Search Results for: Environmental Health

BY KEITH NUTHALL
JAPAN has appealed against a WTO ruling that ruled its quarantine measures on imported apples from the USA could not be justified on health grounds under the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKE
HEALTH conscious Sri Lankan consumers are being offered a Vanilla Diet ice cream by Cold Stores, manufacturers of the Elephant House brand. Sucrose free, it contains 40 per cent less vegetable fat than regular ice creams.…

BY RICHARD HURST
THE SOUTH African tobacco sector is surviving despite the unfavourable conditions imposed by its government and an increasingly hostile marketing environment. Nonetheless, the industry contributes Rand 5.5 billion in excise and tax to the government exchequer, equivalent to a quarter of the nation’s health care expenditure.…

KEITH NUTHALL
AMERICAN health officials have overseen the slaughter of 28,000 salmon on a fish farm in Maine, because of an outbreak of infectious salmon anaemia. Controls were imposed swiftly at the farm in Broad Cove, Cobscook Bay, because the disease ravaged the state’s fish farms in 2001.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE INTERNATIONAL Maritime Organisation has approved a significant tightening of its MARPOL convention regarding the phasing out of certain oil tankers, although it has postponed many formal decisions on the issue until a key meeting in December. Following political pressure – especially from the EU – IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Committee agreed to bring forward from 2005, from 2007 the phasing-out of ‘category 1’ tankers delivered before the MARPOL convention came in force in 1982.…

Keith Nuthall
FRANCE is giving Euro 40 million to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to help it fund Russia’s cleansing of the radioactive contamination in the Barents Sea caused by its aging decommissioned nuclear fleet. The money will be channelled through the nuclear-related budgets of the EBRD-managed Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership (NDEP) Support Fund, the principal financing arm of European Union policies aimed at cleaning up pollution in its neighbours to the north.…

BY PHILIP FINE

FROM Gaudeloupe, Arizona, to Duxbury, Massachusetts, and from Helena, Montana, to Loganville, Georgia, US smoking bans have increasingly been finding a small-town

following ; 78 towns and cities in the United States have now enacted smoking bans in all workplaces and restaurants within their municipalities.…

BY MARK ROWE
AN INDONESIAN environmental organisation report alleges that tailings from the gold mining firm Newmont Minahasa Raya contain four times the government-allowed level of cyanide, endangering the health of residents and threatening the environment. The Indonesian Forum for the Environment says high levels of cyanide, mercury, cadmium and arsenic in Buyat Bay had been found in marine animals and reduced the catch of local fishermen in north Sulawesi.…

BY PHILIP FINE

HEALTH claims about nuts can now be made following the release of a study finding that the regular consumption of nuts could reduce the risk of heart disease. The US Food and Drug Administration says that research has discovered a 47 per cent lower risk of sudden cardiac death for men who ate nuts at least twice a week compared to

those who rarely or never consumed nuts.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE OFFICE International des Épizooties, the world animal health organisation, has declared northern Argentina (north of the 42° parallel) free from foot and mouth disease (FMD), albeit with the help of vaccination, backdated to July 7…