Paul Harvey, Radio Legend, Dies at 90

ABC Radio Network spokesman Louis Adams said Harvey died Saturday at his winter home in Phoenix, Ariz., surrounded by family. No cause of death was immediately available.Harvey, who was born and raised in Tulsa, Okla., was married to the late Lynne Cooper of St. Louis who died less than a year ago. They had one son, Paul Jr.

He was a news commentator and talk-show pioneer whose staccato style made him one of the country’s most familiar voices. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush in 2005.

Known for his resonant voice and trademark delivery of “The Rest of the Story,” Harvey had been heard nationally since 1951, when he began his “News and Comment” for ABC Radio Networks.

In a statement, ABC Radio Networks President Jim Robinson calls Harvey “one of the most gifted and beloved broadcasters in our nation’s history.”

He began his radio career in 1933 in Tulsa, while he was still in high school, his Web site said.

Paul Harvey News consisted of more than 1,200 radio stations and 400 Armed Forces Network stations that broadcast around the world and 300 newspapers, his biography reported.

A virus that weakened his vocal cord forced him off the air in 2001. But he returned to work in Chicago and was still active as he passed his 90th birthday.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,502645,00.html

American taste for soft toilet roll ‘worse than driving Hummers’

We keep hearing that the “era of big government is back.” Now we can say that the “era of soft toilet paper must end.” My favorite line in this story – “softness equals ecological destruction.” – gt

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The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country’s love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public’s insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom.

“This is a product that we use for less than three seconds and the ecological consequences of manufacturing it from trees is enormous,” said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council.

“Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution.” Making toilet paper has a significant impact because of chemicals used in pulp manufacture and cutting down forests.

A campaign by Greenpeace seeks to raise consciousness among Americans about the environmental costs of their toilet habits and counter an aggressive new push by the paper industry giants to market so-called luxury brands.

More than 98% of the toilet roll sold in America comes from virgin forests, said Hershkowitz. In Europe and Latin America, up to 40% of toilet paper comes from recycled products. Greenpeace this week launched a cut-out-and-keep ecological ranking of toilet paper products.

“We have this myth in the US that recycled is just so low quality, it’s like cardboard and is impossible to use,” said Lindsey Allen, the forestry campaigner of Greenpeace.

The campaigning group says it produced the guide to counter an aggressive marketing push by the big paper product makers in which celebrities talk about the comforts of luxury brands of toilet paper and tissue.

Those brands, which put quilting and pockets of air between several layers of paper, are especially damaging to the environment.

Paper manufacturers such as Kimberly-Clark have identified luxury brands such as three-ply tissues or tissues infused with hand lotion as the fastest-growing market share in a highly competitive industry. Its latest television advertisements show a woman caressing tissue infused with hand lotion.

The New York Times reported a 40% rise in sales of luxury brands of toilet paper in 2008. Paper companies are anxious to keep those percentages up, even as the recession bites. And Reuters reported that Kimberly-Clark spent $25m in its third quarter on advertising to persuade Americans against trusting their bottoms to cheaper brands.

But Kimberly-Clark, which touts its green credentials on its website, rejects the idea that it is pushing destructive products on an unwitting American public.

Dave Dixon, a company spokesman, said toilet paper and tissue from recycled fibre had been on the market for years. If Americans wanted to buy them, they could.

“For bath tissue Americans in particular like the softness and strength that virgin fibres provides,” Dixon said. “It’s the quality and softness the consumers in America have come to expect.”

Longer fibres in virgin wood are easier to lay out and fluff up for a softer tissue. Dixon said the company used products from sustainbly farmed forests in Canada.

Americans already consume vastly more paper than any other country – about three times more per person than the average European, and 100 times more than the average person in China.

Barely a third of the paper products sold in America are from recycled sources – most of it comes from virgin forests.

“I really do think it is overwhelmingly an American phenomenom,” said Hershkowitz. “People just don’t understand that softness equals ecological destruction.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/26/toilet-roll-america

Deadly bacteria defy drugs, alarming doctors

A new category of bugs becomes more resistant to treatment, and their toll — which already includes a Brazilian beauty queen — is expected to rise.

By Mary Engel
February 17, 2009

When Ruth Burns had surgery to relieve a pinched nerve in her back, the operation was supposed to be an “in-and-out thing,” recalled her daughter, Kacia Warren.

But Burns developed pneumonia and was put on a ventilator. Five days later, she was discharged — only to be rushed by her daughter to the hospital hours later, disoriented and in alarming pain.

Seventeen days after the surgery, the 67-year-old nurse was dead.

Burns had developed meningitis — an infection of the fluid that surrounds the spinal cord and brain. The culprit wasAcinetobacter baumannii, a bug that preys on the weak in hospitals. Worse, it was a multi-drug-resistant strain.

Acinetobacter doesn’t garner as many headlines as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, the dangerous superbug better known as MRSA. But a January report by the Infectious Diseases Society of America warned that drug-resistant strains of Acinetobacter baumannii and two other microbes — Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Klebsiella pneumoniae – could soon produce a toll to rival MRSA’s.

The three bugs belong to a large category of bacteria called “gram-negative” that are especially hard to fight because they are wrapped in a double membrane and harbor enzymes that chew up many antibiotics. As dangerous as MRSA is, some antibiotics can still treat it, and more are in development, experts say.

But the drugs once used to treat gram-negative bacteria are becoming ineffective, and finding effective new ones is especially challenging.

“We’re literally running out of drugs to treat gram-negatives,” said Dr. Brad Spellberg, an infectious disease specialist at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. “And there is nothing in the pipeline right now.”

Exact numbers are hard to come by, because infections by these three bacteria are not reportable by law. But using 2002 data voluntarily reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from about 300 large, mostly urban hospitals, the Infectious Diseases Society of America identified about 104,000 gram-negative infections that were resistant to at least some antibiotics, roughly the same as the 102,000 MRSA infections found that year.

A class of broad-spectrum antibiotics known as carbapenems have been the drug of last resort for gram-negative bugs.

“The carbapenems are . . . the best gram-negative drugs we have,” said Dr. Helen Boucher of Tufts University, an infectious disease specialist. “These bugs have found a way to make an enzyme that dissolves these drugs. That means our best gun is ineffective.”

As the drugs fail, doctors find themselves as a last resort turning to older, more toxic ones such as colistin, largely abandoned because of the severe side effects: kidney damage and deafness. At one East Coast hospital, the number of orders doctors made for colistin went from one in 2001 to 68 in 2007, Boucher said.

“This is a drug that’s like poison,” she said.

For the most part, gram-negative bacteria are hospital scourges — harmless to healthy people but ready to infect already-damaged tissue. The bacteria steal into the body via ventilator tubes, catheters, open wounds and burns, causing pneumonia, urinary tract infections, and bone, joint and bloodstream infections.

Pseudomonas is widely found in soil and water, and rarely causes problems except in hospitals.

Klebsiella causes a sudden, severe pneumonia, mostly in people already suffering from ailments such as diabetes or chronic lung disease. Its telltale sign is a blood-tinged sputum dubbed “currant jelly.” It can also cause urinary tract and abdominal infections.

Acinetobacter generally causes wound and bloodstream infections. It has become notorious among veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are believed to have contracted it in field hospitals and carried it to veterans hospitals in the U.S.

The first U.S. outbreak of Klebsiella resistant to all known antibiotics occurred at a Brooklyn hospital in 2000. The so-called pan-resistant strain has since been found along the Eastern Seaboard and throughout the Midwest.

A December report of Israeli hospitals found mortality rates from pan-resistant Klebsiella to be 44%.

Doctors have no doubt that pan-resistant Klebsiella will show up in California and other states. California hospitals are already encountering strains that, although not resistant to all known antibiotics, are resistant to many. Harbor-UCLA had two cases of highly-drug-resistant Klebsiella last year, Spellberg said.

Similarly resistant strains of Pseudomonas and Acinetobacter also are on the rise, as are resistant strains of Escherichia coli, another gram-negative bacterium.

These four microbes are among the six leading causes of infections in hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare settings, the Infectious Diseases Society of America reported.

The bacteria have remained largely off the public’s radar, Boucher said, because they affect mostly the elderly or ill. But they do not always limit themselves that way. Drug-resistant Pseudomonas was behind the widely publicized Jan. 24 death of Brazilian beauty queen Mariana Bridi, 20, of sepsis — a bloodstream infection.

The health department in Espirito Santo, Brazil, said what began as a urinary tract infection spread rapidly.

Bridi died after doctors had tried to contain the rampaging infection by amputating her feet and hands and removing her kidneys.

http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-sci-badbugs17-2009feb17,0,5079716.story

Householders to be charged for each flush of toilet

From Australia…

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HOUSEHOLDERS would be charged for each flush under a radical new toilet tax designed to help beat the drought.

The scheme would replace the current system, which sees sewage charges based on a home’s value – not its waste water output.

CSIRO Policy and Economic Research Unit member Jim McColl and Adelaide University Water Management Professor Mike Young plan to promote the move to state and federal politicians and experts across the country.

“It would encourage people to reduce their sewage output by taking shorter showers,recycling washing machine water or connecting rainwater tanks to internal plumbingto reduce their charges,”Professor Young said.

“Some people may go as far as not flushing their toilet as often because the less sewage you produce, the less sewage rate you pay.”

Professor Young said sewer pricing needed to be addressed as part of the response to the water crisis.

“People have been frightened to talk about sewage because it is yucky stuff, but it is critically important to address it, as part of the whole water cycle,” he said.

“We are looking at reforming the way sewage is priced and this plan will drive interest in the different ways water is used throughout Australia.”

The reform would see the abolition of the property-based charge with one based on a pay-as-you-go rate and a small fixed annual fee to cover the cost of meter readings and pipeline maintenance, Professor Young said.

The pay-as-you-go rate would provide financial savings for those who reduce their waste water output.

Professor Young and Mr McColl will promote the plan nationally through their Droplet, a newsletter whose 6000 subscribers include state and federal politicians, water policy specialists and economists around the country.

Professor Young said a sewage pricing plan, like the one proposed, was already used in the US.

“In places like the City of Bellaire, Texas (a virtual suburb of Houston), they do it and the system seems to work,” he said.

“As nearly all of (the homes in) mainland Australia’s cities and towns already have water meters, introduction of a volumetric charge, such as that used in the City of Bellaire, would not be difficult to implement.”

Mr McColl said the plan had to be viewed in the context of “the crucial issues surrounding water resources” in Australia.

“We should be prepared for the (drought) situation we are going through now to occur again, as well as the potential impact of climate change, so we have to act now for the future,” he said.

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,24659589-5005369,00.html