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The FDA has announced that beginning today, spinach and lettuce sold across the United States may now be secretly irradiated before it reaches grocery store shelves. What's "secret" about it? The FDA previously decided that irradiation warning stickers would not be required on any food items because it would be "too confusing to consumers." (The word IRRADIATION apparently has too many letters to be understood to food buyers.) Thus, irradiated foods will not be labeled as such, and consumers are going to be left in the dark about all this (except for those who actually eat the irradiated food, in which case they will glow in the dark).

FDA's latest ruling that spinach and iceberg lettuce can be irradiated weighs food safety against concerns about vitamin loss and cleaner farming practices. For many consumers, the prospect of eating produce zapped with ionizing radiation doesn't sound all that appetizing, conjuring up images of mushy fruits and wilted leaves -- not to mention fears over safety. Last month's ruling by the Food and Drug Administration that food manufacturers can now irradiate fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce to kill bacteria came with reassurances that the process wouldn't result in food any less appealing or healthful than non-irradiated varieties.

Food irradiation is basically the process of passing radiation through food in order to sterilize it and make it safe for consumption. It has the ability to rid most foods of disease harboring microbes, such as E Coli. It has been touted as a miracle in many areas of the world where disease harboring microbes take hundreds of lives each year. But what happens when such a miracle becomes fatal... Irradiated food has been a controversial process in Australia for about a decade now, but it has recently come under the microscope and slapped a ban due to a rash of cat deaths. At first, the account of around 90 recorded illnesses at a vet clinic was nothing more than a mystery, but one veterinarian, Dr. Georgina Child, put two and two together.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has ruled that more work needs to be done on an environmental assessment for a produce irradiator that's proposed for a location near Honolulu International Airport. Advertisement The commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board issued a ruling last week saying the NRC staff needs to consider alternate technology and sites in producing the assessment. The board's decision said it expects the staff to give meaningful consideration to transportation accidents in preparing a final environmental assessment. The ruling came after almost three years of discussion at the NRC, which has been considering Pa'ina Hawaii LLC's request to build an irradiator that would use up to a million curries of cobalt-60 to treat local fruits such as papayas, vegetables and other items so they can be shipped to the Mainland insect-free.

A BAN on seafood coming from an area near the Dounreay nuclear site is to stay in place, following a Food Standards Agency review. The restriction, preventing the removal of fish and shellfish from a 2km exclusion zone, was imposed in 1997 after the discovery of radioactive particles on the seabed. The order, under the Food and Environment Protection Act, was to ensure any seafood contaminated by irradiated nuclear fuel did not enter the food chain. Last year, Dounreay began work using remotely operated vehicles to remove the worst of the particles that have caused concern for more than quarter of a century. Up to £25 million will be spent on covering an area the size of 60 football pitches and on monitoring up to the 2020s.

For decades, the IAEA and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) have spearheaded the development and application of nuclear techniques in food and agriculture, teaming up to contribute to the world´s goals for food security in valuable ways. Today the successful "Atoms for Food" partnership stands in the balance.

Consumers worried about salad safety may soon be able to buy fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce zapped with just enough radiation to kill E. coli and a few other germs. The Food and Drug Administration on Friday will issue a new regulation allowing spinach and lettuce sellers to take that extra step, a long-awaited move amid increasing outbreaks from raw produce.

"Exposure to radiotherapy or radiation-based diagnostics like computed tomography (CT scans) in early childhood increases breast cancer risk in adulthood, a new study in the Jan 2010 issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. The study involved women exposed to thymic irradiation during infancy from 1926 to 1957. Breast cancer was identified in 96 treated in an average dose of 0.71 Gy and 57 untreated women during 159,459 person-year follow-up. Adams MJ and colleagues from University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry found women who were treated by radiation were 200 percent more likely to develop breast cancer than those who did not receive radiation. Higher doses of radiation were linked to high risk of breast cancer."