UK beekeepers and scientists tackle sticky problem of honey fraud

Research Associate and Business Development Manager, Steven Daniels (L) and Research Associate, Raghavan Chinnambedu Murugesan speak in a laboratory in Aston University in Birmingham, central England on June 17, 2024. (AFP)
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Updated 05 August 2024
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UK beekeepers and scientists tackle sticky problem of honey fraud

HIGHBRIDGE, ENGLAND: Lynne Ingram cuts a peaceful figure as she tends to a row of humming beehives in a leafy corner of Somerset, southwest England.
But the master beekeeper, who has been keeping hives for more than 40 years, has found herself in a fight against a tricky and evolving foe — honey fraudsters.
The practice of adulterating honey is well known, and historically adulterants such as ash and potato flour have been used.
Now, advancements in technology and science have made it much easier, with “bespoke, designer or bioengineered” syrups used as diluting agents capable of fooling authenticity tests, Ingram said.
She founded the UK Honey Authenticity Network (HAN UK) in 2021 to raise awareness about natural honey and warn of the threat posed by fraud.
“One of the impacts we’re seeing all over the world is beekeepers going out of business,” she said.
Adulterated honey can be sold to retailers for a price several times lower than genuine producers can afford.
As well as producing their own honey, many larger-scale beekeepers have crop pollination contracts with farmers, delivering thousands of colonies to growers across the country.
If they go out of business due to unfair competition, this vital natural method of pollinating crops is reduced and food production suffers.
The British Beekeepers Association, which represents more than 25,000 producers and where Ingram is a honey ambassador, wants the risk of fraud to be recognized to protect the industry and consumers.
“I’d like to see an acknowledgement that there is actually an issue here,” she said.

Labelling for transparency
In May, the European Union updated its honey regulations to ensure clearer product labelling and a “honey traceability system” to increase transparency.
On the labelling for blended honeys, for example, all countries of origin are now required to appear near a product’s name, where previously it was only mandatory to state whether blending had occurred.
Labelling in the UK, which has now left the EU, is not as stringent and Ingram believes consumers are “being misled” by vague packaging.
Behind the EU action is an apparent increase in adulterated honey arriving in the 27-nation bloc.
The substandard adulterates can have adverse effects on consumers’ health, such as raising the risk of diabetes, obesity, and liver or kidney damage.
Between 2021 and 2022, 46 percent of the honey tested as it entered the EU was flagged as potentially fraudulent, up from 14 percent in the 2015-17 period.
Of the suspicious consignments, 74 percent were of Chinese origin.
Honey imported from the UK had a 100-percent suspicion rate.
The EU said this honey was probably produced in third countries and blended again in the UK before being sent to the bloc.
The UK is the second largest importer of honey in terms of volume in the whole of Europe. China is its top supplier.
Not all of the UK’s imported honey leaves the country, however. Considerable quantities stay on the domestic market.
“We think there’s an awful lot of it on the shelves,” said Ingram, adding that adulterated honey was “widely available” in big supermarkets.

Detecting fraud 
Behind the closed blinds of a research laboratory at Aston University in Birmingham, central England, researchers fighting honey fraud are harnessing cutting-edge technology.
Aston scientists and beekeepers, including Ingram, are using light to reveal the contents of honey samples at the molecular level.
The technique — known as Fluorescence Excitation-Emission Spectroscopy (FLE) — involves firing lasers into samples.
The light frequencies re-emitted are then collated into a three-dimensional image — or “molecular fingerprint” — of the honey tested.
Alex Rozhin, the project lead and a reader in nanotechnology, said the test “can trace different molecules through the spectrum and confirm which type of biochemicals are present.”
In the darkened lab, the light from different honeys is clearly visible.
The first gives off a vivid green and the second a cooler blue, indicating distinct chemical compositions.
Using FLE, Rozhin says his team “can immediately trace a concentration of fraud inside samples” with “different spectral bands corresponding to syrup (or) to natural honey.”
Rozhin said FLE is more accurate than existing tests and can provide results far quicker, at a greatly reduced cost and without the need for highly trained personnel.
One of the Aston team’s aims is to create a version of FLE that can be used by honey producers or even consumers with scaled-down equipment or eventually just a smartphone.
Rolling the test out like this would also accelerate the creation of a honey database which, through machine learning, could be used as a catalogue of biometric signatures.
“If we get a new sample and it’s been tampered with and it’s different from how the database is built up, we’ll know there’s something obscure,” said Steven Daniels, an Aston research associate specializing in machine learning.
Ingram said the test could close international gaps in testing methods by establishing a unified standard, but the government needed to monitor the sector too.
“We really need to get to grips with this,” she said.


Don’t expect human life expectancy to grow much more, researcher says

Updated 08 October 2024
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Don’t expect human life expectancy to grow much more, researcher says

  • Women continue to live longer than men and life expectancy improvements are still occurring — but at a slowing pace, the researchers found
  • The researchers focused on eight of the places in the world where people live the longest — Australia, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain and Switzerland

NEW YORK: Humanity is hitting the upper limit of life expectancy, according to a new study.
Advances in medical technology and genetic research — not to mention larger numbers of people making it to age 100 — are not translating into marked jumps in lifespan overall, according to researchers who found shrinking longevity increases in countries with the longest-living populations.
“We have to recognize there’s a limit” and perhaps reassess assumptions about when people should retire and how much money they’ll need to live out their lives, said S. Jay Olshansky, a University of Illinois-Chicago researcher who was lead author of the study published Monday by the journal Nature Aging.
Mark Hayward, a University of Texas researcher not involved in the study, called it “a valuable addition to the mortality literature.”
“We are reaching a plateau” in life expectancy, he agreed. It’s always possible some breakthrough could push survival to greater heights, “but we don’t have that now,” Hayward said.
What is life expectancy?
Life expectancy is an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a given year might expect to live, assuming death rates at that time hold constant. It is one of the world’s most important health measures, but it is also imperfect: It is a snapshot estimate that cannot account for deadly pandemics, miracle cures or other unforeseen developments that might kill or save millions of people.
In the new research, Olshansky and his research partners tracked life expectancy estimates for the years 1990 to 2019, drawn from a database administered by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. The researchers focused on eight of the places in the world where people live the longest — Australia, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain and Switzerland.
The US doesn’t even rank in the top 40. But is also was included “because we live here” and because of past, bold estimates that life expectancy in the US might surge dramatically in this century, Olshansky said.
Who lives the longest?
Women continue to live longer than men and life expectancy improvements are still occurring — but at a slowing pace, the researchers found. In 1990, the average amount of improvement was about 2 1/2 years per decade. In the 2010s, it was 1 1/2 years — and almost zero in the US
The US is more problematic because it is harder hit by a range of issues that kill people even before they hit old age, including drug overdoses, shootings, obesity and inequities that make it hard for some people to get sufficient medical care.
But in one calculation, the researchers estimated what would happen in all nine places if all deaths before age 50 were eliminated. The increase at best was still only 1 1/2 years, Olshansky said.
Eileen Crimmins, a University of Southern California gerontology expert, said in an email that she agrees with the study’s findings. She added: “For me personally, the most important issue is the dismal and declining relative position of the United States.”
Why life expectancy may not be able to rise forever
The study suggests that there’s a limit to how long most people live, and we’ve about hit it, Olshansky said.
“We’re squeezing less and less life out of these life-extending technologies. And the reason is, aging gets in the way,” he said.
It may seem common to hear of a person living to 100 — former US President Jimmy Carter hit that milestone last week. In 2019, a little over 2 percent of Americans made it to 100, compared with about 5 percent in Japan and 9 percent in Hong Kong, Olshansky said.
It’s likely that the ranks of centenarians will grow in the decades ahead, experts say, but that’s because of population growth. The percentage of people hitting 100 will remain limited, likely with fewer than 15 percent of women and 5 percent of men making it that long in most countries, Olshansky said.
 

 


Nobel Prize in medicine honors two Americans for discovery of microRNA

Updated 07 October 2024
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Nobel Prize in medicine honors two Americans for discovery of microRNA

  • The Nobel Assembly said Monday that their discovery is “proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function”

STOCKHOLM: The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded Monday to Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA, a fundamental principle governing how gene activity is regulated.
The Nobel Assembly said that their discovery is “proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.”
Ambros performed the research that led to his prize at Harvard University. He is currently a professor of natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Ruvkun’s research was performed at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, where he’s a professor of genetics, said Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General of the Nobel Committee.
Perlmann said he spoke to Ruvkun by phone shortly before the announcement.
“It took a long time before he came to the phone and sounded very tired, but he quite rapidly, was quite excited and happy, when he understood what, it was all about,” Perlmann said.
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 that were critical in slowing the pandemic.
The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.
The announcement launched this year’s Nobel prizes award season.
Nobel announcements continue with the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Oct. 14.
The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.


Sardinia’s sheep farmers battle bluetongue as climate warms

Updated 07 October 2024
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Sardinia’s sheep farmers battle bluetongue as climate warms

  • Some 20,000 sheep have died so far this year on the island, which is home to nearly half Italy’s flock and plays an important role in the production of famed Italian cheeses such as Pecorino

ARBUS: The sheep huddle together, bleeding from the nose, aborting lambs or suffocating on saliva as they succumb to bluetongue, a virus sweeping through flocks on the Italian island of Sardinia.
Some 20,000 sheep have died so far this year on the island, which is home to nearly half Italy’s flock and plays an important role in the production of famed Italian cheeses such as Pecorino.
It is another blow for farmers in a region already battered by a drought aggravated by man-made climate change — which experts say is also fueling the spread of bluetongue and longer outbreaks.
“The virus hit about two and a half months earlier than usual,” 39-year-old farmer Michela Dessi told AFP as she scanned her flock for panting or limping sheep in her fields in Arbus in western Sardinia.
Bluetongue does not present any risks to humans but in animals it causes swollen heads, high fevers, mouth ulcers, difficulty swallowing and breathing, and can turn an infected animal’s tongue blue.
It is transmitted between animals by biting midges.
While cattle, goats and deer can get it too, sheep are the most severely affected, according to the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH).
Infected and pregnant ewes abort or their lambs are born deformed, and survivors can lose their wool.
Sunken sides are a sign the ewes are carrying dead fetuses. The sick animals struggle to expel them.
The infection rate this year on Dessi’s farm is about 60 percent, and some 30 percent of her sheep have aborted.
Around 50 of her 650 sheep have died — and in a way she said was “horrible to watch.”
With high fevers, “they refuse food and water and some suffocate or drown in their own saliva,” she said, adding that it is illegal to euthanize them.
Nearly 3,000 outbreaks have been recorded so far this year in Sardinia, compared to 371 last year — and the end is not yet in sight.
Bluetongue used to peak in Sardinia in August but has done so as late as November in recent years, according to the region’s veterinary research institute (IZS).
“Climatic conditions heavily influence midge populations,” the animal health division at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome told AFP.
They affect “their biting behavior and the speed of development of the virus, with climate change likely driving the virus’s expansion... and contributing to larger outbreaks.”
Cases have been reported this year in other European countries, from neighboring France to Portugal, Spain, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Bluetongue has been present in Sardinia since 2000 but Italy’s farming lobby Coldiretti says authorities are too slow each year to vaccinate the island’s flocks.
The costs of failing to rein it in are high.
A University of Bologna study last year found the 2017 outbreak, which killed 34,500 sheep, cost an estimated 30 million euros ($33 million).
That included damages suffered by farms — deaths, reduced milk yields, infertility, abortions — costs to animal health authorities and subventions paid by the region to affected farms.
“The first outbreaks occur in the same at-risk areas each year,” meaning highly targeted measures could theoretically prevent outbreaks, said Stefano Cappai from research institute IZS.
There are three variants on the island this year, two of which can be vaccinated against, with mortality rates twice as high among unvaccinated sheep.
Flocks should be vaccinated in March or April, Cappai said, but vaccines were only issued by the region in mid-June this year.
By that point, the virus had begun to spread unchecked.
Even if the vaccines had been made available earlier, some farmers fear to use them.
Others only vaccinate part of their flock, which means they fail to reach herd immunity, Cappai said.
And some farmers — like Dessi — vaccinated her flock, only for the sheep to catch the variant for which there is no vaccine yet.
Battista Cualbu, head of Coldiretti in Sardinia, who also has an outbreak on his farm, said vaccines are not enough and authorities must disinfect areas and provide midge repellents.
“It would certainly save public money because the region has to pay compensation for dead livestock (and) lost income,” he said, including less milk sold and fewer lambs for the slaughterhouse.
Compensation is set at 150 euros per sheep killed by bluetongue — a figure Coldiretti is battling to increase, although the region has failed to pay up over the past three years, Dessi said.
As temperatures fall, the case numbers are expected to decline but Dessi said the end was weeks away.
“I’ve dug three mass graves already and I fear the worst is still to come,” she said.


Survivor of rare rapid-aging disease progeria dies at 28

Sammy Basso. (Twitter @SammyBasso)
Updated 06 October 2024
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Survivor of rare rapid-aging disease progeria dies at 28

  • Born in 1995 in Schio, in the northern Italian region of Veneto, Basso was diagnosed with progeria at the age of two. In 2005, he and his parents founded the Italian Progeria Association

MILAN: Sammy Basso, who was the longest living survivor of the rare genetic disease progeria, has died at the age of 28, the Italian Progeria Association said on Sunday.
Progeria, also known as Hutchinson–Gilford syndrome, causes people to age rapidly, leading them to appear older than they are, with a reduced quality of life and a life expectancy of only 13.5 years without treatment, the association’s website said.
It affects one in every 8 million people born, and has a worldwide incidence of one in every 20 million.
Born in 1995 in Schio, in the northern Italian region of Veneto, Basso was diagnosed with progeria at the age of two. In 2005, he and his parents founded the Italian Progeria Association.
He became famous through the National Geographic documentary “Sammy’s Journey,” which recounts his journey along Route 66 in the United States, from Chicago to Los Angeles, with his parents and one of his best friends, Riccardo.
“Today our light, our guide, has gone out. Thank you Sammy for making us part of this wonderful life,” the association wrote on its Instagram page.
There are only 130 recognized cases of classic progeria worldwide, of which four are in Italy.
However, the Italian Progeria Association estimated there could be as many as 350 cases as they can be difficult to trace especially in developing countries.

 


‘Russian spy’ whale likely died of infection: Norway police

Updated 04 October 2024
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‘Russian spy’ whale likely died of infection: Norway police

  • Animal rights’ organizations NOAH and One Whale claimed the whale had been shot dead and filed a police report

OSLO: A beluga whale found dead in Norway in August, suspected by some of being a Russian spy, probably died of an infection and not gunshot wounds, Norwegian police said Friday.
Nicknamed “Hvaldimir” in a pun on the Norwegian word for whale (“hval“) and its purported ties to Moscow, the white beluga first appeared off the coast in Norway’s far-northern Finnmark region in 2019 and quickly became a celebrity in the country.
He was found dead on August 31 in a bay on Norway’s southwestern coast.
Animal rights’ organizations NOAH and One Whale claimed the whale had been shot dead and filed a police report.
The Norwegian Veterinary Institute conducted an autopsy and found a 35-centimeter (14-inch) stick lodged in his mouth.
“The report concluded that the probable cause of death was a bacterial infection, possibly a result of wounds in his mouth caused by a stick that got stuck,” police official Amund Preede Revheim said in a statement on Friday.
“The stick may also have made it difficult for Hvaldimir to eat, thereby increasing the risk of infection,” he added.
Police said they had found no trace of bullets and had decided not to open an investigation.
“There is nothing in the examinations that suggests Hvaldimir was killed illegally,” Preede Revheim said.
When Hvaldimir was found in 2019, Norwegian marine biologists removed a man-made harness with a mount suited for an action camera and the words “Equipment St. Petersburg” printed in English on the plastic clasps.
The whale appeared to be accustomed to humans.
Norwegian officials said the whale might have escaped an enclosure and been trained by the Russian navy.
Moscow has never made any official response to claims the whale could be a “Russian spy.”