The Public Health Advocacy Institute has dropped a wet blanket over the high fructose corn syrup lobby. The lobby has claimed sugar is always sugar, no matter what, based on measured levels of fructose. To prove their point using propaganda they have started to pressure the government to allow corn syrup to be hidden with the label corn sugar.

While they play games with the names, actual fructose measurements are in and it does not look good for high fructose corn syrup. It turns out that it has…high fructose.

A report on October 27th from the PHAI is thus titled: Discovery of Elevated Fructose Levels in Popular Soft Drinks Raises Important Legal Questions for Regulators and Consumers

Laboratory testing revealed that bottled full-calorie Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Sprite had fructose estimates of 64-65%, well in excess of the upper-level of 55% fructose generally recognized as safe by the Food and Drug Administration

These levels not only put them in excess of safe levels, defined by others, but also at odds with their own claims to safety.

…the representation that HFCS is “compositionally equivalent” to table sugar could amount to false and misleading advertising requiring action by the Federal Trade Commission and State Attorneys General.

Fructose was isolated and extracted from corn in America during 1970s after President Nixon’s economic advisers demanded that payments for corn surplus should be put to some kind of use. Leaders of the country at that time balked at the idea of paying farmers to grow something and then do nothing with it, so they set about to manufacture demand. The very recent origin of high fructose corn syrup was thus driven by an artificial (US Patent 3,689,362 by Yoshiyuki Takasaki in 1972) urgency related to farm politics, as I have discussed before.

I could also point out the political importance of high fructose corn syrup comes from an even older issue of national concern. The reason corn syrup has been made cheaper to use in processed foods than sugar is due to import quotas that restrict America’s supply of sugar.

Before artificial corn sweeteners were made in America the US Marines were called into action to invade the state of Hawaii in 1894 and overthrow the Queen. This was to ensure access to sugar. American plantation owners feared they would lose their land to the Queen if she maintained power. They formed a “Committee of Safety to overthrow the Kingdom” and found a sympathetic ear in the US Secretary of State, James Blaine. He had suggested in 1881 that the US would be better off invading Cuba, another rich source of sugar, than to let it sit in the hands of a European power.

The sugar of Hawaii is not enough to meet demand today. This makes me wonder if Blaine had realized the safety risk present today from high fructose corn syrup in America, would he have pressed even more to annex Cuba? Alas, Cuba became independent and America continues to try and find ways to dispose of its corn surplus.

The BBC reveals that staff were told to ‘keep quiet’ after accidental Camelford poisoning.

Staff from a company involved in the UK’s worst mass water poisoning were told to keep quiet about what had happened, an inquest has been told.

Twenty tonnes of aluminium sulphate were accidentally added to the water supply in Camelford, Cornwall, in 1988.

A former manager at the South West Water Authority (SWWA) said senior managers did not want the public knowing what had gone wrong that July.

Three weeks passed before the public were alerted. The story gives examples of people who died from the poison.

The BBC brings good news about the cattle plague (Rinderpest) virus — it has officially been wiped out. The virus has been blamed for widespread famine.

The World Health Organization (WHO) so far has declared only two diseases officially eradicated.

The first was smallpox caused by variola virus (VARV), which was in fact eradicated by application of cowpox. The second was cowpox or rinderpest (caused by the rinderpest virus — RPV). Smallpox had caused epidemics throughout human history with estimated death tolls in the 300-500 million range (as high as 10% of all deaths in the 20th century).

Although rinderpest was used to cure smallpox, on its own it continued causing mass death of cattle herds throughout Europe and Africa for centuries.

More than a third of the population of Ethiopia died in the 19th century, for example, after Italians introduced infected cattle from India.

Vaccination was hindered due to conflict, lack of authority and perhaps even a lack of will from Europeans to solve for destabilization of Africa (preferring wealth accumulation to be controlled from Europe).

The BBC article points out the method used to test and eliminate the virus had to be administered locally, which meant operation in uncontrolled environmental conditions and by non-professionals.

The test, which was developed with the support of the UK’s Department for International Development, was designed to be used by local people in the field and to give reliable results within minutes. It proved highly effective and the technology has been rolled out across Africa. This was particularly important in the later stages of the programme when pockets of the virus remained in war-torn areas of southern Sudan and Somalia. Dr Mike Baron of the IAH told BBC News that it had been too dangerous for outsiders to enter those areas. Experts, he said, would train locals – so called ‘barefoot vets’ – to recognise the disease and administer vaccines. They would work with nomadic tribesmen in the regions and vaccinate herds “on the move”.

This is hugely important to understand for the security community because it highlights how distributed and centralized systems of information can interoperate; two systems of thinking, if you will, one deliberative and controlled (follow the steps handed to you) while the other is exploratory and creative (design the steps for others to follow).

The cost of infection was extremely high as 70% of cattle infected would die. This surely gave the incentive for tests and vaccines to be taken seriously. It also probably is what enabled the broad collaboration across systems despite national, religious and ethic diversity.

…to begin with [in the 1960s] there was little to no co-ordination. Individual countries and groups of countries would attempt to vaccinate cattle, suppressing the disease for a while. But it would then re-appear. Progress was only made [in the 1990s] once large unified projects were established to tackle the disease.

A dedicated global campaign, combined with local administration, was necessary for eradication.

Conflict in Ethiopia and Somalia in the 1980s was the main obstacle to the vaccination campaigns but there were other problems too. UC Davis has an excellent write-up about issues of trust, competition and complex economics that were overcome by an Ethiopian scientist in America armed only with an elegantly simple and stable test and vaccine.

The new vaccine proved amazingly powerful in protecting cattle, even when they were injected with 1,000 times a fatal dose of rinderpest. And it met all of Yilma’s criteria for simplicity and heat stability. Requiring no syringes or needles, the vaccine could easily be scratched onto the neck or abdomen of the animal, producing sufficient immune response to ward off the rinderpest virus. Later, the herder could just peel the scab from an animal’s immunization site, grind it up in a saline solution and, from a single calf, have 250,000 additional doses for future vaccinations.

What happens next? Here is an interesting side-note in the NYT:

Still to be decided is how much virus to keep frozen in various countries’ laboratories, along with tissue from infected animals and stocks of vaccine, which is made from live virus. Virologists like to have samples handy for research, but public health experts, fearing laboratory accidents or acts of terrorism, usually press to destroy as much as possible. The smallpox virus is officially supposed to exist only in two lab freezers, one in Atlanta and one in Moscow.

This brings me back to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Rinderpest has been associated with wars and invasions; arguably introduced as a form of biological warfare. The first Italian invasion of 1888 destroyed the capital and foundation of social relations in the Horn of Africa by killing 90% of livestock. Rinderpest also was followed by smallpox but the complete collapse of food sources intensified local disputes and withered resistance. Anyone who wonders if Italy could have had this role only needs to look to the second Italian invasion in 1935, which involved heavy use of mustard gas, tear gas and other agents as well as bombing of field hospitals.

Was Rinderpest unintentionally carried or sent as a strategic weapon? Rinderpest is still listed as “biological warfare” agent so keeping it in Atlanta or Moscow seems like an incredibly high risk practice.