The passing scene: Links & comments 6/30/14

What If Banks, Not Abortion Clinics, Needed Buffer Zones? by Barbara O’Brien for Open Salon.

What if people doing business with the “too big to fail” banks had to run a gantlet of yelling protestors just to enter the bank.  Suppose the banks were vandalized, and their employees subject to harassing and threatening telephone calls.  Suppose bankers had actually been murdered.  Is there any doubt that the bank protestors would be classified as terrorists?  Yet all these things have happened with abortion clinics, and it is accepted as normal.

The Unkindest Cut by Elias Vlanton for The Washington Monthly.

Joshua Steckel, a high school guidance counselor, worked hard with students from poor families to convince them it was both possible and worthwhile to qualify for college by studying hard.   But at the end of the road, his students found that college was unaffordable.   Financial aid packages only covered part of the cost of college, and what was left was more than poor families can pay.

Antibiotic scientist must push discovery to market by Kelly Crowe for CBC News.

The emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a big threat to public health.  Yet few if any drug companies are interested in developing new antibiotics.  Profits on new antibiotics are small and risky because developing new antibiotics is difficult and expensive, regulatory approvals take time and money and antibiotics soon become obsolete as bacteria develop new resistance.

Peru now has a ‘license to kill’ environmental protestors by David Hill for The Guardian.

Under a new law, Peruvian police can escape criminal responsibility for killing civilians while on duty without having to show they are acting according to police regulations.

Big business loves desperate, overqualified, underpaid workers by David Atkins for The Washington Monthly.

Today’s South is boldly moving backwards by labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein for Reuters.

Historically Southern business leaders have sought to compete with the North by means of cheap labor.  This is still true.

Obama Admin’s TPP Trade Officials Received Hefty Bonuses From Big Banks by Lee Fang for Republic Report.

 

Pigs, antibiotics and the risk of deadly infections

A century ago childbirth, surgery and even minor scratches were deadly risks because of the possibility of infection.  We Americans have no living memory of this because of the miracle of antibiotics.  But our margin of safety is disappearing because of the rise of antibiotics-resistant bacteria.

Drug company research on antibiotics is diminishing for this very reason.  As the drugs become less effective, they become less profitable.  This is a good reason to step up research by the National Institutes of Health on antibiotics and on alternatives to antibiotics (such as phages, viruses that attack bacteria).

Pigs in a factory farm. Credit: Farm Sanctuary

An estimated 80 percent of antibiotics administered in the United States are to animals rather than human beings, most of them to healthy animals to promote growth and as a precaution.  It would be possible to slow down evolution of drug-resistant bacteria by using alternative methods of protecting meat animals from disease, such as raising them in less crowded conditions and weaning them at a later date when they’ve built up natural immunities.

The National Pork Producers Council estimated in 2002 that such practices applied to pigs would increase the cost of pork production by $4.50 a pig.  This is trivial in terms of what I pay for a pork barbecue sandwich, but it might be decisive in terms of a farmer’s profit margins, because processors would not offer a farmer who shunned antibiotics a better price than one who used them.

It is interesting to me that Denmark has addressed this problem more decisively and effectively than we Americans have.  What gives Denmark such a good political culture when compared to the United States?