Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Even small amounts of neonicotinoid pesticide lethal for bees
NTU says insecticide residue contributing to bee disappearance
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Ebook Sales Slow, Strategies Shift - EContent Magazine
Ebook Sales Slow, Strategies Shift - EContent Magazine
"I was surprised by these findings, because I was sure that ebook sales had been growing at an exponential rate," says Kenneth Eade, a self-published author of several books that sell three times better in digital format versus print format on Amazon. "However, we have observed many bookstore closings and consolidations in the past few years, and I think we will continue to see more. Although paper title sales are higher, you cannot ignore ebooks, which I still think are the future of publishing."
"I was surprised by these findings, because I was sure that ebook sales had been growing at an exponential rate," says Kenneth Eade, a self-published author of several books that sell three times better in digital format versus print format on Amazon. "However, we have observed many bookstore closings and consolidations in the past few years, and I think we will continue to see more. Although paper title sales are higher, you cannot ignore ebooks, which I still think are the future of publishing."
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Saturday, February 1, 2014
Thursday, January 30, 2014
WHAT ROOM IS THERE FOR DEBATE IN LABELING GMOS?
Voters in Washington narrowly
defeated a law that would require big agriculture and the chemical companies to
tell us what foods contain genetically engineered ingredients last November. A
similar ballot initiative for Proposition 37 failed in California the year
before. In both contests, the “no” vote was solicited by a multi-million dollar
campaign sponsored by the chemical companies and junk food manufacturers.
The Washington campaign for
Proposition 522 was the most expensive in the state's history, drawing national
attention and millions of dollars in out-of-state campaign cash. The “No on 522”
campaign raised an unprecedented $22 million, largely from big biotech firms such
as Monsanto and junk food companies. By contrast, the “Yes on 522” campaign
raised almost $8 million from GMO opponents and natural foods and products
companies.
The Grocery Manufacturers of
America donated $11 million from its member companies to No on 522 and was sued
by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson in October for concealing donors.
The trade group then voluntarily revealed that members such as Pepsico
($2.4 million), Coca-Cola ($1.5 million) and Nestle ($1.5 million) gave huge
donations to defeat the labeling initiative.
On Dec. 27, 2013, Sen. Diane
Feinstein wrote a letter to President Barack Obama, urging him to re-evaluate
the Food and Drug Administration’s policy that genetically engineered food does
not need to disclose it is genetically engineered, stating:
“It is my strong opinion that
consumers have the right to know whether their food originates from genetically
modified organisms. Your administration should re-evaluate the Food and Drug
Administration’s outdated policy that genetically engineered food does not need
to disclose this fact on required labels.”
In her letter, she asks the president
to help move the FDA to change its “outdated” policies because, “given these
facts, I believe that genetic engineering is clearly of material importance to
American consumers,” she writes. “Thus the outdated policy position the FDA
took over 21 years ago on labeling should be revised.”
Seventy percent of packaged foods already contain genetically engineered
ingredients, in the form of soy, corn, canola oil, cotton oil, rapseed oil,
high fructose corn syrup or beet sugar. Code of Federal Regulations Title 21,
Chapter 1, subpart B requires the labeling of ingredients in foods. The FDA was
formed as a consumer agency to protect the consumer, but now the problem is
that it appears to be controlled by the very industry it regulates. For
example, the Obama administration’s deputy commissioner
of foods, Michael Taylor, refuses
to make FDA testing of GMO food safety mandatory. Taylor worked for the FDA
from 1976 to 1981, when he went into private practice at a law firm who
represented Monsanto, only to return through the “revolving door” to the FDA in
1991.
The
current FDA policy not requiring labeling of genetically engineered foods comes
from Taylor’s interpretation of the “Delaney clause.” The Delaney clause is a
1958 amendment to the Food, Drugs and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which states: “the
Secretary of the Food and Drug Administration shall not approve for use in food
any chemical additive found to induce cancer in man, or, after tests, found to
induce cancer in animals.” The Delaney clause applied to pesticides in
processed foods, but only when the concentration of a residue of cancer causing
pesticide increased during processing. It never applied to pesticides in raw
foods.
In
1988 Taylor published an article titled "The De Minimis Interpretation of
the Delany Clause: Legal and Policy Rationale" in the Journal of the American
College of Toxicology (now called the International Journal of
Toxicology), which he had previously presented in December 1986 at a symposium
on Topics in Risk Analysis, sponsored by International Life Sciences Institute
Risk Science Institute, Society for Risk Analysis, and Brookings Institution. The
paper was delivered and published during the midst of a debate and litigation
over federal agencies' interpretation of the Delaney clause.
As analytical instrumentation
increased in power and more and more agents were found to be carcinogenic at
very low levels, agencies had developed a quantitative risk assessment approach to
interpreting the Delaney clause, which stated that if a carcinogen was present
at levels less than one in 1 million parts, the risk of that carcinogen was
"de minimis" and it could be allowed on the market. In
the article, Taylor presented arguments in favor of this approach. Advocates in
favor of organic food have criticized Taylor for taking this stance and have
attributed the stance not to a good faith effort to reasonably regulate, but to
an alleged desire to benefit Monsanto financially.
Between 1994 and 1996 Taylor
went back through the revolving door to the United States Department of
Agriculture, where he acted as administrator of the Food Safety &
Inspection Service. Between 1996 and 2000, after briefly returning to King
& Spalding, he then returned to Monsanto to become vice president for public
policy. In 2009, Taylor once
again returned to government through the revolving door as senior advisor to
the FDA commissioner, and was appointed by Obama on Jan. 13, 2010, to another
newly created post at the FDA: the deputy commissioner for Foods. It is
Taylor’s interpretation of the Delaney clause that forms the basis of the FDA’s
policy not to require the disclosure of genetically engineered ingredients.
Genetically engineered foods
that exist on the market today either make crops resistant to pesticides
manufactured by the same companies that genetically engineer the foods, allowing
farmers to spray more pesticides on their crops, or make their own
insecticides. The current food labeling laws should apply to genetically
engineered foods, because there are several studies on animals and humans that
show that, especially in cases of crops that are engineered to make their own
pesticides, the toxins created by the genetically engineered crops are more
potent than the natural toxins they are derived from, and they have been found
to breach the digestive system in animals, creating precancerous cell growth in
the ileum of lab animals. There are human studies which how that they permeate
into the bloodstream of pregnant women, and infiltrate the brain of the unborn
fetus. Because the genetically modified seeds are patented, and the owners must
give permission for studies, and because studies are expensive, most studies
are funded by the companies themselves, and the FDA does not require any
independent safety testing of any genetically engineered food products.
However, as Feinstein points out, consumers have a right to
know if the food they are putting on their families’ tables are laden with
pesticides, and the labeling laws that are already in existence should disclose
any ingredient that is not normally found in food. The FDA should make sure
that the margin of error falls on the side of consumer safety.
Kenneth Eade is a best-selling author of “An Involuntary
Spy” and an attorney based in Los Angeles.Tuesday, January 28, 2014
PETITIONS TO REQUIRE TESTING ON ALL GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS
The FDA does not require
independent testing for any genetically engineered (GMO) foods that it allows
to be put on your table. Instead, it lets the chemical industry decide what to
submit. The EPA allows the chemical industry to make genetically modified (GM)
foods that produce their own insecticide and does not require any independent
safety testing.
These two petitions request
President Barack Obama, the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Senate to require
independent safety testing of all GMO foods:
http://aninvoluntaryspy.com/6.html
http://aninvoluntaryspy.com/6.html
“The
chemical industry is trying to control our food supply and currently there is
no independent testing required for genetically modified foods,” said Kenneth
Eade, Author of the best selling GMO thriller, “An Involuntary Spy” http://amzn.com/B00GQPBLZ6 . “When doing research for the book,
I was shocked at what I uncovered,” he added.
The FDA does not test the
safety of GMO crops. Instead, all GMO foods are assumed to be safe unless there
is already evidence to the contrary. The FDA relies on self-reported data from
the companies that manufacture the crops as to their safety. Moreover,
due to legal and copyright restrictions surrounding GMO patents, independent
scientists must ask for the chemical companies’ permission before publishing
research on their products. As a result, almost all of the long-term animal
feeding studies that have ever been conducted on GMO feed have been carried out
by the biotech companies themselves, with their own rules and using their own
standards of reporting. What few independent studies have been conducted have shown
a range of adverse health effects from reduced fertility to immune system
dysfunction, liver failure, obesity and cancer.
Genetically engineered foods
are in almost all processed food products in the United States. A simple
reading of the label will reveal one or more of the following ingredients in
every one of them: corn or corn oil, cottonseed oil, canola oil (made from
rapeseed oil, a GMO product), soy and/or soybean oil, and/or high fructose corn
syrup.
Genetically engineered corn and
soy are used for most of the animal feed in the United States. And GMO
sweet corn is now appearing in stores. There are no current federal
labeling laws for GMO products, and two labeling measures in California and
Washington have been defeated, in the wake of heavy spending of millions of
dollars against the measures by Monsanto, Dow Chemical, Bayer, Coca Cola,
Kellogg’s, and many others whose name you will see on products on your
breakfast, lunch or dinner table. A member of the board of directors of
Mc Donalds and one from Sara Lee sit on the board of directors of
Monsanto.
Because GMO foods pose a
serious health risk in the areas of toxicology, allergy and immune function,
reproductive health, and metabolic, physiologic and genetic health and are
without any of their claimed benefits, the American Academy of Environmental
Medicine (AAEM) believes that it is imperative to adopt the precautionary
principle, which is one of the main regulatory tools of the European Union
environmental and health policy and serves as a foundation for several
international agreements. The most commonly used definition is from the 1992
Rio Declaration that states: "In order to protect the environment, the
precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities.
Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full
scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing
cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)