Amy Drozdowska | Vox

Factory farms are an ideal breeding ground for the next pandemic

2021-12-20T17:47:53-05:00

Swine influenza under an electron microscope. | BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images

We’ve seen the devastating effects of a pandemic firsthand: the loss of human life, the economic toll, and the impact on everything from mental health to children’s education.

Which is why, as Covid-19 spread, people looked for a way to prevent future outbreaks.

In the US, people started to call for the closure of “wet markets” overseas. Some research suggested that the many different species living closely together in these markets might have allowed the virus to mutate and jump to humans.

But Martha Nelson, who studies viruses at the National Institutes of Health, says that if we’re really serious about preventing a future pandemic, we also need to look closer to home.

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“I think it’s really easy to think that pandemics come from other places,” she explains, “I think it’s really easy to think that they’re foreign invaders coming from other people who were doing things in a bad way. And I certainly would never underplay the importance of wet markets and all the opportunities for novel pathogens to emerge there. But I think it’s sometimes hard to see things in your own backyard.”

On this episode of the Future Perfect podcast, Nelson explains the pandemic risk lurking on factory farms in the US.

Nelson has studied our system of raising pigs closely, and she argues that by moving pigs across the country and raising large numbers of pigs in very close proximity, we’re creating ideal conditions for a dangerous influenza virus to develop. And since she’s also seen how easily pigs can spread novel viruses to humans, she’s even more concerned.

Given the frequency of pig to human transmission, she says, we’re “playing Russian roulette” with our current system of factory farming animals.

How factory farms are making the antibiotics we use less effective against disease

2021-04-19T15:51:24-04:00

A pig farmer gives a piglet an antibiotic “booster shot.” | Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

Every year, around 8 million Americans go to a health care provider for a urinary tract infection. Fortunately, many of those infections are pretty easy to treat. Doctors prescribe a regimen of antibiotics and send the patient on their merry way.

But if those antibiotics stopped working, urinary tract infections could quickly develop into something much more serious: possibly a kidney infection, maybe a blood infection, sepsis, and even death. And since we’re increasingly seeing antibiotic resistance in a wide range of bacteria, UTIs would be one of many infections that would become much less easy to treat.

That’s why Cindy Liu and Lance Price, two public health researchers, were so concerned when they found E. coli from chicken meat in samples of human urinary tract infections.

Liu and Price knew that factory-farmed chickens, like many factory-farmed animals worldwide, are fed a steady supply of antibiotics over the course of their lives to fend off disease. They also knew that the E. coli growing among those chickens were becoming resistant to those antibiotics. And now they had evidence that those antibiotic resistant E. coli from chickens could take up residence in human bladders.

As Liu clarifies, there has been some effort in the US to separate the antibiotics used in human medicine and animal treatment, but other countries have different standards.

“Bacteria, they do not respect boundaries,” she says. So antibiotic-resistant strains of E. coli could easily travel here from other countries, leaving us with infections that we cannot treat.

The practice of feeding factory-farmed animals a steady diet of antibiotics doesn’t just undermine our ability to treat human urinary tract infections. It’s a problem for any of the infections we currently treat with antibiotics.

“As bacteria become resistant to all of our antibiotics because of our overuse in animal production and in human medicine, we are not going to be able to save people the way we have in the past, which is by just giving them an oral antibiotic,” Price says. “My sister had bone cancer just two years ago. The first four rounds of chemo, she had three bacterial infections. If any of those had been super resistant, she could have died of a failure of a $20 prescription.”

On this episode of the Future Perfect podcast, we explore the antibiotic risks posed by our current system of raising meat, and what we might do to fix the problem.

Growing chicken is big business. So why are many farmers forced into debt they can’t pay off?

2021-12-20T17:48:20-05:00

In barns like this one, growers raise chickens to eating weight in a few short weeks. | Buyenlarge/Getty Images

Craig Watts describes himself as a “recovering poultry grower.”

In 1992, he saw a newspaper ad looking for farmers to raise chicks into slaughter-ready chickens, and he considered the option. He already had a long-standing family farm in North Carolina, but he’d still have to invest a lot of money upfront— $200,000 to build two massive barns that would house thousands of chicks. As he remembers it, a representative from a big poultry company came out to convince him, and promised him positive cash flow, profits to pay off the buildings, and plenty of support.

“Those are the three biggest lies I ever heard,” he says.

Watts quickly found himself deep in debt. His contracts were short, and in order to keep getting them, he’d often need to make expensive upgrades that only added to his debt burden.

He was paid according to a tournament system. There was a base rate of pay, but the company would take the weights of his birds, look at how much grain the chickens ate and a couple of other factors, and rank his performance against all the other farmers in the area using an algorithm he had no access to. The highest-ranked farmers made more, and the lowest-ranked farmers made less.

The National Chicken Council, a trade association representing the interests of the chicken industry to Congress and federal agencies, defends this system, saying it rewards farmers for high performance and incentivizes them. But Craig was a high-performing farmer, and he was still frustrated with the system. He says it was hard to control his performance because he had no control over the feed or the chicks he got. He even documented instances where he received very sick chicks.

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And he had few options. For many years, Craig remembers, there was only one poultry company in his area, so he couldn’t try to get a better deal elsewhere.

So in 2010, Craig Watts decided to fight back — even though speaking up potentially put him at financial risk. He would participate in a series of workshops that the Justice Department held, under the Obama administration, to gather evidence about problems in contract livestock raising.

On this episode of the Future Perfect podcast, Watts and Leah Douglas, a reporter for the Food and Environment Reporting Network, explain the arguments that were made in those workshops, the hopes they raised in farmers like Watts — and why they failed to make much of a difference in the end. Subscribe to the Future Perfect podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Where the US already has a border wall with Mexico

2020-02-19T09:03:14-05:00

Clothes hung out to dry at a migrant shelter in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, close to the US border wall. | Jillian Weinberger/Vox

Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, are known as “Ambos Nogales” — “both Nogales.” The city straddles the border of Arizona and Sonora, Mexico.

For a long time, a hole-riddled chain-link fence ran along that border. Residents could cross back and forth with ease, and Ambos Nogales felt like one big community. As the longtime county sheriff, Tony Estrada, recalled, “On a Mexican holiday like Cinco de Mayo, they would actually let everybody come across the border. And it was a great celebration.”

But in 1995, the federal government replaced the chain-link fence with a wall. Over time, that wall has been fortified with surveillance towers, more Customs and Border Protection agents, drones, and coils of barbed wire. In the 25 years since, the wall has changed the community and the lives of its members. It’s also had deadly consequences for migrants who want to cross into the United States.

Now, President Trump wants to extend the Nogales model all along the US-Mexico border. It’s a drum he’s been beating since the 2016 race, a project that’s already started and that he’s campaigning on building out even further.

In the final episode of the season, The Impact goes to Nogales with the Arizona Republic to find out why the federal government decided to build the wall, how it has changed Ambos Nogales, and how the wall has affected migrants who hope to cross into the United States.

Further listening and reading:

Rafael Carranza’s reporting in the Arizona Republic
Maritza Dominguez’s work on the Valley 101 podcast
USA Today Network’s “The Wall: A 2,000-mile search for answers”
Radiolab’s Border Trilogy explores Operation Blockade and the federal government’s Prevention Through Deterrence policy
Vox’s guide to where 2020 candidates stand on policy, including immigration

Free college tuition helps, but it’s not a silver bullet

2020-02-12T11:10:21-05:00

Olivia Terrentine, a Kalamazoo Promise recipient, works on a writing assignment. | Byrd Pinkerton/Vox

On November 10, 2005, the school board in Kalamazoo, Michigan, called a meeting. Parents and students and teachers packed into a hot room with fluorescent lighting. Then, the school superintendent, Janice Brown, stood up to make an announcement: A group of anonymous donors — local wealthy individuals — were to going to cover the tuition costs for graduates of the Kalamazoo public schools.

This is the Kalamazoo Promise: Attend Kalamazoo Public Schools from kindergarten through 12 grade, live in the district, and your in-state college tuition is completely covered. Attend Kalamazoo Public Schools for a shorter period, and a percentage of your tuition is paid for. This applies to four-year public universities, community colleges, and even some private schools and trade programs. And it will continue to apply for the foreseeable future.

In 2005, this was big news. Kalamazoo was a struggling town. The biggest employer had left, and much of the middle class had left with it. The public schools had been losing students for years. So before the program, teachers told me in interviews for The Impact podcast, college wasn’t always on students’ radars.

“I can remember doing parent teacher conferences and saying, I really think this student has great college potential,” Scott Hunsinger, a long-time Kalamazoo Public School teacher, remembers. “And you could almost see that thought: Well … how would we pay for it?”

“It was frustrating because [college] wasn’t a part of their vocabulary,” says Valerie Long, another KPS teacher. “It wasn’t a part of, you know … that’s what’s next.”

After the Promise, that changed. Valerie Long remembers her nephew, a second-grader, telling her he was going to college shortly after the Promise was announced.

“I thought to myself: It’s begun,” Long says. “What a beautiful thing. It’s begun as a second grader!”

College graduates do better in life. They earn more money. They have access to a wider range of jobs. But college is getting more and more expensive in the United States. Those who finish often graduate with a lot of debt … sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. This debt can keep them from moving forward in their lives, from buying a house or starting a family. And the No. 1 reason students give for dropping out of college is the price.

Free college tuition feels like it should solve these problems. That’s what some people in Kalamazoo thought would happen when the Promise started, in 2005. It’s part of the platform put forward by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, though they want to go even further than making tuition free.

Now, almost 15 years later, we have a fair amount of data about the results of the Kalamazoo Promise. And researchers like Michelle Miller-Adams and her colleagues at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research have spent years digging into the data.

“It’s very much a glass half-full, glass half-empty story,” Miller-Adams says.

On the glass half-full side, the Kalamazoo Promise has had some impressive results. It’s bumped up high school graduation rates over time — and it’s bumped up college completion rates, too.

On the glass half-empty side, college completion rates for Kalamazoo are only up to the state average for public universities. That’s impressive for a high-poverty school district, but, as Von Washington Jr., the executive director of community relations at the Kalamazoo Promise, puts it, “They’re still having what we consider to be national average numbers of success. And that’s just not acceptable.”

On this episode of The Impact: Vox’s Byrd Pinkerton looks at why more of these Kalamazoo students with free college tuition don’t finish — and what the Kalamazoo Promise is trying to do to bring college completion rates even higher.

This episode follows two Kalamazoo Promise students: Aaliyah Buchanan and Olivia Terrentine. They’ll take us through their educational experiences — from elementary school through high school and eventually to college — to understand the hurdles that cropped up on their track to college, and the ways that they’re trying to get past them now.

Further listening and reading:

Michelle Miller-Adams’s book about the Promise, The Power of a Promise: Education and Economic Renewal in Kalamazoo, gives in depth background on the program.
MLive’s Kayla Miller introduced us to Aaliyah and wrote a great piece about the Promise last year.
The Upjohn Institute has a real trove of data and research about the Promise for anyone who would like to dig further into the numbers.
Vox’s explainer on free college in the 2020 race

How Canada lifted nearly 300,000 kids out of poverty in a single year

2020-02-05T16:50:10-05:00

Because of the Canada child benefit, Natasha Razouk receives several hundred dollars every month to help take care of her young daughter. | Byrd Pinkerton/Vox

Natasha Razouk has lots of piercings, and her skin is decorated with tattoos: gargoyles, fairy wings, diamonds, stars, and spades.

In August 2019, she also had four rose tattoos. She was a heroin addict for seventeen years, and she gets a rose for every year that she stays sober — though in August, she’d actually been sober for five years, not four.

“The first year that I was clean, I didn’t do it, because for me the first year … it was easier,” she explained, “Not that it wasn’t hard, but I was surrounded. I was structured. I was very followed.”

Natasha got clean after she had her daughter Scarlett, who is now 7.

Scarlett is very different from her mother. On this day, she was wearing her hair in a perky ponytail, and lots of pink.

“She’s a lot more girly than I was,” Natasha said, laughing. “She loves to dance. She loves music. She loves to sing.”

But differences in taste aside, the two were clearly very close. During our interview, Natasha helped her daughter with a bouncy ball she’d made at a nearby booth, and they laughed together as it bounced around.

The booth was part of a back-to-school fair at a charitable organization in Montreal. Kids could make bouncy balls, but they also got free winter boots, free backpacks, and a free set of school supplies: glue and colored pencils and erasers and notebooks. Even a lunchbox.

That was definitely helpful for Natasha. But it didn’t come close to covering all the costs of raising her daughter. Kids are expensive, after all. They need clothes and food and health care and day care and any number of other costly things.

That’s why the Canadian government gives parents like Natasha a little money each month — a few hundred Canadian dollars — to help cover the costs of raising a child.

When the latest version of this program, known as a child benefit, was implemented in 2016, liberal Canadian politicians promised that it would lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty.

Dylan Matthews covers anti-poverty measures for Vox. So he decided to go to Canada for The Impact, Vox’s podcast about how policy shapes people’s lives. He wanted to figure out: Did the Canadian child benefit deliver on that promise? How do parents spend these checks? How has the child benefit affected Natasha’s life, and Scarlett’s? And what can the US presidential candidates who have signed onto an American version of a child benefit learn from our neighbors to the north?

Listen to this episode of The Impact to hear what he discovered:

Further listening and reading:

Vox’s Dylan Matthews explains what child benefits are, and the plan to introduce one in the US
The National Academy of Sciences recently studied child benefits as a tool to cut child poverty in half; here’s what they found.
In the episode, we talk about a graph Kevin Milligan drew. See it, and an associated tweet thread, here. You can read a paper Kevin wrote with Mark Stabile about previous child benefit increases here.
Vox’s guide to where 2020 candidates stand on policy

Subscribe to The Impact on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.

Why some Australians are paying for private health care they don’t want to use

2020-01-31T12:16:51-05:00

Janet Feldman, a breast cancer patient in Australia’s public health system, at home with husband, Darren (right), and son, Ari, in Melbourne, on November 1, 2019. | Anne Moffat for Vox

When we first met Janet Feldman, she was wearing pink shoes, a fuzzy pink sweater, and pink glasses.

“Nothing to do with breast cancer,” she told us, “I just love the color pink.”

Janet does have breast cancer, though. She’s had it for more than 10 years. She remembers the day, more than a decade ago, when a doctor told gave her the diagnosis. She was sitting in his office with her mother.

They had to make a decision about her care: Would she go private or public?

Janet lives near Melbourne, Australia, and Australia has a health care system that looks a little bit like the public option proposed by some US presidential candidates, including former Vice President Joe Biden and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg. In Australia, anyone can get care through the country’s public system. But if they want more flexibility or access to certain doctors, they can also purchase private insurance.

Janet had paid for private insurance. Her mother assumed that would be the better option, so she asked the doctor to recommend a good private hospital.

“He said, ‘No, no.’ He said, ‘Listen to me,”’ Janet remembered. “He said, ‘You’re gonna stay public.’”

Why would a doctor tell his patient not to use the private insurance she was paying for? And why would Australia maintain a private health care system if the public system is the one doctors tell patients to use?

Answers to these questions could tell us a lot about the future of the US health care system, especially if Biden or Buttigieg end up in the White House.

Listen to this episode of The Impact, Vox’s podcast about how policy reshapes people’s lives, for those answers:

Dylan Scott, a Vox policy reporter, went to Australia with The Impact’s Byrd Pinkerton to investigate the country’s public-private system. They met with doctors, researchers, patients — and even a robot — and returned to the US with evidence that could both hearten and concern candidates like public-private boosters Biden or Buttigieg.

A top executive at one of Australia’s biggest health insurance providers, Dwayne Crombie, agrees: Private insurance will need to be reformed if it’s going to survive. “The debate’s really about the timeframe for the death spiral,” he says.

At the same time, patients like Janet enjoy high-quality care in the public sector. The balance between public and private health care is hard to strike.

Further Reading

Dylan’s piece on Australia’s hybrid health care system
Stephen Duckett’s working paper on public and private insurance in Australia
Dylan’s piece on the three different kinds of health care plans floated by the Democratic candidates
Vox’s guide to where 2020 candidates stand on policy

Subscribe to The Impact wherever you get your podcasts, including: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Megaphone

Taiwan’s single-payer system is popular — but it might be in trouble

2020-01-29T13:16:00-05:00

Doctor Tien Hui-Wen sees a patient at Xiulin Health Center. | Ashley Pon for Vox

On the east coast of Taiwan, where a small valley meets sharp, green mountains, lies the township of Xiulin. It has a few narrow streets. Many houses have corrugated roofs and siding.

In this township is a clinic, a building a couple of stories tall with physicians’ offices, X-ray facilities, and a small office for dental care.

Dr. Huei-wen Tien works there. She’s a short woman in her late 50s. Her hair has gone white so she’s dyed it bright pink, and she wears an all-black outfit with black ankle boots. Her motorcycle helmet has the word “Punk” written on the side, and she rides her moped to visit her patients.

Today, her trips take her just a few minutes into the township, but some days, she drives hours up into the mountains to treat patients living in very remote areas.

In one house, she visits a stroke patient. She checks his blood sugar levels and talks him through some medications.

For the patient, all of this care is free.

Taiwan has a program that looks a lot like the Medicare-for-all proposal being floated by presidential candidates like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. It’s called National Health Insurance, and it covers every single person in the country.

The Impact is Vox’s podcast about how policy shapes people’s lives. On this episode, Vox policy reporter Dylan Scott walks us through how Taiwan built their single-payer system and what the US can learn from the program. Dylan Scott went to Taiwan with The Impact’s Byrd Pinkerton, as part of Everybody Covered, a project supported by a grant from The Commonwealth Fund. They interviewed patients, doctors, government officials, and a researcher with a charming love story.

Listen to this episode to hear what they discovered:

Dylan learned that the people of Taiwan love their universal health care program that has significantly improved Taiwan’s health outcomes.

But he also learned that the entire system could go bankrupt — and soon — if the country doesn’t make dramatic changes.

Further listening and reading:

Ask Dylan anything about universal health care in r/politics today at 2 pm ET today
Dylan’s piece on Taiwan’s single-payer success story
Uwe Reinhardt’s latest book, Priced Out: The Economic and Ethical Costs of American Healthcare
Tsung-Mei Cheng wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion piece making the case for a public option
Dylan’s piece on the three different kinds of health care plan floated by the Democratic candidates
Vox’s guide to where 2020 candidates stand on policy

Subscribe to The Impact on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.

How Germany helped make renewable energy cheap for the rest of the world

2020-01-29T09:25:09-05:00

Hans-Josef Fell and his solar panels. | Kenny Malone/NPR

Hans-Josef Fell describes himself as a “solar freak.” His entire home, in a small town in Northern Bavaria, runs on renewable energy: heating, cooling, and electricity.

Fell installed his first solar panels in 1991, and though they cost him about $70,000 in today’s dollars, he considered them to be a worthwhile purchase to help fight climate change. At the time, most Germans either could not afford them or saw them as a losing financial investment. Fell realized he wanted to find a way to change that, so that his fellow countrymen would invest in renewable technology instead of fossil fuels.

As a Green party member in Germany’s national parliament, Fell eventually helped create a policy that looks a lot like part of the Green New Deal some Democrats are proposing in the US. His law allowed Germans to sell the renewable energy they create to the grid at a high fixed price — a price that would more than cover the cost of installing a solar panel, or investing in a wind turbine. Germany paid for this through a surcharge on every electricity consumer’s bill.

For this episode, The Impact partnered with NPR’s Planet Money to investigate the consequences of Germany’s green push. In some ways, the law succeeded beyond Fell’s wildest dreams. Demand for renewables grew so much in Germany that other countries, including China, started to mass-produce solar panels and wind turbines, which drove down prices. Now, people all over the world can afford this technology.

But the law has also had some unintended consequences. Because of amendments to the law and technological improvements, the surcharge on Germany’s electric bills have skyrocketed. Now, Germany has the highest electric bills in Europe. Electricity has become a burdensome expense for some Germans living on welfare, and the high cost has left a few spending a lot of time in the dark.

Further listening and reading:

Vox’s David Roberts on how government policy helped make solar technology affordable
Roberts on how to solve the “solar duck curve” problem
Roberts on California’s residential solar mandate
Vox’s Umair Irfan and Tara Golshan on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal
Vox’s guide to where all 2020 candidates stand on policy, including climate change issues.

Subscribe to The Impact on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.

A plan to reverse the war on drugs, from the Vietnam War era

2020-01-29T09:27:37-05:00

President Ford announces his clemency plan for Vietnam War draft evaders. | David Hume Kennerly/ Getty Images

In 1974, Gerald Ford became president after some of the most difficult years in our country’s history.

In addition to Watergate and President Nixon’s resignation, the Vietnam War had divided the country for more than a decade. While millions of Americans served in Southeast Asia, many others protested the war at home — some of them by evading the draft. Ford wanted to find a way to bring the country back together. Just a few weeks after he took office, he announced a plan “to bind up the nation’s wounds.”

For the young men convicted of draft evasion — a felony — during the Vietnam War, Ford promised, “I’m throwing the weight of my presidency into the scales of justice on the side of leniency.”

Ford gave those young men an opportunity to apply to a Clemency Board, a small group appointed by the president who would decide whether to erase that felony from the men’s records. Now, many of the Democratic candidates for president want to follow Ford’s model for a new group of people in federal prison: those convicted of nonviolent drug crimes.

In this episode, The Impact looks back on President Ford’s clemency plan through the lives of two men: one who fought in Vietnam and served on the Clemency Board, and one who evaded the draft. We explore how the Board transformed their lives and what it might mean for a new generation of young people behind bars.

Further listening and reading:

The Uncertain Hour’s third season explores the war on drugs and its aftermath
Vox’s German Lopez on incarceration in America
Vox’s guide to where 2020 candidates stand on policy, including criminal justice reform
Professor Mark Osler’s law review article on Ford’s Clemency Review Board.

Subscribe to The Impact on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.

Amy Drozdowska | Vox

Factory farms are an ideal breeding ground for the next pandemic

Sign up for the Meat/Less newsletter course

How factory farms are making the antibiotics we use less effective against disease

Further reading

Growing chicken is big business. So why are many farmers forced into debt they can’t pay off?

Sign up for the Meat/Less newsletter course

Further reading

Where the US already has a border wall with Mexico

Free college tuition helps, but it’s not a silver bullet

Further listening and reading:

How Canada lifted nearly 300,000 kids out of poverty in a single year

Why some Australians are paying for private health care they don’t want to use

Taiwan’s single-payer system is popular — but it might be in trouble

How Germany helped make renewable energy cheap for the rest of the world

A plan to reverse the war on drugs, from the Vietnam War era