Didn't do much yesterday. We had our monthly senior group's breakfast and health talk. Afterward we just chilled out. Today I have already collected a bunch of tomatoes which will be stewed tomorrow and the first of the pretty little read Lipstick peppers. Did a bit of cleaning up in the gardens but am holding off on the watering till later. The weather people are predicting half an inch. Good but not nearly what we need.
I had just noted that I was tickled to read the subtitle to this AlterNet article when the editing bar disappeared. Interesting question of which is more dangerous--the cantaloupe or al Qaeda. Obviously, our government considers terrorism the more dangerous event. When have we seen our legislators suggest that they would trade cuts in the Homeland Security budget? Or the TSA? But if you look at the CDC page you see that food poisoning kills about 3000 Americans each year. That means the equivalent of a 9/11 occurs every year because of contaminated foods.
And then there are the 23k people who die each year from infections from antibiotic resistant bacteria. This SFGate article covers the problem which has exploded over the last couple of decades. Only part of the problem is due to over prescription of antibiotics by doctors. The larger part of the phenomenon stems from farmer's routine use of small doses of antibiotics to facilitate weight gain in livestock. But every effort the USDA has mounted to regulate the agricultural use of antibiotics has met with intense opposition by the Agribusiness lobby and the regulators have caved. I have seen a couple of articles that use the same quote about entering a "post-antibiotic era." Most qualify that with "if nothing is done." But I think we may be in the "post-antibiotic era" no matter what we do--because what we have done in the past will linger well into the future.
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