product:vitamin a

Bee Decline Could Cause Malnutrition In Developing Countries | ThinkProgress
▻http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/01/28/3616486/bees-matter-for-nutrition

http://d35brb9zkkbdsd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/AP898427129461.jpg

Many people in developing nations already face a range of challenges, including poverty, pollution, and climate change that’s helping make droughts longer and storms more intense. But according to a new study, residents of developing nations could also soon be struggling with something else: malnutrition fueled by the decline of pollinators around the world.

The study, published this month in the journal PLOS ONE, looked at dietary surveys from women and children in parts of Zambia, Uganda, Mozambique, and Bangladesh. The University of Vermont and Harvard University researchers calculated what percentage of five nutrients — vitamin A, zinc, iron, folate, and calcium — in the women and children’s diets came from foods that are heavily dependent on pollinators (crops such as cocoa and Brazil nuts, for example, rely on bees for pollination). The researchers found that, under a scenario in which all pollinators were removed, up to 56 percent of the people in the areas looked at would be at risk of nutritional deficiencies.

Those deficiencies can go far beyond simply not getting proper nutrition, the report notes: vitamin A deficiency causes 800,000 women and children to die every year, and has been found to roughly double the risk of death from measles, diarrhea, and malaria.

“The take-home is: pollinator declines can really matter to human health, with quite scary numbers for vitamin A deficiencies, for example, which can lead to blindness and increase death rates for some diseases, including malaria,” Taylor Ricketts, a UVM scientists who co-authored the study, said in a statement.

Because of nationwide shortages, Washington hospitals are rationing, hoarding, and bartering critical nutrients premature babies and other patients need to survive.

..At the time of this writing—some shortages come and go by the week—Atticus’s hospital is low on intravenous calcium, zinc, lipids (fat), protein, magnesium, multivitamins, and sodium phosphate; it’s completely out of copper, selenium, chromium, potassium phosphate, vitamin A, and potassium acetate. And so are many other hospitals and pharmacies in the country, leading to complications usually seen only in the developing world, if ever.

▻http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/children-are-dying/index.php

“These deficiencies and conditions don’t exist except in historical data or in Third World countries.”

Firestorm Erupts Over Transgenic Rice Study in Chinese Children - ScienceInsider
►http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/09/firestorm-erupts-over-transgenic.html?ref=em

The illustration is part of a media firestorm now engulfing a 4-year-old study in which Chinese schoolchildren were given golden rice, a genetically modified form of rice designed to boost vitamin A levels. The results of that study, published online early in August, drew little attention until the activist group Greenpeace China on 29 August claimed the trial shouldn’t have gone forward and called it a “scandal of international proportions.”