Drug overuse in cattle imperils human health

KANSAS CITY, Mo. --
Two children seriously injured in the Joplin, Mo., tornado in May 2011 showed up at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City suffering from antibiotic-resistant infections from dirt and debris in their wounds.

Physicians tried different drugs, but at first nothing seemed to work.

Blame the overuse of antibiotics in livestock, according to the doctors familiar with their cases.

“These kids had some really highly resistant bacteria that they clearly had not picked up in a hospital,” said Jason Newland, director of the Children Mercy’s antibiotic stewardship program.

Newland and other doctors believe those infections are part of the price we are paying for a half-century of overusing antibiotics in cattle and other meat animals in the United States.

“If you look at tonnage, 80 percent of the total of all the antibiotics we use in the States is used in meat animals,” Newland said.

As in humans, bacteria growing inside animals that are given antibiotics can develop a resistance to the medicines, Newland explained. That resistant bacteria can then be transferred to the soil through animal waste.

During severe storms, such as the EF5 tornado which killed 161 people in Joplin, that contaminated soil can end up in open wounds, and even modern medicine is challenged in combating the serious infections that can occur.

“We are increasingly treating kids with antibiotic-resistant infections who were at the last antibiotic we could possibly use on them,” Newland said. “In the next 20 years, will we see antibiotics resistant to everything?”

A yearlong investigation by The Kansas City Star found a multimillion-dollar-a-year pharmaceutical arms race in the beef industry is not just about curing sick cows.

It’s also about fattening cattle cheaply and quickly, driven in part by efforts to maximize profits, according to food safety advocates. In fact, the same number of cattle today are producing twice as much meat as they did in the 1950s because of genetics, drugs and more efficient processing.

Despite decades of warnings, the federal government has failed to pass meaningful regulation of animal drug use, failed to adequately monitor the harmful residues they leave behind, and failed to stop the consumption of meat contaminated with such substances.

Consider:

•  Last year, an Arizona lab discovered a strain of antibiotic resistant MRSA in meat that can infect humans. MRSA is the potentially fatal staph infection that sometimes races through hospitals.

•  Mexico rejected contaminated meat that U.S. rules allow Americans to eat. A shipment of U.S. beef in 2008 contained high levels of copper, a byproduct of industry and antibiotics, which can damage kidneys. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which hasn’t set allowable amounts of copper in meat, couldn’t stop it from distribution in the United States.

•  Until it tightened monitoring this year, the government couldn’t even stop the sale of meat containing arsenic, one of the residues found in cattle treated with antibiotics. High levels of the poison can cause vascular disease and hypertension in humans. Many U.S. veterinarians who specialize in treating cattle said in a recent survey that they were concerned about the overuse and improper use of antibiotics and other drugs. Some blamed salesmen intent on making more money. Based on sales data alone, the amount of drugs used in livestock is increasing, and beef samples are showing greater numbers of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

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Man set on fire Christmas night, Miami-Dade police are investigating

A 44-year-old man was set on fire Christmas night at a gas station in central Miami-Dade County. He was burned over 75 percent of his body but remained alive Wednesday as his family pleaded for help in finding his attackers.

It was a mystery why Darrell Brackett was set ablaze at the U-Gas station at 4700 NW 27th Ave. Miami-Dade police said they were treating the investigation as possible attempted murder.

“This is a human being,” his mother, Bridgett Brackett, told reporters as she stood outside Jackson Memorial Hospital, where her son was being treated. “This is not an animal.”

Was it a random attack? A robbery gone wrong? Police said only that they were still investigating.

It happened Tuesday night, about a half hour before midnight, police said. Earlier in the evening, Darrell Brackett and his girlfriend had a cookout at their home, his mother said.

Afterward, they took their guests home. After dropping them off, Brackett and his girlfriend were heading home when their van ran out of gas near Northwest 49th Street and 23rd Avenue.

Stay in the van, Brackett told his girlfriend, according to his mother. He would walk to a gas station.

He made to the U-Gas, police said, where he paid for some gas and walked over to a pump. What happened next remained unclear to authorities Wednesday.

What police do know is that they got calls saying a man on fire was running in the middle of the street.

Bridgett Brackett said a woman who saw her son in flames rushed over to help him. She got him to the ground and rolled him in the dirt of the median, which put out the flames.

Brackett’s mother said he told her that he had only asked some men at the gas station a question, and that he told the woman who rescued him, over and over, “They didn’t have to do this to me.”

The woman kept talking to him, trying to keep to him alert, asking him questions until help arrived and got him to Jackson, his mother said

Back at the van, Brackett’s girlfriend became worried when he didn’t return. At first, she figured he got caught up talking to some people, Brackett’s mother said. After awhile, she left the van and walked to a corner store to borrow a phone so she could call Brackett’s cellphone.

It went to voicemail.

She was leaving when the store clerk told her to come back. It was the police, calling back after the number appeared on Brackett’s phone.

They told her what happened.

Wednesday night, Bridgett Brackett said doctors told her they had placed her son in a medically induced coma to help him recover. He was burned over about 75 percent of his body, she said, including his waist, parts of his legs and his head.

The only parts that weren’t burned were his thighs, his mother said, because his thick jeans protected them.

Bridgett Brackett spent Wednesday at the hospital, constantly answering her cellphone. It seemed to ring every five minutes with another person who had heard the news and couldn’t believe what had happened to Darrell, a man who worked at a landscaping company and enjoyed coming home and hanging out with his girlfriend.

She said she knew her son wasn’t perfect, and that he had his ups and downs.

Records show Brackett had been arrested several times, mostly for drug possession and petty crimes, but he never spent time in prison.

He wasn’t one to argue, his mother said. “He would avoid trouble by walking away.”

The Brackett family also hopes to find the woman who helped put out the flames. They want to thank her.

“We’re just praying,” Bridgett Brackett said, “and taking it day by day.”

Detectives asked anyone with information to call Miami-Dade County Crime Stoppers, anonymously, at 305-471-8477.

Information from Miami Herald news partner WFOR-CBS 4 is included to this report.

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Analysis: Amazon’s Christmas faux pas shows risks in the cloud

(Reuters) – A Christmas Eve glitch traced to Amazon.com Inc that shuttered Netflix for users from Canada to South America highlights the risks that companies take when they move their datacenter operations to the cloud.

While the high-profile failure – at least the third this year – may cause some Amazon Web Services customers to consider alternatives, it is unlikely to severely hurt a fast-growing business for the cloud-computing pioneer that got into the sector in 2006 and has historically experienced few outages.

“The benefits still outweigh the risks,” said Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry.

“When it comes to the cloud, Amazon has got it right.”

The latest service failure comes at a critical time for Amazon, which is betting that AWS can become a significant profit generator even if the economy continues to stagnate. Moreover, it is increasingly targeting larger corporate clients that have traditionally shied away from moving critical applications onto AWS.

AWS, which Amazon started more than six years ago, provides data storage, computing power and other technology services from remote locations that group thousands of servers across areas than can span whole football fields. Their early investment made it a pioneer in what is now known as cloud computing.

Executives said last month at an Amazon conference in Las Vegas they could envision the division, which lists Pinterest, Shazam and Spotify among its fast-growing clients, becoming its biggest business, outpacing even its online retail juggernaut. Evercore analyst Ken Sena expects AWS revenue to jump 45 percent a year, from about $ 2 billion this year to $ 20 billion in 2018.

The service has boomed because it is cheap, relatively easy to use, and can be shut off, scaled back or ramped up quickly depending on companies’ needs. As the longest-running player in the game, Amazon now boasts the widest array of datacenter products and services, plus a broader stable of clients than rivals like Google Inc, Rackspace Inc and Salesforce.com Inc.

Outages such as the one that took down Netflix and other websites on the eve of one of the biggest U.S. holidays are part and parcel of the nascent business, analysts say. Moreover, outages have been a problem long before the age of cloud computing, with glitches within corporate datacenters and telecommunications hubs triggering myriad service disruptions.

COMING SOON: POST-MORTEM

Amazon’s latest service failure comes months after two high-profile outages that hit Netflix and other popular websites such as photo-sharing service Instagram and Pinterest. Industry executives, however, say its downtimes tend to attract more attention because of its outsized market footprint.

Netflix – which CEO Reed Hastings said relies on AWS for 95 percent of its datacenter needs – would not comment on whether they were pondering alternatives. Analysts say the video streaming giant is unlikely to try a large-scale switch, partly because all cloud providers experience outages.

“Despite a steady stream of these service outages, the demand for cloud services offered by AWS, Google, etc. continues to escalate because these services are still reliable enough to satisfy customer expectations,” said Jeff Kaplan, managing director of consultancy ThinkStrategies Inc.

“They offer cost-savings and elasticities that are too attractive for companies to ignore.”

But “Netflix and other organizations which rely on AWS will have to reexamine how they configure their services and allocate their service requirements across multiple providers to mitigate over-dependency and risks.”

AWS spokeswoman Rena Lunak said the outage was traced to a problem affecting customers at its oldest data center, run out of northern Virginia, which was linked also to the June failure.

The latest glitch involved a service known as Elastic Load Balancing, which automatically allocates incoming Web traffic across multiple servers in order to boost the performance of a website. She declined to provide further details about the outage, saying the company would be publishing a full post-mortem within days.

AWS has traditionally been used by start-up tech companies and smaller businesses that anticipate rapid growth in online traffic but are unwilling or unable to shell out on IT equipment and management upfront.

The company has more recently started winning more and more business from larger corporations. It has also set up a unit that caters to government agencies.

Regardless, Amazon’s clientele would do well not to put all their eggs in one basket, analysts say.

“Service outages do occur, but they are not common enough to cause users of these services to abandon today’s Cloud service providers at significant rates. In fact, every major Cloud service provider has experienced outages,” Kaplan said.

“Therefore, organizations that rely on these services are putting backup and recovery systems and protocols in place to mitigate the risks of future outages.”

(Additional reporting; editing by Edwin Chan and Richard Chang)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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George H.W. Bush in intensive care

HOUSTON — Former President George H.W. Bush has been admitted to the intensive care unit at a Houston hospital "following a series of setbacks including a persistent fever," but he is alert and talking to medical staff, his spokesman said Wednesday.

Jim McGrath, Bush's spokesman in Houston, said in a brief email that Bush was admitted to the ICU at Methodist Hospital on Sunday. He said doctors are cautiously optimistic about his treatment and that the former president "remains in guarded condition."

No other details were released about his medical condition, but McGrath said Bush is surrounded by family. Bush has been hospitalized since Nov. 23.

Earlier Wednesday, McGrath said a fever that kept Bush in the hospital over Christmas had gotten worse and that doctors had put him on a liquids-only diet.

"It's an elevated fever, so it's actually gone up in the last day or two," McGrath told The Associated Press earlier in the day. "It's a stubborn fever that won't go away."

But he said the bronchitis-like cough that initially brought the 88-year-old to the hospital has improved.

Bush was visited on Christmas by his wife, Barbara, his son, Neil, and Neil's wife, Maria, and a grandson, McGrath said. Bush's daughter, Dorothy, was expected to arrive Wednesday in Houston from Bethesda, Md. The 41st president has also been visited twice by his sons, George W. Bush, the 43rd president, and Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida.

Bush and his wife live in Houston during the winter and spend their summers at a home in Kennebunkport, Maine.

The former president was a naval aviator in World War II — at one point the youngest in the Navy — and was shot down over the Pacific. He achieved notoriety in retirement for skydiving on at least three of his birthdays since leaving the White House in 1992.

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Deadline to apply for free foreclosure case reviews is Monday

Florida residents who believe they suffered from shoddy foreclosure practices have through Monday to apply for a free case review that could net them up to $125,000 if wrongdoing is found.

The program, which is overseen by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, began in November 2011 with an estimated 4 million eligibility letters mailed nationwide.

As of late September, just 3.8 percent of Floridians who were sent letters about their eligibility for the review have applied.

Cases are eligible for review if the foreclosure was on a primary residence in some stage of foreclosure during 2009 and 2010. The foreclosure had to have been handled by one of 24 banks or mortgage servicers named in consent orders crafted in response to findings of foreclosure deficiencies. The affected servicers can be found at independentforeclosurereview.com.

Problems contacting borrowers who may have been evicted from foreclosed homes, as well as borrower fatigue in applying for aid programs probably contributed to the limited response, some foreclosure defense attorneys said.

“A lot of these homeowners have been promised a lot of things in the past that were never fulfilled,” said attorney Ron Kaniuk, of Sachs Sax Caplan in Boca Raton. “It’s the law of diminishing returns. Once you are disappointed a few times, you stop filling stuff out.”

The Independent Foreclosure Review is separate from the $25 billion attorneys general settlement reached in February.

Nationwide, the return rate of borrowers responding to eligibility letters was about 5.3 percent through Sept. 27. Since then, an additional 121,677 borrowers have applied nationwide, said Bryan Hubbard, a spokesman for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

The original deadline to apply for the review was April 30. It was pushed back to July 31 and then Dec. 31.

Reviewers are looking for several problems including failure to put a homeowner on a permanent loan modification after he or she successfully completed a trial period, foreclosing on a borrower while he or she was current on payments under a loan modification, and not providing a borrower with proper notification during a foreclosure.

Remediation to borrowers can include credit fixes, reimbursement of improperly charged fees, and lump-sum payments of between $500 and $125,000.

For more information about the Independent Foreclosure Review, call 1-888-952-9105.

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Outdoorsy fun for the New Year’s holiday

So, as Miss Ella once sang, What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?

Many of you, of course, will ring in 2013 with champagne and dancing at one of the clubs in Miami Beach or downtown Miami — and many of these same people will wake up with a hangover Tuesday only to wonder why they spent $2,000 to be in the same space as R&B/hip-hop act Drake and a DJ at the Fontainebleau or depressed that they spent $1,500 for a VIP table at the Catalina’s Studio 54 party to hear ’70s disco when they could have played Donna, Gloria and the Village People at any old time on iTunes for a few houseguests.

Clubbing not your thing? Good thing you live in South Florida, where going outside generally makes sense at this time of year. Here are some suggestions for activities, with an accent on the great outdoors and even a little fitness thrown in for good measure.

King Mango Strut

The annual spoof of the Orange Bowl Parade — or whatever some politician wants to call it now, as in ‘La Gran Naranja’ — has been “putting the ‘nut’ back in ‘Coconut Grove’ since 1981,” its ads tout. This time around, being an election year should provide plenty of fodder, and not just the silliness going on in West Kendall and Brickell, where some people are still waiting to cast a vote in the presidential race. (Obama won, go home.) The snarky parade pokes good-natured fun at the people and things behind the events that made the news snap during the year. This year’s grand marshal will be Clint Eastwood’s chair, fresh from the Republican National Convention.

This year’s parade takes place at 2 p.m. Sunday in downtown Coconut Grove on the corner of Commodore Plaza and Main Highway. The wacky participants turn left onto Main Highway and then left onto Grand Avenue at CocoWalk. Get comfy along the street and prepare to giggle. Call the Mango Hotline at 305-582-0955 for information.

The ball drop

You can go traditional and watch the ball drop in downtown Miami at the Bayfront Park Amphitheater New Year’s shindig. The free event features music and the midnight countdown for the dropping of the Big Orange, followed by fireworks. Be there at 301 N. Biscayne Blvd. Call 305-358-7550.

Just want the fireworks part? Miami Beach’s New Year’s Eve Party offers a free fireworks celebration at midnight on the beach near Ocean Drive and Eighth Street, if you can tear yourself away from Carl Cox at Mansion and Calvin Harris at Liv. Call 305-673-7400.

Bike It

Shark Valley, on the Tamiami Trail about 35 miles into the Everglades, is a real South Florida experience. Cycle amid gators — and we’re not talking the University of Florida variety. Alligators, wading birds and turtles frolic freely in the greenery along the 15-mile round-trip bike path. A multilevel observation at the midpoint offers a nice break spot for a boxed lunch or photo ops. There are no shortcuts, but you can opt for a tram tour. Call 305-221-8776.

Other leisurely bike rides around town include the shaded 13 or so miles of the Old Cutler Trail in South Miami, and you can pop over to Pinecrest Gardens for the Sunday Green Market, one of South Florida’s best farmers markets. North Dade residents aren’t too far from the restored Hollywood Beach Broadwalk for some nice ocean views while cycling or strolling.

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Lady Gaga Documentary Announced

The nearly 33 million Little Monsters who follow Lady Gaga on Twitter got a massive Christmas present this morning as the singer revealed she'll soon be coming to a theater near you!

VIDEO - Lady Gaga Hosts Fame Picnic in Paris

"Merry Christmas little monsters," Gaga wrote. "Terry Richardson is making a #LadyGagaMOVIE documenting my life, the creation of ARTPOP + you!"

"Thank you for being so patient waiting for my new album ARTPOP I hope this gets u excited for things to come. I love you with all my heart!" Gaga announced her fourth album on August 6, 2012 and featured several of the songs in contention for inclusion on her recent Born This Wall Ball. Although no release date is yet known, it's rumored to be due out in Spring 2013.

VIDEO - The Secret Lady Gaga Never Told Beyonce

Gaga has previously collaborated with Richardson on countless magazine covers and 2011's Lady Gaga x Terry Richardson photobook.

Lady Gaga won't be the only major musician to be featured in a documentary next year. It was revealed on November 26 that HBO would be airing a Beyonce documentary on February 16, 2013.

VIDEO - Get A Sneak Peek at Beyonce's Documentary

The film promises extensive first-person footage -- some of it shot by Beyonce on her laptop -- in which she reflects on the realities of being a celebrity, the refuge she finds onstage and the joys of becoming a mother after giving birth to her daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, in January 2012. Watch a sneak peek below.

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Hock gets haute

Looking for a quick $1 million?

Help is here for Big Apple high rollers: a new breed of upscale pawn shops is willing to trade cash for pricey personal items like jewelry, antique cars and fine wine.

The city’s first high-end pawnbroker, Borro.com, has loaned out millions to more than 15,000 well-heeled clients in its initial year, using their extravagant toys and valuables as collateral.

“We even have a Grammy in our vaults,” said Paul Aitken, the CEO and founder of Borro.com, who declined to identify the artist.

“A lot of our clients are young sports and entertainment people who are just starting their contracts and have some early liquidity problems until their big money comes in,” he added.

Bad economic times and skittish traditional lenders such as banks have left fertile ground for several high-end pawn brokers including iPawn.com. It typically hands out loans of around $100,000 to cash-crunched businesses or professionals.

Both pawn shops say they’ve won followings in their first year in New York because of the city’s abundance of luxury items, coupled with the Big Apple’s appetite for risk and sophistication about leverage.

The outfits — which operate in the privacy of referrals from financial planners and others — offer securitized loans at about half the cost of roadside hock shops where goods wind up on display and the loans are hardly enough to fund a Caribbean weekend.

“We can keep our interest [rates] incredibly low because we lend out more cash we’d otherwise pay in overhead,” said Ben De-Kall, the founder of iPawn.com and a former Lehman Bros. investment banker .

De-Kall, a Columbia MBA, said he knows the humiliation of having few places to turn after his lifestyle letdown following Lehman’s collapse.

“We’re working largely with business people who can’t get the financing they need,” said De-Kall.

He said one client, a doctor, got turned down by his banker for a quick loan to expand his practice. Within hours, iPawn.com wired $40,000 for his deal, backed by the doctor’s briefcase full of family heirlooms, diamonds and luxury timepieces.

Expanding across the US from its headquarters in Texas, iPawn holds banking licenses.

Appraisal of collateral — such as gems, precious metals and artworks — starts online through photos and videos. If a client is interested, he ships the valuables to Texas for a final valuation before cash worth up to 70 percent of the item’s value is wired to the borrower.

About 85 percent of the clients accept the appraisals. Cars and houses are too big to pledge, De-Kall noted.

Borrowers seeking bigger bucks — loans up to $1 million — can turn to Borro.com, which in turn requires substantial collateral such as antique cars, beach homes, a corporate helicopter and even a Babe Ruth baseball bat, said Borro.com founder Aitkin.

“We take on a lot of Warhols valued in the $300,000 to $500,000 range,” said Aitken, a former technology entrepreneur who sold his phone app company to help bankroll the UK-based Borro.com.

A typical recent loan for $24,000 was backed by a case of 1989 Chateau Petrus valued at about $38,000. It’s safe in climate-controlled vaults, where unclaimed treasures are rare, Aitken said.

tharp@nypost.com

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Miami: We’re still busiest cruise port

Florida’s ports are steaming bow-to-bow in the race to be the world’s businest cruise ship port.

Though some publications have reported Port Canaveral in the lead with 3,761,056 million for its fiscal year ending Sept. 30, PortMiami officials Monday said they had hosted 3,774,452 passengers during the same period, putting it slightly ahead. Fort Lauderdale’s PortEverglades reported 3,689,000 passengers for the period, putting it slightly behind the others in third place.

“We’re all very close,’’ said Paula Musto, PortMiami spokeswoman.

PortMiami has slipped below its previous high of 4 million plus passengers because of changing ship deployments, she said. That number is expected to again cruise past 4 million in 2013 as several new ships homeport in Miami.

Jane Wooldridge

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New generation of judges serving on federal bench in South Florida

For a fleeting moment this fall, U.S. District Judge Robert N. Scola Jr. declared in jest that he wished he were “king of the world.”

If he had such power, Scola said from the bench, he would deny a defense lawyer’s request to travel to Pakistan to question a group of defendants charged in a Miami terrorism case along with two Muslim clerics. Since the missing defendants weren’t present, the judge considered them “fugitives.’’

But the judge let the defense team make the upcoming trip against fierce opposition from prosecutors, because case law allows such extraordinary depositions, he found.

Scola, a former Miami-Dade prosecutor and state circuit court judge, relishes his role as one of three new members on South Florida’s federal bench, which is experiencing a generational sea change as the result of several retirements and presidential appointments.

“I knew I wanted to be a judge when I was 10 years old; my father was a judge in Massachusetts,” Scola said, during a brief December interview wedged between verdicts in the South Beach “bar-girls” trial and the sentencing of a mental-health clinic director convicted of Medicare fraud.

Over the past few years, the federal court in the Southern District of Florida has seen the departure of four judges — Daniel T.K. Hurley, Paul C. Huck, Alan S. Gold and Patricia A. Seitz — who have gone on “senior” status, meaning they handle lighter caseloads. Another federal judge, Adalberto Jordan, was confirmed this year as a member of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.

Those five vacancies, in one of the busiest federal districts for criminal and civil cases in the country, accounted for about one-third of all the positions on the federal bench in South Florida.

The retirements have generated coveted openings that have been filled by Scola, 57; Kathleen M. Williams, 56, a former Miami federal public defender; and Robin S. Rosenbaum, 46, a former Fort Lauderdale federal magistrate judge. Rosenbaum, also a one-time federal prosecutor, was sworn in as a new U.S. district judge Dec. 13.

“It’s pretty obvious that Robin is never going to make a decent living,” 11th Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus, for whom Rosenbaum once clerked, quipped about her public-service career during her investiture in Fort Lauderdale federal court.

But then Marcus struck a more serious note, describing federal district judges as the “crucible of justice” in the U.S. court system. “I have to say, Robin, this is work you were born to do,” he said.

Another recent nominee: Miami-Dade Circuit Judge William L. Thomas, a former assistant public defender in both the state and federal system. Thomas is scheduled for confirmation as a federal judge in 2013. If confirmed, he would become the first openly gay black man appointed to a federal judgeship in the nation.

Michael Caruso, the Miami federal public defender who replaced Williams in August, said the appointment of federal judges is in many ways a “president’s most enduring legacy.”

“All presidents strive to appoint smart, fair and hardworking lawyers,” Caruso said, commenting on the four nominated by President Barack Obama in South Florida. “President Obama, in addition to choosing women and men who share these traits, has chosen those who’ve been trial lawyers in the criminal justice system and who have devoted a significant portion of their career to public service.”

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