Scare Tactics Over Foreign Drugs

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/opinion/scare-tactics-over-foreign-drugs.html

About five million Americans buy medication internationally each year because of high costs in the United States. These drugs are considered “foreign unapproved drugs” by the Food and Drug Administration, and federal law makes it illegal to buy them. Generally, though, purchases go through without a hitch. Only rarely do customs agents seize an order. For almost 15 years big drug companies have vigorously lobbied Congress and the federal government to stop Americans from buying foreign medicines. As part of that lobbying, they have made it seem as if all medications purchased from Canada and other international sources are the same as those that come from websites that sell counterfeit drugs. Even the F.D.A. has made that suggestion. In testimony in February before a House subcommittee hearing to explore the public health threat of counterfeit drugs, Howard R. Sklamberg, a deputy commissioner at the F.D.A., said that foreign unapproved drugs posed the same health risks as counterfeit drugs. Equating people who buy and sell safe medication, such as pharmacy owners in Canada, with criminals who sell counterfeit drugs will lead to overly zealous enforcement actions that will curtail access to lower-cost medication in other countries. In fact, Section 708 of the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act, which passed in 2012, allows United States Customs to destroy genuine medications mailed to patients in the United States from Canadian and other foreign pharmacies. Regulations to implement that section of the law will be published by mid-April.

Driving under the influence of marijuana

If you are pulled over on suspicion of drunken driving, the police officer is likely to ask you to complete three tasks: Follow a pen with your eyes while the officer moves it back and forth; get out of the car and walk nine steps, heel to toe, turn on one foot and go back; and stand on one leg for 30 seconds. Score well on all three of these Olympic events, and there’s a very good chance that you are not drunk. This so-called standard field sobriety test has been shown to catch 88 percent of drivers under the influence of alcohol. But it is nowhere near as good at spotting a stoned driver. In a 2012 study published in the journal Psychopharmacology, only 30 percent of people under the influence of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, failed the field test. And its ability to identify a stoned driver seems to depend heavily on whether the driver is accustomed to being stoned.We may not have as much to fear from stoned driving as from drunken driving. Some researchers say that limited resources are better applied to continuing to reduce drunken driving. Stoned driving, they say, is simply less dangerous. Still, it is clear that marijuana use causes deficits that affect driving ability, Dr. Huestis said. She noted that several researchers, working independently of one another, have come up with the same estimate: a twofold increase in the risk of an accident if there is any measurable amount of THC in the bloodstream. The estimate is based on review papers that considered the results of many individual studies. The results were often contradictory — some of the papers showed no increase in risk, or even a decrease — but the twofold estimate is widely accepted. The difference in risk between marijuana and alcohol can probably be explained by two things, Dr. Huestis and Dr. Romano both say. First, stoned drivers drive differently from drunken ones, and they have different deficits. Drunken drivers tend to drive faster than normal and to overestimate their skills, studies have shown; the opposite is true for stoned drivers.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/health/driving-under-the-influence-of-marijuana.html

City to Fit All Streetlights With Energy-Saving LED Bulbs

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/nyregion/city-to-fit-all-streetlights-with-energy-saving-led-bulbs.html

The amber glow of the New York City streetlight is going away. In an energy-saving effort, the city plans to replace all of its 250,000 streetlights with brighter, whiter, energy-saving, light-emitting diode fixtures in one of the nation’s largest retrofitting projects, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, said in a news conference on Thursday. 

The news conference was on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, where lights have already been replaced, expecting to save more than $70,000 and nearly 248,000 kilowatt-hours a year in energy. Unlike standard lights, which last six years, LED bulbs can burn for 20 years before they need to be replaced, the administration said, and the project is expected to save $14 million a year in energy and maintenance costs. The project is the first to receive financing through the Accelerated Conservation and Efficiency initiative or “ACE,” the administration said, a $100 million competitive program that the Department of Citywide Administrative Services created to expedite such sustainability projects.

Workers at Nuclear Waste Site in New Mexico Inhaled Radioactive Materials

Thirteen employees who worked the night shift at a nuclear waste burial site in New Mexico after an underground leak are carrying radioactive materials in their bodies, but it is too soon to say how much health risk this poses, Energy Department officials said on Thursday. The workers inhaled plutonium and americium, which if lodged in the body bombards internal organs with subatomic particles for the rest of the person’s lifetime. The dose calculation is a bit arcane because the dose in such cases will be delivered over many years.  Sensors in the salt mine detected a leak at about 11:30 p.m. on Feb. 14. At that hour, no one was in the mine, and automatic systems reduced the ventilation and ran the exhaust through high efficiency particulate filters, officials said, minimizing the flow of materials to the surface. The next morning, after officials realized that the surface was contaminated, they told the workers at the site to “shelter in place,” and all were scanned for external radioactive materials before they were sent home; no contamination was found. The mine has not been operating since then.
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