Up to 90,000 expected to die from H1N1 this fall. Yeah, we're doomed.

"The H1N1 flu virus could cause up to 90,000 U.S. deaths, mainly among children and young adults, if it resurges this fall as expected, according to a report released Monday by a presidential advisory panel.
The H1N1 virus, commonly known as swine flu virus, could infect between 30 percent and 50 percent of the American population during the fall and winter and lead to as many as 1.8 million U.S. hospital admissions, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology reported.
The report says 30,000 to 90,000 deaths are projected as part of a "plausible scenario" involving large outbreaks at schools, inadequate antiviral supplies and the virus peaking before vaccinations have time to be effective."
LINK to CNN

Tomato blight spreading

"The earliest and most widespread case of a serious plant disease ever in the East is forcing the removal of tomato plants from stores in New York and New England. This infectious disease is called late blight, the same disease that caused the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s. It does occur occasionally in the Northeast, but this year's rainy weather has accelerated the spores' airborne spread. On top of that, infected plants have been widely distributed by big-box retail stores.
According to the Associated Press, the disease is not harmful to humans, but it is quite contagious. It is most likely spread on garden center shelves to plants that were not involved in the initial infection. Once plants reach gardens, both home and commercial ones, the disease can also spread."
LINK

Level 6

"The World Health Organization raised the swine flu alert Thursday to its highest level, saying H1N1 has spread to enough countries to be considered a global pandemic.
Increasing the alert to Level 6 does not mean that the disease is deadlier or more dangerous than before, just that it has spread to more countries, the WHO said.
As of Wednesday evening, the virus had spread to 72 countries, the health agency said. There were 25,288 confirmed cases and 139 deaths. The United States had 13,217 cases and 27 deaths, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday."
LINK

Here in Rhody -

"The state Department of Health has confirmed 39 cases of H1N1 swine flu in Rhode Island as of 11 a.m. Tuesday, twice as many as a week ago.
Health officials report that the illness continues to spread around the state, with increases in isolated cases as well as clusters of flu-like illnesses. Growing numbers of children and people with chronic health problems are getting sick, and more are being hospitalized.
Most illnesses in Rhode Island have been milder than seasonal influenza, but 10 people with swine flu have required hospitalization.
Late Monday, the North Providence School Department announced that the Greystone Elementary School would close for the rest of the week because three children tested positive for swine flu.
"We are seeing more cases in schools, more hospitalizations and more individuals who have underlying medical conditions being affected," said Health Director David R. Gifford, in a statement. "Everyone needs to continue to be vigilant about handwashing, coughing and sneezing into elbows, and staying home if they are sick. We expect that this will likely continue throughout the summer and into the fall.""
LINK

Aha! Swine flu freaking man-made evil blah blah!

Hmmmm....
"May 13 (Bloomberg) -- The World Health Organization is investigating a claim by an Australian researcher that the swine flu virus circling the globe may have been created as a result of human error.
...“One of the simplest explanations is that it’s a laboratory escape,” Gibbs said in an interview with Bloomberg Television today."
LINK

Swine flu- this is horrendous.

Jesus.

"Fears of getting a killer bug are sweeping across the Mexican capital as reports erupted about an epidemic of swine influenza that is said to have killed dozens in recent weeks. The government ordered all schools and universities in Mexico City shut and advised people to pull their children out of nurseries and avoid busy places such as restaurants, bars and cinemas. Pharmacies rapidly sold out of hygienic masks and vitamin supplements. Many clinics stuck signs on their doors advising they had run out of influenza vaccines.
...News of the flu had been lingering for several days but surged to national attention late Thursday after a televised announcement from Federal Health Minister José Angel Córdova. "With the information obtained this afternoon, we have before us the threat of a new type of influenza," Cordova said, announcing the first total school closures over the urban area of 20 million since the 1985 earthquake. Mexican authorities said there had been 20 deaths confirmed from the virus in recent weeks, mostly healthy adult men and women, who were in groups not normally considered vulnerable. Then panic increased to fever pitch on Friday when the World Health Organization upstaged the Mexican government by saying that 60 deaths may have been caused by the virus."
LINK

We're all going to die. Sooner."Brown clouds dim Asia, threaten world's food"

"Thick brown clouds of soot, particles and chemicals stretching from the Persian Gulf to Asia threaten health and food supplies in the world, the U.N. reported Thursday, citing what it called the newest threat to the global environment.
The regional haze, known as atmospheric brown clouds, contributes to glacial melting, reduces sunlight and helps create extreme weather conditions that impact agricultural production, according to the report commissioned by the U.N. Environment Program.
The huge plumes have darkened 13 megacities in Asia — including Beijing, Shanghai, Bangkok, Cairo, Mumbai and New Delhi — sharply "dimming" the amount of light by as much as 25 percent in some places." LINK

French oysters, dying off? Oh noes!!!!

One of the most beautiful and delish looking things I've ever seen was some oysters my DH had in Brittany. They were served in their shells, atop little mounds of fleur de sel, baked in a champagne cream sauce. Glorious.
So this saddens me.

"FRANCE'S shellfish industry is facing its worst crisis in 40 years after stocks of young oysters have been decimated by a mystery ailment.
French oyster farmers have seen between 40 and 100 per cent of their oysters aged one to two years wiped out in recent weeks, far higher than the normal mortality rate in the summer months, a top industry expert said." LINK

Holy sh*t, Marburg is WICKED scary.

"The World Health Organization has warned people not to go into Ugandan caves with bats, after a Dutch tourist contracted the deadly Marburg virus.
The woman, aged 40, died after being taken to hospital following her return to the Netherlands, health authorities there said.
They said she probably contracted the disease while visiting a Ugandan cave inhabited by fruit bats.
Marburg is a contagious disease that causes sudden bleeding and high fever.
There is no treatment or vaccine.
The largest outbreak occurred in 2004-2005 in Angola and killed more than 300 people.
No tourists are known to have previously contracted the disease.
"It is an isolated case of imported Marburg," said WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl.
"People should not think about amending their travel plans to Uganda but should not go into caves with bats."
Dutch health officials said people who had come into contact with the woman on her return were being closely monitored.
In the past, Marburg and the related Ebola virus have caused outbreaks in humans and great apes with mortality rates of 80 to 90%.
Early symptoms of Marburg are diarrhoea, stomach pains, nausea and vomiting, which give way to bleeding. It is spread by the transfer of blood or other bodily fluids. " LINK

After the flood comes the pestilance...

"First came the floods -- now the mosquitoes.
An explosion of pesky insects is pestering clean-up crews and just about anyone venturing outside in the waterlogged Midwest.
In some parts of Iowa there are 20 times the normal number, and in Chicago up to five times more than usual.
The good news is these are mostly floodwater mosquitoes, not the kind that usually carry West Nile virus and other diseases. But they are very hungry, and sometimes attack in swarms with a stinging bite." LINK

Hm... West Nile mosquito spray killing lobsters?

Oh, man. This end of the world stuff can be really depressing sometimes.
Climate change is bringing tropical diseases (such as West Nile Disease) to non-tropical places (like Rhode Island) where these diseases kill people. So local governments have been laying down mosquito killing poisons to try to save people's lives, but...
"lobstermen believe the methoprene is stunting the growth of young lobsters, much as it does to mosquito larva.
Emotions are rising on both sides. Lobstermen have seen their catches fall by more than half in the last several years, causing nearly every one of them to lose money and some to quit and sell their boats. On the state’s side, no one wants to have to say they didn’t do everything they could to protect Rhode Islanders from disease.
“We figure there won’t be a lobster industry in a short time if this keeps up,” said Dellinger. “All the state wants to do is control us, but you can’t keep polluting the environment and still get fish.”
Local lobster catches topped off in 1999 with about 3,500 tons. Each of the following years got progressively worse. In 2005, the last year with complete figures, the take was less than 1,500 tons.
In response, the lobstermen have greatly reduced the number of traps they set and accepted one new size restriction after another designed to leave lobsters in the water longer so they can successfully reproduce.
Still, the catch remains low. And many lobsters, particularly those caught close to shore, are coming up with a disfiguring, and still unexplained, shell disease.
What they are not seeing is even more disturbing — young lobsters. " LINK

Alaska salmon, headed out?

"With a sickening thud, another hefty and handsome salmon lands in the waste barrel, headed for the dogs.
More Alaskan salmon caught here end up in the dog pot these days, their orange-pink flesh fouled by disease that scientists have correlated with warmer water in the Yukon River.
The sorting of winners and losers at Moore's riverbank fish camp illustrates what scientists have been predicting will accompany global warming: Cold-temperature barriers are giving way, allowing parasites, bacteria and other disease-spreading organisms to move toward higher latitudes.
"Climate change isn't going to increase infectious diseases but change the disease landscape," said marine ecologist Kevin D. Lafferty, who studies parasites for the U.S. Geological Survey. "And some of these surprises are not going to be pretty."
Mary Ruckelshaus, a federal biologist with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, has been running climate models to peer into the future for Pacific Northwest salmon. Those models predict that salmon will become extinct without aggressive efforts to preserve the clear, cool streams needed for spawning, such as planting trees to shade streams and curtailing the amount of water siphoned off by farmers."It's sort of a time bomb," Ruckelshaus said. "If people don't have a plan for it, it can be disastrous when it hits." Her models didn't factor in the potential for emerging diseases, such as the one that Kocan, her former professor, has been studying."
It's the kind of redistribution of disease that can be expected with climate change, Kocan said: "Everything is getting warmer, and that's how climate change is going to redistribute all kinds of disease. Parasites have their optimum conditions -- upper and lower limits. We'll notice where they show up but not necessarily where they disappear."" LINK

Nasty fish disease in Lake Michigan

"The deadly fish disease Viral Hemorrhagic Septicemia (VHS) has been found in yellow perch in the Lake Michigan waters off Milwaukee. The finding comes a week after VHS was detected in round gobies found dead on beaches in South Milwaukee, the first such finding in southern Lake Michigan. " LINK

Rat plague in Bangladesh- ick!

"Dhaka - The UN's World Food Programme began distributing emergency food aid on Sunday to 120 000 people facing famine in south eastern Bangladesh, where an invasion of rats led to widespread crop destruction.
People from the affected areas in the Chittagong hill tracks were struggling to feed themselves and had been eating wild roots from the jungle ever since the area was overrun by millions of rats, the WFP said. The flowering of bamboo forests for the first time in 50 years in the affected areas, located along a 300-kilometre border stretch with India, led to the so-called "rat-flood".
The rodents multiplied by feeding on bamboo blossoms, rice stalks and vegetables. Villagers said that whatever they tried to grow was devoured within hours.
Plague every 50 to 60 years
The bamboo forests first began blossoming last year in the Lusai Hills in the neighbouring Indian state of Mizoram. Authorities declared it a disaster zone after rats went on to eat food stocks.
Locals said the plague happened once every 50 to 60 years, with the last such disaster in 1958.
It was feared the rats would infest the region for at least three more years, as they did in the late 1950s. " LINK

A really, really, really bad idea.

Sometimes the government still surprises me with their apparent reckless desire to destroy everything. This is one of those times. Fresh from admitting that there were accidents at Plum Island, they want to build a new center for animal disease research. Next to land where there are herds of cattle and a wildlife preserve. Yay!

And don't forget the possibility that Plum Island might be where Lyme disease spread out from. Tinfoil hatty or not, it is true that tick borne diseases were being studied there for use in wartime, and that Plum Island is only 6 miles across Long Island Sound from Lyme- deer swim to Block Island, and that's 12 miles offshore.

"...former Plum Island lab director Jerry Callis talking about tick research on Plum Island:
"Plum Island experimented with ticks, but never outside of containment. We had a tick colony where you take them and feed them on the virus and breed ticks to see how many generations it would last, on and on, until its diluted. Recently they reinstated the tick colony."

"In the book, The Belarus Secret, author John Luftis, the Justice Department employee who exposed Kurt Waldheim as a Nazi, states that Nazi germ warfare scientists had experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases. Loftus also states that he had received information that the United States had tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during the early part of the 1950s." LINK to wikipedia on Erich Traub

"Mr. Carroll argues that outbreaks of the Dutch duck plague virus that devastated duck farms on eastern Long Island in the 1960's, Lyme disease in 1975, West Nile virus in 1999 and the mysterious 1999 disease that killed most of the lobsters in Long Island Sound all occurred too suspiciously close to Plum Island to dismiss the possibility of a laboratory link. " LINK to NYT

"The only U.S. facility allowed to research the highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease experienced several accidents with the feared virus, the Bush administration acknowledged Friday.
...The Homeland Security Department told a House committee there were other accidents inside the government's laboratory.
The accidents are significant because the administration is likely to move foot-and-mouth research from the remote island to one of five sites on the U.S. mainland near livestock herds."
LINK to article about accidents at Plum Island


"The Bush administration is likely to move its research on one of the most contagious animal diseases from an isolated island laboratory to the U.S. mainland near herds of livestock, raising concerns about a catastrophic outbreak.
...One such government report, produced last year and already turned over to lawmakers by the Homeland Security Department, combined commercial satellite images and federal farm data to show the proximity to livestock herds of locations that have been considered for the new lab. "Would an accidental laboratory release at these locations have the potential to affect nearby livestock?" asked the nine-page document. It did not directly answer the question.
A simulated outbreak of the disease — part of an earlier U.S. government exercise called "Crimson Sky" — ended with fictional riots in the streets after the simulation's National Guardsmen were ordered to kill tens of millions of farm animals, so many that troops ran out of bullets. In the exercise, the government said it would have been forced to dig a ditch in Kansas 25 miles long to bury carcasses. In the simulation, protests broke out in some cities amid food shortages.

...An epidemic in 2001 devastated Britain's livestock industry, as the government slaughtered 6 million sheep, cows and pigs. Last year, in a less serious outbreak, Britain's health and safety agency concluded the virus probably escaped from a site shared by a government research center and a vaccine maker. Other outbreaks have occurred in Taiwan in 1997 and China last year and in 2006.

If even a single cow signals an outbreak in the U.S., emergency plans permit the government to shut down all exports and movement of livestock. Herds would be quarantined, and a controlled slaughter could be started to stop the disease from spreading." LINK to article about creating new facility

What? Boston hospitals not taking patients for 4 freaking days because of norovirus outbreak? wtf, mate?

Just saying, it seems to me that this should be total top New England headlines, not the tragic monoxide thing or the (also) tragic gang war nonsense.

"A wave of vomiting and diarrhea has swept through wards at two Boston hospitals in the past month, leaving more than 70 patients and staff members ill from a germ whose spread can be slowed by thorough hand-washing.
more stories like this
The outbreaks of norovirus spawned several days of gastrointestinal misery at Brigham and Women's and Massachusetts General hospitals and at a day-care facility run by Children's Hospital Boston, where 33 children and employees fell ill.

The stricken medical ward stopped accepting patients for four days..."

Someone very nice I know is in treatment at one of these hospitals for something very serious. I very much hope she knew before it finally made the news that it wasn't ok for people with compromised immune systems to go anywhere near there.

Tidbits from the upcoming IPCC report

"The report included these likely results of global warming:

*Hundreds of millions of Africans and tens of millions of Latin Americans who now have water will be short of it in less than 20 years. By 2050, more than 1 billion people in Asia could face water shortages. By 2080, water shortages could threaten 1.1 billion to 3.2 billion people, depending on the level of greenhouse gases that cars and industry spew into the air.

*Death rates for the world's poor from global warming-related illnesses, such as malnutrition and diarrhea, will rise by 2030. Malaria and dengue fever, as well as illnesses from eating contaminated shellfish, are likely to grow.

*Europe's small glaciers will disappear with many of the continent's large glaciers shrinking dramatically by 2050. And half of Europe's plant species could be vulnerable, endangered or extinct by 2100.

*By 2080, between 200 million and 600 million people could be hungry because of global warming's effects.

*About 100 million people each year could be flooded by 2080 by rising seas.

*Smog in U.S. cities will worsen and "ozone-related deaths from climate (will) increase by approximately 4.5 percent for the mid-2050s, compared with 1990s levels," turning a small health risk into a substantial one.

*Polar bears in the wild and other animals will be pushed to extinction. "

LINK

Worse and sooner.

The next installment of the IPCC report is shaping up to be a stunner.

"WASHINGTON (AP) - The harmful effects of global warming on daily life are already showing up, and within a couple of decades hundreds of millions of people won't have enough water, top scientists will say next month at a meeting in Belgium.

At the same time, tens of millions of others will be flooded out of their homes each year as the Earth reels from rising temperatures and sea levels, according to portions of a draft of an international scientific report obtained by The Associated Press.

Tropical diseases like malaria will spread. By 2050, polar bears will mostly be found in zoos, their habitats gone. Pests like fire ants will thrive.

For a time, food will be plentiful because of the longer growing season in northern regions. But by 2080, hundreds of millions of people could face starvation, according to the report, which is still being revised." LINK

It's enough to make you sick. I mean, seriously.

"The spread of human disease has become one of the most worrisome subplots in the story of global warming. Incremental temperature changes have begun to redraw the distribution of bacteria, insects and plants, exposing new populations to diseases that they have never seen before.

A report from the World Health Organization estimated that in 2000 about 154,000 deaths around the world could be attributed to disease outbreaks and other conditions sparked by climate change." LINK

Super-invasive whitefly works with plant viruses to decimate crops.

Xinhua has the coolest news.
"Scientists in China have discovered a rapidly spreading crop pest and a virus have joined forces to enhance both their invasions worldwide.
A variety of the whitefly Bemisia tabaci known as the B biotype is "a super-invasive organism," Shu-Sheng Liu, an entomologist at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, explained Wednesday.
During the past 20 years, the B whitefly has spread rapidly around the world causing hundreds of millions of dollars in crop losses. Outbreaks of the B whitefly have often been followed by pandemics of a group of plant viruses, called begomoviruses, that the whiteflies carry. " LINK

h5n1- 19th Egyptian human case confirmed

"CAIRO, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) -- Egypt announced the 19th human bird flu case on Wednesday after a 27-year-old woman from central Egypt was tested positive to the deadly H5N1 virus, the official news agency MENA reported. " LINK