Your hosts, Lynn, Levon, Marc
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Many activists, farmer groups, environmentalists and others on both sides of the Atlantic are a little happier this week with the apparent failure of a giant free trade deal known as CETA- Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement. There are still other major free trade deals in the works such as TPP and TISA however, A former senior scientist with Health Canada, says such trade deals can allow food products containing chemical residues, hormones, or other products into one country that are banned from another. He says these deals therefore have the potential to cause harm to citizens As a former government regulator, he says targetting multi-nationals like Monsanto, Bayer, Dupont, Syngenta, ChinaChem and others is missing the point. He says it is governments which approve potentially harmful chemicals, synthetic hormones, and food technologies, and they should be targetted instead. Marc spoke to micro-biologist Shiv Chopra. It is a sad and troubling statistic: babies in parts of Canada’s far north have the highest incidence of lung infections in the world. For example, in northern Quebec, some 50 percent of babies were admitted to a hospital with a lung infection in the first year of life. In the western part of the territory of Nunavut, the figure was more than 40 per cent of babies. The report on the situation points out that reasons for this high infection rate are not quite clear. However, the good news is that there exists an antibody which can prevent infections in 96 percent of cases. Lynn spoke to Dr Anna Banerji, author of the report Canadian music- Daniel Lanois– “Under a Stormy Sky” from 1989 album “Acadie”. The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) is teaming up with researchers at University of Calgary for a unique experiment in space. They want to find out how long-duration space flights affect the human brain. Levon spoke with Professor Giuseppe Iaria of the University of Calgary, in the western prairie province of Alberta. He is the lead researcher in this experiment they’ve called Wayfinding. And he begins with an explanation of what Wayfinding is and why it’s important for us to understand how it works. Images of the week
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