The answer to the ongoing Brofiscin saga lies not in the South Wales Quarry but in Doncaster. Jon Hughes explains the complex legal judgement that has paralysed the Environment Agency and undermined its raison d’etre; to make the polluter pay
Prominent critics of the failure of Environment Agency Wales (EAW) to pursue the UK’s interests against Monsanto in the US Bankruptcy Court have come under extraordinary attack over the past 10 days.
A ruling in the US courts at a meeting which the Environment Agency claims never took place has dashed all hopes of making Monsanto pay up for polluting Brofiscin quarry in Wales. Is the Agency guilty of obstructing the course of justice? Jon Hughes investigates
What does Douglas Gowan know that everyone else wants to keep hidden? For 40 years the story of Brofiscin Quarry – now the most polluted place in the UK – has been suppressed...
With news that storms caused by smog from Asian cities over the Pacific Ocean will melt Artic ice, Christine Loh, the CEO of Civic Exchange, looks at Hong Kong, where worsening air pollution causes on average four deaths a day.
In the middle of a meeting in Westminster Silvia Wilson stood up, in tears, pleading for a doctor that could diagnose and treat her daughter’s health problem.
Obesity is a problem that is chronic, stigmatised, costly to treat and rarely curable. Why? Because we are looking in the wrong places for a solution. Pat Thomas reports
Over 1,000 juvenile delinquents showed a 44 per cent drop in antisocial behaviour when put on a low sugar diet. So why is the government completely ignoring what we are feeding our children, and yet is happy to spend £2,500 on administering each ASBO?
The human species has been breastfeeding for nearly half a million years. It’s only in the last 60 years that we have begun to give babies the highly processed convenience food called ‘formula’.
Too fat, too thin, too sad, too happy... Whatever the problem Biotech is developing a vaccine or a pill to cure us. Mark White examines the consequences of a world where all our worries can be medicated away.
When Governments try to reassure the public with announcements about how much they are doing to solve problems like bird flu or global warming, it just avoids the real question - how did we get into this in the first place?
Bird flu has been raging through Asia for more than a decade. But it is only recently that most of us have started to pay attention to the story. Pat Thomas seperates fact from fiction and asks whether this is a random act of nature or yet another man-made disaster.
If you split post-operative patients into two groups, giving one a view of trees and the other a view of a brick wall, the group that was exposed to the trees will need fewer painkillers, develop fewer complications and will
check themselves out of hospital more quickly than the group with the urban view. Isn't it time to accept that some of the distress we currently feel is tied to the world beyond the consulting room, to this planet of ours that's
become so stripped and bare?
Aspartame is the most controversial food additive in history. The most recent evidence, linking it to leukaemia and lymphoma, has added substantial fuel to the ongoing protests of doctors, scientists and consumer groups who allege that this artificial sweetener should never have been released onto the market and that allowing it to remain in the food chain is killing us by degrees.
Aspartame should never have reached the marketplace. But even if the authorities were to remove it from sale tomorrow, how much faith should consumers place in the other artificial sweeteners on the market?
The huge popularity of antibacterial household cleaners is encouraging superbugs,
allergies, immune-system failure and dangerous environmental pollution. It’s time to
stop cleaning ourselves to death.
The US Food and Drug Administration has issued a hefty warning to the cosmetics industry - clean up your act or else. The question is: will the agency follow through?
Costing £2.9 billion, the UK’s new police communication system Tetra has been described by one independent scientist as likely to cause ‘more civilian deaths than all the world’s terrorist organisations put together’
In 1993 Tory MP David Willetts wrote a pamphlet called The Opportunities for Private Funding in the NHS, which proposed using Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs) and other commercial mechanisms to provide health services in the UK. Conservative ministers thought Willetts’s proposals too radical. They were consigned to the shelf until 1997, when the New Labour Government put them into action.
According to the World Health Organisation, more than 30 serious new diseases have emerged in the last three decades. Mark Walters describes one of them, Lyme disease, and shows how our destruction of the environment is inextricably linked to its proliferation
