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Good morning,
Ray. Due to better communications
and because of our agribusiness food chain trucking network, it is harder to
hide or restrict local outbreaks or toxic pollutions. More people are affected
and at risk, as we saw with one sick 1,200 pound cow being added to 20,000
pounds of meat eventually sent to eight states. As the authors below might say, act locally, think globally. As opposed to
the years when the pollution in Picher was isolated from public view, today we
know that pollution from coal plants in the Midwest blows into Northeastern
states, making those people sick. We know that toxic water runoff near rivers
ends up in the food chain. Science has had to prove the consequences to us what
native cultures knew long ago and what we had forgotten when we became seduced
by a chemical-additive culture that assumed infinite resources. Signs are,
however, that we are learning to pay attention and generate a political will to
correct our past ignorance. To paraphrase
John Muir, when you pull at one thing in Nature, you find that it is connected
to everything else. - KWC REH wrote: Karen, this is certainly not new to me. The Eagle
Picher Mining company constantly told our parents there was no lead threat from
their mines and that the children were fine. No tests were
necessary and none were done. Like agent Orange in Vietnam, those
of us who grew up there now suffer from various brain issues having to take
terrible drugs with nasty side effects just to keep our minds.
Unless you have experienced such things you have no idea. Lies,
lies and more lies from the purveyors of jobs and alleged wealth. Opening and
ending paragraphs excerpted from an update from Vanishing Borders:
Protecting the Planet in the Age of Globalization Lead Quote: “Though
estimates vary widely, experts project that as many as three hundred thousand
to five hundred thousand Britons could die
over the next thirty years from BSE, depending on the incubation period and the
success of past attempts to eliminate the disease from the British herd.” Microbial Migrations By Hilary French and Brian Halweil, in Orion Magazine online, Jan. 07, 2004 @ http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/04-1om/MadCow.html TWO YEARS AGO, the world news media presented viewers with the garish spectacle of
thousands of animal carcasses going up in smoke in the British countryside in a
desperate attempt to contain the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease there. The
effort destroyed more than two million animals and brought tremendous suffering
to the country's farm families. In mid-March of that year, the press reported a
related event, in which U.S. federal agents raided a Vermont farm to seize
sheep suspected of carrying the biological agents implicated in mad cow
disease, the frightening ailment that has led to the slaughter of nearly two
hundred thousand cattle in Europe. The two
diseases are not related in any biological sense, of course. Foot-and-mouth is
caused by a virus and is not thought to be transmissible to humans, while mad
cow is caused by a prion - a poorly understood snip of protein - and is
responsible for nearly one hundred human fatalities. The two diseases are connected, however, by the economic
environment that allows them to thrive. Their
spread from isolated incidents to potentially global epidemics can be traced to
trade that crisscrosses the globe, growing international migration, and the
practices of industrial agriculture. For most
of history, natural boundaries such as mountains, deserts, and ocean currents
have served to isolate ecosystems and many of the species they contain. But
rapid growth in trade and travel in recent decades has made these physical
barricades permeable. More than five billion tons of goods were shipped across
the world's oceans and other waterways in 1999, over six times as much as in
1955. More people are flying greater distances than ever before, with some two
million people now crossing an international border every day. This explosion
in the movement of goods and people across international borders is fast
leading to the spread of infectious disease as well as ecological disruptions
with unpredictable consequences. Nascent efforts at international cooperation are struggling to deal with the problems posed by today's
burgeoning microbial migrations. Although mad cow disease (officially known as bovine
spongiform encephalitis or BSE) is much less contagious than foot-and-mouth, it
presents a far graver risk for humans. Mad cow spreads when an animal consumes
feed containing the remnants of infected animals, and humans get it by eating
infected meat. Since 1986, the year mad cow disease was detected in the U.K.,
British meat has been shipped around the world. So have British feed products,
which can harbor this poorly understood illness. Though estimates vary widely, experts project that as many as three
hundred thousand to five hundred thousand Britons could die over the next
thirty years from BSE, depending on the incubation period and the success of
past attempts to eliminate the disease from the British herd. Mad cows have already shown up in nearly a dozen European
nations, Canada, and, more recently, in the United States. The United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization has declared that all nations should consider
themselves at risk, but many seem unprepared to deal with the threat. A 2000
survey by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found that one in four American slaughterhouses and feed processing plants
fails to take measures to avert mad cow disease, such
as the proper labeling of feed that contains animal parts and implementing
systems to prevent commingling of cattle feed with feed for other animals. …WHILE RECENT
OUTBREAKS of
livestock disease have inspired new interest in more localized agriculture,
they have at the same time dramatized the need to step up cooperation across international borders to combat shared
health and ecological perils.
Countries have in fact been working together on these matters for decades,
harmonizing regulations for trade in animals and animal products across
borders. But an inherent weakness in the international agreements, especially
in the U.S., is the tendency for international standard-setting bodies to be
disproportionately swayed by the very industries they were created to oversee. It is becoming clear that a global governance system that
will be up to the task of stemming today's rising tide of biotic mixing will be
fundamentally different in character from the post-World War II system in place
today. Instead of
standard-setting bodies dominated by industry, there will have to be new
forums where citizens, farmers, companies,
and governments can collaborate across political borders to reshape current
agriculture and industrial practices so that they protect the health of the
planet's people and natural systems. The silver lining to the foot-and-mouth
and mad cow scares of 2001, and those of today, may be the added political will they
may generate for setting this transition in motion.” >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> |
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