Chinese Boy with Ability to See in the Dark Stuns Medics

Image: YouTube screen shot

A young Chinese boy who was born with beaming blue eyes has stunned medics with his ability to see in pitch black darkness.

Nong Yousui from Dahua, China has eyes that reflect neon green when light is shined on them. Doctors have studied Nong's amazing eyesight since his dad took him to hospital concerned over his bright blue eyes. "They told me he would grow out of it and that his eyes would stop glowing and turn black like most Chinese people but they never did", his Dad said.

Nong enjoys playing outside with his schoolmates but experiences discomfort when in bright sunlight, however can see completely clearly in pure darkness. To test his abilities, a Chinese journalist prepared a set of questionnaires which he was able to finish while sitting in a pitch black room. The tests show Nong can read and write perfectly without any light and can see as clearly as most people do during the day.

According to the World Record Academy (the leading international organization which certify world records), Nong has even set the world record for the first human who can see in the dark. In animals, night vision is made possible by the existence of a thin layer of cells, called the tapetum lucidum. And like a Siamese cat, Nong's sky-blue eyes flash neon green when illuminated by a flashlight.

Nong's night vision has sparked interest around the world by vision scientists, evolutionary biologists, and genetic engineers. And this is good news for science as we may eventually be able to use genetic technologies to deliberately create such a condition ourselves.

A new and growing generation of extraordinary and gifted children are springing up across our planet.


Source: whydontyoutrythis.com

Asian Honey: Banned in Europe, Is Flooding U.S. Grocery Shelves

Image: Raw For Beauty

Asian Honey, banned in Europe, is flooding U.S. grocery shelves. The FDA has the laws needed to keep adulterated honey off store shelves but does little, honey industry says.

A third or more of all the honey consumed in the U.S. is likely to have been smuggled in from China and may be tainted with illegal antibiotics and heavy metals. A Food Safety News investigation has documented that millions of pounds of honey banned as unsafe in dozens of countries are being imported and sold here in record quantities.

And the flow of Chinese honey continues despite assurances from the Food and Drug Administration and other federal officials that the hundreds of millions of pounds reaching store shelves were authentic and safe following the widespread arrests and convictions of major smugglers over the last two years.

Experts interviewed by Food Safety News say some of the largest and most long-established U.S. honey packers are knowingly buying mislabeled, transshipped or possibly altered honey so they can sell it cheaper than those companies who demand safety, quality and rigorously inspected honey.

“It’s no secret that the honey smuggling is being driven by money, the desire to save a couple of pennies a pound,” said Richard Adee, who is the Washington Legislative Chairman of the American Honey Producers Association.

“These big packers are still using imported honey of uncertain safety that they know is illegal because they know their chances of getting caught are slim,” Adee said.

Food safety investigators from the European Union barred all shipments of honey from India because of the presence of lead and illegal animal antibiotics.  Further, they found an even larger amount of honey apparently had been concocted without the help of bees, made from artificial sweeteners and then extensively filtered to remove any proof of contaminants or adulteration or indications of precisely where the honey actually originated.

An examination of international and government shipping tallies, customs documents and interviews with some of North America’s top honey importers and brokers documented the rampant honey laundering and that a record amount of the Chinese honey was being purchased by major U.S. packers.
Food Safety News contacted Suebee Co-Op, the nation’s oldest and largest honey packer and seller, for a response to these allegations and to learn where it gets its honey. The co-op did not respond to repeated calls and emails for comment. Calls and emails to other major honey sellers also were unreturned.

Read the full article here

Source: Raw For Beauty 

Chicken to be Exported to China, Processed, then Imported Back to the US

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Catching up to this news, which dropped quietly just before the holiday weekend: In a first, the US Department of Agriculture has given permission for chicken products processed in the People’s Republic of China to be sold in the United States without labeling that would indicate where the chicken products came from.

The news was broken by Politico, whose writers obtained USDA documents before the agency released them, and then followed up by the New York Times, with some no-holds-barred analysis by Bloomberg Businessweek.

If you’ve been reading for a while, you’ll know that food safety in China is well below US standards. So it may be a surprise to hear that birds grown and slaughtered outside that country, but cooked and made into products in it, would be acceptable for sale here. Especially since the plants that USDA has approved for sales into the US market will not have USDA inspectors on site.

Here is the USDA notice, in the form of an audit issued by the Food Safety and Inspection Service.

This development fascinates me; it touches so many issues that have been percolating through food production and food safety.

First, there’s the decade of maneuvering between the US and China over meat exports in both directions. China, along with a number of other Asian nations, blocked US beef imports in 2003 after a Washington state cow tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy,  “mad cow” disease. Then in 2004, avian influenza flared in Asia; the US blocked imports of Chinese poultry, and in 2009 China brought a restraint-of-trade action against the US in front of the World Trade Organization. It won in 2010 — at about the same time that it accused the US of dumping chicken parts at below-market prices and slapped American poultry with tariffs of more than 100 percent.

The audit process that approved the Chinese plants began after the WTO decision; the USDA inspected, asked for corrective actions, inspected again, and finally approved the deal on Aug. 30. The audit allows China to sell back to the US only poultry that was raised and slaughtered in the US, or (as the audit documents say) a country “that FSIS determined to have a poultry slaughter inspection system equivalent to the US system.” But the magazine World Poultry notes: “Experts suggest that this could be the first step towards allowing China to export its own domestic chickens to the US.”

Second, there are the most recent moves around ensuring that imported food is safe. Most of the food consumed in the US is overseen not by USDA but by the Food and Drug Administration, which has been struggling for years with guaranteeing the safety of imports. Reports by the Government Accountability Office, the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Pew Charitable Trusts and Center for Science in the Public Interest all found that the FDA could not keep up with the task; estimating that its inspectors were able to lay hands on no more than 2 percent of imported foods. The massive Food Safety Modernization Act tried to revamp the system for policing imports, which make up about 15 percent of the US diet; last July the FDA proposed regulations under that new law which said the best way forward was for companies handling imports to police their foreign suppliers themselves. The FDA rule is not final, but the USDA China audit seems to be following a similar pattern.

Third, there’s the already-contentious topic, “country of origin labeling,” known as COOL for short. The USDA has been implementing COOL for the past few years, requiring that retailers label meats, fish and shellfish, fruits and vegetables, and some nuts if they originated outside the US. Much of the US meat industry has been fighting COOL in court; the most recent hearing (covered by Food Safety News) was Aug. 27. Yet according to the USDA, the Chinese processing allowed under the new audit elides COOL requirements, because — no matter what is done in processing — the chicken meat originated in the US.

Last, there’s how neatly this spotlights the global nature of food production, especially the way that inexpensive transport has changed how food is raised and made. Just to reiterate what’s going to be allowed: chickens raised in the US (or “equivalent” countries), and slaughtered in the country where they were grown, are going to be shipped across the globe to be turned into processed products, and then shipped back to be sold. Developing-world labor, and containerized shipping (so well explained by Rose George in the new book Ninety Percent of Everything), are both so inexpensive that it is cheaper to send a chicken nugget around the world to be ground, formed and breaded than to do all that in the place where the chicken was raised.

Source:

www.wired.com

Source: worldtruth.tv