1. USA Today, “Shale Could Be Long-Term Home for Nuclear Waste”
March 17, 2014
By Wendy Koch

Could shale rock spur another energy bonanza? It’s already helped create a surge in U.S. oil and natural gas production, and research today suggests it could do something else: store radioactive waste from nuclear power plants.

These rock formations are ideal for storing potentially dangerous spent fuel for millennia, because they are nearly impermeable, a U.S. geologist told a scientific meeting. One of the biggest risks of storing nuclear waste for thousands of years is water contamination.

The development of new U.S. nuclear power plants, all of which are now decades old, has been partly hobbled by the lack of a long-term repository for their waste. In 2009, the U.S. government abandoned plans for a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, so plants currently store about 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel onsite in above-ground facilities.

“Shale has a lot of nice properties. … We really should consider whether this is something we should look into,” says Chris Neuzil of the U.S. Geological Survey, who presented his findings Monday in Dallas to the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society. He says experiments show how incredibly watertight shale can be — 100 to 10,000 times less permeable than cement grout.

“Not all shales have the low permeabilities at the scale we desire,” but plenty is available in tectonically stable areas that won’t be used for oil and natural gas production, Neuzil says. In recent years, hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is being used to break apart these rock deposits and extract the the gas or oil trapped within.

Neuzil says current U.S. storage of nuclear waste is problematic because the spent fuel continues to produce heat and harmful radiation long after a power plant uses it to produce electricity. Plants typically store the waste in steel-lined, concrete pools filled with water or in massive, airtight steel casks.

Neuzil says safe maintenance of above-ground storage depends on stable societies for thousands of years. He also notes the risks of natural disasters, including Japan’s 2011 tsunami that knocked cooling pumps offline at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Several countries, including France, Switzerland and Belgium, have plans to develop long-term nuclear waste repositories hundreds of yards underground in layers of shale and other clay-rich rock. Neuzil is investigating a site using limestone in Ontario with the Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organization.

“He’s bringing up a very sensible idea, but this isn’t particularly new,” says Mick Apted, a geochemist at Austin-based INTERA, an environmental consulting firm. “The Europeans have taught us this.”

Apted, who’s working with Switzerland and Belgium on their programs, says France is furthest along in pursuing an underground repository in clay-rich rock, which isn’t as hard as shale. He says France, which gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear power, has identified a site. In Finland and Sweden, he says, companies have submitted a construction license to build a repository in granite-like rock and are waiting on government approval.

“It’s far too soon to know” whether shale is a viable long-term storage option, says Geoff Fettus, an attorney in the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. He says prior research has looked at the feasibility of various geologic formations, but “NRDC is not aware of a significant number of studies on this particular medium (shale).”

In his January 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama received standing applause from both sides of the political aisle when he called for a “new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants.” In February, his administration finalized $6.5 billion in loan guarantees for the nation’s first two new nuclear reactors in three decades — at Southern Co.’s Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia.

The expansion of nuclear power, welcomed by the nuclear industry and business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, remains controversial in the environmental community. Many environmentalists oppose it, citing potential Fukushima-type meltdown risks as well as the lack of a long-term repository for nuclear waste.

Yet in recent years, it’s drawn the support of leading climate scientists, such as James Hansen, former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who say solar and wind energy will not be able to deliver enough carbon-free energy to avoid catastrophic global warming. Nuclear power plants emit no heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.

2. Chicago Tribune, “MillerCoors Lifts a Glass to Saving Water”
March 18, 2014
By Julie Wernau

It can take up to 20 gallons of water to make a single pint of beer and, with water in scarce supply, more than one-quarter of beverage production is in jeopardy.

In response, major brewers such as Chicago-based MillerCoors have been squeezing water out of the beer-making process because of concerns that their most important ingredient could soon dry up. That includes helping farmers who grow hops and barley or tap the same water sources as the breweries — to better manage water use.

Smaller craft breweries also have joined the effort, working hand in hand with environmental groups to ensure that water quality, key to the flavor of their brews, remains high.

“If there’s no water, there’s no beer,” said Kim Marotta, director of sustainability at MillerCoors.
In the past three years, the company says, its eight breweries have saved 1 billion gallons of water, equivalent to the amount of water 10 million Americans use daily for everything from drinking and bathing to brushing teeth.

MillerCoors says it’s using 3 1/2 barrels of water for every barrel of beer it produces, half the water some other beer-makers use. That’s ahead of its goal for in-house water reduction.

Now the company is focused on improving water-management practices at farms, especially in parts of the country that don’t have adequate water supplies.

“It can cause serious disruptions to your business if water is severely limited,” said Tod Christenson, director of the Beverage Industry Environmental Roundtable.

MillerCoors has several breweries in areas with water limitations.

Its Fort Worth, Texas, brewery, for example, sits on the Trinity River watershed, which provides the state with 40 percent of its drinking water. The demands of people, agriculture and industry, combined with a drought during the past three years, have threatened the brewery’s source of water.

The company has launched a massive initiative to spread best practices for water management at farms in the region. Those farms don’t supply MillerCoors, but they compete with the breweries’ water needs.

“It’s not unusual for a brewery to focus on conservation within their four walls. It is very unusual for a company to go outside those walls and engage with landowners,” said Ken Klaveness, executive director at Trinity Waters, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the watershed.

MillerCoors breweries in Irwindale, Calif., and Golden, Colo., also depend on at-risk watersheds. And recent changes in weather patterns have threatened the water supply in the San Luis Valley in Colorado where the company relies on about 150 barley growers.

“Their aquifers are really depressed, and many are depleted,” Marotta said.

In Silver Creek Valley, Idaho, MillerCoors teamed with The Nature Conservancy and, during three growing seasons, helped a barley farmer save 430 million gallons of water, the equivalent of the amount its brewery would use for three months.

The fixes were relatively simple. Pivots on the water sprinkling system were lowered so more water hit crops and less was lost to evaporation. The system also was retrofitted with a device to alert the farmer when it rained, so the system could be turned off with a smartphone.

MillerCoors, which contracts directly with 850 barley growers, hopes to duplicate that success at other farms that tap into water sources that also supply breweries and drinking water.

Reducing water use globally is crucial.

“As the population booms, they’re consuming more food. Agriculture continues to grow to serve their needs. Also, living standards are rising around the world, and they are desiring more Western diets, which means more consumption of dairy and meat, which is water-intensive,” said Richard Rosengren, senior adviser at The Nature Conservancy in Minneapolis.

Some of the measures MillerCoors has taken to cut water use might seem small, but they add up because of the immense volume of beer the company makes; last year it produced 63.3 million barrels of beer. At its Fort Worth brewery, for example, the same water used to warm beer bottles for labeling is also used during labeling.

At MillerCoors’ Milwaukee brewery, which sprawls over 82 acres, a machine pumps ionized air into cans to remove dust, a process that once used water. The company also determined that its massive kettles got just as clean with one rinse using a better cleaning mixture instead of multiple times with water.

Since 2009 the company has cut about a half-barrel of water use from each barrel of beer it produces. The Beverage Industry Environmental Roundtable said 84 percent of breweries cut water use from 2010 to 2012.

St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch is also taking part. The company has reduced water use in its breweries 32 percent during the past five years, according to Pete Kraemer, vice president of supply.

Recently, drought conditions in the West led the company to lower its water usage at its Los Angeles brewery by 12.6 percent, he said, and the company also reduced water at its Fairfield, Calif., brewery by 4.4 percent.

But smaller craft brewers, Christenson said, don’t have the economy of scale to sharply curtail water needs. It isn’t uncommon, he said, for smaller brewers to use twice the amount of water or more per can of beer compared with the largest breweries, because their runs are smaller and their kettles need to be rinsed more frequently.

Revolution Brewing, a craft brewery in Chicago, pumps out 220 cans per minute compared with the 6,700 cans per minute produced at MillerCoors’ brewery in Milwaukee.

“At our size, we can’t hope to have an impact standing alone, but when we interact with other brewers, we can see some result,” says Josh Deth, managing partner at Revolution.

Revolution is among 40 craft brewers that have signed on to an initiative with the Natural Resources Defense Council that would grant smaller water bodies and tributaries certain protections under the Clean Water Act.

In spite of water-saving measures the company has taken, it takes about seven barrels of water to produce one barrel of Revolution beer, Deth said.

“There’s a lot of things the bigger brewers can do because they have more volume, more space,” he said.

The company taps into Lake Michigan and wants to make sure the quality remains up to snuff.

Josh Mogerman, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said working with brewers was a natural fit because it is an industry that thinks about water quality as much as they do.

“Bad water is bad beer,” he said.

3. WNYC News, “New Sanitation Commissioner Faces Challenges”
March 17, 2014
By Tracie Hunte

Listen here to Eric Goldstein’s radio interview.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has a new Sanitation Commissioner. Over the weekend, he appointed Kathryn Garcia, the former Chief Operating Officer for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. She’ll take over the sanitation job from John Doherty, who’s retiring after 16 years.
Garcia is well known in city government and among environmental groups, but her only experience in the Sanitation Department comes from an internship there more than 20 years ago.
Garcia will have a number of challenges ahead of her, including implementing former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Solid Waste Management Plan from 2006. Then-City Councilman Bill de Blasio voted for the plan.
“The fact that she has this extensive experience in working in a New York City government agency; that she has a commitment to implementing environmentally-sustainable disposal programs and that she has the personal confidence of the mayor. Those are the essential qualities one needs in a commissioner these days,” said Eric Goldstein, New York City Environment director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

He spoke to WNYC’s Amy Eddings.

4. New York Times – “Well” Blog, “Sorting Out the Risks of Fish”
March 17, 2014
By Roni Caryn Rabin

Fish is often called “brain food.” It’s an excellent source of lean protein, rich in nutrients like omega-3 fatty acids, B vitamins and iodine, and pregnant women are encouraged to eat it. There’s just one, ah, catch: Fish also may have mercury, which can harm the developing brain.

Two advocacy organizations sued the Food and Drug Administration last week, demanding that the agency require canned and packaged fish to carry labels informing consumers of the mercury content, and that federal officials force grocery stores and fish markets to display information if they sell fish high in mercury.

The F.D.A. long ago put out information about mercury in seafood, but the groups say it should be at consumers’ fingertips when they’re shopping for dinner.

“People shouldn’t have to do detective work to get this information,” said Michael Bender, executive director of the Mercury Policy Project, one of the groups. Agency officials said they could not comment because of the continuing litigation.

But will labels on a can of tuna do more harm than good — scaring people away from eating fish altogether?

That’s the concern of fishing industry representatives, who note that consumption of fish and seafood dropped the last time the F.D.A. issued warnings about mercury. They argue that the benefits of eating fish are much greater than the possible harmful effects of mercury.

“When environmental activists suggest that consumers not eat a healthy protein like seafood, they’re doing more harm than good,” said Gavin Gibbons, a spokesman for the National Fisheries Institutes, a nonprofit organization backed by the fishing and seafood industry. “The benefits outweigh the risks.”

Many health experts are also cautious about the way they word their advice on the matter because they don’t want Americans to forgo the benefits of fish and seafood in favor of, say, bacon cheeseburgers.

Worries over mercury in seafood stretch back decades, confounding consumers who are told that fish and seafood are healthy, especially for the developing fetus, but hazardous in great amounts. New research has helped tease out the benefits and the harms.

Edward Groth III, an independent food safety consultant who prepared a report on the effects of mercury on fetal brain development for the Mercury Pilot Project, agreed that women of childbearing age shouldn’t just quit eating fish.

“If women are eating less fish because they’re confused, and there’s some evidence that’s the case, then we’re not getting the result we want,” he said. “The secret is to get women to eat more low-mercury fish.”

The debate has taken on added urgency because of new studies suggesting that mercury may cause subtle adverse effects at levels lower than those now considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency, even as they reaffirm the cognitive benefits to children whose mothers ate fish while pregnant.

Dr. Emily Oken and her colleagues at Harvard looked at the association between mothers’ fish intake and their infants’ cognitive scores at six months. The researchers found that the babies’ performance on visual recognition memory tests increased a significant four points with each additional weekly serving of fish that the mother ate while pregnant.

But the researchers also measured mercury levels in the mothers’ hair, and found that infants whose mothers had very high levels of mercury scored lower than the others, for a drop of 7.5 points for every one part per million increase in mercury.

The bottom line: The babies who scored highest were those whose mothers were among the top fish and seafood consumers, eating it at least twice a week, but who also had lower mercury levels.

Dr. Oken’s study included only 135 pairs of mothers and infants, but several other epidemiological studies in recent years have reported similar associations. Another Harvard study found that children whose mothers ate fish and seafood during pregnancy were at a lower risk for impulsive and hyperactive behaviors, but that prenatal exposure to low levels of mercury increased the risk for those behaviors.

“It’s a paradox, but it highlights an important public health message: that eating fish is really important for development, but eating fish high in mercury — swordfish, king mackerel, fresh tuna — does pose a risk to neurodevelopment,” said Sharon Sagiv, lead author of that study, now an epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Though most studies have examined the effects of prenatal exposure to mercury, the brain continues to develop through childhood, and one study has suggested middle-age adults could also be vulnerable to mercury’s effects. In that research, adults who ate a high-fish diet performed well on cognitive tasks, but performance was impaired among those with higher blood mercury levels.

So, what’s a health-conscious fish eater to do?

For starters, avoid eating large predatory fish that are high on the food chain. The F.D.A. lists only four fish in this category: swordfish, king mackerel, shark and tilefish. The Natural Resources Defense Council has a more comprehensive list that includes orange roughy, marlin, and both ahi and bigeye tuna.

When it comes to canned tuna, “light” tuna usually is the smaller skipjack, with significantly less mercury than “white” albacore; still, the F.D.A. recommends no more than 12 ounces of light tuna a week and no more than six ounces of white tuna for women — even less for children.

The good news: Many fish and shellfish are low in mercury, including salmon, shrimp and catfish, as well as tilapia, scallops, oysters, herring, sardines and trout.

5. ClimateWire, “U.S. Wood Pellets Could Help U.K. Coal Plants Cut Greenhouse Gases by Half — Study
March 17, 2014
By Tiffany Stecker

Replacing coal with wood pellets in the United Kingdom could lead to a significant decrease in greenhouse gas emissions, according to a recent study, giving environmental points to a booming industry in the Southeast.

The paper, published last month in Environmental Research Letters, says burning wood pellets reduces carbon emissions between 50 percent and 68 percent per unit of fossil fuel electricity — roughly in the midrange of recent studies. The range depends on the size of the power plant, as large, 100-megawatt facilities have a better conversion efficiency than smaller, 20 MW ones per unit of electricity. It also depends on the cycle of tree harvests; a 25-year cycle is more climate-friendly than a 12-year one.

Overall emissions from biomass, or plant-based, energy are widely debated. One study placed the benefits as high as 80 percent over coal, while some environmental groups have said burning wood is worse than coal from a climate perspective.

“The truth lies somewhere in the middle,” said Madhu Khanna, a professor at the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

This study examined 930 scenarios for bringing wood pellets from slash pines at plantations in the southern United States to an electric generator in Selby, England. One important consideration was the distance traveled between the woody material used to make pellets and the pellet-making facility.

“Most studies assume that transportation is like a fixed distance, 50 kilometers,” Khanna said. “It doesn’t take into account that the forest is a spatially distributed resource, and everything isn’t going to be exactly 50 kilometers.”

Overall greenhouse gas emissions are higher in intensive wood-growing practices, in which large amounts of herbicides and fertilizers are used. Nitrogen fertilizers lead to the release of nitrous oxide, a gas more than 300 times as powerful as CO2 in warming the planet.

Business expected to triple

Pellets are usually made from small trees and leftovers of another industry, like paper or lumber. The facility then grinds the woods, dries it and reforms it into small cylinders of processed wood resembling rabbit feed. Unlike most of the pellets for domestic use, which are used to fire small residential stoves, these pellets travel across the Atlantic to fire European power plants, typically in northern countries like England, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Wood pellet production for export, driven by Europe’s renewable energy mandates, has exploded in recent years and is expected to grow three times its size between 2012 and 2015. Proponents of biomass energy consider it carbon-neutral, as trees absorb carbon from photosynthesis, and the forest products industry promotes the growth of trees.

But environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Clean Air Task Force and Friends of the Earth reject this notion. They say emissions from the smokestack of a biomass power plant cannot go unaccounted, as it can take decades for that CO2 to be reabsorbed in forests. This results in a carbon “debt,” in which more carbon is emitted than there are trees to sequester it.

Khanna sat on U.S. EPA’s scientific advisory board in 2012 to explore the issue of biomass emissions. The board published a report recommending that the agency formulate different approaches for different feedstocks — wood waste from the logging industry should be measured differently from whole trees, for example. It also rejected a blanket assumption that all biomass energy is carbon-neutral (ClimateWire, July 15, 2013).

EPA is mulling a proposal to properly account for carbon emissions from biomass power plants, which are currently exempt from greenhouse gas permitting requirements.

“It shows that it is not zero percent, completely carbon-neutral, nor that it should be treated equivalent to coal,” Khanna said of the study. “It depends really on … what one is assuming on how forests will be managed, and then what is the impact with bioenergy.”

Wrestling over the carbon ‘debt’

A carbon debt would be achieved only in certain cases, like if a forester changed his or her schedule from cutting trees every 25 years to every 15 years to accommodate pellet production. In this case, there would be 10 years lost of potential carbon sequestration in trees.

But Sami Wassa, senior scientist for NRDC’s Our Forests Aren’t Fuel campaign, disagrees, based on a single sentence in the methods section of the paper: “Biogenic [greenhouse gas] emissions related to burning of bark and wood pellets were not considered under the assumption that harvested tracts were immediately planted after harvest.”

This assumption is false, he said.

“It may be carbon-neutral after 50 years, but you need to say that upfront,” he said. “This study’s results would be entirely different if you consider the factor of time.”

It is unclear how future demand for pellets will affect prices for other products, Khanna said.

“How far can we go on increasing production of pellets without having a negative impact on the price of pulpwood and traditional markets of pulpwood remains to be seen,” she said. As for an environmental impact, she believes increasing demand will lead to a shift from wood pellets to pellets made from energy grasses, like miscanthus.

The U.S. Industrial Pellet Association, the trade group for manufacturers of Europe-bound pellets, said it “applauds the basic supposition of the study, which is that burning biomass for energy offers significant carbon benefits as a replacement fuel in place of coal.”

6. The Greenville News, “Antibiotics Overuse Making it Harder to Fight Superbugs”
March 16, 2014
By Liv Osby

Kimberly Shivell was giving her baby girl a bath before church one Sunday morning when she noticed a strange, red, nickel-sized bump on her skin that wasn’t there the day before.

By the next day, it was the size of a silver dollar. And terrifyingly, it was the size of her palm by the third day.

Doctors sent the otherwise healthy 15-month-old to the hospital where she wound up having surgery and getting intravenous drugs for what turned out to be an antibiotic-resistant superbug.

“The time in the hospital was horrible,” Shivell told The Greenville News. “You just pray your child doesn’t die from this crazy infection that’s spread in such a small period of time.”

More and more bacteria are becoming resistant to the drugs that have been used to treat them, leaving few treatments for some infections.

At least 2 million Americans contract an antibiotic-resistant infection every year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At least 23,000 of them die, the CDC reports, though other groups set that number much higher.

And experts say it has become a public health crisis that could claim many more lives unless something is done.

“I don’t remember a time when antibiotics weren’t easily accessible, inexpensive and worked,” said Dr. Ryan Hoffman, director of emergency services at Bon Secours St. Francis Health System.

“And I don’t want to go back to a time when people died from scraping their knee or a sore throat,” he added. “That would be my concern.”

Overused and misused

Antibiotics are commonly prescribed for strep throat, tuberculosis and staph infections, among other bacterial conditions. But they don’t work for viruses like those that cause colds, even though they are prescribed for those ailments.

In fact, the CDC estimates that about half of all antibiotics aren’t needed or effective as prescribed. And the bacteria that survive develop resistance to the drugs.

In a report last fall, the CDC sounded the alarm about three “urgent” threats — Clostridium difficile, a severe intestinal infection; a drug-resistant gonorrhea; and Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, like E. coli, which is resistant to most, and in some cases, all, antibiotics.

The report also cited 12 “serious” threats, including Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA; Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus; multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa; drug-resistant Salmonella; and drug-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae. Three more are “concerning threats.”

MRSA caused about 80,461 severe infections and 11,285 deaths in 2011, according to CDC, while an unknown “but much higher number” of less severe infections occurred as well. And resistant S. pneumoniae causes about 1.2 million infections and 7,000 deaths a year, CDC reports.

What’s more, these infections cost the health system more than $20 billion annually and there are few new antibiotics in development.

“The loss of effective antibiotic treatments will not only cripple the ability to fight routine infectious diseases, but will also undermine treatment of infectious complications in patients with other diseases,” the CDC researchers said.

“Many of the advances in medical treatment — diseases such as diabetes, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis — are dependent on the ability to fight infections with antibiotics,” they continued. “If that ability is lost, the ability to safely offer people many life-saving and life-improving modern medical advantages will be lost with it.”

In the food

The medical community has been trying to reduce the amount of inappropriately prescribed antibiotics for several years, issuing guidelines for their use in common childhood ear infections, for example.

But these drugs are also in much of the food that winds up in Americans’ diets. Cattle, hogs and chickens are routinely given antibiotics, not just to treat illnesses, but to promote growth or to prevent disease, according to the CDC.

“Unless you are eating grass-fed, organic beef, you are ingesting antibiotics every time you have a burger,” said Tim Reihm, spokesman for the Alliance for Natural Health – USA, adding that the food chain is “saturated” with antibiotics.

The CDC says the practice of giving antibiotics to food animals is dangerous, unnecessary and should be phased out. And in December, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a plan to do just that.

But critics say it will do little to change the status quo because it’s voluntary, takes three years to implement and allows agribusinesses to continue using the drugs for disease prevention with veterinary oversight.

“It’s useful that the (FDA) is now clearly on record that this is a health threat, that we should be reducing antibiotic use,” Jonathan Kaplan, food and agriculture director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The News.

“But … we have very little reason to believe it’s going to reduce a lot of antibiotic use,” he said. “It’s voluntary and relies on industry to stop a production practice it has insisted on for the last four decades.”

The NRDC, which says the drugs are given to prevent disease because the animals are kept in unsanitary and overcrowded living conditions, sued the FDA in 2012 to act on its own 1977 findings that antibiotics in livestock can lead to resistance. A federal judge ordered the agency to begin cancellation proceedings for two classes of antibiotics, Kaplan said, but FDA appealed and the matter is pending.

Phasing out

This month, the Animal Health Institute, a trade group representing the drug companies that make pharmaceuticals for animals, committed to adopting the FDA policy over the next three years.

The National Chicken Council has too, even though “several studies show the threat from antibiotic use in livestock and poultry production is negligible, if it exists at all,” said spokesman Thomas Super.

Raising healthy birds is the top priority for the industry and antibiotics are just one tool used, he said, adding that the drugs are administered judiciously and only when needed to prevent and treat disease. Most of the antibiotics used in raising chickens aren’t used in human medicine, he said.

“Still, chicken producers are phasing out subtherapeutic or ‘growth uses’ of antibiotics important to treating humans,” he said. “We agree there needs to be dialogue about the use of antibiotics in farm animals, but we stand firm that antibiotics, when used properly and under veterinary oversight, are critical to keeping birds healthy and food safe.”

Liz Wagstrom, chief veterinarian for the National Pork Producers Council, said that hog farmers have for years followed good production practices that include the responsible use of antibiotics to minimize the risk of resistance.

The industry also has spent millions of dollars trying to understand resistance, she said, adding that, from the farmer’s point of view, the FDA guidance will significantly limit the antibiotics and uses available.

“Once those labels are gone, we will no longer have those products to use,” she said. “And we fully expect our producers and feed mills they buy from will comply and will make a real difference in the types of antibiotics that are available and how they may be used.”

National Cattlemen’s Beef Association president Scott George said in a statement the association will review the FDA guidance to ensure it is based on sound science and address producers’ concerns. Producers work with experts on health management plans, including the appropriate use of antibiotics “to prevent, control and treat diseases in their animals,” he said.

“Only by carefully evaluating antimicrobial resistance in a comprehensive manner that evaluates all of the peer-reviewed science related to all animal and human use will we effectively address this important issue,” he added.

First step

But Ami Gadhia, senior policy counsel with Consumers Union, said that while the new guidance is a good first step, the disease prevention use still permitted could leave a loophole for continued inappropriate use of the drugs. And, she said, FDA needs to be moving faster.

“Alarm bells have been ringing on this problem for a very long time,” she said. “Clearly more needs to be done right away on this issue. We would like to see use of antibiotics in food animals limited to treating only sick animals.”

The Infectious Diseases Society of America agrees, saying in a 2011 letter to Congress that “the evidence is so strong of a link between misuse of antibiotics in food animals and human antibiotic resistance that FDA and Congress should be acting much more boldly and urgently to protect these vital drugs for human illness.”

Both Consumers Union and the NRDC have urged Congress to pass the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, or PAMTA, introduced by U.S. Rep. Louise M. Slaughter, D-NY, to ban eight classes of drugs for non-therapeutic uses.

“If we continue along the path we’re going, there is significant worry that people are going to get sicker with antibiotic-resistant bugs,” Gadhia said. “And once they get sick, the treatments we have now just aren’t going to work. That could potentially affect all of us and is something every consumer should be concerned about.”

But Slaughter spokesman Eric Walker said the bill has been stalled by industry lobbying and political contributions.

“In the 112th Congress, there were 225 lobbying reports filed on that bill,” he said, “and 87.5 percent were filed from groups hostile to regulation.”

Harmful bacteria

Meat is routinely contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to Keep Antibiotics Working, a coalition of health, consumer and other groups that works to end the inappropriate use of antibiotics in food animals.

More than half the chicken tested by FDA in 2010 was contaminated with antibiotic-resistant E. coli, according to NRDC, which reports that 80 percent of the antibiotics sold in the U.S., or about 29 million pounds, are used on livestock, and most on animals that aren’t sick.

And Consumer Reports says that almost all the chicken breasts it recently tested from 26 states were contaminated by potentially harmful bacteria, and about half had at least one bug resistant to three or more common antibiotics.

Gadhia points to the ongoing outbreak of antibiotic-resistant salmonella in Foster Farms chicken, which has sickened nearly 500 people in 25 states.

“The science community has known for four decades that when you give herds and flocks of animals antibiotics day after day, you end up breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria,” said Kaplan. “They escape by colonizing workers, going into the environment, riding through the food system on fresh meat products, and can go straight to your kitchen from the grocery store.”

And children are at greater risk of getting many of these infections, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“Fifty years ago, we were able to keep up with the antibiotic resistance that would occur,” said Dr. Joe Maurer of Greenville Health System’s The Children’s Clinic.

“But in recent years, we are losing. The antibiotics we use orally don’t work any more and so we’re having kids coming into the hospital. And these bacteria are not only resistant to antibiotics, they tend to cause more severe infections too,” he said.

“Our concern is that we seem to be further and further limiting our ability to treat (bacterial infections) because of potential overuse of antibiotics, and from the other end the antibiotics given to animals and that get into the environment.”

The good news is that parents increasingly understand that overuse of antibiotics can harm their children, and society as a whole, Maurer said. That’s important because 70 percent of ear infections, upper respiratory infections and sore throats are viral at onset, he said.

So instead of prescribing antibiotics and stronger ones than needed as they often did in the past, he said, doctors don’t give the drugs, wait two or three days to see if the condition improves, or use more selective antibiotics.

Good antibiotic stewardship, said Hoffman, is vital to trying to solve the problem.

Tipping point

One of Maurer’s major concerns is day care centers that require a sick child to be on antibiotics and fever-free for 24 hours before returning even though the drugs won’t help viruses.

“It’s a tough balance,” he said. “We don’t want kids in day care that are sick and spreading disease, but families need their children in day care.”

Still, he said, in the past 10 or 15 years, there’s been a decrease in antibiotics being prescribed, though it seems to have hit a plateau.

“I don’t know what the solution is,” Maurer said. “But from my perspective, more needs to be done.”

Kaplan believes the country is at a tipping point on the issue. More and more people are becoming aware of the problem and consumers are increasingly opting for antibiotic-free foods, he said.

“For the last several decades, the industry side has been to challenge the notion that there’s a credible health threat here. They can’t do that any longer,” he said. “It’s hard to argue with the CDC on whether this issue is a public health threat.”

Kimberly Shivell said she has no idea how Mary Claire was infected.

She took the toddler to the doctor as soon as she noticed the bump and got antibiotics. But when her daughter developed a fever and began vomiting two days later, they were sent to the hospital. After another couple of days, Shivell and her husband, Andy, took their little girl home.

“It was a huge relief,” said the Greenville woman. “She was in such pain and seeing a small child with the IV hooked up all the time was rough.”

Before it happened, Shivell had no idea how common these infections are.

“They said it’s almost as common as a cold,” she said. “All it takes is an open sore to get infected.”

And with two small, rough and tumble girls, the self-described neat freak has been even more meticulous about cleaning, washing hands and making sure any cuts and bruises are treated properly.

“Every night, I spray the tub down and take all the toys and put in the dishwasher to sanitize them,” she said. “And I go straight to the doctor’s office when they get sick now because of what we’ve experienced.”

7. Brooklyn Heritage Radio Network, “What Doesn’t Kill You” – Big Pork with Ted Genoways
March 17, 2014

What does Hormel have to do with the water supply in Nebraska? What are the issues facing workers in the pork industry? Find out on a pork-themed episode of What Doesn’t Kill You as Katy Keiffer chats with expert Ted Genoways.

Ted Genoways is editor-at-large at OnEarth, the magazine of the Natural Resources Defense Fund. He has also contributed to a number of other magazines such as The Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, Harper’s, Mother Jones, The New Republic, and Outside. His book, The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in October.

This program was sponsored by Cain Vineyard & Winery.

8. China Radio International, “Achievements on China’s Wildlife Protection”
March 18, 2014
By Catherine Xu

Listen here to Andrew Wetzler’s interview.
As part of the recently-concluded “two sessions,” members of the CPPCC, including former basketball star Yao Ming and actor Jackie Chan have issued calls for the better protection of wildlife both here in China and beyond.

For the past few years, more and more celebrity advocates have been coming forward to try to further the cause of wildlife protection here in China.

For more on the achievements being made, CRI’s Catherine Xu spoke earlier with Andrew Wetzler, Director of the Endangered Species Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council.