Peggy Noonan Recalls When Bush Wrapped Himself in His Own Failure


By Steve M.
No More Mister Nice Blog
October 24, 2009


It's hard to have a simple response to Peggy Noonan's opening paragraphs this week:

At a certain point, a president must own a presidency. For George W. Bush that point came eight months in, when 9/11 happened. From that point on, the presidency -- all his decisions, all the credit and blame for them -- was his. The American people didn't hold him responsible for what led up to 9/11, but they held him responsible for everything after it. This is part of the reason the image of him standing on the rubble of the twin towers, bullhorn in hand, on Sept.14, 2001, became an iconic one. It said: I'm owning it.

"I'm owning it." Noonan's partly right about that: after running scared on 9/11 and ducking the situation for a couple of days, Bush began on that Friday to act as if having presided over the worst act of terrorism ever on U.S. soil was a mark of virtue.

In retrospect, it's as if he was pleased about it -- proud of it. Eight years later, I can't help thinking he really was pleased: now he'd be consequential, rather than the no-account black sheep of his family.

It's true that he wasn't held responsible for what led up to 9/11 -- his administration and its propagandists took great pains to shift the blame to his predecessor -- but it's odd how Noonan puts that. She mentions responsibility for what went before (presumably so her right-wing base can think about how it's all Clinton's fault) and responsibility for what came after (it's OK now, if you're a Republican, to say bad things about Bush), but it's as if she still can't face the fact that what we need to talk about is responsibility for what happened on 9/11.

Yes, I'm playing with words a bit -- but it's as if Noonan doesn't want to address the point that something unspeakably horrible happened that day -- and on whose watch? It's as if she can accept the build-up (all the fault of the Democrats) and the aftermath (so much failed Republican promise), but looking at the actual event is unthinkable. Which it wouldn't be if it had happened in a Democrat's administration; then failure to obsess over the awful day would be unthinkable.

Noonan pivots to Obama:

Mr. Bush surely knew from the moment he put the bullhorn down that he would be judged on everything that followed. And he has been. Early on, the American people rallied to his support, but Americans are practical people. They will support a leader when there is trouble, but there's an unspoken demand, or rather bargain: We're behind you, now fix this, it's yours.

President Obama, in office a month longer than Bush was when 9/11 hit, now owns his presidency. Does he know it? He too stands on rubble, figuratively speaking -- a collapsed economy, high and growing unemployment, two wars. Everyone knows what he's standing on. You can almost see the smoke rising around him. He's got a bullhorn in his hand every day.

It's his now. He gets the credit and the blame. How do we know this? The American people are telling him. You can see it in the polls. That's what his falling poll numbers are about. "It's been almost a year, you own this. Fix it."

"It's his now." The first eight months of Bush's presidency weren't his, and that's fine, but rubble from a collapse that began long before Obama became president is his rubble. Bush chose to own his rubble (actually, he chose to milk it for sympathy and to wave it like a bloody shirt that justified unrelated foreign adventurism, and inept adventurism than that). But Obama doesn't have agency. We tell him -- or, rather, Noonan, purporting to speak for us, tells him -- what's his responsibility and what isn't.

If you want to use a 9/11 metaphor for Obama, compare him to the people in charge of rebuilding on Ground Zero. Blame him for failing to get that job under way quickly enough. I blame him for not doing enough by now to rein in the fat cats, and not enough to jolt Main Street's economy until we can feel a pulse. And the public is, yes, blaming him for that, too. But, sorry, Peggy: it's not his rubble -- and the public knows that, even if this self-appointed spokeswoman for the public doesn't realize that.

55% Still Blame Bush for Economic Problems --Rasmussen, October 5, 2009 If even Rasmussen gets numbers like that, it's Bush's rubble, even if it's Obama's job to clean it up.

Steve M. blogs at No More Mister Nice Blog.
© 2009 No More Mister Nice Blog All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/143487/peggy_noonan_recalls_when_bush_wrapped_himself_in_his_own_failure/#more
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Company Underbid Embassy Security Contract, Ignored Misconduct, Whistleblowers Say


By Matthew Harwood
Security Management
Sept. 11, 2009


The fallout from the scandal involving private security contractors protecting the U.S. Embassy Kabul continues to rise up the management ladder, according to allegations levied by two ArmorGroup North America (AGNA) whistleblowers.

According to the Associated Press [1]:

James Gordon, former director of operations at ArmorGroup, and John Gorman, a former ArmorGroup manager in Kabul, told reporters they were forced out after trying to get the company to fix a long list of problems.

Gordon, who left ArmorGroup in February 2008, said he alerted the State Department to shortcomings in personnel, equipment and discipline that created security risks, but little changed.

In a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court, Gordon said ArmorGroup withheld from Congress information about employees who went to brothels in Kabul known to house trafficked women.

ArmorGroup's "goal was to maximize their profits, provide a fig leaf of security at the embassy, and pray to God that nobody got killed," Gordon said.

Last week, the Project on Government Oversight wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton [2]detailing AGNA contract abuses, including bizarre booze-soaked sexual hazing, harsh working conditions, and language barriers among guards, that undermined security at the embassy. Graphic pictures of the hazing have been revealed on many Web sites, including this one.


Photo released by Project on Government Oversight

Gormon told reporters that the company cut costs by extending shifts from 8 to 12 hours and by shortening the number of shifts from 5 to 4 days. He also alleged that the company did not properly vet the employees it hired, which helped contribute to abuses and misconduct.

Gordon, who is currently working for another security contractor in Kabul, has filed a whistleblower protection lawsuit against AGNA. He is suing for back pay and punitive damages, reports CNN.com [3].

Among the more shocking allegations, Gordon's lawsuit reveals one security contractor had to be forcibly removed from a brothel during working hours. Gordon unsuccessfully tried to get the employee fired. He failed, he said, because other guards, including an AGNA medic and supervisor frequented the same brothel—one that allegedly dealt in trafficked sex slaves.

Guards' extracurricular activities also led to an outbreak of sexually transmitted diseases, Gordon alleges. In response to these incidents, Gordon tried to enforce a "no-brothels policy," which was met with "outright hostility" by the company, he said.

According to CNN.com, Wackenhut Services Inc., which owns AGNA, responded to Gordon's allegations, calling them "overstated, ill-founded, not based on any personal knowledge, or otherwise lacking in legal merit."

Source:
http://www.securitymanagement.com/news/company-underbid-embassy-security-contract-ignored-misconduct-whistleblowers-say-006188
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Secret Trafigura report said ‘Likely Cause’ of Illness was Release of Toxic Gas from Dumped Waste

A suppressed report which details how an oil company dumped toxic waste in Africa that may cause serious burns has been released following a parliamentary row over freedom of speech.


By Martin Beckford and Holly Watt
Telegraph UK
Oct 16, 2009


The study commissioned just weeks after the incident in West Africa concluded that the dumping would have been illegal under European pollution laws and suggests that the “likely cause” of the illness reported by locals was the “significant release” of potentially lethal gas.

The report had been kept secret after Trafigura, one of the world’s largest independent oil trading firms, obtained a "super injunction" that threatened the centuries-old privilege of newspapers to report what MPs can say freely in the Commons.

On Friday night, as the High Court gagging order was lifted, senior figures at Trafigura admitted their approach may have been “heavy-handed” and insisted it had not been their intention to try to gag Parliament.

The firm also maintained that the damning report was only an unfinished draft study, while its author insisted that it was written “without reference to the underlying specific evidence”.

Trafigura denies anyone died as a result of the waste dumping and says they only suffered “inconveniences” such as “flu-like symptoms”.

Pierre Lorinet, Trafigura’s chief financial officer, told The Daily Telegraph:

“Effectively that report was a draft report, a work in progress, very much when the event was happening and that report was effectively an analysis of possibles, as opposed to basing itself on material analysis, experts working into what did happen on the Ivory Coast.

Because we have been the recipient of quite a lot of inaccurate reporting, we decided that our best course of action at the time was to get the injunction, because we didn’t want more inaccurate reporting on things which are very clearly wrong effectively.

“It is a heavy-handed approach, absolutely. With hindsight, could it have been done differently? Possibly.

“The injunction was never intended to gag Parliament or attack free speech. “Our experience until then, some of the reporting, people weren’t necessarily interested in our side of the story and to be fair it is probably a mistake that we have made over time, we have not been open enough.”

In 2006 Trafigura, a privately-owned, Dutch-registered company that has offices in London, had chartered a tanker, the Probo Koala, to carry a cargo of cheap, dirty petrol known as coker gasoline that it hoped to clean up for a profit.

After using caustic soda and a catalyst to remove sulphur from the fuel, it was left with waste products known as slops that were to be disposed of in Amsterdam. But Trafigura was told that the cost of handling the foul-smelling residue would be far higher than initially thought.

The waste was pumped back onto the ship and in August taken to Abidjan, the biggest city in Ivory Coast, where a local contractor called Compagnie Tommy unloaded it and dumped it at as many as 18 landfill sites across the city at night.

Within days there were reports that locals had suffered injuries from exposure to the dumped waste, with a UN official claiming recently that 108,000 had fallen ill.

Alleged victims came together to launch Britain’s largest ever class action against the oil firm, which was due to be heard at the High Court.

Last month Trafigura agreed an out-of-court settlement that will offer about £950 compensation to each of 31,000 people without accepting liability.

A joint statement issued by both sides following the out of court settlement last month said that more than twenty independent experts from a number of fields have investigated the incident.

“These independent experts are unable to identify a link between exposure to the chemicals released from the slops and dealths, miscarriages, still births, birth defects, loss of visual acuity or other serious and chronic injuries. Leigh Day and Co, [who represented the victims] in the light of the expert evidence now acknowledge that the slops could at worst have caused a range of short term low level flu-like symptoms and anxiety," the statment continued.

Trafigura has already paid more than £100m to the Ivory Coast authorities for a clean-up operation and still faces court action in Amsterdam for the alleged illegal export of toxic waste.

Soon after the incident Trafigura’s lawyers commissioned Minton, Treharne & Davies, a firm of Wales-based scientific analysts, to look into the “potential composition” of the slops discharged from the ship.

The report was not made public by Trafigura, which maintains that the slops could not have caused the illness reported.

But a leaked copy of the Minton report found its way into the hands of journalists from The Guardian newspaper.

In September this year, Trafigura took what it now calls the “unenviable step” of asking its lawyers, Carter-Ruck, to seek an injunction preventing publication of the report.

It says it did so solely to prevent biased reporting, but the terms of the injunction appeared to prevent reporting of the fact that Paul Farrelly, a Labour MP, had tabled a question relating to Trafigura.

This week users of Twitter, the popular “micro-blogging” website, alerted the world to the Commons order paper listing the question and a website for leaked documents where the Minton report could be read.

On Friday night the High Court injunction banning reporting of the Minton paper was lifted.
The long-suppressed report explains the harmful nature of the chemicals “likely to have been present” following the dumping of the slops and states: “

For these people [living or working near the dump sites], the possible consequences are burns to the skin, eyes and lungs, vomiting, diarrhoea, loss of consciousness and death.”

It warns that the sulphur chemicals can break down in the environment and release hydrogen sulphide, a “highly toxic” gas that can kill. It says the effects of the release of this gas were reported and “we conclude hydrogen sulphide release to have been the likely cause”.

The report also states that the disposal of the liquid, corrosive and flammable waste would be “forbidden” under EU rules.

But Trafigura disputes the content of the report, which it says was left unfinished after a more detailed investigation of the actual slops by the Netherlands Forensic Institute.

The oil firm says hydrogen sulphide was not present in the dumped waste.

A statement produced last night by John Minton, the report’s author, said:

“Any suggestion that the draft September 2006 report was anything other than an initial desktop study, which remained in draft and which was quickly superseded when we were first provided with reliable facts, would be wholly incorrect.”

Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/6350262/Secret-Trafigura-report-said-likely-cause-of-illness-was-release-of-toxic-gas-from-dumped-waste.html
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Geithner aides made millions on Wall Street


By Tom Braithwaite
Financial Times
October 14 2009


Obama administration officials now working on fixing and regulating the financial system were beneficiaries of several million dollars in pay from Wall Street and private equity companies, it has been revealed.

Financial disclosure forms show that prior to joining the government, Gene Sperling, a senior Treasury adviser, was paid $887,727 by Goldman Sachs and $158,000 for speeches to companies that included Stanford Group, the company run by Sir Allen Stanford, who has since been charged with fraud.

Mr Sperling’s compensation from Goldman was for work on a philanthropic project. His overall pay, including for his main job at the Council on Foreign Relations, totalled $2.2m in the 13 months to January.

The forms, which were first obtained by Bloomberg, showed that Matthew Kabaker, another adviser in the Treasury, earned $5.8m at Blackstone, the private equity firm, in the two years before joining the administration to work on plans to support banks and spur lending. Much of the compensation was in stock.

Lewis Alexander, another adviser, was chief economist to Citigroup before joining the administration; he was paid $2.4m in the last two years.

Even though some of the officials whose previous salaries were disclosed are senior, many were appointed as “counselors”, meaning they escaped Senate confirmation hearings which could have highlighted their past remuneration and employment at a time of heightened animosity towards the financial industry.

Earlier this month the release of the telephone call logs of Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary, showed he had numerous conversations with a number of Wall Street executives, sparking allegations that the administration was too close to the industry.

Officials argued then and on Wednesday that it was important to have skilled people working for the government as it crafted complicated financial rescues and for Mr Geithner to communicate with financial sector executives. Mr Geithner, the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has never worked on Wall Street.

Mr Obama, however, has hit out at the culture that he said prevailed before last year’s financial crisis – at a time when many of the Treasury officials were working on Wall Street and related businesses.

“We will not go back to the days of reckless behaviour and unchecked excess that was at the heart of this crisis, where too many were motivated only by the appetite for quick kills and bloated bonuses,” he said at a speech in New York last month.

Previous releases of disclosure forms revealed the $5.2m paid to Lawrence Summers, chief economic adviser to the White House, by DE Shaw, the hedge fund, in the two years before he joined the administration.

The disclosures come during a complicated time for the relationship between the Obama administration and business, with officials accused of being too close to companies on the one hand and encountering increased criticism from business lobby groups on the other.

The US Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday launched its “campaign for free enterprise”, arguing the private sector was under threat from various over-reaching government plans, including for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency and a cap-and-trade scheme to reduce carbon emissions.

Source:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f012c4b2-b8f6-11de-98ee-00144feab49a.html
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Kurdistan Halts Oil Exports


By Timothy Williams
The New York Times
October 13, 2009


BAGHDAD — The semi-autonomous Kurdish region has reopened a rift with the central government after announcing that it had halted all petroleum exports from Kurdistan until Baghdad pays the international companies that are pumping oil in the region.

Oil extracted in Kurdistan can be exported only through Iraqi government pipelines running to Turkey, giving Baghdad a stranglehold on the transport of oil produced there. At the same time, the government needs all the revenue it can get to pay for a host of pressing needs.

The amount of oil involved currently, about 100,000 barrels a day, is relatively small compared with Iraq’s total production of 2.4 million barrels a day. But with production from the Kurdish areas likely to increase markedly in coming years, the dispute has taken on added importance.

Kurdistan’s minister of natural resources, Ashti Hawrami, said in a letter dated Oct. 9 and posted on the Kurdish government’s Web site Monday that the decision to stop exports had been made in concert with the two international companies now extracting oil there.

“We have jointly agreed that no free oil will be pumped for export, and payments have to be made,” Dr. Hawrami wrote in the letter. “We will only resume exports with guaranteed payments.”

Kurdistan has awarded more than 30 contracts to international oil companies during the past few years over the objections of Baghdad, which has barred international companies working in Kurdistan from competing for oil contracts in the rest of Iraq.

Kurdistan began signing its own deals with foreign oil companies after becoming impatient with the central government’s inability to adopt a national oil law that would regulate the industry.

The Iraqi Parliament still has not approved an oil law, but earlier this year Baghdad began seeking oil production deals of its own with international companies, including a preliminary agreement with a consortium of British Petroleum and the Chinese National Petroleum Company to develop the enormous Rumalia field in southern Iraq.

After DNO, a Norwegian company, and Genel Energy, a Turkish company, struck oil at the Tawke field in Kurdistan this year, Baghdad originally refused to export their production over its pipelines. The cash-poor government eventually relented, however, giving its approval in late May.

Exports from Tawke and from a second site in Kurdistan, at the Taq Taq field, started June 1, but Baghdad has refused to pay the companies for the oil because it continues to regard their contracts with Kurdistan as illegal.

Meanwhile, officials in Kurdistan said they could not afford to pay because revenue from the fields went directly to Baghdad.

DNO has a 55 percent share in the Tawke field; Genel Energy owns 25 percent; the remainder is owned by the Kurdish government.

Dr. Hawrami, who oversees Kurdistan’s oil sector, said the Norwegian and Turkish companies, which had invested $500 million in Kurdistan, had not received a penny so far for their exports.

Khalid Saleh, an adviser to Hussain al-Shahristani, Iraq’s oil minister, confirmed Monday that oil exports from Kurdistan had stopped. He said the government had no plans to abide by the terms of the Kurdish contracts.

“At this moment, the government is not willing to pay,” he said.

Dr. Hawrami also acknowledged in the letter a complex web of financial arrangements that the Kurdish government had with the two companies, including secret government investments and loans of as much as $50 million.

The deals, which were negotiated with the permission of the president of Kurdistan, Masoud Barzani, were intended to bolster the financially strained oil companies so they could continue exploration in Kurdistan, according to the letter.

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/world/middleeast/13iraqoil.html
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U.S. EPA Delays 79 Mountaintop-Shearing Coal Permits


September 30, 2009
Bloomberg


(National) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is withholding 79 permits to mine coal by removing mountaintops in four Appalachian states to assess the environmental impact of dumping the debris in streams.

The permits in Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Ohio are being held to further evaluate how water quality would be affected from discarding mining debris in adjacent streams and valleys, an EPA spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.

Mining applications from companies including International Coal Group Inc. and Massey Energy Co. are affected.

Shearing the peaks off mineral-rich mountains to expose coal seams is often easier than digging conventional mines and accounts for about 6 percent of U.S. coal demand. Industry officials say new scrutiny of the practice by EPA amounts to a moratorium on Appalachian coal mining. Each of the 79 permits “is likely to result in significant harm to water quality and the environment,” the EPA spokesperson said.

The EPA and Army Corps of Engineers will meet with mining companies to discuss options to reduce the impact on water quality, she said. The permits for the mountaintop removal projects in the four states involve dynamiting or bulldozing peaks.

That is considered the least expensive method to extract coal used to power plants yet the most damaging to surroundings, according to the Sierra Club, a San Francisco-based environmental advocate.

Source:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a9SyfHOzFeDM
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Opposition 'Wins' Greek election


Al Jazeera
Oct. 5, 2009


Greece's opposition Pasok party has won the country's national election with enough seats to form a government, exit polls say.

Surveys by the Reuters news agency and other media showed the Pasok party ahead with about 42.5 per cent of the vote following Sunday's parliamentary elections.

The final result is expected to see the socialist Pasok take between 151 and 159 seats in Greece's 300-seat parliament.

The polls showed the ruling conservative New Democracy (ND) party, which has held power for the last five years, trailing with 36.4 per cent of the vote.

"Exit polls in Greece tend to be fairly accurate, and even at the lowest margin of the state broadcaster exit polls, the socialists have scraped home," Barnaby Phillips, Al Jazeera's correspondent reporting from Athens, said.

'Historic Win'

Pasok hailed the result as a "Historic Win".

George Papandreou, the Pasok leader, said: "We bear a great responsibility to change the course of the country ... We know that we can make it."

Jubilant supporters gathered outside the party headquarters, cheering and waving Pasok flags depicting the party's symbol of a green rising sun.

Costas Karamanlis, the Greek prime minister who leads the ND party, later conceded defeat and stepped down as the conservatives' leader.

Karamanlis had called the election halfway through his second four-year term, saying he needed a strong new mandate to tackle Greece's economic troubles.

But ahead of the vote, surveys suggested his party would lose power.

His conservatives have seen their popularity undermined by a faltering economy and a string of corruption scandals.

Al Jazeera's Phillips said the corruption scandals had severely damaged the New Democrat's chances.

"I think the over-riding sense of this election was 'throw the rascals out', by which I mean that New Democracy was seen as corrupt and incompetent - they had lost their touch," he said. "But I don't think that has necessarily translated into enormous enthusiasm for Pasok."

Economic Challenges

Othon Anastasakis, the director of southeast European studies at Oxford University in the UK, said that voters would demand decisive action from the new government.

"Greece is used to voting for one or the other party ... There won't be a period of grace, they [Greek voters] will start criticising from the beginning," he told Al Jazeera.

Nikos Magginas, an economist with Greece's National Bank, said: "The main challenge for the new government is to submit a credible budget and a realistic timetable for reducing fiscal imbalances."

Both party's had run election campaigns promising to tackle corruption and pull Greece out of economic crisis.

Papandreou promised a $4.36bn stimulus package, campaigning on a platform of taxing the rich and helping the poor, Karamanlis called for two years of austerity.

The vote was the third face-off for Papandreou, a US-born politician, and Karamanlis, both the heirs to two of Greece's most powerful political dynasties.

Source:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2009/10/200910416822365479.html
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Excreted Tamiflu Found in Rivers


Tamiflu, the primary flu-fighting drug, is getting into surface waters where ducks and other water birds may pick it up. If the birds host influenza viruses, which many normally do, those viruses may develop a resistance to the drug.


By Janet Raloff
Science News
Web edition
September 30th, 2009


The premier flu-fighting drug is contaminating rivers downstream of sewage-treatment facilities, researchers in Japan confirm.

The source: urinary excretion by people taking oseltamivir phosphate, best known as Tamiflu.

Concerns are now building that birds, which are natural influenza carriers, are being exposed to waterborne residues of Tamiflu’s active form and might develop and spread drug-resistant strains of seasonal and avian flu.

For their new study, Gopal Ghosh and his colleagues at Kyoto University sampled water discharged from three local sewage treatment plants and water at several points along two rivers into which the treated water flowed. Sampling started early in December 2008, as flu season got underway. The researchers sampled again at the height of the seasonal flu’s onslaught in early February and again as infection rates waned.

Tamiflu’s active form, oseltamivir carboxylate or OC, turned up in the treated sewage on every occasion, the researchers report online September 28 in Environmental Health Perspectives.

Values were in the low nanograms per liter range during the first and last samplings, and reached a high of almost 300 ng/L at one outflow during the flu’s peak, a week when there were 1,738 recorded flu cases in Kyoto.

River residues showed up during only that second sampling — from low nanogram levels at most sampling points to a high of 190 ng/L in a portion of the Nishitakase River where treated sewage accounts for 90 percent of the flow.

Computer modeling has shown that OC should survive sewage treatment, notes Wolf von Tümpling Jr. of the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research, a federal institute in Magdeburg, Germany. Ghosh’s team is now the first to confirm this, he says. Von Tümpling’s own data show that once exposed to sunlight, OC will break down, albeit slowly. Concentrations would fall at best by half every three weeks, he says.

If correlations predicted by earlier studies are correct, concentrations measured at some river sites in the new Kyoto study seem “high enough to lead to antiviral resistance in waterfowl,” Ghosh says.

And the Kyoto team didn’t test during a pandemic, when Tamiflu prescription rates might be 10 times higher, von Tümpling notes.

Indeed, the expected coincident hits by seasonal and H1N1 swine flu this winter, could send Tamiflu use skyrocketing. In a July 14 letter, Food and Drug Administration deputy commissioner Joshua Sharfstein noted that “there is no adequate, approved and available alternative to the emergency use of certain oseltamivir phosphate products for the treatment and prophylaxis of influenza.”

Once ingested, virtually all Tamiflu will end up in the environment in the active form, notes environmental chemist Jerker Fick of Umeå University in Sweden.

The reason: Tamiflu becomes active once the body converts it into a carboxylate form. Roughly 80 percent of an ingested dose becomes this OC, which the body eventually excretes. The body sheds the remaining 20 percent of Tamiflu in its original form, but this phosphate form is immediately turned into the active, carboxylate form when it reaches a water treatment plant, he says.

Two years ago, Fick’s team published data showing that most sewage-treatment technologies will remove “zero percent” of any OC present. And ducks love hanging out around warm, nutrient-rich outflows of treated water during winter-flu season. While sampling for waterborne OC last year in Japan, “I saw it myself,” he says.

If Tamiflu resistance does develop in exposed birds, the affected flu strains will probably be conventional seasonal and avian flu strains, which claim thousands of lives each year, and not H1N1. That’s because H1N1 seems to bypass birds as it spreads among people, notes William Schaffner, chair of preventive medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tenn.

He also notes that U.S. policy is more conservative than Japan’s when it comes to Tamiflu use. Federal guidelines, he says, recommend that “Tamiflu be reserved for treatment of the very sick and anyone who is immunocompromised.”

Source:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/47971/description/Excreted_Tamiflu_found_in_rivers
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