Water Can be Dangerous to Your Health

As much as we require water for life, water is also a major source of illness, especially for children, and there is now a new major threat to South Asian water supplies:

A gene that can turn many types of bacteria into deadly superbugs was found in about a quarter of water samples taken from drinking supplies and puddles on the streets of New Delhi, according to a new study.

Experts say it's the latest proof that the new drug-resistance gene, known as NDM-1, named for New Delhi, is widely circulating in the environment — and could potentially spread to the rest of the world.

Bacteria armed with this gene can only be treated with a couple of highly toxic and expensive antibiotics. Since it was first identified in 2008, it has popped up in a number of countries, including the United States, Australia, Britain, Canada and Sweden.

Most of those infections were in people who had recently traveled to or had medical procedures in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh.

"This is not a problem that is looming in the future ... there are people dying today from infections that can't be treated," said David Heymann, chairman of Britain's Health Protection Agency. He was not linked to the research.

This news came on top of a recent study published in PloS Medicine showing that the macroeconomic growth taking place in India has done little to lower the country's high level of child malnutrition. 

We failed to find consistent evidence that economic growth leads to reduction in childhood undernutrition in India. Direct investments in appropriate health interventions may be necessary to reduce childhood undernutrition in India.

What is the Size of the Gay and Lesbian Community in the US?

There is no certain way to enumerate the gay and lesbian community in the US, but demographer Gary Gates, who is Distinguished Scholar at UCLA's Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, has put forward what has to be the most authoritative estimate to date. 

Gates' best estimate, derived from five studies that have asked subjects about their sexual orientation, is that the nation has about 4 million adults who identify as being gay or lesbian, representing 1.7 percent of the 18-and-over population.

The American Community Survey data are also providing new insights into the LGBT household relationships, as Gates shows in both a power point presentation, and an online video.

Don't Plan to Retire Until Age 70

That is the message of a special section of this week's Economist, written by Philip Coggan. And, in fact, it is virtually impossible to argue with the idea that as life expectancy in the older ages keeps going up, it does not automatically mean that we should have more years of retirement. As you know, of course, this would not be such a big issue were it not for the fact that in virtually all of the richer countries with high life expectancy the birth rate is below replacement level. 

THIS SPECIAL REPORT has shown how the cost of providing pensions is rising across the developed world as the baby-boomers retire. Rich countries now face difficult trade-offs. They must keep costs in check without condemning many elderly people to decades of poverty. And if they move from a tax-funded system to one dependent on the performance of the stockmarket, more risks and costs will pass to the workers.

The best way of reducing the overall pensions burden, almost everyone now agrees, is for people to work longer. They will get paid for the extra years, national output will be boosted and the cost of pensions will fall. Reforms are already pushing workers in that direction. Thanks to the steady demise of defined-benefit schemes in the private sector, employees will be more prepared to do so because they need to build up higher pensions in defined-contribution schemes. And as the supply of younger workers dries up, employers will become more willing to use older ones. With rising life expectancy, the pension age across the board is probably heading for 70.

This is actually a fairly complicated issue and the Economist has put together a very nice short video to explain the demographics and economics behind the argument that 70 has to be the new target age at which people retire.


One could say that the timing of this argument is "interesting" in that the idea that people should work longer is being made at the same time that unemployment is high and everyone is talking about the need to create jobs. Even more jobs will have to be created if people work longer, and thus jobs turn over less frequently. There is no easy way out of this demographic situation.

Planned Parenthood as a Budget Hostage

Tonight at the last minute, the US Congress agreed to a budget compromise that kept the government from shutting down. All through the day, the only real news seemed to be that a small, but obviously influential group of Republicans was willing to shut the government down in order to keep any federal funds from flowing to Planned Parenthood. As I noted here a month and a half ago, Planned Parenthood had been targeted by Republicans because it receives Title X funding to provide family planning services and, at the same time, it also provides abortion services--even though everyone who knows the organization indicates that no federal money goes for those abortion services. NBC News reported that:

Assistant Senate Democratic Leader Richard Durbin said a dispute over federal funding for family planning agencies, which has proven to be the biggest and last stumbling block, had been resolved.

One source told NBC News that the issue was no longer on the table.

Congressional sources told National Journal that the outline of the spending deal includes up to $39 billion in cuts from the 2010 budget, $514 billion for the defense budget covering the remainder of this fiscal year, a GOP agreement to abandon policy riders dealing with Planned Parenthood and the Environmental Protection Agency, and an agreement to pass legislation Friday night to keep the government running while the deal is written in bill form.

For the moment at least those funds to Planned Parenthood have not been cut, but the overall budget compromise was almost certainly several billion dollars lower in total funding for discretionary government spending than would otherwise have been the case had its funding not been held hostage.

Chinese Women Prefer One-Child Families

Today's New York Times has a story that isn't really news to you if you have read Chapter 6 of the 11th edition of my text, or paid attention to my previous post on the one-child policy in China. Nonetheless, this is so important a topic for the world as a whole that it is always useful to be thinking about it. The story is about the low likelihood of China's birthrate rising much above its current level--which is well below replacement level--and so China is moving past its "demographic dividend" into an era of an increasingly older and presumably less productive and more dependent population.

China’s rise has depended partly on a huge spurt in the number of workers as a percentage of the population. This surge has created a cheap, productive labor force for its factories, mines and construction crews.

Now the size of the work force is leveling off. Demographers say it will begin to shrink within just five years, albeit slowly at first.

Meanwhile, the ranks of the elderly are swelling so fast that by 2040, projections show that the median age of Chinese will be higher than that of Americans, but Chinese will enjoy just one-third of the per capita income, adjusted for the cost of living. Experts say that will make China the first major country to grow old before it is fully economically developed.

But as calls for a relaxation of the policy intensify, and official hints of looser restrictions increase, so do concerns that the one-child culture is now so ingrained among Chinese that the authorities may not be able to encourage more births even if they try.

A growing body of research suggests that much of the decline in Chinese fertility over the past three decades is not a result of the one-child policy and its various permutations, but of the typical drop in birthrates that occurs as societies modernize.

These trends are not lost on the Chinese government. The wide range of investments that China is making all over the world, but especially in developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, can easily be viewed as the way that the country will pay for its aging population. It will not worry about having a new batch of its own babies. Rather, it will make money from other countries' batches of babies, not to mention other countries' non-human economic resources.