Clean, safe drinking water is scarce for over 3 billion people across the world. At least 1 billion literally never have access to clean, safe drinking water, putting them at constant risk of severe thirst-related ill health effects, infectious diseases or toxic contamination. Over 100 countries face either sporadic or chronic crisis-level problems related to clean water scarcity.
Yet, over half of the world’s population is at risk for water shortages, with far-reaching effects. Lack of adequate clean water has serious health implications, including the prevalence of water-borne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, hepatitis A and E, and diarrhea. Globally, diarrhea is the leading cause of illness and death and 88% of those deaths are due to inadequate sanitation and availability of clean water. Water shortages also foment civil unrest and often lead to violence and regional conflicts, as we have seen in Darfur, Somalia, Chad, Nigeria and Sri Lanka, among others. Lack of water perpetuates poverty, increases the risk of political instability, and affects global prosperity.
Water resource depletion leads not only to chronic scarcity of clean, safe drinking water for increasing numbers of people, but means arable land is harder to cultivate and to maintain. Persistent drought and accelerated desertification (the expansion of deserts into the farmed and/or built environment) are results of water resource depletion.
But the most insidious and threatening long term effect is the erosion of the overall human food supply. With climate destabilization accelerating, arable land increasingly hard to come by, and grain harvests collapsing, the global food supply is under serious threat. Long term political stability, and the defensibility of political borders, is linked to a sustainable food supply.
Farmers are faced with shrinking supplies of irrigation water, a diminishing response to additional fertilizer use, rising temperatures from global warming, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, rising fuel costs, and a dwindling backlog of yield-raising technologies. At the same time, they also face fast-growing demand for farm products from the annual addition of 79 million people a year, the desire of some 3 billion people to consume more livestock products, and the millions of motorists turning to crop-based fuels to supplement tightening supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel. Farmers and agronomists are now being thoroughly challenged.
CafeSentido.com :: One of the great complaints heard from groups opposing comprehensive health insurance reform, especially from quarters where the chief concern is to prevent a drop in private profit related to healthcare services, is that reform will strip away incentives to devote funding to medical research, in pathologies, treatments and technology. This is a point of philosophical dispute, but to make sure we enact reforms that will not curb research incentives, we should institute a new medical research tax credit.
The program would make all donations to medical scientific research tax deductible, or in some cases, eligible for rebates, designed to steer research into certain pressing areas of health treatment. This would incentivize investment into medical research, whether by for-profit firms or not-for-profit foundations or by individuals giving charitably. That incentive is important, because too many pseudo-theories about the economics of healthcare link the incentive to invest in medical R&D to the profit motive.
In fact, of the $28 billion in funding the NIH devoted to medical research in 2004, $13 billion went to medical schools and teaching hospitals and fully $8.5 billion went to universities, non-profit research foundations, other hospitals and research entities. Only $1.9 billion, or 8%, went to private for-profit firms. This is, in part, owing the fact that those firms have enormous reserves of cash they can devote to R&D, but it is also owing to the fact that the institutions receiving the bulk of the funding actually conduct the bulk of the research.
CafeSentido.com :: President-elect Barack Obama held a press conference today in Chicago to announce his choice for Health and Human Services secretary, former Democratic Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. Daschle is a top adviser to Obama and the two have made clear their commitment to ending the problem of underinsurance and the uninsured and making sure that no Americans go without treatment.
When Obama took the podium, he led off with comments on a few other issues, including escalating job losses and the Blagojevich affair. The president-elect said he was “as appalled and disappointed as anybody” to learn of what Gov. Blagojevich was attempting to do, according to the wiretaps. “I have never spoken to the governor on this subject.” He also said he was “confident” that no one on his team had been involved in any dealmaking.
“This Senate seat does not belong to any politician to trade; it belongs to the people of Illinois”, Obama said, reiterating his own long commitment to ethics reform and to ushering in a new kind of politics across the nation, where money cannot buy influence and public servants are rewarded for the quality of their service.
He urged the Illinois legislature to take the necessary steps to ensure that an appropriate individual fills the seat in a timely fashion, without specifying what action the legislature should take. He also said it was important that whoever fills the seat not be stained in any way by the wrongdoing alleged against Gov. Blagojevich.
Obama called Daschle “one of the foremost healthcare experts” and said that Jean Landrieu has worked to help create the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had done some of the most vital research into ways of improving the government’s budgetary policy toward healthcare to improve and expand coverage.
In formally accepting the nomination, Daschle told the press “Our growing costs are unsustainable and the plight of the uninsured is unconscionable”. He added that “One of the first conversations I had with then Senate-candidate Obama was about the need for meaningful healthcare reform” and thanked the president-elect for his vote of confidence and the opportunity to serve and to work for that reform.
As HHS secretary, Daschle will be responsible for administering Medicare and Medicaid, overseeing drug safety and drug testing. He says he will work to make healthcare reform “an open and inclusive process” working from the grassroots up through the policy-making level of leadership in the White House.
With hospitals closing, funding non-existent, economy unraveling, political impasse and aid frozen, Zimbabwe is facing escalating risk of a severe cholera pandemic
Evelyn Winston Perez, CafeSentido.com :: The spread of cholera due to Zimbabwe’s foundering hygienic infrastructure is reaching crisis proportions. UNICEF is calling for an emergency fund of $17.5 million to fight the spread of cholera in Zimbabwe, calling the outbreak “a cholera crisis of unprecedented levels”. With 13,960 cases already declared and an estimated 589 dead to date, the UN warns upwards of 60,000 people could become infected if drastic and immediate action is not taken to contain the epidemic.
Aid groups are warning that many times more people may already have died from the disease, but that their infections and deaths are going unrecorded due to hospital closures and the collapse of Zimbabwe’s healthcare and communications infrastructure. According to the UK’s Guardian newspaper:
Oxfam said there were likely to be thousands of unreported deaths. “When you look at people who are already weakened by hunger, many already weakened by HIV and AIDS, and with rainy season comes malaria, and we know anthrax is spreading, it’s really just a recipe for disaster,” a spokeswoman said.
Itai Rusike, speaking for the Community Working Group, has said: “Phones are not working, nurses are not there, so their information system has collapsed. It is very difficult to tell how many people have died.” UNICEF is also warning that the severity of the humanitarian catastrophe cannot be underestimated, as 80% of the population of Zimbabwe has no access to safe drinking water.
The UK prime minister Gordon Brown told the press Mugabe leads “a bloodstained regime”, that the cholera outbreak means Zimbabwe’s crisis is “now not just a national emergency, it’s an international emergency”, which could “spill over, if nothing is done, into Mozambique, into South Africa”. Echoing the calls of other leaders, Brown quipped “enough is enough”.
In addition to Brown and other world leaders, South African archbishop Desmond Tutu has also called for Mugabe to “step down”, saying he should be offered a “soft landing” if he resigns and hands over power, but threatened with prosecution at the Hague for crimes against humanity, should he refuse to leave office. Mugabe is being blamed for an ongoing crackdown on dissent at all levels, which some say is worsening as the political stalemate drags on.
The Associated Press is reporting “Brian Raftopoulos, organizer of the Solidarity Peace Trust, said a number of activists have been abducted and protests violently quashed by riot police.” While the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Morgan Tsvangirai —who has been abducted and beaten multiple times this year by security forces— seeks to enter into a failing power-sharing agreement with Mugabe, the regime has refused to relinquish or share control of the police, leading to accusations Mugabe will use the police to impose his will indefinitely.
Mugabe’s government claims the cholera epidemic is being used to scapegoat the perennial president and blames sanctions imposed by “western” powers. Today, Zimbabwe’s information minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu complained “the cholera issue has been used to drive a wedge among us,” said the disease had been brought “under control” and blamed sanctions for the deaths experienced to date.
World Health Organization officials and regional governments suggest otherwise:
468 cholera cases had been detected in South Africa, nine of whom had died, and that Zimbabwe’s epidemic also had spread to Mozambique and Botswana. WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said the cases in South Africa were probably a mix of cholera already found in South Africa and spillover from Zimbabwe.
Experts say cholera is common in the region, as compared to other parts of the world, but that Zimbabwe had been better able to contain outbreaks before the startling collapse of its economy in recent years. Until now, the worst outbreak had seen roughly 3,000 recorded cases, according to Peter Lundberg, of the International Red Cross. By sheer number of infections, this outbreak is already 4.5 times as bad.
Joining the voices of Gordon Brown, Desmond Tutu, and Kenyan pres. Raila Odinga, US Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice has called on Mugabe to “leave”, blaming him for political violence, a “sham election”, and for sabotaging the process of forming a joint governing coalition with the opposition, who won more votes than his party in the first round of voting in this year’s election. Rice also blamed Mugabe for the socio-economic hardship and humanitarian crisis now facing the people of Zimbabwe.
China is choking under a thick covering of contaminants produced from burning carbon-based fuels for industrial production, power-generation, and transport. Environmental degradation is so rampant that much of the northwest of the country is being lost to rapidly expanding deserts. And desertification threatens the already shaky balance between China’s available arable land and its skyrocketing demand for cheap food. Policy makers and market theorists in China and abroad should be thinking about whether that desert can produce something to help China escape the mounting environmental and public health cataclysm.
If the windswept desert plains and sweltering sun-drenched sands can be used for power generation, then industrial land elsewhere in the country can be converted to other uses, and the air across China could be cleaned up, at least in part. At present, China relies mainly on coal for its power generation needs, and coal is the dirtiest fuel source that is widely used. Economic “imperatives” drive Chinese policy toward coal, because it can be harvested domestically, but it may not be necessary to keep burning it in order to keep China’s boomtime economy growing.
China could in fact be —due to its size, both geographically and demographically, and the immense amount of investment pouring into the country— an opportunity to implement what might become models for future “clean” industry-based green-economic development. This would require specific improvements, on a massive scale, and one of the key technologies that will be required is a renewables-oriented grid that transports electricity with minimal energy seepage in “real time”, so that massive renewables farms in remote areas can provide power to faraway urban centers.
The United States is examining this problem as we speak, and the dedicated renewables grid is part of the plans of T. Boone Pickens as well as the “we can solve it” campaign, backing Al Gore’s push for an all-renewables economy within 10 years. The single major obstacle to implementing such plans is not technological capacity, but rather the installation of the optimum infrastructure to distribute the power generated by such means to consumers, and to take advantage of feedback loops, so that all available renewable output capacity ends up being shared across the entire grid.
China has soared in economic terms to become the world’s 2nd leading consumer of energy and its 2nd consumer of petroleum, behind the United States. More than 4 times as populous as the US, and facing shocking degrees of environmental degradation and public health risks, China cannot sustain the level of old-fashioned unfiltered coal-fired power plant-use and resulting carbon emissions, without paying a heavy and potentially irreversible cost.
China is also undergoing a dramatic shift toward the individual automobile as a transport staple, a move that could push global carbon emissions far beyond the “point of no return” for catastrophic climate change. And, pressure will mount in coming years, as the US gets closer to supporting a global carbon-emissions reduction regime, for China to surrender its growth engine to a global security imperative. It would be best served by having a safe means of transitioning away from carbon-based combustibles sooner rather than later.
LANDMARK REGULATORY MOVE STEMS FROM ENVIRONMENTAL, PUBLIC HEALTH CONCERNS
A report in the New York Times cites an anonymous Canadian government source as saying Canada will soon declare bisphenol-a (BPA), a chemical found in some plastics, toxic. The move is prompted by concerns over observed effects on animals, potential environmental contamination, and fears of public health impact in the human population.
The same Times article also reports that “a draft report from the United States Department of Health and Human Services’ National Toxicology Program endorsed a scientific panel’s finding that there was “some concern” about neural and behavioral changes in humans who consume B.P.A.”
The HHS draft came on the same day as the Health Canada story was first reported in the Toronto newspaper, the Globe and Mail. The US may be the next country to take regulatory action against the chemical, though the next step will likely be further studies, with no toxic classification.
The official announcement of the designation opens a 60-day comment period for both the general public and industry. In all, a two-year review process will be followed which could end with “a partial or complete ban on food-related uses of plastics made using B.P.A.”
Rick Smith, the executive director of Canadian activist group Environmental Defence, is quoted as saying “If the government issues a finding of toxic, no parent in their right mind will be using products made with this chemical”. He also said the group, which already campaigns against BPA, “will be arguing strongly for a ban on the use of this chemical in food and beverage containers”.
Professor Jack Bend, an expert in pathology at London’s University of Western Ontario, has said studies make clear that BPA is “an endocrine disrupter”, meaning it interrupts the normal function of hormonal systems, though it is not known to what degree this negatively impacts human beings.
