1. South Korea ferry disaster: transcript shows crew crippled by indecision
Messages between officers on vessel and traffic officials reveal miscommunication and hesitation at crucial phase
The Guardian, 20 April 2014
Officers manning the stricken South Korean ferry that sank last week were hamstrung by indecision and communication problems at the critical moment when deciding whether to evacuate passengers, according to the full communications transcript.
As divers continued to pull bodies from the submerged vessel on Monday, the calls between the crew of the Sewol and traffic officials on the nearby island of Jindo reveal hesitation and uncertainty during a crucial phase in the disaster.
The transcript is certain to add to the anger felt by the relatives of the approximately 240 missing passengers, most of them teenagers who were on a school trip.
"If this ferry evacuates passengers, will they be rescued right away?" an unnamed crew member asked officials at Jindo vessel traffic services centre at 9:24 am on Wednesday, about 30 minutes after the ship began listing, apparently after making a sharp turn in a stretch of water peppered with tiny islands and known for its strong currents.
The initial delay in getting all 476 passengers, including 350 high school pupils and their teachers, off the ship made the task far harder. Officers on the bridge of the Sewol, which lies submerged in water off the south-west coast of South Korea, had already indicated that once the vessel was tilting heavily to one side, passengers increasingly found themselves unable to move.
In another message, the bridge told officials on Jindo that it was "impossible" to broadcast instructions to passengers.
"Even if it's impossible to broadcast, please go out and let the passengers wear life jackets and put on more clothing," an unidentified traffic official said in response.
The bridge then asked about the prospects of an immediate rescue effort.
The unnamed official on Jindo replied: "The rescue of human lives on the Sewol ferry ... the captain should make [his] own decision and evacuate them.
"We are not fully aware of the situation, so the captain should make the final decision on whether you're going to evacuate passengers or not."
The crew member replied: "No, I'm not talking about that. I'm asking, if they evacuate now, can they be rescued right away?"
At this point there appears to have been a confused response from the traffic official, who said rescue boats would arrive in 10 minutes, but failed to mention that a nearby civilian ship had already offered to help 10 minutes earlier.
More evidence that human error may have been a key factor in the disaster – the worst in South Korea for 20 years – came as divers continued to pull bodies from the wreck on Monday after finding a way into the ship on Sunday. The number of confirmed dead now stands at 64.
After days of frustration because of strong currents, divers have now found several ways into the submerged ferry. That includes a new entryway into the dining hall made early Monday morning, Koh Myung-seok, a government spokesman, said.
2.U.S., Japan Fail to Clinch Trade Deal
Bilateral Accord Seen as Key Step for Moving Trans-Pacific Partnership Talks Forward
The wall Street Journal April 24, 2014
TOKYO—The U.S. and Japan failed to clinch a last-minute deal on free trade, damping hopes for an early conclusion of a broader trade deal across the Pacific.
Japan's economy minister Akira Amari told reporters Friday morning that the two countries have been unable to reach accord on any of the major contentious issues, including market access for automobiles and agricultural products.
A bilateral accord is a crucial step for moving forward discussions on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a U.S.-led free trade initiative involving 12 nations. It is also the main economic component of Mr. Obama's foreign policy "pivot" to Asia.
Mr. Amari and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman were tasked with resolving all outstanding issues on bilateral free trade while President Barack Obama was in Tokyo. The instruction was given Thursday by Mr. Obama and Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. An expected meeting Friday between Messrs. Amari and Froman didn't take place, as the representatives decided further talks wouldn't yield any more progress, Mr. Amari said.
In a statement, the two countries said they "have identified a path forward on important bilateral TPP issues" that "will inject fresh momentum into the broader talks." The statement didn't give specifics and cautioned that "there is still much work to be done to conclude TPP."
Mr. Obama left Tokyo Friday morning to continue a four-nation Asia tour, which will take him also to South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines.
Messrs. Froman and Amari held face-to-face talks over 40 hours in the past three weeks, either in Tokyo or in Washington, aiming to scrape together a broad accord that would demonstrate that the two countries stand together on key economic issues in the face of an assertive China.
But rather than showing the strength of the bilateral alliance, which the two countries call the cornerstone of peace and security in Asia Pacific, the failure to make a breakthrough has revealed a divide between the two allies.
3. The antibiotics that could kill you
CNN April 22, 2014
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Martin Blaser: Overprescription of antibiotics put Americans at risk for disease
- He says we wipe out good, protective germs, bringing danger of "antibiotic winter"
- With lower resistance, plague inevitable in interconnected world, he says
- Blaser: Targeted antibiotics, less interference in natural process are key to cutting vulnerability
(CNN) -- In 2010, Americans were prescribed 258 million courses of antibiotics, a rate of 833 per thousand people. Such massive usage, billions of doses, has been going on year after year.
We have few clues about the consequences of our cumulative exposures. We do know that widespread antibiotic treatments make us more susceptible to invaders by selecting for resistant bacteria.
These risks are now well-known, but I want to lay out a new concern: that antibiotic use over the years has been depleting the pool of our friendly bacteria -- in each of us -- and this is lowering our resistance to infections. In today's hyperconnected globe, that means that we are at high risk of future plagues that could spread without natural boundaries from person to person and that we could not stop. I call this "antibiotic winter."
To explain: In the early 1950's, scientists conducted experiments to determine whether our resident microbes -- the huge number of bacteria that live in and on our bodies, now called our "microbiome" -- help in fending off invading bacteria. They fed mice a species of a typical invader, disease-causing salmonella. It took about 100,000 organisms to infect half of the normal mice. But when they first gave mice an antibiotic, which kills both good and bad bacteria, and then several days later gave them salmonella, it took only three organisms to infect them. This isn't a 10 or 20% difference; it's a 30,000-fold difference.
That was in mice, but what about humans? In 1985, Chicago faced a massive outbreak of salmonella. At least 160,000 people became ill and several died from drinking contaminated milk. The health department asked victims of the outbreak and unaffected persons, "Have you received antibiotics in the month prior to becoming ill?" People who said yes were five times more likely to become ill than those who drank the milk but hadn't recently received antibiotics.
People carry a small number of highly abundant bacterial species and a large number of much less common ones. For example, you may carry trillions of Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron in your colon and only a thousand cells, or fewer, belonging to many other species. We are not sure how many rare species any of us has. If you had only 50 cells of a particular type, it would be difficult to detect them against the background of trillions of others.
When you take a broad-spectrum antibiotic, which is the kind most commonly prescribed, it may be that rare microbes occasionally get wiped out entirely. And once the population hits zero, there is no bouncing back. For your body, that species is now extinct. My worry is that some of these critical residential organisms -- what I consider "contingency" species -- may disappear altogether.
