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GLOBESITY, APEC, GLOBAL WARMING AND XENOTRANSPLANTATION - Full Podcast

Monday, September 10, 2007
Posted in Environment Global Warming Health PRISM NEWS PODCASTS Peak Oil | Tagged Environment, Global Warming, Health, PRISM NEWS PODCASTS, Peak Oil

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• APEC has come up the Sydney Declaration, but done very little else to deal with global warming except to put weasel words on a piece of paper.
• Globesity - a new book on how there needs to be a radical change in approach to our personal health, fitness, and society to deal with global warming and other environmental problems.
• Global warming - interview with Dr Gavin Kenny on his recent travels through Thailand, Viet Nam India, Nepal, Egypt, Italy, France and Switzerland where he interviewed farmers to find out how global warming is impacting on their lives.
• Xenotransplantation trials which involve putting pig cells into people’s pancreas to try and deal with diabetes are soon to begin in NZ. But the researchers ignore the risks of creating a viral pandemic and alternative new technologies to avoid these risks.

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Global Warming, Uranium and the APEC Sydney Declaration

Over the last few days the Asia Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) has been meeting to discuss many issues and among the most topical are global warming and nuclear power.

At the same time as APEC was meeting to discuss global warming Australia opened a new coal mine and agreed to sell uranium to Russia for nuclear power stations helping to free up Russian uranium to go into nuclear weapons. Meanwhile both Bush and Howard are promoting nuclear power for everyone, everyone that is except Iran who they want to bomb because they are developing nuclear power. Bush in a similar mind bendingly twisted moment of confusion also referred to APEC as OPEC.

I asked Cindy Baxter of Greenpeace New Zealand who was at the APEC conference in Sydney Australia her opinion on what has been happening with the Sydney Declaration particularly relating to global warming, forestry and energy targets.

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Globesity

When I first saw the advertisement for this new book by Phillip and Jackie Mills “Fighting Globesity - a practical guide to personal health and global sustainability.” I thought �yeah right’ probably just a cheap publicity stunt to piggy back on environmental concerns to sell more gym memberships to their gym fitness business “Les Mills“. Since it was free to attend a talk by Phillip about the book I reluctantly decided to attend and received a major shock. Here was a hard nosed multi-millionaire businessman who has won the award for New Zealand’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2004 talking like a born again greenie.

Phillip himself admitted that even a few years ago he would have regarded what he believes now as too far out. However, having since read widely on environmental issues the solutions he (and his wife) put forward in Globesity are nothing less than a totally radical re-envisioning of the total system change that needs to happen both through ones individual approach to fitness, nutrition and health and the economic system changes that need to happen in order to make our civilisation live within the environmental carrying capacity of our planet. While driven by concern about global warming the other key issues mentioned are depletion of oil, fresh water, soil erosion, toxic conventional agriculture and the threat from genetically engineered food, inactivity and rising obesity levels even while people are becoming more malnourished and the impact this has on personal health and our health system budget. He pointed out that junk food is not only unhealthy for the body it is unhealthy for the planet and that sustainability should start with your own body.

I�quickly decided I had to interview him for Prism Webcast News and what follows is a fascinating insight into one of our leading businessman’s thinking on the radical changes we need to make in order to help our civilisation survive beyond the 21^st century.

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Global Warming through Asia, the Middle East & Europe - A Personal Exploration by Dr Gavin Kenny & Family

Dr Gavin Kenny and family set off in early February to in their own words “To document and share the wisdom of farmers regarding climate change, focusing particularly on adaptation and the contribution of sustainable farming systems.” Their particular way of recording their travels and interviews was on video tape and they are currently in the process of editing this into a documentary film.

Dr Kenny has been a contributor to the IPCC since the mid 1990s. He was a lead author of the Agriculture chapter in the Second Assessment Report and has been a contributing author to the Australia/New Zealand chapters of the Third and Fourth Assessment Reports. For the last five years Gavin has been working with farmers, Regional Councils, and others within New Zealand.

They travelled through Thailand, Viet Nam India, Nepal, Egypt, Italy, France and Switzerland interviewing people to find out how global warming is impacting on their lives and in particular their farming activity. In this interview I ask him about what he found on his travels and some of the stories about how global warming is having an impact in the real world across diverse climatic regions.

Their blog from the trip can be found at: http://earthlimited.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html

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Xenotransplantation and its Risks and Adult Stem Cells as an Alternative

Here in NZ earlier in the year Living Cell Technologies received authorization from the New Zealand regulator MedSafe to advance its program to conduct a Phase I/IIa clinical trial of its DiabeCell� diabetes product in New Zealand for use in xenotransplantation. The trial is going to be conducted at a New Zealand hospital and will involve the injection of encapsulated pig cell islets into the abdomen of the diabetic patients. It should be soon that the actual trial would start as they said it would be carried out in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Having done some research about this topic I decided it would be a good idea to get an experts opinion on what exactly xenotransplantation is and the dangers it presents and what alternatives there are to it like adult stem cell therapy. See also Patient’s Own Stem Cells Mend Heart

I started off by asking�Dr Mae-Wan Ho�to explain in an average persons terms what does Xenotransplantation actually mean?

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