GLP podcast: ‘Only 60 harvests left,’ debunked; Beating pesticide resistance; ‘Regulation through litigation’ threatens sustainable farming?

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Have we so badly depleted the world’s soil that we only have 60 harvests left? No. New “green” pesticides could be available to farmers in the coming years. But there is concern that pests may rapidly develop resistance to these latest and greatest plant-protection products. Environmental groups are trying to subvert the US pesticide regulatory system through litigation, in a bid to get low-risk pesticides banned. Does this tactic pose a threat to our food supply?

Podcast:

Join geneticist Kevin Folta and GLP contributor Cameron English on episode 210 of Science Facts and Fallacies as they break down these latest news stories:

Critics of modern agriculture have claimed for years that the world has only 60 harvests left; “industrial farming” has so thoroughly depleted our soil, the argument goes, that we soon won’t be able to feed ourselves. Although this idea remains popular, it has never been correct. Food production has exploded in recent decades while the amount of land dedicated to agriculture has only increased slightly. On balance, technological advances, especially in plant breeding beginning with the Green Revolution, have made our food supply far more sustainable.

As new biopesticides come online, they are almost immediately confronted by insects, weeds and microorganisms that can rapidly develop resistance to their pesticidal effects. What’s the solution? According to a recent study, farmers have to grow a variety of crops and utilize different chemistries with varying modes of action. This helps prevent pests from evolving resistance to any one of the products used to control them. But the question remains: how much progress are we actually making in controlling pesticide resistance?

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The US has a regulatory system in place designed to protect public health from potentially dangerous chemicals used for industrial applications, including pesticides. Unable to convince regulators to ban many pesticides, activist groups have taken a different tack: selectively filing lawsuits around the country, convincing judges that some chemicals should be banned, or at least more tightly regulated. The result of this regulation-through-litigation strategy is that many low-risk chemicals that help us produce an abundant food supply could disappear from the marketplace. What can be done to halt this concerning trend?

Kevin M. Folta is a professor, keynote speaker and podcast host. Follow Professor Folta on Twitter @kevinfolta

Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Visit his website and follow ACSH on Twitter @ACSHorg

Viewpoint: Why health care based on race is so problematic

Viewpoint: Why health care based on our race is so problematic
Choosing a medical treatment based on patient traits historically used to define races is fundamentally flawed, because race in the context of humans is a social construct, while medicine is based on biology. Race-based prescribing robs some individuals of drugs that could help them, while prescribing them to people who likely will not respond, or even be harmed. Fortunately, the practice of basing treatment decisions on the superficial traits used to define human races is on the decline.

Blood thinners and blood pressure medications have for decades dominated discussions of race-based prescribing. A more recent example of the dangers of using superficial features as guidelines for providing appropriate care is flawed interpretation of a standard measure of kidney function, used to prioritize patients for kidney transplants. Due to a fudge factor of sorts, until very recently Blacks have been given lower priority on the lists for organs.

Perhaps the starkest example I’ve encountered of race obscuring delivery of adequate health care comes from California-based pediatrician Richard Garcia, who wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2003 “The Misuse of Race in Medical Diagnosis”:

My childhood friend Lela wasn’t diagnosed with cystic fibrosis until she was 8 years old. Over the years, her doctors had described her as a ‘2-year-old black female with fever and cough’ and ‘a 4-year-old black girl with another pneumonia. Lela is back.’ Had she been a white child, or had no visible ‘race’ at all, she would probably have gotten the correct diagnosis and treatment much earlier. Only when she was 8 did a radiologist, who had never seen her face to face, notice her chest X-ray and ask, ‘Who’s the kid with CF?’

Today, Lela would have been diagnosed and treated much sooner, because all newborns in the US are screened for CF. Although Dr. Garcia’s essay was published two decades ago, I still hear newscasters, actors in TV medical dramas, and others say that sickle cell disease (SCD) is a black disease and cystic fibrosis a white disease.

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Of course people of shared ancestry tend to look somewhat alike if they have children within their group, restricting the range of gene variants. Another force for similarity within groups is that genes that are near each other on a chromosome tend to be inherited together. But at the single gene level, a sequence of DNA building blocks that encodes a salt channel (CF) or a blood protein (SCD) doesn’t consider the color of a person’s skin or shapes of facial features. It follows Mendel’s first law.

And so a Black child can have CF and a white child sickle cell disease. Garcia offered another example. “I know that Ashkenazic Jews get Tay-Sachs, but the only baby I ever saw with Tay-Sachs was a Mexican child.”

Until recently, prescribing drugs to treat hypertension was the classic example of how race-based medicine can do harm. The story is more complex than for single-gene conditions like CF and SCD because individual differences in blood pressure are more influenced by environmental factors than are salt channels and blood proteins.

The BiDil saga

Hypertension is the #1 cause of cardiovascular disease in the US and damages the kidneys. It affects 45% of Blacks, 32% of non-Hispanic whites, 30% of Hispanics, and 25% of Asians. Although many genes and environmental factors elevate blood pressure, one hypothesis for the prevalence among Blacks today goes back to their ancestors who were captured in Africa and crammed into ships for their journey to enslavement. Perhaps survivors were more likely to have gene variants that enabled their kidneys to conserve salt, combating fluid loss in the hellish conditions. Their descendants might face higher risk of hypertension from fluid retention.

Despite the fact that the genetic underpinnings of hypertension are complex and not well understood, race has been used in treating the condition.

In 2005, the FDA approved the first race-based drug, a pill called BiDil that paired existing drugs (hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate) that lower blood pressure and widen blood vessels, relieving congestive heart failure to a degree. Prescribing BiDil for Blacks was based on several small, flawed studies that tested heart function in Black participants but not in members of other groups. The studies also didn’t consider the social determinants of health, nor identify gene variants that might contribute to or cause hypertension.

BiDil, the first “racialized” drug, was marketed to “self-identified” Black people. That was still true when I looked at ads a year ago. But googling BiDil now returns a warning: potential security risk ahead. Clearly, something is up.

Eventually, epidemiologists and geneticists began to question the designation of a “Black drug.” One follow-up study looked at 100 white patients given the anti-hypertensive part of BiDil and 100 Black patients NOT given the drug. Results were telling: 48 white patients did not respond to the drug and 41 Black patients did respond. That’s only slightly better than a coin toss! Diet has a large effect on hypertension risk, and that has nothing to do with race.

A vast medical literature chronicles the BiDil chapter of race-based medicine. See this study in JAMA Cardiology JAMA Cardiology from 2021. Yet the current description at GoodRx indicates that the legacy of race-based prescribing of BiDil may persist:

BiDil is a combination medication that can help certain patients with heart failure feel better and live longer. BiDil … was specifically studied in Black people and was shown to improve heart failure symptoms. It is not a first-choice drug, but can be added to other heart failure medications.

Kidney failure and the transplant list

Blacks account for 13% of the US population, but account for more than 30% of patients with end-stage kidney disease. However, since 2009 and until recently, reliance on a race-tweaked measurement of how fast the kidneys filter urine – estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) – led to Blacks being less likely to receive kidney transplants.

The level of creatinine in the blood is used to estimate eGFR. This is a measure of the normal and constant breakdown of muscle and protein metabolism.

On average, Blacks have higher blood creatinine concentrations than do whites. But “race-based algorithms” applied to adjust blood test results to account for the population-level difference made some Black individuals appear to have healthier kidneys than they actually do. And they ended up lower on the lists for life-saving kidney transplants than they should have been.

In “The quagmire of race, genetic ancestry, and health disparities” in The Journal of Clinical Investigation from 2021, Giorgio Sirugo, Sarah A. Tishkoff, and Scott M. Williams pointed out another flaw in the reasoning is that most Blacks do not know how much African ancestry they actually have. And like the BiDil story, lumping all Blacks into one group using a “’race’-based correction” can lead to both under- and over- treatment. “Ultimately, precision medicine based on individual genetic risk factors should supersede simple racial classifications,” they concluded.

I became aware of the race-based kidney function situation as a technical editor for the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. That organization, with the National Kidney Foundation, formed the Task Force on Reassessing the Inclusion of Race In Diagnosing Kidney Diseases in 2020 to address the situation. I edited their Perspective in The New England Journal of Medicine. As a result of the task force’s actions, race-based measurements that impact priority for kidney transplants are a thing of the past. A new calculator tool for eGFR was announced in September 2021. And the recommendations are already being wildly implemented, said Paul Palevsky, past president of the National Kidney Foundation and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Coda

In everyday life, we designate race based on appearance, and that has societal repercussions. But thinking as a geneticist, I’ve pondered a “what if” scenario for dividing people according to other traits that have a genetic component.

What if everyone over a certain height would be designated as belonging to a separate race?

People with an extra finger or toe?

Individuals with type AB blood?

This simple thought exercise, which I’ve had my students do, starkly reveals the absurdity of race as a biological measure of anything. It certainly shouldn’t enter into prescribing decisions, like BiDil, or access to life-saving interventions, like kidney transplants.

BiDil and eGFR are not the only examples of the fallacy of race-based medicine. Expanded DNA testing – exomes, genomes, and RNA – will, I hope, dim the misplaced, historical focus on appearances.

I wish that astute pediatrician Richard Garcia had published his account of his friend Lela, dismissed as having cystic fibrosis because of the color of her skin, in a medical journal rather than in The Chronicle of Higher Education. We need more health care providers to focus on the genotype and other non-biased metrics, not the phenotype.

Ricki Lewis has a PhD in genetics and is the author of the textbook Human Genetics: Concepts and Applications, soon to be published in its fourteenth edition. Follow her at her website www.rickilewis.com or Twitter @rickilewis

A version of this article appeared originally at PLOS and is posted here with permission. Check out PLOS on Twitter @PLOS

Viewpoint: How tort lawyers came to fund environmental activist fundamentalist attacks on science and agriculture

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Since the period of stakeholder dialogue in the 1990s and early 2000s, environmental activists engaged in the policy process to try to make an impact. And this worked for the easy wins (increased recycling, lower emissions and effluents, incentives for energy-saving devices, better water and air quality…) but enough was just never enough. The green ambition expanded towards banning synthetic chemicals, plastics, pesticides, fossil fuels, fertilisers, nuclear energy and GMOs, to name a few. This demanded more than just a handful of busy lobbyists and an umbrella group of NGOs. Lately their ambition has extended even further to, well, cancelling out capitalism, corporations and industry. As experience with the war on tobacco showed, regulations would only go so far, especially if you are battling against a product or activity the public want and expect. To defeat industry (ie, to save the world), NGOs would need to wage war on multiple fronts.

If industry actors think this is still only part of the policy dialogue process, then they might as well just stay at home.

The Industry Complex looks at how industry is not simply in a dialogue with a few activist NGOs and interest groups on policy issues. They are facing a coordinated network of organisations who have been implementing a complex series of attacks on multiple fronts via a wide range of stakeholders and interest groups with a long-term strategy of eliminating capitalism and them. Industry needs to change their focus. They are facing a campaign onslaught directed at their very existence.

What we are seeing today is a complex series of activist campaigns against industry and capitalism coordinated at multiple levels (via the media, academe, policy processes, tort law firms and social media influencers). NGOs are playing a long game, scaring and then enlisting teenagers to get involved, not only for media impact but to ensure that the next generation will adopt their ideology seamlessly. With so many groups in action at the same time, these groups can more easily rewrite narratives and control the messages accepted in public discourse. These groups (representing between 5 and 10% of most populations) are well-financed, driven by passion and determined to win at any cost. What they are releasing, with this strategy, is an onslaught on Western values, traditions and economic activity.

If you are an innovator or believe that the way to change the world for the better is through technological solutions, life in Europe is getting pretty hard. Western leadership is feeble and febrile and while regulators may pay lip-service to supporting the industrial sector, they do as little as possible to support innovations to avoid upsetting the anti-industry lobby (see, for example, the European Commission’s comic and chaotic last-minute attempt to stop an industrial exodus from the EU given the incentives offered by the US Inflation Reduction Act). This lip-service is just as well as they have already buggered up European energy independence and are on track to destroying food sovereignty.

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Useful idiots in government, the media and the academe

These activist campaigns have been made easier as several institutional structures have been in flux. Loss of trust in government institutions has weakened the ability for policymakers to stand up to their prevailing narratives (with many governments throwing in the towel and starting to play with the idea of governance by citizen assembly). The economic restructuring and post-digital decline in the large media groups (which had been largely funded by industry until news became free) has created an area ripe for influence by populist movements. Social media groups have further challenged how information is transmitted. The shift in research funding, from industry-academe projects to publicly financed research, has redefined the power structure in universities (with administrators accountable vertically to their paymasters rather than to the interests of their researchers). These evolutions have created an environment of vulnerability where the anti-capitalist narrative can be amplified by the appropriate useful idiots.

The best European leaders can do is isolate industry from the process and play the precaution card around the edges to appease the growing green lobby, hoping tourism and banking can make up for the collapse in European industry, loss of jobs and economic decline. The worst they can do, and this is quite attractive to many in government, is to play up the activist anti-capitalist narrative with regulators posing as benign, caring leaders committed solely to protecting public health and the environment. And should anyone take notice of their decades of actual inaction, they can join the mob and blame industry for not acting. This is what the present European Commission has done, choosing to define itself solely by its Green Deal strategy (despite a pandemic, war in Europe, energy crisis and industrial decline). This embrace of the anti-capitalist agenda has made a more pragmatic government committed to Realpolitik impossible.

But as activist groups continue to get their actors placed in government agencies, large media organisations and scientific bodies, as they continue to change the regulatory rules in their favour, they have hit something of a limit – what could be called a plateau of reason and a wall of reality where their ideological dogma can go no further. Inflation, yield destruction, loss of social goods and economic sacrifices do matter to consumers who might start taking their voting power seriously again.

Industry strategy during this onslaught is to stall the regulatory assaults until lost social goods (like affordable food, electricity and heating) outrage consumers, using their lawyers to keep products on the market via derogations while hoping that the more naive militant groups continue to shoot themselves in their feet. But this is hardly a strategy as the narrative will continue to work against them. When consumers do begin to suffer, activists continue their coordinated attacks and continue to spin their narratives on a wider public they detest as ignorant. Food and energy inflation, they argue, is due to industry price gouging, corporate windfall profits, Ukraine and COVID-19 and certainly not the result of failed green policies. The industry strategy of “ignore and delay” places them as merely one more useful idiot playing into this activist onslaught. Piñatas at an activist free-for-all.

The multiple-front onslaught

This was no happy accident. The anti-tech, anti-capitalist narrative dominating our media, policy arenas, higher places of learning, regulatory agencies and courts was no coincidence or the convergence of some common sense. I have been to enough internal activist meetings, listened to their consultants and advisors and read their reports to know that this multiple-front onslaught has been in the planning for several decades, cunningly executed and professionally finished.

So what are some of these coordinated attacks on multiple fronts?

Using tort lawyers to fund scientists and NGOs, create outrage and generate caseloads

In 2012, a group of academics, tort lawyers, scientists and green activists met in La Jolla to plot out a plan to work together to tobacconise other industries. They planned to coordinate scientific activity with NGO campaigns to sue companies into either bankruptcy or submission. Their report, conceptualised by Naomi Oreskes, cited how the victory over Big Tobacco was not won through regulatory success (they claim the tobacco lobby was too strongly intertwined with government) but through a series of relentless lawsuits and growing public outrage. This strategy, later known as adversarial regulation, could sidestep the democratic policy process and was conceived to bring entire industries, like oil and gas, chemicals and plastics, to their knees.

Billions of US dollars from tort lawsuit settlements have been siphoned off to NGO campaigns and a group of activist scientists, largely based around the Collegium Ramazzini who would use the influence of their research fellows to get IARC (the International Agency for Research on Cancer) to produce monographs on substances, citing remote cancer correlations. These monographs would then be used for a further barrage of lawsuits and research against the next vulnerable industry or company.

It is not about protecting or compensating citizens and it is not about improving the environment or public health; the goal is to bring industry (and capitalism) to its knees. Through relentless tort-law-firm advertising, consumers are made so outraged at industry “lies and poisons” causing so many cancers that they don’t realise they are being forced, via this well-planned fiction, to pay more for lower quality products, less investment in research and innovation and fewer companies who could afford to stay in certain markets. And they are angry at industry rather than the architects of this Big Lie.

This playbook was successfully implemented against companies producing benzene, talcum powder, glyphosate and is presently building momentum against Big Oil (for the effects of climate change). See my SlimeGate series for the backstory. The US government had to step in to cover or prevent lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers who had simply abandoned the US market in the 1990s. Ramazzini activist scientists are now preparing IARC for the next round of monographs with suspect research claiming cancer links to 5G, mobile phones and aspartame (some stock tips: sell your shares in Apple and Coca-Cola before those honeypots get drained … Sorry Warren).

And as laws are being introduced to protect the rights of the environment, the madness will only get worse.

The blade of the anti-capitalist, anti-tech onslaught, tort law. Credit: Nick Youngson via Pix4free and CC-BY-SA-3.0

Undermine regulatory risk assessments

Part of this “Predatort Playbook” is to undermine trust in government regulatory agencies who do not affirm the conclusions of their bought-and-paid-for scientists. Activists campaign against government agencies, claiming they are all industry-funded and therefore refusing to accept the studies prepared by their scientists. In the case of glyphosate, the fact that every single government agency assessment rejected the IARC claim that the substance posed a risk to cancer mattered little as lawyers claimed that these government scientists, all of them, were working for Monsanto (neutering scientific data while further amplifying the cycle of anti-industry outrage). It seems absolutely absurd that a mid-sized seed company could pay off all of the world’s government officials and regulatory scientists, but, well, as Goebbels reportedly said: “The bigger the lie …” (Green Party members in the European Parliament played into the outrage by banning Monsanto employees from entering or engaging in the democratic process in a Kristallnacht inspired frenzy).

The activist objective was to move from a regulatory risk assessment approach to a hazard-based approach. Originally IARC monographs, as hazard assessments, were intended to highlight if a hazard could be linked to certain types of cancer. It was then up to government risk assessment agencies to take this information and determine the safe exposure levels (risk = hazard X exposure), managing the risks while taking into account other important socio-economic factors. The law firms and NGOs saw enormous opportunity in sidestepping the regulatory risk process and relying solely on the hazard-based results (that almost always provide some association with certain types of cancer if dose rates are ignored). With these results, they can run campaigns and lawsuits against “those evil capitalist corporations” and, ironically, enrich themselves.

Did IARC scientists speak up about this abuse of the hazard-based approach by tort lawyers and NGOs? Far from it.

Our useful idiot in LeMonde

IARC activists like Kate Guyton used their useful idiots in the media (like LeMonde’s Stéphane Foucart) to try to discredit EFSA and their regulatory risk methodology. The head of IARC’s monograph programme, Kurt Straif, went on Euronews to make baseless claims about the amount of industry influence within EFSA. A large group of retired scientists associated with IARC and Ramazzini work as litigation consultants advising US tort law firms suing industry (averaging 500 USD/hour). Led by Chris Portier, they went on the offensive against EFSA. Any scientists or journalists who spoke out against IARC monographs were savaged in the media or had journal editors pressured to retract their articles. This was not scientific (or respectful to the institution of science). Later it was discovered that hundreds of thousands of dollars were sent via Ramazzini fellow, Linda Birnbaum’s NIEHS office, to IARC and Ramazzini for communications activities.

EFSA, in a vain effort to restore public trust, has since had to change its methodologies to demand transparency on what was once confidential or proprietary industry data and admit non-scientific information into their risk assessments. This broken-winged bird will likely no longer be able to fly high enough to defend the scientific risk assessment process from the next activist science onslaught. Sorry Bernhard, you fought valiantly but the Facebook approach to science has won.

Degrowth narrative

A relentless wave of anti-capitalism campaigns has not only destroyed public trust in innovative technologies, it has started to weave a post-pandemic narrative that the only way forward (to fight climate change, restore biodiversity, feed a growing global population, avoid future pandemics, create a just society …), the answer to all of our problems is to eliminate industry, capitalism and the progressive growth and innovation model. This solution has purveyed Western cultural dialogue and is no longer discussed along the fringes.

This degrowth narrative has even caught the attention of some of the more naive dreamers in the financial industry (who assume everyone is like them, comfortable enough to survive the consequences of a “great capitalism reset“). The World Economic Forum (WEF) used to be seen as a meeting place for world and business leaders to discuss the vital issues of the day. But somewhere along the way, the organisation’s aging and isolated leadership felt the urge to shape the world rather than listen to its many voices. This year few Western leaders made the pilgrimage to Davos to be lectured to by bankers who have found religion.

But what would cause these scions of capitalism to turn their backs on … capitalism?

Credit: John Englart/Climate Action Network Australia via CC-BY-SA-2.0

Were they spooked by the sudden realisation that catastrophic climate change would destroy their markets? If they had taken that seriously then they would have known about it decades ago when their risk managers were drawing up such scenarios. Was COVID-19 really the opportunity to reset the Western economic system? Well then why are these same bankers now ordering their workers back to the office? Or were they caught unawares by a shifting anti-capitalist narrative that destroyed trust in the financial system while offering viable decentralised finance solutions? I think we’re getting closer. The only way these WEF bankers could retain relevance and hopefully regain trust was to embrace the activist narrative and try to define a Capitalism 2.0 (let’s call it stakeholder capitalism!). Capitalism brought prosperity and global development but its financiers were willing to trade it away for a handful of magic beans (to try to regain public trust).

I find it remarkable that these titans of industry were forced into a corner having to react, so easily pushed around by a small group of environmental activists. But then events took over in 2022. Years of poor energy strategy in Europe were worsened by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and rather than a green capitalism reset, industry was scrambling to keep the lights on and obtain any fossil fuels at all. Degrowth was no longer seen as a desirable ambition, except by the affluent few with timeshares in Davos.

Institutionalise ESG and then tighten the noose

The business world fell into a cavern of distrust in the 1990s. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) was an attempt for industry to rebuild trust by opening up stakeholder dialogue and committing to be good corporate citizens. But while the corporate world was trying to listen, the conversation moved elsewhere on how to restrict capitalsim and stop industry. Activists, now welcome at the policy table, took hold of the narrative and excluded industry from the table. Their goal was not dialogue but rather to change the world and undo the damage inflicted by rampant capitalism. You cannot fight climate change and have capitalism, shouts Naomi Klein – you have to make a choice. CSR rang hollow as the public fear of climate change and biodiversity loss was amplified (with the blame cleverly placed on industry and not regulators or consumers).

But what if the power of capitalism became a force for good? If investments were shaped by a series of environmental, social and governance standards (ESG), then corporations could make a much larger positive impact. ESG was soon translated into “bean-counter language”, as a scorecard with points established by an opaque consultancy in the investment community. If companies wanted their stocks to be included in any ESG Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), they would have to jump through certain arbitrarily set hoops (in what I referred to as a daily Squid Game). Activists entered into the scorecarding process and soon companies were punished if they financed natural gas-powered energy projects (deducting points for natural gas at the same level as coal since, well, both are fossil fuels). It did not take long for the energy sector to become under-funded well before any geopolitical stresses. Companies are now passing the ESG obligations down their value chain (see how food manufacturers are forcing farmers to adopt unsustainable practises to score better ESG points).

It is not clear where environmental, social and governance standards will eventually settle and who is setting them. The hoops for industry to jump through keep changing in arbitrary and irrational manners. ESG is becoming a noose that will continue to slowly tighten and choke free enterprise. Should Blackrock’s Larry Fink have so much power (the US ETF market is worth ten trillion dollars)? Should this one person have the means to stack corporate boards from which he can impose what his green advisors tell him should be the next level of sustainability? Activist groups, now donning Wall Street suits, have found a new way to squeeze industry and distort free markets.

The bottom line is no longer the bottom line with ESG. Credit: Triplebotline via CC-BY-SA-3.0

ESG has moved from being a force for good to becoming a meaningless points system designed by activists who are hell-bent on collapsing the entire system. And, wait for it, the European Commission has decided to make ESG reporting mandatory for all mid-sized companies. Sweet!

Make no compromises

When was the last time you witnessed an environmental NGO leader sitting down at a table with industry, government and researchers to compromise on legislation? For example, could they sit down with EU regulators and say: OK for the use of oil and gas for the next decade as part of a reasonable energy transition process? Or maybe allow farmers to use glyphosate for terminating cover crops and no-till farming but not for preharvest applications unless necessary. Of course not – zealots, by definition, never compromise … regardless of the consequences. Activists don’t want a better world … they want to impose their world.

See an excellent analysis of this 1991 nuclear activist strategy report

This “never compromise” strategy was developed and openly articulated by anti-nuclear activists who have been fighting a zero-nuclear campaign since the 1970s (one of the original environmental campaigns). If activists were to compromise and allow any nuclear energy under any conditions, then their absolutist argument would collapse. How much CO2 from coal-fired power plants could have been avoided if the activist community had simply compromised and tried to develop a better nuclear energy policy. To this day the anti-nuclear lobby cannot accept the error in their ways.

The WHO, in a COP5 tobacco framework report, dispelled any consideration of vaping as a viable alternative to smoking. Their justification? It would risk setting back the years of progress in “denormalising the tobacco industry”. How many lives would the WHO have saved if they had got over their zealot absolutism and compromised with industry to reduce the harmful effects of tobacco smoking. To this day the anti-tobacco lobby cannot recognise the benefits of vaping as a smoking cessation strategy.

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One might counter that changing the world is a good thing – that these groups are succeeding because their intentions are good and even if they may not be completely correct all of the time, it is always better to be safe than sorry (precaution). Well … if these groups did not knowingly lie, mislead and create unnecessary fears and distrust; if these groups did not, in their ideological dogma, create situations that were detrimental to human health and the environment; if these groups were not so hypocritical and non-transparent; if these groups did not frighten children and then enlist them as lobbyists… then maybe I would agree with you. But their political and social agenda to win at all costs and impose their ideals on others is a moral issue that needs to be opposed.

Winning at all costs (to health and the environment)

This “war on capitalism” strategy has been designed by cunning zealots to win at all costs and I fear, due to the complex strands of this Medusa, that activists are unable to correct it or change direction. Thus we see campaign machinery so tightly functioning that it cannot be stopped even if activists admit that the environment will be the biggest loser. For example:

  • The battle to ban nuclear energy was so entrenched that activists themselves could not change direction in the face of the failed energy transition following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So we watched helplessly as German nuclear reactors were decommissioned as an energy crisis loomed. Conclusion: more coal power and higher carbon emissions.
  • The coordinated attacks on glyphosate and pesticides in general have got out of control. As activists pressure food and retail corporations to pressure farmers to adopt certain farming practises to meet their ESG targets, the agriculture sector will be hard-pressed to meet their yields when glyphosate is eventually banned. Conclusion: less biodiversity, less sustainable farming, less food and fewer farmers.
  • The blanket movements against all plastics have been costing the environment immensely. Conclusion: the alternatives (more glass packaging, higher recycling energy costs, more food waste) have proven to be anything but sustainable.
  • Three decades of the war on GMOs have ignored the positive impacts of seed breeding on global agricultural yields and the means from new, non-transgenic plant breeding techniques like gene editing to protect specific crops and improve yields. Conclusion: more pesticides and lower yields (especially for subsistence farmers in developing countries suffering under an agroecology campaign onslaught).
  • The war on vaping (as an anti-industry campaign) has created a library of misleading safety information on nicotine. Conclusion: the public is confused about whether these harm-reducing smoking cessation products are any safer than smoking.

There is no rationality here. None necessary. The activist war machine has grown too big to be controlled as funding continues to flow from trusts and foundations (whose boards have been stacked with green allies). As part of their activist communication strategy is to suppress any public disagreement within movements and always speak with a single voice, the only way environmental activists can stop the destructive madness of the green ideology is to leave the organisations and protest for more rational environmental solutions from the outside. There have been many who have left but, like any cult, the fundamentalists are severe on those who may consider straying from the prescribed dogma.

What can be done?

The situation seems out of control as these interest groups grow stronger, more monied, more self-assured and less tolerant.

Western governments are too weak to stand up for scientific evidence, innovation and public benefits (the EU cannot even stop funding the NGOs that are attacking them). The European governance system (hazard-based and precautionary) has been set up to reject any uncertainty (ie, all innovations and technologies). Large media organisations have taken a hard turn to the left with groups like the Guardian running NGO-like campaigns (anti-capitalist and pro-activist). A well-coached, angry teenager with a microphone has far more influence than an innovator delivering healthcare solutions. NGOs are operating like cults. Planting seeds of doom and negativity into a generation of teenagers, activists have bred a culture of despair and hopelessness. The vilification of those who attempt to leave NGOs and speak up is so severe that many reasonable people feel trapped and unable to take action.

Industrial companies, thinking they are safe from attack, as today’s second slowest zebra, think if they play the dialogue game and don’t speak out against the madness, trust will somehow magically return. They have become isolated and widely reviled. Universities have shunned industry cooperation, are paying outrageous speaking fees to support the likes of Vandana Shiva and firing anyone who questions their social justice positions. Vilified as evil, industry has been defined by our prevailing narrative as the source of the problem and not the solution.

Outspoken, outraged and intolerant social media communities have grown incredibly risk-averse, demanding to be kept 100% safe (from everything) and oblivious to any costs or consequences their ridiculous demands will have on others. Confirmation bias spread up silos of ignorance, where we can choose what and whom we want to listen to, has created what I have called the Age of Stupid. (If I only listen to those who agree with me, how would I know that I’m not the stupid one?) The environmental-health activist onslaught is but one part of the picture and I fear bigger problems as AI tools, like sophisticated chatbots, will soon take over the democratic process, alienating the centre ground and pushing public discourse during elections to the extremes. Forecasting how long and how rampant this political extremism will run is beyond my pay-grade though. There will be significant losses to societies.

I once said, years ago, that this precautionary risk-aversion madness would stop when the bodies start piling up. Then COVID came, bodies did pile up due to fundamental failures in risk management, but an even more risk-intolerant leadership locked up entire continents (and the docilians complied and stacked the bodies up). After almost two years, we were rescued from this madness by great scientific and technological innovations developed by industry (pharmaceuticals, chemicals, plastics, tech…) and, not even a month after we started to (hope to) return to normal, the anti-industry campaign onslaught continued (apparently some companies were going to make profits).

So how do we stop this?

With so many attacks on so many fronts (with horrifying consequences), no courage in government, academe or industry, and not enough people taking a stand given the hostile personal assaults, if you were to ask me how to solve this situation, I am afraid that I would have to say, honestly, that I have got nothing. I don’t know. There is a reason I called this series the Industry Complex. The situation has become very complex.

These zealots are too big, too influential and too coordinated to contain … and I fear they have lost control of their own agenda. Society, the environment and public health will suffer greatly from their blind ideologies, but so be it. The best I can do is keep curating how the Age of Stupid destroyed prosperity in the early 21st century. I can only hope someone much more intelligent than this “bear of very little brain” can provide a better insight.

My only hope is that history has shown how, sometimes, cultist onslaughts destroy themselves with their own dogma (once they’re done eating their young). Not much to hope for considering how professionalised these mercenaries have become, I know.

… Sorry.

David Zaruk has been an EU risk and science communications specialist since 2000, active in EU policy events from REACH and SCALE to the Pesticides Directive, from Science in Society questions to the use of the Precautionary Principle. Follow him on Twitter @zaruk

A version of this article was originally posted at David Zaruk’s website and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article.

Stretching human life span to 200 years? Implications of bowhead whale study

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There’s no one gene that can extend the human lifespan dramatically, but current science suggest that entire sets of genes could be a big part of the answer. Pat of the answer to the mystery of aging might be found in the vast oceans of our world.

Whales have been on this planet millions of years longer than we have. One of the most exciting and popular genetics stories coming out at the turn of this New Year focused on the bowhead genome, which was sequenced recently by researchers at the University of Liverpool. Dovetailing with findings from human genomic studies, including a recent one of a 115-year-old woman, the Liverpool whale study is funded largely by two organizations interested in bringing on an age when large numbers of humans live way into their hundreds, and beyond: the Life Extension Foundation and the Methuselah Foundation.

Thus far, the Liverpool group has identified some 80 genes likely to be involved in the keeping the lifespan of bowhead whales very long. The long-term goal is to apply the findings to manipulate human genome to do the same for us, and along the way help medical researchers to stop or slow cellular aging processes that have been linked to cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other conditions that have put a limit on the human lifespan. In other words, a potential type of human enhancement is on the radar screen.

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Our giant cousins in the sea

Members of the bowhead whale species can live up to two centuries. Certain giant tortoises also have lifespans that can live to 200 years, but being reptiles, their biology is fairly different from that of humans. In contrast, whales and humans are both mammals and therefore share many more genes already. And, if the Liverpool study goes really well, we may find out that human end up sharing a little more of the whale genome, or at least that of bowheads. And that may help us alter the human of the future to live longer.

I’m talking about genetically modifying organisms – not plants or algae, but human beings. This adds a curious dimension to the story, since one of the two main funders of the bowhead project, Life Extension, is interested mostly in hormonal and nutritional supplements, and we can associate extensive use nutritional supplements with people who shop at places like Whole Foods Market that reject genetic modification technology based on ideology, not science. If the research in Liverpool pans out as much as the investigators hope, genetic manipulation of humans–using some whale genes as a guide, or perhaps even slipping whale genes or parts of them into the human genome–couldl do a lot more for human longevity than any new vitamin product.

Medical innovations along the way

The other major funder of the bowhead genome research, the Methuselah Foundation, is interested in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. It’s quite fascinating, because we don’t have a safe tactic yet for getting genes from non-human mammals into all the tissues of an aging human that are undergoing deterioration. The most hopeful approach though, could be to create various lines of transgenic stem cells–cells using DNA sequences from both human and whales–that can be injected into the body and migrate to organs that need some rejuvenation.

We don’t want to invent a new species, a human whale hybrid; nor do is it desirable or ethical to play around with the genetics of human embryos–a possibility that is raised often in science fiction settings, most recently in the BBC America series, Orphan Black. Instead, the approach most likely to succeed is to regenerate organs and systems as needed as a person ages. This is certainly the strategy of the Methuselah Foundation, whose goal is to “create a world where 90-year olds can be as healthy as 50-year olds–by 2030.” That means people born around 1950, baby boomers, not babies.

So while the two century milestone can be an excellent guideline and motivating factor, there is a huge potential for innovations along the way that might address some of today’s most common, and deadly, health conditions. This means the whale genome study could start to improve the human condition in the very near term. The benefits of understanding what makes our sea-bound mammalian cousins so long-lived are out there for the taking. But, jumping into the water on this one will be only for those not fearing the technology of genetic modification.

David Warmflash is an astrobiologist, physician, and science writer. Follow @CosmicEvolution to read what he is saying on Twitter.

Viewpoint: How Environmental—Social—Governance (ESG) screens can be manipulated to promote misleading science and damage sustainability efforts

While the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investor point system has had a bit of a rough time over the last year, the great and the good at the World Economic Forum in Davos are determined to push through an ESG 2.0 – a kinder and gentler corporate PR game (what they now call “prosperity for all” stakeholder capitalism… sweet). Several years ago, I referred to ESG as a type of Squid Game with some faceless power calling out daily arbitrary rule changes – hoops – that corporations have to jump through to keep their stocks listed on a wide range of sustainability-focused Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).

Those hoops have become tighter and, for the food industry, have thus filtered down the value chain to farmers. Food manufacturer ESG scores now depend on how green the farmers can grow the food and feedstock for their downstream processors (everything from the chip to the salad to the sweetener now has to comply with some company’s ESG targets). Since farmers are rarely treated fairly by the food value chain, this worries me. That ESG is an endless process of “improvements” imposed by people with little understanding of agricultural challenges means that the goal of achieving sustainable intensification (and farmer profitability) is getting further from reality. But as long as farmers can meet the targets food corporations and retailers are imposing, corporate stocks will be harvesting profits.

I recently met with a large group of farmers and most shared the same issue: the downstream ESG interference with their farming practises is becoming intolerable. Some examples of how food manufacturers’ ESG demands are harming farmers’ ability to succeed:

  • Farmers with contracts to supply food processors are now having their fertiliser and water use audited (with reduction targets in place).
  • Clients are starting to request that suppliers adopt regenerative farming practises (regardless of the crop, climate or their particular growing conditions), eliminating other cash crops without compensation.
  • Sustainability groups have food waste reduction targets that conflict with how farmers utilise lost yields in the fields.
  • Certain pesticides and chemicals, while not banned from the market, are entering onto ESG watch-lists.

The implication here is that farmers who require fewer crop inputs (fertilisers, pesticides, water, modified seeds…) will have more value in the ESG investment point race. So will farmers now have to make decisions not on the basis of what is best for their crop or soil, but on what will make some corporate investor relations director shine at the next general assembly?

Credit: Motley Fool

The externalising of ESG up the value chain is a cynical move by the food industry to claim credit for the achievements of others. Rather than working on improving their own internal water and waste reductions, companies can claim success on standards they imposed on their suppliers – in this case, farmers. One farmer told me:

Companies are “using their propaganda machine to say to the less educated consumer, ‘Look at what we’re making our growers do.’ They should be using their giant propaganda machine to try to destroy the image that farmers are stupid.”

Where farmers and food processors need to strengthen their trust and cooperation, ESG is driving a wedge between them. Whatever happened to dialogue?

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ESG: Bad for the environment, bad for consumers

This is not the first time investor obsession with ESG has buggered up global trade, the environment and development. The recent European energy crisis and under-investment in the energy transition has as much to do with random ESG point deductions for companies investing in natural gas projects as with the Russian invasion of Ukraine (natural gas is, after all, a fossil fuel and thus does not tick the right bean-counter box). This juvenile categorisation has also restricted energy projects in developing countries where financing any fossil fuels would have hurt a bank’s ESG ratings (and might have pulled them out of an ETF).

Even though ESG trends tend to suppress energy stocks relative to the price of hydrocarbons, the price of energy is set to soar. Credit: CelsiusEnergy

But if an unsophisticated scoring valued natural gas at the same ecological level as coal, this bodes poorly for farmers unwittingly being pulled into the ESG investor points game. At some point, someone in an auditing firm cubicle may be persuaded to value organic food with more ESG points than conventionally-grown. At which point large food corporations, in satirical Dilbertesque fashion, will all pile into demanding to source only organically grown food. What would then happen to US corn yields if, for example, sweeteners would have to be organic and non-GMO? Stupid ESG decisions by naive auditors will not only make it impossible for farmers to supply the food processors; these arbitrary board-room decisions will ultimately affect global food security.

I fear we are getting close to that. Corporate demands for regenerative practises assume a one-size-fits-all approach. While I have been a strong supporter of cover crops and no-till for more than a decade, anyone who has been on a farm will tell you there are different soils, different crops and different climates that make such farming decisions highly selective. Forcing all farmers in a particular supply chain to plant certain covers or take a cash crop out of rotation to meet some ESG goals for that company’s market is hurting the farmer (and the food supply). Worse, for many crops, they will need to invest in new equipment to adapt their practises. Farmers who need to irrigate or apply certain fertilisers or pesticides should look at what is in the best interest for their farm and their crops and not be burdened with having to consider what is in the best interest of some downstream company’s inclusion in some arbitrary ESG ETF. Farmers are rightly frustrated.

We’re trying to produce more with less, not less with more.

Farmers have signed up to the sustainable intensification of agriculture objective (getting higher yields on less land to rewild less productive soils). ESG agriculture is demanding that farmers produce less with more inputs (and more work). This is doomed to failure but the farmers will not be the only ones to suffer. Like the ESG energy debacle, food prices will rise.

The reality is that the impossibility to meet the endlessly tightening ESG standards will lead to rampant cheating (what I called “organish” food) or non-reporting of necessary farming practises. But this “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach will conflict with the ‘G’ in ESG – governance – that demands transparency and integrity.

To be honest, the entire ESG process lacks integrity.

Smallholders have small voices

And what will this fund-driven demand for ESG points do to farmers in developing countries?

This is where I really have to hold my nose as the great and the good down the food chain pontificate their extreme mixture of sustainability and social justice PR. “Fair trade” set the standard for hypocrisy as compliance standards and certification bureaucracy disqualified most smallholders (the ones who needed the support and markets). Thankfully, people with concern for genuine social justice stopped using that hollow marketing trick (although some agroecologist vultures are still feeding off of its rotting carcass).

Sustainable farming has become the new buzzword where Western ideals for ecology are imposed on subsistence farmers in developing countries. Take for example, SIFAV, the Sustainable Initiative on Fruits and Vegetables whose objective is to “drive sustainability within global supply chains, with a focus on reducing the environmental footprint, improving working conditions, wages and incomes, and strengthening due diligence reporting and transparency.” Environmental / Social / Governance. Their mission statement essentially assures companies who commit to this supply chain label that this will be enough to deliver the highly-prized ESG points.

But SIFAV’s sustainability reduction targets will deliver more suffering or exclusion of smallholders in developing countries who will have to make the sacrifices to meet the ESG targets. SIFAV’s steering committee is mostly made up of retail and food processing companies and a few NGOs (well… is WWF still an NGO?). No voice of farmers, agronomists or farming representatives at the table to temper the zeal of their strategic planners. SIFAV is managed by IDH – the Sustainable Trade Initiative. In other words, ESG has become a new, more complex type of fair trade – old wine poured into new bottles, but this time the wine has turned to vinegar by the time it is imposed on the farmers.

The IDH espouses noble goals, supported by ministries, non-profits and NGOs, but what about the farmers? Credit: IDH

Single voice… simple message… coordinated

I recommend that farmers should join together and politely inform their urban, PR-savvy clients that they already follow the best farming practises possible according to their particular conditions and challenges and that their focus on food quality and sustainable yields is more important than some investment fund’s ESG requirements. Farmers have to make it clear that they are equal partners in the food chain, and not some bit player that can easily be replaced if they don’t submit to the investor-driven ESG demands.

What would a baker be without grain? A butcher without livestock? Managers in food processing businesses who think food comes from their factories need to spend some time on the farm. The worst offender, Chipotle, in their Scarecrow campaign, painted the conventional farmers who provide most of their food as grim, soulless and toxic. Farmers should have joined together to boycott supplying such a dreadful organisation.

I have argued before that the food value chain needs to be integrated with a clear single message, coordinated and simply communicated. The organic food industry does just that – it presents itself as a single organism, on message (even if there are many definitions of organic and their idealism is unrealistic). As long as there is opportunism dividing the actors in the conventional food chain, messages will be mixed and trust will be weak. Farmers’ interests have to play an important part of that message – if arbitrary ESG standards make them unable to farm, then retailers and processors will be unable to sell.

Quite frankly, with ESG, the corporate investor relations managers need to suck it up and leave their silly points collection process to reflections on their own company’s internal management achievements. Go into your budgets, buy a wind farm and stop screwing farmers. Farmers deserve respect, not lectures. Farmers deserve support, not sacrifice. They have more important things to do than worry about whether the food manufacturers survive another random round of some ESG Squid Game.

David Zaruk has been an EU risk and science communications specialist since 2000, active in EU policy events from REACH and SCALE to the Pesticides Directive, from Science in Society questions to the use of the Precautionary Principle. Follow him on Twitter @zaruk

A version of this article was originally posted at Risk Monger’s website and has been reposted here with permission.

Viewpoint: No, your water bottle does not pose a danger to your health — Here’s how HuffPost misrepresents the science on safe plasticizers

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We’ve often heard that economics is the “dismal science.” That phrase also seems like an apt description of claims used to attack a class of chemicals called “phthalates.” 

“These harmful chemicals are lurking in countless products,” warns the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Following their lead, some newspapers known for their advocacy positions echo this view. “Phthalates are everywhere, and the health risks are worrying,” opines The Guardian (UK). 

Alarming studies, augmented by sensationalist media headlines and environmental advocacy group commentaries, suggest that phthalates, used to make a wide variety of plastic products including medical devices, can disrupt our endocrine system and cause myriad health problems. 

US oversight agencies take a different view. 

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “Several studies have shown associations between phthalate exposures and human health, although no causal link has been established.”

What’s the disconnect between activists and independent regulatory scientists? Limited human research is based on urine studies — one of the lowest rungs of toxicological science. They don’t show causation, just associations, which scientists say is problematic.

Our bodies have natural detoxification systems, so it’s no surprise that the Centers for Disease Control notes that while people are routinely exposed to plasticizers, “[f]inding a detectable amount of phthalate metabolites in urine does not mean the levels will cause harmful health effects” — a conclusion echoed by the state-of-the-art study of phthalate exposure.

Nevertheless, studies based on associations of questionable relevance have kicked phthalates and other so-called endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) into the perceived chemical bad actors guild, often with the help of news outlets and social media platforms ignorant of the science and desperate for clicks and eyeballs. 

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HuffPost on phthalates: Courting clicks

A perfect example: this HuffPost story claiming that phthalates in plastic water bottles are potentially dangerous. That innocuous, disposable container you drink from might expose you to dozens of harmful chemicals, HuffPost asserts. The story, with the subtitle “The plastic packaging of your beloved bottled water may post certain health risks,” isn’t subtle.

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Author Daryl Austin promises to tell you “what experts want you to know,” but his piece is littered with rudimentary scientific mistakes. He overlooks contrary evidence from credible experts at the CDC, EPA and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and independent global health agencies to construct a narrative that needlessly alarms his readers.

Phthalates in PVC

Before we go further, a bit of background is in order. Phthalates, a common family of chemicals used to soften hundreds of PVC (vinyl) products, have been employed safely for more than 45 years. These chemicals enhance the durability, flexibility and performance of many specialized products: blood bags, wire and cable jacketing, sports stadium roofing, traffic cones, and some types of packaging — to name just five flexible vinyl applications that contain phthalate “plasticizers.”

During this same timeframe, but much more so lately, phthalates have been scrutinized and otherwise maligned by some scientists and many environmental groups as causes of acute and chronic harm to human health. 

While their use is regulated by multiple government agencies in the United States, all have concluded that when used as intended, currently employed phthalates do not pose significant risks. In a 2018 analysis of plasticizers used in common food-contact materials, FDA researchers concluded: “There have been no studies to date which show any connection between human dietary exposure to phthalates and adverse health effects.”  

Challenged in a petition filed by the NRDC and other environmental groups to reassess that finding, the FDA re-reviewed relevant studies and denied the groups’ claims that phthalates pose demonstrable harm:

… [B]ased on the information currently available to FDA, we do not have a basis to conclude that dietary exposure levels from approved ortho-phthalates exceed a safe level.

Scientific evidence has not satisfied environmental groups, nor the misinformed journalists who enable them. They continue to ignore the findings of independent regulatory agencies while promoting questionable animal studies and epidemiological research GLP has previously critiqued. But there’s another fundamental problem in the HuffPost article…

…There are no phthalates in your water bottle

Although the author dedicates more than 530 words to the dangers of phthalate exposure — a contested conclusion to say the least — plastic water bottles do not contain phthalates at all — as a simple Google search confirms.

Plastic water bottles are typically manufactured from a polymer called polyethylene terephthalate (PET). This is the chemical nomenclature for a material you’re almost certainly familiar with — polyester — which is why recycled water bottles can be turned into threads used to manufacture shirts, tote bags, strapping materials and, of course, new water bottles. 

Despite its name, PET is neither polyethylene nor a phthalate; nor does it contain phthalates. Austin is a journalist, not a chemist, so he can be forgiven for initially believing that a chemical with “terephthalate” in its name is a phthalate. But that was no excuse for HuffPost not fact-checking what turned out to be a grossly misleading story.

Remember that the headline misleadingly asserts that the story addresses “what experts want you to know.” Clearly the author never consulted any experts who would have corrected his misguided premise regarding phthalates and water bottles. This article should not have been written in the first place; after it was posted, and once HuffPost was informed of the mistake that invalidated the story’s premise, it should have been retracted.

This is doubly so because my organization, the Flexible Vinyl Alliance, and our colleagues at the Vinyl Institute, contacted HuffPost four times after the story was published requesting that they address all these errors. We reached out to seven HuffPost editors, including editor-in-chief Danielle Belton. We were ignored every time. Below is the fourth and final message we sent them, to no avail.

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According to its About Us page, HuffPost:

… endeavors to be accurate in its reporting, transparent and thorough in its sourcing, and fair and independent in its analysis. … HuffPost works to correct any misstatements in a timely manner, with a correction note appended to the bottom of an article to indicate what has been fixed and how.

Those standards are admirable in theory, but they need to be applied. Credible news organizations take the necessary time to fact-check their articles before they publish. And they don’t dodge repeated attempts to help them correct inaccuracies so that readers aren’t misled. On this issue, at least, that does not describe HuffPost.

Kevin D. Ott is the executive director of the Flexible Vinyl Alliance (FVA). Follow FVA on LinkedIn and visit their website

Humans are ill equipped to handle freezing cold — so why do so many of us live in chilly climates?

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Humans are a tropical species. We have lived in warm climates for most of our evolutionary history, which might explain why so many of us spend winter huddled under a blanket, clutching a hot water bottle and dreaming of summer.

Indeed all living apes are found in the tropics. The oldest known fossils from the human lineage (hominins) come from central and eastern Africa. The hominins who dispersed northwards into higher latitudes had to deal with, for the first time, freezing temperatures, shorter days that limited foraging time, snow that made hunting more difficult and icy wind chill that exacerbated heat loss from their bodies.

Given our limited adaptation to the cold, why is it that our species has come to dominate not only our warm ancestral lands but every part of the globe? The answer lies in our ability to develop intricate cultural solutions to the challenges of life.

Many humans dread the cold of winter. Mariia Boiko/Shutterstock

The earliest signs of hominins living in northern Europe are from Happisburgh in Norfolk, eastern England, where 900,000-year-old footprints and stone tools have been found. At that time, Happisburgh was dominated by coniferous forest with cold winters, similar to southern Scandinavia today. There is little evidence the Happisburgh hominins stayed at the site for long, which suggests they didn’t have time to adapt physically.

It’s still a bit of a mystery how these hominins survived the tough conditions that were so different from their ancestral African homelands. There are no caves in the region, nor evidence of shelters. Artefacts from Happisburgh are simple, suggesting no complex technology.

Evidence for deliberate campfires at this time is contentious. Tools for tailoring fitted, weather-proof clothes don’t appear in western Europe until almost 850,000 years later. Many animals migrate to avoid seasonal cold, but the Happisburgh hominins would have had to travel about 800km south to make a meaningful difference.

It’s hard to imagine hominins surviving those ancient Norfolk winters without fire or warm clothing. Yet the fact the hominins were so far north means they must have found a way to survive the cold, so who knows what archaeologists will find in the future.

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The Boxgrove hunters

Sites from more recent settlements, such as Boxgrove in West Sussex, southern England, offer more clues about how ancient hominins survived northern climates. The Boxgrove site dates to nearly 500,000 years ago, when the climate deteriorated towards one of the coldest periods in human history.

There is good evidence these hominins hunted animals, from cut marks on bones, to a horse shoulder blade probably pierced by a wooden spear. These finds fit with studies of people who live as foragers today which show people in colder regions depend on animal prey more than their warm climate counterparts. Meat is rich in the calories and fats needed to weather the cold.

A fossilised hominin shin bone from Boxgrove is robust compared to living humans, suggesting it belonged to a tall, stocky homininLarger bodies with relatively short limbs reduce heat loss by minimising surface area.

The best silhouette for avoiding heat loss is a sphere, so animals and humans in cold climates get as close to that shape as possible. There is also clearer evidence for campfires by this period.

Cold climate specialists

The Neanderthals, who lived in Eurasia about 400,000-40,000 years ago, inhabited glacial climates. Compared to their predecessors in Africa, and to us, they had short, strong limbs, and wide, muscular bodies suited to producing and retaining heat.

Yet the Neanderthal protruding face and beaky nose are the opposite of what we might expect to be adaptive in an ice age. Like Japanese macaques living in cold areas and lab rats raised in cold conditions, living humans from cold climates tend to have relatively high, narrow noses and broad, flat cheekbones.

Computer modelling of ancient skeletons suggests Neanderthal noses were more efficient than those of earlier, warm-adapted species at conserving heat and moisture. It seems the internal structure is as important as overall nose size.

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Musk ox are well adapted for cold weather. Fitawoman/Shutterstock

Even with their cold-adapted physique, Neanderthals were still hostage to their tropical ancestry. For example, they lacked the thick fur of other mammals in glacial Europe, such as woolly rhinos and musk oxen. Instead, Neanderthals developed complex culture to cope.

There is archaeological evidence they made clothes and shelters from animal skins. Evidence of cooking and use of fire to make birch pitch glue for the manufacture of tools show sophisticated Neanderthal control of fire.

More controversially, some archaeologists say early Neanderthal bones from the 400,000-year-old site of Sima de los Huesos in northern Spain show seasonal damage from slowing down their metabolisms to hibernate. The authors argue these bones show cycles of interrupted growth and healing.

Only a few species of primate hibernate such as some lemurs in Madagascar and the African lesser bushbaby, as well as the pygmy slow loris in norther Vietnam.

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Lesser bushbabies are one of the few primates that hibernate. Rudi Hulshof/Shutterstock

This might give you the idea that humans can hibernate too. But most species that hibernate have small bodies, with some exceptions like bears. Humans may be too big to hibernate.

Jack of all trades

The earliest fossils in the Homo sapiens lineage date from 300,000 years ago, from Morocco. But we didn’t spread out of Africa until about 60,000 years ago, colonising all parts of the globe. This makes us relative newcomers in most habitats we now inhabit. Over the intervening thousands of years, people living in freezing cold places have adapted biologically to their environment but on a small scale.

One well-known example of this adaptation is that in areas with low sunlight, Homo sapiens developed light skin tones, which are better at synthesising vitamin D. The genomes of living Inuit people from Greenland demonstrate physiological adaptation to a fat-rich marine diet, beneficial in the cold.

More direct evidence comes from DNA from a single 4,000-year-old permafrost-preserved hair from Greenland. The hair hints at genetic changes that led to stocky body shape that maximised heat production and retention, like the hominin we only have one shin bone from the Boxgrove site.

Our tropical legacy means we would still be unable to live in cold places without developing ways of coping with the temperatures. Take, for example, the traditional Inuit parka, which provides better insulation than the modern Canadian army winter uniform.

This human ability to adapt behaviourally was crucial to our evolutionary success. Even compared to other primates, humans show less physical climatic adaptation. Behavioural adaptation is quicker and more flexible than biological adaptation. Humans are the ultimate adapters, thriving in nearly every possible ecological niche.

Laura Buck is a Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology at Liverpool John Moores University. Find Laura on Twitter @_LTBuck

Kyoko Yamaguchi is a Senior Lecturer in Human Genetics at Liverpool John Moores University. Find Kyoko on Twitter @KyokoYamaguchi2

A version of this article was originally posted at the Conversation and is reposted here with permission. The Conversation can be found on Twitter @ConversationUS

GLP podcast and video: Low-carb diets cause heart disease? Economic de-growth or ‘green’ growth?

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Many people have turned to low-carb diets as a way to shed unwanted body fat, but a new study suggests they may just be elevating their heart disease risk. As the developing world continues to pull itself out of poverty, a new debate has emerged among economists in wealthy, Western countries: should emerging nations clean up their environments before further growing their economies, or can they do both at the same time?

Podcast:

Video:

Join geneticist Kevin Folta and GLP contributor Cameron English on episode 208 of Science Facts and Fallacies as they break down these latest news stories:

Low-carb and ketogenic diets have loyal adherents, who swear that these eating regimens have helped them lose weight and dramatically improve their health. But a new study indicates that high-fat, low-carb dieting could double someone’s heart disease risk. Should this research concern us?

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Should climate change force developing nations to put the environment before economic development? That’s been the conventional wisdom among many scientists and global warming activists for decades; however, a new school of thought in economics claims that the developing world can simultaneously protect their natural resources and boost their economies. Is such an effort really possible?

Kevin M. Folta is a professor, keynote speaker and podcast host. Follow Professor Folta on Twitter @kevinfolta

Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Visit his website and follow ACSH on Twitter @ACSHorg

Honeybee health: Driving problem is not climate or pesticides but the deadly Varroa mite

Some food grown in the US, especially high-cost luxuries like almonds, are pollinated using bees. Since bees are most often rented and transported for such purposes, keeping them alive is important to owners and growers. As their value for higher-cost foods has grown, so have bee numbers; they are up 85 percent in the last 60 years. You would just never know it if your source is Greenpeace, so when you use verbiage identical to Greenpeace press releases in an academic paper press release your work is going to be suspect. And that is a paper on bee deaths we’ll discuss today.

No matter how much effort is put into prevention, bees die. A lot. Some years more than others, and when that happens environmentalists promote campaigns against weedkillers and other agricultural tools, but the number one killer of bees is not climate change or land use, it is parasites. Bees live in a small enclosed space and diseases can devastate them in a short amount of time. The only way to prevent losses of 50 percent or more is with modern medicine against pests like varroa mites and others. Parasites are all three of the top three reasons bees die of external causes.

There are other factors, severe weather will cause more deaths, and for the few bee species that can be estimated (7 out of approximately 25,000 – that’s right, we don’t even know how many bee species exist) land use changes can be implicated. If someone tries hard enough, they can even find a way to “correlate’ farming to dead bees.

That is not the goal of a recent paper, but they use flawed ‘false equivalence’ to enable that, by acknowledging mites but then putting farming and weather events right next to them. I like bees, I want them to stick around, but no one is helped if pesticides are given false equivalence with the pests they kill in bee deaths.

Farming is a non-existent peril for bees outside the statistical noise range but even weather events are not worth mentioning beyond creating an average. Yes, hurricanes sometimes happen but listing those alongside the top killer is a way to boost their credibility the same way as if a journalist talks to an expert on climate change and then drops in a denier for ‘balance.’

Credit: Overturf et. al.

if they invoke global warming, hurricanes, and pesticides in their false equivalence with mites, how do I argue they may be going after farming? The authors use pleas for action by Greenpeace that have no evidence basis – a manufactured claim that one third of the world’s food, 100 crops, etc. need bees or we are doomed. It was entirely made up. USDA knows it, scientists know it, everyone who reads Google outside the first 20 results knows it. But the authors ignore USDA data showing pollinators are only involved in about $15 billion of food and instead blindly repeat the Greenpeace claim that it is 1,000% greater.

Here is the science truth. The 12 crops that provide 90 percent of our food are not pollinated by bees. Some are wind pollinated, some are self-pollinated or propagate asexually or parthenocarpically – they don’t need fertilization. Not by bees or the tens of thousands of flying insects that would take their place if that one species of bees disappeared tomorrow.

Only 13 crops need bees. Will the food system collapse without…almonds? You are literate to know science does not matter in press releases, but press releases matter to journalists, and therefore the public.

The authors seem to believe 40 percent losses are alarming. The science community certainly don’t. Especially not since periodic die-offs much greater than that have literally been noted for as long as records of bees have been kept.

Bees are not vital pollinators for 100 vital crops or even 10 percent of food. They are not even declining. We have to look at their methodology a lot more critically when they make breezy statements that a USA Today fact checker would have asked them to cite.

Greenpeace did not invent that business about 100 crops from nothing, it was an unsubstantiated claim in a 1976 Pollinator Handbook, but everyone knows better by now, but that is no excuse. The general rule on old literature is that if you don’t accept claims that a low-fat diet will make you lose weight, also believed in 1976, don’t accept claims on other things because it matches your bias.

Back to the paper. The authors used survey claims of losses by beekeepers – unfortunately that is the best we can do – and combined those with publicly available data on land use, weather, and farming, and rightly agree that mites are a problem but strangely declare that pesticides and climate change are also big culprits.

Yet the data don’t show it.

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How they seem to show it is statistical manipulation but don’t let that part alarm you. Statistical ‘manipulation’ and even ‘trick’ does not carry the colloquial negative connotation those terms have in culture. If you have data created using different methods you have to make them relevant to each other. There is no meta-analysis without manipulation so it’s important. Shedding light on arcane parts of data is a positive force in statistics, but if someone is averaging and upscaling to show a result they perhaps wanted to show it is more like data dredging or HARK-ing; Hypothesis After Results Known. A real no-no.

Credit: Sketchplanations.com

I am not sure how to feel about their data period. Mostly, why? USDA has been surveying beekeepers since 1986 but this analysis only goes back to 2015. Using recent results may be causing sampling bias. They included a hurricane event – since bees only live a few weeks why a hurricane should he included to implicate weather in a long-term decline is unknown – and they touch on culture and accept they have no way to know how competent beekeepers are, but still wave it away in their press kit.

That cultural confounder, which finer resolution upscaling can’t help with, is that beekeeping became a fad.

Since the surge of Greenpeace claims that bees are keeling over en masse, there has been a surge in amateur beekeeping. Which has meant a surge in bee deaths by amateur beekeepers who buy into ‘power of nature’ mythology that they can just put up a hive and Gaia’s supernatural abilities will kick in. Which is completely false. With a surge in amateur beekeeping there has also been a surge in deaths due to overuse of needed chemicals to cure diseases – and deaths due to not using chemicals at all. Are new beekeepers going to blame their own incompetence? I have no idea, but if an aggressive statistician looks at a map and sees a farm near where a bunch of bees died, it is easy to correlate the farm to the deaths rather than nature or even misuse of chemicals by a beekeeper. It is also the completely wrong conclusion but it can be gained with statistical significance. Upscaling and statistical tricks magnify incomplete national data in that instance, while a neutral examination would catch that bees dying from truck accidents on the way to an almond farm did not die due to pesticides used by the farmers at the almond farm even though a statistician can claim they are ‘linked’ because of geography, especially if the resolution is only by state.

Statistics can link anything to anything, that is why their claims are only exploratory. In the real world, science and evidence is what matters. Evidence shows that bees are not in decline, our food supply is not at risk, and the top killer by far is mites, with other pests way behind, and chemicals that are not misused are down in the statistical noise area.

Credit: Giuliade via CC-BY-SA-4.0

As an observational paper, this is fine, even their press release concedes that ‘other’ is a large killer compared to things like pesticides. They know they are working with limited data, much of it is subjective and changes from year to year, and they need to make a lot of assumptions to try and get it all similar enough to make sense. But for 13 years prior to COVID-19 we warned about the problems of statisticians and epidemiologists and even some biologists creating ‘red meat’ papers for anti-science activists, because it could cause real harm (and did) when it came to vaccines and trust in our food supply.

Expect to see this paper trotted out in the same way. It is not going to be compelling to the science community but for Pesticide Action Network and others, it is pure honey.

Hank Campbell founded Science 2.0 in 2006, and writes for USA Today, Wall Street Journal, CNN, and more. His first book, Science Left Behind, was the #1 bestseller on Amazon for environmental policy books. Follow Hank on Twitter @HankCampbell

A version of this article was posted at Science 2.0 and is used here with permission. Any reposts of this article should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article.Check out Science 2.0 on Twitter @science2_0

Changing negative perceptions about GMOs? Gene-edited purple tomato with great taste, longer shelf life and as much anthocyanin as blueberries is one of many new GM foods

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The first genetically modified (GM) food ever made commercially available to the public was a tomato, invented in the US in 1994. Since then, a number of different genetically modified foods have been created, including corn, cotton, potatoes and pink pineapple.

Although genetically modified foods still get a bit of a bad rap, there are actually many good reasons why modifying an organism’s genetics may be worthwhile. For example, many breeds of genetically modified foods have made them more resistant to disease.

It’s also possible to modify foods to make them more nutritious. Take for example golden rice. This grain was engineered to have higher levels of vitamin A, in order to tackle deficiencies of this nutrient in impoverished countries.

Credit: FDA

But despite all the developments in genetically modified foods since 1994, few products have actually made it to the market. The continued ignorance of the general public about GM products alongside the reluctance of government policymakers in some countries have impeded the progress of genetically modified foods moving from the lab to the market. This is why the regulatory approval of purple tomatoes in the US this September is so exciting.

Anti GMO protestors theatrics and outlandish claims drown out reasoned discourse around GMO crops. Credit: Thierry Roge via EPA
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Making a purple tomato

For the last 14 years, Cathie Martin and Eugenio Butelli from the John Innes Centre in Norfolk, England, and their team have been working on developing the purple tomato. Their aim was to engineer a tomato that contained higher levels of anthocyanins – which can be used alongside unmodified tomatoes to study the benefits of anthocyanins. The team chose to modify a tomato because the fruits are delicious and widely consumed.

Anthocyanins occur naturally in many fruits and vegetables that have a red, purple or blue flesh or peel – such as blueberries, strawberries, aubergines and red cabbages. In order to produce a purple tomato, the team incorporated genes from snapdragons into the DNA of tomatoes.

Purple tomatoes contain the same level of anthocyanins as blueberries. Credit: pilipphoto via Shutterstock

The end result of these experiments was a unique fruit – and not just because of it’s colour. They also succeeded in engineering tomatoes that contained high levels of anthocyanins – comparable to the amount found in blueberries – which is beneficial for a number of reasons.

The higher levels of anthocyanins in purple tomatoes actually work to double their shelf life compared to red tomatoes. This is because anthocyanins help to delay over-ripening and reduce the fruit’s susceptibility to fungus attack post-harvest.

Another benefit of high levels of anthocyanins is that they attract pollinators and animals to disperse seeds, which increases reproductive success of the plants and their yield. Anthocyanins also protect plants from UV damage and protect them from pathogens, which maximises their survival.

Credit: Joana F Henriques et. al.

Anthocyanins may also be good for your health. Studies on other foods containing them have linked them to lower inflammation, lower risk of type 2 diabetes and cancer. They may also protect the brain against disease, such as dementia.

While studies into the benefits of purple tomatoes specifically on humans are still ongoing, one study which fed cancer-prone mice food supplemented with purple tomatoes found they actually lived 30% longer compared to the mice given red tomatoes.

The future of GM

There have been a number of exciting developments in the field of GM foods in the last few years, including the first genome-edited GABA tomatoes in Japan and vitamin D enriched tomatoes in the UK. Both were developed using CRISPR genome-editing technology.

Genetic modification can offer many benefits. Not only might it help us tackle the challenges of climate change by developing more resilient crops, breeding plants with higher levels of certain vitamins and minerals may potentially allow us to improve health and lower the burden of many common diseases. And, GM crops may help us ensure that everyone, regardless of where they live, has access to high-quality fresh produce that’s good for them and the environment.

GM foods are also tightly regulated in many countries, which means that any products which are approved for consumption are safe for human, plant and animal health.

All three agencies have ahand in regulating GMO foods. Credit: FDA

The greatest challenge now is getting more governments around the world to approve these genetically modified foods for sale. Although the UK is ahead of other countries when it comes to regulation of gene-edited crops, it’s currently unknown whether the GM purple tomato will be offered for sale there. But it’s expected that purple tomatoes will be available for sale in the US as soon as 2023.

Yang Yue is a PhD Candidate in Plants, Food and Health at the Quadram Institute working on a project which looks at the impact of anthocyanin-enriched food on gut and brain health. Follow Yue on Twitter @YangYue_Plant

A version of this article was posted at the Conversation and is used here with permission. Check out Conversation on Twitter @ConversationEDU

How the war in Ukraine has derailed the European Union Farm to Fork initiative — and sparked debate about what constitutes sustainable agriculture

In March 2020, the EU, unveiled its Farm to Fork (F2F) strategy, an ambitious policy designed to reduce agriculture’s carbon footprint. The stated objective: to “accelerate our transition to a sustainable food system”. It outlines five major components:  

  • Have a neutral or positive environmental impact
  • Help mitigate climate change and adapt to its impacts
  • Reverse the loss of biodiversity
  • Ensure food security, nutrition and public health, making sure that everyone has access to sufficient, safe, nutritious, sustainable food
  • Preserve affordability of food while generating fairer economic returns, fostering competitiveness of the EU supply sector and promoting fair trade”

The ambition is to begin a transition to a ’more sustainable’ farming system. What that means in practice and how ‘sustainability’ is defined remain largely unaddressed and controversial.

F2F established targets by 2030 to cut the use of chemical and hazardous pesticides by 50%, reducing fertilizer use by 20%, and lowering by 50% the sales of antimicrobials for farmed animals and in aquaculture. To achieve many of these goals, F2F proposes “increasing the amount of land devoted to organic farming” to 25% in 2030 from 9.1% in 2020

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Visionary or misguided?

The response to the strategy has been mixed. In general, environmentalists saw it as a potential shift away from what they see as destructive farming practices that rely on synthetic fertilizers and crop chemicals.

An analysis in Nature Food praised it as “a first step towards genuine food systems governance and … well timed to address some of the most pressing environmental and public health concerns that European society faces”. Many green groups saw it as a victory for an ‘organic first’ policy. The pan-European group Organic Cities claimed it “put organic farming at the heart of the transition to sustainable food systems.”

Many sustainability experts are less sanguine. F2F supporters, including the Nature Food commentators, noted that the commitments are as yet just aspirational:

The concept remains rather ill-defined in the F2F Strategy, appearing as a panacea without clear conceptual boundaries.

Others question equating organic practices with sustainability, noting that life-cycle studies conclude that the environmental benefits of almost tripling organic acreage could end up releasing more polluting carbon into the atmosphere than conventional practices. [Read this comprehensive review by Our World in Data]

Economists were harsh in their assessments. F2F, however well meaning, could significantly increase global food insecurity. Its targets are unrealistic, and implementation would reduce food production, resulting in higher food prices. 

Independent evaluations

An impact assessment from Wageningen University released in 2021, concluded the recommended F2F policy switch would decrease EU crop output by 10-20%.

US Department of Agriculture studies estimated a reduction in agricultural production across the EU by 12% by 2030. 

Based on our analysis, the food and agricultural sustainability measures proposed by the European Commission (EC) in their 10-year plan to reduce the use of traditional agricultural inputs of land, fertilizers, antimicrobials, and pesticides in the EU would lead to a reduction in both EU agricultural production and their competitiveness in export markets. 

F2F could send global food prices soaring — by 89% if all countries followed the European model. 

[T]ightening the EU food supply would likely result in price increases that affect consumer budgets, reduce food security, and decrease GDPs worldwide…. Our models find that the more widespread EC’s measures limiting usage of agricultural inputs, the more marked these impacts become, with consequences for international food insecurity.  

We find that when trade is restricted because of the imposition of the EC’s proposed measures, the impacts are concentrated in regions with the world’s most food-insecure populations.

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Perhaps the most significant unintended consequence of F2F is the disruptions it could bring to Africa and other vulnerable regions likely to face the brunt of the inevitable shortfalls in European food production. The USDA study estimated that “the number of food-insecure people in the world’s most vulnerable regions [would increase] by 185 million (global adoption).”

A Centre for Africa-Europe Relations brief on F2F also raised red flags, suggesting the plan does not take into account the global sustainability impact of its ‘Europe-first’ proposal.

[T]he F2F and Biodiversity Strategy’s positive impacts on greenhouse gas emissions (due to lower production and increased efficiency in Europe) might be offset by higher emissions from increasing agricultural production outside the EU. Similarly, the F2F and Biodiversity Strategy’s potential biodiversity gains could be offset if they contribute to agricultural expansion in biodiversity hotspots around the equator. 

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Assessing the fallout of the war in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine which has brought sizable food disruptions globally has further thrown into doubt the ambitious goals established by the F2F. It’s prompted an ongoing debate within the EU about whether the strategy should be altered considering the global food disruption caused by the year-long conflict. Food and fertilizer prices have soared as both Russia and Ukraine are bread baskets suppling global markets with wheat, barley, corn, sunflower oil and fertilizers. The associated price hikes for major agricultural commodities and inputs have contributed to global inflationary pressures.

A European Parliament report from April 2022 noted the magnitude of the escalating food crisis and the collateral damage the war has caused. 

Ukraine normally supplies almost half of the cereals (52% of EU corn imports) and vegetable/rapeseed oils (23% and 72% of EU imports respectively) and a quarter of the poultry meat imported to Europe, and Russia is a major global exporter of fertilizers, vegetable oils, wheat and barley. The two countries together account for more than 30% of world wheat exports and nearly 30% of barley.

Russia is the world’s biggest supplier of fertilizers, and second largest exporter of potash, a key ingredient in fertilizers. … [S]anctions will oblige the EU to replace the import share of Russia and Belarus, respectively 60% for potash and 35% for phosphates. In the EU, some fertilizer producers have temporarily halted production, as energy costs were too high.

Europe has at least temporarily slowed its plans to pass F2F sparking a clash between the proponents and opponents of the strategy. F2F supporters are loathe to compromise, arguing the war’s disruptions are temporary. They argue the urgency of climate change demands that F2F be fully implemented and not watered down. Skeptics argue the Ukraine war has made it clear why F2F’s targets were never achievable, and reconsideration is necessary. They argue for a more comprehensive assessment of food sustainability, which would put innovative technologies such as genetically engineered crops, including CRISPR gene edited varieties, on the table for consideration. 

Competing visions

UK’s Financial Times has outlined the political forces that are coalescing to prompt a reassessment of F2F’s targets. French president Emmanuel Macron projected a 13% drop in food production, saying the sustainable food strategy was “based on a pre-Ukraine war world” and should be reviewed. According to FT:

A paradigm shift is needed…starting with the objectives, targets and timeline of the Farm to Fork strategy…. Pekka Pesonen, secretary-general of Copa-Cogeca [Europe’s largest farmers interest group], said the best way to reduce carbon emissions was to increase productivity. He wants new technologies permitted that would allow gene editing to improve the output of animals and plants. Roughly speaking, two-thirds of the productivity improvements will come from better genetic material, our crops and livestock. 

The EU farmers lobby opposes many aspects of the F2F given the difficult situation many EU farmers face because of rising fertilizer and energy costs. That was exacerbated by last summer’s heat wave which reduced crop output. 

Christiane Lambert, co-president of Copa-Cogeca, said the pesticide cut was “not realistic, adding: “We may not be able to meet consumption demand if we see some of those products being removed due to the directive.  It is important that this decision should be taken based on science, not politics.” 

The proposal to implement the pesticide reduction plans was effectively shelved last September by farm ministers from Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia. During an EU Agriculture and Fishing meeting they jointly requested the European Commission carry out a second impact assessment on the measure because it “does not take into account the impact of the war in Ukraine on global food security and the resulting threats to the European Union”.  

Environmentalists push back

Environmental groups, which before the war assumed F2F was a done deal, are panicking. “Watering down the Farm to Fork strategy and its policies will maintain Europe’s dependence on non-renewable energy sources like fossil fuels, and will go against what is needed right now to secure food for all,” the Food Policy Coalition declared.

For the Green lobby there is no room for compromise. They have ferociously criticized any measures to soften the strategy, calling it a sell-out to corporate interests and a reduction in the commitment of the EU to reduce the carbon footprint of the agricultural sector. 

Last November, several environmental, organic and Green NGOs co-authored a letter to the EU Ministers for Agriculture, Environment and Health and the President of the European Parliament arguing that it was unacceptable to delay the reduction of pesticide use in the EU. The coalition “strongly condemned the attacks to weaken” the proposal to reduce pesticide use, saying its adoption was “crucial to implement the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity Strategies.  

F2F was an important step, they wrote:

… towards achieving a toxic free environment, protecting the environment and achieving resilient farming systems capable of securing food production and facing current and future crises…the massive use of synthetic pesticides already has a negative impact on human health, on biodiversity including pollinators, as well as on water and soil quality.

Drawing on an internal European Commission document, Politico reported in a January article entitled “Farm to Flop” that F2F was “in deep peril with many of the most ambitious reforms delayed or entirely blocked by political battles among farmers, EU officials and national diplomats.” Three years after its proposal, the article noted:

[T]he green sheen is fading, as twin food and energy crises inflamed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine embolden critics, from French farm lobbies to the bloc’s own agriculture commissioner, who argues that the shift is too ambitious and will impose an uneven and unfair compliance burden across EU member countries.

According to the EC document, many of the most far-reaching proposed changes are losing traction across the 31 EU countries. The biggest issue: Many countries do not believe the EC’s plan to slash pesticide use in half by the end of the decade is feasible. 

“The Green Deal is … a political program in which all sorts of objectives are included, and which, as is the case with political programs, will be implemented to a greater or lesser extent, EC Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski, known to be against what he believes is an impractical plan, said in December before the Polish parliament. 

F2F was never a realistic policy; it’s aspirational but without the necessary details to ensure it’s the most sustainable approach. It would reduce food production and farm income and boost food prices. 

Much of it is a wish list designed to address the concerns of green activists without significant input from the farm sector with a documented yield shortfall of as much as 44% compared to conventional farming, according to the most recent independent study. A separate impact assessment from Wageningen University concluded the recommended F2F policy switch would decrease EU crop output by 10-20%. 

And since the move to organic farming is less productive than conventional farming, much more land would be required to grow food. That could increase rather than decrease the carbon footprint of agriculture. A study by Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, published in the journal Nature, concluded that:

Organically farmed food has a bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed food, due to the greater areas of land required.

According to Stefan Wirsenius, who participated in the study,

The greater land-use in organic farming leads indirectly to higher carbon dioxide emissions, thanks to deforestation…. The world’s food production is governed by international trade, so how we farm in Sweden influences deforestation in the tropics. If we use more land for the same amount of food, we contribute indirectly to bigger deforestation elsewhere in the world.

The EU needs to rely on science to forge a more sustainable agricultural policy to reduce the carbon footprint of farming and lower the use of chemical inputs, some of which have dangerous ecological impact. Key would be to expand, rather than restrict, the use of new breeding techniques that could lower the toxic levels of chemical, increase yields, offer climate resilience and improve nutrition — but F2F specifically excludes such innovations, bowing to lobbying from green groups. 

As the Wageningen University study noted:

Removing legislative barriers to new breeding techniques, to shorten the breeding process significantly could help. This will contribute to making crop production more sustainable in the mid-term for annual crops and in the long term for permanent crops.

Only through the application of advanced technology has food production expanded in the US and Europe even as the number of farmers and the acreage under production has plunged. It is folly to try to turn back the clock to a mythical idyllic time when chemical use in agricultural was less pronounced, when in fact in western countries, we are using less crop chemicals per acre to produce food than any time in history. 

Only science and technology can make agriculture more sustainable, lessen its carbon footprint and reduce the use of chemical inputs. The failure of the EU to adopt genetic engineering (GE) for crops at a time when many countries including China, Israel, USA, Canada, Argentina, England, Brazil, Japan — and now countries in Africa — are doing so would place EU farmers at a severe competitive disadvantage without making agriculture more sustainable.

Adopting CRISPR and other genetic engineering techniques would enable farmers to grow disease, pesticide and drought resistant and more nutritious crops. With the world population hurtling to 9.7 billion from 8.0 billion currently, all agricultural tools should be on the table. Everything should be done to expand food production and not constrain it. It’s critical that science and not ideology drive food policy. Everything should be done to expand food production and not constrain it by making it more expensive to produce, less productive to grow — and less sustainable.        

Steven E. Cerier is a retired international economist and a frequent contributor to the Genetic Literacy Project. 

GLP podcast and video: Eating bugs safe? Pesticide use exploding? COVID and trust in science

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The European Union is all too happy to allow consumers to eat potentially dangerous bug-based food, yet it remains hostile to low-risk biotech crops and many pesticides. The hypocrisy is palpable. Is pesticides use “exploding”? Activist groups say “yes,” though the evidence tells a different story. How can public health officials rebuild America’s trust in science after three years of controversial pandemic-response measures?

Podcast:

Video:

Join geneticist Kevin Folta and GLP contributor Cameron English on episode 208 of Science Facts and Fallacies as they break down these latest news stories:

The European Union is known for its hyper-skepticism of novel technologies. Yet the recent push to increase insect consumption has found eager supporters among EU leadership. This has persisted despite legitimate concerns that insect farming carries potentially serious health risks that should be addressed before humans begin relying on cockroaches as a protein source. Why is the EU so enthusiastic about bug-based food but fearful of low-risk biotech crops and pesticides?

Friends of the Earth Europe recently claimed that global pesticide use has increased by 80 percent since 1990. It’s a troubling statistic. It’s also meaningless. Food production has outpaced increases in pesticide use over the same period, even though the global population has boomed. Moreover, the toxicity of many pesticides continues to decline, though we may be using greater quantities of them. These numbers make clear that farming is becoming more sustainable over time, whatever critics may say.

Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Nearly three years of confusing, often contradictory pandemic response measures has left many Americans deeply skeptical of the public health establishment. Fearful that the public will begin rejecting health advice unrelated to COVID-19, officials are now scrambling to rebuild this fractured relationship between citizen and scientist. Are experts taking the right steps to regain America’s trust?

Kevin M. Folta is a professor, keynote speaker and podcast host. Follow Professor Folta on Twitter @kevinfolta

Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Visit his website and follow ACSH on Twitter @ACSHorg

Viewpoint: ChatGPT gets a lot wrong or garbled. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful.

ChatGPTgets a lot wrong or garbled. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful. Here’s how
It doesn’t take much to get ChatGPT to make a factual mistake. My son is doing a report on U.S. presidents, so I figured I’d help him out by looking up a few biographies. I tried asking for a list of books about Abraham Lincoln and it did a pretty good job:

a reasonable list of books about lincoln screen capture by jonathan may
A reasonable list of books about Lincoln. Screen capture by Jonathan May., CC BY-ND

Number 4 isn’t right. Garry Wills famously wrote “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” and Lincoln himself wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, of course, but it’s not a bad start. Then I tried something harder, asking instead about the much more obscure William Henry Harrison, and it gamely provided a list, nearly all of which was wrong.

books about harrison fewer than half of which are correct screen capture by jonathan may cc by nd
Books about Harrison, fewer than half of which are correct. Screen capture by Jonathan May., CC BY-ND

Numbers 4 and 5 are correct; the rest don’t exist or are not authored by those people. I repeated the exact same exercise and got slightly different results:

more books about harrison still mostly nonexistent screen capture by jonathan may cc by nd
More books about Harrison, still mostly nonexistent. Screen capture by Jonathan May., CC BY-ND

This time numbers 2 and 3 are correct and the other three are not actual books or not written by those authors. Number 4, “William Henry Harrison: His Life and Times” is a real book, but it’s by James A. Green, not by Robert Remini, a well-known historian of the Jacksonian age.

I called out the error and ChatGPT eagerly corrected itself and then confidently told me the book was in fact written by Gail Collins (who wrote a different Harrison biography), and then went on to say more about the book and about her. I finally revealed the truth and the machine was happy to run with my correction. Then I lied absurdly, saying during their first hundred days presidents have to write a biography of some former president, and ChatGPT called me out on it. I then lied subtly, incorrectly attributing authorship of the Harrison biography to historian and writer Paul C. Nagel, and it bought my lie.

When I asked ChatGPT if it was sure I was not lying, it claimed that it’s just an “AI language model” and doesn’t have the ability to verify accuracy. However it modified that claim by saying “I can only provide information based on the training data I have been provided, and it appears that the book ‘William Henry Harrison: His Life and Times’ was written by Paul C. Nagel and published in 1977.”

This is not true.

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Words, not facts

It may seem from this interaction that ChatGPT was given a library of facts, including incorrect claims about authors and books. After all, ChatGPT’s maker, OpenAI, claims it trained the chatbot on “vast amounts of data from the internet written by humans.”

However, it was almost certainly not given the names of a bunch of made-up books about one of the most mediocre presidents. In a way, though, this false information is indeed based on its training data.

As a computer scientist, I often field complaints that reveal a common misconception about large language models like ChatGPT and its older brethren GPT3 and GPT2: that they are some kind of “super Googles,” or digital versions of a reference librarian, looking up answers to questions from some infinitely large library of facts, or smooshing together pastiches of stories and characters. They don’t do any of that – at least, they were not explicitly designed to.

Sounds good

A language model like ChatGPT, which is more formally known as a “generative pretrained transformer” (that’s what the G, P and T stand for), takes in the current conversation, forms a probability for all of the words in its vocabulary given that conversation, and then chooses one of them as the likely next word. Then it does that again, and again, and again, until it stops.

So it doesn’t have facts, per se. It just knows what word should come next. Put another way, ChatGPT doesn’t try to write sentences that are true. But it does try to write sentences that are plausible.

When talking privately to colleagues about ChatGPT, they often point out how many factually untrue statements it produces and dismiss it. To me, the idea that ChatGPT is a flawed data retrieval system is beside the point. People have been using Google for the past two and a half decades, after all. There’s a pretty good fact-finding service out there already.

In fact, the only way I was able to verify whether all those presidential book titles were accurate was by Googling and then verifying the results. My life would not be that much better if I got those facts in conversation, instead of the way I have been getting them for almost half of my life, by retrieving documents and then doing a critical analysis to see if I can trust the contents.

Improv partner

On the other hand, if I can talk to a bot that will give me plausible responses to things I say, it would be useful in situations where factual accuracy isn’t all that important. A few years ago a student and I tried to create an “improv bot,” one that would respond to whatever you said with a “yes, and” to keep the conversation going. We showed, in a paper, that our bot was better at “yes, and-ing” than other bots at the time, but in AI, two years is ancient history.

I tried out a dialogue with ChatGPT – a science fiction space explorer scenario – that is not unlike what you’d find in a typical improv class. ChatGPT is way better at “yes, and-ing” than what we did, but it didn’t really heighten the drama at all. I felt as if I was doing all the heavy lifting.

After a few tweaks I got it to be a little more involved, and at the end of the day I felt that it was a pretty good exercise for me, who hasn’t done much improv since I graduated from college over 20 years ago.

a space exploration improv scene the author generated with chatgpt screen capture by jonathan may cc by nd
A space exploration improv scene the author generated with ChatGPT. Screen capture by Jonathan May., CC BY-ND

Sure, I wouldn’t want ChatGPT to appear on “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” and this is not a great “Star Trek” plot (though it’s still less problematic than “Code of Honor”), but how many times have you sat down to write something from scratch and found yourself terrified by the empty page in front of you? Starting with a bad first draft can break through writer’s block and get the creative juices flowing, and ChatGPT and large language models like it seem like the right tools to aid in these exercises.

And for a machine that is designed to produce strings of words that sound as good as possible in response to the words you give it – and not to provide you with information – that seems like the right use for the tool.

Jonathan May is a Research Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. Follow Jonathan on Twitter @jonathanmay

A version of this article appeared originally at The Conversation and is posted here with permission. Check out The Conversation on Twitter @ConversationUK

Viewpoint: ‘Health impact of chemicals doubled in last 5 years’? Media misreporting flawed studies misleads the public

“Plastics and pesticides: Health impacts of synthetic chemicals in US products doubled in last 5 years, study finds,” a July 22 CNN headline announced to the world. Referring to a paper recently published in the journal Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, the media outlet told its readers in no uncertain terms what’s at stake:

The proof is piling up: Many synthetic chemicals can harm your health and that of your children. Evidence has doubled in the last five years about the negative impact on our health of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in plastics, pesticides, flame retardants and other merchandise….

“It’s a global problem,” the paper’s senior author told CNN. “These are chemicals used in consumer products all across the world.”

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In fact, the astounding claim that the “health impact of synthetic chemicals in US products” has doubled in the space of five years is in no way supported by the Lancet analysis. The media coverage of the paper, and indeed the paper itself, are part of a decades-long trend among some scientists and activists to amplify the risk of exposure to chemicals in consumer products far beyond what can be justified by the evidence.

Led by Leo Trasande, a pediatrician at New York University’s Langone School of Medicine, researchers reviewed the literature linking “endocrine-disrupting chemicals” (EDCs) to a wide range of health effects–from cognitive deficits and obesity in children to breast and prostate cancer in adults. In reviewing the evidence, the authors highlighted the extent to which data accumulated since 2015 have strengthened the evidence available up to that point.

With 16 pages of text, six tables, and 220 references, the paper presents itself as a comprehensive assessment of what is known about the association between exposure to EDCs and disease—and it paints a picture of a pervasive and urgent problem.

No fewer than 21 different associations were mentioned in the review’s abstract for which “evidence is particularly strong,” for which “greater evidence has accumulated,” or for which “evidence also exists.” However, the authors were not concerned with critically evaluating the studies they cited. When one examines the papers cited in support of these associations, both the methods used and the results of the studies are often inconsistent.

For example, the authors cited four studies addressing prenatal exposure to organophosphorus pesticides and intellectual deficits in children. Two of the studies showed some evidence of an effect, whereas the other two did not. Yet the authors judged this association to be supported by “strong evidence” based on these contradictory studies. This same problem occurred with other associations discussed in the paper. Given the small number of studies available on a specific topic, it is meaningless to speak of a “strengthening” of the evidence since 2015. Counting publications is not the same as evaluating the evidence.

The long crusade against “EDCs”

The Lancet review is only the latest attempt to emphasize the threat from potentially endocrine-active chemicals in the environment. Concern about the effects of these substances goes back to the 1990s, when scientists in Europe proposed the endocrine disruption hypothesis to account for falling sperm counts, and the best-selling book Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story came out in the United States. Since 1992, the number of scientific articles published on “endocrine disrupting chemicals” has increased steadily from one to 1,197.

The term “endocrine-disrupting chemicals” encompasses a sprawling and heterogenous class of compounds that can mimic or interfere with the body’s hormones that control developmental, reproductive, brain, and immune functions. These include both natural and synthetic compounds: dietary phytoestrogens present in plants and chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA), parabens, phthalates, organophosphate pesticides, pyrethroid insecticides, and flame retardants.

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A key fact that the review authors failed to acknowledge anywhere in their paper is that most of the exposures reported in the studies they examined add up to trace amounts of the various compounds. That is, they can be detected with sophisticated analytical techniques but are below the level where they are likely to cause any harm.

This poses a problem for epidemiologic studies, which can detect relatively strong relationships–such as smoking and lung cancer; alcohol and cancer of the mouth and throat; or infection with HPV and cervical cancer–but are much less helpful when it comes to assessing very weak or subtle relationships. In addition to the difficulty of accurately measuring real-world exposure to very low-level chemicals, observational studies are susceptible to confounding and bias, which can distort the results.

While focusing on trace chemical residues, studies investigating EDCs often fail to account for the many lifestyle factors that have documented health effects and are likely to dwarf the possible impacts of EDCs. These include increasing consumption of calorie-dense foods and its attendant effects on the prevalence of obesity and diabetes, medications, endogenous hormone production, and physical activity. In view of these methodological problems, the results of most epidemiological EDC studies are likely to be questionable.

For all their weaknesses, studies of EDCs get widespread publicity and reinforce the prevalent view that we are being poisoned by pervasive chemicals in the environment. Agencies like the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) continue to fund studies of questionable hazards (like BPA), and professional organizations such as the Endocrine Society and the American Academy of Pediatrics play up the threat from EDCs.

None of this is to imply that we should ignore the possible health effects of exposure to various chemicals. However, the results of these studies need to be examined critically based on what scientists have learned in recent decades. When researchers fail to contextualize new data, they feed the popular misconception that we are being poisoned on all sides by highly toxic chemicals.

Potentially harmful vs probably harmless

Scientists need to make distinctions between compounds that, based on accumulated evidence, are unlikely to cause harm and compounds that should be targeted for further study. For example, the Lancet review highlighted BPA, which has been widely used for decades in many consumer products, as a potential health hazard, and Trasande reiterated this concern in a just-released study published in JAMA Network Open [a new ‘open access’ journal that publishes less rigorously vetted stories than JAMA itself]. The new paper purported to show that adults enrolled in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Study (NHANES) who were in the highest third for urinary BPA had a 49 percent increased risk for all-cause mortality compared to those in the lowest third.

This conclusion deserves careful scrutiny for many reasons, the most important being that the Lancet review and the new JAMA Network Open study failed to acknowledge that BPA has been the subject of extensive, high-caliber research over the past two decades. This research has demonstrated that human exposure to BPA is extremely low and that the compound is efficiently metabolized and excreted in urine, even in infants. Furthermore, BPA’s estrogenic potency is orders of magnitude lower than that of the natural hormone estradiol.

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In their introduction, the authors of the Lancet paper referred to DDT, an insecticide whose indiscriminate use following World War II gave rise to the environmental movement in the 1960s. But the DDT experience also provides a cautionary tale, which they failed to mention.

In 1993 an early epidemiologic study reported that, compared to women with relatively low blood levels of a DDT metabolite, women with relatively high levels had a three-fold increased risk of developing breast cancer. The results were widely publicized and generated intense concern among women. However, when a large number of further studies were done, their results consistently failed to support the existence of an association.

ddt pesticide
Collection of pesticides, including DDT, that were still in use by some farmers in the 1970’s. Credit: Getty Images

It is significant that Richard Sharpe, a leader in the field of male reproductive development and one the originators of the “environmental estrogen hypothesis” in the 1990s, became increasingly critical of the hypothesis and the massive research juggernaut it unleashed. Sharpe has pointed out the fundamental bias that underlies the activist position on EDCs–the narrow focus on low or very low-level contaminants as the sole explanation for complex developmental processes, which gives short shrift to other factors that are more likely to have detectable effects.

Sharpe was alluding to medications taken by women during pregnancy, as well as lifestyle factors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise. In an e-mail exchange he wrote,

I ended up disproving my own hypothesis/ideas (on the potential impact of environmental oestrogens on male reproductive disorders) early on in the ED saga. Plus, I was lucky that the question that drove me was ‘what causes these disorders?’ not ‘how do EDCs cause these disorders? Such a simple difference, but it takes your thought processes in a very different direction.[1]

In contrast to BPA and DDT, other compounds (like the organophosphorus pesticide chlorpyrifos) may merit in-depth study to determine whether early reports of adverse effects in children are sound. Studies should be carried out in heavily exposed populations with suitable comparison groups with no, or low, exposure in order to learn about the chemical’s effects.

But here, too, one has to keep a sense of perspective. Trasande and other endocrine disruption hypothesis advocates often ignore the fact that pesticides currently in use have been tested for toxicity and have a safety margin several orders of magnitude below the level at which toxic effects have been observed. Furthermore, most pesticides are applied at particular times in the smallest quantities possible.

The difficult challenge of identifying low-level toxins in the environment will not be advanced by a blunt approach that often relies on crude studies that don’t distinguish between harmless exposures and those that may have serious health effects. At best, this effort only serves to scare the public and mislead policymakers.

Notes:

  1. Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks, p. 113.

Geoffrey Kabat is an epidemiologist and the author, most recently of Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter @GeoKabat

A version of this article first appeared on the GLP on August 19, 2020.

Reassessing the East Palestine chemical scare: How dangerous is vinyl chloride?

News coverage of the East Palestine train derailment has ranged from hysteria to hysteria. One would think that one of the most dangerous chemicals in the world is being discharged from the train. Has anyone bothered to actually examine how toxic vinyl chloride is? You may be surprised.

The media has used predictable scare tactics in covering the East Palestine train derailment, subsequent fire, and release of vinyl chloride and its combustion products. A silly New York Times opinion piece, written by non-scientists, has gone as far as calling for vinyl chloride to be banned as if it’s some chemical warfare agent. Unfortunately, media coverage has lacked perspective and this is at least partly responsible for the “end of the world” theme repeated over and over.

Has anyone even asked the following questions: How toxic is vinyl chloride? How does it compare to other chemicals? What are the realistic long-and-short consequences of the accident for people and the environment? Is it a chemical that should have ever been on that train in the first place?

To address these questions we need know to more about vinyl chloride’s chemical, toxicological, and carcinogenic properties. First, for some perspective, it is helpful to take compare vinyl chloride to two familiar chemicals: chloroform and alcohol. When it comes to toxicity and carcinogenicity, the three have more in common than you might suspect. A valuable resource for doing so is a database of the comparative hazards or lists of chemicals from the National Fire Protection Association.

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The National Fire Prevention Association Safety Diamond System

“The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) is a global self-funded nonprofit organization, established in 1896, devoted to eliminating death, injury, property and economic loss due to fire, electrical and related hazards.”

Among the many functions of the NFPA is the identification and evaluation of hazardous materials that first responders may encounter in case of a fire or spill. As such, the organization has a database of hundreds of potentially hazardous chemicals along with warnings about the particular hazards of each substance. As stated in the NFPA’s disclaimer (1) the information provided is qualitative, not quantitative, and may have data gaps. Nonetheless, it is a useful tool for coping with accidents like the one in Ohio. Here’s an example of an NFPA safety diamond.

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NFPA diamonds provide advice about four types of hazards of hundreds of chemicals. The blue square represents health hazards and the red square flammability. For the purposes of this article instability (yellow square) – whether something will spontaneously explode  (TNT is category 4) – and the white square (special conditions) are less relevant. I will focus only on health and flammability.

What do the numbers mean?

NPFA provides broad descriptions for five health categories. These are the numbers found in the blue square.

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And for flammability:

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Some examples that may surprise you

How deadly is vinyl chloride? Below are the safety diamonds for it plus chloroform, and ethanol. There is more similarity than you might expect. None of them are especially toxic, as indicated by their class 2 (blue square) status.

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Here are two that are more toxic:

NFPA safety diamonds for alcohol, chloroform, and vinyl chloride. Additionally, NFPA safety diamond for nicotine and hydrogen cyanide.

Acute animal toxicity – LD50

Another method to evaluate chemical toxicity is involves laboratory animals. A common measure of chemical toxicity is the LD50 test, which determines the dose of a given chemical required to kill half the lab animals exposed to it, usually orally. It provides useful information on the toxicity of a given chemical but with certain limitations:

LD50 in lab animals provides only one data point – the acute (single dose) lethality of the chemical when given to lab animals, usually rats, by mouth. It does not address chronic exposure, long-term effects, or carcinogenicity. Furthermore, toxicity and metabolism in rats can be very different than that of humans. That said, LD50 does a good job of identifying very dangerous (or very safe) chemicals, especially if the pattern of toxicity is similar in other animals, such as mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, etc.

Table 1 shows LD50 values (the higher the number, the safer the chemical) of common substances.

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Table 1. LD50 values of vinyl chloride compared to some common substances. The higher the number the safer the chemical. Keep in mind that exposure at the accident was from inhalation, not oral consumption, so these data are only indirectly applicable. It is difficult to determine inhalation toxicity from oral LD50 values. It is, at best, an approximation.

References: abcdef

Bottom line: Vinyl chloride when given orally has very low toxicity in rats. Its toxicity is comparable to that of alcohol and much less so than widely-used OTC drugs. You will not find this in any news story.

Rats and humans: inhalation

Did people inhale enough vinyl chloride to be harmed? It’s impossible to say but it would have taken quite a bit.

The acute toxicity (rat oral LD50 >4000 mg/kg; rat and mouse inhalation LC50 390,000 mg/m3 and 294,000 mg/m3 respectively) is low. Anesthetic effects have been reported in humans at levels of 12,000 ppm (30,720 mg/m3 for a five-minute exposure period.

Is 12,000 ppm a lot? Yes, it is. According to OSHA:

Action level means a concentration of vinyl chloride of 0.5 ppm averaged over an 8-hour work day.

That’s quite a difference. Like chloroform, which was used for general anesthesia for more than 100 years, vinyl chloride elicits anesthesia-like effects at high doses – more than 20,000 times the levels that set off an alarm at OSHA. It is possible that it would have been a useful drug when general anesthesia was in its infancy.

What about cancer and other long-term effects?

Like chloroform and ethanol, vinyl chloride is classified as a carcinogen. But not from acute exposure. It is an occupational carcinogen, a chemical that can cause cancer (in this case liver cancer) as a result of long-time exposure. [Emphasis mine]

Vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) is an IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) group 1 carcinogen known to cause hepatic angiosarcoma (HAS) in highly exposed industrial workers.

The same holds true for other conditions that can arise from chronic, but not acute, exposure to the chemical:

One-time acute exposures to VCM, causing mild symptoms such as dizziness and headaches, have not been proven to propagate long-term effects.

Source for both quotes: Vinyl Chloride Toxicity 

This information should reassure people who were briefly exposed. Cancer from chemicals does not work this way; it takes a long period of exposure. I haven’t seen any comparisons, but I’d bet my last penny that the cancer risk from smoking absolutely dwarfs that of a single exposure to vinyl chloride, no matter the dose.

And drinking too. A Lancet Oncology paper estimated that more than 700,000 cases of cancer – about 4% of total new cancers – are from drinking.

Even if I lived near East Palestine I would not be concerned about liver cancer from such short exposure. But I might stop drinking. Alcohol, upon ingestion, forms acetaldehyde, which is both toxic and carcinogenic

Burning – the big problem

This is where the difference between vinyl chloride and alcohol becomes apparent. Different chemicals form different combustion products. Obviously, automobile exhaust doesn’t pose an acute threat or everyone on the Cross Bronx Expressway would be dead. But the same cannot be said for vinyl chloride. Its combustion products are anything but benign. A partial list:

  • Phosgene (a deadly respiration toxin) was used in WWI as a chemical weapon
  • Hydrogen chloride (a severe irritant to the eyes, skin, nasal passages, and lungs). It is likely that the symptoms that residents experienced were from this. At very high concentrations HCl can be fatal but you would know it was present long before it would reach lethal levels. It is very unpleasant to get even a whiff.

Exposure to phosgene gas represents the most dangerous scenario and it isn’t clear whether this has been an issue. This remains the most troubling unknown scenario in the accident. Fortunately, these gases dissipate rapidly.

Of the gases emitted from burning, it is most likely that hydrogen chloride did the most damage, possibly being responsible for the death of fish and animals in the area. Fish are very sensitive to acidic (low pH) water (but not so much to vinyl chloride). It was probably the hydrogen chloride that harmed fish, pets, and other animals. Unless you’ve taken a snootful of the stuff, something I inadvertently did many times during my career in the lab, you cannot fully appreciate what an unpleasant experience that is, but it is not a deadly toxin like phosgene. My best guess is that after almost four weeks very serious disease would have become evident if phosgene were present in significant quantities.

How bad was this accident?

No one wants to host a burning train full of chemicals, but as far as poisons go, there are far worse chemicals that are regularly being transported around the US. Here are some:

  • Methyl isocyanate, a deadly poison that was responsible for more than 10,000 deaths in Bhopal, India in 1984 following a leak.
  • Anhydrous ammonia was released in a truck accident in Texas in 1976. Five people died from inhaling it. Hundreds were hospitalized.
  • Ammonium nitrate, an explosive fertilizer, destroyed an entire city in 1947 killing 600 people. This is just one of many accidents from the chemical.
  • Concentrated sulfuric acid will destroy all living matter, including human skin. And if mixed with water a violent explosion can result.

What about the environment?

To the extent that one can be “lucky” living near a burning train full of chemicals, vinyl chloride’s properties make long-term environmental problems unlikely. Why? Because vinyl chloride is a gas at room temperate and evaporates very rapidly. It is essentially the exact opposite of the case of PCB contamination of the Hudson River. Once PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) get into a waterway they are going to be there forever unless the contaminated river bed is removed. Not only is this group of chemicals non-biodegradable but also non-volatile. The boiling point for the PCB class of chemicals ranges from about 500-700oF – not too different from the temperature of Venus.

Conversely, the boiling point of vinyl chloride is 8oF, so except under extraordinary circumstances, it’s a volatile gas and evaporates rapidly. This makes environmental accumulation very unlikely. In fact, an EPA report estimates that the half-life (the amount of time it takes for half of the chemical to be cleared) from soil and water is very short:

If vinyl chloride is released to soil, it will be subject to rapid volatilization with reported half-lives of 0.2 and 0.5 days…If released to water, vinyl chloride will rapidly evaporate… [with] a half-life of 0.805 hr.

So, after 5 half-lives (using the value 0.35 days for the half-life) 97% of the chemical will be gone from soil. In water, most will be gone in a few hours. The fate of the chemical, should it find its way to groundwater is not well understood:

“inyl chloride will be expected to be highly mobile in soil and it may leach to the groundwater. It may be subject to biodegradation under anaerobic conditions such as exists in flooded soil and groundwater.

Bottom line

This accident could have been much worse.

  • The train didn’t explode. This would have created immense damage, including more deadly combustion products.
  • Vinyl chloride, news reports notwithstanding, is a relatively benign chemical in terms of its inherent toxicity, much less toxic than some of the truly deadly poisons that are routinely transported around the country. Some of these would have created a disaster with the loss of human life.
  • The chance of cancer arising from a single exposure to vinyl chloride is vanishingly small.
  • The media is spreading hysteria because that’s what they do.

A train carrying chemicals engulfed in flames is scary enough. We don’t need the extra decoration.

Josh Bloom, ACSH’s Director of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Science, earned his Ph. D.in organic chemistry at the University of Virginia, followed by postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania. His career 20+ year first career was drug discovery research at Wyeth. (Disclosure: He has a small amount of Pfizer stock in his IRA.) Find Dr. Bloom on Twitter @JoshBloomACSH

A version of this article was originally posted at the American Council on Science and Health and is reposted here with permission. The ACSH can be found on Twitter @ACSHorg

GLP Podcast & Video: FDA checks chocolate-heart health claims; Cure for binge drinking? Gene-edited wheat may cut cancer risk

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Does dark chocolate reduce your heart disease risk? The FDA says candy companies need to tread lightly when it comes to promoting the health benefits of cocoa. Could a drug used to treat alcohol addiction help limit binge drinking? Gene editing can reduce the amount of cancer-linked acrylamide in wheat. Will it significantly improve public health?

Podcast:

Video:

Join geneticist Kevin Folta and GLP contributor Cameron English on episode 207 of Science Facts and Fallacies as they break down these latest news stories:

Some candy companies have asked the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for permission to promote the heart-health benefits of dark chocolate. Research has indeed linked moderate cocoa intake to a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, though the FDA says the association needs to be studied more rigorously before candy makers can market their products as heart-healthy treats.

The drug naltrexone is already used to treat severe alcohol use disorder by blocking endorphins responsible for the euphoria we feel when we drink. Now, researchers say the drug could be used to reduce the appeal of binge drinking, which could help prevent addiction in the first place. Will it work?

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When some grains are cooked, they accumulate a chemical called acrylamide, which researchers have linked to an increased cancer risk. Although most acrylamide-containing foods pose minimal risk in the quantities we typically consume them, gene editing can be used to reduce how much of the chemical results from the cooking process. What does this development tell us about the power of biotechnology to boost the safety of our food supply?

Listen to the podcast here: https://tinyurl.com/33kj5wvh

Kevin M. Folta is a professor, keynote speaker and podcast host. Follow Professor Folta on Twitter @kevinfolta

Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Visit his website and follow ACSH on Twitter @ACSHorg

Analysis: US public health officials scramble to restore trust in science and vaccines after two years of COVID controversies

By the summer of 2021, Phil Maytubby, deputy CEO of the health department here, was concerned to see the numbers of people getting vaccinated against covid-19 slipping after an initially robust response. With doubt, fear, and misinformation running rampant nationwide — both online and offline — he knew the agency needed to rethink its messaging strategy.

So, the health department conducted something called an online “sentiment search,” which gauges how certain words are perceived on social media. The tool found that many people in Oklahoma City didn’t like the word “vaccinate” — a term featured prominently in the health department’s marketing campaign.

“If you don’t know how your message is resonating with the public,” Maytubby said, “you’re shooting in the dark.”

Across the country, health officials have been trying to combat misinformation and restore trust within their communities these past few years, a period when many people haven’t put full faith in their state and local health departments. Agencies are using Twitter, for example, to appeal to niche audiences, such as NFL fans in Kansas City and Star Wars enthusiasts in Alabama. They’re collaborating with influencers and celebrities such as Stephen Colbert and Akbar Gbajabiamila to extend their reach.

Some of these efforts have paid off. By now, more than 80% of U.S. residents have received at least one shot of a covid vaccine.

But data suggests that the skepticism and misinformation surrounding covid vaccines now threatens other public health priorities. Flu vaccine coverage among children in mid-December was about the same as December 2021, but it was 3.7 percentage points lower compared with late 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The decrease in flu vaccination coverage among pregnant women was even more dramatic over the last two years: 18 percentage points lower.

The command center in the basement of the Oklahoma City County Health Department features a large digital display that allows staff members to review covid case numbers and other important data, such as overall childhood vaccine rates, during their morning meeting. Credit: Nick Oxford/KHN

Other common childhood vaccination rates are down, too, compared with pre-pandemic levels. Nationally, 35% of all American parents oppose requiring children to be vaccinated for measles, mumps, and rubella before entering school, up from 23% in 2019, according to a KFF survey released Dec. 16. Suspicion swirling around once-trusted vaccines, as well as fatigue from so many shots, is likely to blame.

Part of the problem comes down to a lack of investment that eroded the public health system before the pandemic began. An analysis conducted by KHN and The Associated Press found local health department spending dropped by 18% per capita between 2010 and 2020. State and local health agencies also lost nearly 40,000 jobs between the 2008 recession and the emergence of the pandemic.

Phil Maytubby (center), deputy CEO of the Oklahoma City County Health Department, meets with staff in the agency’s command center to review the latest information on covid case numbers and hospitalizations. Credit: Nick Oxford/KHN

This made their response to a once-in-a-century public health crisis challenging and often inadequate. For example, during covid’s early days, many local health departments used fax machines to report covid case counts.

“We were not as flexible as we are now,” said Dr. Brannon Traxler, director of public health at the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control.

At the start of the pandemic, Traxler said, only two people worked on the media relations and public outreach team at South Carolina’s health department. Now, the team has eight.

The agency has changed its communication strategies in other ways, too. Last year was the first year, for example, that South Carolina published data on flu vaccinations every two weeks, with the goal of raising awareness about the effectiveness of the shots. In South Carolina, not even one-quarter of adults and children eligible for a flu shot had been vaccinated by early December, even as flu cases and hospitalizations climbed. The flu vaccine rate across all age groups in the U.S. was 51.4% last season.

Those who have opted out of both the covid and flu shots seem to be correlated, Traxler said.

“We’re really just trying to dispel misinformation that’s out there,” Traxler said. To that end, the health department has partnered with local leaders and groups to encourage vaccinations. Agency staffers have also become more comfortable talking to the press, she said, to better communicate with the public.

But some public health experts argue that agencies are still failing on messaging. Scientific words such as “mRNA technology,” “bivalent vaccine,” and “monoclonal antibodies” are used a lot in public health even though many people find them difficult to understand.

A study published by JAMA found that covid-related language used by state-level agencies was often more complex than an eighth-grade reading level and harder to understand than the language commonly used by the CDC.

“We have to communicate complex ideas to the public, and this is where we fail,” said Brian Castrucci, CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, a charitable group focused on strengthening public health. “We have to own the fact that our communication missteps created the environment where disinformation flourished.”

Most Americans support public health, Castrucci said. At the same time, a small but vocal minority pushes an anti-science agenda and has been effective in sowing seeds of distrust, he said.

The more than 3,000 public health departments nationwide stand to benefit from a unified message, he said. In late 2020, the foundation, working with other public health groups, established the Public Health Communications Collaborative to amplify easy-to-understand information about vaccines.

“The good guys need to be just as well organized as those who seek to do harm to the nation,” he said. “One would think we would learn from this.”

Meanwhile, a report published in October by the Pew Research Center found 57% of U.S. adults believe “false and misleading information about the coronavirus and vaccines has contributed a lot to problems the country” has faced amid the pandemic.

Davie Baker, who lives in Oklahoma City, says she was initially reluctant to get the covid vaccine, then a pharmacist at Sam’s Club helped change her mind. “She cleared some things up for me,” Baker says. Credit: Nick Oxford/KHN

“I was leery like everyone else,” said Davie Baker, 61, an Oklahoma City woman who owns a business that sells window treatments. When the shots became widely available in 2021, she thought they had been developed too quickly, and she worried about some of the things she’d read online about side effects. A pharmacist at Sam’s Club changed her mind.

“She just kind of educated me on what the shot was really about,” Baker said. “She cleared up some things for me.”

Baker signed up for her first covid shot in May 2021, around the same time the health department in Oklahoma City not 5ced the number of vaccines administered daily was starting to decline.

The department updated its marketing campaign in early 2022. Instead of using the word “vaccinate” to encourage more people to get their covid shots — the term the agency’s social media analytics revealed people didn’t like — the new campaign urged people to “Choose Today!”

“People don’t trust like they used to,” Maytubby said. “They want to make up their own minds and make their own decisions.” The word “choose” acknowledged this preference, he said.

Maytubby thinks the “Choose Today!” campaign worked. A survey of 502 adults in Oklahoma City conducted during the first half of 2022 found fewer than 20% of respondents reacted negatively or very negatively to a sample of “Choose Today!” advertisements. And an estimated 86.5% of adults in Oklahoma City have received at least one dose of a covid vaccine — a rate higher than the state average of about 73%.

Other factors are likely at play that have helped bolster Oklahoma City’s vaccine numbers. In the same survey of Oklahoma City adults, some people who were recently vaccinated said family members or church leaders urged them to get the vaccine, or they knew someone who had died from covid. One person said money was the motivation — they received $900 from their employer for getting the covid vaccine.

Meanwhile, the war against misinformation and disinformation wages on. Childhood vaccination rates for the immunizations students typically need to enter kindergarten are down 4.5% in Oklahoma County since the 2017-18 academic year as parents increasingly seek exemptions to the requirements.

That worries Maytubby. He said the primary tactic among those trying to sow distrust about vaccinations has been to cast doubt — about everything from the science to their safety.

“In that aspect, they’ve been pretty successful,” Maytubby said. “Misinformation has changed everything.”

Lauren Sausser, South Carolina Correspondent, covers health care across the South as a member of KHN’s Southern Bureau. She is based in Charleston, where she previously spent nine years covering health care at The Post and Courier. A graduate of Clemson University and Columbia University, she has received awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists, the Society of Professional Journalists, and other groups. In 2016, she was part of a team of reporters who were named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. In 2017, she was recognized as Reporter of the Year by the South Carolina Press Association. Find Lauren on Twitter @laurenmsausser

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation. Find KHN on Twitter @KHNews

GLP Podcast & Video: Synthetic biology makes $10,000 perfume way cheaper; ‘Fashionable organic fantasies’ at the WEF; Sleeping pills cause dementia?

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A bottle of perfume used to cost more than $10,000. The price has dropped precipitously thanks to advancements in synthetic biology, making a lot of fragrances available to many more consumers. The recent World Economic Forum (WEF) gathering in Davos proved to be a massive platform for “fashionable fantasies” about organic farming. A headline-grabbing study recently linked sleeping medication to dementia. But the research deserves much more scrutiny than it’s received from the press.

Podcast:

Video:

Join geneticist Kevin Folta and GLP contributor Cameron English on episode 206 of Science Facts and Fallacies as they break down these latest news stories:

Instead of harvesting thousands of petals from hundreds of plants to manufacture perfume, scientists can use the tools of synthetic biology to engineer microbes that produce identical fragrance ingredients much more sustainably. Applied beyond perfume to food ingredients, flavorings and medicines, these techniques are poised to yield an array of economic and environmental benefits. But this raises an important question: could consumer perceptions delay the progress of synthetic biology in the same way they slowed progress in crop biotechnology?

There is a clear consensus surrounding organic farming. Although there is nothing wrong with this form of agriculture, it simply cannot produce enough to meet the global demand for food today or in the future. Why, then, do so many economic and political elites continue to push governments around the world to mandate organic farming practices? It would seem that ideology trumps evidence more often than we’d like to admit.

Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.

A recent study captured popular attention for positing a link between commonly used sleeping medications and dementia. Some news stories helpfully explained the paper’s limitations, though most press coverage simply repeated the study’s conclusion without providing the necessary context. For now, there is little evidence indicating that a properly used sleeping medication contributes to dementia.

Listen to the podcast here: https://tinyurl.com/33kj5wvh

Kevin M. Folta is a professor, keynote speaker and podcast host. Follow Professor Folta on Twitter @kevinfolta

Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Visit his website and follow ACSH on Twitter @ACSHorg

Can we know for sure COVID’s origins? Why is Omicron so persistent? Knowing how evolution works provides guidance

The evolution of COVID
The latest phrase borrowed from biology in COVID conversations is convergent evolution. It refers to pairs of unrelated species that look similar because their ancestors evolved under similar environmental conditions. Natural selection favored adaptive (helpful) inherited traits, and millennia later, two unrelated species of mammals or birds look remarkably alike.

Convergent evolution happens to viruses, too. It is unspooling right now as SARS-CoV-2 genome evolution coalesces into variations on the Omicron theme.

The natural history of SARS-CoV-2 began with the wild type, another term from classical genetics. It means “most common,” not “normal” as the media often misuses it.

As the virus changed, we grouped sets of new mutations, which substitute one RNA base of the genome at a time, into “variants.” We named them, which biologists tend to do.

Alpha, recognized in November 2020, begat beta, gamma, and delta, all of which stayed with us for a bit. The next few versions were fleeting. The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses and WHO skipped Nu (because it sounds like “new”) and Xi (a common surname), landing on Omicron. And natural selection has favored its collection of mutations. No new Greek letters necessary.

COVID-19 variants and their symptoms
Credit: WHO

When species look alike

Biologists term traits that are alike in two species that arise from recent shared ancestors homologous, while similar structures or behaviors that arise from similar environmental exposures are analogous. Convergent evolution reflects responses to similar environments (analogy), rather than descent from recent shared ancestors (homology).

Striking examples of convergent evolution are pairs of placental mammals and Australian marsupials. These include anteaters, moles, wolves, ocelots and native cats, flying squirrels and flying phalangers, and groundhogs and wombats.

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Species that illustrate convergent evolution need not be a world apart. Familiar examples abound.

• A shark is a fish and a dolphin a mammal, each adapted to life in the ocean.
• Butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, and the Australian opossum extract nectar from flowers using long beak-like structures.
• Hedgehogs, porcupines, and echidnas are covered in quills.
• Bats and whales detect high frequencies of sound for echolocation.
• Pig snouts resemble those of peccaries.

Evolution is ongoing due to the flexibility of genetic material – RNA or DNA. Sequences of the building blocks change, unprovoked, when errors occur during the molecules’ replication, like a glitch in copying and pasting a document. Mutations also arise from exposure to certain chemicals or radiation. Natural selection then retains altered genetic information that is helpful (adaptive) through capacity to reproduce, and weeds out individuals with detrimental genetic changes.

Evolution is also branching – it always is, the popular meme of apes morphing into humans a cringeworthy error. When a new mutation happens as a virus (or cell) replicates its genetic material, the old version remains in half the offspring. That’s why even as the latest version of SARS-CoV-2 begins to circulate, its older brethren are still around. If a newbie has a reproductive advantage – spreads more readily from host to host – it eventually dominates the population of viruses in an area.

The origin question: We will never know

We still do not, and may never, know the immediate predecessor of SARS-CoV-2. I suspect many other geneticists share my opinion that the origin is unfathomable, but have been loathe to speak out because of politics and a public uncomfortable with the reality that science is inherently uncertain.

So here’s what we do know. The answer may lie in a very specific part of the enemy.

SARS-CoV-2 presumably descended from a different coronavirus, possibly in a cave or caves. One candidate is RaTG13, but there are likely others. We can’t describe what we haven’t yet discovered.

Clues to the origin lie in what to the virus is the most important part of its anatomy: the triplets of spike proteins proteins that festoon the surface. Each spike has two parts: one grabs a cell, then the other slips the virus inside.

A spike grabs on using its receptor binding domain (RBD), which adheres to receptors (ACE2) on many host cell types, like in our lungs. A small part of the RBD, the “furin cleavage site,” holds the halves of a spike together, until a host’s enzyme cuts it. That jettisons the virus into the cell like an arrow shot from a bow.

Key to the power of the furin cleavage site is a specific sequence of four contiguous amino acids. This is where looking at other viruses provides compelling clues to where SARS-CoV-2 may have come from.

The first SARS virus, from 2003, doesn’t have a furin cleavage site, but HIV, the Ebola virus, and the MERS coronavirus do. That’s why the furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 is dubbed a “gain-of-function.” Altering this viral Achilles heel can and has changed the speed of transmission.

sars-cov-2 anatomy
Credit: Global Health News Wire

(ASIDE: Like convergent evolution, gain-of-function isn’t a new term. In grad school in the late 1970s I made gain-of-function mutations by bombarding flies with X-rays. Now Etsy sells a gain-of-function tee shirt that idiotically besmirches Anthony Fauci.)

Back to the million dollar question: How did the novel furin cleavage site get into SARS-CoV-2, when its nearest known relative doesn’t have it? Perhaps more importantly, where did this happen?

Did pieces of RNA altering the furin cleavage site swap into the genomes of the recent ancestors of SARS-CoV-2:

• in a bat cave?
• in an abandoned mine shaft in Yunnan province?
• in a “wet market” near the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
• directly in a lab at the institute, either by accident or purposely?

More than one of the above, none of the above, or even all of the above?

However it happened, most puzzling is the extent of change to the furin cleavage site: four contiguous amino acids. That represents twelve RNA bases, because RNA or DNA triplets encode the amino acids that make up proteins.

Did the four-amino-acid-change happen one-at-a-time, and we just haven’t identified the intermediates? Or all at once? Stretches of genetic material that move among genomes are well known for organisms, from bacteria to humans. But they are rare among viruses.

So how did the exact stretch of amino acids that catapult the viruses into our cells get there?

Occum’s razor might suggest that someone engineered the four amino acids into the furin cleavage site, perhaps by accident, perhaps to create a bioweapon. Then a “lab leak” transpired.

But because we can’t discount a role for natural selection acting on a protein in a way that benefits the virus once it got into the environment, we can’t know with any degree of confidence how, exactly, SARS-CoV-2 came to attack humanity and many other species. That’s the crux of the issue that I rarely read in media reports.

From origin to Omicron. What’s next?

However SARS-CoV-2 got here, it has gone through a complex choreography of changes.

“G614D” was an early mutant slipping unnoticed into New York City from Europe as politicians unschooled in biology frantically closed borders to flights from certain nations, as if that could keep viruses out like closing the doors on a plane. (“G614D” is code for the particular amino acid change.)

The virus continued to reinvent itself. We named mutations, grouped them into variants, and tracked their spread around the world through their genome sequences on increasingly crowded dashboards, the US lagging behind for uncomfortable months. SARS-CoV-2 variants soon began marching up the Greek alphabet towards Omicron, 15th of the 24 letters.

Then the pace of mutation slowed as natural selection continued to favor changes that propelled the virus into and out of human noses and mouths ever faster, the same changes persisting among even the least related viral strains, because they’re adaptive. The retooled viruses began to make people less sick, while vaccines perhaps dampened the spread and tamed symptoms.

And so after three years of change, SARS-CoV-2 evolution has slowed as a suite of similar Omicrons persist, because the comprising mutations enhance viral binding to our ACE2 receptors. If it ain’t broke …

Looking at the virus as a whole, the extent of change in a short time is astounding, although perhaps that’s partly because we haven’t given such genetic scrutiny to other pathogens, posting new genome sequences daily.

For SARS-CoV-2, all possible single-RNA-base changes that could have altered the amino acid sequence of just the viral spike protein had happened by early 2021. But the beast hasn’t ceased. Mutations that alter two RNA bases at a time are now accelerating. They have “gained momentum and their numbers are increasing rapidly. These provide a large mutation landscape for SARS-CoV-2 future evolution, on which research should focus now,” write Jiri Zahradnik, Jaroslav Nunvar, and Gideon Schreiber in Perspectives: SARS-CoV-2 Spike Convergent Evolution as a Guide to Explore Adaptive Advantage.

In other words, the virus isn’t yet done with us. Anthony Fauci’s agrees, in his farewell Perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine, which borrows from Yogi Berra: “It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over…but It’s Never Over — Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases.” Dr. Fauci calls COVID “the loudest wake-up call in more than a century to our vulnerability to outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases.”

As long as we share the planet with others and evolution continues to mold genomes, infectious diseases will be with us. But we control that future, to an extent. Writes Dr. Fauci:

“The emergence of new infections and the reemergence of old ones are largely the result of human interactions with and encroachment on nature. As human societies expand in a progressively interconnected world and the human–animal interface is perturbed, opportunities are created, often aided by climate changes, for unstable infectious agents to emerge, jump species, and in some cases adapt to spread among humans. When it comes to emerging infectious diseases, it’s never over.”

I agree.

Ricki Lewis has a PhD in genetics and is a genetics counselor, science writer and author of Human Genetics: The Basics. Follow her at her website or Twitter @rickilewis

A version of this article appeared originally at PLOS and is posted here with permission. Check out PLOS on Twitter @PLOS

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