US mom, doctors eye chemicals for rise in child cancers

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A mom whose four-year-old died after losing a battle to a brain tumor called Wednesday for tougher US regulation of chemicals suspected of being behind a rise in childhood cancers.
"There's growing evidence linking toxic chemicals and carcinogens in the environment with childhood cancer," Christine Brouwer told a telephone news conference as she described losing a child to cancer.
"I'll most likely never know what caused my daughter's cancer, but researchers are finding more and more links between the hazardous substances in our homes and workplaces and cancer and other diseases."
Brouwer's daughter Mira underwent several operations and endured painful and nauseating treatments to try to beat the cancer she was diagnosed with just before her second birthday, on January 27, 2004.
After several rounds of surgery and months of treatment, Mira's cancer went into remission and she seemed to have won her fight against the ailment.
But it came back on her fourth birthday, killing her weeks later.
Her family questioned why the child was struck by such a serious illness so young, and Brouwer's suspicions turned toward the chemicals found in cleaning fluids for the floors that babies crawl on, in the plastic of the bottles they drink from and in some of the foods they and their parents eat.
Boston University professor of environmental health Richard Clapp said the incidence of childhood cancer in the United States has grown about one percent a year for the past two decades.
"It's clear that at least one component of the cause is environmental chemical exposure," he said.
Epidemiologists have linked chlorinated solvents to childhood leukemia and other solvents to brain cancer in children, said Clapp, who served as director of the Massachusetts Cancer Registry for 10 years in the 1980s.
Pediatrician Sean Palfrey said doctors suspect chemicals and other environmental pollutants are behind a rise in everything from cancer to allergies to asthma in children.
"The problem with our current situation is that we are putting so many chemicals out into our environment, and our bodies have no idea how to detoxify them, don't know how to prevent them being absorbed," he said, calling for tougher US laws on chemicals.
Brouwer, Clapp and Palfrey were participating in a news conference organized by the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families advocacy group, which says the 35-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act does not cover the vast majority of chemicals in US consumer products and urgently needs an overhaul.

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/

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Breast implants may be linked to rare cancer: FDA

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Women with silicone or saline breast implants may face a small increase in risk for a rare immune-system cancer near their implants, U.S. regulators said on Wednesday.
Officials need more data to tell if the implants caused the cancer and are asking doctors to report confirmed cases, the Food and Drug Administration said in a statement. Overall the agency still considers implants safe and said women without symptoms should not change their routine monitoring.
The cancer warning could hit sales of implants sold by Allergan Inc and Johnson & Johnson's Mentor unit. Allergan shares closed down nearly 1.9 percent.
"Sales growth could be negatively impacted by the media coverage," Wachovia analyst Larry Biegelsen said in a research note about Allergan, which relies on implants more than diversified healthcare company Johnson & Johnson. Other Allergan analysts said they saw little risk to sales.
Safety concerns have dogged breast implants for years. Silicone implants were banned for most U.S. women in 1992 after some complained the devices leaked and made them chronically ill. Widespread sales resumed in 2006 with FDA approval over vocal protests from consumer advocates.
"This is exactly the kind of problem we were concerned about when we said we don't know enough about these products and whether they are safe," said Amy Allina, policy director at the National Women's Health Network.
An estimated 5 million to 10 million women around the world have breast implants.
The FDA said its review found about 60 cases since 1997 of anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL), a type of immune-system cancer. The number is tough to verify and some reports could be duplicates, the agency said. The FDA said "women with breast implants may have a very small but increased risk of developing this disease in the scar capsule adjacent to the implant."
"We need more data" to better understand the issue, said Dr. William Maisel, chief scientist in the FDA's device unit.
The risk to Allergan's implant sales is "nearly zero," Gleacher & Co analyst Amit Hazan said in a research note.
"There are very few FDA approved products that would get a report (and media event) like this about such a small issue, but breast implants are at the top of that list," he said.
ALCL is rare in women without implants. In the United States, the disease is found in breast tissue in about three out of every 100 million nationwide without implants.
Mentor and Allergan said they supported the FDA action and agreed the number of cases was small.
ALCL is "extremely rare and not to be mistaken for breast cancer," Allergan spokeswoman Caroline Van Hove said.
"A woman is more likely to be struck by lightning than get this condition," she said.
Symptoms, including persistent swelling or pain near the implant, appeared between one year and 23 years after the devices were inserted, the FDA's Maisel said. He advised women to contact a doctor if they have symptoms. Data on treatments is limited but they may include removal of the implants, chemotherapy or radiation.
Officials do not know if women face a higher risk if they get implants for reconstruction after cancer surgery or for cosmetic reasons, Maisel said.
The agency is setting up a registry to track implants and working to add information to implant labels.
"We fully support FDA's efforts to gather additional data and study ALCL in patients with breast implants," Mentor spokesman Christopher Allman said.
The agency plans to release interim findings from ongoing studies of silicone implants in the spring. As a condition of approval, each maker was required to study risks in 40,000 women for 10 years.
Allergan shares fell 1.9 percent to $70.72 on the New York Stock Exchange. Johnson & Johnson shares slid 0.8 percent to $60.60, also on the NYSE.
(Additional reporting by Debra Sherman in Chicago; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn, Gerald E. McCormick, Steve Orlofsky and Carol Bishopric)

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/

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Bad eating can give you depression: study

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Eating foods high in trans-fats and saturated fats increases the risk of depression, according to a Spanish study published in the US Wednesday, confirming previous studies that linked "junk food" with the disease.
Researchers also showed that some products, such as olive oil, which is high in healthy omega-9 fatty acids, can fight against the risk of mental illness.
Authors of the wide-reaching study, from the universities of Navarra and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, followed and analyzed the diet and lifestyle of over 12,000 volunteers over six years.
When the study began, none of the participants had been diagnosed with depression; by the end, 657 of them were new sufferers.
"Participants with an elevated consumption of trans-fats (fats present in artificial form in industrially-produced pastries and fast food...) presented up to a 48 percent increase in the risk of depression when they were compared to participants who did not consume these fats," the head study author said.
Almudena Sanchez-Villegas, associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, also noted that in the event "more trans-fats were consumed, the greater the harmful effect they produced in the volunteers."
The research team found, at the same time, that after assessing the impact of polyunsaturated fats -- composed of larger amounts of fish and vegetable oils -- and olive oil, these products "are associated with a lower risk of suffering depression."
The report, published in the online journal PLoS ONE, noted the research was performed on a European population that enjoys a relatively low intake of trans-fats -- making up only 0.4 percent "of the total energy ingested by the volunteers."
"Despite this, we observed an increase in the risk of suffering depression of nearly 50 percent," said researcher Miguel Martinez.
"On this basis we derive the importance of taking this effect into account in countries like the US, where the percentage of energy derived from these fats is around 2.5 percent."
The report pointed out that the current number of depression sufferers in the world is around 150 million people, and has increased in recent years.
This rise is attributable, according to the authors, "to radical changes in the sources of fats consumed in Western diets, where we have substituted certain types of beneficial fats -- polyunsaturated and monounsaturated in nuts, vegetable oils and fish -- for the saturated and trans-fats found in meats, butter and other products such as mass-produced pastries and fast food."
Though not a focus of the study, researchers pointed out that deadly cardiovascular disease is "influenced in a similar manner by diet, and might share similar mechanisms in their origin."

Source:http://news.yahoo.com/

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New fitness guidelines urge Canadians to get moving

Canada's revised physical activity guidelines are finally out and, as expected, they ease some of the pressure on Canadians.

The revised guidelines no longer call for daily activity of 60 minutes a day but instead recommend that adults get at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity per week. That exercise can come in small bouts, of 10 minutes or more.

Children aged five to 17 should get at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity daily, the guidelines recommend, instead of the 90 minutes of physical activity a day previously recommended.

The previous guidelines recommended that sedentary kids progress gradually to meeting targets; that slow progression recommendation has not been eliminated.

Older adults – now defined as those over the age of 65 -- are also urged to aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity per week rather than the previous recommendation of 30 to 60 minutes of moderate physical activity on most days.

The guidelines were released Monday by the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology and based on four years of research analysis by dozens of fitness experts and physiologists.

When a preview of the new guidelines emerged earlier this month, many reacted with anger to them, saying that calling for less daily exercise from Canadians would send the wrong message.

But the CSEP insists that the new guidelines should be seen as minimum targets and reflect their contention that more is always better.

"Canadians should try and exceed the minimum activity thresholds as the greater the variety, intensity and duration of the physical activity, the greater the health benefit," the group said in a news release Monday.

It's also clear that most Canadians don't come close to meeting the new minimums. According to data released by Statistics Canada last week, only 17 per cent of men and 14 per cent of women accumulate 150 minutes per week of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. The percentage of adults doing at least 30 minutes of activity five days a week or more was just five per cent.

Young Canadians fared even worse, with just seven per cent of those aged 5 to 17 attaining the minimum level of physical activity each day.

The new physical activity guidelines state:

Adults (18-64 years)

• should accumulate at least 150 minutes of moderate- to vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity per week, in bouts of 10 minutes or more, to achieve health benefits
• add muscle and bone strengthening activities using major muscle groups, at least 2 days per week
• more physical activity provides greater health benefits

Children (5-11 years) and Youth (12-17 years)

• should accumulate at least 60 minutes of moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity daily, this should include:
• vigorous-intensity activities at least three days per week
• activities that strengthen muscle and bone at least three days per week
• more daily physical activity provides greater health benefits

Older Adults (65 years and older)

• should accumulate at least 150 minutes of moderate- to vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity per week, in bouts of 10 minutes or more
• it is also beneficial to add muscle and bone strengthening activities using major muscle groups, at least two days per week
• those with poor mobility should perform physical activities to enhance balance and prevent falls
• more physical activity provides greater health benefits

According to the guidelines, "moderate" physical activities include brisk walking, skating and bike riding. Playing basketball, soccer, running and swimming are examples of vigorous activities.

Examples of muscle and bone-strengthening activities include push-ups, sit-ups, shoveling, raking, climbing and play structure-related activities.

The CSEP notes that it has been over a decade since the first fitness guidelines were published and that there have been significant advances in the science of physical activity and measurement since then, prompting the need to update the Guidelines.

The new guidelines, which have been endorsed by the Public Health Agency of Canada, have won the approval of most of the 1,000 experts consulted, says the CSEP.

Minister of Health Leona Aglukkaq congratulated the CSEP on the development and release of the new guidelines.

"We know that most Canadians aren't active enough," she said in a statement. "The guidelines are an important step in providing up-to-date information about the physical activity Canadians need as part of a healthy lifestyle, and to help them get moving. We are pleased to have supported CSEP in reviewing the science and developing the guidelines."

The CSEP is also planning to release guidelines calling for limits on sedentary time. Its scientists are currently doing research "in this very important area," the group says and will communicate what the science shows as soon as the information is available.

Source:http://www.ctv.ca/

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Ontario MP fighting for independent drug reviewer

An Ontario MP whose daughter's death was blamed on a now-discontinued prescription medication is in Vancouver to fight for an independent drug safety agency.

Oakville, Ont. MP Terence Young's daughter died suddenly at the age of 15 in March 2000. He says it was an ordinary Saturday evening for his family that saw his daughter baking cookies while he and his wife returned from a shopping trip.

"I went into my study and she came downstairs to negotiate the evening's activities, as 15-year-olds do, and jumped up and fell down on the carpet, dead. Her heart had stopped and she never regained consciousness," Young recalled to CTV's Canada AM Monday.

Young's daughter, who was bulimic, had been taking a medication called cisapride, sold as Prepulsid, on and off for about 18 months to help relieve her symptoms of bloating.

A coroner's inquest found Vanessa's bulimia along with the medication led to heart arrhythmia and caused her heart attack.

Young began investigating Prepulsid and found that Health Canada had issued five warnings about the drug before Vanessa's death, and yet doctors were still prescribing it.

It was pulled off the market in the U.S. three days after Young's death after the deaths of 80 people were attributed to the drug. It was later pulled in Canada as well.

Young sued the maker of Prepulsid, Janssen-Ortho Inc., a division of Johnson & Johnson, and eventually settled out of court. But the former MPP says the event catapulted him to return to politics to fight for change.

Since becoming an MP in 2008, Young has been on a mission to raise public awareness about medication safety, complaining that bad drugs are still being approved and used by Canadians every day.

"Nothing significant has changed since Vanessa died. There are dangerous drugs on the market right now, because regulators still aren't issuing proper safety warnings," Young said.

"Twenty-two prescription drugs that Health Canada and the pharmaceutical industry told us were safe to our families have been taken off the market since 1997 for injuring and killing patients."

This week, Young is in Vancouver to speak at a conference in support of Therapeutics Initiative, a unit of the University of British Columbia, which provides independent reviews of medications and informs the B.C government on which drugs to cover under PharmaCare.

"It does superb, evidence-based work on prescription drugs. I think it's the best source in Canada of evidence-based safety information on prescription drugs," Young said.

The province wants to abandon the group in favour of what critics say will be an industry-controlled process involving people with financial ties to the drug industry.

Young wants to prevent the B.C. government from cutting funding to the group. As well, he's introduced a private member's motion to take the medication regulatory authority away from Health Canada, which he says has "done a dismal job of protecting Canadians."

Instead, he'd like to see an independent drug agency that's similar to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission or the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, independent of industry.

Only that kind of group would "truly protect Canadians," Young says.

Source:http://www.ctv.ca/

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Many depressed students getting missed: study

One out of every four students who visits a university health centre for a routine medical problem has the signs of depression, according to researchers who say an opportunity is being missed to spot these students.

The study looked at more than 1,600 college students at the University of British Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Washington.

All of them had visited a campus medical clinic and agreed to answer to fill out a survey that asked about their mood and their outlook for the future. They were also quizzed about they alcohol and tobacco use, as well as unwanted sexual encounters and violence.

The researchers found that 25 per cent of the men and 26 per cent of the women had the signs of depression. Many of them were depressed enough that they reported that they had considered suicide.

The authors note that depression can be a serious illness and that depressed students need treatment, which might include counselling but could also include medication.

Yet, doctors at campus medical clinics are not catching many of these students because there's currently no way to screen students for depression.

Dr. Michael Fleming, a professor of family and community medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine who led the study, says depression screening is simple.

While waiting for an appointment at the health centre, the student could answer seven simple questions and their answers could be immediately entered into his or her electronic health record.

Then, when the doctor or nurse sees the student, he or she could ask further about the student's depression and assess whether further action were needed.

"Depression screening is easy to do, we know it works, and it can save lives," Fleming said in a statement. "It should be done for every student who walks into a health centre."

He says students whose depression is missed are more likely to drop out of school, engage in risky behaviour or even commit suicide.

"Things continually happen to students -- a low grade or problems with a boyfriend or girlfriend -- that can trigger depression," Fleming said. "If you don't take the opportunity to screen at every visit, you are going to miss these kids."

Universities typically separate mental health treatment from primary care treatment. If students come to a campus health center and complain about depression, they are referred to a counselling centre.

"But students don't necessarily get there unless they are pretty depressed," Fleming said. "If we screen, we can try to find every student that is depressed."

Dr. Stan Kutcher, an adolescent psychiatrist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, cautioned against reading too much into the study. He noted that the survey could determine only if the students had the signs of depression, not full clinical depression.

He notes that just because some of the students reported sleep disturbances, lack of interest, feelings of guilt or any of the other nine common symptoms of depression doesn't mean that any of them could be classified as clinically depressed.

"If you didn't have symptoms of depression sometime in the last week, there's something wrong with you. You're brain-dead," he told CTV.

The study appears in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry.

Source:http://www.ctv.ca/

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Frequency of opioid prescribing 'troubling': study

TORONTO — Researchers are raising new concerns about opioids, in particular some of the high doses of strong painkillers being prescribed to socially disadvantaged people in Ontario.

A study by the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences finds that Canadian guidelines for opioid therapy are not always being followed. And preliminary data indicate that patients who receive high opioid doses have a much greater likelihood of dying than a member of the general population.

"While prescribing has been increasing of opioids, as expected, the daily dose that people are receiving is also increasing over time, and that increase is most pronounced among people who are being prescribed long-acting oxycodone -- so this is drugs like OxyContin," said Tara Gomes, a researcher and epidemiologist at the institute.

"About a third of people who are receiving prescriptions for long-acting oxycodone are in fact receiving doses that are considered to be high or very high dose, based on published clinical guidelines."

The term opioid covers powerful painkillers like morphine, codeine and oxycodone.

Researchers looked at prescriptions for patients aged 15 to 64 under Ontario's public drug plan over a six-year period from 2003 to 2008, and found opioid prescribing rates rose 16.2 per cent. By 2008, 180,974 people were receiving nearly 1.5 million opioid prescriptions annually. The findings are published Tuesday in the journal Open Medicine.

Patients with cancer and in palliative care who were taking opioids were not included in the study.

Gomes said several guidelines define an upper dose, or watchful dose, at about 200 milligrams per day. In 2008, 32.6 per cent of people treated with OxyContin received daily doses equivalent to more than 200 mg of oral morphine per day.

"People who were receiving high or very high doses of opioids were 10 times more likely to die within two years (compared to) the general population," she said in an interview.

Among patients who had prescriptions filled for high or very high doses of opioids in 2004, almost 20 per cent of the deaths during the subsequent two-year period were related to opioids.

The Office of the Chief Coroner for Ontario classified 302 deaths as opioid-related, including 45 confirmed as suicides, the study showed.

Gomes described the findings as troubling. The median age of people who were dying of opioid-related causes was 46 years.

"So these are young people that are either being treated with opioids for pain, or have begun to abuse these drugs and become addicted to them, and are dying as a result of that," she said.

Multi-doctoring, in which addicts visit more than one doctor for a painkiller prescription, is considered to be part of the problem, experts say.

Gomes said more education is needed for the public about the risks associated with these drugs, and for physicians and pharmacists about the dangers of prescribing high doses.

Having real-time access to electronic records that show the prescribing history of patients could help address problems of drug dependency and addiction, she said.

Dr. Philip Berger, chief of the family medicine department at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, said the study is an extension of earlier findings, looking more closely at deaths and prescribing rates in a socially disadvantaged group.

He said the Ontario Ministry of Health, the regulatory body -- the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario -- and the University of Toronto have "utterly failed until very recently to confront an epidemic of opioid deaths which has been known for a long time."

But he said the ministry has finally responded with its plan for real-time monitoring that would allow a pharmacist to ascertain whether a patient received a similar prescription on the same day or recently, inappropriately and from more than one doctor.

"That's good," he said, "but the system's not implemented yet."

And he noted that regulatory bodies have issued new guidelines.

"I'm not sure how much that is penetrating the consciousness of Canadian doctors. I hope so. But we're not going to know until there's more studies done."

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150 years of dieting fads and still no quick fix

WASHINGTON — Before there was Dr. Atkins, there was William Banting. He invented the low-carb diet of 1863. Even then Americans were trying out advice that urged fish, mutton or "any meat except pork" for breakfast, lunch and dinner -- hold the potatoes, please.

It turns out our obsession with weight and how to lose it dates back at least 150 years. And while now we say "overweight" instead of "corpulent" -- and obesity has become epidemic -- a look back at dieting history shows what hasn't changed is the quest for an easy fix.

"We grossly, grossly underestimate" the difficulty of changing behaviors that fuel obesity, says Clemson University sociologist Ellen Granberg, after examining archives at the Library of Congress. She believes it's important to show "we're not dealing with some brand new, scary phenomenon we've never dealt with before."

Indeed, the browning documents are eerily familiar.

Consider Englishman William Banting's account of losing almost 50 pounds in a year. He did it by shunning "bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer and potatoes, which had been the main (and I thought innocent) elements of my existence" in favor of loads of meat.

His pamphlet, "Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public," quickly crossed the Atlantic and become so popular here that "banting" became slang for dieting, Granberg says.

While obesity has rapidly surged in the last few decades, we first changed from a nation where being plump was desirable into a nation of on-again, off-again dieters around the end of the 19th century, Granberg says.

Before then, people figured a little extra weight might help withstand infectious diseases that vaccines and antibiotics later would tame. It also was a sign of prosperity. But just as doctors today bemoan a high-tech, immobile society, the emergence of trolleys, cars and other machinery in the late 19th century scaled back the sheer number of calories people once burned, Granberg explains. Increasing prosperity meant easier access to food.

"An excess of flesh is to be looked upon as one of the most objectionable forms of disease," the Philadelphia Cookbook declared in 1900. Low-cal cookbooks hadn't arrived yet; the calorie wasn't quite in vogue.

By 1903, La Parle obesity soap that "never fails to reduce flesh" was selling at a pricey $1 a bar. The Louisenbad Reduction Salt pledged to "wash away your fat." Soon came an exercise machine, the Graybar Stimulator to jiggle the pounds. Bile Beans promoted a laxative approach.

As the government prepares to update U.S. dietary guidelines next week, the Library of Congress culled its archives and, with Weight Watchers International, gathered experts recently to discuss this country's history of weight loss.

Granberg recounted how real nutrition science was born.

The government's first advice to balance proteins, carbohydrates and fat came in 1894. A few years later, life insurance companies reported that being overweight raised the risk of death. In 1916, the Department of Agriculture came up with the five food groups. Around World War II, charts showing ideal weight-for-height emerged, surprisingly close to what today is considered a healthy body mass index.

Diet foods quickly followed, as did weight loss support groups like Overeaters Anonymous and Weight Watchers -- putting today's diet infrastructure in place by 1970, Granberg says.

Yet fast-forward and two-thirds of Americans today are either overweight or obese, and childhood obesity has tripled in the past three decades. Weight-loss surgery is skyrocketing. Diet pills have been pulled from the market for deadly side effects, with only a few possible new ones in the pipeline.

More and more, specialists question how our society and culture fuel overeating.

"Should it be socially desirable to walk down the street with a 30-ounce Big Gulp?" asks Patrick O'Neill, president-elect of The Obesity Society and weight-management director at the Medical University of South Carolina.

Negotiating a weight-loss menu for a family with different food preferences is a minefield that affects how people feel about themselves and their relationships with loved ones, adds Clemson's Granberg, who began studying the sociology of obesity after losing 120 pounds herself.

"If what you need is a nutritionally sound, healthful weight-loss plan, you can get 100 of them," she says. "That, we have figured out in the last 100 years. It's how to do all this other stuff that I think is the real challenge."

Source:http://www.ctv.ca/

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Harper leaves for meetings on maternal health

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper is on his way to Geneva, where he hopes to flesh out details of his plan to aid Third World mothers and children.

The multibillion-dollar initiative was approved by G-8 leaders at their June summit and now Harper is working out specifics with the UN commission on information and accountability for women's and children's health.

But his efforts could get sidetracked by revelations of corruption at an international fund into which the Conservative government plowed a half-billion dollars last year.

The Associated Press reported this week that internal investigations at the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria uncovered $34 million in losses in some African nations.

One of those was Mali, one of Canada's top targets for aid.

Harper used his address at the United Nations General Assembly last year to announce a Canadian contribution of $540 million to the fund and linked it to the federal maternal and child health initiative.

That contribution brought Canada's total support for the fund to $1.5 billion since its inception in 2001.

Authorities have recovered $19 million of the missing money, but only a handful of grants have been studied by a special investigative unit.

International Development Minister Bev Oda has said Canada is "deeply concerned" about the revelations.

Investigators found that $4 million had been misappropriated in Mali.

The fund announced last month it had put a hold on $22.6 million worth of grants to Mali.

Officials in Geneva defended the organization, saying it was doing far more to stamp out corruption than other major development agencies.

Harper heads to Morocco before returning to Canada late Thursday.

Source:http://www.ctv.ca/

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Food allergy groups, beer industry at odds over labels

Representatives of Canadians affected by food allergies and celiac disease are worried that planned food labelling changes could be scuttled because of lobbying by the beer industry.

The labelling changes, first announced in July 2008, would make it easier for people with allergies to understand what's in their food.

The new regulations would call for clearer language on their ingredient lists and would alert consumers whether the food or beverage contains one of more of 10 known allergens, such as milk, eggs, nuts or sulphites.

If the product contained gluten, it would have to list the source of the gluten, such as wheat, rye or barley. The regulations would apply to all packaged foods, as well as wine, beer, vinegar and spirits.

"When you pick up a product, you need to know exactly what's in it. You need to understand the ingredients so you can decide, ‘Is this a safe choice for me or my child?'" explained Beatrice Povolo, the director of communications at Anaphylaxis Canada

But the Brewers Association of Canada may threaten the passage of the regulations because it wants to be granted an exemption from the rules.

The beer makers say there is no need for a label on beer bottles that warns if the product is made with barley or wheat, because beer, by definition, has to contain barley or wheat.

What's more, says Andre Fortin, a spokesman for the Brewers Association of Canada, anyone with a wheat or barley allergy or gluten intolerance knows full well that beer is off-limits to them.

"This is an already highly educated population that knows that beer is something they can't consume without a reaction. They know what they can and cannot have," Fortin said in an interview.

He points out that the labelling regulations could be costly for small and medium-sized breweries such as Steam Whistle Brewery and Mill St. Brewery, who don't use paper labels, but instead use painted labels.

"They re-use their bottles up to 20 times," says Fortin. "So this measure would have serious cost implications for them. They're worried that they'd have to change their entire bottle fleet."

But Anaphylaxis Canada and the Canadian Celiac Association are worried that the brewers could use their influence to derail the regulations, which are close to being approved.

Povol says that her groups's executive director met with the Minister of Health Leona Aglukkaq in December and was given her personal assurance that the regulations were moving ahead and that it was just a matter of time before they were approved.

A final draft of the proposed amendments is now waiting for government approval. But the groups say time is of the essence because if a federal election is called before the approval process is complete, they might have to start back at the beginning.

"We don't want to see any further delays. It's been over two years since this process started and even prior to that, 10 years of lobbying for these changes," says Povolo.

Both Anaphylaxis Canada and the Canadian Celiac Association note that the beer industry has had plenty of time over the last two years to prepare for these labelling changes.

They say there have been extensive stakeholder consultations with Health Canada over the past two and a half years and point out that manufacturers will have an 18-month phase-in period after the regulations are approved.

They say it is too late to amend the proposed labelling regulations; either the government approves them or the costly and lengthy process will have to start over.

"This legislation is far too important for Canadians to let the beer industry put it off the rails. The health and safety of millions of Canadians is at stake," the Celiac Association said in a statement.

Source:http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Health/20110125/food-allergens-beer-110125/

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A Re-Engineered Chicken and the War On Bird Flu

Got a fever, headache, sore throat and all the other lovely symptoms of influenza? You can blame it on the birds. The main reservoir for influenza viruses is wild birds, which can pass those microbes to domestic poultry, which can come into contact, and potentially infect, human beings. That is what has happened with the deadly H5N1 avian flu virus, which has killed at least 306 people during the past seven years, not to mention hundreds of millions of chickens and other birds. International heath authorities have increasingly focused on that viral intersection between birds and humans, reasoning that if H5N1 can be controlled in poultry, it won't be able to threaten people. That's a tall order, though: by one count there are as many as 70 billion chickens around the world, many of them in backyard shacks in the developing world, and the shifty flu virus often evades vaccination.

But what if there were a way to breed poultry that are genetically resistant to H5N1 or any other avian flu virus, thus severing a major link in the flu's evolutionary chain? That's what a team of scientists in Britain tried to do recently, and they were remarkably successful. The result, reported in a study in the Jan. 13 issue of Science, is genetically engineered chickens that, while they're still vulnerable to H5N1, don't seem to pass on the disease to other poultry. That's exciting news for chicken farmers who are trying to protect their flocks from a deadly virus, but it could also open the door to genetically engineering disease resistance into a host of other animals. "Genetic modification could be more effective than vaccination," says Helen Sang, a geneticist at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh and a co-author of the Science paper. "You wouldn't need to change the way you tackle each disease."

First the scientists had to figure out a gene that could interfere with the replication of the avian flu virus. Lawrence Tiley, a molecular virologist at Cambridge University and the lead author of the paper, indentified a gene that could make birds produce a piece of RNA that acts as a decoy to polymerase, an enzyme that is vital for viral replication. Rather than binding with the virus' genome, polymerase attaches itself to the decoy gene, preventing the virus from being able to replicate itself and spread.

Using Sang's transgenic techniques, the team was able to insert the decoy gene into chick embryos. When the GM chickens were exposed to the avian flu, they were still infected, getting sick and eventually dying, but they didn't pass on that virus to other chickens in close proximity, both transgenic birds and normal ones. Normally, once a few chickens have been infected with H5N1, the virus burns like wildfire through a flock, often with near 100% mortality. But the transgenic chickens effectively acted as firewalls for avian flu, stopping the spread cold. "The transgenic birds that are infected are shedding virus that seems to be defective in some ways," Tiley told Science.

While the ultimate goal would be to engineer poultry that are simply immune to the disease, the decoy target chosen by Tiley and his colleagues is a clever one. Flu viruses have eight gene segments, and polymerase has to bind to each of them during replication. To somehow evade the decoy, the flu virus would need to change parts of all eight gene segments. By comparison, a flu virus can evade a vaccine by changing just one gene, and since the flu mutates frequently, that's not hard to do. (Those genetic shifts in influenza are why we need a new vaccine every flu season.) Engineered correctly, a transgenic could be all but permanently protected from the flu, as would all their offspring, and they're otherwise normal. "You wouldn't be able to pick them out of a pen of chickens," says Sang.

Sang notes that this is just a small proof of principle study. "Commercial success is a long way off," she says. Transgenic chickens would also need to be approved by regulators and accepted by consumers, no guarantee, given the resistance to GM crops in much of the world. But regulators are already beginning to look at some GM animals, including a transgenic salmon that is able to grow faster in fish farms, and a GM pig that produces much less polluting waste. If we can protect ourselves from the next flu pandemic by tweaking our birds, the benefits might be worth the Frankenstein factor.

Source: Time Magazine
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2042381,00.html#ixzz1BJgkmWf0

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