Health Spectator

Farmers’ organizations at a meeting on the treaty governing the exchange of crop seeds for research and plant breeding, hosted in Rome by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), told the assembled government representatives late Thursday that the treaty ought to be suspended.

Speaking on behalf of 30 farmers’ and other civil society organizations, Ibrahima Coulibaly of the Regional Farmers’ Organization of West Africa (ROPPA) said, “the treaty must halt the exchange of crop germplasm.”

“Germplasm,” in this case, refers to the plant genetic material contained in seeds. For farmers, seeds represent the biodiversity of natural crops that they have nurtured and bred over centuries.

What’s more, the African farm leader concluded, “the suspension should remain in effect until governments meet the minimal obligations of the Treaty, including its core financial arrangements.”

This second meeting of the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) began last Monday, October 29 and finished Friday, November 2. The Treaty is sometimes referred to as “The Law of the Seed.”

However, the Governing Body has been rendered almost completely ineffective, since its 115 member governments have been unable to find the $4.9 million necessary to keep the lights on in its Secretariat, much less to maintain the fundamental monitoring mechanisms that might ensure equitable sharing of the benefits acquired in exchange for the seeds donated to research. Attendees charge that governments have also failed to commit the necessary funding to support in situ (on-farm) seed conservation or for building crop capacity in the global South. They point out that these latter programs are not in the best interests of the multinationals holding the other side of the Treaty.

Many attendees of the meeting were visibly angry, charging that the Treaty had become purely an acquisition mechanism for multinational seed companies, with the supposed reciprocal benefits for farmers and developing nations completely ignored.

“We are faced with the greatest case of institutional biopiracy ever seen,” said Andrew Mushita of the Community Biodiversity Development and Conservation Network (a network of conservation programs in 21 countries). “In effect, governments are now enabling multinational seed companies to impose a legally-binding regime that forces the exchange of farmers’ seeds without reciprocal benefits,” said Mushita, who also addressed the governments Friday.

Another civil society representative at the meeting, Wilhelmina Pelegrina from the Phillipines-based Southeast Asia Regional Initiatives for Community Empowerment (SEARICE), added, “We also expect the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) to suspend its germplasm exchanges in order to remain compliant with the spirit of the Treaty.” Eleven institutes of the CGIAR have distributed 100,000 seed samples under the terms of the Treaty so far this year. “We hope the suspension will be temporary and governments will come to their senses quickly,” said Pelegrina.

The reciprocal benefits mentioned were supposed to be an integral part of the Treaty. Indeed, negotiations for the Treaty began in the mid-1990s because scientific researchers and multinational plant breeders were experiencing a substantial decline in their access to vital breeding material. Scientists and farmers, particularly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, were denying requests for seed from northern “breeders” because private companies were taking farmers’ varieties and patenting them. Farmers resented providing the seeds just to bolster the multinationals’ profits, and regarded the patenting of seeds they had developed as outright theft.

As the decline in seed exchange appeared to be threatening world food security, governments decided to act. After seven years of acrimonious negotiations, they hammered out a Treaty that included provisions for Farmers’ Rights and is supposed to guarantee an equitable flow of financial benefits to developing countries. Without funding for core administrative services, however, farmers and developing countries have no confidence that there is equity in the system.

According to Pat Mooney of ETC Group, headquartered in Canada, who also attended the meeting, “The global seed industry has annual commercial sales of $23 billion. Beginning in the 1970s, multinational pesticide enterprises began buying seed companies.

“Today,” Mooney said, “the top 10 seed companies have 57% of the commercial seed trade. Last year, a single company’s biotech seeds and traits—Monsanto’s—accounted for 86% of the total worldwide area devoted to genetically modified seeds.”

These multinational gene giants, critics charge, are the major beneficiaries under the current Treaty environment. But some attendees also blame participating governments for current woes.

“It’s not all governments,” said Guy Kastler, Via Campesina/Europe “the real biopirates at this meeting are France, Germany and Australia. These governments are making it impossible for the international community to fulfill its Treaty obligations. Although their seed industries are major beneficiaries of the Treaty, these three countries haven’t contributed a penny to the Treaty’s operations and they are actively blocking negotiations here.”

Representatives from farmers’ organizations —who are attending the meeting at FAO’s invitation but at their own expense—sat stunned Thursday as governments refused to discuss the proposed program of work for the Treaty. According to a press release from organizers, even the most contentious issues passed by without comment.

Farmers undertake the overwhelming majority of the world’s seed conservation and plant breeding. This was confirmed Tuesday when the representative of the Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties (UPOV), the Geneva-based intergovernmental body that oversees intellectual property related to plant varieties, reported that breeders had only “protected” 70,000 varieties in recent decades. Farmers breed and adapt more than one million varieties every year.

“If negotiations collapse at FAO,” said Maria Elza Gomez from a Brazilian small farmers’ organization, “the matter might move to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, whose scientific subcommittee will meet at FAO in Rome in February 2008.

“Governments and FAO could lose control of the Treaty to a different UN body. This would be a serious mistake: the control over seeds—the first link in the food chain—would be left [to] a bunch of environmentalists who know nothing about agriculture.”

[Editor's Note: to see Dan Rather's thought-provoking coverage of the U.S. Farm Bill, click here.]

An expanded recall on September 29 of 21.7 million tons of beef resulted in the bankruptcy a week later of 67-year-old Topps Meat, the largest U.S. maker of frozen beef patties. Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said the contagion was likely caused by beef from Ranchers Beef Ltd of Balzac, Alberta, Canada, a company that had ceased operation citing insolvency just a month before.

Nearly 100 people in the U.S. and Canada were sickened by the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak, while the recall itself was the second largest in U.S. history.

The chain of events illustrates–with considerable irony–the problems inherent in establishing a farmer’s cooperative under a food distribution system that consolidates control by increasingly centralized producers, processors and distributors within a framework in which adequate inspection and food safety are frequently brushed aside.

The irony is that Ranchers Beef was a new co-op formed by ranchers attempting to overcome exploitation at the hands of centralized packing houses by marketing their own beef.

According to an article run by the Canadian National Post on August 22, just a week after the 14-month-old co-op closed, Ranchers Beef was “christened the Cadillac of food safety in a post-mad-cow era, capable of tracking each bovine as it journeyed from the truck, through the plant, to its end in a box of beef.” One investor claimed that Ranchers Beef was “the only plant eligible to ship to Europe” in all of North America.

The U. S. Food Safety and Inspection Service delisted Ranchers Beef as an importer on October 20. U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Richard Raymond said the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) provided pulse field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) patterns—a form of genetic fingerprinting—from Ranchers Beef products that “helped us determine a likely source of contaminated product which led to the September 29 Topps Meat expanded recall.”

Ranchers Beef was not the first Canadian co-op-style meatpacker to close in recent history. In February, Ranchers Choice Beef Co-op Ltd in Dauphin, Manitoba had decided to cease operation under similar financial constraints.

Observers site the U.S. Farm Bill currently working its way through the Senate as a possible mechanism of correcting a food distribution system that increasingly crowds out smaller farmers and ranchers in favor of industrial-style production facilities. While consumers continue paying higher prices for beef and other farm products, smaller farmers and ranchers are under increasing pressure to quit the business, usually by selling out to conglomerates.

That such a large distributor as Topps Meat should be brought down by the recall illustrates yet another irony of the current system: because meat products are intermingled on such a grand scale without prior testing for safety, when a problem does arise, the resulting recall is farm more extensive than it would have been had a smaller batch been distributed on a local level.

What’s more, according to the National Post, Ranchers Beef plans to market premium beef tested for bovine spongioform encephalopathy (BSE), were disallowed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. That a plant designed for preventing and tracking BSE should be blamed for an E. coli outbreak, which is caused by poor sanitary procedures during slaughtering, was just one more painful bit of irony.

[Editor's Note: to see Dan Rather's thought-provoking coverage of the U.S. Farm Bill, click here.]

We can’t say we’ve yet read Barbara Kingsolver’s popular book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. However, assuming the following quotes excerpted from her interview on another channel are representative of her work, we look forward to doing so:

On average, 85 cents of every food dollar goes to the processors, packagers, advertisers and oil companies who profit handsomely from our lack of regard for soil, water, climate and the future. Farmers have no choice but to respond to consumer demand. They can only grow what we will buy….

It’s not “natural” that organic and whole foods cost more than tallow-fried junk. We choose that through our tacit approval of the Farm Bill that defines food and nutrition policy in this country. We’ve elected to subsidize corporate commodity farms while leaving small, diversified fruit and vegetable farmers on their own, trying to compete. For organic farmers it’s even worse-–-we make them pay for their own inspection and oversight. If we’d like to flip this over and subsidize healthy rather than unhealthy foods, we can call our legislators and start talking. This is a good time to do it, because the Farm Bill is being renegotiated at this moment.

We think Ms. Kingsolver’s notion of contacting your legislative representatives is a good one. To make it easier, you can find contact information for all your U.S. government officials here. (In fact, this source will show you how to contact your state representatives as well.)

As for the Farm Bill, it has passed the House and is now being debated and modified by the Senate. You can find additional information and ideas about what the Farm Bill might better include at OxFam America. As a general guide, agribusiness doesn’t need help to keep going. But small farmers—who have to compete with the large farms and their economies of scale—can use all the help they can get. They are the main source of hope for healthy and sustainable—not to mention local and organic—agriculture.

Thus, while “farm subsidies” has become a near-epithet for many in recent years, we shouldn’t overlook aid to small farmers, particularly those who are bucking the current trend in conventional agriculture by producing organic farm products. As Ms. Kingsolver points out, why should organic farmers have to bear an additional economic burden in paying for inspection and oversight to make sure they are farming in a way that we should all hope they do? Perhaps the U.S. should pay more attention to subsidizing small-scale, sustainable, organic farming techniques so that we can all have healthier choices of food that don’t degrade the environment.

It’s a good idea to let your representatives know how you feel about topics such as the Farm Bill, organic farming, and genetic modification. And if you’re not sure how you feel about those topics, go to our site search or our category listings on the left sidebar and find articles we’ve provided on these subjects.

We hope to be bringing you more in the near future. Come to think of it, you might even use the Make a Donation button at left to help assure that we can.

[Editor's Note: to see Dan Rather's thought-provoking coverage of the U.S. Farm Bill, click here.]

The World Health Organization released its annual report today, with emphasis on the changing world situation regarding communicable diseases. In her report, Inspector General Dr. Margaret Chan noted that since 1951, when the WHO issued its first set of legally binding regulations to prevent the international spread of disease, much has changed.

In 1951, Chan noted, the disease situation was “relatively stable,” with only six quarantinable diseases of relative concern: cholera, plague, relapsing fever, smallpox, typhus, and yellow fever. “New diseases were rare,” Chan said, “and miracle drugs had revolutionized the care of many well-known infections.”

Fast forward to 2007, when the WHO is dealing with several diseases of lesser concern in 1951–such as tuberculosis–making a dangerous comeback in drug-resistant form, plus an array of diseases not heard of in 1951: AIDS, SARS, avian flu, Ebola, Mad Cow disease, hemorrhagic fever–just to name a few.

“The disease situation [now] is anything but stable,” Chan said. “Population growth, incursion into previously uninhabited areas, rapid urbanization, intensive farming practices, environmental degradation, and the misuse of antimicrobials have disrupted the equilibrium of the microbial world.”

Perhaps most alarmingly, Chan noted that “new diseases are emerging at the historically unprecedented rate of one per year.” What’s more, she said, “during the last five years, WHO has verified more than 1100 epidemic events worldwide.”

Air travel, she pointed out, moves over 2 billion people per year, making it possible for a disease to spread internationally as soon as it emerges.

Consequently, she is urging worldwide adoption of the International Health Regulations (2005) that came into effect in June 2007. These new regulations are designed to be more proactive than previous WHO regulations, and if fully enforced and practiced globally, would give the WHO far greater power to deal with international health emergencies.

The Ministry of Health of Indonesia has announced a new case of human infection of H5N1 avian influenza. A 28-year-old female from Tabanan District, in Bali Province, developed flu symptoms on August 14, was hospitalized on August 18, then died in hospital on August 21. She was a poultry trader.

Case investigators found that she collected poultry from villages where outbreaks of avian influenza had occurred.

Of the 105 cases confirmed to date in Indonesia, 84 have been fatal.

Researchers now have proof that a virus may be involved in human obesity, according to a paper just published in the International Journal of Obesity. A virus had been shown to cause obesity in animal subjects, but the link between the virus and humans remained unproven.

Dr Richard L. Atkinson (Obetech Obesity Research Center, Richmond, VA) and other researchers tested both obese and thin volunteers for antibodies to adenovirus-36—the suspected agent—as well as three other viruses not believed to be linked to obesity. They not only searched for antibodies to the virus, but checked serum lipid (cholesterol and triglyceride) levels as well. They also measured the body mass index (BMI) of the individuals and their percentage body fat.

The researchers also included 89 pairs of twins in their study, enabling them to compare differences between twins who tested differently for exposure to Ad-36.

Animal experiments had shown that when infected with Ad-36, stem cells turned into fat cells. It is well known that increasing the number of fat cells in the body enhances the likelihood that the individual will be overweight.

The present study was designed to test for an effect of the virus on humans.

When all the data were analyzed, the scientists found that 30% of the obese versus 11% of the thin subjects had been exposed to the adenovirus. Among twin pairs in which one twin had been exposed to the adenovirus and one had not, the exposed twins showed higher percentage body fat and BMI.

Perhaps the most surprising effect of the adenovirus confirmed in this study is that while it increases fat accumulation, it lowers serum triglyceride and cholesterol levels.

As expected, the study showed no correlation between human obesity, cholesterol or triglyceride levels and exposure to the adenoviruses known as Ad-2, Ad-31, and Ad-37. Heretofore, this class of viruses has been associated primarily with minor infections such as colds, respiratory infections, and pink eye.

The hypothesis that multiple sclerosis is a genetically enabled disease in which immune cells attack the nervous system has been confirmed through a human genome-wide study that will be announced in tomorrow’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Assuming further genetic and functional studies confirm these results, the risk factors for contracting MS will be laid squarely on the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) region of human chromosome 6, along with specific alleles (gene variations) in the interleukin-2 receptor alpha gene (IL2RA) and the interleukin-7 receptor alpha gene (IL7RA).

Alleles in the HLA region have been linked to several other autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and ankylosing spondylitis. The HLA genes generally encode proteins that form part of the cell membrane and are therefore responsible for the body’s ability to differentiate between its own and foreign cells. They also affect antigen formation and therefore indirectly influence the functioning of an important group of immune cells known as T cells.

Impairment of regulatory T cells—also known as suppressor T cells—allows the body to attack its own tissues and is a major factor in multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases.

The New England Journal of Medicine is reporting that a man was injured by lightning while jogging and wearing an iPod. Doctors from the Vancouver General Hospital in Vancouver, B.C. report that the man suffered punctured eardrums, a broken jaw and second-degree burns on his chest, head, and left leg.

They attribute his broken jaw to the fact that the man was wearing the iPod, which caused the lightning strike (a side flash from a nearby tree) to pass through his head, causing a violent contraction of his jaw muscles. They stated that usually in lightning strikes of this nature, the high resistance of human skin keeps the flash traveling on the outside of the body.

The combination of body sweat and the metal from the iPod headset, however, caused the lightning to penetrate the jogger’s body, resulting in more substantial injuries.

Andrew Speaker, the lawyer who boarded international airline flights with what was believed to be “extensively drug resistant tuberculosis” has had his diagnosis downgraded to “multi-drug resistant tuberculosis” by the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, Colo. While that distinction might appear to be splitting hairs, it is important for two reasons, according to Charles Daley, head of the center’s infectious disease division.

“Number one, it allows us to change the way we treat him,” Daley said, “and if someone has become infected by Mr. Speaker… we now have some drugs available to… treat them and prevent them from developing TB.”

“However,” Mitchell Cohen, Director of the Coordinating Center for Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) pointed out, “MDR TB remains difficult to treat. It will require approximately two years of medication and relatively toxic drug regimens to achieve the desired outcome, very different from drug-susceptible TB.”

Cohen then went on to discuss the public health issues at stake.

He first explained that the CDC and the National Jewish Medical and Research Center used different methods to test Speaker’s dominant strain of TB. He pointed out that the augur proportion method used by the CDC “is the approved standard of the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute,” then added that the “CDC acts as the TB reference laboratory not only for the United States but also internationally. ” He then reiterated that the CDC tests “found resistance to both first- and second-line TB medications, meeting the definition of XDR [extremely drug resistant] TB.”

Unfortunately, Cohen said, the initial bronchoscopy specimen obtained by a hospital in Atlanta was no longer available for retesting.

Cohen then cautioned that “there is a tendency to want to think about XDR TB and MDR TB as two different illnesses. ” In fact, he said, “they are only describing a level of drug resistance found in the bacteria attained from the patient specimen. This is a serious illness that can be transmitted to others, and thus puts others at risk for getting a difficult-to-treat disease.”

Most tellingly, Cohen pointed out that “the public health response to drug-resistant TB infections, either MDR TB or XDR TB is the same under the World Health Organization’s TB and airline travel guidelines that were published in 2005.” He then emphasized that “Without question, people with these infections should not be flying on commercial airlines.”

CDC continues to recommend the follow-up and retesting of passengers and crew who traveled on the transatlantic flights with Andrew Speaker and says it “will continue to ensure the well-being of patients who may have been exposed and infected by this patient,” according to Cohen.

Yogis and Buddhists, among others, have long known the benefits of meditation and mindfulness. Now, Western science is not only confirming those benefits, but attempting to find clues to how it works.

Studies currently being published in the journal Psychological Science by UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman and his colleagues seem to indicate that naming negative emotions helps us handle them better. Lieberman and his colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to identify regions of the brain that were active during their experiments. Meanwhile, they had subjects, whom they showed faces of people expressing strong emotions such as fear and anger, pick either a name for the person or a name for the emotion.

Only when they spoke the name of a negative emotion did the subjects’ brains react with more activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region and less in the amygdala. The amygdala is a portion of the brain that processes strong emotions such as fear, anger, and panic. The right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region, on the other hand, controls impulses. Thus, the experiments seem to indicate that naming or talking about a negative emotion helps calm the individual and helps him gain control.

Putting the brakes on

This may be an explanation, the researchers hypothesize, for why talking therapies help people to feel better: Simply talking about the emotion helps “put the brakes on.”

Some meditation teachers advise putting a label on a thought or emotion that we want to get rid of while meditating. In such forms of meditation, the goal is to divest the self of ego-based images and emotions, especially destructive emotions such as greed and anger. The naming process seems to form a separation from the emotion; otherwise, the meditator may begin to identify with that emotion, temporarily becoming one with it, as commonly occurs in day-to-day life.

Previous research has shown that depression often results from negative emotions or thoughts spiraling out of control, particularly in the elderly. One particularly bad practice to which many are prone is called rumination, which one researcher described as “problem solving gone awry.” In rumination, one can go from pondering what has gone wrong to cause the current situation and wind up in repetitive negative thought patterns, which result in depression.

Other workers point out that not all rumination leads to depression. In 2003, Treynor, Gonzalez, and Nolen-Hoeksema differentiated between “reflective pondering” and “brooding.” They described reflective pondering as “a purposeful turning inward to engage in cognitive problem solving to alleviate one’s depressive symptoms.” Brooding, on the other hand, they saw as representing “a passive comparison of one’s current situation with some unachieved standard.”

These same authors found that a brooding response style was associated with an increased risk for future depression while a reflective pondering response style was not. In general, it appears that the practice of comparing one’s current situation with some abstract ideal or even with another person’s situation is psychologically dangerous: it can lead to depression.

As it happens, Buddhist teachers have for centuries discouraged their disciples from making mental distinctions or judgments. One of the techniques they have long taught—mindfulness, or staying in touch with the present moment rather than turning thought inward—has in recent years caught the attention of psychological researchers, who find that it serves to cut off rumination, and as a consequence, results in greater mental health, while avoiding depression.