Archive for the ‘health’ Category
|The rise of drug-resistent bacteria
Saturday, March 6th, 2010
Nicholas Kristof has another column in the Sunday NY Times, The Spread of Superbugs, about bacteria that are increasingly difficult to kill with antibiotics and their links to the way we produce meat in modern agricultural systems.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/estherase/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Posted in food and agriculture, health | No Comments »
Cell phones and your health
Saturday, February 27th, 2010
Environmental Working Group (EWG) has updated their information on cell phone radiation and potential health risks.
As I alluded to in a previous post, conducting human health risk analyses for things like cell phone radiation exposure is difficult because it’s hard to determine how much exposure is too much, and it takes years to see what health effects might show up.
The research below suggests that links between cell phone radiation and health are now becoming evident.
And with more than 4 billion cell phone users worldwide (2/3 of the human population), we are unintentionally conducting one of the largest epidemiological studies of all time.
Learn more from EWG:
- Risks and research—executive summary
- Risks and research—full report (pdf)
- How much radiation does your cell phone emit?
- How to reduce radiation exposure
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gibbons/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
Tags: consumer
Posted in health, risk analysis, technology | 1 Comment »
Haiti’s story
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Little good news is coming out of Haiti these days. There’s a deep social-environmental history that needs to be explored to understand why crises like poverty, AIDS, mudslides, and this week’s earthquake have been so devastating to the Haitian people.
I have written a bit about this history for one of the book projects I’m working on. Below are a few excerpts, but before reading further, please consider helping with the humanitarian relief for earthquake victims:
- Doctors Without Borders USA
- AmeriCares
- An additional list of aid agencies can be found at the NY Times.
Tags: Haiti
Posted in conflict, energy, food and agriculture, health, nature and culture, population, race and class, risk analysis, social science | 2 Comments »
Thoughts on addressing population and climate change in a just and ethical manner
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
That’s the title of a new article1 by Suzanne Petroni in the latest issue of Population and Environment (subscription required). She begins by acknowledging the complex history between these issues:
There is, in the field of population and reproductive health, a present debate around the merits and deficiencies of bringing the issue of global population growth back to the public agenda. Many see the current attention to the issue of climate change as an opening in which to make the case that global warming can not be alleviated or reversed without slowing population growth. They believe that linking population growth and climate change will help governments to see the exigency of the matter, and will place family planning back into the political realm as an urgent matter of national and environmental security….
But others worry that focusing on the environmental impacts of demographic change places at risk the hard-fought and long-developed global consensus that individual rights and empowerment are what matters most in fostering just and sustainable development. They fear that a renewed focus on the impacts of the growth of our global population poses a risk of drawing the international community back to numbers-driven policies and programs, which have not always prioritized individual interests…
- [D]oes the right of the community to live on a healthy planet trump the right of the individual to decide for him or herself, without external pressure, their own desired level of fertility?
- Does the United States, which emits a hugely disproportionate amount of greenhouse gases, have a right to suggest that other countries reduce their rates of population growth in order to somehow compensate for our profligate and consumptive lifestyles?
- How can we best balance a duty to future generations with the values of individual freedom and equality among the planet’s current occupants?
- And, while coercive means of population control have been widely condemned in most parts of the world, does making the ‘‘population-climate change connection’’ run the risk of countries seeing population control as an ‘‘easy fix’’ to the environmental challenges we face?
In light of these huge questions, what are her recommendations?
Posted in behavior, gender, health, population | No Comments »
Drug resistance and meat production
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
MSNBC is giving front page coverage to a potentially serious problem that scientists identified years ago—microbes are becoming drug resistant because of antibiotic use in meat production.
Researchers say the overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals has led to a plague of drug-resistant infections that killed more than 65,000 people in the U.S. last year — more than prostate and breast cancer combined. And in a nation that used about 35 million pounds of antibiotics last year, 70 percent of the drugs — 28 million pounds — went to pigs, chickens and cows. Worldwide, it’s 50 percent.
Governments are starting to realize the urgency of this issue:
The rise in the use of antibiotics is part of a growing problem of soaring drug resistance worldwide, The Associated Press found in a six-month look at the issue. As a result, killer diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and staph are resurging in new and more deadly forms.
In response, the pressure against the use of antibiotics in agriculture is rising. The World Health Organization concluded this year that surging antibiotic resistance is one of the leading threats to human health, and the White House last month said the problem is “urgent.”
….[T]hree federal agencies tasked with protecting public health — the Food and Drug Administration, CDC and U.S. Department of Agriculture — declared drug-resistant diseases stemming from antibiotic use in animals a “serious emerging concern.” And FDA deputy commissioner Dr. Joshua Sharfstein told Congress this summer that farmers need to stop feeding antibiotics to healthy farm animals.
However, entrenched special interests continue to be as resistant as the germs our food system is producing:
Farm groups and pharmaceutical companies argue that drugs keep animals healthy and meat costs low, and have defeated a series of proposed limits on their use.
As Michael Pollan, Peter Singer, Wendell Berry, and others have noted, this is what results from the treadmill of production and the Walmartization of our food system. When the only thing that matters is producing the most food for the least cost, our modern industrialized food system—and antibiotic resistance—is what we get.
One farmer who buys into antibiotic use echoes this conventional wisdom—that the most fundamental principle of food production is about lowering cost:
“Now the public doesn’t see that,” he said. “They’re only concerned about resistance, and they don’t care about economics because, ‘As long as I can buy a pork chop for a buck 69 a pound, I really don’t care.’ But we live in a world where you have to consider economics in the decision-making process of what we do.”
Another farmer, who eschewed antibiotic use, is one of many who are bucking conventional wisdom:
Kremer sells about 1,200 pigs annually. And a year after “kicking the habit,” he says he saved about $16,000 in vet bills, vaccinations and antibiotics.
“I don’t know why it took me that long to wake up to the fact that what we were doing, it was not the right thing to do and that there were alternatives,” says Kremer, stooping to scratch a pig behind the ear. “We were just basically killing ourselves and society by doing this.”
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/ / CC BY 2.0
Tags: drug resistance, meat and diet
Posted in food and agriculture, health | 1 Comment »
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