want some green drugs?

 

It is always interesting to read things that happen in other countries that we know will never happen in the United States because of our unwillingness to be unfriendly to corporations.  The first was Germany’s request to its citizens to cut back on meat.  And then the United Kingdom followed with their own health program that encouraged taking public transportation to your surgery.  And, now there is this….

The European Union requires pharmaceutical companies to analyze the environmental risks of their drugs.  This became a growing concern after the vast amount of data in which various drugs were showing up in water supplies.  With this information, doctors can take environmental factors into consideration prior to prescribing the medication.

Most countries have followed the minimum requirements set forth by the law.  However, some countries have moved many steps further.  For example, Sweden.  

They have managed to create a database that rates pharmaceutical substances in terms of their toxicity, persistence, and bioaccumulation potential based on data given by pharmaceutical manufacturers. It is part of Stockholm’s larger effort to reduce levels of the most environmentally hazardous medicines in wastewater effluent and in surface water by 2011.

The hope is that doctors will pick the greener of two similar options.  The database currently has 1,100 substances and gets 5 million hits per month.  Because of its success, it is expected that the entire European Union will institute the use of the database.

The United States, however, does not assess or classify drugs based on their environmental impact.  What is also interesting is that if an American drug company wants to sell its product in Europe, and invariably they all do, they must comply with providing the impact report.  The transition to bring this live in this country would be cost effective and easy…. half of the work is already done.

However, given that the pharmaceutical industry is one of the largest lobbying industries in D.C., we would guess a database like this would never be implemented in the states.  It would require guidelines being met that they would argue would impact the bottom line.  Politicians would side with the drug makers for the simple reason that they would want to get reelected and their campaign financed.  This country has shown time and time again that we support corporations over people and there is doubt that this would be an exception.

* reference material came from an article published in Environmental Health News

** photo by kasrak, via Flickr

food, glorious food

There have been quite a few articles in recent weeks about our food supply. It is hard to write about each one and not have you feel bombarded with information, so I thought what would be best was to post links to each with blurbs about the importance of this information.

Lula’s Green Light for Monsanto Has Flooded Brazil with GMO Soya & Increased Amazon Deforestation, via Environmental News Network

Lula’s government promotes genetically-modified organisms despite social opposition.

Brazil is home to one of the world’s largest areas of genetically-modified seed cultivations with 15 million hectares in 2007. The greatest increase of these crops occurred under the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, despite growing opposition from Brazilian farmers and environmentalists.

Most of the concern centers around the reorganization of the National Biosafety Technical Commission or CTNBio, under Lula’s Administration. The group used to be a heavy critic of genetically modified agriculture, but has moved towards a favorable voice under new appointments. For example, the approval for use of MON810. Critics argued that the approval of MON810 for commercial use in Spain, Argentina and the United States, and other countries, had caused the contamination of conventional corn varieties with genetically-modified corn and led to social and economic problems. “The lack of segregation, identification and effective procedures led to the contamination of conventional varieties with transgenic varieties,” they said. These warnings were ignored by the committee.

In this same article, is the information that deforestation of the Amazon has increased by 4% due to encroaching farm exploitation. Many of the suspecting farms produce GMO soy.

All in all, Brazil has two factions; one that is strongly fighting global warming and the deforestation of the Amazon and the other that is enacting policy that encourages farming using GMO seeds. We have seen in the United States that farmers need to grow mass acreage of GMO seeds to not only counter the cost of the seeds, but also because these crops are commodity crops, which require larger volume.

It will be interesting to see how this progresses.

Food crunch opens doors to bioengineered crops, via wibw.com

Surging costs, population growth, and drought and other setbacks linked to global climate change are pressuring world food supplies, while soaring prices on the street have triggered riots and raised the number of people going hungry to more than 923 million, according to U.N. estimates.

With food demand forecast to increase by half by 2030, the incentive to use genetic engineering to boost harvests and protect precious crops from insects and other damage has never been greater.

The article goes on to discuss all the various areas where GM food is being embraced as a fix to the food crisis caused by global warming. What the article does not address is the criticism of using GM seeds for crops; primarily the affect on human health (due to the overuse of antibiotics) and the possibility of plant extinction (due to a bacteria wiping out the entire plant population). There are many other reasons why GMO is seen, by many food educators and policy makers, as a bad answer to the growing food concern. You can flip through this site to find many links, or do a simple google search.

EU approves genetically modified soybean for import, via ENN.

The European Union has authorized imports of a genetically modified (GM) soybean type for sale across its 27 national markets for the next 10 years, the European Commission said on Thursday.

Developed and marketed by Monsanto, the soybean is destined for use in food and animal feed, not for growing. It is a second-generation GM product known by its code number MON 89788 and commercially as Roundup RReady2Yield.

The reason this article is worthy of attention is because of how the soy is going to be used: animal feed. It is important to understand that animals evolved eating grasses. Like humans, they are designed to digest food that they are genetically built to eat. As an example, cows became ruminants because they are supposed to digest grass and by eating grain they become sick and require more antibiotics than necessary. In other words, when animals eat grains like corn and soy they are sick and that sickness is transferred to you when you eat them.

The EU has long fought the dominance of GM food in their society. I am curious as to what changed.

who knew…?

In the coming weeks a monumental decision will be made that will influence the future evolution of global climate policies. A single country has in its power the ability to alter the course of global negotiations and change the dynamics of a political debate characterized by gridlock. That country is . . .

Poland. Yes, Poland. (It is not the U.S. presidential election.) Over the next 6 weeks, the EU, with France taking the lead, must convince Poland (plus other Eastern European countries and Italy) to fall in line with (i.e., not veto) its ambitious climate policies or else see them utterly fall apart.

Essentially you have one country that is very secure in it’s energy, cause it uses coal. And, another country that is dependent on others, and wanting to change climate policy, because it serves their national interest.

I have found two interesting articles about it HERE and HERE.

I think we have an interesting few weeks ahead of us…..