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Gaza cease-fire
needed to save lives
I’m writing to ask that you do everything in your power to help stop a genocide in Gaza that is unfolding in front of our eyes.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to be living through it, fearful every minute might be your last and seeing multiple generations of family lines being murdered and erased from their ancestral land.
People in Gaza are literally pleading for their lives to the international community to do anything we can to stop this. I am urging you to stand on the right side of history and call for an immediate cease-fire.
Sonja Goetsch-Avila
Oakland
U.S. should support
market for super drugs
Re: “Broken drug market hinders battle to contain superbugs” (Page A6, Oct. 19).
The problem of antimicrobial resistance and the high toll infections with these superbugs take on us is incredibly important and unfortunately not reported on nearly enough.
I want to emphasize more reasons why we all should care: We face more extreme weather events and we all lived through flooding and storms in California in the last rainy season. Floods make drains and sewers overflow, impacting sanitation and leading to more infections with multidrug-resistant bugs. The Pasteur Act will address this in an innovative way by ensuring drug developers that their new drugs will be bought, making the high development cost sustainable for them.
This is similar to how we succeeded as a country in getting a vaccine against COVID in record time — by financing development and getting the vaccine in return. We need success stories like this for new antibiotics and new antifungals — and fast.
Eva Jencquel
Berkeley
Plenty of guilt to share
in destruction of war
It’s understandable that we Americans are sympathetic with the Palestinians under air attack in Gaza. But we need to avoid seeing ourselves as morally superior to the Israelis. After all, in World War II we dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and firebombed Tokyo.
In Europe, we killed 40,000 Germans in Hamburg in a single air attack. It was the expressed strategy of the British air commander “Bomber” Harris to end the war by making life intolerable for Germany’s civilians.
War is horrible. There is always plenty of guilt to go around.
Arnold Gilbert
Walnut Creek
