In the face of budget cuts authorized by President Bush, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) is preparing for significant staff reductions in 2008. The new proposal calls for reducing the OIG’s budget by more than $5 million, or roughly 10 percent of their total allotment for 2006. Critics charge that the OIG is being attacked because it has issued several reports during the Bush Administration’s tenure that have been highly critical of the EPA’s lax regulatory enforcement and its tendency to bow to political and industry pressure.

Internal memos discussing the new budget and its ramifications were released by the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). According to a memo sent last month by acting Inspector General Bill Roderick and obtained by PEER, the reductions may cost the OIG more than 30 full-time jobs, since 90 percent of the OIG budget is earmarked for personnel. The budget cuts may also force the OIG to close certain facilities as well. The OIG is also looking at early-retirement buyouts for some employees, along with a hiring freeze that will hamstring their ability to replace significant losses by attrition.
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As the number of pet deaths continues to grow, the New York State Department of Agriculture announced today that their testing of Menu Foods’ tainted cat food revealed the presence of aminopterin, an ingredient used in the manufacture of rat poison. At this point, company and state officials have no leads as to how the substance got into the contaminated pet food.

Earlier this week, a Wisconsin pet owner filed a class-action suit against Menu Foods. The suit was filed by Progressive Law Group, who claims that they are receiving around 200 queries per day about the case. Class actions have also been filed in Chicago and Seattle, and a number of class actions have been filed in Canada as well. The suits are claiming that Menu Foods acted negligently and dangerously by its lack of sufficient quality-assurance measures and its failure to adequately test the safety of these products.
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A damning new report commissioned by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development has found the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) grossly overestimated the ability of their levee systems to protect New Orleans in the face of strong storms. A wide range of miscalculations and oversights by the Corps, says the report, led to the failure of the levees during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In addition, the report concludes that the system today remains insufficient to protect the city against major storm surges.

The cadre of scientists and engineers, known as “Team Louisiana,” was led by Ivor van Heerden, director of the LSU Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes. The highly anticipated, nearly 500-page report, offers a slew of data and evidence related to the failure of several federal levee systems, including those on the east and west banks of the Industrial Canal, east and west banks of the London Avenue Canal, the east bank of the 17th Street Canal, the north bank of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW), and the west bank of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO).
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Another day, another scandal at the Department of Justice. The Washington Post reported today that political appointees at the Justice Department who were sympathetic to President Bush interfered with the government’s landmark case against the tobacco industry. In effect, the DOJ officials have been accused of intentionally weakening their own case in order to spare cigarette makers from excessive penalties.

Sharon Y. Eubanks, the government’s lead prosecutor in the case, told the Post that officials in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ office aggressively influenced the way she handled the case during the trial’s final stages in 2005. Eubanks said that she was ordered to drop her request that industry executives be removed from their jobs as part of the penalty against them. She also claimed that the DOJ officials forced their own witnesses to change their testimonies at the 11th hour and that they forced her to read closing arguments, word for word, that they’d composed on her behalf.
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Facing widespread criticism over potential conflicts of interest, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced plans today to add stricter guidelines to its process of choosing advisory committee members.

“FDA is committed to making the advisory committee process more rigorous and transparent so that the public has confidence in the integrity of the recommendations made by its advisory committees,” said Dr. Randall Lutter, the FDA’s acting deputy commissioner for policy. “Today’s draft guidance document should provide more consistency in the consideration of who is eligible to participate in advisory committee meetings and would simplify the process.”
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A New York Times investigative report in today’s editions has further exposed a dangerous and growing concern within the medical community: physicians with significant financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Research has shown that these financial connections can unduly influence a range of important medical decisions made by doctors, including the crafting of general clinical practice guidelines and the use of specific prescription tendencies for their own individual patients.

The genesis of the Times’ report was a review of records kept by the state of Minnesota, which was the first state to pass a law requiring disclosure of all financial transactions between drug companies and physicians. (Vermont, Maine, West Virginia, California, and Washington, D.C., have similar statutes on the books.)
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In a fascinating new study, dermatologists in Seattle have discovered that it may be possible for people to become addicted to ultraviolet (UV) light and that the addiction may be a “substance-related disorder” similar in nature to drug and alcohol addiction. The results of their study have been published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.

“Numerous studies have shown that increased knowledge of the dangers of overexposure to UV light often fails to change tanning behavior and attitudes, especially among high-risk age groups such as adolescents and young adults,” explained Dr. Robin Hornung, the study’s lead author. “We also know from previous experiments that UV light causes endorphin release, similar to the euphoric sensation associated with intense exercise commonly referred to as ‘runner’s high’ or other pleasure-seeking behavior. Our study set out to find whether certain individuals, particularly those who classify themselves as frequent tanners, exhibit addictive behaviors toward tanning.”
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The Wall Street establishment earned a significant legal victory this week when a U.S. appeals court denied class-action status to former Enron investors attempting to bring suit against banking entities involved in the energy behemoth’s collapse. The ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which overturned a Houston federal district court decision, comes only weeks before the trial was set to begin.

Plaintiffs in the class-action case were seeking roughly $40 billion in damages from several investment banks, including Barclays, Credit Suisse First Boston, and Merrill Lynch. (Other banks, including Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and CIBC, have been part of previous shareholder settlements that amounted to $7.3 billion.) The ruling means that any suit in the case must be brought only by individual investors, which drastically improves the prognosis for the defendants. Plaintiff attorneys are considering bumping the case to the Supreme Court.
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Researchers at the University of Leeds in England have determined that a certain class of drugs used to treat high blood pressure may in fact increase the risk factor for heart attacks and lead to an increased need for cardiac pacemakers.

These medications, known as calcium channel blockers (CCBs), work to reduce the force of heart contractions, widen arteries, and limit electrical activity in the heart. However, by blocking calcium channels, the drugs may lead to other significant health problems.
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Canadian pet-food producer Menu Foods is recalling more than 60 million cans and pouches of “wet” dog and cat food after the food was linked to kidney failure in a number of pets. In the wake of 10 recent pet fatalities, frantic dog and cat owners are scrambling to determine whether their pets are at risk.

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the recall includes all “cuts and gravy” style dog and cat food that was manufactured at Menu Foods’ Emporia, Kansas, facility between December 3, 2006, and March 6, 2007 and extends to more than 80 private-label and store brands including Iams, Nutro, Science Diet, Eukanuba, Mighty Dog, Foodtown, Food Lion, Publix, Winn Dixie, and Western Family. (The complete list of affected products can be found at http://www.menufoods.com/recall.)
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