Should the food industry resign from the health department too?

Furore over links between Assistant Minister for Health Fiona Nash’s office and industry continues today with revelations that her former chief of staff is connected to the alcohol, as well as the food industry. Alastair Furnival resigned last Friday over his role in shutting down a website about the health star rating food labelling system and it’s now been revealed that he played a key role in cancelling the funding of the Alcohol and other Drugs Council of Australia. Furnival is co-owner of a lobbying firm that has represented major food companies opposed to the new front-of-pack labelling system. According to Fairfax, he and his wife also co-own a company, which, in turn, owns another that lobbied for the alcohol industry in 2012. Such conflicts of interest place question marks over an individual’s capacity to judge a situation, perform a duty or make a decision in a fair and impartial manner. But what if a public institution, such as the Department of Health itself, has conflicted interests? Furnival’s conflict of interest is worrying and should be thoroughly scrutinised. But the influence of the food and alcohol industries at the institutional-level precedes Furnival and will continue despite his resignation.Rock Ethics Institute at the Pennsylvania State University and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University

Muscle function in a patient with brody's disease

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Metabolomics-Based Screening of Inborn Errors of Metabolism: Enhancing Clinical Application with a Robust Computational Pipeline

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Animals in Capital: A Marxist Perspective on the Use of Other Animals in Capitalist Commodity Production

PURPOSE: Pheochromocytomas and paragangliomas (PGL) are neuroendocrine tumors of sympathetic and parasympathetic paraganglia. This study investigated the relationships between genotype-specific differences in mitochondrial function and catecholamine content in PGL tumors. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN: Respiratory chain enzyme assays and (1)H-nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy at 500 MHz were conducted on homogenates of 35 sporadic PGLs and 59 PGLs from patients with hereditary mutations in succinate dehydrogenase subunits B and D (SDHB, SDHD), succinate dehydrogenase assembly factor 2, von Hippel-Lindau (VHL), rearranged during transfection (RET), neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), and myc-associated factor X. RESULTS: In SDHx-related PGLs, a significant decrease in complex II activity (P < 0.0001) and a significant increase in complex I, III, and IV enzyme activities were observed when compared to sporadic, RET, and NF1 tumors. Also, a significant increase in citrate synthase (P < 0.0001) enzyme activity was observed in SDHx-related PGLs when compared to sporadic-, VHL-, RET-, and NF1-related tumors. An increase in succinate accumulation (P < 0.001) and decrease in ATP/ADP/AMP accumulation (P < 0.001) was observed when compared to sporadic PGLs and PGLs of other genotypes. Positive correlations (P < 0.01) were observed between respiratory chain complex II activity and total catecholamine content and ATP/ADP/AMP and total catecholamine contents in tumor tissues. CONCLUSIONS: This study for the first time establishes a relationship between determinants of energy metabolism, like activity of respiratory chain enzyme complex II, ATP/ADP/AMP content, and catecholamine content in PGL tumors. Also, this study for the first time successfully uses NMR spectroscopy to detect catecholamines in PGL tumors and provides ex vivo evidence for the accumulation of succinate in PGL tumors with an SDHx mutation