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The EU is not for the birds I have been struggling to find a slick way to use the phrase the ‘gobbledegook’ in this sorry little saga but however I stack it, it still sounds clunky.
Let’s just say, as ye sow so shall ye reap. [From the UK Times.]
TURKEY farmers are barricading their premises to prevent the spread of a savage disease after Brussels banned the only drug that can eradicate it. Ten million turkeys being reared for the £100 million Christmas trade are at risk from blackhead (Histomanos meleagridis), which can destroy entire flocks.
The disease, which enters the gut of birds and attacks their liver, has broken out in France, Germany and the Netherlands and farmers fear that it will be carried into Britain by migrating birds. East Anglia and Kent are particularly vulnerable.
Two predictions:
- It will transpire that this drug was banned as a result of ferocious lobbying by the enviro-mentalists.
- The EUnuchs will try and find some way to blame this whole farrago on the Americans in general and George Bush in particular.
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We’d be happy to sell you some. Your loss is our gain.
Word on the ground here in hollaqnd is that the drug in question save’s the turkey’s but puts those who eat the turkey’s at a higher risk of cancer.
This is just a test to see how this anti-spambot thingie works, because Scott Wickstein is threatening to install it at Troppo Armadillo
According to the National Farmers Union:
As my old GP used to say, they probably made baby rats swim in it until they died, and then called it dangerous.
According to http://www.doh.gov.uk/com/dmz.htm they tested rats with daily oral doses up to one gram per kilogram (equivalent of a human eating a couple of slices of turkey made of pure DMZ I would think) and found no significant mutagenic (carcinogenic) activity. It is only carcinogenic in a test tube.
This is the latest symptom of a growing EU scam – the prohibition of many useful chemicals which the public and industry have been using for decades, due to the activities of, as Mr. Carr says, ‘Greens’.
Gardeners and horticulturalists have seen a succession of pesticides and herbicides banned, often with the most flimsy justification.
But beyond outright bans, the EU has another way of making things happen which bears no relationship to its actual powers – great though they may be. As with the recent attempt to enforce an EU-wide ban on smoking in public places by invoking ‘health and safety at work’ rules, the way it bans chemicals is by making them extremely expensive to register, or by demanding equally expensive tests, which no manufacturer (particularly of generic products) can afford to finance.
The widely used pesticide, Malathion (albeit an organophosphate – but reputedly one of safest of its kind) fell foul of just this trick, a year or so back.
By some curious mechanism, it seems that garden centre shelves are now filled with just two or three insecticides – many of which come from a large German chemical company. Purely coincidentally, I’m sure.
The demon drug in question is Nifursol — the only additive that prevents turkeys from blackhead. It has been banned in the EU since 31 March 2003, pursuant to Commission Regulation 1756/2002 amending the Additives in Feedingstuffs Directive.
The grounds for the ban are that if you stuff huge quantities of Nifursol into small rodents, some may get cancer or suffer other adverse effects.
You then ‘extrapolate’ from large quantities administered to animals to small quantities.
You then ‘extrapolate’ from animals to human beings, who might pick up some of the ‘residues’ when they eat (in this case) turkey.
You then reduce the limit 100-fold, to be on the ‘safe side’ (known as a ‘conservative’ estimate).
Then you’re safe — if anything does go awry, no Guardian editorial will ever accuse you of ‘neglecting’ the potential human health hazard, etc.
It’s called ‘regulatory science’ and has nothing to do with science as such. It is the basis for all the ‘acceptable daily intake’ limits. It has no medical foundation. It has no epidemiological foundation — it is based entirely on the assumption that if a kilo of a synthetic product can cause cancer in a mouse, one nanogram or molecule might just possible cause cancer in one in 1000 million human beings or thereabouts.
David is right — it is environmentalism gone mad. As Michael Fumento put it “if the results of mass-dose testing of laboratory animals are to be interpreted as applying to humans, they could prove that everything does cause cancer” — because plants are chock a block full of natural carcinogens anyhow.
Oh, and naturally it’s all the Americans’ fault – they set the ball rolling with the infamous Delaney Clause as far back as 1958. We just copied them …
The book to read is Edith Efron’s “Apocalyptics: Cancer and the Big Lie: How Environmental Politics Controls What We Know About Cancer”
See here.
“Leisure suits cause cancer in rats.”
So, we’re going to get cancer because we eat 2 slices of turkey once a year????
Research has determined that exposure to laboratories causes cancer in mice.
Sadly nothing new. There’s no reason for people to get sick and die from malaria when the proper application of effective pesticides like DDT would save so many lives. But the regulators and activists care more about maintaining precident and political posturing than about science or effective public health policies.