BUGS and Pacific Sands, Inc. Ready Products to Aid Oil Spill Cleanup Efforts
Carlsbad, California
U.S. Microbics (aka BUGS), an environmental technology company, and Pacific Sands, Inc., a manufacturer of a broad range of environmentally friendly cleaning products, are jointly formulating products that could directly benefit victims of the recent Gulf Oil Spill, one of the worst environmental disasters of our time. The products could soon be available for consumer and commercial use and could be used on marine structures and wildlife contaminated with gooey oil.
Using components of the Pacific Sands Natural Choices product line and the oil spill cleanup experience of BUGS management coupled with direct input from industry experts and technologists, the companies hope to introduce one or more products that can help clean up oil spill residue without using additional solvents, dyes, and chemicals that irritate the skin, require special equipment and training to apply or may harm the environment. The developed products would be available to consumers on the www.EcoGeeks.com website and to industrial and commercial clean up users on a BUGS website to be announced.
Robert Brehm, CEO of BUGS, commented, \"The BUGS technology was successfully used on the Santa Barbara oil spill in the late 1960's and I believe there are cleanup lessons we have learned that are applicable to the Gulf Oil Spill particularly with respect to the use of oil-eating microbes for post capture oil treatment in soil and water. In the past we used surfactants and degreasers with oil spill cleanup operations and the availability of the natural products from Pacific Sands and commercially available microbe products could significantly aid the cleanup process without harmful environmental effects of conventional processes now being used. Our goal is to have simple and effective natural products that can be easily used by the consumer and by commercial cleanup crews.\"
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Expert Panel Speaks Out on Need for Privacy, Access and Identity for Healthcare Information
Princeton Junction, New Jersey
Privacy, access and identity are vital to the Obama administration's effort to modernize the nation's healthcare information infrastructure, a panel of policy and technology experts told healthcare industry leaders, public policy makers and policy-influencing organizations at a National Press Club briefing in Washington, DC. The event was co-hosted by the Smart Card Alliance Healthcare and Identity Councils and the Secure ID Coalition. A video of all of the presentations from the healthcare identity and privacy briefing is available online. The topic is timely because healthcare IT is getting nearly a $19 billion boost from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The speakers agreed the sense of urgency and massive investment are good news, but that time pressure might also cause problems.
\"There is a risk we will focus too much on standards for electronic health records (EHRs) and ways to exchange them at the expense of sound privacy and identity models,\" said Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance. \"The critical issues are getting control over who has access to healthcare information, and correctly tying the right individual to his or her health records. That means identity management and access authentication security have to be baked-in from the start, not tacked on at the end.\"
Correctly identifying patients and their records is difficult just within a single hospital, but gets far worse between multiple institutions, according to a leading practitioner and specialist on the subject, Paul Contino, vice president, Information Technology, at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. He cautioned that identity management must be addressed correctly up front or \"we're going to have problems with the linkages of electronic medical records\" on a regional or even national basis. Mount Sinai revamped patient registration processes and implemented a smart card-based patient card to more accurately link individuals to their medical and administrative records.
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