A6 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, June 3, 2008 VIEWPOINT Opinion and Letters to the Editor EDITORIAL Established January 2, 2007 James L. Davis, Publisher & Editor w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w Colleen A. Davis, Co-Publisher, Office & Advertising Manager Josie Luke, Assistant Editor Lyndsay Reid, Advertising Design Charlotte Williams, Advertising Sales Kathy P. Ockey, Staff Journalist Judi Bishop, Staff Journalist Casey Wood, Webmaster Our Vision To be a valued member of the communities we serve and to be trusted as an honest, truthful and reliable source of news. w w w Our Mission To inform, entertain and provide a public forum for the discussion of events impacting the people of the Emery County area and to inform with news and features relevant to those who call the Castle Valley area home w w w Our Principles We will be ethical in all of our efforts to provide information to the public. We will be unbiased in our reporting and will report the facts as we see them and do our best to focus on the good news of the county, its people, history and way of life. We will be strong and active members of the community and assist in any way that we are able. We will strive to provide the best quality product possible to our readers and advertisers...always. We will verify the details of news we are reporting and if a mistake is made on our part we will correct it immediately. We will always listen to suggestions on how to do our job better. Editorial Submission Guidelines The Emery County Review welcomes and invites letters to the editor and guest opinion articles on public policy or current events. We welcome letters of thanks to individuals who have helped make our community a better place to live, work and play. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit all submissions for space constraints, clarity and errors in fact. Submissions must include author’s name and contact information. Contact information will not be published. Letter’s and opinion articles can be sent to jldavis@theemerycountyreview.com, mailed to The Emery County Review, P.O. Box 487, Orangeville, UT. 84537 or faxed to 435-748-2543. When Urban Representatives Attack Josie Luke Many members of the Utah State Legislature from urban cities need a few lessons from rural Utahans; the first and most simple lesson being on rural economics. The first example I saw of this ignorance was in the cap a legislative committee put on the amount of mineral lease monies Emery County could receive. This cap was placed after the legislative bill had been passed by an appropriations committee. A state representative, who obviously didn’t understand the economic situation that the county is facing, thought the money might be better spent by others. It took months of work by many people to work out the problems this created for the county, such as the budget shortfall recently faced by the special service districts in the county. Eventually, the cap was removed and the county received the funds, which had been set aside. I had naively hoped that this change might wake up urban representatives to the economic realities facing the county, but in the past week, yet another step was taken by a group of representatives from the Wasatch Front which will potentially hurt our economy. In 2005, the state legislature passed a bill creating economic development incentives for businesses created in the state or those who chose to relocate here. These incentives were based on the median annual wage of the county where these businesses chose to locate. As an example, if a business chose to locate in a county with a median annual income of $20,000, the business would have to pay a certain percentage above this median to qualify for these incentives. The recent change from median to average, or in more statistical terms, median to mean, raised the annual wage for many Utah counties, especially those in rural Utah. For instance, in Emery County, the median wage was calculated at $22,498 and the average wage is calculated at $38,973, a difference of $16,475 or 73 percent. In Carbon County, the difference was $10,240 or 48 percent, and in Piute County, the county with the lowest median wage, the difference was $7,759 or 44 percent. Looking at this from one perspective, one could see it as a way to make businesses pay higher wages in order to qualify for economic incentives, which I am definitely for, but on average, the percentage for all counties in Utah was just 25 percent, with the median wage being $27,548, and the average being $34,548. This discrepancy is obvious to anyone who looks at the numbers. A county like Emery, where although the unemployment numbers are low, close to 3.5 percent in the third quarter of 2007, the economy is in desperate need of new business. This change as Mike McCandless, the county economic director put it, “discriminates against rural counties.” After taking three statistics classes in college, required for my major, one of the basic lessons I learned about calculating the average is that using the median guards against outliers, which skew the average. This means that instead of using the mean, which takes in all of the annual wages and divides it by the number, in calculating the median you take all the numbers, put them in order and select the middle number in the list. In a county like Emery, where two of the biggest employers are in mining and utilities, the annual wages provide an example of where the median would be a better statistical tool, both because it does not skew the numbers like the mean and because the jobs that are being added to the American economy, and that of Emery County are currently service jobs, which will not pay wages like the jobs that now support the county’s economy. So, to those state legislators who are from urban areas, I would ask you to take more care in the changes you make. We need incentives for business to locate in our area much more than more rural economies. The Utah economy is touted as one of the most dynamic in the country—your counties’ economies may be doing fine, but ours is not. Be careful; don’t just rush ideas through the legislature before you have studied the effects that they may have. Chinese Drugs Come with a Dose of Danger Phyllis Schlafly Copley News Service “Chinese Counterfeits and American Failures,” the title of a congressional hearing on April 29, laid bare a shocking problem: A counterfeit ingredient in a blood-thinner widely used in surgery, combined with the Food and Drug Administration’s failure to inspect Chinese imports, appears to be responsible for at least 81 deaths in the United States. The blood-thinner, heparin, which is made from pig intestines, had been safely used for about 70 years. What’s different today is that most heparin is imported from China, a country that has no compunction about putting poisons in its products to make them cheaper for the world market. The CEO of Baxter International, which supplies half the heparin used in the U.S., accused the Chinese of having engaged in a “deliberate scheme to adulterate” the medication by using a poisonous product (an altered form of chondroitin sulfate) that mimics the effects of heparin. U.S. patients suffered severe side effects such as abdominal pain, decreased blood pressure, burning sensations, chest pain, diarrhea, dizziness, loss of consciousness, vomiting and death. The FDA didn’t discover this deception because the FDA inspects China’s drug makers every 13 years. Government auditors admit that the FDA conducted only 30 inspections of the more than 3,200 foreign drug companies during the last fiscal year, and plans to conduct only 50 this year. The FDA did only 21 inspections annually of Chinese drug-making facilities in fiscal 2002 through 2007. The FDA is now trying to establish offices in three Chinese locations as a base for just eight U.S. inspectors, but China has yet to give its OK. At the congressional hearing, the FDA officials refused to name the Chinese companies that sold the poisoned heparin. The officials argued that such information is somehow “commercial confidential.” Some congressmen at the hearing urged the FDA to inspect foreign companies every two or three years, but FDA Commissioner Andrew “I don’t believe that’s the solution to the problem. It’s much more complex.” Indeed it is. The FDA would need 500 more inspectors to inspect foreign companies with the same regularity as domestic companies. That would cost seven times the current budget. Heparin is made in thousands of small unregulated, unlicensed, unsupervised family home workshops where three to five people stir pig intestines in a concrete vat to transform them into a dry substance. It’s impossible to trace the ingredients back to the slaughterhouses. There is no paper trail to document the supply chain, there are no records, and documents, if any, are easy to fake. There is no tagging of the pigs, monitoring of the feed, or files on each animal’s vaccinations. Since mid-2006, China’s pig herds have suffered serious outbreaks of a viral illness commonly known as blue-ear disease. Sick animals are supposed to be rejected by slaughterhouses, but enforcement is lax. These home heparin workshops are not regulated by Chinese because they are designated as chemical makers, not drug producers or pharmaceuticals. Neither China nor the United States has any current procedure or future plan to make the ingredients consistent, clean or traceable. The FDA calls the contamination “a worldwide problem” that has appeared in 11 countries. Recalls of heparin have also taken place in Germany, Denmark, France, Italy and Japan. What’s the surprise? It is already known that the Chinese intentionally poisoned other products they exported to the United States. U.S. cats and dogs were sickened and killed by Chinese pet food that had been adulterated by melamine, a chemical used in plastic, which was added to wheat gluten to fake higher protein levels. The Chinese poisoned toothpaste and children’s anti-fever medicines by using diethylene glycol instead of glycerin. These poisons are not only dangerous in themselves, but they can compromise the overall usefulness of certain critical drugs by giving rise to drug-resistant mutant bacteria. Millions of Chinesemade toys had to be recalled because of lead paint used at unacceptable levels. Some 6,000 baby T-shirts were just recalled in Japan following detection of high levels of formaldehyde. The World Health Organization estimates that 10 percent to 15 percent of the world’s drug supply is counterfeit. Some products are completely fake; others have been tampered with, contaminated, diluted, repackaged or mislabeled in a way that misrepresents the contents, dosage, origin or expiration date. At least 80 percent of active and non-active ingredients in U.S. drugs now come from overseas, the majority from China. Your next medicine might contain cement, gypsum, antifreeze, talcum powder, sawdust, industrial solvents or paint. As a devotee of free trade at all costs, the Bush administration apparently has no plan to ensure that imports of Chinese ingredients into the United States for prescription drugs, food, medical devices, and animal feed meet U.S. safety standards. When will Americans wake up to the high cost of “free” trade? (Phyllis Schlafly is a lawyer, conservative political analyst and the author of the newly revised and expanded “Supremacists.” She can be contacted by e-mail at phyllis@eagleforum.org.)