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from Asia Times
LEAST BIASED, HIGH; News & Media Website based in Hong Kong
Fear not, age of the phage may be coming
The human race has a deadly drug problem. The scourge posing an existential threat isn’t heroin or cocaine. Although such drugs do exact a heavy price on societies around the world, the cost of dealing with them is nothing compared with the looming disaster threatened by our out-of-control dependence on antibiotics. The bacteriophage was discovered 10 years before penicillin, but at the time science lacked the ability to use it effectively and then mostly forgot about it after the discovery of penicillin. Now it could become the savior of humankind. Bacteriophages (phages, for short) are viruses that attack bacteria – and there are an awful lot of them out there waiting to be useful. A recent paper in the World Journal of Gastrointestinal Pharmacology and Therapeutics hailed phages as “the most abundant biological entity on Earth, [which] play a crucial role in regulating bacterial populations [and] are responsible for the death of approximately 20-40% of all marine surface bacteria every 24 hours.”
The human race has a deadly drug problem. The scourge posing an existential threat isn’t heroin or cocaine. Although such drugs do exact a heavy price on societies around the world, the cost of dealing with them is nothing compared with the looming disaster threatened by our out-of-control dependence on antibiotics. The bacteriophage was discovered 10 years before penicillin, but at the time science lacked the ability to use it effectively and then mostly forgot about it after the discovery of penicillin. Now it could become the savior of humankind. Bacteriophages (phages, for short) are viruses that attack bacteria – and there are an awful lot of them out there waiting to be useful. A recent paper in the World Journal of Gastrointestinal Pharmacology and Therapeutics hailed phages as “the most abundant biological entity on Earth, [which] play a crucial role in regulating bacterial populations [and] are responsible for the death of approximately 20-40% of all marine surface bacteria every 24 hours.”
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from Hoover Institution
Nonprofit Organization in Stanford, California
The Mediterranean abruptly separates Europe’s civilization from those of Africa and the Middle East. On one side, reaching North to Scandinavia and East to the Bering Strait, some seven hundred million mostly prosperous people live according to principles derived from Judeo-Christianity, Greek philosophy, and Roman law. Their number is shrinking. On the other side, southward to the Cape of Good Hope and East to the Indian subcontinent, are three times that number of mostly poor peoples, most of whom live according to beliefs and traditions alien from those on the northern shore. As these grow in number, more and more press to migrate across the sea; not to join the aliens on the other side, but to replace them. The sea is not nearly wide enough, and democracy seems impotent, to secure this frontier against this demographic and civilizational imbalance.
The Mediterranean Sea is today, as it has always been, a crossroads. The name itself testifies to that, as it means “the sea in the middle of the earth,” a Latin term reflecting an earlier Greek belief. We know better, or do we? From Syria to Libya and on the high seas, and with outside players including China, Iran, Russia, and the United States, the Mediterranean has re-emerged of late as a cockpit of conflict. In an era of renewed Great Power competition, with a contrast between prosperity to the north and instability and poverty to the south and east, with revisionist powers present and with a clash of ideologies (Western secularism versus radical Islam) in the mix, the Mediterranean’s recent prominence is not surprising. The region was rarely completely at peace in the last century. Indeed, the Mediterranean is only returning to a role it has often played before, and for good reason. The Mediterranean is both a fault line of cultures in conflict and a geostrategic chokepoint.
The United States is an Atlantic and Pacific power by virtue of geography, strategic necessity, and economic opportunity. A forward defense of the far littorals—Europe and the East-Asian barrier states facing China—is the essential requirement for our security. All else is not only secondary or tertiary, but often an ill-advised and grossly costly drain on our resources. The Mediterranean matters to us only because of its importance to our NATO allies. At this point, it offers nothing essential to the United States. From our encounters with the Barbary Pirates through our misbegotten engagements in the eastern Mediterranean during the (now-waning) Age of Oil, our commitments to the region have produced cumulative negative returns.
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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