Opinions
Opinions
| Date | Opinions | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Mar 11, 2009 |
''You Can't Catch MRSA by Reading About It...'' "…as far as we know. But one of the journalistic challenges here is that we don’t know a lot about MRSA, and so the challenge in my Thursday column was how to raise public concern about a legitimate public health issue without becoming alarmist and exaggerating the danger." |
Antibiotics in Food Animal Production |
| Apr 3, 2013 |
''Yes, Antibiotic-Resistant Bugs Can Jump from Animals to Humans'' "For decades, the meat industry has denied any problem with its reliance on routine, everyday antibiotic use for the nation's chickens, cows, and pigs. But it's a bit like a drunk denying an alcohol problem while leaning on a barstool for support. Antibiotic use on livestock farms has surged in recent years — from 20 million pounds annually in 2003 to nearly 30 million pounds in 2011." |
Antibiotics in Food Animal Production |
| May 15, 2010 |
''Working to Save Lives With Safe Food'' "At age 2, Kyle Allgood of Chubbuck, Idaho, became sickened by a deadly strain of E. coli O157:H7, from contaminated spinach. When Kyle's abdominal pains would not subside, he was flown to a Salt Lake City hospital, where his downward spiral ended in kidney failure, a heart attack and, ultimately, death. The tragedy the Allgood family endured is far from rare. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that each year, food-borne illness strikes tens of millions of Americans, hospitalizes hundreds of thousands and kills several thousand—mostly young children like Kyle, the elderly or others who are especially vulnerable." |
Food Safety |
| Aug 7, 2012 |
''Will Humans Lose the Battle With Microbes?'' Bacteria have become increasingly resistant to the drugs we've come to rely on. Only a concerted effort can avert a public health crisis. |
Antibiotic Innovation, Antibiotics in Food Animal Production |
| Jan 20, 2012 |
''Who Else Is Paying Your Doctor?'' "It took longer than expected, but the Obama administration is finally poised to enact badly needed regulations requiring that the manufacturers of drugs, medical devices and medical supplies disclose all payments they make to doctors or teaching hospitals." |
Conflicts of Interest |
| Jun 11, 2011 |
"The deaths of 31 people in Europe from a little known strain of E. coli have raised alarms worldwide, but we shouldn't be surprised. Our food often betrays us." |
Food Safety |
| Dec 17, 2007 |
''When a Child Can't Be Home for Christmas'' "For youth from foster care, the holidays are often a stark reminder of what it means not to have a family. We miss the comfort of knowing we have a place where we are always welcome, year after year. We don't know the family traditions of mom's best tablecloth and china, dad's carving the turkey, grandma's famous stuffing recipe, football in the den with the cousins, or even the inevitable family dramas." |
Health Topics |
| Dec 28, 2008 |
''We need antibiotic ban in foods'' "For two years my colleagues at the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production and I poured over volumes of data on what the Food and Drug Administration calls on its Web site 'a growing threat,' ..." |
Antibiotics in Food Animal Production |
| Sep 21, 2010 |
"Most of the antibiotics sold in the United States — 70 percent — go to the animals we eat, especially pigs and chickens. To speed up growth and to prevent the spread of disease in crowded conditions, growers put small amounts of antibiotics into animals’ daily feed." |
Medical Safety, Antibiotics in Food Animal Production |
| Jul 26, 2012 |
''Washington's election-year paralysis hurts the nation'' "A federal food safety law shifting the government's focus from responding to dangerous contamination to preventing it has been heralded as the most sweeping food security reform in decades. But 18 months after the law was enacted, the rules needed to put it into effect are nowhere to be seen. That inaction is just one example of a disheartening election-year paralysis in Washington." |
Food Safety |
| Aug 24, 2012 |
''Tracking a Superbug at the NIH'' "A deadly outbreak of antibiotic-resistant bacteria last year at the Clinical Research Center of the National Institutes of Health offers a fascinating and frightening window on the future of medicine. Fascinating because scientists used whole-genome sequencing to obtain a fine-grained blueprint of the genetic material in the bacteria and to track how it spread. Frightening because the bacteria, resistant to multiple antibiotics, defied efforts to control it in the 234-bed hospital in Bethesda." |
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| Sep 28, 2010 |
''Tougher food safety rules long overdue'' "The House committee hearing last week on the summer's recall of 550 million eggs is exhibit A in the fight for tougher oversight by the Food and Drug Administration." |
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| Jan 16, 2013 |
''Time to Move on New Food Rules'' "America hasn't made major changes to its food-safety laws since the 1930s, so it probably should come as no surprise that - once a decision was finally made to update them - it took two more years to generate new regulations. But the Food and Drug Administration's menu for reform is now mostly assembled, and that's welcome news. For decades, federal regulators have reacted to outbreaks of foodborne illnesses rather than working aggressively to prevent them." |
Food Safety |
| Oct 19, 2011 |
''Thinking outside the doctor’s office to build a strong, healthy nation'' "The most urgent health problems facing our nation — such as obesity, asthma, diabetes, heart disease and injuries — are shaped more by where we live and work than by what happens in the doctor’s office or hospital." |
Health Impact Assessment |
| May 31, 2008 |
"In the past month, two new reports have examined how farm animals are raised in this country." |
Antibiotics in Food Animal Production |
| Mar 7, 2009 |
''The withdrawal of drug-company money'' "In recent years, the pharmaceutical industry has been repeatedly (and rightly) excoriated for its shameless efforts to promote its products: Freebies handed out to doctors as inducements to prescribe particular drugs." |
Conflicts of Interest |
| Oct 22, 2010 |
The U.S. Needs More Weapons in the Fight Against Superbugs Director of Pew Health Group Medical Safety, Allan Coukell, discusses antibiotic resistance and U.S. policy after a Washington Post health piece on resistant superbugs. |
Antibiotic Innovation |
| Mar 6, 2010 |
"Until three months ago, Thomas M. Dukes was a vigorous, healthy executive at a California plastics company." |
Antibiotics in Food Animal Production |
| May 7, 2013 |
''The Senate Aims to Clean Up Compounding Pharmacies'' When a doctor sticks a needle in you, you expect that the drugs it carries won’t be tainted. But, possibly owing to a strange gray area in federal law, thousands of patients last October got injections for back pain that contained highly dangerous fungal meningitis, and dozens of them died. Members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee are now seeking to fix the government’s oversight of the obscure world of compounding pharmacies. The reforms they want are overdue. |
Drug Manufacturing and Distribution, Drug Safety |
| Mar 30, 2010 |
"Last week, fire ravaged a warehouse at a Marseilles, Ohio, egg farm. Power was cut off to two of the farms’ 16 chicken barns, and 250,000 chickens either died or had to be euthanized because of the loss of environmental control." |
Food Safety |
| Jun 2, 2011 |
''The High Cost of Cheap Meat'' "The point of factory farming is cheap meat, made possible by confining large numbers of animals in small spaces. Perhaps the greatest hidden cost is its potential effect on human health." |
Antibiotics in Food Animal Production |
| Mar 14, 2010 |
"Congress passed legislation last year intended to protect consumers from the credit card industry’s most deceptive and unfair practices. The main provisions finally went into effect last month. But the Federal Reserve still has to write new rules intended to stop companies from bleeding customers dry with exorbitant fees for late payments, with charges for exceeding the credit limit, or with “any other penalty fee or charge.” |
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| Jun 30, 2010 |
''The Fed and Your Credit Card'' "Congress passed legislation last year banning many of the worst practices of credit card companies and ordered the Federal Reserve to issue new rules to ensure that late charges and all other penalties — a major source of abuse — are 'reasonable and proportional.' That dubious reading is especially troubling given a recent analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Safe Credit Card Project that found that some companies fail to disclose the penalty interest charges in their contracts — a clear violation of banking law." |
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| Jan 6, 2012 |
''The F.D.A.’s Token Gesture'' "After withdrawing its own 34-year-old request/promise to restrict the routine use of penicillin and tetracyclines in farm animal feed, the F.D.A. made it crystal clear that, despite the increasingly common threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in supermarket meat, it would leave the regulating up to industry itself." |
Antibiotics in Food Animal Production |
| Jul 24, 2011 |
''The end of the era of antibiotics'' "For decades, we have lived in blissful ignorance of the infectious diseases that tormented earlier generations. Just take a pill, or get a shot, and they will go away. But the miracle drugs are starting to fail, even for common diseases - and we have ourselves to blame." |
Antibiotics in Food Animal Production |
