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Justin Buck
March 23, 2017

Submitted as coursework for PH241, Stanford University, Winter 2017

Background

On April 26, 1986, a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, USSR exploded, releasing a cloud of radioactive material. A week after the explosion, a series of storms deposited significant levels of radioactive material from Chernobyl to certain areas in Wales, Scotland, and Cumbria. Two isotopes of Caesium that were deposited from the Chernobyl reactor fallout, Cs-134 and Cs-137, were of particular concern to public health officials. [1] Inhalation or ingestion of Cs-137 increases the risk of various types of cancers, and has an alarming long half-life of roughly thirty years. [2] In the UK, officials use the becquerel (Bq) as the base unit of radioactivity in an area. Prior to the accident in Chernobyl, levels of Cs-137 in the UK hovered around 5 Bq/m ². Immediately after the accident, officials measured levels of Cs-137 as high as 1785 Bq/m ² in some areas of Wales. [1] However, months after the Chernobyl fallout, officials measured Caesium deposition from rainfall, rather than vegetation, and discovered that areas in Scotland received an astounding 20,000 Bq/m ². [3]

Following the heavy rainfall and deposition, environmental officials became increasingly concerned with the ability of livestock in the affected areas to ingest the radioactive material while grazing, and passing the radioactive material to humans. As the grazing patterns of sheep expose them to the highest risk of radioactive exposure of all animals used by citizens, officials began testing flocks of sheep for radioactive contamination in high risk areas, such as the Welsh sheep in Fig. 1. [4]

The UK Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food Reacts

Following the high becquerel levels in North Wales, Cumbria, and Scotland, officials from the UK Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food (MAFF) began testing sheep in contaminated areas. Initial testing was performed by removing roughly 1 kg of muscle from a slaughtered sheep and subjecting it to gamma-spectrometry analysis. Testing showed that sheep from many of the areas initially suspected of being severely contaminated exceeded MAFF's reaction threshold of 1000 Bq/kg. [1] This threshold was originally established under Article 31 of the Euratom Treaty by experts in Luxembourg on May 23, 1986, and was subsequently adopted as the standard by MAFF. [5]

The initial testing methods posed problems for MAFF. Transporting, arranging, slaughtering, and disposing of the sheep at the Ministry's laboratory proved too rigorous to perform on every sheep that required testing. Furthermore, the widespread slaughtering of affected sheep was extremely wasteful. In response, MAFF was able to develop NaI detectors that were portable and able to accurately measure the caesium levels in live sheep. The devices allowed the ministry to test 28,000 sheep in the first two months of using the NaI detector, a significant improvement from the 2800 sheep they were able to test over three months using gamma-spectrometry methods. [4]

MAFF issued a 3-week ban on slaughtering and the movement of sheep in Cumbria and Wales starting on June 20, 1986. The ban was issued across 5000 farms and restricted 2.5 million sheep from being slaughtered or moved. [1] MAFF claimed that the half-life of caesium in sheep is 25 days, so roughly half of the caesium currently in sheep would be gone in 21 days. They also claimed that within the three week window, new grass would replace the contaminated grass. However, four days after the ban was announced, testing showed that the caesium in certain sheep was not decreasing, and was in fact increasing in some sheep. [3] The ban was extended indefinitely until proper testing could be performed on all affected farms. During the 21-day window, approximately 1750 farms showed becquerel levels less than the 1000 Bq/kg threshold and were taken off the restricted list. By October of 1986, 315 farms remained on the restricted list. [1]

Upland vs. Lowland Sheep

After the ban on sheep movement and slaughter, caesium levels remained higher than many experts were predicting in upland areas of the United Kingdom. Sheep that were grazing in exclusively upland areas persistently showed Caesium activity levels above the 1000 Bq/kg threshold for safe consumption. In 1987, researchers funded by MAFF tested the effects of moving upland sheep to lower lands. The researchers tested Cs-137 and Cs-134 levels before and after restricting the sheep to lowland pastures. Results showed that more than 80% of the original caesium was no longer in the sheep after 40 days. Furthermore, the transfer coefficient of caesium to lamb muscle was 0.79 day/kg for upland sheep, roughly six times the transfer coefficient measured in previous MAFF studies in lowland farms. Further studies showed that the upland pastures had significantly higher Cs-137 levels, and areas prone to high water accumulation were also associated with higher Cs-137 levels. [5]

Takeaways

While the widespread effects of the Chernobyl fallout were unforeseeable for the period, government entities should be better prepared to serve the public when there is a possible health risk stemming from nuclear energy issues. Further research is required to understand the long-term effects of the Chernobyl fallout on non-participating countries and how to best prepare for similar accidents in the future.

© Justin Buck. The author grants permission to copy, distribute and display this work in unaltered form, with attribution to the author, for noncommercial purposes only. All other rights, including commercial rights, are reserved to the author.

References

[1] W. A. Kerr and S. Mooney, "A System Disrupted - The Grazing Economy of North Wales in the Wake of Chernobyl," Agr. Syst., 28, 13-27 (1988).

[2] J. E. Hoeve and M. Z. Jacobson, "Worldwide Health Effects of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident," Energy Environ. Sci. 5, 8743 (2012).

[3] B. Wynne, "Sheepfarming After Chernobyl: A Case Study in Communicating Scientific Information," Environment 31, No. 2, 10 (1989).

[4] B. Walters, "Chernobyl Derived Activity in Sheep: Variation within a Single Flock and With Time," J. Environ. Radioact. 7, 99 (1988).

[5] B. J. Howard et al., "A Comparison of Caesium 137 and 134 Activity in Sheep Remaining on Upland Areas Contaminated by Chernobyl Fallout With Those Removed to Less Active Lowland Pasture," J. Soc. Radiol. Prot., 7, 71 (1987).

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On April 26, 1986, a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, USSR exploded, releasing a cloud of radioactive material. A week after the explosion, a series of storms deposited significant levels of radioactive material from Chernobyl to certain areas in Wales, Scotland, and Cumbria.

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BSE Inquiry

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This Page is [ARCHIVED CONTENT] and shows what the site page http://www.bseinquiry.gov.uk/report/volume1/toc.htm looked like on 25 May 2006 at 12:00:00

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Billy McIntyre tried to stick to his routine on Wednesday night. At about 7pm he left his terraced house on a quiet estate in the north of Aberdeen and made the 10-minute journey up the hill to the city's royal infirmary.

For an hour and a half he sat with his daughter Donna, aged 21, who has been in hospital since being diagnosed with new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in September. As usual, he chatted with her, tickled her, and tousled her hair to keep her animated.

When he returned home he could not stomach the thought of dinner. He made do with a cup of tea, and tried to concentrate on the television. At 8am the next day, McIntyre rose, washed and dressed before going into the kitchen for some breakfast. He turned on the radio and waited. It was a long, slow morning. At 12.32pm, Nick Brown, the agriculture secretary, rose to announce publication of the public inquiry into Britain's BSE epidemic.

'I was emotional all the way through the announcement,' McIntyre said. 'I was crying a lot. Some of that was relief that the answers were coming out. But mainly it was anger because the report was so damning. I'm not going to congratulate ministers on this report because the whole thing should never have been allowed to happen. I don't even accept their apology.' McIntyre's daughter will be dead in months.

David Bee had never seen anything like it. The cow was arching its back, waving its head from side to side. It was pitifully thin. His colleague, Mike Teale, had told him of being chased by a similarly afflicted beast which had 'chased him across the box on her knees'.

It was three days before Christmas, 1984. Bee, a well-known local vet, had been called to Pitsham Farm on the South Downs by its owner, Peter Stent. Stent was worried. One of his cows was ill. He had no idea what it was.

When Bee arrived, he was not sure what to think. Maybe there was a local problem with mercury poisoning Stent's herd. Maybe it was a kidney disease. Nobody knew then, but Stent's sick animal would soon become famous as 'Cow 133'. In the heart of farming country, Bee was staring into the eyes of a disaster.

He never expected a walk-on part in the story of Britain's biggest public health scandal. Most of the locals knew him as an enthusiastic 'joiner-in' at church in his picturesque village of West Liss. His bright tone made him a favourite when it came to reading out passages from the Bible.

Cow 133 was the first case of BSE, bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Sixteen years and sixteen volumes of public inquiry later, the Government stands accused of failing the public. Bureaucracy, caution and secrecy has led, slowly and painfully, to the realisation that the structures in place to protect the people had simply not worked.

Last week, Lord Phillips' report into how a disease in cows became a tragedy for humans shone a light into the deepest recesses of government operation. Debate so far has focused on the surface story, the missed opportunities and confused messages which allowed an ugly sore to fester.

That story was contained in Volume 1 of Lord Phillips' inquiry. But there are 15 other volumes, thousands of pages of memos and secret deals, legal challenges and stand-up rows that reveal how government really works - and not always work in the public's interest. Not since the Scott inquiry into the Arms to Iraq affair has Britain seen such a damning indictment of its public 'servants'.

Carol Richardson had just returned from holiday in September 1995. A pathologist at the government's Central Veterinary Laboratory, she was asked to study the brain of an adult cow from Pitsham Farm, one that Bee had seen. After looking at slides of the brain she confirmed that it showed characteristics of a 'spongiform encephalopathy', BSE. It was the start.

Richardson sought a second opinion from a colleague, Dr Martin Jeffrey. She left the slides on his work bench in the laboratory and went to lunch. On her return, Jeffrey had left a note by one of the slides. 'Bovine scrapie' he wrote, referring to the BSE-type disease common in sheep.

Richardson's boss, Gerald Wells, was at a meeting in Cheshire when she made her astonishing finding. On his return he read the report. 'I agreed with her,' he said simply. The following April further evidence emerged from a farm in Kent. Something big was happening.

How should the Government vets deal with it? The head of pathology department at the CVL was Ray Bradley. With initial results showing that a new, potentially fatal, disease had been discovered, the initial policy was clear. Bradley sent a memo to Dr William Watson, CVL director, and Dr Brian Shreeve, director of research. This is what it said:

'If the disease turned out to be bovine scrapie it would have severe repercussions to the export trade and possibly also for humans if for example it was discovered that humans with spongiform encephalopathies had close association with cattle. It is for these reasons that I have classified this document confidential. At present I would recommend playing it low key.'

New cases kept dribbling in. It was suggested that information should be passed around, the usual method when new scientific discoveries are made. The veterinary journals - Vision, the in-house magazine for the Government's veterinary service, and Veterinary Record - were suggested as forums for this exhange. But permission was withdrawn. Plans to give information to universities and outside research bodies were also blocked.

Why? By getting the information out in the public domain, there would be a greater chance of understanding what the vets were dealing with and of estimating how widespread the problem was. The reasoning by the officials was clear. 'Because of the nature of the disorder, its political implications and possible effects on exports,' said Dr Bernard Williams, head of the Government's veterinary investigation service. Cards would be played very close to the chest.

By the end of May 1987, with Margaret Thatcher's third election victory a matter of weeks away, there were six positive cases of BSE and 13 suspected cases. It was well over two years since Bee had first set eyes on Cow 133. The problem was growing. Ministers had still not been told.

On June 1, William Rees, the chief veterinary officer and as such one of the most powerful men in the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, wrote to Donald Thompson, MAFF's parliamentary secretary, about BSE.

'Irresponsible or ill-informed publicity is likely to be unhelpful since it might lead to hysterical demands for immediate, draconian government measures and could lead to a rejection of UK exports,' he said.

'It does not seem appropriate at this stage for MAFF to issue general information. The political implication are serious, particularly if not handled correctly.'

That line became the leitmotif of the Government's response to an approaching storm. Economics were the main concern and the farming industry needed to be protected. People could be easily alarmed, the civil service thought. Better secrecy than public hysteria. By the end of August, 1987, 46 more probable cases of BSE had been identified. By the middle of September it was 73. By the end of October, 120. Farming newspapers published the first articles about an 'incurable disease wiping out dairy cows'. By the end of November, there were 243 suspected cases.

The public were oblivious to the danger. Richard Sibley, chairman of the British Cattle Veterinary Association, said: 'Throughout most of 1986 and 1987 most veterinary surgeons who were in the front line of disease diagnosis and control were ignorant of the presence of this disease and were not informed of its clinical signs or its significance as a potential national disease problem.'

By the end of March 1988, 600 probable cases of BSE had been reported. The Government's mind was made up: scrapie in sheep had never jumped species to man, despite being known about for 200 years. BSE wouldn't either.

As usual, John MacGregor's red box of weekend reading was overflowing. It was February 1988 and the secretary of state for agriculture had a two busy days of meetings and business ahead.

In his ministerial papers was a document from John Suich of MAFF's animal health division. The BSE problem was becoming serious, numbers were rising alarmingly. Suich suggested that a slaughter compensation scheme should be agreed for farmers, who were increasing disquiet about a disaster developing in their midst.

Two months earlier, MacGregor had received a letter from Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, a landowner. 'There is nothing which prevents veterinary officers from certifying the carcass of an animal infected with this disease as fit for human consumption. I understand little research has been done on whether this disease can be transmitted to humans through the consumption of beef from infected animals. Until this is known it seems quite wrong to sell infected carcasses for this purpose.' It was the first time the public health link had been made.

Suich's memo to MacGregor tackled the issue. 'I would be reluctant to say the risk [to human health] is negligible. One theory is that BSE may have originated from sheep affected with scrapie. If this theory is correct we have to face up to the possibility that the disease could cross another species gap.'

This view would not be made public for another eight years. MAFF considered it too dangerous for the multi-billion pound farming industry.

MacGregor read Suich's comments on the slaughter and compensation deal. In the margins, more as an aide-mémoire than anything else, he noted that there was a need for caution. How much would a slaughter and compensation scheme cost? Would analogies be made with other farming problems, such as rhizomania in sugar beet which was devastating crops, leaving the Government open to heavy compensation claims? Treasury was unlikely to agree to funding the scheme if there was no evidence that there was a risk to human health. For MacGregor, the former chief secretary to the Treasury, economics were of primary concern.

MAFF officials took this to mean that the scheme was off the agenda. In a letter to the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Donald Acheson, they failed to make it clear that they urgently wanted a slaughter and compensation scheme. They simply said they wanted Acheson's thoughts on the possible health implications of BSE. Acheson himself confessed that he felt irritated at the incredibly short notice he had been given to come up with such an important opinion.

'To be, off the cuff, asking the CMO, at a moment's notice, personally to give advice to take diseased cattle out of the food chain is a gross misunderstanding of the nature of the job,' Acheson later told the inquiry.

His feelings were nothing compared with Dr Hilary Pickles, the principal medical officer at the Department of Health. How, she asked, was the department supposed to fulfil its role when MAFF didn't keep them informed?

'The most serious delay was in informing DH in the first place,' she said. 'The Central Veterinary Laboratory were aware of a new disease in January 1987, they informed their ministers in June 1987 but wrote to us only on 3 March 1988, by which time they had 500 cases.' Pickles was furious. Inter-departmental jealousies meant that MAFF wanted to keep BSE within its sphere of influence.

The civil service had fallen into what is known along the corridors of Whitehall as 'shaded-opinion'. When officials feel they know the mind of the minister, all options are couched in terms that the minister is likely to agree to. MAFF officials didn't tell Acheson of their own feelings on the issue of compensation because they thought MacGregor's mind was made up. It wasn't.

'I am a little surprised to find significance attached to things which were an aide-mémoire to me,' MacGregor said later of his notes scribbled in the margins. On such misunderstandings are problems built. It was another five months of delay and circulating memos before the slaughter scheme was finally agreed. In that time hundreds of infected carcasses had entered the food chain.

With Acheson and Pickles' opinions clear, Bradley knew pressure was growing on MAFF to give information more widely to the medical profession. In September 1987 he dropped a note to Watson suggesting publishing an article about BSE in the medical journal the Lancet. 'There are of course pros and cons,' Bradley said. 'What do you think?'

Watson replied. 'Not at present. It would over-emphasise the possible link to human spongiform encephalopathies.' So the public remained ignorant.

MAFF were determined to hold the line that beef was perfectly safe to eat. A week after Bradley's Lancet request, Rees knew that '[the DoH] are aware of the problem and have informally expressed some concern about any possible human health risks,' he wrote in a progress report to MacGregor. But less than a month later, Suich circulated this memo to press officers in case they had to answer questions on BSE.

'Q: Can it be transmitted to humans?'

'A: There is no evidence that it is transmissable to humans.'

There was no evidence, but there were concerns. It was MAFF's policy not to reveal them.

A cow's death is seldom pretty. In the Eighties most of Britain's 1,000 abbatoirs had adopted a 'production-line' system for killing, blood-letting and cutting up cows.

Beasts ready for slaughter would arrive at a holding area. They would be lined up between metal fences, single file, and fed into a pen. A bolt would be fired into the animal's brain, followed by a pithing rod, a pronged instrument which would cause further damage to the brain and spinal cord to stop the animal kicking. Hoisted up by the hind legs, the cow's neck would be slit, the head cut off and the offal removed. Meat would then be processed in one direction, and the mass of guts and blood would go to a different department. Everything was used for either animal or human consumption.

In October 1992, John Gummer, then the secretary of state for agriculture, was called before the agriculture select committee. Sitting before them in the House of Commons, Gummer was asked about hygiene standards for killing cattle. Reading from reports from environmental officers charged with inspecting slaughter houses, Gummer said:

'We have real problems with our slaughter houses.' He turned to one of the officer's reports. 'Slaughter hall floor heavily soiled with blood, gut contents and other debris - no attempt to clean up between carcasses. Car cleaning brush heavily contaminated with blood and fat being used to wash carcasses. Offal rack and carcass rails encrusted with dirt. Missing windows - birds, flies and vermin entering. Effluent discharging across floor - risk of contamination.' Faeces was often found smeared over the dead bodies of the cows.

A year earlier, Gummer had warned Prime Minister John Major that 60 per cent of slaughter houses did not meet European standards.

It mattered. In November 1989, the Government had ordered that brains and spinal cords of cows should be prevented from entering the human food chain. Brain and spinal cord were thought to contain the infective BSE material. It became known as the specific bovine offal ban.

The removal of the spinal cord was a tricky business. Cows had to be sawn neatly in two. The safety of the public was dependent on men with knives with electric saws and stun guns, killing and cutting up cows in chaotic conditions. There was widespread evidence that remains of spinal cords were entering the food chain, in reports given to MAFF and the DoH in 1995.

'We asked MAFF officials whether evidence of poor hygiene standards in slaughter houses did not raise concerns about the standard of enforcement of the duty to remove the spinal cord from the carcass,' Lord Phillips said. 'Each replied that it did not.'

Even with the evidence that the slaughter house system was filthy, MAFF and the department of healt stuck to the line that beef was perfectly safe to eat.

On a warm pring evening in May 1990, Gerald Wells received a telephone call. It was the chief veterinary officer, Keith Meldrum. Wells, a senior member of the Central Veterinary Laboratory, was asked about his discovery of a BSE-type disease in a cat in Bristol.

Wells said that it had 'profound implications' for the Government's line on BSE's possible effects on people. Other experts argued that if a cat had 'caught' BSE, probably from eating infected offal crushed up in pet food, people could be next. Meldrum held a meeting with Gummer at which they agreed that the Government had to hold the line. They said there was 'no likely connection' between the cat and BSE. Such stubbornness was to continue for another six years.

Over the next three years, finding after finding undermined the foundations of the Government's policy. And every time, the Government sort to shore up its own rickety structure with assurances that beef was completely safe.

In August 1990 scientists successfully transferred BSE to a pig. In March 1993 the Lancet reported that the first dairy farmer had died CJD, the human equivalent of BSE. That month Kenneth Calman, the chief medical officer, issued a statement saying that beef was safe to eat.

'Dr Calman was seeking to address fears that a farmer had somehow caught BSE from his cattle,' the Phillips report says. 'Responding to such fears by emphasising that it was safe to eat beef naturally carried the inference that transmission of the disease from cow to human was impossible.

'Dr Calman should have been careful not to suggest such a belief, for he considered that there was a real potential for BSE to move from cows to humans.'

Then came Vicky Rimmer. Early in summer 1993 she fell ill with a degenerative disease which mystified her doctors. By mid-September she was blind and had fallen into a coma. She would become another fatal CJD statistic.

On 26 January, 1994, press reporting of Vicky's case was causing alarm. Calman was again pressed into action with the encouragement of MAFF and made another reassuring statement. 'On the basis of the work done so far there is not the slightest evidence that eating beef or hamburgers caused CJD,' he said. Phillips said that the strength with which Calman made the point was 'somewhat more emphatic than desirable'.

Why was Calman wheeled out so regularly? A briefing paper from Douglas Hogg, the secretary of state for agriculture in 1995, to Major reveals the thinking. 'The Chief Medical Officer and the Chief Veterinary Officer ought to be by far the most convincing spokesmen for the Government on the question of whether BSE could be transmitted to humans from infected meat.' Politicians weren't trusted, so Britain's faith in experts had to be tested to the limit.

In the second half of 1995, two more dairy farmers died of CJD, bringing the total to four. The committee of experts brought together by the Government to advise them on BSE and CJD said they were now looking at something greater than a chance phenomenon. One official suggested that maybe the farmers had eaten the infected cattle feed they were giving to their herds. Holding the line was getting difficult.

Another blow came. Two more teenagers had been diagnosed with CJD. The media smelt scandal. Confidence had to be rebuilt, ministers had to go on the attack.

In December, Stephen Dorrell, the health secretary, appeared on Jonathan Dimbleby's ITV political programme on ITV to do just that.

'So there is no conceivable risk from what is now in the food chain?' Dimbleby asked. Dorrell thought about his reply carefully, mindful that a word out of place could bring the Government's policy down around his ears. 'That is the position,' he said. Dorrell admitted later that his words 'had gone too far'.

Hogg was worried. Public confidence in beef was taking a battering. He demanded a campaign to convince the public that eating beef was safe. He asked the scientific committee of advisers, supposedly independent, to answer a series of questions. 'This was not because he wished to know the answers,' Lord Phillips said. 'It was in the hope that the answers would be suitable to publish in order to give reassurance to those who are worried about the safety of eating beef.'

Colin MacLean, the director general of the Meat and Livestock Commission, wrote to one of the committee, Dr Richard Kimberlin.

'We agree that we need succinct answers to these questions and my colleagues in our PR company have drafted the sort of answers they would like to see (although they cannot put words into [the committee's] mouth!).'

The MLC is charged with promoting beef in Britain. Kimberlin, a government adviser, was also a paid consultant for the MLC. Phillips says of MacLean's reassuring words on the safety of eating beef that 'hyperbole had replaced accuracy'.

The rows were beginning. As more and more cases of CJD appeared, the DoH was getting increasingly nervous. But to keep the beef industry and exports from collapse MAFF ploughed on.

By the end of February 1996, just a month before Hogg had to get up in the Commons and announce a link between BSE and a new form of CJD in people, MAFF prepared a leaflet to reassure the public. On the front page it stated: 'Two facts should be made absolutely clear. Fact 1: there is currently no scientific evidence to indicate a link between BSE and CJD. Fact 2: the independent expert committee set up to advise the Government on all aspects of BSE is satisfied that British beef is safe to eat.'

Dr Ailsa Wight, a department of health expert on BSE, was shown the leaflet and was asked whether the DoH might like to jointly issue it with MAFF. Wight passed the request on to Dr Jeremy Metters, the deputy chief medical officer. He was furious.

'Some statements are too definite and in time may be seen to be wrong,' he wrote in a memo to Wight. 'We should not follow MAFF's hyperbole of reassurance. We must leave ministers and CMO in particular an escape route if any of these statements turns out to be WRONG.'

As the inter-departmental battles intensified, the number of young people catching CJD was increasing. Dr Robert Will, the leading expert in CJD from the Government supported CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh, had depressing news. These cases of CJD were unlike any other. There was something going on.

On a damp evening early in March, 1996, Richard Packer, the permanent secretary at MAFF, walked into Hogg's cavernous office on the corner of Smith Square in Westminster. It was late, but Packer had some bad news. 'There is a very dark cloud on the horizon,' he told Hogg. 'SEAC [the Government advisory committee] think, or are coming to the view, that BSE might be transmissible.'

Hogg paused as the import of what Packer was saying sunk in. 'This is a very serious state of affairs,' he said.

Calman was told. Meldrum was told. Beef was not safe. Hogg prepared to make a statement to Parliament as soon as possible. If this leaked out, the Government would be finished. It was agreed that Dorrell would make the first statement and Hogg would follow. For the first time in the whole disaster, the considerations of the DoH were put ahead of those of MAFF.

On 20 March, at 3.31pm, Dorrell rose from the green Government benches in the Commons chamber. He said that a new form of CJD had been discovered and that, despite there being no firm scientific evidence that it had come from eating beef, SEAC concluded that the cases were linked to eating infected meat in the Eighties.

At 4.17pm, Hogg made his statement, saying that all cattle over 30 months would be slaughtered. In that one day billions of pounds were wiped off the value of Britain's beef industry. Incinerators worked night and day burning cattle. Pictures of bovine funeral pyres led the news day after day as hundreds of herds were burnt. Farmers were ruined. Many have never recovered.

The Government had finally been caught out. From day one, convinced by the theory that scrapie had never been transmitted to man from sheep, and that therefore BSE could not be transmitted either, they drew a line in the sand and refused to cross it. Even when the scrapie theory was proved wrong - BSE actually came from a genetic mutation in cattle in the Seventies and was passed on by feeding cow remains to herds as animal feed - they refused to budge.

Economics guided them. The public could not be trusted to make up their own mind. Science found it impossible to prove a link, so there was always an opportunity for more research. More delay and more reassuring noises.

Eventually the weight of evidence overwhelmed the Government's defences. But even at the very last, there were those arguing that a cattle cull could be 'disproportionately expensive' given the number of cases of CJD (then 10). These were men trying to bale out out the Titanic with a teaspoon.

Sixty miles away, David Bee must have greeted the news with horror. On a cold Christmas in 1984 he had created the first ripple of a gathering storm which eventually engulfed the nation. And in Aberdeen, Billy McIntyre still makes the 10 minute journey to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary to tousle his daughter's hair. Anything to keep her happy until she dies from a disease that started in cattle and is now eating her brain.
The key unanswered questions Why does vCJD predominantly affect young people?
A possible explanation is the disproportionate consumption by young people of beefburgers, some of which contain high-risk material. There is also a higher incidence of affections such as tonsilitis or gastroenteritis in children giving rise to transmission through broken skin or mucous membranes; and transmission via childhood vaccines prepared in cultures containing bovine constituents.
How many more people will succumb to vCJD?
Estimates of the size of an epidemic are made difficult by the many unknowns. Scientists do not know enough about dose, route of exposure, incubation period, genetic susceptibility and scale of the species barrier between cattle and humans. Latest estimates range from a few hundred to just over 130,000.
What was the origin of BSE?
Lord Phillips believe we may never know for certain how and why BSE first appeared. The best guess is that a sporadic form of the disease probably occurred in the 1970s through some type of freak genetic dysfunction. The epidemic happened because remains of individual diseased cattle were ground up and fed back to healthy animals.

Useful links

BSE Inquiry
Food Standards Agency BSE Review
MAFF BSE site
Department of Health BSE/CJD site
Human BSE Foundation - voluntary support group
BSE news and research

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Sixteen years after the first infected cow was discovered, the Philips report exposes how the deadly truth was carefully hidden from the public by overcautious officials and political pressure. Kamal Ahmed, Anthony Barnett and Stuart Millar report.

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It may have started with the death of a cow on a farm in Pitsham, West Sussex, England, in 1984 - two years before "mad cow disease" was officially identified. It ended by changing the way the UK approaches farming, prepares food, conducts surgery and gives blood.

As the US department of agriculture confirms it has identified a single case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in California, American officials and farmers would do well to examine the British experience of what proved to be a devastating disease and led to a national crisis. It resulted in millions of animals being destroyed in an effort to control the disease and the deaths so far of 226 people from the linked human disease.

BSE's unheralded arrival in the UK - it might have in fact existed since the 1970s at such a low level that farmers and vets did not notice it - was to wreak havoc in agriculture, undermine trust in government and sour international relations. The linked human disease, called variant CJD, or "the British disease" in some quarters, has caused the lingering deaths of 176 Britons and nearly 50 others around the world, including three in the US. The whole episode has cost the British taxpayers billions.

After 14 years, the UK government in 2000 finally accepted, after a long, detailed and costly independent inquiry, that the failures of successive administrations had contributed to the BSE catastrophe.

There has been a decade of arguments - often behind closed doors - about just how big the risk to human health the disease in cattle poses. One agriculture secretary, John Gummer, famously fed his daughter a beefburger in front of the cameras to demonstrate it was safe.

The health department played down the issue at an early stage. But it was one of Gummer's predecessors, John MacGregor, who took what in retrospect was the key protective measure on limiting the spread to humans by banning risky parts of cattle (including brain and spinal cord) from entering the food chain when the crisis erupted. He overrode the advice of his civil servants in private, but then he also downplayed the importance in public.

By the time the first UK death from the horrific, long-incubating vCJD - that of 19-year-old Stephen Churchill - occurred in 1995, with the bombshell of a possible link to BSE announced in March the following year, the peak of BSE infection in cattle had passed. The disease was in retreat, thanks to a ban on feeding the meat and bone meal that had passed on the infection from dead cattle to live ones.

The worst years for cattle deaths from BSE in England, Scotland and Wales, was 1992 (36,680) and 1993 (34,370). But millions of other cows have been destroyed because they were too old to go into human or animal food.

In the years that followed, widely varying forecasts of the human death toll from vCJD in the UK were made. Those that predicted fewer than 100 deaths proved far too optimistic. Those that predicted a six-figure toll may look to some over-pessimistic. Three British cases have been linked to blood transfusion involving infected donors.

Some believe the crisis in the UK is almost over and restrictions on cattle allowed to enter the food chain have been eased substantially in recent years. All are tested. Fears of BSE-like diseases in other species - most notably sheep and goats - have led to better controls and monitoring of them too. Others are more cautious, particularly over whether vCJD has indeed been consigned to history.

The crisis changed for ever official estimate of risk. Years of lax controls, poor oversight of slaughterhouse practices and political complacency, then secrecy, changed attitudes among civil servants and politicians. They are now more ready to consider worst-case scenarios - critics would say too ready.

The BSE inquiry, set up by Tony Blair early in office, though long, detailed and complicated, was held in public. Now Britons are hardly surprised by the grilling of ministers and key players, for example in the current Leveson dissection of the media, its practices and links with politicians.

Governments are less tempted to ignore scientific advice. Civil servants were urged by the BSE inquiry to be less ready to sit on bad news. Ministers, bruised by the experience of BSE and other public health disasters such as salmonella in eggs in the 1990s, are more open on public health risks. The public now expects government to be straight with them about the risks.

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Mad cow disease - a very British response to an international crisis

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US officials and farmers would do well to examine the British experience of what proved to be a devastating disease

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WOAH - World Organisation for Animal Health

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Bovine spongiform encephalopathy aka BSE- WOAH

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Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) is a progressive, fatal disease of the nervous system of cattle caused by the accumulation of an abnormal protein.

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Last Modified: Oct 17, 2023

Cattle affected by BSE experience progressive degeneration of the nervous system. Affected animals may display changes in temperament (nervousness or aggression), abnormal posture, incoordination and difficulty in rising, decreased milk production, or loss of condition without noticeable loss of appetite. There is no treatment or vaccine to prevent BSE. Following the onset of clinical signs, the animal's condition deteriorates until it either dies or is destroyed. This process usually takes from two weeks to six months.

BSE is not a contagious disease and therefore is not spread through casual contact between cattle or with other species. The primary route of spread of classical BSE infection in cattle is feed contaminated with the infectious agent. Scientific evidence shows that feed contamination results from incorporating ingredients (for example, meat-and-bone meal) that contain protein derived from rendered infected cattle. Standard rendering processes do not completely inactivate the BSE agent. Therefore, rendered protein such as meat-and- bone meal derived from infected animals may contain the infectious agent. The preferred method for disposal of BSE-infected carcasses is alkaline digestion or complete, high- temperature incineration. Under no circumstances should BSE suspects be used for human or animal consumption.

Agricultural officials around the world have taken actions to eradicate or control the disease. These entail prohibiting the inclusion of mammalian meat-and-bone meal in animal feed; prohibiting the use of specified risk materials or SRMs (those tissues, e.g., brain and spinal cord, known to have the highest infectivity) in food, feed, or other products; and destroying animals showing signs of BSE and other animals at high risk of developing the disease. As a result of these actions, most notably the imposition of feed bans, the rate of newly reported cases of BSE around the world has decreased to less than 10 cases annually.

In 1997, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) implemented regulations that prohibit the feeding of most mammalian proteins to ruminants, including cattle. This feed ban is the most important measure to prevent the transmission of disease to cattle. In 2008, the ban was strengthened by prohibiting the inclusion of SRMs (brains and spinal cords from animals 30 months of age or older) in any animal feed. The 2008 rule also prohibits the use of all cattle carcasses not inspected and passed for human consumption, unless the cattle are less than 30 months of age, or the brains and spinal cords have been removed.

An ongoing, comprehensive interagency surveillance program for BSE has been in place in the U.S. since 1990. The program targets cattle populations with the highest probability of BSE detection, including animals with neurological symptoms consistent with BSE and cattle 30 months of age or older are that are non-ambulatory, recumbent, or unable to rise or walk without assistance. Because BSE, including atypical BSE, is exceedingly uncommon among U.S. cattle, the chosen targeted population will create intentional bias in the sample frame, which favors detection of disease. APHIS also supports the FDA's regulation prohibiting the use of most mammalian proteins in ruminant feed.

Because of the clinical history that can be obtained, samples collected on the farm from cattle exhibiting symptoms of central nervous system disease are particularly valuable to the BSE Ongoing Surveillance Program efforts in the U.S. Accredited veterinarians with proper training can play a key role in the sampling of these animals and should contact their VS field office for more information. BSE is a reportable disease. Any suspicious cases should be reported to the APHIS - VS Area Oﬃce or the State animal health official as a suspected foreign animal disease (FAD).

The agent responsible for BSE has not been completely characterized. There are a variety of theories regarding the nature of the agent. The most widely accepted is that disease is caused by an abnormal prion protein that accumulates in the central nervous system and causes the normal cellular version of the protein to change shape such that it can no longer be degraded by the cell, causing the protein to accumulate and damage the cell.

The BSE agent is extremely resistant to heat and to normal sterilization processes. It also does not evoke any detectable immune response or inflammatory reaction in host animals. In cattle naturally infected with BSE, evidence of disease has been found only in brain tissue, in the spinal cord, and in the retina. In experimentally infected cattle, the distal ileum, bone marrow, dorsal root ganglion, and trigeminal ganglion from experimentally infected cattle were also found to be infective.

In March 1996, the United Kingdom's Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) announced the identification of 10 cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in people. These cases had a characteristic clinical and pathological phenotype that differed from other routinely diagnosed cases of classic (sporadic) CJD. SEAC concluded, and scientific evidence later confirmed, that these cases were linked to exposure to classical BSE before SRM bans were implemented. It is not known whether atypical forms of BSE (L- or H-type) are causally linked to forms of human prion diseases.

In the U.S., public or human health protective measures are maintained by both the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) and the FDA. The most important public health protective measure is the removal of SRMs from the human food supply. Other controls include banning non-ambulatory disabled cattle from the human food chain; prohibiting air-injection stunning of slaughter cattle; requiring additional process controls in advanced meat-recovery systems; and forbidding the use of mechanically separated meat in human food. Additionally, protection from BSE and other disease is achieved through antemortem inspection of slaughter cattle and the exclusion from slaughter of animals with any clinical signs of neurological disease or other abnormalities.

The U.S. also maintains import regulations, consistent with the OIE guidelines for BSE, to prevent BSE from entering the US through imports. Beginning in 1989, APHIS prohibited the importation of ruminants and most ruminant products from countries that had identified BSE in native cattle or that were at risk for BSE. As more research was done to help define the disease, this research also provided scientific justification to outline ways to safely trade commodities to minimize the risk of disease. This is reflected in the OIE guidelines for safe trade. APHIS current import regulations are consistent with these guidelines and allow safe trade in many bovine commodities, including meat.

BSE was first diagnosed in the mid-1980s in Great Britain. BSE incidents have declined worldwide as countries have established control measures, such as feed bans. The highest number of cases was reported in 1992, with more than 37,300, and there has been a continued reduction in detections of this disease annually since then, with fewer than 10 cases annually worldwide over the past 3 years.

Six cases of BSE have been identified in the U.S. The first case was detected in 2003 in Washington State in a 6 year-old dairy cow imported from Canada and confirmed as classical BSE. The subsequent five cases were confirmed as atypical BSE forms. The second, in 2005, was a 12 year-old beef cow in Texas. The third, in 2006, was a 10 year-old beef cow in Alabama. The fourth, in 2012, was a 10 year-old dairy cow in California. The fifth case, in 2017, was an 11 year-old beef cow in Alabama. The sixth case, in 2018, was a 6 year old mixed breed beef cow in Florida.

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Last Modified: Oct 17, 2023 Cattle affected by BSE experience progressive degeneration of the nervous system. Affected animals may display changes in temperament (nervousness or aggression), abnormal posture, incoordination and difficulty in rising, decreased milk production, or loss of condition without noticeable loss of appetite. There is no treatment or vaccine to prevent BSE.

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Full timeline of BSE crisis from first record of a brain disease in sheep in 1732 up to the publication of today's inquiry report.

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Bovine spongiform encephalopathy - Wikipedia

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Bovine spongiform encephalopathy ( BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy and fatal neurodegenerative disease in cattle that may be passed to humans who have eaten infected flesh. BSE causes a spongiform degeneration of the brain and spinal cord.

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The sun is always shining in the Swedish seaside town of Sundsvall, according to the staff of Renewcell, the world's first commercial-scale textile-to-textile recycling factory.

Renewcell's enormous warehouse opened last year. It sits on the water's edge, with easy access for the ships that deliver 400kg bales of shredded cotton and denim from textile waste sorters in Germany, Switzerland and Sweden. Inside the warehouse, the large rectangular bales are stacked in colossal fabric pyramids, each exploding with ribbons of navy blue and black fabric. The towering piles weigh 500 tonnes. Every month, the plant can take 10 times that amount and turn it into a material called Circulose. Circulose looks and feels like chalky craft paper, but it can be used to make viscose rayon (usually made from wood pulp) and, in turn, new clothes.

"Instead of sending [textile waste] to landfill or incineration, we want to pick it up and be that circularity," says Patrick Lundström, the CEO of Renewcell. "We see ourselves as the missing link in the fashion industry."

A drop in the ocean ... a textile delivery awaits treatment at Renewcell. Photograph: Felix Odell

The opening of the plant could not come soon enough. The question of what to do with the mountains of textile waste produced by the fashion industry is increasingly pressing. Images of used garments strewn across the beaches of Ghana and the dunes of the Atacama desert in Chile highlight the truth of waste colonialism - the practice of big waste producers such as the UK offloading their waste on to poorer countries without effective waste management - and reveal how overproduction has rendered piles of T-shirts, dresses and jeans worthless to charities and resellers.

But the 60,000 tonnes of textile waste Renewcell will be able to process by next year is a drop in the ocean. The EU and Switzerland generated 7m tonnes of garment waste in 2020. By 2030, this figure is expected to be more than 8.5m tonnes. About 70% of this gets thrown out with ordinary household waste and goes directly to landfill or incinerators, according to themanagement consultancy McKinsey. About 30% is collected via donation bins, take-back schemes and charities. The better-quality garments are taken and resold by vintage or charity stores within Europe; the leftovers are exported to Africa and Asia to be sold in their secondhand markets.

But a report published in February by the sustainable fashion foundation Changing Markets suggested that as much as half of the castoffs sent to the global south are of such poor quality that they end up being dumped in rivers or sold to be burned for (very toxic) fuel. The amount turned back into new clothing is estimated to be between 0.1% and 1%.

Factory of the future? Renewcell's facility in Sundsvall. Photograph: Renewcell

Companies other than Renewcell have chemical recycling technology, which creates virgin-quality fibres that can in theory be recycled on a loop, but progress towards achieving commercial scale has been slow. The Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel (HKRITA), for instance, opened a plant in Indonesia in 2021, but it recycles fewer than 1,000 tonnes annually. "Without getting [more] recycling systems operating at significantly higher scale, we will not be able to catch up with the industrial and post-consumer waste being generated," says its CEO, Edwin Keh. Mechanical recycling of textiles has existed for years, but it accounts for a tiny percentage of the fibre market and produces materials that have to be blended with virgin fibres to be useable as clothing.

The problems that vex textile recyclers tend to be the same: a need for single materials that is complicated by blended fibres(which make up most of our clothes); a lack of infrastructure for collecting and sorting textile waste; and a difficulty procuring sufficiently large orders to justify the investment to build big enough factories.

Renewcell had some advantages when it came to industrialising. It took over an old paper mill that was already using 100% renewable energy and had some of the required infrastructure. A partnership with the H&M group and the not-for-profit Canopy led to orders from fashion brands including Levi's, Ganni and Filippa K. Even so, it has reported weaker-than-expected sales; on 16 October, it announced that Lundström would be departing as CEO, with the company reportedly hoping that new leadership will spark an uptick in orders.

The price of overproduction ... clothes discarded in Chile's Atacama desert, near the city of Iquique. Photograph: Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images

The process at Renewcell can handle cotton textiles that contain up to 5% synthetic materials, but Lundström says it is working to expand this. In Renewcell's labs, Circulose can be recycled up to seven times. The hope is to increase capacity at the Sundsvall plant to 120,000 tonnes in 2024; they are exploring opening locations in the US, Asia and Africa. "There are no excuses any more," says Lundström. "Our promise is to process 100% of textile waste. We are creating that circularity."

The textile waste crisis is starting to catch the attention of legislators. Soon, extended producer-responsibility schemes will make brands accountable for the end-of-life phase of their products. In the EU, the destruction of unsold goods will be banned from 2024 and, by 2025, textiles will be collected in a separate waste stream, similar to paper and glass. The UK is yet to legislate on the matter, but, in July, the environment minister Rebecca Pow launched a programme that includes proposals to stimulate circularity and create a textile recycling industry.

These moves represent a significant shift in awareness of how rapidly the garment industry has collapsed into one of take-make-waste. But the ever-increasing speed of production and the rise of ultra-fast fashion brands such as Shein and Boohoo mean the gap between the volume of waste created and the capacity of textile recyclers will continue to widen.

In some respects, fast-fashion players are working to find solutions. H&M has a 10.37% stake in Renewcell and is already selling clothes made from Circulose. Since 2013, it has run a take-back programme through collection bins in its stores. Its ambition, according to Cecilia Brännsten, the head of resource use and circular impact at H&M Group, is to use "textile waste from production to build the raw material that we use for our garments". But the lack of recycling infrastructure and capacity makes this ambition hard to reconcile with a business model built on mass production.

Plus, H&M's take-back scheme has long been plagued with questions about its efficacy. In the 10 years it has been operating, the programme has collected 155,000 tonnes of textiles for resale and recycling, but some sources suggest their production volumes are as high as 3bn garments annually. In its report, Changing Markets reported finding garments from fast-fashion brands, including H&M, in landfills, or burned in Kenya. This is "a symptom of a very linear industry where the pieces of the puzzle do not fit yet", says Brännsten.

The truth is that the fashion industry produces too many clothes. In the years it will take textile recyclers to build industrial-scale factories, hundreds of billions more garments will be made - and discarded. "Recycling is perhaps the last resort to address waste," says Keh. "It is much better not to create waste, or to waste less in the first place."

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'The missing link': is textile recycling the answer to fashion's waste crisis?

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Millions of tonnes of T-shirts and dresses are dumped or burned every year. Turning old clothes into new ones is possible - the question is whether it is a realistic solution

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Climate crisis is ‘not gender neutral’: UN calls for more policy focus on women

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Only a third of countries with climate crisis plans include access to sexual, maternal and newborn health services, UNFPA report finds

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The damage caused by the climate crisis through extreme weather has cost $16m (£13m) an hour for the past 20 years, according to a new estimate.

Storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts have taken many lives and destroyed swathes of property in recent decades, with global heating making the events more frequent and intense. The study is the first to calculate a global figure for the increased costs directly attributable to human-caused global heating.

It found average costs of $140bn (£115bn) a year from 2000 to 2019, although the figure varies significantly from year to year. The latest data shows $280bn in costs in 2022. The researchers said lack of data, particularly in low-income countries, meant the figures were likely to be seriously underestimated. Additional climate costs, such as from crop yield declines and sea level rise, were also not included.

The researchers produced the estimates by combining data on how much global heating worsened extreme weather events with economic data on losses. The study also found that the number of people affected by extreme weather because of the climate crisis was 1.2 billion over two decades.

Two-thirds of the damage costs were due to the lives lost, while a third was due to property and other assets being destroyed. Storms, such as Hurricane Harvey and Cyclone Nargis, were responsible for two-thirds of the climate costs, with 16% from heatwaves and 10% from floods and droughts.

People wait to be rescued from their home in Houston, Texas, after the area was flooded by Hurricane Harvey in August 2017. Storms areresponsible for two-thirds of the climate costs. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The researchers said their methods could be used to calculate how much funding was needed for a loss and damage fund established at the UN's climate summit in 2022, which is intended to pay for the recovery from extreme weather disasters in poorer countries. It could also rapidly determine the specific climate cost of individual disasters, enabling faster delivery of funds.

"The headline number is $140bn a year and, first of all, that's already a big number," said Prof Ilan Noy, at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, who carried out the study with colleague Rebecca Newman. "Second, when you compare it to the standard quantification of the cost of climate change [using computer models], it seems those quantifications are underestimating the impact of climate change."

Noy said there were a lot of extreme weather events for which there was no data on numbers of people killed or economic damage: "That indicates our headline number of $140bn is a significant understatement." For example, he said, heatwave death data was only available in Europe. "We have no idea how many people died from heatwaves in all of sub-Saharan Africa."

Extreme weather: glacial flooding, wildfires and hailstorms cause havoc across the world - video

There has been a sevenfold increase in reported losses from extreme weather disasters since the 1970s, according the World Meteorological Organization. However, separating the effect of global heating from population growth, urban migration and better reporting of disasters is difficult.

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, took a different approach based on how climate change had exacerbated the extreme weather events. Hundreds of "attribution" studies have been done, calculating how much more frequent global heating made extreme weather events. This allows the fraction of the damages resulting from human-caused heating to be estimated.

The researchers applied these fractions to the damages recorded in the International Disaster Database, which compiles available data on all disasters in which 10 people died, or 100 were affected, or the country declared a state of emergency or requested international assistance.

The central estimate was an average climate cost of $140bn a year, with a range from $60bn to $230bn. These estimates are much higher than those from computer models, which are based on changes in average global temperature rather than on the extreme temperatures increasingly being seen in the world.

The years with the highest overall climate costs were 2003, when a heatwave struck Europe; 2008, when Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar; and 2010, when drought hit Somalia and a heatwave hit Russia. Property damages were higher in 2005 and 2017 when hurricanes hit the US, where property values are high.

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The analysis used a statistical value of a life lost of $7m, an average of the figures used by the US and UK governments. "A lot of people are very uncomfortable with the idea that we put a price tag on a life," said Noy. "But this is very standard economic practice and comes about because, ultimately, we need make decisions about [the value of] investments in various things."

Heatwaves, flood and fire: what it's like to survive 2023's extreme weather - video

Noy said that only considering the economic damage caused to infrastructure would heavily skew the cost estimates to rich countries, despite much of the damage from extreme weather hitting poorer ones. He contrasted the $140bn damage estimate with the $100bn promised by rich countries to poorer ones, but yet to be delivered in full, and noted that 90% of that money was for cutting emissions. The figures also contrast with the subsidies of $7tn a year enjoyed by the fossil fuel industry.

At the UN climate summit Cop27 in 2022, countries agreed to set up a loss and damage fund to help poorer ones rebuild after climate-related disasters. "You can use our methodology to start putting numbers on how much money we need in the fund," Noy said.

Ideally, he said, a quick attribution study on an extreme weather event would estimate the climate-related damage and lead to a rapid delivery of funds: "It would be a kind of insurance scheme for countries." The methodology might also be useful for determining damages in climate lawsuits, he said.

Dr Stéphane Hallegatte, at the World Bank and not part of the study team, said: "The key message is that climate change is visibly increasing global economic losses from disasters. This has been a topic of controversy, with some claiming that climate change effects are negligible compared with other factors like economic growth and urbanisation.

"This study looks at the attribution for the physical event - it's much simpler, robust, and it provides a convincing case. It is an emerging field and uncertainties are really large. One lesson of the study is that global research centres - mostly located in rich countries - need to work more on what is happening in poorer countries."

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Climate crisis costing $16m an hour in extreme weather damage, study estimates

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Analysis shows at least $2.8tn in damage from 2000 to 2019 through worsened storms, floods and heatwaves

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Whale hunting returns to Iceland despite hopes ban would last forever

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An investigation found that around 40% of hunted whales did not die instantly

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https://www.scidev.net/global/opinions/gm-food-crops-yet-to-crack-indias-vast-farms/

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By: Ranjit Devraj

[NEW DELHI] As the world's second-largest producer of rice, wheat, vegetables and fruit, India is a country that no multinational corporation involved in genetically modified (GM) crops can ignore.

Genetic engineering of crops - where genes are inserted from the same or another organism - can boost a plant's resistance to pests, help it grow in difficult conditions such as drought, and increase its nutrient levels.

So, how is it that multinational firms have failed to make a dent on any leading farm food producer and consumer in India?

The US multinational Monsanto, through an Indian subsidiary, Mahyco, did manage to push through Bt cotton, a non-food. Genetically engineered to produce proteins borrowed from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, it is intended to kill the deadly pink bollworm pest.

But that was 20 years ago and no other GM crop, food or non-food, has since gained entry into Indian farms.

Food crops are proving particularly difficult to crack for GM companies. For a start, India's large population of vegetarians, reckoned to be 40 per cent of its 1.4 billion people, do not take kindly to the idea of engineered food in any form on the table.

Secondly, while GM crops are being promoted as a way to save on toxic pesticides, most require the use of herbicides with glyphosate and glufosinate, which are no less toxic.

In 2015, the World Health Organization identified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen, adding fuel to the debate over the safety of GM crops.

Moreover, additional genes from foreign species are layered in to protect the plants from herbicides which makes them more costly to produce.

The way in which Bt cotton surfaced in India, catching the country's regulators off-guard and forcing them to approve an accomplished fact, also did not inspire public confidence.

Bt cotton now dominates the 12,000 hectares that India has under cotton farms. However, the pink bollworm pest is beginning to show signs of resisting the Bt proteins, prompting some farmers to return to pesticides.

The stealthy entry of Bt cotton into India galvanised environmentalists and activists into approaching the Supreme Court in 2004 to ensure tighter regulation of all GM crops.

So far, the court, which set up its own expert committee, has not been sympathetic to pleas by government counsel that GM food crops are essential to feed India's large population.

At the last hearing on 29 August, the Supreme Court indicated that it would not be rushed into allowing the planting of GM mustard in the September sowing season.

"One year here or there does not matter," Justice BV Nagarathna, a member of the bench, said.

"This is only one season. Next year there will be another season. However, environmental harm cannot be reversed."

The court was hearing affidavits filed by litigants against the government approval in February of the "environmental release" of GM mustard. Environmental release is a step away from full commercial cultivation.

The government did, however, caution that the matter was under adjudication before the Supreme Court.

U-turn on GM

GM mustard was not the first genetically engineered food crop developed in India and then banned.

Mahyco used genes from the same B.thuringiensis to produce Bt eggplant (also known as brinjal or aubergine) only to see the government ordering a moratorium on sowing, based on feedback from consultations with stakeholders.

Mahyco, though frustrated by the moratorium, successfully negotiated with neighbouring Bangladesh to accept Bt eggplant. In 2018, the German conglomerate Bayer bought out Monsanto, gaining control over Mahyco and by 2022 the new owners had secured a similar deal with the Philippines.

The FAO acknowledges concerns over potential risks of GM crops raised by scientists, the public and regulators, including pests becoming resistant to pesticides and GM foods posing safety issues to humans and animals. However, it insists the benefits outweigh these risks.

The FAO says that more than 17 million farmers are planting GM crops in 29 countries and "reaping higher yields with reduced use of pesticides and better management of weeds among other benefits." But that does not sound convincing in India which alone has 120 million farmers.

Pro-vegetarian sentiments, farmers' fears that the accompanying weedicides could destroy other crops planted on a rotational basis, and the demands for tighter and more transparent regulation by litigants have stayed the government's hand.

Litigants cite the case of the herbicide-tolerant (HT) variety of Bt cotton, or HTBt cotton, compelling Indian cotton growers to add weedicides to their growing list of costly farm inputs.

India, a major edible oil importer, was expected to buy up to 14 million tonnes of edible oil during the September 2022 to October 2023 season. Paradoxically, India is also the world's leading exporter of edible oils - especially mustard oil.

Glyphosate concerns

But closer examination shows that the 'white' mustard oil that Indian traders import is actually canola, extracted from rapeseed, a variety of mustard genetically engineered to be herbicide tolerant.

In Canada, where canola is one of the country's leading crops, herbicides, especially glyphosate, save growers the cost of uprooting weeds. Citing the apparent laxity over glyphosate use, a study published January charges Canada's regulators with "embracing industry narratives" and resorting to "opaque decision-making and lack of transparency" to promote commercial interests over the imperatives of public health and environmental protection.

Those are also the charges that litigants are levelling at India's regulators - granting clearances for GM mustard and the glufosinate herbicide that goes with it. Banned in the EU since 2020, glufosinate presents additional dangers to Indians who use not only the oil but also the seeds and leaves in traditional cuisine.

Switching to GM crops to save on pesticides has resulted in growers having to use herbicides - so that it is a toss up between one type of toxic agrochemical and another. GM also typically addresses only a single pest when there are several that demand the use of pesticides.

With the pink bollworm becoming resistant to Bt proteins, the reality is that farmers are far from being free of pesticides - already a costly farm input to which herbicides will need to be added.

For now, the main stumbling block for the proponents of GM food crops is the fact that the Supreme Court's own technical expert committee has strongly recommended a complete ban on herbicide-tolerant crops in the country.

Since the government has preferred to leave the matter to the court, it is safe to say it could take years before GM food crops enter India's farm gates.
This piece was produced by SciDev.Net's Asia & Pacific desk.

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GM food crops yet to crack India's vast farms

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GM firms struggle to penetrate India's vast market as highest court blocks sowing of genetically-modified crops.

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Rice. Half of Humanity Eats It. And Climate Change Is Wrecking It.

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From the Mississippi to the Mekong, farmers and researchers are finding creative fixes for the dire threats of global warming, extreme rains and sea-level rise.

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Climate change is wreaking havoc across the globe, notably endangering agriculture. Crops and animals are equally affected, as rising temperatures raise concerns among farmers.

One particular crop that is currently in trouble is rice. Periods of low precipitation make it difficult for seedlings to sprout and grow, yet too much rain makes it difficult for the crops "to keep their heads above water," The New York Times explained.

In addition, the salt from seawater is harmful to crops. As sea levels are rising in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, seawater is traveling further inland than it ever used to.

The Greenly Institute argues that rice is both the "victim and contributor" to its own demise.

According to Greenly, the reason behind this is the introduction of industrial rice farming, as farmers were merely adapting to the growing food demand on top of fighting famine. This meant using hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers, resulting in three harvests a year.

Rice farming contributes to climate change

According to the , "Rice is responsible for 10% of global methane emissions, and in Southeast Asia, one the world's major rice bowls, rice cultivation accounts for as much as 25-33% of the region's methane emissions."

Rice farming-the conventional way, at least-may be a factor when it comes to climate change. Traditionally, rice is grown in flooded fields where rice straw residue decomposes, releasing methane into the atmosphere. On top of that, the use (or overuse) of nitrogen-based fertilizers could lead to nitrous oxide emissions, as rice plants don't absorb the fertilizer properly.

GHG emissions are further boosted by burning rice residues, like rice straw.

"Vietnam's Mekong Delta produces around 29 million tons of rice straw per year and over 80% of it is burned in the fields after harvest," the added in its report.

Could rice farming be made more sustainable?

The short answer is yes. One way would be by using less water. Research written in Environmental Science & Biology , carried out over a period of seven years, suggests farmers could let the rice paddies dry out a little before watering them again. By using this method, methane emissions were cut by approximately 60%, without altering rice yield.

Using biotech solutions can help too. CRISPR technology has been proven to be a successful method to grow crops, by efficiently manipulating their genome. As previously explained, "CRISPR is basically a gene-editing technology that finds specific bits of DNA inside a cell and, once the bits are identified, alters a piece of it or turns genes on or off."

The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is already working on developing new rice varieties, including weather-resistant rice that could tolerate drought, flood, heat, and cold, as well as issues in the soil itself, like high salt and iron toxicity.

"It's a whole livelihood, it's a cultural crop, you have religion involved, you have beliefs, stories. Life in Asia, and Southeast Asia in particular, has evolved around rice," said Bjoern Ole Sander of the IRRI, per Scientific American .

"Rice has such a high carbon footprint, but the investments are still relatively low," Sander added. "It is definitely a crop that deserves more attention."

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Climate change is threatening rice farming-can crops be kept afloat? - Bio.News

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Re-examining rice farming methods using biotech solutions such as CRISPR technology could aid in making this valuable crop more sustainable.

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GMO FAQs Fundamentals Food & Farming Health & Safety Sustainability Labeling Regulation Agricultural biotechnology frequently asked questions Fundamentals What are GMOs? Which genetically engineered crops and animals are approved in the US? Where are GMO crops and animals approved and banned? Why is there controversy over GMO foods but not GMO drugs?

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Climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly, many of the impacts will be more severe than predicted and there is only a narrow chance left of avoiding its worst ravages, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said.

Even at current levels, human actions in heating the climate are causing dangerous and widespread disruption, threatening devastation to swathes of the natural world and rendering many areas unliveable, according to the landmark report published on Monday.

"The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet," said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a co-chair of working group 2 of the IPCC. "Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future."

Droughts, floods, heatwaves

In what some scientists termed "the bleakest warning yet", the summary report from the global authority on climate science says droughts, floods, heatwaves and other extreme weather are accelerating and wreaking increasing damage.

Allowing global temperatures to increase by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, as looks likely on current trends in greenhouse gas emissions, would result in some "irreversible" impacts. These include the melting of ice caps and glaciers, and a cascading effect whereby wildfires, the die-off of trees, the drying of peatlands and the thawing of permafrost release additional carbon emissions, amplifying the warming further.

'Atlas of human suffering'

António Guterres, the UN secretary general, said: "I have seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this. Today's IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership."

John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate, said the report "paints a dire picture of the impacts already occurring because of a warmer world and the terrible risks to our planet if we continue to ignore science. We have seen the increase in climate-fuelled extreme events, and the damage that is left behind - lives lost and livelihoods ruined. The question at this point is not whether we can altogether avoid the crisis - it is whether we can avoid the worst consequences."

The report says:

Everywhere is affected, with no inhabited region escaping dire impacts from rising temperatures and increasingly extreme weather.

About half the global population - between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people - live in areas "highly vulnerable" to climate change.

Millions of people face food and water shortages owing to climate change, even at current levels of heating.

Mass die-offs of species, from trees to corals, are already under way.

1.5C above pre-industrial levels constitutes a "critical level" beyond which the impacts of the climate crisis accelerate strongly and some become irreversible.

Coastal areas around the globe, and small, low-lying islands, face inundation at temperature rises of more than 1.5C.

Key ecosystems are losing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide, turning them from carbon sinks to carbon sources.

Some countries have agreed to conserve 30% of the Earth's land, but conserving half may be necessary to restore the ability of natural ecosystems to cope with the damage wreaked on them.

Chance to avoid the worst

This is the second part of the IPCC's latest assessment report, an updated, comprehensive review of global knowledge of the climate, which has been seven years in the making and draws on the peer-reviewed work of thousands of scientists. The assessment report is the sixth since the IPCC was first convened by the UN in 1988, and may be the last to be published while there is still some chance of avoiding the worst.

A first instalment, by the IPCC's working group 1, published last August, on the physical science of climate change, said the climate crisis was "unequivocally" caused by human actions, resulting in changes that were "unprecedented", with some becoming "irreversible".

This second part, by working group 2, deals with the impacts of climate breakdown, sets out areas where the world is most vulnerable, and details how we can try to adapt and protect against some of the impacts. A third section, due in April, will cover ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and the final part, in October, will summarise these lessons for governments meeting in Egypt for the UN Cop27 climate summit.

'Cataclysmic' for small islands

Small islands will be among those worst affected. Walton Webson, an ambassador of Antigua and Barbuda and the chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, called the findings "cataclysmic".

He urged the UN to convene a special session to consider action. "We are continuing to head for a precipice - we say our eyes are open to the risks, but when you look at global emissions, if anything we are accelerating towards the cliff edge. We are not seeing the action from the big emitters that is required to get emissions down in this critical decade - this means halving emissions by 2030 at the latest. It is clear that time is slipping away from us."

Governments in other parts of the world could help their people to adapt to some of the impacts of the climate crisis, the report says, by building flood defences, helping farmers to grow different crops, or building more resilient infrastructure. But the authors say the capacity of the world to adapt to the impacts will diminish rapidly the further temperatures rise, quickly reaching "hard" limits beyond which adaptation would be impossible.

'Global dominoes'

The climate crisis also has the power to worsen problems such as hunger, ill-health and poverty, the report makes clear. Dave Reay, the director of Edinburgh Climate Change Institute at the University of Edinburgh, said: "Like taking a wrecking ball to a set of global dominoes, climate change in the 21st century threatens to destroy the foundations of food and water security, smash onwards through the fragile structures of human and ecosystem health, and ultimately shake the very pillars of human civilisation."

The report plays down fears of conflicts arising from the climate crisis, finding that "displacement" and "involuntary migration" of people would ensue but that "non-climatic factors are the dominant drivers of existing intrastate violent conflicts".

But Jeffrey Kargel, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in the US, said: "The current warfare activity in eastern Europe, though not attributable to climate change, is a further caution about how human tensions and international relations and geopolitics could become inflamed as climate change impacts hit nations in ways that they are ill-prepared to handle."

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IPCC issues 'bleakest warning yet' on impacts of climate breakdown

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Climate breakdown is accelerating rapidly, many of the impacts will be more severe than predicted and there is only a narrow chance left of avoiding its worst ravages, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said.

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ad it been released at any point in the past few years, Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes would have been an important documentary; a feature-length blend of audio interviews and largely unseen archive footage that puts the 1986 disaster into horrifying new perspective. That it comes out now - just days after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, including an attack on the Chernobyl site itself - makes it as unmissable as it is harrowing.

Obviously, this timeliness was never the intention. Indeed, the film-maker James Jones had a different historical event in mind when he started work on it two years ago. "I initially thought the relevance was Covid," he says. Like Chernobyl, the early days of the pandemic were marked with mysterious illnesses that the local government attempted to keep a lid on. "I was interested in the idea that this invisible enemy was threatening us," he says. "An authoritarian regime was lying about it, and Chinese citizens were starting to voice their disquiet publicly."

The seed of the documentary was planted when Jones read two books on the disaster during lockdown - "Not good for my mental state," he says in retrospect. "But completely fascinating." One contained a footnote that caught his eye. "It referenced footage that was shot in Pripyat [in northern Ukraine] the weekend after the accident," he says. Despite the fact that the worst nuclear disaster in history had happened down the road hours earlier, releasing 400 times more radioactive material into the atmosphere than the Hiroshima bomb, the footage showed residents milling about as if nothing had happened.

"You can see mothers pushing babies around and kids playing football in the sand," says Jones. "Then you start to see these white flashes on the film because of the insanely high level of radiation. It was so chilling." Nevertheless, the existence of this footage spurred him to seek out more. Via a wealth of sources - national archives, propaganda films, collapsed Soviet documentary studios, western news reports, children and soldiers who happened to have video cameras at the time - he began to piece together a blistering documentary that draws a straight line from the USSR's attempts to play down the disaster to the fall of the Soviet Union itself.

Although Chernobyl is one of those historical punctuation points on which everyone thinks they have a decent overview, not least due to Sky's recent drama series, The Lost Tapes is studded with moments of footage so extraordinary that you are unlikely to forget them. A clean-up helicopter crashing to the ground over the explosion site. Searing footage of injuries and mutations to humans and animals. Wooden grave markers in an irradiated forest.

Visceral horrors ... an image shot at tremendous risk during the clean-up operation after the accident in 1986. Photograph: Sky UK/Top Hat TV / Sirota

But perhaps the most unforgettable sequence is of the so-called liquidators; civil and military personnel who, after the robot designed to do the job became overloaded with radiation and malfunctioned, were tasked with clearing tons of contaminated material from the roof of the building by hand. We see them fashioning rudimentary PPE by tying lead sheets to their bodies, and joking nervously about vodka. Then there is one clip where a camera follows a group of liquidators up a ladder and out on to the roof itself. It is absolutely extraordinary, like being led by the hand into the mouth of hell. "It was the most dangerous place on Earth at the time," Jones says. "Many of them had no idea what they were doing."

Equally distressing is the footage shot around Pripyat before the disaster. The place looks like a utopia. It's clean and open, filled with so many children that a government official proudly opens the new wing of a maternity ward to cope with capacity. Jones admits that this footage has an air of Soviet propaganda to it, but it does seem a largely accurate reflection of how people who lived there felt about their town.

"It just humanised the place," says Jones of this footage. "I loved the drama series, but it is relentlessly grim. I think the only shot you see of the actual town is when a bird falls from the sky and dies. But this whole other reality existed, of people swimming in the sea and having ordinary lives. So when the tragedy does hit, you feel that this wasn't the distant world of grim Soviet citizens. It was a lively and joyous place."

One thread the documentary does share with the series, though, is Lyudmilla Ignatenko. Played by Jessie Buckley in the drama, she is a Ukrainian, pregnant at the time of the accident, whose husband died of severe radiation poisoning after trying to put out the blaze.

Ignatenko is one of the primary interviewees in The Lost Tapes. She displays similar emotional backbone here, providing an audio recollection of the horror she witnessed with remarkable clearheadedness. "Lyudmilla has been through so much tragedy," says Jones, awestruck.

Some of the more homespun archive footage also helps remind us how relatively recent the disaster was. To watch the uniformed cast of the Chernobyl series - or any official Soviet footage from that time, much of which was still shot on black and white film to save upgrading their kit - you could be lulled into thinking all this took place in the 1950s or 60s. But Jones's wealth of new video footage, with some startlingly era-appropriate fashion, helps to underline that in terms of history, this happened very recently.

"It feels properly 80s," says Jones. "Actually there was a great clip I really wanted to use where there's a really 80s disco, and just like flashing lights and DJs and stuff. But it felt slightly wrong tonally to include it."

Aerial view of the site, in footage found by James Jones and his team in Ukraine. Photograph: Sky UK/Top Hat TV / Sirota

For all the visceral horror of Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes, the thing that drags the film into the now is the torrent of disinformation that gushed out of the USSR in the wake of the tragedy. Despite the rest of the world reacting with justified alarm at the threat to life, the Soviet government clamped shut and refused to acknowledge anything that wasn't fully undeniable, regardless of evidence. Pripyat residents are evacuated, but told they will return in a matter of days. Patients dying of unimaginable radiation burns were brushed away as having no connection to Chernobyl. The documentary claims that 200,000 people are estimated to have died as a direct result of the disaster. The official Soviet tally remains at 13. To put it in modern terms, this was fake news on a colossal scale.

Eventually, people learned the truth and public anger at the cover-up was such that Ukrainian independence soon followed, as did the final collapse of the USSR. I ask Jones whether, in the age of the internet, something so big could be covered as easily.

"You would think it would be impossible but then you look at Russia, at eastern Ukraine. If people are watching state television, particularly people at a certain age, you really can control what people think. I guess Putin's tactic now is just to sow confusion everywhere so people feel they can't trust anything, whether it's state TV or some conspiracy theory on Facebook. The actual truth is just one of many things running around. You'd like to think that, if people were dying from radiation or getting cancer or their hair was falling out, that it would be documented. But I don't know. My faith in the modern world has been shaken."

Ordinary lives ... Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes lays bare the tragedy through new archive footage and interviews with those who survived. Photograph: Sky UK/Top Hat TV / Sirota

Securing all the footage was such an arduous job that it took him right up to the wire. "It was scattered around Russia and Ukraine, and it was just a nightmare," he says. "Soviet bureaucracy, the pandemic, sanctions. Our payments to Russia kept getting stopped by banks. It was laughable. Until two or three weeks ago, I thought there was no way we could deliver on time."

The documentary was finally handed in a week ago. "Literally in the nick of time," says Jones. "If the war had started earlier, the film wouldn't have been finished." That brings us to the subject that has cast a shadow over the interview, the documentary, and the world at large. Throughout our talk, Jones has spoken adoringly of his Ukrainian producers who helped to hunt down the archive footage, along with the crew and interview subjects from the area. Have they been in touch since the invasion? "Pretty much all of them, yeah," he replies. How are they doing? "They are all terrified, you know? Angry. They are all feeling pretty helpless."

And Lyudmilla Ignatenko? "I texted yesterday saying, you know, I hope you're OK. I always talk to her in Russian when we text," he says. "This time, she replied in Ukrainian."

Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes is on Sky Documentaries tonight at 9pm.

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Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes - stunning TV that is suddenly unmissable

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ad it been released at any point in the past few years, Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes would have been an important documentary; a feature-length blend of audio interviews and largely unseen archive footage that puts the 1986 disaster into horrifying new perspective.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/05/how-super-enzymes-that-eat-plastics-could-curb-our-waste-problem

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Beaches littered with plastic bottles and wrappers. Marine turtles, their stomachs filled with fragments of plastic. Plastic fishing nets dumped at sea where they can throttle unsuspecting animals. And far out in the Pacific Ocean, an expanse of water more than twice the size of France littered with plastic waste weighing at least 79,000 tonnes.

The plastic pollution problem is distressingly familiar, but many organisations are working to reduce it. Alongside familiar solutions such as recycling, a surprising ally has emerged: micro-organisms. A handful of microbes have evolved the ability to "eat" certain plastics, breaking them down into their component molecules. These tiny organisms could soon play a key role in reducing plastic waste and building a greener economy.

The scale of the problem

As a species, we make an enormous amount of plastic. In 2020, the most recent year for which we have data, 367m tonnes were produced globally, according to trade association Plastics Europe. This represented a slight decline compared with 2019, when 368m tonnes were made, but that was probably because of the Covid-19 pandemic: production had previously increased almost every year since the 1950s. A 2017 study estimated that 8.3bn tonnes of plastic had been made in total.

A huge fraction of this goes to waste. In 2016 the world generated 242m tonnes of plastic waste, according to the World Bank. Despite the popular image, only a small fraction of this ends up in the ocean - but the seas may still be absorbing more than 10m tonnes of plastic every year. As well as the dangers of the plastics themselves, they contain a lot of additives that leach out into the water. "Over time we really don't know what effects these have," says Tiffany M Ramos of Roskilde University in Denmark.

Much of the rest ends up in landfills. That does not sound so bad, but a lot of it is single-use plastic, which is inherently wasteful. Making plastic requires extracting fossil fuels such as oil from the ground, with all the pollution risks that entails. Plastic manufacturing also releases greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. A 2021 report found that the US plastics industry alone releases 232m tonnes of greenhouse gases every year, the equivalent of 116 coal-fired power plants.

The solution is not to stop using plastics altogether, because they are incredibly useful. For example, plastic bottles are far lighter than glass ones, so transporting them requires less energy and releases a smaller amount of greenhouse gases. But we do need a revolution in how we handle plastics, and this is where the micro-organisms come in.

On the scrapheap

In 2016 researchers led by microbiologist Kohei Oda of the Kyoto Institute of Technology in Japan reported a surprise discovery. Oda's team visited a recycling site that focused on items made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a clear plastic that is used to make clothing fibres and drinks bottles.

Like all plastics, PET is a material made up of long string-like molecules. These are assembled from smaller molecules strung together into chains. The chemical bonds in PET chains are strong, so it is long-lasting - exactly what you do not want in a single-use plastic.

Oda's team took samples of sediment and wastewater that were contaminated with PET, and screened them for micro-organisms that could grow on the plastic. It found a new strain of bacterium, called Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6. This microbe could grow on pieces of PET. Not only that: Oda's team reported that the bacterium could use PET as its main source of nutrients, degrading the PET in the process.

The key to this ability was a pair of enzymes made by the bacteria. Enzymes are complex molecules that can speed up chemical reactions. They are crucial to life: our digestive system relies on enzymes to break down the complex chemicals in food into simpler ones that our bodies can absorb and use. For example, our saliva contains an enzyme called amylase that breaks up the long molecules of starch found in foods such as bread.

Ideonella sak a iensis 201-F6 produces two unique enzymes. The first is a PETase that breaks the long PET molecules down into smaller molecules called MHET. A second enzyme called MHETase then goes to work, producing ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid. These two chemicals are the building blocks of PET, so Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6 can completely reverse the manufacturing process that made PET.

Plastic eaters

The finding made headlines around the world, but it was not the first example of an organism that could degrade plastics. Reports of plastic-munching microbes date back to at least the early 1990s. The earliest examples were arguably less remarkable, because they could only eat plastics that were chemically flimsy or biodegradable. But by the 2000s researchers had found enzymes that could tackle tougher plastics.

A prominent researcher in this area has been Wolfgang Zimmermann of Leipzig University in Germany. His team studied enzymes called cutinases, which it obtained from bacteria such as Thermobifida cellulosilytica, and which could also break down PET.

If you're the first bacterium in that rubbish pile that suddenly has a taste for plastic, then you've got an unlimited food source

Prof John McGeehan, University of Portsmouth

Lars Blank of Aachen University in Germany first heard about this in 2012. He set about creating a consortium of researchers to study plastic-eating enzymes. This became the P4SB project, which ran from 2015 to 2019. Blank has since set up a project called MIX-UP, which sees European and Chinese researchers cooperating.

By the mid-2010s plenty of plastic-degrading enzymes were known. The potential was clear to Gabriella Caruso of the Institute for Coastal Marine Environment in Messina, Italy, who wrote in a 2015 review that "microbial degradation of plastic is a promising eco-friendly strategy which represents a great opportunity to manage waste plastic materials with no adverse impacts".

So why did Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6 cause such a stir? "The difference with the 2016 paper was this micro-organism could use the plastic as its sole energy and food source," says John McGeehan of the University of Portsmouth. "That's actually quite surprising and it kind of shows evolutionary pressure in action. If you're the first bacterium in that rubbish pile that suddenly has a taste for plastic, then you've got an unlimited food source."

Put another way, the earlier enzymes had not evolved for plastics. They evolved to break down tough chain molecules found in living things, and their ability to degrade plastic was a side-effect. In contrast, the enzymes in Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6 were specialised.

Blank has a different interpretation, arguing that the Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6 enzymes are not especially good because they only degrade PET slowly. "Wolfgang Zimmermann had far better enzymes at that point," he says. But the excitement the paper created had a huge impact. "Suddenly the media and also the academic literature really cranked up and a lot of interest came in."

Better and better enzymes

Two years later McGeehan and his colleagues took things further. They produced a three-dimensional structure of the Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6 PETase, shedding light on how it worked. Hoping to understand how it evolved, they tweaked the structure. To their surprise, this made the enzyme more efficient at degrading PET. Clearly, it was possible to improve the enzyme.

McGeehan now wants to take that further, modifying the PETase and other such enzymes so that they can be used on an industrial scale to break down plastics that would otherwise linger in the environment. "We've got a big £6m grant from the government," he says, and they have started a specialist institute called the Centre for Enzyme Innovation.

This is now bearing fruit. In 2020 McGeehan's team reported that it had linked the PETase and MHETase enzymes together. This "super-enzyme" could eat PET about six times faster than the two enzymes working separately. Other groups such as Blank's MIX-UP have produced modified enzymes of their own.

Meanwhile there is evidence that microbes all around the world are evolving similar abilities. A study published in October 2021 looked at microbial DNA from a range of habitats. In areas with high levels of plastic pollution, the researchers found that the microbes were more likely to have enzymes with plastic-degrading tendencies. In line with this, a 2020 study identified a soil bacterium that can feed on some of the components of polyurethane, which releases toxic chemicals when it breaks down.

The question now becomes: how significant a role can these enzymes really play in reducing plastic pollution?

The circular economy

So far, most of the activity has been in universities, but some groups are attempting to commercialise the technology. The University of Portsmouth has set up Revolution Plastics, which aims to forge links between academics and industry. "We've already advertised a joint PhD project with Coca-Cola," says McGeehan. He is also part of an international research team called BOTTLE, which is negotiating with large companies.

The most advanced project is run by Carbios, a French biotechnology company. In September 2021 it opened a pilot plant in Clermont-Ferrand, where it will test a system for recycling PET. Carbios's system uses an enzyme that was first identified in compost, which they modified so that it worked faster and could operate at high temperatures where PET is softer.

The advantage of these enzymes is that they break down the plastic at the molecular level, so it is possible to recreate the highest-quality plastic. In contrast, other forms of recycling cause a slow decline in quality, until eventually the plastic cannot be recycled again and gets landfilled or incinerated. Enzymatic recycling, in theory at least, is truly circular. "That's what we call a closed-loop recycling system," says Ramos. "You recycle something, but then you're able to make something new of the same quality out of that." To date, only a tiny percentage of plastics are being recycled in this way, but the enzymes could change that - "Which would be great."

McGeehan says: "I think in the next five years we're going to be seeing demonstration plants all over the place."

Still, there are limits to the enzymes' usefulness. "It will never be a one-size-fits-all type of solution," says Ramos, and we should not count on the enzymes to mop up all our plastic waste. Some plastics are even tougher than PET.

Blank points out that the enzymes work best if the plastic has been softened by heating. That means releasing the enzymes into the environment would not do much good: they only really work in temperature-controlled reactors. So the solution to plastic in the sea remains the same as before: we have to stop releasing it in the first place.

Nevertheless, it seems likely that plastic-eating enzymes will have a role to play as societies move towards a circular economy in which everything is recycled as much as possible. In a study published in July 2021, McGeehan and his colleagues estimated how much enzymatic recycling of PET will cost. They calculate that it could compete on cost with standard manufacturing methods, which use fossil fuels as feedstock.

The key is to be savvy about where we use the enzymes, says Blank. Some plastics can be mechanically recycled, a technology that is improving rapidly, so they probably are not the best targets. Instead, he says, researchers should go for plastics that cannot be recycled any other way - particularly if they can become substances that are otherwise expensive to make.

Ultimately, the enzymes have to be part of a revolution in the entire way we make and use plastics, says Ramos. Better methods of recycling are useful, she adds, but they are only part of the solution. It is also important for plastic products to be designed in such a way that they can easily be reused and recycled. That might mean avoiding designs that use several kinds of plastic, or fuse plastic with other materials, as these are very difficult to recycle.

As with all our environmental problems, there is no silver enzyme. These chemical machines can help us recycle plastic better, but we will always need to pick up our litter.

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How 'super-enzymes' that eat plastics could curb our waste problem

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Many micro-organisms have evolved chemical processes that enable them to digest plastics, potentially leading to a new form of recycling

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False banana: Is Ethiopia’s enset ‘wondercrop’ for climate change?

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The banana-like crop has the potential to feed more than 100 million people, according to research.

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Toxic "forever chemicals" used in non-stick saucepans and food packaging have been found in otters across England and Wales, according to a study.

The substances, called PFASs, are also used in waterproof clothing, stain resistant products and fire retardants.

The chemicals are linked to pregnancy complications, liver disease, cancer and other illnesses.

Scientists say concentrations of these compounds in otters are a guide to levels of pollution in the environment.

The substances can leach out from products, getting into drains and sewage treatment works - from which they can then escape and contaminate the environment more widely.

PFAS substances are present in farmland sludge, which can wash from fields into rivers. Factories and landfill sites are another source for the chemicals.

Denmark recently banned their use in food packaging paper.

Used since the late 1940s, PFAS chemicals - which are divided into compounds called perfluoroalkyls and polyfluoroalkyls - help to make products water, grease and stain resistant.

They are known as "forever chemicals" because they don't break down easily in the environment. They contaminate fish, which can then be ingested by animals and humans. PFAS compounds can also get directly into drinking water.

Researchers tested 50 otters found dead in 2007-09 and detected PFASs in all of them. 80% of the animals had at least 12 different types of the chemicals in their livers. In a separate study for a long-term monitoring scheme called the Otter Project, animals that had died between 2014-19 all contained two types of restricted PFASs.

Emily O'Rourke, a PhD student at Cardiff University and lead author of the study, told BBC News that otters were a "sentinel" species, revealing "widespread environmental pollution" of British fresh waters. The research backs up a recent Environmental Audit Committee report which showed there was a "chemical cocktail" of pollutants in rivers.

It's unclear whether the concentrations of chemicals found in the otters are high enough to cause harm. The otters mainly died in road collisions and so the precise impact of the chemicals on their health is not known. Ms O'Rourke said it was likely the toxic chemicals had a "sub-lethal" effect.

Britain should 'catch up'

PFASs will be in the environment "for years and years to come" according to Ms O'Rourke.

"When we are washing clothes, or just washing things down the drain, they get into our sewage works, which are not designed to remove PFASs because they're ancient. They are also retained in the sewage sludge," she said.

Ms O'Rourke said there were over 5,000 different types of the chemicals now in use. So far they had been regulated individually, but she believes they should be regulated by class.

"Denmark recently banned their use in food-contact paper - like in fast-food packaging - and Britain needs to catch up. Now that we are not under the EU chemicals framework, we need to get our own chemicals strategy," Ms O'Rourke explained.

Some 27 NGOs including Breast Cancer UK, The Alliance for Cancer Prevention and the CHEM Trust have come together to set out the case for a UK Chemicals Strategy, which should include phasing out "all very persistent chemicals, including the whole PFAS family and other halogenated chemicals".

Since 2000, a series of voluntary industry initiatives has limited their use. However, according to the study, concentrations of PFASs are regularly recorded that are above the Environmental Quality Standards for water and fish in England.

In July 2021, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden officially informed the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) of their intention to restrict PFAS.

Dr Elizabeth Chadwick, principal investigator on the Otter Project, encouraged members of the public to continue reporting otters found dead.

"Our research was possible though the ongoing collection of otters found dead from across Britain. Our archive has samples from more 4,000 individuals collected since 1992; it is a unique and important resource for understanding this protected species, and for understanding environmental contamination and health," she said.

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Toxic 'forever chemicals' found in British otters

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Toxic "forever chemicals" used in non-stick saucepans and food packaging have been found in otters across England and Wales, according to a study. The substances, called PFASs, are also used in waterproof clothing, stain resistant products and fire retardants. The chemicals are linked to pregnancy complications, liver disease, cancer and other illnesses.

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The parts of the world suitable for growing coffee, cashews and avocados will change dramatically as the world heats up, according to a new study.

Key coffee regions in Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam and Colombia will all "drastically decrease" by around 50% by 2050.

Suitable areas for cashews and avocados will increase but most will be far from current sites of production.

The authors say that greater efforts must be made to help farmers adapt.

Coffee is one of the world's most important crops, not just as key beverage but as a livelihood for millions of small farmers.

And thanks to growing consumer preferences in richer countries, demand for avocados and cashews has increased substantially in recent decades.

While the threat to coffee from climate change has been well documented in recent years, there is little information about how rising temperatures will impact avocados and cashews.

In this study, the authors looked at how rising temperatures and changing rates of precipitation will impact the three crops over the next 30 years. The researchers have also, for the first time, incorporated information about land and soil characteristics.

Coffee is the most susceptible crop to high temperatures. In those countries accounting for the majority of the world's production of Arabica - the dominant coffee variety - suitability for growing the crop will decrease by around half by 2050 - a "drastic" reduction, according to the report.

Some key areas will see a heavier impact. In the lowest temperature scenario, there would be a reduction of 76% in Brazil's most suitable areas for coffee. In Colombia it would shrink by 63%.

Some regions at the northern and southern ends of today's growing areas will become more suitable, including Argentina, South Africa, China and New Zealand among others.

But according to the authors, this doesn't mean that these new regions can easily replace the current sites.

"The key message for those that are in the main producing regions today is that farming systems have to adapt to the changing conditions," said lead author Roman Grüter, from Zurich University of Applied Sciences.

"If there is already coffee grown in a new area where it is just about possible with some management options, it might get easier or might be possible to expand but it doesn't mean that we will get perfect coffee growing regions within 10 years or so."

For cashews, the picture is different. Overall, the areas of the world that are highly suitable for growing the crop will increase by 17%.

However, in some of the countries that currently are reliant on cashews as a key cash crop the news is not good. India loses significant areas of suitability, while Benin loses half its suitable areas under the lowest modelled increase in temperature.

For avocados, the picture is also complicated - especially in the biggest producing countries.

Mexico, the world's largest producer, sees a major increase in suitable lands, up over 80%. However, Peru - another major grower - loses around half its suitable areas under the same climate model.

While the rise in temperatures and changes in rainfall patterns might make some areas more suitable, the authors are concerned that a major shift to develop these crops in new regions might see more forests converted to farmland or a rise of invasive species.

"In regions that might get more suitable for growing those crops, it is important to make sure that there are no negative environmental impacts such as deforestation," said Roman Grüter.

"In all of these changes, the local stakeholders, the local communities have to get involved in these changing processes. It should be really participatory."

The Sicilian experience

A temperature rise of around 1C over the past 30 years has seen farmers in Sicily turn to a range of new crops more suited to warmer conditions.

One of them is Andrea Passanisi, who grows avocados close to Mount Etna. Along with other producers, this change has been very successful for Andrea.

However, as temperatures continue to rise, growing conditions are getting more difficult.

"The real climate change here is in the seasons," he told BBC News.

"Once it was cold in November and December, now it is January or February - that is not good for avocados."

Increased levels of drought and intense downpours are also challenging for farmers.

"If you grow on land that's not suitable for avocado, it's the end," Andrea said.

"We will continue to grow, as we have good land, but we will not have as much fruit."

While the changing temperatures might seem to be bad news for current growers of these crops, there are some active steps that producers can take that could mitigate climate change.

"It is possible that some regions where avocados are currently grown the use of the genetic variability of avocado might help," said Dr Joaquin Guillermo Ramirez Gil, from the National University of Colombia, who wasn't involved in the new study.

"This species has three 'races' with different geographical origins, which makes it quite 'plastic' to adapt to different climatic conditions.

"There are also local adaptations and new management alternatives such as the use of bio-stimulants and nanotechnology-based products as a basis for reducing stress due to extreme weather conditions."

The research has been published in the journal Plos One.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

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Climate change: Key crops face major shifts as world warms

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Global warming will alter the areas suitable to grow key crops like coffee, cashews and avocados.

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This site provides information on working with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in contained use facilities. Contained use means the work stays within a research laboratory or a biotechnology production facility and not released into the environment.
What are GMOs?

New GMO 2014 Regulations

The Genetically Modified Organisms (Contained Use) Regulations 2014 come into force on 1 October 2014.
GMO 2014 Regulations

GMO Toolbox talk

Genetically Modified Organisms (Contained Use) presentation.
GMO Toolbox Talk

Managing the risks from GMOs

Managing the risks from GMOs requires an assessment of the risks to human health and the environment. This assessment must be carried out and any appropriate control measures put in place before the contained use involving GMOs can begin.
More about GMO risks

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This site provides information on working with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in contained use facilities. Contained use means the work stays within a research laboratory or a biotechnology production facility and not released into the environment. What are GMOs? The Genetically Modified Organisms (Contained Use) Regulations 2014 come into force on 1 October 2014.

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Research into the gene editing of plants in the UK will become much easier with new rules brought forward by the government that will encourage field trials and other development efforts.

Ministers said cutting red tape on gene editing research would help to develop new strains of crops that need less pesticide, have less environmental impact and provide better nutrition. The new rules, introduced in the form of a statutory instrument laid in parliament on Thursday, will apply only to research, rather than allowing gene-edited crops into widespread cultivation or consumption.

It is part of a gradual approach towards gene editing by the government, after public consultation last year. The preferred direction of travel is clear, however, with ministers having repeatedly voiced support for gene editing and genetic modification as aids to modernising farming.

Jo Churchill, the minister for agri-innovation and climate adaptation, said: "New genetic technologies could help us tackle some of the biggest challenges of our age, around food security, climate change and biodiversity loss. Now we have the freedom and opportunity to foster innovation, to improve the environment, and help us grow plants that are stronger and more resilient to climate change."

Field trials will still require notification to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and any future crops or foods would be subject to separate authorisation requirements, as at present. The new rules apply only to gene editing, the process of working on a plant's existing genome, to speed up what could be achieved through natural selection, rather than genetic modification, which can include importing genes from other species.

The government cited sugar beet that is resistant to common viruses, wheat strains that contain less of a possible carcinogen and are adapted to the climate crisis, and tomatoes resistant to mildew, as promising areas of research for UK scientists.

Campaigners have expressed concern that the government's moves over the past year, since Brexit made it possible for the UK to ditch some of the EU's strict rules on GM, may be the prelude to much greater use of gene editing and GM.

Pat Thomas, the director of Beyond GM, a pressure group, said: "Today's announcement is a sop to the biotech research establishment that doesn't really address the most significant hurdles that developers need to face, which are that farmers don't really want to grow genetically engineered crops and citizens don't want to eat them."

She added: "There's a lot of techno-optimism about what kind of gene-edited foods might materialise one day. But none of the crops Defra is talking about is close to coming to market. After 35 years of use, genetically engineered crops have not delivered much in terms of real value and they have largely been a distraction from more meaningful discussions about what kind of food system we want and need to transition to."

Scientists welcomed the rule changes. Prof Nick Talbot, the executive director of the Sainsbury Laboratory, in Norwich, said: "We can achieve the outcomes of plant breeding - which has been so successful in controlling diseases and improving yields - but in a much more precise manner ... to produce nutritious crops requiring much lower fertiliser inputs and with greater resilience. We need innovation to help us escape from the chemical treadmill of current agriculture. In the face of the climate emergency, doing nothing is no longer an option."

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UK moves closer to allowing gene editing of crops by allowing more research

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Research into the gene editing of plants in the UK will become much easier with new rules brought forward by the government that will encourage field trials and other development efforts. Ministers said cutting red tape on gene editing research would help to develop new strains of crops that need less pesticide, have less environmental impact and provide better nutrition.

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Gideon Henderson, chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, believes the time is ripe for a new public debate on biotechnology, the science of manipulating genes in crops and animals.

"The last time we had an extensive public discussion was in the 1990s," he notes. Then, public outrage at the idea of 'Frankenfoods' centred on fears of what might result from newly available techniques that allowed the introduction of genes from one species into a completely different species. Lurid stories of tomatoes altered with fish genes grabbed the headlines.

Those fears were stoked further by boasts, real or rumoured, by companies such as Monsanto of the potential to control the future food chain, putting farmers in their thrall by forcing them to buy expensive seeds and weedkiller, and by the potential for GM crops to contaminate conventional crops or wild plants through cross-pollination.

The result was widespread public revulsion. EU directives in 1996 and 2001 effectively prevented the cultivation of all but a handful of GM crops, and most member states also instituted their own GM restrictions, which remain in place with only a few exceptions today. Many developing countries imposed similar rules on their farmers, fearing exclusion from the EU market.

In the intervening decades, science has moved on. Gene editing tools that act as "genetic scissors" now allow a degree of precision unthought of in the 1990s, whereby individual genes can be targeted and sections of their DNA manipulated, effectively cutting and pasting as one would with an electronic document. This brings within reach the kind of genetic selection within a species that was previously achieved only through decades of selective breeding.

But while scientists see a clear distinction between gene editing - working within a single species to alter the genetic code, in a way identical to the effects of selective breeding - and genetic modification, whereby genes from different species are mixed in a way that could never happen in nature, the EU's judges disagreed. The 2018 ruling by the European court of justice effectively stopped the development in Europe of gene-edited crops, subjecting them to the same rules as GM, which many scientists view as a mistake.

Nick Talbot, executive director of the Sainsbury Laboratory, said: "Gene editing provides the opportunity to carry out precision plant breeding and thereby harness the extraordinary biodiversity of crop species. Very complex traits that contribute to the yield of crops and their ability to adapt to environmental changes can be better understood and new varieties developed. It is vital that this technology - already recognised by the Nobel prize and of vital importance in biomedical science - is evaluated for use in agriculture in the UK."

Gene editing can be applied to plants and animals, though its use on humans is controversial. Gene-edited foods would probably be subject to new labelling rules, but exactly how labelling would work is one of the concerns of the consultation. Robin May, chief scientific adviser to the Food Standards Agency, said: "As with all novel foods, gene-edited foods will only be permitted to be marketed if they are judged to not present a risk to health, not to mislead consumers, and not have lower nutritional value than existing equivalent foods."

Allowing gene editing in England would also provide a major boost to the biotech industry and to the UK's research and development capabilities.

The government is keen to draw a firm distinction between gene editing and genetic modification, but if gene editing is allowed, it will raise the question of whether genetic modification should be re-evaluated.

Henderson believes that debate is for the longer term. "Some would agree [that GM crops are the next logical step], some would disagree," he said. "One of the reasons for the second half of the consultation is to gather views on GM, and there could be legislation on GMOs in the longer term. But the more immediate issue is about precision editing. We are trying to change gene editing now, before a broader debate about GM."

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Environment department scientist calls for biotechnology debate

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Gideon Henderson, chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, believes the time is ripe for a new public debate on biotechnology, the science of manipulating genes in crops and animals. "The last time we had an extensive public discussion was in the 1990s," he notes.

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The world's harvests are coming under increasing pressure from extreme weather events, disease and deteriorating soil health - problems that are set to get worse in the next few decades. Could one solution be to genetically edit our food to make it more resilient? With the UK's recent announcement that it will ease the rules for growing gene-edited crops in England, Madeleine Finlay investigates what it will mean for scientists researching the technology, and why it could become a critical tool for the future of our food

How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

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Is gene editing the future of food? - podcast

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With the UK's announcement that it will ease the rules for growing gene-edited crops, we investigate what this could mean for our food in a changing climate

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/29/genetically-modified-food-a-step-closer-in-england-as-laws-relaxed

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Genetically modified food a step closer in England as laws relaxed

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Government removes costs and red tape in go-ahead for more trials of gene edited crops

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Gaps in environmental protections following the UK's departure from the EU put wildlife, from hedgehogs to dragonflies, at risk, nature groups have warned.

A report for the Wildlife Trusts, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds ( RSPB) and World Wild Fund for Nature ( WWF), warns the UK is at risk of losing regulations preventing hedgerows from being cut during the nesting season and buffer strips from being ploughed or sprayed with pesticides.

Rules ensuring bare soils are protected from draining or blowing away and safeguarding ponds and their wildlife could also be lost without additional regulation, the report says.

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Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

Wildlife, from hedgerow-nesting yellowhammers and small mammals such as hedgehogs to bees and pollinating insects, could be at risk as a result of the gaps opening up in environmental protections post-Brexit, it adds.

The new Agriculture Bill will move subsidies to farmers away from the current system of payments for the amount of land farmed to one in which land managers are paid to protect wildlife and the environment and store carbon.

But the report by the Institute of European Environmental Policy warns many environmental regulations are based on EU law, while agricultural support payments have been conditional on meeting selected green standards.

It says a new system of regulation is needed to maintain and improve farming and environmental standards following the UK's exit from the EU.

The new Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), which the government plans to introduce to replace European oversight of environmental protections, should have the power and resources to make sure environmental rules relating to agriculture are implemented and enforced effectively, it adds.

And compliance with environmental regulations should apply to all farmers, irrespective of whether they receive public funding, the report urges.

Ellie Brodie, the Wildlife Trusts' senior policy manager, said: "We're really concerned that the Agriculture Bill does not contain the regulation that's so desperately needed and nature will continue to take the rap.

"Gaps must be filled and enforcement must be strengthened if we're to address the nature crisis and climate emergency.

"It's absolutely vital that all new regulations apply to every single farmer - not just those who sign up to the schemes designed to help wildlife - otherwise, to take just one example, damaging pesticides could pollute rivers and taxpayers will pay an even higher price for their clean drinking water."

Tom Lancaster, from the RSPB, said: "The Agriculture Bill includes vital new powers to pay farmers to restore nature, but is silent on the rules and regulations for farming in the future.

"With the change that Brexit will bring, this presents real risks to our soils and hedgerows, and the nature that depends upon them.

Debbie Tripley, from WWF, added there was a need to have firm but fair enforcement and advice that will ensure food is produced to high environmental standards across the country.

"And our farmers' efforts must not be undercut by imports that are cheap in price but catastrophically expensive for our natural world and climate - so future trade deals must clearly reject deforestation and other poor agricultural practices, at the same time as we invest in standards and proper enforcement in the UK," she said.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), said: "We will continue to be a world leader on the environment as we leave the EU and both the Agriculture Bill and the Environment Bill are a crucial part of that.

"We will not lower the exceptionally high environmental standards we already hold. In fact, leaving the EU means we can transform British agriculture to reward farmers for enhancing the environment, tackling climate change and protecting our wildlife for future generations."
Press Association

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Brexit puts wildlife at risk as UK faces losing environmental protections, report warns

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Gaps in environmental protections following the UK's departure from the EU put wildlife, from hedgehogs to dragonflies, at risk, nature groups have warned.

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The European Parliament has approved new rules on GM crops, designed to break the stalemate between pro and anti-GM countries.

The legislation will give governments more power to decide whether to grow GM crops, after years of deadlock.

Some see the move as "a victory for common sense". Others warn it may prove detrimental, by undermining innovation and the single market.

Only one GM crop - a type of maize used for animal feed - is grown commercially in the EU.

There have been no new GM crops approved since 1998, apart from a type of GM potato, which was withdrawn, as countries opposed to GM have been able to block Europe-wide approval.

Member states will receive a licence to ban safe products which have been approved at European level, and they will be allowed to base these bans on non-scientific grounds
Jeff Rowe, Europabio

Under the new legislation, agreed on Tuesday in Strasbourg, any new GM crops in the pipeline would still go through the European risk approval process.

Once deemed safe, individual countries would be able to decide for themselves whether to plant them. But experts are divided on whether it will lead to the planting of fewer or more GM crops in Europe.

Innovation concerns

Prof Huw Jones of Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire, which carries out research on GM crops, described the vote as "a step forward".

"As a scientist who uses GM as a research tool, I think it's a step forward, it's a step in the right direction because it could engage the big biotech companies in Europe again," he says.

But some warn that the move is a "stop sign for innovation in Europe".

"Member states will receive a licence to ban safe products which have been approved at European level, and they will be allowed to base these bans on non-scientific grounds," says Jeff Rowe, chairman of the Agri-Food Council of Europabio, the European Association for Bioindustries.

"This sets a dangerous precedent for the internal market and sends a negative signal to innovative industries considering investing in Europe."

Practical hurdles

Peter Melchett, policy director of the Soil Association, says that countries wishing to grow GM crops face "a huge risk". Political leaders in Scotland and Wales are opposed to GM crops and can now ban them from the fields, despite the crop being cleared on health and safety grounds at the EU level.

"It will help Scotland and Wales consolidate their opposition to GMOs by banning them," he says. "In England it's unclear because there are currently no GM crops that could be grown in England and it's not clear if any will be developed, but what is clear is there is still no demand for GM food from supermarkets and others in England."

Friends of the Earth campaigner Clare Oxborrow says while the decision is "good news" for nations like Scotland and Wales, it is a "double-edged sword that could open the door to GM crops being grown in England".

The new rules also raise practical questions, such as how to deal with land borders in neighbouring countries, and whether companies will be willing to spend hundreds of millions on regulatory requirements when not all nations will buy them.

GM crops are used widely in the US and Asia, but nine countries have opposed their cultivation in the EU (Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg and Poland).

For some EU nations, GMO foods are seen as a potential threat to the reputation of its agricultural produce, while in others, ministers argue it is an essential technology to feed a growing world population.

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The European Parliament has approved new rules on GM crops, designed to break the stalemate between pro and anti-GM countries. The legislation will give governments more power to decide whether to grow GM crops, after years of deadlock. Some see the move as "a victory for common sense".

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Monsanto ordered to pay $289m as jury rules weedkiller caused man’s cancer

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Court finds in favor of Dewayne Johnson, first person to take Roundup maker to trial

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Natural GMOs??

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12 September 2019, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Gülzow: At the State Research Centre for ... [+]
dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images

A new study finds that many common foods, including beer and tea, turn out to be "natural" GMOs. What's a health-food purist to do?
Even though no one has found any evidence that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are harmful, anti-GMO activists have campaigned against them for years, with considerable success. As of this writing, 19 out of 28 countries in the European Union have voted to ban or severely restrict genetically modified plants, and many other countries impose similar bans.

But all of these restrictions may be in vain, because nature got there first. It turns out that many common foods have already been genetically modified, by a bacterium called Agrobacterium. (Read on to see the list.) And, in news that should be even more frightening to the anti-GMO crowd, these foods are transgenic: they contain genetic material from completely different species. Frankenfoods!

First, as I've argued before, genetic modification technology is just a tool, and a very precise one at that. Scientifically, claiming that GMOs are bad for you is nonsensical-it depends entirely on what the genetic modification is. Whether a food scientist modifies a tomato to taste better by traditional breeding or by using GM technology, you still end up with a tomato that has different genetic content. The only difference is that with traditional breeding, you have no idea what exactly you changed in the plant's DNA. And humans have already consumed billions of servings of GM foods with no ill effects. The GM foods we eat today are perfectly safe.

So back to my first point. What are all these natural Frankenfoods, and how did they get that way?

I'll start with the common sweet potato, or yam. Humans eat hundreds of varieties of sweet potatoes, and you can buy them in markets on every continent. Back in 2015, a group of scientists from Belgium, Peru, China, and the US (Tina Kyndt and colleagues) discovered that every cultivated variety of sweet potato has "foreign" DNA integrated into its genome, from a bacterium called (appropriately) Agrobacterium. They tested 291 different varieties, and found the bacterium 100% of the time. They also tested wild relatives of sweet potato, and found that the wild varieties (which humans don't eat) are missing the bacterial DNA.

Agrobacterium is a bacterium with special properties: it has evolved to be able to insert its DNA directly into the genomes of a wide variety of plants. (Don't worry, it doesn't infect humans.) In sweet potatoes, this happened naturally, centuries or millenia ago, long before humans were cultivating it. But then we came along, and (apparently) we liked the taste of these naturally transgenic sweet potatoes, so those are the ones that we chose to cultivate. As a result, all the sweet potatoes we eat are GMOs, although it happened naturally.

That was five years ago. But in a newly published study, scientists Tatiana Matveeva from Russia and Léon Otten from France discovered that Agrobacterium has made its way into dozens of other plants, including some of our favorite foods and drinks. Matveeva and Otten searched through the genomes (the DNA) of hundreds of plants, and found 39 natural GMOs, as they called them.

So without further ado, here are the natural GMO foods, all of them transgenic, with the common name followed by the formal species name in italics:

bananas (Musa acuminata)

beer (hops) (Humulus lupulus)

cranberries (Vaccinium macrocarpon)

date-plum (Diospyros lotus)

guava (Psidium guajava)

peanuts (Arachis hypogaea)

pomelo fruit (Citrus maxima)

Suriname cherry (Eugenia uniflora)

sweet potatoes (Ipomoea species)

tea (Camellia sinensis, which is used for most teas)

walnuts (Juglans species)

yams (Dioscorea alata)

That's right, beer and tea are GMOs-even if they are labelled as "organic." Keep in mind that this list is undoubtedly incomplete: the new study relied on current genome databases, which are still missing many common foods.

If you're reading this, you've probably already consumed countless servings of transgenic, GMO foods. As I wrote above, there's no reason to believe that GMO foods are harmful in any way. Plenty of plants are naturally poisonous, of course (think hemlock), but widely-consumed foods got that way for a reason: people like to eat them, and they help sustain us.

If you believe the alarmist claims of the anti-GMO movement, then you're going to have to start avoiding many more foods, including everything on the list above. And yes, that includes beer.

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Surprise! Your Beer And Tea Are Actually Transgenic GMOs

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A new study finds that dozens of common plants, including many foods and two of the world's most popular beverages, are "natural" GMOs that contain bacterial DNA, making them transgenic as well. Will this change the thinking of anti-GMO activists?

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More visitors than ever will head to national parks this summer. Here's what we can do to keep the wild in wilderness-and set parks on a sustainable path for the next century.

This year marks the centennial of the National Park Service, and record numbers of visitors are expected to celebrate by exploring the system's incomparable natural, historical, and cultural resources.

Marvel at how wild the parks can be without human interference.

All those adventure seekers impact parks. But there's a respectful way to go about it.

When a tourist loaded a young bison into the back of his car at Yellowstone National Park last month, the incident shocked people inside and outside the park. But there are ways all visitors-park veterans or nature newbies-can minimize effects on these irreplaceable places and set parks on a sustainable path for the next century. You can help keep the in wilderness and maybe even leave parks better than you found them.

Keeping the wild in wilderness

Since the bison calf incident on May 9, Yellowstone National Park officials are on high alert. The driver, Shamash Kassam, of Canada, was cited for "picking up and disturbing a bison calf" when he encountered what he said was a "wet and shivering" calf in Lamar Valley. Concerned for its survival, he said, he plucked the bison from the roadway, placed it into the back of his SUV, and drove it to nearby Lamar Buffalo Ranch. Attempts by park personnel to reintegrate the calf into its herd were unsuccessful, and, since it posed a safety concern by continually approaching people, it was euthanized. According to the Casper Star-Tribune of Casper, Wyo., Kassam pleaded guilty on June 2. He was sentenced to six months probation and ordered to pay a fine and a $500 contribution to the Yellowstone Park Foundation Wildlife Protection Fund.

According to those with decades of experience in the country's first national park, visitors do best by wildlife if they keep their distance, don't feed the animals, and take photos focused more on the animals and less on their selfies. Many parks, including Yellowstone, require a 25-yard buffer zone for ungulates like deer, elk, and bison and a 100-yard no-go zone for predators like bears and wolves.

"Some people just think that's a suggestion, but the rules are not arbitrary; they are in the best interest of people and resources," says Yellowstone spokesperson Charissa Reid.

This recording should be all the incentive you need to stay at least 100 yards from bears: https://t.co/2Kgq0opZIm. pic.twitter.com/UjK73leTTq

- YellowstoneNPS (@YellowstoneNPS) May 27, 2016

Whether it's bison or bears, wild animals are protective of their young and will aggressively defend them. Last year, in separate events, five people who encroached on bison were seriously injured. Kerry Gunther, a bear expert in his 34th year in Yellowstone, emphasizes that people are putting themselves at risk when approaching or chasing down wildlife. "Wildlife is aggressive when they don't know what you're going to do," he says. "Wildlife needs our concern but not our assistance."

"Wildlife needs our concern but not our assistance."

The bison put in the car isn't the first incident this season that has park officials concerned. In recent weeks, there has been a rash of dangerous and illegal behavior-people trying to pose for close-ups with bison or, in one instance, trying to pet an adult bison-some of which has been captured on video and made the rounds on social media. In one incident, four young men visiting the park ventured off the boardwalk at the Great Prismatic Spring-away from the walkways put in place not only to protect visitors from scalding water and sometimes thin geothermal crust, but also to safeguard the delicate bacterial mats which give the spring its stunning colors. No one in the party was injured, but they ended up in hot water with park authorities.

Leading the park's response to record numbers of visitors is Yellowstone's social scientist, Ryan Atwell. It's his job to understand what people are hoping to get out of their time in the park and to match that with staff objectives to educate and regulate, to protect park resources, and to safeguard visitors. "We have so many different kinds of visitors with different definitions of what they think 'wild' is," says Atwell. "Some think, 'I'm in a park, it must be safe'," he says, but that can lead to plenty of injuries and many more near-misses. So stay on the trail, say the experts, and marvel at how wild the parks can be without human interference.

Waste not

More than 300 million annual park visitors generate a lot of trash, at least 100 million pounds of it. And that's just the garbage that's handled by the National Park Service (NPS); it doesn't include the cast-offs generated by visitors in restaurants, lodges, and tour buses. But from Glacier to Everglades, there are things every park visitor can do to minimize the mess.

Roughly a year ago, the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) and Subaru launched a pilot project in partnership with the NPS. The car manufacturer has operated a "zero-landfill" assembly plant for more than a decade and agreed to lend that expertise to parks. The initiative is now focused on three big parks-Denali, Grand Teton, and Yosemite-where 7 million combined visitors generated 16.6 million pounds of waste in 2013. Nearly 10 million pounds of that was sent to landfills that year, and the rest was reused, recycled, or, where possible, composted.

NPCA's Hayley Mortimer says those parks are now setting goals to greatly reduce what's diverted to landfills, which requires bringing together stakeholders-from gateway communities and park concessionaires to day-trippers-who need to sign on to the program if it's going to succeed. Visitors to some parks this summer may see signage advising "Don't Fill the Landfills" in an effort to have waste deposited into the correct bins. Information gleaned so far from the zero-landfill project revealed that mindless tossing of items into the wrong bins is still a major issue. Simply paying attention to where you're throwing something can also set a good example for other visitors. (And don't forget to remove the never-recyclable lids from bottles!)

"Your choices and behavior are imperative for the sustainability of these places,"

But really helping to reduce the stream of garbage in parks starts before you get there. Mortimer urges visitors to "rethink their picnic" and opt for reusable containers over plastic bags or bottles-including water bottles, coffee cups, dishware, and silverware. Parks are working to increase the number of water-bottle refilling stations, and the water, says Mortimer, is safe. Since food waste is the primary source of garbage in parks, if you're eating in a park, don't order more than you need and, if you do, pack containers to take home the leftovers.

Two other trash tips to leave parks in better shape than you found them: C hoose air dryers instead of paper towels in restrooms; collect micro-trash when you see it (like that tiny corner of the granola bar wrapper that flies away when you're opening it). " Your choices and behavior are imperative for the sustainability of these places," says Mortimer.

Enjoy the view

In the early 1990s, an uptick in visitors to parts of Zion National Park turned into 5,000 vehicles vying for 400 parking spaces on a peak season day along the Zion Canyon Scenic Drive. Out of frustration, visitors parked pretty much anywhere, which had a serious impact on some park resources. In 2000, the park put in place the mandatory, and highly successful, shuttle that still operates daily from March through October.

Several other parks have followed Zion's lead, but many more offer voluntary shuttles (including heavily visited Yosemite, Rocky Mountain, Acadia, and Grand Canyon) and other alternative transit. The NPS reports having 147 alternative transportation systems in 72 parks.

DYK?: Zion has a pedestrian entrance too? It can be the easiest way to enter our park. pic.twitter.com/uBbYr9D2lH

- Zion National Park (@ZionNPS) May 25, 2016

As park visitation continues to climb-there were more than 300 million visitors to parks in 2015 and even more are expected in this centennial year-park roads have become more congested. The NPS is quick to point out that it has not responded to that crush by building new roads or even expanding existing ones, but is instead focused on alternative transit. (Never mind that with a nearly $12 billion maintenance backlog it can barely afford to fill potholes.)

Congestion on roads means air and noise pollution, parking woes, and traffic headaches. Opting for a shuttle or tram reduces wear and tear on park infrastructure, protects plant and animal life, and creates cleaner and quieter parks for everyone. Not only does getting out from behind the wheel benefit park resources, but it takes the stress out of navigating tricky terrain and allows everyone to take in the sights. And isn't that the reason we go to national parks?

"Some of us are worried that Yellowstone is becoming more of an amusement park atmosphere."

Whether it's behaving well around wildlife, being mindful of waste, or reducing carbon pollution by swapping your ride, visitors have countless opportunities to leave parks better than they found them.

Atwell talks about turning unfortunate incidents into opportunities to educate all visitors and to clarify their roles in the stewardship of nature. "Some of us are worried that Yellowstone is becoming more of an amusement park atmosphere. But it's still an amazing, dynamic experience to be in this park. It can be a powerfully positive experience," he says.

The key is "respect," he says, a word uttered many times since the beginning of the tourist season. In places like Yellowstone, Denali, or the Great Smoky Mountains, each visitor needs to step back, encounter those priceless resources within limits, and value them as a national heritage they help safeguard. Atwood has seen the park and the people many times at their best, and often with groups of college students who cry at the end of their time in Yellowstone. Those human-wild interactions can be, he says, "phenomenally life changing opportunities."

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How to Not Love the National Parks to Death - Yes! Magazine

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More visitors than ever will head to national parks this summer. Here's what we can do to keep the wild in wilderness-and set parks on a sustainable path for the next century. This year marks the centennial of the National Park Service, and record numbers of visitors are expected to celebrate by exploring the system's incomparable natural, historical, and cultural resources.