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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
What can be more essential to wellbeing than clean water. Yet nearly half the human population it seems does not have access to clean water. If you think this is true only of third world developing countries I am sorry to tell you that you are mistaken. More than 2 million people lack access to safe drinking water and sanitation, including at least 1.4 million people who don’t have indoor plumbing.
Citation for the scientific paper: doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02621-0
Approximately 4.4 billion people drink unsafe water — double the previous estimate — according to a study published today in Science1. The finding, which suggests that more than half of the world’s population is without clean and accessible water, puts a spotlight on gaps in basic health data and raises questions about which estimate better reflects reality.
That this many people don’t have access is “unacceptable”, says Esther Greenwood, a water researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology in Dübendorf and an author on the Science paper. “There’s an urgent need for the situation to change.”
The United Nations has been tracking access to safely managed drinking water, recognized as a human right, since 2015. Before this, the UN reported only whether global drinking-water sources were ‘improved’, meaning they were probably protected from outside contamination with infrastructure such as backyard wells, connected pipes and rainwater-collection systems. According to this benchmark, it seemed that 90% of the global population had its drinking water in order. But there was little information on whether the water itself was clean, and, almost a decade later, […]
Many species of birds in the U.S. are in decline, and one of the reasons is decribed in this report. A billion birds a year dying by flying into buildings. Do you think it might be time to begin to devise programs to stop this? I do. The death of so many birds threatens not only the birds but North America’s ecosystem, of which birds are a critical component.
A seagull flies near a window in Manhattan. Credit: image depotpro / iStock / Getty
Less than half of injured or stunned birds survive collisions with windows, new research has found, which means as many as one billion birds may be killed each year from flying into buildings in the United States.
The discovery was made by a team of ornithologists with the NYC Bird Alliance, the Fordham University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology.
“Even common avian species in North America are declining, so identifying and addressing threats to bird populations is critical for the conservation of not only individual species, but the ecosystems they belong to. Collisions with buildings are a leading anthropogenic cause of death for birds in the United States,” the authors wrote in the study. “Affecting over 50 avian families and hundreds of species; building collisions kill between 365 million and 1 billion birds a year in the United States alone and pose a significant threat to birds […]
If you are a regular SR reader you know I have been predicting this for years. Climate change is causing viruses, and bacteria to muttate and produce mutated variations of diseases for which our present antibiotics will not work. The question, as this article describes is whether a pharmaceutical industry will respond as they should an create new antibiotics. And if they do will they be affordable. Since we do not have a healthcare system, having instead an illness profit system, the answer to that is unclear.
Jean Lee, a PhD student at Melbourne’s Doherty Institute, inspects the superbug Staphylcocus epidermidis on an agar plate Credit: William West / AFP / Getty
In November 2012, 18-year-old Meredith Littlejohn was a high school senior eagerly awaiting college acceptance letters, prom, and graduation when she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a type of rapidly progressing blood and bone cancer.
Littlejohn underwent four rounds of chemotherapy and went into remission. But by June, her cancer had returned, and she resumed treatment. With her immune system waning due to the chemotherapy, Littlejohn contracted an infection caused by the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa. But the bacteria causing her infection had evolved to evade many common antibiotics that would normally have cured her. Littlejohn’s doctors treated her with colistin, a last-resort antibiotic used for hard-to-treat infections. But even the colistin was not effective against the bacteria.
By October, the infection spread to her lungs and then to her bloodstream. A year after her […]
Julie Appleby, - Med Page Today | Kaiser Family Foundation
Stephan:
The MAGAt Republicans are owned by the illness profit corporations as their opposition to honorable wellbeing oriented healthcare makes clear over and over. Here is their latest move. But although the Republicans are the worst villains in this neither party seems to understand the importance of universal birthright single payer healthcare. The united Stat6es by objective measure has the poorest healthcare in the developed world, and by orders of magnitude the most expensive. It is one of the main indicators that the U.S. is not, as it once was, a nation making fostering wellbeing its first priority.
Credit: MedPage Today
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is back under attack. Not as in the repeal-and-replace debates of yore, but in a fresher take from Republican lawmakers who say key parts of the ACA cost taxpayers too much and provide incentive for fraud.
Several House Republican leaders have called on two agencies to investigate, while Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) fired off more than half a dozen questions in a recent letter to CMS.
At issue are the ACA’s enhanced subsidies, put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic as part of economic recovery legislation. Grassley said in a recent news release that the subsidies “left Obamacare, a program already riddled with problems, wide open to new waste, fraud, and abuse.”
While potential fraud in government programs has always been a rallying cry for conservatives, the recent criticisms are a renewed line of attack on the ACA because repealing it is unlikely, given that more than 21 million people enrolled in […]
Suzanne Robott, President of MedShadow Foundation - STAT
Stephan:
Here, in this article we see the depth of corruption of the healthcare regulatory agencies of the UNited States, in this case the FDA. This is a demonstration of how in America corporate profit is more important than the wellbeing of the nation’s people. This is insane, and as a people we must speak out demanding change.
Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP
When the FDA learned that a testing facility in India had submitted fraudulent data for more than 400 drugs (most of them generics), the agency should have withdrawn them from the market. Instead, it has allowed these drugs to continue to be prescribed and distributed for at least a year as the pharmaceutical companies retest them for equivalency to the original brand-name drugs.
As someone whose work focuses on the hidden and minimized side effects of prescription and over-the-counter drugs, I know the FDA’s decision is wrong. That’s why I published an open letter to the agency asking that approval be withdrawn for all of these medicines until new, clean data has been submitted, reviewed, and approved by the FDA. The European Medicine Agency (EMA) has already suspended distribution of these 400-plus drugs.
I also requested that the FDA release the names of those 400 questionable drugs. But it has declined, because the FDA considers the information surrounding how, where, and by whom any drugs are tested […]
MAGAt Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has been steadily dismantling public education in Florida from elementary school to public colleges. He wants christofascist indoctrination not fact-based education, and here is one of the latest moves he has arranged. Why the people of Florida continue to support this man and his legislators is beyond me, but when one adds this to the collapse of home insurance, as a result of sea rise and dramatic weather events, it is becoming clear that the future of Florida looks rather grim.
Discarded books from the New College library. Credit: Steven Walker
Hundreds of New College of Florida library books, including many on LGBTQ+ topics and religious studies, are headed to a landfill.
A dumpster in the parking lot of Jane Bancroft Cook Library on the campus of New College overflowed with books and collections from the now-defunct Gender and Diversity Center on Tuesday afternoon. Video captured in the afternoon showed a vehicle driving away with the books before students were notified. In the past, students were given an opportunity to purchase books that were leaving the college’s library collection.
Some discarded books included “Nine and Counting: The Women of the Senate”, “The War of the Worlds” and “When I Knew,” which is a collection of stories from LGBTQ+ people recounting when they knew they were gay. Several books from the GDC were retrieved by local activists from the SEE Alliance and a few students before they could be taken for disposal.
New College responds to book dumping
After the Herald-Tribune reported on the book disposal, New College […]
This is a classic story of why Republican governance is always inferior to Democrat governance. I say that not as a partisan statement but as a matter of objectively verifiable facts. Every congressional Republican voted against the the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act bill, arguing it was nothing more than handouts to prop up climate and social justice programs. But now it is Republican states that are all too happy to take the great bulk of the benefits this climate law provides.
A julo Othow started solar and storage company EnerWealth Solutions seven years ago to get small solar projects on farmland and other places in rural communities in the Southeast where money is tight and the phrase “green economy” is rarely spoken.
In just the last year, Othow said the amount of solar her company has developed went from 2 megawatts of power to 25 — an increase of 1,150% because of the Inflation Reduction Act, the massive climate and economic development law enacted in 2022.
“What the Inflation Reduction Act allows us now to do is for everyday people to start to take advantage of this technology,” said Othow, a longtime lawyer in North Carolina’s solar industry and the president of Black Owners of Solar Services.
The IRA is the Biden Administration’s signature climate law. The historic act is the most aggressive climate policy in U.S. history, rolling out billions in tax breaks and other incentives with the goal of cutting economy-wide carbon emissions 40% by 2030.
Every congressional Republican voted against the bill, arguing it […]
Thom Hartmann, Contributing Writer - Raw Story | Commentary
Stephan:
I have been telling you for 30 years that the tax changes made during the Reagan administration fundamentally changed the structure of America, and created the vast wealth inequality and the uber-rich oligarchs who are now trying to end democracy in the United States. Thom Hartmann apparently agrees with me, and here is his take on these issues. Reagan was a loathsome president, but a typical Republican candidate, not very bright, utterly self-centered, easily manipulated by the wealthy the class to which he wanted to belong. Read this, it will explain a great deal about what has happened in the UNited States and why our democracy is in such danger.
Nancy and Ronald Reagan at his inauguration in 1981 Credit: National Archives
Twenty-two years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote for The New York Times Magazine about the era in which he and I both grew up, when the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich ran between 74 and 90 percent.
“[T]he America I grew up in — the America of the 1950’s and 1960’s — was a middle-class society, both in reality and in feel. The vast income and wealth inequalities of the Gilded Age had disappeared. Yes, of course, there was the poverty of the underclass — but the conventional wisdom of the time viewed that as a social rather than an economic problem. Yes, of course, some wealthy businessmen and heirs to large fortunes lived far better than the average American. But they weren’t rich the way the robber barons who built the mansions had been rich, and there weren’t that many […]
