Effect Measure: Cats and other carnivores
Effect Measure: Cats and other carnivores points out that, while few humans eat completely raw birds - cats do!
And cats live in close proximity to humans. Cats are also mammals, so their immune system is more similar to humans than birds.
So far, a mammal-to-mammal easily transmissible form of the H5N virus does not seem to have shown up (though bird-to-bird is going full speed).
3 Fatal Gator Attacks in 1 Week Worry Fla. - Yahoo! News
These are unfortunate, unrelated coincidences,
commission spokesman Willie Puz said - AP News reported yesterday.
That phrase always gets my attention.
Associated Press:
MIAMI - Trapper Todd Hardwick typically gets about four nuisance alligator calls each day, but he is getting 15 now, after an unprecedented burst of three deadly gator attacks on people in a week.
The article mentions that the area where the woman jogger was attacked was part of the everglades, not too long ago. Now it is a suburban community.
When someone built homes there and told people to move in, they forgot to build a new home for the alligators to move out to and live.
As humans increase in numbers and move into choice climates, it is said they
displace
the species that are already there. In practice, they wipe out the wildlife homes and, if the animals put up a fight or or taste good - they outright kill them. Not a pleasant description, but often true.
While the morality of the actions is debatable, the bottom line is that certain species numbers are dwelling. While dogs, cats, and rats have made out well from their association with man - certain other species have not been so lucky.
No need to list them here. You know where to find the lists - and what most of the species are, already.
ABC News: New England Reeling From Flooding
ABC News reported today that the flooding in New England last week stood out in terms of both how severe it was, and how long it has been since the last time the area flooded like this.
ABC News:
Record rainfall %u2014 three months' worth of downpour in less than a week %u2014 has brought parts of New England and Massachusetts' Merrimack River the area's worst levels of flooding in 70 years.
Floods seem to be a major problem for US coastal cities now.
It has always been almost an annual affair in mid-Atlantic communities in north Carolina.
However, it has been a long time since we have seen floods in New Orleans and New England that match what they have been subjected to recently.
In the past year, experts reported that the sole data indicating global warming was not happening - came from one solitary defective satellite. Without the data from that one bird with the glitch, everyone finally agreed global warming and climate change was real. So then the debate moved on to weather it was really a problem.
There have been some really weird floods around the world in the past year. Once subjects get in the news, they tend to get better coverage as they catch the public's attention.
However, a lot of these floods are not in annual flood zones like those along the Mississippi or the Nile.
They are in Saudi Arabia, in central/eastern Europe, and New England. The results are people drowning in flash floods in the dessert, huge amounts of fertile farmland getting submerged underwater, municipal dams being wrecked, and city storm sewers breaking.
Flooding is nothing new. Nor are its consequences: destroyed homes, town evacuations, mudslides, drownings, property damage, and public infrastructure being damaged.
However, over the last year - the places where the floods occurred and the frequency+magnitude seems to be different than usual.
Sure, even variations are nothing new - but ...
all of these,
all in the same year?
Effect Measure: Indonesian cluster: What, me worry?
Right about the time the Indonesian volcano erupted in May 2006, an interesting report came out.
It disclosed that there was a cluster of 8 people infected with avian flu. That in itself was not surprising. Lots of the poultry birds there have it and people have been getting infected from the birds.
What was interesting is that in the case of this cluster, there did not seem to be birds around these people that were carrying the virus.
Effect Measure: Indonesian cluster: What, me worry?:
One thing I've learned in many years as an epidemiologist is that disease outbreaks are rarely what they appear to be at first. Sometimes they are worse and sometimes they are better, but mostly they are different. I've spent a lot of years dealing with cancer clusters and I am a strong believer these clusters are real. But there is a school of thought that says they aren't and there is a strong argument to make there. I disagree with them, for technical reasons. The one thing I know about clusters, though, is that it is important to verify all the initial information. A large proportion of the time the cancers in a cancer cluster aren't even cancer, or they are a different kind of cancer than initially reported. Numerous other facts usually turn out to be different than originally thought .
So in the Indonesian cluster, as with other reports about bird flu that come to us from far away, filtered through media reports and machine translations, I now prefer to wait a bit and see how it shakes out. I didn't do that in the early days of the bird flu problem but I should have. I've checked the diagnoses with a source in-country and I'm satisfied it is H5N1. But the other information, like dates of onset, are always problematic, so I'm waiting to see what develops.
My personal opinion is that the Indonesian cluster looks like it is a possible instance of either increased bird to human transmission or an instance of human to human. These cases have occurred before, but the size of this cluster makes one ask if something has changed. Henry Niman derides the idea it is enhanced bird to human transmission on the grounds that bird flu is very hard to catch from a bird. True. There are millions of bird human exposures and very few human cases. On the other hand it is hard to catch from other people, too. So I'm not sure I understand Henry's point (although I am quite sure he'll tell me, in his usual gracious way).
Wait-and-see seems like a good policy. More news on the cluster will undoubtedly come out. The volcano might interfere with this a little, by drawing attention away from this subject briefly.
However, because bird flu - especially the H5N1 - has gotten so much attention from media and governments worldwide, they will not drop this story before the facts about how these people got infected come out.
This Is News to Me!
I have been wanting a convenient place to track current news events that interest me.
I am not really into gossip, politics, or minding other peoples business.
Rather, I find emerging patterns, trends, and science far more interesting.
Some things just catch my eye and my interest.
Beyond what I have said, I cannot really articulate the rules for what is interesting to me, so I will not bother trying.
This weblog is just sort of a richer form of bookmarking for me.
I have tried bookmarking things with my browser, and the problem is that no browsers provide a way to capture all of the metadata about each web page that I want to capture. Also, as I bookmark more things, the bookmarking menus in my web browser get slower. This frustrates me.
Social bookmarking sites, in other words, those on the web - suffer slightly less from that problem. However, they are slow, unreliable, and limited in capacity. This frustrates me too.
I have read about the upcoming Google Notebook (
review) feature. It sounds closer to what I would like to be doing. However, it is just going into beta now.
I understand how blogs work. Blogs are fee. Lets of bookmarklets exist to save a little record of a blog entry or a news story into a weblog. For now, I think that will be fine for me.
I wish Google furnished Blogspot with a tagging feature for postings but they do not. This is one of my biggest sources of frustration about blogspot.com - no tagging. I have messed around with using Technrati tags but they are inconvenient, and an imperfect substitute.
However, I am an optimist. I think this latter problem will get solved by someone someday kind of soon.
If not, well - whatever.
This is just a bunch of scraps of information about some apparently random things going on. My intuition might tell me they are significant. But that has yet to be proven. I am just keeping track here, nothing more.
This is not really a journal of my thoughts or doings. Instead, it is a log of events.
