Health Glance
You'd think that more than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, scientists would know what, if any, long-term health dangers face the thousands of workers needed to clean up the Gulf of Mexico spill.
You'd be wrong.
"We don't know a damn thing," said Anchorage lawyer Michael Schneider, whose firm talked with dozens of Alaska cleanup workers following the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in preparation for a class-action lawsuit that never came.
Health of Exxon Valdez cleanup workers was never studied
Cellphone industry attacks San Francisco's ruling on radiation
San Francisco, a city that banned the plastic bag, now has waded into the muddy territory of cellphone radiation, setting off a call to arms in the $153 billion wireless industry. Last week, the Board of Supervisors passed a law -- the first in the nation -- requiring retailers to inform their customers how much radiation the cellphones on their shelves emit, so shoppers can figure out how close the devices come to the upper limits on radiation set by the Federal Communications Commission.
The law, which goes into effect early next year, didn't mention the word, but it was all about one thing: cancer, and whether cellphones cause it.
EWG's Cancer Prevention Tips
According to a new report from the President's Cancer Panel, environmental toxins play a significant and under-recognized role in cancer, causing "grievous harm" to untold numbers of people. EWG's own research has found that children are born "pre-polluted" with nearly 300 industrial chemicals, pesticides and contaminants that have been found to cause cancer in lab studies or in people.
Study Finds Body's Potential Universal Flu Defence
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The human body makes rare antibodies effective against all flu viruses and these might be boosted to design a better universal flu treatment, researchers reported on Monday.
Tests on mice suggest these immune system proteins could help most people survive a normally lethal dose of flu virus, the team at the University of Wisconsin and Seattle-based Theraclone Sciences said.
Genetically Altered Salmon Get Closer to the Table
The Food and Drug Administration is seriously considering whether to approve the first genetically engineered animal that people would eat — salmon that can grow at twice the normal rate. The developer of the salmon has been trying to get approval for a decade.
But the company now seems to have submitted most or all of the data the F.D.A. needs to analyze whether the salmon are safe to eat, nutritionally equivalent to other salmon and safe for the environment, according to government and biotechnology industry officials. A public meeting to discuss the salmon may be held as early as this fall.
Human foetus feels no pain before 24 weeks, study says
The human foetus feels no pain before 24 weeks, according to a major review of scientific evidence published today. The connections in the foetal brain are not fully formed in that time, nor is the foetus conscious, according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.
The findings of two reports commissioned by the Department of Health strike a blow to those seeking to reduce the upper time limit for having an abortion, currently at 24 weeks.
German court legalises euthanasia with patient consent
A top German court has ruled that it is not a criminal offence to cut off the life support of a dying person if that person has given their consent. The Federal Court of Justice acquitted a lawyer who had advised the daughter of a comatose woman to cut off her feeding tube.
Earlier the patient had expressed her wish not to be kept alive artificially.
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