Health News:100,s of students exposed to TB ♦ Highest rate of poultry food poisoning ♦ Smoking when pregnant increases cancer risk for daughters ♦ plus More

100,s of students exposed to TB at 2 Elk Grove Schools. School District officials announced that about 100 Franklin Elementary and 300 Franklin High School students will undergo skin tests for TB exposure the week of March 16. Continue Reading

Ireland has highest rate of poultry food poisoning bacteria in Europe  A report this week by Ella McSweeney,The Consumer Show has revealed a bacteria that can cause lethal food poisoning in humans is present on more than 98% of Irish chicken. The bacteria, campylobacter, is a potentially lethal food poisoning bacteria and 98% of Irish chickens tested positive for it when they were assessed Continue Reading

Male partner's healthier lifestyle may help infertile obese female conceive  Male partners of infertile obese females may increase the odds of conceiving a child by improving their own weight and dietary habits, Continue Reading

Exposure to endocrine disruptors during pregnancy affects the brain two generations later  Prenatal exposure to low doses of the environmental contaminants polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, change the developing brain in an area involved in metabolism, Continue Reading

Smoking when pregnant increases cancer risk for daughters  Women who smoke when pregnant are putting their daughters at a greater risk of developing ovarian and breast cancer later in life, a new study has determined. Findings also demonstrated that mothers who reported smoking most days while pregnant had daughters who had an earlier age of first menstruation, or menarche Continue Reading

Italy Leading the Way to find Safer Alternative for BPA in Food Packaging

Finding alternatives and safer to replace endocrine disruptors, potentially hazardous substances and used in many areas including the food packaging: Endocrine disruptors are substances such as bisphenol A, (BPA),phthalates and parabens, technologically useful in the production of plastic but equally worrying for their ability to disrupt the endocrine system, putting consumers at risk.

European researchers are working to identify alternatives to the three groups of substances that are safer for the protection of human health and equally valid for industrial uses. There is already a list of potentially substitute, but often lack of data and studies on their possible toxicity.

Precisely for this reason, the first step of the project will be  to evaluate the actual endocrine disrupting activity of candidates for substitution.

The goal is to  identify three to five for each of the three groups of substances under consideration, and to assess the possible impact on product safety in the specific sectors considered (materials in contact with foodstuffs, cosmetics, plastics used in medical devices). The next step will be the evaluation of actual products and prototypes that will be compared with similar products currently in use.

source italy www.ilfattoalimentare.it/