|
Peanut detection kit wins independent OK
How fresh is that fish?
NPD/Awards
Self-organising networks essential to innovations
US accused of using famine, AIDS to push GMOs
EC to tighten label laws on chicken contents
Life takes its toll on female diet
New compound may fight Alzheimer’s, type-2 diabetes
Congress to hear plea on Chinese garlic
Cosmeceuticals to boom
Big baccy wins a reprieve
World’s vital signs in decline
NPD/Inventions
Peanut
detection kit wins independent OK
An allergen test to assay peanut
content of foodstuffs is the first to win Performance Tested Method
status from the independent AOAC International Research Institute.
The kit uses enzyme immunoassay to
detect peanut levels of less than 0.1 part per million, even in complex
food matrices such as cereals, confectionery, baked goods, ice cream etc,
say the makers, Tepnel Life Sciences.
How fresh
is that fish?
Scottish researchers have found a
novel way to measure the freshness of fish. The method integrates the
outputs of several complementary physical and chemical sensors into a
single artificial quality index (AQI) with an accuracy and precision at
least as good as those of sensory evaluation using the quality index
method (QIM).
The texture and electronic nose
sensors complemented each other to give the most sensitive indicators of
freshness before/after "day four" of chilled storage of cod (Gadus
morhua) and hake (Merluccius capensis) respectively.
The AQI technique has the potential
for applications for foods other than fish products, and the developers
are looking for partners to commercialise the invention. Details from
Nesvadba Paul at the Robert Gordon
University, Aberdeen. T +44 1224 262839 E p.nesvadba@rgu.ac.uk.
NPD/Awards
Roche Vitamins, now part of the
Dutch DSM group, has given its internal Innovation Award for 2003 en to Dr
August Rüttimann, for the development of a new process for genistein.
Genistein belongs to the
isoflavones chemical family, which has health benefits related to
cardiovascular diseases, cancer, menopausal symptoms and especially
osteoporosis. The substance is naturally present in soy products such as
soybeans, tofu or soy flour.
Dr Rüttimann successfully
elaborated an environmentally friendly process to produce genistein in a
very pure form. This new and exclusive process has been filed for patent
and will be implemented in Roche Vitamins’ factory at Sisseln,
Switzerland. Genistein in pure form will be available in 2004, for
applications in the food and dietary supplement industries.
Innovation
Self-organising
networks essential to innovations
Forget the experts and the
scientists – what you need for innovation are self-organising networks.
This is the conclusion of a new
study that argues that innovation emerges as different agents learn and
select improvements in a process the author calls learning selection. The
findings are based on a study of examples from agriculture, industry,
economy and information technology and reported in Enabling innovation:
a practical guide to understanding and fostering technological change
by Boru Douthwaite published by Zed Books.
Successful innovation, the report
argues, is based on diversity, grasping opportunities and mobilising
creativity among people willing to run with a brilliant idea even if it is
still flawed and underdeveloped. Evidence comes from different fields such
as rice harvesting, wind turbines, local exchange trading systems (LETS)
and the Linux open source computer operating system.
Although the intended audience is
the farming community, there are lessons for other sectors. The author
says that in top-down, donor-funded ventures, it may be in everyone’s
interest (donors, ministry officials, field staff and even end users) to
keep the “technology transfer” process going, even when it is clear
that the technology in question is inappropriate or not usable.
“The green revolution in rice in
Indonesia, with its emphasis on a single crop and recommended levels of
fertiliser and pesticides, required a new wave of innovation based on the
principle that farmers are creative experts in managing their own fields.
The high value placed on co-operation in Danish culture allowed wind
turbine manufacturers to win against US rivals which are held back by
individualism, fondness for patents and fear of talking to competitors.
“The spread of LETS in the UK
shows how user learning selection leads to local ownership of the idea,
thus promoting attempts to improve the policy environment for the
technology. The growth of Linux shows the capacity of the Internet to
accelerate learning selection repetition through the rapid exchange of
information among people separated by great distances.
Douthwaite
says launching a learning selection innovation process requires
-
shedding any top-down, ‘big
is good’, ‘private sector is best’ assumptions
-
motivating people to co-develop
a technology not by financial inducements or subsidies but with a
prototype technology that makes a plausible promise of being of
benefit to them
-
following the KISS (keep it
simple, stupid) principle) -prototypes should not be used to dazzle
people with the ingenuity of their design but be simple and flexible
enough to allow revision
-
identifying a product champion,
one who is ‘low on the ego end’, prepared to admit mistakes and
acknowledge the work of others, and able to identify and put into
effect co-developers’ beneficial novelties
-
not releasing innovations too
widely too soon and only using patents when it is necessary to stop
someone else trying to privatise a technology.
GM/Trade
US accused
of using famine, AIDS to push GMOs
The US is using its political
weight and financial aid to further the commercial interests of American
firms with interest in genetically modified organisms (GMOs), says the
Friends of the Earth (FOE), an environmental activist organisation.
In a new report due out tomorrow, Playing
with Hunger, the FOE demanded that the US stop using aid aimed at
alleviating hunger and disease as a political and marketing tool to
benefit big agri-business.
In May 2003 the US Congress has
passed legislation tying AIDS assistance to acceptance of GMOs. The US has
also asked the World Trade Organisation to end the European Union
moratorium on GMOs.
“Having attempted to use
USAID’s famine relief programme to dump unwanted GM maize in Southern
Africa they are now resorting to even more unacceptable methods.
African nations should have the right to decide what their people
are fed. It is immoral for
the US to exploit famine and the AIDS crisis in this way,” said Nnimmo
Bassey, director of environmental rights action for FOE in Nigeria.
For the past several years the US
has offered GM maize to famine-hit countries in Southern Africa. Most
rejected whole seed but accepted milled corn. Southern Africa also has the
highest incidence of HIV infection, ranging up to one in three people, and
potentially 13.4 million orphans from AIDS-related deaths.
The US blamed the EU moratorium on
GMOs as the cause of African rejection of GM food aid, but the EU strongly
denied the charge, adding “food aid … should not be about trying to
advance the case for GM food abroad, or planting GM crops for export, or
indeed finding outlets for domestic surplus, which is a regrettable of the
US food aid policy”.
FOE claims the UN World Food
Programme (WFP) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID)
should have anticipated the controversy over GM food aid to Southern
Africa. “Both have been aware since 2000 of the problems and
controversies over food aid and GMOs, and should have guaranteed real
alternatives to GM food aid to the countries in need,” the organisation
said.
FOE also criticises the food aid
system and describes US involvement as “cynical”. FOE International
chairman Ricardo Navarro said “Food aid is being used, particularly by
the US, as a marketing tool to capture new markets.
Big agribusinesses are huge beneficiaries of the current food aid
system. There is a need for stricter regulation of food aid to prevent it
from being used as a way to open up new markets for GM products.”
The United States Department of
Agriculture (USDA), USAID, and the US State Department are hosting a
summit on agriculture from June 23-25, 2003 in Sacramento, California.
They have invited ministers of trade, agriculture, and environment from
180 nations. FOE believes that this event will be used to promote GM crops
in developing countries.
The report is available for
download at the Friends of the Earth International website at www.foei.org/publications/gmo.
Labels
EC to
tighten label laws on chicken contents
European Commission wants to
tighten labelling laws governing the addition of water with proteins
derived from pork and beef to chicken meat.
The move follows surveys by the
UK’s Food Standards Agency that showed many chicken products supplied to
UK restaurants and takeaways aren’t labelled accurately.
The presence of undeclared pork and
beef proteins in chicken has caused great concern, especially among some
religious groups, even though the presence itself is not illegal. Water
and hydrolysed animal proteins are added to chicken to bulk up the
product, which is then sold on largely to the catering industry.
The agency proposes that if a
chicken product contains an ingredient from any other animal, this would
have to be declared and displayed prominently in the product’s name. It
also wants the use of added water to be declared more prominently.
Of 130 samples taken by the FSA, 65
claimed to have more meat than was true, 20 contained pork DNA, seven
contained beef DNA and four contained both pork and beef DNA. Twenty local
authorities that took part are considering formal enforcement action
against the relevant companies. Moreover, Dutch authorities have taken
formal enforcement action against five chicken processing companies
products. The Netherlands is the
Nutrition/Markets
Life takes its
toll on female diet
Most female eating disorders
usually occur early in life, but more women are becoming anorexic or
bulimic after mid-life, with patient cases doubling in the last six years.
This view is based on US national
trends and patient records at Remuda Ranch, a specialist treatment centre
for female eating disorders.
Remuda director of research Dr
Edward Cumella blames the trend on changes in culture and specific
individual causes such as life transitions. The cultural changes include a
dramatic increase in youth consciousness compared to 20 years ago,
cosmetic surgery to preserve role models such as celebrities, and an
obsession with thinness.
The body’s metabolism slows down
in mid-life but life transitions can also affect eating habits. These
events include the death of people close to you, divorce, empty nest
syndrome, menopause, greying hair, loss of strength and lack of exercise.
“Many women also feel that excessive focus on diet and exercise can deny
the reality of ageing," says Cumella.
Eating disorders among the elderly
might prove fatal. Elderly women develop eating disorders often because of
a lack of enthusiasm for life, to get attention from family members, as a
protest against current living conditions, from economic hardship, and
medical conditions such as decrease in appetite due to medication,
arthritis and an inability to taste food.
NPD/Biotech
New
compound may fight Alzheimer’s, type-2 diabetes
Lab tests show that a compound
called ALS-499 helps inhibit amyloid protein aggregation characteristic of
several diseases, including Alzheimer's and type-2 diabetes. It may
undergo clinical trials within the next few years.
Under licence, a private US
biopharmaceutical firm, Advanced Life Sciences, will develop drugs based
on the compound, which was discovered by the Argonne National Laboratory.
ALS's chief executive Dr Michael
Flavin said “This technology will strengthen our inflammation-fighting
drug portfolio and provide us with a platform from which we can develop
new drugs that may prevent a number of significant diseases."
Argonne, in collaboration with ALS
and the University of Chicago, has been studying the biophysical
foundations of amyloid formation. This focuses on what happens when
proteins in the body clump together in ways that cause disease.
ALS has exclusive worldwide rights
to commercialise ALS-499 and the platform technology as a way to prevent
amyloid fibril formation.
Trade
Congress to
hear plea on Chinese garlic
US congressmen will today hear a
complaint by US garlic producers against “illegal and unfair” imports
of Chinese garlic which they claim is destroying the California industry.
Despite the US Department of
Commerce imposing dumping duties of 376%, Chinese imports went from three
million pounds in 2000 to over 54 million pounds in 2002.
Industry representatives claim
Chinese garlic is illegally labelled as produced in other Asian countries,
thus circumventing the dumping order, that there are shortcomings with
Commerce's new shipper administrative review procedures, and that Commerce
uses a flawed methodology for making dumping determinations.
Markets
Cosmeceuticals
to boom
Demand for cosmeceuticals in the US
will grow 8.5%/y to 2007, propelled by a stream of new products offering
appearance-enhancing benefits for an ageing population, predicts a new
study from market researcher Freedonia. Skin care products will dominate
while professional products (eg Propecia and Botox) and botanical extracts
and enzymes grow the fastest.
This study of the $3.4 billion US
cosmeceuticals industry presents historical data for 1992, 1997 and 2002
and forecasts to 2007 and 2012 by product and by chemical. It also
examines the market environment, details industry structure and market
share, and profiles 37 companies.
Tobacco
Big baccy
wins a reprieve
Just hours after the World Health
Organisation won agreement on tighter controls on marketing tobacco
products, a Florida appeals court threw out a landmark $145 billion
punitive damage award against US cigarette makers.
The three-judge panel said the case
should never have gone forward as a class-action lawsuit but rather as
separate claims brought by individual smokers against the tobacco
industry.
The New York Times reports
that the original Florida decision, which came in 2000, was the largest
punitive damage award ever awarded by a jury.
The judges held that the estimated
300,000 people each had unique reasons fro starting and continuing to
smoke. This meant a class action was the wrong format for seeking redress.
Matthew Myers, president of the
Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, in Washington, told the New York Times
the ruling "in no way absolves the tobacco industry of the decades of
deception and wrongdoing that led a jury to assess the largest punitive
damage award in history."
Markets
World’s
vital signs in decline
Failure to meet the needs of the
world's poorest citizens threatens long-term global stability, reports Vital
Signs 2003, the latest publication from the Worldwatch Institute, a
Washington, DC research organisation.
“While the global economy has
grown sevenfold since 1950, the disparity in per capita income between the
20 richest and 20 poorest nations more than doubled between 1960 and
1995,” it says.
"The world's failure to reduce
poverty levels is now contributing to global instability in the form of
terrorism, war, and contagious disease," says Vital Signs
project director Michael Renner. "An unstable world not only
perpetuates poverty, but will ultimately threaten the prosperity that the
rich minority has come to enjoy."
The report, produced in cooperation
with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), also warns that
environmental degradation is making poverty worse and adding to global
instability.
Disease is rampant in poor
countries. More than 13 million children have lost a parent due to AIDS;
14.4 million die each year from infectious disease, and there were 12
million international refugees at the beginning of 2002, it said.
"Little will ever be achieved
in terms of conservation of the environment and natural resources if
billions of people have no hope, no chance to care," says UNEP
Executive Director Klaus Toepfer.
The report found
-
Infectious diseases each year
kill twice as many people worldwide as cancer. These are people often
either in the early or prime years of life. This “unravels” the
economic and social fabric of societies.
-
One-quarter of the world's 50
recent armed conflicts involved control of natural resources.
Virtually all were in poor countries where a particular ethnic group
or economic elite has gained control of resources at the expense of
the poor majority.
-
Harvesting of illegal drug
crops, mainly cannabis, coca, and opium poppies, increased
dramatically since the 1980s, leading to rising addiction rates in
industrial nations, and a growing black market that undermines
development in many poor nations.
-
In addition to the 12 million
"official" refugees worldwide, there are another 50 million
environmental refugees-driven from their homes by dam building,
drought, flooding, etc.- and other internally displaced persons not
included in official UN statistics.
-
Corruption is costing some of
the world's poorest countries billions of dollars each year and
undermining efforts to promote economic development.
On the positive side
-
While only 4% of people living
with HIV/AIDS in low- and middle-income countries receive treatment,
access to treatment is improving.
-
The gap between the information
haves and have-nots is still huge but shrinking, thanks largely to
cellular telephony, which is cheaper to install than fixed-wire
phones.
-
New industries are beginning to
provide pollution-free electricity and good jobs.
Worldwatch president Christopher
Flavin expressed deep concern that a faltering global economy. “The vast
effort now required to restore peace in the Middle East will divert the
resources needed to address the causes and consequences of poverty in
scores of developing nations,” he said. |
