Search Results for: Environmental Health⊂mit=Search

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE SLOVENIAN government has tabled compromise proposals to break the current political logjam at the European Union (EU) Council of Ministers over gas supply unbundling. As current EU president, Slovenia has suggested for instance that some joint ownership of energy producing and transmission utilities could occur if there were "additional safeguards" preventing conflicts of interest, and guaranteeing the "structural independence of decision making" by distribution operators.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE ORGANISATION for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) has put the waste sector at the heart of an ‘affordable’ strategy to prevent potentially disastrous environmental and economic problems caused by climate change.

Under current government policies worldwide, global greenhouse gases may grow 37% by 2030, and 52% by 2050, warned the OECD’s 2008 Environmental Outlook report.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

AFTER years of resistance from France, Italy and other European Union (EU) member states favouring privacy on a range of issues, all recipients of EU agricultural and rural development subsidies will be published from April 30, 2009. Under a new European Commission rule, the full name, municipality and, where available, postal code of recipients will be published, said the Commission, in "clear, harmonised, nationally-managed websites with a search tool".…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Union’s (EU) scientific committee on health and environmental risks has given a clean bill of health for the use of the textile flame retardant hexabromocyclododecane (HBCDD). It has concluded that "there is at present no need for further information and/or testing and for risk reduction measures beyond those which are being applied already" as regards the exposure of textile industry workers using HBCDD during textile sewing and also "for all scenarios for consumers."…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Commission has proposed extending the life of the European Union’s (EU) Community Tobacco Fund for two more years, up until 2009, when it will probably expire. The fund – which has helped pay for the EU’s ‘HELP – for a life without tobacco’ campaign – receives 5% of the EU’s annual direct payment budget for tobacco producers.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A EUROPEAN Union (EU) research project is trying to identify mechanical innovations that can make car and aeroplane engines not only run cleaner, but with more efficiency and power. The EU-funded ‘multi-core execution of hard real-time applications supporting analysability’ (MERASA) project has discovered that making clean cars helps "make them more economical as well as safer to run", said a project memorandum: "These benefits are not restricted the car industry alone, but extend to the airline industry."…

BY RACHEL JONES, in Caracas

WHILE Paraguay has been producing and exporting soy since the 1970s, its dependence on soy products has increased dramatically over the last decade – a development that has been encouraged through heavy investment by international agribusiness.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL and MARK ROWE

RICH member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are pooling experts and budgets to assess the environmental risks of using nanomaterials, including those incorporated into sunscreens, cosmetics and packaging. The OECD’s Working Party on Manufactured Nanomaterials will manage the programme; it already can call on 100 experts from the OECD’s 30 member countries.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE EUROPEAN Parliament’s economics committee has called for the European Union’s (EU) minimum rate of excise duty on diesel to be raised to that for unleaded petrol: from the current Euro 302/1,000 litres to Euro 359/1,000 litres by 2015, with Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania having until 2016.…

BY MONICA DOBIE

SIGNIFICANT falls in heart attacks and strokes in France and Italy have indicated that the introduction of public smoking bans in Europe are having beneficial health effects, the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) has claimed.

In France, the National Sanitary Institute has just released statistics showing that the rate of admissions in emergency wards of patients with myocardial infarction and strokes has fallen 15% since French public smoking ban came into effect in January 2007, preventing smoking in restaurants hotels and casinos.…