By year's end, the European Union is expected to adopt REACH, a proposal that would "require manufacturers to test industrial chemicals used in the manufacturing process to gather health and safety data." REACH stands for "Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals." The bill "has prompted a U.S.-led coalition of 13 countries to step up lobbying efforts to make the final measure more amenable to industry," reports the Wall Street Journal. "The diplomatic missions of the U.S., Japan, Australia, India and other countries issues a length joint critique of the proposed law this month, saying certain provisions would disrupt international trade without offering clear environmental benefits." C. Boyden Gray, the U.S. ambassador to the EU and former chair of FreedomWorks and Citizens for a Sound Economy, said European policymakers "never did a proper impact assessment to evaluate the risk-versus-benefit status of this legislation."
Website: Wall Street Journal (sub req'd), June 27, 2006

A new report by Rep. Henry A. Waxman examines how the Bush Administration has carried out FDA's historic enforcement responsibilities. The report is the result of a 15-month investigation that included a review of thousands of pages of internal agency enforcement records. It finds that there has been a precipitous drop in FDA enforcement actions over the last five years.

The small scientific world of prion researchers -- the scientists who investigate "transmissible spongiform encephalopathies" (TSE) such as mad cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans -- is abuzz. That's because the two confirmed cases of US mad cow disease in Texas and Alabama are an "atypical" strain different from the British strain. This really should not be surprising. Sheldon Rampton and I reported in 1997 that very strong evidence of an "atypical" TSE disease in US cattle goes back to the 1985 work of Dr. Richard Marsh, the researcher to whom we dedicated our book Mad Cow USA. Even before Britain confirmed its first case of mad cow, Marsh was investigating a similar disease he traced to Wisconsin dairy cattle, confirming suspicions among US scientists since the 1960s that a deadly TSE disease in mink -- transmissible mink encephalopathy or TME -- resulted from their eating dairy cattle.