Search Results for: Environmental health

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE FINAL round of negotiations leading to a UN Framework Convention on Tobacco Control at the World Health Organisation will begin in February 2003 with many issues still outstanding, including the all-important question of advertising. It became clear at the fifth round, which ended in October, that the US and the EU are still far apart on the question of tobacco advertising.…

BY PHILIP FINE

THE US National Academy of Sciences says that no significant evidence yet exists that eating products from cloned livestock causes harm. A committee – which included microbiologists, geneticists and animal scientists – said most of the serious risks are not human health hazards linked to food but from the potential impact of cloned animals on the environment that they interact with.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
ENVIRONMENTALISTS have gained significant new access rights to information held by public authorities and others under legislation agreed by the Council of Ministers of the European Union (EU) and the European Parliament. In what was welcomed by environmental campaigners as a victory over some EU member governments, the agreement goes well beyond the United Nations’ 1998 Aarhus Convention on information, decision-making and redress in environmental matters by widening the range of what can be accessed and simplifying the procedures.…

KEITH NUTHALL
INNOVATION is important in the provision of water services, whether that be to prevent the contamination of supplies by a return of this summer’s floods, or to source drinking water for arid areas where ground reserves are running dry.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
HALF-HEARTED efforts by European Union Member States to impose controls on shabby shipping have been blamed for the disastrous sinking of the ill-named Prestige oil tanker, off Galicia, Spain. Placing on record their disgust at the environmental tragedy, the Council of Europe’s environment committee deplored “the negligence of governments and their lack of any real determination to provide themselves with the means of preventing such disasters – or at least minimising their impact.”…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE HIGH risk of nurses worldwide becoming victims of violence has sparked four international organisations into drawing up guidelines advising managers on how to reduce the exposure of their staff to physical attack or threats.

These draft Framework Guidelines for addressing Workplace Violence in the Health Sector are being produced by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the World Health Organisation (WHO), Public Services International (PSI) and the International Council of Nurses (ICN).…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
US poultry producers have slaughtered 9,600 chickens after an outbreak of Newcastle Disease in California, which health officials have been trying to prevent infecting large-scale commercial poultry producers. They have reported that outbreaks were discovered in 25 smallholdings in Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
AS with any organisation that represents members with a common basic purpose but often with radically different approaches towards achieving it, CANSO has had some difficulty in defining its voice in the community in which it operates. Indeed it is a fairly new organisation, formally set up in 1998, and composed of leading civil air navigation service operators who until then had been used to speaking their own minds without any need to temper their opinions.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AS the bill for cleaning up after the Prestige disaster grows larger and larger, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has committed itself to redoubling efforts to raise the standard of shipping amongst its developed country members.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE TOTAL phasing out of nuclear energy being carried out by a number of EU countries is not justified according to the EU’s internal market commissioner Frits Bolkestein (CORRECT SPELLING). In a speech headed “Nuclear energy needed more than ever” given to the Institute of Economic Affairs, London, Mr Bolkestein said nuclear energy provided the technical capacity to increase energy diversification which was needed to reduce external dependence.…