Congratulations to the management and production teams at these facilities for their recent safety achievements:

• Cargill Salt - Watkins Glen, NY evap plant, 600,000 hours
• Cargill Deicing Technology - Avery Island, LA mine, 500,000 hours
• Compass Minerals - Duluth, MN processing facility, 200,000 hours & six years
• Cargill Deicing Technology - Lansing, NY mine, 100,000 hours
  
• Cargill Salt - Newark, CA processing facility, 100,000 hours
  
• Compass Minerals - Chicago, IL processing facility, 100,000 hours & two years
  
• Sifto Canada - Goderich, ON evap plant, 100,000 hours & one year
  
• Cargill Salt - Buffalo, IA terminal, six years
• Cargill Salt - Cincinnati, OH terminal, four years
  
• Cargill Salt - Hutchinson, KS evap plant, two years
  
• Cargill Deicing Technology - Cleveland, OH mine, one year

The latest new study from Oxford University says that traffic-light labelling on the front of food packages do not influence consumer choices. Technical Director Mort Satin provides his opinion on the traffic light label..and..the UK, where the label was invented...and the Food Standards Agency who are actively promoting it. Vlog on (x-ms-wmv 18.35 MB) ...

An evaluation of road deicing alternatives directed by Xianming Shi and Laura Fay of the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University and conducted for the Colorado Department of Transportation examined common chloride, acetate and ag byproduct deicers and concluded:

• Corrosion-inhibited salt (NaCl) and mag chloride (MgCl2) is preferred "until better deicer alternatives are identified."
• Training, calibration and minimized application rates -- the essence of the Salt Institute's Sensible Salting program -- are key to minimizing adverse environmental impacts.
• Chlorides in the environment did not exceed the water quality standard. This is an aesthetic standard for taste, not a health standard.

The report formulated a "deicer composite index" similar to that published a few years ago as NCHRP Report 577 . The model, like that of Report 577, allows local customization. Using the current weighting for Colorado users, the method validated current CDOT user priorities ("the inhibited liquid MgCl2 deicer products present a better alternative than either the non-inhibited NaCl or the K- or Na-acetate/formate deicers").

Better watch out. Better not slide. Better watch out; I'm telling you why. Officials who don't clear roads, may lose their jobs.

Citizens know when you are sleeping; they know when you're awake. They know when you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.

Tis the season for a little reminder to government officials: Ignore winter maintenance at your peril because there are a number of legendary examples of officials who have had worse than coal in their stockings.

In New York City during the winter of '68-'69, Republican mayor John Lindsey was held responsible for a snow removal debacle in the borough of Queens. He had the poor judgment to go out in his limo to survey the mess and his limo was stuck in the snow. He was retrieved by rescuers in a four-wheel drive--a complete public relations disaster.

During the harsh winter of '78 and '79 in Chicago, Mayor Michael Bilandic was labeled as incompetent for the city's failure to adequately clear roads. His opponent used this to her advantage during the campaign and pundits blame the snow for Bilandic's defeat.

In Washington DC in 1996, infamous Mayor Marion Barry took a bit less heat for disastrous snow removal efforts mostly because residents in the District were accustomed to the city's inadequate snow response. In fact, if you look at the antics of Marion Barry, you might draw the conclusion that the citizens were willing to overlook most any bad behavior.

And more recently, the Valentine's Day Blizzard of 2007 drastically affected the eastern half of North America, halting commerce and causing 37 deaths. In Pennsylvania, officials were under attack by residents who believed that they did not adequately respond to the snowfall. Although citizens don't need a study to know that salting and plowing saves lives, a study by Marquette University details the safety benefits of proper winter maintenance.

Since there is also an economic cost to poor winter maintenance, in this tough economy, we encourage officials to keep the roads clear for commerce and for the safety of their residents. They know when you've been bad or good. It is a little difficult to hide poor winter maintenance (video ).

Stories this month (html 48.91 kB) include a consensus that salt iodization does not interfere with attempts to reduce population salt intakes, the relevance of "climategate" to the salt and health debate, how New York City is risking its greatest culinary achievement and severe economic loss in China due to poor winter road maintenance.

The recent revelation that some global warming scientists have fudged data to hide information that didn't suit their purposes is very similar to the process we are now witnessing in the Dietary Guidelined Advisory Process. Once you start tampering with data, you can be sure it will not stand the test of time. Click on the photo for a short VLOG on the issue.

The Wall Street Journal's on a roll on "climategate," and we recently pointed to the disturbing parallel of the parasitic relationship of government advocates and special interest groups on the global warming and salt reduction issues. Today's WSJ carries an opinion column by Daniel Henniger, "Climategate: Science Is Dying ," making another observation relevant to the salt and health debate: the use of junk science to prop up government policy goals -- whether by the Bush or Obama Administrations -- is creating, in Henniger's words, a "credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with with it."

Henniger points out the corrosive effect on science of the environmentalists'-touted "precautionary principle" whereby objective standards of evidence are replaced by subjective judgments -- "this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences."

Henniger quotes an Obama Administration spokesperson on the "precautionary principle:"

The Obama administration's new head of policy at EPA, Lisa Heinzerling, is an advocate of turning precaution into standard policy. In a law-review article titled "Law and Economics for a Warming World," Ms. Heinzerling wrote, "Policy formation based on prediction and calculation of expected harm is no longer relevant; the only coherent response to a situation of chaotically worsening outcomes is a precautionary policy. . . ."

If the new ethos is that "close-enough" science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails.

The tie to salt, we hope, is obvious. In the absence of evidence from even a single controlled trial of whether salt reduction would improve health and in the absence of any evidence that physiological salt appetite can be modified as a "behavior" by either education of policy diktat, the government errs on the side of precaution. I use "err" purposefully since the current policy is erroneous both on the science and even on the question of precaution. Low-salt diets are risky for some people and may be risky for the entire population. So even advocates of the "precautionary principle" should favor our longstanding advocacy of a controlled trial to get the evidence right. Close isn't "close enough for government work."

A commentary by Bret Stephens in today's Wall Street Journal , "Climategate: Follow the Money," raises issues, believe it or not, that pertain directly to salt. Salt? Bear with me. Stephens explains:

Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.

We have no direct evidence that World Action on Salt and Health (WASH) and its salt reductionist members are engaged in such nefarious activities, but Stephens goes on to explain how "follow the money" makes sense when you take off the blinders that only money coming from corporate sources may be influencing a policy debate. "Money" is why we continue to see studies of salt and blood pressure when everyone accepts a relationship and why we're seeing more observational studies of the right question: salt and health outcomes. But the reluctance of the federal government to fund a controlled trial of salt and health outcomes may be linked to the tangled web of "money" as well.

Consider that thought when reading what Stephens says about the devotion of the universities and groups advocating on global warming:

(T)hey depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what's known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.

Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU's temperature database: "I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.

The American College of Physicians has weighed-in the media flap over evidence-based medical recommendations . ACP's for them. So are we. We have no expertise in the area of mammography, but we are close students of the larger question over whether "evidence" or "experts" should be the source of our public health policies. We weigh-in on the side of evidence-based recommendations.

ACP president Joseph W. Stubbs decries "the politicization of evidence-based clinical research." He calls for reliance on evidence and a transparent process. Noble words, we'd agree.

But inconsistent. ACP still carries on its website, a 2004 advisory to ignore the 2003 findings of this same US Preventive Services Task Force ; USPSTF found insufficient evidence to support a population salt-reduction strategy . We agree with that evidence-based conclusion as well and invite Dr. Stubbs to join us in advocating a "constructive and transparent" process on the salt/health controversy.

With that single caveat, we commend the ACP statement that

... critics have made unfair and unsubstantiated attacks on the expertise, motivations, and independence of the scientists and clinician experts on the USPSTF.

ACP believes that it is essential that clinicians and patients be able to make their own decisions on diagnosis and treatment informed by the best available scientific evidence on the effectiveness of different treatments and diagnostic interventions. The USPSTF is a highly regarded, credible and independent group of experts that performs this role, on a purely advisory basis, to the Department of Health and Human Services, as it relates to interventions to prevent or detect diseases. As is often the case with evidence-based reviews, the USPTF’s recommendations will not always be consistent with the guidelines established by other experts in the field, by professional medical societies, and by patient advocacy groups. Such differences of opinion, expressed in a constructive and transparent manner so that patients and their clinicians can make their own best judgment, are important and welcome. It is not constructive to make ill-founded attacks on the integrity, credibility, motivations, and expertise of the clinicians and scientists on the USPSTF.

Some critics have erroneously charged that the USPSTF’s recommendations were motivated by a desire to control costs. According to the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, “the USPSTF does not consider economic costs in making recommendations.” The Agency continues, “it realizes that these costs are important in the decision to implement preventive services. Thus, in situations where there is likely to be some effectiveness of the service, the Task Force searches for evidence of the costs and cost-effectiveness of implementation, presenting this information separately from its recommendation” and the “recommendations are not modified to accommodate concerns about insurance coverage of preventive services, medicolegal liability, or legislation, but users of the recommendations may need to do so.” [emphasis added in bold]

Under the bills being considered by Congress, the USPSTF will have an important role in making evidence-based recommendations on preventive services that insurers will be required to cover, but the bills do not give the Task Force — or the federal government itself — any authority to put limitations on coverage, ration care, or require that insurers deny coverage. Specifically, the House and Senate bills would require health plans to cover preventive services based in large part on the evidence-based reviews by the USPSTF, but no limits are placed on health plans’ ability to offer additional preventive benefits, or in considering advice from sources other than the USPSTF in making such coverage determinations. Accordingly, patients will benefit by having a floor – not a limit – on essential preventive services that would be covered by all health insurers, usually with no out-of-pocket cost to them. Patients will also benefit from having independent research on the comparative effectiveness of different treatments, as proposed in the bills before Congress. The bills specifically prohibit use of comparative effectiveness research to limit coverage or deny care based on cost.

The controversy over the mammography guidelines illustrates the importance of communicating information on evidence-based reviews to the public in a way that facilitates an understanding of how such reviews are conducted and how they are intended to support, not supplant, individual decision-making by patients and their clinicians.

ACP urges Congress, the administration, and patient and physician advocacy groups to respect and support the importance of protecting evidence-based research by respected scientists and clinicians from being used to score political points that do not serve the public’s interest.

Let's all agree on the process: follow the science. And then let's agree that digging in to defend the current politically-correct policies -- whatever they may be, but in our area of concern, policies that try to guide salt intake levels -- should be seriously questioned when such independent policy auditors as the USPSTF point out discrepancies between policy and evidence. To paraphrase the strategy that unraveled the Watergate scandal: follow the evidence. Let's not cherry-pick the science and support only the outcomes we like.

As we blogged when we first learned of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force's revised recommendations on frequency of mammograms , we wished USPSTF were as influential as media coverage suggested -- and not because we wanted to express an opinion on this recommendation. Rather, we wanted to endorse the process of evidence-based public health policy.

That was two or three forests worth of coverage ago, and most of the media accounts studiously avoid the real question: is there evidence to support the recommendation? Story after story deal with the outrage on the left about damage to women's empowerment or, conversely, on the right, questions about whether the reduced use of the procedure presages the rationing of medical care alleged integral to ObamaCare.

Dr. Gilbert Ross of the American Council for Science and Health has a healthier perspective.

“I don't think this issue is a gender-related one at all,” says Dr. Ross. “It certainly shouldn't be. Actually, the emerging recommendations for PSA screening for prostate cancer are very similar to these breast cancer recommendations. The authoritative bodies weighing in on PSA screening basically say don't do it unless there is some rationale for it in terms of specific risk factors, because the potential downsides outweigh the benefits. Of course, any kind of cancer screening is always an emotional issue. For women who want a more individualized risk estimate to help guide them in this decision, the NCI has a 'tool' for figuring out one's risk for breast cancer. Some women in a higher-risk category, besides getting more frequent mammograms, may also consider discussing with their doctors the potential benefits of taking a drug to reduce risk of breast cancer -- chemoprevention.

...“We believe that politicizing this issue does no one any good and contributes to confusion among women and their doctors,” says Dr. Ross. “In fact, this is an unusual instance when we agree with a New York Times editorial, calling for the mammography screening discussion to be completely severed from the ongoing healthcare reform debate.”

ACSH quotes Dr. Arthur Caplan,director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, added his weight to the argument for reason:

“In this case, the taskforce found that screening all women in their forties led to too many false positives and too much unnecessary follow-up testing for the number of lives it saved. They did not say that no lives were being saved. They said not as many as everyone thought. And not enough to justify asking every woman under fifty to get a mammogram every year...

“There is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the scientists' finding that evidence does not support routine mammography for most women under fifty. But there is every reason to doubt that the numbers they compiled will be sufficient to overturn a medical practice that carries so much ethical weight for women.”

Let's not get hung up on how we feel on this issue. Science is evolutionary. Evidence can improve over time. Let's follow the science, not the ideologues.

Spy thriller fans have been seeking alternative heroes since Tom Clancy stopped writing about his CIA champion Jack Ryan.

But the CIA will be getting an entirely new face next summer --Angelina Jolie. Jolie's new move, Salt, centers around the efforts by her character (Evelyn A. Salt) to clear her name as a rogue CIA operative. Hollywood can be so incestuous. The role in the original screenplay was written for Tom Cruise, but he dropped out. Cruise, moviegoers will remember, starred in another thriller (plus sequels), Mission Impossible, sharing a leading role with Jolie's father, Jon Voight.

Salt suffuses our culture. Who would have pictured the Salt Queen being dethroned by Angelina Jolie? So, salt fans, get used to the new "face" for salt -- here's the poster promoting the movie and the YouTube posting of the movie "teaser" trailer .

Earlier this year a New Jersey startup "food manufacturer," Bon Vivant International , began marketing "NutraSalt an all-natural, low-sodium sea salt," claiming "66 percent less sodium than other salt products."

Well, I guess this "food manufacturer" makes other things than food. Food grade salt is required to have at least 97% sodium chloride. So NutraSalt cannot be food grade salt.

The founder claims: "The product can be sold as table salt and as an ingredient to food-service companies and food makers."

It would be interesting to know which "food-service companies and food makers" are using non-food-grade salt. Inquiring minds want to know.

It has been but a few short days since the U.S. media heralded findings by the U.S. Preventive Service Task Force (USPSTF) that there is insufficient evidence to recommend that some women get regular mammograms. The press reported that the USPSTF is "influential" in setting federal policy. We responded that we only hoped it was true , but, sadly, that hadn't been our experience. The USPSTF has been a lonely voice insisting on quality science to guide policy.

We know nothing of the quality of the science on either side of the mammogram debate, but we do know that when the evidence-based recommendations of the USPSTF come up against political correctness, PC politics wins. That's been the case with the debate over dietary salt.

Thus, it was no surprise that the White House ducked. The NY Times reported that when "the task force recommendations stirred concern among women, and came under fire from lawmakers of both parties, the White House emphasized that they were not binding...."

That's the way the federal government has dealt with the salt debate: politics trumped science. The USPSTF found insufficient evidence to recommend a general reduction in salt intakes, but the powers-that-be blithely ignored this evidence-based conclusion and redoubled its efforts to achieve the impossible: substituting federal recommendations for human physiology. Read all about it .

"(E)xcessive salt restriction is as harmful as high salt in heart failure," concludes a study in the European Journal of Pharmacology . The Osaka, Japan-based research team demonstrated that for heart failure patients low-salt diets activate plasma aldosterone and the "increased plasma aldosterone level with strict salt restriction activated the mineralocorticoid receptor signaling in volume-overloaded condition, resulting in increased myocardial fibrosis."

In short, yet another study showing the risk of low-salt diets. The authors conclude:

A recent report showed that high sodium intake rather improved cardiac performance, induced peripheral vasodilatation, and suppressed the release of vasoconstrictor hormones in patients with compensated heart failure (Damgaard et al., 2006). Indeed, our findings suggest that salt depletion, which increases the plasma aldosterone level, must be avoided in addition to salt overload in the treatment of heart failure.