Rachel's #923: Food Additives Raise Hyperactivity

[Guest guest]

At 01:13 PM 9/6/07, you wrote:

Having

trouble viewing this email? You can read it as a

web

page.

..

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

Rachel's

Democracy & Health News #923

 

" Environment,

health, jobs and justice--Who gets to

decide? "

 

Thursday,

September 6,

2007.............Printer-friendly

version

 

www.rachel.org

-- To make a secure

donation, click

here.

 

 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

Featured stories in this issue...

 

Some Food

Additives Raise Hyperactivity, Study Finds

The new, carefully controlled study shows that some artificial

food

additives increase hyperactivity and decrease attention span in a

wide

range of children.

Toxic Cocktail

Living in a chemical soup is an inescapable side effect of

modern

life. The question is: is it doing us any harm? " There are

good

reasons to think that it might be. Not because of the action of

any

one chemical but because of the way the effects of different

components combine once they are inside the body. "

Editorial:

A Preemptive Strike Against Toxic Chemicals

" Business as usual isn't working. We've had too many

man-made

chemicals that turn out to prey on the health of humans or

wildlife to

let more into the environment without the closest of scrutiny.

After

all, we're talking about chemicals developed in labs -- chemicals

that

the human body and the environment have not evolved to process

or

defend themselves against. "

Business

Group Says Climate Change Requires a Revolution

" How do you change society in a radical way in a democracy so

the

people you want to vote for you are also going to suffer the

consequences of the policies that you put in place. I don't

think

we've seen that kind of a challenge in societal change happening

peacefully. It's [only] happened in revolutions. "

Global

Warming Takes a Toll on the Oyster Industry in Delaware Bay

The oyster fishery on the Delaware Bay has been decimated by not

one, but two waves of parasites. In the 1920s, the fishery

produced 2

million bushels annually; today it's down to 70,000, a 96%

reduction.

" This is one of the penalties of global warming, " says

Rutgers

University researcher Eric Powell.

Grasslands Are Losing

Ground

Experiments show fringed sage and other woody shrubs, which

cattle

won't eat, displace other plants as the climate changes.

Seeking Willie Horton

In a moment of candor, the New York Times acknowledges that the

Republican electoral strategy has been based on fomenting and

exploiting racism: " The people who run the G.O.P. are

concerned, above

all, with making America safe for the rich.... But right-wing

economic

ideology has never been a vote-winner. Instead, the party's

electoral

strategy has depended largely on exploiting racial fear and

animosity. "

 

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

 

New York Times, Sept. 6, 2007

[Printer-friendly

version]

 

SOME FOOD ADDITIVES RAISE

HYPERACTIVITY, STUDY FINDS

 

By Elisabeth Rosenthal

 

Common food additives and colorings can increase hyperactive behavior

in a broad range of children, a

study

being released today found.

 

It was the first time researchers conclusively and scientifically

confirmed a link that had long been suspected by many parents.

Numerous support groups for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

have for years recommended removing such ingredients from diets,

although experts have continued to debate the evidence.

 

But the new, carefully controlled study shows that some artificial

additives increase hyperactivity and decrease attention span in a wide

range of children, not just those for whom overactivity has been

diagnosed as a learning problem.

 

The new research, which was financed by Britain's Food Standards

Agency and published online by the British medical journal The Lancet,

presents regulators with a number of issues: Should foods containing

preservatives and artificial colors carry warning labels? Should some

additives be prohibited entirely? Should school cafeterias remove

foods with additives?

 

After all, the researchers note that overactivity makes learning more

difficult for children.

 

" A mix of additives commonly found in children's foods increases

the

mean level of hyperactivity, " wrote the researchers, led by Jim

Stevenson, a professor of psychology at the University of Southampton.

" The finding lends strong support for the case that food additives

exacerbate hyperactive behaviors (inattention, impulsivity and

overactivity) at least into middle childhood. "

 

========================================================

 

Additional background reading:

 

P. Grandjean and P.J. Landrigan,

" Developmental

neurotoxicity of

industrial chemicals, " Environmental Health Perspectives

Vol. 368

(December 16, 2006), pgs. 2167-2178.

 

========================================================

 

In response to the study, the Food Standards Agency advised parents to

monitor their children's activity and, if they noted a marked change

with food containing additives, to adjust their diets accordingly,

eliminating artificial colors and preservatives.

 

But Professor Stevenson said it was premature to go further.

" We've

set up an issue that needs more exploration, " he said in a

telephone

interview.

 

In response to the study, some pediatricians cautioned that a diet

without artificial colors and preservatives might cause other problems

for children.

 

" Even if it shows some increase in hyperactivity, is it clinically

significant and does it impact the child's life? " said Dr. Thomas

Spencer, a specialist in Pediatric Psychopharmacology at Massachusetts

General Hospital.

 

" Is it powerful enough that you want to ostracize your kid? It is

very

socially impacting if children can't eat the things that their friends

do. "

 

Still, Dr. Spencer called the advice of the British food agency

" sensible, " noting that some children may be

" supersensitive to

additives " just as some people are more sensitive to caffeine.

 

The Lancet study focused on a variety of food colorings and on sodium

benzoate, a common preservative. The researchers note that removing

this preservative from food could cause problems in itself by

increasing spoilage. In the six-week trial, researchers gave a

randomly selected group of several hundred 3-year-olds and of 8- and

9-year-olds drinks with additives -- colors and sodium benzoate --

that

mimicked the mix in children's drinks that are commercially available.

The dose of additives consumed was equivalent to that in one or two

servings of candy a day, the researchers said. Their diet was

otherwise controlled to avoid other sources of the additives.

 

A control group was given an additive-free placebo drink that looked

and tasted the same.

 

All of the children were evaluated for inattention and hyperactivity

by parents, teachers (for school-age children) and through a computer

test. Neither the researchers nor the subject knew which drink any of

the children had consumed.

 

The researchers discovered that children in both age groups were

significantly more hyperactive and that they had shorter attention

spans if they had consumed the drink containing the additives. The

study did not try to link specific consumption with specific

behaviors. The study's authors noted that other research suggested

that the hyperactivity could increase in as little as an hour after

artificial additives were consumed.

 

The Lancet study could not determine which of the additives caused the

poor performances because all the children received a mix. " This was

a

very complicated study, and it will take an even more complicated

study to figure out which components caused the effect, " Professor

Stevenson said.

 

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

 

Return to Table of Contents

 

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

 

New Scientist (pg. 44), Sept. 1, 2007

[Printer-friendly

version]

 

TOXIC

COCKTAIL

 

By Bijal Trivedi

 

Today, and every day, you can expect to be exposed to some 75,000

artificial chemicals. All day long you will be breathing them in,

absorbing them through your skin and swallowing them in your food.

Throughout the night they will seep out of carpets, pillows and

curtains, and drift into your lungs. Living in this chemical soup is

an inescapable side effect of 21st-century living. The question is: is

it doing us any harm?

 

There are good reasons to think that it might be. Not because of the

action of any one chemical but because of the way the effects of

different components combine once they are inside the body. As

evidence stacks up that this " cocktail effect " is real,

regulators

around the world are rethinking the way we measure the effects of

synthetic mixtures on health.

 

Environmentalists have long warned of this danger, but until recently

there was no solid evidence to confirm their fears -- nor any to allay

them. Most toxicity testing has been done on a chemical-by-chemical

basis, often by exposing rats to a range of concentrations to find the

maximum dose that causes no harm. It's a long way from gauging the

effects of the complex mixtures we experience in everyday life, and

that could be a dangerous omission.

 

" When you get a prescription the doctor will ask what else you are

taking, because they are concerned about drug interactions, which

everyone knows can be quite devastating, " says Shanna Swan,

director

of the Center for Reproductive Epidemiology at the University of

Rochester in New York. This also happens with chemicals like

pesticides and endocrine disrupters, she adds. " You have to

consider

their interactions, and we are just starting to do that. "

 

To assess the risk posed by such mixtures, a small number of

scientists in Europe and the US are now testing chemical brews on

yeast, fish and rats. The effects could be additive, or they might be

synergistic -- that is, greater than the sum of the parts. They could

even cancel each other out. Finding out is important, because we don't

have enough data on many compounds to anticipate how they will

interact when mixed. Other researchers are probing for associations

between disease in humans and past exposure to groups of chemicals.

 

Andreas Kortenkamp, an environmental toxicologist at the School of

Pharmacy, University of London, and his colleagues developed an

interest in these mixture effects after they noticed a rise in

endocrine disorders, suggesting that the body's hormonal systems may

have been disrupted. In men there were increases in congenital

malformations like hypospadia -- in which the urethra is on the wrong

side of the penis -- and cryptorchidism, a condition in which the

testes fail to descend into the scrotum. There was also a rise in

testicular cancer and lower sperm counts. In women there were more

breast cancers and polycystic ovaries.

 

These increases posed a conundrum for the researchers. When they

examined people who had these disorders, and their mothers, they found

they had only very low levels of the chemicals that are known to cause

the disorders; in the lab, only much higher concentrations of these

individual compounds have be found to produce the same effects. This

led Kortenkamp to suspect that mixtures were the missing link. He

wondered if the effects of different chemicals, acting through the

same biochemical pathway, could add up.

 

Kortenkamp's group focused on groups of chemicals called

xenoestrogens, compounds that disrupt the activity of the hormone

oestrogen and induce the development of female sexual characteristics.

High levels of xenoestrogens in the environment have been shown to

feminise male fish, and have even driven one species in an isolated

experimental lake in Canada almost to extinction.

 

In 2002 Kortenkamp and his colleagues tested a mix of eight

xenoestrogens on yeast. These included chemicals used as plasticisers,

sunscreen ingredients and others found in cooling and insulating

fluids. In the mixture, each was below the level that toxicologists

call the " no-observed-effect concentration " -- the level that

should

be safe. Sure enough, the combination triggered unusual effects in the

yeast. Kortenkamp and his colleagues dubbed the mixture effect

" something from nothing " (see Diagram).

 

Kortenkamp and his colleagues found that if the doses of all eight

chemicals were simply added together, after adjusting for the varying

potencies, this new cumulative dose could be used to predict the

effect -- a principle called " dose addition " . " This result

was to be

expected, but it had never been shown with endocrine disrupters until

our work, " says Kortenkamp. Intuitively this makes sense, he says:

" Every mixture component contributes to the effect, no matter how

small. "

 

Since then the effect has been shown with other species, too.

Kortenkamp and his colleagues now report that mixtures of

xenoestrogens feminised males to varying degrees even though the

individual components should have been harmless. In July this year the

team showed that a blend of anti-androgens -- chemicals that block the

effect of male sex hormones -- can work in the same way. They exposed

pregnant rats to two common fungicides, vinclozolin and procymidone,

and the prostate cancer drug flutamide, and then screened the male

offspring for reproductive deformities. At higher doses, each of these

three chemicals wreaks havoc with sex hormones, and they all do it via

the same mechanism: they disrupt male development by blocking androgen

receptors and so prevent natural hormones from binding. The

researchers found that even when the chemicals were used in doses that

had no effect when given individually to pregnant rats, a mixture of

them disrupted the sexual development of male fetuses.

 

Earl Gray, an ecotoxicologist at the reproductive toxicology division

of the US Environmental Protection Agency's Health and Environmental

Effects Research Laboratory (HEERL) in Research Triangle, North

Carolina, and his team also tried exposing pregnant rats to

vinclozolin and procymidone. When they exposed the animals to the

compounds individually, they too saw no effect. But when they combined

the two, half of the males were born with hypospadia. Gray calls this

phenomenon " the new math -- zero plus zero equals something " .

 

Gray then tried the same experiment with phthalates -- the ubiquitous

compounds that are used to soften plastics and thicken lotions, and

are found in everything from shampoo to vinyl flooring and flexible

medical tubing. They also disrupt male development, in this case by

stopping the fetus from making testosterone. The mix of two phthalates

that Gray used caused many of the same effects on male rat fetuses as

a mixture of vinclozolin and procymidone.

 

It makes sense that chemicals targeting the same pathway would have an

additive effect. But what about mixtures of chemicals that work via

different mechanisms? Surely the individual doses of such chemicals

would not be additive in the same way.

 

" The mixture of different chemicals shouldn't have had any effect.

But

it did " In 2004, Gray and his team put this to the test by mixing

procymidone with a phthalate at levels that, on their own, would

produce no effect. Because the chemicals work via different routes, he

expected that the combination wouldn't have any effect either. But

they did. Then the team mixed seven compounds -- with four independent

routes of action -- each at a level that did not produce an effect.

" We expected nothing to happen, but when we give all [the

compounds]

together, all the animals are malformed, " Gray says. " We

disrupted the

androgen receptor signalling pathway by several different mechanisms.

It seems the tissue can't tell the difference and is responding in an

additive fashion. "

 

All of this is throwing up problems for regulatory agencies around the

world. Governments generally don't take into account the additive

effects of different chemicals, with the exception of dioxins -- which

accumulate to dangerous levels and disrupt hormones in the body -- and

some pesticides. For the most part, risk assessments are done one

chemical at a time.

 

Even then, regulation is no simple issue. First you need to know a

chemical's potency, identify which tissues it harms and determine

whether a certain population might be exposed to other chemicals that

might damage the same tissue. Add in the cocktail effect and it gets

harder still. " It is a pretty difficult regulatory scenario, "

admits

Gray. " At this point the science is easier than implementing the

regulatory framework. "

 

Mixed up inside

 

For one thing, with many mixtures it's almost impossible to work out

how much we're getting. The endocrine disrupter diethyl phthalate, for

example, easily escapes from plastics and is in so many different

products -- from toothbrushes to toys, and packaging to cosmetics and

drugs -- that it would be difficult to work out the aggregate exposure

from all sources, says Gray. This also makes it tricky to investigate

possible links between chemical mixtures and disease. " Everyone

has

exposure to chemicals, even people living in the Arctic, " says

John

Sumpter, an ecotoxicologist at Brunel University in London. " We

can't

go to a group with a mixture of nasty chemicals and then go to another

who have had no exposure and compare their rate of breast cancer risk

or sperm count. We are doing a scientific experiment by letting these

chemicals accumulate in our bodies, blood and wildlife. "

 

That's why some researchers are suggesting new ways to gauge the

effects of chemical mixtures on the body. For example, rather than

trying to identify levels of individual xenoestrogens in a patient's

blood, it may be more efficient to take a serum sample and determine

the " oestrogenic burden " being imposed on their body from a

variety of

different sources by testing the sample on oestrogen-sensitive cells

in the lab. " It might work well as a screening tool to identify

people

with potential problems, " says Linda Birnbaum, director of the

experimental toxicology division at HEERL. Then, for example, you

could make cocktails of foods, water and other products from the

person's life to try to identify the source of the chemicals.

 

Nicolas Olea, a doctor and oncologist at the University of Granada,

Spain, is already trying this kind of approach. He is exploring

whether exposure to chemicals with oestrogenic activity leads to

genital malformations like cryptorchidism and hypospadia in men, and

breast cancer in women. He and his colleagues took samples from

various tissues and measured the ability of the environmental

contaminants in them to trigger the proliferation of lab-cultured

oestrogen-sensitive cells. Because it is difficult to predict from a

compound's structure whether it might have oestrogenic effects, a

cell-based assay like this is a cheap way to screen potentially

harmful chemicals. They found that the higher this " total

effective

xenoestrogen burden " the greater the chance the contaminants could

disrupt oestrogen-dependent processes.

 

Others are cautiously optimistic about Olea's approach. " The

concept

is correct, I cannot comment on how well the cell effect tracks a

cancer effect, " says James Pirkle, deputy director of the US

Centers

for Disease Control's Environmental Health Laboratory in Atlanta,

Georgia.

 

Shanna Swan is doing something similar. In a study published in 2005

she showed that boys whose mothers had had higher levels of five

phthalates while their babies were in the womb had a shorter distance

between the anus and genitals -- a marker of feminising activity. They

also had higher rates of cryptorchidism compared to sons of mothers

with lower phthalate levels. Swan devised a cumulative score to

reflect exposure levels to all five phthalates and found that score

was " very predictive of ano-genital distance " .

 

The method is still expensive, and a regular " phthalate scan "

isn't on

the cards just yet. A potentially less costly approach, says Pirkle,

is regular biomonitoring of subsets of the population to measure the

levels of dangerous chemicals in blood and urine, and link particular

chemicals to specific health effects. Every two years since 2001, the

US Centers for Disease Control has published data on the US

population's exposure to a range of potentially harmful chemicals. In

2005 the agency released data for 148 chemicals; next year it plans to

release a report covering 275. While that number falls far short of

the number of new chemicals entering the fray each year, Pirkle says

that technology is making it ever easier to monitor new substances.

The reports do not consider specific mixtures but include exposure

data for each individual chemical to make it easier to calculate the

likely effects of mixtures.

 

The European Union, meanwhile, is taking steps to control the number

of chemicals being released in the first place. On 1 June its REACH

(registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemical

substances) regulations became law. The aim is to cut health risks

associated with everyday chemicals by forcing chemical manufacturers

and importers to register their compounds and provide safety

information to the new European Chemicals Agency, based in Helsinki,

Finland. This information must be provided before the chemicals are

sold. The new law shifts the burden of responsibility for the health

effects of chemicals from government to industry and is also intended

to encourage the use of less harmful alternatives for the more toxic

chemicals.

 

Not everyone is so worried about the cocktail effect. Some researchers

even find it reassuring -- or at least not as bad as it could be.

Kevin Crofton, a neurotoxicologist at the EPA, explored how a mixture

of 18 polyhalogenated aromatic hydrocarbons found in electrical

equipment, flame retardants and paints could disrupt thyroid hormone

levels in rats. At the lowest doses of the mixture the effect on the

levels of the thyroid T4 hormone was what you would expect from the

principle of dose addition; at the highest doses the effect was twice

that. " Some people would call that synergy, " says Crofton,

" but it is

not a very big synergistic effect. It was a twofold difference. "

 

He adds: " These results are quite reassuring because EPA's default

to

calculate the cumulative risk of mixtures is dose addition. " Only

recently, however, have scientists like Crofton been able to prove

that this default is correct. " If it had been a 20-fold difference

I

would have said, 'Boy, the agency needs to look into how it is doing

things.' "

 

Kortenkamp says that regulatory bodies seem to be starting to

acknowledge that chemical-by-chemical risk assessment provides a false

sense of security. In November last year around 100 scientists and EU

policy-makers at the " Weybridge +10 " workshop held in

Helsinki

concluded that mixture effects must be considered during risk

assessment and regulation. The European Commission plans to spend more

on probing the effects of environmental chemicals on human health.

 

For now, though, chemicals are an inescapable part of life. And while

high-profile campaigns by pressure groups like WWF seek to alert us to

what they see as the dangers of artificial chemicals, some

toxicologists warn that they may be overstating the case. " I think

you

need to be careful about hyping the risk, " says Crofton, referring

to

stories in which individuals have been screened for several hundred

chemicals. " When you say I have 145 chemicals in my body, that in

itself does not translate into a hazard. You have to know something

about the dose, the hazard and how all these chemicals can add

up. "

Olea, however, suggest that it is sensible to be cautious. " If you

don't know it is good, assume it is bad, " he says.

 

Like it or not, the chemicals are with us. " People can't keep

phthalates [or other chemicals] out of their air, water or food, "

says

Swan. " Most people don't have the information or money to do these

things. " A more productive approach might be to tell people how to

limit exposure to harmful substances and request better labelling from

manufacturers. " We need to put a lot of money into figuring out

what

these things do in real-world scenarios and take regulatory

action, "

she says. " Just like we limited cigarette smoke exposure, we'll

have

to limit other exposures. "

 

Bijal Trivedi is a freelance science writer based in Washington DC

 

Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

 

Return to Table of Contents

 

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

 

 

The

Daily Green, Sept. 4, 2007

[Printer-friendly

version]

 

EDITORIAL: A PREEMPTIVE

STRIKE AGAINST TOXIC CHEMICALS

 

California Considers Schemes To Stop Pollution Before It Starts

 

In the United States, the use of potentially toxic chemicals has

always had a leap-before-you-look regulatory approach, with the

emphasis on producing innovative new products and solutions. Problem

is, time and again substances thought to be harmless prove toxic, or

persistent in the environment, and cleaning them becomes a costly --

both in health and dollars -- headache.

 

That's why it's good to watch California, which is considering two

competing proposals that may be more complementary, according to

a

Los Angeles Times editorial, than they appear.

 

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, is pushing a

" green

chemistry " initiative that has the backing of business

and industry

in the Golden State. It would look at chemicals used and study their

potential risks -- as well as potential alternatives.

 

Assemblyman

Mike

Feuer, a Democrat, has proposed a Massachusetts-

style inventory of all hazardous chemicals used by California

businesses, and require regular reports about their plans to reduce or

eliminate their use.

 

The take-home message from both proposals is this: Business as usual

isn't working. We've had too many man-made chemicals that turn out to

prey on the health of humans or wildlife to let more into the

environment without the closest of scrutiny. After all, we're talking

about chemicals developed in labs -- chemicals that the human body and

the environment have not evolved to process or defend themselves

against.

 

Copyright Reuters

 

Return to Table of Contents

 

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

 

Financial Times (London, UK), Sept. 5, 2007

[Printer-friendly

version]

 

CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATE NEEDS

REVOLUTION

 

By John Aglionby in Jakarta

 

A revolution of society on a scale never witnessed in peacetime is

needed if climate change is to be tackled successfully, the head of a

major business grouping has warned.

 

Bjorn Stigson, the head of the Geneva-based

World

Business Council

for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), predicted governments

would be

unable to reach agreement on a framework for reducing carbon emissions

at either a US-sponsored meeting in Washington later this month or at

a United Nations climate summit in Indonesia in December.

 

Climate change is also expected to be high on the agenda at this

week's annual summit of Pacific leaders in Sydney.

 

" It will probably get worse before it gets better before

governments

feel they've got the political mandate to act, " he told the

Financial

Times during a visit to Jakarta. " We're going to have to go into

some

sort of crisis before it's going to be resolved. I don't think people

have realised the challenge. This is more serious than what people

think. "

 

The " challenge " , Mr Stigson said, is for developed nations to

cut

carbon emission levels by 60 to 80 per cent from current levels by

2050 if global emissions are to be kept below 550 parts per million.

Global emissions at that level would keep average permanent global

temperature increase below 3 degrees by 2050, a level beyond which

most scientists say climate change would be significantly worse.

 

The WBCSD reached this conclusion after studying the

Stern

review on

climate

change, the International Energy Association's

world

energy

outlook, and a recent International Plant Protection

Convention

review.

 

" I think it's beginning to dawn on people that we are talking

about

such a major change in society people are saying this is tougher than

what we thought, " he said. " How do you change society in a

radical way

in a democracy so the people you want to vote for you are also going

to suffer the consequences of the policies that you put in place. "

 

" I don't think we've seen that kind of a challenge in societal

change

happening peacefully. It's [only] happened in revolutions. "

 

The 200 members of the WBCSD, which have a combined market cap of

$6,000bn, are dismayed by politicians' lack of political will to

address the issues, Mr Stigson said.

 

" We're very concerned by what we see and the lack of response from

governments in grasping the responsibility they have in dealing with

this issue, " he said. " Our problem right now is that we...don't

know

what the policies are going to be beyond 2012. How do you take these

issues into consideration when you build a new plant that's going to

live for 30, 40 years. "

 

The WBCSD want rich countries to agree on global targets for

themselves while committing to developing nations $80-$100bn a year

and technology to help them grow more sustainably.

 

" If that deal is not there, you'll be in a situation where India,

China and Brazil will say, we're not going to get into any

agreement, "

he said. " If I were betting my money now, I would bet that by 2012

the

world will not have a global framework. We will have a patchwork of

regional and national regulations that we have to make as compatible

as possible. "

 

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

 

Return to Table of Contents

 

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

 

Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, N.J.), Aug. 13, 2007

[Printer-friendly

version]

 

OYSTERMEN 'IN THE

FIGHT'

 

By Richard Pearsall

 

Port Norris, N.J. -- Thanks to the oyster industry, this old port at

the mouth of the Maurice River once had more millionaires per capita

than any other place in New Jersey.

 

Or so the story goes.

 

Those days are gone, the oyster fishery on the Delaware Bay having

been decimated by not one, but two waves of parasites.

 

But the industry survives -- a few dozen oystermen still ply the bay

-- and New Jersey is striving to ensure that the fishery at least

holds its own.

 

" We're in the fight, " said Eric Powell, director of the

Haskin

Shellfish Research Laboratory, the Rutgers outpost here dedicated to

both research and managing the oyster beds.

 

Toward the latter end, the lab, in conjunction with the Army Corps of

Engineers, the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and

others, has been dumping millions of clamshells into the bay each year

for the past three years.

 

The idea is to encourage what's called " recruitment, " building

up a

layer of the clean, hard surfaces that baby oysters, or " spat, "

love

to grab hold of to get started in life.

 

The results so far are inconclusive.

 

Oystermen will be allowed to harvest 80,000 bushels from state managed

oyster beds this year, slightly above the average of 70,000 bushels a

year that has prevailed over the past decade.

 

But the number has gone up and down from year to year and is likely to

continue to do so depending on the strength of the parasite that began

afflicting the oyster beds in the 1990s.

 

" The mortality rate from disease is still too high, " Powell

said of

dermo, which has proven to be a persistent enemy of the Eastern

oyster. " This is one of the penalties of global warming. "

 

Dermo is a warm-water disease, he explained, one that has moved up the

East Coast, reaching New Jersey in the 1990s and now a problem as far

north as the coast of Maine.

 

It also likes high salinity, so it is more of a problem in periods of

drought when the salt line moves further up the bay.

 

" We can minimize the damage from dermo, " Powell said, " but

we can't

eradicate it. It's going to take its toll. As a result, we're going to

have to be more proactive. "

 

The oystermen themselves seem to have found a niche market for their

product and are looking more to protect and preserve than grow their

industry.

 

" We want the industry to be stable, " said Steve Fleetwood, an

oystermen himself and the manager of the Hillard Bloom Packing Company

in Port Norris.

 

" With the dermo still around, I don't know that any of us are

really

comfortable. "

 

At its peak in the late 1920s, the oyster fishery sent some 500 boats

and 4,000 men out on to the Delaware Bay, where they dredged up as

many as two million bushels of oysters a year.

 

The captains of the schooners that sailed the bay got rich, as did the

entrepreneurs who ran the shucking and packing houses in Bivalve and

Shell Pile and the railroad barons whose cars carried the prized

seafood to market.

 

" This was a boom town, " said Megan Wren, surveying the now

largely

desolate area around her offices here at the Bayshore Discovery

Project, a nonprofit whose mission is to preserve the history and

culture of the region, but also to promote its future.

 

Nature turned out to be even crueler to the oyster fishery than the

Great Depression, striking with two waves of parasites that, while not

harmful to humans, are deadly to oysters.

 

In the 1950s, a parasite called MSX destroyed more than 90 percent of

the harvestable oysters on the bay's bottom.

 

Then in the 1990s, just when the oyster beds were beginning to recover

from MSX, the second parasite, dermo, struck.

 

Today about 70 boats, each with a license attached, dredge the

Delaware Bay for oysters.

 

They still employ basically the same techniques as the sailing

schooners that preceded their diesel-powered boats, dragging a steel

cage along the bottom, pulling it up, then sorting out its contents on

deck for the prized catch.

 

Rutgers and the DEP carefully monitor both the bay bottom and the

catch, enabling them to control this year's catch and accurately

establish a quota for next year.

 

The overall quota the state sets for the beds it manages is divided

among the license holders, resulting this year in an allotment of

about 1,100 bushels per boat.

 

" The number of licenses is limited, " said Jason Hearon,

fisheries

biologist for the state DEP, " in part to keep the pressure for a

bigger harvest down. "

 

One problem facing the program is finding enough shell to use for seed

strata.

 

" A few years ago this was a waste product they couldn't get rid

of, "

Powell said of the clamshells. Now there is competition from road work

and other uses.

 

" It's really criminal for shells to go anywhere but back into

their

natural environment, " he concluded.

 

Reach Richard Pearsall at (856) 486-2465 or

rpearsall

 

Copyright 2007 Courier-Post

 

Return to Table of Contents

 

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

 

Denver Post (Denver, Colo.), Sept. 3, 2007

[Printer-friendly

version]

 

GRASSLANDS ARE LOSING

GROUND

 

By Katy Human Denver Post Staff Writer

 

On eastern Colorado's grassy rangeland, the dominant plant of the

future may be one shunned even by the hungriest of cattle: fringed

sage.

 

The unpalatable mint-green shrub increased in bulk by 40 times during

climate change experiments conducted by the U.S. Department of

Agriculture and Colorado State University, the scientists reported

last week.

 

" It was a minor species at the beginning of the study, but by the

end

of four years, 10 percent of the aboveground cover was this

species, "

said Jack Morgan, a USDA range scientist in Fort Collins.

 

" Here's a plant that may be a winner in a greenhouse future, "

Morgan

said.

 

Grassland covers about 40 percent of Earth's land, Morgan and his

colleagues

 

Scientists set up greenhouses on prairie 40 miles northeast of Fort

Collins and then pumped carbon dioxide into some of them to see how

that would affect the vegetation over four years. (Photo courtesy ARS

Rangeland Resources Research Unit)wrote in a paper in the Proceedings

of the National Academy of Sciences, and woody shrubs have been moving

steadily into most of the planet's grasslands for more than a century.

Scientists have attributed that livestock-unfriendly trend to many

things, Morgan said, from the suppression of natural fires to

overgrazing, drought and climate change.

 

" There's some who would debate if carbon dioxide and climate

change

were a factor, " Morgan said. " But that's what our study shows

-

clearly. "

 

Forty miles northeast of Fort Collins, on Colorado's northeastern

plains, Morgan and his colleagues set up clear plastic greenhouses

around plots of prairie.

 

They pumped extra carbon dioxide into some of the greenhouses, left

ambient air in others, and followed plant communities in both -- and

on normal prairie -- for four years.

 

Fringed sage increased its aboveground bulk by 40 times in the

greenhouses with extra carbon dioxide, the team found.

 

" That's a huge response, " Morgan said. " I've not seen any

plant in the

literature that responds as much. "

 

Other studies have shown that plant species react differently to

climate change.

 

In Colorado's mountains, fields of wildflowers gave way to sage during

warming experiments.

 

In a California grassland, species diversity dropped when scientists

increased carbon dioxide levels.

 

On rangeland, the likely continued woody plant encroachment is not

just an ecological problem. It's a financial one for ranchers, said

Terry Fankhauser, executive vice president of the Arvada-based

Colorado Cattlemen's Association.

 

" We know climate change is inevitable, and we know that means

species

changes, " Fankhauser said.

 

More shrubs and fewer grasses would not be welcome changes, he said,

although Colorado cattlemen have long had to deal with woody invaders.

 

" It's already a part of everyday ranch management, " Fankhauser

said.

" We have to control those woody species to maintain native

vegetation. "

 

Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-954-1910 or

khuman.

 

Return to Table of Contents

 

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

 

The New York Times (pg. A19), Aug. 24, 2007

[Printer-friendly

version]

 

SEEKING WILLIE

HORTON

 

By Paul Krugman, Times columnist

 

So now Mitt Romney is trying to Willie Hortonize Rudy Giuliani. And

thereby hangs a tale -- the tale, in fact, of American politics past

and future, and the ultimate reason Karl Rove's vision of a permanent

Republican majority was a foolish fantasy.

 

Willie Horton, for those who don't remember the 1988 election, was a

convict from Massachusetts who committed armed robbery and rape after

being released from prison on a weekend furlough program. He was made

famous by an attack ad, featuring a menacing mugshot, that played into

racial fears. Many believe that the ad played an important role in

George H.W. Bush's victory over Michael Dukakis.

 

Now some Republicans are trying to make similar use of the recent

murder of three college students in Newark, a crime in which two of

the suspects are Hispanic illegal immigrants. Tom Tancredo flew into

Newark to accuse the city's leaders of inviting the crime by failing

to enforce immigration laws, while Newt Gingrich declared that the

" war here at home " against illegal immigrants is " even

more deadly

than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. "

 

And Mr. Romney, who pretends to be whatever he thinks the G.O.P. base

wants him to be, is running a radio ad denouncing New York as a

" sanctuary city " for illegal immigrants, an implicit attack on

Mr.

Giuliani.

 

Strangely, nobody seems to be trying to make a national political

issue out of other horrifying crimes, like the Connecticut home

invasion in which two paroled convicts, both white, are accused of

killing a mother and her two daughters. Oh, and by the way: over all,

Hispanic immigrants appear to commit relatively few crimes -- in fact,

their incarceration rate is actually lower than that of native-born

non-Hispanic whites.

 

To appreciate what's going on here you need to understand the

difference between the goals of the modern Republican Party and the

strategy it uses to win elections.

 

The people who run the G.O.P. are concerned, above all, with making

America safe for the rich. Their ultimate goal, as Grover Norquist

once put it, is to get America back to the way it was " up until

Teddy

Roosevelt, when the socialists took over, " getting rid of

" the

income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that. "

 

But right-wing economic ideology has never been a vote-winner.

Instead, the party's electoral strategy has depended largely on

exploiting racial fear and animosity.

 

Ronald Reagan didn't become governor of California by preaching the

wonders of free enterprise; he did it by attacking the state's fair

housing law, denouncing welfare cheats and associating liberals with

urban riots. Reagan didn't begin his 1980 campaign with a speech on

supply-side economics, he began it -- at the urging of a young Trent

Lott -- with a speech supporting states' rights delivered just outside

Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in

1964.

 

And if you look at the political successes of the G.O.P. since it was

taken over by movement conservatives, they had very little to do with

public opposition to taxes, moral values, perceived strength on

national security, or any of the other explanations usually offered.

To an almost embarrassing extent, they all come down to just five

words: southern whites starting voting Republican.

 

In fact, I suspect that the underlying importance of race to the

Republican base is the reason Rudy Giuliani remains the front-runner

for the G.O.P. nomination, despite his serial adultery and his past

record as a social liberal. Never mind moral values: what really

matters to the base is that Mr. Giuliani comes across as an

authoritarian, willing in particular to crack down on you-know-who.

 

But Republicans have a problem: demographic changes are making their

race-based electoral strategy decreasingly effective. Quite simply,

America is becoming less white, mainly because of immigration.

Hispanic and Asian voters were only 4 percent of the electorate in

1980, but they were 11 percent of voters in 2004 -- and that number

will keep rising for the foreseeable future.

 

Those numbers are the reason Karl Rove was so eager to reach out to

Hispanic voters. But the whites the G.O.P. has counted on to vote

their color, not their economic interests, are having none of it. From

their point of view, it's us versus them -- and everyone who looks

different is one of them.

 

So now we have the spectacle of Republicans competing over who can be

most convincingly anti-Hispanic. I know, officially they're not

hostile to Hispanics in general, only to illegal immigrants, but

that's a distinction neither the G.O.P. base nor Hispanic voters takes

seriously.

 

Today's G.O.P., in short, is trapped by its history of cynicism. For

decades it has exploited racial animosity to win over white voters --

and now, when Republican politicians need to reach out to an

increasingly diverse country, the base won't let them.

 

Return to Table of Contents

 

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

 

Rachel's Democracy & Health News (formerly Rachel's

Environment &

Health News) highlights the connections between issues that are

often considered separately or not at all.

 

The natural world is deteriorating and human health is

declining

because those who make the important decisions aren't the ones

who

bear the brunt. Our purpose is to connect the dots between human

health, the destruction of nature, the decline of community, the

rise of economic insecurity and inequalities, growing stress

among

workers and families, and the crippling legacies of patriarchy,

intolerance, and racial injustice that allow us to be divided

and

therefore ruled by the few.

 

In a democracy, there are no more fundamental questions than,

" Who

gets to decide? " And, " How do the few control the

many, and what

might be done about it? "

 

As you come across stories that might help people connect the

dots,

please Email them to us at

dhn.

Rachel's Democracy & Health News is published as often

as

necessary to provide readers with up-to-date coverage of the

subject.

 

Editors:

Peter Montague -

peter

Tim Montague -

tim

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

 

To start your own free Email subscription to Rachel's Democracy

& Health News send any Email to:

rachel-.

 

In response, you will receive an Email asking you to confirm

that

you want to .

 

To , send any Email to:

rachel-.

 

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Environmental Research Foundation

P.O. Box 160, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903

dhn

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

 

---

Incoming mail is certified Virus Free.

Checked by AVG anti-virus system

(http://www.grisoft.com).

Version: 6.0.859 / Virus Database: 585 - Release 2/14/05

 

 

******

Kraig and Shirley Carroll ... in the woods of SE Kentucky

http://www.thehavens.com/

thehavens

606-376-3363

 

 

 

---

Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.

Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).

Version: 6.0.859 / Virus Database: 585 - Release 2/14/05