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Monsanto unapproved GMO wheat govt-stored up to 2011
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| AFP Photo / Jean-Francois Monier |
Monsanto’s unapproved GMO wheat, which made its way onto an Oregon field and is feared to have contaminated US wheat supplies, was stored at a US government-controlled facility until at least late 2011.
The confirmation that the controversial strain of wheat was stored at the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado, comes as US Department of Agriculture (USDA) investigates how the unapproved wheat ended up in an Oregon field this spring.
The documents detailing shipments of the bioengineered wheat received by Reuters consist of correspondence between Monsanto and the Colorado facility. The site can store seeds for decades while retaining their viability, much longer than is possible with conventional storage.
Monsanto insists the contamination of the field was sabotage. The company suggested earlier that someone was able to secretly access bioengineered wheat, which had been made resistant to Roundup, a Monsanto-sold pesticide, and planted it in the Oregon field to damage Monsanto's work with biotech crops.
The USDA announcement of the discovered bioengineered wheat on an 80-acre farm in Oregon opened up a probe into the matter.
The plant was developed by Monsanto between 1998 and 2005, but was never approved or made into a commercial product.
The company has thus far failed to determine how the crop entered the environment, and insisted that all genetically-modified seeds stored at the high-tech Colorado facility were incinerated on January 5, 2012.
"At our direction, the seed was destroyed ... as it was old material and we had no plans for its future use," said Monsanto spokesman Thomas Helscher.
The seed storage at Fort Collins received 43 physical containers of Monsanto's wheat that contained more than 1,000 unique varieties, documents reveal.
Some of the wheat was also stored at Monsanto’s facilities in St. Louis, Missouri.
The USDA is currently trying to confirm that all Monsanto seeds were accounted for and destroyed as the company reports.
The agency is investigating how Monsanto’s GMO wheat was handled when transferred to Fort Collins in late 2004 and early 2005 after the contract for the storage of wheat was set in November 2004.
At the time Monsanto was in the process of shutting down work with the so-called ‘Roundup Ready’ wheat.
There is no indication that the GMO wheat made it to commercial supplies, but it cannot be held responsible for wheat sent elsewhere, USDA spokesman Ed Curlett said.
The contamination scandal has hurt US grain exports, as Japan and South Korea issued import restrictions in the wake of the discovery. US farmers have filed several lawsuits seeking damages from Monsanto.
There had been worldwide protests held against GMO-companies, primarily Monsanto, which is viewed globally as a champion of bioengineered foods.
New Jersey hospital deports unconscious stroke victim
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A US hospital deported an unconscious stroke victim after noticing that the patient was an undocumented immigrant from Poland. Polish health officials are furious that the man was “dumped on their doorstep” before the transfer was approved.
“Imagine being carted around like a sack of potatoes,” Polish Consul General Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka told New York Daily News, describing the incident in which 69-year old Wladyslaw Haniszewski was unconsciously deported to his homeland.
Haniszewski, who suffers from a blood disease, lived in Perth Amboy, N.J., for 30 years. He recently lost his job, apartment, and health insurance, and was forced to move into a homeless shelter, the Daily News reports.
After the man suffered a dangerous stroke, a friend named Jerzy Jedra took him to the New Jersey hospital for treatment. When officials at the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital noticed that the patient had no health insurance and lived in the US without documentation, they sent the comatose man to Poland. US hospitals are legally required to provide emergency care to anyone who needs it, but are allowed to deport stabilized undocumented immigrants.
But in order to deport someone, a US hospital must first get consent from either the patient, a family member, or a court guardian. Officials at the Polish consulate claim that no one was contacted, and that Haniszewski’s family was never informed that the man was deported.
Meanwhile, Haniszewski was left at the doorstep of a hospital in Boleslawiec, Poland. The facility is now being forced to take care of the man’s medical payments, which have cost “a few hundred dollars” a day, the hospital’s deputy director told TVN.
Junczyk-Ziomecka, who works at the Polish consulate in New York City, said she was trying to help the comatose man, only to realize last week that he was gone. Polish officials are furious about the deportation, especially since the 69-year-old patient was not in a healthy state to sign off on the transfer.
“Behind our backs they transported the unconscious man to Poland,” she told TVN, noting that she was most furious about the hospital’s decision to dump the man at the facility. “I cannot imagine such a situation that the decision about transporting an unconscious person could be made without agreement. Between the two institutions must be a contract, there must be documents. You cannot simply leave a patient at the door and drive away.”
At least 800 people have been deported from US hospitals without consent over the past six years in 15 states, the Associated Press reported in April. Medical repatriation has become increasingly common, but AP suggests that the actual number of such hospital deportations is much higher than figures show. Some health advocates are afraid that repatriations will occur more frequently after major components of Obamacare are implemented in 2014, since the US government will reduce its payments to hospitals that care for large numbers of uninsured patients.
Shena Erlington, director of the Health Justice Program, told the Daily News that although hospitals may face the burden of paying for uninsured patients, medical care providers should not have the ability to deport patients.
“It’s an incredibly disturbing case,” Lori Nessel, director of the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall University School of Law, said about the Haniszewski repatriation. “This kind of action seems clearly illegal and also not ethical, but it’s hard to bring forth a legal action.”
The New Jersey hospital denies any wrongdoing and claims that the patient was informed of his discharge and care plan. The patient is awake, but unable to speak or communicate with doctors.
Study links fracking with methane-contaminated drinking water
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| Spencer Platt / Getty Images / AFP |
Household drinking water that comes from wells near known fracking sites contains levels of methane six times greater than what’s common elsewhere, a new study has found.
Researchers at Duke University sampled drinking water from 141 wells across northeastern Pennsylvania and southern New York and determined that the concentration of methane, the main component of natural gas, is much higher when those wells are within one kilometer of a hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” sites.
Fracking is a method of drilling deep into the Earth in order to extract natural gas and has seen an emergence in recent years as an increasingly popular process used by energy companies. That spread in popularity is not without opposition from environmentalists and activists, however, who fear fracking has detrimental effects on the Earth.
According to the latest study, researchers have linked fracking sites with methane contamination several times over what is seen elsewhere. The scientists say that those high levels aren’t a direct result of the drilling, though, but caused in part by poor well construction that has allowed the water to become contaminated.
"It is looking like we are seeing a problem with well construction in some places and not others," wrote the study’s main author, Robert Jackson.
"Poor casing and cementing problems are the simplest explanation of what we found,” he said, but declined to single out well construction as the exclusive cause of the contamination.
"We need to understand why, in some cases, shale gas extraction contaminates groundwater and how to keep it from happening elsewhere," the researchers wrote.
Jackson and his crew determined that 82 percent of the 141 water wells tested had elevated levels of methane, with other additives appearing in unusually high numbers as well. In addition to finding methane concentrations at around six times the usual level, Jackson also found ethane concentrations 23 times higher in drinking water at homes near fracking sites. In ten of the sites located within one kilometer of a drilling, propane was detected in 10 separate water samples.
“The methane, ethane and propane data, and new evidence from hydrocarbon and helium isotopes, all suggest that drilling has affected some homeowners’ water,” Jackson wrote.
Steve Everley, a spokesman for Energy in Depth, told the Wall Street Journal that Jackon’s study "is not a smoking gun to say that gas drilling is a problem."
"There is methane concentration near gas wells, but there is also methane concentrations in areas where there is no gas drilling," he said. Energy in Depth, wrote the Journal, is funded by the Independent Petroleum Association of America.
Jackson’s peer-reviewed study appeared in this week’s edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
