The Further Adventures of Germ Girl

BEIJING - Nearly half of the antibiotics produced in China are being fed to livestock… Of the 210,000 tons of antibiotics made in China each year, 97,000 tons end up in animals, Xiao Yonghong, a professor from the Institute of Clinical Pharmacology of Peking University, was quoted as saying by People’s Daily.

Research by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences found that more than 50 percent of livestock breeders in Shandong and Liaoning provinces added antibiotics to their animal fodder.

“The overuse of antibiotics is common now, which has led to a rising death rate among animals as their immune systems are depressed. Also, antibiotics remain detrimental to people’s health after intake,” said Qi Guanghai, deputy head of the feed research institute under the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

“Attention should be paid to the problem of antibiotic intake via daily food consumption because that will increase the possibility for drug-resistant bacteria to develop in human bodies,” said Huang Liuyu, director of the Institute for Disease Prevention and Control of the People’s Liberation Army.

For example, a 650-gram premature infant born in Guangzhou developed resistance to seven kinds of antibiotics, which was suspected to be due to his mother’s daily intake of meat and eggs that contained remnants of antibiotics, the People’s Daily report said…

A new killer strain of superbug has reached New Zealand shores.

Up to four patients have contracted the bacterial gene, which inhabits other bacteria, since December last year.

New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, or NDM-1, is found in E. Coli and Klebsiella bacteria, causing anything from urinary tract infections, high fevers and pneumonia to abdominal infections. In extreme cases, it can be fatal…

In just a few months the superbug has spread to the United States, Canada, Brazil, Belgium, the Netherlands, UK, Pakistan, Austria, France, Germany, Oman, Kenya, Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and Singapore, killing more than 20 people.

The New Zealand patients with NDM-1 (three confirmed and one suspected) had recently returned from India.

Over the last month, American news outlets have followed the cholera epidemic as the disease has spread throughout Haiti and into Port au Prince, where over one million earthquake victims are still living in tent camps with little or no sanitation and access to clean water. The presence of cholera in these overcrowded camps will undoubtedly have horrific consequences. Cholera is not endemic to Haiti and speculation in the press of the source of the outbreak has at times taken the tone of a Michael Crichton thriller with a whodunit twist…

 More frequently, the outbreak is explained the same way so many of Haiti’s problems are by the American media: simply a consequence of the nation’s “crushing” or “devastating” poverty, with little context or investigation. Is America’s news coverage of the cholera epidemic, which has now taken over one thousand lives, yet another example of an industry reliance on “disaster porn”? 

In the New York Daily News, Haiti-based journalist Ansel Herz pointed out that CNN returned to Haiti for the second time since the January 12 earthquake to cover the cholera outbreak—but in a typically lurid fashion, with little attention to the underlying causes.* “With CNN lagging behind its more partisan competitors, disaster porn is now the news channel’s bread and butter,” wrote Herz. “But it has managed to entirely miss the big-picture story: The cholera outbreak itself is a symptom of failed foreign policies and organizations that have left the Haitian people as poor as ever and disconnected from the mechanisms of their own development.” …

(Correction: We originally reported that CNN’s coverage of the recent cholera epidemic marked the network’s first visit to Haiti since the January 12 earthquake. In fact, it was the second time—Anderson Cooper visited Haiti this summer to receive an honorary knighthood from the Haitian government. The relevant sentence has been updated. CJR regrets the error.)

WASHINGTON, Nov 18 (Reuters) - DNA fingerprinting has confirmed what health experts have suspected — the cholera epidemic that has killed more than 1,100 people in Haiti came from one single source. But little immediate good can come from tracking down that source. Rumors had been circulating for weeks that Nepalese troops with the United Nations mission brought the cholera to Haiti, which, despite having many other health problems, did not have cholera. Health officials deny this and say checks show no evidence that one of the Nepalese soldiers carried the infection. But it has to have come from somewhere and at the height of the humanitarian effort after January’s devastating earthquake, an estimated 10,000 different non-governmental organizations were sending people and supplies into the Caribbean island nation… The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Pan-American Health Organization have analyzed samples of Vibrio cholerae from several patients and they are all identical. This suggests it entered Haiti in a single “event” — not necessarily an infected person, but possibly. People often can carry cholera with no symptoms and in a country with chlorinated water and good sewage, the bacteria in their waste quickly get destroyed. Other potential sources include imported food, especially seafood, or a boat or ship’s bilge water. With tons of aid pouring into Haiti for months, it may be impossible to track down who or what carried it in. 

BEIJING - China has the highest number of diabetics in the world with an estimated 92.4 million sufferers, 61 percent of whom have yet to be diagnosed, experts warned on Sunday. … According to the latest study jointly conducted by the China Diabetes Society and the International Diabetes Federation (IDF), 13 percent of the total medical expenditure in China, around $25 billion, is related to diabetes.

CDC: Epidemic is the latest expansion of a pandemic that began 49 years ago in Indonesia and caused 4,946 deaths worldwide just last year