Category Archives: Science/Medicine

W. David Stephenson blogs on homeland security et al. brings us this really cheerful prediction about avian flu from the Boston Globe:

”We’re not going to have much warning,” [WHO Scientist Dr. Michael] Ryan said. ”One day, two days, maybe three, if we are extremely lucky. Once contagious among humans, the virus will spread like a tsunami. There will be the flash point — probably in Asia, perhaps somewhere else — followed by waves of infection that would hurtle around the world.”

It could be awful:

In worst-case scenarios based on extrapolations from the 1918 outbreak, some epidemiologists predict that a pandemic spawned by bird flu could kill 140 million people in a matter of months, and sicken so many hundreds of millions that some governments and national economies would collapse.

Or it could just be really really bad:

The World Health Organization is urging countries to brace for a ”mild to moderate” pandemic likely to kill 2 million to 7.4 million people, according to Ryan.

”We need to steer away from worst-case scenarios or we’ll end up like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck, too terrified to move,” he said. ”We need preparation, not panic.”

The UK Telegraph summarizes a story in the New Scientist (the original seems to be behind a pay wall) as suggesting that elephants are seeking revenge for the killing of their relatives and friends,

The reputation that elephants have for never forgetting has been given a chilling new twist by experts who believe that a generation of pachiderms may taking revenge on humans for the breakdown of elephant society.

The New Scientist reports today that elephants appear to be attacking human settlements as vengeance for years of abuse by people.

But later in the story this starts to seem a bit sensationalist: the real problem may be that the killing of older, wiser elephants has created a generation of “juvenile delinquents”.

Destined for reform school?

Via Slashdot comes news that Mind Control Parasites in Half of All Humans:

According to a Yahoo News story, half of the world’s human population is infected with Toxoplasma, a parasite shown to alter the brain function of rats, inducing them into behavior that benefits the parasite but is suicidal for the rat. So what affect does it have on humans?

The research is by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey — a name of some controversy for his earlier research in schizophrenia — so it’s not surprising that he suggests there may be a link to it. (According to the Wikipedia article linked above, Dr. Torrey “told The New York Daily News his wife thinks he is going to be assassinated by cat lovers.”)

Myself, I’d like to see a whole set of correlations of Toxoplasma infection to various behaviors, such as spending, eating, and — why not? — voting…

Bird flu has been identified in Greece, Italy and Bulgaria as well as Nigeria. Which means it’s Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

Yikes.

Meetings considered harmful. But we knew that.

It does, however, allow me to include a shot of one of my all-time favorite Demotivators:

Uh-oh: Boing Boing: Bird flu, ahoy! (click through to see the graphic)

Er, don’t lots of migratory birds winter in Florida? (I gather they don’t tend to fly here from Europe, that’s just the people, but presumably as soon as we have bird flu almost anywhere in the North, South or Central America, we get it too, right?)