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sarahbalick

India hospital transfusions infect thousands with HIV - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-india-36417789

india hospital hiv

shared by sarahbalick on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • India hospital transfusions infect thousands with HIV
  • At least 2,234 Indians have contracted the deadly HIV virus while receiving
  • blood transfusions in hospitals in the past 17 months alone.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • India has around 2.09 million people living with HIV/Aids.The highest number of patients who had been infected with HIV as a result of contaminated blood in hospitals, were from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh with 361 cases, Mr Kothari's RTI (Right to Information) query revealed.
  • "This is the official data, provided by the government-run Naco. I believe the real numbers would be double or triple that," Mr Kothari told the BBC.
  • "But each such test costs 1,200 rupees ($18; £12) and most hospitals in India do not have the testing facilities. Even in a big city like Mumbai, only three private hospitals have HIV testing facilities. Even the largest government hospitals do not have the technology to screen blood for HIV," Mr Kothari said.
katherineharron

Deborah Birx, Pence's 'right arm' on coronavirus - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 19 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Dr. Deborah Birx can be seen at the White House briefing room lectern most days in her new role as what Vice President Mike Pence calls his "right arm" on the coronavirus task force, making her one of the most visible medical officials in the country.But in 2003, Birx, an HIV researcher, was trying to get the attention of the official helming the global AIDS response -- by standing outside of his house for a week.
  • Beginning her training there in 1980, Birx became an Army physician and eventually the head of the US Military HIV Research Program in 1996 -- a role in which she oversaw the Thai vaccine trial, the first HIV vaccine to show preventative results. Birx became the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Global HIV/AIDS in 2005, overseeing all of the agency's HIV/AIDS worldwide and working to improve laboratory health efforts in Africa.
  • She has overhauled the HIV strategy for the Trump administration, and she and Pence developed a relationship in 2018 when she spoke at the World AIDS Day event at the White House. Birx did not ask for this job -- the White House came to her, sources said.
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  • "I want to speak particularly to our largest generation now, our millennials," Birx said Monday. "I (am) the mom of two wonderful millennial young women who are bright and hardworking and I will tell you what I told to them -- they are the core group that will stop this virus."
rachelramirez

One Man Was Wrongly Blamed For Bringing AIDS to America - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...505412

aids patient 0 US history

shared by rachelramirez on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • How One Man Was Wrongly Blamed for Bringing AIDS to America
  • One of those 40 cases was a Canadian flight attendant named Gaëtan Dugas.
  • “When the study got written up and was circulated beyond the immediate team to other people within the CDC, that ambiguous oval got interpreted by some as a zero,”
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  • As the 57th AIDS patient to reach the CDC team’s attention, Dugas was originally billed as Case 057. But since he came from outside California, and wasn’t even a U.S. resident, the investigators started referring to him offhandedly as the “Out-of-California patient”—or “Patient O” for short.
  • He sequenced the complete genomes of HIV taken from U.S. samples collected in the late 1970s, and showed that Dugas could not possibly have been the first AIDS patient in the U.S. Indeed, the disease likely entered the country from Haiti in 1971, flying under the radar for a decade before anyone realized what was happening.
  • The idea fit with the prejudices of the day: Here was a modern Typhoid Mary, whose homosexuality and irresponsible promiscuity had brought a plague to American shores.
  • The CDC team did their best to naysay this misconception, but it gained steam globally in 1987, after the journalist Randy Shilts published his bestselling book And The Band Played On.
  • HIV first started infecting humans somewhere in West Africa, having jumped into us from chimpanzees.
  • He also concluded that the virus must have arrived in the U.S. around 12 years before AIDS was formally recognized in 1981.
  • They reveal that HIV had spread from Africa to the Caribbean by around 1967, and had jumped into the U.S. by around 1971. It landed in New York City and began diversifying rapidly
  • By the time anyone noticed the first sign of AIDS in 1981, the virus had already hopped from coast to coast, and become genetically diverse.
  • This means that not only did Dugas not bring AIDS to America, but he didn’t spread it west either. He was a totally mundane part of a very unusual epidemic.
  • In 2010, evolutionary biologists used gene trees to prove that a man named Anthony Eugene Whitfield had knowingly infected many women with HIV. More recently, biologists used a pocket-sized DNA sequencer to track the evolution of Ebola in real-time, providing details about routes of transmission that helped to curtail the recent west African outbreak.
mattrenz16

Indiana Needle Exchange That Helped Contain Historic HIV Outbreak May Close : Shots - H... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-outbreak-may-be-forced-to-clo

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • In 2015, rural Scott County, Indiana, found itself in the national spotlight when intravenous drug use and sharing needles led to an outbreak of HIV.
  • In all, 235 people became infected with HIV over the course of the outbreak, most of them within the first year. In all of last year, there was one new case. Health officials credit the needle exchange for the dramatic drop-off in cases.
  • But with cases the lowest in years, Scott County's commissioners are considering shutting the program down. Two of three commissioners have said they plan to vote to end the program during their meeting June 2, arguing it enables drug use. (Neither would grant interviews to NPR.)
proudsa

CDC Director Calls It 'Shameful' This Curable Disease Still Kills Millions - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...fight_568ecb4ee4b0a2b6fb6f5349

shared by proudsa on 08 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • "Drug-resistant tuberculosis threatens to reverse the gains that we've made. It's not just the threat overseas, it's the threat here,"
  • Drug-resistant tuberculosis knows no borders, and we risk turning the clock back on antibiotics and making it very difficult for us to stop tuberculosis from spreading around the world and in this country if we don't improve our control efforts.
  • We do prioritize addressing MDR-TB. We have done that for more than 20 years; that's why we've been able to drastically reduce U.S. cases of MDR-TB.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • How will you and the CDC help ensure a well-executed program?
  • Right, and one of the things that will help tuberculosis control is the test and treat approach, and increasing the proportion of HIV-positive people that are treated. The majority of TB cases currently occur before people are started on anti-HIV medicines.
  • Partly it's the characteristic of the bacteria: You require long-term treatment for many months, we don't have a vaccine as we do with measles or polio, but partly it's the nature of the control program.
  • Fundamentally, what happens with tuberculosis will depend on two things. First, how well we implement what we know today, and second, how quickly we get better tools to stop tuberculosis.
  • If we could figure out which of them are going to develop active TB and provide shorter, more effective treatments for them, then we might really be able to knock down tuberculosis cases.
anonymous

Attacks Blaming Asians For Pandemic Reflect Racist History Of Global Health : Goats and... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...e-from-black-death-to-covid-19

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The pandemic has been responsible for an outbreak of violence and hate directed against Asians around the world, blaming them for the spread of COVID-19. During this surge in attacks, the perpetrators have made their motives clear, taunting their victims with declarations like, "You have the Chinese Virus, go back to China!" and assaulting them and spitting on them.
  • The numbers over the past year in the U.S. alone are alarming. As NPR has reported, nearly 3,800 instances of discrimination against Asians have been reported just in the past year to Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition that tracks incidents of violence and harassment against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S.
  • Then came mass shooting in Atlanta last week, which took the lives of eight people, including six women of Asian descent. The shooter's motive has not been determined, but the incident has spawned a deeper discourse on racism and violence targeting Asians in the wake of the coronavirus.
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  • This narrative – that "others," often from far-flung places, are to blame for epidemics – is a dramatic example of a long tradition of hatred. In 14th-century Europe, Jewish communities were wrongfully accused of poisoning wells to spread the Black Death. In 1900, Chinese people were unfairly vilified for an outbreak of the plague in San Francisco's Chinatown. And in the '80s, Haitians were blamed for bringing HIV/AIDS to the U.S., a theory that's considered unsubstantiated by many global health experts.
  • Some public health practitioners say the global health system is partially responsible for perpetuating these ideas.According to Abraar Karan, a doctor at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, the notion persists in global health that "the West is the best." This led to an assumption early on in the pandemic that COVID-19 spread to the rest of the world because China wasn't able to control it.
  • China's response was not without fault. The government's decision to silence doctors and not warn the public about a likely pandemic for six days in mid-January caused more than 3,000 people to become infected within a week, according to a report by the Associated Press, and created ripe conditions for global spread. Some of the aggressive measures China took to control the epidemic – confining people to their homes, for example — have been described as "draconian" and a violation of civil rights, even if they ultimately proved effective.
  • But it soon became clear that assumptions about the superiority of Western health systems were false when China and other Asian countries, along with many African countries, controlled outbreaks far more effectively and faster than Western countries did, says Karan.
  • Some politicians, including former President Donald Trump publicly blamed China for the pandemic, calling this novel coronavirus the "Chinese Virus" or the "Wuhan Virus." They consistently pushed that narrative even after the World Health Organization (WHO) warned as early as March 2020, when the pandemic was declared, that such language would encourage racial profiling and stigmatization against Asians. Trump has continued to use stigmatizing language in the wake of the Atlanta shooting, using the phrase "China virus" during a March 16 call to Fox News.
  • A report by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), released this month, directly linked Trump's first tweet about a "Chinese virus" to a significant increase in anti-Asian hashtags. According to a separate report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 U.S. cities increased 149 percent in 2020, from 49 to 122.
  • Suspicion tends to manifest more during times of vulnerability, like in wartime or during a pandemic, says ElsaMarie D'Silva, an Aspen Institute New Voices fellow from India who studies violence and harassment issues. It just so happened that COVID-19 was originally identified in China, but, as NPR's Jason Beaubien has reported, some of the early clusters of cases elsewhere came from jet setters who traveled to Europe and ski destinations.
  • the West is usually regarded as the hub of expertise and knowledge, says Sriram Shamasunder, an associate professor of medicine at UCSF, and there's a sense among Western health workers that epidemics occur in impoverished contexts because the people there engage in primitive behaviors and just don't care as much about health.
  • In the early days of COVID-19, skepticism by Western public health officials about the efficacy of Asian mask protocols hindered the U.S.'s ability to control the pandemic. Additionally, stereotypes about who was and wasn't at risk had significant consequences, says Nancy Kass, deputy director for public health at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.
  • According to Kass, doctors initially only considered a possible COVID-19 diagnosis among people who had recently flown back from China. That narrow focus caused the U.S. to misdiagnose patients who presented with what we now call classic COVID symptoms simply because they hadn't traveled from China.
  • It's reminiscent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, Kass says. Because itwas so widely billed as a "gay disease," there are many documented cases of heterosexual women who presented with symptoms but weren't diagnosed until they were on their deathbeds.
  • That's not to say that we should ignore facts and patterns about new diseases. For example, Kass says it's appropriate to warn pregnant women about the risks of traveling to countries where the Zika virus, which is linked to birth and developmental defects, is present.
  • But there's a difference, she says, between making sure people have enough information to understand a disease and attaching a label, like "Chinese virus," that is inaccurate and that leads to stereotyping.
  • Karan says we also need to shift our approach to epidemics. In the case of COVID-19 and other outbreaks, Western countries often think of them as a national security issue, closing borders and blaming the countries where the disease was first reported. This approach encourages stigmatization, he says.
  • Instead, Karan suggests reframing the discussion to focus on global solidarity, which promotes the idea that we are all in this together. One way for wealthy countries to demonstrate solidarity now, Karan says, is by supporting the equitable and speedy distribution of vaccines among countries globally as well as among communities within their own borders.Without such commitments in place, "it prompts the question, whose lives matter most?" says Shamasunder.
  • Ultimately, the global health community – and Western society as a whole – has to discard its deep-rooted mindset of coloniality and tendency to scapegoat others, says Hswen. The public health community can start by talking more about the historic racism and atrocities that have been tied to diseases.
  • Additionally, Karan says, leaders should reframe the pandemic for people: Instead of blaming Asians for the virus, blame the systems that weren't adequately prepared to respond to a pandemic.
  • Although WHO has had specific guidance since 2015 about not naming diseases after places, Hswen says the public health community at large should have spoken out earlier and stronger last year against racialized language and the ensuing violence. She says they should have anticipated the backlash against Asians and preempted it with public messaging and education about why neutral terms like "COVID-19" should be used instead of "Chinese virus."
Javier E

Bill Gates on the Real Successes of Foreign Aid - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3509104576331251275217720.html

development metric aid research economic social income living standard

shared by Javier E on 25 May 11 - No Cached
  • Mr. Kenny acknowledges that the hundreds of billions of dollars that the West has poured into poor countries has had a limited impact on income, which is what most economists use to measure progress in living standards. As he notes, many countries in Africa today have real per capita incomes lower than that of Britain at the time of the Roman Empire. Over the past several decades, through good times and bad, the income gap between rich and poor countries has grown. And no one really knows why.
  • Mr. Kenny shows that quality of life—even in the world's poorest countries—has improved dramatically over the past several decades, far more than most people realize. Moreover, with reams of solid data to support his case, he argues that governments and aid agencies have played an important role in this progress.
  • Fifty years ago, more than half the world's population struggled with getting enough daily calories. By the 1990s, this figure was below 10%. Famine affected less than three-tenths of 1% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa from 1990 to 2005. As Mr. Kenny suggests, the record has thoroughly disproved Malthusian prophecies of food shortages caused by spiraling population growth. Family sizes have fallen for many decades now in every region, including Africa.
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  • Virtually everywhere, infant mortality is down and life expectancy is up. In Africa, life expectancy has increased by 10 years since 1960, despite the continent's HIV pandemic. Nearly 90% of the world's children are now enrolled in primary schools, compared with less than half in 1950. Literacy rates in the sub-Saharan region have more than doubled since 1970. Political and civil rights also have gained ground.
  • dramatic improvements in quality of life have been achieved even in poor countries where incomes have fallen. How can this be? He credits the spread of new technologies and ideas. Because of them, as he writes, many of "the best things in life are cheap."
  • Mr. Kenny recommends focusing development aid on helping to spread such ideas and the cheap technologies that can measurably improve quality of life. He suggests, among other things, that we create a global technology bank to fund research or award prizes for advances that particularly benefit the world's poor.
katyshannon

The CDC Gives U.S. Schools Low Marks In Sex Ed : NPR Ed : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-s-schools-low-marks-in-sex-ed

cdc us schools sex ed low marks npr crisis

shared by katyshannon on 11 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Fewer than one-fifth of middle schools — and half of high schools — are teaching all of the sex education topics recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a new study reveals.
  • The CDC report found that, for every age group, the least likely topics to be taught were how to get and use condoms.
  • The results, from the 2013-14 school year, did not surprise Stephanie Zaza, the director of the CDC's Division of Adolescent and School Health, who oversaw the survey administration. "As far back as I can recall," she says of the low rates of compliance, "it's been pretty flat."
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  • As part of its biennial school health profile, the CDC asked all states to survey school health educators on what they teach to students when it comes to sex. Ultimately, 44 states had enough respondents to be included in the data, which also looked at certain large urban school districts and U.S. territories.
  • The survey listed 16 recommended topics as critical to sexual health, falling under four broad subject areas: HIV prevention, STD prevention, pregnancy prevention and information on sexuality.
  • The findings offer a glimpse inside thousands of classrooms to reveal that what gets taught about sex — often decided at the district level — varies widely nationwide.
  • For example, the study found that Kentucky had the lowest rate of the states surveyed for teaching middle schoolers the full range of recommended material, at just under 4 percent. North Carolina had the highest rate for middle schoolers, with over 45 percent.
  • In high school, the gap is even wider. In New Jersey, 9 out of 10 high school students receive the full list of recommended topics. Arizona was lowest in the survey, with fewer than 1 in 5 students.
  • Zaza says there's a variety of reasons why sex education is sometimes put on the back burner, including a lack of time or qualified staff, or restrictive policies.
  • Young people are a high-risk population when it comes to sexual health: Nearly half of high school students say they have had sex, and half of all new sexually transmitted infections occur in people ages 24 and younger.
sgardner35

Activist: Malawi's constitution is failing girls - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by sgardner35 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Part of my research methodology was to engage in focus group discussi
  • ons with women in village settings. In order to do this in any village in Malawi, one has to seek permission from the village chief.And so I did. The chief told me to come back the next day so that he can have time to mobilize the women, as well as give them proper notice of the proposed discussion
  • They were... kids. Teenage girls.
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  • I was shocked. Then it dawned on me, "aah, girl-child marriages." After asking, I found the girls' ages ranged from 13 to 18, with two being 24. This then spurred me into action and it was the beginning of a decade-plus journey of understanding girl-child marriages in my country and fighting for the practice to end.
  • In 2010, half of the women (50%) aged 20--24 years were married or in a union before age 18 (compared to 6.4%of boys), while 12% of women married before they were 15 compared to only 1.2% of men. Child marriage is in both rural and urban areas. It is also higher than the regional average for sub-Saharan Africa (37%).
  • This law was born amid the outcry against girl-child marriage, as the country had realized the dangers of girl-child marriage.Save for a few areas, it is a very progressive piece of legislation, particularly from a women's rights perspective. Among other things, the law prohibits marriage for anybody below the age of 18.
  • studies have shown that girl-child marriage is a risk factor in the transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, as young wives do not have much bargaining power to negotiate safe sex with older men.
  • Girl-child marriages need to be prohibited tough the Constitution because they are a violation of every conceivable human right including the right to life, health, education, human dignity and development. What I know for sure child marriage is a guarantee for poverty among girls in my country and I want it to end. No ifs or buts.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: The Vatican's Corruption Has Been Exposed - 0 views

nymag.com/...rruption-has-been-exposed.html

Catholic church homosexual homophobia morality LGBT trans biology gender identification victimization victim truth history

shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • the book did not surprise me, as such, but it still stunned, shocked, and disgusted me. You simply cannot unread it, or banish what is quite obviously true from your mind
  • It helps explain more deeply the rants of Pope Francis about so many of his cardinals, especially his denunciations of “Pharisees” and “hypocrites,” with their sexual amorality and their vast wealth and power. “Behind rigidity something always lies hidden; in many cases, a double life,”
  • The only tiny consolation of the book is the knowledge that we now have a pope — with all his flaws — who knows what he’s dealing with, and has acted, quite ruthlessly at times, to demote, defrock, or reassign the most egregious cases to places where they have close to nothing to do
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  • And if you want to understand the ferocity of the opposition to him on the Catholic right, this is the key. His most determined opponents are far-right closet cases, living in palaces, leading completely double lives, backed by the most vicious of reactionaries and bigots on the European and American far right
  • As a secular gay journalist, not hostile to the church, he walked into the Vatican and was simply staggered by its obvious gayness.
  • (Lepore hazards a guess that 80 percent of the Vatican’s population is gay.
  • as Martel probes deeper and deeper, one theme emerges very powerfully: “Homosexuality spreads the closer one gets to the holy of holies; there are more and more homosexuals as one rises through the Catholic hierarchy. The more vehemently opposed a cleric is to gays, the stronger his homophobic obsession, the more likely it is that he is insincere, and that his vehemence conceals something.”
  • it’s highly predictable that John Paul II’s pontificate, which launched a new war on homosexuals, turns out to be the gayest of them all — and the one most resistant to any inquiry into stories of sex abuse
  • Ratzinger, (the future Pope Benedict XVI) personally received notification of every claim of sex abuse in the church under John Paul II, ignoring most, and made the stigmatization and persecution of sane, adjusted non-abusive gay people across the globe his mission instead. There wasn’t a theological dissident he didn’t notice and punish, but barely a single pedophile he found reason to expose
  • Martel explains how two of John Paul II’s favorite cardinals — whose nicknames within the Vatican are Platinette (after a drag queen) and La Mongolfiera — set up an elaborate and elite prostitution service that continued through the papacy of Benedict XVI, and was financed from the Vatican coffers.
  • He notices simple things that some might call innuendo, but any gay man will instantly recognize, like the fabulous interiors of the gay cardinals’ palaces, always with their “assistants” or young “relative” on hand
  • take Martel’s interaction with the Swiss Guards, one of whom vents: “The harassment is so insistent that I said to myself that I was going straight home. Many of us are exasperated by the usually rather indiscreet advances of the cardinals and bishops.”
  • Or the prostitutes who keep elaborate records of their clients, and have already caused huge scandals in Italy.
  • Or a confessor-priest in Saint Peter’s who guides Martel into the Vatican with the words: “Welcome to Sodoma.”
  • If you want to find a figure who crystallizes all this hypocrisy in the narrative, it would be the late Colombian cardinal, Alfonso López Trujillo, tasked by John Paul II in the 1970s to rid Latin America of liberation theology, and then to launch a global crusade against homosexuality and the use of condoms
  • Trujillo’s own master of ceremonies on these trips tells us: “López Trujillo travelled with members of the paramilitary groups … He pointed out the priests who were carrying out social actions in the barrios and the poorer districts. The paramilitaries identified them and sometimes went back to murder them. Often they had to leave the region or the country.”
  • “López Trujillo beat prostitutes; that was his relationship with sexuality. He paid them, but they had to accept his blows in return. It always happened at the end, not during the physical act. He finished his sexual relations by beating them, out of pure sadism.”
  • what was Trujillo’s task in Rome? You guessed it: president of the Pontifical Council for the Family! This was the figure who spearheaded the war on gays in the 1980s and 1990s, who forbade the use of condoms, who spread the lie that condoms don’t protect anyone from HIV. And yet when he died, Benedict XVI gave the homily at the funeral mass.
  • if the Catholic right wants to weaponize the book, they’ll have to take on their own icons, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and a whole range of their closest allies in the church.
  • It is even transphobic, I am now informed, for a gay man not to want to sleep with a trans man who has a vagina. In response to my recent column on the subject, I was told by Sue Hyde, a woman who is at the very heart of the LGBTQIA++ movement, to, yes, give it a try:
  • And the core thesis of the book — which is that it is the hypocrisy of the closet that is the real problem — is not one the right will be able easily to absorb.
  • Critically, Martel reaches the same conclusion I did recently — the omertà of the closet was a core reason for sex abuse
  • Gay priests felt unable to report pedophiles or abusers or hypocrites because they too could be outed by the abusers and forced out
  • There is no “gay lobby.” There is a “honeycomb of closets,” often insulated from each other, built on deception and self-hatred, that amounts to a system where protecting the image of the church became far more important than saving children from rapists.
  • There can be no meaningful reform until this closet is ended, and the whole sick, twisted syndrome is unwound.
  • only a radical change will help. Ending mandatory celibacy is no longer an option
  • Women need to be brought in to the full sacramental life of the church. Gay men need to be embraced not as some manifestation of “intrinsic moral evil” but as human beings made in the image of God
  • Francis is nudging the church toward this more humane and Christian future, but the more he does so, the more fervently this nest of self-haters and bigots will try to destroy him.
  • Everything I was taught growing up — to respect the priests and hierarchs, to trust them, to accept their moral authority — is in tatters.
  • the last drops of moral authority the Vatican might hope to have evaporate with this book. It is difficult to express the heartbroken rage so many of us in the pews now feel.
  • It tells you a lot about the LGBTQIA++ movement that it’s now lost Martina Navratilova.
  • A pioneering open lesbian who had an openly transgender coach in her glory years, who did more for gay visibility than any gay group ever has, is now being disowned by Athlete Ally, a New York–based organization that supports LGBT athletes
  • She argued in an op-ed that a trans woman who started out in life as male has an unfair advantage in sports over women who have never biologically male. For this, her comments have been condemned as “transphobic, based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people.”
  • The truth, of course, is that the science is firmly behind Navratilova.
  • If you take this argument seriously — that biology is entirely a function of gender identity — then the whole notion of separate male and female sports events is in doubt
  • denying reality is stupid, can easily backfire, and will alienate countless otherwise sympathetic people
  • if the Equality Act were to pass — a priority for Nancy Pelosi — it would be illegal to bar a trans woman from competing against biological females, as it is already in many states.
  • When Trujillo was promoted to Rome, the reckless excesses went into overdrive. A Curia source tells Martel: “Everyone knew that he was homosexual. He lived with us, here, on the fourth floor of the Palazzo di San Calisto, in a 900-square-metre apartment, and he had several cars! Ferraris! He led a highly unusual life.”
  • Maybe. Or maybe I’ll sleep with whomever I want — you know, something we used to call sexual freedom.
  • Once upon a time, the religious right would tell me that I should sleep with women because I might find the right one and finally be happy. Now the intersectional left is telling me something almost exactly the same. What has happened to this movement? Where on earth has it gone?
  • Smollett was dumb and incompetent in his elaborate hoax. But he was smart about one thing. The most noble thing in our current culture is victimhood
  • Smollett aimed for the jackpot — physically attacked for being gay and black by Trump supporters
  • so all good liberals instinctively and with good intentions believed him, embraced him
  • His identity as gay and black rendered him instantly innocent, just as the Covington boys’ whiteness rendered them instantly guilty.
  • Booker, Harris, Pelosi: They’ll never apologize for their rush to judgment. This may not have been “precisely, factually, and semantically correct,” you see, but it was morally true.
  • Believe Jussie. Just believe. He may have made up an entire story, but “he’s not lying.”
anonymous

Roxana Hernandez: Anger over transgender migrant's death in US - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-44311420

US culture policy

shared by anonymous on 31 May 18 - No Cached
  • According to ICE, Ms Hernandez was "processed as an expedited removal" when she applied for admission at the San Ysidro port of entry in California on 9 May.
  • She died early in the morning of 25 May having been transferred to Lovelace Medical Center in Albuquerque by air ambulance.
  • Immigrants' rights groups have condemned the US government after a transgender immigrant died in US custody while seeking asylum.
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  • The immigrants' rights groups are calling for dignified and humane treatment for all asylum seekers, medical care sensitive to the needs of transgender people and those with HIV, and the closure of all immigration detention centres.
  • Earlier this month, a 20-year-old indigenous Guatemalan woman, Gomez Gonzalez, was shot dead in Texas by a US border patrol officer who said a group of migrants rushed towards him.
Javier E

How Will the Coronavirus End? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...608719

strategies effects pandemic culture politics history crisis

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the 18 million viewers of his TED Talk.
  • We realized that her child might be one of the first of a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19. We decided to call them Generation C.
  • “No matter what, a virus [like SARS-CoV-2] was going to test the resilience of even the most well-equipped health systems,”
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  • To contain such a pathogen, nations must develop a test and use it to identify infected people, isolate them, and trace those they’ve had contact with. That is what South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong did to tremendous effect. It is what the United States did not.
  • That a biomedical powerhouse like the U.S. should so thoroughly fail to create a very simple diagnostic test was, quite literally, unimaginable. “I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,”
  • The testing fiasco was the original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the single flaw that undermined every other countermeasure. If the country could have accurately tracked the spread of the virus, hospitals could have executed their pandemic plans, girding themselves by allocating treatment rooms, ordering extra supplies, tagging in personnel, or assigning specific facilities to deal with COVID-19 cases.
  • None of that happened. Instead, a health-care system that already runs close to full capacity, and that was already challenged by a severe flu season, was suddenly faced with a virus that had been left to spread, untracked, through communities around the country.
  • With little room to surge during a crisis, America’s health-care system operates on the assumption that unaffected states can help beleaguered ones in an emergency.
  • That ethic works for localized disasters such as hurricanes or wildfires, but not for a pandemic that is now in all 50 states. Cooperation has given way to competition
  • Partly, that’s because the White House is a ghost town of scientific expertise. A pandemic-preparedness office that was part of the National Security Council was dissolved in 2018. On January 28, Luciana Borio, who was part of that team, urged the government to “act now to prevent an American epidemic,” and specifically to work with the private sector to develop fast, easy diagnostic tests. But with the office shuttered, those warnings were published in The Wall Street Journal, rather than spoken into the president’s ear.
  • Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared. “Much worse,”
  • “Beyond any expectations we had,” said Lauren Sauer, who works on disaster preparedness at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “As an American, I’m horrified,” said Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “The U.S. may end up with the worst outbreak in the industrialized world.”
  • it will be difficult—but not impossible—for the United States to catch up. To an extent, the near-term future is set because COVID-19 is a slow and long illness. People who were infected several days ago will only start showing symptoms now, even if they isolated themselves in the meantime. Some of those people will enter intensive-care units in early April
  • A “massive logistics and supply-chain operation [is] now needed across the country,” says Thomas Inglesby of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That can’t be managed by small and inexperienced teams scattered throughout the White House. The solution, he says, is to tag in the Defense Logistics Agency—a 26,000-person group that prepares the U.S. military for overseas operations and that has assisted in past public-health crises, including the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
  • The first and most important is to rapidly produce masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment
  • it would also come at a terrible cost: SARS-CoV-2 is more transmissible and fatal than the flu, and it would likely leave behind many millions of corpses and a trail of devastated health systems.
  • This agency can also coordinate the second pressing need: a massive rollout of COVID-19 tests.
  • These measures will take time, during which the pandemic will either accelerate beyond the capacity of the health system or slow to containable levels. Its course—and the nation’s fate—now depends on the third need, which is social distancing.
  • There are now only two groups of Americans. Group A includes everyone involved in the medical response, whether that’s treating patients, running tests, or manufacturing supplies. Group B includes everyone else, and their job is to buy Group A more time. Group B must now “flatten the curve” by physically isolating themselves from other people to cut off chains of transmission.
  • Given the slow fuse of COVID-19, to forestall the future collapse of the health-care system, these seemingly drastic steps must be taken immediately, before they feel proportionate, and they must continue for several weeks.
  • Persuading a country to voluntarily stay at home is not easy, and without clear guidelines from the White House, mayors, governors, and business owners have been forced to take their own steps.
  • when the good of all hinges on the sacrifices of many, clear coordination matters—the fourth urgent need
  • Pundits and business leaders have used similar rhetoric, arguing that high-risk people, such as the elderly, could be protected while lower-risk people are allowed to go back to work. Such thinking is seductive, but flawed. It overestimates our ability to assess a person’s risk, and to somehow wall off the ‘high-risk’ people from the rest of society. It underestimates how badly the virus can hit ‘low-risk’ groups, and how thoroughly hospitals will be overwhelmed if even just younger demographics are falling sick.
  • A recent analysis from the University of Pennsylvania estimated that even if social-distancing measures can reduce infection rates by 95 percent, 960,000 Americans will still need intensive care.
  • There are only about 180,000 ventilators in the U.S. and, more pertinently, only enough respiratory therapists and critical-care staff to safely look after 100,000 ventilated patients. Abandoning social distancing would be foolish. Abandoning it now, when tests and protective equipment are still scarce, would be catastrophic.
  • If Trump stays the course, if Americans adhere to social distancing, if testing can be rolled out, and if enough masks can be produced, there is a chance that the country can still avert the worst predictions about COVID-19, and at least temporarily bring the pandemic under control. No one knows how long that will take, but it won’t be quick. “It could be anywhere from four to six weeks to up to three months,” Fauci said, “but I don’t have great confidence in that range.”
  • there are three possible endgames: one that’s very unlikely, one that’s very dangerous, and one that’s very long.
  • The first is that every nation manages to simultaneously bring the virus to heel, as with the original SARS in 2003. Given how widespread the coronavirus pandemic is, and how badly many countries are faring, the odds of worldwide synchronous control seem vanishingly small.
  • The second is that the virus does what past flu pandemics have done: It burns through the world and leaves behind enough immune survivors that it eventually struggles to find viable hosts. This “herd immunity” scenario would be quick, and thus tempting
  • The U.S. has fewer hospital beds per capita than Italy. A study released by a team at Imperial College London concluded that if the pandemic is left unchecked, those beds will all be full by late April. By the end of June, for every available critical-care bed, there will be roughly 15 COVID-19 patients in need of one.  By the end of the summer, the pandemic will have directly killed 2.2 million Americans,
  • The third scenario is that the world plays a protracted game of whack-a-mole with the virus, stamping out outbreaks here and there until a vaccine can be produced. This is the best option, but also the longest and most complicated.
  • there are no existing vaccines for coronaviruses—until now, these viruses seemed to cause diseases that were mild or rare—so researchers must start from scratch.
  • The first steps have been impressively quick. Last Monday, a possible vaccine created by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health went into early clinical testing. That marks a 63-day gap between scientists sequencing the virus’s genes for the first time and doctors injecting a vaccine candidate into a person’s arm. “It’s overwhelmingly the world record,” Fauci said.
  • The initial trial will simply tell researchers if the vaccine seems safe, and if it can actually mobilize the immune system. Researchers will then need to check that it actually prevents infection from SARS-CoV-2. They’ll need to do animal tests and large-scale trials to ensure that the vaccine doesn’t cause severe side effects. They’ll need to work out what dose is required, how many shots people need, if the vaccine works in elderly people, and if it requires other chemicals to boost its effectiveness.
  • No matter which strategy is faster, Berkley and others estimate that it will take 12 to 18 months to develop a proven vaccine, and then longer still to make it, ship it, and inject it into people’s arms.
  • as the status quo returns, so too will the virus. This doesn’t mean that society must be on continuous lockdown until 2022. But “we need to be prepared to do multiple periods of social distancing,” says Stephen Kissler of Harvard.
  • First: seasonality. Coronaviruses tend to be winter infections that wane or disappear in the summer. That may also be true for SARS-CoV-2, but seasonal variations might not sufficiently slow the virus when it has so many immunologically naive hosts to infect.
  • Second: duration of immunity. When people are infected by the milder human coronaviruses that cause cold-like symptoms, they remain immune for less than a year. By contrast, the few who were infected by the original SARS virus, which was far more severe, stayed immune for much longer.
  • scientists will need to develop accurate serological tests, which look for the antibodies that confer immunity. They’ll also need to confirm that such antibodies actually stop people from catching or spreading the virus. If so, immune citizens can return to work, care for the vulnerable, and anchor the economy during bouts of social distancing.
  • Aspects of America’s identity may need rethinking after COVID-19. Many of the country’s values have seemed to work against it during the pandemic. Its individualism, exceptionalism, and tendency to equate doing whatever you want with an act of resistance meant that when it came time to save lives and stay indoors, some people flocked to bars and clubs.
  • “We can keep schools and businesses open as much as possible, closing them quickly when suppression fails, then opening them back up again once the infected are identified and isolated. Instead of playing defense, we could play more offense.”
  • The vaccine may need to be updated as the virus changes, and people may need to get revaccinated on a regular basis, as they currently do for the flu. Models suggest that the virus might simmer around the world, triggering epidemics every few years or so. “But my hope and expectation is that the severity would decline, and there would be less societal upheaval,”
  • After infections begin ebbing, a secondary pandemic of mental-health problems will follow.
  • But “there is also the potential for a much better world after we get through this trauma,”
  • Testing kits can be widely distributed to catch the virus’s return as quickly as possible. There’s no reason that the U.S. should let SARS-CoV-2 catch it unawares again, and thus no reason that social-distancing measures need to be deployed as broadly and heavy-handedly as they now must be.
  • Pandemics can also catalyze social change. People, businesses, and institutions have been remarkably quick to adopt or call for practices that they might once have dragged their heels on, including working from home, conference-calling to accommodate people with disabilities, proper sick leave, and flexible child-care arrangements.
  • Perhaps the nation will learn that preparedness isn’t just about masks, vaccines, and tests, but also about fair labor policies and a stable and equal health-care system. Perhaps it will appreciate that health-care workers and public-health specialists compose America’s social immune system, and that this system has been suppressed.
  • Attitudes to health may also change for the better. The rise of HIV and AIDS “completely changed sexual behavior among young people who were coming into sexual maturity at the height of the epidemic,”
  • Years of isolationist rhetoric had consequences too.
  • “People believed the rhetoric that containment would work,” says Wendy Parmet, who studies law and public health at Northeastern University. “We keep them out, and we’ll be okay. When you have a body politic that buys into these ideas of isolationism and ethnonationalism, you’re especially vulnerable when a pandemic hits.”
  • Pandemics are democratizing experiences. People whose privilege and power would normally shield them from a crisis are facing quarantines, testing positive, and losing loved ones. Senators are falling sick. The consequences of defunding public-health agencies, losing expertise, and stretching hospitals are no longer manifesting as angry opinion pieces, but as faltering lungs.
  • After COVID-19, attention may shift to public health. Expect to see a spike in funding for virology and vaccinology, a surge in students applying to public-health programs, and more domestic production of medical supplies.
  • The lessons that America draws from this experience are hard to predict, especially at a time when online algorithms and partisan broadcasters only serve news that aligns with their audience’s preconceptions.
  • “The transitions after World War II or 9/11 were not about a bunch of new ideas,” he says. “The ideas are out there, but the debates will be more acute over the next few months because of the fluidity of the moment and willingness of the American public to accept big, massive changes.”
  • One could easily conceive of a world in which most of the nation believes that America defeated COVID-19. Despite his many lapses, Trump’s approval rating has surged. Imagine that he succeeds in diverting blame for the crisis to China, casting it as the villain and America as the resilient hero.
  • One could also envisage a future in which America learns a different lesson. A communal spirit, ironically born through social distancing, causes people to turn outward, to neighbors both foreign and domestic. The election of November 2020 becomes a repudiation of “America first” politics. The nation pivots, as it did after World War II, from isolationism to international cooperation
  • The U.S. leads a new global partnership focused on solving challenges like pandemics and climate change.
  • In 2030, SARS-CoV-3 emerges from nowhere, and is brought to heel within a month.
  • On the Global Health Security Index, a report card that grades every country on its pandemic preparedness, the United States has a score of 83.5—the world’s highest. Rich, strong, developed, America is supposed to be the readiest of nations. That illusion has been shattered. Despite months of advance warning as the virus spread in other countries, when America was finally tested by COVID-19, it failed.
andrespardo

The Guardian view on coronavirus and hunger: the bigger killer? | Editorial | Opinion |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...s-and-hunger-the-bigger-killer

enviroment nature hunger crisis

shared by andrespardo on 27 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Famine is riding alongside pestilence, on the tail of war. Though coronavirus leaves no part of the world untouched, its impact will be harshest in places that were already suffering.
  • The head of the World Food Programme warns that we are now on the brink of a hunger pandemic, with the prospect of multiple famines “of biblical proportions” within a few months,
  • Covid-19 alone has not created this crisis. Rather, it is one more devastating blow, complicating and deepening the troubles of countries already struggling with the impact of war, global heating, other health crises, and specific threats such as the locust infestations plaguing east Africa. It could almost double the number of those facing acute hunger, pushing an additional 130 million people to the brink of starvation by the end of the year. In all, shortages are likely to affect a fifth of the world’s population. Many of them live in overcrowded conditions, with poor sanitation, and a considerable number have pre-existing health problems such as HIV or TB; malnutrition will make them more vulnerable to Covid-19 and other threats
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  • ikely to suffer, particularly in places where it is labour intensive.
  • UN organisations are uniquely placed to handle border closures, restrictions and transport disruption given their regional presences, contacts and diplomacy. In the long run, warn economists and global health experts, developing countries will need trillions of dollars to recover. The UN is seeking just $2bn for its emergency appeal; yet as of last week, wealthier countries had pledged only a quarter of that. They must deliver on those promises now, and give more.
  • All this is a matter of common decency, but also of self-interest. In 2007-08 we saw how rising food prices can destabilise societies, producing repercussions felt much more widely.
  • climate crisis and wars in Syria and elsewhere should already have told us: that other people’s suffering will not be contained. It is our business, too.
carolinehayter

Messenger RNA vaccines: Now proven against coronavirus, the technology can do so much m... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Pandemic

shared by carolinehayter on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • This astonishing efficacy has held up in real-world studies in the US, Israel and elsewhere. The mRNA technology -- developed for its speed and flexibility as opposed to expectations it would provide strong protection against an infectious disease -- has pleased and astonished even those who already advocated for it.
  • it's a technology that researchers had been betting on for decades. Now those bets are paying off, and not just by turning back a pandemic that killed millions in just a year.
  • showing promise against old enemies such as HIV, and infections that threaten babies and young children, such as respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and metapneumovirus. It's being tested as a treatment for cancers, including melanoma and brain tumors. It might offer a new way to treat autoimmune diseases. And it's also being checked out as a possible alternative to gene therapy for intractable conditions such as sickle cell disease.
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  • "If you want to make a new influenza vaccine using the traditional methods, you have to isolate the virus, learn how to grow it, learn how to inactivate it, and purify it. That takes months. With RNA, you only need the sequence,"
  • "When the Chinese released the sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we started the process of making RNA the next day. A couple weeks later, we were injecting animals with the vaccine."
  • Weissman's lab is now working on a universal coronavirus vaccine that would protect against Covid-19, SARS, MERS, coronavirus that cause the common cold -- and future strains.
  • "We started working on a pan-coronavirus vaccine last spring," Weissman said. "There have been three coronavirus epidemics in the past 20 years. There are going to be more."
  • The mRNA approach promises to send instructions for making the healthy version of a protein, and Weissman sees special promise in treating sickle cell disease, in particular.
  • Different tumor cell types have various, recognizable structures on the outside that the immune system can recognize. "You can imagine being able to inject someone with an mRNA that encodes an antibody that specifically targets that receptor," McLellan said.
  • "We identify mutations found on a patient's cancer cells," the company says on its website. Computer algorithms predict the 20 most common mutations. "We then create a vaccine that encodes for each of these mutations and load them onto a single mRNA molecule," Moderna says.
  • BioNtech has been working with academic researchers to use mRNA to treat mice genetically engineered to develop a disease similar to multiple sclerosis -- an autoimmune disease that starts when the immune system mistakenly attacks the myelin, a fatty covering of the nerve cells.In the mice, the treatment appeared to help stop the attack, while keeping the rest of the immune system intact.
  • The idea behind gene therapy is to replace a defective gene with one that works properly.
  • Another obvious use for mRNA technology is to fight cancer. The human body fights off cancer every day, and using mRNA could help it do so even better.
  • "It's gene therapy without the half a million dollar price tag," he added. "It should be just an IV injection and that's it."
  • "The idea there is if you are immune to tick saliva proteins, when the tick bites you, the body produces inflammation and the tick falls off," Weissman said.
yehbru

Opinion: How to distribute Covid-19 vaccines fairly around the world - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Covid politics vaccine distribution equality

shared by yehbru on 02 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • According to Dr. Mike Ryan, director of the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Programme, one in ten people around the world may have been infected with the novel coronavirus.
  • A Gates Foundation report reveals this deadly disease to have devastated the global economy and set back the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals by an estimated 20 years.
  • Without collaboration, the rollout of vaccines will be uneven and risks exacerbating inequalities and global tensions
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  • the World Health Organization and international health partners have created the "Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator" (ACT-Accelerator) to distribute 2 billion doses of a vaccine, as well as 245 million treatments and 500 million tests by the end of 2021.
  • We need to share our funds, resources and expertise to increase production of lifesaving vaccines and train healthcare workers, while bringing costs down in a way that ensures no country is left behind.
  • It has so far pledged over half a billion dollars to the initiative, with the bulk of this going to COVAX's Advanced Market Commitment (AMC) to help developing countries access approved vaccines.
  • the UK has led a match-funding initiative to the COVAX AMC --pledging £1 for every $4 invested up to £250 million -- that successfully incentivized other countries to join in this global effort.
  • We also know that of the roughly 200 candidate vaccines in development, the vast majority could fail, based on what has been learned from previous vaccine clinical trials
  • We know from previous efforts that distributing lifesaving treatments can highlight inequality built into the international system -- just recall the experience of antiretroviral therapies for HIV/AIDS in the 1990s. After some wealthier countries did not take the threat seriously enough or make equitable access a priority, an epidemic surged across sub-Saharan Africa, which killed over 2 million adults and children in a single year at its peak.
Javier E

The lost days of summer: How Trump struggled to contain the virus - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-aff6-220dd3a14741_story.html

trump virus pandemic crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • If the administration’s initial response to the coronavirus was denial, its failure to control the pandemic since then was driven by dysfunction and resulted in a lost summer, according to the portrait that emerges from interviews with 41 senior administration officials and other people directly involved in or briefed on the response efforts.
  • Right now, we’re flying blind,” said Thomas Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Public health is not getting in the way of economic recovery and schools reopening. Public health is the means to economic recovery and schools reopening. You don’t have to believe me. Look all over the world. The U.S. is a laggard.”
  • the White House had what was described as a stand-down order on engaging publicly on the virus through the month of June, part of a deliberate strategy to spotlight other issues even as the contagion spread wildly across the country. A senior administration official said there was a desire to focus on the economy in June.
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  • It was only in July, when case counts began soaring in a trio of populous, Republican-leaning states — Arizona, Florida and Texas — and polls showed a majority of Americans disapproving of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, that the president and his top aides renewed their public activity related to the virus.
  • Trump and many of his top aides talk about the virus not as a contagion that must be controlled through social behavior but rather as a plague that eventually will dissipate on its own. Aides view the coronavirus task force — which includes Fauci, Birx and relevant agency heads — as a burden that has to be managed, officials said.
  • . An internal model by Trump’s Council on Economic Advisers predicts a looming disaster, with the number of infections projected to rise later in August and into September and October in the Midwest and elsewhere, according to people briefed on the data.
  • As the nation confronts a once­in-a-century health crisis that has killed at least 158,000 people, infected nearly 5 million and devastated the economy, the atmosphere in the White House is as chaotic as at any other time in Trump’s presidency — “an unmitigated disaster,” in the words of a second former senior administration official.
  • “It’s extraordinary that a country that helped eradicate smallpox, promoted HIV/AIDS treatment worldwide and suppressed Ebola — we were the world’s leader in public health and medicine, and now we can’t even protect our own people from the most devastating epidemic in decades.”
  • Asked who was to blame for the pandemic’s dark summer turn, Pelosi said, “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”“The delay, the denial . . . the hoax that it’s going to go away magically, a miracle is going to happen, we’ll be in church together by Easter, caused death,” Pelosi added.
  • In Trump’s White House, there is little process that guides decision-making on the pandemic. The president has been focused first and foremost on his reelection chances and reacting to the daily or hourly news cycle as opposed to making long-term strategy, with Meadows and other senior aides indulging his impulses rather than striving to impose discipline.
  • “He sits in the Oval Office and says, ‘Do this,’ or, ‘Do that,’ and there was always a domino blocker. It was John Bolton or H.R. McMaster on national security or John Kelly. Now there are no domino blockers.”
  • What’s more, with polls showing Trump’s popularity on the decline and widespread disapproval of his management of the viral outbreak, staffers have concocted a positive feedback loop for the boss. They present him with fawning media commentary and craft charts with statistics that back up the president’s claim that the administration has done a great — even historically excellent — job fighting the virus.
  • “Everyone is busy trying to create a Potemkin village for him every day. You’re not supposed to see this behavior in liberal democracies that are founded on principles of rule of law. Everyone bends over backwards to create this Potemkin village for him and for his inner circle.”
  • Although Fauci, Birx and other medical professionals sit on the coronavirus task force, many of the more pressing decisions lately have been made by the smaller group that huddles in the morning and mostly prioritizes politics. The cadre includes Meadows, senior adviser Jared Kushner and strategic communications director Alyssa Farah.
  • The policy process has fallen apart around Meadows, according to four White House officials, with the chief of staff fixated on preventing leaks and therefore unwilling to expand meetings to include experts or to share documents with senior staffers who had been excluded from discussions.
  • Luciana Borio, a director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council during the first two years of the Trump administration, decried “a response in disarray hampered by a lack of clear, consistent public health-oriented guidance to the public.
  • “It’s very difficult to know who to trust,” Borio said. “To expect the public to sort out the facts in a time of tremendous stress leads to inconsistent and disparate actions, and that really hurts our collective effort to fight the virus.”
  • What also has frustrated a number of the president’s allies and former aides is that he simply seems uninterested in asserting full leadership over the crisis, instead deferring to state leaders to make the more difficult decisions while using his presidential bully pulpit to critique their performances.
  • “A suppression-level effort to shrink and not just mitigate the spread of covid requires a national strategy that includes standards and significant federal funding. Such a strategy is lacking right now.”
  • The Trump administration has resisted devising a national testing program and instead ceded the task to state governments, even as cases of infection average more than 60,000 a day and some people wait 10 days or longer for test results, delays that render the results essentially useless.
  • While some states have been able to largely meet the needs of their populations, the federal government is the only entity with the power to coordinate testing across state lines, push and enable manufacturers to increase production of test kits and supplies, surge those supplies as needed and ensure fair payment.
  • Without federal coordination, states, businesses, hospitals — and soon schools and universities — find themselves competing with each other for limited supplies, often overpaying as a result.
  • Despite repeated calls to invoke the Defense Production Act to help resolve testing-supply shortages, the administration has resisted doing so. Trump and several White House aides have instead continued to think that it is politically advantageous to cede the issue to the states to avoid taking ownership or blame for the issue, even though testing shortages are largely seen as a federal failure.
  • “Other countries have taken this virus seriously, trusted their public health officials and scientists, and now they’ve flattened the curve,” he said. “Meanwhile, our situation gets worse and worse every day and some Americans think, ‘Oh, that’s just the way it is.’ But that isn’t how it has to be.
  • He’s just not oriented towards things that even in the short term look like they’re involving something that’s hard or negative or that involves sacrifice or pain,” a former senior administration official explained. “He is always anxious to get to a place of touting achievements and being the messenger for good news.”
Javier E

239 Experts With 1 Big Claim: The Coronavirus Is Airborne - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-coronavirus-is-airborne.html

Covid-19 research transmission

shared by Javier E on 05 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • The coronavirus is finding new victims worldwide, in bars and restaurants, offices, markets and casinos, giving rise to frightening clusters of infection that increasingly confirm what many scientists have been saying for months: The virus lingers in the air indoors, infecting those nearby.
  • If airborne transmission is a significant factor in the pandemic, especially in crowded spaces with poor ventilation, the consequences for containment will be significant. Masks may be needed indoors, even in socially distant settings.
  • Health care workers may need N95 masks that filter out even the smallest respiratory droplets as they care for coronavirus patients.
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  • Ventilation systems in schools, nursing homes, residences and businesses may need to minimize recirculating air and add powerful new filters.
  • in an open letter to the W.H.O., 239 scientists in 32 countries have outlined the evidence showing that smaller particles can infect people, and are calling for the agency to revise its recommendations
  • Whether carried aloft by large droplets that zoom through the air after a sneeze, or by much smaller exhaled droplets that may glide the length of a room, these experts said, the coronavirus is borne through air and can infect people when inhaled
  • But the infection prevention and control committee in particular, experts said, is bound by a rigid and overly medicalized view of scientific evidence, is slow and risk-averse in updating its guidance and allows a few conservative voices to shout down dissent.
  • “If we started revisiting airflow, we would have to be prepared to change a lot of what we do,” she said. “I think it’s a good idea, a very good idea, but it will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society.”
  • In early April, a group of 36 experts on air quality and aerosols urged the W.H.O. to consider the growing evidence on airborne transmission of the coronavirus. The agency responded promptly, calling Lidia Morawska, the group’s leader and a longtime W.H.O. consultant, to arrange a meeting.
  • But the discussion was dominated by a few experts who are staunch supporters of handwashing and felt it must be emphasized over aerosols, according to some participants, and the committee’s advice remained unchanged.
  • Dr. Morawska and others pointed to several incidents that indicate airborne transmission of the virus, particularly in poorly ventilated and crowded indoor spaces. They said the W.H.O. was making an artificial distinction between tiny aerosols and larger droplets, even though infected people produce both.
  • We’ve known since 1946 that coughing and talking generate aerosols,
  • Scientists have not been able to grow the coronavirus from aerosols in the lab.
  • Most of the samples in those experiments have come from hospital rooms with good air flow that would dilute viral levels.
  • In most buildings, she said, “the air-exchange rate is usually much lower, allowing virus to accumulate in the air and pose a greater risk.”
  • The W.H.O. also is relying on a dated definition of airborne transmission, Dr. Marr said. The agency believes an airborne pathogen, like the measles virus, has to be highly infectious and to travel long distances.
  • Dr. Marr and others said the coronavirus seemed to be most infectious when people were in prolonged contact at close range, especially indoors, and even more so in superspreader events — exactly what scientists would expect from aerosol transmission.
  • Experts all agree that the coronavirus does not behave that way.
  • “We have this notion that airborne transmission means droplets hanging in the air capable of infecting you many hours later, drifting down streets, through letter boxes and finding their way into homes everywhere,”
  • The agency lagged behind most of its member nations in endorsing face coverings for the public. While other organizations, including the C.D.C., have long since acknowledged the importance of transmission by people without symptoms, the W.H.O. still maintains that asymptomatic transmission is rare.
  • Many experts said the W.H.O. should embrace what some called a “precautionary principle” and others called “needs and values” — the idea that even without definitive evidence, the agency should assume the worst of the virus, apply common sense and recommend the best protection possible.
  • “There is no incontrovertible proof that SARS-CoV-2 travels or is transmitted significantly by aerosols, but there is absolutely no evidence that it’s not,
  • So at the moment we have to make a decision in the face of uncertainty, and my goodness, it’s going to be a disastrous decision if we get it wrong,” she said. “So why not just mask up for a few weeks, just in case?”
  • he agency also must consider the needs of all its member nations, including those with limited resources, and make sure its recommendations are tempered by “availability, feasibility, compliance, resource implications,” she said.
  • if the W.H.O. were to push for rigorous control measures in the absence of proof, hospitals in low- and middle-income countries may be forced to divert scarce resources from other crucial programs.
  • That’s the balance that an organization like the W.H.O. has to achieve,” he said. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to say, ‘We’ve got to follow the precautionary principle,’ and ignore the opportunity costs of that.”
  • In interviews, other scientists criticized this view as paternalistic. “‘We’re not going to say what we really think, because we think you can’t deal with it?’ I don’t think that’s right,”
  • Even cloth masks, if worn by everyone, can significantly reduce transmission, and the W.H.O. should say so clearly, he added.
  • The W.H.O. tends to describe “an absence of evidence as evidence of absence,” Dr. Aldis added. In April, for example, the W.H.O. said, “There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from Covid-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.”
  • The statement was intended to indicate uncertainty, but the phrasing stoked unease among the public and earned rebukes from several experts and journalists. The W.H.O. later walked back its comments.
  • In a less public instance, the W.H.O. said there was “no evidence to suggest” that people with H.I.V. were at increased risk from the coronavirus. After Joseph Amon, the director of global health at Drexel University in Philadelphia who has sat on many agency committees, pointed out that the phrasing was misleading, the W.H.O. changed it to say the level of risk was “unknown.”
  • But W.H.O. staff and some members said the critics did not give its committees enough credit.“Those that may have been frustrated may not be cognizant of how W.H.O. expert committees work, and they work slowly and deliberately,”
anonymous

Hart Island: Coronavirus burials in New York remake history - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...mass-grave-coronavirus-burials

history US

shared by anonymous on 22 May 20 - No Cached
  • Only 11 miles from Manhattan, Hart Island has been the final resting place for New York’s unclaimed and poor for over a century.
  • It is the largest mass grave in the United States. At least 1,000 bodies are buried on the island a year, and more than 1 million can be found in the plots of its potter’s field, known as City Cemetery.
  • Its earliest iteration was as a training ground for soldiers during the Civil War. Purchased by the city in 1868, the land in the Long Island Sound has been home to a boys reformatory, asylum, prison, rehab center and even a Nike missile silo
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  • The first documented burial took place on April 22, 1869, according to Melinda Hunt, director of the Hart Island Project, a nonprofit organization identifying and tracking burials on the island.
  • This concept of honoring the dead was particularly relevant during the AIDS epidemic of the late ’80s and ’90s, which killed more than 100,000 people in New York. Many AIDS patients were laid to rest at Hart Island in an isolated area from other remains and in deeper individual graves because of the stigma and lack of knowledge about how AIDS spread.
  • Hunt says New York City as a whole has never run out of burial space. “The city is able to recycle graves after 25 years
  • Mass burials on Hart Island often hold a negative association, most likely because of the way burials have evolved throughout history, as private funerals have become the norm.
  • Those epidemics include the yellow fever and tuberculosis outbreaks of the 19th century, when the island was used as a quarantine station for those who were infected. It also proved key in handling the waves of victims associated with the spread of the great flu pandemic of 1918, when over 30,000 deaths were recorded in the city — 20,000 of which came that fall alone.
  • The burials were long conducted by inmates, most often from Rikers Island. “You hear people who say if you go to Hart’s, you’re going to be haunted the rest of your life,” said Saxon Palmer, a former Rikers inmate, who was on the job for the entirety of his four-month sentence in 2019. “Then most people wouldn’t come back the next week.”
  • “I’ve often referred to Hart Island as New York City’s family tomb. … There’s something really meaningful about that, to be buried with earlier generations,” Hunt said. “We want for people to be able to stay connected … because that’s what is going to make us feel safe in the end, that the city has honored every life.”
anonymous

Yellow Fever killed 10 percent in Philadelphia - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...n-percent-residents-still-died

history US

shared by anonymous on 21 May 20 - No Cached
  • In summer 1793, a malignant visitation spread over the nation’s capital, carrying off young and old, poor and prosperous in agonizing ways.People collapsed in the streets untended and died horrible deaths at home, their skin turning yellow, their vomit dark with blood.
  • Families were wiped out. Handshaking stopped. Citizens avoided one another and covered their faces with cloth.Half the residents fled the city, including President George Washington. Schools were closed. Some roads outside town were guarded to keep refugees away.This was Philadelphia, the U.S. capital from 1790 to 1800. Wagons arriving from the city were burned as a precaution. Letters and newspapers from Philadelphia were handled with tongs.
  • During the worst of it, a hundred people were buried a day. Historian J.H. Powell’s classic 1949 account is entitled “Bring Out Your Dead,” after the calls of the roving burial teams.What was destroying them, scientists say, was the first virus found to cause human disease.
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  • “For every death, there’s about 21 other infections,” she said modeling showed. So most of Philadelphia’s 50,000 people probably were infected. “They were either lucky that they didn’t develop disease or had mild disease compared to those that were unlucky and died.”Yellow fever is one of more than 200 known human viruses, according to the National Institutes of Health. They include those that cause HIV/AIDS, Ebola, polio, smallpox, measles, mumps, rabies, the common cold and now the novel coronavirus.
  • In the late 1800s, scientists were just starting to realize that strange microbes smaller than bacteria were causing disorders in plants and animals. Bacteria, which had been discovered in the 1670s, had been associated with human illnesses such as typhoid fever, cholera and tuberculosis.
  • U.S. Army physician Walter Reed reported in 1900 that the leading suspect bacteria was not found in the blood of fever cases he studied in Cuba.There was an alien “parasite” at work, he believed.“At the time they didn’t even call it a virus,” Staples said. “They didn’t know really what a virus was.”
  • In 1900, Reed set up what he called an “experimental sanitary station” in Cuba, where yellow fever was prevalent. He named it Camp Lazear, for Jesse W. Lazear, a medical colleague who had died of the fever that year.
  • After extensive testing on volunteer patients who were infected, Reed confirmed that mosquitoes were the carrier and eliminated bacteria as a cause.
  • The yellow fever virus was isolated in 1927, and scientists soon came up with an effective vaccine, called 17D, a weakened form of the virus itself. It’s still in use, and a recent scholarly paper called it “one of the most outstanding human vaccines ever developed.”
  • But in Philadelphia in 1793, the only remedy would be something that killed mosquitoes.
woodlu

How environmental damage can lead to new diseases | The Economist - 1 views

www.economist.com/...amage-can-lead-to-new-diseases

pandemic

shared by woodlu on 20 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • THE WORLD’S monitored populations of wild animals have decreased by an average of 68% in the past 50 years
  • intensive farming and the changing use of land are largely to blame
  • More than 100 countries recognised the need to reverse species decline by 2030 and acknowledged the consequences of harmful environmental practices and climate change for biodiversity.
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  • Growing evidence points to a connection between destructive environmental practices and emerging diseases.
  • Of more than 330 diseases which emerged between 1940 and 2004, nearly two-thirds were zoonotic, meaning they were transmitted from animals to humans, as with, for example, HIV/AIDS and probably covid-19.
  • over 70% originated in wildlife,
  • Replacing old-growth forests with a single crop, such as oil palm, can also lead to the transmission of disease. If predators’ habitats are destroyed and their populations dwindle, other creatures such as rodents, mosquitoes, bats and some primates can proliferate.
  • scientists are increasingly turning their attention to how altering land interferes with a pathogen’s journey from animals to humans
  • felling trees increases contact between humans and disease-carrying animals
  • correlation between the loss of forests in west and central Africa and outbreaks of Ebola between 2004 and 2014
  • Cutting down trees may also increase the threat to humans posed by viral infections transmitted through mosquito bites, such as Zika, dengue and chikungunya.
  • link between changes in global forest cover between 1990 and 2016 and an increase in reported epidemics, even accounting for the fact that deforestation usually means more humans living nearby
  • These harbour potentially zoonotic pathogens and tend to cluster in places where they will be more frequently exposed to humans and livestock. Rodents, for example, often inhabit the border areas between newly created pastures and forests.
  • Wildlife may also move towards human settlements in search of food. Mango trees planted on pig farms in Malaysia probably attracted fruit bats carrying nipah, a virus that infected local pig farmers in 1999 and still breaks out yearly in Bangladesh.
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