The Rundown

China’s National Health Commission is exploring avenues to combat a burgeoning obesity problem, including adding scales to hotel rooms, developing region-specific healthy recipes and hiring Olympic athletes to promote weight management. One of the chronic, non-communicable diseases that Chinese health officials are concerned about is diabetes, which has spread in an unusual way compared to the rest of the world. Diabetes has developed in a shorter time, in a younger age group and in people with lower body mass indexes (BMIs). The reason? Studies have shown that Asians hold a higher body fat percentage compared to their Caucasian counterparts, making them more susceptible to chronic diseases like diabetes are relatively lower BMIs.

In North Korea, citizens are being urged to give their children more “revolutionary” names. However, some residents told RFA that the actual motive behind the order is to discourage people from using names that sound too South Korean. The move is another example of pushback against what Pyongyang regards as an infiltration of South Korean capitalist culture, but also reflects recent declarations from the DPRK that South Korea is no longer considered part of the same country. The North Korean government has suggested names with meanings that convey the party’s eternal love for the people, like Eun Hye (grace), Eun Dok (benevolence) and Haeng Bok (happiness), as well as names that reflect party loyalty, like Chung Song (loyalty), Chung Sil (sincerity) and Chung Bok (devotion).

Podcast Free Asia

And with that, RFA Insider goes on indefinite hiatus as Radio Free Asia weathers the termination of federal grants that fund RFA and its partner networks. We thank you for tuning in over this past year, and hope to meet you on air again.

BACK TO MAIN

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Amy Lee for RFA Insider.

“Black men: Compared with White men, Black men have a more than 60% higher incidence of prostate cancer, an earlier age at diagnosis, a higher rate of metastatic cancer at the time of diagnosis, and a two to three-fold higher rate of prostate cancer mortality.  Unfortunately, none of the large prostate cancer screening trials included adequate numbers of Black men to determine any specific recommendations for screening.”¹

Black men in the U.S. have the highest rate of prostate cancer in the industrialized world. It is a leading cause of death for all men and Black men die from this cancer at over twice the rate of White men. The cancer in Blacks often spreads more quickly if not aggressively treated.

Over the last forty years, at least 30,000 Black men have died yearly from prostate cancer. Screening with the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) blood test can find this cancer early.

The 2018 US Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) report stated: “Screening offers a small potential benefit of reducing the chance of death from prostate cancer in some men.” “More aggressive screening strategies particularly those that use a lower PSA threshold …., provide the greatest potential reduction in death from prostate cancer.”

While acknowledging that PSA screening saves lives the USPSTF does NOT call for universal screening of Black men for prostate cancer. The National Cancer Institute, 4/10/19, The American Cancer Society 3/11/16, and the American College of Physicians, 4/9/13, none of these organizations call for universal prostate cancer screening for Black men.

Why?

Black men do NOT get universal prostate screening because of priorities and money.

 The PSA test is “a hugely expensive public health disaster”. “As Congress searches for ways to cut costs in our health care system, a significant savings could come from changing the way the antigen is used to screen for prostate cancer.”²

Americans waste an enormous amount of money on an inaccurate test for prostate cancer.

The political priorities are obvious: Trillions of dollars in tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and trillions in dollars for the military–war machine.

Are all lives equally worthy?

ENDNOTES:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Nayvin Gordon.

Photo by Simon Berger

In the U.S. in 2022, 49,476 people died by suicide, and there were approximately 1.6 million suicide attempts. Not included in suicide statistics is the even more common U.S. “death of despair” of drug overdose death, numbering 107,941 in 2022. While most of us are not attempting to kill our pain in a manner that puts us in the emergency room or the morgue, the majority of Americans are less dramatically trying to disconnect from painful lives.

It is convenient for apologists of U.S. society to see those of us overwhelmed by our pain—anxious, depressed, dissociating, or in some other way having difficulty functioning—as suffering from a “mental illness” and in need of “treatment.” However, the more that Americans have bought the idea that there is an epidemic of mental illness which requires greater access to treatment, the more fucked up we are all getting, and the more we enable a fucked up society to become increasingly more so. Not only is psychiatric treatment—which for most patients means psychiatric drugs—not helping many of them while making some feel even worse; we have also been sidetracked from examining what it is about society that is fucking up so many of us, and we have been diverted from pursuing those nooks and crannies that have yet to be dehumanized.

First, how are the majority of us today disconnecting from our painful lives? Next, what is the core source of our painful lives? And finally, what is a path that makes more sense than increasingly more mental health treatment?

Using Drugs to Disconnect

One way to disconnect from our emotional pain is through psychoactive drugs, which includes not only cannabis, alcohol, and illicit hard drugs, but a wide array of psychiatric drugs. Drugs are by no means the only way we try to disconnect, but I will begin with them.

Recently reported in the journal Addiction, a 2022 U.S. survey revealed that there are now “more daily and near daily” cannabis users (17.7 million) than there are such high-frequency alcohol users (14.7 million). While far more people continue to drink alcohol than use cannabis, the median alcohol user reported drinking 4 to 5 days in the past month compared to the median cannabis consumer who used it 15 to 16 days in the past month; and cannabis users were 7.4 times more likely than alcohol drinkers to use it on a daily basis.

While there is little hypocrisy among alcohol and cannabis users about trying to disconnect from their unpleasant realities to feel better, there is enormous hypocrisy when it comes to psychiatric drugs among some users and most prescribers, who would rather call these drugs “medication,” even though these drugs are in the same psychoactive category as alcohol and cannabis.

Thankfully, there are a handful of non-hypocritical, non-bullshitting psychiatrists such as Joanna Moncrieff, co-chairperson of the Critical Psychiatry Network and author of The Myth of the Chemical Cure (2008). Moncrieff points out, “Psychiatric drugs are psychoactive substances, like alcohol and heroin. . . . Alcohol helps to reduce social anxiety not because it corrects an underlying biochemical imbalance, but because features of alcohol induced intoxication include relaxation and disinhibition.” Moncrieff explains that psychiatric drugs—rather than correcting an abnormal state in the manner of insulin for diabetes— “induce an abnormal or altered state,” and are in the same category as alcohol.

Just how many of us are using psychiatric drugs? In 2020, it was reported that 16.5% of U.S. adults were prescribed psychiatric drugs; so out of a U.S. adult population of 258.3 million in 2020, 42.6 million adults were taking the edge off with prescribed “medication.” This total does not include the millions more Americans under 18 put on psychiatric drugs, often to make their inability to adjust to an alienating school and other surroundings less painful for their parents.

Disconnecting By Other Means

Today, much of the U.S. economy is fueled by buying and selling that which disconnects us from painful realities. For many of us, our “drug of choice” is not an actual drug.

Karl Marx (1818-1883), during his lifetime, saw religion serving as the major drug of choice, as he famously said about religion in 1843: “It is the opium of the people.”

With the rise of the corporatocracy and the loss of power of both the Mafia and the Catholic Church, “deadly sins” such as greed, lust, and gluttony have been legalized and commercialized, not only providing huge profits for the corporatocracy, but also providing the ruling class with other non-drug disconnects for those individuals who are turned off by organized religion.

Gambling—the buzz of betting, winning, and losing—is one of the most powerful ways to disconnect from how fucked up we feel about our lives. Statista reported in 2023, “The gross gaming revenue of the gambling industry in the U.S. reached almost 53 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, growing significantly over the 2020 figure.” Problem gambler statistics include: two million American adults meet severe gambling criteria; four to six million American adults meeting mild or moderate gambling criteria; and Americans in their early twenties are the fastest-growing group of problem gamblers (one study of college students estimated the percentage of “disordered gamblers” to be 7.89%). Once upon a time, Americans had to get off our asses to be a problem gambler, but now all it takes is a smart phone to place bets.

Porn? Worldmetrics.org reports that “Pornography is a $12 billion industry in the United States,” and, “The global porn industry is estimated to be worth over $97 billion,” a global industry that many Americans are enriching. Worldwide, worldmetrics.org reports “10% of adults admit to internet sexual addiction”; and in the U.S., the average age of first exposure to porn is eleven; 40 million Americans are regular visitors to porn sites; and 200,000 Americans are “porn addicts.”

Overeating may top the list of non-drug ways Americans try to disconnect from the pain of our lives. While obesity is sometimes the product of an unlucky slow metabolism (sometimes caused by psychiatric drugs), most obesity results from overeating in order to kill our emotional pain—including the pain of loneliness and boredom. How obese are Americans? Assessed between 2017 to 2020, the prevalence of obesity among U.S. adults 20 and over was 41.9%, and the prevalence of severe obesity was 9.2%, according to the CDC, which notes: “This means that more than 100 million adults have obesity, and more than 22 million adults have severe obesity.” An increasing number of us eat to kill our emotional pain, then become obese, which damages our physical health, which causes us even more suffering.

Shopping? “Compulsive buying” is routinely defined as uncontrolled urges to buy with resulting significant adverse consequences such as bankruptcy or a spouse demanding a divorce. Using this definition, a telephone survey found 5.8% of Americans qualified for compulsive buying. And millions more Americans, without significant adverse consequences, are buying shit that they don’t need in order to divert themselves from their dissatisfying lives.

Two of my personal favorite disconnects are spectator politics and spectator sports. The best spectator-politics buzz of my life was the 1973 Watergate Hearings, but spectator politics doesn’t seem to have the diversionary value it once had for me. And spectator politics can often increase pain, which I first experienced as a kid when the televised Vietnam War resulted in great anxiety about a future of either getting killed in a war that seemed to have no end, fleeing to Canada, or becoming one of those miserable male teachers in my school avoiding the draft. Luckily for me, when I was thirteen in 1969, my favorite New York City sports teams—the Jets, Mets, and Knicks—suddenly transformed from futile and frustrating to champions; and the buzz they provided made them my “gateway drugs” that began a lifelong “drug addiction” to using spectator sports to disconnect from painful realities.

The above list of non-drug ways of disconnecting is by no means a comprehensive one. From playing video games to watching gamers play video games on YouTube, the list of diversions in our consumer society is damn near endless.

The Source of the Pain We Are Disconnecting From

In the 1960s and 1970s, there were many prominent thinkers dissecting our increasing dehumanization. A small sample from this group of well-known authors who immediately come to mind include: Erich Fromm, Lewis Mumford, Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, Jane Jacobs, E.F. Schumacher, Leopold Kohr, Kirkpatrick Sale, Jerry Mander, John McKnight, and Wendell Berry.

Back in that era, the misery caused by capitalism—the prioritizing of profit over life resulting in human beings feeling alienated—was a given; and so original thinkers were delving into just how dehumanization was playing out throughout society: from technology, to schooling, to healthcare, to transportation, to the mass media, to neighborhoods and communities, to architecture and urban planning, and to every aspect of our lives. Back then, it was not all that radical to conclude that we are increasingly being forced to become machine components alienated from our humanity so as to fit into a large machine.

Lewis Mumford, in this two-volumed The Myth of the Machine (1967, 1970), details the origins and the scope of the “megamachine”: a social and bureaucratic system that functions impersonally like a gigantic machine. To make the megamachine work efficiently, people are dehumanized to be machine cogs, and Mumford describes the structure that makes it possible for authoritarian control over large populations be it in a labor machine, a military machine, a school machine, or a healthcare machine.

My experience is that while alienated young critical thinkers nod in intellectual agreement to a neoliberal capitalist explanation for their malaise, they resonate emotionally to the idea of being forced to be dehumanized cogs so as to fit into a particular machine within the megamachine.

There are of course different experiences of the megamachine.

There are those of us who simply cannot fit into any labor machine, becoming homeless or institutionalized in a prison, mental hospital, or in some other way.

Then there are those of us who are able to adjust and adapt enough to fit into a money-making machine so as to not end up on the streets, but pay the price of alienation from our humanity. Some of us experience that alienation in anxiety, depression, dissociations, and various ineffectual rebellions, which today are commonly called “mental illnesses.” While others, in denial of their alienation, become capable only of relationships with machine-like people, incapable of a truly loving human relationship, including with their spouse and children.

Then there are the most fucked up of all. These are the control-freaks atop of hierarchies who are running large machines within the megamachine. We’re talking about Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates. We’re talking about the most frighteningly fucked up machine-like individuals in society.

To be sure, a handful of Americans have lucked into a way of obtaining money that is somewhat outside the direct control of the megamachine, but most of them are aware that their lucky deal can be eliminated at any time by the megamachine. Moreover, they likely experience the pain of other components of the megamachine (for example, the healthcare machine); and they would be incredibly lucky not to experience the pain of the megamachine’s crushing of an unlucky family member or close friend.

What Are Our Options?

Sadly, it is quite realistic to be hopeless about dismantling the megamachine. Even during a time in U.S. history when the megamachine was nowhere near as technologically and militarily powerful as it is today, when Native Americans were far more cohesive and talented warriors than any group is today, they had no chance against machinery that has no shame about genocide, and had they continued their fight, the result would have been total genocide.

Certainly, a few times in U.S. history, political activism has made life within the megamachine less horrific. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, when financial impoverishment was causing severe pain for many people, New Deal legislation made the financial lives of some of them less painful. And during the 1960s and 1970s, the activism of Ralph Nader and Nader’s Raiders resulted in less physically dangerous surroundings through the creation of theOccupation and Safety Health Act, Environmental Protection Agency, Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act, Safe Water Drinking Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and other health and safety measures.

However, throughout U.S. history, the megamachine has only grown in scope and power, and its destructive impact on us has been both direct and indirect.

The dehumanizing impact of the megamachine is direct when, for example, workers are fully aware of simply being replaceable machine cogs who receive nothing of value in return for their efforts except money to survive in the megamachine. The impact is direct when, in addition to the labor machine, we suffer alienating dehumanization in various other machines such as in a school machine and healthcare machine.

The megamachine’s horrors are also indirect. One of the few positive developments in my mental health profession is increasing awareness of the powerful relationship between “adverse childhood experiences” (such as emotional and physical abuse and neglect) with later emotional and physical difficulties. However, the seldom-asked question in our society is why so many parents are abusing, neglecting, and otherwise traumatizing their children? Abusive and neglectful parents are themselves almost always products of the megamachine’s violence (including its wars, layoffs, and other traumatizations), resulting in powerlessness, resentment, rage, substance abuse, and little frustration tolerance in parenting, which results in adverse childhood experiences.

Big Pharma and their partners in psychiatry have successfully sold a biochemical, individual-defect story of our malaise, which has made billions of dollars for drug companies. This narrative also enables the megamachine to go unchallenged. The “mental illness” explanation for suffering is today the cultural norm, and those remaining critics of the megamachine’s destructive impact are now, unlike the 1960s and 1970s, pushed far to the margins of society.

Moreover, the mental health machine has been an abject failure when it comes to helping people. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002-2015, acknowledged in 2011, “Whatever we’ve been doing for five de­cades, it ain’t working. When I look at the numbers—the number of sui­cides, the number of disabilities, the mortality data—it’s abysmal, and it’s not getting any better.” And in 2021, New York Times concluded that psychiatry had done “little to improve the lives of the millions of people living with persistent mental distress. Almost every measure of our collective mental health—rates of suicide, anxiety, depression, addiction deaths, psychiatric prescription use—went the wrong direc­tion, even as access to services expanded greatly.”

Mental health machine “treatment”—be it biological, chemical, electrical, or behavioral techniques—is aimed at adjustment to the megamachine. Psychoactive drugs are the only treatment employed by the overwhelming majority of psychiatrists, while a few of them also use electroshock. And most of my psychologist colleagues offer techniques such as cognitive-behavioral therapy to help people adjust to the megamachine.

So, if dismantling the megamachine any time soon is unrealistic, what makes sense?

First, it helps to recognize the reality that the megamachine—directly and indirectly—results in painful alienation from one’s humanity and life in general, and this pain fuels anxiety, depression, suicidality, and other compulsions to disconnect and numb ourselves. To the extent that we do not deny, shame, or pathologize our disconnections as well as the pain that fuels them, we have a better chance to be accepting, loving, and wiser with ourselves and others.

Of great importance, it is helpful to acknowledge that while it is difficult to remain fully human within the megamachine, it is possible not to be completely damaged by it. To accomplish this, we can embrace “harm reduction,” an idea that comes to us from social justice advocates who recognize that, given the nature of society, illicit drug use will continue, but that there are less dangerous ways of using such drugs (for example, sterile syringes rather than dirty ones). Harm reduction can be applied to both drug and non-drug disconnects. Furthermore, not only is it helpful to embrace this concept for ourselves, by helping others navigate their machines with the least dangerous disconnects, we will feel more fully human.

Finally, while we can be realistic about the domination of the megamachine, we can also recognize that hidden nooks and crannies of non-machine life remain. We may have become so beaten down by the megamachine that we lack the energy to find those hidden cracks in which there are gems of humanity and life, so many of us need to acquire the energy required to keep seeking. If we keep searching, my experience is that we will eventually discover others who can energize us to keep looking, and when we find such people, we must value them. If we then find those nooks and crannies in which life remains, we can connect and restore some of our humanity, and we can become further revitalized by energizing other seekers.

The post The U.S. Disconnecting & Numbing Epidemic: The Culprit and Our Options appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bruce E. Levine.

The post Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women: An Overlooked Epidemic of Violence appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

The post What’s Driving Our Epidemic of Distrust? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sam Pizzigati.

This week’s News on China.

Sources:
• Spike in respiratory illnesses
“China Tells WHO Known Germs Are Causing Surge in Child Pneumonia”
“Upsurge of respiratory illnesses among children-Northern China”
• Taiwan opposition parties run on separate tickets
“Taiwan opposition parties register separate bids for presidential race in a boost for DPP and a worry for mainland China”
“Taiwan election: KMT’s Hou Yu-ih climbs in polls after collapse of joint ticket, but DPP’s William Lai still leads”
• Negative FDI for the first time
“How much FDI is China actually attracting?”
“Foreign investment in China turns negative for first time”
• Renewable energy plants in deserts
“China’s Remote Deserts Are Hiding an Energy Revolution“

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

Image by Annie Spratt.

What if the “epidemic of coups” in West and Central Africa is not that at all, but a direct outcome of outright revolutionary movements, similar to the anti-colonial movements that liberated most African nations from the yoke of Western colonialism throughout the 20th century?

Whether this is the case or not, we are unlikely to find out anytime soon, simply because the voices of these African nations are largely and deliberately muted.

In order for us to understand the real motives behind the spate of military takeovers in West and Central Africa – eight since 2020 – we are, sadly, compelled to read about it in Western media.

And that is a major part of the problem. Simply put, Western media has failed to convey the deeper social and economic contexts behind the political upheaval in various African regions.

The near-complete control over the narrative, however, is deliberate.

In a relatively comprehensive description of Oligue Nguema, the new leader of Gabon, the BBC website offered nothing of substance in terms of familiarizing us with the motives behind the military’s move against the corrupt, long-time leader of Gabon, Ali Bongo.

Of course, the voice of Nguema himself was almost completely absent in the piece.

It is difficult and time-consuming to find a cohesive, non-filtered political discourse emanating from Gabon – or Mali, Burkina Faso or the rest of the African countries undergoing political transitions now.

What we find instead is news, information and opinions, almost all filtered through Western news agencies, politicians, academics and ‘experts’. Even those who may appear to speak non-conformist language tend to feed the stereotype, perpetuating the mainstream perception of Africa.

A quick examination of recent articles on West Africa in the French media reveals an obvious truth. The language used in deconstructing the recent upheaval demonstrates that no true awakening is underway among the French intelligentsia, even by those who purportedly speak as part of the country’s mainstream ‘left’.

In an interview, published on August 30 in Le Point, French author and expert in African Studies, Antoine Glaser, blames the French government for failing to see how Africa has ‘gone global’.

The article appeared shortly after the Gabon coup. But Glaser’s ideas are not new. He has made several references in the past to such failure, including an article in L’Opinion early in August.

The gist of his argument is that France has failed to understand the changing political dynamics in and around Africa, and that the once tightly French-controlled African markets have been largely occupied by China, Turkey and others.

But the subtle message is this: Africa revolves or should always revolve in France’s orbit, and an alternative understanding must be developed by policymakers in Paris to cope with, or catch up to the new, globalized African politics.

The same sense of entitlement was conveyed in Le Figaro.

Isabelle Lasserre, in her article entitled ‘Gabon: la diplomatie française désarçonnée par l’«épidémie» de coups d’État en Afrique’, speaks of “bathtub torture” of French diplomats.

“They barely believe they can get their heads out of the water when a new putsch plunges it back into them, even more brutally,” she writes.

The ‘brutality’ referenced here is not that suffered by African nations in the painful periods of colonialism, post-colonialism and decolonization, but that of French diplomats.

Lasserre references Macron’s use of the phrase “epidemic of putschs” – “putschs’ being another word for ‘coups’ in German.

It was Macron who popularized the term. It makes Africans appear unruly, sick even. French journalists are now blaming their government for failing to diagnose, let alone remedy, the pan-African disease.

No alternative understanding is possible when the problem is coined in such a way, where the blame is squarely on Africans, and the lesser blame – of simply failing to understand – is placed on France and other Western governments.

“In Africa, one coup does not drive out another but adds to the previous one,” Lasserre writes.

In other words, it is an African-induced chaos, and Europe is suffering and shouldering its consequences – ‘a white man’s burden’ of sorts.

Little attention has been paid to the possibility that perhaps African countries are fed up with the old apparatus, that of Western-supported wealthy and violent dictators – and supposed ‘democrats’ – who squander their country’s wealth to remain in power.

Gabon is a very rich country in terms of energy resources, lumber, manganese and iron. But its tiny population of 2.3 million is very poor.

This racket of exploitation has been sustained for decades simply because it served the interests of the local rulers and their multinational partners.

What other means of protests do the people of Gabon – or Mali, or all the rest – have, when mass rallies are violently crushed and the media is tightly controlled? – aside, of course, from military coups.

This does not seem to be the heart of the matter to many in the French media, who are mostly concerned about losing their stronghold in Africa to China, Russia and others.

Instead, some in the media are even flouting the theory that Africans are impressed with the persona of ‘strongmen‘ of non-democratic regimes – a direct reference to Russia and China.

Although the ‘strongman theory’ has long been discounted, or at least lost its appeal in academic circles, it is often applied in its old form and ugly insinuations in Western understanding of Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

It would make no sense for Africans to reject democracy, one that is based on true equality, fair distribution of wealth, ample opportunities, freedom of expression and the press, and all the rest. The only explanation, though often communicated indirectly, is that they all suffered from collective malaise, which complicates the supposedly noble mission of Western countries.

In truth, many African nations – as demonstrated by the latest popular military takeovers – deeply resent Western governments for the right reasons: their military interventions, economic exploitation, political meddling and a lingering sense of superiority.

Rarely do we hear such alternative views because we are not meant to. The political discourse emanating from West Africa, although largely inaccessible, speaks of a collective desire for a paradigm shift.

“It is necessary for this fight to go through arms, but also through our values, our behavior, and the recovery of our economy”, said Ibrahim Traoré, the transitional President of Burkina Faso.

In his speech, late last year, he declared that “the fight for total independence has begun.”

A similar sentiment was conveyed by Assimi Goita, President of the Transition in Mali when he spoke about the need to ‘regain’ the nation’s dignity in the context of ‘colonial domination’.

France’s and other Western countries’ ‘experts’ should fundamentally reconsider their understanding of Africa.

They should also diversify their political lexicon, to include ‘dignity’, ‘values’, ‘liberation’ and ‘total independence,’ because, clearly, the language of ‘epidemic of coups’ and other self-serving, convenient phraseology has completely failed.

(Romana Rubeo, a French-speaking journalist, contributed to this article.) 

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

The Sackler family, the billionaire owners of OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, have secured immunity from all current and future civil litigation related to their role in fueling the opioid epidemic. The legal shield was granted last week by a federal appeals court in exchange for the family agreeing to pay up to $6 billion to thousands of plaintiffs in various lawsuits that are now suspended as part of the deal. While the Sacklers appear safe from further civil litigation, they could — and should — be criminally charged, says Ed Bisch, who lost his son Eddie to an OxyContin-related overdose in 2001 at age 18. “Fines without any prosecutions, there is no deterrent. They look at it as the cost of doing business,” says Bisch. We also speak to Christopher Glazek, the investigative reporter who was the first to publicly report how the Sackler family had significantly profited from selling OxyContin while fully aware that the highly addictive drug was directly fueling the opioid epidemic in America. “The Sacklers lied about how addictive the drug was, in order to convince doctors and patients that it wasn’t dangerous,” says Glazek.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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From the movie theater to the shopping mall, inside a church and a synagogue, through the grocery aisle and into the classroom, gun violence has invaded every corner of American life. It is a social epidemic no vaccine can stem, a crisis with no apparent end. Visual evidence of the carnage spills with numbing frequency onto TV shows and floods the internet. Each new shooting brings the lists of loved ones lost, the galleries of their smiling photos and the videos of the police response. And each mass shooting brings another surge of national outrage.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, guns became the leading killer of children in 2020, overtaking car crashes, drug overdoses and disease for the first time in the nation’s history. Yet as the one-year anniversary of the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, passes, nagging questions loom.

Why haven’t lawmakers acted with forceful correctives? What will it take to regain a sense of safety? When will change happen? And how, exactly, did America end up here?

Ryan Busse, former executive at Kimber America, a major gun manufacturer, recently shared his thoughts on these questions with ProPublica. He was vice president of sales at Kimber America from 1995 to 2020 but broke with the industry and has become a gun safety advocate. He testified about mass shootings and irresponsible marketing last July in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and authored the book “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America.”

In June 2021, he became a senior adviser for Giffords, a gun violence prevention group led by Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman gravely injured in 2011 during a mass shooting. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I think we might be on the precipice of things getting much worse. I think this Bruen decision, the Supreme Court ruling, quite possibly will unleash so many lawsuits against so many counted-upon regulations that citizens may wake up to the equivalent of, like, no stop signs in their town anymore, except for it’ll be on gun regulation. [The Bruen decision has been called one of the court’s most significant rulings on guns in decades. It struck down New York’s concealed carry law as unconstitutional, saying it conflicted with the Second Amendment.]

As I write in my book, there was a time not that long ago, maybe about 15 to 20 years ago, when the industry understood a sort of fragile social contract needed to be maintained on something as immensely powerful as the freedom to own guns. And so the industry didn’t do certain things. It didn’t advertise in egregiously irresponsible ways. It didn’t put, you know, growth, company growth, above all other things. There were just these unspoken codes of conduct the industry knew not to violate. And those seem to have broken down. And now it’s kind of a victory at all costs. And sadly, I think there’s a lot of cost.

I am a gun owner. I hunt and shoot with my boys. I want to continue doing that. I believe and I think that I have a right to do those things. On the other hand, I do not believe that right can exist without a commensurate amount of responsibility. And that responsibility either has to be voluntary or it has to be legislated.

I don't think universal background checks are an infringement. I just don’t buy that. I think it’s part of the responsibility of exercising this right. I don’t think strengthened red flag laws are in any way an infringement. I think that’s what we must do as responsible citizens. I don’t think that controlling irresponsible marketing is an infringement on our Second Amendment rights. In fact, I think it’s our responsibility to do it. I think there’s a small thread of truth in the position you portray, but democracies function in a sort of carefully balanced gray area. And I think our balance in the country right now is way, way off.

There were people who agreed with everything I said before the sort of radical shifts started to happen in about 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008. But, you know, as with most things, when you earn a paycheck from something, you’re likely to be greatly influenced by it. And so, over time, most of the people in the industry have either converted to a true belief in the sort of radicalized Second Amendment absolutism that now I think is very dangerous, or they have just left the industry. There is only a place for complete, 100% devotion.

It was a combination of factors. After Columbine in 1999, the National Rifle Association in very well-publicized meetings now, thanks to sleuthing and digging by reporters at NPR, we now have tapes of the meetings where they literally said, are we going to be part of the solution here? Or maybe we can use these things to drum up hate and fear in our members? We might even be able to use them to drive membership. And they chose the latter. They perfected that system for about seven or eight years, getting their feet underneath them. They figured out it can drive politics. And then an explosion hit. That explosion was the future Black president leading in the polls in 2007. And then Barack Obama won in 2008. So you have this sort of uncapping of hate and conspiracy, much of it racially driven, that the NRA was tapping into. Prior to 2007, people in the United States never purchased more than 7 million guns in a single year. By the time Barack Obama left office, the United States was purchasing almost 17 million guns a year. And so I think it’s impossible to discount the degree to which Obama’s presidency lit this whole thing on fire.

When Trump was elected, there was what was called in the industry the “Trump Slump,” meaning since a Republican was elected, the fear of Obama was gone, and Hillary Clinton didn’t get elected. The sort of fear and conspiracy subsided, and sales stagnated for a little while because the industry and gun owners believed that the threat had passed. But with Trump, we experienced a whole new, never seen before level of fear, racism, hatred and conspiracy that culminated in 2020. In that year, you had George Floyd, COVID lockdowns, Black Lives Matter, Antifa protests and Kyle Rittenhouse. I mean, it’s the most tumultuous year any of us can remember with the most hatred and conspiracy and nastiness. None of us can remember a year like that. In that year, the United States consumers bought almost 23 million guns in a single year, more than three times as much as before Barack Obama took office.

When those things happen, they’re not products of one particular event or series of events. They are the culmination of lots of turmoil in our society. And we’ve always had turmoil in our society, and every society has always had turmoil in it. What no other society has had is 425 million guns and this culture, on the right, that tells young men that to be real young men, they must purchase an AR-15 and go out and solve their problems. The industry 15 years ago would not even allow the AR-15 to be used or displayed at its own trade shows. I mean, they were locked up in a corner. You had to have military or police credentials to even go in there. Now, they’re spread around like crazy, and the marketing campaigns are so aimed at young men that in some ways, it’s not shocking that Uvalde or Buffalo or [the July 4 shooting at a parade in the Chicago suburb of] Highland Park, all three heinous crimes, all three committed with AR-15s, all by very young men. It’s not shocking to me that those happen; it’s shocking to me that they don’t happen every day.

What is more powerful in this country right now than social media advertising? And if it’s not so powerful, why do all the gun companies and the tactical gear companies maintain such polished social media accounts? Advertising is something that happens over time, and creates a perception and creates brands, and creates ways of thinking. And I think that certainly happened with the Buffalo shooter.

The Buffalo shooter wrote in his manifesto about perusing YouTube videos, social media accounts, all the places where tactical gear — which are some of the most egregiously advertised items in the firearms industry right now, bulletproof vests, helmets, gloves, all things that weren’t marketed at all 20 years ago. He studied very carefully what bulletproof vest to wear, what tactical gear to wear, he used the exact same gun that was used in Sandy Hook, the Bushmaster XM-15, the same gun that was advertised in [Remington Arms’] man card campaign that told young men: “You don’t have a man card if you don’t have one of these rifles. And you do have a man card if you do have one of them.”

Now, can you draw a direct line from that ad to those two shooters? I don’t know that you can draw a direct line, but I think you could damn sure draw an obtuse line. I mean, two young men who, obviously, I mean, come on, like, that’s not a mistake. And if advertising doesn’t matter, then why are they doing it?

What did Winston Churchill say? “Americans will eventually do the right thing.” And I think we may be in for more ugliness before we do the right thing. Some of that will be demanding that the Supreme Court not apply foolish originalist reasoning to instances like this. So part of that will be demanding that either through public pressure or through eventually, in the long game, replacing those justices with ones who don’t believe that way.

The other thing is, we’re going to have to, as a society, just rise up and demand responsibility, the same kind of responsibility that the industry that I worked in once imposed on itself.

You know, I tell the story that 15, 20 years ago, the industry named guns like the Smith & Wesson 629 or the Remington 870 because you had [industry] attorneys that knew that even the names of guns could be important. They could encourage people to do irresponsible things. And so you’d never wanted to even name things that might encourage bad things to happen. Now we have a gun called the Wilson Urban Super Sniper. I mean, what are you supposed to do with that? We now have a gun called the Ultimate Arms Warmonger. What are you supposed to do with that? We now have an AR-15 company called Rooftop Arms, as in when you don’t get what you want, you vote from the rooftops. And what happened in Highland Park? A kid got up and killed people from a rooftop. You see the old self-imposed responsibility; those old norms of behavior have been just completely trashed.

So we can, as a society, demand reinstatement of those norms. Those have nothing to do with laws. They don’t require legislation. They don’t require two-thirds of the vote in the Senate. We can demand that. And we may have to.

Justin Cooper, chief of operations at Rooftop Arms, told ProPublica the business name stems from the origins of founders and is in no way related to “voting from the rooftops,” past events or political causes, or views.

ProPublica contacted Remington Arms and Bushmaster for comment but didn’t receive a response.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Corey G. Johnson.

U.S. drug policy reform advocates condemned President Joe Biden's commitment to "accelerating the crackdown on fentanyl trafficking" as part of his administration's strategy for tackling the opioid crisis, a policy the White House announced in a preview of Tuesday night's State of the Union address.

Although the SOTU preview says the administration will be "expanding access to evidence-based prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and recovery," the document says Biden will "work with Congress to make permanent tough penalties on suppliers of fentanyl," fentanyl analogs, and fentanyl-related substances (FRS).

The outline states that Biden "looks forward to working with Congress on its comprehensive proposal to permanently schedule all illicitly produced FRS into Schedule I," the most severe Drug Enforcement Administration classification.

"The push to place all fentanyl-related substances in Schedule I is unfortunate and misguided. Schedule I is supposed to be for substances that we know to be harmful and not helpful."

"Traffickers of these deadly substances must face the penalties they deserve, no matter how they adjust their drugs," the preview asserts.

In response to the SOTU preview, Maritza Perez Medina, director of the office of federal affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, said in a statement that "we are glad to see President Biden continue to call for increased access to evidence-based treatment, harm reduction, and recovery services."

"But, his support for harsher penalties for fentanyl-related substances—which will result in broader application of mandatory minimum sentencing and disproportionately harm Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities—in the same breath is incredibly counterproductive and fails to recognize how we got to this place to begin with," she asserted. "Over 100,000 of our loved ones being lost to avoidable overdoses a year is not because of a lack of enforcement, it's a direct result of it."

Gregory Dudley, who chairs the chemistry department at West Virginia University, argued that "the push to place all fentanyl-related substances in Schedule I is unfortunate and misguided. Schedule I is supposed to be for substances that we know to be harmful and not helpful."

"We don't know which of these substances would be harmful or helpful, and how could we without testing them?" Dudley asked. "Some of these substances could be lifesaving opioid antagonists like naloxone, or better. This proposal prioritizes criminalization over healthcare."

Susan Ousterman, who lost her son Tyler to an accidental overdose in 2020 and subsequently founded the Vilomah Memorial Foundation, said that "it's incredibly disheartening to see the president co-opting the grief of mothers like me in an attempt to increase penalties, rather than prioritizing the health measures that are desperately needed to save lives."

"Increased penalties for people who use or sell drugs, including fentanyl-related substances, would not have kept my son alive or the countless children of other mothers I have met," Ousterman stressed. "In fact, it's policies such as these that created the increased stigma and fear that kept our children from accessing help, and it's what has led to the increasingly dangerous drug supply that resulted in their deaths."

"It's time for the president and other policymakers to prioritize the lives of all humans by embracing a health approach rather than engaging in politics that only perpetuate this disastrous war on drugs," she added. "As a person who understands the profound impact both substance use and child loss have on families, I expected more."

Biden was one of the architects of the 1980s escalation of the War on Drugs. He coined the term "drug czar" while advocating the establishment of the cabinet-level position and was a key supporter of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, legislation that accelerated U.S. mass incarceration.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Moral injury is a specific and devastating trauma that arises when people face situations that deeply violate their core values. Such violations of morality can result in shame, guilt, and hopelessness, raising the risk of substance abuse, depression, and suicide. When society allows the uncontrolled spread of a deadly virus, millions are afraid they may become infected and transmit the virus to their family.

How did we arrive at this point of moral degradation?

For thousands of years, physicians took oaths to always act in the patient’s best interest when providing care. At the heart of medical ethics, this moral code was passed down through the centuries and reaffirmed by The World Medical Association (WMA) in 1949 and again in 2006. Additionally, the WMA specified:” A physician shall not allow his/her judgment to be influenced by personal profit or unfair discrimination,” and “shall not receive any financial benefits or other incentives solely for referring patients or prescribing specific products”.

Ethics ran headlong into The HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) Act of 1973.

The passage of this act set the stage for the undermining of long-established medical ethics. The HMO Act was designed specifically to reduce costs, by charging patients a monthly fee for a set package of health care.  The Act was passed with the knowledge that there had been no systematic analysis done to show that it would not negatively impact health care.  Nonetheless, the Government gave millions of dollars in direct financial assistance to develop the HMO which was designed to be a profit-making business.

This HMO economic arrangement put physicians and other healthcare providers’ financial interests into conflict with the needs of their patients. The monthly pot of money must provide for profit, salaries, wages, and health care.  If too much is spent on the patients, there is less available for profit and wages. So began the Health Insurance, Corporate Medicine assault on medical ethics. By 1980 this Wall Street strategy had crystallized into a worldwide approach to health care.

In 1980 the World Bank Acts

Publishing a new healthcare sector policy in 1980, the World Bank advocated reducing public health infrastructure and opening the door to rampant privatization of health services and pharmaceutical supply.

This policy was adopted by the US government. The Federal Government’s share of public health expenditures plummeted from 60% in 1968 to 10% in 1983, where it has remained for forty years. This silent war on our Public Health Infrastructure carried out under both Democratic and Republican administrations has drained hundreds of billions of dollars from our Public Health Services, jeopardizing the health, safety, and welfare of the population. Since 2009 alone, some $150 Billion has been defunded, along with the loss of some 60,000 jobs.

Tragically the Medical Profession succumbed to the rise of Corporate Health Care by betraying their core medical ethic and became complicit “stewards” of an economic system that puts profits before people. The AMA’s (American Medical Association) Principles of Medical Ethics:V11, gives the following ethical guidelines for physicians: “Mitigate possible conflicts between physicians financial interests and patient interests by minimizing the financial impact of patient care decisions and the overall financial risk for individual physicians.”

We have experienced four decades of HMO’s negative effects on health care while they became the darlings of Wall Street earning billions of dollars for investors as health care was rationed by: denial of service, restricted benefits, cost cutting, patients dumping, overworked and underpaid staff, and plunging physician’s incomes.

The author D.H. Lawrence (1880-1930) appears to have anticipated these horrors, when he wrote: “The mosquito knows full well, small as he is he’s beast of prey. But after all he only takes his bellyful, he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.”

Fast Forward to the ACA (Affordable Care Act) of 2010

One of its chief goals was to “reduce the cost of health care” by giving “financial incentives” to providers for the “Value” they provide in health care. A value-based payment incentive was to be established by bundling payment for certain types of care. Forbes magazine, advertised as ‘The Capitalist Tool’ stated, “Bundled payments are just price controls by another name—and as such will yield subpar care by encouraging insurers and providers to put their own financial interests above the medical needs of patients.”

The ACA was passed with very little known about its effectiveness or risks to Patient Care.

Once again it is all about cost-cutting. But now with the so-called “Value-Based Purchasing”, it is no longer about making profits for corporations, but spending less government money — it is about getting more for the Governments shrinking dollars going to health care spending for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security Disability. The politicians want to “save” money, which in reality means to redistribute money, but the economics is similar. With some ten trillion dollars in tax cuts for the rich over the last two decades, the US treasury has less available for social services as politicians continue to redirect a trillion dollars per year to the military — war industry without concerns that it is “costing the government too much.”

The Tax Reform Act of 12/2017 will suck an estimated thirty billion dollars out of Medicare. Bundled payments will shrink and the giant vice of shrinking payments, combined with rising costs (hospital profits, rising prices for supplies, drugs, medical equipment, etc.) will inevitably squeeze the lifeblood out of both the patients and the healthcare providers.

Tragically, this became a reality in 2020 with Covid-19, when the elderly were allowed to die as the state of Arizona rationed health care using “Crisis Standards of Care,” to decide who lives and who dies.

This policy was founded upon the ethics promoted in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

JAMA called for “A Framework for Rationing Ventilator and Critical Care Beds during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” JAMA accommodated itself to this brutal betrayal of the people’s health. The journal advocated a policy to ration and deny care that will fall most heavily on those over 60 years of age. The JAMA article of March 27, 2020, recommends who should be DENIED care:

1)     Those least likely to survive treatment.  Statistics show that the death rate increases over the age of 60. (the elderly, with a higher risk for minorities)

2)     Those with other medical conditions. More common over age 60. (the elderly, with a higher risk for minorities)

3)     Those who are working and “intrinsically more worthy” will be given priority and those who are retired will be denied. (the elderly)

4)     Those who are younger will be given priority and the elderly will be denied.

The exsanguination of medical ethics has helped bring us to this dangerous moment in history.

We have witnessed a craven transformation of medical ethics when physicians and other health providers are clamoring to sign up for “Value-Based Bundled Care.” The AMA has betrayed their ancient oath as healers, in service to an economic system that puts profits before people.

The Covid pandemic President Biden declared was over, and the lifting of all restrictions against its spread, have killed a quarter of a million US citizens in 2022, 95% are age 65 and older. Our parents and grandparents continue to die, while vaccine-evasive and transmittable Covid variants constantly emerge as the pandemic has become one of the leading causes of death in the US. Moral injury continues to spread across the land. We have been led into a partnership with Dracula.

How do we escape from this public health catastrophe of Moral Injury?

“Unless your employer hires more staff or supplies more resources, chances are you’ll have to keep making decisions that violates your ethics, compounding your trauma.” The causes of Moral Injury require “systemic solutions on a much broader level.”

This is the road to cure and prevention.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Nayvin Gordon.

Researchers in the U.S. have linked the climate crisis and the extreme weather patterns it causes to the country's epidemic of gun violence in a first-of-its-kind analysis, showing that thousands of shootings in the U.S. in recent years were attributable to higher-than-average temperatures.

As Environment Journal reported Tuesday, experts at Boston University School of Public Health and University of Washington School of Social Work analyzed 116,000 shootings in 100 of the country's most populous cities between 2015 and 2020 and found that 7,973 took place during periods of unseasonable heat, concluding that about 7% of shootings could be attributed to extreme heat.

The research, which was originally published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open in December, found that the Northeast and Midwest saw the greatest increases in gun violence on days that were unseasonably hot, but the trend was observed across the country.

"We know that segregation and disinvestment lead communities of color, especially Black communities, to have greater exposure to adverse environmental conditions that contribute to gun violence risk."

When the temperature rose within the 96th percentile of average daily temperatures, the cities of Seattle and Las Vegas saw the highest elevated risk of gun violence, according to the analysis. In Seattle, the temperature rose to 84°F, while people in Las Vegas faced 104°F temperatures.

"It could be that heat causes stress, which makes people more likely to use aggression," said Dr. Jonathan Jay, a co-author of the study and faculty member of Boston University's Center for Climate and Health. "Or it could be that people are more likely to get out on warmer days and have more interactions, which creates more opportunities for conflict and violence. Most likely, it's a combination of both."

While it is the first analysis of the correlation between the climate crisis and gun violence in the U.S., the study offers the latest evidence of a dynamic that has been previously reported: violent incidents, including domestic and gender-based violence, increase during and after extreme weather events driven by the climate emergency.

As The Washington Postreported Tuesday, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2022 identified a link between extreme weather and domestic violence, while The Lancetpublished an analysis of more than 40 studies showing "an increase in one or several [gender-based violence] forms during or after extreme events, often related to economic instability, food insecurity, mental stress, disrupted infrastructure, increased exposure to men, tradition, and exacerbated gender inequality."

The Lancet report included research completed in 2021 at St. Catherine University in Minnesota, which found that economic stresses caused by flooding, drought, and extreme heat in Kenya were linked to a 60% rise in domestic violence in certain parts of the country.

Evidence for the connection between violence and the effects of the climate emergency is "overwhelming," Terry McGovern of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health told the Post on Tuesday.

"Heat waves, floods, climate-induced disasters increase sexual harassment, mental and physical abuse, femicide, [and reduced] economic and educational opportunity and increase the risk of trafficking due to forced migration," McGovern told the newspaper.

Researchers at Boston University and Washington University said their new study makes the case both for lawmakers to pass gun control and climate action measures and for local investment in heat mitigation strategies, such as increasing tree cover in "urban heat islands."

When introducing the Saving Hazardous and Declining Environments (SHADE) Act in 2021, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.) noted that many formerly redlined urban neighborhoods are on average 4.68°F hotter than non-redlined areas, "due to reduced tree cover and increased asphalt or concrete surfaces."

"We know that segregation and disinvestment lead communities of color, especially Black communities, to have greater exposure to adverse environmental conditions that contribute to gun violence risk, such as abandoned buildings, liquor stores, lack of green space, and more intense urban heat islands," Jay said in a statement in December.

Heat mitigation strategies could be a crucial part of an effort that is "part racial justice, part climate change mitigation, and part gun violence prevention," he added.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

The Biden administration on Thursday filed suit against one of the nation's largest pharmaceutical distributors, AmerisourceBergen, and two of its subsidiaries for allegedly violating federal law and contributing to the opioid epidemic.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the complaint accuses AmerisourceBergen of at least hundreds of thousands of violations of the Controlled Substances Act. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is requesting civil penalties and injunctive relief.

"The Department of Justice is committed to holding accountable those who fueled the opioid crisis by flouting the law."

"The Department of Justice is committed to holding accountable those who fueled the opioid crisis by flouting the law," Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement. "Companies distributing opioids are required to report suspicious orders to federal law enforcement. Our complaint alleges that AmerisourceBergen—which sold billions of units of prescription opioids over the past decade—repeatedly failed to comply with that requirement."

Anne Milgram, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a Justice Department agency, highlighted that the complaint "alleges that the company's repeated and systemic failure to fulfill this simple obligation helped ignite an opioid epidemic that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths over the past decade."

Citing data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute on Drug Abuse said earlier this year that "opioid-involved overdose deaths rose from 21,088 in 2010 to 47,600 in 2017 and remained steady in 2018 with 46,802 deaths. This was followed by a significant increase through 2020 to 68,630 overdose deaths."

The DOJ's complaint spotlights five pharmacies to which AmerisourceBergen distributed drugs: two in New Jersey and one each in Colorado, Florida, and West Virginia.

"For years, AmerisourceBergen put its profits from opioid sales over the safety of Americans," declared Philip R. Sellinger, the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey. "According to the complaint, this was part of a brazen, blatant, and systemic failure by one of the largest companies in America."

Jacqueline C. Romero, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, said that "the allegations against AmerisourceBergen are disturbing, especially for a company that is headquartered only a few miles from neighborhoods in Philadelphia devastated by the opioid epidemic."

In a lengthy statement responding to the new suit, the distributor provided details about each of the five pharmacies, and claimed that the examples "were cherry-picked by DOJ from the thousands of pharmacies AmerisourceBergen delivers medicines to be the most incriminating to the company."

"An objective review of the facts shows that the DOJ's complaint about AmerisourceBergen is simply an attempt to shift blame from past administrations at the Department of Justice and specifically their agency, the DEA, to industries they were tasked with regulating," the company added.

Meanwhile, in a tweet Thursday, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) welcomed the "strong action" from the DOJ "to hold pharma and distributors accountable for fueling the opioid crisis."

Various multibillion-dollar settlements for other suits have already been reached with opioid distributors, manufacturers, and retailers—including AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, CVS, Johnson & Johnson, McKesson, Walgreens, and Walmart.

However, many policymakers, experts, and advocates argue more must be done. As Jayapal put it: "All these companies need to be held accountable. This is a start."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

By them, I mean one of the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of “people” I encountered during my many forays into the darkest recesses of the Internet. Despite the staggering amount of time many of us spend online — more than six-and-a-half hours a day, according to recent research — we tend to haunt the same websites and social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, CNN, Reddit, Google) again and again. Not me, though. Over the past five years, I’ve spent more hours than I wish to count exploring the subterranean hideaways and uncensored gathering spaces for some of the most unhinged communities on the Internet.

Where I went and who I didn't meet there

A man holds a placard with 'Trump loves QAnon' written while he protests against the compulsory vaccination campaign against SARSCoV2, on January 9, 2022 in Brussels, Belgium.

(Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images)

Call it an occupational hazard. Only recently, I published my first book, A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, an investigative political thriller that opens with the 2016 street murder of a 27-year-old who had worked for the Democratic National Committee. In the absence of a culprit, Seth Rich’s killing got swept into the fast-flowing conspiratorial currents of that year’s presidential race, a contest that pitted an unabashed conspiracy theorist, Donald Trump, against a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who had been the subject of decades’ worth of elaborately sinister claims (with no basis in reality). For my book, I set out to understand how a senseless crime that took the life of a beloved but hardly famous mid-level political staffer became a national and then international news story, a viral phenomenon of ever more twisted conspiracy theories that reached millions and all too soon became a piece of modern folklore.

To do so, I traced the arc of those Rich conspiracy theories back to their origins. In practical terms, that meant hundreds of late nights spent huddled over my desk, eyes fixed on my computer screen, clicking and scrolling my way through a seemingly endless trail of tweets, memes, posts, and videos. The Internet is, in some ways, like an ancient city, its latest incarnation resting atop the ruins of so many civilizations past. I came to think of myself then as an online archeologist digging my way through the digital eons, sifting through archived websites and seeking out long-vanished posts in search of clues and answers.

Or maybe I was a waste handler, holding my nose as I picked through piles (or do I mean miles?) of toxic detritus that littered old versions of social media sites you’d know like Twitter and Reddit, and others you probably don’t, like 4chan, 8kun, and Telegram. It was there that I encountered so many of them, those faceless users, the ones I might have passed on the street, who, with the promise of anonymity, had felt unburdened to voice their unfiltered, often deeply disturbing selves. It was all id, all the time.

Who were these people? I couldn’t help but wonder whether they actually believed the stuff they wrote. Or was it all about the thrill of saying it? In an unnervingly boundless online world, were they testing the boundaries of the acceptable by one-upping each other with brazen displays of racism, misogyny, or antisemitism (just to start down the list)?

Firing up my laptop and venturing into those noxious places was like entering an inside-out world impervious to logic and critical thinking. They had their own language — losers were “cucks,” loyal foot soldiers “pedes,” and Hillary Clinton was Hillary “Klanton” — and they operated with their own sets of elaborate but twisted rules and hierarchies. After a few hours of studying such “conversations,” a form of vertigo would set in, a spinning sensation that made me get up from my desk and clear my head with a walk or a conversation with a real human being.

Now that the book is published, I don’t spend much time in those disturbing online worlds. Still, every once in a while, I can’t help checking in — old habits die hard — despite the horrors I saw there while gathering material for my book. What nags at me even now — in fact, it haunts me in some way — is the knowledge that there were real people behind those toxic accounts. The same people you might sit next to on a bus without having the slightest suspicion of just how disturbed they were and what a disturbing world they were helping create or elaborate. That knowledge still weighs on me.

Weapons of Mass Disinformation

A man wearing a QAnon t-shirt waits in line for a rally featuring former President Donald Trump on September 25, 2021 in Perry, Georgia.

(Photo:Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

A confession: on a few of those late nights spent in the online ruins, I caught myself starting to nod along with some of the wild-eyed nonsense I was reading. Maybe I found a particular Reddit thread surprisingly convincing. Maybe the post in question had sprinkled a few verifiable facts amid the nonsense to make me think, Huh? Maybe my sixth cup of coffee and lack of sleep had so weakened my mental safeguards that madness itself began to seem at least faintly reasonable. When I felt such heretical thoughts seep into my stream of consciousness, I took it as a sure sign that I should log off and go to bed.

Thinking back on those moments, I admit that the first feeling I have is pure and utter embarrassment. I’m an investigative reporter. I make a living dealing in facts, data, and vetted information. Heck, my first job in journalism was as a full-time, trained fact-checker. I should be impervious to the demented siren song of conspiracy theories, right?

The correct answer is indeed: right. And yet…

I realize now that, on those disturbing long nights at the computer, I was more than an avid journalistic explorer of online content. I had immersed myself — and immersion is what the Internet does best. It’s the gateway point to a seemingly infinite number of rabbit holes. Who hasn’t clicked on a Wikipedia entry about, say, the making of the atomic bomb only to check the time, realize that two hours had slipped by, and you’re now watching a YouTube video about the greatest comebacks in baseball history with no memory of how you got here in the first place?

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that conspiracy theories weren’t a fixture of American life before the Internet came along. Quite the opposite: for as long as we humans have existed, we’ve dreamt up elaborate theories and fables to explain the inexplicable or, increasingly in our time, the otherwise all too explicable that we refuse to believe. Some of the founders of this country were unashamed conspiracy-mongers. What those delirious late nights at the computer led me to believe, however, is that tools for spreading such fantastical theories have never been more powerful than they are today and they’ve entered our politics in an unnerving fashion (as anyone paying attention to the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol knows).

Put simply, we don’t stand a chance against the social media companies. Fueled by highly sophisticated algorithms that maximize “engagement” at all costs by feeding users ever more inflammatory content, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest of them don’t simply entertain, inform, or “connect” us. As New York Times reporter Max Fisher writes in his book The Chaos Machine, “This technology exerts such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity, and is so pervasive in our lives, that it changes how we think, behave, and relate to one another. The effect, multiplied across billions of users, has been to change society itself.”

Spending so much time burrowing into such websites, I came away with a deep sense of just how addictive they are. More than that, they rewire your mind in real-time. I felt it myself. I fear that there’s no path out of our strange, increasingly conspiratorial moment, filled with viral lies and rampant disinformation, without rewriting the algorithms that increasingly govern our lives.

The Lost Art of Saying Hello

Still, I’m under no illusion that Tweets and memes can adequately explain the schisms in American life and this country’s descent into a more embittered, polarized, us-versus-them cultural moment. Nor can Donald Trump, who is as much a product of the strange Internet world of conspiracies as a cause of it. They are, in fact, the ever-more-virulent symptoms of a country in which it’s not enough to disagree with your opponents. You also have to demonize them as subhuman, criminal, and alien, while, in the process, doing genuine harm to yourself.

In what still passes for the real world, how else to explain the prominence of conspiracy theories like QAnon or the current far-right trend of accusing someone, especially anyone who disagrees with you, of being a “groomer”? Or how do you account for the existence of a seemingly inextinguishable belief now lurking in our world that one of the country’s prominent political families, the Clintons, are also prolific serial killers who have slaughtered dozens, if not hundreds of people? Or the explosion of those baseless claims I spent all that time exploring about the murdered Seth Rich, claims that would haunt his family for years, denying them even the space to grieve for their own son?

No amount of late-night online sleuthing was going to provide an answer to the larger social ills afflicting this country. Indeed, the more time I spent online, the greater the chasm appeared — so vast, in fact, that I began to wonder whether it could ever be bridged. Nor is this a malady that can be dealt with by politicians or governments, important as they are. It runs even deeper than that.

When I think about the root causes of such societal drift, I return to a phrase I read in a 2021 study that described a “national friendship decline.” According to that survey, “Americans report having fewer close friendships than they once did, talking to their friends less often, and relying less on their friends for personal support.” The data wasn’t all grim. More than four in ten respondents said that they had made a new friend during the pandemic. Still, the lockdowns and self-isolation of these Covid years had exacerbated what the survey’s authors called a “loneliness epidemic.”

When I think about those endless Twitter rants and Reddit screeds I encountered, I envision lonely people hunched over their computers in empty apartments, posting and scrolling madly (sometimes in the most literal sense) deep into the night. Loneliness and social isolation, of course, can’t explain away all the mad conspiratorial rants you find on the Internet, nor are they the sole cause of the brittle, increasingly dangerous state of American politics. But it’s so much easier to resent and rage against a perceived enemy if you’ve never met them or anyone like them, so much easier to cast the other side as the out-group or the villain if you’ve never shared a meal or a coffee or a phone call with them.

I mention that “loneliness epidemic” only to underscore my belief that healing the schism in our culture and politics will require something more difficult and yet simpler than major policy reforms or electing a new generation of officials. Don’t get me wrong: both of those are needed, on both sides of the proverbial aisle. Today’s politics too often resemble a race to the bottom, as politicians rush to outflank their rivals and whip up their constituencies (often using social media to do it). All the while, powerful interest groups, their lobbyists, and a growing billionaire class shape (or sink) the kinds of wholesale changes needed to reboot our political system.

Yet our problems run deeper than that — and the solutions can’t be found in Washington, D.C.

One answer is finding ways to knit back together an unbearably frayed nation. Neighborhood groups, book clubs, sports leagues, civic associations, labor unions, religious groups, whatever it is, the surest way out of this stubborn conflict must come through the simplest of gestures — human connection. The lost art of saying hello.

Tech executives love to talk about the value of “connection” and their goals of “connecting” the world. Almost two decades into the social media era, we should know better than to believe those empty paeans used as cover for the relentless pursuit of profits. Now more than ever, it’s time to step away from those weapons of mass disinformation.

I don’t care much for New Year’s resolutions, but if I did, I would say: let’s make 2023 the year of logging off. Get to know your neighbors and colleagues. For my part, I’ll work on not thinking of those everyday strangers, or even those tiny avatars on the Internet, as them. Instead of fearing them, I’ll think I say hello.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Andy Kroll.

The post An Epidemic of White Supremacy in the Queensland Police? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robert Inlakesh.

Yellow Fever hit New York City in the late eighteenth century. The Big Apple population at the time was 60,000 and over the course of five years, eight percent of those New Yorkers succumbed to the disease (or related malfeasance).

Adjust that ratio for 2022 and the death count would approach 675,000.

Yellow fever is described by the always trustworthy World Health Organization as “an acute viral hemorrhagic disease transmitted by infected mosquitoes.” It can incubate in your body for up to 6 days but is often asymptomatic. If symptoms do arise, mild to moderate cases last for 3 or 4 days and present with:

• Fever
• Headache
• Nausea
• Vomiting
• Muscle pain (usually a backache)
• Decreased appetite

For some patients, there is a secondary toxic phase that occurs very shortly after they recover from the above symptoms. This phase typically commences with a return of the high fever but things quickly escalate from there, e.g.

• Kidney damage
• Liver problems
• Jaundice (the yellowing of skin and eyes is where this disease gets its name)
• Abdominal pain
• Dark urine
• Steady and extreme vomiting
• Internal bleeding
• Bleeding from the mouth, nose, or eyes

Roughly 50 percent of those who enter the toxic phase are dead within a week.

Sad reality: Pandemics and epidemics are often handled in an inexplicable, inefficient, greedy, and lethal manner. Here’s how the Museum of the City of New York described the scene more than two centuries ago:

By 1795, yellow fever was making its way through New York City. The true cause of yellow fever was unknown at the time. Many thought the disease was spread by consuming or inhaling the fumes of rotting food or coffee. Others believed the illness was imported from the West Indies. The press was reluctant to publish the extent of yellow fever due to fears of people leaving the city and the economy suffering. New Yorkers falsely believed the disease was not contagious, and by 1798, the dispersion of yellow fever had reached epidemic proportions claiming the lives of thousands. Various efforts were made to clean up certain neighborhoods most widely affected by the disease, but other than quarantining infected ships, the newly formed health department did little to prevent the sickness from spreading.

As you well know, this type of scenario is nothing new within our culture — regardless of which technology delivers the narrative.

Keep your guard up…

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Deconstructed.

A pond deep in Telephone Gap, a section of the Green Mountain National Forest that activists are focusing anti-logging efforts on. Photo by Will Solomon.

On a cool day in early May, I joined Zack Porter and Justin Lindholm outside Rutland, Vermont for a hike into the northern portion of the Green Mountain National Forest. Our fairly remote destination was within what the US Forest Service has termed the “Telephone Gap Integrated Resource Project,” one of several blocs within the 400,000-acre federally owned forest that the agency has targeted for logging.

Porter is the director of Standing Trees, which he describes as the only organization explicitly focused on protecting and restoring wild, public lands in New England. He opposes these logging projects, and before meeting to hike, described to me the regional problem, as he sees it. “There’s really kind of an epidemic of roadless logging in both New Hampshire and Vermont, in the White Mountain and Green Mountain National Forests,” he explained. “Many thousands of acres at this point have been targeted. And many miles of roads have been punched into some of the wildest landscapes that we have in New England.”

Porter is particularly focused on logging in roadless sections of the forest, arguing that the Forest Service is exploiting a loophole in the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule (RACR), one of the final acts enacted by the Clinton Administration, to log in these areas. RACR put administrative protections on 58.5 million acres of inventoried roadless areas throughout the United States, effectively preventing most management activities like road construction and logging. But, Porter said, the Forest Service has not applied that rule to roadless areas that were inventoried post-2001, a distinction he describes as “completely arbitrary” that effectively creates “two classes of roadless areas.”

“Whereas this kind of a landscape would have significant protections on it almost anywhere else in the US, because [these lands] weren’t inventoried as roadless until after 2001… [they] are completely vulnerable to logging,” Porter said.

Telephone Gap is currently a top priority for Standing Trees — in part because logging has not started there yet, and the still-new organization has been able to participate in every step of the public engagement process thus far. But logging in roadless areas is already approved or ongoing at several nearby sites, including the Robinson Integrated Resource Project and the Early Successional Habitat Creation Project, both located within Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest.

Porter, Lindholm, and I walk first down, then uphill through a series of logging roads and snowmobile trails, moving through yellow birch, red maple, sugar maple, ash, beech, spruce, and a host of other species. Lindholm — a lifelong hiker in these woods and former member of the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Board — points out several stands he believes the Forest Service wants to cut, a prediction based in part on what the agency is doing elsewhere in the forest. We regularly see downed trees — Lindholm refers to one covered in moss as “nature’s condominium” for the variety of plant and animal life it supports. This falling-down and decay is, both he and Porter emphasize, a natural process, one the Forest Service is essentially trying to artificially replicate in its efforts to create “early successional habitat” — one of their main rationales for logging.

Rick Enser is sharply critical of the “early successional” approach to forest management, which typically involves clearcutting in order to open the canopy and foster “young” forest habitat. Enser is a biodiversity specialist who now lives in Vermont, but worked for nearly three decades in the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management. This emphasis on new forest, he says, is a rationale he only saw come into being in the last several decades, as federal and state agencies began “to create a narrative in which early successional habitat was [considered] an essential component of the landscape that had always been there” but — due to reforestation that began in the 1800s — was now in short supply.

But this effort to promote a supposedly “ideal” balance of forest types produces, Enser argues, an essentially contrived forest composition. “In order to create habitat, you have to destroy one,” says Enser. “So they’re destroying tracts of forest and all of the species that occupy those to create this sort of artificial early successional type for the benefit of a few species.”

“It’s all a ruse,” he continues. “It’s all a made-up story just to basically, you know … to do what their intent is, which is to log.”

The Forest Service, for its part, defends the approach, arguing that it fairly weighs various imperatives in forest management. “Restoring young and old forest habitat is an important habitat objective for the Green Mountain National Forest and many other regional habitat restoration efforts. The Green Mountain National Forest’s planned management has a unique opportunity to contribute to both young and old forest targets,” says Chris Mattrick, the district ranger for the Rochester/Middlebury district of the Green Mountain National Forest, which includes Telephone Gap, noting that Vermont Conservation Design, an ecological guiding blueprint for Vermont put out by the state, “actually identifies young and old forests as high priority habitat types currently underrepresented on the landscape.”

Mattrick also disagrees with Porter’s characterization of logging in roadless areas. “Although it is possible that some of the roadless areas inventoried as part of the 2006 [Green Mountain National Forest] Forest Plan revision process could have been included as part of the RACR protected acres if they had been inventoried prior to 2001, it is subjective at best to make this assumption,” he says. (Porter disputes this, saying: “I’ve yet to see anything that approaches reasonable justification for why these roadless areas should be treated differently.”)

It’s not just the RACR application that Porter takes issue with. More generally, he characterizes the approach by the Forest Service as myopic, saying that above all, the value of old and wild forests is uniquely vital — particularly for their ability to sequester carbon on a rapidly heating planet, as well as to mitigate the impacts of increasingly extreme weather, including in places like Vermont .

Jamison Ervin, a Vermont resident who has worked in sustainable forest management and nature conservation for organizations including UNDP and the Nature Conservancy, shares this view. She describes the sort of logging that federal and state governments are currently undertaking as reckless. “In the last five years or so, there’s just been this sea shift in understanding of the magnitude of the planetary crisis,” she says. “We’re facing the Sixth Extinction. We’re on track to lose a million species by 2050. We’re looking at this intertwined planetary crisis of biodiversity loss, of climate change, and then, increased vulnerability to disaster, increased water [insecurity], increased food insecurity … These are intertwined issues.”

At the same time, she says, many government agencies are ramping up logging efforts, targeting “forests that are essential for carbon, essential for biodiversity, and absolutely essential for mitigating [and] avoiding floods … They’re logging as if they’re in the nineteenth century.”

Numerous studies conducted over the last several decades support Ervin’s point: older, wilder forests are better at storing carbon, and are more resilient to the severe weather disturbances increasingly occurring in New England. They produce cleaner air, cleaner water, and more effectively support long-term biodiversity. Indeed, this was a major impetus for President Biden’s Earth Day “Executive Order on Strengthening the Nation’s Forests, Communities, and Local Economies,” which calls for inventorying and protecting mature and old-growth forests on federal lands. (Standing Trees was a proponent of this push, in coordination with a national effort called Climate Forests; Ervin, along with ~150 other scientists, signed a letter of support for the order.)

Porter argues that there is a particular imperative to allowing forests to mature on public lands. “What [the Forest Service] forgets is that the Green Mountain National Forest’s greatest value is that it really is the best place for old forest to return on the landscape,” he says. “We’re managing our private forests so heavily in New Hampshire and Vermont, it makes the most sense to think of our national forest differently. We shouldn’t be managing our national forests the same way we manage every other forest.”

With Standing Trees, Porter aims to encourage this approach in Vermont and elsewhere in the region. He is closely watching developments around Telephone Gap, and he expects the Forest Service to release a “Proposed Action” with more detail on logging plans there soon. “This document should give us more of an idea of where they are planning to log,” he says. “We are investigating legal and other avenues for compelling the agency to treat all roadless areas equally.” Standing Trees is also, with Climate Forests, continuing to draw attention to the value of old-growth forests across the country; in July the campaign released a list of ten federal forests that are “part of a pervasive pattern of federal forest mismanagement” that includes the Telephone Gap site.

Our hike ends at one of the most pristine ponds I’ve visited in the New England backcountry. It’s a natural body of water; in it we see relatively rare, wild (not stocked) brook trout. Lindholm believes the structure of the pond developed, in part, through beaver damming. There isn’t another person in sight, and just about the only evidence of other visitors is a single canoe sitting along the bank. The three of us look at the Montane spruce-fir forest ringing the pond, trying to determine whether the Forest Service considers these trees to be part of the “suitable timber base.” But looking out at the undisturbed landscape, even asking feels sort of ridiculous.

“The word wild is completely misued and abused in New England,” says Porter. “We say wild, and we go ahead and log the heck out of that place.”

“We have to reground ourselves in what the word wild really means.”

This piece first appeared in Earth Island Journal.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Will Solomon.

We speak with Congressmember Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, after a man was arrested on suspicion of hate crime after neighbors said he allegedly pointed a gun at her home and threatened to kill her. He was found outside of her home last Saturday night with a .40-caliber handgun yelling “Go back to India. I’m going to kill you,” and has since been released from jail as prosecutors say they lack evidence to bring a hate crime case against him, though his weapons have been seized. Jayapal is the first Indian American woman to serve in the House of Representatives. “We need to take away the tools from people who just find it too easy these days to express their hatred, their white supremacy, their racism in violent ways,” says Japayal, who blames the violence against her in part on former President Trump’s boosting of right-wing extremism.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Around 1.35 million people die each year on the world’s roads, and another 20 million to 50 million are seriously injured. Half of these deaths and many of the injuries involve pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists – the most vulnerable users of roads and streets.

Around the world, someone dies from a road accident every 25 seconds. The head of the United Nations Road Safety Fund has called road deaths and injuries a “silent epidemic on wheels”.

I have studied cities and urban policy for many years, including transportation and road safety. In my view, making transportation systems safer is feasible and isn’t rocket science. The key is for governments to prioritize safer roads, speeds and vehicles, and to promote policies such as traffic calming that are known to reduce the risk of crashes.

The costs

It may seem like hyperbole to talk about road deaths as equivalent to pandemic diseases, but the numbers make the case. Road fatalities are now the top cause of death for children and young adults worldwide between the ages of 5 and 29, and the seventh-leading cause of death overall in low-income countries.

Crashes cause serious economic harm to victims and their families, as well as to the broader society. A 2019 study estimated that between 2015 and 2030, road injuries will cost the global economy almost $1.8 trillion.

Because death and injury rates are highest in low- and middle-income countries, dangerous roads add to the costs of being poor and are a major inhibitor of economic growth. That is why one of the U.N.‘s Sustainable Development Goals is to halve the number of global deaths and injuries from traffic incidents by 2030.

More deaths in lower-income countries

There is considerable variation in traffic fatality rates worldwide. Road traffic death rates range from 27 per 100,000 population in Africa to only 7 per 100,000 in Europe.

Richer nations have had mass automobile traffic longer than lower-income countries, so they have had more time to develop strategies and tactics to reduce accidents and fatalities. For example, in 1937 – in an era when traffic death in the streets of cities like New York was considered a routine part of metropolitan life – the U.S. road death rate was 31 per 100,000. That’s about the same as today’s rate in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Lower-income countries tend to have vehicles that are less safe; poorer roads; more vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians and cyclists, sharing urban space with vehicles; and poorer medical care, which means injury can more easily lead to death. These nations also have less ability to introduce or enforce traffic laws.

Traffic incidents in higher-income counties often only involve one or two people. In lower-income countries, incidents tend to involve multiple passengers.

For example, in 2021 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a fuel truck collided with a crowded bus 110 miles outside the capital of Kinshasa, killing 33 people. Deadly road incidents are frequent in the DRC, where the roads are poor, there are many unsafe older vehicles, many drivers are not properly trained and drinking and driving is common.

For many middle-income countries, the challenge is a very rapid increase in vehicular traffic as the population becomes more urban and more people earn enough money to buy motorcycles and cars. This quick rise can overwhelm the carrying capacity of urban roads.

In the US, less regulation and more deaths

There also are differences among richer countries. In 1994, Europe and the United States had the same traffic death rates, but by 2020 Americans were over three times more likely to die on the road than Europeans.

Today, 12 people are killed in traffic per 100,000 annually in the U.S., compared to 4 per 100,000 in the Netherlands and Germany, and only 2 per 100,000 in Norway. The difference reflects more aggressive programs across Europe to reduce speeds, greater investment in mass transit and stricter drunk driving enforcement.

The U.S. doesn’t just lag behind other rich countries in promoting road safety. In recent years, traffic deaths in the U.S. have increased. After a gradual reduction over 50 years, fatalities soared to a 16-year high in 2021 when almost 43,000 people died. Pedestrian deaths hit a 40-year high at 7,500.

What caused this surge in deaths? Roads were less busy during COVID-19 lockdowns, but proportionately more people engaged in riskier behaviors, including speeding, drinking and driving, distracted driving and not using seat belts.

Cyclist and pedestrian traffic deaths were rising even before the pandemic, as cities encouraged walking and biking without providing adequate infrastructure. Painting a white line on a busy street is not a substitute for providing a fully protected, designated bicycle lane.

For the next time you need to explain unprotected bike lanes: pic.twitter.com/F1VrkctIK3

— stevie. (@chefanieeee) April 11, 2022

Two harmful narratives about traffic safety

Two narratives often cloud discussions of traffic fatalities. First, calling these events “accidents” normalizes what I view as a slaughter of innocents. It is part of the cult of automobility and the primacy that the U.S. affords to fast-moving vehicular traffic.

Automobility has created a special form of space – roads and highways – where deaths and injuries are considered “accidents.” In my view, this is an extreme form of environmental injustice. Historically disadvantaged groups and poorer communities are overrepresented in traffic deaths and injuries.

The second misleading narrative holds that nearly all road deaths and injuries are caused by human error. Public officials regularly blame poor drivers, distracted pedestrians and aggressive bicyclists for street deaths.

People do take too many risks. In recent years, AAA’s annual traffic safety culture survey has found that a majority of drivers view unsafe driving behaviors, such as texting while driving or speeding on highways, as extremely or very dangerous. But significant numbers of drivers report engaging in those behaviors anyway.

But as urban studies expert David Zipper has pointed out, a persistent myth often cited by government agencies and the media asserts that 94% of accidents in the U.S. are caused by individual drivers. This bloated figure has successfully shifted responsibility away from other factors such as car design, traffic infrastructure and the need for more effective public policies.

Governments have the tools

As I see it, road traffic deaths and injuries are not accidents. They are incidents that can be prevented and reduced. Doing that will require governments and urban planners to reimagine transportation systems not just for speed and efficiency, but also for safety and livability.

That will mean protecting motorcyclists, bicyclists and pedestrians from vehicular traffic and reducing traffic speed on urban roads. It also will require better road design, enforcement of traffic laws that make the roads safer, and more effective and enforceable measures that promote safety devices like seat belts, child restraints, and helmets for bikers and motorcyclists.

Unlike the COVID-19 pandemic, making streets safer doesn’t require designing new solutions in laboratories. What’s needed is the will to apply tools that have been shown to work.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Rennie Short.

Around 1.35 million people die each year on the world’s roads, and another 20 million to 50 million are seriously injured. Half of these deaths and many of the injuries involve pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists – the most vulnerable users of roads and streets.

Around the world, someone dies from a road accident every 25 seconds. The head of the United Nations Road Safety Fund has called road deaths and injuries a “silent epidemic on wheels”.

I have studied cities and urban policy for many years, including transportation and road safety. In my view, making transportation systems safer is feasible and isn’t rocket science. The key is for governments to prioritize safer roads, speeds and vehicles, and to promote policies such as traffic calming that are known to reduce the risk of crashes.

The costs

It may seem like hyperbole to talk about road deaths as equivalent to pandemic diseases, but the numbers make the case. Road fatalities are now the top cause of death for children and young adults worldwide between the ages of 5 and 29, and the seventh-leading cause of death overall in low-income countries.

Crashes cause serious economic harm to victims and their families, as well as to the broader society. A 2019 study estimated that between 2015 and 2030, road injuries will cost the global economy almost $1.8 trillion.

Because death and injury rates are highest in low- and middle-income countries, dangerous roads add to the costs of being poor and are a major inhibitor of economic growth. That is why one of the U.N.‘s Sustainable Development Goals is to halve the number of global deaths and injuries from traffic incidents by 2030.

More deaths in lower-income countries

There is considerable variation in traffic fatality rates worldwide. Road traffic death rates range from 27 per 100,000 population in Africa to only 7 per 100,000 in Europe.

Richer nations have had mass automobile traffic longer than lower-income countries, so they have had more time to develop strategies and tactics to reduce accidents and fatalities. For example, in 1937 – in an era when traffic death in the streets of cities like New York was considered a routine part of metropolitan life – the U.S. road death rate was 31 per 100,000. That’s about the same as today’s rate in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Lower-income countries tend to have vehicles that are less safe; poorer roads; more vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians and cyclists, sharing urban space with vehicles; and poorer medical care, which means injury can more easily lead to death. These nations also have less ability to introduce or enforce traffic laws.

Traffic incidents in higher-income counties often only involve one or two people. In lower-income countries, incidents tend to involve multiple passengers.

For example, in 2021 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a fuel truck collided with a crowded bus 110 miles outside the capital of Kinshasa, killing 33 people. Deadly road incidents are frequent in the DRC, where the roads are poor, there are many unsafe older vehicles, many drivers are not properly trained and drinking and driving is common.

For many middle-income countries, the challenge is a very rapid increase in vehicular traffic as the population becomes more urban and more people earn enough money to buy motorcycles and cars. This quick rise can overwhelm the carrying capacity of urban roads.

In the US, less regulation and more deaths

There also are differences among richer countries. In 1994, Europe and the United States had the same traffic death rates, but by 2020 Americans were over three times more likely to die on the road than Europeans.

Today, 12 people are killed in traffic per 100,000 annually in the U.S., compared to 4 per 100,000 in the Netherlands and Germany, and only 2 per 100,000 in Norway. The difference reflects more aggressive programs across Europe to reduce speeds, greater investment in mass transit and stricter drunk driving enforcement.

The U.S. doesn’t just lag behind other rich countries in promoting road safety. In recent years, traffic deaths in the U.S. have increased. After a gradual reduction over 50 years, fatalities soared to a 16-year high in 2021 when almost 43,000 people died. Pedestrian deaths hit a 40-year high at 7,500.

What caused this surge in deaths? Roads were less busy during COVID-19 lockdowns, but proportionately more people engaged in riskier behaviors, including speeding, drinking and driving, distracted driving and not using seat belts.

Cyclist and pedestrian traffic deaths were rising even before the pandemic, as cities encouraged walking and biking without providing adequate infrastructure. Painting a white line on a busy street is not a substitute for providing a fully protected, designated bicycle lane.

For the next time you need to explain unprotected bike lanes: pic.twitter.com/F1VrkctIK3

— stevie. (@chefanieeee) April 11, 2022

Two harmful narratives about traffic safety

Two narratives often cloud discussions of traffic fatalities. First, calling these events “accidents” normalizes what I view as a slaughter of innocents. It is part of the cult of automobility and the primacy that the U.S. affords to fast-moving vehicular traffic.

Automobility has created a special form of space – roads and highways – where deaths and injuries are considered “accidents.” In my view, this is an extreme form of environmental injustice. Historically disadvantaged groups and poorer communities are overrepresented in traffic deaths and injuries.

The second misleading narrative holds that nearly all road deaths and injuries are caused by human error. Public officials regularly blame poor drivers, distracted pedestrians and aggressive bicyclists for street deaths.

People do take too many risks. In recent years, AAA’s annual traffic safety culture survey has found that a majority of drivers view unsafe driving behaviors, such as texting while driving or speeding on highways, as extremely or very dangerous. But significant numbers of drivers report engaging in those behaviors anyway.

But as urban studies expert David Zipper has pointed out, a persistent myth often cited by government agencies and the media asserts that 94% of accidents in the U.S. are caused by individual drivers. This bloated figure has successfully shifted responsibility away from other factors such as car design, traffic infrastructure and the need for more effective public policies.

Governments have the tools

As I see it, road traffic deaths and injuries are not accidents. They are incidents that can be prevented and reduced. Doing that will require governments and urban planners to reimagine transportation systems not just for speed and efficiency, but also for safety and livability.

That will mean protecting motorcyclists, bicyclists and pedestrians from vehicular traffic and reducing traffic speed on urban roads. It also will require better road design, enforcement of traffic laws that make the roads safer, and more effective and enforceable measures that promote safety devices like seat belts, child restraints, and helmets for bikers and motorcyclists.

Unlike the COVID-19 pandemic, making streets safer doesn’t require designing new solutions in laboratories. What’s needed is the will to apply tools that have been shown to work.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Rennie Short.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Chrissy Stroop.

Why is avian influenza so deadly for domesticated birds but not for wild birds that carry it?

Avian influenza (AI) is a contagious virus that affects all birds. There are two groups of AI viruses that cause disease in chickens: highly pathogenic AI and low pathogenic AI.

HPAI viruses cause high mortality in poultry, and occasionally in some wild birds. LPAI can cause mild to moderate disease in poultry, and usually little to no clinical signs of illness in wild birds.

The primary natural hosts and reservoir of AI viruses are wild waterfowl, such as ducks and geese. This means that the virus is well adapted to them, and these birds do not typically get sick when they are infected with it. But when domesticated poultry, such as chickens and turkeys, come in direct or indirect contact with feces of infected wild birds, they become infected and start to show symptoms, such as depression, coughing and sneezing and sudden death.

There are multiple strains of avian influenza. What type is this outbreak, and is it dangerous to humans?

The virus of concern in this outbreak is a Eurasian H5N1 HPAI virus that causes high mortality and severe clinical signs in domesticated poultry. Scientists who monitor wild bird flockshave also detected a reassortant virus that contains genes from both the Eurasian H5 and low pathogenic North American viruses. This happens when multiple strains of the virus circulating in the bird population exchange genes to create a new strain of the virus, much as new strains of COVID-19 like omicron and delta have emerged during the ongoing pandemic.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the risk to public health from this outbreak is low. No human illnesses have been associated with this virus in North America. That was also true of the last H5N1 outbreak in the U.S. in 2014 and 2015.

Should people avoid poultry products until this outbreak ends?

No, that’s not necessary. Infected poultry or eggs do not enter the food supply chain.

To detect AI, the U.S. Department of Agriculture oversees routine testing of flocks done by farmers and carries out federal inspection programs to ensure that eggs and birds are safe and free of virus. When H5N1 is diagnosed on a farm or in a backyard flock, state and federal officials will quarantine the site and cull and dispose of all the birds in the infected flock. Then the site is decontaminated.

After several weeks without new virus detections, the area is required to test negative in order to be deemed free of infection. We call this process the four D’s of outbreak control: diagnosis, depopulation, disposal and decontamination.

Avian influenza is not transmissible by eating properly prepared and cooked poultry, so eggs and poultry are safe to eat. The USDA recommends cooking eggs and poultry to an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit (74 Celsius).

Are avian influenza outbreaks happening more frequently around the world, or do we just hear more about them than we did 20 or 30 years ago?

The dynamics of the spread of avian influenza viruses are very complex. HPAI is a transboundary disease, which means it is highly contagious and spreads rapidly across national borders.

Some research indicates that detection of HPAI viruses in wild birds has become more common. Reports are seasonal, with a peak in February and a low point in September. There are ongoing outbreaks of HPAI in wild birds in Asia, Europe and Africa. Many migratory bird species travel thousands of miles between continents, posing a continuing risk of AI virus transmission.

In addition, we have better diagnostic tests for much more rapid and improved detection of avian influenza compared to 20 to 30 years ago, using molecular diagnostics such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests – the same method labs use to detect COVID-19 infections.

Farmers can take steps to make their flock more biosecure, such as preventing birds and their feed from being exposed to wild birds.

What’s the prospect of developing a vaccine for poultry that could reduce the economic harm from outbreaks?

Many factors would have to be weighed before adopting vaccination as a strategy for controlling HPAI. At this time, the Department of Agriculture has not approved the use of vaccination in the U.S. for protecting birds from avian influenza.

One reason for this is that using vaccines would potentially affect international trade and poultry exports. Importers would not be able to distinguish vaccinated birds from infected birds based on the routine testing, so they might ban all U.S. poultry exports.

Vaccination also could delay outbreak detection, since it can potentially hide non-apparent infections in infected birds. And if infections go unnoticed, they could spread to other farms before farmers can put control measures in place.

Avian influenza vaccines can reduce clinical signs, sickness and death rates in domestic poultry, but they would not prevent birds from becoming infected with the virus. Ultimately, the USDA’s goal is to eradicate HPAI quickly after it is detected. However, vaccines could be used to help control an outbreak, and this is an option that the agency is investigating now.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Yuko Sato.

What have we lost because of the pandemic? According to our calculations, a lot — and many of the worst hit countries and regions are far from world media attention.

Typically, damage from any disaster is measured in separate categories: the number of fatalities and injuries it caused, and the financial damage it led to (directly or indirectly).

Only by aggregating these various measures into a comprehensive total can we begin to formulate a fuller picture of the burden of disasters, including pandemics.

The usual approach has been to attach a price tag to death and illness. Many governments calculate this “value of statistical life”.

They do this based on surveys asking people how much they are willing to pay to reduce some risk (for example, improve a road they often use), or by calculating the additional compensation people demand when they take on high-risk occupations (for example, as a diver on an oil rig).

By observing the amount of money people associate with small changes in mortality risk, one can then calculate the overall price of a “statistical life” as valued by the average person.

By adding the dollar value of asset damage to the “priced” value of life lost (or injured), the overall cost of an adverse event (such as an earthquake or an epidemic) can be calculated.

Calculating ‘lost life years’
But “value of life” prices can vary a lot between and even within countries. There is also an understandable public distaste for putting a price tag on human life. Governments typically do not openly discuss these calculations, making it difficult to assess their legitimacy.

An alternative is a “life years lost index”. It is based on the World Health Organisation (WHO) measure of “disability-adjusted life years” (DALY), calculated for a long list of diseases and published in a yearly account of the associated human costs.

In conventional measurements of the impact of disaster risk, the unit used is dollars. For this alternative index, the unit of measurement is “lost life years” — the loss of the equivalent of one year of full health.

This is a sum of three key measures of the pandemic’s impact: lost life years because of death and sickness from the disease, and the equivalent lost years due to decline in economic activity. The map below presents these figures per person, in order to enable the relevant comparison across countries.

For example, in the map above we see Australia has a life-years-lost figure of 0.02. This means, on average, every person in Australia lost just over seven life days from the pandemic. In New Zealand, where fewer people died and there have been only a few thousand cases, the figure is 0.01, meaning each person lost fewer than four life days.

In India, by contrast, the average person lost nearly 15 days and in Peru the equivalent figure is 25 days. That loss is based on a combination of the precipitous recession and the death and sickness caused by the virus directly.

So, how do we put this in context? Is losing 25 days a catastrophic loss that justifies the kinds of public actions we have observed around the world? We can answer that question by comparing the impact of COVID-19 to other disasters.

The price of a pandemic
When we compare the total aggregate costs of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 with the average annual costs associated with all other disasters in the previous 20 years, we find the pandemic has indeed been extremely costly (in terms of lost life years).

This is despite those past two decades having seen many catastrophic events: horrific tsunamis in Indonesia (2004) and Japan (2011), very damaging hurricanes in the US (2005 and 2017), a high-mortality cyclone in Myanmar (2008), deadly earthquakes in India (2001), Pakistan (2005), China (2008), Haiti (2010) and Nepal (2015), and others.

The graph below shows the life years lost in 2020 by continent, per person, from COVID-19 compared to the average annual cost of all other disasters 2000-2019. As we can see, the costs of the pandemic are much higher — more than three times higher in Asia and more than 30 times higher in Europe.

The most vulnerable countries have been small, open economies such as Fiji, Maldives and Belize, which rely heavily on the export of services, especially tourism.

These are not necessarily countries that have experienced a high number of deaths from the pandemic, but their overall loss is staggering.

More generally, the per-capita loss associated with COVID-19 is particularly high in most of Latin America, southern Africa, southern Europe, India and some of the Pacific Islands. This is in stark contrast to where the global media’s attention has been directed (the US, UK and EU).

Costs will continue to rise
These measures are for 2020 only. Obviously, the pandemic is continuing to rage, and will most likely continue to have an impact on the global economy well into 2022. Many of the adverse economic impacts will still be felt years from now.

Worryingly, some of the countries that have already suffered the greatest economic impact have also been slow to secure enough vaccine doses for their populations. They may well see their economic slumps carry on into next year, especially with larger, richer countries having the resources to buy vaccines first.

Much public and media attention has focused on the death toll and immediate economic impact from COVID-19. But the human and social costs associated with that economic loss are potentially much greater, particularly in poorer countries.

The heavy burden many small countries have borne has, to some extent, been overlooked. Countries such as Lebanon and the Maldives are experiencing dramatic and painful crises, largely under the radar of world attention.

However, our conclusion that the human cost of the economic loss is possibly much higher than the cost associated with health loss does not imply public policies such as lockdowns, border restrictions and quarantines have been unwarranted.

If anything, countries that experienced a deeper health crisis also experienced a deeper economic crisis. There has been no effective trade-off between saving lives and saving livelihoods.

This story is part of a series The Conversation is running on the nexus between disaster, disadvantage and resilience. You can read the rest of the stories here.

Dr Ilan Noy, chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington and Nguyen Doan, doctoral student in economics, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

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Photo of San Francisco gun control rally by Natalie Chaney on Unsplash.

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As fake news on Covid-19 spreads faster than the virus, scientists call for a halt to the “infodemic”.

As China admits that the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) is now the worst public health crisis that the country has faced since its founding, a group of scientists has sent out a piercing appeal for sobriety in media coverage of the epidemic.

The scientists in a statement published on February 19 in one of the world’s leading science journals, Lancet, appealed for support for the scientists, public health professionals and medical professionals.

VIEW: The coronavirus world map

“We are public health scientists who have closely followed the emergence of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (Covid-19) and are deeply concerned about its impact on global health and wellbeing.

“We have watched as the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China, in particular, have worked diligently and effectively to rapidly identify the pathogen behind this outbreak, put in place significant measures to reduce its impact, and share their results transparently with the global health community.

– Partner –

“This effort has been remarkable,” the scientists said in a formal statement which they asked the public to endorse and sign.

Fighting the ‘infodemic’
This appeal cannot be timelier. It comes at a time when the coronavirus “infodemic” is overshadowing the coronavirus epidemic itself.

I had started to worry when my driver asked me the other day if it is true that China’s government officials are killing people who are sick of the coronavirus there just to get rid of the virus.

I proceeded to interrogate him on where he got the information and scolded him, saying this is fake news. But what really got me worried was when no less than a senator of the Philippines played back in a public hearing in February in the halls of Philippine Congress a conspiracy theory video that claimed the coronavirus to be a form of “bio-warfare” developed by the US against China.

Vicente Sotto, whose claim to fame before he was elected senator was as a broadcast personality, alleged his office had received the video anonymously and found it was “somehow very interesting, if not revealing”. The theory has been debunked by experts.

What happened next was just as interesting. Instead of first asking the opinion of the health experts present, Senator Sotto turned to Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin for his comments. Locsin, a veteran journalist and publisher, immediately rejected the theory as the “craziest video”.

But it was also crazy that Senator Sotto did not immediately ask for the opinions of the health officials present at the Senate hearing, particularly Health Secretary Francisco Duque III or WHO country representative Rabindra Abeyasinghe. It seems that Senator Sotto was looking for sensational angles rather than scientific opinions and who better to ask than a journalist?

This is a tendency to which most of us in the public are now inclined as we read and talk about the origins, nature and spread of Covid-19.

As of March 10, barely two months after the confirmation of the first case of corona virus (31 December 2019), in Wuhan, China, there were at least 67,773 confirmed cases in the mainland China province of Hubei, bringing the world total to more than 118,745, with the death toll at 4284. Major outbreaks have also developed in Iran, Italy – with a quarantine of its population of more than 60 million – and South Korea with thousands of confirmed cases and multiple deaths.

[embedded content]
How to protect yourself against Covid-19. Video: World Health Organisation

Reprise Sars and Merscov
This Covid-19 epidemic that started in China and now threatens to be a worldwide pandemic brings to mind two epidemics in our lifetime — Sars and Merscov.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) was a viral respiratory illness that was recognised as a global threat in March 2003, after first appearing in southern China in November 2002.

It reached Singapore on February 25  and I had personal experience coping with public hysteria for months until the high-quality Singapore medical system and responsible media licked the virus three months later in May.

A total of 238 probable Sars cases were reported in Singapore between March and May 2003, 33 of whom died. The first case was on February 25 while the last case was 5 May 5.

Although away from my family as a visiting professor in Singapore, I overcame my initial jitters and later felt safe enough to go out to the market, take the bus to my office and make occasional forays downtown. It did cramp my social life, however.

The crucial thing to remember is to be informed, collected and aggressive in combating false information.

Pandemic in digital age
What makes Covid-19 different from Sars and Merscov, however, is not only its initial size but the milieu into which it was born. Covid-19 is now at a stage when it is likely going to be declared a pandemic and described with many others — thanks to social media.

When Sars and Merscov were infecting people, the younger generation were only beginning to surf the internet and use the original cell phone. Social media was still an infant.

But now, a WHO official warns that false news was “spreading faster than the virus”. Claims are made that the virus is spread by eating bat soup or could be cured by garlic. A WHO official has met officials of tech companies at Facebook’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, including those from Google, Apple, Airbnb, Lyft, Uber and Sales force.

Earlier he held talks with Amazon at the e-commerce giant’s headquarters in Seattle.

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus was labelled a public health emergency, books on the disease have popped up on the e-retailer. And when users search for the word coronavirus on Amazon, listings for face masks and vitamin C pop up.

Vitamin C has been listed as one of the fake cures for coronavirus.

In response, Facebook on February 27 announced that it was banning ads that “create a sense of urgency” about Covid-19 or suggest cures or preventive measures” and “will remove posts that contain false information about the virus”.

Most likely unintended, but in the foreseeable future we may have to fight the coronavirus on two fronts — the viral epidemic and the informational epidemic fronts.

Rather than be passive recipients of news, we have to become critical and push back on all information that sounds “crazy” and “conspiratorial”. The educated class should take the lead in doing this.

Schools should be involved and introduce courses on media information literacy, starting with identifying fake news especially in relation to science and health.

This is quite a challenge to both the medical scientists and the communication scientists. May both groups of scientists win.

Dr Crispin C. Maslog, a former journalist with Agence France-Presse, is an environmental activist and former science professor at Silliman University and the University of the Philippines Los Baños, Philippines. He is a founding member and now chair of the board of the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC), Manila. This article was produced by SciDev.Net’s Asia & Pacific desk.

BANGKOK — The global march of the new virus triggered a vigorous appeal Thursday from the World Health Organization for governments to pull out “all the stops” to slow the epidemic, as it drained color from India’s spring festivities, closed Bethlehem’s Nativity Church and blocked Italians from visiting elderly relatives in nursing homes.

As China, after many arduous weeks, appeared to be winning its epic, costly battle against the new virus, the fight was revving up in newly affected areas of the globe, unleashing disruptions that profoundly impacted billions of people.

The U.N. health agency urged all countries to “push this virus back,” a call to action reinforced by figures showing about 17 times as many new infections outside China as in it. The virus has infected nearly 98,000 people and killed over 3,300.

“This is not a drill. This is not the time for giving up. This is not a time for excuses. This is a time for pulling out all the stops,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva. “Countries have been planning for scenarios like this for decades. Now is the time to act on those plans.”

As Chinese manufacturers gradually reopened their factories, anti-virus barriers went up elsewhere.

In Italy, the epicenter of Europe’s outbreak, workers in latex gloves pinned “closed” notices on school gates, enforcing a 10-day shutdown of the education system. Italy’s sports-mad fans are also barred from stadiums until April 3.

A government decree that took effect Thursday urged the country’s famously demonstrative citizens to stay at least 1 meter (3 feet) apart from each other, placed restrictions on visiting nursing homes and urged the elderly not to go outside unless absolutely necessary.

That directive appeared to be widely ignored, as school closures nationwide left many Italian children in the care of their grandparents. Parks in Rome overflowed with young and old, undercutting government efforts to shield older Italians from the virus that hits the elderly harder than others. Italy has the world’s oldest population after Japan.

“It’s an absolute paradox!” said Mauro Benedetti, a 73-year-old retiree called upon to watch his grandson. “They tell us to stay home. How can we help our kids and grandkids at the same time?”

“Grandparents are now at risk,” he said.

Italy’s death toll climbed Thursday to 148, and its confirmed cases to 3,858.

Iran, which has registered 107 virus deaths, also closed schools and universities and introduced checkpoints to limit travel between major cities. Iranians were urged to reduce their use of paper money. Iranian state TV also reported that Hossein Sheikholeslam, a 68-year-old diplomat who was an adviser to Iran’s foreign minister, had died of the virus.

Amid the string of bad news, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani urged state television to offer “happier” programs to entertain those stuck at home.

Brian Hook, the U..S. special representative for Iran, said the United States offered humanitarian assistance to help Iran deal with its outbreak but “the regime rejected the offer.” He said the offer would stand.

Virus fears also affected the joyful Indian celebration of Holi, in which Hindu revelers celebrate the arrival of spring with bursts of color, including bright powders smeared on faces. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other leaders said they wouldn’t attend Holi events and the Holi Moo Festival in New Delhi was canceled.

In the United States, where 12 have died from the virus, hundreds were placed in self-quarantines due to cases in a New York suburb. A suburban Seattle school district with 22,000 students announced it would close for up to two weeks because of coronavirus concerns and Seattle’s normally clogged highways were nearly vacant for Thursday’s morning commute as large tech employers like Amazon encouraged employees to work from home.

Off the coast of California, a cruise ship carrying about 3,500 people was ordered to stay put until passengers and crew could be tested because a traveler from its previous voyage died and another two were infected. A helicopter delivered test kits to the ship, which has people aboard with flu-like symptoms — lowering the kits by rope to the 951-foot (290-meter) Grand Princess

Financial markets remained volatile, as investors continued to weigh the size of the epidemic’s dent on the global economy. Outbreak fears led to a sharp U.S. stock selloff, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling 969 points, or 3.6 percent, nearly wiping out gains from a day earlier. Analysts said more yo-yo moves on global markets are likely while new infections accelerate.

The OPEC oil cartel called for a deep production cut to keep crude prices from falling further as disruption to global business from the coronavirus slashes demand from air travel and industry — deciding Thursday to push for a cut of 1.5 million barrels a day, or about 1.5% of total world supply.

Across the globe, travelers faced ever-greater disruptions, as countries sought to keep the virus out. But South Africa confirmed its first case Thursday, becoming the seventh African nation to report infections. Britain and Switzerland reported their first coronavirus deaths.

“The virus doesn’t care about race and belief or color. It is attacking us all, equally,” said Ian MacKay, who studies viruses at the University of Queensland in Australia.

The outlook for the travel industry was increasingly grim. The International Air Transport Association said the outbreak could cost airlines as much as $113 billion in lost revenue. The struggling British airline Flybe collapsed Thursday amid sinking demand.

Australia, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates were among the countries banning entry from people coming from countries that had outbreaks.

Germany’s Lufthansa and its subsidiaries Austrian Airlines and Swiss said they will cancel all flights to and from Israel for three weeks starting Sunday after Israeli authorities announced tough restrictions on travelers from several countries because of the new virus.

Palestinian officials closed the storied Church of the Nativity in the biblical city of Bethlehem indefinitely, weeks ahead of the busy Easter holiday.

Japan said visitors from China and South Korea would face a two-week quarantine at a government facility and be barred from public transit. Sri Lankans arriving from Italy, South Korea and Iran will be quarantined at a hospital once used for leprosy patients.

In China, where hospitals were releasing hundreds of recovered patients, officials reported 139 new infection cases and 31 more deaths. Overall, China has reported 80,409 cases and 3,012 deaths, and authorities say about 6,000 people remained hospitalized in serious condition.

A state visit to Japan by Chinese President Xi Jinping was postponed. It was to have been the first for a Chinese leader since 2008.

___

Sedensky is an AP National Writer. Leicester reported from Paris. Contributing to this report were Kim Tong-Hyung and Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul, South Korea; Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo; Bharatha Mallawarachi in Colombo, Sri Lanka; Ken Moritsugu in Beijing; Aniruddha Ghosal and Ashok Sharma in New Delhi; Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Nicole Winfield in Rome, Geir Moulson in Berlin; Stan Choe in New York; Jamey Keaten in Geneva; Elaine Ganley in Paris, and Danica Kirka in London.

This article originally appeared on Common Dreams.

Public health advocates, experts, and others are demanding that the federal government cover coronavirus testing and all related costs after several reports detailed how Americans in recent weeks have been saddled with exorbitant bills following medical evaluations.

Sarah Kliff of the New York Times reported Saturday that Pennsylvania native Frank Wucinski “found a pile of medical bills” totaling $3,918 waiting for him and his three-year-old daughter after they were released from government-mandated quarantine at Marine Corps Air Station in Miramar, California.

“My question is why are we being charged for these stays, if they were mandatory and we had no choice in the matter?” asked Wucinski, who was evacuated by the U.S. government last month from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak.

“I assumed it was all being paid for,” Wucinski told the Times. “We didn’t have a choice. When the bills showed up, it was just a pit in my stomach, like, ‘How do I pay for this?’”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is not billing patients for coronavirus testing, according to Business Insider. “But there are other charges you might have to pay, depending on your insurance plan, or lack thereof,” Business Insider noted. “A hospital stay in itself could be costly and you would likely have to pay for tests for other viruses or conditions.”

Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told the Times that “the most important rule of public health is to gain the cooperation of the population.”

Congress needs to immediately pass a bill appropriating funding to cover 100% of the cost of all coronavirus testing & care within the United States. We will not have a chance at containing it otherwise.@tedlieu – as my rep, can you please ensure this is brought up?

— William LeGate 🧢 (@williamlegate) March 2, 2020

In the case of the Wucinskis, Kliff reported that “the ambulance company that transported [them] charged the family $2,598 for taking them to the hospital.”

“An additional $90 in charges came from radiologists who read the patients’ X-ray scans and do not work for the hospital,” Kliff noted.

The CDC declined to respond when Kliff asked whether the federal government would cover the costs for patients like the Wucinskis.

The Intercept‘s Robert Mackey wrote last Friday that the Wucinskis’ situation spotlights “how the American government’s response to a public health emergency, like trying to contain a potential coronavirus epidemic, could be handicapped by relying on a system built around private hospitals and for-profit health insurance providers.”

We should be doing everything we can to encourage people with #COVIDー19 symptoms to come forward. Huge surprise medical bills is going to make sure people with symptoms don’t get tested. That is bad for everyone, regardless of if you are insured. https://t.co/KOUKTSFVzD

— Saikat Chakrabarti (@saikatc) March 1, 2020

Play this tape to the end and you find people not going to the hospital even if they’re really sick. The federal government needs to announce that they’ll pay for all of these bills https://t.co/HfyBFBXhja

— Scott Beggs (@scottmbeggs) March 2, 2020

Last week, the Miami Herald reported that Osmel Martinez Azcue “received a notice from his insurance company about a claim for $3,270” after he visited a local hospital fearing that he contracted coronavirus during a work trip to China.

“He went to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he said he was placed in a closed-off room,” according to the Herald. “Nurses in protective white suits sprayed some kind of disinfectant smoke under the door before entering, Azcue said. Then hospital staff members told him he’d need a CT scan to screen for coronavirus, but Azcue said he asked for a flu test first.”

Azcue tested positive for the flu and was discharged. “Azcue’s experience shows the potential cost of testing for a disease that epidemiologists fear may develop into a public health crisis in the U.S.,” the Herald noted.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, highlighted Azcue’s case in a tweet last Friday.

“The coronavirus reminds us that we are all in this together,” Sanders wrote. “We cannot allow Americans to skip doctor’s visits over outrageous bills. Everyone should get the medical care they need without opening their wallet—as a matter of justice and public health.”

Last week, as Common Dreams reported, Sanders argued that the coronavirus outbreak demonstrates the urgent need for Medicare for All.

The coronavirus reminds us that we are all in this together. We cannot allow Americans to skip doctor’s visits over outrageous bills.

Everyone should get the medical care they need without opening their wallet—as a matter of justice and public health. https://t.co/c4WQMDESHU

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) February 28, 2020

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. surged by more than two dozen over the weekend, bringing the total to 89 as the Trump administration continues to publicly downplay the severity of the outbreak.

Dr. Matt McCarthy, a staff physician at NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital, said in an appearance on CNBC‘s “Squawk Box” Monday morning that testing for the coronavirus is still not widely available.

“Before I came here this morning, I was in the emergency room seeing patients,” McCarthy said. “I still do not have a rapid diagnostic test available to me.”

“I’m here to tell you, right now, at one of the busiest hospitals in the country, I don’t have it at my finger tips,” added McCarthy. “I still have to make my case, plead to test people. This is not good. We know that there are 88 cases in the United States. There are going to be hundreds by middle of week. There’s going to be thousands by next week. And this is a testing issue.”

BEIJING — China reported 143 virus deaths and a dip in new cases Saturday while the head of the World Health Organization praised the country’s efforts to contain the new disease, saying they have “bought the world time” and that other nations must make the most of it.

France, meanwhile, reported Europe’s first death from the new virus, a Chinese tourist from Hubei province, where the disease emerged in December. The United States was preparing to fly home American passengers quarantined aboard a cruise ship in Japan.

China reported 2,641 new cases in the 24 hours through midnight Friday, raising its total to 66,492. Mainland China’s death toll rose to 1,523.

The number of new cases was down from the 5,090 in the previous 24-hour period after authorities changed the basis for counting patients. Numbers of new cases have fluctuated, fueling both optimism the disease might be under control and warnings that such hopes are premature.

The U.N. health agency’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, urged governments to step up their efforts to prepare for the virus, saying “it’s impossible to predict which direction this epidemic will take.”

Tedros told a gathering of international foreign and security policy leaders in Germany on Saturday that WHO is encouraged there has not yet been widespread transmission outside China and that “the steps China has taken to contain the outbreak at its source appear to have bought the world time.”

“We’re encouraged that an international team of experts is now on the ground working closely with Chinese counterparts to understand the outbreak,” Tedros told the Munich Security Conference.

But he said the agency is “concerned by the continued increase in the number of cases in China,” and by reports about the number of health workers who have been infected or died.

“We’re concerned by the lack of urgency in funding the response from the international community,” Tedros said.

“We must use the window of opportunity we have to intensify our preparedness,” he added. “China has bought the world time. We don’t know how much time.”

China’s government suspended most access to Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak, on Jan. 23. Restrictions have expanded to cities with a total of 60 million people in the broadest anti-disease measures ever imposed. Restaurants, shops and other businesses nationwide were ordered to close.

The Lunar New Year holiday was extended to keep factories and offices closed, but now officials have been ordered to revive business activity as economic losses mount.

Authorities have announced measures to try to curb new infections as millions of workers crowd into planes, trains and buses to return to densely populated cities.

Under the new measures, people returning to Beijing will have to isolate themselves at home for 14 days, according to a notice published Friday. It said people who fail to comply will face legal consequences but gave no details.

COVID-19, a disease stemming from a new form of coronavirus, has spread to more than two dozen countries.

The 80-year-old Chinese tourist who died in France was hospitalized Jan. 25 with a lung infection, according to Health Minister Agnes Buzyn. His daughter also fell ill but authorities say she is expected to recover.

In Japan, the U.S. Embassy said a chartered aircraft will arrive late Sunday to fly home Americans aboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess in Yokohama, near Tokyo. The passengers have been quarantined aboard the ship since Feb. 5, but they will face another two-week quarantine after arriving in the United States.

Those who return to the U.S. will fly to Travis Air Force Base in California and some will fly onward to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, said an embassy statement. It said no one with symptoms would be allowed aboard the flight.

Hong Kong’s government said its residents aboard the cruise ship also will be flown home as soon as possible, and they too would face a second quarantine.

So far, 285 people from the cruise ship have tested positive for the virus. Japan’s Health Ministry allowed 11 passengers to disembark Friday. It said passengers above 80 years of age, those with underlying medical conditions and those who stayed in windowless cabins during the 14-day quarantine could move to a facility onshore.

On Thursday, the number of new cases reported by authorities in Hubei spiked to 15,152, mainly because China has changed the way it is counting. That included 13,332 that were diagnosed with doctors’ analyses and lung imaging instead of the previous standard of laboratory testing. Health authorities said the new method would facilitate earlier treatment.

Nine more temporary hospitals have opened in gymnasiums and other public buildings, with 6,960 beds in Hubei, the National Health Commission announced. It said 5,606 patients with mild symptoms were being treated.

The ruling Communist Party is trying to restore public confidence following complaints leaders in Wuhan suppressed information about the disease. The party faced similar criticism after the 2002-03 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

The party should “strengthen areas of weakness and close up loopholes” after the epidemic exposed “shortcomings and deficiencies,” President Xi Jinping said at a meeting of party leaders Friday, according to state media.

Extended closures of factories and businesses prevented a flood of travel after the Lunar New Year holiday, normally the Chinese industry’s busiest season, officials said at a news conference.

Total volume of daily travelers is down 80% from last year, according to a deputy transportation minister, Liu Xiaoming.

Business losses are so severe that forecasters have cut their outlooks for China’s economic growth.

The state-owned banking industry has provided more than 537 billion yuan ($77 billion) in credit to industries such as retail, catering and tourism that have been hurt most, according to Liang Tao, vice chairman of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission.

This weekend, a team of WHO experts were due to begin a mission in China.

A WHO official, speaking at the conference in Munich, defended China’s handling of the outbreak.

“Some of the rhetoric for me has not been helpful, not been helpful at all. China has a strong public health and health system,” said Dr. Michael Ryan, WHO’s chief of emergencies. “I think we as the global community need to change our narrative if we’re going to work successfully with China and other countries to stop this disease.”

Associated Press writers Geir Moulson in Munich, Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and Elaine Ganley in Paris contributed to this report.

BEIJING — Chinese health authorities urged people in the city of Wuhan to avoid crowds and public gatherings, after warning that a new viral illness that has infected more than 400 people and killed at least 17 could spread further.

The appeal came as the World Health Organization convened a group of independent experts to advise whether the outbreak should be declared a global emergency.

The number of new cases has risen sharply in China, the center of the outbreak. Seventeen people have died, all in Hubei province, since the outbreak emerged in its provincial capital of Wuhan late last month, officials announced Wednesday night. They said the province has confirmed 444 cases there.

“There has already been human-to-human transmission and infection of medical workers,” Li Bin, deputy director of the National Health Commission, said at a news conference with health experts. “Evidence has shown that the disease has been transmitted through the respiratory tract and there is the possibility of viral mutation.”

The illness comes from a newly identified type of coronavirus, a family of viruses that can cause the common cold as well as more serious illnesses such as the SARS outbreak that spread from China to more than a dozen countries in 2002-2003 and killed about 800 people. Some experts have drawn parallels between the new coronavirus and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, another coronavirus that does not spread very easily among humans and is thought to be carried by camels.

But WHO’s Asia office tweeted this week that “there may now be sustained human-to-human transmission,” which raises the possibility that the epidemic is spreading more easily and may no longer require an animal source to spark infections, as officials initially reported.

Authorities in Thailand on Wednesday confirmed four cases, a Thai national and three Chinese visitors. Japan, South Korea, the United States and Taiwan have all reported one case each. All of the illnesses were of people from Wuhan or who recently traveled there.

“The situation is under control here,” Thai Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul told reporters, saying there are no reports of the infection spreading to others. “We checked all of them: taxi drivers, people who wheeled the wheelchairs for the patients, doctors and nurses who worked around them.”

Macao, a former Portuguese colony that is a semi-autonomous Chinese city, reported one case Wednesday.

Some experts said they believe the threshold for the outbreak to be declared an international emergency had been reached.

Dr. Peter Horby, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at Oxford University, said there were three criteria for such a determination: the outbreak must be an extraordinary event, there must be a risk of international spread and a globally coordinated response is required.

“In my opinion, those three criteria have been met,” he said.

In response to the U.S. case, President Donald Trump said: “We do have a plan, and we think it’s going to be handled very well. We’ve already handled it very well. … we’re in very good shape, and I think China’s in very good shape also.”

In Wuhan, pharmacies limited sales of face masks to one package per customer as people lined up to buy them. Residents said they were not overly concerned as long as they took preventive measures.

“As an adult, I am not too worried about the disease,” Yang Bin, the father of a 7-year-old, said after buying a mask. “I think we are more worried about our kids. … It would be unacceptable to the parents if they got sick.”

Medical workers in protective suits could be seen carrying supplies and stretchers into Wuhan Medical Treatment Center, where some of the patients are being treated.

Travel agencies that organize trips to North Korea said the country has banned foreign tourists because of the outbreak. Most tourists to North Korea are either Chinese or travel to the country through neighboring China. North Korea also closed its borders in 2003 during the SARS scare.

Other countries have stepped up screening measures for travelers from China, especially those arriving from Wuhan. Worries have been heightened by the Lunar New Year holiday rush, when millions of Chinese travel at home and abroad.

Officials said it was too early to compare the new virus with SARS or MERS, or Middle East respiratory syndrome, in terms of how lethal it might be. They attributed the spike in new cases to improvements in detection and monitoring.

“We are still in the process of learning more about this disease,” Gao Fu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control, said at the news conference.

Gao said officials are working on the assumption that the outbreak resulted from human exposure to wild animals being sold illegally at a food market in Wuhan and that the virus is mutating. Mutations can make it spread faster or make people sicker.

Jiao Yahui, a health commission official, said the disease “will continue to develop. It has developed different features compared with the early stage, and the prevention and precautionary measures need to change accordingly.”

One veteran of the SARS outbreak said that while there are some similarities in the new virus — namely its origins in China and the link to animals — the current outbreak appears much milder.

Dr. David Heymann, who headed WHO’s global response to SARS in 2003, said the new virus appears dangerous for older people with other health conditions, but doesn’t seem nearly as infectious as SARS.

“It looks like it doesn’t transmit through the air very easily and probably transmits through close contact,” he said. “That was not the case with SARS.”

Health officials confirmed earlier this week that the disease can be spread between humans after finding two infected people in Guangdong province in southern China who had not been to Wuhan.

Fifteen medical workers also tested positive for the virus, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission has said. Fourteen of them — one doctor and 13 nurses — were infected by a patient who had been hospitalized for neurosurgery but also had the coronavirus.

“This is a very profound lesson, which is that there must not be any cracks in our prevention and control,” Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang said about the infections of the medical workers in an interview with state broadcaster CCTV.

Experts worry in particular when health workers are sickened in outbreaks by new viruses, because it can suggest the disease is becoming more transmissible and because spread in hospitals can often amplify the epidemic.

The Lunar New Year is a time when many Chinese return to their hometowns to visit family. Li, the health commission official, said measures were being taken to monitor and detect infected people from Wuhan, and that people should avoid going to the city, and people from the city should stay put for now.

Associated Press journalists Dake Kang and Emily Wang in Wuhan, China; Tassanee Vejpongsa in Bangkok, Thailand; Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul, South Korea; Maria Cheng in London; Yanan Wang in Beijing and Alice Fung in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.