Without question, agricultural research is one of the most vital investments we can make to feed our increasing population and protect our planet.
Agricultural research has been helping people by fighting hunger and lowering food costs for years. It also aids rural America which has a higher wage structure than some of developing countries and faces competition in the world marketplace.
High-yield farming is the result of agricultural research and some would say it’s the greatest achievement of human civilization for the environment.
Increased crop yields since 1960 are saving millions of square miles of wildlife habitat around the world from being plowed down for low-yield crops. Latest estimates put this saving in land areas equal to the United States, Europe and Brazil.
We cannot return to an earlier time period when new technology and research were not as much a part of the agricultural scene.
If the United States farmer attempted to produce the crops we harvest now with the technology that prevailed in the ‘40s, it would require an additional area of approximately 200 million hectares of land of similar quality, say those in USDA agricultural research. To find such land, most of the forests east of the Mississippi River would have to be chopped down and most pastures would have to be plowed up and these lands would have to be planted to annual crops.
With the use of innovative practices, farmers have reduced soil erosion. Today, most farmers are using systems that leave at least 40 percent or more crop residue after planting. No-till, ridge-till and mulch till account for the reduction in soil loss.
The most sustainable farming in the world today is that done with hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizer, integrated pest management and conservation tillage, according to the Soil and Water Conservation Society of the United States.
Kansas farmers, and their counterparts across the United States, take responsibility for the conservation of valuable topsoil seriously. This country has as much of the planet’s valuable cropland as any other nation. U.S. farmers also have the infrastructure needed to make this land productive.
Farmers can, and will, do more to improve their environment. They will conserve more water, monitor grassland grazing and continue to implement environmentally sound techniques that will ensure preservation of the land.
Farmers will adopt new techniques spawned by agricultural research. High-yield farming works and will continue to work because it is flexible enough to accept and adapt to change.
No agricultural system, or any system, is perfect. Farmers must continue to search for better ways to farm through research and education.
John Schlageck, a Hoxie native, is a leading commentator on agriculture and rural Kansas.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Sony hack, the latest in a wave of company security breaches, exposed months of employee emails. Other hacks have given attackers access to sensitive information about a company and its customers, such as credit-card numbers and email addresses. One way hackers can sneak into a company is by sending fake emails with malicious links to employee inboxes. Here are five simple steps to make your email more secure and limit the harm a hacker can have:
ARCHIVE EARLY AND OFTEN
Most corporate email systems allow people to set up regularly scheduled archiving so that emails are moved off of the server after a certain number of days. You can still check archived emails on your work computer, but they are no longer easily accessible on websites outside the office or on your phone. That limits hackers’ ability to access those emails too. You can make exceptions for emails that you want to keep in your active inbox, and they won’t be archived.
GET ORGANIZED
As emails come into your inbox, deal with them. Sort them into folders. This segments your data, requiring an attacker to know which folder to go to, or to take multiple steps to search for wanted information. Paired with archiving, it also ensures that what the hacker does compromise is limited and known for any future damage assessment. Sensitive information can also be removed from your inbox. For example, delete an email and save what you need to your hard drive or an external drive.
KEEP WORK AND PERSONAL EMAILS SEPARATE
Don’t use your work email for personal email or activities online. That limits details a hacker can glean about you to conduct more sophisticated attacks targeting you as the entryway into your company’s system. For example, hackers can learn about your shopping habits or personal hobbies and use those to send a phishing email that appears to come from websites you bought goods from or read frequently. Phishing messages route you to a fake address and allow hackers to gain access to your system.
DON’T CLICK ON UNEXPECTED LINKS AND ATTACHMENTS
If you receive an email with a link or attachment you weren’t expecting, send the person a separate email asking whether the first email was legitimate. For links from companies such as banking institutions, hover your cursor over the hyperlink or right-click to show the link’s final destination. Before you click, make sure the address that pops up when you hover over the link matches where the hyperlink says you’ll be sent. If unsure, use a new window and physically type in the website’s address to conduct your business.
IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING
If your email is acting up or a link or attachment strikes you as strange, forward it to your IT department as quickly as possible. Your attention and fast response may prevent someone else at your company from making a mistake.
NEW YORK (AP) — Health officials say the flu is now hitting hard in parts of the country, especially the South and Midwest.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday reported cases were widespread in 29 states last week. If the trend continues, it could bring another early peak to the flu season as happened in the last two winters.
Experts worry this will be a bad season because the dominant strain — seen in roughly two-thirds of recent tests — is a nasty bug not covered in this year’s vaccine. But officials have not seen an unusually high number of hospitalizations or deaths so far.
Flu season traditionally peaks around February. But in the last two winters, flu peaked by early January.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — U.S. agriculture has a big appetite for freer trade with Cuba. From wheat to rice to beans, the industry stands to be a big beneficiary of President Barack Obama’s plan to ease economic and travel restrictions imposed against the communist-ruled island.
Agricultural exports are among the few exceptions to the U.S. trade embargo, but they’re subject to cumbersome rules. Latin American and Asian countries with fewer restrictions and easier financing have gained market share.
Sales of U.S. agricultural products to Cuba peaked at over $710 million in 2008, but fell to $350 million by 2013. Frozen chicken, soybeans and soy products, and corn are the main products Cuba buys from the United States.
Wheat and rice growers see new opportunities. Cuba hasn’t bought U.S. wheat or rice for several years.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In its toughest crackdown yet on medical errors, the federal government is cutting payments to 721 hospitals for having high rates of infections and other patient injuries, records released Thursday show.
Medicare assessed these new penalties against some of the most renowned hospitals in the nation, including the Cleveland Clinic, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa. Eleven Kansas hospitals are among those being penalized.
One out of every seven hospitals in the nation will have their Medicare payments lowered by 1 percent over the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 and continues through September 2015. The health law mandates the reductions for the quarter of hospitals that Medicare assessed as having the highest rates of “hospital-acquired conditions,” or HACs. These conditions include infections from catheters, blood clots, bed sores and other complications that are considered avoidable.
The penalties are falling particularly hard on academic medical centers: Roughly half of them will be punished, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis.
Dr. Eric Schneider, a Boston health researcher who has interviewed patient safety experts for his studies, said research has demonstrated that medical errors can be reduced through a number of techniques. But “there’s a pretty strong sense among the experts we talked to that they are not widely implemented,” he said. Those methods include entering physician orders into computers rather than scrawling them on paper, better hand hygiene and checklists on procedures to follow during surgeries. “Too many clinicians fail to use those techniques consistently,” he said.
The penalties come as the hospital industry is showing some success in reducing avoidable errors. A recent federal report found the frequency of mistakes dropped by 17 percent between 2010 and 2013, an improvement U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell called “a big deal, but it’s only a start.” Even with the reduction, one in eight hospital admissions in 2013 included a patient injury, according to the report from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, or AHRQ.
he new penalties are harsher than any prior government effort to reduce patient harm. Since 2008, Medicare has refused to pay hospitals for the cost of treating patients who suffer avoidable complications. Legally, Medicare can expel a hospital with high rates of errors from its program, but that punishment is almost never done, as it is a financial death sentence for most hospitals. Some states issue their own penalties — California, for instance, levies fines as high as $100,000 per incident on hospitals that are repeat offenders.
The government has also been giving money to some hospitals and quality groups to help improve patient safety efforts.
The HAC program has “put attention to the issue of complications and that attention wasn’t everywhere,” said Dr. John Bulger, Geisinger’s chief quality officer. However, he said hospitals such as his now must spend more time reviewing their Medicare billing records as the government uses those to evaluate patient safety. The penalty program, he said, “has the potential to take the time that could be spent on improvement and making sure the coding is accurate.”
Hospitals complain that the new penalties are arbitrary, since there may be almost no difference between hospitals that are penalized and those that narrowly escape falling into the worst quarter.
“Hospitals may be penalized on things they are getting safer on, and that sends a fairly mixed message,” said Nancy Foster, a quality expert at the American Hospital Association.
Hospital officials also point out those that do the best job identifying infections in patients may end up looking worse than others. “How hard you look for something influences your results,” said Dr. Darrell Campbell Jr., chief medical officer at the University of Michigan Health System. “We have a huge infection control group, one of the largest in the country. I tell them to go out and find it.” Campbell’s hospital had a high rate of urinary tract infections but was not penalized because it had fewer serious complications than most hospitals, records show.
The penalties come on top of other financial incentives Medicare has been placing on hospitals. This year, Medicare has already fined 2,610 hospitals for having too many patients return within a month of discharge. This is the third year those readmission penalties have been assessed. This is also the third year Medicare gave bonuses and penalties based on a variety of quality measures, including death rates and patient appraisals of their care. With the HAC penalties now in place, the worst-performing hospitals this year risk losing more than 5 percent of their regular Medicare reimbursements.
In determining the HAC penalties, Medicare judged hospitals on three measures: the frequency of central-line bloodstream infections caused by tubes used to pump fluids or medicine into veins, infections from tubes placed in bladders to remove urine, and rates of eight kinds of serious complications that occurred in hospitals, including collapsed lungs, surgical cuts, tears and reopened wounds and broken hips. Medicare tallied that and gave each hospital a score on a 10-point scale. Those in the top quarter — with a total score above 7 — were penalized.
About 1,400 hospitals are exempt from penalties because they provide specialized treatments such as psychiatry and rehabilitation or because they cater to a particular type of patient such as children and veterans. Small “critical access hospitals” that are mostly located in rural areas are also exempt, as are hospitals in Maryland, which have a special payment arrangement with the federal government.
The AHRQ study found that the biggest decreases in errors among those it studied occurred in the two categories of infections Medicare used in setting the penalties. Central-line associated bloodstream infections decreased by 49 percent and catheter-associated urinary tract infections dropped by 28 percent between 2010 and 2013. By contrast, pneumonia cases picked up by patients on ventilators that help them breathe – a condition not covered by the new penalties — decreased by only 3 percent during the same period.
Some of the errors on which the Medicare HAC penalties are based are rare compared to other mistakes the government tracks. For instance, AHRQ estimated that in 2013 there were 760,000 bad drug reactions to medicine that controls blood sugar in diabetics, but only 9,200 central-line infections. Infections from tubes inserted into urinary tracts are more common — AHRQ estimated there were 290,000 in 2013 — but those infections tend to be easier to treat and less likely to be lethal.
On the other measures, the study estimated there were 240,000 falls and more than 1 million bedsores.
In evaluating hospitals for the HAC penalties, the government adjusted infection rates by the type of hospital. When judging complications, it took into account the differing levels of sickness of each hospital’s patients, their ages and other factors that might make the patients more fragile. Still, academic medical centers have been complaining those adjustments are insufficient given the especially complicated cases they handle, such as organ transplants.
Medicare penalized 143 of 292 major teaching hospitals, the KHN analysis found. Penalized teaching hospitals included Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and Keck Medicine of USC in Los Angeles; Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta; Northwestern Memorial Hospital and University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago; George Washington University Hospital and Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C.
“We know some of the procedures we do — heart transplants or resecting cancerous portions of the esophagus — are going to be just more prone to having some of these adverse events,” said Dr. Atul Grover, the chief public policy officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges. “To lump in all of those things that are very complex procedures with simple things like pneumonia or hip replacements may not be giving an accurate result.”
Medicare levied penalties against a third or more of the hospitals it assessed in Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Utah, Washington and the District of Columbia, the KHN analysis found.
The penalties are reassessed each year and Medicare plans to add in more kinds of injuries. Starting next October, Medicare will assess rates of surgical site infections to its analysis. The following year, Medicare will examine the frequency of two antibiotic-resistant germs: Clostridium difficile, known as C. diff, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA.
Jordan Rau is a reporter for Heartland Health Monitor, a news collaboration focusing on health issues and their impact in Missouri and Kansas.
PRATT — With winter weather here, it’s hard to picture planning spring and summer fun, but the secret about Kansas state parks is out and reservations are a must for busy holiday weekends.
Consider making your 2015 camping and cabin reservations in advance and ensure your family and friends ample space at the lake for your next visit. Campsite reservations for 2015 can be made beginning at noon on Dec. 19, and cabin reservations can be made at any time. Simply visit www.ksoutdoors.com and click on the “Reserve A Cabin Or Campsite Now” button, choose the location you’d like to visit, and begin searching for your ideal date.
Camping and cabin reservations guarantee the holder their spot will be open and ready when they arrive at the park. Payment in full is required at the time a reservation is made. Reserving a cabin requires a non-refundable $14 reservation fee. Reserving a campsite requires a non-refundable $3 reservation fee per stay.
Daily vehicle entrance permits are $5. Annual vehicle permits are $25 or you can purchase a State Park Passport when you register your vehicle for $15. Annual vehicle permits for seniors and persons with disabilities are available through department offices for $13.75.
For more information about Kansas state parks and their amenities, visit ksoutdoors.com.
FRAMINGHAM, Mass. (AP) — Staples Inc. says nearly 1.2 million customer payment cards may have been exposed during a security breach earlier this year.
The office supply retailer said in October that it was looking into a potential credit card breach, adding to a long list of retailers recently hit by cyberattacks.
Staples said Friday that an investigation shows that the criminals used malware that may have allowed access to information for transactions at 115 of its U.S. stores. That includes cardholder names, payment card numbers, expiration dates and card verification codes.
The Framingham, Massachusetts-based company is offering free identity protection services, including credit monitoring, to customers who might be at risk.
The security breach affected different stores at different times between July and September.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama downplayed the benefits of building the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. He said it would not lower gasoline prices and argued more jobs would be created by repairing America’s infrastructure.
He said the pipeline would mainly benefit Canadian oil companies that need to get Canadian oil to the Gulf of Mexico.
He said the pipeline is “not even a nominal benefit for U.S. consumers.”
Obama spoke Friday during his year-end news conference, shortly before he was leaving the White House for a Hawaii vacation.
Obama has resisted efforts by Republicans to authorize the pipeline’s construction. Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said it would be the first bill taken up in the new GOP-controlled Senate.
Environmentalists have made opposition to its approval a priority.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Several Kansas City leaders are working to bring a national school mentoring program to the struggling Kansas City district.
Organizations such as the Kauffman Foundation, the Kansas City Public Schools and the mayor’s office said at a rally this week that the City Year AmeriCorps could help the district’s struggling students.
The Kansas City Star reports the program, which started in the Boston public schools in 1988, trains people 17 to 24 years old to serve as tutors and mentors. In return, they earn about $12,500 a year and a chance for college tuition vouchers and scholarships.
Several Kansas City leaders visited Orlando, Florida, in November to see the program in action. Superintendent Steven Green says everyone was impressed.
