Insecticide Use on Planes
December 10th, 2012A reader reported that, during a flight from Los Angeles to Sydney, the cabin crew sprayed insecticide throughout the cabin.
While this was a genuine WTF moment for me, I asked my wife about it, who has flown much more than I have, and she had experienced it on a flight from Australia to New Zealand.
This won’t be news to many of you, as the practice has been around for many years (decades?), but it was news to me:
2004: Flight attendants call for end to on-board insecticides:
Kerry Yuen, now retired and living in Carollton, Texas, was a flight attendant for 39 years, much of that time on the Los Angeles-Australia route. Yuen said sometimes the pesticide was applied so thickly you could see it dripping down the wall, covering instrument panels, coating the galley where food was prepared. She remembers the days when she emptied two cans of phenothrin per flight above the heads of passengers, though the label on the can said not to inhale.
In the mid-1990s, in-flight spraying of phenothrin came under congressional scrutiny after several congressmen, visiting New Zealand, were sprayed with the pesticide over their objections.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency moved to ban the use of phenothrin in aircraft in the United States, and to protect U.S. citizens, the U.S. government was able to convince many countries to eliminate in-flight spraying requirements, particularly after the Department of Transportation (DOT) began considering a rule that passengers on U.S. carriers would be notified in advance that spraying would occur on flights to those countries.
But in most cases, the between-flight application of permethrin continued.
2001: Crews in revolt over jet spraying:
New Zealand’s insistence on spraying the cabins of incoming airliners is striking public opposition in the United States.
Flight attendants, backed by their union, say the spray is making them sick.
And some American travellers are said to be avoiding New Zealand because of the spray, which is being investigated for effects on the brains of unborn and newborn babies.
After earlier claims that the insecticide was causing illness, quarantine officials ceased spraying cabins while passengers were on board.
United, Air New Zealand, Qantas and most other New Zealand-bound airlines now spray a “residual” bug-killer while the plane is empty. The residue stays on surfaces for up to eight weeks.
Flight staff at United, the only US airline regularly serving New Zealand, claim the spray gives them itchy skin, bad headaches and nerve problems.
Their union, the US-based Association of Flight Attendants, is urging the World Health Organisation, Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies to press New Zealand to ease its regulations.
United Airlines confirmed that the issue had spilled into court, with attendants lodging health claims, but would not comment further.
New Zealand flight attendants believe the spray is safe, but the Americans claim the residual sprays contaminate food on galley counters and seep through to their skin from seat fabric.
Now, I just called Air New Zealand in an attempt to understand the current practice, since typing words like fumigation, insecticide, pesticide and permethrin into the website search widget results in no mention of any of this.
I was put on hold for about 20 minutes.
The representative came back on the phone and told me that the planes are fumigated every seventh week and when there are no passengers aboard. She repeated a few times that the spray is not applied while people were aboard. The insecticide is applied through the aircraft’s air conditioning system.
I requested to see more information on this, since nothing is available on the Air New Zealand website. This is what I received over email:
Air New Zealand spray their aircrafts only with a spray that is WHO approved.
It is done by Boracure and is done every seventh week. Done overnight when all passengers have disembarked, galley surfaces are wiped down and the aircraft is lightly sprayed via the air conditioning.
Ok, so the routine procedure is to leave a persistent residue of poison in the planes, rather then applying it when the people are present. If the as-little-detail-as-possible response from the airline doesn’t cut it for you, see this Australian Government page, which goes into detail of how this works: DAFF/MPI Schedule of Aircraft Disinsection Procedures for Flights into Australia and New Zealand.
Now, what happens if the bio-security certificate, which allows a plane to not have to be gassed on each flight, has expired and people are aboard?
Be sitting down for this one. This happened in 2008.
Passengers on an Air New Zealand flight from Fiji found themselves being fumigated yesterday after it was discovered that the aircraft’s biosecurity clearance had expired.
An Auckland man – who spoke to the Herald on condition of anonymity – said two Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry officers boarded NZ21 from Nadi at Auckland International Airport yesterday morning.
“All we heard was that this was a MAF requirement. It was like how they used to do things on planes about 20 years ago, but I still thought it was pretty strange,” he said.
A bio-security certificate prevents an airline from having to fumigate an aircraft every time it returns here.
The spraying left the man with a sore throat and caused a baby to gag and vomit.
The construction engineer said the MAF officers took about five minutes to fumigate the plane before leaving the passengers to sit in “a thick fog” as they sealed the door shut behind them.
“It was pretty concerning to see that and there were other passengers having to hold their noses and cover their mouths,” he said. “It was something akin to a sauna, not the heat but the look of the place and the longer it went on the foggier it became, it was ridiculous.
“Even now I have a real raspy throat so you could imagine what the effect would be on an infant.”
…
Air New Zealand spokeswoman Di Paton said biosecurity certificates on its aircraft did expire “very occasionally”. But she said the airline did not consider it had made a mistake in terms of not having its biosecurity clearances before passengers boarded, saying “these kind of things happen”.
“In this particular instance it was by one day the biosecurity clearance had expired – a few hours, in fact. It’s not really a mistake. It’s just happened as a result of other things.”
So, there you have it.
Enjoy your flight!
FDA Increases Allowed Radiation Doses of Meats for Human Consumption
December 9th, 2012Via: Natural News:
Rather than actually take the time to address the root causes of meat and poultry contamination, which more often than not are a direct result of outrageously unsanitary factory farming practices, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has instead decided to simply up the doses of radiation that industrial food producers are allowed to blast on their filthy, contaminated meat products.
In the first new rule recently published in the Federal Register, the FDA specifies that “unrefrigerated uncooked meat” can now be irradiated right alongside refrigerated, frozen and cooked meat. And in the second new rule, the FDA increases the amount of ionizing radiation that can be applied to poultry products such as chicken by 50 percent, bumping the dosage up to 4.5 kilograys (kGy) of radiation from the previous 3.0 kGy.
You can view the two published rules here:
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2012-11-30/pdf/2012-28967.pdf
Israeli Airstrike on Home ‘Was a Clear Violation of the Laws of War’
December 9th, 2012“International law is that law which the wicked do not obey and the righteous do not enforce.”
—Abba Eban, Israeli diplomat and politician
Via: Human Rights Watch:
An Israeli airstrike that killed 12 civilians – the largest number of civilians killed in a single attack during the Gaza fighting in November – was a clear violation of the laws of war.
On November 18, 2012, Israeli forces dropped what appears to have been a large aerial bomb on the three-story home of the Dalu family in Gaza City, killing 10 members of the household – one man, five women, and four children. A young man and an elderly woman of the Muzannar family next door were also killed.
At first the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they were attacking a Hamas fighter named Yahia Abayah. Eight days later the IDF said the target had been the man killed in the house, Mohamed Jamal al-Dalu, whom they called a “terror operative” for Hamas without providing supporting information. Even if al-Dalu, a low-ranking police officer, was a legitimate military target under the laws of war, the likelihood that the attack on a civilian home would have killed large numbers of civilians made it unlawfully disproportionate, Human Rights Watch said. Attacks in which the expected civilian loss exceeds the anticipated military gain are serious violations of the laws of war.
“The Israeli claim that the attack on the Dalu home was justified is unsupported by the facts,” said Fred Abrahams, special advisor at Human Rights Watch, who conducted research in Gaza. “The onus is on Israel to explain why it bombed a home full of civilians killing 12 people.”
Research Credit: almaverdad2
Kaiser Permanente: ‘Limit Exposure to Genitically Modified Organisms’
December 9th, 2012Via: Willamette Live:
Despite what the biotech industry might say, there is little research on the long-term effects of GMOs on human health. Independent research has found several varieties of GMO corn caused organ damage in rats. Other studies have found that GMOs may lead to an inability in animals to reproduce.
Here are several ways you can help limit your exposure to GMOs…
Research Credit: almaverdad2
A U.S. Apple Factory May be Robot City
December 9th, 2012Probably the biggest caveat that’s not mentioned about this alleged insourcing boom is that some companies will be looking to gain the benefits of manufacturing in the U.S. but using robotic labor to do it.
Via: Computer World:
Apple’s planned investment of $100 million next year in a U.S. manufacturing facility is relatively small, but still important. Apple has the money, talent and resources to build a highly automated factory that turns out products that are potentially cost competitive with those it now makes in China.
Apple has already demonstrated its use of automation in the manufacturing of some of its MacBook products, including the MacBook Air. It was built with what the company calls its “unibody design” that was crafted from a single sheet of aluminum.
A 2009 Apple video of its unibody manufacturing process has glimpses of highly automated systems shaping the metal. In it, Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of design, talked about the manufacturing process. “Machining enables a level of precision that is just completely unheard of in this industry,” he said.
Apple has the know-how to build one of the world’s most modern plants, and if it succeeds, it could influence others to build in the U.S. But success will mean holding down costs, and to do so, Apple will likely rely heavily on automation, say analysts and manufacturers.
Greeks Turn to the Forests for Fuel as Winter Nears
December 9th, 2012Via: Guardian:
It is early Sunday. The sun has barely risen above the chestnut forest that lies somewhere near the crest of Mount Pelion, but loggers’ pick-up trucks are already streaming through the muddy slush, their cargo bouncing in the back. Theirs are rich pickings, much in demand as winter envelopes the villages and towns of an increasingly poverty-stricken Greece. As they pass, they do not look up because many do not have permits to do what they have just done.
Research Credit: ottilie
China: 700 Mountains to be Levelled to Make Way for New Town
December 9th, 2012Via: Telegraph:
Chinese developers are planning to flatten 700 mountains to make way for a new town in the north-west of the country.
The nation’s most ambitious “mountain moving” project is slated for a patch of desert the outskirts of Lanzhou in the Gansu province and is estimated to cost £2.2bn, according to the Guardian.
But developers hope the cost and effort will be worth it, with the new metropolis potentially able to boost the region’s GDP by £27bn by 2030.
The ambitious mountain-flattening is already underway, despite concerns over the effect it will have on the natural environment.
Lanzhou, home to 3.6 million people, already has the nation’s worst air pollution and the region is notoriously arid, with water in scarce supply.
Newly Released Drone Records Reveal Extensive Military Flights in U.S.
December 8th, 2012Via: Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Today EFF posted several thousand pages of new drone license records and a new map that tracks the location of drone flights across the United States.
These records, received as a result of EFF’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), come from state and local law enforcement agencies, universities and—for the first time—three branches of the U.S. military: the Air Force, Marine Corps, and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
While the U.S. military doesn’t need an FAA license to fly drones over its own military bases (these are considered “restricted airspace”), it does need a license to fly in the national airspace (which is almost everywhere else in the US). And, as we’ve learned from these records, the Air Force and Marine Corps regularly fly both large and small drones in the national airspace all around the country. This is problematic, given a recent New York Times report that the Air Force’s drone operators sometimes practice surveillance missions by tracking civilian cars along the highway adjacent to the base.
The records show that the Air Force has been testing out a bunch of different drone types, from the smaller, hand-launched Raven, Puma and Wasp drones designed by Aerovironment in Southern California, to the much larger Predator and Reaper drones responsible for civilian and foreign military deaths abroad. The Marine Corps is also testing drones, though it chose to redact so much of the text from its records that we still don’t know much about its programs.
Research Credit: HPLovecraft666
And Now… ‘Conservation Drones’
December 8th, 2012Via: Mother Jones:
First things first: No, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is not using drones to vaporize poachers. But thanks to a five million dollar grant awarded by Google on Tuesday, the organization is expanding its use of unmanned aerial vehicles to track and deter criminals who illegally hunt endangered animal species around the world.
WWF spokesman Lee Poston is not calling these vehicles drones, because he doesn’t want people to confuse them with the military kind. According to Poston, they are “sophisticated radio-controlled devices like hobbyists use” that can be “controlled from your iPad or other device.” But the WWF website does call them “conservation drones.”
Prior to receiving the Google grant, the WWF had already deployed trackers in Nepal’s national parks. These drones are light enough to be launched by hand and can be programmed to fly about 18 miles at a maximum elevation of 650 feet, for almost an hour. The cameras on the drones allow rangers on the ground to spot would-be poachers, especially in hard-to-reach places.
‘Clinton Vows to Thwart New Soviet Union’
December 7th, 2012Wow, Clinton vows to thwart new Soviet Union:
The US is trying to prevent Russia from recreating a new version of the Soviet Union under the ruse of economic integration, Hillary Clinton warned on Thursday.
“There is a move to re-Sovietise the region,” the US secretary of state told a news conference in Dublin hours before going into a meeting with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.
“It’s not going to be called that. It’s going to be called a customs union, it will be called Eurasian Union and all of that,” she said, referring to various iterations of a Moscow-backed plan to deepen economic ties with its neighbours.
“But let’s make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.”
Oh sure, let’s make no mistake about it!
Is Mrs. Clinton concerned that the Russians will orchestrate something like NAFTA or the Free Trade Area of the Americas or the Trans-Pacific Partnership?
Is she afraid that the state will again own factories that produce junk automobiles?
Perhaps Clinton is worried that prisoners, languishing in neo-Soviet gulags, will be used for slave labor in the state’s war industries. And these war industries would support a vast network of military bases all over the world…
If I keep going, I’m definitely going to ruin my coffee high. Maybe someone else wants to take a stab at it.
