Cancéropôle Lyon Rhône-Alpes

Steven King
Irish Examiner.com
Published July 23, 2008

IN Gulliver’s Travels, the King of Bobdingnag — the land of the giants — claimed that whoever could make two ears of corn grow where only one grew before was a greater patriot than all the politicians put together.

It’s sad to note then that nearly 300 years on from the publication of Swift’s satire, the politicians are still standing in the way of an agricultural technology that has the potential to do just that.

Despite food prices having risen by 50% in two years, the Government appears to have no strategy to reverse things. On the contrary, the direction of policy is all towards supporting the inefficient organic sector. Moreover, it shows no sign of dropping its opposition to new food technologies that offer the prospect, among other things, of higher yields from the same acreage.

It’s not hard to guess from which quarter in the current coalition the opposition to GM (genetically modified) food principally emanates. Earlier this month, Environment Minister John Gormley mused out loud that Ireland must keep open the option of declaring itself a GM-free zone. This despite the fact that the Food Safety Authority — the expert body — has been generally positive about GM-derived foods.

In delaying cultivation, the anti-GM lobbies have exacted a heavy price, not least in the Third World. Closer to home, incredibly, the programme for government not only stakes out an anti-GM position but declares itself in favour of biofuels which require land to be given over from food to fuel production.

Is it any wonder supermarket prices are skyrocketing? The politicians believe, of course, that they are reflecting public concerns. If the entire world was well-fed and food prices were static, stay-as-we-are might be an affordable luxury. But when a large proportion of the world’s population is still undernourished, don’t politicians have a responsibility to show leadership, to support the scientific and agricultural sectors as they explore ways to grow more, better food?

In a free society, shouldn’t the ultimate decisions lie with consumers who can make up their own minds? As long as the relevant experts are satisfied that GM food is safe — and they are — shouldn’t we be left to decide whether or not to purchase it?

Isn’t that the correct approach rather than engaging in a spurious, never-ending public debate that will inevitably be hijacked by the tiny number of green fundamentalists? ‘Safe’ is the last word the romantics would use to describe GM. Despite Americans having eaten it for years with no discernible side-effects, these so-called earth-lovers continue to raise claims that eating GM food can cause cancer and liver disease (and heart failure and brain damage and any other unpleasant health complication they can concoct on the basis of some kooky laboratory experiment, one suspects).

All credit to the self-styled defenders of our environment, though: they have managed to scare the life out of most of us. They are working with the grain: in the current zeitgeist anything processed or industrialised is potentially harmful, while anything that appears to be close to nature is pure and uncorrupted.

So, rather than embracing GM as opening up the possibility of greater control over the properties of plants, the environmentalists reject it as dangerous interference in nature with all sorts of unknown potential problems.

Have they forgotten that Mother Nature supplies not only delicious things for us to eat, but also its fair share of toxic fungi, bacteria and viruses?

There is a clear paradox here. While we in the developed world enjoy prosperity and health as never before, when it comes to GM foods superstition, ignorance and fear appear to be triumphing over human reason. One suspects that if matters had been left to the likes of Greenpeace, we would all still be hunter-gatherers.

Superstition, of course, is as old as time. When Charles Darwin provided a mechanism for the origin of species by means of natural selection, he violated the ancient notion that species are immutable and created by God in a hierarchy — with humans near the top, just below angels. The superstition about GM is similar: a sense that we are ‘playing God’ by moving genes around.

The further each generation is from the land and, thereby, a direct knowledge of crop production, the more susceptible to the scaremongering we become.

Many other innovations that are now commonplace in our lives were met with similar scepticism and opposition when first introduced. Some might be able to recall the horror stories about microwave ovens. Before that, pasteurisation and even technologies such as canning and freezing provoked alarm.

For all the frightening talk about ‘Frankenstein foods’, though, GM is simply a new tool for plant breeding, a development of what humans have been doing successfully for centuries: breeding wild grasses into wheat and barley, wolves into dogs and so on. In each case, human choice replaced biological chance. The difference is that now we have the ability to isolate the genes which carry specific traits: the randomness has been taken out of the equation. Throughout history there have been those who embraced this kind of change and those who clung to the old ways because they felt at least the risks were known. And since feeding ourselves was the primary occupation of mankind for most of our history, changes in food production have tended to be accepted only very slowly. Modern intensive agriculture has a bad press. The need to increase food production has resulted in the loss of one-fifth of the world’s topsoil and one-third of its forests.

BUT organic farming is scarcely the answer: it requires even more land to be devoted to agriculture. This is the dirty little secret the disillusioned financiers who give up the rat-race to sell organic jam, the New Age religionists and the middle-class hypochondriacs don’t want you to know. Their response is to turn their fire on new technologies to make agriculture more efficient so more land can be left wild — or to call for us all to eat less and breed less.

This hostility to GM makes no sense. Already, GM crops have been designed which are insect-resistant or have a herbicide resistance so they need less spraying. Another benefit is that agricultural landdoesn’t require such extensive tilling, which allows more organic matter to accumulate in the soil.

This is just the beginning. The future holds promise for new GM crop varieties with increased tolerance of drought, heat and cold; with improved disease resistance or nutritional value, or as production systems for pharmaceutical compounds (such as edible vaccines for the developing world) and renewable industrial compounds (such as biodegradable plastics). These ideas might be unfamiliar, but that is no reason to reject them out of hand.

The discussion of food illustrates a broader need to remind ourselves just how much modern society has achieved in changing the lives of people for the better through the application of science, industry and reason. Perhaps then we will all be better able to see the ideas of the anti-GM brigade for the manure they really are.

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Terry D. Etherton

On July 15, 2008, The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) announced its final scientific opinion that food from cloned cattle and pigs is safe, and there are no implications of animal cloning on the environment.

The findings of the EFSA Report concur with those presented in the Risk Assessment (RA) released on December 28, 2006, by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

As previously discussed in the Terry Etherton Blog on Biotechnology, the FDA RA (“A Risk-Based Approach to Evaluate Animal Clones and Their Progeny – DRAFT”) concluded that “….the available data has not identified any food consumption risks or subtle hazards in healthy clones of cattle, swine, or goats. Thus, edible products from healthy clones that meet existing requirements for meat and milk in commerce pose no increased food consumption risk(s) relative to comparable products from sexually-derived animals.”

Key findings of the EFSA Scientific Committee Report are:

- There is no indication that differences exist in terms of food safety for meat and milk of clones and their progeny compared with those from conventionally bred animals.

- Somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT (the most common technique used to clone animals) results in the production of healthy cattle and pig clones, and healthy offspring that are similar to their conventional counterparts based on parameters such as physiological characteristics, demeanor and clinical status.

- From the data collected, no environmental impact is foreseen.

In February 2007, EFSA was asked by the European Commission to provide a scientific opinion on the food safety, animal health, animal welfare and environmental implications of animal clones, obtained through the SCNT technique, of their progeny and of the products obtained from those animals. The final opinion also follows public consultation on a draft opinion issued earlier this year.

As I have discussed previously, cloned animals will be of value because of their increased genetic merit to provide healthy and nutritious meat and milk. Cloned animals also will increase food production, improve disease resistance, and enhance reproductive efficiency. An additional benefit is that cloning can be used to protect endangered species.

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Jörn P. W. Scharlemann and William F. Laurance
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
Balbao, Ancon, Panama

(Published in Science 319:43-44, 2008)

Global warming and escalating petroleum costs are creating an urgent need to find ecologically friendly fuels. Biofuels–such as ethanol from corn (maize) and sugarcane–have been increasingly heralded as a possible savior (1, 2). But others have argued that biofuels will consume vast swaths of farmland and native habitats, drive up food prices, and result in little reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions (3-5). An innovative study by Zah et al. (6), commissioned by the Swiss government, could help to resolve this debate by providing a detailed assessment of the environmental costs and benefits of different transport biofuels.

To date, most efforts to evaluate different biofuel crops have focused on their merits for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions or fossil fuel use. Some studies suggest that corn-derived ethanol in the United States (7) and Europe (8) consumes more energy than it produces; others suggest a modest net benefit (2). Relative to petroleum, nearly all biofuels diminish greenhouse-gas emissions, although crops such as switchgrass easily outperform corn and soy (9). Such comparisons are sensitive to assumptions about local growing conditions and crop by-products, but even more important, their focus on greenhouse gases and energy use is too narrow.

The arguments that support one biofuel crop over another can easily change when one considers their full environmental effects. A key factor affecting biofuel efficacy is whether native ecosystems are destroyed to produce the biofuels. For example, regardless of how effective sugarcane is for producing ethanol, its benefits quickly diminish if carbon-rich tropical forests are being razed to make the sugarcane fields, thereby causing vast greenhouse-gas emission increases (4). Such comparisons become even more lopsided if the full environmental benefits of tropical forests–for example, for biodiversity conservation, hydrological functioning, and soil protection–are included (10, 11).

Another environmental cost that varies among biofuels is trace-gas emissions. For example, crops that require nitrogen fertilizers, such as corn or rapeseed, can be a significant source of nitrous oxide, an important greenhouse gas that also destroys stratospheric ozone. When nitrous oxide emissions are compared among ethanol-producing crops, grasses and woody coppice become more favorable, whereas corn or canola may be worse for global warming than simply burning fossil fuels (3).

In the debate about different biofuels, one can easily be overwhelmed by the “apples and oranges” problem: Each biofuel has certain benefits and potential costs, and there is no common currency for comparing them. This is where Zah et al. have broken new ground by devising a conceptual scheme to evaluate different biofuels using just two criteria: greenhouse-gas emissions and overall environmental impact.

The authors compare gasoline, diesel, and natural gas with 26 different biofuels produced from a wide range of “crops.” They assess the total environmental impact of each fuel by aggregating natural resource depletion and damage to human health and ecosystems into a single indicator, using two different methods (12). The second key criterion for each fuel is its greenhouse-gas emissions relative to gasoline.

The findings of Zah et al. are striking (13) (see Figure 1 below). Most (21 out of 26) biofuels reduce greenhouse- gas emissions by more than 30% relative to gasoline. But nearly half (12 out of 26) of the biofuels–including the economically most important ones, namely U.S. corn ethanol, Brazilian sugarcane ethanol and soy diesel, and Malaysian palm-oil diesel–have greater aggregate environmental costs than do fossil fuels (see Figure 1, top panel). Biofuels that fare best are those produced from residual products, such as biowaste or recycled cooking oil, as well as ethanol from grass or wood. The findings highlight the enormous differences in costs and benefits among different biofuels.

Despite its apparent advantages, the scheme of Zah et al. is not perfect. Collapsing disparate environmental costs into a single number is risky, although it is reassuring that the two different methods used yielded similar results. A bigger worry is that their analyses fail to capture the potentially important indirect effects of different biofuels. For example, U.S. government subsidies to encourage corn-based ethanol production are prompting many American farmers to shift from growing soy to growing corn. This is helping to drive up global soy prices, which in turn amplifies economic incentives to destroy Amazonian forests and Brazilian tropical savannas for soy production (14). Furthermore, Zah et al. rely on relatively old (2004) data sets and fail to consider the social consequences of large-scale biofuel production, especially rising food cost.

Zah et al. excluded from their analysis so-called second-generation biofuels, such as those made from the breakdown of plant cellulose or lignin, because of insufficient data. Such biofuels could be produced from nonfood plants–such as prairie grasses or trees grown on marginal land (15), or algae cultivated in aquaculture (16)–reducing the use of food crops for biofuels (see the figure, bottom panel). Some second- generation biofuels appear particularly promising in terms of their benefits and costs for biofuel production (5).

Not all biofuels are beneficial when their full environmental impacts are assessed; some of the most important, such as those produced from corn, sugarcane, and soy, perform poorly in many contexts. There is a clear need to consider more than just energy and greenhouse-gas emissions when evaluating different biofuels and to pursue new biofuel crops and technologies. Governments should be far more selective about which biofuel crops they support through subsidies and tax benefits. For example, multibillion-dollar subsidies for U.S. corn production appear to be a perverse incentive from a rational cost-benefit perspective.

References and Notes

Figure 1. Greenhouse emissions are plotted against overall environmental impacts of 29 transport fuels, scaled relative to gasoline. The origin of biofuels produced outside Switzerland is indicated by country code: Brazil (BR), China (CN), European Union (EU), France (FR), and Malaysia (MY). Fuels in the shaded are considered advantageous in both their overall environmental impacts and greenhouse-gas emissions.

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New York, NY — July 21, 2008. The latest attempt by proponents of organic agriculture to prove that organically grown crops are nutritionally superior to conventional ones has failed, according to Joseph D. Rosen, Ph.D., emeritus professor of Food Toxicology at Rutgers University and a scientific advisor to the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH).

Dr. Rosen analyzed a pro-organic report by Charles Benbrook and colleagues at the Organic Trade Association’s Organic Center and found the data had been selectively chosen and presented to “prove” the desired point. Dr. Rosen’s report, Claims of Organic Food’s Nutritional Superiority: A Critical Review, was published by ACSH.

In the original pro-organic paper, Benbrook and colleagues had stated that organic produce is 25% “more nutritious” than that produced by conventional agricultural practices. But when Dr. Rosen actually recalculated some of their data, correcting several inaccuracies, he concluded that the conventional products were actually 2% more nutritious than the organic varieties:

•The Benbrook paper had claimed that organically grown vegetables had much more quercetrin (a precursor of the antioxidant quercetin) than conventional varieties. But the organic vegetables studied had been sprayed with an organic pesticide that greatly increases plants’ production of quercetrin — so of course they beat the conventional plants on that measure.

•Dr. Rosen also points out that the organic proponents included data of dubious validity in their review. They used data from articles that were not peer-reviewed, and in one case included nutrient content from an analysis of whole kiwi fruits — both the inedible skin and the edible pulp, though this is not what the consumer would eat.

Dr. Rosen’s analysis demonstrates how organic proponents have, once again, used misleading and inappropriately-evaluated data to support their agenda.

For more information please contact Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, President, or Dr. Ruth Kava, Director of Nutrition, at ACSH (212-362-7044).

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New York, NY — July 21, 2008. The latest attempt by proponents of organic agriculture to prove that organically grown crops are nutritionally superior to conventional ones has failed, according to Joseph D. Rosen, Ph.D., emeritus professor of Food Toxicology at Rutgers University and a scientific advisor to the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH).

Dr. Rosen analyzed a pro-organic report by Charles Benbrook and colleagues at the Organic Trade Association’s Organic Center and found the data had been selectively chosen and presented to “prove” the desired point. Dr. Rosen’s report, Claims of Organic Food’s Nutritional Superiority: A Critical Review, was published by ACSH.

In the original pro-organic paper, Benbrook and colleagues had stated that organic produce is 25% “more nutritious” than that produced by conventional agricultural practices. But when Dr. Rosen actually recalculated some of their data, correcting several inaccuracies, he concluded that the conventional products were actually 2% more nutritious than the organic varieties:

•The Benbrook paper had claimed that organically grown vegetables had much more quercetrin (a precursor of the antioxidant quercetin) than conventional varieties. But the organic vegetables studied had been sprayed with an organic pesticide that greatly increases plants’ production of quercetrin — so of course they beat the conventional plants on that measure.

•Dr. Rosen also points out that the organic proponents included data of dubious validity in their review. They used data from articles that were not peer-reviewed, and in one case included nutrient content from an analysis of whole kiwi fruits — both the inedible skin and the edible pulp, though this is not what the consumer would eat.

Dr. Rosen’s analysis demonstrates how organic proponents have, once again, used misleading and inappropriately-evaluated data to support their agenda.

For more information please contact Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, President, or Dr. Ruth Kava, Director of Nutrition, at ACSH (212-362-7044).

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Comments are closed.

New York, NY — July 21, 2008. The latest attempt by proponents of organic agriculture to prove that organically grown crops are nutritionally superior to conventional ones has failed, according to Joseph D. Rosen, Ph.D., emeritus professor of Food Toxicology at Rutgers University and a scientific advisor to the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH).

Dr. Rosen analyzed a pro-organic report by Charles Benbrook and colleagues at the Organic Trade Association’s Organic Center and found the data had been selectively chosen and presented to “prove” the desired point. Dr. Rosen’s report, Claims of Organic Food’s Nutritional Superiority: A Critical Review, was published by ACSH.

In the original pro-organic paper, Benbrook and colleagues had stated that organic produce is 25% “more nutritious” than that produced by conventional agricultural practices. But when Dr. Rosen actually recalculated some of their data, correcting several inaccuracies, he concluded that the conventional products were actually 2% more nutritious than the organic varieties:

•The Benbrook paper had claimed that organically grown vegetables had much more quercetrin (a precursor of the antioxidant quercetin) than conventional varieties. But the organic vegetables studied had been sprayed with an organic pesticide that greatly increases plants’ production of quercetrin — so of course they beat the conventional plants on that measure.

•Dr. Rosen also points out that the organic proponents included data of dubious validity in their review. They used data from articles that were not peer-reviewed, and in one case included nutrient content from an analysis of whole kiwi fruits — both the inedible skin and the edible pulp, though this is not what the consumer would eat.

Dr. Rosen’s analysis demonstrates how organic proponents have, once again, used misleading and inappropriately-evaluated data to support their agenda.

For more information please contact Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, President, or Dr. Ruth Kava, Director of Nutrition, at ACSH (212-362-7044).

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Comments are closed.

by Rose Pruyne
Web Administrator,
Department of Dairy and Animal Science

“Great Web sites share everything they learn and hear
(that’s relevant of course) with their users.”
- Andrew B. King

What does it take to be successful on the Web? The answer to that is simple and yet not so simple: Provide relevant information. Make it easy to discover.

How do we make sure that we provide relevant information on the DAS Web Site? We let go of the content.

That is, we entrust its care to nearly 30 content managers - researchers, educators, extension professionals, students - our experts around the state and in neighboring states. Along with regularly contributing their knowledge and expertise to das.psu.edu, these individuals continually seek and apply feedback from you, our clientele.

And to guarantee that this content is accessible to every one of our users, regardless of individual needs or technologies, we continually test and readjust how the site delivers that information.

So, is it working? The message from you, our users, is yes.

A snapshot of user activity

From January 1 of this year to the present, the Dairy and Animal Science Web Site was visited 146,288 times - an average of about 841 site visits each day. Compare this with benchmarked sites containing similar content, which received an average of 17,056 visits during the same time period.

Visits to das.psu.edu averaged a handful of page views each and added up to a total of 488,322 page views. This is compared to an average of 55,172 page views in the same time period on similar sites.

Our visitors spent, on average, about 3 minutes reading the Web page(s) that that interested them - approximately the time it takes to give a Web page a fairly thorough perusal. Considering that the tendency of users on the Web is to skim rather than read, this is an impressive amount of time to linger over Web content.

But perhaps the most telling is this: A total of 15,520 users repeatedly visited the pages they consider the most valuable to them - an average of more than 200 times each.

International visitors

Our statistics show that a large number of our users are viewing das.psu.edu outside the United States - 185 different countries and territories, including Canada, The United Kingdom, India, Australia, Mexico, the Philippines, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Spain, Greece, Denmark, Costa Rica, South Africa, and so on…

Aside from the United States, countries with the most visitors are Canada, with 4,074 visits; the UK, with 3,420 visits; India, with 2,276 visits; and Australia, with 1,814 visits. In addition, we receive a significant number of visitors from Spanish-speaking regions of the globe, which has lead us to translate much of our key information into Spanish (the DAS Web site is one of a very few sites at Penn State to offer Spanish content).

How users get to the DAS site

So far this year, more than 1,300 Web pages in education and industry linking to our site have generated 30,631 visits. By far, however, most users arrive at das.psu.edu using search engines - about 60 percent. (Of those, most are Google searches, with Yahoo coming in a distant second.)

Search engine statistics can be a gold mine of information. By studying the most commonly used words or phrases entered into Web searches, we can better understand what our users are looking for - and if possible bring them to us sooner and make information even easier to find.

“Sweet Bonus” or Survival? Get the Facts and Then Decide!
by Sherry Bunting
Introduction by Terry Etherton

On June 22, 2008, the Star Tribune newspaper (Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota) published an article, “Is Labeling Milk as Free of Hormones a Bad Idea“, written by Lou Gelfand. The story is great example of the lousy and slanted journalism being practiced that focuses on agricultural biotechnology … in this case, rbST and milk labeling.

I have written about bad science journalism before. It continues to mystify me why some journalists fail to practice accurate and informative journalism. Must be easier to present a bias, distort the truth and mislead readers.

Enjoy the response that Ms. Bunting sent to the Star Tribune.

# # # #

As a 28-year veteran journalist, I find several inaccuracies in your article about milk labeling.

First, record high milk prices do not mean good income for dairy farmers. They are facing record high prices for all inputs — particularly feed, fuel, and fertilizer — surging farther and faster than milk prices (up 35-75% over year ago). The U.S. Department of Agriculture figures that dairy farms are profitable when the milk-feed ratio is 3.0 or above. Currently, it is 1.7!

Second, the dairy price support program does not “buoy” milk prices. This very low “floor” on the price of milk has not been triggered in years and it has not been adjusted for inflation. It is a non-factor.

Third, I am from Pennsylvania and our Sec of Agriculture did not “retreat.” A compromise was reached. Bottlers are prohibited from making “absence claims.” They are allowed to make production-related claims only, such as “produced from cows not treated with rbST.” They may not say “hormone free.” In addition, the FDA disclaimer stating no distinguishable difference in the milk must also appear on the label in a font size at least half the size of the claim.

Fourth, the countries mentioned do not ban products from cows treated with rbST (Posilac), they ban their farmers from using it because they market milk in a supply management or quota system. In Canada, for example, dairy farmers buy the right to sell a certain “quota” of milk. This keeps the supply tight and the price high to farmers. A production efficiency tool like rbST is certainly not going to be allowed by a nation that uses supply management.

Fifth, technologies that safely boost production efficiency are conserving our natural resources by producing more with less. In case you have not noticed, the U.S. and World population is expanding and our land base for producing food is shrinking. What could be more “green” than producing more milk with fewer cows, requiring less feed, less land to grow the feed, less manure waste nutrient to manage, etc. You get my drift.

Sixth, the only “sweet bonus” here is the one the retailers are collecting from consumers for “hormone-free” milk when actually all milk contains protein hormones as does nearly every food on the planet — plant or animal. There is no distinguishable difference between naturally occurring bovine somatotropin in the cow and the synthetic hormone used to supplement the cow. These cows actually benefit with greater longevity as they are producing milk at a profitable level for a longer period of time, so a farmer can afford to keep feeding and caring for a cow that does not breed back when she should for her next lactation. In those cases, if the milk production falls to a certain level and she is not with calf for another lactation, she would be sold for beef.

You see, rbST is not the “evil demon” activists and lately, journalists, seem to want to make it out to be. But of course, there are simply not enough journalists today with a solid background in science to discern the truth, and even fewer who truly understand agriculture and razor thin margins farmers operate on.

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by Rose Pruyne
Web Administrator,
Department of Dairy and Animal Science

“Great Web sites share everything they learn and hear
(that’s relevant of course) with their users.”
- Andrew B. King

What does it take to be successful on the Web? The answer to that is simple and yet not so simple: Provide relevant information. Make it easy to discover.

How do we make sure that we provide relevant information on the DAS Web Site? We let go of the content.

That is, we entrust its care to nearly 30 content managers - researchers, educators, extension professionals, students - our experts around the state and in neighboring states. Along with regularly contributing their knowledge and expertise to das.psu.edu, these individuals continually seek and apply feedback from you, our clientele.

And to guarantee that this content is accessible to every one of our users, regardless of individual needs or technologies, we continually test and readjust how the site delivers that information.

So, is it working? The message from you, our users, is yes.

A snapshot of user activity

From January 1 of this year to the present, the Dairy and Animal Science Web Site was visited 146,288 times - an average of about 841 site visits each day. Compare this with benchmarked sites containing similar content, which received an average of 17,056 visits during the same time period.

Visits to das.psu.edu averaged a handful of page views each and added up to a total of 488,322 page views. This is compared to an average of 55,172 page views in the same time period on similar sites.

Our visitors spent, on average, about 3 minutes reading the Web page(s) that that interested them - approximately the time it takes to give a Web page a fairly thorough perusal. Considering that the tendency of users on the Web is to skim rather than read, this is an impressive amount of time to linger over Web content.

But perhaps the most telling is this: A total of 15,520 users repeatedly visited the pages they consider the most valuable to them - an average of more than 200 times each.

International visitors

Our statistics show that a large number of our users are viewing das.psu.edu outside the United States - 185 different countries and territories, including Canada, The United Kingdom, India, Australia, Mexico, the Philippines, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Spain, Greece, Denmark, Costa Rica, South Africa, and so on…

Aside from the United States, countries with the most visitors are Canada, with 4,074 visits; the UK, with 3,420 visits; India, with 2,276 visits; and Australia, with 1,814 visits. In addition, we receive a significant number of visitors from Spanish-speaking regions of the globe, which has lead us to translate much of our key information into Spanish (the DAS Web site is one of a very few sites at Penn State to offer Spanish content).

How users get to the DAS site

So far this year, more than 1,300 Web pages in education and industry linking to our site have generated 30,631 visits. By far, however, most users arrive at das.psu.edu using search engines - about 60 percent. (Of those, most are Google searches, with Yahoo coming in a distant second.)

Search engine statistics can be a gold mine of information. By studying the most commonly used words or phrases entered into Web searches, we can better understand what our users are looking for - and if possible bring them to us sooner and make information even easier to find.