Author: Andrew Sullivan

New Dish New Media Update: A Bumper July

Apologies for being a little late on the monthly report, but it’s great news. July saw our traffic at 900,000 unique visitors and over 6 million pageviews. As for revenue, here’s the monthly chart since March:

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It was our best month since March, bringing us tantalizingly close to 30,000 subscribers. Revenue in all of 2013 was $851K. Revenue for 2014 with five months remaining is $833K.  Revenue in July 2013 was $20K. This July it was $39K – almost double. Thanks to all of you who subscribed last month – especially those treasured Founding Members who came through with their renewals after an email nudge from yours truly.

We’re trying to prove you can build a profitable new media enterprise without surrendering to native advertising. You’re showing how it can be done. So if you haven’t yet, please take a couple of minutes to subscribe. Without you, we couldn’t do any of it.

Grieving In Verse

Alec Wilkinson tells the story behind the poet Edward Hirsch’s long poem Gabriel, written about the death of his adopted son who died from taking a club drug at age 22. Wilkinson describes the work as a creatively updated form of elegy:

Elegies of any length tend to be collections of poems written over the course of years. The most famous elegy, perhaps, is Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” which is about his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died young of a stroke, in 1833. It includes the lines “ ’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.” It consists of a hundred and thirty-one poems and an epilogue written over seventeen years. Thomas Hardy’s elegy for his wife is a series of twenty-one short poems called “Poems of 1912-13.” Mallarmé never finished “A Tomb for Anatole,” his long poem for his son who died at eight; it exists only in fragments. The closest thing to “Gabriel,” at least in tone, might be “Laments,” written in the sixteenth century by the Polish poet Jan Kochanowski for his daughter, who died when she was two and a half. There are nineteen laments altogether, most a single page or less, the last telling of a dream or a vision in which she returns to him.

Elegies also tend to occupy a spiritual ground—to accept an order of things, and to assume an afterlife.

They address God respectfully. In the manner of the Jewish poets who began interrogating God after the Holocaust, and even to wonder if there could be a God who could preside over such horror, Hirsch invokes God in order to rebuke him. “I keep ranting at God, whom I don’t believe in,” he said, “but who else are you going to talk to?” From “Gabriel”:

I will not forgive you

Sun of emptiness

Sky of blank clouds

I will not forgive you

Indifferent God

Until you give me back my son.

Finally, elegies typically elevate their subject. Embedded within “Gabriel” is a picaresque novella about a tempestuous boy and young man, a part Hirsch calls “the adventures of Gabriel.” Eavan Boland wrote me in a letter that “the creation of the loved and lost boy” is one of the poem’s most important effects. It represented, she said, “a subversion of decorum: the subject of elegy is meant to be an object of dignity. But here it is just an unruly son, an unmanageable object of fear and love in a contemporary chaos.”

“Your Fixation On Good Intentions Is Blinding You To Your Recklessness”

Palestinians killed in an Israeli attack on a UN-run school

Saletan criticizes Israel for retreating to its intentions to explain away the death and destruction in Gaza:

When you focus on intentions, it’s easy to lose sight of tactical decisions that endanger civilians as a side effect. High on this list is the IDF’s shift from guided missiles to artillery. Based on the U.N. review and its own reporting, the Times says the fatal hits in Jabaliya “were likely to have come from heavy artillery not designed for precision use.” Such artillery is “considered effective if it hits within 50 yards of its target.” That margin of error obviously increases the risk to civilians.

A human rights lawyer tells the Times that no matter how hard you try, “You just can’t aim that weapon precisely enough in that environment because it’s so destructive.” From the standpoint of good intentions, that’s an excuse. But morality isn’t just about where you aim. It’s also about the weapon you use. It’s easy to tell yourself that you aimed as well as you could, when the fatal decision was to use a weapon you couldn’t have aimed any better.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells suggests that Israel may not be as capable as it claims to be of launching “surgical strikes” after all:

Last week, the just war theorist and liberal Zionist Michael Walzer published a pained, moving defense and critique of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. He argued that Israel must be allowed to defend itself against disproportionate attacks, but that the IDF must also take more “positive efforts” to limit civilian casualties in Gaza, even if it means asking its own soldiers to take more risks. The State Department’s harshly worded statement after the Rafah attack followed a similar logical line.

But this all assumes that the Israeli military can in fact do better — that it can precisely control what its rocket strikes destroy in Gaza. The details of the attacks on U.N. shelters suggest this is somewhat less true than we often acknowledge. … Perhaps Israel’s military precision was always overhyped. Or perhaps this conflict is simply too messy, on the ground, to expect precision. Either way, it is impossible to describe the strikes in this conflict as surgical. They are everything but.

And as John Cassidy points out, the question of whether Israel has committed war crimes hinges on a bit more than the nobility of its intentions:

In an interview with Mike Huckabee on Fox News last week, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, said that Israel was guilty of war crimes, because it repeatedly launched attacks with the knowledge that the number of civilian casualties was likely to be disproportionate to the military gains. In a tweet on Monday, Roth said: “#Hamas still firing rockets indiscriminately at Israel. Those are war crimes. But they don’t justify #Israel’s own war crimes, killing many.”

Imposing collective punishment is also a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. The term refers to punitive sanctions of “any sort, administrative, by police action or otherwise,” that are imposed on targeted groups for actions which they themselves didn’t commit. Any postwar investigations are likely to focus on specific incidents and attacks that might fall under the collective-punishment rubric. For example, over the weekend, there were claims on social media that Israeli forces had shelled the marketplace in Rafah, causing numerous civilian casualties, after a Hamas attack in the city left two Israeli soldiers dead and one missing (and later declared dead). If such an attack did take place—and if it was intended to punish or terrorize the people of Rafah—it could be deemed a war crime.

(Photo: A Palestinian, injured by an Israeli military strike on a UN school, reacts as he lies on the ground, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip on August 3, 2014. By Ali Hassan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Can The American Position On Israel Ever Change?

Beauchamp considers the implications of the Obama administration’s criticism of Israel:

In the past few days, after the sixth Israeli strike on a Gaza UN shelter for Palestinians fleeing the fighting, the Obama administration sent some pretty harsh words Israel’s way. The attack on the UN facility in Rafah was “indefensible,” according to Senior Adviser to the President Valerie Jarrett, who added that you “can’t condone the killing of all of these innocent children.” UN Ambassador Samantha Power called the Rafah strike “horrifying;” a longer State Department statement named it “disgraceful.”

It’s hard to imagine a clearer signal of administration outrage with Israel at the Gaza campaign, short of a personal statement from the president. The US is clearly upset with Israel, which isn’t all that rare, but this level of public criticism is very unusual. Given the US’s strong commitment to supporting Israel, the Obama criticism probably does not augur any substantive change in that pro-Israel US foreign policy. But it could still matter by impacting domestic Israeli politics, which are highly sensitive to fears of “losing” American support.

I hardly see fear of “losing” America in the current onslaught. I see an Israeli prime minister openly treating the president and secretary of state with contempt and derision, secure in the knowledge that in any battle between Obama and Netanyahu, the Congress will back Netanyahu every time. Waldman nonetheless sees the Gaza conflict contributing to a shift in how Americans think about the conflict:

[I]f this conflict drags on and the civilian casualties mount, more Americans could begin questioning their position on this issue. That doesn’t mean they’ll go from being “pro-Israel” to “anti-Israel,” a pair of perniciously simplistic ideas that discourage us from thinking rationally. It means that they might start seeing the issue as a complex one, where sometimes Israel’s government is right and sometimes it’s wrong, and a contest to see which politician can wave an Israeli flag with the most vigor doesn’t serve America’s interests (or Israel’s, for that matter). If that happens, politicians might actually feel free to enter into real debate on this topic.

Look at the contortions of Rand Paul to see how that will work out. He has had to renounce all his previous views on the subject and now backs Israel with a blank check and wants to cut aid from the only moderate group among Palestinians. And that’s just the price for even entering a nomination battle, let alone winning it. But the shift among the younger generations is a sign for a more balanced approach. Alas, by the time that gains real political clout, the West Bank will be all settlements. Jonathan Ladd believes that US public opinion on Israel has little to do with empirical reality anyway:

First, because Americans are so inattentive to the details of political controversies, and hold such consistent views on every Israeli-Palestinian violent clash, we shouldn’t see their opinions as a reflection on the details of any specific clash. The American public’s endorsement of current Israeli policy largely isn’t a reaction to that policy because most people aren’t following the details at all.

Second, the one thing that could change U.S. mass opinion would be if party elites changed their messages. The one group attachment powerful enough to potentially overwhelm group attitudes is party identification. For instance, if most Democratic politicians in Washington came out against an Israeli military operation, that could potentially lead ordinary Democrats to follow those cues rather than their group attitudes when forming an opinion. If that happened, American mass opinion would likely become much more split than it is today.

But the Democrats are as likely to do that as they are to re-invade Iraq. Just see what Harry Reid just said.

Map Of The Day

twitter-media-israeli-palestine-map

Gideon Lichfield captions the above image, which “depicts Twitter accounts that tweeted about the Israeli shelling of a UN school in Beit Hanoun on July 24th”:

The Twitter accounts are arranged according to how many connections they share; the closer two accounts are, the more accounts they both follow. The bigger the circle, the more followers that account has. What emerges from this is distinct groupings: “pro-Palestinian” in green on the right; “pro-Israel” in blue on the left. Lotan has colored most of the international journalists and media outlets in gray; they clearly have more followers among the pro-Palestinian side. The dark blue group in the upper left are American conservatives and Tea-Party types, while the lighter blue are Israeli media outlets and blogs, and American Zionist figures.

The standout here is Ha’aretz, the left-wing Israeli newspaper. While closer to the pro-Israel side, it clearly has a lot of pro-Palestinian followers. It’s fair to say that readers of Ha’aretz’s English edition include the only groups of people from the two sides who are reading the same news.

Fact-Check Those Insults, Mr. President

In an interview with The Economist published over the weekend, Obama got in this little dig at Russia:

Russia doesn’t make anything. Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old. The population is shrinking.

But as Mark Adomanis points out, none of these statements is factually accurate. So why, then, did the president make them? Zenon Evans wonders:

It’s bizarre that Obama criticized Russia on these fronts when there’s plenty of legitimate issues – like Moscow’s crackdown on civil rights, the pro-Western political opposition, and independent media – that he could have addressed instead. These, of course, don’t have much bearing on the war Russia is waging against Ukrainian sovereignty or the mass killing of civilians on a Malaysian plane, but whether it’s due to a lazy team of fact-checkers or deliberate rah-rah nationalism to boost the U.S. by comparison, dubious talking points don’t help the Obama administration resolve the current crises.

Hearing the president say “Russia doesn’t make anything” will only inflame anti-American sentiment among Russian civilians, thereby reinforcing Putin’s own ballooning cushion of popular support. And, there’s need for healthy debate about the U.S.’s actions against the Kremlin throughout this war, but by spouting some easily-debunked information, Obama effectively invites skepticism of the accuracy of other White House claims about Russia.

But Dylan Matthews figures he was playing up the overall idea that Putinist Russia has no future:

[T]he fact that Obama felt compelled to say this — inaccuracies and all — is interesting. The implicit argument being countered here is the idea that, as TIME magazine recently put it, a “Cold War II” is afoot and Russia might present a real rival to the US. But one crucial thing that made the Soviet Union a plausible rival was that, for much of the world, Communism was an extremely attractive ideology, one embraced by guerrilla and resistance movements across the globe and thus capable of pulling numerous countries into the Soviet orbit. As Obama points out, there’s nothing so attractive about 2014′s Russia, which profoundly limits how successful it can be as a world power.

“The Non-Inhaler, The Twelve-Stepper, And The Roof-Hitter”

That’s Rick Hertzberg’s priceless description of our last three presidents and their relationship to weed. Rick thinks that Barry O has been playing the long game on marijuana sanity (as do I) but thinks it’s time for something a little more expeditious:

When it comes to executive orders, the roof-hitter has a long way to go before he catches up with Carter (320), Reagan (381), Clinton (364), or George W. Bush (291). At last count, Obama had issued a hundred and eighty-three. One more he could issue—and should, without delay—would remove marijuana from the government’s list of Schedule I drugs, which includes heroin and LSD, and demote it to, say, Schedule V, down there with codeine cough syrup—or, at the very least, to Schedule II, with cocaine and methadone. It’s time for Obama to get out in front of the parade.

Dissents Of The Day

Several readers jump on this quote of mine:

“Clinton’s developing a new formula for politics: stand for nothing but winning power. And the Democrats seem perfectly happy with it.” Perfectly happy? No. Accepting of reality? Trying to be.

There’s no new formula here. It’s just Machiavellian. Ask yourself: Why on earth would Hillary stake out a position in favor of some philosophy, doctrine, or model that she plans to sell us on?  One that already has its legions of paid detractors?  A nice, book-length box into which she can spend 8 years cramming the world?  Instead she takes on the unsexy and, obviously, less academically palatable task of judging the world as it is: a 3D chess game where the rules change constantly.

Labeling and categorizing reality based on something you read is just another ideology. I don’t think Hillary stands for “nothing” because she’s not into that game. I think she stands for enlightened self-interest, as expressed through a desire to see America win those games in which she chooses to engage, to the greater glory of, of course, herself.

The question should not be, “Is Hillary Clinton a moral leader?” The question should be, “Is Hillary Clinton America’s best bet to lead in a post-moral world?”

It’s not craven, cynical, or even strictly selfish of her.  It’s her acknowledgement that we live “after history.”  It’s intuitive, I think.  It’s that bedrock Clinton talent of fingering the wind.  Is she right?  She’s a better bet than Ted Cruz, or some other deluded hack.

Another:

While I’m personally horrified by the prospect of Hillary Clinton running for president, her policy vacuity may be the only thing I don’t hold against her. You write, “Clinton’s developing a new formula for politics: stand for nothing but winning power. And the Democrats seem perfectly happy with it.”

In other news, the sun rises in the east and the sky is blue. Vacuous standard-bearer candidates are the norm, not the exception, in American history. And rightly so: Prior to WWII, the president had so little real power that his personality only mattered in the most unusual of crises. (Which is to say, Washington and Lincoln.) People usually voted the party, not the man. And since WWII, the executive branch has become so large that while the more powerful president’s personal gifts and faults matter more than formerly, the hundreds of appointed bureaucrats drawn from his party’s activists matter much more to most policy questions than does the president himself. Or herself. So people today should vote the party, not the man, and public opinion research suggests that in the main they do so.

Historically, a candidate who stands for something usually loses his party’s nomination to a candidate whose policy vacuity makes him an empty vessel for voters to fill with their own preferences. American parties usually nominate Zachary Taylor, not Henry Clay. “Availability” was once the polite term for the virtue of being a supposedly electable policy cipher. Abraham Lincoln was “available,” as were Ulysses Grant, Grover Cleveland, Dwight Eisenhower, and Bill Clinton. As were Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman when nominated for vice president.

In the modern era, only Goldwater, McGovern, and Reagan stand out as true policy candidates (Obama had much the effect of a policy candidate, but his stated policy disagreements with Hillary in 2007-08 were minuscule. Perhaps call Obama a “biography” candidate, alongside Kennedy.) All other major nominees were “available” – to the extent that they had any known strong policy commitments, they were nominated in spite of them, not because of them.

So, Hillary Clinton. Vacuous? Yes. Troublingly so? Not in the context of American politics and history.

The trick, ultimately, is not demanding that every presidential candidate be a policy genius. The trick is reducing the reach of executive authority so that the vacuous mediocrities we tend to elect can do less harm. If we had given George W. Bush the powers and duties held by Rutherford B. Hayes, the world would barely have noted his time in office.

Another piles one:

I was a very strong supporter of Obama from as soon as he gave that speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, and now I’m perfectly happy with electing Hillary Clinton as a Democratic President who stands for nothing. Why?

Two reasons: first, because I just want Hillary to maintain what Obama has achieved. I don’t believe she could have passed the stimulus or the ACA or even Dodd Frank, but he did. Now she can keep the Republicans from dismantling those and flushing the country down the toilet like they did under the Bush administration. She also doesn’t need to stand for anything to elect liberal justices to the Supreme Court who will begin to undo the current court’s disastrous decisions on guns, corporate speech, and women’s rights. He didn’t get immigration reform or cap-and-trade, and neither will she against a group of Republican Know Nothings.

Which brings me the second reason I want her: the first female President will probably win big, and losing three (or four!) consecutive elections against rising demographic odds and twelve (or sixteen!) years of obstruction and no new ideas will eventually bring about the implosion of the current Republican party, which is focused only on taxes and abortion, and the recreation of a Republican party that can compromise again. Obama did the heavy lifting on the liberal agenda as much as can be done, and frankly I don’t want the Democrats to go all Elizabeth Warren off the deep end, with post office banks and $15 minimum wages. All I want is someone to put liberals on the Supreme Court and wait for the Republicans’ own bile to wear them down to nothing. And who better to do that than Hillary Rodham Clinton?

A Cure For Ebola?

Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, the American ebola patients now being treated in the isolation unit at Emory University Hospital, received an experimental treatment while still in Liberia that may have saved their lives. James Hamblin looks into just what this “top-secret serum” is:

[It’s] a monoclonal antibody. Administration of monoclonal antibodies is an increasingly common but time-tested approach to eradicating interlopers in the human body. In a basic monoclonal antibody paradigm, scientists infect an animal (in this case mice) with a disease, the mice mount an immune response (antibodies to fight the disease), and then the scientists harvest those antibodies and give them to infected humans. It’s an especially promising area in cancer treatment.

In this case, the proprietary blend of three monoclonal antibodies known as zMapp had never been tested in humans. It had previously been tested in eight monkeys with Ebola who survived—though all received treatment within 48 hours of being infected. A monkey treated outside of that exposure window did not survive. That means very little is known about the safety and effectiveness of this treatment—so little that outside of extreme circumstances like this, it would not be legal to use. [Sanjay] Gupta speculates that the FDA may have allowed it under the compassionate use exemption.

John Timmer has more on the treatment:

Fortunately, Mapp [Biopharmaceutical, the drug company working on zMapp,] has been publishing papers describing its progress on an Ebola treatment as it went along, so it’s possible to understand how the therapy was developed and how it operates.

Despite its fearsome behavior, Ebola is a fairly simple virus, with only seven genes. The gene that is essential for the virus to attach to human cells, called Ebola glycoprotein, has been identified previously. Antibodies that stick to this protein would be expected to block infection of new cells and target any virus circulating in the blood stream for destruction. The problem appears to be that an effective antibody response comes too late for the patients. (The virus also takes steps to tone down the immune response.) Mapp decided to do the immune system’s job for it by making antibodies that can then be injected into infected individuals to perform the same function. The challenges are making the right ones and making enough of them.

Shirley Li notes that zMapp isn’t the only experimental ebola treatment out there:

So why ZMapp, of all the experimental solutions to Ebola, of which there are many? Perhaps it comes down to Mapp’s recent successes: The NIH included Mapp in its $28 million five-year grant awarded to five companies to research Ebola further in March. A press release dated July 15, 2014 revealed that Defyrus, a private life sciences biodefense company based in Canada, had partnered with Mapp’s San Diego-based commercialization partner firm Leaf Biopharmaceutical Inc., to push the ZMapp serum’s clinical development. And just last week, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency announced it awarded a contract to Mapp to continue development of the serum.

Still, fighting Ebola means a multi-pronged attack. While Mapp’s method focuses on eradicating the disease after infection, the NIH has been working on preventing it in the first place. In the NIH’s case, it’s working to promote development of antibodies within the subject, instead of injecting them from an outside source that survived Ebola.

Steven Hoffman and Julia Belluz blame the lack of an effective ebola treatment until now on the way pharmaceutical companies prioritize their R&D:

Ebola will continue to move through Africa — this time, and again in the future — not only because of the viral reservoirs and broken health systems specific to the continent. There are much larger issues at play here. Namely, the global institutions we designed to promote health innovation, trade, and investment perpetuate its spread and prevent its resolution.

This shouldn’t be news. Most all of the money for research and development in health comes from the private sector. They naturally have a singular focus — making money — and they do that by selling patent-protected products to many people who can and are willing to pay very high monopoly prices. Not by developing medicines and vaccines for the world’s poorest people, like those suffering with Ebola. Right now, more money goes into fighting baldness and erectile dysfunction than hemorrhagic fevers like dengue or Ebola.

Follow all of our ebola coverage here. Update from a reader:

In the past I have been very critical of your coverage and thoughts on scientific matters; it’s incredibly frustrating to see published opinions littered with “rookie mistakes” from people who lack scientific training. As someone who is highly educated in these matters and has to compete for diminishing public funds, I have no tolerance for the long history of scientific inaccuracy from the media.

Having said that, your coverage of the Ebola epidemic has been pleasantly accurate and appropriate. I especially appreciate you highlighting Steven Hoffman and Julia Belluz’s article. They highlight a searing problem in our current research system; research priorities go towards profitable markets. The federal government is supposed to offset that, but thanks to the current batch of Republicans, worthwhile funding opportunities are going unfunded.

A colleague of my boss recently received a perfect score on a federal grant, but it did not get funded. There was nothing wrong with the grant scientifically, conceptually, or practically; they just ran out of money. The big problem is that funding opportunities aren’t growing while the scientific community is expanding. This has led us to the current ultra-competitive environment where there is no lack of sound ideas, projects, and causes that can directly be addressed and make real, lasting impacts on people’s lives.

But there’s no profit there, so Big Pharma researches ED, makes boner pills instead, and sleeps on beds of cash while poor people die of Ebola. “And the beat goes on…”

The Creatures From The Green Lagoon

Toledo, Ohio Contends With Contaminated Tap Water For Third Day

Life in northwest Ohio is returning to normal after the mayor of Toledo lifted a drinking-water ban that affected some half a million metro-area residents. Ben Richmond offers a recap of the past days’ events:

On Saturday, Toledo officials issued a warning not to drink the water after they discovered high levels of the toxin microcystin in the water, coming from a huge bloom of the cyanobacteria (or “blue-green algae”) microcystis in Lake Erie’s Maumee Bay, where the city of 284,000 draws its drinking water. Boiling tap water only concentrates the toxins further, so residents were left emptying store shelves of bottled water and lining up at water distribution centers, as their water supply turned a sickly shade of Satanic vomit-green.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “the presence of high levels of cyanotoxins in recreational water and drinking water may cause a wide range of symptoms in humans including fever, headaches, muscle and joint pain, blisters, stomach cramps, diarrhea, vomiting, mouth ulcers, and allergic reactions.” It gets worse: Microsystin has also been linked to liver inflammation and hemorrhage, kidney damage, and “potential tumor growth,” the EPA adds.

The restrictions were lifted Monday, although the long-term outlook for the area’s water system remains uncertain. Agricultural pollution appears to have be the culprit, Richmond notes:

Nature might provide the sunshine and warm weather that allows the cyanobacteria to flourish, but its farms and towns near waterways that give the blue-green algae their super-food: phosphorus. High use of phosphorus-based fertilizers and the presence of livestock near water supplies, combined with waste-water and run-off from towns and cities near the waterways has raised the levels of phosphorus in the lake, leading to record-breaking blooms in 2011, and above average blooms since.

Brad Plumer adds that climate change may bear some blame:

The number of heavy rain events in the Midwest has increased some 37 percent since the 1950s. That’s significant, since it’s the really heavy storms that wash away the most phosphorus from farm soil and cities into the watershed. … One 2013 study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences predicted that algae blooms in Lake Erie were likely to increase in the years ahead — even if farming practices stay the same. That’s because, as the planet warms, the atmosphere will be able to hold more moisture and heavier rainfall events in the Midwest will become more and more common.

Meanwhile, Gwynn Guilford registers the national scale of the problem:

Lake Erie is notorious for its algal blooms. But it’s hardly the only body of water in the US that sees these ecological catastrophes in the summer of 2013 alone. For instance, Oregon had to commute its Midsummer Triathalon down to a biathalon in Aug. 2013 due to toxic slime clogging Blue Lake. Kentucky reported its first toxic algae problems in the state’s history only in 2013, after visitors to four lakes complained of rashes and stomach pain; the blooms are back again this year. In Florida, toxic algae in Indian River Lagoon killed more than 120 manatees in 2013, say some scientists.

Mark Berman zooms out:

The water issue in the US pales in comparison to the clean water shortages in other parts of the globe. There are 783 million people without access to clean water around the world, according to the United Nations. But the Toledo ban still speaks to the sensitivity of water systems in the US, which are relied upon by hundreds of millions of people and can be severely affected by natural occurrences or outside contaminants.

Meanwhile, Rebecca Leber observes that there’s little in the way of regulatory oversight when it comes to such issues:

Testing for microcystin isn’t federally mandated, nor is it required in the state of Ohio. As a result, many towns don’t have emergency response plans in place and vary in how often they test water samples for the toxin. The Toledo Blade reported that water treatment officials across Ohio have asked the EPA for additional guidance on testing for microcystin. That lack of guidance can result in confusion, even risk to the public’s safety: State officials had assured Toledo residents that the water plant had enough sophisticated “safeguards in place to neutralize the toxin and remove it before it can get into the water supply.” The tap-water ban was announced eight days later.

The Bloomberg editors concur:

Lake Erie, which was known as “North America’s Dead Sea” in the late 1960s, was saved mainly by the Clean Water Act of 1972, which required sewage-treatment plants and industry to limit how much pollution they discharged into US streams and rivers. It was an enormous undertaking, with the federal government spending more than $60 billion nationwide to improve treatment facilities. …  What’s clear is that today’s regulations aren’t up to the job of safeguarding the US’s drinking-water supply. Rules that mandate stricter rules for fertilizer application should be adopted. Lawmakers also should tie the availability of federal subsidies to farms, such as crop insurance, to farm-management practices that reduce runoff. In the meantime, cities like Toledo will be stuck paying the bill as they spend more money to monitor, test and filter water.

(Photo: Algae from Lake Erie washes ashore at Maumee Bay State Park in Oregon, Ohio, on August 4. By Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images)