Flaws of Perception, by Deepak Chopra
"At the atomic level you make a new liver every six weeks; a new skin once every five days; you replace your skeleton every three months; and you replace the raw material of your DNA every six weeks - it comes and goes like migratory birds.
What if we could see the body as it really is? What would we see? We would see first of all that it is made up of atoms, the atoms in turn are made up of subatomic particles, and these subatomic particles are not material things, but fluctuations of energy and information that are flickering in and out of an infinite void at the speed of light. If I could see my body as it really is, through quantum instruments, what I would see is that 99% of my body is empty space and that 1% that appears to be material is also empty space; that the whole thing is made out of nothing."
Read the entire article
Friday, October 21, 2005
Hospital infections are the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States
Myth: Hospitals Keep You Safe from Germs
Hospital Infections Kill Tens of Thousands Every Year
ABC News, Oct. 14, 2005
There's a deadly threat hiding inside America's hospitals. What's even scarier, your hospital is probably keeping it a secret.
Maureen Daly's mother was a healthy 63-year-old woman when she had surgery to fix a broken shoulder. However, after being admitted to the hospital, Daly's mother got an infection that left her immobilized on a respirator. Daly was told that life-threatening germs are an inevitable fact of hospital life.
Daly was shocked. "I cannot accept that it would be a fact of life that you can walk into a hospital with a broken shoulder and leave practically dead," she said.
Her mother died four months later. It turns out hospital infections are the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States.
Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York and founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, said, "These infections kill as many people each year in our country as AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined."
McCaughey said it's secrecy that's allowed the problem to grow. "Most states have not required hospitals to report their infections, or provide that information to the public," she said.
Pennsylvania is one of only six states that has passed a law requiring the reporting of infections. Experts say public disclosure forces hospitals to reduce infection rates. Dr. Rick Shannon, chief of medicine at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, looked at the data on patients in the hospital's intensive care units. He was stunned.
"Fifty-one percent of everyone who got these infections died. Half the people who got one died," he said. Dr. Shannon wasted no time. He gave an order to the ICU staff. Reduce hospital infections to zero -- in just 90 days.
Staff nurses said they didn't think it could be done.
But after just one week, the ICU staff identified the culprit. It wasn't a superbug -- it was the staff. And the fact they each had their own way of washing hands, changing dressings, and putting in catheters. "No one actually knew what the right way to do it was. And not knowing what the right way to do it was that all these little errors could creep in that would lead to infection," Dr. Shannon said.
Dr. Shannon and his team quickly found solutions, like putting in more hand-sanitizers and raising the head of the bed 30 degrees to prevent pneumonia. The results were unbelievable.
"Ninety days later, we went from 49 infections to zero," he said.
And the results a year later are equally impressive. Only one patient in the ICU has died from an infection.
McCaughey says it's important for the public to know about infection rates at hospitals. "The public has a right to this information. If you are going into the hospital, you should be able to find out which hospital in your area has a serious infection problem, so you can stay away from that hospital," she said. Her advocacy group is working to pass more state laws -- like Pennsylvania's -- requiring hospitals to release this data.
And McCaughey says there's a simple thing you can do to keep yourself safe from dangerous germs in any hospital.
"Ask doctors and nurses to clean their hands before touching you. If you are worried about being too aggressive, just remember, your life is at stake," she said.
Read at the original source
Hospital Infections Kill Tens of Thousands Every Year
ABC News, Oct. 14, 2005
There's a deadly threat hiding inside America's hospitals. What's even scarier, your hospital is probably keeping it a secret.
Maureen Daly's mother was a healthy 63-year-old woman when she had surgery to fix a broken shoulder. However, after being admitted to the hospital, Daly's mother got an infection that left her immobilized on a respirator. Daly was told that life-threatening germs are an inevitable fact of hospital life.
Daly was shocked. "I cannot accept that it would be a fact of life that you can walk into a hospital with a broken shoulder and leave practically dead," she said.
Her mother died four months later. It turns out hospital infections are the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States.
Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York and founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, said, "These infections kill as many people each year in our country as AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined."
McCaughey said it's secrecy that's allowed the problem to grow. "Most states have not required hospitals to report their infections, or provide that information to the public," she said.
Pennsylvania is one of only six states that has passed a law requiring the reporting of infections. Experts say public disclosure forces hospitals to reduce infection rates. Dr. Rick Shannon, chief of medicine at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, looked at the data on patients in the hospital's intensive care units. He was stunned.
"Fifty-one percent of everyone who got these infections died. Half the people who got one died," he said. Dr. Shannon wasted no time. He gave an order to the ICU staff. Reduce hospital infections to zero -- in just 90 days.
Staff nurses said they didn't think it could be done.
But after just one week, the ICU staff identified the culprit. It wasn't a superbug -- it was the staff. And the fact they each had their own way of washing hands, changing dressings, and putting in catheters. "No one actually knew what the right way to do it was. And not knowing what the right way to do it was that all these little errors could creep in that would lead to infection," Dr. Shannon said.
Dr. Shannon and his team quickly found solutions, like putting in more hand-sanitizers and raising the head of the bed 30 degrees to prevent pneumonia. The results were unbelievable.
"Ninety days later, we went from 49 infections to zero," he said.
And the results a year later are equally impressive. Only one patient in the ICU has died from an infection.
McCaughey says it's important for the public to know about infection rates at hospitals. "The public has a right to this information. If you are going into the hospital, you should be able to find out which hospital in your area has a serious infection problem, so you can stay away from that hospital," she said. Her advocacy group is working to pass more state laws -- like Pennsylvania's -- requiring hospitals to release this data.
And McCaughey says there's a simple thing you can do to keep yourself safe from dangerous germs in any hospital.
"Ask doctors and nurses to clean their hands before touching you. If you are worried about being too aggressive, just remember, your life is at stake," she said.
Read at the original source
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Bigger portions will get eaten
Bigger portions will get eaten
Bigger portions will get eaten
By Nanci Hellmich, USA TODAY, October 20, 2005
Americans eat what's put in front of them, even if it's way too much.
In fact, adults and children - even kids as young as 2 - will keep on eating if they are served bigger portions, according to two new studies discussed Wednesday at the annual meeting of the Obesity Society, an organization of weight-loss professionals.
This research adds to evidence that supersized portions could be contributing to adult and child obesity.
In one study, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston fed dinner to 75 kids ages 2 to 9 on three occasions. The meal was designed to be appealing to them: macaroni and cheese, corn, applesauce, baby carrots, chocolate-chip cookies and milk.
The macaroni-and-cheese entree was served three different ways: an age-appropriate portion on the dinner plates; twice as much of the entree on the dinner plate; and twice as much made available in an individual serving dish instead of on the plate. Findings:
- 63% ate more when served more.
- Normal-weight kids were as likely as overweight kids to eat more of the larger portion.
- When served an age-appropriate amount, children ate about half (56%) of the entree.
- When the portion was doubled, the children ate an average of 29% more of the macaroni and cheese than when they were served the more appropriate amount. However, they ate slightly less of the other foods so that their calorie intake at the larger-entree meal was only about 13% higher. This happened with all ages, even those as young as 2.
- The kids who ate the most when the entree was doubled ate less when allowed to spoon out macaroni from the individual serving dish.
"Modest weight loss improves nearly all parameters of health," says researcher Suzanne Phelan, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at Brown University.
Read the entire article
Bigger portions will get eaten
By Nanci Hellmich, USA TODAY, October 20, 2005
Americans eat what's put in front of them, even if it's way too much.
In fact, adults and children - even kids as young as 2 - will keep on eating if they are served bigger portions, according to two new studies discussed Wednesday at the annual meeting of the Obesity Society, an organization of weight-loss professionals.
This research adds to evidence that supersized portions could be contributing to adult and child obesity.
In one study, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston fed dinner to 75 kids ages 2 to 9 on three occasions. The meal was designed to be appealing to them: macaroni and cheese, corn, applesauce, baby carrots, chocolate-chip cookies and milk.
The macaroni-and-cheese entree was served three different ways: an age-appropriate portion on the dinner plates; twice as much of the entree on the dinner plate; and twice as much made available in an individual serving dish instead of on the plate. Findings:
- 63% ate more when served more.
- Normal-weight kids were as likely as overweight kids to eat more of the larger portion.
- When served an age-appropriate amount, children ate about half (56%) of the entree.
- When the portion was doubled, the children ate an average of 29% more of the macaroni and cheese than when they were served the more appropriate amount. However, they ate slightly less of the other foods so that their calorie intake at the larger-entree meal was only about 13% higher. This happened with all ages, even those as young as 2.
- The kids who ate the most when the entree was doubled ate less when allowed to spoon out macaroni from the individual serving dish.
"Modest weight loss improves nearly all parameters of health," says researcher Suzanne Phelan, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at Brown University.
Read the entire article
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
FDA Questions Use of Antibacterial Soaps
FDA Questions Use of Antibacterial Soaps
FDA Questions Use of Antibacterial Soaps
Hearing Will Probe Possible Link To Drug-Resistant Bacteria; No Clear Benefit Over Plain Soap?
By JANE ZHANG, Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, October 18, 2005; Page D1
The Food and Drug Administration is questioning the use of popular antibacterial cleansers, which critics say may not only provide little benefit for healthy consumers but could carry environmental and public-health risks.
In documents made public yesterday, the agency raised concerns about the use of antibacterial soaps, wipes and washes, a class of products that includes everything from some Dial soaps to Pfizer Inc.'s Purell hand sanitizer. This Thursday, the FDA will bring the issue to an outside committee of experts, which will examine whether the agency needs to limit their use by consumers. The FDA could, for example, recommend labels that would limit the circumstances in which some products would be used, which would also restrict how they could be marketed.
The committee is looking at the use of these products by healthy consumers, as opposed to their use by those -- such as health-care providers and food-service employees -- where the benefits may more clearly outweigh the risks. The FDA documents state that it "often is not clear what contribution consumer antiseptics make relative to washing with plain soap and water."
Any moves by the FDA could affect hundreds of products that are on store shelves: Manufacturers have introduced 253 antibacterial products in the U.S. so far this year. Last year, there were 322 new products, according to Datamonitor's Productscan Online, a new-products database. Antibacterial products generally cost about the same as their conventional counterparts, though prices can sometimes vary widely.
Some doctors have recommended against the widespread use of antibacterial products for years, arguing that they can lead to the emergence of bacteria that resist antibiotics. In 2000, the American Medical Association recommended that the FDA "expedite its regulation" of antibacterial consumer products that have been linked to resistant bacteria.
The FDA's concerns come against a backdrop of heightened awareness about the potential for drug-resistant bacteria. The incidences of deadly bird flu in Asia, for example, have increased anxiety about infectious diseases overall. Earlier this year, the FDA for the first time banned an antibiotic used in chickens and turkeys because of evidence that its use might lead to pathogens that could withstand drugs used to fight human illness.
In the documents released yesterday, the FDA said it found no medical studies that showed a link between a specific consumer antibacterial product and a decline in infection rates. Indeed, one major study found little difference between washing with soap and using an antimicrobial product. However, the agency said that the data about links to resistant strains of bacteria are "conflicting and unclear." The worries raised by researchers center largely on triclosan, an ingredient in a number of antibacterial products.
The agency also raised concerns about the environmental impact of some antibacterial cleansers, which may hurt some algae and fish and break down into a harmful contaminant. Another potential fear -- which the FDA said was "controversial" -- was that using too many antibacterial products may prevent people from being exposed to routine bacteria, weakening the development of their immune systems and leading to asthma and allergies.
Makers of the antibacterial products strongly defended them in filings to the agency. Manufacturers said that the cleansers' effects on the environment are limited, and there is no solid evidence that their products lead to resistant bacteria in real-world conditions. Moreover, they said, monitoring systems are in place to pick up such problems if they arise.
Manufacturers also stood by their individual products. "We're not aware of any evidence linking the use of Safeguard to drug resistance in bacteria," said Laurie Steuri, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble Co., which makes the Safeguard line of antibacterial soaps. A spokeswoman for Pfizer, which markets Purell to consumers, said, "We definitely believe there is benefit to consumers."
Still, many medical experts disagree. Stuart Levy, a researcher at Tufts University and president of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, says products with alcohol and bleaches aren't worrisome, but chemicals that don't quickly evaporate or break down -- including triclosan -- are. Triclosan, he says, has been linked to antibiotic-resistant bacteria in lab tests. Use of such products by healthy households should be limited, he says, unless their manufacturers can prove concrete health benefits.
Read article at original source
FDA Questions Use of Antibacterial Soaps
Hearing Will Probe Possible Link To Drug-Resistant Bacteria; No Clear Benefit Over Plain Soap?
By JANE ZHANG, Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, October 18, 2005; Page D1
The Food and Drug Administration is questioning the use of popular antibacterial cleansers, which critics say may not only provide little benefit for healthy consumers but could carry environmental and public-health risks.
In documents made public yesterday, the agency raised concerns about the use of antibacterial soaps, wipes and washes, a class of products that includes everything from some Dial soaps to Pfizer Inc.'s Purell hand sanitizer. This Thursday, the FDA will bring the issue to an outside committee of experts, which will examine whether the agency needs to limit their use by consumers. The FDA could, for example, recommend labels that would limit the circumstances in which some products would be used, which would also restrict how they could be marketed.
The committee is looking at the use of these products by healthy consumers, as opposed to their use by those -- such as health-care providers and food-service employees -- where the benefits may more clearly outweigh the risks. The FDA documents state that it "often is not clear what contribution consumer antiseptics make relative to washing with plain soap and water."
Any moves by the FDA could affect hundreds of products that are on store shelves: Manufacturers have introduced 253 antibacterial products in the U.S. so far this year. Last year, there were 322 new products, according to Datamonitor's Productscan Online, a new-products database. Antibacterial products generally cost about the same as their conventional counterparts, though prices can sometimes vary widely.
Some doctors have recommended against the widespread use of antibacterial products for years, arguing that they can lead to the emergence of bacteria that resist antibiotics. In 2000, the American Medical Association recommended that the FDA "expedite its regulation" of antibacterial consumer products that have been linked to resistant bacteria.
The FDA's concerns come against a backdrop of heightened awareness about the potential for drug-resistant bacteria. The incidences of deadly bird flu in Asia, for example, have increased anxiety about infectious diseases overall. Earlier this year, the FDA for the first time banned an antibiotic used in chickens and turkeys because of evidence that its use might lead to pathogens that could withstand drugs used to fight human illness.
In the documents released yesterday, the FDA said it found no medical studies that showed a link between a specific consumer antibacterial product and a decline in infection rates. Indeed, one major study found little difference between washing with soap and using an antimicrobial product. However, the agency said that the data about links to resistant strains of bacteria are "conflicting and unclear." The worries raised by researchers center largely on triclosan, an ingredient in a number of antibacterial products.
The agency also raised concerns about the environmental impact of some antibacterial cleansers, which may hurt some algae and fish and break down into a harmful contaminant. Another potential fear -- which the FDA said was "controversial" -- was that using too many antibacterial products may prevent people from being exposed to routine bacteria, weakening the development of their immune systems and leading to asthma and allergies.
Makers of the antibacterial products strongly defended them in filings to the agency. Manufacturers said that the cleansers' effects on the environment are limited, and there is no solid evidence that their products lead to resistant bacteria in real-world conditions. Moreover, they said, monitoring systems are in place to pick up such problems if they arise.
Manufacturers also stood by their individual products. "We're not aware of any evidence linking the use of Safeguard to drug resistance in bacteria," said Laurie Steuri, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble Co., which makes the Safeguard line of antibacterial soaps. A spokeswoman for Pfizer, which markets Purell to consumers, said, "We definitely believe there is benefit to consumers."
Still, many medical experts disagree. Stuart Levy, a researcher at Tufts University and president of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, says products with alcohol and bleaches aren't worrisome, but chemicals that don't quickly evaporate or break down -- including triclosan -- are. Triclosan, he says, has been linked to antibiotic-resistant bacteria in lab tests. Use of such products by healthy households should be limited, he says, unless their manufacturers can prove concrete health benefits.
Read article at original source
Monday, October 10, 2005
Scientists Finding Out What Losing Sleep Does to a Body
Scientists Finding Out What Losing Sleep Does to a Body
Scientists Finding Out What Losing Sleep Does to a Body
By Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, October 9, 2005
With a good night's rest increasingly losing out to the Internet, e-mail, late-night cable and other distractions of modern life, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that too little or erratic sleep may be taking an unappreciated toll on Americans' health.
Beyond leaving people bleary-eyed, clutching a Starbucks cup and dozing off at afternoon meetings, failing to get enough sleep or sleeping at odd hours heightens the risk for a variety of major illnesses, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity, recent studies indicate.
"We're shifting to a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week society, and as a result we're increasingly not sleeping like we used to," said Najib T. Ayas of the University of British Columbia. "We're really only now starting to understand how that is affecting health, and it appears to be significant."
A large, new study, for example, provides the latest in a flurry of evidence suggesting that the nation's obesity epidemic is being driven, at least in part, by a corresponding decrease in the average number of hours that Americans are sleeping, possibly by disrupting hormones that regulate appetite. The analysis of a nationally representative sample of nearly 10,000 adults found that those between the ages of 32 and 49 who sleep less than seven hours a night are significantly more likely to be obese.
The study follows a series of others that have found similar associations with other illnesses, including several reports from the Harvard-run Nurses' Health Study that has linked insufficient or irregular sleep to increased risk for colon cancer, breast cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Other research groups scattered around the country have subsequently found clues that might explain the associations, indications that sleep disruption affects crucial hormones and proteins that play roles in these diseases.
"There has been an avalanche of studies in this area. It's moving very rapidly," said Emmanuel Mignot of Stanford University, who wrote an editorial accompanying the new obesity study in the October issue of the journal Sleep. "People are starting to believe that there is an important relationship between short sleep and all sorts of health problems."
Not everyone agrees, with some experts arguing that any link between sleep patterns and health problems appears weak at best and could easily be explained by other factors.
"There are Chicken Little people running around saying that the sky is falling because people are not sleeping enough," said Daniel F. Kripke of the University of California at San Diego. "But everyone knows that people are getting healthier. Life expectancy has been increasing, and people are healthier today than they were generations ago."
Other researchers acknowledge that much more research is needed to prove that the apparent associations are real, and to fully understand how sleep disturbances may affect health. But they argue that the case is rapidly getting stronger that sleep is an important factor in many of the biggest killers.
"We have in our society this idea that you can just get by without sleep or manipulate when you sleep without any consequences," said Lawrence Epstein, president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. "What we're finding is that's just not true."
While many aspects of sleep remain a mystery -- including exactly why we sleep -- the picture that appears to be emerging is that not sleeping enough or being awake in the wee hours runs counter to the body's internal clock, throwing a host of basic bodily functions out of sync.
"Lack of sleep disrupts every physiologic function in the body," said Eve Van Cauter of the University of Chicago. "We have nothing in our biology that allows us to adapt to this behavior."
The amount of necessary sleep varies from person to person, with some breezing through their days on just a few hours' slumber and others barely functioning without a full 10 hours, experts say. But most people apparently need between about seven and nine hours, with studies indicating that an increased risk for disease starts to kick in when people get less than six or seven, experts say.
Scientists have long known that sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea, narcolepsy and chronic insomnia, can lead to serious health problems, and that difficulty sleeping may be a red flag for a serious illness. But the first clues that otherwise healthy people who do not get enough sleep or who shift their sleep schedules because of work, family or lifestyle may be endangering their health emerged from large epidemiological studies that found people who slept the least appeared to be significantly more likely to die.
"The strongest evidence out there right now is for the risk of overall mortality, but we also see the association for a number of specific causes," said Sanjay R. Patel of Harvard Medical School, who led one of the studies, involving more than 82,000 nurses, that found an increased risk of death among those who slept less than six hours a night. "Now we're starting to get insights into what's happening in the body when you don't get enough sleep."
Physiologic studies suggest that a sleep deficit may put the body into a state of high alert, increasing the production of stress hormones and driving up blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart attacks and strokes. Moreover, people who are sleep-deprived have elevated levels of substances in the blood that indicate a heightened state of inflammation in the body, which has also recently emerged as a major risk factor for heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.
"Based on our findings, we believe that if you lose sleep that your body needs, then you produce these inflammatory markers that on a chronic basis can create low-grade inflammation and predispose you to cardiovascular events and a shorter life span," said Alexandros N. Vgontzas of Pennsylvania State University, who recently presented data at a scientific meeting indicating that naps can help counter harmful effects of sleep loss.
Other studies have found that sleep influences the functioning of the lining inside blood vessels, which could explain why people are most prone to heart attacks and strokes during early morning hours.
"We've really only scratched the surface when it comes to understanding what's going on regarding sleep and heart disease," said Virend Somers of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "I suspect as we understand more about this relationship, we'll realize how important it really is."
After several studies found that people who work at night appear unusually prone to breast and colon cancer, researchers investigating the possible explanation for this association found exposure to light at night reduces levels of the hormone melatonin. Melatonin is believed to protect against cancer by affecting levels of other hormones, such as estrogen.
"Melatonin can prevent tumor cells from growing -- it's cancer-protective," said Eva S. Schernhammer of Harvard Medical School, who has conducted a series of studies on volunteers in sleep laboratories. "The theory is, if you are exposed to light at night, on average you will produce less melatonin, increasing your cancer risk."
Other researchers are exploring a possible link to other malignancies, including prostate cancer.
"There's absolutely no reason it should be limited to breast cancer, and it wouldn't necessarily be restricted to people who work night shifts. People with disrupted sleep or people who are up late at night or get up frequently in the night could potentially have the same sort of effect," said Scott Davis of the University of Washington.
The newest study on obesity, from Columbia University, is just the latest to find that adults who sleep the least appear to be the most likely to gain weight and to become obese.
Other researchers have found that even mild sleep deprivation quickly disrupts normal levels of the recently discovered hormones ghrelin and leptin, which regulate appetite. That fits with the theory that humans may be genetically wired to be awake at night only when they need to be searching for food or fending off danger -- circumstances when they would need to eat to have enough energy.
"The modern equivalence to that situation today may unfortunately be often just a few steps to the refrigerator next door," Mignot wrote in his editorial.
In addition, studies show sleep-deprived people tend to develop problems regulating their blood sugar, which may put them at increased risk for diabetes.
"The research in this area is really just in its infancy," Van Cauter said. "This is really just the tip of the iceberg that has just begun to emerge."
Read at the original source
Scientists Finding Out What Losing Sleep Does to a Body
By Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, October 9, 2005
With a good night's rest increasingly losing out to the Internet, e-mail, late-night cable and other distractions of modern life, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that too little or erratic sleep may be taking an unappreciated toll on Americans' health.
Beyond leaving people bleary-eyed, clutching a Starbucks cup and dozing off at afternoon meetings, failing to get enough sleep or sleeping at odd hours heightens the risk for a variety of major illnesses, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity, recent studies indicate.
"We're shifting to a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week society, and as a result we're increasingly not sleeping like we used to," said Najib T. Ayas of the University of British Columbia. "We're really only now starting to understand how that is affecting health, and it appears to be significant."
A large, new study, for example, provides the latest in a flurry of evidence suggesting that the nation's obesity epidemic is being driven, at least in part, by a corresponding decrease in the average number of hours that Americans are sleeping, possibly by disrupting hormones that regulate appetite. The analysis of a nationally representative sample of nearly 10,000 adults found that those between the ages of 32 and 49 who sleep less than seven hours a night are significantly more likely to be obese.
The study follows a series of others that have found similar associations with other illnesses, including several reports from the Harvard-run Nurses' Health Study that has linked insufficient or irregular sleep to increased risk for colon cancer, breast cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Other research groups scattered around the country have subsequently found clues that might explain the associations, indications that sleep disruption affects crucial hormones and proteins that play roles in these diseases.
"There has been an avalanche of studies in this area. It's moving very rapidly," said Emmanuel Mignot of Stanford University, who wrote an editorial accompanying the new obesity study in the October issue of the journal Sleep. "People are starting to believe that there is an important relationship between short sleep and all sorts of health problems."
Not everyone agrees, with some experts arguing that any link between sleep patterns and health problems appears weak at best and could easily be explained by other factors.
"There are Chicken Little people running around saying that the sky is falling because people are not sleeping enough," said Daniel F. Kripke of the University of California at San Diego. "But everyone knows that people are getting healthier. Life expectancy has been increasing, and people are healthier today than they were generations ago."
Other researchers acknowledge that much more research is needed to prove that the apparent associations are real, and to fully understand how sleep disturbances may affect health. But they argue that the case is rapidly getting stronger that sleep is an important factor in many of the biggest killers.
"We have in our society this idea that you can just get by without sleep or manipulate when you sleep without any consequences," said Lawrence Epstein, president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. "What we're finding is that's just not true."
While many aspects of sleep remain a mystery -- including exactly why we sleep -- the picture that appears to be emerging is that not sleeping enough or being awake in the wee hours runs counter to the body's internal clock, throwing a host of basic bodily functions out of sync.
"Lack of sleep disrupts every physiologic function in the body," said Eve Van Cauter of the University of Chicago. "We have nothing in our biology that allows us to adapt to this behavior."
The amount of necessary sleep varies from person to person, with some breezing through their days on just a few hours' slumber and others barely functioning without a full 10 hours, experts say. But most people apparently need between about seven and nine hours, with studies indicating that an increased risk for disease starts to kick in when people get less than six or seven, experts say.
Scientists have long known that sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea, narcolepsy and chronic insomnia, can lead to serious health problems, and that difficulty sleeping may be a red flag for a serious illness. But the first clues that otherwise healthy people who do not get enough sleep or who shift their sleep schedules because of work, family or lifestyle may be endangering their health emerged from large epidemiological studies that found people who slept the least appeared to be significantly more likely to die.
"The strongest evidence out there right now is for the risk of overall mortality, but we also see the association for a number of specific causes," said Sanjay R. Patel of Harvard Medical School, who led one of the studies, involving more than 82,000 nurses, that found an increased risk of death among those who slept less than six hours a night. "Now we're starting to get insights into what's happening in the body when you don't get enough sleep."
Physiologic studies suggest that a sleep deficit may put the body into a state of high alert, increasing the production of stress hormones and driving up blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart attacks and strokes. Moreover, people who are sleep-deprived have elevated levels of substances in the blood that indicate a heightened state of inflammation in the body, which has also recently emerged as a major risk factor for heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.
"Based on our findings, we believe that if you lose sleep that your body needs, then you produce these inflammatory markers that on a chronic basis can create low-grade inflammation and predispose you to cardiovascular events and a shorter life span," said Alexandros N. Vgontzas of Pennsylvania State University, who recently presented data at a scientific meeting indicating that naps can help counter harmful effects of sleep loss.
Other studies have found that sleep influences the functioning of the lining inside blood vessels, which could explain why people are most prone to heart attacks and strokes during early morning hours.
"We've really only scratched the surface when it comes to understanding what's going on regarding sleep and heart disease," said Virend Somers of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "I suspect as we understand more about this relationship, we'll realize how important it really is."
After several studies found that people who work at night appear unusually prone to breast and colon cancer, researchers investigating the possible explanation for this association found exposure to light at night reduces levels of the hormone melatonin. Melatonin is believed to protect against cancer by affecting levels of other hormones, such as estrogen.
"Melatonin can prevent tumor cells from growing -- it's cancer-protective," said Eva S. Schernhammer of Harvard Medical School, who has conducted a series of studies on volunteers in sleep laboratories. "The theory is, if you are exposed to light at night, on average you will produce less melatonin, increasing your cancer risk."
Other researchers are exploring a possible link to other malignancies, including prostate cancer.
"There's absolutely no reason it should be limited to breast cancer, and it wouldn't necessarily be restricted to people who work night shifts. People with disrupted sleep or people who are up late at night or get up frequently in the night could potentially have the same sort of effect," said Scott Davis of the University of Washington.
The newest study on obesity, from Columbia University, is just the latest to find that adults who sleep the least appear to be the most likely to gain weight and to become obese.
Other researchers have found that even mild sleep deprivation quickly disrupts normal levels of the recently discovered hormones ghrelin and leptin, which regulate appetite. That fits with the theory that humans may be genetically wired to be awake at night only when they need to be searching for food or fending off danger -- circumstances when they would need to eat to have enough energy.
"The modern equivalence to that situation today may unfortunately be often just a few steps to the refrigerator next door," Mignot wrote in his editorial.
In addition, studies show sleep-deprived people tend to develop problems regulating their blood sugar, which may put them at increased risk for diabetes.
"The research in this area is really just in its infancy," Van Cauter said. "This is really just the tip of the iceberg that has just begun to emerge."
Read at the original source
Friday, October 07, 2005
Pollution: A life and death issue
Pollution: A life and death issue
Pollution: A life and death issue
By Alex Kirby, BBC News website environment correspondent, Monday, 13 December, 2004
As part of Planet Under Pressure , a BBC News website series looking at some of the biggest environmental issues facing humanity, Alex Kirby considers the Earth's growing pollution problem.
One of the main themes of Planet Under Pressure is the way many of the Earth's environmental crises reinforce one another.
Pollution is an obvious example - we do not have the option of growing food, or finding enough water, on a squeaky-clean planet, but on one increasingly tarnished and trashed by the way we have used it so far.
Cutting waste and clearing up pollution costs money. Yet time and again it is the quest for wealth that generates much of the mess in the first place.
Living in a way that is less damaging to the Earth is not easy, but it is vital, because pollution is pervasive and often life-threatening.
Air: The World Health Organization (WHO) says 3 million people are killed worldwide by outdoor air pollution annually from vehicles and industrial emissions, and 1.6 million indoors through using solid fuel. Most are in poor countries.
Water: Diseases carried in water are responsible for 80% of illnesses and deaths in developing countries, killing a child every eight seconds. Each year 2.1 million people die from diarrhoeal diseases associated with poor water.
Soil: Contaminated land is a problem in industrialised countries, where former factories and power stations can leave waste like heavy metals in the soil. It can also occur in developing countries, sometimes used for dumping pesticides. Agriculture can pollute land with pesticides, nitrate-rich fertilisers and slurry from livestock. And when the contamination reaches rivers it damages life there, and can even create dead zones off the coast, as in the Gulf of Mexico.
Chronic problem
Chemicals are a frequent pollutant. When we think of chemical contamination it is often images of events like Bhopal that come to mind.
But the problem is widespread. One study says 7-20% of cancers are attributable to poor air and pollution in homes and workplaces.
The WHO, concerned about chemicals that persist and build up in the body, especially in the young, says we may "be conducting a large-scale experiment with children's health".
Some man-made chemicals, endocrine disruptors like phthalates and nonylphenol - a breakdown product of spermicides, cosmetics and detergents - are blamed for causing changes in the genitals of some animals.
Affected species include polar bears - so not even the Arctic is immune. And the chemicals climb the food chain, from fish to mammals - and to us.
About 70,000 chemicals are on the market, with around 1,500 new ones appearing annually. At least 30,000 are thought never to have been comprehensively tested for their possible risks to people.
Trade-off
But the snag is that modern society demands many of them, and some are essential for survival.
So while we invoke the precautionary principle, which always recommends erring on the side of caution, we have to recognise there will be trade-offs to be made.
The pesticide DDT does great damage to wildlife and can affect the human nervous system, but can also be effective against malaria. Where does the priority lie?
The industrialised world has not yet cleaned up the mess it created, but it is reaping the benefits of the pollution it has caused. It can hardly tell the developing countries that they have no right to follow suit.
Another complication in tackling pollution is that it does not respect political frontiers. There is a UN convention on transboundary air pollution, but that cannot cover every problem that can arise between neighbours, or between states which do not share a border.
Perhaps the best example is climate change - the countries of the world share one atmosphere, and what one does can affect everyone.
For one and all
One of the principles that is supposed to apply here is simple - the polluter pays.
Sometimes it is obvious who is to blame and who must pay the price. But it is not always straightforward to work out just who is the polluter, or whether the rest of us would be happy to pay the price of stopping the pollution.
One way of cleaning up after ourselves would be to throw less away, designing products to be recycled or even just to last longer.
Previous generations worked on the assumption that discarding our waste was a proper way to be rid of it, so we used to dump nuclear materials and other potential hazards at sea, confident they would be dispersed in the depths.
We now think that is too risky because, as one author wrote, "there's no such place as 'away' - and there's no such person as the 'other'".
Ask not for whom the bell tolls - it tolls for thee, and for me.
Read the entire article
Pollution: A life and death issue
By Alex Kirby, BBC News website environment correspondent, Monday, 13 December, 2004
As part of Planet Under Pressure , a BBC News website series looking at some of the biggest environmental issues facing humanity, Alex Kirby considers the Earth's growing pollution problem.
One of the main themes of Planet Under Pressure is the way many of the Earth's environmental crises reinforce one another.
Pollution is an obvious example - we do not have the option of growing food, or finding enough water, on a squeaky-clean planet, but on one increasingly tarnished and trashed by the way we have used it so far.
Cutting waste and clearing up pollution costs money. Yet time and again it is the quest for wealth that generates much of the mess in the first place.
Living in a way that is less damaging to the Earth is not easy, but it is vital, because pollution is pervasive and often life-threatening.
Air: The World Health Organization (WHO) says 3 million people are killed worldwide by outdoor air pollution annually from vehicles and industrial emissions, and 1.6 million indoors through using solid fuel. Most are in poor countries.
Water: Diseases carried in water are responsible for 80% of illnesses and deaths in developing countries, killing a child every eight seconds. Each year 2.1 million people die from diarrhoeal diseases associated with poor water.
Soil: Contaminated land is a problem in industrialised countries, where former factories and power stations can leave waste like heavy metals in the soil. It can also occur in developing countries, sometimes used for dumping pesticides. Agriculture can pollute land with pesticides, nitrate-rich fertilisers and slurry from livestock. And when the contamination reaches rivers it damages life there, and can even create dead zones off the coast, as in the Gulf of Mexico.
Chronic problem
Chemicals are a frequent pollutant. When we think of chemical contamination it is often images of events like Bhopal that come to mind.
But the problem is widespread. One study says 7-20% of cancers are attributable to poor air and pollution in homes and workplaces.
The WHO, concerned about chemicals that persist and build up in the body, especially in the young, says we may "be conducting a large-scale experiment with children's health".
Some man-made chemicals, endocrine disruptors like phthalates and nonylphenol - a breakdown product of spermicides, cosmetics and detergents - are blamed for causing changes in the genitals of some animals.
Affected species include polar bears - so not even the Arctic is immune. And the chemicals climb the food chain, from fish to mammals - and to us.
About 70,000 chemicals are on the market, with around 1,500 new ones appearing annually. At least 30,000 are thought never to have been comprehensively tested for their possible risks to people.
Trade-off
But the snag is that modern society demands many of them, and some are essential for survival.
So while we invoke the precautionary principle, which always recommends erring on the side of caution, we have to recognise there will be trade-offs to be made.
The pesticide DDT does great damage to wildlife and can affect the human nervous system, but can also be effective against malaria. Where does the priority lie?
The industrialised world has not yet cleaned up the mess it created, but it is reaping the benefits of the pollution it has caused. It can hardly tell the developing countries that they have no right to follow suit.
Another complication in tackling pollution is that it does not respect political frontiers. There is a UN convention on transboundary air pollution, but that cannot cover every problem that can arise between neighbours, or between states which do not share a border.
Perhaps the best example is climate change - the countries of the world share one atmosphere, and what one does can affect everyone.
For one and all
One of the principles that is supposed to apply here is simple - the polluter pays.
Sometimes it is obvious who is to blame and who must pay the price. But it is not always straightforward to work out just who is the polluter, or whether the rest of us would be happy to pay the price of stopping the pollution.
One way of cleaning up after ourselves would be to throw less away, designing products to be recycled or even just to last longer.
Previous generations worked on the assumption that discarding our waste was a proper way to be rid of it, so we used to dump nuclear materials and other potential hazards at sea, confident they would be dispersed in the depths.
We now think that is too risky because, as one author wrote, "there's no such place as 'away' - and there's no such person as the 'other'".
Ask not for whom the bell tolls - it tolls for thee, and for me.
Read the entire article
Climate change: Uncharted waters?
Climate change: Uncharted waters?
Climate change: Uncharted waters?
By Alex Kirby, BBC News Online environment correspondent, Friday, 3 December, 2004
As part of Planet Under Pressure , a BBC News series looking at some of the biggest environmental problems facing humanity, Alex Kirby explores the implications of climate change.
Climate change is our biggest environmental challenge, says the UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair. His chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, calls it a far greater global threat than international terrorism.
There is wide though not unanimous agreement from scientists that they are right.
It is certainly possible that warming temperatures could take the Earth into uncharted waters, even though nobody can say exactly how fast it may happen and who will be most affected.
Life on Earth exists only because of the natural greenhouse effect, the ability of the atmosphere to retain enough heat for species to thrive (and no more).
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a consortium of several thousand independent scientists, says rising levels of industrial pollution are unnaturally enhancing this effect, with increasing amounts of heat trapped near the Earth instead of escaping into space.
The main culprits, it says, are the burning of fossil fuels - oil, coal and gas - and changes in land use.
The chief greenhouse gas from human activities is carbon dioxide (CO2).
Before the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were about 270-280 parts per million (ppm).
They now stand at almost 380ppm, and have been rising at about 1.5ppm annually.
Rising temperatures
The consequence of increasing CO2 and other pollutant levels, the IPCC says, will be higher average global temperatures, meaning unpredictable weather, rising sea levels, and perhaps runaway heating as the whole climate system slips out of gear.
The IPCC predicts that if we go on as we are, by 2100 global sea levels will probably have risen by 9 to 88cm and average temperatures will be between 1.5 and 5.5C higher than now.
That may not sound very much - but the last Ice Age was only 4-5C colder than today.
The sceptics are unmoved. Some say the human influence on the climate is negligible, and that isolating one small variable, CO2 and other greenhouse gas levels, in an immensely complex natural system is meaningless.
Others insist the IPCC's measurements are flawed and its predictions unreliable. Yet others believe a warmer world would be better for most of us.
They are entirely right to argue that there are still many uncertainties about the climate and any influence we may have on it.
Sobering facts
But many who were once sceptics now accept that enhanced climate change is happening, and that we have to respond - not necessarily by trying to reduce its extent but by adapting to its effects.
Part of the problem is that climate change is now part of the stuff of science fiction, with Hollywood and some campaign groups alike feeding scare stories that owe little, if anything, to scientific fact.
But the facts are sobering enough. We know that average global surface temperatures have risen by 0.6C in the last 140 years.
All of the 10 warmest years have occurred since 1990, including each year since 1997.
The possibilities are sobering too.
Many water-scarce regions now will probably become thirstier.
Some countries may be able to produce bigger harvests, but in others yields will drop. Sea level rise may make many coastal areas uninhabitable.
Weather patterns may change, producing more heat waves, droughts, floods and violent storms.
Aid agencies are warning that these combined effects could seriously jeopardise attempts to lift the world's poorest people out of poverty.
Furthermore, there is also the possibility of "positive feedbacks"- for example, higher temperatures may release more methane from the Arctic tundra and CO2 from peat bogs, which will themselves speed up the warming process.
Then there is the inertia of the atmosphere and the oceans.
Delayed effect
If somehow we could halt all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the heating would continue for decades or centuries.
What we do today may literally determine how long the Greenland icecap survives - even though, at fastest, it will still take a good few centuries to disappear.
And wildlife, less equipped to adapt than humans, could be hit hard. One estimate suggests hundreds of thousands of species may be at risk of extinction by 2050 because of climate change.
Creating worldwide consensus on this global problem is difficult, not least because of the economic cost of cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions.
The Kyoto Protocol, which commits rich countries to reducing emissions, is a small but necessary start on building an international system for tackling climate change, its proponents believe.
But the country responsible for about a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, the US, has refused to sign up to it.
The protocol does not require developing countries to cut their emissions, although fast-industrialising countries like China will soon be significant contributors as those in poor nations increasingly demand rich world lifestyles.
For them, emissions cuts could have significant social costs in slowing the growth that feeds economic development, creates jobs and helps lift the poor out of poverty.
A prudent look at the evidence, preliminary though it is, suggests we shall be wise to err on the side of caution.
Dr Geoff Jenkins, of the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, said recently: "Over the last few decades there's been much more evidence for the human influence on climate.
"We've reached the point where it's only by including human activity that we can explain what's happening."
And what's happening now could lead to a world beyond our experience.
Read the entire article
Climate change: Uncharted waters?
By Alex Kirby, BBC News Online environment correspondent, Friday, 3 December, 2004
As part of Planet Under Pressure , a BBC News series looking at some of the biggest environmental problems facing humanity, Alex Kirby explores the implications of climate change.
Climate change is our biggest environmental challenge, says the UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair. His chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, calls it a far greater global threat than international terrorism.
There is wide though not unanimous agreement from scientists that they are right.
It is certainly possible that warming temperatures could take the Earth into uncharted waters, even though nobody can say exactly how fast it may happen and who will be most affected.
Life on Earth exists only because of the natural greenhouse effect, the ability of the atmosphere to retain enough heat for species to thrive (and no more).
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a consortium of several thousand independent scientists, says rising levels of industrial pollution are unnaturally enhancing this effect, with increasing amounts of heat trapped near the Earth instead of escaping into space.
The main culprits, it says, are the burning of fossil fuels - oil, coal and gas - and changes in land use.
The chief greenhouse gas from human activities is carbon dioxide (CO2).
Before the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were about 270-280 parts per million (ppm).
They now stand at almost 380ppm, and have been rising at about 1.5ppm annually.
Rising temperatures
The consequence of increasing CO2 and other pollutant levels, the IPCC says, will be higher average global temperatures, meaning unpredictable weather, rising sea levels, and perhaps runaway heating as the whole climate system slips out of gear.
The IPCC predicts that if we go on as we are, by 2100 global sea levels will probably have risen by 9 to 88cm and average temperatures will be between 1.5 and 5.5C higher than now.
That may not sound very much - but the last Ice Age was only 4-5C colder than today.
The sceptics are unmoved. Some say the human influence on the climate is negligible, and that isolating one small variable, CO2 and other greenhouse gas levels, in an immensely complex natural system is meaningless.
Others insist the IPCC's measurements are flawed and its predictions unreliable. Yet others believe a warmer world would be better for most of us.
They are entirely right to argue that there are still many uncertainties about the climate and any influence we may have on it.
Sobering facts
But many who were once sceptics now accept that enhanced climate change is happening, and that we have to respond - not necessarily by trying to reduce its extent but by adapting to its effects.
Part of the problem is that climate change is now part of the stuff of science fiction, with Hollywood and some campaign groups alike feeding scare stories that owe little, if anything, to scientific fact.
But the facts are sobering enough. We know that average global surface temperatures have risen by 0.6C in the last 140 years.
All of the 10 warmest years have occurred since 1990, including each year since 1997.
The possibilities are sobering too.
Many water-scarce regions now will probably become thirstier.
Some countries may be able to produce bigger harvests, but in others yields will drop. Sea level rise may make many coastal areas uninhabitable.
Weather patterns may change, producing more heat waves, droughts, floods and violent storms.
Aid agencies are warning that these combined effects could seriously jeopardise attempts to lift the world's poorest people out of poverty.
Furthermore, there is also the possibility of "positive feedbacks"- for example, higher temperatures may release more methane from the Arctic tundra and CO2 from peat bogs, which will themselves speed up the warming process.
Then there is the inertia of the atmosphere and the oceans.
Delayed effect
If somehow we could halt all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the heating would continue for decades or centuries.
What we do today may literally determine how long the Greenland icecap survives - even though, at fastest, it will still take a good few centuries to disappear.
And wildlife, less equipped to adapt than humans, could be hit hard. One estimate suggests hundreds of thousands of species may be at risk of extinction by 2050 because of climate change.
Creating worldwide consensus on this global problem is difficult, not least because of the economic cost of cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions.
The Kyoto Protocol, which commits rich countries to reducing emissions, is a small but necessary start on building an international system for tackling climate change, its proponents believe.
But the country responsible for about a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, the US, has refused to sign up to it.
The protocol does not require developing countries to cut their emissions, although fast-industrialising countries like China will soon be significant contributors as those in poor nations increasingly demand rich world lifestyles.
For them, emissions cuts could have significant social costs in slowing the growth that feeds economic development, creates jobs and helps lift the poor out of poverty.
A prudent look at the evidence, preliminary though it is, suggests we shall be wise to err on the side of caution.
Dr Geoff Jenkins, of the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, said recently: "Over the last few decades there's been much more evidence for the human influence on climate.
"We've reached the point where it's only by including human activity that we can explain what's happening."
And what's happening now could lead to a world beyond our experience.
Read the entire article
Can the planet feed us?
Can the planet feed us?
Can the planet feed us? The challenge of feeding the world without destroying the planet.
By Alex Kirby, BBC News Online environment correspondent, Wednesday, 24 November, 2004
More of us are eating more and better than ever before.
World cereal consumption has more than doubled since 1970, and meat consumption has tripled since 1961.
The global fish catch grew more than six times from 1950 to 1997.
None of this happened by magic, though, but only by giving Nature a massive helping hand.
The World Resources Institute said in 1999 that half of all the commercial fertiliser ever produced had been applied since 1984.
So one question is whether the world can go on increasing its harvests at this rate - or even faster, to cater as well for the extra 75 million people born annually.
Crop increases
Our recent achievements are impressive - while global population doubled to 6 billion people in the 40 years from 1960, global food production more than kept up.
The proportion of malnourished people fell in the three decades to the mid-1990s from 37% to 18%. But we may not be able to go on at this rate.
For a start, much of the world's best cropland is already in use, and farmers are having to turn to increasingly marginal land. And the good land is often taking a battering - soil degradation has already reduced global agricultural productivity by 13% in the last half-century.
Many of the pesticides on which the crop increases have depended are losing their effectiveness, as the pests acquire more resistance.
A key constraint is water. The 17% of cropland that is irrigated produces an estimated 30-40% of all crops, but in many countries there will be progressively less water available for agriculture.
Many of these are poor countries, where irrigation can boost crop yields by up to 400%. There are ways to improve irrigation and to use water more effectively, but it's not clear these can bridge the gap.
Biotechnology, in principle, may offer the world a second Green Revolution, for example by producing drought-resistant plants or varieties that withstand pest attacks.
But it arouses deep unease, not least because of fears it may erode the genetic resources in thousands of traditional varieties grown in small communities across the world.
Nobody knows what the probable impacts of climate change will be on food supplies.
Modest temperature increases may actually benefit rich temperate countries, but make harvests even more precarious across much of the tropics.
Too little space
Another question concerns the huge cost to other forms of life of all the progress we've made in securing our own food supply.
The amount of nitrogen available for uptake by plants is much higher than the natural level, and has more than doubled since the 1940s.
The excess comes from fertilisers running off farmland, from livestock manure, and from other human activities. It is changing the composition of species in ecosystems, reducing soil fertility, depleting the ozone layer, intensifying climate change, and creating dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and other near-coastal seas.
The sheer amount of the Earth we need to produce our food is having an enormous impact.
Globally, we have taken over about 26% of the planet's land area (roughly 3.3 billion hectares) for cropland and pasture, replacing a third of temperate and tropical forests and a quarter of natural grasslands.
Another 0.5 billion ha has gone for urban and built-up areas. Habitat loss from the conversion of natural ecosystems is the main reason why other species are being pushed closer to the brink of extinction.
Food security comes at a high price. In any case, it is a security many can only envy.
Increasing hunger
At the moment we are not on course to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving world hunger by 2015.
Although the proportion of hungry people is coming down, population increase means the actual number continues to rise.
In the 1990s global poverty fell by 20%, but the number of hungry people rose by 18 million. In 2003, 842 million people did not have enough to eat, a third of them in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Hunger and malnutrition killed 10 million people a year, 25,000 a day - one life extinguished every five seconds.
The world does produce enough to feed everyone. But the food is often in the wrong place, or unaffordable, or can't be stored long enough. So making sure everyone has enough to eat is more about politics than science.
But whether we can go on eating the sort of diet we've grown used to in developed countries is far from clear.
Much of it travels a long way to reach us, with the transport costs adding hugely to the "embodied energy" it contains. There's a lot to be said for eating local, seasonal food where we can.
And meat usually demands far more than grain - water, land, grain itself (34% of world grain supplies are fed to livestock reared for meat). Yet, worldwide, the richer we grow the more we turn to meat.
Something's got to give - and not only our waistbands.
Read the entire article
Can the planet feed us? The challenge of feeding the world without destroying the planet.
By Alex Kirby, BBC News Online environment correspondent, Wednesday, 24 November, 2004
More of us are eating more and better than ever before.
World cereal consumption has more than doubled since 1970, and meat consumption has tripled since 1961.
The global fish catch grew more than six times from 1950 to 1997.
None of this happened by magic, though, but only by giving Nature a massive helping hand.
The World Resources Institute said in 1999 that half of all the commercial fertiliser ever produced had been applied since 1984.
So one question is whether the world can go on increasing its harvests at this rate - or even faster, to cater as well for the extra 75 million people born annually.
Crop increases
Our recent achievements are impressive - while global population doubled to 6 billion people in the 40 years from 1960, global food production more than kept up.
The proportion of malnourished people fell in the three decades to the mid-1990s from 37% to 18%. But we may not be able to go on at this rate.
For a start, much of the world's best cropland is already in use, and farmers are having to turn to increasingly marginal land. And the good land is often taking a battering - soil degradation has already reduced global agricultural productivity by 13% in the last half-century.
Many of the pesticides on which the crop increases have depended are losing their effectiveness, as the pests acquire more resistance.
A key constraint is water. The 17% of cropland that is irrigated produces an estimated 30-40% of all crops, but in many countries there will be progressively less water available for agriculture.
Many of these are poor countries, where irrigation can boost crop yields by up to 400%. There are ways to improve irrigation and to use water more effectively, but it's not clear these can bridge the gap.
Biotechnology, in principle, may offer the world a second Green Revolution, for example by producing drought-resistant plants or varieties that withstand pest attacks.
But it arouses deep unease, not least because of fears it may erode the genetic resources in thousands of traditional varieties grown in small communities across the world.
Nobody knows what the probable impacts of climate change will be on food supplies.
Modest temperature increases may actually benefit rich temperate countries, but make harvests even more precarious across much of the tropics.
Too little space
Another question concerns the huge cost to other forms of life of all the progress we've made in securing our own food supply.
The amount of nitrogen available for uptake by plants is much higher than the natural level, and has more than doubled since the 1940s.
The excess comes from fertilisers running off farmland, from livestock manure, and from other human activities. It is changing the composition of species in ecosystems, reducing soil fertility, depleting the ozone layer, intensifying climate change, and creating dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and other near-coastal seas.
The sheer amount of the Earth we need to produce our food is having an enormous impact.
Globally, we have taken over about 26% of the planet's land area (roughly 3.3 billion hectares) for cropland and pasture, replacing a third of temperate and tropical forests and a quarter of natural grasslands.
Another 0.5 billion ha has gone for urban and built-up areas. Habitat loss from the conversion of natural ecosystems is the main reason why other species are being pushed closer to the brink of extinction.
Food security comes at a high price. In any case, it is a security many can only envy.
Increasing hunger
At the moment we are not on course to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving world hunger by 2015.
Although the proportion of hungry people is coming down, population increase means the actual number continues to rise.
In the 1990s global poverty fell by 20%, but the number of hungry people rose by 18 million. In 2003, 842 million people did not have enough to eat, a third of them in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Hunger and malnutrition killed 10 million people a year, 25,000 a day - one life extinguished every five seconds.
The world does produce enough to feed everyone. But the food is often in the wrong place, or unaffordable, or can't be stored long enough. So making sure everyone has enough to eat is more about politics than science.
But whether we can go on eating the sort of diet we've grown used to in developed countries is far from clear.
Much of it travels a long way to reach us, with the transport costs adding hugely to the "embodied energy" it contains. There's a lot to be said for eating local, seasonal food where we can.
And meat usually demands far more than grain - water, land, grain itself (34% of world grain supplies are fed to livestock reared for meat). Yet, worldwide, the richer we grow the more we turn to meat.
Something's got to give - and not only our waistbands.
Read the entire article
Energy: Meeting soaring demand
Energy: Meeting soaring demand
Energy: Meeting soaring demand
By Alex Kirby, BBC News website environment correspondent, Tuesday, 9 November, 2004
The first problem with energy is that we are running short of traditional sources of supply.
The International Energy Agency says the world will need almost 60% more energy in 2030 than in 2002, and fossil fuels will still meet most of its needs.
We depend on oil for 90% of our transport, and for food, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and the entire bedrock of modern life.
But oil industry experts estimate that current reserves will only last for about 40 years.
Views vary about how much more will be found or made economically viable to use.
Pessimists predict production will start declining within 15 years, while optimists say we won't have to worry for a century - though rising prices are likely to push us towards alternative energy sources anyway.
Gas, often a suitable replacement for oil, won't last indefinitely either.
There's plenty of coal, but it's still usually hard to use without causing high pollution.
Worrying signs
Not everyone depends on the fossil trio, though. Nearly a third of today's world population (6.1bn people) have no electricity or other modern energy supplies, and another third have only limited access.
About 2.5 billion people have only wood or other biomass for energy - often bad for the environment, almost always bad for their health.
That's the second problem - understandably, they want the better life that cheap and accessible energy offers.
But if everyone in developing countries used the same amount of energy as the average consumer in high income countries does, the developing world's energy use would increase more than eightfold between 2000 and 2050.
The signs are already there. In the first half of 2003 China's car sales rose by 82% compared with the same period in 2002.
Its demand for oil is expected to double in 20 years.
In India sales of fuel-guzzling sports utility vehicles account for 10% of all vehicle purchases, and could soon overtake car sales. And the developed world is not standing still.
In the last decade, US oil use has increased by almost 2.7 million barrels a day - more oil than India and Pakistan use daily altogether.
Crossing continents
Where our energy comes from is a third problem - energy sources are often long distances from the point of consumption.
Centralised energy generation and distribution systems are fairly new.
A couple of centuries ago virtually everyone would have depended on the fuel they could find within a short distance of home.
Now, the energy for our fuel, heat and light travel vast distances to reach us, sometimes crossing not only continents but political and cultural watersheds on the way.
These distances create a whole host of challenges from oil-related political instability to the environmental risks of long-distance pipelines.
But even if we could somehow indefinitely conjure up enough energy for everyone who wants it, without risking conflict and mayhem in bringing it back home, there would still be an enormous problem - how to use the energy without causing unacceptably high levels of damage to the natural world.
Counting cost
The most obvious threat is the prospect that burning fossil fuels is intensifying natural climate change and heating the Earth to dangerous levels.
But forget the greenhouse effect if you want. There are still real costs that go with the quest for and use of energy: air and water pollution, impaired health, acid rain, deforestation, the destruction of traditional ways of life.
It's one of the most vicious circles the planetary crisis entails.
Cheap, available energy is essential for ending poverty: ending poverty is key to easing the pressures on the planet from the abjectly poor who have no choice but to eat the seed corn. But the tank is running dry.
It doesn't have to be like this. Our energy use is unsustainable, but we already know what a benign alternative would look like.
All we have to do is decide that we will get there, and how.
It will make vastly more use of renewable energy, from inexhaustible natural sources like the Sun and the seas.
Nuclear power?
One key fuel may well be hydrogen, which is a clean alternative for vehicles and is in abundant supply as it is a chemical component of water.
But large amounts of energy are needed to produce hydrogen from water, so it will not come into its own as a clean alternative until renewable energy is widely available for the process.
Some analysts suggest that nuclear power will be needed to bridge the gap between now and the renewable future.
Many environmentalists (but not all) are deeply unhappy with the idea - fission technology has been in use for a generation, but concerns remain about radioactive waste disposal and the risk of accidents.
Nuclear fusion - a new form of nuclear power which combines atoms rather than splitting them apart - could be ready by around 2040, but that is too long to wait.
However, we can also get energy to do several jobs at once, as combined heat and power plants do. And we can use less of it by becoming energy-efficient.
The British government estimates that 56% of energy used in UK homes could be cut using currently available technologies - yet the original Model T Ford did more miles to the gallon than the average Ford vehicle produced today in the US.
We can install power stations on our roofs by covering our houses with solar tiles, or buying miniature wind turbines the size of a satellite dish.
Practically, the energy crisis is soluble. But reaching the broad sunlit uplands will mean a drastic mental gear change for policy-makers and consumers alike.
Read the entire article
Energy: Meeting soaring demand
By Alex Kirby, BBC News website environment correspondent, Tuesday, 9 November, 2004
The first problem with energy is that we are running short of traditional sources of supply.
The International Energy Agency says the world will need almost 60% more energy in 2030 than in 2002, and fossil fuels will still meet most of its needs.
We depend on oil for 90% of our transport, and for food, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and the entire bedrock of modern life.
But oil industry experts estimate that current reserves will only last for about 40 years.
Views vary about how much more will be found or made economically viable to use.
Pessimists predict production will start declining within 15 years, while optimists say we won't have to worry for a century - though rising prices are likely to push us towards alternative energy sources anyway.
Gas, often a suitable replacement for oil, won't last indefinitely either.
There's plenty of coal, but it's still usually hard to use without causing high pollution.
Worrying signs
Not everyone depends on the fossil trio, though. Nearly a third of today's world population (6.1bn people) have no electricity or other modern energy supplies, and another third have only limited access.
About 2.5 billion people have only wood or other biomass for energy - often bad for the environment, almost always bad for their health.
That's the second problem - understandably, they want the better life that cheap and accessible energy offers.
But if everyone in developing countries used the same amount of energy as the average consumer in high income countries does, the developing world's energy use would increase more than eightfold between 2000 and 2050.
The signs are already there. In the first half of 2003 China's car sales rose by 82% compared with the same period in 2002.
Its demand for oil is expected to double in 20 years.
In India sales of fuel-guzzling sports utility vehicles account for 10% of all vehicle purchases, and could soon overtake car sales. And the developed world is not standing still.
In the last decade, US oil use has increased by almost 2.7 million barrels a day - more oil than India and Pakistan use daily altogether.
Crossing continents
Where our energy comes from is a third problem - energy sources are often long distances from the point of consumption.
Centralised energy generation and distribution systems are fairly new.
A couple of centuries ago virtually everyone would have depended on the fuel they could find within a short distance of home.
Now, the energy for our fuel, heat and light travel vast distances to reach us, sometimes crossing not only continents but political and cultural watersheds on the way.
These distances create a whole host of challenges from oil-related political instability to the environmental risks of long-distance pipelines.
But even if we could somehow indefinitely conjure up enough energy for everyone who wants it, without risking conflict and mayhem in bringing it back home, there would still be an enormous problem - how to use the energy without causing unacceptably high levels of damage to the natural world.
Counting cost
The most obvious threat is the prospect that burning fossil fuels is intensifying natural climate change and heating the Earth to dangerous levels.
But forget the greenhouse effect if you want. There are still real costs that go with the quest for and use of energy: air and water pollution, impaired health, acid rain, deforestation, the destruction of traditional ways of life.
It's one of the most vicious circles the planetary crisis entails.
Cheap, available energy is essential for ending poverty: ending poverty is key to easing the pressures on the planet from the abjectly poor who have no choice but to eat the seed corn. But the tank is running dry.
It doesn't have to be like this. Our energy use is unsustainable, but we already know what a benign alternative would look like.
All we have to do is decide that we will get there, and how.
It will make vastly more use of renewable energy, from inexhaustible natural sources like the Sun and the seas.
Nuclear power?
One key fuel may well be hydrogen, which is a clean alternative for vehicles and is in abundant supply as it is a chemical component of water.
But large amounts of energy are needed to produce hydrogen from water, so it will not come into its own as a clean alternative until renewable energy is widely available for the process.
Some analysts suggest that nuclear power will be needed to bridge the gap between now and the renewable future.
Many environmentalists (but not all) are deeply unhappy with the idea - fission technology has been in use for a generation, but concerns remain about radioactive waste disposal and the risk of accidents.
Nuclear fusion - a new form of nuclear power which combines atoms rather than splitting them apart - could be ready by around 2040, but that is too long to wait.
However, we can also get energy to do several jobs at once, as combined heat and power plants do. And we can use less of it by becoming energy-efficient.
The British government estimates that 56% of energy used in UK homes could be cut using currently available technologies - yet the original Model T Ford did more miles to the gallon than the average Ford vehicle produced today in the US.
We can install power stations on our roofs by covering our houses with solar tiles, or buying miniature wind turbines the size of a satellite dish.
Practically, the energy crisis is soluble. But reaching the broad sunlit uplands will mean a drastic mental gear change for policy-makers and consumers alike.
Read the entire article
Water scarcity: A looming crisis?
Water scarcity: A looming crisis?
Water scarcity: A looming crisis?
By Alex Kirby, BBC News Online environment correspondent, Tuesday, 19 October, 2004
The world's water crisis is simple to understand, if not to solve.
The amount of water in the world is finite. The number of us is growing fast and our water use is growing even faster.
A third of the world's population lives in water-stressed countries now. By 2025, this is expected to rise to two-thirds.
There is more than enough water available, in total, for everyone's basic needs.
The UN recommends that people need a minimum of 50 litres of water a day for drinking, washing, cooking and sanitation.
In 1990, over a billion people did not have even that.
Providing universal access to that basic minimum worldwide by 2015 would take less than 1% of the amount of water we use today. But we're a long way from achieving that.
Pollution and disease
Global water consumption rose sixfold between 1900 and 1995 - more than double the rate of population growth - and goes on growing as farming, industry and domestic demand all increase.
As important as quantity is quality - with pollution increasing in some areas, the amount of useable water declines.
More than five million people die from waterborne diseases each year - 10 times the number killed in wars around the globe.
And the wider effects of water shortages are just as chilling as the prospect of having too little to drink.
Seventy percent of the water used worldwide is used for agriculture.
Much more will be needed if we are to feed the world's growing population - predicted to rise from about six billion today to 8.9 billion by 2050.
And consumption will soar further as more people expect Western-style lifestyles and diets - one kilogram of grain-fed beef needs at least 15 cubic metres of water, while a kilo of cereals needs only up to three cubic metres.
Poverty and water
The poor are the ones who suffer most. Water shortages can mean long walks to fetch water, high prices to buy it, food insecurity and disease from drinking dirty water.
But the very thing needed to raise funds to tackle water problems in poor countries - economic development - requires yet more water to supply the agriculture and industries which drive it.
The UN-backed World Commission on Water estimated in 2000 that an additional $100bn a year would be needed to tackle water scarcity worldwide.
This dwarfs the $20bn which will be needed annually by 2007 to tackle HIV and Aids, and, according to the Commission, it is so much it could only be raised from the private sector.
Even if the money can be found, spending it wisely is a further challenge. Dams and other large-scale projects now affect 60% of the world's largest rivers and provide millions with water.
But in many cases the costs in terms of population displacement and irreversible changes in the nearby ecosystems have been considerable.
Using underground supplies is another widely used solution, but it means living on capital accumulated over millennia, and depleting it faster than the interest can top it up.
As groundwater is exploited, water tables in parts of China, India, West Asia, the former Soviet Union and the western United States are dropping - in India by as much as 3m a year in 1999.
Technical solutions
New technology can help, however, especially by cleaning up pollution and so making more water useable, and in agriculture, where water use can be made far more efficient. Drought-resistant plants can also help.
Drip irrigation drastically cuts the amount of water needed, low-pressure sprinklers are an improvement, and even building simple earth walls to trap rainfall is helpful.
Some countries are now treating waste water so that it can be used - and drunk - several times over.
Desalinisation makes sea water available, but takes huge quantities of energy and leaves vast amounts of brine.
The optimists say "virtual water" may save the day - the water contained in crops which can be exported from water-rich countries to arid ones.
But the amounts involved would be immense, and the energy needed to transport them gargantuan. And affordable, useable energy will probably soon be a bigger problem than water itself.
Climate change
In any case, it is not just us who need water, but every other species that shares the planet with us - as well all the ecosystems on which we, and they, rely.
Climate change will also have an impact. Some areas will probably benefit from increased rainfall, but others are likely to be losers.
We have to rethink how much water we really need if we are to learn how to share the Earth's supply.
While dams and other large-scale schemes play a big role worldwide, there is also a growing recognition of the value of using the water we already have more efficiently rather than harvesting ever more from our rivers and aquifers.
For millions of people around the world, getting it right is a matter of life and death.
Read the entire article
Water scarcity: A looming crisis?
By Alex Kirby, BBC News Online environment correspondent, Tuesday, 19 October, 2004
The world's water crisis is simple to understand, if not to solve.
The amount of water in the world is finite. The number of us is growing fast and our water use is growing even faster.
A third of the world's population lives in water-stressed countries now. By 2025, this is expected to rise to two-thirds.
There is more than enough water available, in total, for everyone's basic needs.
The UN recommends that people need a minimum of 50 litres of water a day for drinking, washing, cooking and sanitation.
In 1990, over a billion people did not have even that.
Providing universal access to that basic minimum worldwide by 2015 would take less than 1% of the amount of water we use today. But we're a long way from achieving that.
Pollution and disease
Global water consumption rose sixfold between 1900 and 1995 - more than double the rate of population growth - and goes on growing as farming, industry and domestic demand all increase.
As important as quantity is quality - with pollution increasing in some areas, the amount of useable water declines.
More than five million people die from waterborne diseases each year - 10 times the number killed in wars around the globe.
And the wider effects of water shortages are just as chilling as the prospect of having too little to drink.
Seventy percent of the water used worldwide is used for agriculture.
Much more will be needed if we are to feed the world's growing population - predicted to rise from about six billion today to 8.9 billion by 2050.
And consumption will soar further as more people expect Western-style lifestyles and diets - one kilogram of grain-fed beef needs at least 15 cubic metres of water, while a kilo of cereals needs only up to three cubic metres.
Poverty and water
The poor are the ones who suffer most. Water shortages can mean long walks to fetch water, high prices to buy it, food insecurity and disease from drinking dirty water.
But the very thing needed to raise funds to tackle water problems in poor countries - economic development - requires yet more water to supply the agriculture and industries which drive it.
The UN-backed World Commission on Water estimated in 2000 that an additional $100bn a year would be needed to tackle water scarcity worldwide.
This dwarfs the $20bn which will be needed annually by 2007 to tackle HIV and Aids, and, according to the Commission, it is so much it could only be raised from the private sector.
Even if the money can be found, spending it wisely is a further challenge. Dams and other large-scale projects now affect 60% of the world's largest rivers and provide millions with water.
But in many cases the costs in terms of population displacement and irreversible changes in the nearby ecosystems have been considerable.
Using underground supplies is another widely used solution, but it means living on capital accumulated over millennia, and depleting it faster than the interest can top it up.
As groundwater is exploited, water tables in parts of China, India, West Asia, the former Soviet Union and the western United States are dropping - in India by as much as 3m a year in 1999.
Technical solutions
New technology can help, however, especially by cleaning up pollution and so making more water useable, and in agriculture, where water use can be made far more efficient. Drought-resistant plants can also help.
Drip irrigation drastically cuts the amount of water needed, low-pressure sprinklers are an improvement, and even building simple earth walls to trap rainfall is helpful.
Some countries are now treating waste water so that it can be used - and drunk - several times over.
Desalinisation makes sea water available, but takes huge quantities of energy and leaves vast amounts of brine.
The optimists say "virtual water" may save the day - the water contained in crops which can be exported from water-rich countries to arid ones.
But the amounts involved would be immense, and the energy needed to transport them gargantuan. And affordable, useable energy will probably soon be a bigger problem than water itself.
Climate change
In any case, it is not just us who need water, but every other species that shares the planet with us - as well all the ecosystems on which we, and they, rely.
Climate change will also have an impact. Some areas will probably benefit from increased rainfall, but others are likely to be losers.
We have to rethink how much water we really need if we are to learn how to share the Earth's supply.
While dams and other large-scale schemes play a big role worldwide, there is also a growing recognition of the value of using the water we already have more efficiently rather than harvesting ever more from our rivers and aquifers.
For millions of people around the world, getting it right is a matter of life and death.
Read the entire article
Biodiversity: The sixth great wave
Biodiversity: The sixth great wave
Biodiversity: The sixth great wave
By Alex Kirby, BBC News Online environment correspondent, Friday, 1 October, 2004
All the creatures we share the Earth with are important in some way, however unprepossessing or insignificant they may appear. They and we are all part of the web of life.
From the dawn of time, extinction has usually progressed at what scientists call a natural or background rate. Today the tempo is far faster.
Many scientists believe this is the sixth great wave - the sixth mass extinction to affect life on Earth.
We were not here for any of the previous mass extinctions, but this time our sheer preponderance is driving the slide to oblivion.
LIVING PLANET INDEX
The index tracks the size of specific populations of selected species
It shows them as a percentage of the 1970 populations
It shows falling population levels in all three ecosystem types studied
We have more than doubled our numbers in half a century, and that is the most obvious reason why there is less room for any other species.
We are taking their living room to grow our food, their food to feed ourselves. We are exploiting them, trading in them, squeezing them to the margins of existence - and beyond.
Often the choice is hard: conserve a species or feed a community, tourists' dollars or turtles' nests.
In 2003 the World Conservation Union's Red List said more than 12,000 species (out of 40,000 assessed) faced some extinction risk, including:
one bird in eight
13% of the world's flowering plants
a quarter of all mammals.
That gives you a ballpark figure. Science has described 1.75 million species, some experts estimate that there may be 13 or 14 million in the world in total - but until they are catalogued, nobody knows.
FIVE MASS EXTINCTIONS
Cretaceous (About 65 million years ago)
Triassic (About 208 million years ago)
Permian (About 245 million years ago)
Devonian (About 360 million years ago)
Ordovician (About 438 million years ago)
Our pillage of the natural world has been likened to burning down the medieval libraries of Europe, before we had even bothered to catalogue their contents.
Many species keep us alive, purifying water, fixing nitrogen, recycling nutrients and waste, and pollinating crops.
Plants and bacteria carry out photosynthesis, which produces the oxygen we breathe. Trees absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas given off by human activities.
Pandas and microbes
Some years ago, when the global annual gross product was about $18 trillion, US researchers calculated the value of the goods and services provided by the Earth to the world economy: $33 trillion.
Tropical cone snails contain toxins which show promise for treating some forms of cancer and heart irregularities. One toxin may be a thousand times more potent than morphine for pain relief.
But millions of cone snails are now killed annually for their shells, and their habitats are under pressure.
That is the argument for utility. But the creatures we can see, and those we can use directly, are just the start of the story.
Lord May, president of the Royal Society (the UK's national academy of sciences), has said: "Most conservation effort goes into birds and mammals - creatures like the panda, a dim, dead-end animal that was probably on the way out anyway.
"Yet arguably it's the little things that run the world, things like soil microbes. They're the least-known species of all."
Complex network
And we continue to tug at the loose threads of the web of life, thinking we can split it into its separate parts.
Brazil nuts are a lucrative harvest in the Amazon. But an experiment to produce them in plantations failed, because the trees bear a good crop in the forest, but are barren in isolation.
We are not removing individual species from the Amazon: we are destroying the entire forest. US researchers estimate that by 2020 less than 5% of it will remain in pristine condition.
Within 15 years, about a fifth of central Africa's forests will have gone, by one estimate. And the forests of Indonesia are in headlong retreat.
Some species are bucking the trend towards extinction. In 1953 there were about 2.5bn people: today there are 6bn.
Ensuring other species keep their living space is not sentimental. It is the only way we shall survive.
Extinction, whatever Steven Spielberg says, really is for ever. The web is unravelling.
Read the entire article
Biodiversity: The sixth great wave
By Alex Kirby, BBC News Online environment correspondent, Friday, 1 October, 2004
All the creatures we share the Earth with are important in some way, however unprepossessing or insignificant they may appear. They and we are all part of the web of life.
From the dawn of time, extinction has usually progressed at what scientists call a natural or background rate. Today the tempo is far faster.
Many scientists believe this is the sixth great wave - the sixth mass extinction to affect life on Earth.
We were not here for any of the previous mass extinctions, but this time our sheer preponderance is driving the slide to oblivion.
LIVING PLANET INDEX
The index tracks the size of specific populations of selected species
It shows them as a percentage of the 1970 populations
It shows falling population levels in all three ecosystem types studied
We have more than doubled our numbers in half a century, and that is the most obvious reason why there is less room for any other species.
We are taking their living room to grow our food, their food to feed ourselves. We are exploiting them, trading in them, squeezing them to the margins of existence - and beyond.
Often the choice is hard: conserve a species or feed a community, tourists' dollars or turtles' nests.
In 2003 the World Conservation Union's Red List said more than 12,000 species (out of 40,000 assessed) faced some extinction risk, including:
one bird in eight
13% of the world's flowering plants
a quarter of all mammals.
That gives you a ballpark figure. Science has described 1.75 million species, some experts estimate that there may be 13 or 14 million in the world in total - but until they are catalogued, nobody knows.
FIVE MASS EXTINCTIONS
Cretaceous (About 65 million years ago)
Triassic (About 208 million years ago)
Permian (About 245 million years ago)
Devonian (About 360 million years ago)
Ordovician (About 438 million years ago)
Our pillage of the natural world has been likened to burning down the medieval libraries of Europe, before we had even bothered to catalogue their contents.
Many species keep us alive, purifying water, fixing nitrogen, recycling nutrients and waste, and pollinating crops.
Plants and bacteria carry out photosynthesis, which produces the oxygen we breathe. Trees absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas given off by human activities.
Pandas and microbes
Some years ago, when the global annual gross product was about $18 trillion, US researchers calculated the value of the goods and services provided by the Earth to the world economy: $33 trillion.
Tropical cone snails contain toxins which show promise for treating some forms of cancer and heart irregularities. One toxin may be a thousand times more potent than morphine for pain relief.
But millions of cone snails are now killed annually for their shells, and their habitats are under pressure.
That is the argument for utility. But the creatures we can see, and those we can use directly, are just the start of the story.
Lord May, president of the Royal Society (the UK's national academy of sciences), has said: "Most conservation effort goes into birds and mammals - creatures like the panda, a dim, dead-end animal that was probably on the way out anyway.
"Yet arguably it's the little things that run the world, things like soil microbes. They're the least-known species of all."
Complex network
And we continue to tug at the loose threads of the web of life, thinking we can split it into its separate parts.
Brazil nuts are a lucrative harvest in the Amazon. But an experiment to produce them in plantations failed, because the trees bear a good crop in the forest, but are barren in isolation.
We are not removing individual species from the Amazon: we are destroying the entire forest. US researchers estimate that by 2020 less than 5% of it will remain in pristine condition.
Within 15 years, about a fifth of central Africa's forests will have gone, by one estimate. And the forests of Indonesia are in headlong retreat.
Some species are bucking the trend towards extinction. In 1953 there were about 2.5bn people: today there are 6bn.
Ensuring other species keep their living space is not sentimental. It is the only way we shall survive.
Extinction, whatever Steven Spielberg says, really is for ever. The web is unravelling.
Read the entire article
Local food 'greener than organic'
Local food 'greener than organic'
Local food 'greener than organic'
BBC News, Wednesday, 2 March, 2005
Local food is usually more "green" than organic food, according to a report published in the journal Food Policy.
The authors say organic farming is also valuable, but people can help the environment even more by buying food from within a 20km (12-mile) radius.
The team calculated a shopping basket's hidden costs, which mount up as produce is transported over big distances. The study found "road miles" account for proportionately more environmental damage than "air miles".
Therefore, the researchers' message to consumers is this: it is not good enough to buy food from within the UK - it is better if it comes from within your area, too.
However, they admit that consumers are prevented from "doing the right thing" because of inadequate labelling.
"The most political act we do on a daily basis is to eat, as our actions affect farms, landscapes and food businesses," said co-author Professor Jules Pretty, from the University of Essex, UK.
"Food miles are more significant than we previously thought, and much now needs to be done to encourage local production and consumption of food."
Clean-up costs
Professor Pretty and his colleague Tim Lang, from City University, UK, painstakingly estimated the environmental price tag on each stage of the food production process.
That price might reflect, for example, the clean-up costs following pollution, or the loss of profits caused by erosion damage.
"The price of food is disguising externalised costs - damage to the environment, damage to climate, damage to infrastructure and the cost of transporting food on roads," Professor Lang told the BBC News website.
The authors calculated that if all foods were sourced from within 20km of where they were consumed, environmental and congestion costs would fall from more than £2.3bn to under £230m - an "environmental saving" of £2.1bn annually.
They pointed out that organic methods can also make an important contribution. If all farms in the UK were to turn organic, then the country would save £1.1bn of environmental costs each year.
Consumers can save a further £100m in environmental costs, the authors claim, if they cycle, walk or catch the bus to the shops rather than drive.
Each week, the average person clocks up 93p worth of environmental costs, the report concludes.
These costs should be addressed by the government, companies and consumers, the authors believe.
Read the entire article
Local food 'greener than organic'
BBC News, Wednesday, 2 March, 2005
Local food is usually more "green" than organic food, according to a report published in the journal Food Policy.
The authors say organic farming is also valuable, but people can help the environment even more by buying food from within a 20km (12-mile) radius.
The team calculated a shopping basket's hidden costs, which mount up as produce is transported over big distances. The study found "road miles" account for proportionately more environmental damage than "air miles".
Therefore, the researchers' message to consumers is this: it is not good enough to buy food from within the UK - it is better if it comes from within your area, too.
However, they admit that consumers are prevented from "doing the right thing" because of inadequate labelling.
"The most political act we do on a daily basis is to eat, as our actions affect farms, landscapes and food businesses," said co-author Professor Jules Pretty, from the University of Essex, UK.
"Food miles are more significant than we previously thought, and much now needs to be done to encourage local production and consumption of food."
Clean-up costs
Professor Pretty and his colleague Tim Lang, from City University, UK, painstakingly estimated the environmental price tag on each stage of the food production process.
That price might reflect, for example, the clean-up costs following pollution, or the loss of profits caused by erosion damage.
"The price of food is disguising externalised costs - damage to the environment, damage to climate, damage to infrastructure and the cost of transporting food on roads," Professor Lang told the BBC News website.
The authors calculated that if all foods were sourced from within 20km of where they were consumed, environmental and congestion costs would fall from more than £2.3bn to under £230m - an "environmental saving" of £2.1bn annually.
They pointed out that organic methods can also make an important contribution. If all farms in the UK were to turn organic, then the country would save £1.1bn of environmental costs each year.
Consumers can save a further £100m in environmental costs, the authors claim, if they cycle, walk or catch the bus to the shops rather than drive.
Each week, the average person clocks up 93p worth of environmental costs, the report concludes.
These costs should be addressed by the government, companies and consumers, the authors believe.
Read the entire article
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