Students working on PF300 at Cuatro Communidades.
Credit: AguaClara.
Doña Reina remembers the water that ran from the faucet at her home in rural Honduras. It was yellowish, opaque, she said in Spanish, and “y sucia,” which means dirty. Then, in 2008, her small village of Tamara received its first water treatment plant, a gravity-fed system made of locally sourced materials that was designed by engineering students in the U.S. Today, Reina’s water is clean enough to drink from the tap.
The students were part of a Cornell University program called AguaClara, which focuses on treating water affordably in infrastructure-poor communities, and without using electricity. Since 2005, AguaClara, which means clear water, has helped complete 14 plants in partnership with Hondurans who planned and built the structures. Now locals own and operate these plants, which serve about 65,000 people.
Villages in Honduras with populations below 15,000 usually don’t have water treatment plants because building small plants is significantly less cost-effective than building large ones. As a result, about 4 million Hondurans experience the […]
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Lenny Bernstein and Scott Higham, - The Washington Post
Stephan: It has been obvious to anyone who looked at the data that the opioid crisis could only exist with the full cooperation of the pharmaceutical industry, a subgroup of physicians, and the pharmacy distribution network.
They knew it too, but were making so much money off of addiction that, hey, why stop. The DEA and the FDA , particularly the former, also played their roles. This is one of the reasons I keep saying that we do not have healthcare in the U.S. we have an illness profit system. Here is a story that should disgust and amaze you.
To combat an escalating opioid epidemic, the Drug Enforcement Administration trained its sights in 2011 on Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of the highly addictive generic painkiller oxycodone.
It was the first time the DEA had targeted a manufacturer of opioids for alleged violations of laws designed to prevent diversion of legal narcotics to the black market. And it would become the largest prescription-drug case the agency has pursued.
Ultimately, the DEA and federal prosecutors would contend that the company ignored its responsibility to report suspicious orders as 500 million of its pills ended up in Florida between 2008 and 2012 — 66 percent of all oxycodone sold in the state. Government investigators alleged in internal documents that the company’s lack of due diligence could have resulted in nearly 44,000 federal violations and exposed it to $2.3 billion in fines, according to confidential government records and emails obtained by The Washington Post.
But six years later, after four investigations that spanned five states, the government has taken no legal action against Mallinckrodt. Instead, the company has reached a tentative settlement with federal prosecutors, according to sources familiar with the discussions. […]
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The Trans-Pacific Partnership may officially be dead yet a looming free trade battle remains in the Pacific Rim.
