Search Results for: Research

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A EUROPEAN and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership has been launched by the European Commission. Commanding Euro 200 million of Brussels’ money, the initiative will develop new medicines and vaccines against AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. It will involve the pharmaceutical industry and Norway as well as developing countries and will also see EU institutions participating in Member States’ national research and development programmes.…

BY SWINEETHA DIAS WICKRAMANAYAKA
INDIAN researchers have developed a package of techniques that could allow confectionary companies to market organic cashew nut bars. Scientists at the Kerala Agriculture University’s Cashew Research Station have identified high density planting systems using natural oil insect repellants, secondary crops between trees which drive out weeds, and carnivorous insects to attack other pests.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has taken an important step towards giving EU water legislation more teeth, by moving against Belgium’s system of “tacit approvals” of pollution. Belgian law allows companies to assume that they have a right to pollute if they make an application to regulators and then receive no reply.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EU’s Joint Research Centre has developed post-slaughter tests for the gender of beef meat. With male meat supposedly of a higher quality exports, imports carry a subsidy difference of Euro 130/kg depending on sex, making accurate designation crucial for producers and processors.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
SMART cards for health are not exactly a novelty but the Prevencard to be launched in the UK next year uses some particularly smart technology.

Prevencard, which is being marketed by the Spanish company Grupo Prevencard International, is a commercial application of security research carried out under the EU’s 5th Framework Programme for research.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE FIRST update to the European Union’s inventory of national policies and regulations promoting the availability of orphan drugs has been completed and published by the European Commission. This new detailed inventory lists all incentives made available by the EU and its Member States to support research into orphan medicinal products.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A NEW laboratory tasked with fostering innovative solutions for nuclear waste management has been inaugurated at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.

Its Institute for Transuranium Elements, in Karlsruhe, Germany, has opened a Euro 10 million Minor Actinide Laboratory, which will manufacture and characterize the most suitable materials for the transmutation of long-lived toxic elements created by the nuclear industry.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A NEW DNA test has been developed which can detect tuberculosis in two to three hours; Professor Mike Barer from Leicester University used the results from the decoding of the mycobacterium tuberculosis bacterium genome to look for markers that could be used to detect the germ.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN INTERNATIONAL Agenda for Action has been drawn up at a UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) workshop on boosting “Clean Coal Combustion in Small and Medium Sized Boilers in Central and Eastern Europe.” The plan has been approved by experts from the region, along with those from western Europe, the USA, the World Coal Institute, the World Energy Council, IEA Coal Research and UNECE.…

BY MARK ROWE
ENVIRONMENTAL organisations and an American local authority have issued a lawsuit against the US government for its contribution to global warming, a move that may have important repercussions for the insurance industry.

A lawsuit filed in the US District Court in San Francisco claims that two American export credit agencies illegally provided US$32billion in financing for oil fields, pipelines and coal-fired power plants over the past 10 years without assessing their contribution to global warming.…