Samsung Has a Dirty Little Secret

Photo courtesy: Care2

Do you have a television? Radio? Cell phone? Digital camera?

Chances are pretty good that at least one of these appliances is made by Samsung. If you don't own a Samsung appliance now, you've probably owned one in the past; or, will in the future.

With taglines like "Turn on Tomorrow", Samsung has gone from a little electronics company to the conglomerate that's seen everywhere. Although Samsung's products might be on the cutting edge of technology, most people are unaware of its crude and unfair attitudes toward worker health.

Family members and friends of these workers at Samsung in Korea believe that they have discovered a cancer cluster among young workers exposed to toxic chemicals.

USA Today reported that the company is desperately trying to reassure the public that its products are safe after a January lawsuit involving six people. All six developed leukemia and lymphoma they claim was caused by exposure to radiation and benzene, a carcinogen, in Samsung chip factories.

Last month was the 3rd anniversary of the death of Yu-mi Hwang, a Samsung semiconductor factory worker, who died from leukemia at age 22, but despite public concerns, Samsung has stonewalled.

The company says that Yu-mi's rare episode of cancer, the miscarriage in the worker that came next and the leukemia in the worker that came after that, all from the same work station, and all the other leukemia sufferers, 10 deaths total- are all still unrelated to conditions inside the Samsung factory, but the families aren't buying this line- and neither should you.

Despite its public commitment to eliminate PVC and BFRs from new models of all its products by 2010, Samsung has only offered up two phones which don't contain these toxic substances (Blue Earth GT-S7550 and Reclaim M560).

Yu-mi’s family, co-workers, friends and other concerned people have formed SHARPS (Supporters for the Health And Rights of People in the Semiconductor Industry) to demand justice for the dead and safer conditions for the workers who make our electronic gadgets.

Care2 (an online community of caring individuals who use the internet to help others) has joined with SHARPS, The Center for Environmental Health, and the Electronics Take Back Coalition to demand that Samsung:

1) accept responsibility for the hazards of semiconductor manufacturing;
2) compensate those harmed; and
3) prevent future suffering and mistreatment of workers by making Samsung a toxics-free model workplace where workers are treated with dignity and respect.

Join us in asking Samsung to come clean regarding the chemical hazards of working in their factories. Click here to go to the page which contains contact info.

The following video was made by the workers and families of Samsung employees.

Workers in Samsung from Workers in Samsung on Vimeo.

Note: No one is sure what actually takes place on Samsung's semiconductor manufacturing lines (because Samsung doesn't allow photographs in its semiconductor unit); but, it is known that too many workers are dying.

Via Care2

Call For Ban on Aspartame

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

An Overdue Ban On A Dangerous Sweetener

CHICAGO, IL, August 15, 2009 --/WORLD-WIRE/-- The artificial sweetener aspartame has been shown to cause cancer in lab rats, and should be banned for human consumption, warns the Cancer Prevention Coalition.

Under the explicit provisions of the 1958 Delaney Law, which requires an automatic ban on carcinogenic food additives, the Coalition is calling on Dr. Margaret Hamburg, the newly appointed Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and public health advocate, to promptly ban the continued use of aspartame.

First discovered in 1965 by the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle, aspartame is an artificial sweetener marketed by Ajinomoto Sweeteners under trademark names including Nutrasweet, Equal and Canderel.

Aspartame is the second most widely used artificial sweetener in the world. It is found in more than 6,000 products including carbonated and powdered soft drinks, hot chocolate, chewing gum, candy, desserts, yogurt, and tabletop sweeteners, as well as some pharmaceutical products like vitamins and sugar-free cough drops. More than 200 million people worldwide consume it.

The sweetener has been used for more than 30 years, having first been approved by the FDA in 1974.

After saccharin, aspartame is the commonest sweetener, consumed by over 200 million people worldwide, and represents about 60% of the artificial sweetener market.

Aspartame provides food, soft drinks, candy and chewing gum manufacturers with substantial cost savings compared to sugar, which is 200 times less sweet. Aspartame is a sweetener without calories, which helps people control their weight.

Studies of the carcinogenicity of aspartame performed by producers of the sweetener have been negative.

But Cancer Prevention Coalition Chairman Samuel S. Epstein, MD warns that the use of aspartame in foods, vitamins and pharmaceuticals is based on false safety information and political maneuvering going back more than 30 years.

In January 1976, then Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Alexander M. Schmidt, MD testified before Congress that Hazleton Laboratories, under contract to Searle, had been charged with falsifying toxicological data on aspartame.

The FDA convened a Public Board of Inquiry to review concerns about the sweetener’s carcinogenic effects in experimental animals. In 1980, the Board concluded that aspartame could “contribute to the development brain tumors.”

Dr. Epstein points out that FDA then recommended that, pending confirmation of these findings, the sweetener should no longer be used.

However, then Searle Chairman Donald Rumsfeld, later Secretary of Defense in the Bush Administration, vowed to "call in his markers," to get the sweetener approved.

On January 21, 1981, the day after Ronald Reagan's inauguration, Searle re-applied to the FDA for approval to use aspartame as a food sweetener, and Reagan's new FDA commissioner, Arthur Hayes Hull, Jr., appointed a 5-person Scientific Commission to review the Board of Inquiry's decision.

It soon became clear that the panel would uphold the ban by a 3-2 decision, but Hull then installed a sixth member on the commission, and the vote became deadlocked. He then personally broke the tie in aspartame's favor.

Hull later left the FDA under allegations of impropriety, then took a position with Burston-Marsteller, the chief public relations firm for Searle and for Monsanto, which purchased Searle in 1985.

Dr. Epstein is not alone among doctors in his concern about the sweetener.

In a July 25, 2009 letter to the new FDA commissioner, H.J. Roberts, M.D., a Florida internist and diabetes expert, drew her attention to the dangerous health effects of aspartame in foods and other products.

"My own data base encompasses over 1400 individuals who have suffered major disorders that could be directly ascribed to the use of these products, including gum," wrote Dr. Roberts, who authored the books "Aspartame Disease: An Ignored Epidemic," and "Aspartame Disease: an FDA Approved Epidemic."

There have been other calls to ban the sweetener, including one in the UK earlier this year, when Member of Parliament Roger Williams cited "compelling and reliable evidence for this carcinogenic substance to be banned from the UK food and drinks market altogether."

Dr. Epstein says the evidence on the carcinogenicity of aspartame was strongly reinforced in a unique feeding test conducted on rats in an Italian laboratory.

In 2005, based on highly sensitive and life-long feeding tests in groups of about 200 rats and at doses less than usual human dietary levels, the prestigious Italian Ramazzini Foundation confirmed that aspartame is unequivocally carcinogenic. A high incidence of cancers was induced in multiple organs of the lab rats fed the sweetener, including lymph glands, brain and kidney.

Dr. Epstein says rats were fed aspartame beginning in the early fetal stage of life, resulting in their lifelong exposure to aspartame.

"This resulted in a still higher increase in the incidence of cancers at sites, including those previously reported," he says.

The Ramazzini study was reported in the November 2005 issue of "Environmental Health Perspectives," the peer-reviewed journal of the United States' National nstitute of Environmental Health Sciences.

"Our study has shown that aspartame is a multipotential carcinogenic compound whose carcinogenic effects are also evident at a daily dose of 20 milligrams per kilogram of body weight (mg/kg), notably less than the current acceptable daily intake for humans," the Ramazzini authors wrote.

Currently, the acceptable daily intake for humans is set at 50 mg/kg in the United States and 40 mg/kg in Europe.

In April 2007, the results of this study were presented by Ramazzini scientists at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York.

Not surprisingly, says Dr. Epstein, these findings have been sharply challenged by the sweetener industry, major sweetener users, such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé and Monsanto, and also by the industry-oriented scientific journal "Critical Reviews in Toxicology."

In view of the new scientific evidence of aspartame's carcinogenicity and the political gamesmanship that led to its original approval by the FDA, Dr. Epstein is urging the new FDA Commissioner, Dr. Hamburg, to impose an immediate ban on the use of aspartame for human consumption.

CONTACT:

Samuel S. Epstein, MD
Professor emeritus Environmental & Occupational Medicine
University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health
Chairman, Cancer Prevention Coalition
Chicago, Illinois

epstein@uic.edu
www.preventcancer.com
312-996-2297