H5N1

Dr. Carroll as king of Haiti

Via the Peoria Journal Star, Dr. John Carroll writes from Cité Soleil: If I Were King of Haiti…. Excerpt:

This post is GUARANTEED to make everyone mad. Liberals, conservatives, Haitians, non-Haitians, grassroot workers, Lavalas, non-Lavalas, people who wear ties, people who carry machetes, the Haitian diaspora, MINUSTAH, academics, rednecks, Christians, and non-Christians. Everyone will be upset. I guarantee it. And I am so sorry… 

If I were King of Haiti here is what I would do with Cite Soleil: I would level it. I would destroy it with bulldozers…after I removed the people of course. 

Soleil would no longer be the poorest slum in the western hemisphere. It would no longer exist. With Haitian labor I would cart off the rubble and refuse and the decaying bones up Route 9 to Titanyen and bury all of it with the thousands of political victims and earthquake victims interred there. 

And it would only take me two days to do this.

Actually, this doesn't make me mad. Following Haiti's troubles with cholera and poverty—yes, that makes me mad.

UN: Disaster losses "out of control"

Via ReliefWeb, a report from the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction: Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2013 - From Shared Risk to Shared Value: the Business Case for Disaster Risk Reduction. This has obvious consequences for public health. Excerpt, with my bolding:

The United Nations today issued a stark warning to the world's business community that economic losses from disasters are "out of control" and will continue to escalate unless disaster risk management becomes a core part of business investment strategies. 

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said: "Governments bear the responsibility for disaster risk reduction. But the level of risk is also related to the where and the how of investment by the private sector, which is responsible for 70 to 85% of worldwide investment in new buildings, industry and critical infrastructure." 

He continued: "We have carried out a review of disaster losses in 56 countries. Our startling finding is that direct losses from floods, earthquakes and drought have been underestimated by at least 50%. So far this century, direct losses from disasters are in the range of $2.5 trillion. This is unacceptable when we have the knowledge to reduce the losses and benefit from the gains. 

"Let us not shy away from the meaning of these numbers: Economic losses from disasters are out of control. They can only be reduced in partnership with the private sector, including investment banks and insurance companies. For too long, markets have placed greater value on short-term returns than on sustainability and resilience. At long last, we are coming to understand that reducing exposure to disaster risk is not a cost but an opportunity to make that investment more attractive in the long-term." 

The UN Secretary-General was speaking today as he launched a ground-breaking report from the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) which is built on important new data sets including reviews of national disaster loss databases, survey responses from 1,300 SMEs in disaster-prone locations in the Americas, and a review of risk management in 14 major corporations including ABB, ARUP, BG Group, Citigroup, General Electric, HCC Group, HIRCO Group, Hitachi Group, InterContinental Hotels Group, Nestlé, NTT East Corporation, Roche, Shapoorhi Pallonji&Co. Ltd., and Walmart. 

The UNISDR 2013 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR13): Creating Shared Value: the Business Case for Disaster Risk Reduction highlights how the transformation of the global economy over the last 40 years has led to rapid increases in disaster risk in low, medium and high income countries.

Carbon dioxide hits levels not seen for three million years

Via The Globe and Mail, a New York Times report: Carbon dioxide hits levels not seen for three million years. Excerpt:

Carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million was first seen in the Arctic last year and had also spiked above that level in hourly readings at Mauna Loa. But the average reading for an entire day surpassed that level at Mauna Loa for the first time Thursday, according to both NOAA and Scripps. 

Carbon dioxide rises and falls on a seasonal cycle and the level will dip below 400 this summer, as leaf growth in the Northern Hemisphere pulls about 10 billion tons of carbon out of the air. But experts say it will be a brief reprieve – the moment is approaching when no measurement of the ambient air anywhere on Earth, in any season, will produce a reading below 400. 

Governments have been trying since 1992 to rein in emissions, but far from slowing, emissions are rising at an accelerating pace. “It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” said Maureen Raymo, a Columbia University earth scientist.

And for many of us, the disaster will be felt as one epidemic or pandemic after another, as well as the breakdown of basic public health measures like clean, adequate water.

Caution: Canadian government may be hazardous to your health

Via Macleans.ca: When science goes silent. The muzzling isn't just of environmental scientists; it's affecting the food supply as well. And this is a government elected by about 40% of the population, most of whom after 7 years of Stephen Harper's Conservatives appear quite content with their choice of rulers; the rest of us, not so much. Excerpt:

As far as the government scientist was concerned, it was a bit of fluff: an early morning interview about great white sharks last summer with Canada AM, the kind of innocuous and totally apolitical media commentary the man used to deliver 30 times or more each year as the resident shark expert in the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). 

So he sent an email off to Ottawa notifying department flaks about the request, and when no response had been received by the next morning, just went ahead and did it. After all, in the past such initiative was rewarded. His superiors were happy to have him grab some limelight for the department and its research, so much so they once gave him an award as the DFO’s spokesperson of the year. 

But as he found out, things have changed under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. Soon after arriving at his offices, the scientist was called before his regional director and given a formal verbal reprimand: talk to the media again without the explicit permission of the minister’s office, he was warned, and there would be serious consequences—like a suspension without pay, or even dismissal. 

“He can’t understand it. The interview was of no consequence and had absolutely no relevance to government policy,” says Gary Corbett, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), the union that represents 30,000 government researchers, technicians and science support workers. “It really burst his bubble. They’ve taken away the impetus to educate the public.” 

Corbett shared details of the incident for the first time with Maclean’s but not the scientist’s identity, for fear he might face further sanction. 

It’s just one of many such stories of muzzled federal scientists and suppressed research that are being brought to the union’s attention, he says. All against the backdrop of sweeping cuts to water, air and wildlife monitoring programs, a total restructuring of federal environmental reviews, and the downloading of responsibility for lakes and rivers to the provinces.

“It’s almost like this government doesn’t want any of this stuff to be open to public discussion,” says the union leader. “What we’re seeing is a total lockdown.”

China: Part of the context of H7N9

Via Shanghai Daily, a grim reminder that China has more public-health problems than H7N9: Bodies of 2 infants found along river.

Police are investigating reports that the corpses of several infants were found in the Xiangjiang River in Hengyang, Hunan Province, the Xiaoxiang Morning Herald reported yesterday. 

The bodies might be those of infants who died in premature birth or induced labor, or newborns who died of disease, said Liao Gaofeng, sector chief with the local health authority. 

"Infant corpses are always seen in the river, at least four times a year," a local fisher surnamed Zhu said. He said he found a dead infant with placenta and umbilical cord attached on Sunday. Three boys found another and buried him in a muddy flat on Tuesday, Zhu said. No information was released on what Zhu did with the body he found. 

A local police officer surnamed Kuang said it is not known whether the corpses were abandoned locally or came from upstream, the paper reported. 

"It is such an inhuman act to leave dead infants in the wild, not only polluting the environment but also spreading diseases," Liao said. He said parents should send corpses to a funeral home for cremation. 

The local health authority is assisting police in the investigation, the paper reported. 

In March 2010, the corpses of 21 fetuses and infants were found under a bridge crossing the Guangfu River on the outskirts of Jining in Shandong Province. Eight of the 21 bodies had tabs with clinic code numbers on their feet. The tabs showed the bodies were from the Affiliated Hospital of Jining Medical University, Xinhua news agency reported. 

In some parts of China, especially in poor rural areas, parents are reluctant to take baby bodies home for a funeral. Instead, they sometimes dump the bodies at hospitals or pay someone to bury them, said Ma Guanghai, who is deputy dean at Shandong University's School of Philosophy and Social Development

H7N9: Guangzhou wildlife projects unaffected

Via China Daily: Guangzhou wildlife projects unaffected. Excerpt:

Wildlife conservation plans in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, remain unaffected by the recent outbreak of the H7N9 bird flu virus in eastern and northern China, officials say. 

Lian Junhao, director of the office of wildlife protection and management under the city's forestry and gardening administration, said Guangzhou still plans to set up two more wild and migrant bird sanctuaries before the end of the year. 

"Guangzhou has strict quarantines before birds and animals are released back into the wild, and wildlife habitats are sterilized monthly," Lian was quoted as saying by Guangzhou Daily. 

"So there is no need to adjust our wildlife plans for Guangzhou," he said. 

According to Lian, Haizhu and Baiyun lakes in the Haizhu and Baiyun districts will become sanctuaries for wild or migrating birds this year. 

Various areas in the southern metropolis — which has warm weather and many wetlands and forest parks — are considered ideal habitats for wild birds in the winter. Large numbers of migrant birds from northern China stop in the city. 

"No wildlife has been found dead or sick since last fall in any of the city's 19 monitoring stations, located in urban areas and the outskirts of the city," added Lian who is an expert in wildlife protection. 

To prevent the H7N9 virus from spreading in Guangdong — which borders Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions — the province's department of forestry has issued an emergency notice to city departments to expand patrols and immediately isolate any area where sick or dead wild birds or poultry are found. 

By the end of Wednesday, Guangdong had reported no H7N9 bird flu cases, according to sources at Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

China: Pigs, dogs perish overnight (but not from H7N9)

Via Shanghai Daily: Pigs, dogs perish overnight. Excerpt:

Hundreds of pigs and dozens of dogs died overnight in central China's Henan Province, apparently victims of a chemical gas leak from an under-fire factory after local authorities excluded the possibility of H7N9 infection, local media reported. 

A total of 238 pigs and 89 dogs have been confirmed dead after local villagers found the carcasses and reported the deaths on Monday morning, a government official in Shanhua Town in Yanshi City said. 

Authorities said the animals had not died due to the current bird flu outbreak, dubbed H7N9 infection, and the carcasses have been spread on lime and buried deep. 

Meanwhile, a further probe into the widely-panned medical product manufacturing factory is ongoing after villagers claimed to have smelled "extremely strong odor," Dahe Daily reported. 

"We always smell chemical odor but the smell was extremely putrid this morning," a villager said on Monday. Residents are blaming the factory for the death of the animals. 

Villagers said the factory has been emitting foul odor for more than a dozen years, and has never stopped production despite wide protests. Instead, its emissions of waste gas have increased and sickened villagers in recent years. The factory has also dumped waste water and polluted a local river.

Millions face starvation as world warms, say scientists

Via The Observer, something to ponder when you've put H7N9 out of your mind: Millions face starvation as world warms, say scientists. And before starvation, public health disasters on a very great scale. Excerpt:

Millions of people could become destitute in Africa and Asia as staple foods more than double in price by 2050 as a result of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts that will transform the way the world farms. 

As food experts gather at two major conferences to discuss how to feed the nine billion people expected to be alive in 2050, leading scientists have told the Observer that food insecurity risks turning parts of Africa into permanent disaster areas. Rising temperatures will also have a drastic effect on access to basic foodstuffs, with potentially dire consequences for the poor. 

Frank Rijsberman, head of the world's 15 international CGIAR crop research centres, which study food insecurity, said: "Food production will have to rise 60% by 2050 just to keep pace with expected global population increase and changing demand. Climate change comes on top of that. The annual production gains we have come to expect … will be taken away by climate change. We are not so worried about the total amount of food produced so much as the vulnerability of the one billion people who are without food already and who will be hit hardest by climate change. They have no capacity to adapt." 

America's agricultural economy is set to undergo dramatic changes over the next three decades, as warmer temperatures devastate crops, according to a US government report. The draft US National Climate Assessment report predicts that a gradually warming climate and unpredictable severe weather, such as the drought that last year spread across two-thirds of the continental United States, will have serious consequences for farmers. 

The research by 60 scientists predicts that all crops will be affected by the temperature shift as well as livestock and fruit harvests. The changing climate, it says, is likely to lead to more pests and less effective herbicides. The $50bn Californian wine industry could shrink as much as 70% by 2050. 

The report lays bare the stark consequences for the $300bn US farm industry, stating: "Many agricultural regions will experience declines in crop and livestock production. The rising incidence of weather extremes will have increasingly negative impacts on crop and livestock production. Climate disruptions have increased in the recent past and are projected to increase further over the next 25 years. 

"Critical thresholds are already being exceeded. Many regions will experience declines in crop and livestock production from increased stress due to weeds, diseases, insect pests and other climate change-induced stresses. Climate disruptions to agricultural production have increased in the recent past and are projected to increase further". 

Lead author Jerry Hatfield, director of the US government's national laboratory for agriculture and the environment, said that climate change was already causing weather extremes to worsen. Very hot nights, fewer cool days and more heatwaves, storms and floods have already devastated crops and will have "increasingly negative" impacts, he said. 

The report follows recent disastrous harvests in Russia, Ukraine, Australia and the US. In 2010, climate-driven factors led to a 33% drop in wheat production in Russia and a 19% drop in Ukraine. Separate climate events in each case led to a 14% drop in Canada's wheat output, and a 9% drop in Australia. 

A separate US government-funded study of the fertile Lower Mekong basin, which includes Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, states that temperatures there could rise twice as much as previously expected, devastating food supplies for the 100 million people expected to live there by 2050. 

"We've found that this region is going to experience climate extremes in temperature and rainfall beyond anything that we expected", says Jeremy Carew-Reid, author of the Climate Change Adaptation and Impact Study for the Lower Mekong.

Japan: "Fukushima No. 1 is still in an extremely unstable condition"

Via The Japan Times, an Associated Press report that would be funny if it weren't so serious: Rat, snakes, leaks betray just how frail Fukushima No. 1 is. Excerpt:

A rat causing a power outage by short-circuiting a temporary switchboard. Another blackout occurring as workers install antirat nets. Holes in the linings of huge sunken reservoirs leaking radioactive water. 

Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has run into a string of problems the past few weeks that highlight its precarious state more than two years after three of its six reactors melted down in the wake of a devastating earthquake and tsunami. 

A makeshift system of pipes, tanks and power cables meant to carry cooling water into the melted reactors and spent-fuel pools inside shattered buildings remains highly vulnerable, Nuclear Regulation Authority Chairman Shunichi Tanaka acknowledged Wednesday. 

“Fukushima No. 1 is still in an extremely unstable condition. There is no mistake about that,” Tanaka said at a weekly meeting of the regulatory body’s leaders. 

“We cannot rule out the possibility that similar problems might occur again. Whenever a problem occurs, it halts the plant’s operations and delays the primary goal of decommissioning the plant.” 

The problems have raised doubts about whether the plant can stay intact through a decommissioning process that could take 40 years, prompting officials to compile risk-reduction measures and revise decommissioning plans. The regulatory watchdog said Wednesday it would add a ninth on-site inspector in order to better oversee the plant. 

Just over the past three weeks, there have been at least eight accidents or problems at the plant, the NRA said. 

The spate of problems started March 18, when a rat got into an outdoor switchboard — which was sitting on a pickup truck — powering the jury-rigged cooling system and several other key parts of the plant, causing a short-circuit and blackout that lasted 30 hours in some areas of the plant. Four storage pools for fuel rods lost cooling during the outage, causing Tepco to acknowledge that it had added backup power only to the reactors, despite repeated concerns raised over a pool meltdown. 

The cause of the outage wasn’t clear at the time, but Tepco later released a photo of the electrocuted rat, which had fallen on the bottom of the switchboard housing. The most extensive outage since the crisis started after the March 2011 disasters caused more Fukushima residents to even consider evacuation. 

Two weeks later, a new water processing machine designed to remove most radioactive elements temporarily stopped after a worker pushed a wrong button. The next day, one of the fuel storage pools lost power again for several hours when part of a wire short-circuited a switchboard while an operator installed antirat nets. 

Tepco reported three other minor glitches on the same day, including overheating of equipment related to boron injection to the melted reactors. 

Arikia Millikan: Chasing cholera in Haiti

Via the website Medium for Haiti, Arikia Millikan has posted an important personal essay: Chasing Cholera in Haiti. The first two paragraphs:

It was February 25, 2012, and I was tracing cholera's path around Haiti, trying to understand how a disease so treatable could kill so many people. A cholera outbreak could never happen in Miami, all the experts said, but I didn't understand how a bacterium could discriminate against who it would infect and kill, and why it was picking Haiti of all places to do this. 

Silver bursts of sunlight caught my eye at irregular intervals as we wound around the bends of the Artibonite River on our way from Saint-Marc to Mirebalais. At 320 km long, the Artibonite is the longest river in Haiti. It provides the 1.2 million residents of Haiti's capital city, Port-au-Prince, with hydroelectric power, making it the most powerful river in Haiti. And ever since the Nepalese faction of the United Nation's military operation infected the river with cholera by improperly disposing of their infected waste, it has been the deadliest river in Haiti.

As you'll see when you click through, her post also includes some vivid photographs. It's among the most memorable and powerful accounts I've read about Haiti's cholera.

Arikia sent the link as part of an email, and she's allowed me to quote from it:

As you may know, I've been traveling to Haiti once a year since I reconnected with my family in 2009. It's never been easy going there, or talking about it afterward. The conditions there for many people are dire, and I have seen what I am certain is the absolute worst of humanity. 

Last year when I went there in February/March of 2012 for Haiti Rewired, I decided to put my science writing background to work and tackle the cholera epidemic. I connected with some aid workers who had been treating cholera victims and studying the epidemiology, and had them guide me through the bacterium's war path. I was not prepared for what I learned.

When I came back, I couldn't bring myself to write about it, even though it was the absolute most important thing for me. I saw a PTSD therapist who helped me work through some of the complicated emotions that result upon returning to civilization from a place many refer to as "hell in paradise". 

Now, a year later, with the encouragement from Evan Hansen, my former Wired editor who is now heading up the Haiti initiative among other things at Medium, I am strong enough to tell my story, and ready to go back and dig deeper.

It's not a pleasant story, not one that you would want to "like" on facebook. But it's an important one to understand. Please read it and share it with your social networks.Haiti needs so much help, and I have to believe that every little gesture counts.