Featured stories in this issue…
Skating To the Dark Side on Thin Ice
At a power plant in southern Indiana, a national environmental
group is advocating for the burial of thousands of tons of hazardous
carbon dioxide wastes deep underground in an active earthquake zone.
Europe’s Carbon Market Holds Lessons for the U.S.
The carbon traders are hoping to make billions of dollars while
saving the planet. Unfortunately, the available data suggest that
there’s tons of money to be made trading carbon, but it won’t save the
planet.
Global Warming’s Twin, Ocean Acidification, Is Here
Carbon dioxide is warming the planet but it is also making
the oceans more acidic, disrupting the lives of tiny creatures that
form the base of the marine food web. This is serious.
Why the Demise of Civilisation May Be Inevitable
No one likes to consider it, but every civiliation before ours has
collapsed. Will ours be the exception?
Will a Pandemic Bring Down Civilisation?
There is a widespread belief that our society has achieved a scale,
complexity and level of innovation that make it immune from collapse.
But perhaps a simple virus could change all that.
Can Lifestyle Changes Bring Out the Best in Genes?
The new scientific field called “epigenetics” tells us that “the
environment” is far more important than we previously thought because
“the environment” modifies how our genes function. This comes as
quite a surprise to traditional genetic theorists.
Agricultural Antibiotics May Be the Cause of Super-bugs
“The European Union banned the use of antibiotics for growth
promotion based on the precautionary principle. In this case, it is
more scientific to simply ban the product that might be the cause of
the [antibiotic] resistance, than simply do nothing because there are
no precise means to measure the complex interaction between organisms
and transmission of resistance in bacteria.”
Bacteria in Pork Showing Resistance To Antibiotics
For years, scientisis have been warning that the overuse of
antibiotics by physicians and farmers would lead to antibiotic-
resistant bacteria in the human food chain. Now that prediction is
coming true.
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From: Rachel’s Democracy & Health News
June 19, 2008
SKATING TO THE DARK SIDE ON THIN ICE
[Rachel’s introduction: At a power plant in southern Indiana, a national environmental group is advocating for the burial of thousands of tons of hazardous carbon dioxide wastes deep underground in an active earthquake zone.]
By Peter Montague
When burned, coal produces three times its own weight in carbon dioxide (CO2) — making it far dirtier than any other energy source, per unit of usable energy. Carbon dioxide is the main human contributor to global warming, so as more people worry about the future of human civilization in a hothouse world, new coal plants are being canceled across the country.
To protect its enormous investment in land, equipment, politicians and environmental groups, the coal industry has bet its future on an untried technology called “carbon capture and storage,” or CCS for short. The idea is to capture the carbon dioxide emitted by burning coal, compress it into a liquid, and bury it a mile below ground, hoping it will stay there forever. The coal industry’s fanciful name for this is “clean coal” and even though clean coal does not actually exist anywhere on Earth, the industry has sold the idea so effectively that more than 60% of Americans say they favor it.
To gain permission to build new coal plants, the coal and electric power industries are now promising the moon: “This new coal plant will be ‘capture-ready.’ Just let us build this plant now and we’ll add a CCS unit onto the back end as soon as CCS technology has matured and is affordable.” In other words, the industry is saying, “Let us build ‘capture-ready’ coal plants now and someday eventually maybe we’ll be able to capture the CO2 and bury it in the ground, where we hope it will remain forever.”
This is precisely the situation at Duke Energy’s ‘capture-ready’ plant being built now at Edwardsport, Indiana.
The 630-megawatt Edwardsport plant will emit an estimated 4300 tons of CO2 per year (unless and until CCS is tacked onto the plant). Therefore, during its 40-year lifetime, the plant will produce 4300 x 40 = 172,000 tons, or 344 million pounds, of CO2.
Duke Energy executives insist that the deep earth beneath Edwardsport is ideal for storing hazardous liquid CO2. At least one major environmental group — the Clean Air Task Force, headquartered in Boston — agrees with them. A recent news report in the Bloomington, Indiana, Herald Times says, “Clean Air Task Force representative John W. Thompson describes the Duke carbon sequestration initiative as a pioneering effort that could provide a template for other companies and countries to ameliorate global warming by safely storing carbon dioxide….” When Duke Energy officials met with the editorial board of the Herald Times recently, the Clean Air task Force tagged along to provide Duke Energy a patina of green.
Indiana Earthquakes So Powerful They Shake the Ground in New Hampshire
Edwardsport lies in Knox County in southwestern Indiana, about 70 miles below Evansville. Southwestern Indiana lies atop a geologic feature known as the “Wabash Seismic Zone.” Because it was only discovered in recent decades, the Wabash Seismic zone is not nearly so well known as the nearby “New Madrid Seismic Zone” which is famous because in 1811-1812 it spawned earth-shattering quakes that registered as high a 8 on the Richter scale, which were felt in New Hampshire a thousand miles away and rang church bells in Washington, D.C., according to the Indiana Geological Survey.
Here’s what the Central United States Earthquake Consortium has to say about the Wabash Seismic Zone:
“Recent studies have indicated that the New Madrid Seismic Zone is not the only ‘hot spot’ for earthquakes in the Central United States. On June 18, 2002, a 5.0 magnitude earthquake struck Evansville, Indiana with an epicenter between Mt. Vernon and West Franklin in Posey County, in an area that is part of the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone….
“The Wabash Valley Seismic Zone is located in Southeastern Illinois and Southwestern Indiana and it is capable of producing ‘New Madrid’ size earthquake events….”
Here is a map showing Evansville, Indiana, in relation to earthquakes that have occurred in the region; Edwardsport is 70 miles southwest of Evansville — down toward the New Madrid seismic zone.
Just two months ago, on April 18, a magnitude 5.2 earthquake struck in the Wabash zone, with its epicenter 34 miles from Edwardsport. Since then nearly 3 dozen earthquakes have occurred in the Wabash zone, 29 of them strong enough for local people to feel. In other words, the Wabash zone is very active: “A magnitude 1.0 earthquake is probably happening once a week somewhere in the Wabash seismic zone,” says Michael Hamburger, an Indiana University professor of geological sciences.
Lubricating the Geology
In the 1960s, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal outside Denver, Colorado began pumping liquid wastes into the ground and inadvertently set off a series of earthquakes by lubricating the underground geology. Scientists studying the feasibility of pumping liquid CO2 into the ground near the Wabash seismic zone in Edwardsport, Indiana will need to show why CO2 could not promote more and bigger earthquakes in southern Indiana and Illinois — and why powerful earthquakes in the Wabash or New Madrid zones will never release Duke’s CO2 into the atmosphere. “Never” is a long time.
So far, government scientists have not set any criteria for deciding what makes a “good” site for burying CO2 in the ground. Without such criteria, claiming that any power plant is “capture ready” is a scam. To be “capture ready,” a plant has to be capable of capturing its CO2 but also the ground beneath the plant has to be suitable for storing it in perpetuity.
So… is Edwardsport, Indiana the place where the nation’s best independent geologists would recommend burial of 344 million pounds of pressurized liquid CO2? Or are Duke Energy and the Clean Air Task Force just using the fake promise of “carbon storage someday” to overcome public opposition to a coal plant so they can make a buck? Not so, insists John Thompson of the Clean Air Task Force. “We’re into this plant not because we love coal…. We’re just interested in clean air and clean water,” he says.
But wait. Recently the Doris Duke Foundation announced a grant of $845,000 to the Clean Air Task Force to promote carbon capture and storage. Hmmm… Duke Power (now Duke Energy) was started in 1905 by Doris Duke’s father, James B. “Buck” Duke.
Furthermore, in the past couple of years, the Joyce Foundation has awarded three grants to the Clean Air Task Force to promote “clean coal” — $55,000, $60,000 and $787,500. So between them Duke and Joyce have given the Clean Air Task Force $1.7 million to promote carbon capture and storage, even, apparently, in active earthquake zones. Maybe for that kind of money, skating to the dark side on such thin ice begins to resemble a scam of such proportions that it can only be labeled “an American success story” — right up there with junk bond king Michael Milken, Iran-Contra mastermind Oliver North, and Enron’s Kenneth “Kenny Boy” Lay.
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From: International Herald Tribune
June 18, 2008
EUROPE’S CARBON MARKET HOLDS LESSONS FOR THE U.S.
[Rachel’s introduction: The carbon traders are hoping to make billions of dollars while saving the planet. Unfortunately, the available data suggest that there’s tons of money to be made trading carbon, but it won’t save the planet.]
By James Kanter
BRUSSELS: As the United States moves toward action on global warming, practical experience with carbon markets in the European Union raises a critical question: Will such systems ever work?
Backers of carbon markets, including the presumptive U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, see them as one of the cheapest and most effective ways to control greenhouse gases in advanced economies.
Yet the experience in Europe, which established the world’s largest greenhouse gas market three years ago, tells a cautionary tale — one in which politicians and influential industries may be diverting carbon trading from its original purpose of reducing planet-warming gases.
“We currently are in danger of losing yet another decade in the fight against global warming,” said Hugo Robinson of Open Europe, a research group in London.
On Wednesday, the European Environment Agency reported that carbon emissions from industries participating in the carbon trading plan, known as cap and trade, continue to rise.
Emissions from factories and plants that trade pollution permits rose by 0.4 percent between 2005 and 2006 and by 0.7 percent between 2006 and 2007, during the first two years of the system’s operations.
Europeans took an early lead in efforts to curb global warming, championing the Kyoto agreement and implementing a market-based system in 2005 to cap emissions from about 12,000 factories producing electricity, glass, steel, cement, and pulp and paper. Companies buy or sell permits based on whether they overshoot or come in beneath their pollution targets.
Although the system also underpins Europe’s claim to be leading global environmental policy, EU officials acknowledge that establishing such a vast market has been more complicated than they anticipated, and that its effectiveness so far has been limited.
“Of course it was ambitious to set up a market for something you can’t see and to expect to see immediate changes in behavior,” said Jacqueline McGlade, the executive director of the European Environment Agency. “It’s easy, with hindsight, to say we could have been tougher,” she said.
A major stumbling block arose at the outset, when some EU governments participating in the effort allocated too many trading permits to polluters when the market was created. That led to a near-market meltdown after the value of the permits fell by half, and called into question the validity of the entire system.
Since then, EU officials have promised tough reforms to fight against special interests, and the price of carbon permits has largely recovered.
Yet a ferocious lobbying battle is under way as EU regulators seek to overhaul the dysfunctional parts of the market by charging polluting companies more and reducing the oversupply of pollution permits traded within the system.
Brussels is also seeking to consolidate its oversight of the market, rather than leave it partly in the hands of EU governments that, in some cases, enabled companies to profit from the system by allocating them more pollution permits than they needed.
“The politics you’re now seeing in Europe now are the real politics of carbon,” said David Victor, the director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University. “The central lesson from Europe is that governments must find ways of managing the allowances that clearly are going to be one of the most valuable pieces of public property in the 21st century,” he said.
Energy-intensive industries like power, steel and aluminum have geared up their lobbying machines to challenge proposals that would force them to buy many more permits than in the past. During the three years in which they participated in the first phase of the new market, carbon emissions from the iron and steel sector in Britain alone rose more than 10 percent while emissions in the cement industry rose more than 50 percent, according to transcript from the British Parliament.
The electricity industry in particular is rejecting proposals that would force it to buy all of its allowances. That could prevent utilities like E.ON and RWE in Germany and Vattenfall, a Swedish energy company, from continuing to earn extra money from the system.
Meanwhile, major multinationals like the Anglo-Dutch oil company Royal Dutch Shell and the steel giant ArcelorMittal have threatened to freeze some investments in Europe unless the plan is reviewed. Airlines like the German carrier Lufthansa say the regulations are unworkable without a global deal on greenhouse gas regulations.
And poorer countries in the EU, led by Hungary, are clamoring to overturn emissions allowances that they say are too stingy and risk undermining their economic growth.
The proposals also are under attack from environmentalists, who want to restrict polluters from using large numbers of permits from an offsetting program, the Clean Development Mechanism.
They are concerned that offsets might undermine tight caps and delay efforts to shift Europe to a low-carbon economy because European industries would be rely too heavily on other parts of the world to make reductions.
“The sheer amount of lobbying creates so much uncertainty about the way these markets operate that nobody really is investing in cleaner technologies in Europe,” said Robinson of Open Europe.
Carbon markets, also known as cap and trade systems, have come into vogue because they are more politically palatable than imposing new carbon taxes.
Americans pioneered pollution markets in the 1970s and used them on a broader scale with some success during the 1990s to control emissions from power plants that produced acid rain. American officials also pushed hard for emissions trading to be included in the Kyoto climate protocol on the grounds that markets are the most effective way of encouraging innovative emission-reducing technologies.
But the momentum in the United States to create a nationwide carbon market ground to a halt in 2001, when President George W. Bush withdrew support for the Kyoto protocol. Bush said carbon-controls would put an undue burden on the U.S. economy unless fast-growing countries like China and India also made commitments to cut emissions.
Now the tide is turning again in favor of carbon markets in the United States. Although the Senate earlier this month blocked a bill that would have imposed a cap and trade system to slash greenhouse gases by 2050, both candidates for the presidency have pledged support for market-based systems like the one in Europe.
Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has said he supports the use of a market to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. His proposal would require pollution credits to be auctioned rather than given away to big industries, including coal and oil companies.
McCain favors giving permits away to big polluters before moving to an “eventual” auctioning of permits to reduce emission levels 60 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.
Victor, the Stanford director, said Americans were likely to undergo many of the same challenges already experienced in Europe.
“Government largess on a vast scale was actually one of the main reasons that the European system actually got off the ground,” said Victor. “The challenge for the United States now will be to have enough pork to get people to the meal, but not to give away so much that we end up squandering public resources,” said Victor.
A question that hangs over the European system — and that is likely to be of major concern to U.S. policy makers — is whether the rules still can be tightened up sufficiently so that industries eventually emit less and adopt cleaner technologies.
For Heinz Zourek, the director general for Enterprise and Industry at the European Commission, polluters of all sizes, not just energy- intensive industries, should be seen to be participating in efforts to lower carbon, and to reduce pleading by special interests.
“As long as you treat them badly,” said Zourek, referring to different sectors of the economy, “it’s better to treat them equally badly.”
Copyright 2008 The International Herald Tribune
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From: Environmental Science & Technology
June 11, 2008
GLOBAL WARMING’S TWIN, OCEAN ACIDIFICATION, IS HERE
[Rachel’s introduction: Carbon dioxide is warming the planet but it is also making the oceans more acidic, disrupting the lives of tiny creatures that form the base of the marine food web. This is serious.]
By Noreen Parks
Since the Industrial Revolution, oceans have absorbed an estimated 525 billion metric tons of human-generated CO2 and become 30% more acidic. This acidification is decreasing the amount of carbonate available for marine organisms such as plankton and corals to construct calcium carbonate shells and skeletons. The effects have remained virtually invisible thus far, but now, in a study published online May 22 in Science (DOI 10.1126/science.1155676), researchers report detecting acidified surface water along the west coast of North America.
Deep ocean waters normally are more acidic and have higher CO2 levels than shallow waters because decomposing organic matter sinks and makes deep water acidic, and deep water contains CO2 absorbed when the water last circulated to the surface. Seasonal upwelling propels this deep water onto continental shelves. During the spring of 2007, Richard Feely of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and colleagues sampled waters along 13 survey lines extending from British Columbia (Canada) to Baja California (Mexico). The water was more acidic than expected close to shore and near the surface, and the entire water column was undersaturated in carbonate down to 50 meters in places, which would make it difficult for marine organisms to form calcium carbonate shells. According to the researchers’ calculations, the conditions would not have occurred without the continually rising levels of anthropogenic CO2 added to these waters.
As the ocean continues to absorb CO2, global seawater circulation patterns will bring increasingly acidic waters to shallower depths. Under current carbon emissions trends, carbonate levels could plunge by as much as 50% by 2100, Feely says. In studies mimicking future ocean acidification conditions, researchers have found a range of harmful impacts, from the dissolution of plankton and bivalve shells to depressed metabolism in mollusks and invertebrates. “Acidified water disrupts multiple physiological processes,” explains Jim Barry of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. “For coral reefs and other calcifying animals, the effects may be large, but we don’t know yet what the long-term impacts will be on all marine ecosystems.”
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From: New Scientist
April 2, 2008
WHY THE DEMISE OF CIVILISATION MAY BE INEVITABLE
[Rachel’s introduction: No one likes to consider it, but every civiliation before ours has collapsed. Will ours be the exception?]
By Debora MacKenzie
Doomsday. The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins. Every civilisation in history has collapsed, after all. Why should ours be any different?
Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic (see “Will a pandemic bring down civilisation?“). Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if the very nature of civilisation means that ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later?
A few researchers have been making such claims for years. Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as complexity theory suggest that they are right. It appears that once a society develops beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile. Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down.
Some say we have already reached this point, and that it is time to start thinking about how we might manage collapse. Others insist it is not yet too late, and that we can — we must — act now to keep disaster at bay.
Environmental mismanagement
History is not on our side. Think of Sumeria, of ancient Egypt and of the Maya. In his 2005 best-seller Collapse, Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, blamed environmental mismanagement for the fall of the Mayan civilisation and others, and warned that we might be heading the same way unless we choose to stop destroying our environmental support systems.
Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC agrees. He has long argued that governments must pay more attention to vital environmental resources. “It’s not about saving the planet. It’s about saving civilisation,” he says.
Others think our problems run deeper. From the moment our ancestors started to settle down and build cities, we have had to find solutions to the problems that success brings. “For the past 10,000 years, problem solving has produced increasing complexity in human societies,” says Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist at Utah State University, Logan, and author of the 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies.
If crops fail because rain is patchy, build irrigation canals. When they silt up, organise dredging crews. When the bigger crop yields lead to a bigger population, build more canals. When there are too many for ad hoc repairs, install a management bureaucracy, and tax people to pay for it. When they complain, invent tax inspectors and a system to record the sums paid. That much the Sumerians knew.
Diminishing returns
There is, however, a price to be paid. Every extra layer of organisation imposes a cost in terms of energy, the common currency of all human efforts, from building canals to educating scribes. And increasing complexity, Tainter realised, produces diminishing returns. The extra food produced by each extra hour of labour — or joule of energy invested per farmed hectare — diminishes as that investment mounts. We see the same thing today in a declining number of patents per dollar invested in research as that research investment mounts. This law of diminishing returns appears everywhere, Tainter says.
To keep growing, societies must keep solving problems as they arise. Yet each problem solved means more complexity. Success generates a larger population, more kinds of specialists, more resources to manage, more information to juggle — and, ultimately, less bang for your buck.
Eventually, says Tainter, the point is reached when all the energy and resources available to a society are required just to maintain its existing level of complexity. Then when the climate changes or barbarians invade, overstretched institutions break down and civil order collapses. What emerges is a less complex society, which is organised on a smaller scale or has been taken over by another group.
Tainter sees diminishing returns as the underlying reason for the collapse of all ancient civilisations, from the early Chinese dynasties to the Greek city state of Mycenae. These civilisations relied on the solar energy that could be harvested from food, fodder and wood, and from wind. When this had been stretched to its limit, things fell apart.
An ineluctable process
Western industrial civilisation has become bigger and more complex than any before it by exploiting new sources of energy, notably coal and oil, but these are limited. There are increasing signs of diminishing returns: the energy required to get each new joule of oil is mounting and although global food production is still increasing, constant innovation is needed to cope with environmental degradation and evolving pests and diseases — the yield boosts per unit of investment in innovation are shrinking. “Since problems are inevitable,” Tainter warns, “this process is in part ineluctable.”
Is Tainter right? An analysis of complex systems has led Yaneer Bar- Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the same conclusion that Tainter reached from studying history. Social organisations become steadily more complex as they are required to deal both with environmental problems and with challenges from neighbouring societies that are also becoming more complex, Bar-Yam says. This eventually leads to a fundamental shift in the way the society is organised.
“To run a hierarchy, managers cannot be less complex than the system they are managing,” Bar-Yam says. As complexity increases, societies add ever more layers of management but, ultimately in a hierarchy, one individual has to try and get their head around the whole thing, and this starts to become impossible. At that point, hierarchies give way to networks in which decision-making is distributed. We are at this point.
This shift to decentralised networks has led to a widespread belief that modern society is more resilient than the old hierarchical systems. “I don’t foresee a collapse in society because of increased complexity,” says futurologist and industry consultant Ray Hammond. “Our strength is in our highly distributed decision making.” This, he says, makes modern western societies more resilient than those like the old Soviet Union, in which decision making was centralised.
Increasing connectedness
Things are not that simple, says Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and author of the 2006 book The Upside of Down. “Initially, increasing connectedness and diversity helps: if one village has a crop failure, it can get food from another village that didn’t.”
As connections increase, though, networked systems become increasingly tightly coupled. This means the impacts of failures can propagate: the more closely those two villages come to depend on each other, the more both will suffer if either has a problem. “Complexity leads to higher vulnerability in some ways,” says Bar-Yam. “This is not widely understood.”
The reason is that as networks become ever tighter, they start to transmit shocks rather than absorb them. “The intricate networks that tightly connect us together — and move people, materials, information, money and energy — amplify and transmit any shock,” says Homer-Dixon. “A financial crisis, a terrorist attack or a disease outbreak has almost instant destabilising effects, from one side of the world to the other.”
For instance, in 2003 large areas of North America and Europe suffered blackouts when apparently insignificant nodes of their respective electricity grids failed. And this year China suffered a similar blackout after heavy snow hit power lines. Tightly coupled networks like these create the potential for propagating failure across many critical industries, says Charles Perrow of Yale University, a leading authority on industrial accidents and disasters.
Credit crunch
Perrow says interconnectedness in the global production system has now reached the point where “a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere”. This is especially true of the world’s financial systems, where the coupling is very tight. “Now we have a debt crisis with the biggest player, the US. The consequences could be enormous.”
“The networks that connect us can amplify any shocks. A breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere””A networked society behaves like a multicellular organism,” says Bar-Yam, “random damage is like lopping a chunk off a sheep.” Whether or not the sheep survives depends on which chunk is lost. And while we are pretty sure which chunks a sheep needs, it isn’t clear — it may not even be predictable — which chunks of our densely networked civilisation are critical, until it’s too late.
“When we do the analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose enough of it,” says Bar-Yam. “Now that we can ask questions of such systems in more sophisticated ways, we are discovering that they can be very vulnerable. That means civilisation is very vulnerable.”
So what can we do? “The key issue is really whether we respond successfully in the face of the new vulnerabilities we have,” Bar-Yam says. That means making sure our “global sheep” does not get injured in the first place — something that may be hard to guarantee as the climate shifts and the world’s fuel and mineral resources dwindle.
Tightly coupled system
Scientists in other fields are also warning that complex systems are prone to collapse. Similar ideas have emerged from the study of natural cycles in ecosystems, based on the work of ecologist Buzz Holling, now at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Some ecosystems become steadily more complex over time: as a patch of new forest grows and matures, specialist species may replace more generalist species, biomass builds up and the trees, beetles and bacteria form an increasingly rigid and ever more tightly coupled system.
“It becomes an extremely efficient system for remaining constant in the face of the normal range of conditions,” says Homer-Dixon. But unusual conditions — an insect outbreak, fire or drought — can trigger dramatic changes as the impact cascades through the system. The end result may be the collapse of the old ecosystem and its replacement by a newer, simpler one.
Globalisation is resulting in the same tight coupling and fine-tuning of our systems to a narrow range of conditions, he says. Redundancy is being systematically eliminated as companies maximise profits. Some products are produced by only one factory worldwide. Financially, it makes sense, as mass production maximises efficiency. Unfortunately, it also minimises resilience. “We need to be more selective about increasing the connectivity and speed of our critical systems,” says Homer-Dixon. “Sometimes the costs outweigh the benefits.”
Is there an alternative? Could we heed these warnings and start carefully climbing back down the complexity ladder? Tainter knows of only one civilisation that managed to decline but not fall. “After the Byzantine empire lost most of its territory to the Arabs, they simplified their entire society. Cities mostly disappeared, literacy and numeracy declined, their economy became less monetised, and they switched from professional army to peasant militia.”
Staving off collapse
Pulling off the same trick will be harder for our more advanced society. Nevertheless, Homer-Dixon thinks we should be taking action now. “First, we need to encourage distributed and decentralised production of vital goods like energy and food,” he says. “Second, we need to remember that slack isn’t always waste. A manufacturing company with a large inventory may lose some money on warehousing, but it can keep running even if its suppliers are temporarily out of action.”
The electricity industry in the US has already started identifying hubs in the grid with no redundancy available and is putting some back in, Homer-Dixon points out. Governments could encourage other sectors to follow suit. The trouble is that in a world of fierce competition, private companies will always increase efficiency unless governments subsidise inefficiency in the public interest.
Homer-Dixon doubts we can stave off collapse completely. He points to what he calls “tectonic” stresses that will shove our rigid, tightly coupled system outside the range of conditions it is becoming ever more finely tuned to. These include population growth, the growing divide between the world’s rich and poor, financial instability, weapons proliferation, disappearing forests and fisheries, and climate change. In imposing new complex solutions we will run into the problem of diminishing returns — just as we are running out of cheap and plentiful energy.
“This is the fundamental challenge humankind faces. We need to allow for the healthy breakdown in natural function in our societies in a way that doesn’t produce catastrophic collapse, but instead leads to healthy renewal,” Homer-Dixon says. This is what happens in forests, which are a patchy mix of old growth and newer areas created by disease or fire. If the ecosystem in one patch collapses, it is recolonised and renewed by younger forest elsewhere. We must allow partial breakdown here and there, followed by renewal, he says, rather than trying so hard to avert breakdown by increasing complexity that any resulting crisis is actually worse.
Tipping points
Lester Brown thinks we are fast running out of time. “The world can no longer afford to waste a day. We need a Great Mobilisation, as we had in wartime,” he says. “There has been tremendous progress in just the past few years. For the first time, I am starting to see how an alternative economy might emerge. But it’s now a race between tipping points — which will come first, a switch to sustainable technology, or collapse?”
Tainter is not convinced that even new technology will save civilisation in the long run. “I sometimes think of this as a ‘faith- based’ approach to the future,” he says. Even a society reinvigorated by cheap new energy sources will eventually face the problem of diminishing returns once more. Innovation itself might be subject to diminishing returns, or perhaps absolute limits.
Studies of the way cities grow by Luis Bettencourt of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, support this idea. His team’s work suggests that an ever-faster rate of innovation is required to keep cities growing and prevent stagnation or collapse, and in the long run this cannot be sustainable.
The stakes are high. Historically, collapse always led to a fall in population. “Today’s population levels depend on fossil fuels and industrial agriculture,” says Tainter. “Take those away and there would be a reduction in the Earth’s population that is too gruesome to think about.”
If industrialised civilisation does fall, the urban masses — half the world’s population — will be most vulnerable. Much of our hard-won knowledge could be lost, too. “The people with the least to lose are subsistence farmers,” Bar-Yam observes, and for some who survive, conditions might actually improve. Perhaps the meek really will inherit the Earth.
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From: New Scientist
April 5, 2008
WILL A PANDEMIC BRING DOWN CIVILISATION?
[Rachel’s introduction: There is a widespread belief that our society has achieved a scale, complexity and level of innovation that make it immune from collapse. But perhaps a simple virus could change all that.]
By Debora MacKenzie
For years we have been warned that a pandemic is coming. It could be flu, it could be something else. We know that lots of people will die. As terrible as this will be, on an ever more crowded planet, you can’t help wondering whether the survivors might be better off in some ways. Wouldn’t it be easier to rebuild modern society into something more sustainable if, perish the thought, there were fewer of us.
Yet would life ever return to something resembling normal after a devastating pandemic? Virologists sometimes talk about their nightmare scenarios — a plague like ebola or smallpox — as “civilisation ending”. Surely they are exaggerating. Aren’t they?
Many people dismiss any talk of collapse as akin to the street-corner prophet warning that the end is nigh. In the past couple of centuries, humanity has innovated its way past so many predicted plagues, famines and wars — from Malthus to Dr Strangelove — that anyone who takes such ideas seriously tends to be labeled a doom-monger.
There is a widespread belief that our society has achieved a scale, complexity and level of innovation that make it immune from collapse. “It’s an argument so ingrained both in our subconscious and in public discourse that it has assumed the status of objective reality,” writes biologist and geographer Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, author of the 2005 book Collapse. “We think we are different.”
Ever more vulnerable
A growing number of researchers, however, are coming to the conclusion that far from becoming ever more resilient, our society is becoming ever more vulnerable. In a severe pandemic, the disease might only be the start of our problems.
No scientific study has looked at whether a pandemic with a high mortality could cause social collapse — at least none that has been made public. The vast majority of plans for weathering a pandemic all fail even to acknowledge that crucial systems might collapse, let alone take it into account.
There have been many pandemics before, of course. In 1348, the Black Death killed about a third of Europe’s population. Its impact was huge, but European civilisation did not collapse. After the Roman empire was hit by a plague with a similar death rate around AD 170, however, the empire tipped into a downward spiral towards collapse. Why the difference? In a word: complexity.
In the 14th century, Europe was a feudal hierarchy in which more than 80 per cent of the population were peasant farmers. Each death removed a food producer, but also a consumer, so there was little net effect. “In a hierarchy, no one is so vital that they can’t be easily replaced,” says Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Monarchs died, but life went on.”
Individuals matter
The Roman empire was also a hierarchy, but with a difference: it had a huge urban population — not equalled in Europe until modern times – which depended on peasants for grain, taxes and soldiers. “Population decline affected agriculture, which affected the empire’s ability to pay for the military, which made the empire less able to keep invaders out,” says anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter at Utah State University in Logan. “Invaders in turn further weakened peasants and agriculture.”
A high-mortality pandemic could trigger a similar result now, Tainter says. “Fewer consumers mean the economy would contract, meaning fewer jobs, meaning even fewer consumers. Loss of personnel in key industries would hurt too.”
Bar-Yam thinks the loss of key people would be crucial. “Losing pieces indiscriminately from a highly complex system is very dangerous,” he says. “One of the most profound results of complex systems research is that when systems are highly complex, individuals matter.”
The same conclusion has emerged from a completely different source: tabletop “simulations” in which political and economic leaders work through what would happen as a hypothetical flu pandemic plays out. “One of the big ‘Aha!’ moments is always when company leaders realise how much they need key people,” says Paula Scalingi, who runs pandemic simulations for the Pacific Northwest economic region of the US. “People are the critical infrastructure.”
Vital hubs
Especially vital are “hubs” — the people whose actions link all the rest. Take truck drivers. When a strike blocked petrol deliveries from the UK’s oil refineries for 10 days in 2000, nearly a third of motorists ran out of fuel, some train and bus services were cancelled, shops began to run out of food, hospitals were reduced to running minimal services, hazardous waste piled up, and bodies went unburied. Afterwards, a study by Alan McKinnon of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, predicted huge economic losses and a rapid deterioration in living conditions if all road haulage in the UK shut down for just a week.
What would happen in a pandemic when many truckers are sick, dead or too scared to work? Even if a pandemic is relatively mild, many might have to stay home to care for sick family or look after children whose schools are closed. Even a small impact on road haulage would quickly have severe knock-on effects.
One reason is just-in-time delivery. Over the past few decades, people who use or sell commodities from coal to aspirin have stopped keeping large stocks, because to do so is expensive. They rely instead on frequent small deliveries.
Cities typically have only three days’ worth of food, and the old saying about civilisations being just three or four meals away from anarchy is taken seriously by security agencies such as MI5 in the UK. In the US, plans for dealing with a pandemic call for people to keep three weeks’ worth of food and water stockpiled. Some planners think everyone should have at least 10 weeks’ worth. How long would your stocks last if shops emptied and your water supply dried up? Even if everyone were willing, US officials warn that many people might not be able to afford to stockpile enough food.
Two-day supply
Hospitals rely on daily deliveries of drugs, blood and gases. “Hospital pandemic plans fixate on having enough ventilators,” says public health specialist Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who has been calling for broader preparation for a pandemic. “But they’ll run out of oxygen to put through them first. No hospital has more than a two-day supply.” Equally critical is chlorine for water purification plants.
It’s not only absentee truck drivers that could cripple the transport system; new drivers can be drafted in and trained fairly quickly, after all. Trucks need fuel, too. What if staff at the refineries that produce it don’t show up for work?
“We think that if we can make people feel safe about coming to work, we’ll have about 25 per cent staff absences if we get a flu pandemic like the one in 1918,” says Jon Lay, head of global emergency preparedness for ExxonMobil. If that happens, then by postponing non- essential tasks, and making sure crucial suppliers also hang tough, “we can maintain the supply of products that are critical to society”.
Some models, however, suggest absenteeism sparked by a 1918-type pandemic could cut the workforce by half at the peak of a pandemic wave. “If we have 50 per cent absences, it’s a different story,” says Lay, who says his company has not modelled the impact of absence on that scale. And what if a pandemic is worse than 1918?
Critical infrastructure
All the companies that provide the critical infrastructure of modern society — energy, transport, food, water, telecoms — face similar problems if key workers fail to turn up. According to US industry sources, one electricity supplier in Texas is teaching its employees “virus avoidance techniques” in the hope that they will then “experience a lower rate of flu onset and mortality” than the general population.
The fact is that the best way for people to avoid the virus will be to stay home. But if everyone does this — or if too many people try to stockpile supplies after a crisis begins — the impact of even a relatively minor pandemic could quickly multiply.
Planners for pandemics tend to overlook the fact that modern societies are becoming ever more tightly connected, which means any disturbance can cascade rapidly through many sectors. For instance, many businesses — including New Scientist’s parent company — have contingency plans that count on some people working online from home. Models show there won’t be enough bandwidth to meet demand, says Scalingi.
And what if the power goes off? This is where the complex interdependencies could prove disastrous. Refineries make diesel fuel not only for trucks but also for the trains that deliver coal to electricity generators, which now usually have only 20 days’ reserve supply, Osterholm notes. Coal-fired plants supply 30 per cent of the UK’s electricity, 50 per cent of the US’s and 85 per cent of Australia’s.
Powerless
The coal mines need electricity to keep working. Pumping oil through pipelines and water through mains also requires electricity. Making electricity depends largely on coal; getting coal depends on electricity; they all need refineries and key people; the people need transport, food and clean water. If one part of the system starts to fail, the whole lot could go. Hydro and nuclear power are less vulnerable to disruptions in supply, but they still depend on highly trained staff.
With no electricity, shops will be unable to keep food refrigerated even if they get deliveries. Their tills won’t work either. Many consumers won’t be able to cook what food they do have. With no chlorine, water-borne diseases could strike just as it becomes hard to boil water. Communications could start to break down as radio and TV broadcasters, phone systems and the internet fall victim to power cuts and absent staff. This could cripple the global financial system, right down to local cash machines, and will greatly complicate attempts to maintain order and get systems up and running again.
Even if we manage to struggle through the first few weeks of a pandemic, long-term problems could build up without essential maintenance and supplies. Many of these problems could take years to work their way through the system. For instance, with no fuel and markets in disarray, how do farmers get the next harvest in and distributed?
Closing borders
As a plague takes hold, some countries may be tempted to close their borders. But quarantine is not an option any more. “These days, no country is self-sufficient for everything,” says Lay. “The worst mistake governments could make is to isolate themselves.” The port of Singapore, a crucial shipping hub, plans to close in a pandemic only as a last resort, he says. Yet action like this might not be enough to prevent international trade being paralysed as other ports close for fear of contagion or for lack of workers, as ships’ crews sicken and exporters’ assembly lines grind to a halt without their own staff, power, transport or fuel and supplies.
Osterholm warns that most medical equipment and 85 per cent of US pharmaceuticals are made abroad, and this is just the start. Consider food packaging. Milk might be delivered to dairies if the cows get milked and there is fuel for the trucks and power for refrigeration, but it will be of little use if milk carton factories have ground to a halt or the cartons are an ocean away.
“No one in pandemic planning thinks enough about supply chains,” says Osterholm. “They are long and thin, and they can break.” When Toronto was hit by SARS in 2003, the major surgical mask manufacturers sent everything they had, he says. “If it had gone on much longer they would have run out.”
The trend is for supply chains to get ever longer, to take advantage of economies of scale and the availability of cheap labour. Big factories produce goods more cheaply than small ones, and they can do so even more cheaply in countries where labour is cheap.
Flawed assumptions
Lay points to recent hurricanes in the US and the 2005 fire at the Buncefield oil depot in the UK as examples of severe disruptions to the normal supply chain. In all of these instances, he points out, supplies from refineries were maintained. But those disasters were localised, and help could come from unaffected places nearby.
Disaster planners usually focus on single-point events of this kind: industrial accidents, hurricanes or even a nuclear attack. But a pandemic happens everywhere at the same time, rendering many such plans useless. “There are numerous assumptions behind our conclusions,” Lay admits. “If they prove to be flawed, we could struggle.”
The main assumption is how serious a pandemic could be. Many national plans are based on mortality rates from the mild 1957 and 1968 pandemics. “No government pandemic plans consider the possibility that the death rate might be higher than in 1918,” says Tim Sly of Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.
Even a rerun of 1918 could be bad enough. In a 2006 study, economist Warwick McKibbin of the Lowry Institute for International Policy in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues based their “worst-case” scenario on the same death rate as in 1918. The result, their model predicts, would be 142 million deaths worldwide, leading to a massive global economic slowdown that would wipe out 12.6 per cent of global GDP.
Death rate
This scenario assumes around 3 three per cent of those who fall ill die. Of all the people known to have caught H5N1 bird flu so far, 63 per cent have died. “It seems negligent to assume that H5N1, if it goes pandemic, will necessarily become less deadly,” says Sly. And flu is far from the only viral threat we face.
The ultimate question is this: what if a pandemic does have huge knock-on effects? What if many key people die, and many global balancing acts are disrupted? Could we get things up and running again? “Much would depend on the extent of the population decline,” says Tainter. “Possibilities range from little effect to a mild recession to a major depression to a collapse.”
Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
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From: Scientific American
June 17, 2008
CAN LIFESTYLE CHANGES BRING OUT THE BEST IN GENES?
New research shows diet and exercise may change how genes act
[Rachel’s introduction: The new scientific field called “epigenetics” tells us that “the environment” is far more important than we previously thought because “the environment” modifies how our genes function. This comes as quite a surprise to traditional genetic theorists.]
By Lisa Stein
A new pilot study shows that eating right, exercising and reducing stress may help keep chronic diseases at bay by switching on beneficial genes, including tumor-fighters, and silencing those that trigger malignancies and other ills.
“We found that simple changes have a powerful impact on gene expression,” Dean Ornish, founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute and clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco (U.C.S.F.), said during a news conference. “People say, ‘Oh, it’s all in my genes, what can I do?’ That’s what I call genetic nihilism. This may be an antidote to that. Genes may be our predisposition, but they are not our fate.”
Ornish, who has built a reputation on advocating healthy living, and U.C.S.F. colleagues report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that they found the activity of more than 500 genes in the normal tissue of 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer changed after the patients began exercising regularly and eating diets heavy in fruit, veggies and whole grain (supplemented with soy, fish oil, the mineral selenium and vitamins C and E) and low in red meat and fats.
In addition to downing healthier fare, the men also walked or worked out at least 30 minutes six days a week; did an hour of daily stress- reducing yoga-type stretching, breathing and meditation; and participated in one-hour weekly group support sessions.
The subjects had all opted to skip conventional surgical or radiation treatment in favor of a “watchful waiting” approach. The researchers say it is too early to tell whether the lifestyle changes kept the cancer cells in check. But they say the study indicates that exercising, improving nutrition and limiting stress may prompt “profound” differences in the behavior of genes. Among them: some genes believed to be tumor suppressors turned on or became more active, whereas certain disease-promoting ones, including oncogenes (in the so-called RAS family that are implicated in both prostate and breast cancer), were down-regulated or switched off.
The findings were based on changes in levels of RNA (molecules that carry instructions from DNA or genetic material) in samples of noncancerous prostate tissue taken before and three months after the men started the study.
“It is absolutely intriguing this lifestyle change can have as much effect as the most powerful drugs available to us now,” U.C.S.F. geneticist Christopher Haqq said during the news conference. “We medical oncologists are always looking for drugs that can do this. It is delightful to find that diet and lifestyle can have profound effects and be complementary to drug therapies — with fewer side effects.”
Ornish, who has done extensive research showing that nutritional and other lifestyle changes may prevent and even reverse chronic diseases, says that perhaps the most surprising element of this study was how swiftly the benefits appeared.
“People say, ‘Why bother?’ But when they see that in just three months these changes can make a difference, they may change their minds,” he said. “It is not really so much about risk-factor reduction or preventing something bad from happening. These changes can occur so quickly you don’t have to wait years to see the benefits.”
Ornish said the findings show that comprehensive lifestyle changes may benefit the general population as well as those with prostate cancer.
Copyright 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.
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From: NewsTarget (Taiwan)
November 22, 2007
AGRICULTURAL ANTIBIOTICS MAY BE THE CAUSE OF SUPER-BUGS
[Rachel’s introduction: “The European Union banned the use of antibiotics for growth promotion based on the precautionary principle. In this case, it is more scientific to simply ban the product that might be the cause of the [antibiotic] resistance, than simply do nothing because there are no precise means to measure the complex interaction between organisms and transmission of resistance in bacteria.”]
By Celina Cook
Have you been to the grocery store recently and chosen that chicken cut that is not treated with antibiotics? Or did you choose one that was treated with antibiotic, thinking all bacteria in it would be dead?
According to recent research, farms may be more effective sources of transmission of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to the community than hospitals. Fresh poultry from animals not treated with antibiotics will probably pose a smaller risk to your health. If you catch any disease from it, antibiotics will really work for you if you need them.
Any bacteria harmful to humans that are left in the antibiotic-treated meat after the antibiotic kills the others will certainly be a significant hazard, if not to you, to the population as a whole. The super-bugs caught from these meats will be hard to kill; for, once they have been exposed to antibiotics, they become resistant to them after some time.
Fighting an infection caused by these bacteria will be much more difficult than fighting bacteria that are not resistant. Like in the recent cases of MRSA, many people either do not get rid of them easily, or continue having the infection for some time in spite of the treatment.
Antibiotics and antibiotic-resistant bacteria are in the air and soil around farms, in surface and ground water, among wild animal populations, as well as on retail meat and poultry. They end up in your kitchen, and contaminate other foods by unsafe handling practices; and if they are able to override the gastric barriers your body has against them, they settle in your gut.
They might live there for a long time without any signs of infection, but ready to be transmitted to other carriers. One or two cases of this kind are enough if the transmission rate is high; that is, if the bacteria are highly contagious. Without appropriate control measures, the harm done by these resistant bacteria starts to spread throughout the community, and affect people that are more susceptible than the carriers.
Some variants of antibiotic-resistant bacteria transmitted in this way might evolve then that never were found among humans. If these new variants are harmful to humans and highly and rapidly transmissible within the human population, the agricultural antibiotic impact must be carefully assessed.
The number of people that carry antibiotic resistant bacteria due to contaminated meals is approximately the same as the one generated by a hospital. This happens because, although we have much less chance of getting antibiotic resistant bacteria in each individual meal than in a hospital, a large number of people are exposed to a small risk in contrast with the small number exposed to a high risk (when we go to the hospital). People eat at least three times every day, so we have more than a thousand chances a year to be exposed to a small risk of infection carried by contaminated food. But the average healthy person spends just some days in a year at the hospital, where the risk of getting resistant bacteria is higher.
A large-scale natural experiment conducted in the US and several European countries showed that resistant bacteria evolved more frequently in the European Union before the use of antibiotics in agriculture was banned.
Many European countries approved avoparcin for animal growth promotion in the 1970s, but the US did not. In the early 1980s, vancomycin started to be used in the U.S. hospitals due to an increase in resistance of Staphylococcus aureus (the famous MRSA, which is attacking our school kids nowadays) to other antibiotics. Vancomycin is still being used in hospitals to fight MRSA.
Some strains of vancomycin-resistant enterococci appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s, spreading through U.S. health-care systems. In Europe, vancomycin was less used, for most enterococci were sensitive to other antibiotics. The resistant bacteria appeared there too, but in a less severe way than in the U.S. That was the phase in which the antibiotic in the poultry and meats was still effective against the bacteria.
During the late 1990s, though, the resistant enterococci were more frequent in the community, including in people who had not been previously in a hospital. That showed that the bacteria in the food were starting to get resistant to the agricultural antibiotics.
The result was that the European community pool of resistant bacteria, generated by the use of antibiotics in hospitals and agriculture, was apparently much larger than in the U.S., where the resistance was generated only by use of vancomycin in hospitals. After EU banned avoparcin, the resistance to bacteria in the community was reduced. That is, the impact of the agricultural antibiotics in European hospitals was larger than the impact of US hospitals on one another.
The European Union banned the use of antibiotics for growth promotion based on the precautionary principle. In this case, it is more scientific to simply ban the product that might be the cause of the resistance, than simply do nothing because there are no precise means to measure the complex interaction between organisms and transmission of resistance in bacteria.
Therefore, since bacteria like the MSRA spread more rapidly in the population when they are found in contaminated food, precautionary measures such as banning agricultural antibiotics are highly effective in controlling the impact of these bacteria in the population.
References:
1) Based on a study by David L. Smith, Jonathan Dushoff and J. Glenn Morris, Published July 5, 2005 PLOS Medicine
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From: Wall Street Journal (pg. B6)
June 16, 2008
BACTERIA IN PORK SHOWING RESISTANCE TO ANTIBIOTICS
[Rachel’s introduction: For years, scientisis have been warning that the overuse of antibiotics by physicians and farmers would lead to antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the human food chain. Now that prediction is coming true.]
By Thomas M. Burton
Scientists are beginning to detect antibiotic-resistant bacteria in pork, pigs and some veterinarians, raising the issue of whether these so-called superbugs might find a new route to infect farmworkers or even people who eat pork.
University of Minnesota veterinary public-health researchers last month reported they found the antibiotic-resistant bugs in 7.1% of 113 swine veterinarians tested. Public-health doctors at the University of Iowa found the same bacterial strains among 147 of 299 pigs tested with nasal swabs.
Perhaps of greatest concern, Ontario Veterinary College researcher Scott Weese also detected these bacteria in 10% of 212 samples of ground pork and pork chops collected in four Canadian provinces.
These particular strains of antibiotic-resistant bugs haven’t so far been shown to sicken patients, at least in North America. Three patients in Scotland were found to have the same bacterial strain, and there have been serious infections reported in the Netherlands related to these strains. Since an estimated 18,650 deaths a year in the U.S. are estimated to be caused by a range of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, researchers have encouraged U.S. and Canadian authorities to pay attention to the findings.
“It’s potentially relevant to the human population,” Dr. Weese said. “The question is whether it can cause problems among humans.” He cautions that such bugs in meat and pigs “are not an important source of disease at this point.”
In a medical-journal article last year, doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that there were 94,360 infections in a recent year in the U.S. from certain strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Most were in patients who had recently been hospitalized or were in long-term care such as nursing homes, but there were also serious infections among people with no such histories. Often, the cases were skin infections, but others are nearly untreatable pneumonia or blood infections.
The concerns over superbugs in pigs and pork take place against a backdrop in which Congress is questioning whether the Bush administration is doing enough about food-borne illnesses. These include the recent cases of salmonella-related illness linked to fresh tomatoes, as well as other outbreaks of E. coli bacterial infections from ground beef. The Agriculture Department acknowledges it isn’t testing for the antibiotic-resistant bugs, officially called MRSA, which stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.
That is understandable, in the view of Lyle Vogel, assistant executive vice president of the American Veterinary Medical Association. “This is something we cannot ignore, but it’s a resource issue,” he says. Compared with E. coli and salmonella infections, “it does not seem to rise to the top of the priority list.”
The National Pork Board, an industry trade group, is funding some of the research to evaluate how much of a concern it is for agriculture workers or the public. This includes the University of Minnesota’s work.
Write to Thomas M. Burton at tom.burton@wsj.com
Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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Rachel’s Democracy & Health News highlights the connections between issues that are often considered separately or not at all.
The natural world is deteriorating and human health is declining because those who make the important decisions aren’t the ones who bear the brunt. Our purpose is to connect the dots between human health, the destruction of nature, the decline of community, the rise of economic insecurity and inequalities, growing stress among workers and families, and the crippling legacies of patriarchy, intolerance, and racial injustice that allow us to be divided and therefore ruled by the few.
In a democracy, there are no more fundamental questions than, “Who gets to decide?” And, “How DO the few control the many, and what might be done about it?”
Rachel’s Democracy and Health News is published as often as necessary to provide readers with up-to-date coverage of the subject.
Editors:
Peter Montague – peter@rachel.org
Tim Montague – tim@rachel.org
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