After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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Factory-farm drug dealers
Independent researchers at the Union of Concerned Scientists recently issued a report revealing that livestock are being fed even more massive doses of antibiotics than the drug companies and industrialized agribusiness corporations have admitted.
The drugs are not used to treat animal diseases, but simply as a cheap way to fatten the animals. While 3 million pounds of antibiotics are used each year to treat humans, the UCS reports that industry feeds 3.7 million pounds to cattle, 10.3 million pounds to pigs, and 10.5 million to poultry.
The nontherapeutic use of antibiotics means fatter profits for drug and livestock producers, but it poses a real danger to you and your family's health. Such overdosing means that bacteria with a natural resistance to a given antibiotic survive in the animals, becoming strains of "superbugs" that can't be killed by that antibiotic.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control report that salmonella bacteria are now being found with immunity to the antibiotic commonly used to treat the most severe cases of salmonella food poisoning—an antibiotic related to those used to fatten livestock.
To stop this dangerous profiteering, call the UCS: 202-332-0900.