Leah Zerbe at Rodale reports on the dangerous side effects of doctors over prescribing antibiotics and their use in factory farming:

The World Health Organization recently said resistance to antibiotics might be the end of modern medicine; people could die after routine operations or when a simple scrape on the knee becomes infected.
In fact, we’re already seeing all sorts of antibiotic-resistant infections claim lives and strain the healthcare system. The most common, MRSA, alone kills about 18,000 people a year in the United States—that’s more than AIDS. Gonorrhea is also on the verge of being untreatable, and many common antibiotics no longer cure urinary tract infections.

Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) has reintroduced to Congress the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, which aims to reduce the use of human antibiotics in animals. It is estimated that 80% of the antibiotics used in the US go to animal agriculture.

Basically, factory farms are unsanitary, so the animals may get sick unless they are pumped full of antibiotics. This legislation would not only help keep antibiotics working better for humans, but would also encourage factory farmers to create more sanitary conditions for the animals.

For all the sophisticated analysis involved, the theory that Knip is testing couldn’t be more basic. He thinks the key difference between the two populations is…dirt. In a sense, he wonders if kids in Finland, and in the United States and other developed nations as well, are too clean for their own good.

***

The idea that dirt, or the lack of it, might play a role in autoimmune disease and allergy gained support along another border. In the late 1980s, Erika von Mutius was studying asthma in and around Munich. At the time, researchers thought air pollution was the cause. But after years of work, the young German researcher couldn’t clearly link Munich’s pollution and respiratory disease.

On November 9, 1989, an unusual opportunity came along: The Berlin Wall fell. For the first time since the 1940s, West Germans could conduct research in the East. Von Mutius, of Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, seized the opportunity, expanding her study to include Leipzig, a city of 520,000 deep in East Germany.

The countryside around Leipzig was home to polluting chemical plants and was pocked with open-pit coal mines; many residents heated their apartments with coal-burning ovens. It was a perfect experiment: Two groups of children with similar genetic backgrounds, divided by the Iron Curtain into dramatically different environments. If air pollution caused asthma, Leipzig’s kids should be off the charts.

Working with local doctors, von Mutius studied hundreds of East German schoolchildren. “The results were a complete surprise,” von Mutius says. “In fact, at first we thought we should re-enter the data.” Young Leipzigers had slightly lower rates of asthma than their Bavarian counterparts—and dramatically less hay fever, a pollen allergy.

Puzzling over her results, von Mutius came across a paper by David Strachan, a British physician who had examined the medical records of 17,000 British children for clues to what caused allergies later in life. Strachan found that kids with a lot of older brothers and sisters had lower rates of hay fever and eczema, probably because the siblings brought home colds, flus and other germs.

After learning of Strachan’s study, von Mutius wondered whether air pollution might somehow protect East Germans from respiratory allergies.

Soon, studies from around the world showed similarly surprising results. But it was germ-laden dirt that seemed to matter, not air pollution. The children of full-time farmers in rural Switzerland and Bavaria, for example, had far fewer allergies than their non-farming peers. And a study following more than 1,000 babies in Arizona showed that, unless parents also had asthma, living in houses with dogs reduced the chances of wheezing and allergies later in life. Researchers proposed that the more microbial agents that children are exposed to early in life, the less likely they are to develop allergies and autoimmune diseases later on. Studies also showed that baby mice kept in sterile environments were more likely to face autoimmune disease, seeming to back what came to be called the “hygiene hypothesis.”

It should be obvious to first world people that this is what Civilization does. It has been going on since civilization began. It is what happens when patriarchy and technology get married.

Guarani anger over teenager’s death 18 March 2013

Guarani Indians have traveled to Brasília to warn of the violence they are forced to endure.

© MPF

Guarani Indians have traveled to Brazil’s capital, Brasília, to warn of the ‘complete disrespect’ and ‘permanent human rights violations’ they are suffering as a wave of death and violence has swept over their communities.

Last month, 15-year-old Guarani boy Denilson Barbosa was shot dead, reportedly by the owner of the ranch which occupies part of the Indians’ ancestral land.

Since then, several communities have reported gunmen intimidating them and firing shots into the air, and three Guarani have died of unknown causes. Their deaths are being treated as mysterious.

Guarani leaders have received death threats via anonymous phone calls, and they fear their movements are being closely monitored by the ranchers’ gunmen.

Having seen much of their land taken from them to make way for ranches and sugarcane plantations, thousands of Guarani now live in overcrowded reserves or roadside camps. Their efforts to take back their ancestral land, rightfully theirs according to Brazilian and international law, often result in violence.

The delegation of seven Guarani leaders met with various government authorities in Brasília, and urged them to map out Guarani lands and implement an emergency security program as soon as possible.

They also called for the rancher thought to be responsible for Barbosa’s death to be investigated and brought to trial.

Many Guarani have been killed by gunmen in recent decades, and in almost every case, the perpetrators have not been punished.

Earlier this year, hundreds of Guarani commemorated the ten year anniversary of the killing of internationally renowned leader Marcos Veron. His killers remain free.

60 nears misses over the last 3 years! It only takes ONE.

Click on the source link to see the map.

Two years ago today, floodwaters from a massive, deadly earthquake/tsunami combo in Japan knocked out cooling equipment at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, resulting in what experts were quick to deign the second-worst nuclear disaster in history (after Chernobyl), after radioactive contamination touched everything from tuna to baby formula to butterflies. The $125 billion incident precipitated an identity crisis among the world’s big users of nuclear power, particularly Germany, which was so spooked that it vowed to shut down every one of its nuke plants by 2022.

But here in the US, there’s no sign of any impending nuclear phaseout, despite the steady parade of meltdown scares reported in a new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS dug into public data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the nuclear industry’s top federal regulator, and found that in 2012 twelve different nuclear power plants experienced “near miss” events, defined as an incident that multiplies the likelihood of a core meltdown by at least a factor of 10. The reasons range from broken coolant pumps to fires to “failures to prevent unauthorized individuals from entering secure areas;” in some cases aging equipment was at fault, and two plants were repeat offenders. One, a California plant, already ranks high in vulnerability to earthquakes. In most cases, the study charges, weak oversight from the NRC was to blame.

In the map below, click on a plant to see what caused it to have a brush with meltdown in 2012:

The UCS study found nearly 60 such “near misses” over the last three years. Still, the NRC chair told the Associated Press on Sunday that the performance of most nuke plants is “quite good,” and pointed to its own study from last week, which found 99 of the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants to be in top-tier performance.