Our World — 15 May 2010

Rosanne Skirble | Washington, DC
14 May 2010

HOST: Straight ahead on "Our World": An ecosystem in peril as technological fixes fail to stop the massive underwater oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico; Ecology lessons from the ashes of a volcano, and a long awaited climate bill introduced this week in the U.S. Senate.

JOHN KERRY
"It will create millions of jobs, move us toward energy independence and strengthen America's security and it will give us cleaner air."

HOST: Responding to the climate crisis. That and the debate over the safety of antibiotics in livestock feed. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World." I'm Rosanne Skirble.

Gushing Gulf Oil Spill Threatens Wildlife, Ecosystem

TEXT: Despite a three week effort to stop the massive deep water oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the flow has continued unabated from the ocean floor at the rate of 5,000 barrels a day, according to BP estimates. That number has been disputed by some scientists and environmental groups who say, based on a video of the leak, that as much as 70,000 barrels of oil are leaking daily. After a meeting with his top advisors on steps to stop the oil and contain its spread, President Obama spoke about the federal effort, from the White House Rose Garden.

PRESIDENT OBAMA
"The people of the Gulf coast need our help and they deserve nothing less than for us to stand up and do whatever is necessary to stop this spill, prevent further damage and compensate all those who have been harmed already. That's our job. It is also our job to make sure this kind of mess doesn't happen again. It is a job we have been doing and will keep on doing until this well is capped and the spill is cleaned up and all claims are paid."

HOST: And all this is happening during spring spawning season, in a region that produces one-third of the nation's seafood. Doug Rader, Chief Oceans Scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund says it is certain to impact aquatic life.

DOUG RADER
"... making them extraordinarily vulnerable to the toxic effects of the oil itself. Now the same thing is happening with birdlife migrating to and from the tropics. Those that have completed their migrations in the Gulf region are nesting and beginning to feed this year's crop of migratory birds."

TEXT: As the oil shoots up from the sea floor, Rader says it has the potential to contaminate each layer of the water column.

DOUG RADER
"...directly exposing those animals to toxicity, at the surface including the very sensitive surface zones where not only sea turtles and marine mammals and sea birds can be oiled, but also where the highways for fish larvae exist. And then as it rains back into the abyss over a much wider area carrying toxicants back into the deep sea where ancient corals and other sensitive ecosystems exist."

TEXT: One response strategy has been to use dispersants or anti-freeze-like chemicals to break the oil up into smaller globules. Those particles mix more readily with water, and sink. Rader says dispersants are being sprayed from airplanes and - for the first time - pumped directly into the deep ocean.

DOUG RADER
"In this case we do have the additional challenge of trying to guess what the effects would be of dispersants used at [this] depth to try to begin dispersing the oil before it even gets to the surface."

TEXT: Rader says it is a choice between two bad options. While the chemicals may protect birds and other wildlife by dissipating the slick before it reaches shore, their toxicity in the Gulf could harm fish and other marine life.

Judith Dowell is a biologist with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and an expert on oil spill contamination. She says it is important to understand the nature of the oil in order to predict its ecological effects.

JUDITH DOWELL
"If a lot of it is very light material, it is going to vaporize. If a lot of it is heavy material, it may precipitate to the bottom. In the meantime, you have these medium molecular weight compounds that are dispersing within the water column. Until you can get some very accurate measurements of the depth of the slick and the geographical extent of the slick, it's not easy to do."

TEXT: Simply put, Dowell says, not enough data has been collected. The slick threatens sensitive coastal wetlands, areas critical to wildlife. Barrier islands and wetlands also serve to buffer towns on the coast from hurricanes and storm surges. Doug Rader with the Environmental Defense Fund says the spill may finally force coastal communities to put more adequate plans and safeguards in place to prevent an off shore disaster in the future.

DOUG RADER
"There are thousands of wells in the Gulf [of Mexico]. There are 35,000 miles [56,000 kilometers] of pipeline in the Gulf. It is pretty clear that the status quo in terms of investment to prevent risk and to respond to events wasn't adequate and that some retrofitting of that entire infrastructure is necessary to be able to sustain the current level of production in the Gulf."

TEXT: Rader says the time is also ripe to rethink the wisdom of offshore drilling in favor of other energy options in the face of climate change.

DOUG RADER
"That going forward with a more balanced portfolio of energy sources that begins to address the global problem of warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions and threatening coastal areas like coastal Louisiana by rising seas and intensifying storms has to be a piece of the mix."

TEXT: To that end on Wednesday, Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman introduced long-awaited climate and energy legislation. Senator Kerry told reporters it is time for the United States to act.

SENATOR JOHN KERRY
"We're weighed down by a broken energy policy built on a dangerous addiction to foreign oil. We are threatened by the impacts of a changing climate. And right now as a dangerous oil spill washes on to our nation's shores, no one can doubt how urgently we need a new energy policy in this country."


TEXT: The American Power Act covers a broad cross-section of the nation's top environmental and energy issues, from expanded nuclear power and carbon capture and sequestration, to giving states veto power over drilling within 120 kilometers off shore if, in the language of the proposed law,..."they stand to suffer significant adverse impacts in the event of an accident."

Ecology Lessons from Mt. St. Helens 25 years after deadly eruption

HOST: The ongoing eruption of the Icelandic volcano with the unpronounceable name reminds us that it's been exactly 30 years since the bigger and deadly eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State. That explosive eruption killed 57 people, destroyed 518 square kilometers of forest, and sent an ash plume so high it circled the globe. Now three decades later, the blast zone is once again teeming with life. Even scientists are amazed. Tom Banse has more on the wider lessons ecologists draw on the May 18th anniversary.

PANICKED TV CAMERAMAN DAVID CROCKETT
I can hear the mountain behind me rumbling. An enormous mud and water slide washed out the road...

TEXT: That's local TV cameraman David Crockett, scrambling to escape unimaginable devastation.

CROCKETT
My God, this is hell... I just can't describe it. It's pitch black, just pitch black. This is hell on earth I'm walking through."

TEXT: In Seattle that day - 150 kilometers from the volcano - university student Peter Frenzen watched the eruption unfold on TV. Thirty years later, Frenzen is the staff scientist for the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. The park preserves portions of the blast zone for scientific studies. Other parts are open for public recreation.

FRENZEN
We are actually standing on what was the top and insides of Mount St. Helens. The original surface here would be about 150-200 feet below us. If we had been here on May 17, 1980, we would have been drifting over the landscape about 150-200 feet in the air.

TEXT: But with our feet firmly planted on the ground, we wander down one of the bucolic trails that now wind over the once charred landscape. Tall alders grow around ponds that weren't here before. Multitudes of frogs and salamanders will appear soon as it warms up. Elk hoof prints cross the way. Willows and lupines sprout on exposed hillsides.

FRENZEN
The change has been amazing. And one of things that we've learned here at Mount St. Helens is that things that initially look dead are usually anything but dead. Those things that look messy to our eye are in fact the critical ingredients of the next thriving ecosystem.

TEXT: Like Frenzen, Washington State University botanist John Bishop has also spent much of his professional career in the blast zone.

BISHOP
What we've realized as we've spent a lot of time here and we've quantified the plants and the animals is that we actually have extraordinary levels of diversity here, of biological diversity.

TEXT: More richness now, in fact, than in an old growth forest. The patchy jumble of habitats has become a stronghold for critters otherwise in decline such as elk, the yellow warbler and Western toad.
BISHOP
This recognition might lead us to be more careful as we decide what to do with disturbed areas.

TEXT: Peter Frenzen says the human tendency is to rush in and restore or replant things. But after watching the developments on the slopes of Mt. St. Helens, he and his colleagues have become believers in letting nature run its course, at least some of the time.

FRENZEN
Of course it's not as productive in terms of lumber or other material that you're trying to get. But in terms of the animals and plants out here, it's fundamentally more productive in terms of the diversity of the ecosystem that results.

TEXT: Forest Service researcher Charlie Chrisafulli and seven other scientists published a journal article to that effect this spring. It's the latest in a flurry of recent papers that try to draw wider implications from the explosion of new life at the volcano.

CHRISAFULLI
Lessons from Mount St. Helens have application to wildfire for example. But also areas that were inundated following tsunamis, or from windstorms and ice storms and even from harvesting practices or strip mines.

TEXT:? In fact, Chrisafulli says U.S. mining industry consultants called him recently for ideas about restoring the scraped, barren landscape around closed strip mines. He told them to plant lupines because those flowers have done such a good job of creating new soil at the volcano.

Safety of Antibiotics in Livestock Feed Debated

HOST: Doctors around the world are finding it harder and harder to cure some infections. Bacteria are developing resistance to the drugs used to kill them. Health experts point to doctors over-prescribing antibiotics, and patients misusing them, as part of the problem. Many also say the meat industry is contributing - by feeding animals antibiotics to help them grow better. Denmark banned the practice in the 1990s. But as VOA's Steve Baragona reports, there is disagreement over how effective the ban has been.

TEXT: In the late 1980s, doctors in Europe were finding that vancomycin, one of the most potent antibiotics in the medicine cabinet, was not working as well as it used to. Certain bacteria had developed resistance to it, even though doctors were not using very much of this drug of last resort.

Niles Frimodt-Moller is head of antibiotic research at the Danish State Serum Institute. Interviewed after a recent Congressional briefing in Washington, he said a drug similar to vancomycin was widely used in livestock at the time.

FRIMODT-MOLLER
"They used, I mean, hundreds of tons of this drug in animal husbandry in Europe, while we only used kilograms of vancomycin."

TEXT: Animals in many large livestock-raising operations around the world get a small but steady dose of certain antibiotics in their feed. It keeps the animals healthy, and that promotes their growth. But when bacteria are steadily exposed to an antibiotic, they will eventually develop resistance. Frimodt-Moller said a number of studies linked use of the animal drug as a growth promoter to vancomycin-resistant bacteria in people.

FRIMODT-MOLLER
"It could be shown that it was transmitted by food to humans in hospitals, and in non-hospitalized humans, and we found the same types in infections. So there was good reason for banning the growth promoters."


TEXT: Denmark banned the drug's use as a growth promoter in 1996, and levels of resistant bacteria found in animals and meat declined. The European Union has since banned the use of several other antibiotics as growth promoters. But over-use in animal husbandry is not the only source of antibiotic resistance. And the ban does not appear to have made much difference in the rates of resistant infections in people, says Rich Carnevale with the U.S. industry-sponsored Animal Health Institute. He says Denmark may have over-reacted.

CARNEVALE
"They saw resistance. They said, 'Well, it could be due to use of drugs in animals. And certainly some of that resistance was. But the real question is, was it harming humans? And to this day, they have not been able to really conclude that it's actually harming humans."?

TEXT: Meanwhile, Carnevale says, animals get sick more often than they did before the ban, which means Danish farmers have to use more antibiotics to treat them than they used to.

CARNEVALE
"They actually increased their overall uses of antibiotics quite a bit. And I don't think they got, in all cases, the change in resistance they were looking for."

TEXT: A 2003 report from the World Health Organization supports Denmark's decision to ban antibiotic growth promoters. It says reducing antibiotic resistance overall is a good thing. Bacteria that become resistant can spread that trait to other bacteria. But the report notes that more data is needed about the impact on people. While researchers continue to study the issue, the debate goes on. [SIGNED]

HOST: You're listening to Our World on VOA, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

Polio Endemic in Few Countries, Eradication Nears

HOST: A new study in the British Journal The Lancet reports that more than two thirds of the estimated 8.8 million deaths in children under-5 in 2008, were caused by infectious diseases such as pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, and sepsis. High-income countries comprise only about one percent of the total deaths, while almost half of all under-5 deaths occur in just five countries-India, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, and China.

In three of those countries: India, Nigeria and Pakistan, plus Afghanistan, polio remains endemic. Polio can strike at any age, but - according to the World Health Organization - it usually affects children under five through contaminated drinking water. In 1988, the World Health Assembly targeted polio for eradication. Incidence of the disease has fallen by 99 percent since then.?

Ellyn Ogden leads the polio program for the U.S. Agency for International Development. She helps coordinate the global eradication campaign with health institutions, governments, community groups and donors.? In a recent interview, Ogden told VOA that if the effort to eradicate polio is successful - which she believes it can be - it would be only the second time, after smallpox in 1977 - that a human disease has been wiped out.

ELLYN OGDEN
I believe that we have a vaccine that is cheap. It's very effective. It's very safe, and we have a moral obligation to use it and prevent horrible disability in children if we can. Yes, there are other diseases that are out there and they deserve attention and resources as well, but here we really have an opportunity to wipe polio off the face of the earth. This is a devastating disease for children. It cripples. It maims. It occasionally kills. Children in particular have a miserable life affected by polio. These are the crawlers on the street. These are people begging for food. They really don't have much of a future, and I think we can provide them with a good future, just by a simple vaccination. We know that it can stop transmission if we can get it into enough children for enough times to build population immunity, and that the challenges facing the program now are not technical. They are not epidemiologic. They are about political commitment. They're about people doing a good job consistently. It's about reassuring parents that the vaccine is safe and motivating health workers to continue to go back even in very difficult conditions over long distances in the hot sun carrying vaccine to a place where they may have missed it before. And it's starting to recognize children that have been left out and fallen through the cracks before. So, we can no longer turn our back on children in the urban slums. You can't turn your back on children living up the side of a mountain, or in a conflict area or living in a river basin where there are no health services. You have to recognize the children that nobody else sees.

BRIDGE
HOST: Fifty years ago this month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the world's first birth control pill. The medical breakthrough would reshape America's cultural landscape.
In her 1975 hit single, country star Loretta Lynn sings a victory anthem for The Pill:

You wined me and dined me
When I was your girl
Promised if I'd be your wife
You'd show me the world.
But all I've seen of this old world
Is a bed and a doctor bill.
I'm tearin' down your brooder house
'Cause now I've got the pill.

TEXT: Today, twelve million American women take the Pill, making it the leading contraceptive in the United States. But when the Pill hit the market in 1960, 30 states had laws restricting the advertising and sale of contraceptives. Two states banned them outright. Those laws were rendered invalid for married women by a 1965 Supreme Court decision and the ruling was expanded in 1972 to cover all women. University of Minnesota historian Elaine Tyler May says in the post-World War II baby boom era, the impetus for promoting an oral contraceptive for women came not from drug companies or the government. It came from the vision of two women: Margaret Sanger and Katharine McCormick.

ELAINE TYLER MAY
"Sanger had the political savvy and experience and connections and Katharine McCormick had the money. So really the funding for the early contraceptive part of this research came from Katharine McCormick single-handedly."

TEXT: Sanger and McCormick felt the female contraceptive could emancipate women. The team they worked with to make that happen attached other far-reaching utopian dreams to the project.

ELAINE TYLER MAY
"The most idealistic hopes attached to the Pill were that it would solve the problem of overpopulation, and poverty; that domestically, it would create happy families because married couples could enjoy sex without fears of unwanted pregnancy; that single women wouldn't have babies anymore because they could prevent it until they were married."

TEXT: It gradually became clear that the Pill was not a panacea for all those societal ills. It did not stem overpopulation, cut poverty, lower the divorce rate or put an end to unwanted pregnancies. Nor did the Pill spark the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Instead as May writes in her new book, America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril and Liberation, Women liberated themselves as the result of the feminist movement, and they used the Pill as an important tool to gain control over their lives.

ELAINE TYLER MAY
"... making demands on their doctors and the medical profession. And they also used the Pill to challenge pharmaceutical companies to make the pills safer. There was also, of course, the challenge to the Catholic Church where women in particular, but men and women, decided they would use contraception even if the Church didn't approve it."

TEXT: May says today's Pill has little in common with the one on the market in 1960.

ELAINE TYLER MAY
"The pill 50 years ago was a very high dose pill, 10 milligrams of hormones. It is a fraction of that now. So it's a much safer pill and a lot of the difficulties have been worked out in terms of safety and side effects, not all of them, but there are still problems with the Pill. It is not a perfect contraceptive."

TEXT: And, May adds, women are still facing barriers to full reproductive rights. While more contraceptive options and devices are available today, many women are denied access to them. Some states have so-called conscience clauses written into laws, allowing doctors and pharmacists to refuse to provide reproductive health products and services because of their personal beliefs.

ELAINE TYLER MAY
"They can just say they won't do it. Abstinence-only sex education denies young women opportunity to have the knowledge they need to make their own informed decisions."

TEXT: May observes that 50 years after women gained a powerful tool to control their own bodies, they are still fighting to use that tool as they see fit. She suggests that could help explain why the United States has a higher teen pregnancy rate than any other country in the industrialized world. And this year, for the first time since 1991, that rate is on the rise.

OUR WORLD THEME
TEXT: And, that's our program for this week. Faith Lapidus is our editor. Our technical director is Bob Doughty. I'm Rosanne Skirble. Join us online at voanews.com/ourworld or on your radio next week at this same time as we explore the latest in science and technology on Our World.