Piper Hoffman

Lactation is not a medical condition related to pregnancy or childbirth, and firing someone who wants to pump breast milk is not sex discrimination, according to a federal judge in Texas.

This decision is a stumper. Lactation occurs because of and immediately following pregnancy and childbirth, which makes it “related” to them. Only women lactate, so firing an employee because she needs to pump does discriminate against her on the basis of her sex.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought this suit against debt-collection agency Houston Funding on behalf of an employee whom the company fired, allegedly because she wanted to pump at work. The EEOC is considering appealing the decision by Judge Lynn Hughes (who is male).

Since the firing the federal government passed a law requiring employers to provide break time for new mothers to pump breast milk at work, but it does not prohibit employers from firing workers for pumping. One might have presumed that the anti-discrimination laws already had that covered, but now that is up in the air, and it will probably take years and opinions from higher courts to clear it up.

As a Jew I don’t actually want anything for Christmas, but I do have a year-round wish to turn down the world’s volume knob, as regular readers know from “WOULD YOU TURN THAT DOWN?!!”

In that spirit, here is a collection of quotes from fellow opponents of noise pollution. Two of my favorites:

“The sanitary and mechanical age we are now entering makes up for the mercy it grants to our sense of smell by the ferocity with which it assails our sense of hearing.”
~ Havelock Ellis, 1912, in Impressions and Comments (1930)

“I have terrible hearing trouble. I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf.”
~ Pete Townshend of The Who (2006 interview)

Music lovers, listen up: you now have Pete Townshend’s approval to wear earplugs at rock concerts.

An update on my previous post, Factory Farms are Breeding More Than Cows: Agribusiness Antibiotic Abuse Creates Superbugs: the FDA has refused consumer advocates’ petitions to “limit the routine feeding of antibiotics to farm animals.” For an administration that claims it wants to improve health care, rendering some of our most important medications powerless is a funny way of showing it.

A while back I wrote about the damage that noise, such as the din in subways, concerts, and spinning classes, does to our hearing. This article describes evidence that noise is correlated to hearing loss.
Wear those ear plugs. The more people do it, the less silly we’ll look!

Article first published as Factory Farms Are Breeding More Than Cows on Blogcritics.
Antibiotics are overused, and as a direct result drug-resistant bacteria are developing that sicken and kill people (they are fatal in 30-60% of cases). This is old news. Doctors have responded by prescribing antibiotics less often and by emphasizing to patients the importance of taking all the pills prescribed to them. (If you don’t finish all your antibiotics, start doing so as of right now. Don’t be one of those cretins who stops taking antibiotics because they “feel better.” You’re bumping off antibiotics and aiding and abetting superbugs, and none of us appreciate it.)

What you may not have heard is that the antibiotics prescribed to people are just the tip of the superbug problem. Almost 80% of antibiotics administered in the United States are given to animals raised for food. Factory farms administer antibiotics to cows, pigs, and chickens preventatively (because the conditions they live in are so gross it’s hard to imagine they won’t get sick) and to foster unnaturally fast growth (because the more meat per day per animal, the more money for agribusiness).

28.8 million pounds of antibiotics are sold every year in the U.S. to feed to animals raised for food. Compare that to seven million pounds sold for administration to human beings. The numbers make it clear what we have to do: clean up factory farms so that animals aren’t trapped in filth so disgusting it would make them ill without medication, and give antibiotics only to animals who are sick. Both of these fixes require government to regulate agribusiness, which it is notoriously loathe to do.

Industry is trying to stave off government regulation by giving the appearance of solving the problem itself. For instance, according to Reuters, “the poultry industry [says] it already has ratcheted down ‘by a large margin’ its use of antibiotics.” But self-regulation is never the right (i.e. effective/remotely successful) answer for agribusiness. The same Reuters article reports that “Bernadette Dunham, director of FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, noted voluntary efforts to reduce antibiotic use and said, ‘We believe additional steps are necessary to have a real impact on this problem.’”

Doctors favor regulation of antibiotics on factory farms. The American Medical Association endorsed a bill to reduce the amount of antibiotics agribusiness feeds to animals they raise for food (see below for more on the bill, known as PAMTA). The AMA’s newspaper quoted Dr. Brad Spellberg, associate professor of medicine at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California, as saying “I’ve seen patients die of treatable infections. I’ve told their family, ‘I have no medicine to use.’ This is a catastrophic public health crisis. I don’t know how else to put it.” (Emphasis added.)

The government knows what’s going on. The Food and Drug Administration acknowledged in 2010 that routinely feeding antibiotics to animals raised for food “is not in the interest of protecting or promoting public health.” But it has taken no action.

In 2009 Representative Louise Slaughter (D, NY) introduced PAMTA, The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, which would have phased out the use of “medically important antibiotics” for non-medical purposes on factory farms. The bill did not make it into law. If it ever does, it would accomplish one of the necessary reforms – not giving antibiotics to animals who are not sick; unfortunately, it would do nothing to clean up factory farms to prevent animals from becoming sick.

You can help support PAMTA: sign the pro-PAMTA petition, and call your Representative and Senators to ask them to help introduce and co-sponsor PAMTA.

A win on PAMTA would still leave the problem of repulsive and corrosive conditions on factory farms. “[T]he reason why antibiotics are fed to animals on factory farms is to keep them from dying in the filthy, crowded conditions that farmers force these animals to call home. Factory farms are prime breeding grounds for potentially deadly bacteria such as E. coli, salmonella, and campylobacter, and the conditions are so putrid that millions of animals die within a matter of weeks before they are even sent to slaughter, despite being shot up with drugs. Imagine how few would survive without them.” The best way to clean up meat, dairy, and egg factories: Go veg and put them out of business. It’s a matter of life and death not just for the animals, but for you too.

The CALM Act.  Sounds sort of Zen, maybe even a little flaky for Congressional legislation.  But CALM, or the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, is a significant recognition of a health risk few take seriously: noise-induced hearing loss.

 You have probably noticed that the volume of television commercials is louder than the volume of the shows they interrupt.  The CALM Act (which has passed the House and Senate, but has a few more legislative hurdles before it reaches the President) would require commercials to broadcast at the same volume as television shows and no louder. 

 On the Internet the comments about this legislation are leaning towards the dismissive, but noise is not trivial.  In non-industrialized societies older people have significantly better hearing than older people in industrialized societies because they have endured less noise.  In other words, the noise around us is making us deaf. 

 For instance, just 30 minutes on the New York subway can be enough to cause hearing damage.  Add to that the MP3 player turned way up so it can be heard above the subway din, and multiply it by two rides a day for the average commuter.  Then there are power tools, traffic, and music — in bars, at concerts, and even in spinning classes at gyms, where people pay for cardiac health with future hearing loss.

 I carry ear plugs everywhere.  I use them on the subway, in gym classes, in movie theaters, and at bars.  Usually I can still hear well enough to converse, and when I can’t, the people without ear plugs probably can’t hear each other either.  I may look silly, but I walk away without a headache from the noise or a sore throat from shouting.

 Television commercials aren’t the biggest culprit in the assault on our ears, but Congress’s acknowledgement that noise pollution causes hearing loss and that it is worthy of federal attention is a quiet though welcome step forward.  I hope there will be more progress on and awareness of this issue so that I won’t be the only one who can carry on a conversation at the nursing home.