Life as a Spectator Sport

I don't usually quote other people's blogs in their entirety, but I thought this was too important to just mention it and provide a link. Its from Animal Blawg by David Cassuto, Luis Chiesa and Suzanne McMillan.

Antibiotics in Your Organic Lettuce and Other Tales from the Factory Farm

I’m writing a piece about CAFOs and climate change for the Animals & Society Institute, which, as you might imagine, is not a cheerful pursuit. Still, even with all my carping about antibiotics in animal feed, I had not realized that vegetables like corn, potatoes and lettuce absorb antibiotics when fertilized with livestock manure. Usually, one hears about antibiotic transmission through meat and dairy products. I was even more disturbed to learn (all of this from the Environmental Health News) that eating organic offers no protection — though, given the way USDA organic certification has been canted in favor of Big Food, I should have guessed.

This information about contaminated produce comes from a 2005 University of Minnesota study where researchers planted corn, scallions and cabbage in manure-treated soil and a similar 2007 study on corn, lettuce and potatoes. In each case, the crops were found to contain antibiotics (chlortetracycline and sulfamethazine, respectively).

The reason organic certification offers no protection lies with lack of USDA restrictions on using manure from animals treated with antibiotics. Since 90% of the drugs administered to these animals gets excreted in their urine or manure, which then gets spread on soil used to grow vegetables, the vegetables absorb the antibiotics. Eventually, so too do we. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, animals receive over 25 million pounds of antibiotics each year in the United States.

Recommendations abound to mitigate the problem, although none have so far been implemented. Some mitigation strategies offer significant cause for concern. For example, some suggest high temperature composting, which can reduce antibiotic concentrations significantly. However, it has no effect whatsoever on concentrations of sulfamethazine, a commonly administered drug. Such proposals terrify me because, even if implemented, they will not fix the problem while likely giving Big Food a free pass to continue using antibiotics indefinitely.

Don’t get me wrong; I favor high temperature composting. It’s part of any sustainable agriculture program and one of many steps necessary to combat climate change. However, it will not solve the antibiotic problem.

The solution to this particular problem is simple: Ban subtherapeutic antibiotic use in agriculture, much as Europe did in 2006. The status quo is incredibly dangerous, both to humans and the environment at large. A ban represents a straightforward solution that no one in this country with any juice will entertain.

Big Food argues that the drugs are necessary to its continued operation. Even if that were true (which it is not — the National Research Council estimates that a ban on subtherapeutic antibiotics would increase per capita costs a mere $5-10/year), so what? Industrial Agriculture brutalizes billions of animals in indescribable ways and forms one of the chief sources of greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4 (methane) and N2O). It also causes widespread environmental degradation and disease, including the swine and bird flu. I’m hard pressed to come up with a reason why its continued existence should be a national priority.

–David Cassuto

I personally think there is a snowball's chance in hell of a ban on sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics. Regardless of administrative change, corporate food producers still have way too much control of our legislatures. So our only choice is to buy from people we trust--local farmers and farmers' markets, in other words, and to grow our own.

Major hugs to my friend Bill, who after I whined and bitched about the state of my garden, showed up at my front door this week with a huge bag of green beans, new potatoes and onions. We're still eating the potatoes and onions, and made two dinners of the beans before I put the rest of them in the freezer.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Public officials finally beginning to see the light?

An excellent article in the Kingston, New York, "Daily Freeman" warns citizens to stock up for a possible worsening flu situation the same way they would for severe winter weather. That's a good analogy to make for parts of the country where electricity is commonly interrupted during winter storms, and icy roads make supermarket deliveries impossible. But even in areas with far milder winters, weather can interrupt food deliveries. I inspected a supermarket several years ago that had missed nine consecutive grocery deliveries (a two-and-a-half week period), either because of bad weather in the immediate area surrounding the store, or bad weather in the area where their grocery vendor was located. Their shelves were virtually bare. They had meat, because that came from a local vendor, but non-perishables were almost completely gone.

Fortunately for local residents, there was another supermarket about ten miles away in the next small town. Otherwise, they'd have had a forty mile drive to buy food. In the absence of gas deliveries, a forty mile drive might well be out of the question. So it's heartening to see public health officials finally beginning to urge people to keep a stock of food on hand in case of any kind of emergency.

It's time for their counterparts in the rest of the country to do the same thing.

KINGSTON — People should have a three-week supply of food on hand in the case the current swine flu pandemic worsens, the leader of a town supervisors’ group said last week, and he warned that 40 percent of the workforce could be kept away from their jobs this fall if the outbreak lasts that long.

John Valk Jr., the supervisor of the town of Shawangunk and the president of the Ulster County Supervisors Association, said a worsening pandemic of the H1N1 influenza strain means “our workforce would be slower. Deliveries to stores would slow down, and that is the point of stocking up on 21 days’ worth of supplies. ... As things (get) backlogged, you’d have the things you need at the house.”

Greene County Public Health Director Marie Ostoyich has also advised readiness in the event the flu outbreak becomes more serious. She said briefings from state officials have emphasized that residents be prepared for the disruption of both municipal and commercial services.

“They did talk about (how) it won’t be business as usual,” Ostoyich said. “We don’t know about schools, businesses, whatever there may be — sort of like when we have a major snowstorm and we’re down to bare-bones basics and people aren’t to be out on the road traveling unless it’s absolutely necessary.

“We urged all the municipalities to come up with their plan,” she added, “but I don’t think I could, in any way, predict exactly what that’s going to look like when we’re there.”

Dr. Michael Caldwell, the Dutchess County health commissioner, said federal guidelines have varied during previous flu outbreaks, from keeping food supplies for as little as three days to longer periods based on the severity of the problem.

“You need to have a preparedness plan, maybe even more than three days of food, because, if there was a slowdown in travel, you would see a decrease in the ability to move food to your local shopping center and your local grocery store because a lot of those foods come in everyday,” Caldwell said. “We saw this with SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome, in 2002), and it went on a couple of months, and it was really causing a lot of trouble globally, particularly in the Asian part of the world and in Canada.”

Information being used by local officials in preparing for swine flu problems includes U.S. Department of Health and Human Services data about three influenza pandemics during the 20th century: the 1918-19 outbreak, which caused at least 675,000 U.S. deaths and up to 50 million deaths worldwide; the 1957-58 outbreak, which killed 70,000 in the United States and up to 2 million worldwide; and 1968-69 outbreak, which claimed 34,000 lives in this country and 700,000 around the world.

Valk said his grandmother died in the 1918 flu pandemic and he hopes medical science has advanced far enough to lessen the effects this time around.

“What I’ve read is that it was just like now, where it was, at first, minor and people thought we’d gotten through the flu season, and then it came back with a vengeance after the summer,” Valk said. “That’s when they lost control. Of course, they didn’t have flu vaccines” or flu treatments at the time.

Valk said even if there are fewer cases than expected in the current pandemic, it still could affect community services and be complicated by other events.

“If we had a snowstorm in the middle of winter and we had four of our highway guys (home sick) out of the 11, how would we get the roads clean?” he said.

Woodstock Supervisor Jeff Moran recently noted that, during the 1918 outbreak, there was a “lockdown” of the town.

“We stopped the traffic between Woodstock and Kingston, what traffic there was at that time, and closed the road,” he said.

The current flu outbreak — which was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization earlier this month — has been confirmed in 74 countries and all 50 states in this country. In the United States, there have been 21,449 cases of swine flu and 87 deaths associated with the disease. New York state has had more than 1,700confirmed cases, and New York City has had 23 deaths.

Locally, there have been 30 confirmed cases of swine flu in Dutchess County, four in Ulster County, three in Columbia County and one in Greene County. There have been no reported flu deaths in the region during the current outbreak.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Just some eye candy today

Four loaves of multi-grain bread just out of the oven, and a bowl of homemade butter. Who says you have to be rich to enjoy the finer things in life!

Sunday, June 14, 2009

You never know what you're going to find in the driveway around here

This time it was not a tree, but a half-grown domestic white duck, orange webbed feet and all. I wish I had thought to grab the camera and take its picture, but by the time that occurred to me, I was halfway to town. The nearest family that has any poultry at all is half a mile away, and I don't know whether they have ducks or not. The only reason I know they have poultry is that I can hear their roosters crow in the mornings. So there's no telling where Ducky came from. Someone could have just set it out on the side of the road, not an unusual occurrence in the country. If it doesn't find a home soon, it's likely to become a meal for the nearest fox. My chicken coop still is not finished, and the fenced run itself will be the last step, so I had no safe place to keep it. I could only watch it waddle away and hope it found its way back home soon.

On Friday, I made parmesan cheese for the first time, and it's sitting in a saltwater bath until tonight, when it will join the rest of the cheese rounds in the little fridge. We won't get to eat it for at least 10 months, as it ages.

I'm running out of places to store cheese, and thinking half-seriously about another big refrigerator. If I could find one cheap on craigslist, I could strip it of everything and jury-rig some open shelving to hold the cheeses. I have a swiss cheese ripening (making gas internally to form the eyes) on the kitchen table, and it will go into the regular fridge in another week or so. At that point, I am out of storage space. I'll have to start making labneh, which can be stored in a jar in olive oil, or baker's cheese, which can be frozen. Or we will have to start really eating a LOT of cheese. I already put cheese in anything I can justify--scrambled eggs, salads, shredded and sprinkled on vegetables, and of course sliced in sandwiches. I could make cheesecake with the baker's cheese, but that would have to go back into the freezer, which is already stuffed full.

It's going to be stuffed with something else today as well, a couple of burlap bags that used to hold 50 pounds of green coffee beans each. I happened to see someone going out of the coffee shop with a stack of them, and asked whether I might have some too. If nothing else, they make a good backing for hooked rugs. The girl I asked about it said, "Sure, they just get burned if no one takes them," and returned with several. As she was walking away, she added, "You might see some moths."

"Moths?" I asked faintly. I could feel myself going pale. To anyone who works with wool, "moth" is the ultimate four-letter word. She nodded, and said, "They must lay eggs in the burlap, because everyone who has taken some say they had moths afterward." Out of an abundance of caution (considering that I often have various half-finished wool projects in the car), I asked for a garbage bag to wrap the burlap in, and as soon as I rearrange the freezer to make room for them, they'll go in there for a couple of weeks. In the meantime, they are safely outside.

For the first time in weeks, it isn't raining, so I'm off to do laundry and play in the garden.

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Not too much panic, please . . .

Once again, the word is out that WHO (World Health Organization) is about to declare pandemic level 6, an "official pandemic." With soaring levels of infection, they may actually do it this time, though their greatest concern still seems to be managing panic, not managing illness.

Swine flu is not only becoming more prevalent, it is apparently becoming more deadly. It was already the predominant type of ILI (influenza-like illness) in the US (seasonal flu has mostly died down). But in the last four days, the official mortality rate has increased from .57% to .94% (figures from today's WHO News Briefing). I suspect this abrupt change is due more to delayed reporting than to an actual large increase in the mortality rate. Even so, it suggests that the mortality rate has been higher all along than reported.

Oops -- Near the end of the News Briefing, Dr. Fukuda took back his statement of 249 deaths. He said, "First let me clarify the number that came up earlier. The number I gave you on the number of deaths was erroneous. The number of deaths is 140 so rather than the 249 – if you can make that correction – that is the number of reported deaths from this virus to WHO is 140. In terms of examples of adverse reaction that we would like to either see not occur or have them be reduced." With that correction, the mortality rate is still roughly .57%. There are many reports, however, of doctors being told to put the victim's underlying health problem on the death certificate as the cause of death, rather than the swine flu the person was diagnosed with. So I personally do not believe the published mortality rate is anywhere near correct.

Part of the reason for the misleading low rate is that the field tests for swine flu are seriously unreliable. In several cases, swine flu wasn't diagnosed until an autopsy was performed on the victim. Earlier tests had been negative. So some of the recent increase in mortality may result from the addition of people who died days or even weeks ago.

If WHO does move to the highest pandemic level, swine flu will once again be back in the news. And once again we'll see two other phenomena: first, the naysayers will flood back out of their closets to pooh-pooh everything they hear. Second, emergency rooms will again be overwhelmed with the worried well, many of whom are likely to go home with infections picked up right there in the ER. A reasoned, well-thought-out, moderate response seems to be simply beyond the capacity of most people.

I'll throw out my recommendations again, for what they're worth, starting with the suggestion to have at least a couple of weeks worth of stored food, water and medications. If your children's day care or summer camp closes and you have to stay home with them, you can eat from your reserves, not your most recent paycheck. If so many people become ill that public services are threatened, you won't be fighting the crowds for that last gallon of water on the supermarket shelves.

Make sure you have a wind-up or battery-powered radio capable of receiving emergency broadcasts. Add a couple of wind-up flashlights and a can opener (amazing how often that gets overlooked). Think about how you would prepare your family's meals without electricity, how you would wash the dishes (and the people and the clothing), where you would go to the bathroom. There are thousands of useful sites on the internet with answers, but they're no use to anyone who hasn't considered the questions.

You can forget the sites that tell you how to track down your food and kill it, how to squat on someone else's land without them knowing it, how to evade the authorities and how to field strip a Sig Sauer. All that information may well be useful in some circumstances. But it doesn't come close to knowing how to prepare food, clean up after yourself, go to the bathroom and care for sick family members. Short of the total breakdown of society, those are the skills you'll need the most.

What about masks, hand sanitizers, gloves, etc.? It's probably too late to procure masks from anywhere but your local hardware store, where N95 respirators are sold in the paint and drywall departments. Alcohol-based hand sanitizers probably do some good, but they're not recommended for children, because a small amount of alcohol is absorbed through the skin each time they're used. It's not enough to adversely affect an adult, but children could be at risk. Some other sanitizers contain triclosan, a toxic poison that is accumulating in our sources of drinking water from being flushed down so many drains. And the FDA has issued a warning about one company's products:

Consumers should not use any Clarcon products and should throw these products away in household refuse. Analyses of several samples of over-the-counter topical antimicrobial skin sanitizer and skin protectant products revealed high levels of various bacteria, including some associated with unsanitary conditions. Some of these bacteria can cause opportunistic infections of the skin and underlying tissues. Such infections may need medical or surgical attention, and may result in permanent damage. Examples of products that should be discarded include:

- Citrushield Lotion
- Dermasentials DermaBarrier
- Dermassentials by Clarcon Antimicrobial Hand Sanitizer
- Iron Fist Barrier Hand Treatment
- Skin Shield Restaurant
- Skin Shield Industrial
- Skin Shield Beauty Salon Lotion
- Total Skin Care Beauty
- Total Skin Care Work

Findings from the FDA's recent inspection of the Clarcon facility are particularly concerning because the products are promoted as antimicrobial agents that claim to treat open wounds, damaged skin, and protect against various infectious diseases. The inspection uncovered serious deviations from FDA's current Good Manufacturing Practice requirements.

Good old soap, hot water and effective hand-washing technique is still the best way to clean your hands (count from A to Z while vigorously rubbing your hands with soap, then rinse thoroughly with water). In public restrooms, open the door with a paper towel or tissue after you wash your hands. Don't touch your face. Sneeze or cough into a tissue or your elbow. Stay home if you're sick, and keep your kids home if they're sick. You'll hear these things over and over, and they all work.

Finally, monitor the more responsible public health sites, such as FluTrackers and Effect Measure. FluTrackers is non-political (and strongly moderated to keep it that way), non-sensational, and many of the members are professionals working in virology and epidemiology. The writers at Effect Measure are public health professionals.

Sunday, June 07, 2009

No posting, much work

The garden (all the tomatoes died and had to be replanted, but oh boy am I gonna have beans!). The chicken coop (siding and roof, a little progress). The usual domestic stuff, cheese and butter and bread and laundry. And a new type of work, which I won't go into in detail, but it involves inspecting vacant homes for the agency that owns them.

This is much easier work than the grocery store inspections in some regards. It's a relief not to have to go through endless explanations of why I'm there, what I have to do and why I need someone's signature on a consent. On the other hand, there is nearly always appropriate climate control and adequate light in the stores. I may have to deal with language problems, but at the same time I seldom have to tramp through waist high weeds to get a picture of the property. I may have to persuade a reluctant employee to allow the inspection, but I don't have to climb down a flight of rickety steps into a dark dank basement smelling of mildew, or walk through a house that's been closed up in 90 degree weather.

What has impressed me most about the home inspections is the sad feeling in many of the houses. I'm emphatically not the airy-fairy type--no alleged psychic ability, no sensing of previous occupants, nothing at all like that. But you can't look around the interior of a home without having some idea of the kind of people who lived there. Some of the houses have been in very bad shape inside, leaving one with the suspicion that you wouldn't have wanted to know the occupants. But others were clearly the loved homes of a happy family--well taken care of, nicely painted, attractively landscaped--all the earmarks of sudden and probably unexpected financial disaster. It's hard to look around these rooms and not hear the voices of the people who lived here, hard to see how lovingly the grounds were planted with fruit trees and rose bushes, and not imagine them grilling on the back deck in the summer, with children playing in the sand where a swing set used to be.

So anyway . . . much work, no time for blog posting. No time for much of anything else, except trying to expand the garden and replant the things that didn't make the transition from seedling trays to soil.

I've been fussing at Nick for raiding the containers of frozen cherries in the big freezer--every time he was here, I'd find another empty half-gallon. And now it's cherry-picking time again and there are still three half-gallons of cherries in the back of the freezer. Time to make preserves, or ice cream, or cherries in brandy, or something. We'll be going out to pick some of this year's crop on Tuesday.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

An unexpected visitor

I almost stepped on it, walking down the driveway without paying much attention to what was in front of me. Not a good thing to do in a rural area with a lot of trees and vegetation. But he wasn't going fast, so I ran back to the house and grabbed the camera.

It's actually the first snake I've ever seen here, though I've found their cast-off skins on occasion. Clarence says he had seen them when he first moved out here, and Nick almost stepped on a rattlesnake once. But in spite of the amount of time I spend outdoors, and out in the wilder sections of the property, it's the first time I've encountered one. It's actually rather pretty, a glossy black with blue highlights. Non-poisonous, of course, just the common garden variety black snake.

ETA -- I've been informed by someone who knows snakes better than I do that this was not the "common garden variety black snake," but a black rat snake. Also non-poisonous, however.

Monday, May 25, 2009

The flu isn't playing fair

Almost a month ago, on April 26, 2009, I predicted that the swine flu would either go away quietly or would turn into the biggest event of the year. It did neither, though people who get their news from network television may think it went away. It's still there, infecting people and yes, still killing people. A New York City woman died this past weekend.

In terms of a pandemic, the swine flu has in some respects gone away quietly. It's ironic that the current situation meets the criteria for a Level 6 pandemic, as set out by WHO (the World Health Organization). But concern for worldwide panic (as opposed to worldwide pandemic) has influenced WHO to re-evaluate their benchmarks, and to add severity of illness to a definition that was originally just a spread of infection. They've taken a lot of flak for that, and only time will tell whether they were right or wrong. In the meantime, swine flu staggers on, infecting soldiers on military bases in Kuwait, schoolchildren in Japan, prisoners at Rikers Island in New York, and almost certainly masses of people in Africa, where there is such a lack of testing capability that no cases have yet been reported. Swine flu has been quiet, in terms of making it onto the evening news. It just hasn't gone away.

So what's going on and how should we be dealing with it? My take on this is the same as always. Whether we're planning for flu, a monster hurricane, a tornado, civil unrest, or the bad economy, it doesn't really matter exactly what the disaster may be. The key word is planning. Even more emphatically, planning now, not waiting until an event is unfolding.

But I know that many people simply have no idea where to start. Their questions are not "How much food should I be putting away?" or "What documents do I need to have handy?" but a much more fundamental and worrisome "Every time I think about this it scares me to death and I never take even the first step."

So I was really pleased to come across a blog called Listening to Katrina. It has three sections, a journal written during the time the author's family was fleeing New Orleans, a workbook with simple step-by-step instructions for developing a family disaster plan, and additional detail on how to perform some of those steps (he's computer savvy, and recommends having a flash drive with essential information for each family member, for example). The entire site is well written, well-illustrated and many times unexpectedly humorous. And while it was written by a Hurricane Katrina survivor, the information is meant for any kind of disaster situation.

My only quibble is that he's writing more from a point of surviving a single event, from which the country would recover and go on, than a long-term disaster. But you have to start somewhere, and anyone who goes through his workbook will be better informed and better prepared about taking additional steps.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

No pasties for me, thank you!

I bought this rutabaga, a typical heavily waxed supermarket rutabaga, with the intention of mixing up a batch of Cornish pasties, one of our favorite food groups. The rutabaga clearly had other ideas. A pile of work came in and the rutabaga sat on the kitchen counter for a week or so. By the time I was back in the mood to make pasties, the rutabaga was happily trying to make new rutabagii. So I'll cut it up and stick it in the ground, and report back on what happens. I've never grown rutabaga before, so this should be interesting.

Another reason to be prepared

The LA Times reports in an article by Rebecca Cole that

. . . public reactions in the initial days of the swine flu outbreak . . . sounded like one of those nature films in which tiny fish dart back and forth in perfect unison.

The researchers were tracking thousands of Twitter posts pouring into an Internet site. With every twist and turn of the flu reports, the researchers noticed, the mass of tweets swung this way and that as if they were one, even though most of the individual Twitterers had no contact with one another outside of the website.

It was a rare window into the public psyche amid an explosion of information about a potentially dangerous disease outbreak.

Farther down in the article, Cole quotes Dan Ariely, author of "Predictably Irrational," a book that explores "the concept of learned helplessness to describe how people behave when conditioned by a series of seemingly random, harmful events."

"When we have all these unexplained shocks, we just do what we're told," said Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at MIT.

When people don't know how much risk to take in stressful situations, Ariely said, they look around to see what others are doing. But "if other people are doing foolish things," he said, many times "we do it too."

This seems to make a lot of sense to me, but even more, it suggests a way to talk to people about preparedness that might get through to them, even if your concerns about pandemics, social chaos, peak oil and governmental restrictions on civil liberties do not.

Being prepared--at least a couple of weeks worth of stored food, water and medications, for starters--means you can take a deep breath when something unexpected strikes, sit back for a minute and watch what's going on. You don't have to run to the grocery store to stock up before the storm hits, or make sure you have sanitizers before the pandemic comes to your town. It means that you have time for analysis, time for good decision-making, not just for knee-jerk reactions.

Instant reactions are for catastrophes that come out of nowhere--the tornado that spikes down suddenly from the thunderstorm, the traffic accident you couldn't foresee or prevent, the fire that hits in the middle of the night. Even those occasions can often be handled better if you've thought the scenarios out in advance (what's the best way to get out of each room in the case of fire?). But many other emergencies go from serious situations to emergencies precisely because people have no idea what to do until the moment of panic arrives.

Knowing that your family can manage on stored provisions for at least a couple of weeks puts off the moment when you have to make other decisions, such as whether to go out and risk being exposed to infection. Having a "bug-out" bag in the car means that in the case of an evacuation, you don't have to run around looking for essential items at the last moment. Taking these steps in advance is like installing a smoke detector in your home. You don't do it with the expectation that a fire will occur, but to give yourself time to react in the unlikely case that it does occur.

It's just insurance, that's all.

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