Health care providers must exhibit professionalism – DCE

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Health News of Monday, 17 February 2014

Source: GNA

The Asikuma-Odoben-Brakwa (AOB) District Chief Executive (DCE) Mr. Samuel Adom Botchway has called on health care providers to be professional in their work.

He said the sick need their care, compassion, empathy and above all their love to survive.

Mr. Botchway made the call in a speech delivered on his behalf by the Deputy Coordination Director of AOB Assembly at a forum, as part of celebrations marking the 22nd World Sick Day by Management and staff of Our Lady of Grace Hospital at Breman Asikuma.

He said health is the pivot upon which a mans whole personality and well-being depends and that, a healthy person is an asset to himself, his family and the society as a whole.

According to the DCE unhealthy person saps the enthusiasm for pursuit, saying that unwholesome feeling and sensations retard the peace of functional activity, economic development and spiritual upliftment.

Mr. Botchway said It is the sick and the weak that needs us most and as people, let us always extend a helping hand to the sick and weak as well as the aged for that matters most.

He said the doors of the Assembly are always open and would continue its quest to support health providers in the district to give off their best to the sick.

A message from the Pope, read by Reverend Father Oteng-Dumfeh of the Breman Asikuma Catholic Church, drew the attention to the fact that when people draw nearer with tender love to others in need of care they bring hope and smiles to the contradictions of the world.

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Health care providers must exhibit professionalism - DCE

Ghanas GMO debates: beyond the sticking points (3)

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Feature Article of Monday, 17 February 2014

Columnist: Agorsor, Yafetto, Otwe, Galyuon

Israel D. K. Agorsor, Levi Yafetto, Emmanuel P. Otwe and Isaac K. A. Galyuon This is the concluding part of the articles Ghanas GMO debates: beyond the sticking points (1) & (2)

6. Interfering in Nature As we indicated in the first part of this article, one of the moral arguments against GMOs is that the processes leading to them, that is, genetic engineering techniques, amount to gross interference in nature and the natural order. Here, we present scientific arguments that say that this may not be restricted to GMOs alone, as humankind has always interfered in nature, at times in ways unimaginable, all in an effort to make life better.

You may be surprised to hear that many of the food crops we eat today are not their original selves. They are products of years of conscious and systematic manipulation of nature, if you will call it that, representing a marked departure from what they were in the beginning of time. Humankind has always attempted to improve natural resources to meet the demands of a growing population in a changing climate. That is to say that conventional breeding itself relies on the transfer of genes, albeit via crosses. from one crop species to a related species in order to be able to develop new varieties.

Conventional plant breeding has its own problems. Unlike genetic engineering, conventional breeding in transferring a gene which conditions a specific trait also transfers a number of other genes on the same chromosome along with it. This means that the conventional breeder very often is not only transferring a specific trait to his elite cultivated variety (cultivar), but also other traits that may be undesirable. For example, two varieties of conventionally-bred potatoes, Lenape and Magnum Bonum, and conventionally-bred celery developed to be pest-resistant had to be withdrawn from the market after it was realized that the conventional breeding processes accidentally led to increased levels of naturally occurring toxins in them.

The foregoing explains why some scientists argue that the assumption that conventionally-bred crops are necessarily safer than GM crops is overly simplistic, especially when conventionally-bred crops are not subjected to the kind of pre-marketing safety analysis done for GM crops.

Then, we present another interference in nature: mutation breeding. Mutation breeding is a crop breeding technique where breeders subject seeds to doses of radiation and gene-altering chemicals in order to produce novel plant varieties. This technique has been in use since the dawn of the nuclear age in the 1950s, and has seen an escalated use in the last few years. The Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture programme of the United Nations reportedly received about 40 requests for radiation services from a number of countries across the world in 2013. Many of the multinational seed companies chided for promoting GMOs, like BASF and Monsanto, have all reportedly used this technique in developing new crop varieties, all without regulation.

In Ghana, the Biotechnology and Nuclear Agriculture Research Institute (BNARI) of the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission, and research programmes in some of the nations universities, the University of Cape Coast for example, have been experimenting mutation breeding techniques for some time now.

In a 2004 report, the US National Academy of Sciences remarked that placing GM crops under tight regulations, while approving products of mutation breeding without any regulation, cannot be justified by science. Mutagenesis, the technique underpinning mutation breeding, has the capacity to rearrange or delete hundreds of genes randomly. It makes use of tools such as gamma radiation, which give rise to mutations (i.e., changes in an organisms genetic make-up) that sometimes are beneficial or hazardous to the organism. If you have ever had an X-ray image of any part of your body taken, then you have been exposed to radiation. And it is precisely because of the possibility of this process introducing mutations into your genetic make-up you are advised against taking X-ray images very frequently.

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Ghanas GMO debates: beyond the sticking points (3)

The freedom implicit in all creation — Creating Money: Freedom, Wonder, Delight – Video

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The freedom implicit in all creation -- Creating Money: Freedom, Wonder, Delight
This is the first conversation in the Communion of Light morning conversation series: Creating Money: Freedom, Wonder, Delight. http://communionoflight.com/c...

By: CommunionOfLight

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The freedom implicit in all creation -- Creating Money: Freedom, Wonder, Delight - Video

Freedom, others have faced lawsuits before

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CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Over the past decade, Freedom Industries, its officers and associated companies have faced several lawsuits in Kanawha and Putnam counties, most of which were dismissed for various reasons.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Over the past decade, Freedom Industries, its officers and associated companies have faced several lawsuits in Kanawha and Putnam counties, most of which were dismissed for various reasons.

Freedom Industries now faces about 40 lawsuits after a chemical leaked from its storage tank into the Elk River and fouled the drinking water of 300,000 West Virginians last month. The company filed to reorganize under Chapter 11 bankruptcy a week after the spill.

On Dec. 31, 2013, four companies merged under the umbrella of Freedom Industries: Freedom Industries Inc., Etowah River Terminal LLC, Poca Blending LLC and Crete Technologies LLC.

Freedom markets and distributes chemicals that are mixed by Poca Blending in Nitro. Etowah River Terminal is the storage facility on the Elk that leaked the chemical. It has about a dozen tanks, each of which can hold tens of thousands of gallons of chemicals. It was formerly a Pennzoil facility.

Of the four companies merged in December, Freedom was the oldest. Carl L. Kennedy II, a longtime Charleston businessman, founded it Feb. 10, 1992. Its listed address at that time was 8 Capitol St.

In 2004, Kennedy and Kenneth C. Fox, directors of Eight Capitol Street, defaulted on $8,630 in workers compensation payments, according to documents in Kanawha Circuit Court.

The lawsuit to collect the money was later dropped in 2005 after Kennedy and Fox agreed to repay the money.

Kennedy is a longtime business associate of Dennis "Denny" Farrell, listed as president of Freedom Industries on the company's website. Kennedy is still listed as "incorporator" on Freedom on the West Virginia secretary of state's website.

In 2004, a lawsuit was filed against both Kennedy and Farrell by D-G Airways in Kanawha Circuit Court.

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Freedom, others have faced lawsuits before

WWII soldiers experience abroad fed freedom fight back home

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Breath of Freedom, a documentary airing Monday, reminds us that the world is sometimes a bizarre place, one in which a country can fight a war abroad as the champion of freedom and democracy, while enshrining their opposites in law and practice.

But there is something hopeful in the program, too. The two-hour television special is the story of black American veterans who experienced greater freedom while serving in Germany than theyd had in the U.S., and came back determined to change circumstances at home, playing significant roles in the modern civil-rights movement.

The story is told in film clips and interviews through the experiences of Americans and Germans, black, white and mixed race, including retired King County Superior Court Judge Charles Johnson, who served during the occupation.

Hosea Williams, a close associate of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s, was a sergeant in a unit that fought under Gen. George Patton. Williams earned a Purple Heart after being severely injured in a Nazi bombing raid, but he wasnt safe at home after the war.

He was still in uniform traveling home after the war when he drank water from a bus-station fountain reserved for whites. An angry crowd beat him so badly they thought he was dead and called a hearse. He was just barely alive, but had to be driven past white hospitals to a veterans hospital more than 100 miles away where he was hospitalized for a month.

Nothing about that makes sense, but it wasnt just a matter of a few people behaving badly, it was part of the systematic subjugation of black Americans rooted in laws those veterans would help change.

Johnson, who grew up in Arkansas, joined the Army in 1948 and served almost four years in a segregated unit in Germany. While he was there, he had a German girlfriend with whom he traveled all around the country. It opened a whole new world to him, he says in the documentary, but when he came home, he returned alone.

I asked him about that last week and he said, She wanted to come here, but I knew I couldnt live that kind of life here in the United States. Its something you just didnt let yourself think about because you knew it couldnt work here. Interracial marriage was banned in most states until the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court ruling in 1967.

The Germans hadnt suddenly given up the racist ideas that led to death camps, but the power equation was different. Johnson said Germans didnt always like seeing him and his friends dating German women, but they had to tolerate it.

Johnson came home with a mission, to get a law degree and get out of Arkansas. While he was finishing college after the war, he told a professor he wanted to attend law school and was looking for a place where hed be able to get a job. The professor had earned a Ph.D. from the University of Washington while working nights at the post office.

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WWII soldiers experience abroad fed freedom fight back home

Scientific racism's long history mandates caution, experts warn

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Racism as a social and scientific concept is reshaped and reborn periodically through the ages, and according to a Penn State anthropologist, both medical and scientific researchers need to be careful that the growth of genomics does not bring about another resurgence of scientific racism.

"What we are facing is a time when genomic knowledge widens and gene engineering will be possible and widespread," said Nina Jablonski, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. "We must constantly monitor how this information on human gene diversity is used and interpreted. Any belief system that seeks to separate people on the basis of genetic endowment or different physical or intellectual features is simply inadmissible in human society."

What worries Jablonski and the sociologists, psychologists and evolutionary biologists in her session at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, on February 14 in Chicago, are people who believe that they can use genetic traits to describe races and to develop race-specific interventions for each group. One particularly disturbing approach, although currently suggested as beneficial, is application of genetics to create special approaches to education. The idea that certain individuals and groups learn differently due to their genetic makeup, and so need specialized educational programs could be the first step in a slippery slope to recreating a new brand of "separate but equal."

Similar approaches in medicine that are based not on personal genetics but on racial generalizations can be just as incorrect and troubling, especially because human genetic admixture is so prevalent.

"Our species is defined by regular admixture of peoples and ideas over millennia," said Jablonski. "To come up with new reasons for segregating people is hideous."

Classification of humans began innocently enough with Carl Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who simply classified humans into races in the same way they classified dogs or cats -- by their physical characteristics. These were scientists classifying the world around them and realizing that the classifications were not immutable but had a great deal of diversity and overlap. However, in the last quarter of the 18th century, philosophers, especially Immanuel Kant, looked to classify people by behavior and culture as well as genetics. Kant suggested that there were four groups of people, three of which because they existed under conditions not conducive to great intellect or achievement were inferior. Only the European race was capable of self-improvement and highest level of civilization.

Kant's ideas, widely accepted during his lifetime, set up the idea of European superiority in the future. Coupled with the great rise and profitability of slavery at the time, his views were adopted and morphed to legitimize the slave trade.

In the late 19th century, after Darwin's ideas became accepted, many applied his principles to the cultural, political and social spheres, developing the concept of Social Darwinism. Darwin's nephew, Francis Galton, suggested that in parts of the world there were still "pure races" and that these needed to be preserved. This line of thought led to the eugenics movement and eugenic engineering ideas of the early 20th century. Included in this were the rise of European superiority and the trappings of eugenics and racial purity.

"The most odious of all was the rise of Nazism and biological justification of Nordic supremacy," said Jablonski. "Emphasis was placed on the need to maintain the purity of all races, but especially the Nordic race and to improve the races."

The reasoning given was that the quality of a race could be improved by preventing reproduction of those deemed physically or mentally undesirable either by sterilization or extermination.

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Scientific racism's long history mandates caution, experts warn