Revealed: Monsanto owner and US officials pressured Mexico to drop glyphosate ban

02/16/2021

Source: The Guardian

Internal government emails reveal Monsanto owner Bayer AG and industry lobbyist CropLife America have been working closely with US officials to pressure Mexico into abandoning its intended ban on glyphosate, a pesticide linked to cancer that is the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkillers.

The moves to protect glyphosate shipments to Mexico have played out over the last 18 months, a period in which Bayer was negotiating an $11bn settlement of legal claims brought by people in the US who say they developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma due to exposure to the company’s glyphosate-based products.

READ MORE

Politicians step up the fight against Mexico’s Coca-Cola habit

10/29/2020

Source: The Economist

On a visit in July to Chiapas, a poor southern state, Hugo López-Gatell, Mexico’s covid-19 tsar, condemned an unlikely culprit for deaths from the disease. Fizzy drinks are “bottled poison”. Every year 40,000 Mexicans, the number of recorded covid-19 victims at the time, die from drinking too many, he claimed. The country’s health “would be different had we not been fooled” by a marketing machine that promotes products “as if [they] were happiness”.

The blasé response to the pandemic by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his administration is a bigger reason why the official death toll now stands at 90,000. But they are correct to point out that sugary drinks contribute to Mexico’s high rates of obesity and diabetes, which make people more vulnerable to the virus. Three-quarters of Mexicans are overweight, up from a fifth in 1996. Although fizzy drinks are a worthier target than some of Mr López Obrador’s nemeses (suppliers of renewable energy, for example), they are also inescapably part of the country’s culture.

READ MORE

‘We Had To Take Action’: States In Mexico Move To Ban Junk Food Sales To Minors

09/14/2020

Source: NPR

Picture this: You’re 17, you walk into a corner store and grab a Coca-Cola and Doritos, but the cashier refuses to sell them to you because you’re underage.

That rule is expected to soon become reality in parts of Mexico, as lawmakers in several states push legislation to keep junk food away from children, partly in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

READ MORE

Mexico aims to produce its own coronavirus vaccine

09/08/2020

Source: NBC News

MEXICO CITY – Mexico is working to produce its own COVID-19 vaccines and could have one ready by next spring, according to a researcher coordinating local efforts amid a global race to tame a disease that has infected over 26.75 million people worldwide.

Esther Orozco, coordinator of the scientific group that represents Mexico at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, said research based on a virus that transmits the avian Newcastle disease is the most viable candidate to produce the first vaccine in Mexico.

Read More

Report: Mexico leads in health worker deaths from COVID-19

09/02/2020

Source: Associated Press

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico leads the world in coronavirus deaths among its health care workers, Amnesty International said in a new report Wednesday.

It said Mexico has reported 1,320 confirmed deaths from COVIID-19 so far, surpassing the United States at 1,077, the United Kingdom at 649, and Brazil at 634.

Read more…

Why Are So Many People Dying Of Covid-19 In Mexico?

09/03/2020

Source: Forbes

With 65,241 confirmed Covid-19 fatalities (as of September 1, 2020), the pandemic has hit Mexico particularly hard. Mexico’s death toll has already exceeded levels originally conceived as “catastrophic” by local health authorities. But, what’s scary is how many Covid-19 patients in Mexico are dying before being connected to ventilators. According to Mexico’s publicly available epidemiological oversight database, only 20% of the country’s Covid-19 patients who died were intubated. An astounding 51,924 Covid-19 patients never received ventilator treatment before they died. Right now in Mexico thousands of Covid-19 patients are dying every week without access to the type of delicate intensive care that could have saved their lives.

Read More…

Mexico bars shipment of glyphosate pesticide

Photo by Martin Lopez on Pexels.com

11/25/19 – AP News

The Mexican government says it won’t allow a 1,000-ton shipment of the pesticide glyphosate into the country, citing health and environmental concerns.

Mexico became the latest in a string of countries to announce bans on glyphosate, the active ingredient in weed killer Roundup.

Read more…

Mexico City debates allowing children legal gender change

Photo by Magda Ehlers on Pexels.com

11/19/19 – AP News

A couple of hundred demonstrators have protested against a proposed Mexico City law that would allow children and adolescents to change the gender listed on their birth certificates.

They would have to be accompanied by at least one guardian to do so.

Read more…

Tents, stench, smoke: Health risks are gripping migrant camp

11/14/19 – AP News

By Nomaan Merchant

A smoke-filled stench fills a refugee camp just a short walk from the U.S.-Mexico border, rising from ever-burning fires and piles of human waste. Parents and children live in a sea of tents and tarps, some patched together with garbage bags. Others sleep outside in temperatures that recently dropped to freezing.

Justina, an asylum seeker who fled political persecution in Nicaragua, is struggling to keep her 8-month-old daughter healthy inside the damaged tent they share. The baby, Samantha, was diagnosed with pneumonia and recently released from a hospital with a dwindling supply of antibiotics.

Read more

Mexico City’s “walking fish”

Photo by Artem Lysenko on Pexels.com

11/11/19 – BBC Travel

By Megan Frye

Frankie was missing half his face. A fungal infection had come over the little axolotl, a native amphibian of the waterways of Mexico City.

But Frankie, along with other axolotls, have a special talent. Veterinarian and axolotl researcher Erika Servín Zamora, who was also Frankie’s caregiver, said she was astounded to see the animal’s remarkable regeneration abilities that she’d read about in her studies. Within two months, Frankie had grown a new, fully functional eye, and life was back to normal in his tank at the city’s Chapultepec Zoo.

Read more…