Gabrielle Canon writes at
Mother Jones writes this scary, scary piece about how
Antibiotics Are Spreading Like Crazy—and a Lot of Them Are About to Stop Working:
In 1945, Sir Alexander Fleming won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of penicillin, which transformed modern medicine. Later that year, the bacteriologist issued a prescient warning: The miracle medicine could one day come with dangerous side effects. If antibiotics were overused, he told the New York Times, bacteria would develop resistance and spur a new generation of bugs impervious to the drugs' power.
In the last 60 years, Fleming's advice has gone largely unheeded. Antibiotic consumption continues to grow even as health officials around the world sound the alarm over rising numbers of resistant bacteria. Now, a new report from the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy (CDDEP), a multidisciplinary research organization, paints a harrowing picture of where we stand in the arms race against antibiotic resistance. The main finding is grim: Antibiotic consumption rose by 30 percent between 2000 and 2010 and is expected to swell further as demand for drugs and mass-produced meat products grow around the world. [...]
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, of the roughly 2 million people in the United States afflicted every year with illnesses caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, 23,000 of them will die. These illnesses cost around $20 billion each year, and lead to an additional $35 billion in productivity losses.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2014—Georgia legislator who wants to stop black people from voting is a StudentsFirst favorite:
Critics of Michelle Rhee and Campbell Brown, her successor as the face of corporate education policy, are meeeaan, a very serious analyst argued Tuesday at TPM Cafe. Never mind that Rhee gleefully invited reporters to film her firing people and Brown is refusing to disclose exactly whose big money she's fronting for, and that both push disastrous policies, their critics are just so mean, it's terrible. Of course the education debate has many voices and some of those may occasionally be legit unpleasant, but in real life, there's no comparison between some person being mean on the internet and the kind of damage that people like Rhee and Brown support are doing every day. Let's take one recent case. Remember the Georgia state senator who's trying to close down an early voting site because too many black people might vote there? Yeah. That guy. Let's talk about his ties to StudentsFirst, the organization Rhee founded.
State Sen. Fran Millar not only thinks that having an early voting location in an area "dominated by African American shoppers and ... near several large African American mega churches" would be a big problem—he'd prefer "more educated voters"—he's also been the state Senate Education Committee chair. In that role, he lavishly praised the StudentsFirst state education report card. That report card doesn't focus on results. It focuses only on whether state education laws conform to StudentsFirst-preferred policies—basically states are graded on whether they attack teachers and privatize education sufficiently.
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