1.
Warm - Up
2.
I Do : Key Terms/Vocabulary notebook
- Teach students vocabulary they will come across on the News Analysis Sheet and in news articles that they do not know or key words they need to remember in the future.
3.
We Do: Discuss
- What are the various sources for news? Are some more reliable than others? Why?
- Distribute and reference the “Resource Guide” provided. Describe the differences in various story forms, including news stories, news analysis, editorials, and opinion-editorials. What is the value of the various story forms?
- Move next to a discussion on news sources, then proceed to highlight “on the record” conversation and anonymous sources. What makes a source reliable?
- Why does news consumption require us to read, watch, and listen with a critical eye?
4.
You Do: (FLIPPED)
Look at the newspaper or web site and select an article that pertains to the content of your course. They should proceed to complete each of the questions listed on the worksheet, and bring this to class the following day.
Current News Article:
'Dairy Cliff' Dodged Thanks To Small Food Stamps Cut
Posted: 01/02/2013 10:12 pm EST | Updated: 01/02/2013 10:24 pm EST
The fiscal cliff deal negotiated by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (above) and Vice President Joe Biden averts the dairy cliff, at least for one year. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
WASHINGTON -- To prevent a spike in milk prices, the "fiscal cliff" budget deal awaiting President Barack Obama's signature includes an unexpected cut of more than $100 million from food stamps.
The legislation reduces funding for efforts to promote healthy eating under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) from $395 million to $285 million in fiscal 2013. The one-year cut offsets the cost of preserving a U.S. Department of Agriculture program that protects dairy farmers from price fluctuations. Had the latter program lapsed on schedule, the resulting "dairy cliff" would have boosted the cost of milk to as much as $7 a gallon.
The food stamps cut doesn't affect nutrition assistance benefits, and it's a small amount of money considering the Congressional Budget Office estimates the government will spend more than $80 billion on the program this year. Still, nutrition assistance advocates are not exactly thrilled.
"This funding cut to the program undermines and weakens a critical component of our nationwide efforts to promote healthy eating and prevent chronic disease just as investments to prevent obesity and promote healthy eating are beginning to show results," Matthew Marsom, an executive with the Public Health Institute, said of the Nutrition Education and Obesity Prevention Grant Program.
The goal of the program, informally known as SNAP-Ed, is to promote healthy eating habits and lifestyles among people who receive nutrition assistance. States receive grants to encourage SNAP recipients to eat more fruits and vegetables and to get more exercise, according to a USDA overview.
Marsom lamented that the Senate had earlier passed an agriculture reform bill that did not include the cut, which was a product of the last-minute fiscal cliff deal between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Vice President Joe Biden. A spokesman for McConnell's office confirmed that the SNAP-Ed decrease pays for continuation of the Milk Income Loss Contract (MILC) program.
Rep. Reid Ribble (R-Wis.), a member of the House Agriculture Committee, said in a statement that he had led House and Senate lawmakers in pushing for an extension of the milk program. He told a farm industry publication that MILC is an important safety net for dairy farmers in the event that milk prices fall and feed costs rise.
Without congressional action to preserve the program, Ribble said, consumer prices for milk would "skyrocket."
Related/ Supplemental News Article (AOW_10_Gr910_NGSSS)
Cows on Drugs
Note: This is an editorial (someone’s opinion, not a straight news story)
Now that Congress has pushed through its complicated legislation to reform the health insurance system, it could take one more simple step to protect the health of all Americans. This one wouldn’t raise any taxes or make any further changes to our health insurance system, so it could be quickly passed by Congress with an outpouring of bipartisan support. Or could it?
More than 30 years ago, when I was commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration, we proposed eliminating the use of penicillin and two other antibiotics to promote growth in animals raised for food. When agribusiness interests persuaded Congress not to approve that regulation, we saw firsthand how strong politics can trump wise policy and good science.
Even back then, this nontherapeutic use of antibiotics was being linked to the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria that infect humans. To the leading microbiologists on the F.D.A.’s advisory committee, it was clearly a very bad idea to fatten animals with the same antibiotics used to treat people. But the American Meat Institute and its lobbyists in Washington blocked the F.D.A. proposal.
In 2005, one class of antibiotics, fluoroquinolones, was banned in the production of poultry in the United States. But the total number of antibiotics used in agriculture is continuing to grow. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, 70 percent of this use is in animals that are healthy but are vulnerable to transmissible diseases because they live in crowded and unsanitary conditions.
In testimony to Congress last summer, Joshua Sharfstein, the principal deputy commissioner of the F.D.A., estimated that 90,000 Americans die each year from bacterial infections they acquire in hospitals. About 70 percent of those infections are caused by bacteria that are resistant to at least one powerful antibiotic.
That’s why the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Pharmacists Association, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American Public Health Association and the National Associationof County and City Health Officials are urging Congress to phase out the nontherapeutic use in livestock of antibiotics that are important to humans.
Antibiotic resistance is an expensive problem. A person who cannot be treated with ordinary antibiotics is at risk of having a large number of bacterial infections, and of needing to be treated in the hospital for weeks or even months. The extra costs to the American health care system are as much as $26 billion a year, according to estimates by Cook County Hospital in Chicago and the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, a health policy advocacy group.
Agribusiness argues — as it has for 30 years — that livestock need to be given Secondary Reading High School, Supplemental Articles 910, December 13, 2011 antibiotics to help them grow properly and keep them free of disease. But consider what has happened in Denmark since the late 1990s, when that country banned the use of antibiotics in farm animals except for therapeutic purposes. The reservoir of resistant bacteria in Danish livestock shrank considerably, a World Health Organization report found. And although some animals lost weight, and some developed infections that needed to be treated with antimicrobial drugs, the benefits of the rule exceeded those costs.
It’s 30 years late, but Congress should now pass the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, which would ban industrial farms from using seven classes of antibiotics that are important to human health unless animals or herds are ill, or pharmaceutical companies can prove the drugs’ use in livestock does not harm human health.
The pharmaceutical industry and agribusiness face the difficult challenge of developing antimicrobials that work specifically against animal infections without undermining the fight against bacteria that cause disease in humans. But we don’t have the luxury of waiting any longer to protect those at risk of increasing antibiotic resistance.
Source: Donald Kennedy, New York Times 4.18.10
Donald Kennedy, a former commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration, is a professor emeritus of environmental science at Stanford.
