Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

Whose sarin?
London Review of Books | Seymour M. Hersh | 12/08/13

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country's civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded -- without assessing responsibility -- had been used in the rocket attack. ... Read more

A Superbug Outbreak at NIH
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PBS Frontline | Bill Rockwood | 10/22/13

One particularly dangerous bug, Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase, or KPC, has been found in American hospitals in 44 states so far. That's likely an underestimate, since there is no national reporting system to track outbreaks of drug-resistant bacteria at hospitals.

In 2011, KPC came to one of the nation's flagship research hospitals, the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, known as the NIH. What followed was an outbreak even they still can't fully explain. ... Read more

When We Lose Antibiotics, Here's Everything Else We'll Lose Too
Wired Magazine | Maryn McKenna | 11/20/13

This week, health authorities in New Zealand announced that the tightly quarantined island nation -- the only place I've ever been where you get x-rayed on the way into the country as well as leaving it -- has experienced its first case, and first death, from a strain of totally drug-resistant bacteria

He was flown to Wellington Hospital where tests found he was carrying the strain of bacterium known as KPC-Oxa 48 -- an organism that rejects every kind of antibiotic.   Wellington Hospital clinical microbiologist Mark Jones (said): "Nothing would touch it. Absolutely nothing. It's the first one that we've ever seen that is resistant to every single antibiotic known." ...

... "Post-antibiotic era" is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot these days, most of the time without people stopping to consider what it might really mean. A year ago, I started wondering what life would be like, if we really didn't have antibiotics any more. ... Read more

Award-winning science journalist Maryn McKenna shadows the first group to join the EIS after Sept. 11, 2001. She follows them across the United States and to Africa and Asia, revealing their exhaustion, frustration, occasional fear - and exhilaration when they solve a mystery in time to save lives.

Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future
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medium.com | Maryn McKenna | date

... Sir Alexander Fleming's prediction was correct. Penicillin-resistant staph emerged in 1940, while the drug was still being given to only a few patients. Tetracycline was introduced in 1950, and tetracycline-resistant Shigella emerged in 1959; erythromycin came on the market in 1953, and erythromycin-resistant strep appeared in 1968. As antibiotics became more affordable and their use increased, bacteria developed defenses more quickly. Methicillin arrived in 1960 and methicillin resistance in 1962; levofloxacin in 1996 and the first resistant cases the same year; linezolid in 2000 and resistance to it in 2001; daptomycin in 2003 and the first signs of resistance in 2004. ... Read more

Trans Fat "Ban" Not What It Appears
Alliance for Natural Health | author | 12/03/13

You may have already heard the news: the FDA has banned trans fats! Well, sort of.   Under the FDA's proposed rule, trans fat itself is not banned. Instead, the ban is on the major source of trans fats in processed food--partially hydrogenated oils (PHOs). PHOs are artificial trans fats, created via the process of adding hydrogen to vegetable oils in order to make them semi-solid. ...

... The timing and intent of the FDA's rule is suspect for two reasons. First, it was announced only after most companies had already eliminated trans fat--it's currently only in a handful of foods. Second, the ban will promote market demand for two new GMO soybeans by Monsanto and DuPont, which are engineered for trans fat free oils. ...

... Essentially, the FDA released the PHO ban at a politically perfect point: when it would no longer anger Big Food, but would be of tremendous benefit to Big Biotech's and Big Food's newly deregulated products. ... Read more