Brazil's President Lula and Venezuelas President Hugo Chavez
Members of a fledgling South American defence union should stop seeking solutions from the US and turn to their own leaders for answers, Ecuador’s president said.
Rafael Correa spoke at the opening of a one-day summit in Guyana of the Union of South American Nations, or Unasur, which drew leaders including Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez and Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Mr Correa said the region had looked to Washington for help for decades. “We need to rescue our own thoughts at this time,” he said. “We have to think for ourselves.”
Mr Silva called Unasur a global player whose members had co-operated with each other and survived an economic crisis still affecting some Western nations.
He said Brazil, which is soon expected to be the world’s fifth-largest economy, no longer had to listen to “some third-rate” official telling the country what to do.
Unasur had strengthened its involvement in defence and health issues, but it needed to create an arbitration council to resolve differences between countries, Mr Correa said.
Mr Correa also asked that Unasur create a commission to investigate the events that led to a September 30 police revolt in Ecuador in which about a dozen people died and 270 were wounded. The uprising was led by police upset over a new law that would deny them promotion bonuses. (more…)
Brazil is the world’s leading exporter of beef
Brazilian health officials said this week that a suspected case of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal illness that destroys brain tissue, probably wasn’t caused by eating beef of an animal infected with the mad cow sickness.
“The occurrence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob from beef consumption is highly unlikely” Jose Saraiva, health secretary for the city of Campinas, which was notified of the case on Nov. 12, told reporters. “This possibility has almost been ruled out.”
Health officials in Campinas, in Sao Paulo state, said they were investigating a possible case of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob, which would be the first ever in Brazil. The variant of the incurable human illness has been linked to eating meat from animals infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, known as BSE or mad cow.
Brazil is the world’s largest beef exporter. JBS SA, the world’s largest meat-processing company, said Brazil has never had a case of mad cow.
“Brazilian beef is healthy,” the Sao Paulo-based company said in a statement. “It’s important to remember this is an initial diagnosis and cannot be confirmed.”
Campinas’s health department will have a definitive diagnosis in 15 days, Saraiva said.
At least 139 people worldwide have died from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob, according to the World Health Organization’s website. Most of the deaths were in the U.K. (more…)
