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WHY WE NEED RAIL FULL SERVICES AGAIN LABOUR.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/travel/2019/04/auckland-professor-says-kiwis-should-quit-air-travel-to-protect-the-environment.html
Auckland professor says Kiwis should quit air travel to protect the environment
• 07/04/2019
A grassroots movement calling for Kiwis to stay firmly on the ground is taking flight. Credits: Video – Newshub Image – Getty
A grassroots movement calling for Kiwis to stay firmly on the ground is taking flight.
It’s asking everyday travellers to keep out of the skies in a bid to protect the environment.
Auckland physicist Professor Shaun Hendy decided to give up air travel for a year to limit his carbon footprint.
“It was adding up the carbon emissions that I was responsible for,” he told Newshub. “I was about three times the average Kiwi as an academic travelling to conferences.”
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He documented his travels along the way, from stormy drama on the Cook Strait ferry to a bus trip through Bulls on his way home from Wellington.
“Lovely trip, it does take a day so you’ve got to commit to it.”
The cost of flying is going down, but the cost to the environment is becoming much clearer.
If you fly the 496km between Auckland and Wellington, you emit around 150kg of carbon dioxide equivalent. A medium-sized car making the same journey emits about a third less, while a bus, train and electric car all have significantly lower emissions – just under 55kg between all three of them.
Air travel is vital to the country’s trade, investment and tourism, and new technology is making it more efficient. But there’s no disputing the boom in air travel is having an impact on climate.
“Per kilometre, flying in a plane puts out more carbon dioxide than pretty much every other form of travel,” Victoria University climate scientist James Renwick said.
Stats NZ data shows New Zealand residents took more than 3 million flights in 2018. One Auckland passenger flew 639,000km – the equivalent of 15 circuits around the Earth.
But if you’re not ready to swap the skies for the roads yet, there are some alternatives.
Both Air New Zealand and Jetstar have a carbon buyback scheme in which travellers pay a small fee to offset the emissions generated by their ticket.
Aviation commentator Irene King said it’s a positive step, but the airlines and manufacturers need to make greener planes.
“It’s supply and demand, and we know the fuel prices will go up, and so there’s massive incentive toward greater engine efficiency.”
If the movement takes off, flying from one location to the other could soon be as frowned upon as using plastic bags.
Newshub.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/health/drug-resistant-candida-auris.html?module=inline
DEADLY GERMS, LOST CURES
A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy
The rise of Candida auris embodies a serious and growing public health threat: drug-resistant germs.
9:02Revenge of the Bacteria: Why We’re Losing the War
Bacteria are rebelling. They’re turning the tide against antibiotics by outsmarting our wonder drugs. This video explores the surprising reasons.CreditCreditMelissa Golden for The New York Times
By Matt Richtel and Andrew Jacobs
April 6, 2019
Last May, an elderly man was admitted to the Brooklyn branch of Mount Sinai Hospital for abdominal surgery. A blood test revealed that he was infected with a newly discovered germ as deadly as it was mysterious. Doctors swiftly isolated him in the intensive care unit.
The germ, a fungus called Candida auris, preys on people with weakened immune systems, and it is quietly spreading across the globe. Over the last five years, it has hit a neonatal unit in Venezuela, swept through a hospital in Spain, forced a prestigious British medical center to shut down its intensive care unit, and taken root in India, Pakistan and South Africa.
Recently C. auris reached New York, New Jersey and Illinois, leading the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to add it to a list of germs deemed “urgent threats.”
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The man at Mount Sinai died after 90 days in the hospital, but C. auris did not. Tests showed it was everywhere in his room, so invasive that the hospital needed special cleaning equipment and had to rip out some of the ceiling and floor tiles to eradicate it.
“Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump,” said Dr. Scott Lorin, the hospital’s president. “The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive.”
C. auris is so tenacious, in part, because it is impervious to major antifungal medications, making it a new example of one of the world’s most intractable health threats: the rise of drug-resistant infections.
Dr. Shawn Lockhart, a fungal disease expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, holding a microscope slide with inactive Candida auris collected from an American patient.CreditMelissa Golden for The New York Times
Dr. Shawn Lockhart, a fungal disease expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, holding a microscope slide with inactive Candida auris collected from an American patient.CreditMelissa Golden for The New York Times
For decades, public health experts have warned that the overuse of antibiotics was reducing the effectiveness of drugs that have lengthened life spans by curing bacterial infections once commonly fatal. But lately, there has been an explosion of resistant fungi as well, adding a new and frightening dimension to a phenomenon that is undermining a pillar of modern medicine.
“It’s an enormous problem,” said Matthew Fisher, a professor of fungal epidemiology at Imperial College London, who was a co-author of a recent scientific review on the rise of resistant fungi. “We depend on being able to treat those patients with antifungals.”
Simply put, fungi, just like bacteria, are evolving defenses to survive modern medicines.
Yet even as world health leaders have pleaded for more restraint in prescribing antimicrobial drugs to combat bacteria and fungi — convening the United Nations General Assembly in 2016 to manage an emerging crisis — gluttonous overuse of them in hospitals, clinics and farming has continued.
Resistant germs are often called “superbugs,” but this is simplistic because they don’t typically kill everyone. Instead, they are most lethal to people with immature or compromised immune systems, including newborns and the elderly, smokers, diabetics and people with autoimmune disorders who take steroids that suppress the body’s defenses.
Scientists say that unless more effective new medicines are developed and unnecessary use of antimicrobial drugs is sharply curbed, risk will spread to healthier populations. A study the British government funded projects that if policies are not put in place to slow the rise of drug resistance, 10 million people could die worldwide of all such infections in 2050, eclipsing the eight million expected to die that year from cancer.
In not sure about the idea that NZ’ers, not flying, will have an effect on the environment, but it all helps.
But rail as a transport replacement, it’s the realization yet to happen.
Lets hope it doesn’t go down the road of built up, then sold off to be asset stripped and end up falling apart again.
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