News & Articles

Can antibiotic medicines, long hailed as miracle drugs, be too much of a good thing? Yes.
Two factors are at work here. First, bacteria (one of the earliest forms of life on Earth) are miracles in their own right, with a stunning ability to outsmart the antibiotic drugs through rapid evolution. Second is the rather dull inclination of us supposedly-superior humans to overuse and misuse antibiotic medicines. Every time we take an antibiotic to kill some bad bacteria that is infecting our bodies, a few of the infectious germs are naturally resistant to the drug, so they survive, multiply, and become a colony of Superbugs that antibiotics can’t touch.
Multiply this colony by the jillions of doses prescribed for everything from deadly staph infections to the common cold, and we get the “antibiotic paradox:” The more we use them, the less effective they become, for they’re creating a spreading epidemic of immune Superbugs.
A big cause of this is the push by drug companies to get patients and doctors to reach for antibiotics as a cure all. For example, millions of doses a year are prescribed for children and adults who have common colds, flu, sore throats, etc. Nearly all these infections are caused by viruses – which cannot (repeat: CANNOT) be cured with antibiotics. Taking an antibiotic for a cold is as useless as taking a heart drug for heartburn. The antibiotics will do nothing for your cold, but it will help establish drug-resistant Superbugs in your body. That’s not a smart trade off.
In fact, it’s incomprehensibly stupid. Antibiotics are invaluable medicines we need for serious, life-threatening illnesses, but squandering them on sore throats has already brought us to the brink of Superbugs that are resistant to everything. That’s the nightmare of all nightmares.
“The Rising Threat Of Antibiotic Resistance In The United States,” www.alternet.org, December 20, 2013.

GOP to US infrastructure: All fall down

I love groups with the gumption to take on big tasks and do what needs to be done – can-do groups that can, and do. But, uh-oh, here comes The Little Choo-Choo That Couldn’t: The US Congress.
Since the earliest days of our US of A, the most basic task of this legislative body has been to keep our national house in good repair – tending to roads, bridges, rail systems, airports, school buildings, parks, internet access, etc. Yet, with a toxic mix of anti-government ideology and fiscal foolishness, Congressional Republicans have recently been blocking every serious proposal to reinvest in America’s collapsing infrastructure.
The result is an inexcusable drop in maintenance, even as our population has expanded dramatically and the wear and tear on all parts of the infrastructure has created disasters-in-the-making. As one senator says of our increasingly-ramshackle house, “I’ve been here seven and a half years. We have not solved one single problem. It’s just so frustrating.”
That was no tax-and-spend liberal Democrat talking – it was a penny-pinching Republican, Bob Corker of Tennessee. Indeed, it was not that long ago that most Republicans understood and funded infrastructure – from Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt to Ike, and even Reagan, who called such common sense maintenance “an investment in tomorrow that we must make today.”
Gail Collins, the superbly sensible New York Times columnist, recently noted that, “In a perfect world, Congress would figure out a serious, long-term plan to fix bridges, [etc.].” Yes, but I would amend her observation with this: It shouldn’t take “a perfect world” – even a Congress in a half-way mediocre world ought to be able to do that job.
Actually, thanks to GOP obstinacy, Congress isn’t the Little Choo-Choo That Couldn’t. It’s the Choo-Choo that could, but won’t.
“Congress: The Road To Roads,” The New York Times, August 1, 2014.
“Build We Won’t,” The New York Times, July 4, 2014.
“America’s Highways, Running on Empty,” The New York Times, June 2, 2014.
“Remarks by the President on Building a 21st Century Infrastructure,” www.whitehouse.gov, May 14, 2014.