Last weekend, The Presumptive Nominee made more than a few waves by saying that there was a link between childhood vaccines and autism, even though research has shown that there is no link. In fact, recent research suggests genetic causes and heightened awareness resulting in better diagnoses. But, then, Republicans seem to have a very different idea about scientific research in the first place.
Emboldened by their battle-scarred Champion, right-wingers everywhere have decided to go public with their bizarro world scenarios. The Wall Street Journal told us yesterday not to worry about “Peak Oil” and climbing petroleum prices, there’s plenty of oil to go around.
The Drudge Report wants you to know that global warming is just a myth — he links this article which claims that the colder-than-usual January temperatures “wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years” (though I will note that the author of this article says DailyTech.com has erroneously interpreted the data).
And Discover Magazine doesn’t want you to think you should be one iota less terrified of the H5N1 virus just because hardly anybody has died of it after three years of dire warnings.
In related news, Paris Hilton just won the Nobel Peace Prize, and green monkeys are flying out of my butt!
Re: bird flu. I was participating in a disaster planning forum 2 years ago, and of course, there was the skeptic about bird flu.
The forum went inactive after about a year later because there was a lot of discussion about how to prepare and when nobody died, the interest waned.
Sad.
I told you before not to underrate the danger of H5N1. By itself, it hasn’t been a threat to humans – reassortment with other viruses makes it a whole new ballgame.
I remain unswayed.
Scaring a woefully underprepared public health community into overdue action by presenting gloom-and-doom scenarios is all well and good, but what I have read about the possibilities of reassortment happening with H5N1 does little to make me think that the doomsday scenarios of global chaos due to pandemic are simply overstated for that very effect. Reassortment of H5N1 requires a close-contact population of poultry, pigs and humans, the subsequent merging of the avian flu with a swine flu, and only then the mutation into a flu easily transmitted between pigs and people. Since the pigs don’t seem to come down with H5N1 any more than the people do, the sequence of events does not appear to exactly be a bubbling cauldron.
Certainly the public health community in this country has learned very little about disaster preparedness despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the wake of September 11. The possibility of pandemics has been real for decades, not simply since the rise of H5N1…not unlike the possibiliy of terror attacks. We overlook preparedness at our own peril, but the need for preparedness does not necessarily equate to the likelihood of the risk.
You are unswayed because you don’t have the reassortment thing exactly right.
This is what you need to think about: the transfer of genetic material between different types of viruses occurs in a human host. There are many well-documented cases of bird-to-human transfer of H5N1. It will only take one case of a person who has that and who is co-infected with a virus that does transmit easily from person to person, the viruses mingle and produce an entirely new strain that is as easily passed from human to human as a cold would be.
The World Health Organization might be a better source about this than Discover Magazine. If you look at their definition of the 6 phases of pandemics, we’re already at the start of Phase 4. In terms of global sweep, 3 years in the first three phases is not remarkable.
You may very well be lucky enough to be right and that H5N1 will mutate and drop away in an Andromeda Strain-like ending. But if I’m right, please remember that I tried to save you.
I *HAVE* looked at WHO’s material, and it is their description of the reassortment process I summarized. There is still very little bird-to-human transmission, and the entire process of reassortment is dependent on a second viral strain that is easily transmittable to humans. The WHO asserts that the transfer process would involve pigs, as this vector is a far more likely route given the easier transmission of virus from bird to pig and pig to human. And to date they have not yet been able to document any significant impact of H5N1 on pig populations in the “hot zone” of Southeast Asia.
WHO’s EPR group presently assesses the pandemic risk at Stage 3, not Stage 4. Stage 3 is described as “NO or VERY LIMITED human-to-human transmission”. WHO itself has backed off its own predictions of global pandemic: in 2005 they estimated 150 million human deaths, but subsequently in 2007 reversed their predictions and said only that the chance of pandemic still existed. That’s a significant public reversal of what was a fairly alarming initial claim.
I also direct your attention to this 2007 report to the United Nations by the U.S. Mission to the UN and this executive summary of an Avian Flu conference held by the government of India in December 2007, both of which present data to show the successful containment of avian flu, the extremely low incidence and/or increase of human cases, and improved preparedness by national governments.
So please spare me the ominous threats unless you’ve got the data that show something markedly different.
Without stepping into the pan-flu quagmire, I am astonished by some of the assertions made in the WSJ commentary about the future of oil. Even the most optimistic estimate of global resources in place I had read up to this point was about 5.6 trillion barrels, including the oil equivalent of natural gas reserves – a far cry from the 12 to 16 trillion cited in the commentary.
Without trying to refute all the points in the commentary, one thing that struck me is that the author fails to account for the cost of extraction from “unconventional” oil sources. These unconventional sources, and some other alternative fuels, have far lower energy returns on energy invested (EROEI) than we currently see with oil. At some point it just becomes too expensive to pull, pump, crush, or squeeze the oil out. And simply saying that “modern science and unfolding technologies will, in all likelihood, double recovery efficiencies” won’t necessarily make it so.
Even if peak oil is 20, 30, 40 or more years away, we are getting a taste of what a more expensive energy future looks like and should create enough of an incentive to make our society’s underpinnings less dependent on fossil fuels.
At some point it just becomes too expensive to pull, pump, crush, or squeeze the oil out.
Right, but as conventional oil becomes more expensive to produce, the relative cost of unconventional petroleum production is less burdensome in comparison.
Less burdensome by comparison, yes, but regardless of the technological hurdles that can be overcome, it may simply be too expensive in absolute terms to be worth the trouble.
Depends on how much people are willing to pay, I presume. Profit always wins out, after all.