Vision for America

Here is a news story that could determine whether you live or die. Many of the world’s scientists are warning that one of the mightiest weapons doctors have against sickness is being rendered useless — so a few people can get richer, for a while. If they aren’t stopped soon, the World Health Organization warns we are facing “a doomsday scenario of a world without antibiotics”. It will be a world where transplant surgery is impossible. It will be a world where a simple appendix operation will be as routinely lethal as it was in 1927, before the discovery of penicillin. It will be a world where pneumonia and TB and gonorrhea are far harder to deal with, and claim many more of us. But it’s a world that you and I don’t have to see – if we act on this warning now.

As the scientists I’ve interviewed explain it, antibiotics do something simple. They kill, slow down or stall the growth of bacteria. They were one of the great advances of the 20th century, and they have saved millions of us. But they inherently contain a problem — one that was known about from very early on. They start an arms race. Use an antibiotic against bacteria, and it kills most of it — but it can also prompt the bacteria to evolve a tougher, stronger, meaner strain that can fight back. The bacteria is constantly mutating and dividing. The stronger the antibiotic, the stronger some bacteria will become to survive. It’s Darwin dancing at super-speed.

So the more we use antibiotics, the more we lose them. It’s a battle played out on human bodies and in human wounds, with sky-high stakes. In many developed countries today, MRSA kills more people than Aids. The obvious conclusion, then, is that we should use antibiotics sparingly, and only when they are really needed to treat the sick. But in one crucial area we are doing the exact opposite — for the sake of a few people’s profits.

In the United States, Latin America, and Asia, animals being farmed for meat and milk are being automatically given antibiotics in their food all day — irrespective of whether they are healthy or sick. It’s like slathering your child’s Cornflakes with antibiotics, all year round. Some 80 per cent of all antibiotics in the US go straight into farm animals. This speeds up the race massively. It’s like taking bacteria to the gym and giving them a constant work-out — and then unleashing them on the rest of us.

You can see how this process makes bacteria stronger and tougher — and at work on humans — in a startling study by Professor Barry Levy in the New England Journal of Medicine. His team went to a chicken farm where antibiotics had not been used before, and started to put the antibiotic tetracycline into their feed. Before the start of the experiment, there was no tetracycline-resistant bacteria on the farm. Within two weeks, 90 per cent of the chickens were excreting tetracycline-resistant organisms. Even more strikingly, half of all the humans living on the farm were by then excreting tetracycline-resistant bacteria too.

This process partially explains the evolution and spread of many superbugs. Only a fortnight ago, a new strain of MRSA was found in British milk that could be transmitted to human beings. To some degree this arms race is an inevitable part of nature – but our factory farms are massively artificially accelerating it. They are bringing the day when antibiotics won’t work much closer.

Why? Why would factory farms automatically feed antibiotics to healthy animals, given the obvious risk? If you cram animals together, give them little room to move, and make them grow and produce far beyond the level they would in natural circumstances, they will routinely get ill — and they do. It is cheaper for their owners to simply automatically and preemptively drug them all, than to try to treat their illness individually, or to create an environment where sickness is not standard.

The animals in these factory farms can become reservoirs of stronger superbugs. Sometimes it spreads to us through contamination of raw meat, but more often it filters out through workers who have contact with the animals. Dutch pig farmers are 760 times more likely to be carrying pig-MRSA than the rest of the population. This story ends eventually with the death of antibiotics — and routine operations becoming deadly once more.

We always knew factory farming was a scar on our conscience, but it turns out it is also an urgent threat to our health. Of course, factory farming is not the only source of growing antibiotic resistance. Doctors have been over-prescribing them, and patients have too often not been taking their full course, enabling tougher bacteria to survive and thrive. But this is the most egregious cause.

A few years ago, it looked like the European Union had taken the lead, by banning the routine use of some types of antibiotics simply to promote the growth of animals. But research published this week by the Soil Association suggests farmers are sidestepping the real issue. The prescription of modern cephalosporins, the antibiotics which are most widely believed to promote stronger variants of MRSA in animals and humans — has quadrupled in the past decade in Britain. Why? They are advertised to farmers, who are under greater pressure than ever to get more and more out of their herds because supermarkets have ratcheted up the pressure for quick profit. Decent small farmers who want to resist these trends find themselves out of business.

Britain’s former chief medical officer Liam Donaldson says this over-prescription is so dangerous to us all it should be banned. Yet David Cameron’s Government ignored the official recommendation from its own veterinary advisers to take even the much milder step of banning the advertising of antibiotics to farmers. In the US, all attempts to ban the routine feeding of antibiotics — led by Representative Louise Slaughter — are routinely smothered by the farming lobby.

It might seem strange that governments all over the world are taking such a gamble with public health, in the face of the best scientific advice. But Big Agriculture has armies of lobbyists and open checkbooks, while the people trying to protect the public have only the facts and reason and truth on their side. The squandering of life-saving antibiotics is one example of a bigger trend hijacking global politics. Small groups of rich people, determined to maximize profits, are buying or bamboozling politicians into serving their interests and into ignoring the interests of the vast majority of the population. This is the trend that is making it so hard to (say) re-regulate the banks to prevent another global crash, or prevent the unraveling of the climate.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The majority of the population can organize and shout louder than these self-interested juntas of profit. There are inspiring examples. In Lincolnshire, there were plans to import the first US-style mega-farm into this country by a group of tycoons who claimed their cows “do not belong in fields”. But public pressure forced the Environment Agency to investigate, and the plans to be abandoned. Fighting back on issues like this works – and we need to step it up.

Otherwise, the history books — written by people far more vulnerably to bacteria than you and I have ever been — will record something startling. Our demand for cheap meat turned us, in turn, into cheap meat.
Johann Hari presents a regular podcast, uncovering the news you won’t hear elsewhere. You can subscribe via i-Tunes or click here.

For updates on this issue and others, follow Johann on twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101. Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here. You can email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101

Follow Johann Hari on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johannhari101

[Source: huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/factory-farming-is-manufa_b_878872.html]

By Amy Goodman

A reporter, describing the devastation of one city in Japan, wrote: “It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts … as a warning to the world.” The reporter was Wilfred Burchett, writing from Hiroshima, Japan, on Sept. 5, 1945. Burchett was the first Western reporter to make it to Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped there. He reported on the strange illness that continued to kill people, even a full month after that first, dreadful use of nuclear weapons against humans. His words could well describe the scenes of annihilation in northeastern Japan today. Given the worsening catastrophe at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, his grave warning to the world remains all too relevant.

The disaster deepens at the Fukushima complex in the aftermath of the largest recorded earthquake in Japanese history and the tsunami that followed, killing thousands. Explosions in Fukushima reactors No. 1 and No. 3 released radiation that was measured by a U.S. Navy vessel as far away as 100 miles, prompting the ship to move farther out to sea. A third explosion happened at reactor No. 2, leading many to speculate that the vital containment vessel, holding uranium undergoing fission, may have been breached. Then reactor No. 4 caught fire, even though it wasn’t running when the earthquake hit. Each reactor also has spent nuclear fuel stored with it, and that fuel can cause massive fires, releasing more radiation into the air. The cooling systems and their backups all have failed, and a small crew of courageous workers remains on-site, despite the life-threatening radiation, trying to pump seawater into the damaged structures to cool the radioactive fuel.

President Barack Obama had hoped to usher in a “nuclear renaissance,” and proposed $36 billion in new federal, taxpayer-subsidized loan guarantees to entice energy corporations to build new plants (adding to the $18.5 billion already approved during the George W. Bush administration). The first energy corporation in line to receive the public largesse was Southern Co., for two reactors slated for Georgia. The last time new construction on a nuclear power plant in the U.S. was ordered, and ultimately built, was back in 1973, when Obama was a seventh-grader at the Punahou School on Honolulu. The Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 effectively shut down new commercial nuclear projects in the U.S. Nevertheless, this country remains the largest producer of commercial nuclear power in the world. The 104 licensed commercial nuclear plants are old, close to the end of their originally projected life spans. Plant owners are petitioning the federal government to extend their operating licenses.

These licenses are controlled by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). On March 10, the NRC issued a press release “regarding renewal of the operating license for the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station near Brattleboro, Vt., for an additional 20 years. The NRC staff expects to issue the renewed license soon.” Harvey Wasserman, of NukeFree.org, told me, “The first reactor at Fukushima is identical to the Vermont Yankee plant. … There are 23 reactors in the United States that are identical or close to identical to the first Fukushima reactor.” A majority of Vermonters, including the state’s governor, Peter Shumlin, support shutting down the Vermont Yankee reactor, designed and built by General Electric.

The Japanese nuclear crisis has sparked global repercussions. Protests erupted across Europe. Eva Joly, a French member of the European Parliament, said at one protest, “We know how to get out of the nuclear plants: We need renewable energy, we need windmills, we need geothermal, and we need solar energy.” Switzerland has halted plans to relicense its reactors, and 10,000 protesters in Stuttgart prompted German Chancellor Angela Merkel to order an immediate shutdown of Germany’s seven pre-1980 nuclear plants. In the U.S., Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said, “What is happening in Japan right now shows that a severe accident at a nuclear power plant can happen here.”

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The nuclear age dawned not far from Fukushima, when the United States became the sole nation in human history to drop nuclear bombs on another country, destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. Journalist Wilfred Burchett described, for the first time, the “atomic plague,” writing: “In these hospitals I found people who, when the bomb fell, suffered absolutely no injuries, but now are dying from the uncanny after-effects. For no apparent reason their health began to fail.” More than 65 years after he sat in the rubble with his battered Hermes typewriter and typed his warning to the world, what have we learned?

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

© 2011 Amy Goodman

Some politicians are so determined to serve their corporate patrons that even disasters like Fukushima can’t lessen their deregulatory zeal. The expression for that kind of determination is “Come hell or high water.” Now, thanks to deregulation, we’ve seen both.

As tragedy unfolds in Fukushima, an ideological struggle’s being waged here at home. A CBS News headline reads “Nuclear Safety Expert: It Could Happen Here.” The Nation’s Christian Parenti offers a piece called “Nuclear Hubris: Could Japan’s Disaster Happen Here? Experts are being quoted on both sides of the debate. The Brattleboro Reformer’s “Could It Happen Here?” piece reflects a special anxiety, since the Vermont Yankee reactor down the road in Vernon is a General Electric Mark I like the reactors at Fukushima. Other “can it happen here?” stories have appeared in Pennsylvania, Grand Rapids, Detroit, South Carolina, San Francisco, Michigan, New Hampshire, and undoubtedly elsewhere around the country.

The question urgently needs to be asked. There are at least 23 similar reactors in the United States, and some them are forty years old. And “can it happen here?” stories are appearing in other parts of the world, too, like Canada, Great Britain, India, Russia, Australia, and Armenia.

But in another sense, “Can it happen here?” is the wrong question, because the truth is that it’s already happened – and it will continue to happen as long as private corporations are allowed to decide whether our risk of disaster outweighs their need to show strong quarterly earnings. We’ve seen the damage that can be caused by excessive deregulation and government cost-cutting. Yet despite this latest tragedy, the political voices of corporate America are once again waging their perennial war against sanity and common sense.

If the Devil had lobbyists we’d be in Armaggedon now – and he’d be winning.
Hell

Enter Sen. Mitch McConnell, right on cue. Here’s what the Republican Majority Leader said on Fox News Sunday as the flames of Fukushima unleashed hell on the Japanese countryside: “”This discussion reminds me, somewhat, of the conversations that were going on after the BP oil spill last year. I don’t think right after a major environmental catastrophe is a very good time to be making American domestic policy.”

Right. And right after a drunk driving accident isn’t a good time to administer a Breathalyzer test.

The anti-regulation forces seem to have stopped trying to make rational arguments for their position, probably because those arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny. Instead they’ve been reduced to making the case for amnesia. Sen. McConnell’s defenders may claim that he’s only suggesting we wait until emotions have died down, but he and his allies really want to wait until the terrible details have faded from our memories.

It was Republican Rep. Joe Barton, after all, who apologized to Tony Hayward of BP because the oil company was asked to set up a claim fund to compensate the victims of its spill. Barton had received $1.5 million in campaign funds from the oil industry by then (he’s probably received more since then). That gaffe (revealing your true feelings can be a gaffe in Washington) cost Barton his chairmanship of the House Energy Committee, although the GOP mollified him by naming him “chair emeritus.”

The chairmanship went instead to Rep. Fred Upton,who could have been Barton’s clone after a White House panel made an urgent, common-sense call for more oil drilling regulation. The expert group had concluded that “none of the major aspects of offshore drilling safety — not the regulatory oversight, not the industry safety standards, not the spill response practices — kept pace with the push into deepwater,” and that “our nation was entirely unprepared for an inevitable disaster.”

What was Upton’s response? ” “Neither this nor any investigation should be used as political justification for a pre-determined agenda to limit affordable energy options for America.” Translation: No facts, please. We have oil lobbyists to serve.

The Mighty Atom

According to an independent report, “The Obama administration may soon guarantee as much as $18.5 billion in loans to build new nuclear reactors to generate electricity, and Congress is considering whether to add billions more to support an expansion of nuclear power. These actions come after an extensive decade-long campaign in which companies and unions related to the industry have spent more than $600 million on lobbying and nearly $63 million on campaign contributions.”

While the nuclear industry lavishes money on both parties, it celebrated the Republicans’ Congressional victory with special pleasure. As a nuclear lobbying group put it in a story about nuke company NRG: “Nuclear Power Benefits From Republican Wins, NRG Says.” NRG’s CEO added that government was no longer led by “just California and Oregon tree-huggers.”

The American nuclear power has long been green with envy (or should that be blue, like Cherenkov radiation?) as it gazed longingly at countries that didn’t regulate nuclear reactors as carefully as the United States – countries like … well, like Japan.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency has faced accusations of lax oversight for a long time. Anderson Cooper grilled a Japanese official this evening over the government’s apparent willingness to accept the Tokyo Power Company’s assertions about the state of the reactors at face value, without confirming them independently. This apparent gullibility came after what the Wall Street Journal described as “a string of nuclear safety records cover-ups … including … the company’s doctoring of safety records concerning reactor shrouds, a part of the reactors themselves, in the 1980s through the early 1990s.”

The Japanese official sounded a lot like own government representatives did when they echoed BP’s claims about the state of the oil spill and rescue efforts without insisting on verifying them independently. Apparently we’ve exported more than just our nuclear reactors to Japan. Their government’s imported American-style corporate cronyism, too.

High Water

Despite the near-inevitability of disasters, business leaders – and the politicians that serve them – insist on behaving as if they’ll never happen. Case in point: The House Republican budget includes cuts to funds for “Flood Control and Coastal Emergencies.” As we wrote when it was first released, the National Oceanographic and Aeronautical Administration (NOAA) estimates that damage from coastal floods and storms costs an average $11.4 billion per year, nearly four hundred times as much as the cuts would save. NOAA also reports that there’s a roughly 1-in-20 chance of a fifty billion dollar event occurring in any given year.

They’re cutting thirty million dollars intended to reduce costs that would be many times that magnitude – and would save lives – when the next severe tropical storm comes, as it inevitably will.

The bottom line? They blew it with Katrina, and now they’re planning to blow the next Katrina too. The NOAA statistics tell the story. (They want to cut funding for NOAA, too.)

Invaders From Outer Space

It gets worse.

Republicans under Bush even resisted a Congressional request to find ways of protecting the planet from asteroids. That led to this sentence from a New York Times editorial:

NASA officials say the space agency is capable of finding almost every asteroid that might pose a devastating threat to Earth, but because it lacks the money to do it, the job will not get done.
That’s not what a guy wants to read while he’s having his morning coffee.
As former astronaut Russell “Rusty” Schweickart explained in another Times editorial:

In 1998, Congress gave NASA’s Spaceguard Survey program a mandate of “discovering, tracking, cataloging and characterizing” 90 percent of the near-Earth objects larger than one kilometer (3,200 feet) wide by 2008 … But instead of coming up with a plan and budget to get the job done, the report bluntly stated that “due to current budget constraints, NASA cannot initiate a new program at this time.”
That’s right. When Congress asked the Bush Administration to tell it how much it would need to find Earth-endangering asteroids, the answer was “we don’t want to spend the time or money.” That’s a direct reflection of the right-wing, all-government-is-bad ideology. If conservatives couldn’t even motivate themselves to defend our planet = our “home world,” as they might say on Star Trek – how can they be expected to protect us from earthbound catastrophes?

What was the name of that movie where Bruce Willis saves the planet from an asteroid? Oh, yeah. Armageddon.

American Fukushimas

Think Fukushima is thousands of miles away?

When people in this country die because the Food and Drug Administration didn’t provide adequate oversight,that’s Fukushima too.

When under-regulated bankers put millions of people out of work, that’s Fukushima.

When drowning Americans die in Louisiana because the government wasn’t there to help them, that’s Fukushima.

Disasters will always happen. We can’t make ourselves completely safe from accidents. We have lives to lead. But whenever people suffer needlessly because ideologues won’t let the government do its job, that’s Fukushima.

The Real Fukushima

The fact that we’re using Fukushima as a metaphor doesn’t lessen the horror of what people are experiencing in the real Fukushima, and all through Japan. One day, a little more than twenty years ago, a friend and I drove up the eastern coast of Japan’s main island from Tokyo. We didn’t get as far as Fukushima Prefecture. It was August, and it so hot that steam seemed to rise up from the farms and fields. The water seemed inviting and the people were warm and friendly. What’s happening there today is heartbreaking, and we should keep the people there in our minds and hearts.

That’s all the more reason to rededicate ourselves to an important idea: Government exists to protect us when other institutions cannot. Businesses exist to make a profit, and their prosperity benefits everyone if it’s properly managed. But the profit motive needs to be balanced by human (and humane) considerations if we’re to be a livable society – or at the very least a survivable one.

Regulations are our way of ensuring that the drive for profits never again leads to needless tragedies: Not in Fukushima. Not in the Gulf of Mexico. Not in New Orleans. And not in your home town, or mine, or anyone else’s.
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Richard (RJ) Eskow, a consultant and writer (and former insurance/finance executive), is a Senior Fellow with the Campaign for America’s Future. This post was produced as part of the Curbing Wall Street project and the Strengthen Social Security campaign. Richard also blogs at A Night Light.

He can be reached at “rjeskow@ourfuture.org.”

Website: Eskow and Associates