ghostwritten for her by a company working on behalf of a pharmaceutical firm.

Last week, the drug giant Pfizer Inc. agreed to pay $2.3 billion U.S. to settle criminal and civil allegations that it had illegally marketed several drugs for unapproved uses and rewarded doctors with kickbacks. It was the largest criminal fine in history and was Pfizer’s fourth settlement for illegal marketing in the U.S. since 2002.

Little data exists on the extent of the marketing activities in Quebec. One of the few Canadian studies found, in 2006, that 42 per cent of general practitioners in B.C. got visits from drug sales reps several times a week. Two-thirds saw them at least once a month.

The visits are part of vast, multi-billion-dollar marketing campaigns that include food brought to doctors’ offices, restaurant meals, trips, high-paying gigs as consultants and speakers, drug samples, research grants and continuing-education talks that doctors attend to maintain their licences.

Critics say the marketing is poorly regulated and that a growing pile of studies shows the perks sway doctors to prescribe costlier drugs that aren’t necessarily the best ones for their patients—a major reason for soaring health-care costs.

“The gross majority of interactions that physicians have with pharmaceutical companies are unnecessary and problematic,” said Hofmann.

***

Pushing pills involves fantastic amounts of money. In a study in 2008 in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine, two Canadian academics, Joel Lexchin and Marc-André Gagnon, calculated that pharmaceutical companies spent $57.5 billion on marketing in the U.S. in 2004. That was nearly double the $32 billion spent on researching and developing drugs.

The marketing budget included $20.4 billion for an army of 100,000 “detailers,” as the sales reps are known in the business. That worked out to about one detailer for every nine doctors; their numbers had swelled by nearly three times since 1995.

In Canada, there were 5,190 detailers in 2002, or one for each 11.4 doctors, according to a 2006 study by the University of Victoria’s Drug Policy Futures research group.

All those detailers and marketing bucks have big impacts on medical decisions of doctors, according to one of the most comprehensive scientific reviews of the question, done by Dr. Ashley Wazana, now a psychiatrist at the Jewish General.

In a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2000, he reported that doctors who accepted funding for a trip to a company-sponsored conference prescribed that company’s drugs 80- to 190-percent more often than those who hadn’t.

Those who “occasionally” ate pharma-sponsored meals were 2.7 times more likely to request that the sponsor’s drug be added to a hospital formulary (a hospital-approved list of drugs). Doctors who “often” ate the meals were 14 times more likely to do so.

The review also noted that hearing a drug salesman at a talk led doctors to recommend “inappropriate treatment” more often than other doctors, including treatment that cost more and was more invasive.

Wazana also found that just one in five doctors agreed that pharma reps “fairly portray their product.” Three-quarters of residents said the reps “may use unethical practice.”

Despite this, most doctors have some interaction with detailers. Four in five residents attended industry-paid meals, with the average resident eating on the corporate dime 14 to 15 times a year, Wazana found. Interns did so 31 times a year.

Among doctors, 85 to 87 per cent said they had some interaction with detailers, with an average of three to four encounters a month. Eighty-six per cent accepted free drug samples, and half got research grants.

The interactions start right in med school. A survey of 826 U.S. medical students published in 2005 found that 97 per cent had received some form of gift from pharma reps. Students got gifts or attended a sponsored activity an average of once a week, and they ranged from lunch to parties, trips and candy. More than two-thirds said the gifts would never influence their prescribing practices.

In fact, many doctors rely on detailers more than any other source for information about new drugs. U.K. doctors said drug reps were their most important source of initial information in a third of the cases when they prescribed new medicines, with pharmaceutical marketing accounting for another 15 per cent, according to a 2003 study in the journal Family Practice.

That study also reviewed 616 prescriptions the doctors had written. The doctors cited pharma reps more often than any other factor as influencing their prescription choice. The reps were cited 39 per cent of the time, far more than concern about the drug’s side effects (17 per cent) or prescribing guidelines developed by the medical community (15 per cent).

The marketing has paid off in spades for the pharmaceutical industry, according to a 2002 study by Yale University marketing professor Dick Wittink. He found that each dollar spent lobbying doctors through sales reps and pharma-sponsored events returned nearly $12 in increased prescriptions for brand-name drugs.

At the Quebec Medical Association, which represents 9,000 doctors and medical students, an official said the research is news to him. “We are not aware of that. We haven’t studied this question,” said Robert Nadon, the association’s director of professional affairs.

“We think doctors are professionals and that they will respect their ethics code.”

Russell Williams, president of Rx&D, the Canadian lobby group for brand-name drug companies, said member companies follow an ethics code, which says product information given to medical professional must be “accurate and fair” and that gifts to doctors can’t be “excessive” and must be limited to “modest meals and/or refreshments.”

The code adds, “Hospitality should not be utilized as the primary access to meet with health care professionals, but as an opportunity to expand the business discussions.”

“I believe our industry is dealing with this issue in an upfront way,” said Williams. “We’re not selling shoes here. These are complex molecules. We need to have dialogue with doctors.

“There is a significant engagement from our side to make sure that the relationship is of the highest ethical standards. It is working quite well.”

Officials at the McGill University Health Centre, the Jewish General and the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal couldn’t be reached for comment.

The body that represents Quebec hospitals and CLSCs has no policy on staff interactions with pharma reps, said Eric Côté, spokesman for the Association québécoise d’établissements de santé et de services sociaux. “Technically, doctors are autonomous workers.”

Côté referred calls to the Quebec College of Physicians. The college said it expects doctors to abide by its ethics code, which says continuing education classes must be “balanced” and that doctors should avoid conflicts of interest. Doctors can’t accept commissions or benefits for having prescribed a drug, but they can accept “customary presents and gifts of modest value.”

But critics say the rules are nebulous. “It’s so vague as to be completely useless,” Hofmann said.

“Also, there are generally minimal and infrequent repercussions associated with these kinds of ethics code violations.”

“Drug companies would not be detailing physicians if they didn’t have a huge return on investment. They’re in the business of making money,” said Jeff Connell, spokesman for the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association.

Connell said his association’s members lose business and patients pay more when detailers steer doctors to more expensive brand-name drugs that aren’t necessarily more effective than similar generic versions. When a drug’s patent is about to expire, he said, brand-name pharmaceutical companies often make minor changes so they can patent the medicine anew and then get doctors onside with aggressive marketing campaigns.

Indeed, of 177 new drugs approved in Canada since 2001, federal regulators deemed that 156 (or 88 per cent) fell in a category of drugs that show “moderate, little or no therapeutic advantage over comparable medicines.” Just 19 of the drugs were considered “a breakthrough or substantial improvement,” according to data from the federal Patented Medicine Prices Review Board.

Rx&D’s Williams disputed the board’s data, calling it “inadequate in reflecting serious, incremental innovation. It’s not telling the real story.”

***

When Shahram Ahari was hired as a detailer in New York City by a major U.S. pharmaceutical firm, he was surprised when he met his co-workers. At the company’s intensive, six-week boot camp for detailers, he said he met hundreds of fellow college grads, mostly in their mid-20s, perhaps two-thirds of them women—the vast majority beautiful. He was the only one in his class of 22 with a science degree.

“They were 200 or 300 of the most attractive people I had ever seen. The physical appeal was only part of it. They were vivacious, well-coiffured, well-dressed, engaging people,” he said.

The training was part CIA, part Freud. Ahari learned to quickly scan a doctor’s office and spot anything that could be used to strike up a personal conversation and, with luck, friendship—golf paraphernalia, photos of trips or kids, religious items. The information would later be entered into the company’s file on the doctor and analyzed for future approaches.

“It was analogous to training in spy agencies. You instantly suss up the person’s personality and look for points of entry. You capitalize on sexual appeal. My more attractive colleagues would say, ‘I’m going to wear my short skirt today,’ or ‘I’m going to wear my low-cleavage top. He (the doctor) seems to get a kick out of that,’” he said.

His in with many doctors was their belly. “Food is a pretty powerful catalyst for sales. I sometimes saw myself as a glorified caterer,” he said.

Food would often have a greater impact than his best arguments about a drug’s merits. “I would argue with doctors until I was blue in the face (about a drug). Then I’d take them out to dinner and see their (prescription) numbers rise,” he said.

Ahari often provided food at hospital “rounds,” and he was also careful not to neglect the staff at doctors’ offices; they could be useful for scheduling appointments with doctors and putting in a good word about his company’s drugs.

“There’s almost a sub-art to figuring out which food people will like. How successful and delicious your lunch is has a sway in terms of how quickly you can get meetings (with the doctor),” he said.

He rewarded high prescribers with an invitation to join the company’s “speaker’s bureau.” That meant lucrative gigs addressing other doctors at company-sponsored lunch and dinner meetings and medical symposiums. Speakers typically earned $100 to $500 for a lunch or dinner presentation and up to $10,000 for a major conference talk.

“We’re constantly monitoring our return on investment. We’re not a charity,” Ahari said. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch. It’s the patient who pays.”

***

The revelations about drug marketing practices have pushed a few U.S. states to ban gifts to doctors, limit their value or require them to be disclosed publicly.

In Canada, there has been less scrutiny and less action. Some provinces, including Ontario and B.C., have sent out small numbers of so-called “academic detailers” in an effort to counter the pharma message and provide independent drug information to doctors.

But critics say a handful of academic detailers can’t possibly counter the huge numbers of pharma reps and that doctors have shown they can’t police themselves.

Ahari and Hofmann both said doctors should be forced to publicly disclose any benefits they receive. Another measure, said Hofmann, would be for revenue authorities to require doctors to include free drug samples and meals as income and to tax it.

Ahari said he eventually quit his job as a detailer because of his rising ethical concerns. “Not only are you fooling your (doctor) clients, you’re fooling yourself that you’re doing something good,” he said. “I felt I had become such a calculating social manipulator I would be thinking like a chess game in every social encounter with my girlfriend and family. It was horribly disconcerting.”

Ahari has since spoken before Congress, at medical schools and to the American Medical Association about detailing and conflict of interest. He is now attending medical school himself at the University of California at Davis.

Back at McGill, Hofmann hopes his cafeteria lunches will get a colleague or two to question the price of the food they’re enjoying.

“It’s an obvious stance that physicians should take. Getting gifts from an industry that seeks to manipulate your prescribing practices and may adversely affect your patients is unethical.”

Alex Roslin is vice-president of the Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting.

Statistics Hog-Tie Pig Farming to H1N1 Cases

2009-09-10T22:51:00.011-04:00

By Alex Roslin

August 27, 2009

The Georgia Straight

[Click here for the story at the Straight website]

As hospitals brace for the coming flu season and a possible new surge of H1N1 cases, international data on the flu pandemic shows it has hit Canada worse than almost any other country.
And a close look at the data suggests that a key factor may be something that health authorities have largely overlooked: hog farming.
Canada had the sixth-highest number of H1N1 cases per capita and the fifth-highest per capita rate of H1N1 deaths of all 134 countries and dependencies that had reported flu cases to the World Health Organization as of July 6. (That’s the last date for reliable international comparisons, because the WHO advised countries in early July to stop reporting data on individual H1N1 cases.)
Canada’s H1N1 rate was almost 15 times the global average—23.7 lab-confirmed cases per 100,000 people, compared to an international average of 1.6 cases per 100,000, according to the WHO data. Canada’s per capita rate was double that of the U.S. and 2.5 times that of Mexico, where the pandemic is thought to have started.
Canada’s H1N1 death rate was 10 times the international average: 7.4 deaths per 10 million people, versus 0.7 globally.
It’s not clear why Canadian H1N1 rates are so high. One possibility is that Canadian medical authorities have simply sent more cases to labs for testing. But the data also suggests another possible factor: Canada’s high concentration of hog farms.
It just so happens that Canada has the world’s eighth-highest number of pigs per capita—almost 15 million pigs, or about one for every two Canadians. And an analysis of international flu data shows that H1N1 rates have strong correlations with hog farming.
In Mexico, where it probably all started, there was a moderate, statistically significant 46-percent correlation between confirmed per capita H1N1 cases in all of the country’s 32 states and its federal district and the number of pigs per capita in those states. That’s according to the data as of July 2, the date the Pan American Health Organization stopped publishing the breakdown of flu cases within countries of the Americas.
(Correlation measures the strength of the relationship between two groups of data. A correlation of 30 to 50 percent is generally considered to be moderate, 50 to 70 percent is strong, while 70 percent or higher is very strong.)
Yucatán was the Mexican state with the highest rate of H1N1 cases per capita: 92 per 100,000 people. It’s also one of the country’s hog-farming hubs, with the most pigs per capita of any state, more than one for every two people.
Argentina had the world’s highest per capita death rate from H1N1, with 15 deaths per 10 million people, or 20 times the world average of 0.7 deaths. In Argentina’s 24 provinces and its capital district, there was a 70-percent correlation between the per capita death rate and the ratio of pigs to people.
The Argentinean province that had the highest death rate was Santa Fe, with 130 H1N1 deaths per 10 million people. Santa Fe also happens to have Argentina’s highest ratio of pigs to people.
And those countries aren’t the only ones where there’s apparently a relationship between the pandemic and hog farming. Among the 39 countries and dependencies in the Americas that had reported H1N1 cases as of July 6, there was a 51-percent correlation between H1N1 cases per capita and the number of pigs per capita.
Globally, the 20 countries with the most pigs per capita had a per-capita H1N1 rate of 5.5 per 100,000—more than 3.3 times the international average of 1.6 cases. As well, their per capita death rate from H1N1 was 2.5 per 10 million, or more than triple the international average of 0.7.
“This is a very serious concern,” said Bob Martin, who headed the Washington, D.C.–based Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, when told about the Georgia Straight’s data analysis. “It’s just another step in showing what serious impacts these large-scale swine operations can have.”
Martin’s commission released a study last year that said workers in large farms, and their neighbours, have high rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses due to manure runoff and emissions like ammonia and fine-particle pollution. Respiratory illness makes people more vulnerable to H1N1, he said.
A high portion of H1N1 hospitalizations and deaths have occurred among people with an additional medical condition like asthma or a compromised immune system.
In an initial story in July, the Straight reported that strong correlations exist between per capita H1N1 rates and the number of pigs per person within B.C.’s five health regions and in each of Canada’s provinces.
As of July 8, Manitoba, the country’s hog-farming capital, with 2.4 pigs per person, had three times as many H1N1 hospitalizations per capita as the Canadian average and 3.7 times as many deaths per capita.
The international data puts the high Manitoba numbers into even starker perspective. Manitoba’s per-capita H1N1 rate, 65 per 100,000 people, was 40 times higher the international average and far worse than that of the country with the highest rate in the world, Chile, which had 44 cases per 100,000.
Manitoba’s death rate—41 per 10 million people—was 60 times the global average and nearly three times that of Argentina, the worst-hit country in the world in terms of deaths.
So far, Canadian public-health officials have said the flu pandemic is spreading mostly randomly, though they acknowledge it has hit some vulnerable populations harder, especially those with respiratory problems, aboriginal people, and pregnant women. Most scientists believe H1N1 originated on a huge Mexican factory pig farm, then spread between people around the world.
In Canadian aboriginal communities, H1N1 is thought to be worse because of poor health care and overcrowding. Indeed, the data confirms that Native people have been hit harder and need extra resources to deal with H1N1. The per capita number of H1N1 cases in each province had a very strong 87-percent correlation with the per capita number of aboriginal people.
That’s even higher than the 77-percent correlation between per capita H1N1 cases and the per capita number of pigs in the 10 provinces.
However, when it comes to more serious H1N1 cases that involved hospitalization and death, the correlations were stronger for hog farming. There was a 44-percent correlation between per capita H1N1 hospitalization rates and the number of aboriginal people per capita in each province, compared to a 72-percent correlation between hospitalization rates and the per capita number of pigs in each province.
H1N1 deaths per capita had an 82-percent correlation with the percentage of aboriginal people in each province, but had an even stronger 89-percent correlation with the number of pigs per capita.
“I hope the World Health Organization will start looking at the same data you’re looking at,” the Pew Commission’s Martin said in a phone interview.

The Corruption Factor

2009-08-15T05:40:00.016-04:00

Ramazan Bashardost (right), a former Afghan planning minister and law professor, quit the cabinet of Afghan president Hamid Karzai citing widespread corruption and is running for president in the Aug. 20 election. Beside him is Scott Taylor, publisher of Canadian defense magazine Esprit de Corps. Photo by Sasha Uzunov.

Canada is quiet amid growing reports of government corruption in Afghanistan, which votes Thursday

Alex Roslin

Saturday, August 15, 2009

The Montreal Gazette

The man they call the Ralph Nader of Afghanistan couldn’t have a more humble office or home. Ramazan Bashardost, a popular Kabul MP, is running his campaign for the Afghan presidency out of a small tent where he lives opposite the country’s parliament.

While many other candidates travel in convoys with squads of bodyguards and are said to be systematically bribing voters, Bashardost has a modest election budget of $20,000 and only a smattering of campaign posters up around Kabul.

Yet a poll released yesterday ahead of Afghanistan’s election, which takes place Thursday, puts Bashardost in third place with 10 per cent of the vote—a potential spoiler position and enough to possibly cost president Hamid Karzai, the front-runner, an outright majority and force a run-off poll. Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s former foreign minister, is in second place—polling at 26 per cent to Karzai’s 44 per cent.

Bashardost—a former Afghan planning minister who quit Karzai’s cabinet citing widespread corruption—condemns the Karzai regime as hopelessly sleazy. During a phone interview this week, he said he has a special message for Canadians: “It’s time for Canadian taxpayers to say, ‘Enough. We won’t give our tax dollars to people who steal money.’”

Bashardost’s message is increasingly resonating with Afghans and Western officials irked at Karzai’s inclusion of several prominent warlords and drug traffickers in his re-election campaign.

The U.S. administration of President Barack Obama has distanced itself from Karzai in recent months. U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton called Afghanistan a “narco state” during her confirmation hearing in January.

Obama rebuffed the Afghan leader’s request for a bilateral visit this spring, and put an end to the friendly bi-weekly videoconference chats Karzai had enjoyed with president George W. Bush, the Washington Post reported in May.

“Karzai is not our man in this upcoming election,” said a U.S. official quoted in the story.

In contrast, Canadian officials have refused to take Karzai to task publicly about corruption. Asked in June about Karzai’s choice of a well-known warlord as a vice-presidential candidate, International Trade Minister Stockwell Day, who chairs the cabinet committee on Afghanistan, said there is a “reluctance” to say “anything about a particular candidate.”

“There are times when we will look at certain candidates who are running and we will say, if I was involved in that election, if I was running against that candidate, I’d be making his or her past history very clear,” Day told a House of Commons committee.

“But we have made a commitment that we’re not going to interject ourselves into the election process.”

These concerns centre around corruption related to Afghanistan’s flourishing opium trade, which now feeds 90 percent of the world’s supply and was worth an estimated $3.4 billion last year, or a third of the country’s gross domestic product, according to UN figures.

About $70 million U.S. of that revenue flows to the Taliban insurgency, mostly through taxation of opium farmers and shipments, according to CIA and U.S. Defense Department estimates.

U.S. military officials recently responded to this flow of revenue by placing 50 Afghans suspected of being traffickers who fund the Taliban on a target list to be captured or killed, according to a New York Times report this week.

But the bulk of the opium revenues go not to the Taliban, but to Afghan warlords and corrupt political figures who are allied with the West, says Jorrit Kamminga, director of policy research at the London-based International Council on Security and Development, a think tank that focuses on Afghanistan.

“Opium is a third of the Afghan economy. It means everybody is involved either directly or indirectly. It’s really everywhere. You could argue it’s a narco-state,” he said.

When the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001, their ban on opium growing went with them. One of the most conspicuous manifestations of opium’s prominent role is the Kabul neighbourhood of Sherpur, the country’s wealthiest enclave. An empty hillside as recently as 2001, Sherpur now boasts extravagant mansions that Afghans have dubbed “poppy palaces” and “narcotecture.”

Some of the most candid public criticism of Karzai has come from the former U.S. ambassador for counternarcotics in Afghanistan, Thomas Schweich. In an article in The New York Times Magazine last year, Schweich said he initially believed Karzai’s strong anti-drug statements when he arrived in Kabul in 2006, but that soon changed.

“Over the next two years I would discover how deeply the Afghan government was involved in protecting the opium trade,” he wrote. “Karzai was playing us like a fiddle: The U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai’s friends could get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems.”

***

Thomas Ruttig, a former UN diplomat now working as co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, said Western nations are also to blame for the drug-fuelled corruption.

“The West has to be partly blamed. Many of our Afghan allies are involved in the drug trade. We are effectively turning a blind eye,” he said in an interview from his Kabul office.

The corruption is now so rife, he said, it is pushing angry Afghans to support the Taliban.

“One of the major reasons people turn away from the government is what I would call bad governance, including corruption. It has created a lot of disillusionment,” he said.

The anger is also being turned against Canadian soldiers, who are increasingly seen as “bullyboys of a corrupt regime,” said Scott Taylor, publisher of Ottawa-based defense magazine Esprit de Corps.

Taylor has reported extensively from Afghanistan and interviewed some of its most infamous warlords.

“We are turning a willful blind eye (to the corruption). We have de facto become what the Soviets were—trying to prop up a hated regime,” he said.

Speaking by phone from his tent in Kabul, Bashardost agreed. “The Afghan state is in the process of destroying itself—without a need for the Taliban to use any force.

“When people go before a judge, they are asked for bribes. People say it is better to resolve their problems through (judicial councils organized by) the Taliban or tribal leaders.”

A case in point, he said, is Kandahar, the province that is home to Canada’s 2,800-troop mission. Kandahar, a major Taliban bastion, has seen opium cultivation shoot up fourfold since 2003, while corruption has also become widespread.

A sign of how bad things are came in 2008 when UN inspectors headed out to audit the Afghan government’s opium-eradication efforts in Kandahar. They found 72 percent of the crops that were supposed to have been destroyed were actually still standing.

It was one of the lowest rates of any province in the country, according to a 2008 UN report. Local officials often take bribes from farmers in order not to destroy crops.

Ruttig and Kamminga both advocate a radical solution they say would undermine the opium traffickers and warlords and eliminate much of the corruption—buying the opium crop directly from farmers and destroying it. Alternatively, Kamminga says, the opium could also be sold to drug companies to turn into medicine such as morphone.

***

Today, Kandahar’s highest-profile politician is Karzai’s half-brother, Ahmed Wali, who is the head of the provincial council and is widely suspected of links to drug trafficking.

A 2006 Newsweek investigation reported that well-placed sources said Karzai’s brother was a “major figure” in the opium trade; one Afghan Interior Ministry official said he “leads the whole trafficking structure” in the country’s south.

“There were numerous diplomatic reports that (Karzai’s) brother Ahmed Wali, who was running half of Kandahar, was involved in the drug trade,” Schweich wrote in his piece last year.

U.S. officials have directly challenged Karzai about evidence of his brother’s drug ties in several meetings since 2006, according to reports in the Washington Post and New York Times. The Afghan president reportedly dismissed the allegations, citing lack of proof. (Karzai’s brother also denies the claims; he has never been charged with drug involvement.)

Canada’s Defense Department didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story. A Foreign Affairs spokeswoman said none of the three department officials authorized to grant media interviews on the Afghan election was available to comment.

Taylor said the allegations about Ahmed Wali are widely known among Canadian officials, but they are loath to rock the boat. “If we are going to start stirring things up with Ahmed Wali Karzai, we are going to have trouble with Hamid Karzai,” he said.

“Our primary mission is to stay alive, so we basically want to anger as few people as possible.”

But that policy is backfiring, said Bashardost, because it fuels the Taliban insurgents who are killing Canadian soldiers.

“I’m sorry to say Western powers are wasting their money and (soldiers’) lives in Afghanistan,” he said.

Bashardost, a French-educated former law professor, shot to prominence as planning minister in 2005 when he produced a report that said 80 per cent of the 2,400 non-governmental organizations involved in foreign-aid projects in Afghanistan were corrupt.

He recommended the expulsion of all the corrupt NGOs, but lost Karzai’s support and ended up resigning. He then set up his tent outside parliament and ran for office, winning the third-highest number of votes out of 400 parliamentary candidates.

Bashardost says Canada can take some simple steps to help Afghanistan: Cut ties with corrupt Afghan officials and investigate how hundreds of millions of dollars in Canadian development aid to Afghanistan are being spent.

“The Canadian government must absolutely demand that it won’t spend one dollar or give one (soldier’s) life if the Afghan government is full of warlords, corrupt people, drug traffickers and war criminals,” he said.

“Your soldiers and money are very useful—on condition that the regime is clean, which is not the case right now.”

TAGS: Afghanistan, drugs, opium, corruption

Pigs Possibly Linked to H1N1 Flu Cases in B.C.

2009-07-16T11:40:00.010-04:00

By Alex Roslin

Thursday, July 16, 2009

The Georgia Straight

[Read story at the Straight website]

Remember when they called it “swine flu”? The first pandemic flu in 41 years was quickly renamed “H1N1” in its early days after the pig industry, in damage-control mode, proclaimed loudly that people couldn’t get sick from eating pork. And they said that it looked like the flu was spreading worldwide from person to person—not from pigs to people.

More than two months after the initial outbreak, it’s still not clear how the flu started. The most accepted explanation is that a farm worker at a massive swine operation in Mexico got the virus from a pig and carried it into the wider population, where it spread without any more involvement from pigs.

But a closer look at the data on H1N1 cases in B.C. and the rest of Canada suggests the pandemic has a much closer relationship with pig farming than suspected. That relationship is especially striking in the most serious cases of the flu that have caused hospitalization and death.

The Fraser Health Authority, the district with the largest number of pigs in the province—and one of the most intensively farmed areas in Canada—has a 39-percent-higher rate of confirmed H1N1 cases per capita (9.7 per 100,000 people) than the provincial average (7.0 per 100,000), according to data from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control as of July 6. B.C.’s first confirmed death from H1N1 flu occurred on July 13 in the region.

The rate is even higher in the Northern Health Authority, which has the highest ratio of pigs to people in the province. The northern region has a 48-percent-higher per capita H1N1 rate (10.3 per 100,000) than the B.C. average.

The data shows a near-perfect 93-percent correlation between the number of pigs in a health region and the number of confirmed H1N1 cases there. (Correlation measures the strength of the relationship between two groups of data. A correlation of 70 percent or higher is generally considered to be strong.)

Density of pigs also seems to have a relationship with H1N1 rates—especially when it comes to the most recent flu cases. There is a 95-percent correlation between new cases of H1N1 confirmed during the week of June 29 and the number of pigs per farm in a particular region.

The same high correlations exist Canada-wide, according to Statistics Canada figures on pig farms and an analysis of data on confirmed H1N1 cases from the Public Health Agency of Canada as of July 8. The data shows that the flu has been more severe in areas with intensive, large-scale hog production.

The total number of confirmed H1N1 cases in each province has a 99-percent correlation with the number of pig farms in that province.

In Quebec, the province with the highest number of pigs—4.3 million—residents were twice as likely to be hospitalized when they acquired H1N1 as the Canadian average. Quebec’s death rate from H1N1 per capita has been 60 percent higher than the national average.

The flu outbreak has been even more severe in Manitoba, which has 2.4 pigs per person, more than any other province. There, the number of H1N1 hospitalizations per capita is triple the national average. The rate of H1N1 deaths per capita in Manitoba has been more than 3.7 times higher than the Canadian average.

The high correlations surprised even long-time critics of intensive, large-scale farming. “Wow, that’s astounding,” said Peter Fricker, projects and communications director for the Vancouver Humane Society.

“If there is a possible link between pig farms and susceptibility to disease, public-health authorities should definitely be investigating. If the correlations are correct, the whole issue of factory farming has to be looked at,” he said in a phone interview.

“Wow, really. I don’t think anybody’s looked at this before,” said Bob Martin, who headed the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, which released a major study last year that said workers in large farms and their neighbours have high rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses due to manure runoff and emissions like ammonia and fine-particle pollution.

Martin, speaking from Washington, D.C., said some people living near pig farms could be more susceptible to H1N1 and to more severe reactions because of such respiratory ailments.

As of mid-June, 40 percent of the people who had died of H1N1 in the U.S. had had an additional medical condition like asthma, diabetes, a compromised immune system, or heart disease, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

Dr. David Patrick, director of epidemiology at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, said the data could mean people living in hog-producing regions have a higher predisposition to catching H1N1. But he cautioned that there could be other, unknown explanations for the high correlations, too.

“The fact that particulates can predispose people to asthma is clear. If particulates are an issue, we have to gradually improve our environment,” he said.

“If we have issues of predisposition [to catching H1N1], that’s a question for sober inquiry by people in environmental health.”

Until now, he said, public-health officials have believed H1N1 spreads randomly between people or may cluster in areas with dense human populations.

“Probably the most important message is if people with flu symptoms have asthma or chronic lung disease or anything that affects their immune system, see a doctor right away because antivirals can help avoid hospitalization,” he said.

The B.C. Pork Producers Association didn’t return a call for comment.

In the province’s agricultural heartland, the Fraser Valley, H1N1 seems to be going strong instead of dying off after the end of the usual flu season, as initially predicted. So far, the vast majority of incidents have been mild, but a flurry of 22 new H1N1 cases there was confirmed during the week of June 29. That number was the highest in any region of the province and almost twice as many per capita as the provincial average.

The high numbers coincide with a trend of relatively high incidence of recent H1N1 cases in some of the biggest hog-producing provinces. During the week after July 3, Manitoba saw the highest rate of new confirmed H1N1 cases per capita in Canada (8.4 per 100,000)—5.6 times more than the Canadian average (1.5 per 100,000).

The location of new flu cases also seems to have a close relationship with especially high concentrations of pig farming. There is an 80-percent correlation between the number of new cases in the seven days after July 3 and a province’s ratio of pigs to people. In other words, the more pigs there are per person, the higher the rate of the flu.

And no region of Canada has a higher density of farm animals by weight than the Fraser Valley, according to Hans Schreier, a soil scientist and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia who has studied agricultural pollution in the Valley.

“We’re generating so much manure in these operations, it winds up in the soil and water,” he said in a phone interview.

Thanks in large part to massive amounts of farm waste pouring into the Fraser River watershed, the Georgia Basin is “perhaps the most threatened area in the country” for coastal eutrophication—a process that stimulates algae blooms and chokes marine life—according to a study Schreier coauthored in 2006 in the journal Biogeochemistry. The study said farm-waste discharge is poorly regulated across Canada.

An Agriculture Canada report in 2002 found factory pig farms were causing health and pollution risks to farm workers and the local community. “In B.C.’s Fraser Valley, this chemical soup [from farm emissions] is so thick it causes a visible haze and can make up 70 per cent of the airborne particles in summer,” said the report, which was quoted in a 2002 Ottawa Citizen story and was obtained under an access-to-information request.

And of all the farm animals in the region, pigs are by far the single biggest source of smog-causing fine-particle pollution, contributing 64 percent of the total fine-particulate matter from all farm-animal sources in the Fraser Valley Regional District, according to a 2004 study done for the district and Environment Canada.

That study noted that while air-quality improvement in the region had focused on reducing emissions from vehicles and industry, “emissions from agricultural operations have been relatively untouched.”

Meanwhile, levels of nitrogen—another big emission from farms—in ground water in the Central Fraser have been above the allowable limit for drinking water since 1981, according to a 1997 UBC study published in the journal Environmental Management.

George Peary, the mayor of Abbotsford, shares his community with the highest number of pigs of any agricultural district in the province—75,570, according to the 2006 census. He acknowledged that manure from pig farms has seeped into ground water in some areas and made some well water undrinkable, but he defended farming practices. “I wouldn’t tie it [H1N1] to agricultural operations,” he said in a phone interview.

“If there were an issue, the public-health people would keep me informed.…There would be all sorts of bells and whistles going off.”

A top health official also dismissed the higher H1N1 rates in his region and said they’re not worthy of further investigation or action. “It just doesn’t matter. It spreads from person to person.…We’re not looking at it from that perspective,” said Dr. Roland Guasparini, chief medical health officer with the Fraser Health Authority.

In recent years, the B.C. government has encouraged hog producers to spread far north to the fertile Peace River region, where there’s more available farmland. The policy has helped turn Peace River into the fastest-growing hog-producing region in the entire country, with a threefold expansion in pig numbers between 2001 and 2006. The region is now home to 24,000 pigs, more than double the human population of Dawson Creek, the region’s administrative centre.

And it just so happens that the Northern Health Authority, which includes the Peace River area, has the highest ratio of pigs to people in the province—and the highest rate of confirmed H1N1 flu cases per capita.

Just across the nearby Alberta border, Denis Sauvageau has all kinds of experience with pig farms moving in next door. He is a fourth-generation farmer in a tiny community called Falher.

On April 28, Canada’s first death related to H1N1 occurred at the High Prairie Health Complex, a 50-minute drive east from Sauvageau’s house. The woman had had asthma-related difficulties, though there’s no evidence they were related to farming emissions.

Sauvageau still recalls vividly how hog producers first came to town in the late 1990s with a slick promotion campaign promising a miracle of rural revitalization. “They would create jobs, keep schools open, keep our children here,” he said.

Today, the smell from a complex of large pig farms five kilometres away is often so strong, Sauvageau can’t stay outside. “The stench is gut-wrenching. It makes you want to puke. You’re done for the night.”

Sauvageau and his neighbours started a protest group, the Peace River Environmental Society, six years ago to demand improvements in farm waste management practices. They held demonstrations. The group estimated that the 50,000 swine in nearby farms produce 20 million gallons of manure per year.

Especially worrisome, he said, are the health problems in nearby areas—high rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses.

The group finally convinced a reluctant province to study air quality in the area. “Odours do extend into surrounding areas at levels that may disrupt quality of life,” a draft version of the province’s report said in 2007. “The subgroup agreed by consensus that odour from CFOs [confined feeding operations] can have health effects.”

(The report was never published because the committee writing it, dominated by government and industry officials, couldn’t reach agreement on the document; Sauvageau’s group posted the draft on its Web site.)

The report cited other studies that had found ammonia from farms can reach levels in the surrounding area that can cause eye and throat irritation, respiratory problems, haze, and fine-particle pollution. Farm emissions of hydrogen sulphide, an eye and respiratory-tract irritant and neurotoxin at high doses, can “cause significant quality-of-human-life concern at the local scale”, according to a 2003 U.S. National Research Council study cited in the report.

The Alberta report also cited international research that found pig-farm workers have rates of chronic bronchitis that are 2.5 to 5 times higher than those in the wider population and 50- to 100-percent higher than those in dairy and poultry workers.

The possible connection between intensive hog operations and H1N1 means governments should tighten rules on farm waste, according to the humane society’s Peter Fricker. “They’re like small cities, except with no sewer system. You could understand why there would be a risk to human health.”

The Pew Commission’s Bob Martin agreed: “We have reached the point that we have to decentralize this production. It’s really a critical kind of issue.”

With 22 new flu cases confirmed just on July 13 and 14—two-thirds in the Fraser—maybe we’ll be calling it “swine flu” again soon.

H1N1 Flu Not Linked to Cattle Farms

Canada-wide, the death rate in confirmed H1N1 cases per capita in each province has an 88-percent correlation with the number of pigs per farm in that province (the bigger the pig farms, the higher the death rate) and an 89-percent correlation with the ratio of pigs to people in the province.

Also worrisome are trends among new cases. The number of new confirmed cases since July 3 in each province has a 97-percent correlation with the number of pigs in the province.

H1N1 rates have a much weaker relationship with poultry and cattle farming. Although a small correlation exists with H1N1 in some cases, especially with poultry operations, it is, on balance, more than twice as high for pig farms. In B.C., H1N1 rates actually tend to have a negative correlation with cattle farming (meaning the more cattle or dairy farms, the fewer flu cases there generally are in a region).

TAGS: farming, health, disease

The Pill Pushers

2009-06-16T09:35:00.005-04:00

Pharmaceutical giants employ "detailers" who specialize in persuading physicians to prescribe their companies' drugs

By Alex Roslin

September 4, 2008

The Georgia Straight

[This story won the Canadian Association of Journalists award for best investigative journalism in a magazine and was a finalist for the investigative journalism prize of the National Magazine Awards for 2008.]

When Shahram Ahari went to work at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly straight out of college in New Jersey, he was hired to do a job that few people know exists. Even the job title would be a mystery to most people. Ahari was going to be a “detailer”.

His job was to schmooze with doctors in order to get them to prescribe Lilly’s drugs. He was really a salesman, but he was also much more. His tools included everything from free drugs to offers of lucrative speaking engagements, even trips. He’d bring medical residents pizza for lunch or invite a doctor to dinner at an exclusive restaurant. He’d do anything to improve sales in his New York City district, which meant a bigger bonus.

The first hint of the strange world Ahari had entered came when he was brought to Indianapolis for Lilly’s intensive, six-week boot camp for detailers. There, he met his fellow trainees. They were hundreds of fellow college grads, mostly in their mid-20s, perhaps two-thirds of them women, the vast majority beautiful.

“They were 200 or 300 of the most attractive people I had ever seen,” he said in a phone interview. “The physical appeal was only part of it. They were vivacious, well-coiffured, well-dressed, engaging people.”

Ahari soon learned that charisma was more important in his new job than, say, medical or scientific knowledge. He was the only one in his class of 22 trainees with a science degree, he said.

The training was part CIA, part Freud. He learned to immediately spot items in a doctor’s office that could be used to strike up a personal conversation and, ultimately, friendship: golf paraphernalia, photos of trips or kids, religious items. The information would later be entered into the company’s file on the doctor and analyzed for future approaches.

“It was analogous to training in spy agencies,” said Ahari, who ended up working for Lilly for a year and a half in New York City. “You instantly suss up the person’s personality and look for points of entry. You capitalize on sexual appeal. My more attractive colleagues would say, ‘I’m going to wear my short skirt today,’ or ‘I’m going to wear my low-cleavage top. He [the doctor] seems to get a kick out of that.’ ”

The practice of detailing has come under growing scrutiny in B.C. Two-thirds of doctors in the province say drug reps visit them at least once a month, according to a 2006 survey by the B.C. Medical Association. Forty-two percent of general practitioners are visited several times a week. ...

Read the rest of the story at The Georgia Straight's website here. Also surf to these follow-up stories: "Pharmacies sell prescription info to drug makers" and "B.C. Health Minister won't prevent gifts going to doctors."

Desperately Seeking Midwife

2009-04-23T11:38:00.006-04:00

WHY AREN'T THERE ENOUGH IN CANADA?

by Alex Roslin

TODAY'S PARENT

Spring 2009

Moiya Callahan’s first prenatal visit to the hospital didn’t go quite as she had imagined. A nurse and intern came into the room for a quick checkup, then the obstetrician dropped by “for literally a minute,” she says. “She came in, asked if I had any questions and left.” There was no time to build a relationship with the person who would bring her little one into this world. That’s not how she had thought it would happen.

Callahan, a music composer in Montreal, turned to the Internet, and that’s where she heard about midwives and their natural approach to pregnancy and childbirth. Still a little unclear on what that meant, she made an appointment. The experience was another eye-opener as she learned about midwives’ philosophy of birth as a healthy normal process that usually doesn’t require a doctor or even a hospital setting. “Your whole world changes. It’s a different perspective on pregnancy. I had never thought like that before.”

Opting for midwifery care

Callahan is part of a fast-growing trend of Canadian parents who are opting for midwifery care, as research shows they offer a safe, low-intervention alternative for the 80 to 90 percent of births that are considered low risk. But in much of Canada, parents are lucky to get in the door. While 24 percent of Quebec parents say they’d like to have their baby in a birthing centre or at home with a midwife, only 1.6 percent actually do. Two-thirds of moms who call for a spot with a midwife are turned away because of a lack of places. That’s largely because the province has just 90 practitioners, instead of the 500 that midwives estimate are needed to meet the demand.

That same story is being repeated across Canada. One of the last industrialized countries to officially recognize and regulate midwifery (beginning with Ontario in 1994), Canada is suddenly seeing a scramble to keep up with the exploding demand for midwives.

In Ontario, the province that leads the way in terms of the proportion of women giving birth with midwives (eight percent), demand is fast outstripping supply. A 2005 Ontario government study found that only 57 percent of women who wanted a midwife’s services in 2003/04 actually got to see one, compared to 80 percent in 1999/2000. According to a 2006 study, some 16,000 women seek a midwife each year, and 6,000 can’t get a spot. Last year, the Ontario government announced a $2.3 million plan to increase by 50 percent the number of enrolments for the four-year midwifery undergraduate program. The aim is to have an additional 1,200 women give birth with a midwife each year. But that will still mean 4,800 women will be out of luck.

While midwifery struggled for recognition as recently as the 1990s, health officials and doctors are quickly coming around, largely for the most pragmatic reason: Midwives can save the cash-strapped health system oodles of money because their natural delivery method costs about 30 percent less than the conventional hospital approach.

Officials also say midwives have a critical role to play in helping Canada’s health care system cope with a yawning lack of maternity care providers, a situation that’s reached crisis proportions and is poised to get a whole lot worse as boomer-aged doctors start to retire.

But despite this, midwifery still faces major obstacles in Canada. Don’t expect anything soon like New Zealand’s quick progress since it officially recognized midwifery in 1990; there, 78 percent of women today give birth with a midwife. In Canada, by contrast, midwives say that while many doctors and nurses support their profession, expansion is still happening at a glacial pace due to resistance from some in the medical community and inertia in the health care bureaucracy. Progress is also slow because of the same delays in turning out new graduates that the medical profession faces: a mishmash of differing approaches in each province and territory, and always tight health budgets.

The maternity case crisis

Callers to Corinne Leclercq’s medical clinic in Victoriaville, Que., got a stark awakening last summer about the crisis hitting the field of obstetrics and gynaecology. A phone message said the clinic had no spaces open for gynaecological exams for the following four months due to a shortage of doctors that would persist for nearly a year.

Gynaecologists’ offices have been inundated by a mini baby boom. Leclercq says a lack of maternity care doctors in the province has meant 20 unfilled hospital positions for OB/GYNs. “It will just get worse,” she says, noting that 30 to 40 percent of OB/GYNs in the province are aged 50 and up and will soon retire. In Ontario, the number of family doctors and obstetricians attending births has already dropped from 3,100 in 1984 to less than 1,300 in 2004. Across Canada, 36 percent of obstetricians and gynaecologists expect to retire within five years, according to a report from the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (SOGC). (Leclercq sits on the society’s board.)

These shortages are a key reason that Canada slipped from sixth to 21st place in national infant mortality rates between 1990 and 2002, and from second place to 11th for rates of maternal complications during labour, says the SOGC report.

“Midwives can help in part with this lack of professionals,” Leclercq said.

But Leclercq’s support comes with an important caveat: She thinks midwives should all work in hospitals and not deliver babies in homes or Quebec’s unique network of midwife-run birthing centres. “The risk is certainly higher at home or in birthing centres,” she said.

It’s a controversial argument that midwives vehemently reject, saying they’ve got not only a proven safety record, but also much lower rates of medical interventions than doctors.

In Wolfville, NS, midwife Louise McDonald is also turning clients away. She is one of just six midwives serving the entire province, where, like her counterparts in the other Atlantic provinces, the Yukon and Nunavut, midwives are not yet regulated by provincial law. This means their services aren’t covered by provincial health plans, and parents must pay $1,200 to $2,400 (McDonald uses a sliding scale depending on family income) for a full course of care at her clinic. It also means she has no malpractice insurance, rights to prescribe medications or hospital privileges, and risks being charged with practising medicine without a licence.

McDonald says midwifery in Atlantic Canada has progressed slowly because of squeezed health budgets — meaning no money for start-up costs for a midwifery program — and an erosion of awareness that most births can happen safely, without any need for medical interventions. “A lot of that is because of the lack of midwives. We can educate women on normal births. We are the specialists in normal births.”

Nova Scotia is now developing regulations to govern midwives and hopes to license and fund them by early 2009. New Brunswick has said it will also license and fund midwives this year. Maria Kuttner, former director of primary health care at the Nova Scotia Department of Health, says the use of midwives for normal birth will free up doctors to deal with cases involving complications. “It’s going to alleviate some of the wait times,” she says.

Kuttner agrees with McDonald that lack of awareness about midwifery in the medical community has contributed to the province’s slowness to license midwives. “They may not appreciate that midwives do more than deliver babies. They take care of families from the beginning of pregnancy,” she says.

The midwifery experience

In Alberta, where the province does regulate midwives, but their service isn’t included in the health plan, Heather Cook was willing to lay down the $3,000 fee to have her second baby in a natural, low-stress setting.

Cook, a Calgary writer, speaks in glowing terms about her experience. “I loved, loved, loved my midwife. I talk about her all the time. The care was so wonderful. I said afterward, ‘I want to do that again!’”

That’s not quite what she was saying after her previous baby was born. Prenatal appointments with her doctor had lasted less than 10 minutes. During labour, nurses did frequent manual checks on her progress that she says were quite uncomfortable. Nurses also advised her to start pushing before she was ready, which left her prematurely exhausted; then “the doctor popped in for the last 15 minutes,” she said.

With her midwife, by contrast, prenatal appointments lasted an hour or more; her midwife visited her at home before and after the birth; and during labour the two midwives who attended were reassuring and unobtrusive, checking her progress manually as little as possible. Cook said their confidence in her helped her trust her body and have a more comfortable labour.

She believes the contrast between the two experiences — both lasting the same nine hours — was the main reason for the large difference in her recovery time. “After my first child, it felt like I had been kicked in the crotch for an hour or two and I stayed in bed for 24 hours,” says Cook. “With my second birth, there was way less swelling and pain, and I was able to walk out of the hospital four hours after having my daughter.”

Leclercq acknowledges that OB/GYNs can’t give pregnant women the same attention as midwives because of vast differences in client loads. She has 200 to 225 maternity care clients per year, while midwives’ professional standards limit their patient load to 40. Leclercq also agrees that rates of medical interventions like C-sections are too high in hospitals, a trend she attributes in part to doctors not wanting to take chances due to the threat of lawsuits: “There are doctors who do too many C-sections.”

On the horizon

Back in Quebec, a radical expansion of midwifery is reportedly in the works at the provincial health ministry.

In June 2008, Minister of Health Philippe Couillard announced the creation, by 2014, of 13 new stand-alone birthing centres where midwives will be based, and a goal to have midwives delivering 10 percent of the province’s 80,000 annual births by 2018. That would mean a need for 2,000 midwives — more than 20 times the current number. Quebec midwives welcome the news. But like their counterparts across the country, they also worry that a fast expansion of midwifery in Canada will come with strings attached, like integration into the hospital system and having doctors train midwives. These are changes that midwives say would imperil their vision of birth as being, in most cases, a healthy normal event best left free of the risk-based approach of the medical model.

Also, despite the province’s support, midwives say that previous expansion plans have stalled due to resistance from a foot-dragging health bureaucracy, which wants control over the birthing centres, as well as from doctors fearing that midwives will take away their jobs. Case in point: In the Laurentians north of Montreal, advocates first proposed a regional birthing centre in 1992; the OK finally came two years ago, 15 years later — and only after the local mayor, who is married to a midwife, agreed to kick in city funds to build it. “The resistance coming from the medical community slowed the birthing centre for years,” said Céline Lemay, president of the Quebec Midwives Association.

For Moiya Callahan in Montreal, any expansion comes a little too late. Activists have lobbied for a birthing centre to serve the eastern and central part of the city, where she lives, for 10 years without much progress, and as she doesn’t have a vehicle, she had to rent cars or take the subway and bus to make her prenatal appointments at the West Island’s Maison de naissance Lac Saint-Louis — a 60 kilometre round trip. Still, the long treks didn’t stop her from having all three of her kids there. “I couldn’t imagine doing it any other way.”

Midwifery basics

Midwifery varies a little in each province and territory, but there are some common basics. Midwives believe moms with low-risk pregnancies can deliver with minimal medical intervention.

“Physicians and nurses are trained to look for illness in the body, whereas midwives tend to look at pregnancy and childbirth as a healthy process,” says Gisela Becker, a practitioner in Fort Smith, NT, who has a master’s degree in midwifery and is vice-president of the Canadian Association of Midwives.

A midwife will usually follow her client through pregnancy, labour, birth and for six weeks postpartum. “When women have one-on-one care, research shows there are better outcomes,” Becker says.

While she takes pains to point out that many doctors and nurses also provide excellent maternity care, Becker says that because midwives offer continuity of care by a single provider and spend more time with clients, they often have more chance to build trust, ease fears about birth and help women go into labour with more self-confidence. “Ninety percent of what we do is preventive care, and if we do that well, hardly any interventions will occur,” she explains.

Prenatal visits usually take place in a clinic or birthing centre and often last an hour or more, while births may happen in hospital or at home. In Quebec, clients deliver in a midwife-led birthing centre.

Looking for a midwife? Most of the provinces and territories have an association of midwives that can give you a referral. A starting place to learn more is the website of the Canadian Association of Midwives: canadianmidwives.org.

Midwifery safe, inexpensive

The research is clear: Midwife-assisted births are safe, lead to fewer medical interventions, such as Caesarean section and episiotomy, and cost less than births with a doctor.

A 2004 study by Quebec midwife Sinclair Harris, of 8,429 midwife-assisted births in birthing centres, found a perinatal mortality rate of 4.7 per 1,000 births from 1995 to 2002, compared to a Quebec average of 6.7 for low-risk deliveries in 1998.

A 2005 study led by Kenneth Johnson, an epidemiologist with the Public Health Agency of Canada, found dramatically lower rates of medical interventions among 5,418 midwife-assisted home births in Canada and the US, as compared to the same type of low-risk births in hospital. Interventions were less frequent for:

• episiotomy (2.1% vs. 33%)
• Caesarean section (3.7% vs. 19%)
• electronic fetal monitoring (9.6% vs. 84.3%)
• vacuum extraction (0.6% vs. 5.5%)

A 1997 study of midwifery for the Quebec government found midwife-assisted clients in the province had fewer premature babies than low-risk-pregnancy moms followed by doctors (2.9% vs. 5.7%) and a lower hospitalization rate during pregnancy (3.3% vs. 10.3%). The study also found midwife-assisted birth in hospital costs less than conventional birth in hospital ($2,062 vs. $3,016).

A 2002 Quebec government report found that 98% of midwife-assisted clients breastfed at birth compared to a provincial average of 72%.

Oceans Awash in Plastic

2008-12-03T15:59:00.003-05:00

Ever wonder what happened to that plastic wrapper or water bottle you accidentally dropped on the sidewalk the other day?

Alex Roslin

The Montreal Gazette

Saturday, November 15, 2008

If you think it wound up in a garbage dump or recycling depot, think again. A lot of the plastic debris that litters Montreal streets is flushed into the city's sewers and straight into the St. Lawrence River.

It then floats off into the Atlantic, where circular ocean currents slowly bring it to the centre of the North Atlantic.

Scientists are growing alarmed about massive floating garbage patches that are believed to be building up in the calm centres of the gyres in the middle of nearly all of the world's oceans.

The best-known patch, dubbed the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, consists of an estimated 100 million tonnes of plastic debris that has accumulated in the North Pacific gyre. Environmentalists call it the Pacific Trash Vortex.

It is believed to be at least half the size of Quebec and possibly up to 10 times its size, depending on how it is measured. And it seems to be growing. Plastic from the vortex is increasingly washing up on Hawaiian atolls and being found in the guts of seabirds and fish.

An estimated 100,000 marine mammals die each year from eating or being entangled in debris - mostly plastic - in the North Pacific alone. Hence the vortex's other nickname: the Plastic Killing Fields.

Plastic in the sea doesn't biodegrade like other garbage. Instead, it slowly breaks up into tinier and tinier pieces that float on the ocean surface or sink to the sea bottom and can take years to finally reach the ocean gyres.

The vortexes are increasingly seen as environmental disaster zones. Plastic contains many toxic chemicals; it also soaks up other dangerous substances already present in the ocean, like carcinogenic PCBs and DDT.

While the oceans may seem far away, Montrealers are directly contributing to the plastic vortexes, say environmentalists like Hélène Godmaire.

Godmaire is the Montreal director of Great Lakes United, a Canadian-U.S. environmental group. The group will issue a report in coming weeks on how antiquated sewage systems in Montreal and other cities in Quebec are discharging massive volumes of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence.

The sewers lack filters and grates to prevent plastic and other street litter from being swept into the river, Godmaire said.

Indeed, 80 per cent of the plastic in the ocean gyres is believed to come from the land, while the remainder is litter from cargo ships, cruise boats and other sea vessels.

"Next time there's a rainstorm, just look at what's in the gutter," said Elaine MacDonald, a Toronto scientist with the environmental group Ecojustice Canada.

"The sewers are directly connected to our rivers and lakes." In a 2005 survey, Ecojustice gave Montreal's sewage system a failing "F" grade - the second lowest grade in the country after Victoria.

The group faulted Montreal for having an antiquated system of sewers. Two-thirds of the island has sewers that combine storm water and sewage in the same pipes.

In normal conditions, the city's sewage-treatment plant filters out plastic and other debris in the rainwater.

But when there is a heavy downpour, the pipes often back up, and raw sewage and debris are discharged directly into the St. Lawrence, said Duong Dao Dang, an engineer at the plant.

Ironically, the situation isn't much better in more recently developed areas of the island where storm and sewer pipes are separate - mostly in the West Island. Here, storm water flows directly into the river, with little filtering of debris.

Grates over gutters catch larger litter, but smaller pieces of floating garbage often wash into the St. Lawrence, Godmaire said.

Montreal city spokesman Philippe Sabourin confirmed culverts that discharge rainwater into the river don't have gratings or filters. "That could create a blockage," he said.

sss Richard Thompson is one of the few scientists studying plastic in the oceans. The marine biologist at England's University of Plymouth first noticed the problem in the early 1990s while working on his PhD at a lab on the Isle of Man, between Scotland and Ireland.

He helped organize a beach cleanup day and was stunned by the amount of garbage - mostly plastic - that had washed up on the island's shores. He borrowed the lab's pickup truck to carry away the debris, expecting he'd have a single load.

"We made six or seven trips and still hadn't touched a fraction of the quantity on the beach. It brought home for me the enormity of it," he said.

"Look at a street after a fair or busy shopping day. You don't have to walk long to see people dropping litter. It doesn't have to be dropped into the sea to wind up there." In a landmark study in 2004, Thompson looked at old samples of plankton collected in the North Atlantic starting in the 1960s. He found microscopic pieces of plastic in the water that had been scooped up with the plankton.

What's more, the amounts of plastic had exploded. The latest water samples had about four times more plastic than the earliest samples from the 1960s. That coincided with a 25-fold increase in plastic production worldwide between 1960 and 2000.

Even more alarming, the water samples were from an area of the Atlantic north of Britain that isn't even in the gyre. No one has ever studied the amount of plastic in the Atlantic gyre itself.

Thompson's studies reported other alarming research: Ninety-eight per cent of dead seabirds studied in northern Europe have plastic in their stomachs.

More than 260 animal species are known to eat or get entangled in plastic - turtles, fish, marine mammals, even small creatures like mussels, barnacles and beach flees.

Ten per cent of all plastic debris eventually winds up in the sea.

Ocean currents and winds are slowly bringing all that debris to the centre of five major ocean gyres in the North and South Atlantic, North and South Pacific and the Indian Oceans, said Marieta Francis, executive director of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, based in Long Beach, Calif.

But despite the ever-growing plastic blobs in the oceans, the Pacific gyre is the only one that has been studied.

That research started when the Algalita foundation's founder, an avid boater named Charles Moore, chanced upon the Pacific Garbage Patch during a 1997 yacht race.

"There were shampoo caps and soap bottles and plastic bags and fishing floats as far as I could see," he told the U.S. News & World Report.

"Here I was in the middle of the ocean, and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic." The vortex was in the North Pacific gyre, where a high-pressure zone forces debris into a central area that has low currents and winds.

Sailors used to fear getting stuck in gyres because the paltry wind could leave ships stranded without headway for weeks on end.

Moore returned with a scientific vessel to study the vortex and netted everything from a cathode-ray tube to a truck tire, a mass of fishing net and a chemical drum.

One of his most outlandish finds: a 16-kilometre-long slick of Taco Bell plastic baggies. He estimated there were 6 million.

Moore found up to 970,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre in some areas of the vortex.

That was triple the density found in an earlier landmark study in the western Pacific by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

That study, done in 1988, was the first to document large amounts of plastic in the Pacific. One area 1,000 kilometres east of Japan had 315,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre.

The density in Moore's gyre is much higher. "You can go for days and days and see plastic everywhere," said Francis.

Moore estimated in 2002 that the volume of plastic in the gyre had tripled in the previous 10 years.

While much of the debris is large and conspicuous, most of it has disintegrated after years of washing around in the ocean.

The plastic pieces are usually five millimetres across or less and must be scooped up in nets finer than a window screen.

"It's not quite what people think. It's like a soup," Francis said.

In the Atlantic, the only research on plastic garbage is more than 30 years old. A survey in the northeastern Atlantic in the early 1970s found 160,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre in some areas.

Back in Canada, the growing plastic vortexes still seem far from the official radar. At the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, oceanographer Denis Gilbert is one of Canada's leading experts on the St. Lawrence and Atlantic environments.

Gilbert said no one in his office is studying plastic debris entering the St. Lawrence River. As for plastic accumulating in the Atlantic gyre, he had never even heard of it. "We have no one working on that," he said.

Thompson, for his part, hopes to cobble together funds for a scientific sea voyage to the heart of the North Atlantic gyre to confirm for the first time that a plastic trash vortex is indeed gathering there, just as in the Pacific. He also wants to study the impacts on the environment.

"I'd be very keen to go. This stuff is here for generations to come. We haven't really begun to comprehend the impacts."

- - -

Our Toxic Trash Winds Up in the Sea

Plastic accounts for an estimated 70 per cent of all the human garbage in the world's water bodies. Here are some more plastic facts:

8% of the world's oil production is used to make plastic.

40% of plastic is used for packaging material.

500 billion to one trillion plastic bags are used worldwide every year.

5% of plastic is recycled in the U.S.;

20% in the European Union.

10% of all plastic debris is thought to wind up in the sea.

80% of plastic in the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch comes from the land.

1.7 million pieces of plastic were found per square kilometre of shoreline in a 2005 worldwide survey.

100 million tonnes of plastic is in the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, estimates the Algalita Marine Research Foundation.

OCEAN SCOURGE: "STOP IT ON LAND"

Marieta Francis says there is a simple solution to the growing soup of plastic trash in the world's oceans. "We need to stop it on land," says the California environmentalist.

Marine biologist Richard Thompson agrees. The first solution, he said, is not to litter the streets. "Any litter that is dropped has a high potential to get into waterways," he said.

Thompson's other solutions come from the three Rs: reduce, reuse and recycle:

Reducing plastic use. Thompson said two-fifths of plastic is used for packaging, which is typically discarded after a single use not long after a product is bought. Another big culprit: plastic bags. Some countries and cities have banned them outright, while others have slapped taxes on them.

Improving recycling. Just 5 per cent of plastic waste in the U.S. is recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The Canadian rate isn't known, but Toronto scientist Elaine MacDonald said it would be quite low, too. One reason: Each municipality has its own recycling program, while provincial guidelines are generally weak, she said.

Designing smarter. A lot of plastic products can't be easily recycled because they use different colours or types of plastic that can't be combined during recycling. "We should design products with a high potential for recycling," Thompson said. Japan is often seen as a model for this idea. Its goal is to achieve a "closed loop" economy in which all used products are recycled into new ones.

Developing biodegradable plastic. Scientists are experimenting with new biodegradable plastics that slowly break down when exposed to sunlight or water. Some of the products are made from corn or pea starch.

Canadian environmentalists Hélène Godmaire and MacDonald say Montreal and other older cities on the St. Lawrence Rivers and Great Lakes need to improve antiquated sewage systems that discharge a lot of plastic and other garbage into the water. They propose:

Filtering storm water. A lot of plastic gets into the sea through outdated city sewers that release debris directly into rivers and lakes. Solution: screens and grates to catch the litter. (Also important: cleaning the screens regularly.)

Upgrading sewage systems. During heavy rain, Montreal's sewage system often backs up, discharging untreated sewage and rainwater carrying plastic and other garbage into the St. Lawrence River.

Thompson said the public has a strong appetite for change.

"Already we are seeing consumers turning away from plastic bags. I think you'd find very quickly consumers would vote with their feet. The public is keen to do the right thing," he said.

WHERE OUR TRASH GATHERS

What are plastic garbage patches?

Scientists say they believe plastic trash blobs bigger than most countries are forming in the middle of the world's oceans. The debris is slowly brought there by circular ocean currents called gyres that sweep up debris and bring it to their centres. Think water funneling down the toilet.

The Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch is the only one that scientists have studied up-close. It's estimated to contain 100 million tonnes of garbage and its size is estimated at anywhere from 700,000 square kilometres (half the size of Quebec) to 15 million sq. km. (10 times Quebec's area) and at least 60 metres deep. Some scientists say it might actually be two trash vortexes - one between Hawaii and California, the other between Hawaii and Japan.

Where are they?

Plastic garbage patches are believed to be accumulating in five gyres - in the middle of the North and South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.

What's in them?

All sorts of litter has been found in the gyres - everything from a cargo spill of millions of plastic baggies to bottle caps, Styrofoam, syringes, water bottles, traffic cones, lighters, tires and toothbrushes, beach balls, plastic bags, shampoo bottles and plastic dinosaurs, checkers, highlighter pens, perfume bottles and fishing line.

Where does the trash come from?

One-fifth of the plastic in the oceans is thought to be litter from ships. The rest comes from land: Much of it is litter from city streets that is swept into sewers and gets discharged into rivers and lakes, eventually making its way into the sea. Some can also blow into the water from poorly secured trash bins or get taken there by seagulls having a snack at a garbage dump.

The trash can take years to bob its way to the ocean gyres, where it slowly breaks up into ever-smaller pieces until it resembles dust.

What does it look like?

Some of the plastic debris can be seen bobbing on or near the surface but much of it has broken down into tiny pieces after years of floating in the sea and is barley visible, so the garbage patch is often described as plastic "soup." Most pieces are less than five millimetres across. About a third of the debris floats on or near the surface - 60 metres down or more - while the rest sinks to the sea bottom.

What is the impact of the plastic garbage in our oceans?

Over 260 animal species are known to eat or get caught in the plastic debris. About 100,000 marine mammals are estimated to die from doing so in the North Pacific alone. On Midway Island in Hawaii, 400,000 albatrosses feed their chicks nearly five tonnes of plastic a year, John Klavitter, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Survey, has estimated. A European study found 98 per cent of dead seabirds had plastic in their stomachs.

Scientists fear toxic chemicals in the plastic may enter the animals' bodies. People may also ingest microscopic pieces of plastic when they eat fish.

Finding the Right Formula for Nursing

2008-10-10T10:43:00.015-04:00

Just three per cent of Quebec mothers breastfeed exclusively until their babies are 6 months old, statistics show. A big part of the problem, says one mom, is the difficulty and cost of finding medical professionals who offer support.

Alex Roslin

The Montreal Gazette

Saturday, October 4, 2008

When Marie-Andrée Bossé had her first baby in 2005, she was all set to breastfeed. She knew breastmilk was the best food for her child.

But she soon started to feel pain and burning sensations during breastfeeding sessions. She consulted a long list of medical professionals—CLSC and hospital nurses and several private lactation consultants—but the problems only got worse.

Soon, there was intense pain in her breasts even when she wasn’t breastfeeding. She was advised to change how the baby latched onto her breast, but the changes helped only a little.

Adding to the pain, she learned she had contracted a host of breastfeeding-related illnesses with strange names she had never heard of before: candidiasis of the nipple, vasospasms and something called bleb—painful blisters around the nipples.

Still, Bossé, a sexology instructor at the University of Quebec in Montreal, insisted on breastfeeding. It was three months before the pain and ailments finally went away with the help of lactation consultants, who showed her how to improve her baby’s latch, and a sympathetic doctor who prescribed medications.

A big part of the problem, she said, was the difficulty in finding medical professionals specialized in breastfeeding issues and the cost of the help. She estimates her expenses for the consultations and drugs at $400 to $500.

“My problems required specialized expertise, and it’s very hard to find those services. That’s why most mothers stop breastfeeding when they encounter problems,” she said.

Breastfeeding experts say Bossé’s story is common and a key reason why, according to a 2006 study by the Quebec government’s statistics institute, just three percent of Quebec moms breastfeed their babies exclusively until they’re six months old. That’s the period of time recommended by Health Canada and the World Health Organization.

Seven years after Quebec adopted one of Canada’s most ambitious policies to promote breastfeeding, the province still has one of the lowest rates of sustained breastfeeding in the country.

For comparison, 19 percent of mothers Canada-wide breastfeed exclusively until six months; in Sweden, the rate is 70 percent.

Now, health officials are reviewing the province’s breastfeeding policy and trying to figure out the reasons for the glacial progress.

The problem, say breastfeeding experts, is that while most Quebec women start out breastfeeding their babies, health professionals are failing to provide proper support and advice when women encounter problems like a bad latch, soreness or poor milk supply.

That, coupled with abundant supplies of infant formula that companies give for free to most Quebec hospitals, makes it hard for women to keep breastfeeding when they encounter problems, said Howard Mitnick, a family doctor at the Jewish General Hospital’s Goldfarb Breast-Feeding Clinic.

“We live in a world where people don’t see breastfeeding and don’t know what it looks like. They have a baby and are suddenly expected to be experts, and people are not around to help them,” he said.

The stakes in the battle over the breast are huge. Research shows breastfed babies have fewer ear and respiratory infections, reduced allergies and diarrhea, a stronger immune system, higher IQ, less risk of diabetes later in life, better development of speech, jaw muscles and baby teeth, and better bonding with mom.

Mothers also benefit by losing weight quicker, experiencing faster contraction of the uterus and having lower risk of osteoporosis and ovarian and breast cancers.

In some cases, research shows breastfeeding is literally a life-and-death issue. A May 2004 U.S. study of 9,900 infants published in the journal Pediatrics found a 27-percent higher chance of death among kids who had never been breastfed compared to those who had, including a 19-percent greater risk of sudden infant death syndrome and 69 percent more chance of death by injury.

“Promoting breastfeeding has the potential to save or delay approximately 720 post-neonatal deaths in the United States each year,” the study said.

The poor situation in Quebec is especially ironic because it was the first Canadian province to officially mandate in 2001 that its hospitals and CLSCs get certified under an international pro-breastfeeding program called the Baby Friendly Initiative.

The initiative, created by the World Health Organization, sets out 10 measures for hospitals to adopt to encourage breastfeeding.

They include training for maternity-ward nurses and doctors, better education on breastfeeding techniques for moms and reduced reliance on formula.

The Quebec government set a target of having 20 hospitals and 40 CLSCs certified as Baby Friendly by 2007, as well as 75 percent of moms breastfeeding exclusively at birth—meaning no infant formula, water or other food—and 10 percent doing so at six months.

Quebec has fallen well short of those goals. Just 13 Quebec hospitals and CLSCs are now Baby Friendly, while only half of moms breastfeed exclusively at birth and just three percent do so at six months.

The failed targets don’t come as a big surprise to Mitnick. He said the province has devoted few funds to train medical staff on breastfeeding techniques, provide more breastfeeding education to parents, create more free lactation clinics or reduce reliance of formula in hospitals.

“The more money the health system puts into breastfeeding, the more money it saves through reduced hospital re-admissions, infections and malnutrition,” he said.

***

Why do so many moms stop breastfeeding early on? A study of Quebec moms in August found the main reasons for giving up are latching problems, pain and poor milk supply.

Most of these problems can be resolved with some expert help, said Louisa Ciofani, a lactation consultant at Royal Victoria Hospital.

Just three percent of moms actually can’t produce enough milk to breastfeed their babies exclusively, usually due to damage to the breast from cancer, burns or surgery, Ciofani said. But even these women can still usually breastfeed to some extent. Less than one percent of women can’t breastfeed at all, she said.

Long ago, it used to be that new moms got help for breastfeeding problems from their mothers, aunts and grandmothers. But after infant formula companies started touting their product as being as good as breastmilk in the 1950s—a belief that numerous studies have since discredited—several generations of women lost that knowledge.

Today, most women must rely on doctors and nurses for help. But few of those professionals have taken the 20-hour training course on breastfeeding that the WHO recommends for maternity-ward staff, Mitnick said.

“People (in hospitals) don’t have the skill set,” he said.

Without help from experts, many breastfeeding moms end up giving up, said Carole Dobrich, a lactation consultant at Mitnick’s clinic and president of the Quebec Association of Lactation Consultants.

“Mothers who are well-supported can get through it, but you have to have that support,” she said.

Tammy Sawyer, a registered massage therapist in Montreal, said she encountered unhelpful hospital staff when she gave birth to her daughter Sophie in August. Her daughter was born with a cleft lip and palate, and medical staff told her to avoid breastfeeding because they believed her baby wouldn’t be able to suck well.

“They said my baby was pretty much going to starve if I breastfed,” Sawyer said.

She said hospital staff advised her use to a pump to manually extract breastmilk, but didn’t show her how to use one.

She later discovered Mitnick’s clinic, where she learned how to breastfeed her baby successfully. She said Sophie is now growing nicely.

Dobrich said hospital staff are often too overworked to teach moms breastfeeding techniques. The result: infant formula is often seen as a quick-fix to feeding problems, she said.

“The quick answer is, ‘Let’s give mom formula because we don’t have time to teach her,’” she said.

Provincial government statistics show half of moms who breastfeed while in hospital are not doing so exclusively and are being given formula to supplement their babies.

The problem is early use of formula can disrupt the establishment of breastfeeding and, later, make it harder for moms to stick with it when they encounter problems or one too many sleepless night, Dobrich said.

The high rate of formula supplementation in hospitals runs counter to WHO guidelines on breastfeeding. The WHO says formula should be used only in cases of dire medical necessity, such as when babies or their mothers are severely ill or the baby has birth weight under 1.5 kilos.

Dobrich said the WHO guidelines are routinely flouted. Mitnick said Quebec hospitals also accept free formula from companies in violation of the WHO guidelines, which call on hospitals to pay at least 80 percent of the market price.

What’s wrong with hospitals accepting free formula? If it’s free, staff hand it out too readily, Mitnick said. “The more formula that’s around, the more it’s going to leak into the maternity rooms.”

And the province’s support for breastfeeding may soon actually diminish, said Isabelle Cloutier, president of the Nourri-Source Federation, a group of volunteers who help moms with breastfeeding problems. She said proposed government cuts to prenatal education classes will make it even harder for mothers to get breastfeeding information.

“We need the will and the cash to change practices,” she said.

Oct. 1 to 7 is breastfeeding week in North America and will be marked with a world-wide "breastfeeding challenge" on Saturday, Oct. 11, when organizers are trying to get the most women possible to come together to breastfeed at one time. In Montreal, last year's winning city with the most moms participating, there are 10 locations this year, including the Palais des Congrès, where the breast-in starts at 11 a.m. For more information and registration, visit Babyfriendly.ca.

For more info on breastfeeding:

Quebec government's statistics institute 2006 report on breastfeeding

Ask Lenore: website of Montreal lactation consultant Lenore Goldfarb

Quebec Nourri-Source Federation's website

Toronto lactation consultant Dr. Jack Newman's website

TAGS: breastfeeding, maternity

The Clones On Our Plates

2008-09-09T09:52:00.006-04:00

Is food from cloned animals safe to eat? The debate continues, but some of the meat and milk is already making its way into the marketplace in the U.S. - and possibly Canada.

by Alex Roslin

The Montreal Gazette

Saturday, September 06, 2008

Clones. To some, the word evokes Frankenfood or Star Wars Stormtroopers. To veterinarian Donald Coover, it conjures a miraculous world of super-cows with high milk and meat yields and horses as fast as Secretariat, the legendary Triple Crown-winning thoroughbred.

Coover is helping to lead the clone revolution out of tiny Galesburg, Kansas, a village of 150 with one convenience store and two churches, surrounded by fields of wheat and cattle ranches.

This is the home base of Coover's company SEK Genetics and its thriving business of selling semen from elite cows to farmers. He says he has also sold enough semen from cloned cows to inseminate tens of thousands of farm animals, and he says "dozens at least, hundreds probably" of other cloning businesses in the U.S. are doing the same thing.

Despite a request by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that farmers respect a voluntary moratorium on selling food from clones to consumers, Coover says he has sold dozens of clones and their offspring to farmers for use in food production since 2001.

"It's not illegal, and it's not unethical," he said. "Instead of having just another damn horse, you have Secretariat every time. That is why it's enormously useful." Cloning is a way to create a perfect genetic copy of an adult animal. Its cell material is transferred to an egg that is grown into an embryo and implanted in a surrogate mother.

Advocates like Coover say the process can help farmers duplicate top livestock and improve meat and milk yields.

"It's frustrating to me that we've been able to develop this incredible technology, and people are bitching and moaning about it," he said.

Food from clones is still banned in Canada, but Health Canada is now considering whether to lift the ban.

Surveys show widespread public unease about the technology. In a 2003 survey for the Canadian government, only 24 per cent of Canadians and 32 per cent of Americans supported the use of cloned animals for food.

The most common concern was "long-term risk to human health," cited by 37 per cent of Canadians.

After a seven-year scientific review, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last January okayed meat and milk from cloned cows, pigs and goats and their offspring as being safe to eat.

The selling of clone food to consumers is still on hold while the U.S. Department of Agriculture works out a plan to assuage the concerns of consumers in the U.S. and abroad. In the interim, it has asked cloners and livestock farmers to continue to respect its voluntary moratorium.

"The food in every respect is indistinguishable from food from any other animal," FDA official Stephen Sundlof told reporters last January.

But the scientific debate about clone food still appears far from over. In fact, Sundlof's statement seems to be contradicted by a 2006 background paper on cloning prepared by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency that was obtained through an access-to-information request.

The CFIA paper and the FDA's own 968-page scientific review published last January depict cloning as an unpredictable technology fraught with problems that almost always leads to outright failure or disfigured animals that aren't safe to eat.

Even in cases where clones and their offspring look healthy, they appear to suffer from genetic abnormalities and research is sparse on whether their food is safe, the documents say.

"There is not enough data to indicate there will be no problem," said Pascale Chavatte-Palmer, one of the world's leading cloning researchers, whose studies are cited over 50 times in the FDA report.

"I think we should know more. We feel there is a rush to accept those clones," she said in an interview.

In Europe, food from clones isn't being sold because of formal and informal moratoriums in various countries. But this week, the European Parliament voted 622-to-32 to urge the European Union's executive branch to ban food from clones, citing concerns about food safety, consumer confidence and animal suffering.

The move followed a report from the European Food Safety Authority in July that said, while there is "no clear evidence" food from cloned cows and pigs is unsafe, more study is needed because of the lack of data.

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Chavatte-Palmer is no anti-biotech Luddite. She's dined on what she calls "very good" cloned Kobe beef, which she thinks was most likely safe to eat. Yet, she paints a picture of a technology that's about as precise as a steamroller.

Out of 1,000 attempts, a clone embryo is successfully developed and implanted into a surrogate mother only about 100 times, said Chavatte-Palmer, who is a research leader at the French government's Institut Nationale de la Recherche Agronomique, the leading agricultural-research institute in Europe.

Of those 100 embryo transfers, just five fetuses are typically born alive, she said.

The rest mostly miscarry due to genetic or physical defects or abnormal placentas. Their most common abnormality is called large offspring syndrome, which results in fetuses 20- to 85-per-cent larger than average.

The animals that survive to birth also often have large offspring syndrome - which occurs in up to half of clone births - or other severe problems like a deformed head, contracted tendons, extreme diarrhea, diabetes, respiratory failure, heart disease and kidney problems. Many die shortly after birth.

A Japanese study cited in the FDA's review painted an unsettling picture of several clone calves that had died. "The neck was bent backwards, the hind legs were stretched tightly or the second joints were bent toward the opposite direction from the normal position," it said.

"Calf No. 12 was disemboweled at parturition and the face of calf 16 was warped."

Some of the calves had been born with "an 'adult' appearance" and displayed "many wrinkles in the skin, thick bone structure and rough hairs resembling those of adult males."

Indeed, Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell in 1996, lived for only six years, half the average lifespan for her breed, and developed obesity, lung cancer and premature arthritis.

Even the few clones that appear to be healthy really aren't, said Chavatte-Palmer, who is one of a small handful of scientists worldwide to have studied the long-term health of clones.

"Cloned animals, although apparently normal, are however significantly different from (conventionally raised animals) maintained in the same conditions," she wrote in a paper in the journal Animal last year.

The CFIA came to a similar conclusion in its paper. "There is an inadequate amount of information on any species to determine long-term physiological effects (of cloning)," it said.

"Early research suggests that these animals have subtle gene expression abnormalities."

The CFIA said cloning "could have long-term effects that compromise animal health and survival."

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So is food from clones safe to eat? The FDA's review concluded that meat and milk from deformed clones, which die early in life or need to be euthanized, is unsafe.

But in a little-noticed passage deep in its report, the agency okayed this food for entry into the human food chain if it is treated in a meat-rendering plant.

Rendering plants process dead animals from zoos and shelters, old meat from grocery stores and butcher-shop trimmings by chopping them up, then cooking them at high temperatures.

Rendering leads to several products that enter the human food chain directly and indirectly, including lard, tallow, protein for livestock feed and crop fertilizer.

The FDA report cites no research on whether or not rendered food from abnormal clones is safe.

"There is not a single study of that," said Jaydee Hanson, a policy analyst at the Washington, D.C.-based Centre for Food Safety.

Hanson said it can't be assumed the rendering process makes all animal products safe to eat. "They don't let animals with mad cow disease enter the food supply through rendering," he said. "They have a belief this is safe. Belief is wonderful for a religious organization."

As for healthy-looking clones, the FDA says their food is identical to that from other animals. "These products are not different than food from traditionally bred animals," Bruce Knight, a senior U.S. Department of Agriculture official, told reporters last January.

But the CFIA paper and the FDA's own review raise questions about this conclusion as well.

"The use of (cloning) may have an effect on gene expression in the resulting animals and thus alter food characteristics, such as biochemical composition, which may be a food safety concern," the CFIA paper says.

"Stress-related developmental problems in young clones may also present an indirect food safety concern. This may lead to increased usage of antimicrobials for the treatment of such disease-prone clones and could also have an effect on the shedding of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria."

The FDA's review acknowledges no large-scale studies of the meat and milk of clones have been done. It relies on 10 small-scale studies involving an average of just five clones each.

Five of the 10 studies found statistically significant differences between food from clones and conventionally bred animals.

Chavatte-Palmer did one of those five studies. She found cow clones reached puberty an average of 62 days later than normal animals, which she said "probably will affect the quality (of their meat) ... The full maturation of muscle is delayed in clones."

As well, she found milk from cow clones had different levels of some fatty acids and enzymes than milk from conventional animals. She concluded more research is needed on whether the differences could cause food allergies.

For pork, the FDA cited only two studies involving seven clones in total, both done by biotech company ViaGen. They found the clones grew 30-per-cent slower than normal animals and had less meat. Two of the clones had so many health problems their data wasn't even included in the final results. The FDA questioned the study because of the small number of clones.

No studies have been done at all on food from goats, the third clone species that the FDA okayed.

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For all the talk about clones, the fact is we're actually unlikely to ever see a clone T-bone at the butcher shop. That's because clones are up to 10 times more expensive to produce than conventional animals - $10,000 to $16,000 for a cow and $6,000 for a pig.

The main source of clone-derived food is likely to be naturally bred offspring of clones. The FDA says clone offspring have fewer health problems than clones and are identical to normal animals.

But the CFIA background paper says there is "limited" data on food from clone offspring and cited two major U.S. reviews of the issue that expressed concern about the "inconclusive evidence" about the safety of their food.

The FDA's report cited no studies on meat or milk from the offspring of cows or goats and only two studies on pork from the offspring of pig clones. The clone offspring were mostly the same as conventional animals, but like the clones had several differences: Of 58 nutrients tested, clone offspring meat had significantly less of seven nutrients, while more of two others. It was also somewhat fattier, more acidic and shrunk more during cooking - indications of poorer quality.

There is also little longer-term research about the health of offspring as they age.

The FDA review says the offspring seem to be healthier than their clone parents because their genetic errors are "reset."

But one of the scientists the FDA cites in its review says he disagrees with the agency's conclusion.

Dean Betts, an associate professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Guelph, is one of the few scientists to have looked into the health of clone offspring.

Betts found the offspring of goat and sheep clones have genetic abnormalities - significantly shorter telomeres, which are the chromosome endings that are believed to control aging and susceptibility to cancer.

Shorter telomere lengths could explain why many clones seem to age faster than normal animals. Dolly the sheep was also found to have shorter telomeres.

"We don't know what it means or if it has health impacts," Betts said. "I would say not enough study has been done ... There could be some impacts on the species itself over generations."

In France, Chavatte-Palmer had hopes of getting some definitive answers to the questions about the health and food of clones and their offspring. But her cloning work has ground virtually to a halt. Funding has dried up, she says, because cloning is a sensitive issue for grant-funding agencies.

"We have piles of data that we haven't had time and money to get help to analyze," she said. "It's very difficult to get funding in this area of research. It's frustrating, very frustrating."

SIDEBAR

Are we already dining on clones?

No labels on clone food in U.S., FDA says

Canadians may have been consuming food from clones for years without knowing it, despite a Health Canada ban.

That’s one of the surprising revelations from documents on cloning from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency obtained under the access-to-information legislation.

About 800 cloned dairy cattle produced through an early version of cloning called embryonic-cell nuclear transfer and from embryo splitting have been registered in Canada since the 1980s, said a CFIA background paper on cloning written in 2006.

The CFIA paper said food from these clones can be sold to Canadian consumers. “There is generally no restriction on the marketing of products, by-products or the progeny of animal clones that are produced using the embryo-splitting technique in Canada or elsewhere,” it said.

The CFIA paper didn’t say whether milk from the cloned cows was indeed sold to consumers. An agency spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Health Canada, however, says no food from clones, including embryonic-cell nuclear-transfer clones, can be sold in the country. “It shouldn’t be on the market,” said Paul Duchesne, a department spokesman.

Embryonic-cell nuclear-transfer was used in the 1980s and early 1990s but was replaced in the mid-1990s by an improved technique called somatic-cell nuclear-transfer cloning, which replicates an adult animal, instead of an embryo.

Donald Coover, a Kansas veterinarian who says he has sold clones and their semen to farmers in the U.S. for years, said hundreds of embryonic-cell nuclear-transfer clones were produced in the U.S. and that their meat and milk quietly entered the U.S. food supply without any official safety review.

He said it’s very likely the same thing happened in Canada. “Nobody at the time made a big deal about it.”

And now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has okayed clone food for human consumption, the CFIA again seems to have no plan for keeping it out of the country, according to an internal email sent by a manager at the agency.

“CFIA has no specific regulatory controls for animal clones,” said the email, dated Feb. 14, a month after the FDA’s decision last January. “There are no special tracking provisions.”

The issue of tracking food from clones is complicated by the fact that the FDA has decided not to label the food, and there’s no way to test if a particular animal is a clone.

“All we’ve had are some preliminary discussions on… the feasibility of detection,” said a CFIA official, who spoke off the record because she is not authorized to talk with journalists. “Nothing has been put in place, and no policies have been created around that.”

SIDEBAR

Quebec farmers shrug off cloning—it’s too costly

Quebec farmers don’t seem to be rushing to embrace cloning. The Union des Producteurs Agricoles, representing 44,000 Quebec farmers, says it has no position on whether to embrace food from clones.

“We haven’t discussed it very much,” said spokesman Patrice Juneau. “It’s not a very important issue for us.”

The 3,800-member Fédération des producteurs de porcs du Québec, also has no position, said spokeswoman Nathalie Hansen.

“The steps required to produce a live (clone) animal are almost a nightmare for farm applications,” said Roger Sauvé, a cow veterinarian in St. Louis de Gonzague, 45 kilometres southwest of Montreal, who specializes in reproductive services for farmers.

“It’s very, very expensive to produce cloned animals right now. Farmers are not ready to pay that kind of money. Practically, it doesn’t make sense.”

Sauvé said existing reproductive technologies are more efficient and cheaper and also offer the advantage of improving a herd’s genetics if two top animals are bred together, while clones can only be as good as their progenitors.

For more information:

- The FDA's Jan. 2008 risk assessment of food from clones and their offspring

- European Parliament reports on cloning

- The Center for Food Safety’s report on food from clones

No Green for Green

2008-08-07T10:44:00.002-04:00

Much-Touted Subsidies Might Just Cover Taxes

Alex Roslin
Business Observer
Montreal Gazette
Thursday, August 7, 2008

When my wife and I started thinking about getting our own house, we had visions of a fun, green-friendly eco-home. Perhaps we’d live in a yurt, or some little abode suspended in the forest that we could swing to on vines like Tarzan and Jane.

We had heard the government offered subsidies for green building. At the home fair, we collected shiny brochures from enthusiastic civil servants who assured us they could help with our dream.

Then we read the brochures. The much-touted subsidies turned out to be barely enough for vines, let alone green features like solar heating, energy-efficient appliances, green-friendly building materials or better-insulated windows, walls and roof.

In fact, green-building subsidies in Canada are so pitifully small, they’re typically just about enough to pay for the taxes on a green-construction project, says Emmanuel Blain-Cosgrove, a Montreal ecological-building consultant.

And they do little to convince anyone to build green who wasn’t already planning to do so, effectively making them little more than subsidies for well-off people.

You may wonder why this is important. Why should society help a few tree-huggers who want to live in their silly eco-homes?

The fact is, there’s no better place for governments to spend our climate-change dollars. Building construction and maintenance is responsible for 40 per cent of greenhouse-gas emissions in Canada. And scientists agree the building sector is by far the industry where there’s the biggest bang in efforts to reduce gas emissions.

Each $100 invested can cut 5.3 to 6.7 tonnes of emissions in the building sector, compared to 2.4 to 4.7 tonnes in the energy-production sector and 1.6 to 2.5 tonnes in better transportation technologies, according to the United Nations’ Nobel-winning International Panel on Climate Change.

So what kind of leadership is on display in Ottawa and Quebec?

Not much. Amazingly, the feds don’t offer a single green-building subsidy for new residential construction. The rationale: Home owners don’t need subsidies because going green will create enough cost savings over the long run to pay for the extra up-front expenses.

How short-sighted can you get? Did anyone stop to consider that most developers set out to build as cheaply as possible and are justifiably worried that buyers won’t cough up extra money for a green house?

Or that most home buyers are going to look first at the asking price of a home—especially with today’s runaway real-estate market—and aren’t likely to be motivated by uncertain cost savings from green construction, which they won’t see for many years? Or that many home owners won’t live in a single house long enough to see the full cost savings?

In Quebec, things are a little brighter, with the province offering $1,500 to $2,500 for energy-reduction measures in new homes, plus another $2,800 from Hydro-Quebec toward an energy-efficient geothermal heating system.

The geothermal subsidy covers a decent, if minor chunk of the $25,000 to $30,000 cost to install geothermal heating in the average home, but here again, it’s effectively a subsidy for the well-off; geothermal heating doesn’t pay for itself in energy savings unless the house is fairly large—at least 2,500 square feet.

Ottawa and Quebec do offer additional subsidies for green renovations of existing homes, but those typically cover less than 10 percent of the cost of the project.

Other jurisdictions show how far behind the feds and Quebec lag. Municipalities in Alberta, of all places, have taken the lead in reducing or waiving building-permit fees to developers that get certified by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green-building program.

Some U.S. states and municipalities offer grants of $10,000 to $20,000 to builders of a LEED-certified home. Other municipalities like Vancouver, Calgary, Kingston and Ottawa have committed to building some or all new facilities to LEED standards, as have the provincial governments of B.C., Alberta and Manitoba.

Every dollar spent on LEED certification leads to long-term savings of $12 to $16 due to lower energy, water and maintenance bills and improved worker productivity and health from better indoor air quality.

Yet, in Quebec, no municipality has followed suit. Neither has the province. In fact, Quebec has dithered for years about simply upgrading its building code to a long-awaited, more environmentally friendly standard.

The next federal election could centre around Stéphane Dion’s proposed carbon tax, a regressive measure likely to fall most heavily on lower-income people. Why not focus instead on proven programs like green-building subsidies that have the added benefit of improving the places we live and work?

TAGS: green building, LEED, global warming, climate change, emissions, energy

A Tough New Row to Hoe

2008-07-21T10:03:00.010-04:00

AGRICULTURE: WORLD FOOD CRISIS

The Green Revolution that began in 1945 transformed farming and fed millions in developing countries. But its methods over the long run are proving to be stunningly destructive. Alex Roslin reports

ALEX ROSLIN

July 19, 2008

The Globe and Mail

[original story]

The idea was to reduce hunger through the magic of economies of scale. The plan was to implement a new approach to farming across the developing world.

And so, starting in 1945, the U.S.-backed Green Revolution did to farming what the Model T did to auto production. It subsidized peasants in developing countries to abandon centuries-old, small-scale farming techniques that used diverse, locally adapted crops and instead plant vast fields of single crops specially bred for high yields. And, since the new monocrops were often less suited to local conditions, farmers were also encouraged to use plenty of pesticides and fertilizers to improve harvests.

Playing a major role in the Green Revolution was the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), set up in the Philippines in 1960 by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations with the collaboration of the Philippine government.

Now, almost half a century later, the Green Revolution's key innovations - chemicals and monocultures - are being blamed for a recent pest and disease epidemic that has ravaged Asian rice fields and sharply curtailed the supply of the main food staple of half of the world's population. The shortages have helped to send rice prices into orbit and sparked unrest across the developing world.

"This pest outbreak is actually man-created," says Kong Luen Heong, an insect ecologist at IRRI's headquarters in Los Banos, 60 kilometres south of Manila. "It's a symptom of an ecosystem breakdown."

PESTICIDE-PROOF PEST

The brown planthopper is a nasty-looking little insect that is the scourge of Asian rice farmers. It has devastated crops in Vietnam, China and Malaysia and is one of the main reasons that the price of rice has shot up fourfold since 2003, Dr. Heong says.

Ironically, a growing body of research shows that the plant-hopper is thriving because of the very pesticides that governments and chemical companies encourage farmers to use to control it.

The reason: Pesticides kill the planthopper's natural predators - spiders and crickets - which normally control the destructive insect. In a 14-year study at an experimental rice farm at IRRI, Dr. Heong found that cutting pesticide use by 88 per cent led to 75-per-cent fewer destructive herbivores as a portion of all the insects at the farm.

Dr. Heong's methods have a proven track record. In 1994, he helped the Vietnamese government create a campaign to encourage rice farmers to reduce pesticide use. Use of the chemicals dropped by half, while farm yields remained unaffected and the planthopper vanished.

But early this decade, Vietnamese farmers reverted to their old ways when rice prices started to creep up. The farmers, anxious to safeguard their increasingly lucrative crops, resumed the use of pesticides as a preventive measure and, in so doing, weakened the health of their crops, Dr. Heong says.

That led, in 2006, to the first massive planthopper outbreak Vietnam had seen in years. In order to ensure that there was enough rice for the domestic market, the government temporarily suspended rice exports, which further stoked price increases, which in turn led to more pesticide use, often with the misguided encouragement of government officials, Dr. Heong says.

He warns that should the planthopper infestation spread in Vietnam - the nation worst hit in the outbreak and the world's third-largest rice exporter - the government there will probably reinstate the ban on exports, sharply escalating the food crisis.

"Importing countries will have a panic reaction and that would further drive the price up," he says.

But his biggest fear is that the spiral of orbiting rice prices and greater chemical use could lead to a nightmare scenario of the planthoppers spreading to Thailand, the world's largest rice exporter.

DIFFERENT MINDSET

Dr. Heong's views coincide with those of a growing group of food experts who agree that farming methods must change in order to prevent future food crises. They say reform is especially needed because the methods instilled by the Green Revolution are ill suited to cope with climate change. And like Dr. Heong, they say much conventional wisdom about modern agriculture isn't borne out by recent scientific evidence.

David Pimentel, a Cornell University entomologist who has also linked pesticide overuse to planthopper outbreaks in Asian rice fields, says that when Indonesia sharply restricted the use of the chemicals on its rice crops in the 1980s, yields increased by 12 per cent in five years.

In a 22-year study he reported on in 2005 in the journal BioScience, Dr. Pimentel compared organic and conventional crop yields in Pennsylvania and found that organic methods produced the same or better harvests, while eliminating the use of pesticides and commercial fertilizers, reducing watering needs and leaving the soil healthier.

In another study that challenged conventional thinking, Mark Winston, a bee expert at B.C.'s Simon Fraser University, found that canola farmers in Alberta who let some of their land go fallow saw dramatically improved yields compared with those who planted their entire farm.

The uncultivated land became an oasis for bees, which, in turn, helped the canola flourish with improved pollination, Dr. Winston and his co-authors reported in a 2006 study in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and the Environment. Leaving 33 per cent of a field unplanted would have more than doubled the profit from the remaining crop because of its greater yield, the study found.

SIGNIFICANT STAKES

"The data is very strong: Plant less and make more money. It's a whole different mindset," Dr. Winston says.

The stakes in all this are significant and go beyond the current food crisis, says David Montgomery, a University of Washington geologist who just wrote the book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. He says the world is losing soil 10 to 20 times faster than it is being replenished, mostly because of Green Revolution-era agricultural methods - such as excessive tilling and monocultures - which leave vast tracts barren after harvest and thus more vulnerable to erosion. "Some day we are going to run out," he says.

Dr. Montgomery found that soil mismanagement was a major factor in the decline of many civilizations, including those of ancient Greece and Rome, early China, the Mayans and Easter Island. "The state of the soil can be seen as helping to define the resilience of a society," he says.

"The challenge in the next century will be to adapt farming to the land. We've been trying to adapt the land to farming. But the earth bats last."

WHAT'S NEEDED NOW

While the Green Revolution did produce higher yields at first, they plateaued in the 1990s. What's needed now, Dr. Heong says, is a new round of changes to farming practices that would amount to a second Green Revolution.

Dr. Heong is no radical environmentalist. His institute, which gets funds from the World Bank, agribusiness and two dozen nations, including Canada, played a major role in encouraging Asian farmers to adopt the very practices he now criticizes.

But in June, at the International Planthopper Conference in Los Banos, he touted what seemed to many the radical idea that Asian government officials must enact policies to rein in pesticide use.

Another solution, Dr. Heong says, is to reduce reliance on monocultures. He is working with Vietnamese officials to encourage farmers to plant a greater diversity of rice varieties and allow parts of their fields to go to grass - methods that he says would create healthier farms without reducing yields.

"In the face of climate change," he says, "more diversity will help the system be more robust."

TAGS: food, pesticides, farm, soil, rice, Green Revolution, International Rice Research Institute, monocultures