JRC develops new testing methods for contaminated sports drinks from Taiwan
2011-08-01
(Press-News.org) Brussels, 29 July 2011 - The European Commission's Joint Research Centre has developed three new methods to detect an illegal clouding agent which can be found in sports drinks imported from Taiwan.
In late May, the Taiwanese authorities informed the European Commission that significant amounts of phthalates were illegally added to certain categories of sports drinks. These chemicals are believed to affect reproductive performance and fertility, and have been linked to developmental problems with children.
Under a request from the Commission's Directorate-General for Health and Consumers, the JRC developed and validated three new testing methods that allow the substance to be rapidly and accurately detected. The methods are freely available on the JRC website and are intended to facilitate the work of laboratories in the EU and world-wide involved in the testing of suspected products. Testing laboratories are invited to submit their feedback regarding the performance of the methods to the JRC, which will analyse the findings and improve the methods, if necessary.
The Taiwanese Food and Drug Administration has published the names of 879 products of more than 300 producers that contained high amounts of phthalates. More than 200 products from 34 producers were exported to 22 countries. These include some EU Member States, in particular Germany and the UK, where some products were withdrawn from the market.
What are phthalates?
Normally, producers of sports drinks, jelly and fruit pulps use a palm-oil based product to obtain a cloudy appearance, but in the Taiwanese incident, this was largely replaced by the two cheaper substances: bis-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (commonly abbreviated DEHP), and - in one case - di-iso-nonyl phthalate (DINP). DEHP and DINP are commonly used as plasticizers in many plastic products. These substances, however, are prohibited in the production of food, and their use in plastic toys and childcare products is restricted in the EU.
INFORMATION:
References
The three analytical methods on the JRC website
http://irmm.jrc.ec.europa.eu/activities/phthalates
List of products that contained high amounts of phthalates, published by the Taiwanese Food and Drug Administration
http://www.fda.gov.tw/eng/news_list.aspx?time=1&classifysn=453
END
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2011-08-01
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration should gather the information needed to develop a new regulatory framework to replace the 35-year-old 510(k) clearance process for medical devices, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine. The 510(k) process lacks the legal basis to be a reliable premarket screen of the safety and effectiveness of moderate-risk Class II devices and cannot be transformed into one, concluded the committee that wrote the report.
FDA's finite resources would be better invested in developing a new framework that uses both premarket ...
2011-08-01
TORONTO, Ont., July 29, 2011—More than eight in 10 Ontarians say they would want to be taken directly to a trauma centre if they were seriously injured, even if another hospital were closer, a new poll has found.
The poll, conducted for researchers at St. Michael's Hospital, also found that 40 per cent of respondents believe they can get access to a trauma centre within an hour of calling 911.
Neither event is guaranteed, said Dr. Avery Nathens, the hospital's trauma director.
Nearly two-thirds (62 per cent) of seriously injured adults in Ontario are taken to their ...
2011-08-01
When people recognize voices, part of what helps make voice recognition accurate is noticing how people pronounce words differently. But individuals with dyslexia don't experience this familiar language advantage, say researchers.
The likely reason: "phonological impairment."
Tyler Perrachione with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explains, "Even though all people who speak a language use the same words, they say those words just a little bit differently from one another--what is called 'phonetics' in linguistics."
Phonetics is concerned with the physical ...
2011-08-01
The first screening by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists of the American ancestors of soybeans for tolerance to ozone and other stresses had an eye-opening result: The world superstars of stress resistance hailed from a little village in far northern Sweden, called Fiskeby.
The screeners, geneticist Tommy Carter and plant physiologist Kent Burkey, are with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in Raleigh, NC. Carter works in the ARS Soybean and Nitrogen Fixation Research Unit, and Burkey is in the agency's Plant Science Research Unit. ARS is USDA's principal ...
2011-08-01
Electronic memory devices, which store information, are increasingly expected to provide not only greater storage density, but also faster access to information. As storage density increases, however, power consumption and unwanted heat generation also increase, and the fidelity of accessing the memory is frequently diminished. Various platforms exist to overcome these hurdles, according to a team led by University of California at Los Angeles researchers, which they describe in detail in the AIP's Applied Physics Letters. A spin-transfer-torque device, for example, relies ...
2011-08-01
By engineering alternating layers of nanometer and micrometer particles, a team of engineers from the University of Minnesota has improved the efficiency of a type of solar cell by as much as 26 percent. These cells, known as dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC), are made of titanium dioxide (TiO2), a photosensitive material that is less expensive than the more traditional silicon solar cells, which are rapidly approaching the theoretical limit of their efficiency. Current DSSC designs, however, are only about 10 percent efficient. One reason for this low efficiency is that ...
2011-08-01
The distinctive roar of a Harley's engine is loud, but studies have revealed the biggest source of noise for motorcyclists is actually generated by air whooshing over the riders' helmets. Even at legal speeds, the sound can exceed safe levels. Now, scientists have identified a key source of the rushing din. Researchers from the University of Bath and Bath Spa University placed motorcycles helmets atop mannequin heads, mounted them in a wind tunnel, and turned on the fans. By placing microphones at different locations around the helmet and at the mannequin's ear, the researchers ...
2011-08-01
Plastics are cheap, flexible, and relatively easy to manufacture, but they can also be more heat sensitive than other materials such as metals. The same goes for plastic (or organic) electronics, which offer the promise of foldable displays or thin, inexpensive devices, but react to temperature swings differently than traditional silicon-based electronics. So, researchers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University decided to explore this temperature-dependent behavior more closely. They took a non-volatile organic memory transistor, made from the plastic pentacene and a layer ...
2011-08-01
The world at large runs on lithium ion batteries. New research at Rice University shows that tiny worlds may soon do the same.
The Rice lab of Professor Pulickel Ajayan has packed an entire lithium ion energy storage device into a single nanowire, as reported this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters. The researchers believe their creation is as small as such devices can possibly get, and could be valuable as a rechargeable power source for new generations of nanoelectronics.
In their paper, researchers described testing two versions of their ...
2011-08-01
CINCINNATI—New University of Cincinnati (UC) research on HIV testing at local emergency departments shows that hospitals miss opportunities to diagnose patients who do not know they are infected with HIV, even when a regular testing program is in place.
The study is part of a special supplement to the July issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The supplement includes a series of studies on HIV testing in the nation's emergency departments, finding that while a growing number of emergency departments (EDs) ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] JRC develops new testing methods for contaminated sports drinks from Taiwan
