Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Juhu beach in Mumbai, India, is crowded out with people. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

At any public meeting on the environment over the past decade , there’s one question that almost always came up. It is a variation of ‘Why will no one talk about population?’ As a result, population is discussed endlessly while people grumble that no one ever talks about it.

The same oddly circular conversation happened in the Observer Review section in an article relating to the new book, 10 Billion, by Stephen Emmott, head of Microsoft’s Research Lab. Five full pages of extract and interview warned, ‘we’re ignoring … the biggest crisis in human history.’

Given below is the text of a letter that was initially written by a group of individuals and sent as a rejoinder to the article written by Chetan Bhagat titled, ‘Letter from an Indian Muslim Youth’ published in The Times of India on 30 June 2013. The letter was sent to The Times of India The signatories include non-Muslims, because a large number of the emails read, ‘I am not a Muslim but I am equally disgusted by Chetan Bhagat’s letter’. Given below is the text of letter followed by more than 200 signatures:

A Letter to Mr. Chetan Bhagat from Indian Muslim Youth

3rd July 2013

Dear Mr. Bhagat,

(GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Three quantitative microbial risk assessments (QMRAs) recently published in the Journal of Food Protection have demonstrated that unpasteurized milk is a low-risk food, contrary to previous, inappropriately-evidenced claims suggesting a high-risk profile. These scholarly papers, along with dozens of others, were reviewed on May 16, 2013 at the Centre for Disease Control in Vancouver, BC (Canada), during a special scientific Grand Rounds presentation entitled “Unpasteurized milk: myths and evidence.”
The reviewer, Nadine Ijaz, MSc, demonstrated how inappropriate evidence has long been mistakenly used to affirm the “myth” that raw milk is a high-risk food, as it was in the 1930s. Today, green leafy vegetables are the most frequent cause of food-borne illness in the United States. British Columbia CDC’s Medical Director of Environmental Health Services, Dr. Tom Kosatsky, who is also Scientific Director of Canada’s National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health,welcomed Ms. Ijaz’s invited presentation as “up-to-date”…