FINDINGS
Wednesday, March 29, 2006; Page A10
FDA: No Concerns on Benzene in Soft Drinks
No safety concerns have arisen from tests for the cancer-causing chemical benzene in soft drinks, the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday, but it did not disclose its findings. The FDA started testing soft drinks after a private study in November found small amounts of benzene in some.
In the vast majority of drinks sampled, benzene was not found or was present at levels below the federal limit for drinking water, it said.
"Although the results to date are preliminary, they do not suggest a safety concern," Robert E. Brackett, director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, wrote in a letter released Tuesday.
A "very, very few samples" had slightly elevated levels of benzene, said Laura Tarantino, the agency's director of food additive safety.
The letter was a pointed retort to an environmental group that is calling for benzene warnings on soft drinks.
The Environmental Working Group asked the FDA to warn the public about soft drinks containing two ingredients that can form benzene. The ingredients are ascorbic acid and benzoate preservatives, also known as vitamin C and sodium or potassium benzoate.
U.N. Agency Falls Short Of HIV Treatment Goals
The United Nations' attempt to put 3 million HIV-infected people around the world on antiretroviral drugs by last year fell far short of its goal, but it saved hundreds of thousands of lives nonetheless, the U.N. health agency said Tuesday.
The "3 by 5 program" -- 3 million people on antiretroviral drugs by the end of 2005 -- was launched in December 2003. The progress report issued by the World Health Organization said only 1.3 million people in poorer countries were being treated at the end of last year.
"Obviously, it is regrettable that the target of 3 million wasn't reached, and that does mean people have died and continue to die of what is a treatable disease," said Kevin De Cock, the AIDS director at WHO. But, he said, the number of people being treated at the end of 2005 was more than triple the number two years earlier, and the program helped lay the groundwork for the more ambitious goal of achieving nearly universal access to the medicine by 2010.
Some 3 million people die of complications of AIDS each year, and WHO said the program prevented 250,000 to 350,000 deaths in 2005.
British Scientists Gain Coveted Journal
A last-minute deal reached Tuesday ensures that a manuscript charting the birth of modern science, lost for more than 200 years, will be housed at Britain's Royal Society rather than falling into private hands.
Hailed as "science's missing link," the journal of Robert Hooke had been scheduled to go on sale at auction with a price tag in excess of $1.75 million. But just before the sale was to take place, auctioneers Bonhams said an anonymous private bidder had agreed to buy it and give it to the Royal Society, Britain's academy of leading scientists, which had said it could not afford to buy it.
The journal contains details of experiments Hooke conducted as curator at the Royal Society from 1662 and his correspondence as secretary from 1677. It was found in a cupboard at a private house in the southern English county of Hampshire.
The notes include Hooke's debate with Isaac Newton over planetary motion and gravity, and the lost record confirming the first observation of microbes by Anton van Leeuwenhoek.
-- From News Services
