WEDNESDAY, MAY 30, 2007
Wednesday Edition: 'Reality' Show Breaks New Ground
You can stick people on islands, make them eat live worms and
bugs, toss them from helicopters and arrange weddings, but this
"reality show" may be beyond anything that has come before. The prize
for winning is life.
From RTÉ News:
A Dutch broadcaster is standing by its decision to air a
reality show in which a terminally ill woman selects a recipient for her
kidneys from three contestants.
Some parliaments members have called the program, to be
broadcast this week, 'wretched' and unethical.
On 'The Big Donor' this Friday, a 37-year-old woman will
choose from three people with kidney problems.
The article adds:
"The chance for a kidney for the contestants is 33 percent. This is
much higher than that for people on a waiting list. You would expect it to be
better but it is worse," said BNN Chairman Laurens Drillich.
BNN says it wants to highlight the difficulties faced by
kidney sufferers in getting donor organs as a tribute to BNN founder Bart de
Graaff who died of kidney failure five years ago, despite several transplants.
More coverage:
- See the network's Web site -- don't miss the logo on top of
the page. (Graphics cycle through in the top banner, but you won't miss the one
with the kidney implanted in the logo.)
Story ideas:
- Is the American system of organ donation flawed?
- Should we allow donors to choose who gets their organs?
- If living donors
may choose whom to give their organs to, why can't donors choose who will get their
organs after they die?
- If it is OK to sell blood plasma or for a woman to sell her
eggs, why is it wrong to sell a kidney or a lung?
An article from the University of Minnesota's Medical Bulletin explains how our current system has evolved:
Since 1986, organ allocation has been overseen by the United
Network for Organ Sharing
(UNOS), a national nonprofit organization under contract with the federal
government. For many years, the standard procedure for lungs was to add people
in need of an organ to a "first-come, first-served" list, requiring them to wait
in line for a transplant. When a donor organ became available, the search for a
good-fit recipient began at the top of the list -- regardless of the degree of
medical urgency. The result: Those who lived long enough to make it to the top
of the list received lungs, while more desperate candidates died waiting.
"The old system was unfair to everybody," says
Cynthia Herrington, M.D., assistant professor of cardiovascular and thoracic
surgery at the University and surgical director of lung/heart-lung transplantation
at the Transplant Center.
In 1998, recognizing the limitations of the original
allocation system, the federal government ordered UNOS to revamp it. After much
discussion, the UNOS Thoracic Organs Committee came up with a ranking system
that assigned lung transplant candidates over age 12 a score from 0 to 100
based both on medical urgency and potential benefit from a transplant. In May
2005 [...] the new queue system went into effect.
Its impact was instantaneous. Immediately, donor lungs began
going to individuals [...] who were judged to be in the toughest shape and,
therefore, with the most to gain. As a result, the national waiting list got
shorter, and the number of people who died while waiting for a lung transplant
dropped from 489 in 2004 to 220 in the first 11 months of 2006.
Additional pieces on this topic:
What happens when a state offers financial incentives to
donors? See this from CNN's "Ethics Matters," 1999.
The Whaling Meeting
Isn't it interesting that while so much media attention has been paid to whales that have strayed inland and to the efforts to save them, little has been written about the International Whaling Commission meeting going on right now in Anchorage, Alaska. Norway, Iceland and Japan still allow whaling. There is a good bit of pressure on those countries to slow or stop whaling.
In the meantime, the Anchorage Daily News explains another battle by native Alaskans to be allowed to harvest bowhead whales, which they say is not only important to them economically but spiritually as well.
The Associated Press says:
The meeting is expected to end with the continuation of a 21-year moratorium on commercial whaling despite a symbolic resolution to overturn the ban that was passed at last year's meeting. A 75 percent majority would be necessary to end the moratorium, but the vote fell short of that mark.
The moratorium was enacted in 1986 to protect several vulnerable species.
Pro-whaling nations, including Japan, Norway and Iceland, argue that it is no longer needed because whale populations have rebounded. Norway and Iceland do not recognize the ban and conduct commercial whaling and Japan hunts whales under a research provision allowed by the IWC.
Activists oppose a program in which Japan kills about 1,000 whales each year for scientific research and then sells the meat. Critics say the program is nothing but a loophole that defies the moratorium and should be better scrutinized by whale-friendly nations.
Hidden Downside to Ethanol: Water Use
When a proposed ethanol plant submitted
a permit request in Tampa Bay, planners were shocked to learn the plant
would use upward of a half-million gallons of water a day.
Most of the water -- about 60 percent -- is used in
the cooling tower, which is where the ethanol is converted from a super-hot
vapor into liquid fuel. Another 20 percent is absorbed into the ethanol itself,
while the remaining 20 percent is used to feed the boiler.
The St. Petersburg
(Fla.) Times says:
Water usage is one of the biggest hurdles facing the ethanol
industry, second only perhaps to concerns over a rise in some food prices due
to increased demand for corn. One recent report by the Minneapolis-based
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, described water as the "Achilles'
heel" of corn-based ethanol.
There are 120 ethanol plants in the United States with another 77 under
construction, mostly in the Midwest. The U.S. EnviroFuels project is the first in Florida. Several other ethanol
projects are under way in Florida, but are still only in the
planning stages.
By the end of 2008, the demand from new ethanol plants would
require a 254 percent increase in the volume of water used by the industry over
the previous decade, the IATP report estimated. It is also noted that "minimal
data" exists on the impact to underground water aquifers.
Pig Farmers Turn to Snack Foods
The
Wall Street Journal says corn prices are so high that pig farmers are turning to
nearly whatever they can afford to feed their pigs:
Besides trail mix, pigs and cattle are downing cookies, licorice,
cheese curls, candy bars, french fries, frosted wheat cereal and peanut-butter
cups. Some farmers mix chocolate powder with cereal and feed it to baby pigs.
"It's kind of like getting Cocoa Puffs," says David Funderburke, a
livestock nutritionist at Cape Fear Consulting in Warsaw, N.C., who helps Mr. Smith and
other farmers formulate healthy diets for livestock.
California farmers are feeding farm
animals grape-skins from vineyards and lemon-pulp from citrus groves. Cattle
ranchers in spud-rich Idaho are buying truckloads of
uncooked french fries, Tater Tots and hash browns.
In Pennsylvania, farmers are turning to
candy bars and snack foods because of the many food manufacturers nearby.
Hershey Co. sells farmers waste cocoa and the trimmings from wafers that go
into its Kit Kat bars. At Nissin Foods, maker of Top Ramen and Cup Noodles,
farmers drive to a Lancaster, Pa., factory and load up on scraps of the squiggly dried noodles,
which pile up in bins beneath the assembly line. Hiroshi Kika, a senior manager
at the company, says the farm business is "very minor" but helps the
company's effort to "do anything to recycle."
The Sad Fate of Route 66 Motels
USA Today reported
a story from The Associated Press on the sad condition of the motels that dot Route 66, which spans 2,400
miles from Chicago to Los Angeles.
In Oklahoma, with more Route 66 miles than any of the eight
states it flows through, many motels are derelict or abandoned, used as junk
yards, makeshift car lots and flophouses.
Owners who inherited these historical footnotes have no use for
them, and would rather sell the properties to a developer if the price was
right.
Today, many structures that made the road what it was -- the
diners, family-owned service stations, barbecue joints -- have fallen apart.
With efforts to fix up these architectural landmarks scarce, time has become
the road's worst enemy.
The non-profit National
Historic Route 66 Federation in Lake Arrowhead, Calif., estimates at least 3,000
motels along the route are in various states of repair or disrepair.
Al's Morning Multimedia: Terrorism Databases
I want to pass along a couple of useful interactive Web sites
that track terrorism and terror groups.
This site, the
Terrorism Knowledge Base, has a search function that lets you search by
group name and by incident. You can also look up leaders and members, and cases.
This map
will stun you. It is a map of current or very recent acts of terror or
suspicious activity worldwide, plotted on an interactive map. If you just
scroll over the icon, a small pop-up banner will appear to tell you what is going on
there. If you click on the icon, it will give you more details. Of course it
does a mashup and places all of the data on a Google map.
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor's
Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story
excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as
original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly
from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided
whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends upon the
accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and
inaccuracies found will be corrected.
Posted at 4:21:42 PM
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