Search Results for: food

BY DAVID HAWORTH, in Brussels
PROPOSALS for a new European Union (EU) wine regime, which are currently under review, will be unveiled in 12 months’ time according to the recently installed European Commissioner for agriculture, Mrs Mariann Fischer Boel.

In a wide-ranging interview in her Brussels office she admitted that the present arrangements are not working.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Food Safety Authority (EFSA) says a genetically modified maize variety is safe enough for consumers, animals and the environment to secure market approval. 1507 maize kills certain “pest” butterflies and moths. EFSA also wants further research using iodine in livestock feed, which could harm meat and dairy consumers.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
A MICHIGAN, USA, company recently gave employees a choice: quit smoking or lose your job. And although this could be considered an effective way to fight nicotine addiction, public health officials do not see it that way. Four employees from Weyco, a firm that manages benefit plans for workers on behalf of other companies were shown the door in January after refusing to take a nicotine test on whether they had smoked since a deadline of January 1, this year.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
PFIZER researchers in Connecticut claim to have developed a new smoking cessation drug that suppresses the desire to smoke rather than weaning a person off the habit by feeding them nicotine. Its scientists discovered a brain receptor that nicotine binds to, designing a drug – Varenicline – that also clings to these neural cells, cancelling and preventing nicotine cravings.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has asked European Union ministers to consider improving crisis management tools available to meat and other food producers. Its suggestions include subsiding insurance premiums, developing mutual funds and creating special public crisis budgets. Brussels said its aim “is to help farm businesses withstand temporary shocks and improve their access to finance”.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
FEW industries are as touchy about their image as the American gambling business but given the way the industry is portrayed by Hollywood this is understandable. Whether or not people are right to hold the industry in such suspicion these days is debatable.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
AN AMERICAN company from Michigan recently gave his employees a choice: quit smoking or lose your job. Four employees from Weyco, a firm that manages benefit plans for workers on behalf of other companies, were sacked in January after refusing to take a nicotine test on whether they had smoked since a deadline of January 1, this year.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has declared that “analytical and clinical studies” should examine whether commonly used finings, cleansing some alcoholic drinks of impurities, cause potentially dangerous allergic reactions. Its current concerns focus on fish products, including gelatine and isinglass; egg products including albumin and lysozyme; and milk products such as casein, used as “processing aids” in wine and cider that “may partly remain in the finished products”.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AN INDUSTRIAL system where collagen is manufactured from crushed pig and chicken bones collected at slaughter houses has been declared safe by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which was examining the risk of it passing on BSE or related diseases.…

BY MONICA DOBIE
THE FOOD and Drug Administration (FDA), of the USA, has issued a medical alert against eating cheese made from raw milk from Mexico, Nicaragua or Honduras, warning it can cause tuberculosis. The bacteria mycobacterium bovis can contaminate this cheese, causing one fatal and several non-fatal cases of TB in the New York region from 2001-2004, concluded the FDA.…