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SCIENCE ADVOCACY FOR HUMAN & ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH ... IN SERVICE OF THE PUBLIC'S RIGHT TO BE INDEPENDENTLY INFORMED.

Physicians and Scientists for Global Responsibility (PSGR) work to produce transparent, high quality science information to educate and inform the public. You might not know us - but we've been working on these issues for 20 years! We respond to consultations on new policy and legislation, release white papers and reports, and interview scientists and doctors whose work draws attention to complex scientific issues - that are often not easily inserted into and indeed, are often missing from, government policy.

PSGR place the public interest, and the obligation to protect future generations at the centre of all research and decision-making. To do this involves thinking about how society identify problems in the first place, and then permits meaningful discourse around normal challenges, such as uncertainty and ambiguity in information flows.

How do decision-makers, scientists and researchers problematise, weigh and consider issues that might be uncertain or ambiguous? How this is undertaken is a reflection of the culture, power-relations and resourcing that surrounds them. But it's important. If nuanced or difficult issues are dismissed or ignored; and there is no language of probability, risk or precaution, society can end up ignorant - such as failing to understand when an (economic, biological, ecological, political or social) tipping point might be arrived at. Good decisions that support health and resilience require broad-based social, scientific and economic information, recognition of power and politics, and value-based judgement. Talking about these issues can help society understand what our values are and prioritise what is important.

1. WHITE PAPER: PROPAGANDA (2023)

PSGR 2023 in-depth discussion paper: When does science become propaganda? What does this suggest for democracy. ISBN 978-0-473-68632-1

This paper sheds light on a stewardship problem in modern societies where technologies and their emissions are everywhere, in air, water, soil -all the way to the digital space but there is no local monitoring or scientific research to triangulate the claims of the industry-paid scientists.

The information that supports the release onto the market and into the environment of technologies and their emissions is broadly controlled by the same industries that seek market access and re-authorisation of these products. There can be no assurance of safety if local scientists do not have freedom and resources to monitor and 3. assess how and why these technologies might cause harm over time. Please read and share!

2. CURRENT ISSUE: DIET DRIVING METABOLIC & MENTAL ILLNESS

The evidence that poor diets with a high ultraprocessed food component drive mortality, cancer, and mental, respiratory, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and metabolic ill health has just become more compelling, with a major review recently published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

PSGR have been interviewing medical doctors who understand the relationship of diet with the diseases that their patients are suffering. As our recent Substack has discussed, an enormous range of mental illness conditions, conventionally understood to be exclusively related to neurotransmitter function, have much deeper aetiologies - commonly (but not exclusively) being driven by inflammation, insulin resistance and poor nutrition. The science that demonstrates that chronic exposures to poor diet produce a direct effect at the cellular and system level - and that this can tip human bodies into multiple mental and metabolic health conditions - is growing stronger and more compelling.

We'll be talking with more and more scientists and researchers in this field, in order to shed light on this important topic. PSGR recognise that such information, based on scientific evidence, is disruptive. Professor Steve Raynor described such knowledge as 'uncomfortable knowledge' as it has the potential to undermine institutional principles, arrangements and goals. Institutions can then take steps to alter how that information is understood. These steps involved denying, dismissing, diverting or displacing the issue concerned:

‘Denial represents a refusal to acknowledge or engage with information. Dismissal acknowledges the existence of information, and may involve some minimal engagement up to the point of rebutting it as or irrelevant. Diversion involves the creation of an activity that distracts attention away from an uncomfortable issue. Finally, displacement occurs when an organization engages with an issue, but substitutes management of a representation of a problem (such as a computer model) for management of the represented object or activity’ (Rayner, 2012, p. 113).

The idea that poor diets drive multiple disease states, and multiple mental illness conditions is not easily dismissed.

The knowledge that children and young people are being diagnosed with more metabolic and mental conditions, at younger and younger ages, produces an urgency that such knowledge is transparently addressed, and steps taken to reverse current preventable health declines.

3. CURRENT ISSUE: DEREGULATING BIOTECHNOLOGY

In 2023 PSGR released a review paper discussing where New Zealand stands currently on biotechnology and gene editing.

In January 24 2024 the New Zealand Environmental Protection Authority (NZEPA) released a Decision Document finding that null segregants do not meet the definition of a genetically modified organism in the Act, and cannot be considered to be a new organism for the purpose of the Act solely by virtue of the criteria of section 2A(1)(d) of the Act. The January 11 2024 Staff Assessment Report (Advice to the Decision-making Committee on APP204173: Null segregants), had earlier recommended that a null segregant does not meet the definitions of a host organism, nor a genetically modified organism in the Act.

We consider that recent media have inadequately discussed the biosecurity risk presented by scalable GMO technology. While the NZEPA considered the potential for scalability, as discussed by Jack Heinemann and colleagues in the paper Are null segregants new combinations of heritable material and should they be regulated? - we consider that the advice failed to meaningfully address the risk-scenario presented in that paper.

Regulators and government departments that are keen on deregulation haven't meaningfully address the potential risk from scalability, when governments and industries commercially release new technology into the environment. There's a manifold reluctance in regulatory circles to discuss what companies don't know when they release a new organism. Off-target and unintended mutations can be almost impossible to detect as they are not predictable. They do happen and they will happen. As releases into the environment increase, so will the likelihood of modified organisms that might carry an effect that presents harm to the surrounding environment. The risks will therefore scale up as development and release of the technology, scales up. Case by case analysis is also difficult - because of the extraordinary difficulty to identify a potential unintended change. Companies aren't likely to spend months and years testing for such elements, when they have already invested large amounts in product development.

PSGR are interested in discussing how risk and gene editing technology - even when we don't understand what the risk may be. This is called stewardship, and it involves precautionary hesitancy. It involves larger consideration that extends beyond to literal interpretations of a technology, to recognise the nuanced and complex factors that shape what risk might present itself as, in the future.

If you are interested in protecting biodiversity we recommend you listen to this interview with Professor Jack Heineman on the risk that arises when we scale up technologies.

‘'Where harm can accumulate at scale transition, that's precisely where regulation is a solution to mitigate risks.'

New Zealand has a low tolerance for unwanted and invasive species. Wilding or volunteer GMO species are a massive problem in north and south America. It is not easy to estimate how highly scalable GMO technologies could themselves become a biosecurity risk for future generations.

4. KEEPING A SHARP EYE ON: FLUORIDATED DRINKING WATER REGULATIONS

PSGR are concerned that the potential cognitive and IQ risk from exposure to fluoridated drinking water has not been sufficiently impartially assessed by New Zealand government agencies. We have worked to highlight to scientists, doctors and the general public that there are too many ‘blind spots’ and that benefit (of a potential marginal alteration in caries outcome) may not outweigh risk (in early childhood, to cognition and IQ).

Fluoridation is a limit on the right in s 11 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 (BORA) to refuse medical treatment. In recent High Court case, the Director-General of Health was found to have failed consider whether the directions were a reasonable limit on the right to refuse medical treatment. The judge has since instructed the Director General of health, Dr Diane Sarfati, to address the restriction, medicated, fluoridated drinking water that by definition cannot be avoided by people and communities and is a restriction on the right to refuse medical treatment, and consider whether that limitation is demonstrably justified.

Who we are

1. WHITE PAPER: PROPAGANDA (2023)

2. CURRENT ISSUE: DIET DRIVING METABOLIC & MENTAL ILLNESS

3. CURRENT ISSUE: DEREGULATING BIOTECHNOLOGY

4. KEEPING A SHARP EYE ON: FLUORIDATED DRINKING WATER REGULATIONS