Thursday, April 16th, 2015
Stephan: A reader who used to live in Brazil sent this to me. As you read this please bear in mind that the writer is an upper middle class person in the 4th largest city in the world. What he is describing is not what happens to a poor person, but to a family firmly in the middle class when climate change, corruption, and poor social policies combine to produce a water disaster. This could be Los Angeles, or Birmingham or Miami 10 years from now.
Sao Paulo is the 4th largest city in the world, with a population of 20 million people.
Credit: cbc.ca
I am writing by candle light. The aching in my hand and the irregular handwriting reminds me that it’s been a long time since I wrote on paper and not a keyboard. The power cut has already lasted more than eight hours and I fear that the combination of events and outcome of what we are going through might be a foreshadowing of what’s soon to come around the world.
It started with an irony, that may well be the perfect metaphor: the largest city in a country that holds 20 percent of Earth’s fresh water supply ends up without any. A combination of climate change, years of deforestation, privatization and a badly managed and corrupt political system have come together in a perfect storm to throw my city into one of its darkest crises ever. We now face a reality of four days without water and two […]
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Wednesday, April 15th, 2015
LINDA A. JOHNSON , Business Writer - The Associated Press
Stephan: Here is the latest report on Americans' astonishing usage of pharmaceuticals. It is not a simple calculus. For instance, what does it say about the particular profile of diseases these drugs are made to deal with? And particularly note the role of increased prices.
Credit: jedmorey.com
TRENTON, N.J. — U.S. spending on prescription drugs soared last year, driven up primarily by costly breakthrough medicines, manufacturer price hikes and a surge from millions of people newly insured due to the Affordable Care Act.
Spending rose 13 percent, the biggest jump since 2001, to a total of $374 billion, according to a report released Tuesday by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. After accounting for population growth and inflation, the increase equaled 10 percent.
A record 4.3 billion prescriptions were filled in 2014, many of them for inexpensive generic pills going to patients now insured through Medicaid in states that expanded eligibility for the government health program for the poor and disabled. The number of prescriptions covered by Medicaid rose by nearly 17 percent, and that increase accounted for 70 percent of growth in the number of prescriptions filled at retail pharmacies. Another sign of the Affordable Care Ac’s impact was that prescriptions paid for in cash, normally filled by uninsured people, declined […]
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Wednesday, April 15th, 2015
Tom Philpott, - Mother Jones
Stephan: This is the latest on the Industrial-Chemical-Pharmaceutical Agricultural model by which we produce our food. That it is a failure becomes clearer and clearer. The data, including this report, just keeps piling up. We must redesign our food system.
A close-up of the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria, which is commonly found on supermarket pork.
Credit: www.royaltystockphoto.com/Shutterstock
Back in April 2012, the Food and Drug Administration launched an effort to address a problem that had been festering for decades: the meat industry’s habit of feeding livestock daily low does of antibiotics, which keeps animals alive under stressful conditions and may help them grow faster, but also generates bacterial pathogens that can shake off antibiotics, and make people sick.
The FDA approached the task gingerly: It asked the industry to voluntarily wean itself from routine use of “medically important” antibiotics—those that are critical to human medicine, like tetracycline. In addition to the light touch, the agency plan included a massive loophole: that while livestock producers should no longer use antibiotics as a growth promoter, they’re welcome to use them to “prevent” disease—which often means using them in the same way (routinely), and at the […]
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Wednesday, April 15th, 2015
, - Norwich BioScience Institutes
Stephan: Here is some important new data on nutrition. I think you should take this very seriously. I like iced tea, and Ronlyn makes half-a-gallon of organic green tea for me every day.
Reference: Potent inhibition of VEGFR-2 activation by tight binding of green tea epigallocatechin gallate and apple procyanidins to VEGF: Relevance to angiogenesis, Christina W. A. Moyle et al, Molecular Nutrition and Food Research, 59(3) 401-412 doi: 10.1002/mnfr.201400478
The Institute of Food Research has published a new study that adds more to the growing body of evidence that certain compounds found naturally in foods have specific effects that help prevent chronic diseases. They have uncovered a mechanism by which polyphenols in green tea and apples affect a key signalling molecule, which could explain other studies that have shown how polyphenol-rich foods reduce risks of chronic diseases.
Credit: Institute of Food Research
Scientists from the Institute of Food Research have found evidence for a mechanism by which certain food compounds could help protect our health.
Dietary studies have […]
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Wednesday, April 15th, 2015
Stephan: Here is the latest update on the Majority-Minority Trend. Whites are becoming minorities in important counties, and this will have economic and political ramifications that are only beginning to be openly discussed.
Between 2000 and 2013, 78 counties in the U.S. flipped from having a majority white population to having a majority minority population, according to a Pew Research analysis of Census Bureau data published last week.
The counties with white populations below 50 percent are concentrated in California, the East Coast, and the South, according to Pew.
According to Pew, two additional counties, in Texas and Michigan, may soon have a majority minority population since the population there now are 50 percent white.
And only two counties shifted from minority white to majority white populations between 2000 and 2013, according to Pew.
According to the Pew analysis, 14 counties that flipped to a minority majority in 2013 had a white population around 60 percent in 2000. And of these five counties that saw the steep drops in white population, four of them were in Georgia.
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