Category Archives: Science/Medicine

A headline of the sort “Testing slimming powers of tequila’s agave” stirs promising thoughts. As does the inital text:

Scientists from Mexico’s tequila producing region say juice extracted from the blue agave plant, best known when distilled into the fiery spirit, may help dieters shed pounds and cut cholesterol.

Sign me up! Sign me up!

But alas,

Sadly for the world’s growing band of tequila lovers, agave’s possible health benefits are lost when the plant is distilled into alcohol.

Figures.

Forget hurricanes. Forget global warming. For a good panic, consider Bird Flu.

Apparently it’s broken out of China and is now Epidemic in Indonesia. Or, at least, in the cautious language of bureaucrats “Indonesia could be on the brink of a bird flu epidemic if the virus continues to accelerate.” Normally when bureaucrats will go that far, it translates into something worse.

Having just had graphic proof that the US government cannot be trusted to protect us from the consequences of disaster, coupled with the fact that at present the US has no stockpiles of the relevant drugs — in part due to sloth, in part due to the speed at which this strain can mutate — some people are going all survivalist on us.

Take a look, for example, at Flu Pandemic Preparation. (And don’t forget your emergency gear.)

I’m not entirely sure I get the threat model here. Why do I need a month’s worth of food? Is the idea I hide in my house to avoid infection, or that everyone around me is sick and dying and the FEMA trucks don’t come?

On a slightly more positive note, there’s the FluWiki, “a new experiment in collaborative problem solving in public health” where presumably rather than work on self-directed survivalist, the objective is a community-centered response.

Meanwhile, I’m still scratching my head as to why I want to pack my brown rice in dry ice, which presumably will keep it cold in my very hot garage for only a very limited period. Does the CO2 have preservative qualities too? If I even knew where to get dry ice. Or 50 pound bags of rice, for that matter.

Here we are up to “O” and the hurricane season still has a lot of punch left in it. Plus the official list only uses 21 letters in the alphabet: Q, U, X, Y and Z are left out — why no Zelda nor Zeke? So we only have six names left for this year (Philippe, Rita, Stan, Tammy, Vince, Wilma — watch out for Tammy). But fear not!

In the event that more than 21 named tropical cyclones occur in the Atlantic basin in a season, additional storms will take names from the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and so on.

One of my colleagues suggested the other day that instead of boring Greek letters, they should go for double letters: Aaron, Bebe, Cece, Dede, Fifi and so on. I mean, who wants to be flattened by hurricane Beta?

Via Dave Farber's mailing list, an interesting and sobering analysis of Hurricane Katrina's public health consequences.

Popular Science, surely not a crazed/wacked gloomdoggling news source, presents a scary story suggesting that the banana as we know it is doomed.

Can This Fruit Be Saved?: The banana as we know it is on a crash course toward extinction. …

For nearly everyone in the U.S., Canada and Europe, a banana is a banana: yellow and sweet, uniformly sized, firmly textured, always seedless. Our banana, called the Cavendish, is one variety Aguilar doesn't grow here. “And for you,” says the chief banana breeder for the Honduran Foundation for Agricultural Investigation (FHIA), “the Cavendish is the banana.”

The Cavendish—as the slogan of Chiquita, the globe's largest banana producer, declares—is “quite possibly the world's perfect food.” Bananas are nutritious and convenient; they're cheap and consistently available. Americans eat more bananas than any other kind of fresh fruit, averaging about 26.2 pounds of them per year, per person (apples are a distant second, at 16.7 pounds). It also turns out that the 100 billion Cavendish bananas consumed annually worldwide are perfect from a genetic standpoint, every single one a duplicate of every other. It doesn't matter if it comes from Honduras or Thailand, Jamaica or the Canary Islands—each Cavendish is an identical twin to one first found in Southeast Asia, brought to a Caribbean botanic garden in the early part of the 20th century, and put into commercial production about 50 years ago.

Anyone who knows about the perils of monoculture could write the next act of this story.

… in 1992, a new strain of the fungus—one that can affect the Cavendish—was discovered in Asia. Since then, Panama disease Race 4 has wiped out plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia and Taiwan, and it is now spreading through much of Southeast Asia. It has yet to hit Africa or Latin America, but most experts agree that it is coming.

And it's happened before, wiping out the precursor to the Cavendish and inspiring the song “Yes, We Have No Bananas”.

The only cheerful part of this story is that I like the sound of some of the other varietals. We have a choice of apples (and tasteless Red Delicious are being pushed out of the market); maybe a diversity of bananas next?