South Sudan, a tiny country cut out from, obviously, the southern end of the Sudan, four years ago, has fallen back into war, with a population of a little over 11 million in two major ethnic groups at each other’s throats for no reason other than the enmity of its president and vice president. At least 1.5 million are internal refugees, many of them stuck in overcrowded United Nations encampments, afraid that soldiers from the other side will torture or kill them.
The reason I am posting this note is that the last blog post I made was about a deranged military medical instructor and his abuse of his students; reading about South Sudan made me feel a sense of disproportion and incongruity compared to the nearly private perversions of an instructor. The story about the medical classes conducted by this doctor was a tiny anecdote compared to the sufferings of millions of African people in a country torn apart by ethnic conflict. As of May, at least 4.8 million people, half of the country, are going hungry at least part of the time, and many of these are starving. Compared to the hunger of five million people, of what importance is the misconduct and perversion of a single military medical instructor?
If you want to read about South Sudan, here is a New York Times article:
Here is something (a bit dated) from CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/10/world/cnnphotos-south-sudan-abyss/index.html
As you can see from the stories, many of them a year old, on CNN, this has been going on for years and is just getting worse (if it is possible for Hell to get worse.)
There is little that the US government is doing about South Sudan, but there is also little that they can do, short of investing a billion dollars in aid and thousands of troops to protect aid convoys and medical facilities. There are also other countries with equally serious and pressing problems, Syria for one. The United Nations has people and facilities in South Sudan, but they can’t stop teenaged soldiers fighting for obsessively hateful warlords on both sides.
It is sad to think about; I thank Heaven that I am not there.
That same month, at DMI’s 20-acre facility in Pink Hill, North Carolina, Hagmann allegedly forced students to take between five and eight shots of liquor in 20 to 30 minutes, then injected a few of them with the dissociative drug ketamine. He then encouraged drunk students to perform nerve blocks on the penises of classmates who had been given ketamine, according to the report.
Yes, that’s what the article said. Fortunately, he just lost his license to practice. Unfortunately, his private contractor company that supplied “military medicine training” to the Uniformed Services University, has received $10.5 million in payment for his “services.”
This could be the most disgusting, sick, and insane individual I’ve heard about today. And “he’s still in the field, commanding troops.” (a quote from Apocalypse Now, from a scene in which a general orders the assassination of “Colonel Kurz”) Actually, his association with the Defense Department has been terminated– or so it says.
“They just didn’t see what was in it for them to look into their own industries exporting these chemicals,” said Jorge Guajardo, the former Mexican ambassador to China.
China’s chemical factories and drug traffickers have exploited this opportunity, turning the nation into a leading producer and exporter of synthetic drugs, including methamphetamine, as well as the compounds used to manufacture them, according to seizure and trafficking route data compiled by American and international law enforcement agencies.
China is now the source of a majority of the ingredients needed to manufacture methamphetamine by Mexican drug traffickers, who produce 90 percent of the meth consumed in the United States, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
As governments around the world have stepped up regulation of these so-called precursor chemicals, the Mexican cartels have increasingly turned to Chinese chemical factories.
Mr. Guajardo, Mexico’s ambassador from 2007 to 2013, said his efforts to persuade Chinese authorities to restrict the export of these chemicals, which are banned in Mexico, came to naught. Instead, he said, Chinese officials said the problem was best handled by Mexican customs agents or claimed that Mexico’s written requests for assistance had used the incorrect typeface or were improperly translated into Chinese.
“In all my time there, the Chinese never showed any willingness to cooperate on stemming the flow of precursors into Mexico,” he said in a telephone interview.
via In China, Illegal Drugs Are Sold Online in an Unbridled Market – The New York Times.
The source chemicals used to manufacture methamphetamine, a long acting analog of amphetamine which is a Schedule I (no accepted medical use, high potential for abuse) drug in the United States, used to be widely available here. One of the main ingredients would have been pseudoephedrine, an over-the-counter drug used as a nasal decongestant for colds and allergies; the market for pseudoephedrine has been controlled by a rationing system all over the US for the last few years. So the illicit manufacturers of methamphetamine switched to ordering their chemicals from China, a more convenient source in any case.
Now, methamphetamine is a popular drug on the black market in the US, one of the most popular drugs of abuse and a way for poor and mentally disturbed persons to pass the time (and lose their teeth) here. It is imported from Mexico in most cases, along with heroin; the traffic in marijuana has been greatly reduced by growers here, and was insufficiently profitable to begin with.
As the world’s largest manufacturing powerhouse, China has become the source for both legal and illegal drug precursors as well as finished drugs. The Chinese government has been passive about trying to control the illegal drug traffic and appears to blame the users and middlemen in other countries for the problem. A few malefactors in China have been arrested, jailed, or even executed, but the traffic continues unabated and large suppliers remain a ready source for almost any drug that can be used legally or abused illegally all over the world.
Ironically, this traffic is the inverse of the opium traffic of the early nineteenth century, during which England and other Western countries went to war twice to force the Chinese government to allow the unrestricted sale of opium to Chinese consumers, who became addicted in vast numbers to smoking opium. The fatally weakened Chinese government failed to prevent Western incursions, which resulted in a vast backlash among the Chinese people, a revolution which overthrew the Chinese imperial system and installed an equally weak republican government, which was unable to resist the invasion of the Japanese, and eventually a prolonged civil war and the installation of a unified and putatively communist totalitarian regime in 1949.
Attempts to control this traffic have failed, and the logical response to this problem is to end legal prohibitions on the sale and consumption of drugs. Monitoring by government agencies of the extent and types of drug trafficking is a reasonable approach, but prohibition has been shown to be worse than useless. Any readers who doubt this statement should brush up on their history: sale of potable alcohol was prohibited in the US from 1920 to 1933, with disastrous consequences. The rise and consolidation of violent criminal gangs, as well as widespread disrespect for the rule of law, is directly attributable to Prohibition. If that history is insufficient, perhaps the recent drug wars in Mexico, with the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Mexican citizens, should be studied.
Experts in drug abuse are in general agreement that the appropriate response to this problem is medical therapy for the abusers, along with education for the general public as to the true effects and side effects of known drugs. The actual initiating cause of drug abuse is mental disturbance, partly due to societal deficiencies such as poverty, childhood deprivation, and discrimination. A law enforcement response to this problem is sure to fail in the long run and produce negative effects such as increased criminal sophistication in response to prohibition.
The New York Times (NYT) published a followup on the story we noted a few days ago about Chinese hackers and their successful penetration of American databases. These databases contained all the “SF-86” (on which applicants reveal personal, health, and sensitive information about themselves) forms, apparently from every American who has ever applied for a security clearance, including retired former civilian employees and current workers. The number of forms was previously reported as between nine and fourteen million, but the exact number is simply unknown. The NYT reported on Congressional hearings in which it was revealed that multiple US agencies have serious holes in their cyber-security practices, including some computers that didn’t even have firewalls and some passwords that were absurdly easy to penetrate, such as “password” and others.
The hackers obtained “administrator” privileges that allowed them unrestricted access to all systems on multiple computer networks; even the Department of Homeland Security had serious vulnerabilities. Other agencies affected: the Department of the Interior, which had large amounts of database storage available in lightly protected archives, ” the Internal Revenue Service, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Energy Department, [and] the Securities and Exchange Commission.” The Securities and Exchange Commission was one which had no firewall or other intrusion protection systems for several months.
Inspector General reports as far back as 2010 have, or should have had, alerted authorities to the security vulnerabilities, but action has been slow at every agency. Some who spoke at the hearings blamed “legacy systems”, that is, systems that were installed at the very beginning of the computer era and then repeatedly patched instead of being replaced because replacement was thought to be too difficult.
” It was not until early last year, as computer attacks began on United States Investigations Services, a private contractor that conducts security clearance interviews for the personnel office, that serious efforts to develop a strategic plan to seal up the agency’s many vulnerabilities started.”
The same group which made these intrusions had previously entered the databases of health insurance companies like Anthem, as well as the travel industry (among many other industries from which patent and other sensitive information was taken). An unusual aspect of those attacks was that none of the data subsequently showed up on the data black market, a suggestion that the hackers were the end users of the data obtained, or government agencies.
Repeated reports by US government investigating bodies have revealed vulnerable networks in every agency looked at. These vulnerabilities have persisted despite claims that the US has spent over $65 billion since 2006 on cybersecurity. Even the Department of Homeland Security has revealed multiple deficiencies in intrusion protection. New tools installed in the last year have identified intrusions that have been taking place for some time; without these tools, investigators might never have known that the intrusions were even taking place.
Clearly, the Chinese government has successfully developed a database of US citizens, those employed by the government, those with security clearances, diplomats, and politicians (although there were claims that the politician’s data has not been breached.) What the Chinese intend to do with this information is not definitely known, although one could speculate as to the advantages this data could confer: the ability to blackmail anyone, or to recruit wavering individuals for espionage work.
This security breach is the worst, and the most embarrassing, of all the breaches revealed to date. Its full repercussions have not yet been felt.
The NYT article link: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/us/attack-gave-chinese-hackers-privileged-access-to-us-systems.html
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is thrust upon the world;
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
Yeat’s words are almost a hundred years old…
A new Finnish study has given support to a formerly discredited method of treating appendicitis: antibiotics. Surgical treatment for appendicitis has been the standard of care for over a hundred years, ever since the abdomen could be safely opened under anesthesia and long before antibiotics were even available. By the time effective antibiotics were developed, surgery was ensconced as the only reasonable treatment option.
Now, a big study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) raises questions about that standard care. 530 patients were enrolled from 2009 to 2012 in Finland; all had uncomplicated appendicitis confirmed by CAT (computer assisted tomography) scans. Patients with an appendicolith (a stony obstruction of the mouth of the appendix), perforated appendix, abscess, or other complications were judged inappropriate candidates for antibiotic therapy. After randomization, 273 patients were assigned to immediate appendectomy and 257 were admitted to hospital for three days of intravenous ertapenem followed by seven days of oral metronidazole and levofloxacin. Seventy of the patients assigned to antibiotics underwent appendectomy within 1 year and 186 did not require surgery. Of the patients assigned to surgery, all but one underwent successful appendectomy; open surgery rather than laparoscopy was performed because the study would be more generalizable to locations where laparoscopy is not available.
Most of the patients who suffered complications from surgery had wound infections, which would also have been possible even if laparoscopic surgery had been done. It has been noted that virtually all patients who have ruptured appendices already have a rupture by the time they present for treatment; almost no ruptures occur after the patient has arrived at the hospital. Of the patients assigned to initial antibiotic treatment who subsequently underwent surgery, 58 had uncomplicated appendicitis, 7 had complicated acute appendicitis, and 5 did not have appendicitis but had appendectomy for suspected recurrent appendicitis. There were no intra-abdominal abscesses and no other significant complications in the antibiotic-first group.
The surgeons who performed the study felt that the failure rate of 27% was acceptable, but in a New York Times (NYT) article about the study, “Dr. Philip S. Barie, a surgeon at Weill Cornell Medical College, noted that antibiotics were not sufficient for more than a quarter of the patients in the new study and said the failure rate was unacceptable.” Others feel that the failure rate is perfectly acceptable when the cost of surgery and the fact that no complications occurred is taken into account.
A repeat study is planned in America, with laparoscopic surgery; in addition, trials of shorter antibiotic courses are under discussion. Many of the patients in the Finnish study were asymptomatic within a day or two and asked to be sent home early. However, patients who have had one episode of appendicitis are at higher risk of a repeat episode, and there is some discussion about whether a patient who has been treated with antibiotics might go to the hospital every time he or she has a pain in the abdomen and require another CAT scan to rule out a recurrence, a potential additional expense.
There is an even more radical alternative: not treating patients with uncomplicated appendicitis at all and waiting to see if the condition would subside spontaneously. The Finnish group is planning a trial to see if this is a potentially acceptable alternative.
The abstract for the JAMA study is here: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2320315 and the NYT article is linked here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/health/study-supports-antibiotic-use-to-treat-appendicitis.html
The White House announced a further increase in the number of hacked personnel records discovered in the last few months: up to 14 million records have been exposed of people who applied for security clearances for civilian jobs with the government. These records include the background information that is requested from those who want security clearances: arrests, drug use, health information, birth dates, Social Security numbers, employment histories and pay data, military records, veteran status, addresses, health and life insurance, ages, genders, and race data, and so on. There are currently 2.5 million civilian government employees, so most of the data includes former employees and applicants. The Office of Personnel Management keeps these records, and based on briefings that employee unions have received, they say that information for all current federal employees, all retirees, and a million former employees has been exposed.
The White House has stated that the Chinese are responsible for this data breach, although the Chinese government has denied it. Whoever has the data, they are in possession of material that could be used for blackmail, for impersonation of individuals, or many other nefarious purposes.
The Associated Press story that revealed this information states that, since the defection of Edward Snowden and his revelations about American surveillance activities, it has become more difficult to recruit new government employees, especially in the security services. This new data breach will surely make it even less attractive to apply for a security-classified job with the US government.
The amount and sensitivity of the information that has been breached makes the security of government computer systems look poor indeed. There is no surprise that this embarrassing revelation has been quietly announced, in parts, over a period of weeks. Government officials do not wish to make a lot of fuss over the news and have minimized the size of the breach, only gradually admitting to its full extent with a series of partial announcements.
Now that the breach has been, apparently, fully announced, we are left with a dilemma: what, if anything, can be done about it? It appears that we have been left fully exposed to a potentially deadly weakness. From now on, security personnel must look carefully for potential uses of this information in operations that damage the country’s security in new and dangerous ways. Any improvements in information security now will be necessarily after the fact and really not very helpful, so to speak, after the horse has left the barn.
The Chicago Tribune has recently conducted an investigation into the problem of persistent lead poisoning in the city of Chicago. Some parts of the city– notably the poor, black south and west sides– have high levels of lead poisoning demonstrated by measurements in school children. In some neighborhoods, like Austin, Englewood, and Lawndale, more than 80% of children tested in 1995 had elevated lead levels. These same neighborhoods now are areas with the highest rates of aggravated assault. The Tribune states that there is more and more research evidence for a link between high lead levels and poor school performance due to interference with brain development, particularly in areas that control attention, emotions, and impulse control. At the same time, there are more links between lead poisoning and youth crime, especially violent crime, again due to impaired brain development, with poor decision-making and impulse control.
Despite the removal of lead from gasoline and new paint, there are still many older dwellings that have been painted with lead-containing paint; this paint is now drying up and peeling off, forming a dust that is high in lead and permeates the interiors of these houses. Houses like these are responsible for the high levels of lead poisoning in children seen in poor Chicago neighborhoods.
Funding for lead testing of children, property inspection, and amelioration of hazardous sites has been sharply cut back at both the federal and state level. This will make it harder to detect the problem of lead pollution at the same time that we are being told lead is more dangerous than previously assumed.
If the problem of violent crime in Chicago, so intractable and inexplicable, is actually due to high levels of lead poisoning in young men, we would be doing ourselves an awful disservice by cutting funding for testing and amelioration. We could save a bundle of money and possibly a lot of lives if we were to make a serious investment in ameliorating the problem of lead pollution and treating the young victims of lead poisoning in poor neighborhoods.
Here’s another one of those surveys that confirms what you thought all along: Republicans and conservatives think people who are poor and/or unemployed have reached that state due to individual failings, while Democrats and liberals think the problem is due to lack of opportunity.
This particular poll was done by YouGov.com, a custom polling company that seems to do more polls than everyone else combined, even Pew and the old favorites (this is only an impression; I haven’t researched who’s the biggest.) According to their website, YouGov can do custom polls for your company to help you find out where to improve and where to break into business: the company will “leverage cutting-edge research and analytic techniques with an eye for assessing the economic impact of your actions. We deliver you the insights and tools that help you to plan and make strategic and tactical decisions while maintaining a focus on tangible outcomes.” The site shows outcomes for many recent polls on subjects from “Academic and Scientific” to “Travel and Leisure”; for example, they have tracked the decline in public perceptions of the TLC cable channel since they have become associated with the Duggan family (the one with nineteen children and sex abuse allegations), they have named BandAid the best-perceived brand for Mother’s Day among mothers with children under eighteen.
One of YouGov’s web pages states that they have a panel of 1.8 million US residents and over 3 million around the world, allowing them to provide a poll with a thousand respondents in 24 hours. The respondents are fully characterized by income levels and other demographic statistics; there are even special polls for children and LGBT respondents. This “infrastructure” allows for rapid response, specialized polls for reasonable prices on almost any subject.
At any rate, YouGov, with their panel of fully qualified opinion holders, provides an essential service and generates polls about a vast number of subjects on which people hold opinions.
The poll in question, conducted April 15-16 2014, analyzed answers to the questions “When people are poor, do you think that’s more likely to be because they had fewer opportunities or because of their individual failings?” and “When people are poor, do you think that’s more likely to be because good jobs aren’t available, or because they have a poor work ethic?”, and conversely, “When people are wealthy, do you think that’s more likely to be because they had more opportunities than other people or because they worked harder than other people? ” and “Which comes closer to your own view about people who are unemployed: most are trying hard to find jobs but can’t, or most could find jobs if they wanted to?” Finally, the question: “Which comes closer to your own view about people who have been unemployed for more than 6 months: most are trying hard to find jobs but can’t, or most could find jobs if they wanted to?”
When you look at people’s answers to these questions, you can see that they depend strongly on their attitudes about people’s individual responsibility and staying powers versus their attitudes about the role that society plays in giving people a chance to succeed or keeping them down on the farm. Clearly, conservatives are likely to feel that an individual has full responsibility for his or her position in life and that one’s success depends entirely on one’s native abilities and energies; whereas liberals are likely to feel that society plays a strong role in determining a person’s position in life by allowing one to show his/her ability or hindering him/her from having a chance to succeed. Further, a liberal is more likely to feel that society displays biases and prejudices that prevent some people of certain ethnic backgrounds, religions, colors, etc. from succeeding while giving other people of different backgrounds a guaranteed place higher on the ladder. Looking at the associated factors, one finds that being male, higher in income, and self-identifying as a Republican (even more so than self-identifying as a conservative) are more strongly associated with this attitude, with Republicans being the most strongly associated.
It is not hard for us to reason that biases operate on a person’s outcomes from birth; certain children picked at birth by random factors such as parent’s wealth, born to privilege, are treated better, fed better, sheltered better, clothed better, protected more from diseases and accidents, loved more, stimulated more, and in every way receive more of what studies have shown enhance a person’s IQ and motivation. On the other hand, other children, marked by chance with misfortune, are ill fed, ill clothed, ill housed, and ill treated regardless of their ability.
On the other hand, the opposing line of reasoning would say that one’s abilities are already inherited at birth and merely make their appearances at the appointed age regardless of the circumstances. It would be extremely difficult to put together experimental support for this hypothesis; virtually all the research shows that enhanced childhood experience reliably enhances abilities, while childhood sensory deprivation leaves one with severe handicaps.
While it is hard to find experimental justification for the “Republican” (this word is used specifically because of the strong association of self-identification as a Republican with this attitude) point of view, there is a significant proportion of the public that holds to this attitude.
I have nothing more that I can say at this moment about this divide in opinion; perhaps in the future, that will change.
Genetically Modified Organisms: A Deep Divide in Opinion Between Scientists and the Public
A recent survey of scientists showed that 88% of them agreed with the statement, “genetically modified organisms (GMO’s) are generally safe.” By contrast, the poll shows that the majority of American laymen disagree and appear to feel that GMO’s are unsafe and/or unhealthy. This poll was conducted by the Pew Research Center in the fall of 2014 on a number of subjects, and used membership in the American Association for Advancement of Science as a marker for “scientist.” More ominously, and partially explaining the public attitude, 67% (two-thirds) of the public agreed that “scientists do not have a clear understanding about the health effects of GMO crops.”
An ABC news poll (conducted by random telephone calls) from 2013 found the following:
“Sixty-two percent of women think genetically modified foods are unsafe to eat, a view that’s shared by far fewer men, 40 percent. Indeed a plurality of men think these foods are safe, while women disagree by better than 2-1.
Similarly, while 49 percent of men say they’d be less likely to buy food labeled as genetically modified, that jumps to 65 percent of women. (Similar numbers of women and men say they’re more likely to buy organic foods.)”
In addition, some 93 percent of respondents think that GMO’s should be labeled, and many would use the labeling to avoid GMO’s, a possibility that has food companies really scared– if GMO labeling causes people to avoid certain foods (those not labeled “GMO free”) then those foods would die a slow death on the shelf.
Politics affects one’s opinion about GMO safety:
“There’s also a political difference. Republicans divide evenly on whether genetically modified foods are safe or unsafe. Independents rate them unsafe by a 20-point margin; Democrats, by a 26-point margin.”
The ABC news report ends with a “scientific” opinion, or at least endorsement:
“The FDA has said labeling isn’t necessary because there’s no evidence genetic engineering changes a food’s quality, safety, ‘or any other attribute.’ In a report late last year, the American Medical Association also said there was ‘no scientific justification for special labeling of genetically modified foods, as a class.'”
In other words, about half of people in the poll would avoid GMO’s if they knew they were in the food; women and Democrats are more likely to shun GMO’s. There appears to be a trend among liberal, radical, and avante-garde thinkers that disagrees with scientific peoples’ thoughts on the subject.
Numerous polls conducted over the last ten years agree that well over ninety percent of respondents favor mandatory labeling of GMO foods; for example, the “Center for Food Safety” has compiled lists, including seven polls conducted since 2001, all of which show the same response.
Rutgers conducted an online survey in 2013 that found:
“American consumers’ knowledge and awareness of GM foods are low. More than half (54%) say they know very little or nothing at all about genetically modified foods, and one in four (25%) say they have never heard of them.”
It seems that it is more likely that the public, rather than science, “does not have a clear understanding of the health effects of GMO crops.”
This is a serious disconnect, because, as the detailed Rutgers report tells us, we are already consuming and using many GMO products:
“According to USDA Crop Acreage reports, in 2013, 94% of the soy, 90% of the cotton, and 90% of the corn produced in the United States were GM varieties featuring the two principal traits of insect resistance and herbicide tolerance, or combinations of the two. Moreover, 95% of the sugar beets grown by farmers in the US (more than a million acres) were herbicide‐resistant GM varieties. In addition, American farmers grew millions of acres of GM herbicide‐resistant canola and alfalfa, and virus‐resistant squash and papaya. Corn, soy, canola, sugar beets, and cotton seed oil are the source of some of the most common ingredients used by American food processors. GM varieties are also often mixed with conventional varieties during shipping, processing and storage. As a result, experts say that the majority of processed foods in the United States likely contain an ingredient from a GM crop, such as corn starch, high‐fructose corn syrup, canola oil, soybean oil, soy flour, lecithin, or cotton‐seed oil.”
What really jars, though, is that most people have no idea what they are consuming:
“Despite the abundance of products with GM ingredients in the U.S., the survey results suggest most consumers are unaware of them. The study found that fewer than half of Americans (43%) are aware that such products are currently for sale in supermarkets, and only about one quarter (26%) believe that they have ever eaten any food containing GM ingredients. In fact, GM soy products were introduced to the market more than 15 years ago, and because most processed foods are likely to contain an ingredient derived from a GM crop, most Americans have consumed such products.”
Many people think there are GMO’s in crops that don’t have them:
“The survey found that even those who say they are aware of the presence of GM foods in American stores are unclear about which foods are available. While three‐quarters correctly recognized that GM corn products are on store shelves, and 59% realized that GM soybeans are available, more than half mistakenly believed that GM tomatoes, wheat, and chicken products are in supermarkets, more than 40% believe that GM apples and rice are on the market, and more than a third believe that GM salmon and GM oranges are currently on offer. These latter products are not on supermarket shelves in the U.S.”
Public impressions about tomatoes may be due to the fact that a GMO tomato, the “Flavr Savr”, was once introduced but was discontinued quickly; for the rest of the products, the reasons for these answers are unclear.
Actual awareness of GMO foods is so low that only 7% of respondents volunteered that GMO products should be labeled without being prompted that GMO’s are a subject of interest; only a quarter of respondents realize that current regulations do not require GMO foods to be labeled. When directly asked “Should GMO foods be labeled?”, then the Rutgers survey showed 73% agreed (lower than the other surveys, and somewhat higher than the percentage that thought food with hormones, antibiotics, or pesticides should be labeled.) About 45 % agreed that eating GMO foods was safe; the majority thought that they were unsafe or weren’t sure.
Clearly, the problem with GMO’s is partly due to a lack of knowledge. The general public simply does not know what GMO’s are, how they are created, how they are propagated, and how they affect foods. If they knew more precisely what GMO’s are, it is possible that the public would view them more favorably. It is also possible that people would have a negative reaction if they really knew what is being done to their food.
In Europe and the United Kingdom, there is very little GMO food available due to regulatory restrictions that have been in place since the late 1990’s. Public disapproval of GMO’s appeared earlier in Europe than in the US, although similar levels of concern have developed; actual public knowledge about the process by which GMO’s are created is as low in Europe as it is in the US. The public attitude towards GMO’s has been reflected, in Europe, in regulatory restrictions that have prevented the import of most GMO’s from the US. Likewise, since 1989, regulations have prevented the import of beef that has been treated with growth hormones to Europe, despite the disapproval of a World Trade Organization dispute panel.
This is a marked contrast to the situation in the US, where GMO’s have been widely available without restrictions. The reasons for this are complex and relate to differences in the way the issue was handled by the government; in the US, the economic advantages of GMO’s have trumped the concerns over health effects. These are issues in European government far beyond the scope of this post, that are nonetheless fascinating. Oddly, European regulations on such matters as environmental pollution, controls on new drugs, pesticides, hormones, etc. were more favorable to industry than those in the US in the 1960’s and 1970’s, while a reversal occurred in the 1980’s.
Further information on the situation in Europe is available at the following sites:
A 2001 report by the Council on Foreign Relations: CFR report 2001 that goes into detail on the regulatory process in Europe.
The European Commission has a site that goes into great detail on regulations, research, and so on: Euro Commission takes you to the index site that will give you more than you ever wanted to know about European regulations.
The opinion polls that we have discussed were found at the following sites:
The Rutgers report can be found at: http://humeco.rutgers.edu/documents_PDF/news/GMlabelingperceptions.pdf
Here’s a link to a Vox.com poll with more detail about scientific attitudes: http://www.vox.com/2015/1/29/7947695/gmos-safety-poll
The ABC news poll can be found here: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97567
Here’s another link: food safety center with a list of polls supporting mandatory labeling.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 