The International Year of Chemistry failed to tackle the worrying proliferation of potentially damaging chemicals.

You would be forgiven for not noticing, but today marks the end of an official year of "worldwide celebration", designed to "generate enthusiasm" and "reach across the globe". For despite its hopeful hype, the UN's International Year of Chemistry appears to have had far less public impact in Britain even than its 2008 predecessor - the International Year of the Potato.

The spotlight on spuds did at least attract some national press attention: this year's science one got scarcely a mention - though it did make 350 words in the Baluchistan Times on Thursday.

It's not as if nothing was happening. The Swiss issued a commemorative postage stamp; there was an international conference on the remote Lord Howe Island in the Pacific; 10-year-old Poorvie Choudhary set a new world record for reciting the 118 elements in the periodic table in 27.6 seconds in Rajasthan; and two weeks ago there was a "Chemistry Caroling Event" in San Francisco ("I am dreaming of a white precipate", "Deck the labs with rubber tubing", and so on). But all to little avail.

It is a shame, for there is much to celebrate. Chemicals have brought us enormous benefits, swelling our harvests, beating back previously unconquerable diseases, and producing a host of consumer goods that underpin modern life.

And the year has also been a missed opportunity for tackling, as had been hoped at its outset, the downside of this chemical revolution - what Yale Professor John Wargo describes as "an unexpected side effect" of our prosperity, "a change in the chemistry of the human body". For many of the substances that have built our economies are now embedded in our tissues and coursing through our veins: some, it seems, are up to no good.

A 39-year-old man in a southern Chinese hospital is suffering from what appears to be a contagious strain of avian flu, state media reported Friday.

The man -- identified by Xinhua as a bus driver with the surname Chen -- was hospitalized in Shenzhen on December 21 as he battled a fever. He tested positive for the H5N1 avian influenza virus, a provincial health department said Friday, according to the official news agency.

Chen was in critical condition Friday at the hospital, the health department said.

The man had not traveled out of the city of Shenzhen, nor did he have direct contact with poultry in the month before he came down with the fever, according to the department.

Shenzhen borders Hong Kong, where more than 17,000 chickens were ordered culled on the same day that Chen was hospitalized. That decision came after a chicken carcass tested positive for avian flu.

Belarus, with highest rate ever recorded for MDR-TB, asks for help

Geneva, Switzerland - On the sidelines of a conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, just three months ago, a senior health official from Belarus met privately with Mario Raviglione, whose job here at the World Health Organization's headquarters is to control the spread of tuberculosis around the world.

Belarus needed help. It had just confirmed a study that found 35 percent of all TB cases in the capital of Minsk were multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) - the highest rate in the world ever recorded for the deadly disease, which takes up to two years to treat and is cured in Western Europe only one third of the time.

"It's a real tragic situation," Raviglione, director of WHO's Stop TB Department, said, looking back at that moment with the Belarus official. "But they came out openly about this and they wanted help, which is very positive. For a long time, several countries have been hiding their realities about multi-drug resistant TB."

The WHO's Regional Office for Europe recently released a report that warned about the spread of the hard-to-treat MDR-TB into all of Europe, making the case that the relatively wealthy capitals of the West faced the grave danger of a much higher number of cases if the entire region did not move quickly to put in place effective control measures.

Modern Miracle Men - Dr. Charles Northen, Who Builds Health From The Ground Up

Reprinted from Cosmopolitan, 1 June 1936

This quiet, unballyhooed pioneer and genius in the field of nutrition demonstrates that countless human ills stem from the fact that impoverished soil of America no longer provides plant foods with the mineral elements essential to human nourishment and health! To overcome this alarming condition, he doctors sick soils and, by seeming miracles, raises truly healthy and health-giving fruits and vegetables.

Do you know that most of us today are suffering from certain dangerous diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until the depleted soils from which our foods come are brought into proper mineral balance?

The alarming fact is that foods - fruits and vegetables and grains - now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contains enough of certain needed minerals, are starving us - no matter how much of them we eat!

This talk about minerals is novel and quite startling. In fact, a realization of the importance of minerals in food is so new that the textbooks on nutritional dietetics contain very little about it. Never the less, it is something that concerns all of us, and the further we delve into it the more startling it becomes.

London - The World Health Organization [WHO] issued a stern warning on Friday to scientists who have engineered a highly pathogenic form of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus, saying their work carries significant risks and must be tightly controlled.

The United Nations health body said it was "deeply concerned about the potential negative consequences" of work by two leading flu research teams who this month said they had found ways to make H5N1 into a easily transmissable form capable of causing lethal human pandemics.

The work by the teams, one in The Netherlands and one in the United States, has already prompted an unprecedented censorship call from U.S. security advisers who fear that publishing details of the research could give potential attackers the know-how to make a bioterror weapon.

The U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity has asked two journals that want to publish the work to make only redacted versions of studies available, a request to which the journal editors and many leading scientists object.

Vietnam says an outbreak of hand, foot and mouth disease has infected more than 110,000 people this year and killed 166, most of them children under 5 years old.

A Health Ministry official said Friday that the infection rate was slowing from a September peak of 3,000 per week to about 1,500 per week in December. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing policy.

The virus typically infects up to 15,000 children per year in Vietnam, killing 20 to 30 of them. Most people recover quickly from the illness after little more than a fever and rash.

The official says this year's figures cannot easily be compared to previous years, because the government has only collected thorough data on this disease in the past year.

Chinese food safety regulators in the southern city of Shenzhen have found carcinogenic mildew in peanuts and cooking oil, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Friday.

The cancer-causing substance, called aflatoxin, triggered public concern this week after milk giant Mengniu Dairy Co Ltd said last weekend its Sichuan plant had destroyed products found by a government quality watchdog to contain it.

Aflatoxin occurs naturally in the environment and is produced by certain common types of fungi. It can cause severe liver damage, including liver cancer.

Xinhua reported that the Shenzhen market supervision bureau had said it found up to 4.3 times of the permitted level of aflatoxin in peanuts sold in two supermarkets and one frozen food store, and up to four times the allowed level of aflatoxin in cooking oil in four restaurants.

Simple Green, a hugely popular household cleaner, is marketed to the consumer as a "non-toxic," "biodegradable," and "non-hazardous" alternative to presumably more toxic cleaners. And yet, the material safety data sheet (MSDS) for Simple Green, which is federally mandated to be made available to the consumer by the product manufacturer (in this case Sunshine Makers, Inc.), tells a radically different story.

The MSDS for Simple Green states that the formula contains up to 4% 2-Butoxyethanol by volume. 2-Butoxyethanol is a petrochemical solvent which gives Simple Green, and products like Windex, their characteristic odor.

It is classified, according to the Dangerous Substance Directive (one of the main European Union laws concerning chemical safety), as "Harmful (Xn)," and has recently been recommended by Environment and Health Canada to be added to the Schedule 1 toxic substances list of the Canadian Environment Protection Act (CEPA). It is also listed by the state of California as a "hazardous substance" and a "toxic air contaminant." Hmm? Non-Toxic, really?

Environmental groups dismayed after agency drops long-held plan to regulate use of human antibiotics fed to healthy animals.

Environmental and consumer groups have condemned the US Food and Drug Administration's move to renege on its long-held policy to regulate the use of human antibiotics in animal feed.

Last week, the agency quietly announced it was withdrawing its plan to limit the use of antibiotics fed to healthy livestock intended for human consumption.

Critics say the U-turn, which comes amid the FDA's own stated concerns over food safety, is at odds with its obligations to protect the public.

The groups also criticised the timing of the announcement, which was made during the holiday season and disclosed only in the federal register.

The popularity of the gluten free diet has grown dramatically. More and more parents are turning toward a gluten free diet to help alleviate symptoms of autism and other learning disorders in their children. To a large degree, many in the medical community have ridiculed this, stating that diet and the autistic spectrum have nothing to do with one another. Medical research and anecdotal evidence however shows that thousands of people have had improvement with diet alterations.

What does diet have to do with behavior?

The food we eat is comprised of carbohydrates, fats, protein, nucleic acids, phytonutrients, vitamins, minerals, water, and other nutrients necessary to sustain the healthy function of the body. It is the basis of how our internal biochemistry works. Ignoring the possibility that food contributes to disease is a cardinal mistake. Food is a drug and therefor can have drug like properties. One person's food is another person's poison. That being said, it goes to say that investigating the potential for a person to react negatively to food should be a primary tool in the "tool-belt" of all physicians.

In the research study below, a case is presented of a 5-year-old boy diagnosed with severe autism at a specialty clinic for autistic spectrum disorders. After initial investigation suggested underlying celiac disease and varied nutrient deficiencies, a gluten-free diet was instituted along with dietary and supplemental measures to secure nutritional sufficiency.

The patient's gastrointestinal symptoms rapidly resolved, and signs and symptoms suggestive of autism progressively abated. This case is an example of a common malabsorption syndrome associated with central nervous system dysfunction and suggests that in some contexts, nutritional deficiency may be a determinant of developmental delay. It is recommended that all children with neurodevelopmental problems be assessed for nutritional deficiency and malabsorption syndromes.

Another research study found a strong correlation with autism and intestinal permeability - AKA leaky gut syndrome. The conclusion of the study is below:

CONCLUSIONS:

The results obtained support the leaky gut hypothesis and indicate that measuring IPT (intestinal permeability)could help to identify a subgroup of patients with autism who could benefit from a gluten-free diet. The IPT alterations found in first-degree relatives suggest the presence of an intestinal (tight-junction linked) hereditary factor in the families of subjects with autism.

Source:

• J Child Neurol. 2010 Jan;25(1):114-9. Epub 2009 Jun 29.
• J Pediatr Gastroenterol Nutr. 2010 Oct;51(4):418-24.