N° 65 – October 2008
Monthly Electronic Newsletter of Sertox (Latin-American Portal of Toxicology) – Year 5

In "The Myth of Pandora’s box" (picture from Spanish newsletter), it is said that it contained all the enable evils to pollute the world as well as all kind of misfortunes. In the past month, at least four boxes seem to have been opened in various places of the current global world, releasing toxic hazards: 1) In Argentina: one of the most repeated words appeared in the media was Ephedrine. A triple murder (like a key to open Pandora’s Box) showed us that Argentina was one of the world major importers of the chemical. This led us to bring forward a mini-editorial (Spanish) on the topic (See); subsequently expanded with a new monograph (ephedra / ephedrine) and now we close it with the logo of the newsletter (thanks, Julia!).
2) In China: In our editorial of September (65) we did mention the Olympic games in Beijing. While the games were developing, the Pandora’s (Melamine) box was covered, even when a worst outbreak of food poisoning was taking place s because of the addition of this substance to milk used to produce food for babies. (See: Milk for babies with melamine in China). Here we felt obliged to incorporate a little executive summary on the substance, as we realized how hard it was to find data on the Internet at that time. After words, WHO published a FAQs report that is now available on our site (see). 3) In Ivory Coast: Garbage Dumps Toxic outdoors: more than 20,000 Ivorian reported the multinational Trafigura because of a spill that caused so far 17 dead in Abidjan city. 4) Again Argentina. People who live in the area of Rosario (southern Santa Fe) are getting tired both because of the smoke, product of burning grassland in the islands of Entre Rios, and the passivity of governmental decisors, at all levels (see: Smoke or the blind goose). Within SERTOX we had several reasons for joy and satisfaction. The birth of Lucio Plazenzotti, our colleague Marcela Evangelista’s son, may be counted at first place. (Will he became a toxicologist?). What’s new in RETEL, such as indexing DOAJ is an accomplished goal as well (See). So we accompany other institutions in remembering the established October 1 as the “National day of Struggle against asbestos”. The global ban is still a goal to achieve (). It is also a good announce to make that one of the two new blogs (thanks, Martin), of two of the most prolific contributors to our site: Javier’s Corner (Javier Waksman’s Corner, English & Spanish) and contributions of Ana Digón. We hope you find useful both. There is many more news, but this month we were indebted to the section: not only toxics we need to live … because the toxics overflowed us. Until the next month. JCP