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FDA decides to breed super bugs

Byoliveridley

Well, what else can you say about it. This is insanely moronic. Read this sierra club release about the overuse of antibiotics brought on by the overcrowding of animals in food production factories (aka “farms”). Read the whole article and see how much everyone will be endangered so that Intervet, Inc. can make money.

FDA Rules Override Warnings About Drug – washingtonpost.com

The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency’s own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous for people. The drug, called cefquinome, belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine’s last defenses against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in animals.

Note, a powerful and potent antibiotic that works well, but is not used much because it’s the last line of defense. But the drug company that manufactures this product cares little about long term efficacy. Their only goal is to maximize short term shareholder value. I don’t blame them, I blame the government for not doing its job, that is, to balance these short term and long term goals and protect the people that pay them a lot of money for this protection.

The wording of “Guidance for Industry #152” was crafted within the FDA after a long struggle. In the end, the agency adopted language that, for drugs like cefquinome, is more deferential to pharmaceutical companies than is recommended by the World Health Organization.

Cefquinome’s seemingly inexorable march to market shows how a few words in an obscure regulatory document can sway the government’s approach to protecting public health.

There’s a reason this present U.S government works in secrecy, so these “obscure” (I am sorry, but nothing that directly affects human health can be called obscure) rule changes will not hit the public eye before it’s too late. Apparently, the FDA can now only consider resistance to food borne diseases in considering an application. That’s like saying that a hospital will only treat victims of food borne diseases, so if you catch the cold, we won’t treat you! This is the Food and Drug Adminstration (all food and all drugs), not the food borne disease protection council.

This drug is absolutely unnecessary for the following reasons:

  1. The disease it treats (respiratory distress in cows) is brought about by insane levels of animal overcrowding
  2. There are currently a dozen antibiotics for this particular problem, none of which are considered susceptible to resistance
  3. The FDA has previous history with similar public health threats with fluoroquinolones
  4. This drug is considered a last resort drug for antibiotic resistant strains of diseases in cancer patients – So strains resistant to this drug will evolve shortly after the antibiotic is overexposed . This is a death sentence for a lot of very vulnerable people.
  5. A similar drug used in Europe for the last 10 years has resulted in an increase in resistant strains of bacteria.

This is what you get when you vote for an ideology that hates government. You get a government that hates itself and is busy pawning parts of itself off to its cronies.

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  • No sun link to climate change

    Byoliveridley

    In response to a stupid “global warming sceptics”, scientists waste their precious time to prove the obvious all over again.

    BBC NEWS | UK | ‘No sun link’ to climate change

    Dr Lockwood initiated the study partially in response to the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Britain’s Channel Four earlier this year, which featured the cosmic ray hypothesis.

    “All the graphs they showed stopped in about 1980, and I knew why, because things diverged after that,” he told the BBC News website.

    “You can’t just ignore bits of data that you don’t like,” he said.

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    Ionic Air Purifiers may actually Increase Particle Concentrations

    Byoliveridley

    Take that, Sharper Image, your air purifiers that you waste tons of paper sending me monthly catalogs for don’t work. The ones that use ozone react with organic compounds in the air, especially your fragrances in cleaning products, air fresheners and perfumes to make fine particles in that crucial 0.1-1 um size range that your lungs don’t clear very effectively.

    Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, especially with other indoor pollutants. But I always thought these air purifiers were a scam, I am glad somebody actually got the NSF to fund this study and get some proof!

    Kinetic Analysis of Competition between Aerosol Particle Removal and Generation by Ionization Air Purifiers

    Kinetic Analysis of Competition between Aerosol Particle Removal and Generation by Ionization Air Purifiers

    Ahmad Alshawa, Ashley R. Russell, and Sergey A. Nizkorodov*

    Department of Chemistry, University of California, Irvine, California 92697-2025

    Abstract:

    Ionization air purifiers are increasingly used to remove aerosol particles from indoor air. However, certain ionization air purifiers also emit ozone. Reactions between the emitted ozone and unsaturated volatile organic compounds (VOC) commonly found in indoor air produce additional respirable aerosol particles in the ultrafine (This model predicts that certain widely used ionization air purifiers may actually increase the mass concentration of fine and ultrafine particulates in the presence of common unsaturated VOC, such as limonene contained in many household cleaning products. This prediction is supported by an explicit observation of ultrafine particle nucleation events caused by the addition of D-limonene to a ventilated office room equipped with a common ionization air purifier.

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    FDA cannot find anything in China

    Byoliveridley

    FDA Finds Chinese Food Producers Shut Down – washingtonpost.com

    American inspectors who arrived in China last week to investigate the two companies that exported tainted pet food ingredients found that the suspect facilities had been hastily closed down and cleaned up, federal officials said yesterday.

    “There is nothing to be found. They are essentially shut down and not operating,” said Walter Batts, deputy director of the Food and Drug Administration’s office of international programs.

    Well, we gave them plenty of warning, did we not!

  • American feed makers used melamine as well

    Byoliveridley

    Well, turns out all that China baiting was for naught, because right in America’s heartland, Ohio, some feed manufacturer was using melamine as a binding agent.

    Melamine From U.S. Put in Feed – New York Times

    Ever since pet food contaminated with an industrial chemical was traced to shipments of wheat flour from China, American officials have concentrated on cracking down on imports.

    It turns out the problem was closer to home, too.

    Yesterday, federal officials announced that a manufacturing plant in Ohio was using the same banned substance, melamine, to make binding agents that ended up in feed for farmed fish, shrimp and livestock.

    Apparently, it is Tembec, a Canadian company with a plant in Ohio. I am sure the effects to humans are not significant, but where’s the control? Where’s the list of things you can’t put in food. More importantly, where’s the list of things you’re allowed to put in? Food being a very easy mode of pollutant ingestion, the ingredients list must be exclusionary, that is, only approved ingredients are allowed. If something is not approved, it is not allowed…

  • Huge Potential Breakthrough for Solar Energy

    Byoliveridley

    The utilization of solar energy on a large scale requires its storage. In natural photosynthesis, energy from sunlight is used to rearrange the bonds of water to O2 and H2-equivalents. The realization of artificial systems that perform similar “water splitting” requires catalysts that produce O2 from water without the need for excessive driving potentials. Here, we report such a catalyst that forms upon the oxidative polarization of an inert indium tin oxide electrode in phosphate-buffered water containing Co2+. A variety of analytical techniques indicates the presence of phosphate in an approximate 1:2 ratio with cobalt in this material. The pH dependence of the catalytic activity also implicates HPO42– as the proton acceptor in the O2-producing reaction. This catalyst not only forms in situ from earth-abundant materials but also operates in neutral water under ambient conditions.

    In Situ Formation of an Oxygen-Evolving Catalyst in Neutral Water Containing Phosphate and Co2+ — Kanan and Nocera, 10.1126/science.1162018 — Science

    Don’t you just love the title of the paper? I would have titled the paper “Splitting Water for Cheap”. The author is interviewed here. This catalyst can split water into H2 and O2 using the energy from a solar cell. Then, when you need electricity, you recombine them in a fuel cell to make water and electricity. So, a closed loop with the only external input being the solar energy. Solar energy can now be stored almost painlessly.

    It is so simple. I am listening to the interview and the author says this can be replicated in a chemistry lab as it only needs a phosphate buffer, cobalt electrode and a conducting glass.

    Wonderful. Now, please stop building coal plants.

    Tags: ,

  • Liquid Coal – Temporarily Frozen

    Byoliveridley

    Liquid coal is back in the news (at least my news!). Via the excellent Grist, Jon Tester (D-Montana – think coal!) casts a principled vote to kill an amendment that would have “mandated” a certain amount of liquid coal be used as part of an omnibus energy package bill.

    Panel rejects coal amendment

    Thomas accused Tester and other Democrats of failing to act on their words of praise for transportation fuels made from coal. But Tester said he couldn’t support the amendment because it would have scuttled the entire bill to which it was attached.

    Tester voted against the provision during a meeting of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to assemble an energy package. The legislation contains measures boosting biofuels, energy efficiency and research and development on carbon capture and storage technology.

    Thomas’s amendment would have required 21 billion gallons of coal-based fuels to be used annually by 2022. The bill already had a provision mandating 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022. The amendment was defeated on a 12-11 party-line vote.

    The Democratic and Republican heads of the Energy Committee had tried to prevent the coal-to-liquids issue from coming up during the panel’s meeting. They wanted to pass a bill out of committee easily and deal with contentious issues, including that one, during debate on the Senate floor

    With such powerful friends, this amendment will not go away. Expect it to be brought back on to the senate floor when it leaves committee. The coal senators of Illinois, West Virginia, Kentucky and the mountain west love the money this will bring to their states. They can pretend to look away from all the devastating effects of coal mining, and the CO2 emissions, etc. by invoking “energy security”. I give you senator Craig Thomas (R-Coal):

    “The bill we’re talking about of course does not include coal and the new opportunities to change the process for developing coal, which would not only enhance our security but it would also reduce and help with the global warming situation,” Thomas said. “I really think if we don’t deal with one of our most abundant resources then we fail to deal with energy security.”

    Yes, using liquid coal will “reduce and help with the global warming situation”. I mean, can’t you at least come up with a plausible half-truth?

    Liquid coal produces more CO2 than gasoline, so how will it help with the global warming situation? Seriously…