Tampa Prep 2009-2010 Impact Defense File
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- AT: Swine Flu 1/2
AT: SuperbugsNo super bugs – links of antibacterial products to resistance are science fiction Charles Gerba, Ph.D., Professor of Environmental Microbiology at the University of Arizona 2009: Antibacterial Soap – doesn it really help? http://www.housekeepingchannel.com/a_475-Antibacterial_Soap_Does_it_Really_Help One theory floating around scientific communities, the “hygiene hypothesis," speculates that by over-killing germs, we deny our immune systems enough common illnesses to protect us from later developing allergies and asthma. “Super bugs” are another fear, rising from overuse of prescription antibiotics so that some bacteria develop resistance against them. We haven’t seen germs respond to disinfectants and sanitizers this way, Gerba points out, likely because these products kill the microorganisms outright, giving them no chance to adapt. Antibacterial hand soaps remain under consideration in this department. Some in the medical community are wary of popular use of these products, believing super bugs may indeed develop in response to accumulations in groundwater, though as yet there is no proof of this. And, says Gerba, some studies show antibacterial soaps may not be any more helpful to consumers than traditional soaps. Dr. Stuart Levy, a professor at Tufts University, says people most likely to benefit from antibacterial hand soaps are those with weakened immune systems, such as pregnant women or the elderly, but that more widespread use is unnecessary. According to Brian Sansoni, spokesperson for the Soap and Detergent Association (SDA), neither the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) nor a number of scientific studies have found super bugs developing in response to antibacterial products. "The theories linking antibacterial products to antibiotic resistance are overstated," Sansoni says. "The real-world research just doesn't back up those claims." Antibacterial resistance is media hype The Record 2006: Why the Media Can’t Get It Right. http://antibiotictruths.com/FSI/FSI_Jan06.pdf Food consumers—and their retailers—who rely strictly on the news media for information regarding the debate over antibiotic use in agriculture receive a daily helping of poor context, oversimplifi cation and plain old factual mistake. Why can’t the press get it right? ■ They confuse correlation with causation. If the world’s pre-eminent scientists often make unfounded assumptions about cause and effect in antibiotic resistance, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that reporters and editors follow. Data to prove true causation often either remains unavailable or confuses reporters not trained in science. ■ They rely too heavily on pet sources. Dependence on “experts” to explain that confusing science has led to what science novelist Michael Crichton labels a dangerous phenomenon: “consensus science.” True scientific breakthroughs, he notes, have historically occurred not by getting all scientists to agree on something, but by the checks and balances of scientific criticism and debate. Reporters either can’t or won’t do the legwork to uncover scientific critiques of the theory that using antibiotics in animals makes human drugs less effective. That makes them easy pickings for an effective activist PR machine that pitches such consensus science— and the appointed stable of pedigreed sources—as the final word on the issue. ■ They fall victim to good intentions. News reporters are human, and like most, they want to improve the world. Their opportunity to improve human health, combined with their ignorance about modern agri-technology, their mistaken assumption that limiting farm antibiotic use will only impact profits and not public health, and sometimes plain lazy reporting leads to stories that start with the assumption that ending the practice is good. ■ They don’t trust science. One of the 20th Century’s best science reporters and now a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, Jon Franklin, notes a shift that occurred in science reporting over the past half century. Where post-war science reporters held research scientists in nearly the same awe reserved for clergymen, by the ’60s and ’70s reporters coming out of humanities departments either cared little about science or harbored suspicion about its motives. By the ’80s and ’90s, that apathy turned into investigative journalism, focused on fi nding dishonesty and malpractice in studies and their funding. That philosophy can be seen in today’s news stories insinuating that scientists who insist on sound science before political action are merely shills for the pharmaceutical industry and agricultural corporations. AT: Swine Flu 1/21. No impact – it’s just another flu – media hype is overblown and we have everything we need to deal with it Frank Furedi Professor of Sociology at University of Kent April 28, 2009: Swine Flu and the Dramatization of the Disease. http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/6615/ There is nothing unusual about the outbreak of flu. Every year, thousands of people die from the flu, and, in normal conditions, society has learned to cope with the flu threat. From time to time, an outbreak of flu turns into a global pandemic, leading to a catastrophic loss of life. However, there is no evidence that the so-called swine flu, which has so far claimed a relatively small number of lives, will turn into a pandemic. Rather, what we are faced with is a health crisis that has been transformed into a moral drama. Although swine flu is a relatively common hazard of pig-farming, it is worth noting that, so far, health inspectors have not found infected pigs anywhere in Mexico. So why call it ‘swine flu’? The main reason is that the last strain of flu that genetically resembled this one was found among swine. But it does not have to be called ‘swine flu’. The Israeli deputy health minister, Yakov Litzman, says his country will refuse to call the disease by that name because religious Jews do not eat pork. ‘We will call it Mexico flu’, he said. What Litzman’s comments demonstrate is that the name, and image, we give to a disease is principally influenced by culture rather than science. History shows that how people respond to a crisis determines the impact and the meaning of that crisis. People do not simply ‘suffer a disaster’. They engage with the terrible or threatening event, sometimes adapting to it and sometimes drawing lessons and meaning from it; at other times they can be disoriented and confused by a crisis, but they often learn to reorganise their lives around it, sometimes in a creative way. In principle, we have all the resources and technical ingredients we need to deal with swine flu. Compared with previous eras, we have a relatively effective warning and tracking system that allows the authorities to take the necessary precautions. Although at present there is no vaccine available to prevent this strain of flu, there are anti-flu drugs that have been shown to work once the virus has been contracted. However, although society has the science and technology to cope with this latest outbreak of flu, its cultural and moral coping mechanisms appear feeble and exposed. When, on 27 April 2009, the World Health Organisation’s emergency committee raised the pandemic threat level for swine flu from level three to level four (out of a possible six), it was acting on a script that was cobbled together in the early years of the twenty-first century. Since the turn of the new millennium, the term ‘pandemic’ has become normalised and is increasingly used to frame global anxieties and fears. ‘Health alerts’ have been transformed into rituals, through which fear entrepreneurs remind us, in a quasi-religious fashion, that human extinction is a very real possibility. Terms like ‘epidemic’ and ‘pandemic’ appear with increasing frequency in newspapers, and are now used in everyday conversation, too. This tendency to inflate the dangers that we face leads to a situation where fearmongers now speculate about hundreds of thousands, millions or even billions of casualties occurring as a result of some crisis or disaster. Even highly prestigious journals and media outlets seem incapable of resisting the temptation to spread alarmist high-casualty scenarios. On 5 February 2004, an editorial in the New Scientist warned that a bird flu outbreak, in which the virus was transmitted between people, could kill 1.5billion people. The dramatisation of bird flu really took off with the WHO announcement in December 2004, which exhorted all nations to overhaul their pandemic strategies. As one study of the campaign of fear around pandemics noted: ‘The heightening of pandemic awareness was achieved through the strategic use of what one can call “scare quotes” in leading scientific journals and press releases, scare statistics, such as the 1968 Hong Kong pandemic which killed 30,000 Britons and over one million people worldwide, [and] scare historical references, such as the flu pandemics of 1918 and 1997.’ (1) In this important study, titled ‘Avian Flu: The Creation of Expectations in the Interplay Between Science and the Media’, the authors drew attention to the strategy of linking current outbreaks of the flu to historic catastrophes, which in turn fostered a climate of panic. In relation to the recent panic about the threat of avian flu, they noted that ‘the shift of emphasis to past pandemics contributes to the rhetoric of fear by imbuing the as-yet minor flu outbreak with historical significance, which obscures the fact that the current strain of avian flu has, as yet, killed only a relatively small number of people who had direct contact with poultry’ (2). Increasingly, public health officials sound as if they are rehearsing their roles for a disaster movie. They frequently argue that, since we had deathly flu pandemics in the past, it is inevitable that we will face another one very soon. ‘Major pandemics sweep the world every century, and it is inevitable that at least one will occur in the future’, said Professor Maria Zambon, a virologist and head of Britain’s Health Protection Agency’s influenza laboratory. For good measure, she added that ‘we can never be completely prepared for what nature will do: nature is the ultimate bioterrorist’ (3). The fatalistic view of an inevitable global flu catastrophe is made more ominous still by linking it with our anxieties about terrorism. Leading British scientist Hugh Pennington also made this link, when he stated in 2005 that avian flu ‘is the biggest threat to the human race’ and it ‘far outweighs bioterrorism; this is natural terrorism’ (4). Inevitably, the dramatisation of the flu has spawned various apocalyptic stories about how viruses can be ‘weaponised’ and used to threaten human survival. Such stories warn the public that terrorists might try to infect our nations with bird flu. Consider the Institute of Public Policy Research’s Commission of National Security for the Twenty-First Century: one of its reports speculated that the threat from pandemic diseases such as SARS and avian flu is growing all the time, and because of inadequate preparation ‘a serious disease outbreak or bio-terrorism incident in the next 18 months could tip the global economy from serious recession into global depression’. In line with Hollywood fantasy plotlines, the report invited us to imagine the possibility of a terrorist purchasing ‘genes for use in the engineering of an existing and dangerous pathogen into a more virulent strain’ (5). Alongside fears about the ‘weaponisation’ of viruses, the internet is awash with rumours about the conspiracy responsible for the current outbreak of swine flu. ‘I find it odd that this recent outbreak of swine flu first appeared in Mexico about the time President Obama was visiting there’, writes one blogger, before asking: ‘Does anyone else find that suspicious?’ And far too many people are replying: ‘Yes.’ Far-right conspiracy theorists describe swine flu as the ‘latest bioterrorism attack by the New World Order’. Left-wing conspiratorial-minded crusaders, meanwhile, blame the Republicans in US Congress for cutting ‘pandemic preparedness’ funds out of Obama’s economic stimulus package. Environmental campaigners point the finger of blame at the big corporations that factory-farm pigs. Everyone seems to have their own version of a Hollywood disaster film, through which they can make sense of the outbreak of flu. It seems the swine flu outbreak has infected our imaginations, giving shape and tangibility to our anxieties about everyday life. We should give the pigs a rest, and get on with living. 2. The WHO has exaggerated the threat of Swine Flu-the most severe cases have already peaked. Directory: files -> documents documents -> North Mankato Taylor Library documents -> In the Red and Brown Water documents -> - documents -> I. Disaster Summary Sheet II. Tropical Cyclones documents -> Cbp and Trade Automated Interface Requirements Appendix: pga december 22, 2015 documents -> Ace abi catair customs and Trade Automated Interface Requirements documents -> Ace abi catair customs and Trade Automated Interface Requirements documents -> Mobile audio/video recording systems documents -> Cartographic Concepts for Realizing a Location Based umts service documents -> 1/ Background Statistics Human development index rank Download 2.71 Mb. Share with your friends:
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