'Superbugs' Spread Around Globe

INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY
In collaboration with
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2014
Copyright © 2014 The New York Times
Farmers
Resort
To Data
To Thrive
By QUENTIN HARDY
LEESBURG, Indiana — Kip
Tom, a seventh-generation family farmer, harvests the staples of
modern agriculture: seed corn,
feed corn, soybeans and data.
“I’m hooked on a drug of information and productivity,” he said,
sitting in an office filled with computer screens and a whiteboard
covered with plans for his farm’s
computer network.
Mr. Tom, 59, is as much a chief
technology officer as he is a farmer. Where his great-great-grandfather hitched a mule, “we’ve got
sensors on the combine, GPS
data from satellites, cellular modems on self-driving tractors,
apps for irrigation on iPhones,”
he said.
The demise of the small family
farm has been a long time coming. But for farmers like Mr. Tom,
technology offers a lifeline, a way
to navigate the boom-and-bust
cycles of making a living from
the land. It is also helping some
of them compete with giant agribusinesses.
Mr. Tom’s farm is expanding,
to 8,100 hectares today from 280
hectares in the 1970s. But some of
his neighbors’ farms are fading
away.
Such costly technology is beyond the means of the smallest
farmers. Equipment makers
have covered their planters, tractors and harvesters with sensors,
computers and communications
equipment. A combine equipped
to harvest a few crops cost perhaps $65,000 in 2000; now it goes
for as much as $500,000 because
of the added information technology.
“We’ve seen a big uptick in the
productivity of larger farms,”
Continued on Page 2
KUNI TAKAHASHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
A mother in Haryana, where almost every baby born in hospitals in recent years has been injected with antibiotics.
‘Superbugs’ Spread Around Globe
Babies Die by the Thousands as India Battles Drug-Resistant Bacteria
By GARDINER HARRIS
AMRAVATI, India — A deadly epidemic that could have global implications is
sweeping India, killing tens of thousands
of infants who are born with bacterial infections that are resistant to most known
antibiotics. More than 58,000 died last year.
India’s resistant infections have already
begun to migrate elsewhere. Researchers
have found “superbugs” carrying a genetic code first identified in India — NDM1 (or
New Delhi metallo-beta lactamase 1) —
around the world, including in France, Japan, Oman and the United States.
Health officials have warned for decades
that overuse of antibiotics would eventually
lead bacteria to evolve in a way that made
the drugs useless.
India and other developing nations are
not the only offenders. Overuse of the drugs
in livestock farms in the United States has
led to the rise of resistant strains there, and
research has shown that as much as half of
antibiotic prescriptions in the United States
are unnecessary.
In the United States, two million people
are sickened by resistant bacteria every
year and 23,000 die as a result. In the European Union, the death toll is similar, 25,000
a year.
But efforts to crack down on inappropriate antibiotic use in the United States
and much of Europe have been successful, with prescriptions dropping between 2000 and 2010. That drop was more
than offset, however, by growing use in
the developing world.
Global sales of antibiotics for human consumption rose 36 percent from 2000 to 2010,
with Brazil, Russia, India, China and South
Africa accounting for 76 percent of that increase.
A growing chorus of researchers say the
evidence is now overwhelming that a significant share of the bacteria present in India
— in its water, sewage, animals, soil and
even its mothers — is immune to nearly all
antibiotics.
And it is not only newborns who are affected. Uppalapu Shrinivas, one of India’s
most famous musicians, died September
19 at age 45 because of an infection that
Continued on Page 3
INTELLIGENCE
WORLD TRENDS
MONEY & BUSINESS
ARTS & DESIGN
Japan and China lower
the tension. PAGE 2
An artist inspired by
a prison cell. PAGE 4
Moscow’s financial hub
sits empty. PAGE 8
Club scene thrives in
Berlin’s ruins. PAGE 12