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A drying Great Salt Lake spells trouble for Utah

by TiaZABcztkkghe Posted on March 5, 2016

Mud flats sit where water used to be next to the Great Salt Lake Marina. REUTERS/George Frey

A drying Great Salt Lake spells trouble for Utah

By on 5 Mar 2016 7:00 amcommentsShare

This story was originally published by CityLab and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Great Salt Lake is drying up, thanks to 150 years of human diversions from the rivers that feed it. That’s the takeaway of a white paper released by a team of Utah biologists and engineers. And if those diversions continue ramping up, as a bill working its way through the Utah legislature proposes, the waterbody may face a withering fate similar to other dried-up salt lakes around the world.

The namesake of Utah’s capital city, the Great Salt Lake is the the state’s defining geographic feature and one of its economic anchors. A 2012 report by the Great Salt Lake Council estimated that the total economic output of the waterbody at $1.32 billion, between mineral extraction from the lake, brine shrimp egg production (used in aquaculture all over the world), and recreation that takes place in and around it. It also serves as an essential migration flyway for millions of birds each year.

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But the lake, which approached record-low water levels last year, is under threat. According to the Utah researchers’ calculations, since the mid-19th century, consistent reductions from the rivers that feed the lake have caused the lake’s elevation to drop by 11 feet, lose roughly half its volume, increase the lake’s salinity, and expose approximately 50 percent of the lake bed.

Those numbers are unrelated to natural fluctuations over wet and dry periods, including the current drought. Since the lake is a closed basin, the only way water leaves it is through evaporation. That makes it fairly simple to calculate just how much water has been lost to agriculture and urban growth.

Utah State University

Currently, the Utah Senate is debating a bill that would fund a number of water infrastructure projects, including the controversial Bear River Development Project, which would dam and divert more water from one of the Great Salt Lake’s main feeds. Supporters of the project say it’s designed to support the state’s growing population and water consumption needs. But the researchers estimate that the project would lead to an additional 8.5 inch drop in the Great Salt Lake’s elevation, and another 30 square miles of exposed lake bed.

Not only does that spell trouble for the lake’s economic and ecological importance, a dried-up lake would ramp up dust storms in the Salt Lake City area, which already suffers some of the worst air pollution in the country. It doesn’t take much searching to find an example of how damaging such withered lakes are for the people around them. In nearby California, the researchers write:

Diversions from the Owens River for the city of Los Angeles desiccated Owens Lake by 1926, causing it to become one of the largest sources of particulate matter (PM10) pollution in the country. This dust affects about 40,000 permanent residents in the region, causing asthma and other health problems.

Lake Urmia in Iran and the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are other examples of how massive water diversions from closed basins for human uses can create environmental health disasters.

To meet the needs of a growing population, and to protect their future health, the researchers stress that Utah policymakers should focus on taking less water, not more, from the Great Salt Lake — especially when it comes to agriculture, which consumes the majority of all that diverted water. Like so many states throughout the arid American West, Utah has to weigh its future against a history of overdrawn resources.

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A drying Great Salt Lake spells trouble for Utah

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Why the EPA’s recent pesticide battle could be a big deal

by Aisha69O9866892 Posted on March 4, 2016

Why the EPA’s recent pesticide battle could be a big deal

By on 4 Mar 2016commentsShare

A battle between the U.S. government and a chemical giant revealed a fundamental flaw in the way we control pesticides — one that could be allowing thousands of unsafe chemicals to go undetected.

In a rare show of regulatory muscle, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a Notice of Intent on Tuesday, announcing that it planned to cancel the sale of products that included a pesticide called flubendiamide as an active ingredient. The EPA has been monitoring these products, manufactured mainly by the company Bayer CropScience LP (and also by the smaller Japanese company Nichino America, Inc.), over the past few years. Studies have shown the pesticide was breaking down into a different, more deadly compound that was killing mussels and other invertebrates that fish rely on for food — a problem that the agency deemed serious enough to warrant the banning of all products of its kind.

The EPA’s move to ban the products is a novel one, and could signal a change in the way it regulates pesticides, particularly with issuing “conditional registrations,” a loophole that allows pesticides that have not undergone otherwise required safety testing to enter the market. Conditional registrations aren’t uncommon at all — according to a 2013 report released by the Natural Resources Defense Council, as much as 65 percent of more than 16,000 pesticides were first approved by the EPA for the market by way of conditional registrations.

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David Epstein, a senior entomologist at the USDA’s Office of Pest Management Policy, says that these conditional registrations exist to aid growers of crops like vegetables, fruits, and nuts keep away pests. And in theory, they can be a beneficial aid to help smaller growers — but the process isn’t perfect.

“It’s a risk-benefit analysis,” Epstein told Grist, explaining that registrants are evaluated for risk in terms of things like human health, environmental safety, and non-target effects, and then they weigh the pesticide’s potential benefits to farmers. Epstein said that flubendiamide, a pesticide he’s used himself on crops, is an important tool for farmers to keep away harmful pests. The conditional registration process, he said, is a way to help growers get pesticides like these more quickly.

“It’s an evolving process,” he said. “Mistakes are made and corrected, and then we and move on.”

But there’s a big problem, according to Nathan Donley, a staff scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity and an expert on pesticide regulations.

“The EPA has no way of tracking these conditional registrations,” he told Grist. “During the normal regulatory process, the public can review docs and comment. But in conditional registration, it all happens backdoor; the public doesn’t get to see.”

Donley argues that the fundamental concept of conditional registration is flawed, and should be shut down until the EPA can better regulate pesticides.

“There’s more than enough pesticides on the market,” said Donley. “If a chemical company can’t demonstrate that its pesticide is safe, then that pesticide shouldn’t be on the market.”

The latest flubendiamide news is only the most recent skirmish in a battle that’s been brewing for months between Bayer, a German chemical giant worth $42 billion that produces the pesticide under the trade name Belt, and the EPA. It all began back in 2008,  when the EPA issued a conditional registration for flubendiamide — the chemical was legal to manufacture, but only under the condition that the companies must produce toxicity data on the impact of its use over the next few years, to fill in gaps in the original risk assessment. The EPA gave Bayer a generous five years to conduct scientific studies to prove that flubendiamide is safe for aquatic invertebrates, or the pesticide would have to go. Bayer agreed that it would voluntarily cancel the products if these stipulations weren’t met.

Seven years later — two years longer than expected — studies conducted by the EPA found that flubendiamide was having adverse effects on aquatic invertebrates. In January, the EPA gave Bayer the sign: a notice that, as they had agreed, Bayer must withdraw its flubendiamide pesticides. But last month, Bayer flat-out refused. In a statement, the company said that it “instead will seek a review of the product’s registration in an administrative law hearing,” asserting that the product was safe. It was a bold move, one that triggered outrage among environmentalists, many of whom demanded that Bayer play by the rules.

Now, it’s a stalemate, with EPA demanding flubendiamide products be banned, and Bayer resisting. But the damage, unfortunately, is already done. In California alone, 42,495 pounds of flubendiamide were sprayed onto 521,140 acres in 2013. In some places, it was applied six times in one year, misted over crops like soybeans, alfalfa, watermelon, almonds, peppers, and tobacco. In many cases, the EPA asserts, it was also being sprayed over wildlife.

The EPA’s notice to Bayer is out in the open, but flubendiamide isn’t leaving yet. According to NPR, Bayer is demanding a hearing before an administrative law judge before it makes any moves. The case has provoked renewed questions about what role the EPA should — and shouldn’t — play in pesticide regulations, and how to prevent unsafe chemicals from being unleashed on the planet.

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Why the EPA’s recent pesticide battle could be a big deal

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California’s Bullet Train Just Gets Better and Better

by DarnellWHSL Posted on March 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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California’s bullet train gets more appealing with every new business plan:

California will need to double down on support of the bullet train by digging deeper into the state’s wallet and accepting a three-year delay in completing the project’s initial leg, a new business plan for the 220-mph system shows.

….The new plan calls for completion of the entire system by 2029, one year later than under the old business plan. Once the initial system starts showing a profit, the business plan asserts, private investors would jump in with an estimated $21 billion, based on financial calculations.

….The 99-page plan and its backup technical documents again raise questions about service and speed. A sample operating schedule does not show any nonstop trains between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The fastest travel time between the cities would be 3 hours and 14 minutes, not the 2 hours and 40 minutes many people expect.

Yes, I’m sure private investors will be panting to invest, just like they’ve invested so much in iffy high-speed rail construction elsewhere in the world. They’ll be especially eager in another few years, when this project will undoubtedly be forecast to open around 2040 or so, and estimates of LA-SF travel time will be four hours. Who could say no?

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California’s Bullet Train Just Gets Better and Better

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The Presidential Election Intrudes on the Conservative Dating Scene

by Brittan6935 Posted on March 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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The annual Conservative Political Action Conference tends to draw a large crowd of college-age Republicans and has long been known as a party scene, where young conservatives can let loose. So it wasn’t surprising to find that the first booth past the door of the exhibition hall this year is “Conservatives Only,” an online dating website strictly for those who lean right.

“We’ve made it easy and safe to meet fun, intelligent, conservative men and women,” the website says, “looking for relationship experiences ranging from friendships and casual dating to a partner for life.”

This is hardly the only politically oriented dating website. Last month, BernieSingles.com launched for people feeling the Bern. But Conservatives Only has been around for a while. It launched in 2012, although it has so far only amassed about 3,000 profiles. With those users spread across the country, dating options are likely limited in many regions.

The site’s founder, Craig Knight, had traveled from Lubbock, Texas, to man the booth at CPAC. He was decked out in a cameo baseball hat and red polo, both emblazoned with his website’s name. “I don’t care if it’s liberals or conservatives; it’s a dating deal-breaker to try to date someone from the other side,” Knight said.

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The Presidential Election Intrudes on the Conservative Dating Scene

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San Bernardino Police Chief Says Shooter’s iPhone May Hold "Nothing of Any Value"

by AngelikFosbery Posted on February 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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The police chief of San Bernardino, California, said Friday that the iPhone at the heart of a massive civil liberties and security debate may not actually contain any critical information, despite the FBI’s insistence that the phone may unlock the secrets of how the San Bernarndino shooters carried out their attack.

“I’ll be honest with you: I think that there is a reasonably good chance that there is nothing of any value on the phone,” Chief Jarrod Burguan said in an interview with NPR. The phone in question is an iPhone 5c used by Syed Farook, one of the two shooters who killed 14 people in a terrorist attack in the Southern California town last December.

A federal judge in Los Angeles ordered Apple last week to write new software that would help the FBI unlock the phone because the Bureau believes it may contain data critical to understanding how Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, planned the attack and with whom they communicated. The FBI was able to retrieve data from the phone that was backed up using Apple’s iCloud service, but Farook stopped using iCloud on October 19, six weeks before the attack itself. But Apple is seeking to throw out the order, arguing in a court filing on Thursday that complying would give the government “a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld: the ability to force companies like Apple to undermine the basic security and privacy interests of hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe.”

While Burguan’s opinion will give those opposed to the court order some ammunition, BuzzFeed tech reporter Hamza Shaban pointed out that the FBI’s opinion is really what counts in this case:

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San Bernardino Police Chief Says Shooter’s iPhone May Hold "Nothing of Any Value"

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Meet the Ex-President Stumping for Sanders

by LonnaDonald0 Posted on February 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bernie Sanders is keeping a light schedule in South Carolina ahead of the state’s Saturday primary. Save for a CNN town hall on Tuesday, the Vermont senator has held no major public events in the state since Sunday and has no plans to be back until Friday. But in the meantime, his campaign is doing the same thing Hillary Clinton’s campaign does when it wants to be two places at once—calling in an ex-president.

In Sanders’ case, that would be the ex-president of Burlington College, Jane Sanders.* The senator’s wife of three decades has so far only seen limited use as a campaign trail surrogate, but on Tuesday in Columbia she was at a community center heading up a motley crew of surrogates who included a handful of local leaders; a fourth-grade class president from Florence, South Carolina; Lethal Weapon star Danny Glover; and Gus Newport, the former socialist mayor of Berkeley, California.

The theme was education, a sweet spot for the former college administrator, who has co-written legislation for Sanders in Washington and ran an after-school program when he was mayor of Burlington. (Just don’t call her a “secret weapon.”) While Jane Sanders seemed, at first, a little nervous speaking extemporaneously, she settled into a groove when it came time for audience questions.

“People say, ‘Oh, Bernie doesn’t have foreign policy experience’—foreign policy is more than war and peace,” she said. “We’ve been to maybe four dozen or more countries and always, always, always he finds time to meet with educators and doctors and nurses, and to talk about what they’re doing that is cutting-edge.”

As evidence, Jane Sanders cited her experiences in Sweden—which Sen. Sanders has pointed to as a model of democratic socialism—where educators work closely with the industrial sector to ensure students aren’t being groomed for jobs that won’t exist. And she offered an example of Swiss ingenuity that might fit well in the United States: “Their high school model is completely different than ours,” she said. “Anybody who knows high schoolers knows they want to do something, they want to have a meaningful impact to contribute. And in the agrarian way of teaching they have to go to class and listen or in the best cases be creative. But in Switzerland they have an apprenticeship program that starts in 10th grade, and they go to actual jobs and they learn on the job but they also come back to the high school one or two days a week to learn the theory and the education.”

“I won’t go on with all 48 countries,” she said.

Newport was an unusual choice to be a campaign spokesman for Bernie Sanders. A former black nationalist, he and Sanders became friends while they were both serving as mayors in the 1980s. Newport even came to Vermont to campaign for Sanders’ failed 1986 gubernatorial run. Like Sanders, who honeymooned with Jane in the Soviet Union and later traveled to Nicaragua to meet Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, Newport conducted his own foreign policy as mayor, making several trips to Cuba and establishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Sanders doesn’t talk much about his time as mayor of Burlington on the stump, but Newport seized on his friend’s work on affordable housing in the city. “If people ask if he’s qualified, that brother’s so qualified,” he said. “I got a knee replacement, I’m 80 years old, I’ll be 81 in two months. I’ll carry his bags.”

(Newport’s other contribution to the community center event was to tell an extended joke involving a priest, a hippie, and Henry Kissinger; I’ll spare you a complete retelling, but suffice it to say that Kissinger dies.)

Although Jane Sanders was the only Caucasian member of the panel, the audience itself looked like the heavily white electorates that Bernie did well with in Iowa and New Hampshire. Even though the event was held in a predominantly African American neighborhood, the attendees were about 90 percent white, including a large number of students from the nearby University of South Carolina and a contingent of nurses from out of state who are road-tripping on Bernie Sanders’ behalf.

When it was over, Jane Sanders pressed the flesh like a political pro, warmly greeting the die-hard supporters who showed up. A woman named Summer Rose, who had driven her LED-light encrusted Bernie-mobile from California, handed Sanders a brightly colored bank note. Rose had heard somewhere that Jane was a Grateful Dead fan, and so she and a bunch of Deadheads from the Bay Area had pooled their money to make a donation. Except, apparently, the only currency they had was a Swiss 20 franc bill.

Jane Sanders posed with a baby. She told another voter she’s a Mets fan. Someone asked her about school lunches and she said she supported putting fresh, local ingredients on kids’ plates. Not Monsanto? “Oh, Lord!” she said throwing up her hands. Not Monsanto. Another man handed her a pair of buttons that the local group HeartBern (which promotes the Sanders campaign by throwing raves) made for her, depicting the future first couple. She held them up for the camera. And then she was whisked away to do an interview on CNN.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the college of which Jane Sanders was president.

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Meet the Ex-President Stumping for Sanders

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6 Things I Would Ask the Presidential Candidates About Food and Farming

by GuyKrajewski Posted on February 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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The 2016 presidential election is hurtling into unknown territory, as candidates blessed by party elites fight for their political lives while insurgents suck up all the oxygen. But one time-tested electoral tradition remains in place: Everyone—from the socialist Vermont Jew with the excellent Brooklyn accent to the xenophobic billionaire reality-TV star—is largely ignoring food and farm policy on the stump.

Meanwhile, slow-motion ecological crises haunt the country’s main farming regions, and diet-related maladies generate massive burdens on the US health care system. Over the next three frantic weeks—with five debates and more than two dozen primaries—the two major-party candidates may well emerge. If I were a debate moderator or a reporter on the trail, here are some questions I would ask them:

1. Bolstered by tens of billions of dollars of crop and insurance subsidies over two decades, farms in the US Corn Belt—the former prairies occupying much of the upper Midwest—churn out the feed that drives the country’s meat industry. They also produce the feedstock for ethanol, which accounts for about 10 percent of fuel we use in cars. Yet the region is losing the very resource that makes all this bounty possible: Its precious store of topsoil is disappearing much faster than the natural replacement rate—a trend that will likely accelerate as climate change proceeds apace. And all of that runaway dirt carries agrichemicals into waterways along with it, fouling tap water in Des Moines, Columbus, Toledo, and countless other communities and feeding a monstrous dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

A growing body of research suggests that diversifying crops—growing other stuff besides just corn and soybeans, including everything from wheat and oats to vegetables—could go a long way to reversing these catastrophes. As president, how would you push farm policy to reward soil- and water-friendly farming practices in the heartland?

2. Meanwhile, in the country’s fruit and vegetable belt, a different kind of water crisis unfolds. Drought persists in California—the source of 81 percent of US-grown carrots, 95 percent of broccoli, 86 percent of cauliflower, 74 percent of raspberries, 91 percent of strawberries, and nearly all almonds and pistachios, plus a fifth of US milk production. In the state’s massive Central Valley, agriculture has gotten so ravenous for irrigation water that its aquifers have been declining steadily for decades. Meanwhile, the Imperial Valley in California’s bone-dry southeastern corner provides about two-thirds of US winter vegetables. These crops are irrigated by water diverted from the declining Colorado River, putting the region’s farms into increasing competition with the 40 million people who rely on the waterway for drinking water. For decades, federal policy has encouraged California’s produce dominance by investing in irrigation infrastructure and through sweetheart water deals with well-connected Central Valley growers. Some observers—okay, me—have called for a “de-Californication” of US fruit and vegetable production in response to these crises. How would your administration respond to California’s declining water resources in the context of its central position in our food system?

3. Republican candidates have focused largely on the alleged scourge of undocumented immigrants from points south, while the Democratic debate has hinged on income inequality. The two issues intersect on our plates, through the hidden labor required to feed us. According to the US Department of Agriculture, about 70 percent of workers on US crop fields come from Mexico or Central America, and more than 40 percent of them are undocumented. Median hourly wage: $9.17. In restaurants, where the median hourly wage stands at $10, tips included, around one in six workers are immigrants, nearly double the rate outside the restaurant industry. After spasms of union busting in the 1980s, the meatpacking industry, too, relies heavily on immigrants—and pays an average wage of $12.50 per hour. How would you act to improve wages and working conditions for the people who feed us?

4. Under Hillary Clinton, the US State Department conducted a “concerted strategy to promote agricultural biotechnology overseas, compel countries to import biotech crops and foods they do not want, and lobby foreign governments—especially in the developing world—to adopt policies to pave the way to cultivate biotech crops,” a 2013 Food & Water Watch analysis of diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks found. Meanwhile, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has called for a different approach to agricultural policy: a “rapid and significant shift from conventional, monoculture-based and high external-input-dependent industrial production towards mosaics of sustainable, regenerative production systems.” Would your administration continue to promote biotech crops around the world and lobby foreign governments to accept them? Why or why not?

5. For decades, US antitrust authorities have watched idly as huge food companies gobble each other up, grabbing ever larger shares of food and agriculture markets. According to Mary Hendrickson, a rural sociologist at the University of Missouri, just four companies (not the same ones in each case) slaughter and pack more than 80 percent of US beef cows, 60 percent of the country’s pigs, and half of its chickens. After last year’s merger of chemical behemoths Dow and Dupont, three companies—DowDuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta—will soon own something like 57 percent of the global seed market and sell 46 percent of pesticides. Since then, state-owned China National Chemical Corp. has bought Syngenta. Early in his administration, President Barack Obama initiated serious investigations of these highly consolidated industries, responding to farmers’ complaints of uncompetitive markets. After much buildup, these efforts ended with a thud. How would your Department of Justice look at consolidation in ag markets—and would you consider antitrust action to break them up?

6. According to a 2013 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, annual US medical expenses from treating heart disease and stroke stood at $94 billion in 2010—and were expected to nearly triple by 2030, driven largely by diets dominated by hyperprocessed food. The report concluded that if Americans followed USDA recommendations for daily consumption of fruits and vegetables, 127,000 lives and $17 billion in medical expenses would be saved annually. What’s the proper federal role for convincing people to eat healthier—especially people of limited means? (Hat tip to Food Tank, which asks nine other excellent questions.)

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6 Things I Would Ask the Presidential Candidates About Food and Farming

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This New Film Will Change the Way You Think About the Black Panthers

by ShanaLushwrjug Posted on February 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Stanley Nelson had just returned from a screening of his new documentary “Black Panthers: Vanguard of a Revolution” at the Apollo Theatre, when he saw her—Beyoncé—backed by dancers adorned in jet black outfits, berets and blown out hair, dancing with authority before thousands of raucous fans at the centerpiece of mainstream American culture, the Super Bowl. “I was shocked and amazed by it,” Nelson recalled later. “But also, it was beautiful.”

The award-winning filmmaker had been swept up in a Black Panther moment. And in a way, so is the rest of the country. Much like during the late 1960s, protests over police brutality in the past year has given rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. The film serves as a reminder that the issues the Black Panthers combated—poverty, economic disparity, tensions between law enforcement and the black community—remain relevant today.

The film, told mainly through the voices of the Panthers’ rank and file, captures the group’s rise and long, steady fall as a cultural and political force, from its infamous gun-touting demonstration at the California statehouse to then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s efforts to disrupt and destroy the Panthers’ national influence. Nelson’s doc also gets at the internal struggles as women rising through the Panther ranks pushed for gender equality.

The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year, has largely been praised, although some insiders have taken issue with Nelson’s portrayal. Former Panther leader Elaine Brown dismissed the film as a “two-dimensional palliative for white people and Negroes who are comfortable in America’s oppressive status quo.” Nelson chose not to respond directly, saying simply, “I don’t think there’s anything about the Panthers that anybody can agree on. But I think in some ways, this film comes really close.”

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This New Film Will Change the Way You Think About the Black Panthers

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Here’s Why Chris Christie’s Zika Quarantines Would Be Pointless

by HelenaDiederich Posted on February 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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During Saturday night’s Republican primary debate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he would use quarantines to prevent the Zika virus outbreak from spreading in the United States. From a Washington Post transcript:

MARTHA RADDATZ (ABC MODERATOR): Governor Christie, at the peak of the Ebola outbreak in west Africa, you ordered an American nurse who landed at Newark Airport be detained and quarantined. As fear spreads now of the Zika virus and with the Rio Olympics just months away, is there a scenario where you would quarantine people traveling back from Brazil to prevent the spread in the United States?

CHRISTIE: You bet I would. And the fact is that because I took strong action to make sure that anyone who was showing symptoms—remember what happened with that nurse. She was showing symptoms and coming back from a place that had the Ebola virus active and she had been treating patients. This was not just some—like, we picked up her just for the heck of it, alright?

We did it because she was showing symptoms, and the fact is that’s the way we should make these decision. You make these decisions based upon the symptoms, the medicine, and the law. We quarantined her, she turned out to test negative ultimately after 48 hours, and we released her back to the State of Maine.

That position might make for a tough-sounding talking point during a debate. But it’s totally pointless as a matter of public health, experts said.

“Zika is rarely, if ever, spread from person to person, so quarantining infected people will do nothing to stem a Zika outbreak,” said Laurie Garret, a global health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Zika, a mosquito-borne virus, has spread to more than 1 million people throughout Latin America. The symptoms of the virus itself are usually mild or nonexistent. But it could be dangerous for pregnant women: Zika has been tentatively linked to a spike in cases of microcephaly, a birth defect in which infants are born with small heads and can have incomplete brain development.

Dean Blumberg, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of California-Davis Children’s Hospital, agreed that a quarantine wouldn’t be much help in controlling an outbreak. “The vast majority of transmissions are from mosquito bites, and most of the country doesn’t have the Zika-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquito in high concentrations,” he said. “So I don’t think a quarantine is necessary or would be beneficial in any way.”

Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, gave a somewhat more measured response when asked a similar question about Zika during Saturday’s debate:

CARSON: Do we quarantine people? If we have evidence that they are infected, and that there is evidence that that infection can spread by something that they’re doing, yes. But, just willy-nilly going out and quarantining a bunch of people because they’ve been to Brazil, I don’t believe that that’s going to work. What we really need to be thinking about is how do we get this disease under control?

Christie received substantial criticism for his response to 2014’s Ebola outbreak. He ordered the quarantine of a nurse, Kaci Hickox, after she returned from fighting Ebola in Sierra Leone. Last October, Hickox filed a lawsuit against Christie for false imprisonment and other claims, arguing that she had not, in fact, exhibited any symptoms indicative of Ebola when she landed at New Jersey’s Newark airport. Ultimately, she did not end up having the virus. That legal case is ongoing.

“The merits of Christie’s actions in the Hickox case will no doubt be decided in court, probably long after he has withdrawn from the presidential race,” Garret said. “But his Zika comments can be addressed immediately.”

Garret added that Christie didn’t quarantine a woman who was New Jersey’s first confirmed Zika case, identified in late January while visiting the state from Colombia.

Elizabeth Talbot, an epidemiologist at Dartmouth College’s School of Medicine, said a more effective solution is to focus on controlling and eradicating the mosquitoes that can carry Zika.

“Our public health energies are best invested in providing education about preventing bites and prioritizing the protection of pregnant women by advising them to postpone travel to affected regions whenever possible,” she said in an email. “The CDC is also recommending that meticulous attention be given to protect persons from mosquito bites if they are identified with Zika in the US following travel. This is so that our Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in the southernmost US do not become infected with Zika and transmit Zika disease in the US. Preventing mosquito bites for ill patients is not the same thing as quarantine, which can be an inflammatory or even scary word.”

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Here’s Why Chris Christie’s Zika Quarantines Would Be Pointless

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WTF Happened to Golden Rice?

by MikaylaU07 Posted on February 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Like the hover boards of the Back to the Future franchise, golden rice is an old idea that looms just beyond the grasp of reality.

5 Surprising GM Foods

“This Rice Could Save a Million Kids a Year,” announced a Time Magazine cover back in 2000. Orange in color, the rice is genetically modified to contain a jolt of beta-carotene, the stuff that gives carrots their hue and that our bodies transform into vitamin A. Diets deficient in that key micronutrient are the leading cause of blindness of children in the global south, where rice tends to be a staple grain. A decade and a half since the Time article, golden rice has yet to be planted commercially—but it continues generating bumper crops of hype. “Is Golden Rice the Future of Food?” the great hipster-foodie journal Lucky Peach wondered last fall, adding that “it might save millions from malnutrition.”

If golden rice is such a panacea, why does it flourish only in headlines, far from the farm fields where it’s intended to grow? The short answer is that the plant breeders have yet to concoct varieties of it that work as well in the field as existing rice strains. This is made all the more challenging in the face of debates over genetically modified crops and eternal disputes about how they should be regulated.

After seed developers first create a genetically modified strain with the desired trait—in this case, rice with beta carotene—they then start crossing it into varieties that have been shown to perform well in the field. The task is tricky: When you tweak one thing in a genome, such as giving rice the ability to generate beta-carotene, you risk changing other things, like its speed of growth. The University of Washington anthropologist and long-time golden rice observer Glenn Stone describes this process as “bringing a superfood down to earth,” and it gets little attention in most media accounts.

The most serious effort to commercialize golden rice is centered at the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the globe’s most prestigious incubator of high-yielding rice varieties. Launched with grants from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations in 1960, IRRI spearheaded the Asian part of what became known as the Green Revolution—the effort to bring US-style industrial agriculture to the developing world. (My review of Nick Cullather’s excellent Green Revolution history The Hungry World is here.)

Today, IRRI coordinates the Golden Rice Network and has been working to develop a viable strain since 2006. And so far, it’s having trouble. On its website, IRRI reports that in the field latest trials, golden rice varieties “showed that beta carotene was produced at consistently high levels in the grain, and that grain quality was comparable to the conventional variety.” However, the website continues, “yields of candidate lines were not consistent across locations and seasons.” Translation: The golden rice varieties exhibited what’s known in agronomy circles as a “yield drag”—they didn’t produce as much rice as the non-GM varieties they’d need to compete with in farm fields. So the IRRI researchers are going back to the drawing board.

Via email, I asked IRRI how that effort is going. “So far, both agronomic and laboratory data look very promising,” a spokeswoman replied. But she declined to give a time frame for when IRRI thinks it will have a variety that’s ready for prime time. Washington University’s Stone says he visited IRRI’s campus in the Philippines in the summer of 2015 and heard from researchers that such a breakthrough is “at least several more years” off. The IRRI spokeswoman also declined to comment on Stone’s time-frame report.

That’s not a very inspiring assessment, given that researchers first successfully inserted the beta-carotene trait in the rice genome in 2000, and that the technology has been lavished with research support ever since—including from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative), USAID, the Syngenta Foundation, and others, according to the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board.

Of course, among people who think biotechnology has a crucial role to play in solving developing-world malnutrition, IRRI’s agronomic struggles are compounded by anti-GMO zealotry as well as what it sees as over-regulation of GMOs in the global south. David Zilberman, an agricultural economist at the University of California at Berkeley, points out that most developing-world nations, including the Philippines, have adopted the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which stipulates a precautionary approach to introducing new GMO products, including restrictions on how trials are conducted. The Cartagena regime stands in sharp contrast to the much more laissez-faire one that holds sway in the United States, Zilberman says.

If the developing world embraced US-style regulation and treated vitamin A deficiency as a medical emergency solvable by golden rice, “it would have become available in 2000” Zilberman says. Based on that premise, he and German agricultural economist Justus Wesseler co-authored a 2014 paper claiming that golden rice has “been available since early 2000” and opposition to it has resulted in “about 1.4 million life years lost over the past decade in India” alone. Such claims abound in pro-GM circles. At a speech at the University of Texas last year, the Nobel laureate British biochemist Sir Richard Roberts accused gold rice opponents of have having committed a “crime against humanity.”

To be sure, opposition to golden rice has occasionally gone overboard. In 2013, activists destroyed one of of IRRI’s golden rice field trials in the Philippines, for example. “Anti-GMO activism has set back our work, in that we not only concentrate with our research, but we have to also spend time and resources to counter their propaganda,” the IRRI spokesperson told me. But the group makes clear that regulation and activism are only two of the challenges facing golden rice—getting it to perform well remains a major task.

Even if and when IRRI does come up with a high-yielding golden rice variety that passes regulatory muster, it remains unclear whether it can actually make a dent in vitamin A deficiency. As the Washington University’s Stone notes, vitamin A deficiency often affects people whose diets are also deficient in other vital nutrients. Vitamin A is fat soluble, meaning that it can’t be taken up by the body unless it’s accompanied by sufficient dietary fat, which isn’t delivered in significant quantities by rice, golden or otherwise.

According to Stone, only one feeding study (PDF) has ever showed a powerful uptake of vitamin A by subjects eating golden rice. The paper was much-cited by golden rice proponents, but Stone says it had a major flaw: The subjects were “well-nourished individuals” who already took in sufficient fat in their diets. The study “demonstrated only that Golden Rice worked in children who did not need it,” he writes. (The study has since been retracted on claims that the author failed to obtain proper consent from the parents of the participants).

Meanwhile, as IRRI scrambles to perfect golden rice, the prevalence of vitamin A deficiency is declining in the Philippines—according to IRRI itself— from 40 percent of children aged 6 months to 5 years in 2003, to 15.2 percent in 2008. “The exact reasons for these improvements have not been determined, but they may be the results of proven approaches to preventing vitamin A deficiency, such as vitamin A supplementation, dietary diversification, food fortification and promotion of optimal breastfeeding,” the group noted. That drop is part of a long-term trend that involves all of Southeast Asia. According to a 2015 Lancet study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, vitamin A deficiency plagued 39 percent of children in the region in 1991, but only 6 percent in 2013—without the help of golden rice.

But VAD, as the deficiency’s known, remains a huge scourge on the Indian sub-continent and in Africa, the study found, affecting more than 40 percent of children in both regions. Whether golden rice will ever help mitigate that ongoing tragedy won’t likely be known for some time. But the technology’s hardly the slam-dunk panacea its advocates insist it is.

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WTF Happened to Golden Rice?

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