A study of US governmental data, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that even ‘low-level’ arsenic exposure is a high risk factor in Type-2 diabetes. A median arsenic concentration of 7.1 micrograms per litre was found in the urine of 788 American adults. This adds to past evidence that arsenic is a potent carcinogen (as if we needed convincing that arsenic might not be good for you). The current World Health Organisation and EPA safety standard for arsenic concentration in water is 10 ppb (parts per billion), although the current Bush administration originally attempted to delay the EPA regulations from coming into effect.

Why is there arsenic in the water you might ask? Well, it does occur naturally in groundwater, and if not efficiently removed, it’ll stay there. It is however also an industrial waste product of coal burning and copper smelting. So, there’s a point of political activism, eh? Maybe developed nations should be able to have drinking water free from poison?

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On 14 August, this World Health Organisation draft on pandemic flu preparedness was leaked on Wikileaks.

This passage is perhaps most striking:

‘global influenza vaccine manufacturing capacity is insufficient to meet demand in a pandemic and [...] in the absence of a multilateral system of benefit sharing, some Member States, particularly developing countries, can neither afford nor access the vaccines’

In other words, ‘there isn’t enough vaccine to go around, poorer countries will be priced out of the market, and millions will die in the event of a pandemic’. Basically, this passage amounts to the blackmailing of developing countries into accepting the WHO’s particular ‘virus sharing’ system. Indonesia has felt the need to withhold virus samples from the WHO in protest of the current system, so what does this system entail?

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