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NETWORK NOTES

PSR Campaign to Get Missiles off Alert Status

Public Interest Groups Call for Ban on Antibiotics in Farm Animals

Multinational Monitor Names 10 WORST CORPORATIONS of 1998

NRC DROPS LIST OF PROBLEM NUCLEAR FACILITIES

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission replaced its high-profile "watch list" with a three-level monitoring system. The semi-annual watch list, begun in 1986, identified safety concerns and potentially deadly problems, often forcing plant operators to improve the conditions of their facilities. Nuclear activists fear that the new tiered system will give less public attention to unsafe sites. Wenonah Hauter, head of Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project, states that "a new oversight process is not going to suddenly turn NRC lap dogs into watch dogs."

Instead of singling out the most dangerous plants, the three-tiered system will classify sites as needing the most oversight, needing extra oversight, and needing normal oversight. Only three plants currently fall within the category of needing the most government oversight: the Millstone Unit 2 plant in Connecticut, and the D.C. Cook Units 1 and 2 in Michigan. In order to get off the list of most-watched sites, plants need only show improvement; they do not have to completely ameliorate potentially dangerous conditions. The NRC claims that switching to the new system will allow it to make better use of its resources.

For more information, contact James Riccio or Wenonah Hauter with the PCCMEP at (202) 546-4996; www. citizen.org/CMEP; 1600 20th St. N.W., Washington, DC 20009.

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Physicians for Social Responsibility campaigns to take missiles off alert status

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Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) has recently released "Abolition of Nuclear Weapons: The Time Is Now," a slide presentation that is part of its campaign to get U.S. and Russian nuclear missiles off hair-trigger alert. Though the U.S. military has prepared a report outlining the ways to take missiles off alert so that they cannot be launched without days of preparation, the President has not yet acted.

Nearly a year ago, a group of doctors and nuclear weapons experts published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that examined the medical consequences of an accidental nuclear launch from just one Russian submarine. "Assuming that 12 of the 16 missiles on board reached targets in eight U.S. cities," the report states, "we calculated that nearly 7 million people would die as a direct result of fire storms started by the missiles. Another 6 to 12 million would die from radiation sickness in the immediate aftermath." For more information, contact PSR at www.psr.org or (202) 898-0159. PSR is the U.S. affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, 727 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139.

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PUBLIC INTEREST GROUPS CALL FOR BAN ON ANTIBIOTICS USE IN FARM ANIMALS

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Five health, consumer, and other public interest groups in March asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ban the use of certain antibiotics to fatten farm animals. Scientists have said that the use of antibiotics to promote animal growth increases the prevalence of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics' effects, and jeopardizes human health. Adding antibiotics to livestock feed can lead to antibiotics resistance in foodborne pathogens, which can make cases of food poisoning difficult to treat or even deadly, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), one of the groups that signed the petition to the FDA. The other groups are the Environmental Defense Fund, Food Animal Concerns Trust, Public Citizen's Health Research Group, and Union of Concerned Scientists.

For more than 40 years, ranchers and growers have fed low levels of penicillin, tetracycline, and other antibiotics to poultry, cattle, and pigs to speed their growth and to cut costs, according to CSPI. In the past two years, the World Health organization and the Centers for Disease Control and prevention have called for ending the use of several antibiotics for growth promotion in livestock.

The groups' concerns are shared in Europe, where the Soil Association of England has released a report revealing "statistics on the enormous increases in use of the most common antibiotics such as penicillin, despite the supposed efforts of successful governments to curtail it. And it reveals some of the failures in the regulatory system which are leaving the human population exposed to the increasing risk of drug-resistant disease." In its magazine Living Earth (January-March 1999), the Association calls for a ban on all non-medical uses of antibiotics in agriculture.

From Alternative Agriculture News, Vol. 17, No. 4 (April 1999). For further information on the call for a ban, contact CSPI at 1875 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Suite 300, Washington, DC 20009.

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MULTINATIONAL MONITOR NAMES 10 WORST CORPORATIONS OF 1998

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Multinational Monitor, a quarterly "watchdog" of corporate behavior founded by Ralph Nader, released its annual list of the "world's 10 worst corporations" in its December 1998 issue. Russell Mokhiber's article features descriptions of the corporations and their crimes: Chevron for calling in the Nigerian military to protect its assets by killing protesters; Coca-Cola for shamelessly pushing its "liquid candy" all over the world, replacing milk in children's diets with nutrition-less soda pop; General Motors for involvement in collaboration with World War II Nazis; Satellite-maker Loral for bribing both Clinton-Gore election campaigns in order to sell its products to China; Mobil Oil for supplying earthmoving equipment to the Indonesian Army to dig mass graves for people the army had killed; Food developer Monsanto for infiltrating the American agriculture industry with its own engineered seeds and now suing people who save the seeds and use them to grow more crops; Cruise company Royal Caribbean for routinely flushing used petroleum products from its ships directly into the ocean; Oil company Unocal for settling three environmental lawsuits out of court without fixing the damage it caused; Wal-Mart for building itself on child labor to become the fastest growing corporate juggernaut on the planet; and finally, pharmaceutical company Warner Lambert for distributing its diabetes drug Rezulin, linked to 33 deaths from liver damage, all according to the Multinational Monitor article.

[See the review of Corporate Predators, by Multinational Monitor's Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, in this Summer 1999 issue of The Workbook.]