Search Results for: Environmental Health

BY PHILIP FINE

AN AMERICAN federal judge was within his right to temporarily shut down state government approved salmon farms, a US appeals court ruled on August 7. The appellate judge had assessed a May ruling, where a federal judge ordered two Norwegian-owned companies (Atlantic Salmon of Maine and Stolt Sea Farms) to fallow their 12 farms from six to 36 months, after being fined for damaging Maine’s coast with excess feed, faeces and medications.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WITH the World Health Organisation securing approval for its long debated Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, attention is now turning to ratifications by member countries: 40 are needed for it to come into force, Last minute concessions were made at the WHO to bring dissenters such as Germany and the United States on board, who had objected to the convention’s insistence on signatory governments banning tobacco advertising; both countries said this broke constitutional guarantees of free speech.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EUROPEAN Union proposals to make polluting energy companies and utilities legally liable for the environmental damage they cause has taken a large step towards becoming law, with EU Member States approving the idea in principle. The Council of Ministers’ decision removes the final serious hurdle to the planned environmental liability directive, as the European Parliament has already given its assent.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AGRICULTURAL economists may disagree, but predicting trends in world food markets is not necessarily rocket science. A dose of healthy common sense can be as good a guide for the future demand for commodities as any amount of slide rules and complex economic equations.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
CROATIA is being challenged at the WTO by Hungary over its June ban on meat imports from any country permitting feed containing animal protein, and – in some circumstances – fish meal. Zagreb justifies its action to prevent BSE outbreaks, but Hungary says it is too extreme, breaking WTO health rules.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
SIGNIFICANT problems have been detected by a European Commission study into the implementation of the European Union’s integrated pollution prevention and control directive in seven EU Member States, with Britain being the only country so far found complying.…

KEITH NUTHALL
INNOVATION from European Union-funded research has continued to offer improvements to the way that EU water utilities work. For instance, the European Commission-funded MicroChem initiative has developed miniaturised laboratory-on-a-chip systems suitable for rapid field testing of water streams. They examine water in tiny pictolitre quantities, flowing through microbore channels produced by photolithographic etching.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
EVERY year it seems, the international community has a pet topic in which it is fashionable to promote good behaviour, and this year the favoured cause seems to be water conservation. The World Bank, the UN Environment Programme and others have all produced weighty tomes on the need to conserve drinking water stocks.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
POLITICAL agreement has been secured at the EU Council of Ministers over the proposed EU regulation boosting health controls on fresh meat, live bivalve molluscs, and milk and milk products.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Agency for Safety and Heath at Work is to focus its medium-term efforts on persuading companies and public corporations to integrate risk prevention considerations into their general management strategies affecting every action taken by workplace organisations.…