magic, deity or an alive "nature" did it?

LATimes discussing the latest Nobel Prize. 

I'll have to read about what it actually was about later, but the firstparagraph in the article says:

 

Since the dawn of life on our planet, 3.7 billion years ago, nature has used the power of evolution to create a vast diversity of molecules with an ever-increasing array of chemical capabilities.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Science awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday to three scientists who have harnessed that power and sped it up, allowing them to create never-before-seen chemical reactions in a process called directed evolution.

uh, nature is not able to do anything. the "breakthru" of Darwin was that things just happened due to chance, with no plan at all.

the "power" of evolution is a meaningless phrase. It merely suggests that evolution is a force, no just randomness that sort of just happens.

IF you think Nature did these things, you assume something is directing these things: i.e. God.

the forbidden word that Darwin's followers preferred to ignore and censor.

And if Nature did these things, you have to assume there is a plan behind life, and things are not just random.

CSI 1850 Smallpox?

From Fox, 

A PBS documentary reveals the identity -- and an artist's digitally created image -- or the woman whose well-preserved body was found in a metal coffin in Queens seven years ago. (Impossible Factual/Joe Mullins)

When a backhoe unearthed a woman's body, some thought it was a recent crime.

But it turns out that she died in the 1850s but was buried in an iron coffin that slowed her decomposition.

A testament to the coffins’ effectiveness, Peterson’s skin was intact to the point that she appeared to have been deceased for only a week.

Warnasch noted that “smallpox lesions covered her body.” Initially he was concerned by this: “The body was so well preserved that I would not have been shocked if the smallpox virus had survived.”

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that the smallpox had degraded to a nonthreatening level. An autopsy revealed that the disease had infected Peterson’s brain and most likely killed her.

so how long could the virus live? This article discusses. Some anecdotes suggest 100 plus years, but it could have been a coincidence since small pox was around back then.

what if you saved a life and noboday cared?

how about if you saved 16 million lives?


My friend in Zimbabwe lost her college aged niece a couple months ago. She was ready to start college but died unexpectedly of an infection.

Sigh.

but the miracle was that she lived that long, because she was born of an HIV positive mother, in the days before the disease was recognized and easily diagnosed, let alone treated. Most of these children died in childhood of ordinary childhood diseases.

Her father died of HIV about that time, again in the days when there was no treatment available, and what treatment was around in the west was very very expensive, too expensive even for the African middle class.

But things changed when GWB decided to spend money to save these lives.

From PJMedia:

WASHINGTON -- The George W. Bush initiative to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa has saved more than 16 million lives so far, according to a new administration report on the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

That includes 14 million men, women, and children on lifesaving drugs and 2.2 million babies born HIV-free to HIV-positive mothers.

The program has also helped 6.4 million orphans and caregivers, and provided 15.2 million men and boys with circumcision to lower the risk of HIV transmission.

Additionally, a quarter of a million medical personnel have been trained to improve care for HIV and other outbreaks.

In his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush announced the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, as "seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many." "As our nation moves troops and builds alliances to make our world safer, we must also remember our calling, as a blessed country, is to make the world better,"

Bush said then. "Today, on the continent of Africa, nearly 30 million people have the AIDS virus, including 3 million children under the age of 15. There are whole countries in Africa where more than one-third of the adult population carries the infection. More than 4 million require immediate drug treatment. Yet across that continent, only 50,000 AIDS victims -- only 50,000 -- are receiving the medicine they need."

At the time, the cost for life-saving antiretroviral treatment had dropped from $12,000 a year to under $300 a year, "which places a tremendous possibility within our grasp," Bush said. Bush had asked Congress for $15 billion over the next five years to treat 2 million HIV patients and prevent 7 million new infections. That was the birth of PEPFAR.

this gets little publicity in the USA because Bush was a Republican, and the press is a Democratic echo box, and never sees anything good about Bush (or Trump).

the docs at the hospital where I used to work were involved in the program, and the public health sister that I worked with ran a clinic outside the capital to monitor the medicine (until Mugabe demolished the clinic and  much of the suburb in revenge LINK)

No I didn't work with this: I left my second African stint in the early 1980s. I suspect we had cases, because we had a couple cases of kaposi's sarcoma etc. but it was not recognized then, and people often died of trivial infections that we attributed to the low protein malnutrition that was common.

Ancient plauges

cross posted from my main blog


right now I'm listening to The-Fate-of-Rome-Climate-Disease-and-the-End-of-an-Empire on Scribd.

Scary.

The theory is that various plagues resulted in depopulation in the Roman empire, and the climate variations (volcanic?) caused famines.

Plagues that weakened Rome includes the Antonine plague (? Measles? Smallpox?) and the plague of Cyprian.(measles? Smallpox? a viral Hemorrhagic fever?)

Measles can be very serious in malnourished people and in adults, and can kill even today. But it may have mutated to be less severe with time. Measles was first described by a Persian physician in the 9th century, but some historians wonder if it mutated (from Rinderpest of cattle or distemper in dogs) long before then.

Ancient mummies howeveer do show evidence of smallpox scars, so we know that disease has been around for quite awhile.

Cyprian's plague was blamed on that diabolic sect the Christians (/s) but one wonders if the custom of Christians for careing for the poor and sick might have resulted in converts too. No data on this: Just wondering.

Wikipedia on the Diseases of Rome. Don't forget Malaria, which was more widespread in "temperate" climates than most moderns realize.

from the article: Mapping smallpox, malaria and Leprosy:

Malaria deaths in the United States, 1870 census.

But the really big plague that probably stopped the swift recovery of the western Roman empire was the plauge of Justinian.

Justinian's plague was probably Bubonic plague, and began in Egypt/Ethiopia, although the black death probably started in China.
The germ does hide in various little critters: Gerbils, rats, etc.
So IHS docs would see a couple cases a year in the Navajo reservation, and there are spotted reports about cases in Islamic terrorists catching it probably from living in dirty caves.

DNA studies suggest that it was around in the silk road area long before then,

from Nature

and SciAm wonders if this might have encouraged locals to migrate to safer pastures (i.e. to Europe and India). But DNA suggests that this strain was a lot less infectious.

But the analysis revealed that plague might have been less transmissible in the early Bronze Age. The six oldest Bronze Age strains lacked a gene called ymt that helps Y. pestis to colonize the guts of fleas, which serve as an important intermediary. In outbreaks of bubonic plague, infected fleas (often travelling on rodents) transmit the bacteria to humans living nearby. Without fleas as a go-between, Y. pestis spreads much less efficiently through blood (where it is known as septicaemic plague) or saliva droplets (pneumonic plague).

yet one does wonder what was behind a lot of bronze age plagues in the Middle East.


and one wonders if this is what hit the Philistines after they stole the Arc of the Covenant ("Hemorrhoids" is the usual translation.) and if this might have been the plague that devestated the Hittites after they went against Egypt in the Battle of Kadesh and took home some POWs as slave (and the plague followed them).

but this article claims it was the Hittites who spread Tularemia via infected sheep and they caught it too. UKTelegraph article:

The method of attack was simple. The Hittites would leave the sheep outside the targeted city. Locals would bring them in and either breed them or eat them, spreading the disease.

and this article suggests it was Tularemia that hit the Philistines too.

Global Security has a history of the use of Tularemia as biowarfare, and mentions the debate if the Tularemia in German troops at Stalingrad was biowarfare or just from normal infections. Discussion here.

Tularemia makes one sick for a couple of weeks, and has a low (under 20percent) mortality, and luckily for modern man, responds to antibiotics.

whereas Y.Pestic (black plague) works quite quickly to kill you.

more on Justinian plague here.

HIV in China

AlJ has an article about the one million cases of HIV in China.

More than 820,000 people had AIDS or were HIV-positive at the end of June, up by 100,000 from the year previous,,,.

More than 40,000 new HIV/AIDS cases were reported in the second quarter alone in China, with 93.1 percent having contracted the virus through sex.

China has experienced scandals related to HIV transfusion through blood transfusions in the past, the number of HIV infections by blood transfusions has "essentially been reduced to zero", according to Xinhua.

In the 1990s, rural parts of China - particularly the central province of Henan - endured the country's most debilitating AIDS epidemic. It stemmed from a tainted government-backed blood donation programme and infected tens of thousands of people, including entire villages.

the article ignores the story of HIV via illicit drug use. 

After nearly three decades of being virtually drug free, use of heroin and other illicit drugs has re-emerged in China as a major public health problem. One result is that drug abuse, particularly heroin injection, has come to play a predominant role in fueling China's AIDS epidemic.

The first outbreak of HIV among China's IDUs was reported in the border area of Yunnan province between China and Myanmar where drug trafficking is heavy. Since then drug-related HIV has spread to all 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities. 

and of course, all the do gooders go on to blame the "Criminalization" of drug use that "marginalizes" people who inject drugs.

 sounds like Soros' "open society" is being sucessful, since one of their aims is to legalize ALL drugs.

The Showman who saved 6500 lives

via Atlas Obscura: When Infants in Incubators were sideshow attractions:

The premise of the attraction was straightforward enough: pay an entrance fee to see something you wouldn’t usually be able to see.

What set Couney’s sideshow apart was that his subjects were premature babies in incubators, receiving care that hospitals did not provide.

The entrance fees he collected went toward his operating costs, including round-the-clock care and wet nurses. Couney did not charge the parents of his tiny patients.

Couney visited the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo with his baby incubators, 1901. PUBLIC DOMAIN

Reporting in 1903, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle described the “seriousness and value of the system shown.” A visit to Couney’s showcase revealed rows of warmed, glass-fronted incubators supplied with filtered air, containing “little pitiful pinched looking waifs… the only things that indicate that they are alive are the healthy color of their little faces and the faint flutterings of movement which are perceptible on closer inspection.”

===========

NPR story of one of these children:

Lucille Horn was one of them. Born in 1920, she, too, ended up in an incubator on Coney Island.
"My father said I was so tiny, he could hold me in his hand," she tells her own daughter, Barbara, on a visit with StoryCorps in Long Island, N.Y. "I think I was only about 2 pounds, and I couldn't live on my own. I was too weak to survive."
She'd been born a twin, but her twin died at birth. And the hospital didn't show much hope for her, either: The staff said they didn't have a place for her; they told her father that there wasn't a chance in hell that she'd live.
"They didn't have any help for me at all," Horn says. "It was just: You die because you didn't belong in the world."
But her father refused to accept that for a final answer. He grabbed a blanket to wrap her in, hailed a taxicab and took her to Coney Island — and to Dr. Couney's infant exhibit.Dr. Martin Couney holds Beth Allen, one of his incubator babies, at Luna Park in Coney Island. This photo was taken in 1941.Courtesy of Beth Allen"How do you feel knowing that people paid to see you?" her daughter asks.
"It's strange, but as long as they saw me and I was alive, it was all right," Horn says. "I think it was definitely more of a freak show. Something that they ordinarily did not see."
Horn's healing was on display for paying customers for quite a while. It was only after six months that she finally left the incubators.
Years later, Horn decided to return to see the babies — this time as a visitor. When she stopped in, Couney happened to be there, and she took the opportunity to introduce herself.
"And there was a man standing in front of one of the incubators looking at his baby," Horn says, "and Dr. Couney went over to him and he tapped him on the shoulder."
"Look at this young lady," Couney told the man then. "She's one of our babies. And that's how your baby's gonna grow up."

What are kids actually doing?

The NYTimes is asking people to relate stories of their sexual escapades in high school and colleges.

They will then presumably presume this survey is significant: but it's not, since anecdotes don't give you an idea of what is going on, and of course, people will lie and make up stories.

If you want hard data, check the CDC data: Youth Risk Surveillance survey which I cited below to put the pedophilia crisis into perspective.

Nationwide, 45.3% of students had had sexual contact with only the opposite sex, 1.6% had had sexual contact with only the same sex, 5.3% had had sexual contact with both sexes, and 47.8% had had no sexual contact (Supplementary Table 5).

So yes, there are virgins in high school.
....
and yes, date rape happens

Nationwide, 7.4% of students had ever been physically forced to have sexual intercourse when they did not want to (Supplementary Table 34). The prevalence of having been forced to have sexual intercourse was higher among female (11.3%) than male (3.5%) students; higher among white female (11.2%), black female (11.7%), and Hispanic female (11.2%) than white male (3.3%), black male (3.4%), and Hispanic male (3.6%) students

.................
and date rape rates varies according to your sexual orientation:

Analyses based on the question ascertaining sexual identity indicated that nationwide, 5.4% of heterosexual students; 21.9% of gay, lesbian, and bisexual students; and 13.1% of not sure students had ever been physically forced to have sexual intercourse when they did not want to (Supplementary Table 34). .

.........
rates vary widely in different areas:

Analyses of state and large urban school district data indicated that across 34 states, the overall prevalence of having been forced to have sexual intercourse ranged from 5.7% to 19.2% across state surveys (median: 8.3%) (Supplementary Table 35). Across 20 large urban school districts, the prevalence ranged from 6.8% to 11.9% (median: 9.2%)

............
and a lot of kids are assaulted or forced into sexual situations short of rape. Note that this analyzed only those who were dating, so cut the percentage in half to see the actual percentage of all kids.

Among the 68.3% of students nationwide who dated or went out with someone during the 12 months before the survey,¶ 6.9% had been forced to do “sexual things” (e.g., kissing, touching, or being physically forced to have sexual intercourse) they did not want to do one or more times during the 12 months before the survey by someone they were dating or going out with (i.e., sexual dating violence) (Supplementary Table 38).

and the rate varies according to who you are dating, i.e. heterosexual vs homosexual vs not sure;

Analyses based on the question ascertaining sexual identity indicated that nationwide, among the students who dated or went out with someone during the 12 months before the survey, 5.5% of heterosexual students; 15.8% of gay, lesbian, and bisexual students; and 14.1% of not sure students had experienced sexual dating violence

---------------
so kids are all promiscuous, right? uh, not really:

Nationwide, 9.7% of students had had sexual intercourse with four or more persons during their life (Supplementary Table 137). The prevalence of having had sexual intercourse with four or more persons was higher among male (11.6%) than female (7.9%) students; 

 -------------
but what about normal intercourse? a lot of statistics ask who has had intercourse at any time, but the actual number who are routinely sexually active is lower than you think

Nationwide, 28.7% of students had had sexual intercourse with at least one person during the 3 months before the survey (i.e., currently sexually active) ,,,,The prevalence of being currently sexually active was higher among 10th-grade (24.9%), 11th-grade (35.3%), and 12th-grade (44.3%) than 9th-grade (12.9%) students;

This pretty well agrees with what I saw in practice: younger teenagers are at great risk for problems, including pregnancy and STDs, and that group continues to have problems:

but a lot of more mature teenagers are having intercourse with regular partners. Since in my day, I have had friends who married at age 16 to 18, I figure this is just the same behavior as their grand parents, except they don't marry nowadays.

In summary:

 there is also a subgroup of teenagers at risk for sexual coercion.

You just can't arrest every time this is done, but school and public health authorities need to address this (as do churches).

This behavior to be addressed, but it is not universal.

By the way: The survey also has statistics on bullying, threats of violence, kids carrying guns, using alcohol and tobacco and drugs, were depressed, thought about suicide, and if they ate their veggies.

 Nationwide, 26.6% of students had eaten vegetables (green salad, potatoes [not counting French fries, fried potatoes, or potato chips], carrots, or other vegetables) two or more times per day during the 7 days before the survey