R.P. Barr

Unintended Consequences

It’s funny how the internet works.  I was looking at Pravda.ru for more about something I heard on RT (Russian Television).  And, there I found a story that originated in my own back yard.  But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

 The news on RT the other day featured a man named William Engdahl who said, “The whole attack on Greece and the attack on the Euro originated from a concerted strategy of Wall Street and US Institutions to permanently cripple or try to cripple the only alternative reserve currency anywhere in the world that can challenge the dollar.”

Could there be any truth in that?  Maybe, if the process had decimated the U.S. economy as well.  Or was that part of the scheme so that stocks would fall and could be bought up for a song? 

Whatever.  It shows how loosening the rules on banking that allowed all sorts of hedging and risk insuring eventually—inevitably—made the bankers believe that making loans was risk free.  That belief inflated a bubble that imploded and ruined the world’s economy.  Not only that, there is now a growing belief that all those smart thinkers on Wall Street could not have taken the many steps they did—lobbied for new laws and everything--without knowing the outcome.  And, if they knew the outcome, there had to be a purpose in it all:  wrecking the Euro.  Conspiracy therorists unite.

 But, I didn’t find anything more about Engdahl and his theory at the Pravda site.  What I found was potentially more alarming.

 If you are old enough, you have a circular scar the size of dime on your upper arm like I do.  We were all vaccinated against smallpox once upon a time with a little bundles of needles.  Wikipedia says that as late as 1967, 15 million people worldwide contracted smallpox and 2 million died.  Then, the World Health Organization led an effort to do something remarkable.  For the first time in human history, a disease was totally eradicated.  It wasn’t easy.  Every person on Earth had to be vaccinated.  Health care workers went door-to-door in the cities, and walked dirt paths to remote shacks.  And, by December 9, 1979, virtually everyone was inoculated.  That is the date that WHO certified the planet to be free of smallpox.

 This week, researchers at George Mason University, Prince William Campus in Manassas, announced that the victory over smallpox may not have been as total as we thought.  The smallpox is still gone.  Nobody needs the vaccine anymore.  A couple generations are free of those little, round scars.  But, early research indicates that the vaccine may also have protected us against HIV.  Oops.

Not the only “oops” in the news.

 The oil companies figured out how to drill for oil thousands of feet under the ocean.  They developed shut-off valves to prevent spills.  Apparently, they did not figure out how to repair malfunctioning shut-off valves.

 A North Korean submarine fired a torpedo into the Cheonan, a South Korean naval vessel.  Was this action ordered by the North Korean government, or was it due to misunderstood orders?  Not likely it was an accident, but those things can happen, too.  It doesn’t matter.  Pyongyang has been unnecessarily belligerent, and now 46 sailors are dead.  South Korea and the U.S. are going to have to reply.  And, Kim Jong Il has promised a retaliation if he doesn’t like the South’s reaction.   Kim watches U.S. television, but apparently he missed the Sesame Street episode when they discussed the concept of what-happens-next.

 Meanwhile, the world is watching to see what happens next in Arizona, and looking for the unintended consequenses that are certain to follow their recent legislation. 

It all helps me understand the frustration of voters in the recent elections.  The world is going crazy and nothing seems to help.  Or, maybe, with the internet and multimedia communications, we’re just more aware of all the craziness that has always been there.  We should remember that elections have unintended consequences, too.

Science fare

There are times when events seem to cluster around a given issue.  Or maybe we are more attuned to specific subjects at different times.  Whatever the cosmic or psychological reason, the stars seem to be aligning over global warming.

We have the meeting in Copenhagen this week.  The recent Congressional hearings.  The salt trade in Mali.   –The what in where?

According to the BBC, in what is probably the world’s oldest continual enterprise, the Tuareg tribesmen in the Sahara Desert of Mali break up slabs of salt in an ancient lake bed and haul these slabs by camel caravan some 1,400 kilometers to Timbuktu where it is sold.  This tradition is now endangered—and improved—by global warming.  If we assume that burning fossil fuels is a reason for the rapidly warming atmosphere, then we should say that hauling materials with pack animals is a good thing.  Except that the changing climate of the Sahara means even less rainfall, and more stress on the camels.  The Tuareg have been forced to start using trucks.  In a few short years, half the salt trade has shifted to these diesel-guzzling machines.  The trucks, meanwhile, can haul more salt than the camels and do it faster.  The trip that took 45 days by caravan now takes 10.  The faster delivery times means that the economics of selling the salt has shifted from a buyers’ to a sellers’ market.  The salt miners have built houses for themselves, and improved their lives.

Isn’t the story of the Tuaregs the dilemma that the world is facing?  Do we tell the Tuaregs that we will not reduce smokestack pollutants unless they go back to camel caravans?

There was also the conveniently timed story that suggested some scientists were selective in reporting the results of global warming studies.  Hello?  The global warming critics ignore thousands of scientific studies to trumpet the few anomalies that support their position.  Now, I am not a scientist, but I know that making a statement about the physical world doesn’t make it true, and cheating—if that is what it was—doesn’t make it false.

Does Gregor Mendel’s name ring a bell.  He is the father of genetics.  His experiments proved how dominant and recessive traits are passed along through generations and how they express themselves.  He was totally right.  And, he cheated when he wrote his reports.  We know this because every experiment supposedly resulted in exactly the right number of dominant and recessive traits displayed in the offspring.  It was like flipping a coin a hundred times and getting exactly fifty heads and fifty tails.  The chances are 50-50, but it will never turn out that way—except in Mendel’s notebooks.

The critics however, see a State of Fear –style conspiracy.   I just finished the Michael Crichton book.  The one that will never be made into a movie.  It’s about a plot by conservation organizations to create global chaos to support their unfounded global warming theories. 

I admire Crichton as a writer, but his credentials as a prophet are not so good.  He has written about robots running amuck in a theme park, a pandemic from outer space, cloned dinosaurs, time travel, killer apes guarding a diamond mine, Japanese businessmen taking over the U.S. and so forth.  Good reads all, but not reality.

He finished State of Fear with an afterward saying that he was not denying global warming, but he didn’t see the science as being clear, and we shouldn’t do anything until it was.

New York’s World Trade Center was composed of several buildings.  The famous towers were number One and Two.  Facing the side of One WTC was a much lower building, Six WTC housed the U.S. Custom House for New York.  When the first airplane struck tower One, the vibrations from the impact were felt in Six.  The Regional Director did not know that an airplane had struck the building across from him, he just knew that his building had never shaken before, so he ordered an evacuation.

Even after the second plane had hit tower Two, there was no understanding that the buildings would come crashing down.  But, when they did, they destroyed the other five building in the complex.

The science of just how the collapse occurred is still being studied, but no-one died in number Six because they didn’t wait.

Back in the days before the public knew that smoking caused cancer and heart disease, children were told not to smoke.  It was considered to be a filthy habit.  All the movies portrayed smoking as either glamorous or just a normal part of life.  Those who abstained, did it without the science.

Meanwhile, those who deny global warming are largely financed by the industries that will have to make changes if the world tightens up on greenhouse gases.  It’s like putting the fox on a committee to study chicken disappearances.

 Where is it written that we should get everything we want regardless of who suffers later?  We need to do what we can to reduce or postpone impending bad events.  That is what good people do.  God is going to be very cross with the rest.

Take a Deep Breath--While You Can

Last week I watched the documentary, “Six Degrees Could Change the World.”  It was a fascinating view of global warming and where we are headed.  Of course, the narrator kept saying that we could head it off or slow the onset, but let’s be real.  Politicians are not going to spend the money and impose the restrictions that would have any serious effect.  The blame is not so much on the politicians as it is on the people who want services, benefits, and protection but don’t want to pay for them.

If you haven’t seen this documentary, it takes the prospect of global warming one degree at a time, showing what the effects of one degree of warming would be, what two would be, etc.  At three degrees, I heard a sentence that caught my attention.  I was a little miffed that the film proceded without elaboration.

Before I drop this bombshell on you, let me back up a bit. 

 Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the polar ice caps are shrinking, glaciers are melting and rivers that depend on melting snow and glaciers are drying up.  Orchards in the Pacific Northwest are going high tech.  They no longer have enough water for typical irrigation.  Those who can are putting sensors in the ground to measure how much moisture is available for the roots and signalling the system to release only enough water to fill the precise need. 

 Meanwhile, melting ice is darker than ice that is not melting.  The darker color attracts and holds more heat, thus accelerating the meltage.  That is why things are happening faster than were predicted a decade ago.  Are you with me so far?

 Good.  Now let’s go to the Amazon.  No ice there.  However, as Six Degrees showed, in 2005 there was a drought.  In the natural way of things, fire followed the drought and about 1,000 square miles of forest was destroyed.  Some tributaries to the Amazon dried up completely, something that has not occurred before in known history.  Fifty percent of the rain for the rainforest is generated by the trees.  When trees burn, it takes time for them to regenerate.  That means there is less moisture to produce rain, and a greater chance of drought, which leads to fire…  It is a self-accelerating cycle.  At the moment, the Amazon is still large enough to take these hits and come back, but at some point in the process of deforestation it will reach a tipping point and then it is all downhill, faster and faster.  The expert interviewed for Six Degrees said that he sees the forest reaching this point in the next twenty years (that’s 2029, if you’re counting).

 At that point, when the narrator was lamenting the loss of biodiversity and saying the loss of the Amazon rain forest could bring about another degree of warming, he said something that I had heard before, but meant more in this context: the Amazon rain forest produces 20% of the world’s oxygen.  Since the air we breathe is no respector of national borders, what happens in Brazil absolutely will affect us.

Bear in mind that as the Amazon goes, so, to greater or lesser degree, do the forests and grasslands that produce the other 80% of our oxygen, so we needn’t wait for 2029 to lose 20%.

 Can you get along with 20% less oxygen?

 I tried to look it up.  I may have missed it, but I don’t think there’s anything out there specific to the long term reduction of oxygen.  The condition of being oxygen deprived is anoxia or hypoxia (apparently the terms are interchangeable).  Human beings can function normally with up to 5% less oxygen, but all of the medical (and Wikipedia) data I found dealt with temporary, short term deprivation.  When there is not enough oxygen for normal cell activity, the body makes do with hydrogen which causes an accumulation of lactic acid.  I am neither a doctor or bio-scientist, but apparently that is not a good thing, especially over time.

 As the oxygen levels continue to decrease, we can expect headaches, fatigue, shortness of breath, a feeling of euphoria and nausea.  (Personally, I have never felt euphoria and nausea at the same time, and am looking forward to that.  Headaches, fatigue and shortness of breath, I’ve got already.)  Once we get to 10% and greater loss of oxygen we can expect to see a “very rapid onset,” of changes in levels of consciousness, seizures, coma, priapism, and death. 

 I had to look up “priapism,” too.  According to Merriam Webster, it is “an abnormal often painful persistent erection of the penis.”  I guess that it will be like the little plastic pegs in turkeys that pop up when the bird is done.

 If you know of anyone with real credentials who has studied this scenario, please let me know. 

 Otherwise, it doesn’t look like we have to worry about the national debt that we will be passing on to our grandchildren.

Worried about Ebola?

The administration is spending more on swine flu prevention.  Vaccines will be produced and stockpiled.  Rationing plans are already drawn up with priority groups identified. 

 I still worry that the largest class of part-time workers—and therefore most likely to be uninsured—are shop clerks.  The very people that are in the best positions to spread contagion are the ones most likely to stay at work if they have sick family members, and remain on the job longer if they become ill.  Part-timers don’t get sick leave.  Workers who have to juggle multiple part-time jobs are more likely to stress their bodies with lack of sleep and improper diets thereby weakening their immune systems.

This week, BBC had a report that hints that the flu may not be the biggest threat on the horizon. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8143823.stm]  Scientists have found ebola virus in pigs in the Philippines.  Read the sentence again, there are three important statements there.

First is ebola.  This is as nasty a disease as ever evolved.  There is no vaccine and no cure.  Ebola hemorragic fever interferes with the lining of blood vessels causing them to leak.  Meanwhile, it also interferes with the surfaces of blood platelets which prevents clotting.  The effect is widespread internal bleeding.  That is the bad news.  The good is that ebola is not easily contagious during the early stages, and becomes virulent only when the bleeding spreads beyond the body.  In developed societies where good hygiene is widely practiced, the chances of spreading ebola are greatly reduced.  It is not spread by air—except when it is, apparently.  In the famous outbreak in a Reston,Virginia animal laboratory, the disease did travel from cage to cage by air.  And, air transmitted microbes killed a nurse as well. 

 But, now it is in pigs.  When ebola was first discovered in Africa, scientists tested some 3,000  species and found the disease in only a few rodents and primates.  Outbreaks were isolated and self-limiting.  Swine, however, are perfect hosts for microbes that want to mutate.  The chances that something bad will come of this pairing are higher than if it had been found in—say, rats.  Plus, the disease had to mutate to attack pigs in the first place.  The ebola may have jumped from monkey to pig or the other way around, or it may have been spread by bats.  The studies continue.

The third shocker in the announcement is that ebola is in the Philippines, not Africa.  Apparently it has been there for some time.  The pig tenders--I’m speaking of people here—are not currently getting sick, although some have tested posiive for the virus.  The pigs are not so lucky.

 The conclusion is that ebola has jumped halfway around the world and adapted to a new species.  Or, it has spontaneously developed half a world away from the initial discovery.  Neither scenario makes me more comfortable.  However, since the Philippino version is not deadly (except to pigs), we don’t have to worry about it this year.  Next year, maybe.

 Meanwhile, I just heard a round-table discussion about reducing traffic in the metropolitan area.  The powers that be want to charge people for driving in certain lanes in order to force car pooling and motivate people to take public transportation.  I think the pandemic planners ought to get together with the folks who want to coerce the work force into close proximity while commuting.  While going to part-time jobs without medical insurance.

Days of Swine and Doses

My current employment finds me updating my organization’s pandemic flu plan.  It’s a thorough and measured stage-by-stage response ranging from being watchful to a 1918-like cataclysm.  Such planning is prudent and necessary.  I helped a similar project when I worked for the Feds when my agency contemplated an avian flu disaster.  What I want to say now is that we are not experiencing a pandemic today.  One may develop, but it’s got a long way to go.

 By World Health Organization standards, a pandemic involves widespread international infection, and the disease must be easily spread.  The H1N1 (formerly known as “swine”) flu has been reported in nine countries.  331 casees total in all the world.  So much for widespread.  Only two countries have reported fatalities.  In a normal year, regular old seasonal flu kills 36,000 Americans.  This new strain isn’t even in the same league.  Of the U.S.swine-flu cases all of them have been among people who have gone to Mexico, their families, or classmates.

  Let’s break that down.  Typical incubation time for the flu is 48 hours before symptoms present themselves, and for 24 to 36 of those 48 hours the unknowing victim is contagious.  So, our Mexican travelers sat on airplanes, shopped, went to work, etc. fully capable of spreading the disease, but didn’t.  And, don’t think that there are a bunch of silent cases out there that will suddenly spring out at us.  Once the symptoms began to make the travelers feel sick, they probably didn’t rush to the doctor the first day.  Even if they did, a confirmed diagnosis often took 2 days.  This second two-day period gave those who were infected during the silent stage a chance to develop symptoms.  In short, if casual contact spread this flu, we would have a lot more cases.  We don’t.

 It is possible that this virus could mutate and become more virulent.  That’s why we make contingency plans.  Remember the avian flu?  It never got off the ground because mutations are random.  It takes millions of combinations before a really effective change leads the virus in a new direction.  The governments of the world slaughtered millions of birds, effectively destroying the chances of those millions of mutations to occur.  Aggressive actions now are curbing the chances of the new flu to become successful.

 What is going on is that hundreds of bureaucrats knocked themselves out for the avian flu, and because they were successful, their wonderful pandemic plans never got used.  Because the avian flu fizzled, the disaster planners never got the recognition they deserved.  It’s like the cold warriors who have seized the radical Islamic movement like a life preserver in a stormy sea.  Careers are made by disasters.  There are no heroes without villains.  There are folks out there who are really hungry for a pandemic.

 Look at the Egyptians who suddenly found a new reason to persecute the Coptic Christians.  The Christians raise pigs.  Even though there have been no cases of flu reported in Egypt and only two in Israel, Egyptians took this opportunity to slaughter tens of thousands of Christian pigs.

 The second leg of this event is the media who are always eager to find something that will frighten people into watching the news.  Nothing like a pandemic to gen up a little panic.

  There is also the idiot factor.  It is spring, people!  There are allergies and upper respiratory infections all around.  Pork fajitas will not give you the flu.  Do not take Tamiflu unless you have a confirmed diagnosis of the flu and normal rest and ibuprofen don't work.  All we need is for a new strain of the flu to become resistant to flu medication due to overuse of the drugs.

 My recommendation is to keep watching the trend, and wash your hands frequently.  Spray or wipe all common surfaces, like doorknobs and telephone receivers, with antiseptics.  Make sure that you are getting enough vitamins and strengthening your immune system.  And then, wait for this little swine to waddle away.  

Legalize pot? What are you smoking?

Tax revenues are down. Nobody wants to see their taxes raised. Let’s tax the potheads and junkies. They can’t sustain a thought, much less a political campaign. Or so the thinking goes. 

There are several arguments that the legalization crowd puts forward: 

1. The war on drugs is a failure. 

What war on drugs? The only serious thing about this multi-generational “war” is the body count. A war is not run by local and state agencies, or piecemeal by national agencies. A war requires a coordinated national strategy with clear objectives, but most of all, a war demands resources. Critics complain that a lot of money has been wasted on ineffective enforcement. It’s like trying to protect a town from a rising river with Lego bricks. You can work very hard and spend a lot, but not much will happen. On the other hand, if you bring in bulldozers and truckloads of sandbags, you might save the town. The United States has not brought out the bulldozers and sandbags. If we spent on the drug campaign a fraction of what we’ve spent in Iraq, and did it through a single, unified command, we would have crushed drug trafficking long ago. 

2. If drugs are legalized, the criminals will go away. 

Did you see the Godfather movies? Especially Godfather II about the early days? Do you remember the scene when Prohibition ended and the family sat around the table with college catalogues to find new careers? No? It didn’t happen. 

Neither did criminals walk away from alcohol. Moonshine is still being made and sold. Legally made alcohol is still being stolen and sold to evade taxation. When I went to college in South Carolina, alcohol could not be sold after sundown. There was at least one person I knew of in my little hamlet who sold liquor and beer out of his garage every night.  

And for whom will the drugs be legal? In my state, alcohol cannot be purchased by people under 21 or tobacco by anyone under 18. Will marijuana be allowed for ten year-olds? No? Then the criminals are still in business. 

Also, druggies have a core belief that the stuff sold legally is not as potent as the stuff on the streets. As soon as it becomes legal, there will be moves to take out the carcinogens, and curb abuse, etc. If the user has to buy from a state store, he knows that his name will go into a database somewhere—it doesn’t matter what officials say. They’re going to get your picture from hidden cameras in the stores and know who you are. 

A few years ago, someone in New York City began selling fentanyl, a synthetic heroin-like drug, to junkies. The problem is that fenanyl is 100 times more powerful than heroin, and overdosing is 100 times more likely. People died. The city launched a campaign to warn addicts about this poison in their midst. What happened? The result was an increased demand for fentanyl. Junkies believed that the victims who died were careless and didn’t know how to handle the stuff, but “that wouldn’t happen to me.” Besides, “a hundred times more potent?” Man, what a high that must be! 

3. Let the states regulate it. 

Right now we only have national borders to worry about. If one state legalizes a drug and another doesn’t, the trucks are going to start rolling. The mafia already makes money transporting cigarettes from North Carolina, where taxes are low, to New York—and they’re not the only ones. Al-Qaeda has supported their activities with U.S. tobacco smuggling as well.  State borders are too porous for the states to regulate drugs independently.

4. The prisons are overcrowded with drug criminals. 

Prison is an occupational hazard for people who engage in criminal activities. I have little sympathy for people who roll the dice and lose. There do need to be alternatives to the current system that offers such incredible rewards for risky enterprise. 

I say that we should go after the users. They don’t have the enormous profit incentives to blind them. And, take courts out of the mix. Drug addiction and use is a medical problem. It is also contagious in the sense that if there is one user in the community, he will convert others. We set up quarantine camps. The studies I’ve read say that it takes 24 months to properly cleanse a body of narcotics. Using that as a baseline, anyone who tests positive for an illegal substance will be immediately shipped to a quarantine camp for 24 months of weekly tests that show no drugs in the system. Any positive test results will start the clock over. The camps will provide counseling, academic and vocational education, and gainful employment. If the camps can take 20 – 30% of users off the street at all times, drug use and trafficking will drop and keep dropping because many (maybe most) of the camp alumni will not become users when they are released. The program will not be cheap, but the reduction in losses to crime and in crime prevention should offset it. 

5. Marijuana is safer than alcohol. 

If alcohol and tobacco were new products, they would never get approval. We are stuck with them due to centuries of practice. That said, I support the use of marijuana for medical purposes. And for people dying and in chronic pain, whatever helps, let them do it. 

But, I have known people whose long term use of recreational drugs, pot and who knows what else, have left them barely coherent. And, the carninogens in marijuana rival those in tobacco. Why would we want to expand those effects through legalization?  Aren't medical costs in this country high enough?

5. What about other drugs? 

I do not believe that anything that intoxicates a person should automatically be banned—or approved. There is debate now about salvia divinorum, a plant that has hallucinogenic properties. Other than making users behave stupidly, I have not seen any studies that show adverse long term effects or links to disease. Leave it alone until the science is in. 

Meanwhile, sex is risky on so many different levels. Fried foods, and salty foods, and corn syrup, and caffeine, and on and on-- There are already lots of legal products that make a body feel better, but may wind up killing it. We’ve got enough of these already.

Bird Flu Flyer

Yesterday, I received an ad in the mail for a book about secret remedies and cures that have been supressed by the establishment. Having worked for the government, I share that skeptical viewpoint. However, I take issue with one of the arguments used in the flyer, and bring it up here because I fear that it may become a popular myth.

The writer said that a few years ago the world was in an uproar over bird flu and the impending epidemic. Where is it? he asked. Isn’t that proof of incompetence on the part of the government and medical establishment?

No. In the news today was a report of poultry flocks in South Korea destroyed after some of the birds developed bird flu. Actions like that have—so far—prevented the virus from spreading and evolving.

There is nothing automatic about evolution. There is no natural progression of diseases from animal to human. There are perhaps millions of trial-and-error mutations that affect the adaptation of the disease. Some of these changes may allow the disease to jump to other species and some of the mutatiions of the new strain may become contagious within the new species--unless there is a vigorous effort to interupt the transmission.

Around the world, birds with the H5N1 strain of avian flu have been destroyed. The few people who have contracted the flu from their flocks have been quarantined. The inevitability that something terrible would be produced from an infinite number of mutations was arrested by preventing the infinite number of mutations from occurring.

I agree that the panic whipped up by the media was inappropriate to the actual threat, but the response by governments around the world was entirely appropriate—they prevented disaster.

The government—and I mean ours—is inefficient and clumsy and slow and typically refighting the last war when faced with a new one. But, when it gets focused on a problem and is given adequate resources, it gets the job done.

That’s why the bird flu never got off the ground.

Baby, it’s warm outside

As proponents of doing nothing are quick to point out, global warming has happened before and we’re all here, right? So, let’s argue about taxes and immigrants and leave the climate alone.

Except, the climate is not going to leave us alone. Brian Fagan has written a fascinating book called, The Great Warming that explores the effects of the last warm cycle (check out www.brianfagan.com). Fagan is an archaeologist with no political ax to grind. He simply looked at what happened to the world during the period 800 AD to 1200 AD. Northern climates did pretty well over all with record harvests and extended growing seasons. Southern areas, however, from Angkor Wat to the Mayans suffered great multi-generational droughts that brought down previously powerful civilizations.
In those days, of course, the populations were much smaller. Like the pueblo Indians in the American southwest, they could abandon their ancestral homes and move where the water was.

Overlay that climatic situation onto today’s world of massive populations and hard borders, and you don’t need a PhD to show you the problems. Any benefits that might appear in the northern regions will be more than offset by the clamor of tropical populations fleeing drought and famine and/or fomenting revolutions and wars.

And, this is not the problem for some vague future generation to worry about. We already have drought in the southwest and the southeastern United States. Georgia is trying to move its border to acquire more water. California is concerned about being able to irrigate its farm lands. Meanwhile, some of the richest farmland in the still wet northeast has been paved over or turned into housing developments. A generation ago, futurists talked about the harvesting the sea to feed the teeming millions. Between pollution and overfishing, that possibility has been pretty much shut off. The rising cost of oil and the conversion of corn to biofuel have already raised food prices. Extended drought should exacerbate the expense of eating and sharply increase the numbers of those suffering from malnutrition.

Solutions to big problems require expensive answers so we can’t expect to hear anything useful until after the election. Come next January, however, we need to address the issue of water resources in this country, in this hemisphere, and in the rest of the world. As much of the planet dries up, we in the United States will pay for it one way or another, and it will be more expensive later.

Morgellons Disease

I subscribe to a health information e-newsletter authored by Dr. William C. Douglas. Yesterday, the good doctor alerted me to a disease or condition that was new to me: Morgellons Disease. It may be new to you since it was only named in 2002. Apparently it was the media disease-of-the-week for awhile, but I must have been somewhere else at the time.

Anyway, Morgellons is a new name for what may or may not be an old condition. Experts are not agreed that it is a separate disease and point to similarities with symptoms of existing diseases. The characteristic symptoms are skin sores, itching like insects are crawling under your skin, and fibers of various colors under the skin. There is also joint pain, fatigue, etc. --I'm not going to go on about the condition because this is not a medical blog.

Dr. Douglas cites outbreaks of Morgellons in the Southwest and attributes the disease to illegal immigration. This is quite a leap. He also castigates the CDC for employing Kaiser Permanente to do a study based on their insured customers. He asserts that Kaiser patients are not in close proximity to the border and are not indigent, so the study cannot address his concerns.

The Morgellons Research Foundation has had reports of the disease from all 50 states and 15 foreign countries including Canada, the U.K., the Netherlands and Australia. That doesn't mean that illegal immigrants have not had a role in the spread of this disease--if it is one--but it does make the case less self-evident.

My concern is that this or any new medical alert will be blamed on illegal immigrants, thus fanning the flames of the rising bigotry against Hispanics and also slowing the discovery of the real reason for the problem. My second concern is that since illegal immigrants, as a group, are the least likely members of our society to seek medical help, they are the ideal human vectors of epidemics. Forcing undocumented individuals into hiding only increases our risk to any contagions they carry and makes medical research that much more difficult.

For more information on Morgellons, I refer you to the CDC website or to Wikipedia.

Against nature

Have you wondered lately about hurricane Flossie approaching Hawaii? Apparently it is a rare, but not unheard of occurrence. But, what about tropical storm Chantal that missed the U.S., brushed Canada and is headed for Iceland? And, then there are the (alleged) tornadoes in New York City. Everyone talks about the weather, but who knew that we were actually doing something about it? Other than Al Gore?

The reason that I'm writing this, however, is not to complain about storms. I saw an article on BBC.com the other day--August 8 actually--reporting the extinction of the Yangtze river dolphin. While you may not care about the extinction of an animal you never heard of before now, there is a reason why you should. This fresh water dolphin with the elongated beak was the last member of the Lipotidae family. The Lipotidae separated from the other aquatic mammal families 40 to 20 million years ago, and yet survived in the Yangtze until this year. The cause of their demise was most likely overfishing--which took away their food supply.

When I read the BBC article, I went to the Chinese news outlets to see what they had to say about this milestone. Nothing apparently, or nothing I could find. However, BeijingReview.com carried an August 3 story about the endangered Chinese paddlefish which are either newly extinct or nearing that condition. They also lived in the Yangtze until dams interfered with their ability to spawn.

Not one to give up, I went on to the Chinese People's Daily online and found an August 8 story that brought me back to global warming. Scientists in the Transantarctic Mountains near the South Pole have been studying the oldest ice on the planet. They have found microbes frozen in the ice that are revived when thawed. With the ice packs melting at both poles, this has the scientists excited. Once released, the younger microbes double in number every few days, the oldest ones take 70 days to double. In germs that are too old to be resuscitated in tact, viable DNA pieces are released that may be absorbed by modern bacteria or protozoans. The upshot is that the biological consequences of these new critters are totally unknown. Shades of Jurassic Park--only smaller--and harder to kill.

That depressed me enough to stop looking. When I was a Boy Scout, I was taught to leave a place in better condition than when I found it. It's too bad that idea hasn't caught on.