CONTENTS
SUPERBUGS ARE
WINNING
Superbugs are Winning
by Abraham Schroeder
pg. 3
Obese Kids and Lunch
by Maggie Latimer
pg. 5
V i r g i n i a ’ s N e g l e c te d F o s te r K i d s
by Kit Whiteman
pg. 8
Sky Farms for Cities
by Maureen Reed
pg. 11
G u a n ta n a m o A b i d e s
by Zach Cowell
pg. 14
Dogs, Genes and Suffering
by Jayson Vivas
pg. 16
T h e K i l l e r W h a l e Co n t r ove r s y
by Sarah Smith
pg. 18
Elements is an independent magazine produced by the
students of a News Media and Society course at the University
of Richmond, in Virginia, with the editorial assistance of
St ephen Nash, instr uctor. All rights reserved.
elementsjournalism@gmail.com
Randall Branding Agency. 2015.
2 | Elements Journal
By A b r a h a m S c h r o e d e r
According a Centers for Disease Control report,
23,000 people die every year in the US due to antibioticresistant bacteria. Antibiotics, a cornerstone of modern
medicine, could become useless if the spread of these
drug resistant bacteria continues.
We need the new drugs to fight the new bugs but
their development is at an all-time low. According to
the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration approved
20 new antibiotics between 1980 and 1984, and one
antibiotic between 2010 and 2012.
The low production rate is a result of the high cost of
developing an antibiotic and the comparatively modest
revenue that antibiotics produce for pharmaceutical
companies. According to the Infectious Disease Society
of America’s report on antibiotic resistance, a research
and development program for antibiotics could take up
to ten years and cost anywhere from $800 million to
$1.7 billion.
Shahriar Mobashery, a professor at Notre Dame and
an expert in antibiotic resistance, said in an interview
with Elements Magazine that antibiotics are not big
money-makers because patients do not use them for
long periods of time, in the same manner that people
use drugs for blood pressure.
The CDC wants doctors to be more cautious when
prescribing antibiotics and farmers to stop feeding their
livestock antibiotics in order to prevent the growth
of new drug-resistant bacteria. With a new focus on
limiting these uses of antibiotics the revenues generated
by antibiotics would be even lower.
A documentary by PBS Reports followed Pfizer’s
last effort to create a new antibiotic. It showed that
by the mid 2000’s Pfizer started an effort to create
new antibiotics in order to combat super bugs. In
2011 Pfizer’s stock dropped and its patent on Lipitor,
a profitable cholesterol drug, was about to end. When
a pharmaceutical company’s patent ends for a drug,
generic brands can begin to sell the same drug, which
means that the company must sell the drug at a much
lower price. Pfizer had to end its antibiotic development
branch, without producing a single new antibiotic.
While big pharmaceutical companies have stopped
making antibiotics, smaller companies are now trying
to fill that void. Cubist USA is a small pharmaceutical
company that is having some success. At the moment,
Cubist claims to have four antibiotics in phase three
testing, the last step before the drug is available to the market.
Universities are also researching ways to create
new antibiotics. Michael Fischbach, a professor at the
University of California, San Francisco, is currently
studying human microbes and using computers to track
Elements Journal | 3