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jonbarron / CC

“Super Freak.” Super Target. Superbad. I’d say the wedding reception classic, shopper’s wonderland, and hit flick are all worth cheering. But “superbugs,” a la swine flu, salmonella, and E. coli? Not so much.

These drug-resistant infections contaminate not only our air and waterways but also America’s meat supply, which is also greatly responsible for creating them. The practice of feeding antibiotics to crowded factory farmed pigs, chickens, and cows started in the ’90s and has since skyrocketed—70 percent of the antibiotics in the U.S. last year were used on factory farms. Old killers like malaria, tuberculosis, and staph are making comebacks, stronger than ever. And thanks to the overuse of antibiotics, more than 65,000 people died last year from drug-resistant infections.

Health and government officials everywhere, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the White House to the World Health Organization, are worried. This alarming article by the Associate Press, which I urge you to read and forward, had so many mind-boggling stats and quotes that I was tempted to cut and paste it in its entirety. Instead, I lifted the following quotes:

“This is a living breathing problem, it’s the big bad wolf and it’s knocking at our door.”
—Dr. Vance Fowler, Infectious disease specialist, Duke University

“If we’re not careful with antibiotics and the programs to administer them, we’re going to be in a post antibiotic era.”
—Dr. Thomas Frieden, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

“If you mixed an antibiotic in your child’s cereal, people would think you’re crazy.”
—Rep. Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat from New York

How can you keep superbugs at bay? Start by going vegan. There’s no doubt that you’ll save animal lives—and better protect your own.

Posted by Karin Bennett

To get the someone you don’t ever bonk to pay the most! Frontline Nonnegative is one of the superior products out there for getting rid of fleas and ticks from your cats or dogs. It also complex on kittens and puppies! It is nearly 100% strong and lasts for between a period to six weeks. [...]

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Happy New Year.

To check out the archives of past strips, click here.

One thing that I think is overlooked a lot is the psychology of eating.  This is something I am working on in my own life.

Experts say:  reduce your caloric intake to lose weight.  Eat until you're not hungry, don't go for full.

So why is this so damn hard for so many people?

We have built a society where there are far more external cues for hunger than internal cues.  In other words, we put a great amount of emphasis on judging hunger from the time on a clock, seeing food (think advertising, food network), and smelling food.  Food is everywhere.  Food is culture.  Food is the topic of conversation in many domains.  Food is intimate.  All of these external cues drown out what our bodies are telling us about our nutritional needs.

Another person mentioned this too – most of us are dehydrated and confuse our need for water with hunger.  Perhaps if we got better at listening to our bodies, this wouldn't happen so much.  Still, those external cues take over, and all of a sudden, we are tricked into thinking we need a fat veggie burger when all we need is a glass of the wet stuff.

I've been recommended meditation as a way of becoming more aware of what my body truly needs.  Still, life doesn't always offer time for anything but snap decisions.  The only way…

veganrepresent / CC

The following post originally appeared in Florida’s Bradenton Herald.

Who would you save—your child or your dog? This is the phony choice lobbed at those of us who advocate for the replacement of animal tests with non-animal testing methods. Fortunately, you don’t have to choose.

Under pressure from citizens concerned about exposure to hazardous chemicals, Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are now considering overhauling toxic-chemical regulations. In more than a decade—and despite killing many millions of animals in chemical toxicity tests—the EPA has failed abysmally to safeguard the public by pulling dangerous substances off the market. The examples are legion and well documented.

For instance, the link between benzene—a gasoline component and solvent widely used in the preparation of drugs and plastics—and human leukemia was established as early as 1928, yet dozens of subsequent animal studies failed to replicate benzene’s cancer-causing effects. Only during the late 1980s were researchers finally able to induce cancer in animals by overdosing them with benzene—and our government is still testing benzene on animals.

Exposure to arsenic has been implicated in increased cancer risk for nearly 150 years. Smelter workers exposed to arsenic in the air are at higher risk for developing lung cancer, and population studies show that arsenic in drinking water can also cause cancer. Yet regulation was delayed for decades while thousands of animals were killed in experiments that attempted to reproduce the effects already seen in humans. Reviews published as late as 1977 reported that animal experiments had failed to produce evidence supporting a link between arsenic exposure and increased cancer risk. It was not until the late 1980s that researchers finally succeeded in reproducing the cancer-causing effects of arsenic in animals.

Updating our chemical management laws is important for protecting human health and the environment. But in order to be effective, we must acknowledge that the current way of testing chemicals for toxic effects uses methods that are decades old, condemns thousands of animals per chemical and provides information that is not very useful for regulating chemicals. Much has happened in the fields of biology and toxicology in the past few decades, and it is imperative that we use all of our current understanding and technology to test chemicals. In addition to providing more relevant and useful information, the modern methods also use many fewer animals—perhaps even no animals.
With tens of thousands of chemicals on the market and more entering it every day, it’s now widely recognized, even by regulators, that “it is simply not possible with all the animals in the world to go through chemicals in the blind way we have at the present time, and reach credible conclusions about the hazards to human health” (Dr. Joshua Lederberg, Nobel laureate in medicine).

The National Academy of Sciences, the government’s own scientific arm, released a report in 2007 confirming that scientific advances can “transform toxicity testing from a system based on whole-animal testing to one founded primarily on in vitro (non-animal) methods.” Such an approach will improve efficiency, speed and prediction for humans while cutting costs and reducing animal suffering. Indeed, high-tech methods are the only way thousands of chemicals can be tested.

Any update of the laws regulating toxic chemicals must include measures to ensure that the most modern testing methods are used. It is critical that the science underlying chemical safety assessments be updated from the crude animal tests developed around the time of World War I to the 21st century technology that is now available. Without this shift in science, chemical management reform of the kind being proposed by the EPA and others is logistically impossible.

So, your child or your dog? We now can—and should—save both.

Posted by Jessica Sandler, director of regulatory testing