These words did not come from President Obama, but rather were the conclusion of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and 12 leading civilian experts recruited to examine what the White House-run National Nanotechnology Initiative had accomplished since President Clinton created it a decade ago.

I dutifully reported that incestuous praise today on AOL News. It was only appropriate to give the federal nano gurus equal time, since last month I wrote eight stories on what many public health experts saw as dangerous shortcomings in the government’s programs to identify and regulate the safety of these wondrous atomic concoctions.

Here is a link to what I wrote today and another to the series of nano stories AOL posted last month.

The 71-page report by the scientific advisors said that unless the U.S. doubles the billions it’s spending on nano, China, South Korea and the European Union will wipe out America’s commercial edge, among other things.

Needless to say, the federal nano gang at the White House, NNI and elsewhere in the government is not happy with my reporting. They expressed their displeasure at length today in an Op-ed that AOL eagerly ran.

The White House advisors also shared their annoyance by issuing “talking points” to nano folks – in and out of the government – on how to respond to what I wrote.

Sensitive little group isn’t it?

Prof. Andrew Maynard

Personally, I think the world would be a bit better off if these policy makers focused more on determining whether nanoparticles are harmful or not before they urge everyone to fill the marketplace with them.

And, if all this isn’t enough to bore the hell out of everyone, here are more exciting views on this sparring match from one of the nation’s leading nano-safety proponents – Prof. Andrew Maynard.

We went though this last year with contaminated peanuts from the Georgia and Texas plants of Peanut Corporation of America.

PCA recalled the tainted goobers, but the ripple effect spread for weeks as hundreds of manufacturers pulled thousands of products made with the pathogen-containing nuts off store shelves throughout North American.

It’s not peanuts this time, but rather a flavoring agent called hydrolyzed vegetable protein. As unappetizing as the name sounds, it is used as a flavoring agent in thousands of gravies, sauces, soups, salad dressings and snacks.

The source of the tainted concoction is Basic Food Flavors, Inc., an international supplier of flavor and seasoning agents.   The FDA conducted an investigation of the company’s Las Vegas, Nev., production plant after a customer who purchased the flavoring had it analyzed and found it contained Salmonella.

As the FDA did with the peanuts and does with many other recalled foods, the agency has to wait until the downstream producers of these consumer products realize that the food they’re selling may also be contaminated.

The federal food detectives say they don’t have enough investigators or a structure that permits them to identify and chase all the ingredients in the processed food that’s manufactured and sold in this country.

For more details on this recall see the story I wrote on AOLnews.com.

For the appetizer: San Antonio Bay oysters polluted with Noroviruses. For the main course: grilled beef infected with E. coli from contaminated tenderizing needles; chicken with Campylobacter or imported ham with Listeria monocytogenes. Then there’s a side dish of stuffing loaded with salmonella-contaminated hazelnuts. And for those watching their weight: a popular nutritional drink fouled with the food poison Bacillus cereus.

Even the family pet wasn’t forgotten.  Its pigs ears and beef hooves were laced with salmonella.

All those item were recalled in December by the federal government or were the subjects of warnings by food safety experts. And 2010 isn’t shaping up to set a safer table, according to some of the country’s leading food safety experts.

That’s not the message from the government’s three big players in the war against dangerous food — the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control. All predict the food supply will be safer because of new safeguards being pushed by the Obama administration.

Less than two months after taking office, the president announced the creation of the Food Safety Working Group and promised more resources to safeguard the nation’s food supply.

“Many of the laws and regulations governing food safety in America have not been updated since they were written in the time of Teddy Roosevelt,” Obama said at that time.

“There are certain things that only a government can do. And one of those things is ensuring that the foods we eat …are safe and don’t cause us harm,” said Obama.

The USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service and the FDA are trying to improve product traceability, both forward and back, in the production chain, with the goal of being able to respond quicker to outbreaks, said Caleb Weaver, USDA’s press secretary.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack wants his agency to “further reduce the incidence of food-borne pathogens and the number of food-borne-related deaths to zero,” Weaver added.

However, some managers and field investigators in the same agencies have views much closer to those of food safety activists. They predict that the very powerful food industry lobbyists, especially for the meat producers, will go down swinging and screaming to thwart meaningful food safety reform.

If you want to see what the food safety experts are worried about, here is a link to the rest of my story on AOL News’ Sphere.com

Les Skramstad and Gayla Benefiled at a memorial for Libby asbestos victims. (c) Photo A. Schneider

According to the Associated Press, Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus quietly inserted language in a package of last-minute amendments that will grant the asbestos victims of the tiny town in the Northwest corner of the state access to Medicare benefits.

Hundreds of people – miners, their families and other townsfolk who had no connection to the now-closed W.R. Grace vermiculite mine – have died from asbestos-related disease. An estimated 2,000 or more of the 10,000 people who live in the county surrounding Libby were diagnosed with signs of the disease.

I couldn’t reach any press people in Baucus’ office for details but the Montana democrat long fought for the people of Libby.

It would be great of there was another amendment slipped in that required the government to warn the millions of home and business owners across the country that the vermiculite insulation in their attics and walls is most likely made from the same asbestos-containing material from the Libby mine.

That would be a great holiday gift that could save lots of lives.

About 400 physicians gathered in Lansing to hear top doctors and senior insurance officials lay out a pioneering plan to detect and treat cancers.

Depending on what studies you read, somewhere between 30 percent and 80 percent of all cancers are caused by exposure to cancer-causing agents in the workplace or the environment. This is what this unique program strives to halt.

In a marriage more typically found in hell, Blue Cross-Blue Shield and Michigan’s largest cancer center – Karmanos Cancer Institute – linked up to attack cancers caused by exposure to arsenic, asbestos and radon.

The broker of this unlikely wedding was Dr. Michael Harbut, a leading specialist in occupational and environmental cancers who is co-Director of the National Center for Vermiculite/Asbestos-Related Cancers at Karmanos.

He told me about the plan a few months ago at a great Chinese restaurant in Seattle’s International District.  His enthusiasm was so infectious that the cook peered out the door to watch.

“It’s so simple” he gushed. “We know arsenic and asbestos kills. If we can find the cancer early and treat it, lives will be saved.

“If we can discover that the patients are being exposed to arsenic in their drinking water and give them clean water, lives will be saved.”

“There is nothing magic about this,” the doctor said, “it’s just medicine being practiced properly without political games.”

The plan says that over the next 18-months, the Blues and Karmanos will recruit and train about 3,000 MDs. They will pay them $500 to take the training and pay them again to test symptom-free patients to determine whether they have or may get cancer.

The docs will conduct relatively inexpensive urine tests to see whether their patients have been exposed to arsenic. If so, the insurance company will pay for special filters to remove arsenic from drinking water. If that’s not practical, bottled water will be supplied.

Yes, the Blues will lay out a lot of money in this program. But it will be just a tiny friction of what the medical care would cost if the cancers fully developed.

So both money and lives are saved. What an idea.

For a more detailed version of this story see what I wrote on Sphere.com

What makes the fate of this group of patients even more puzzling is that they are victims of trauma and thought to be protected by federal law that demands that people with this level of life-threatening injuries must receive equal treatment regardless of their ability to pay.

Every year, uninsured trauma victims – aged 18 to 30 – die at a rate 89 percent greater than victims with equally severe injuries, but who have health insurance, said Dr. Heather Rosen, a research fellow at Children’s Hospital Boston and her colleagues from three other hospitals.

Photo Virginia Department of Health

In the study, published today in the Archives of Surgery, the researchers examined who survived and who didn’t out of 2.7 million patients brought to about 900 U.S. trauma centers between 2002 and 2006.

The researchers analyzed patients suffering from penetrating trauma, such as knife-and-gun-club injuries, or blunt trauma from vehicle crashes and falls. Earlier studies found that there were 18,000 extra deaths a year among the uninsured trauma victims.

Rosen and the other researchers chose to examine those younger patients, 18 to 30, because they had fewer other diseases – comorbidity – to muddy the evaluation of the cause of death.

There is “pervasive evidence of disparities in screening, hospital admission, treatment and outcome due to insurance status,” the study concluded.

It is common knowledge backed by numerous peer-reviewed studies that the absence of insurance has led to preventable deaths of patients with cancer, diabetes, respiratory and other chronic diseases.

But with victims of trauma and other acute medical events, where instant medical intervention or the withholding of it means survival or death, this isn’t suppose to happen because it’s illegal.

The relationship between trauma deaths and lack of health insurance has also been studied at length, but Rosen said this study is different because they used a national trauma database and included about 690,000 patients. She says this “makes it one of the largest studies of its kind.”

In 1986, in response to widespread dumping of uninsured, critically injured or ill patients onto the street or on lesser hospitals, Congress passed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.

The law demanded that hospitals and ambulance services provide care to anyone who needed emergency treatment regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay.

“The main point of the study is that uninsured patients in the United States have a higher risk of dying after trauma even though there is universal access to emergency care,” Rosen told me in an email interview Sunday.

Overall, uninsured patients had the highest rate of death following admission for trauma, even after controlling for age, sex, race and severity and mechanism of injury, the  surgeon said.

The study also discussed that non-white patients had a higher chance of death than white patients with the same injuries. That older had higher death rates than young, and that penetrating injuries were more lethal than blunt trauma.

Rosen and her colleagues also concluded that even when everything else was equal, “uninsured patients received significantly fewer radiographic studies and were less likely to be admitted compared with insured patients with similar diagnoses.”

Trauma is well studied and the mechanism of death among those gravely injured is well known, as are the specific steps that must be taken to keep the lethal dominoes from falling.

Dr. R Adam Cowley, acknowledged by most as the father of trauma medicine, told me years ago, right after he opened the nation’s first trauma center in Baltimore, that teams trying to stall “the cascade of death” that accompanies almost all serious trauma don’t have time to wait while hospital bean-counters and insurance companies debate over who’s going to pay to save the patient’s life.

He sermonized on the “Golden Hour’’ that exists between the injury and the receiving of definitive trauma care and often said “who’s paying the bill is the last thing we have time to worry about.”

Cowley told all who would listen and hundreds who wouldn’t that “If you are critically injured – be it a car wreck, gunshots or falls – and you want to survive, you have, at the most, 60 minutes to be in the hands of people with the right skills, the right equipment and the right motivation to save you ­– a trauma center.”

The model for a trauma center that Cowley established 40 years ago has been honed and refined across the country.

For level I trauma centers  – the top of the four categories of programs ­– there is a collection of highly trained specialists in the hospital or immediately available, including nurses, emergency physicians, surgeons of all specialties, anesthesiologists, radiologists, infectious disease experts, intensivists, technicians and social workers.

These teams fight life-and-death battles one after another and often develop a camaraderie usually found only on a battlefield. I have spent hundreds of days reporting from trauma centers across the country and I’m convinced that the survival of the patient comes way before hospital payment policies.

The cost of trauma care and the intensive-care unit follow up can easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single patient. Trauma centers in Los Angeles, Miami and other urban areas have been brought to the edge of bankruptcy, so the pressure to cut costs is enormous.

I interviewed members of five trauma teams this weekend who had read the study and to a person, they all said “not in my shop.”

“They will tell you they don’t even know the funding status of most of their patients until after they’ve been hospitalized for some time. They take and treat all comers equally as required by their ethics and the law, and certainly don’t actively discriminate on the basis of insurance status,” said Dr. Harold Sherman, who retired as a trauma surgeon after 15 years in Pittsburgh.

He said that all the surgeon’s claims are probably true, and then added, “Post-discharge care certainly does vary with insurance status.  It is a constant irritant to trauma surgeons and does lead to disparities.”

Some that I spoke with this weekend recalled representatives from the hospital billing departments sometimes hovering at the fringes of the bloody ballet to save a life.

“They would never be foolish enough to tell a trauma surgeon to not order this or that test, or cancel a scan or expensive lab work because they found no insurance card in the patient’s wallet,” said a trauma social worker from Washington, DC, who declined to allowed her name to be used because she wasn’t authorized to speak to reporters.

“What surgeon, ER doc or nurse would risk their license and violate federal law to keep the billing office happy?” the social worker added.

On the other coast, Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center says it’s the only level one trauma center serving Washington, Idaho, Montana and Alaska.

Dr. Gregory Jurkovich, Harborview’s chief of trauma said, “We have not seen this disparity (described in Rosen’s report) in the Pacific Northwest.

“We find no difference between any strata of insurance status with regards to care, types of testing, amount or number of procedures,” Jurkovick said Friday. “However, there is decreased access to rehabilitation and chronic care services in the underinsured.”

He says that each of the possibilities Rosen and her colleagues raise for the difference in mortality “will need to be more carefully examined.”

Rosen cautions that the definitive cause for the higher death rate for uninsured remains to be determined. Still, the hard number ­– the nearly 90 percent jump in mortality rates for uninsured accident victims ­– speaks loudly on its own.

“Although the lack of insurance may not be the only explanation,” she says, “the accidental costs of being uninsured in the United States today may be too high to continue to overlook.”

For another version of this story here is a link to AOL’s sphere.com

The 50,000-member American Public Health Association adopted a resolution at its annual meeting this week calling on Congress to pass legislation banning the manufacture, sale, export, or import of asbestos-containing products including products in which asbestos is a contaminant.

Asbestos, a known carcinogen, annually claims the lives of more than 10,000 Americans.

“With this new policy, APHA is joining the World Federation of Public Health Associations and other international organizations calling for a global ban on asbestos mining, and manufacturing, and the dangerous practice of exporting asbestos containing products,” said Dr. Celeste Monforton, chair of the organization’s Occupational Health and Safety section.

“As the World Health Organization noted in 2006, the most efficient way to eliminate asbestos related diseases is to stop using all types of asbestos.”

Asbestos was banned in the U.S. briefly in 1989, after the Environmental Protection Agency conducted a ten-year study, spent millions in research and accumulated 100,000 pages of justification. The agency announced that it would phase out and ban virtually all products containing asbestos

But the fledgling ban lasted less than two years. The well-funded Canadian Asbestos industry challenged the ban. The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court acknowledged that “asbestos is a potential carcinogen at all levels of exposure,” but nevertheless threw out the life-saving legislation over technical issues.

In 2007, after six years of effort, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray muscled a new asbestos ban into existence.

The original language of the precisely crafted legislation would have addressed almost all commercial sources of asbestos. However, between Murray signing off on a solid and important bill and the time it was passed unanimously by the Senate, the asbestos industry, primary the automotive and sand and gravel gangs, had Republicans gut it to almost total uselessness.

Almost 50 industrialized nations have banned the lethal fibers. The U.S. and Canada are the most notable exceptions.  Canada still mines and exports asbestos and too many U.S. lawmakers buckle to the power of industry lobbyists.

Yet like Murray, many continue the fight.

“APHA set a precedent with strong language aimed at preventing asbestos exposure to eliminate deadly diseases.  We can’t let history repeat itself – it is time to ban asbestos and fund educational and research programs,” says Linda Reinstein, Executive Director of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization.

“APHA renews our optimism that a federal asbestos ban is eminent,” added the head of the asbestos victim’s group.

No, really. Its official state rock is serpentine which usually contains asbestos, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Late last night, by unanimous vote, the city council of Manhattan Beach passed a resolution asking the state to find a different, non-lethal hunk of rock to memorialize.

Micro-image by EPA

In 1965, serpentine was designated as the state rock of California in order to promote the then-lucrative asbestos mining industry.  The last U.S. asbestos mines – in California and Vermont – were closed in 2002, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Manhattan Beach Mayor Portia Cohen thanked the council for its vote and added, “It is unthinkable to have serpentine as the State Rock of California when more than 7,000 people in our state alone have died from asbestos since 2007.”

The beach-front community is home to the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, a national asbestos education and victim’s rights group. ADAO launched a “Drop the Rock” campaign urges statewide action to remove serpentine as the official rock.

The Manhattan Beach resolution represents the first official request to the California legislature to remove the rock.

Today, asbestos still kills,

Thousands of homes, schools and businesses still have asbestos-wrapped pipes, boilers and furnaces. Millions more have asbestos-contaminated vermiculite insulation in their walls and attics.

And as unbelievable as is sounds, thousands of asbestos-containing products – from toys to building supplies and automotive parts – enter the U.S. marketplace every year.

The lethality of asbestos has been painfully documented for years yet, Congress still lacks the will to legislate an effective ban on the deadly fibers as 40 other industrialized countries have done.

The one hazard that cannot be legislated away is naturally occurring asbestos, outcroppings of which the USGS has mapped throughout the country.

California is plagued by the problem.

The asbestos contained in the serpentine rock can be released when the rock is broken by soil disturbing activities such as mining, construction, and other land grading activities.  Hundreds of new homes, schools and businesses have been built on this fiber-laced land.

“California has the dubious distinction of being the state with the highest recorded number of asbestos-related deaths and the death toll will continue until the United States Congress passes legislation banning asbestos,” said Linda Reinstein, ADAO’s executive director and co-founder.