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I was off-line for a week with family issues, and while I was gone, news broke out. (It senses your absence, news does. This is the real reason why coups and major foodborne outbreaks happen in August.)
So while I dive into the bigger stories that seem to be happening -- and get some fun summer stuff lined up -- here's a quick recap of things worth noticing:
On Sunday, the Washington Posteditorialized on the need to rein in antibiotic overuse in agriculture:
A few days before, so did the journal Nature, on the need for better data that could help track the evolution of resistance:
That editorial accompanied a commentary by Frank Aarestrup, longtime antibiotic-resistance researcher in Denmark, which relates the country's experience reducing on-farm antibiotic use. His re-telling, using up-to-date statistics, explodes the myth that animal welfare and meat production in Denmark suffered after their ban. They did not.
Meanwhile, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization announced that it would take a hard look at growth promoters during the meeting this week of the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Programme. The website and agenda for the meeting are utterly impenetrable -- annoyingly typical for WHO and UN productions -- but you can follow along on Twitter at #codex2012. And the European Open Science Forum in Dublin, which happens next week, has also announced that it will hold a session on antibiotic resistance in human medicine and agriculture; they're going to look particularly at the role of innovation (in drug development and rapid tests, for instance) and their hashtag, debuting July 12, is #uselessantibiotics.
Finally, if you're short of summer reading, take a look at the series of articles launched two weeks ago by PLoS Medicine, "Big Food." The opening commentary, written by Marion Nestle of NYU and David Stuckler of the University of Cambridge, underlies points that many of you will take for granted: global food and beverage multi-nationals are responsible for increasing consumption worldwide of sugar-sweeted beverages and highly processed foods, and political systems are unwilling to challenge them. Then, however, they smartly turn the examination back onto the public health community they spring from, asking whether the profession has done all it can, and answering No:
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