Having A Drink With Bill Gates

Bill Gates

Starting out a new year writing with a blank sheet of paper requires examining the kinds of things I’d enjoy writing about. Oh, there’s the obligatory flogging of elected officials and regulators, black-hatted oil and coal and railroad guys, obscene profit-taking developers and bankers. But we’ll save that for another time because today, at the end of the first week of our national Congressional session and our state legislative session, here are three stories I’d rather tell you about:

What a great photo op: Bill Gates drinking a glass of water which five minutes earlier contained raw sewage which had been converted to clean water, electricity and ash. Thanks to the Gates Foundation and to the engineering prowess of Janicki Bioenergy  (in Sedro Wooley!), here’s technology that can literally change the world. Hello, Victoria! Peter Janicki explains all.

Leila and Miles Landis

This past month I spent time with my cousin who has been hospitalized because of complications arising from renal failure and dialysis. I came to appreciate how difficult life is with failing kidneys and on Wednesday happened upon a rebroadcast of KPLU reporter Gabriel Spitzer’s  Sound Effect interview, What It’s Like To Spend Your Late 20s On Dialysis, Then Be Saved By A Gift . I swear, after you listen to Leila Mirhaydari tell her story, you will feel so full of her energy, happiness, her joie de vivre that you will want to hug someone. I did.

And on Thursday morning I got an email asking whether I’d heard the “Chinese food” story about General Tso chicken. I had not but found a TED Radio interview from this past November with Jennifer 8.

Lee, Where Does General Tso Chicken Actually Come From?  Then by Thursday afternoon, Florangela Davila’s story, How The Non-Chinese History Of General Tso's Chicken Helps Explain Life As A Second-Gen American, had been posted, featuring a preview of Jennifer’s upcoming documentary, The Search for General Tso .

Now, that’s the kind of stuff I want to be writing about: food, healing, changing the world...

Great way to start out the news year. Much more interesting than Congress and the Legislature, don’t you think?

--Mike Sato

Bring Out Your Dead

I thought about Ebola early last month flying at 35,000 feet with a plane full of people I didn’t know. Liberian Thomas Duncan had entered this country by air, took ill with what was diagnosed as Ebola in Dallas, was eventually quarantined and treated, and died. Makes one look around and want to see what all the coughing is about in the seat three rows back.

Over the last two months I’ve followed the news enough to know that protocols are now in place domestically to afford crucial early detection, that Ebola detected early and treated need not be fatal, that doctors and nurses on the front line of treating Ebola are among the bravest people in the world, and that politicians who ignore medical science by closing our borders and imposing mandatory quarantine requirements deserve all the ridicule that can be heaped upon them for their medieval ignorance. ( Bring out your dead )

The Ebola epidemic is serious business and it’s no longer a West Africa disease alone, not when we are in a global economy. Richard Preston’s scary and informative article in The New Yorker ( The Ebola Wars  ) raises the disturbing prospect of various strains of a rapidly evolving Ebola virus that may take as yet-unknown deadly forms.

Despite early missteps, the Center for Disease Control and hospitals have established and trained in equipment and quarantine protocols. Like the veterans we just honored and the armed forces we spend billions of dollars on, first-line doctors and nurses deserve the very best in equipment and training. After all, as Paul Farmer says in the London Review of Books, ( Diary  ) the US “has the staff, stuff, space and systems” to contain any epidemic within its borders.

I wondered after reading Preston and Farmer whether I would have the courage to comfort Ebola patients, even given the proper equipment and training— and I have to say, I don’t know if I would. I can hardly imagine what it must be like to treat Ebola patients in the hospitals of West African nations. Now that the initial panic in the US has passed with the successful treatment of Dallas nurses and New York City doctor Craig Spencer, the news cycle moves our comfort level farther and farther away from the Ground Zero of Ebola in West Africa.

But Ebola and scores of infectious disease outbreaks that risk becoming pandemics won’t simply go away. “Understaffed and undersupplied, front-line health worker in West Africa have good reason to be afraid,” Paul Farmer writes. “We who aim to help them, though better equipped, are afraid too.”

Here in the US, we still argue about affording medical “staff, stuff, space and systems” to all our citizens. Maybe I’m not ready to go to the front line but I’ll share our “staff, stuff, space and systems” with all Americans, West Africans and the people of the world. We're not dead yet.

--Mike Sato

No, You Shouldn’t Eat The Fish—Not Yet

Fish-consumption rates in Washington state— which has a lot to do with how much toxic pollution in fish people can safely consume— are back in the news, thanks to conservation and commercial fishing groups.  As of today, the state estimates that people consumer on average about 7 oz. of fish a month, about two servings, and has been very slowly considering revisions. On Friday, Earthjustice sued the Environmental Protection Agency to prompt the federal government to require the state to update consumption rates and better protect human health. ( EPA sued over Washington fish-consumption estimates )

This issue applies to ‘resident’ fish that inhabit our bays and estuaries year-round living in the toxic chemicals from our modern lifestyles— not the salmon that pass through our marine waters and estuaries. Everybody has known for years the consumption levels are too low, especially for Native Americans and subsistence fishers. The problem in raising the consumption levels to protect fish eaters is that it would also require tightening pollution standards governing the disposal of toxic chemical into our Puget Sound bays and estuaries.

On one hand, people are at risk eating contaminated fish. On the other hand? According to the spokesperson for the Association of Washington Business in the news article above, it’s a competitiveness issue for industries who care about health and human safety but need to consider regulations that might not allow them to “keep their doors open and people employed.”

As for the state regulator’s point of view, I heard Ecology staff Josh Baldi tell the Puget Sound Partnership’s Leadership Council that it’s not a simple matter because saying people eat more fish than two servings a month would mean that less industrial pollutants would be allowed to be discharged— and discharges are already so tightly controlled that it might not be cost-efficient to require industry to control more.

According to Boeing in a story filed by Ashley Ahearn of EarthFix, a higher fish consumption rate would cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars in upgrades at its facilities to lower pollution discharges into Washington waterways. ( Enviros and Fish Groups File Lawsuit To Raise Fish Consumption Standards http://earthfix.kcts9.org/water/article/enviros-and-fish-groups-file-lawsuit-to-raise-fish/ )

So, do we have to choose? The health of Indians and subsistence fishers or airplanes and jobs? Industries and corporations would like to make it a choice because I’d bet people would choose airplanes and jobs.

But should we have to choose? It’s hard to believe that smart people who run places like Boeing cannot engineer ways to reduce and eliminate pollution to the Sound. After all, they do a pretty good job with airplanes.

Would it cost “hundreds of millions”? I don’t know and I don’t think they do either, and maybe it would create, not eliminate jobs.

But the best part of reducing and eliminating toxic pollution going into our waterways isn’t for the benefit of Indians and subsistence fishers— it’s for all of us who live and work and recreate in the waterways of Puget Sound. The real choice is a cleaner Sound and ensuring healthy human lives.

Let's keep it as simple as possible by thinking about corporations the way they like to be thought of— as individuals, people like you and me. No individual, no matter how rich or powerful,  is above the law. So, if I see an individual putting toxic chemicals into the waterway, I’d say stop and expect the government to do its job to stop the pollution. If the individual didn’t stop, I guess we’d see everyone in court— which seems to be where things are heading now.

--Mike Sato

I’ve Been So Pissed Off These Last Few Days I Forgot to Celebrate

Today’s meeting of the Puget Sound Partnership’s Science Panel was cancelled due to federal agency folks not being able to attend because the federal government is shut down by Congressional Republicans. The Tea Bagger wing nuts and their spineless GOP colleagues are holding the budget hostage to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. It's really a small thing, the Science Panel not meeting, among more major impacts to be felt when many of the government’s environmental and public health services (deemed “unessential”) shut down.

I’ve been so pissed off about the shutdown I forgot on Tuesday to celebrate the opening of the Insurance Exchange and the first day people who are uninsured can buy medical coverage. Sure, the first day was an online fiasco but you know what?-- it’ll get straightened out and the system’s in place to serve the uninsured. For those of us who have friends and family members with preexisting conditions, employed or not, we no longer will worry whether we can get medical insurance. Sure, it will cost money— nothing’s for free — but it will be there for everyone.

That’s not a small thing that went into place on October 1. If I’d had my way, we would have in place a much simpler system of universal health coverage, we'd reign in runaway medical costs, and we'd improve efficiency and effectiveness of medical treatment. But what we got on October 1 is a step forward, a big step forward--- especially considering where we were four years ago.

And most important, we’re not going backwards. How fast we go forward in making our medical care system work for people depends on how important it is to us and to those we elect to lead us. But after October 1 we are not going back.

Which makes the Tea Bagger cum spineless-GOP-follower shutdown of the government (and what’s next for the debt-ceiling deadline) look nakedly cynical. What is there to negotiate about the Affordable Care Act when we are not going backward?

Maybe the next hostage-taking and act of domestic terror to threaten economic chaos will be to force us to build the Keystone pipeline. Dismantle the EPA? Rescind pollution controls on fracking and burning coal? Drill in the Arctic and off our shores?

The list can be endless and will go on and on until the real Republican leadership stands up to work to govern.

In the meantime, I’ll stop being pissed off for a while and happily celebrate what was achieved October 1. Then move on.

--Mike Sato