Tainted Irish pork may have reached 25 nations



The Irish government said on Saturday that laboratory tests of animal feed and pork fat samples confirmed the presence of dioxins, with toxins at 80-200 times the safe limits. Preliminary evidence indicated the problem was likely to have started in September of this year, it added.

The Irish Exporters Association said the total exports of pig meat and related added value products such as pizzas, pies and sandwiches containing pork was about 750 million euros ($950 million). It said 63 percent of this went to the UK.

Britain's FSA said it did "not believe there is significant risk to UK consumers."

The Irish Association of Pigmeat Processors said the contaminated pig feed came from one supplier and the source had been contained.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081207/ts_nm/us_ireland_food_recall

Here is a link to some recalls of meat in the US. I haven't heard of any of these on the news.

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/FSIS_RECALLS/

Here is a recall that walgreens is doing.

Walgreens Recalls 173 Teddy Bears With Chocolate Bars Sold Since Late September 2008
Contact:
Michael Polzin
(847) 914-2925

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- DEERFIELD, Ill., Dec. 5, 2008 – Walgreens is recalling 173 teddy bears with chocolate bars sold in stores since late September 2008. Analysis by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found that certain samples of the chocolate provided with the teddy bears were contaminated with melamine. Customers who purchased any of the 173 teddy bears should return them immediately to the Walgreens stores where they were purchased for a full refund.

Walgreens already has instructed stores to stop selling the product, which is specifically described as an approximately 9-inch high Dressy Teddy Bear with 4-oz. Chocolate Bar. The product's UPC number is 047475864485, and the product tag also includes the item number 291332. Walgreens has not received any reports of illness or injury related to this product.

Walgreens takes the safety of its customers seriously and is working with the FDA on this recall. For additional information, visit Walgreens Web site at http://www.walgreens.com/images/pdfs/recalls/TeddyBear_Product_Safety.pdf or contact Walgreens Product Quality department at 847-315-2755, Monday through Friday between 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Central time.

The ones they catch are few and far between. Ya know 8 years of letting the FDA haveing its staffing cut has left alot of holes. Please people buy your food with brand names, spend the extra ten cents and dont buy crap from dollar stores or dollar tree's etc etc that you ar going to put in your bodey. Do you guys remember that tainted toothpaste?

It's because EVERYTHING has been recalled has been linked to ingrediants from china. It's not rocket science to put two and two together.

I wish there were a way to keep these products out of the US.

Run away with me hellkity to Canada we will plant an organic garden and raise chickens and have free health care

You had me a free healthcare.

hell

Who do you think pays the inspectors, pays for the offices they have to have, the equipment they have to use? There are not enough inspectors! That's why this stuff is happening. It's not just screwing the poor, it's screwing everybody that eats, drinks, or otherwise uses these tanted products. Do you know why there are not more inspectors? Because the last administration gave every body a tax break, with the very best breaks going to the very wealthy. So, now, at least our state government can't retain employees. The working conditions for state government employees are as bad as I have seen in 25 years! Not how do we alleiviate that and get back to the level of services we have had in the past? First, we evaluate and really cut wasteful spending. Then, we have to raise the taxes back to the pre-Bush level. And, if Obama can pull off getting this WPA thing started again...and actually find people who are willing to do that kind of labor, we will have good roads, and safer foods and other products. It's not about having BIG government, it's about having a smarter government. IMO

excellent post

Pesticides Destroying Male Sexuality In All Species


The male gender is in danger, with incalculable consequences for both humans and wildlife, startling scientific research from around the world reveals.


The research – to be detailed tomorrow in the most comprehensive report yet published – shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people.

Backed by some of the world's leading scientists, who say that it "waves a red flag" for humanity and shows that evolution itself is being disrupted, the report comes out at a particularly sensitive time for ministers. On Wednesday, Britain will lead opposition to proposed new European controls on pesticides, many of which have been found to have "gender-bending" effects.

It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminised genitals.

"This research shows that the basic male tool kit is under threat," says Gwynne Lyons, a former government adviser on the health effects of chemicals, who wrote the report.

Wildlife and people have been exposed to more than 100,000 new chemicals in recent years, and the European Commission has admitted that 99 per cent of them are not adequately regulated. There is not even proper safety information on 85 per cent of them.

Many have been identified as "endocrine disrupters" – or gender-benders – because they interfere with hormones. These include phthalates, used in food wrapping, cosmetics and baby powders among other applications; flame retardants in furniture and electrical goods; PCBs, a now banned group of substances still widespread in food and the environment; and many pesticides.

The report – published by the charity CHEMTrust and drawing on more than 250 scientific studies from around the world – concentrates mainly on wildlife, identifying effects in species ranging from the polar bears of the Arctic to the eland of the South African plains, and from whales in the depths of the oceans to high-flying falcons and eagles.

It concludes: "Males of species from each of the main classes of vertebrate animals (including bony fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) have been affected by chemicals in the environment.

"Feminisation of the males of numerous vertebrate species is now a widespread occurrence. All vertebrates have similar sex hormone receptors, which have been conserved in evolution. Therefore, observations in one species may serve to highlight pollution issues of concern for other vertebrates, including humans."

Fish, it says, are particularly affected by pollutants as they are immersed in them when they swim in contaminated water, taking them in not just in their food but through their gills and skin. They were among the first to show widespread gender-bending effects.

Half the male fish in British lowland rivers have been found to be developing eggs in their testes; in some stretches all male roaches have been found to be changing sex in this way. Female hormones – largely from the contraceptive pills which pass unaltered through sewage treatment – are partly responsible, while more than three-quarters of sewage works have been found also to be discharging demasculinising man-made chemicals. Feminising effects have now been discovered in a host of freshwater fish species as far away as Japan and Benin, in Africa, and in sea fish in the North Sea, the Mediterranean, Osaka Bay in Japan and Puget Sound on the US west coast.

Research at the University of Florida earlier this year found that 40 per cent of the male cane toads – a species so indestructible that it has become a plague in Australia – had become hermaphrodites in a heavily farmed part of the state, with another 20 per cent undergoing lesser feminisation. A similar link between farming and sex changes in northern leopard frogs has been revealed by Canadian research, adding to suspicions that pesticides may be to blame.

Male alligators exposed to pesticides in Florida have suffered from lower testosterone and higher oestrogen levels, abnormal testes, smaller penises and reproductive failures. Male snapping turtles have been found with female characteristics in the same state and around the Great Lakes, where wildlife has been found to be contaminated with more than 400 different chemicals. Male herring gulls and peregrine falcons have produced the female protein used to make egg yolks, while bald eagles have had difficulty reproducing in areas highly contaminated with chemicals.

Scientists at Cardiff University have found that the brains of male starlings who ate worms contaminated by female hormones at a sewage works in south-west England were subtly changed so that they sang at greater length and with increased virtuosity.

Even more ominously for humanity, mammals have also been found to be widely affected.

Two-thirds of male Sitka black-tailed deer in Alaska have been found to have undescended testes and deformed antler growth, and roughly the same proportion of white-tailed deer in Montana were discovered to have genital abnormalities.

In South Africa, eland have been revealed to have damaged testicles while being contaminated by high levels of gender-bender chemicals, and striped mice from one polluted nature reserved were discovered to be producing no sperm at all.

At the other end of the world, hermaphrodite polar bears – with penises and vaginas – have been discovered and gender-benders have been found to reduce sperm counts and penis lengths in those that remained male. Many of the small, endangered populations of Florida panthers have been found to have abnormal sperm.

Other research has revealed otters from polluted areas with smaller testicles and mink exposed to PCBs with shorter penises. Beluga whales in Canada's St Lawrence estuary and killer whales off its north-west coast – two of the wildlife populations most contaminated by PCBs – are reproducing poorly, as are exposed porpoises, seals and dolphins.

Scientists warned yesterday that the mass of evidence added up to a grave warning for both wildlife and humans. Professor Charles Tyler, an expert on endocrine disrupters at the University of Exeter, says that the evidence in the report "set off alarm bells". Whole wildlife populations could be at risk, he said, because their gene pool would be reduced, making them less able to withstand disease and putting them at risk from hazards such as global warming.

Dr Pete Myers, chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences, one of the world's foremost authorities on gender-bender chemicals, added: "We have thrown 100, 000 chemicals against a finely balanced hormone system, so it's not surprising that we are seeing some serious results. It is leading to the most rapid pace of evolution in the history of the world.

Professor Lou Gillette of Florida University, one of the most respected academics in the field, warned that the report waved "a large red flag" at humanity. He said: "If we are seeing problems in wildlife, we can be concerned that something similar is happening to a proportion of human males"

Indeed, new research at the University of Rochester in New York state shows that boys born to mothers with raised levels of phthalates were more likely to have smaller penises and undescended testicles. They also had a shorter distance between their anus and genitalia, a classic sign of feminisation. And a study at Rotterdam's Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys.

Communities heavily polluted with gender-benders in Canada, Russia and Italy have given birth to twice as many girls than boys, which may offer a clue to the reason for a mysterious shift in sex ratios worldwide. Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls, but the ratio is slipping. It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born as girls instead in the US and Japan alone.

And sperm counts are dropping precipitously. Studies in more than 20 countries have shown that they have dropped from 150 million per millilitre of sperm fluid to 60 million over 50 years. (Hamsters produce nearly three times as much, at 160 million.) Professor Nil Basu of Michigan University says that this adds up to "pretty compelling evidence for effects in humans".

But Britain has long sought to water down EU attempts to control gender-bender chemicals and has been leading opposition to a new regulation that would ban pesticides shown to have endocrine-disrupting effects. Almost all the other European countries back it, but ministers – backed by their counterparts from Ireland and Romania – are intent on continuing their resistance at a crucial meeting on Wednesday. They say the regulation would cause a collapse of agriculture in the UK, but environmentalists retort that this is nonsense because the regulation has get-out clauses that could be used by British farmers.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/its-official-men-really-are-the-weaker-sex-1055688.html

Wow! I didn't know about all of this.

(NaturalNews) Many people who eat organic food and use natural products are trying to avoid pesticides that are linked to cancer and other diseases. Now Japanese researchers say there is another advantage to "going green" and avoiding toxins and chemical additives in the environment. A common pollutant has been found to have a potent effect on gene activity and could be contributing to the obesity epidemic.

According to an article published in the December issue of the journal Bioscience, the chemical tributyltin affects sensitive receptors in the cells of a host of animals, ranging from water fleas to people. What's more, tributyltin has an impact at extremely low levels -- a thousand times lower than pollutants that are known to interfere with the sexual development of wildlife species, for example. The chemical is known to be damaging to the liver as well as the nervous and immune systems in mammals . But what has just been recognized is that tributyltin also has powerful effects on the cellular components known as retinoid X receptors (RXRs) in a range of species. That's important because RXRs can move into the nuclei of cells and turn on genes that cause the growth of fat storage cells and regulate whole body metabolism. This raises a disturbing possibility: The pollutant could be harming humans by causing slowed metabolism and weight gain.

Scientists Taisen Iguchi and Yoshinao Katsu of the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Japan, who wrote the BioScience article, point out that effects of tributyltin on RXR-like nuclear receptors could be widespread throughout the animal kingdom, including the human species. And they note that the enormous rise in obesity over the past four decades coincides with the increased use of industrial chemicals over the same period.
http://www.naturalnews.com/z025022.html

There is no single entity in China that pulls all the strings. There are multiple factions. My only point is that this means there is no single agenda at work that has power.

Yeah, I don't think the blame is all on China. Even though it's made in China doesn't mean it's just Chinese companies doing the damage. There are plenty of US companies in China making products as well.

well everyone else can continue to consume food and purchase tainted toys from China and get sick, but I sure as hell am not. good luck to you all.

Really the only way to be safe as far as food goes is for everyone to go back to the old days and grow their own. Buying local could be a good idea as well since most local family farmers grow organic. Of course it would require cooking which has pretty much become a lost art.

Well then lets plant some taters and stuff out in the courtyard.

I wonder whats in that soil out there...