Decline in numbers of US honeybee colonies leads to concern

The world may be on the brink of biological disaster after news that a third of US bee colonies did not survive the winter.
Read article in the Guardian (UK) "The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. "

The Dr Rath Foundation Comments: Colony collapse disorder is now a serious worldwide problem. Significantly, therefore, evidence in the United States and Europe has linked pesticides produced by Bayer CropScience to the deaths of bees. In recognition of this, in the UK, a group of members of the British Bee Keepers Association has recently split from the organization and criticized the sponsorship deals it has with companies such as Bayer CropScience and Syngenta, from whom it receives around £17,500 pounds-a-year in funding.

Soil Association urges ban on pesticides to halt bee deaths

I have copied the following item from The Dr. Rath Health Foundation Newsletter

Soil Association urges ban on pesticides to halt bee deaths
The Soil Association has urged the government to ban pesticides linked to honeybee deaths around the world. The chemicals are widely used in UK agriculture but have been banned as a precaution in four other European countries. Last week the Italian government issued an immediate suspension after it accepted that the pesticides were implicated in killing honeybees, joining France, Germany and Slovenia.
Read article in the Guardian (UK)
Comment: Germany suspended sales of the pesticides in May of this year after 700 beekeepers along the Rhine reported that two-thirds of their bees had died following the application of clothianidin. In France, imidacloprid has been banned on sunflowers since 1999 and as a sweetcorn treatment since 2003, after a third of honeybees were wiped out. Imidacloprid and clothianidin are produced by a division of the chemical manufacturer Bayer.

Bayer & Glaxo Linked To Bribes In Italy

A drug licences-for-cash scandal has engulfed Italy's medicines regulatory agency with leading officials arrested along with people linked to major drugmakers, PharmaTimes writes. The most senior figure to have been held is Pasqualino Rossi, vp of Aifa, the Italian Agency for Pharmaceuticals, and one of Italy's most senior reps at the European Medicines Agency. Five lobbyists have also been arrested, and an eighth person is being sought. Arrest warrants were issued after an investigating judge saw a 400-word police report suggesting money had changed hands in return for falsifying clinical data required for drug licences, according to PharmaTimes.
Read article at pharmalot.com

Trasylol was withdrawn in November after a study linked the medicine to kidney failure requiring dialysis and increased death of those patients.

Doctor says 22,000 died amid Bayer drug recall

The lives of 22,000 patients could have been saved if U.S. regulators had been quicker to remove a Bayer AG drug used to stem bleeding during open heart surgery, according to a medical researcher interviewed by CBS Television's 60 Minutes program. The drug Trasylol was withdrawn in November at the request of the FDA after an observational study linked the medicine to kidney failure requiring dialysis and increased death of those patients. It had been given to as many as a third of all heart bypass patients in the United States at the height of its use over a period of many years, according to the report.
Read Reuters news report at yahoo.com