I suppose it has always been so but it is becoming increasingly apparent that there is no difference between tabloids and supposedly serious newspapers, especially as politics has become so shrill. One agricluture related offender I've called out before is Michael Pollan, an opportunist who has been riding high on food scare stories.

For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial agriculture as “unsustainable” . . . Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop working? The soil lose its fertility? . . . Two stories in the news this year, stories that on their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way we’re growing food today.

The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS . . .

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases. . .

Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA presently killing Americans originated on factory farms. But given the rising public alarm about MRSA and the widespread use on these farms of precisely the class of antibiotics to which these microbes have acquired resistance, you would think our public-health authorities would be all over it. Apparently not. . .

Actually, most factory farms are far from filthy. The animals are far, far cleaner than their free range cousins. And there are confinemnet feeding operations that do not routinely use antibiotics. Pollan is full of manure.

Antibiotics are mainly used in such systems to increase feed conversion efficiency rather than ward off disease. Animals who are given sub-therapeutic doses in feed additives grow faster. It's a small percentage, but that adds up to major money over time. If such uses were stopped they'd make less money, but things wouldn't grind to a halt.

Given the routine use of anti-microbials in consumer products and the routine consumption of antibiotics by humans, especially in hospitals where MRSA has been a problem, it's a stretch to tag agriculture for this development. It isn't as if disease germs didn't mutate, developing virulent strains, for all of the history of life on earth. If we totally stopped using antibiotics this would still happen. If humans left the planet it would still happen.

Most of these bacterial toxins are created in the never ending war between strains of bacteria. They fight one another whether we exist or not. If we wish to celebrate increasing human cleverness and sustainability, learning to fight on a more subtle level like bacteria themselves, the MRSA challenge and responses to it provide some cause.

Balaban believes that RIP therapeutics will not cause antagonistic resistance in bacteria leading to antibiotic resistant strains like MRSA. As opposed to antibiotics which target and kill bacteria, prompting them to thicken biofilm layers and devise other antibiotic-resistant measures, RIP therapy is "like Prozac for the bacteria," she says. By knocking out the toxin signaling pathway that bacteria use to deter neighbors and disperse, RIP makes the bacteria think they are alone in their microenvironment, and do not need to spread. Thus, in combination with antibiotic treatment, RIP may lessen bacteria defenses. "Happy bacteria tend not to mutate as much." . . .

Even though Balaban has known that the RIP treatment works since the early 1990s, bringing the therapeutic to market has been markedly slow. One clinician has been running human trials with successful data, Balaban says, but she won't give his name or hospital affiliation. In 2005, a small biotech company called Centegen licensed all of Balaban's patents for RIP, and has continued to develop the compound, called CEN-101. So far the company has been able to raise enough money from private investors to get the compound through preclinical testing and hopes to have an investigational new drug application filed by the end of this year, according to Centegen CEO Paul Abrams.

But for Balaban, this isn't fast enough. The government reported last October that there are 90,000 deaths a year from drug-resistant Staph in the United States -- five times the number of deaths from HIV in North America. "I've known for 15 years that RIP works," she says. "And meanwhile a million people have died."

On the one hand we have wankers like Pollan profiteering on MRSA, comparing it to AIDS for shock value, and on the other we have 15 year old therapies that might have saved a million lives except for the difficulty in jumping through regulatory hoops.

Testing and human trials are necessary, unexpected consequences aren't rare, and companies need the liability protection of an approval process since they can othwerwise be sued to death if a problem does occur, but I would think that people who have fatal infections have little if anything to lose using new therapies. If it was me and I had a choice I'd want to give it a try. At the very least I could be the failed example that could help with future efforts.