Deal lets big farms skirt pollution fines [The Associated Press, 1/30/06]

The Bush administration will let thousands of factory-style farms escape severe penalties for fouling the air and water with animal excrement in exchange for data to help curb future pollution.

The Environmental Protection Agency has signed agreements with 2,681 animal feeding operations in the egg, chicken, turkey, dairy and hog industries. They would be exempt from having to pay potential fines of up to $27,500 a day for violations either in the past or over the next four years. […]

Jon Scholl, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson’s agriculture adviser, said the agreements are the most efficient way of obtaining the data needed to determine whether the animal feeding operations are complying with federal air emission laws.

Yes, let potential offenders of the hook…to determine whether they’re offending or not. Makes perfect sense (in Bush World, at least).

See also A Big To-Doo-Doo / EPA offers air-pollution immunity to factory farms [Grist Magazine, 1/24/05]

Red meat cancer risk clue found [BBC News, 1/31/06]

Scientists at the MRC Dunn Human Nutrition Unit and the Open University compared red meat and vegetarian diets.

Their study, published in Cancer Research, found the red meat diet was associated with a higher level of DNA damage.

Previous work suggests regular meat eaters are significantly more likely to develop bowel cancer.

Dads-to-be pile on the pounds too [New Scientist, 2/1/06]

Pregnancy is something that not all expectant fathers miss out on – male “sympathetic pregnancies” have been reported in humans but never systematically studied. They are often regarded as psychosomatic events.

Now a US team has studied the parental weight patterns of common marmosets and cotton top tamarins – two squirrel-sized, monogamous primate species – from conception to birth. Each month the 25 prospective dads and 33 pregnant mums were weighed. The creatures’ food supply was maintained but not increased during the gestation periods for the marmosets (five months) and tamarins (six months).

“We found that the males gained on average an extra 10% of their body weight during the pregnancy,” says Toni Zeigler who led the research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison National Primate Research Center. The weight gain was not as pronounced as for the females, but was acquired earlier in the pregnancy – about midway.

In New York Schools, Whole Milk Is Cast From the Menu [The New York Times, 2/2/06]

Children today are fat, or at least too many of them are, and to cut the risks of obesity, diabetes and other health problems, New York City — the nation’s largest school district — has decided to cut whole milk from the menu.

That feat, no small one in a system that serves a half-million half pints of milk a day, is already under way, with whole milk banished from cafeterias in the Bronx and in Manhattan. To the ire of the dairy industry, which has lobbied fiercely against the change, the other boroughs are following suit and, by the end of this month, officials say, whole milk will be gone for good.

Kudos to the NYC school district (and shame on the diary industry for putting their profits above health!). Could Pepsi be next?

Agency Fought Retesting of Infected Cow [The Washington Post, 2/3/06]

The report details why scientists at the National Veterinary Services Laboratories concluded that a sample from a Texas animal should be tested with other techniques following initial inconclusive findings. It adds that top officials at the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) told them not to do the additional tests.

When officials from the inspector general’s office met with the head of APHIS, they were told that the protocol followed by the agency was the international “gold standard” and nothing more was needed, the report adds. Nonetheless, the sample was later sent to England for a different set of tests and was found to have the mad cow infection.

The report also found that although there was no evidence that infected meat had made it into the human food chain, the USDA surveillance system did not collect the information needed to say whether slaughterhouses were following all mad cow-related regulations. In nine of 12 facilities visited, the report said, inadequate recordkeeping made it impossible to know whether proper procedures were being followed.

I’ll stick with Boca Burgers, thanks.

‘Lost cells’ offer obesity clue [BBC News, 2/4/06]

By looking at a mouse model of BBS [Bardet-Biedl syndrome], they found there were problems with tiny hair-like projections on cells, known as cilia.

These hairs are important for telling the cell where in the body it is positioned in relation to other cells. Without this function the cell can get lost.

They believe such malfunction could play a role in the symptoms of BBS and its related obesity.