Deregulate!

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And yet other drug dealers..

Globally, diabetes has almost quadrupled in 35 years and yet the multibillion-dollar sugar industry is happy to keep us in the dark about why. 

Back in September 2016, the Journal of the American Medical Association published papers, discovered deep in the Harvard University archives, that demonstrated how the sugar industry has been manipulating research into heart disease for years. These papers revealed that the purveyors of this white poison – in behaviour straight out of the tobacco industry playbook – had been paying Harvard scientists throughout the 1960s to emphasise the link between fat and heart disease and ignore the connection with sugar. Since then, Coca-Cola has funded research into the link between sugar and obesity. And the confectionery industry has paid for research which “demonstrated” that children who eat sweets are thinner than those who don’t.

In 1996, 1.4 million people in the UK had diabetes. Since then the figure has trebled to over 4 million. Diabetes now gobbles up more than 10% of the NHS budget, with that percentage set to rise steeply in the coming years. The World Health Authority published a major report on global diabetes last year. Its figures show that the number of people with diabetes has gone up from 108 million in 1980 to 422 million in 2014. This is not just a matter of bad individual choices. You can’t dismiss this as the aggregate of many millions of singular decisions, each one nothing more than a matter of weakness of will and responsible for itself alone. This has become a global epidemic.

Sugar is poison. My heart attack has finally opened my eyes to the truth | Giles Fraser: Loose canon | Opinion | The Guardian

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Even the Romans knew lead is a deadly toxin, but it took a looooong while before we got it out of gasoline and industry was fighting that all the way..

Engineer Thomas Midgley and his associates at the General Motors Research Laboratory discovered in 1921 that tetraethyl lead, a compound of metallic lead, could make internal combustion engines run more smoothly and reduce engine knock. But in the fall of 1922, the U.S. Public Health Service’s William Mansfield Clark, then the division chief of the agency’s hygienic laboratory, wrote a letter warning the agency’s assistant surgeon general that tetraethyl lead was a “serious menace to the public health.”

The U.S. Public Health Service then requested that its Division of Chemistry and Pharmacology investigate, but the division director suggested that the agency should instead obtain the data from the industry itself. General Motors researchers already knew of a safer alternative to leaded gasoline: ethyl alcohol — also known as ethanol — was among the best anti-knock fuels. It was renewable, nontoxic, and burned more cleanly than gasoline, but couldn’t be patented and therefore offered no profits for GM, according to “The Secret History of Lead” by The Nation’s Jamie Lincoln Kitman....

In 1924, five workers died and dozens more were lead poisoned in a disaster at Standard Oil Company’s experimental laboratories in New Jersey. But Ethyl Corporation’s manufacturers continued to claim the additive was safe. And the Bureau of Mines issued its report on the heels of those deaths in 1924 and exonerated tetraethyl lead, finding the danger of lead accumulation on streets via car exhaust to be remote.

In the 1920s, two of the most adamant voices on the dangers of leaded gasoline were Yandell Henderson, a Yale University physiology professor, and Alice Hamilton, a Harvard University professor of industrial medicine. Henderson warned the federal government that lead exhaust from cars would cause widespread chronic lead poisoning in urban centers, and criticized the Bureau of Mines report as shoddy...

Ethyl Gasoline Corporation representative, Frank A. Howard, objected on the grounds that the GM Corporation and Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey had invested years of research to produce “this apparent gift of God.”

Lead culprits: Profiting from poison – ThinkProgress

Read the whole story, it's a gripping account and pretty typical, and some real shockers.

For instance you will be shocked to know that the rise in crime might actually be related to lead in gasoline..

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Deregulate this as well! Keep Americans (and Chinese) safe!

A bowl of ice cream on a hot day in Shanghai gave American Mitchell Weinberg the worst bout of food poisoning he can recall. It also inspired the then-trade consultant to set up Inscatech — a global network of food spies. In demand by multinational retailers and food producers, Inscatech and its agents scour supply chains around the world hunting for evidence of food industry fraud and malpractice. In the eight years since he founded the New York-based firm, Weinberg, 52, says China continues to be a key growth area for fraudsters as well as those developing technologies trying to counter them. “Statistically we’re uncovering fraud about 70 percent of the time, but in China it’s very close to 100 percent,” he said. “It’s pervasive, it’s across food groups, and it’s anything you can possibly imagine.”

Inside the Secret World of Global Food Spies - Bloomberg

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Keep Americans safe!

The Trump administration is forging ahead with a controversial decision to scrap Obama-era plans to require that all truck, train and bus operators be screened for sleep apnea. The elimination of the rule, part of the White House’s push to slash federal regulations, has reignited a debate over how to balance safety concerns with regulatory relief. Safety advocates warn that killing the proposal could put lives at risk at a time when traffic deaths are already climbing at historic rates: Fatalities in large truck crashes have increased by 20 percent since 2009.

Trump rule change ignites safety debate | TheHill

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To anyone who believes environmental regulation is poison for profits, California must be infuriating. The state’s pollution policies rarely wilt its perennially blooming economy. For the past nine years, a Golden State-centric think tank Next 10 has been releasing its California Green Innovation Index. The results this year show a continuing trend: For two and a half decades, California’s GDP and population have continued to rise, while per capita carbon dioxide emissions have stayed flat.

California Proves That Environmental Regulations Don't Kill Profits | WIRED

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Keep Americans safe! Near perfect timing..

Just 10 days before Hurricane Harvey descended upon Texas on Friday, wreaking havoc and widespread flooding, President Donald Trump signed an executive order revoking a set of regulations that would have made federally-funded infrastructure less vulnerable to flooding. The Obama-era rules, which had not yet gone into effect, would have required the federal government to take into account the risk of flooding and sea-level rise as a result of climate change when constructing new infrastructure and rebuilding after disasters.

Trump reversed flooding regulations days before Hurricane Harvey - Business Insider

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And then there is this, as the cost of flooding become all too obvious..

The Trump administration plans to sharply reduce the government’s estimate of how much each ton of carbon emissions harms the planet. It hasn’t done so yet, and that delay is slowing Trump’s effort to expand coal mining and gas pipelines...

All government regulations are subject to cost/benefit analysis. The “social cost of carbon” was developed in large part to compare long-term costs from coastal flooding and other impacts of emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide with upfront costs to the economy from curbing the burning of fossil fuels, the main source of such emissions.

The value at the end of the Obama presidency was set at roughly $40 for each ton of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted by human activities, or equivalent amounts of other gases such as methane. At that price, the benefits of Obama’s proposals to reduce emissions outweighed the economic costs. The Trump order required a new calculation and ordered agencies to use procedures issued by the Office of Management and Budget in 2003 to craft relevant regulations.

A protracted delay in the Trump administration coming up with its own carbon-cost estimate could empower environmentalists pursuing legal challenges to mining, drilling or pipeline projects, said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

Failure to Set Cost of Carbon Hampers Trump’s Effort to Expand Use of Fossil Fuels - ProPublica

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In the remote forests of northern Sweden, Anders Svenningsson’s multiple sclerosis patients have benefited from a drug he’s been prescribing for the past eight years. It doesn’t require weekly injections, doesn’t leave patients feeling achy and feverish; and most important, halts their disease. That drug, Rituxan—originally developed to treat cancer—has become Sweden’s most prescribed medicine for MS, in which the body attacks its own central nervous system. Swedish doctors have great freedom to prescribe treatments they believe are appropriate, but few MS patients elsewhere can get the drug. That’s because its maker, Roche Holding AG, has never tried to sell it for the disease. Instead, Roche this year introduced a nearly identical medication that it markets under a new name and at 10 times the cost.

How Roche Tweaked an Aging Drug to Keep Profits Rolling In - Bloomberg

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This could develop into the scandal of the century

Microplastic contamination has been found in tap water in countries around the world, leading to calls from scientists for urgent research on the implications for health. Scores of tap water samples from more than a dozen nations were analysed by scientists for an investigation by Orb Media, who shared the findings with the Guardian. Overall, 83% of the samples were contaminated with plastic fibres.

The US had the highest contamination rate, at 94%, with plastic fibres found in tap water sampled at sites including Congress buildings, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters, and Trump Tower in New York. Lebanon and India had the next highest rates. European nations including the UK, Germany and France had the lowest contamination rate, but this was still 72%. The average number of fibres found in each 500ml sample ranged from 4.8 in the US to 1.9 in Europe.

[/url]The new analyses indicate the ubiquitous extent of [url=https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/feb/14/sea-to-plate-plastic-got-into-fish]microplastic contamination in the global environment. Previous work has been largely focused on plastic pollution in the oceans, which suggests people are eating microplastics via contaminated seafood. 

The scale of global microplastic contamination is only starting to become clear, with studies in Germany finding fibres and fragments in all of the 24 beer brands they tested, as well as in honey and sugar. In Paris in 2015, researchers discovered microplastic falling from the air, which they estimated deposits three to 10 tonnes of fibres on the city each year, and that it was also present in the air in people’s homes.

Plastic fibres found in tap water around the world, study reveals | Environment | The Guardian

We don't even know all the stuff that in it as many of these components are trade secrets. There is lots of research already indicating significant health hazards:

Plastic, one of the most preferred materials in today's industrial world is posing serious threat to environment and consumer's health in many direct and indirect ways. Exposure to harmful chemicals during manufacturing, leaching in the stored food items while using plastic packages or chewing of plastic teethers and toys by children are linked with severe adverse health outcomes such as cancers, birth defects, impaired immunity, endocrine disruption, developmental and reproductive effects etc. Promotion of plastics substitutes and safe disposal of plastic waste requires urgent and definitive action to take care of this potential health hazard in future.

Public health impact of plastics: An overview

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There are threats out there that are orders of magnitude more deadly than terrorism but they are only met with denial as action is stifled by mantra's like regulation stifles the economy and government is not the solution, it's the problem. That is, the usual stuff from right-wingers. Take the plastics danger (see previous entry), or this:

Worldwide, air pollution caused 4.2m deaths in 2015, a 7.5 per cent jump from a decade earlier. Toxic air now kills almost as many people as high cholesterol and even more than excessive salt or being overweight, according to the study.  “There is a growing worldwide consensus — among the World Health Organization, World Bank, International Energy Agency and others — that air pollution poses a major global public health challenge,” said Robert O’Keefe, HEI vice-president. “Nowhere is that risk more evident than in the rapidly growing economies of Asia.”

India air pollution deaths poised to exceed China’s