Ralph talks to Oxfam's, Scott Paul, about effective strategies for overcoming world hunger and Emily L. Heil of the University of Maryland Medical Center outlines the risks to humans of giving antibiotics to farm animals.
Scott Paul works for Oxfam, which is an organization that work on issues of inequality, discrimination, and unequal access to resources including food, water, and land. Mr. Paul is Oxfam America’s senior humanitarian policy advisor focusing on East Africa and has been a contributing writer to the policy blog “The Washington Note” and a frequent speaker on US-UN relations, human rights, climate change and US public engagement on global issues.
Adding $52 million to the defense budget and slashing development, slashing diplomacy basically guarantees that if you encounter an American in this world you’re that much more likely to do it at the end of a gun barrel. And that really doesn’t help anybody. It doesn’t express our values. And as Secretary Mattis said as recently as a year ago, if we don’t fully fund the State Department, and I would add if we don’t fully fund USAID and the United Nations, he’s going to have to buy more bullets.
-Scott Paul
Emily L. Heil is an assistant professor of pharmacy practice and science at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy in Baltimore. She is coordinator of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Her op-ed in the Washington Post is entitled “How Maryland Can Combat the Spread of Antibiotic-resistant Bacteria” .
Up to 80% of antibiotics per volume that are used in this country are not used by humans at all, but they’re used in the animal sector, which is a concern, because we can do a lot on the human end, but with no action on the animal end as well, we are not going to be able to slow the antibiotic resistance crisis.
– Emily Heil
Fighting World Hunger/Superbugs