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US campaign against Columbus Day gaining steam

 

A growing movement to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day, which aims to celebrate the culture of native peoples across the Americas, is gaining steam.

Indigenous activists have campaigned for decades for the acceptance of the holiday, saying that celebrating the arrival of Columbus is tantamount to rejoicing in the decimation of Native American populations across the continent.

"Phoenix just recognised the day, the largest city to do so," Jose Matus, the executive director of the Arizona-based Alianza Indigena Sin Fronteras (AISF), Spanish for Indigenous Alliance Without Borders, told Al Jazeera in an interview.

Phoenix's city council voted on Wednesday to celebrate Native Americans in lieu of Columbus Day, which has been celebrated as a Federal holiday on the second Monday of October since 1932.

The city's metropolitan area has a population of over 4,500,000, and is only the latest in a growing series of victories for Indigenous People's Day.

The first city to recognise the day was Berkeley, California, in 1992. Since then, roughly 25 other cities including Denver, Colorado, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, have followed suit.

Furthermore, native populations still see outsized discrimination and inequality, Matus said.

Indigenous peoples

AISF was founded in 1997, the year construction began on the separation wall, to educate indigenous peoples on both sides of the border about their rights to cross the US-Mexico border, among other issues.

"It feels good," Matus continued, referring to Phoenix's decision. "It gives us more strength in promoting the day to other places."

The struggle of native population is important to those involved in other movements, according to Maryam Pugh, the Co-Founder of Philadelphia Printworks (PPW), a grass-roots attire company founded in 2010 that places symbols and quotes from icons of the African-American community on its products.

"Christopher Columbus was a murderer who executed mass genocide on an entire people. It is beyond horrifying that we honour him," Pugh told Al Jazeera in an email.

She thinks replacing his holiday with the celebration of indigenous culture would be a step towards recognising the injustices of the past to unify and move forward.

"It's really important to me to work with all marginalised groups to identify our intersections of oppression,' Pugh told Al Jazeera.

PPW hosted a sale to commemorate Indigenous People's Day. All of the profits will be donated to protest efforts at Standing Rock.

The area in South Dakota has become a hot-spot for indigenous struggle as the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe demonstrates to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), a $3.8bn oil pipeline.

DAPL runs across land that once belonged to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, which is home to tribal burial sites, cultural artefacts, and other sacred areas.

Recently, police presence has increased at the site, with demonstrators continuing to block construction efforts. Protests have turned violent.

"The reality is that history is happening around us right now. Injustice is happening right now," Pugh responded when asked if Standing Rock had affected her.

"It may be more convenient or easier to look the other way. But, if we do, we are just as much to blame."

A day for immigrants?

To the Order Sons of Italy in America (OSIA) Columbus Day is not horrifying, it is a celebration of immigration.

In 2015, OSIA National President Daniel Longo said that Columbus Day has "come to symbolise and celebrate … millions of immigrants, particularly those of Italian ancestry," who followed Columbus "with the hope of finding freedom and a chance to give their families a better future".

This year, OSIA's Commission for Social Justice started a petition for "an official Capital luncheon and White House evening reception in recognition and endorsement of Columbus Day".

So far, 1,398 supporters have signed.

One signatory, Richard DiSilvio from Massapequa, New York, wrote that Indigenous People's Day "is an attack not only on the Italian-American community but also on the entire nation, as well".

Matus, executive director of AISF, does not agree.

"Hopefully next year there will be more cities celebrating Indigenous People's Day. We're in organising mode, so we can get rid of Columbus Day."

Trump Informs Clinton That He Will Try to Have Her Jailed

America is now the kind of country where presidential candidates threaten to jail their political opponents during nationally televised debates. Or, at least, we're the kind of country where one presidential candidate does so.

"If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation. Because there has never been so many lies," Donald Trump informed Hillary Clinton on Sunday night. "People have been, their lives have been destroyed for doing one-fifth of what you've done."

(The FBI has already completed a lengthy investigation of Clinton's emails, and found no offense worthy of prosecution).

"It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country," Clinton said in her response.

© Chip Somodevilla ST LOUIS, MO - OCTOBER 09: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump responds to a question during the town hall debate at Washington University on October 9, 2016 in St Louis, Missouri. This is the second of three…

"Because you'd be in jail," Trump replied.

And the crowd went wild.

Superbug deaths going unreported

 

© Kirk McKoy-Los Angeles Times-TNS In 2014, 73-year-old Sharley McMullen died from a superbug infection after having two medical scope procedures and a surgery at Torrance Memorial Medical Center, according to her medical records. (Kirk…

LOS ANGELES — Many thousands of Californians are dying every year from infections they caught while in hospitals. But you'd never know that from their death certificates.

Sharley McMullen of Manhattan Beach came down with a fever just hours after being wheeled out of a Torrance Memorial Medical Center operating room on May 4, 2014. A missionary's daughter who worked as a secretary at Cape Canaveral, Fla., at the height of the space race, McMullen, 72, was there for treatment of a bleeding stomach ulcer. Soon, though, she was fighting for her life.

On her medical chart, a doctor scribbled "CRKP," an ominous abbreviation for one of the world's most lethal superbugs, underlining it three times.

Doctors tried antibiotic after antibiotic. But after five weeks in the hospital, mostly in intensive care and on morphine because of the pain, McMullen died from complications of the infection, according to a Los Angeles Times review of her medical records.

Her death certificate does not mention the hospital-acquired infection or CRKP, however. Instead, her doctor wrote that McMullen had died from respiratory failure and septic shock caused by her ulcer.

The doctor's conclusion outraged Shawn Chen, McMullen's daughter.

"It should say she died of an infection she got in the hospital," said Chen. "She was so hardy. She would have made it through if it wasn't for this infection."

Dr. Yasmeen Shaw, who treated McMullen in the ICU and filled out the death certificate, said she was following directions from health officials by recording the underlying cause of death, which in her opinion was the perforated ulcer.

"Everything that happened to her health is a consequence of the initial condition she came in with," Shaw said. "Had the patient not have had a perforated ulcer they wouldn't have been in the hospital in the first place."

McMullen's case is hardly unusual. An epidemic of hospital-acquired infections is going unreported, scientists have found.

University of Michigan researchers reported in a 2014 study that infections — both those acquired inside and outside hospitals — would replace heart disease and cancer as the leading causes of death in hospitals if the count was performed by looking at patients' medical billing records, which show what they were being treated for, rather than death certificates.

"Even if one person dies from a hospital-acquired infection, it's one too many," said Dr. Chesley Richards, who oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Center for Health Statistics and who met recently with a group of families to discuss the misleading death certificates.

California does not track deaths from hospital-acquired infections. And unlike two dozen other states, California does not require hospitals to report when patients are sickened by the rare, lethal superbug that afflicted McMullen, raising questions about whether health officials are doing enough to stop its spread.

McMullen's daughter Chen said she called the Los Angeles County Public Health Department to report that her mother had been diagnosed with CRKP, which stands for carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, at Torrance Memorial. When the bacteria gets into a patient's blood, it kills as many as half its victims.

© Kirk McKoy-Los Angeles Times-TNS Exterior of Torrance Memorial Medical Center where in 2014, 73-year-old Sharley McMullen died from a superbug infection after having two medical scope procedures and a surgery at Torrance Memorial…A county employee told her it was not a reportable infection. "She said, 'It's everywhere,'" Chen said.

Torrance Memorial declined to answer questions about the accuracy of the death certificate or other questions about McMullen's care. In a statement, the hospital said it "takes patient safety, particularly as it relates to infection control, very seriously."

Experts say hospitals can prevent the deaths through better infection control procedures, including some as simple as making sure staff wash their hands, but have little incentive to do so if the deaths are not reported.

"We, the community of physicians, had been watching these patients die and trundling them off to the morgue for years," said Dr. Barry Farr, former president of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, who is now retired. "Now we're in the eighth verse of the same song."

Federal health officials call CRKP and other species of pathogens in the broader family known as carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae, or CRE, one of the nation's most urgent health threats.

Because of the danger, the CDC recommends that local health officials require hospitals to report CRE cases. And if that's not possible, according to agency guidelines, health departments should still survey hospitals and nursing homes for the presence of the superbug to make sure facilities are trying to halt its transmission.

Chen said that at first the nurses at Torrance Memorial had taken extra precautions to keep the bacteria raging through her mother's body from spreading by wearing disposable gowns and posting a sign on the door warning others from entering.

But Chen said she was stunned when her mother was moved to another floor where no such precautions were taken. "There was a bedpan of urine sitting on a chair," Chen said.

Chen said she worries that other patients may have been infected.

Torrance Memorial declined to comment on Chen's report of a gap in safety precautions.

County health officials explained that they had stopped requiring health facilities to report CRE infections in 2012 "due to resource limitations," though some hospitals voluntarily submit bacterial samples from patients diagnosed with the superbug.

Infection cases gathered between 2010 and 2012 showed that Los Angeles County was "a high-prevalence region" for the superbug, county officials said.

County officials said they were working to prevent the infections, including by sending public health nurses to hospitals to consult on potential outbreaks and proper infection controls. They said they had no record of a complaint about a CRE case at Torrance Memorial.

The CDC estimates that 75,000 Americans with hospital-acquired infections die during their hospitalizations each year. Since California provides between 10 percent and 12 percent of the nation's hospital care, state officials used the agency's analysis to estimate that 7,500 to 9,000 Californians die each year from infections from hospital germs.

But these numbers may be underestimated, perhaps by a great degree, experts say.

"It's fair to challenge that number," the CDC's Richards said of the estimate of 75,000 deaths.

Sepsis can cause death when an infection spreads to the blood, triggering an inflammatory response that damages the body's organs and causes them to fail.

In March, the CDC estimated that the actual number of deaths from sepsis were as much as 140 percent higher than those recorded on death certificates, or as many as 381,000 deaths a year. According to another study, 37 percent of hospitalizations for sepsis were caused by infections caught in hospitals or other health facilities like nursing homes.

That suggests that as many as 140,000 Americans are dying each year from health care-acquired sepsis, just one subgroup of the infections.

McMullen came to Torrance Memorial for an elective hernia surgery in late April 2014. A week later, her husband rushed her to the emergency room because she was suffering from abdominal pain and weakness.

ER doctors suspected she was losing blood from a perforated ulcer in her stomach. Their suspicion was confirmed through two procedures with an endoscope. She had surgery to stop the bleeding on May 4. By the next day, doctors had diagnosed her infection and sepsis.

McMullen's medical records, which her family provided to The Times, detail how doctors became frustrated as the drugs they prescribed — including colistin, known as the antibiotic of last resort — did not help. Soon McMullen was in critical condition.

The CDC advises hospitals that have a patient with CRE to test other patients nearby and those who have shared the same medical equipment to ensure others are not infected.

The Times asked Torrance Memorial officials whether any other patients were infected with CRE in 2014 or 2015 and if any of those cases may be linked to the bacteria that sickened McMullen. Officials declined to answer those questions.

Without mentioning McMullen, Torrance Memorial officials said that during 2014 the bacteria "seem to have contributed to the death of one patient, who likely acquired CRE while hospitalized."

Yet they ruled out the endoscopes — the source of recent superbug outbreaks at three other Southern California hospitals — as the cause of McMullen's infection. Officials said "following an extensive investigation" they had "determined that there have been no known cases of CRE transmission by endoscope" at the hospital.

One reason doctors are reluctant to report in public records that patients have died from hospital-acquired infections, experts say, is the possibility of malpractice lawsuits.

CDC officials warned in October that they had discovered that some hospitals had tried to stop their infection-control staff from reporting certain types of hospital-acquired infections to a national database as required.

In a 2010 survey published in a CDC medical journal, 49 percent of New York City medical residents said they had knowingly reported an inaccurate cause of death on a certificate.

Nile Moss, 15, unexpectedly died a couple days after having an MRI at Children's Hospital of Orange County in Orange in 2006.

An autopsy showed that he died from a rare superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which the CDC says is a leading cause of health care associated infections.

His parents say they believe the pad patients lay on in the MRI machine was contaminated with the bacteria. The teen was hit with flu-like symptoms soon after having the outpatient test. He was hospitalized after his fever reached 104 degrees and he struggled to breathe.

The doctor did not list the bacteria on Nile's death certificate. Instead he wrote the teen had died from "adult respiratory distress syndrome." Contributing causes, the doctor wrote, were septic shock and pneumonia.

"Doctors have the ability to write whatever they want," said Nile's mother, Carole Moss, one of the people who attended the CDC meeting on inaccurate death certificates. "Many people are angered by this. They cause the harm and then cover it up."

Denise Almazan, a spokeswoman for the children's hospital, said officials were looking into the teen's case and could not immediately comment.

Ed Winter, assistant chief in Los Angeles County's medical examiner-coroner's office, said that any case in which a patient is suspected of dying from an infection acquired from hospital procedures should be sent to the medical examiner for review to determine whether county officials rather than hospital doctors should determine the cause of death.

"If there is a question, we will look into it," he said.

If the autopsy and facts of the case conclude a patient died from the infection, the death certificate would state "acquired infection after surgical procedure," Winter said.

In May, Dr. Martin Makary, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, called on the CDC to add a line to all death certificates where doctors would be asked if the death was caused by a preventable complication from medical care.

Makary estimates that infections, errors and other cases of "medical care going wrong" would be at least the third-leading cause of death among Americans if they were properly recorded.

"We need an open and honest conversation about the problem," Makary said.

Russia says U.S. actions threaten its national security

© AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during an awarding ceremony in Moscow's Kremlin, Russia, on Thursday, Sept. 22, 2016.

MOSCOW, Oct 9 (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Sunday he had detected increasing U.S. hostility towards Moscow and complained about what he said was a series of aggressive U.S. steps that threatened Russia's national security.

In an interview with Russian state TV likely to worsen already poor relations with Washington, Lavrov made it clear he blamed the Obama administration for what he described as a sharp deterioration in U.S.-Russia ties.

"We have witnessed a fundamental change of circumstances when it comes to the aggressive Russophobia that now lies at the heart of U.S. policy towards Russia," Lavrov told Russian state TV's First Channel.

"It's not just a rhetorical Russophobia, but aggressive steps that really hurt our national interests and pose a threat to our security."

With relations between Moscow and Washington strained over issues from Syria to Ukraine, Lavrov reeled off a long list of Russian grievances against the United States which he said helped contribute to an atmosphere of mistrust that was in some ways more dangerous and unpredictable than the Cold War.

He complained that NATO had been steadily moving military infrastructure closer to Russia's borders and lashed out at Western sanctions imposed over Moscow's role in the Ukraine crisis.

He also said he had heard that some policy makers in Washington were suggesting that President Barack Obama sanction the carpet bombing of the Syrian government's military air fields to ground its air force.

"This is a very dangerous game given that Russia, being in Syria at the invitation of the legitimate government of this country and having two bases there, has got air defence systems there to protect its assets," said Lavrov.

© REUTERS/Lucas Jackson Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov takes part in a news conference at United Nations Headquarters in New YorkLavrov said he hoped Obama would not agree to such a scenario.

Russia suspended a treaty with Washington on cleaning up weapons grade plutonium earlier this month in response to what it said were "unfriendly acts" by the United States.

Lavrov said both countries had the right to pull out of the treaty in the event of "a fundamental change in circumstances".

"The treaty was concluded when relations were normal, civilised, when no one ... was trying to interfere in the (other's) internal affairs. That's the fundamental change of circumstances," said Lavrov. (Reporting by Maria Kiselyova; Editing by Andrew Osborn)

Kansas sheriff's deputy kidnapped, sexually assaulted

Kansas — A Kansas sheriff's department says it's investigating after one of its deputies was kidnapped and sexually assaulted.

The Johnson County Sheriff's Department says the deputy was abducted late Friday from a parking lot as she headed into work at the detention center in Olathe. It says the deputy, who has been with the department for about six months, did not know her abductors and was not in uniform at the time.

The department says the deputy was released about two hours later in Lee's Summit, Missouri.

The Kansas City Star reports (http://j.mp/2dGAtcY ) that the department on Sunday released video of the car believed to have been used in the abduction, and authorities want to question two men who may have been in the car.

Kansas sheriff's deputy kidnapped, sexually assaulted

Kansas — A Kansas sheriff's department says it's investigating after one of its deputies was kidnapped and sexually assaulted.

The Johnson County Sheriff's Department says the deputy was abducted late Friday from a parking lot as she headed into work at the detention center in Olathe. It says the deputy, who has been with the department for about six months, did not know her abductors and was not in uniform at the time.

The department says the deputy was released about two hours later in Lee's Summit, Missouri.

The Kansas City Star reports (http://j.mp/2dGAtcY ) that the department on Sunday released video of the car believed to have been used in the abduction, and authorities want to question two men who may have been in the car.