Medicines for "Exotic" Pets

Nearly everyone on my friendslist has a pet. Roughly half have non-cat/dog/farm animals as pets. What many of us don't realize is that not only is it hard to find a vet who even understands the unique problems of our pet's species (or sometimes even our pet's class [mammal/bird/reptile/amphibian/fish...]), but that when our "exotic" pets are prescribed medicine, the vet typically has little or no information about the safety of its use on our pet's species. They are prescribing the medicine "off-label" when they give our pets anesthesia, kidney medicine, or even antibiotics.

One reason for this is that there's a lot more money involved in the more "popular" pets (cats and dogs) as well as in farm animals but there's less to gain from the smaller species, so the pet pharmaceutical companies don't generally put as much money into the research of drugs for them. Another related reason is that all drugs for pets need to be approved by the FDA, and the FDA charges large fees for the approval process. Since pharma companies are willing to put down a lot of money for a product that will sell a lot, they willingly pay these approval fees for drugs for dogs, cats, cows, horses, chicken, and turkey, but not for turtles, guinea pigs, cockatiels, amazon grays, cockatoos, lizards, beta fish, emu, goats, llamas, and so on.

Now here comes the interesting part - the part where we can do something. There was a bill passed in 2004, the Minor Use and Minor Species (MUMS) Animal Health Act of 2004, that allowed lower fees for drugs for these "exotic" pets and less common farm animals (such as goats or llamas), however for it to actually happen it needs funding. It's now 2007 bordering on 2008 and that hasn't happened yet. Should the fees be lowered, then pharma companies wouldn't have to spend as much to get drugs for our "exotic" pets approved, could still turn a profit on them, and therefore we'd have more reliable and safe drugs available for our littlest and strangest family members. So it's time to do something.

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X-posted to various. Feel free to forward or repost this at will.

Bhutto?

As usual, I am filled with ignorance. The extent of my knowledge about Bhutto is that she was important b/c of being a female Prime Minister in an Arabic Muslim nation, and that she was very controversial, having been outed due to corruption charges twice.

I would like to be enlightened in three sentences or less. Anyone care to take up the challenge? I'm able to get longer versions online easily, the problem is that (as judes_39 put it to me on the phone the other day) Google not only can find everything on the internet, but it finds EVERYTHING on the internet, and as a result I'm having difficulty telling what the important parts are. This has always been my weakness since high school, that I cannot pull out the overall picture for being drowned in isolated facts.

So, three sentences (or as short as possible), who was Bhutto, why was she important, and why should I care?