Health and Medicine – Page 18

Melamine in baby formula, an open secret

melamine-eggs Thousands of babies had apparently taken ill having drunk formula milk to which the organic compound melamine had been added. The melamine was being added by unscrupulous operatives somewhere in the milk supply chain, to artificially boost the nitrogen content of the product, and so spoof higher protein levels than are actually present.

Subsequently, lists of contaminated products appeared in the media and on the web and as the melamine scandal widened, the Chinese government issued an apology and promised to crack down on the problem.

However, with news this week that batches of eggs imported into Hong Kong from China have tested positive for melamine, which is suspected of causing kidney problems, it now appears that the compound is being added routinely to animal feed in China. According to the BBC, this news has been released into the Chinese state media by a government realising it has far less control over food standards that it ought to have.

The melamine scandal is not new. It is essentially an open secret in China that the compound is added to all kinds of foods, particularly animal feed and pet food to artificially inflate the protein readings at the so-called quality control stage. Melamine was at the heart of the petfood scandal in 2007, but that was simply the first time that the West learned of the problem. It seems obvious that melamine could have been in the food chain much longer than that.

But, whether the open secret of melamine in the food supply is actually as serious a problem as the media would have us believe is down to toxic dose. AP quotes Peter Dingle, a toxicologist from Murdoch University, Perth, Australia, who says that aside from the tainted baby formula that killed at least four Chinese infants and left 54,000 children hospitalized in September, it is unlikely humans will get sick from melamine. The amount of the chemical in a few servings of bacon, for instance, would simply be too low, he said. But he is not recommending that the practice continue unchecked. China should have cracked down sooner on feed companies he and others have said.

However, if the melamine open secret is as big as it appears from the outside, it is unlikely to be stopped any time soon, particularly because of the heirarchical government system in China. “It could take five or even 10 years” before some companies stop adding the chemical to food products, Jason Yan of the US Grains Council is quoted by AP.

Where to find a four-leaf clover

TL:DR – You might consider yourself lucky to find a four-leaf clover, the aberration in this species of plant occurs in 1 in 10000 specimens. You have a chance of spotting one in a large, well-established patch of clover.

Three-leaf clovers are commonplace. The four-leaf clover is an uncommon variation of the common, three-leaved clover. According to tradition, such leaves bring good luck to their finders, especially if found accidentally. According to legend, each leaf represents something: the first is for hope, the second is for faith, the third is for love, and the fourth is for luck. Actively seeking out a four-leaf clover will not bring you good luck. In fact, there is no such thing as luck, so even if you accidentally find one it’s not going to change your life.

An anonymous visitor to the site emailed me: “I found a 5 leaf clover… do you know anything about it? Is it good luck or bad luck?”

It’s just a mutation, like the four-leaf clover, of course. The four-leaf mutation is quite rare occurring once in about 10,000 specimens. Five is rarer still. But, according to this site: Five-leaf Clovers bring extra good luck and attracts money.

Nice, I wonder why the banks don’t breed these things and hand them out to their managers.

Of course, there is no such thing as “luck” and no number of leaves on a member of the more than 300-strong species of plants in the pea family Fabaceae is going to change that. Clover (Trifolium), or trefoil, usually means three-leafed, hence the surprise when one finds a specimen with four, five or more leaflets. The world record clover is an uber clover with 21 leaflets, although the Guinness record site says 18. At the time of writing, Wikipedia had both figures on two different pages. Intriguingly, both the 18 and 21 leaflet specimens were found/grown by Shigeo Obara, a farmer in Japan’s Iwate prefecture.

Clover is found across the globe, most species are found in the temperate parts of the Northern Hemisphere, but many also occur in South America and Africa, particularly at high altitudes in the tropics. Clovers are small annual, biennial, and short-lived perennial herbaceous plants. To “be in clover” means to be living a carefree life of ease, comfort, and prosperity. But, if you’re due for a drug test make sure you haven’t been drinking milk from cows fed on clover. Clover has a small amount of morphine, which can end up in bottled milk. Eating clover itself can trigger blood and urine drug tests. It’s one more excuse for unlucky athletes caught abusing the system.

Any Irish shamrock (trefoil: God, Son, Holy Spirit) religious analogy doesn’t explain the luck associated with the clover’s fourth leaflet. If anything one would imagine that a fourth leaflet would represent something abhorrent added to the Holy Trinity of Catholicism, the Devil, perhaps, and so be bad luck. Although some say it is meant to represent God’s grace. According to the Wisegeek site, when Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, Eve is supposed to have carried a four leaf clover. “Curiously, the lore of the white clover plant is also associated with repelling snakes, though it didn’t seem to work in the Garden of Eden,” the site says. I suspect the snake-repellant aspect comes from the Irish St Patrick legend. Ireland famously has no snakes.

As mentioned above, one important aspect of the four-leaf clover myth is that for it to bring luck you must find it serendipitously, there’s no point in searching for one and certainly no point in buying one; several websites offer for sale hand-picked four-leaf clovers! However, if you were a child in the Middle Ages who found a four-leaf clover you would have been given the gift of being able to see fairies and plant sprites…

It seems that searching for four-leaf and beyond clovers is a perennial favourite among children and if it gets them out in to their gardens or the countryside on a long hike to search for the biggest then that’s no bad thing. Indeed, the exercise and fresh air will no doubt bring them luck by helping to stave off obesity and type 2 diabetes. Just don’t let them pick any dandelions…it’ll make them wet the bed, you know? [Not really, that’s Deceived Wisdom]

The original short version of this post originally appeared on Sciencebase – 2005-05-19. Updated 2017-06-21.

Ayurvedic Heavy Metal

Before reading on, and specifically before asking why I’ve used a picture of Buddha in an article about Ayurveda…it’s not Buddha, it’s Nagarjuna, redactor of the Sushruta Samhita a sixth century BCE text on surgery, the only treatise for two of the eight branches of Ayurveda. The snake is part of Nagarjuna and is usually depicted as a protective canopy, I’ve never seen Buddha depicted in that way. Apologies for any confusion, but please no more comments or emails telling me I’ve used an inappropriate photo. I don’t believe I have.

Ayurvedic medicines can contain dangerous quantities of heavy metals, including lead, mercury, thallium and arsenic, clinical toxicologists in London have warned. Writing in the International Journal of Environment and Health, they suggest that recent European legislation aimed at improving safety of shop-bought products will have little impact on medicines prescribed by traditional practitioners, imported personally from overseas or bought over the Internet.

The problem is that the heavy metals are not simply inadvertent contaminants of natural herbal products, they are added deliberately in order to supposedly return the body to health by rebalancing allegedly essential minerals. You can read the full article on this via AlphaGalileo.

There are wide and wild claims for Ayurvedic medicine including the ability to treat diabetes, flue, cancer, asthma, flu, acne, boils, diarrhoea, headaches, and that perennial of the alternative remedy market, sex drive. Unfortunately, Ayurveda, although ancient, is no panacea.

Some practitioners are hoping to modernise the Ayurvedic system. However, until it is more widely recognised among users that adding arsenic, lead, thallium and other potentially toxic heavy metals to so-called medicinal preparations is unacceptable, it will remain a practice more associated with the past than contemporary medicine.

Paul I. Dargan, Indika B. Gawarammana, John R.H. Archer, Ivan M. House, Debbie Shaw, David M. Wood (2008). Heavy metal poisoning from Ayurvedic traditional medicines: an emerging problem? International Journal of Environment and Health, 2 (3/4), 463-474

Open Access in Africa

development-heatmap-africa There is much talk about Open Access. There are those in academia who argue the pros extensively in all fields, biology, chemistry, computing. Protagonists are making massive efforts to convert users to this essentially non-commercial form of information and knowledge.

Conversely, there are those in the commercial world who ask, who will pay for OA endeavours and how can growth (current recession and credit crunch aside) continue in a capitalist, democratic society, without the opportunity to profit from one’s intellectual property.

Those for and against weigh up both sides of the argument repeatedly. However, they often neglect one aspect of the concept of Open Access: how they might extend it to the developing nations, to what ends, and with what benefits.

Writing in a forthcoming paper in the International Journal of Technology Management, Williams Nwagwu of the Africa Regional Center for Information Science (ARCIS) at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria and Allam Ahmed of the Science and Technology Policy Research (SPRU) at the University of Sussex, UK, suggest that developing countries, particularly those in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), are suffering from a scientific information famine. They say that beginning at the local level and networking nationally could help us realise the potential for two-way information traffic.

The expectation that the internet would facilitate scientific information flow does not seem to be realisable, owing to the restrictive subscription fees of the high quality sources and the beleaguering inequity in the access and use of the internet and other Information and Communication Technology (ICT) resources.

Nwagwu and Ahmed have assessed the possible impact the Open Access movement may have on addressing this inequity in SSA by removing the restrictions on accessing scientific knowledge. They highlight the opportunities and challenges but also demonstrate that there are often mismatches between what the “donor” countries and organisations might reasonably offer and what the SSA countries can actually implement. Moreover, they explain the slow uptake of Open Access in SSA as being related to the perception of the African scientists towards the movement and a lack of concern by policymakers.

The researchers suggest that the creation of a digital democracy could prevent the widening information gap between the developed and the developing world. Without the free flow of information between nations, particularly in and out of Africa and other developing regions, there may be no true global economy.

“Whatever might emerge as a global economy will be skewed in favour of the information-haves, leaving behind the rich resources of Africa and other regions, which are often regarded as information have-nots,” the researchers say. It is this notion that means that it is not only SSA that will lose out on the lack of information channels between the SSA and the developed world, but also those in the developed world.

“The current pattern of the globalisation process is leaving something very crucial behind, namely the multifaceted intellectual ‘wealth’ and ‘natural resources’ of Africa,” they add. “The beauty of a truly globalised world would lie in the diversity of the content contributed by all countries.

From this perspective, they say, the free flow of scientific articles must be pursued by developing countries, particularly SSA, with vigour. “African countries should as a matter of priority adopt collaborative strategies with agencies and institutions in the developed countries where research infrastructures are better developed, and where the quest for access to scientific publication is on the increase.”

They suggest that efforts could begin locally having found that even within single institutions in most African countries, access to scientific articles is very scant. “Local institutions should initiate local literature control services with the sole aim of making the content available to scientists,” they suggest.

Proper networking of institutions across a country could then ease access to scientific publications. One such initiative in Nigeria has started under the National University Commission’s NUNet Project but wider support from governments is necessary to build the infrastructure. Research oriented institutions could use their funds to grant free access to their readers, especially given that many already pay subscription fees for their readers in large amounts.

Meanwhile, can music bring open relief to Africa?

Williams E. Nwagwu, Allam Ahmed (2009). Building open access in Africa International Journal of Technology Management, 45 (1/2), 82-101 I put in a request with the publishers for this paper to be made freely available, it is now so. You can download the PDF here.

Melamine Apology

wen-jiabao The day after yet more melamine in food warnings, this time in Bangladesh where eight imported powdered milk products have been banned and in Italy, it is reported that the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, has apologised for the Chinese government’s complacency in the melamine in milk scandal. Tainted baby formula milk has killed at least four babies in China and led to the hospitalisation of tens of thousands; it has also caused undue worry for parents the world over.

“We feel that though the incident occurred in enterprises, the government is also responsible,” Wen said in a rare interview with Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of Science magazine. The rare one on one interview took place on September 30 and was published in the US journal yesterday. Wen, apparently expressed sorrow and promised new food regulations after the melamine-tainted milk debacle.

Previously, the head of China’s food quality watchdog, Li Changjiang, resigned “with state approval” back in September, at the height of the scandal, according to the Xinhua news agency. And, yesterday, New Zealand’s Stuff suggested that organised criminal gangs may have been behind the tainted milk that brought down the Chinese operations of the country’s food giant Fonterra.

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Melamine and Kidney Failure

Sciencebase readers following the melamine story and concerned about melamine contaminated foods, will hopefully be interested in the latest expert opinion on the scandal.

Roberta Weiss, a nephrologist (kidney doctor) emailed to provide Sciencebase readers with some more background on melamine contamination and toxicity. Weiss suggests that, “Probably acute renal failure resulting from cyanuric acid crystal formation in the kidneys of babies that ingested the melamine contaminated formula was responsible for the infant deaths, not kidney stone formation.”

Weiss is a kidney doctor for adults, but emphasises that she has never seen a case of melamine related kidney or bladder stones. However, there have been animal studies carried out since the 1980s that do demonstrate that the ingestion of melamine by mice can cause bladder stones, known technically as urolitiasis. These are apparently associated with ulcerations in the bladder. Weiss adds that the animal food tainted with melamine that killed so many pets in the US contained products in the feed from China.

As I’ve mentioned here before, melamine is an organic compound used in the manufacture of plastics and fertilizers. It releases cyanide when burned and has been associated with cyanide poisoning in industrial accidents. Melamine monomer, as opposed to the plastic used to make kitchen utensils and table coverings, itself also has irritant properties. It has been added to various food products to illicitly and fraudulently boost the measured protein content without the expense of actually improving the food’s nutritional value.

According to The Register, Chinese company, Xuzhou Anying, was advertising “dust of melamine” as something it called “ESB protein powder” on the global market trading website, Alibaba. “The latest product, ESB protein powder, which is researched and developed by Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co., Ltd… Contains protein 160 – 300 percent, which solves the problem for shortage of protein resource,” it boasted. A horrifying thought, makes you wonder what is actually in those nasty protein powder drinks bodybuilders use.

“Melamine ingestion results in the production of cyanuric acid in the kidneys,” adds Weiss, “which results in intratubular crystal formation and acute renal failure.” This, she explains occurred in cats who were fed melamine in combination with cyanuric acid experimentally after the pet food issues to demonstrate what may have been happening during that incident.

According to Economics And Finance (Cai Jing) magazine, as reported in the Epoch Times, it is common practice to add melamine to livestock feed along with sodium nitrite, urea, ammonia, silica, potassium nitrate, sodium nitrite, glacial acetic acid, activated carbon materials, urea, ammonia, potassium nitrate, to improve its nutritional profile and other properties of the feed. The use of melamine in this context contravenes international regulations where they exist.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) points out that, “Regulation regarding its use in animal feed do not always exist as it is only recent events which indicated the need to regulate for this substance. However, some countries have established regulations and do not permit the use of melamine in animal feed.” Indeed, the FAO specifically states: “Melamine is not permitted in food or feed stuffs.”

Nevertheless, the FAO says, melamine is often used in agricultural fertilisers. But, has also warned that the commonly used pesticide cyromazine can break down to form melamine (PDF document). This might also explain why melamine has been found in lettuce, water cress, tomatoes, mushrooms, potatoes and other agricultural products in China. Contamination levels are very low at 17 milligrams of melamine per kilogram of mushrooms, for instance. They are notably low compared to the levels of melamine found in contaminated infant formula milk, which were as high as 2560 milligrams per kilogram of ready-to-eat product. The levels of cyanuric acid in these products is unknown.

Sciencebase regular “Offy” pointed me to the North Korean publication The Daily NK, which asks whether there were melamine deaths in 2005. “According to merchants trading between China and North Korea, the Chinese Melamine-tainted milk affair started in Pyongyang in the summer of 2005. At the time, infants who ate imported Chinese powdered milk fell unconscious and, in more serious cases, died.” At the time, the North Korean authorities tested imported Chinese milk and banned it on the basis of their findings.

Because of the pet food problem, pet owners like Offy, have been following this stayed on this for well over a year. “Politics has trumped health in favour of industry for a very long time in the US…it’s not just a problem in China,” she says. Cai Jing blames a lack of supervision for the melamine crisis and suggests an approach that will allow China’s fledgling market economy to continue to grow but at the same time minimising the chances of a similar scandal occurring again. It says that the melamine milk crisis has taught China that government oversight to spot corruption is essential, but it also suggests that the government not be allowed to simply meddle with the market. This would, Cai Jing says, be the only way to ensure a safe food industry.

Why is melamine in baby formula, your food — and your pets’ meals?
Major Chinese supermarket chain in Canada pulls yogurt drinks from shelves
T&T; Supermarkets pulls yogurt drinks from shelves
China: 12 more arrests in tainted milk case

Nobel Prize for Medicine 2008

This year the Nobel committee has awarded the Prize for Physiology or Medicine to Harald zur Hausen for his discovery of human papilloma viruses (HPV) causing cervical cancer and to FranÃ§oise BarrÃ©-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The announcement was made via the Nobel organisation’s Twitter page and on their site.

zur Hausen (born 1936) works at the German Cancer Research Centre Heidelberg. BarrÃ©-Sinoussi (born 1947) is at the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Unit, Virology Department, Institut Pasteur Paris, France and Montagnier (born 1932) is at the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention also in Paris. The full press release for the announcement of the Medicine Prize is here. Where’s Robert Gallo in all this one wonders?

You can get up to the minute alerts on the chemistry, physics, and other Nobels announced later this week via the Nobel site and their new alerting systems with SMS, RSS, Twitter and more (thanks to new publicity guy and friend of Sciencebase Simon Frantz and his colleagues).

nobel-medal You can find the iGoogle gadget for the Prizes here. There’s a news widget here and the Nobel RSS is here.

Physics is announced October 7 (dark energy/dark matter perhaps?), Chemistry (another aspect of biology, no doubt) October 8, Literature on Thursday, we give Peace a chance on Friday, finally the Economics Prize on Monday 13th (hopefully it won’t go to a merchant banker, given the state of the global economy at the moment). You can get a list of past winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine here and the Nobel announcement here.

Chillis and Cancer

If you’ve ever worried that a steaming hot bowl of chili or cajun chicken might be doing you more harm than good, then you’re not alone. Research earlier this decades pointed out that capsaicin (the “hot” compound in red hot chili peppers) and safrole (the hot molecule in black pepper) could both be carcinogenic.

Thankfully, for lovers of Mexican-American, Cajun, white Creole, black Creole, spicy Indian food, Malaysian, Thai etc etc…the opposite seems to be true. It is more likely that compounds found in spicy foods are good for us. One might wonder how such cuisine could have persisted for countless generations if they weren’t good for us. After all the news just in on saturated animal fat is that even it is better for us than the last 20 years of health scaremongering would have you believe and we have been eating that for countless, countless generations.

Anyway, the BayBlab submission to the Cancer Research Blog Carnival #14 hosted on Sciencebase today, cites the various compounds in spices that are thought to have health-giving properties. These include turmeric (curcumin), red chili (capsaicin), cloves (eugenol), ginger (zerumbone), fennel (anethole), kokum (gambogic acid), fenugreek (diosgenin), and black cumin (thymoquinone). The ability of all these compounds to prevent, rather than cause, cancer has apparently now been established.

So, with your health taken care of, it’s time to turn up the heat and tuck into that chili bowl with a smug, if scorched, look on your face!

Cancer Research Blog Carnival #14

cancer research blog carnival I don’t know anyone who hasn’t got a cancer story to tell, whether it is personal experience, a relative or friend, or association with their patients or through their research.

Cancer has always been with us, but contrary to the popular image propagated by the mainstream media it is not a simple, nor single disease. In this month’s cancer research blog carnival hosted on the Sciencebase Science Blog, I present a few selected posts from fellow bloggers discussing various aspects of cancer research. Thanks to everyone who submitted a cancer research post.

First up is PalMD on the Denialism blog who explains that cancer is the second leading cause of death, in the US at least, and confirms the ubiquity of the disease as 4% of the population is directly affected (think six degrees of separation type networks to see how almost all of us can have a cancer story to tell). The post provides answers to some of the LAQs (least asked questions) and FAQs (frequently asked questions about cancer. A post from Stephan Grindley augments the cancer 101 with a straightforward commentary on breast cancer prevention and detection.

According to Charles Daney on Science & Reason, recent studies are making it increasingly apparent that cancer is really many different diseases and he explains how this means a new approach to understanding cancer at the molecular level.

More particularly covering cancer research, GrrlScientist offers an interesting take on the genetics of colour and cancer in Behold The Pale Horse and BayBlab discusses a recent publication in the journal Science on the subject of trans splicing and chromosomal translocations as well as the connection between chilis and cancer – preventative or protagonist?

HighlightHealth, meanwhile, discusses the implications of a large-scale, multi-dimensional analysis of the genomic characteristics of glioblastoma, the most common primary brain tumour in adults. On Hematopoiesis, we learn how travelling normal and malignant cells decide where to stay and on get linked up to five great talks from the experts.

Cancer vaccines are big news and none more so than the vaccine being offered to young girls to protect them from cervical cancer caused by HPV. Health blogger Grace Filby has posted on why this vaccination campaign is not a good idea given the lack of safety data currently available.

Orna Ross tells us about the good things she has gained from having cancer/ and points out that fighting cancer as if it were a battle is not the only approach to tackling the disease. Actorlicious meanwhile provides a star-studded perspective and how the famous and infamous are standing up to cancer.

A post from the University of Oxford science blog on exploiting the Achilles’ heel of cancer, describes how a new approach will lead to treatments with none of the common side effects of cancer therapy. And, Sally Church on the Pharma Strategy blog asks will Abiraterone impact survival in advanced prostate cancer?, the most common carcinoma in men. She also provides a fascinating insight into treating triple negative breast cancer.

Science Metropolis discusses how public health expert Dave Ozonoff hopes to use mathematics and chaos theory to explain paradoxical cancer frequencies, such as those seen in Cape Cod, where rates are 25% higher than the state average in Massachusetts.

Finally, one from the recent Sciencebase archives entitled (hopefully quite controversially) alcohol causes cancer.

Visit the Cancer Carnival site to read past carnivals, to get information on scheduled posts and to find out how to host your own cancer research blog carnival.

Melamine Contaminated Food List

melamine-candy via LA Times Before you check out the following items, please click here first to grab the Sciencebase newsfeed. I’ll be updating the melamine news over the next few days, and the RSS newsfeed system allows you to keep up to date with the Sciencebase site without having to check back by adding our headlines to your Google account, My Yahoo, Bloglines or your active bookmarks in your browser.

As the melamine in milk products from China problem continues to grow apace, Sciencebase presents a succinct list of melamine contaminated food list culled from the most recent news results on the subject. This is by no means an exhaustive list nor is it a condemnation of any particular products, it’s here merely to raise awareness of what is happening with regard to the melamine in milk scandal.

Powdered baby milk.
HK finds melamine in Chinese-made cheesecake.
Cookies With Melamine Found in Netherlands.
Mr Brown coffee products.
Manufacturing giant Unilever recalls melamine tainted tea. CNN is also reporting that the Hong Kong authorities Sunday (October 5) announced that two recalled candy products made by British confectioner Cadbury had high levels of melamine.
Melamine Detected in Two More Ritz Snacks.
More Chinese-made sweets recalled in Japan.
White Rabbit brand Chinese candy contaminated: Asian health officials.
Lipton, Glico and Ritz the latest businesses to be affected by milk powder scandal.
Hong Kong finds traces of melamine in Cadbury products.
Recalled Melamine Milk Products include Asian versions of Bairong grape cream crackers, Dove chocolate, Dreyers cake mix, Dutch Lady candy, First Choice crackers, Kraft Oreo wafer sticks, M&Ms, Magnum ice cream, Mentos bottle yoghurt, Snickers funsize, Yili hi-cal milk, Youcan sesame snacks and others. Testing of some of those has already proven negative.
Melamine Found in More China-Made Products, including Heinz DHA+AA baby cereal.
305 Chinese dairy-based products temporarily banned in Korea.
US bloggers have gone so far as to uncover dozens of products recalled in China that were still on the shelves of their local supermarkets.
31 new milk powder brands found tainted.

Just for the record, this is not, as was suggested on a couple of blogs linking here, a definitive, complete list. I will update it as and when new information comes to light. Check out the previous posts for more information in the background to this news story and for further discussion on the issues surrounding the melamine in milk products scandal: Melamine Scandal Widens and (2008-09-29) Milky Melamine.

More melamine news