Arp - fuck society | 2009-10-23 23:00:00

Only 257 people in the US total died of the flu in 2001. That's it. 257. Far less than people who died of an accidental fall, or suicide by car, or burning to death....
fucking swine
CDC record of number of deaths in 2001
Influenza and pneumonia................................. 62,034 299 people
Influenza......................................................... 257 people
Pneumonia..................................................... 61,777 people
-----------
October 11, 2009 the World Health Organization reported that, worldwide, there have been more than 399,232 laboratory confirmed cases of pandemic influenza H1N1, and over 4,735 deaths.
------------

So.... Only 257 people in the US total died of the flu in 2001. That's it. 257. Far less than people who died of an accidental fall, or suicide by car, or burning to death....

AND world fucking wide there's only been 4,735 deaths. More people than that in the US alone die when crossing the street.

So..... You have to at least wonder why the flu and the swine flu and getting vaccinated are such HUGE topics and why they are using just total scare tactics to make us injct ourselves with some magic potion to protect us from a exceedingly rare menace..... Oh and by the way also according to the CDC flu shots are only minimally effective......

Oh and by the way...... the last time there was a "swine flu pandemic" more people died FROM the vaccine than the fucking flu..... and many many more where left with serious disabilities.

Get that shot at your own risk doods.

Arp - fuck society | 2009-10-23 22:53:34

Arp - fuck society | 2008-10-06 01:10:45

"I CAN't BELIEVE WE SHARED AN AIR MATTRESS!!!" -JeskaOne of Jeska's acquaintances goes nuts kills dad and burns down trailer.

Son arrested in father's shooting in Kingman

11:51 AM Mountain Standard Time on Wednesday, October 1, 2008

By The Associated Press

KINGMAN, Ariz. (AP) -- A Kingman man is under arrest after his father was found dead inside a burning mobile home.

The Mohave County sheriff's office began looking for 26-year-old Shawn Avery Guerrero of Kingman after his father was found dead in his home early Saturday.

He was arrested by police in Tempe on an outstanding warrant, and deputies later obtained a first-degree murder warrant.

Sheriff's spokeswoman Trish Carter said on Wednesday that an autopsy shows 59-year-old John Guerrero was shot in the neck and back and died before his home was set on fire.

Shawn Guerrero is being held in Maricopa County jail pending his return to Kingman.

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Arp - fuck society | 2008-08-10 12:18:18

in continuing Asian zombie violence.....first there was the stabbing/cannibalism on grayhound now this... could be a plague i hope so


A top official for the Beijing Olympics Organizing Committee says the stabbing death of an American was random violence. VOA Sports Editor Parke Brewer is covering the Games and has a report.

In a undated family photo released by Bachman's Inc., a Minneapolis company, CEO Todd Bachman, right, is shown with his wife Barbara, left, and daughter, former Oympian Elisabeth, center
In a undated family photo released by Bachman's Inc., a Minneapolis company, CEO Todd Bachman, right, is shown with his wife Barbara, left, and daughter, former Oympian Elisabeth, center
Secretary-General Wang Wei said Olympics officials are saddened by Saturday's attack against Americans who were visiting Beijing's famous Drum Tower.

Todd Bachman, the father-in-law of U.S. Olympic men's volleyball coach Hugh McCutcheon, was stabbed to death. His wife suffered multiple stab wounds and remains in the hospital in critical condition. Their daughter was not hurt, but their Chinese guide also suffered stab wounds.

Wang said the attacker, who jumped to his death from the tower after the assault, was a 47-year-old jobless, divorced man from eastern China. Wang said he does not believe the attacker knew that his victims were American.

"Because he is dead, there's no way to find out his motives. Apparently it was an isolated criminal act," Wang said.

Wang added that officials from the American Embassy, the FBI and Chinese security inspected the crime scene and all agreed it was random violence.

Wang said Beijing is a safe city but things can happen anywhere. He said areas around Olympic venues are well protected, but that security may be strengthened in other parts of the city.

Arp - fuck society | 2008-08-07 01:07:02

hell yeah. I love antibiotic resistant illness. Bring on the fucking plague. August 11, 2008

Text Size:
Small Text
Medium Text
Large Text

Print E-Mail Feeds
Doctors fear that dangerous bacteria may become entrenched in hospitals.

Doctors fear that dangerous bacteria may become entrenched in hospitals.

Keywords
Superbugs;
Outbreaks;
Infectious Diseases;
Wetherbee, Roger (Dr.);
Moellering, Robert (Dr.);
Infections;
Antibiotics

In August, 2000, Dr. Roger Wetherbee, an infectious-disease expert at New York University’s Tisch Hospital, received a disturbing call from the hospital’s microbiology laboratory. At the time, Wetherbee was in charge of handling outbreaks of dangerous microbes in the hospital, and the laboratory had isolated a bacterium called Klebsiella pneumoniae from a patient in an intensive-care unit. “It was literally resistant to every meaningful antibiotic that we had,” Wetherbee recalled recently. The microbe was sensitive only to a drug called colistin, which had been developed decades earlier and largely abandoned as a systemic treatment, because it can severely damage the kidneys. “So we had this report, and I looked at it and said to myself, ‘My God, this is an organism that basically we can’t treat.’ ”

Klebsiella is in a class of bacteria called gram-negative, based on its failure to pick up the dye in a Gram’s stain test. (Gram-positive organisms, which include Streptococcus and Staphylococcus , have a different cellular structure.) It inhabits both humans and animals and can survive in water and on inanimate objects. We can carry it on our skin and in our noses and throats, but it is most often found in our stool, and fecal contamination on the hands of caregivers is the most frequent source of infection among patients. Healthy people can harbor Klebsiella to no detrimental effect; those with debilitating conditions, like liver disease or severe diabetes, or those recovering from major surgery, are most likely to fall ill. The bacterium is oval in shape, resembling a TicTac, and has a thick, sugar-filled outer coat, which makes it difficult for white blood cells to engulf and destroy it. Fimbria—fine, hairlike extensions that enable Klebsiella to adhere to the lining of the throat, trachea, and bronchi—project from the bacteria’s surface; the attached microbes can travel deep into our lungs, where they destroy the delicate alveoli, the air sacs that allow us to obtain oxygen. The resulting hemorrhage produces a blood-filled sputum, nicknamed “currant jelly.” Klebsiella can also attach to the urinary tract and infect the kidneys. When the bacteria enter the bloodstream, they release a fatty substance known as an endotoxin, which injures the lining of the blood vessels and can cause fatal shock.

Tisch Hospital has four intensive-care units, all in the east wing on the fifteenth floor, and at the time of the outbreak there were thirty-two intensive-care beds. The I.C.U.s were built in 1961, and although the equipment had been modernized over the years, the units had otherwise remained relatively unchanged: the beds were close to each other, with I.V. pumps and respirators between them, and doctors and nursing staff were shared among the various I.C.U.s. This was an ideal environment for a highly infectious bacterium.

It was the first major outbreak of this multidrug-resistant strain of Klebsiella in the United States, and Wetherbee was concerned that the bacterium had become so well adapted in the I.C.U. that it could not be killed with the usual ammonia and phenol disinfectants. Only bleach seemed able to destroy it. Wetherbee and his team instructed doctors, nurses, and custodial staff to perform meticulous hand washing, and had them wear gowns and gloves when attending to infected patients. He instituted strict protocols to insure that gloves were changed and hands vigorously disinfected after handling the tubing on each patient’s ventilator. Spray bottles with bleach solutions were installed in the I.C.U.s, and surfaces and equipment were cleaned several times a day. Nevertheless, in the ensuing months Klebsiella infected more than a dozen patients.

* from the issue
* cartoon bank
* e-mail this

In late autumn of 2000, in addition to pneumonia patients began contracting urinary-tract and bloodstream infections from Klebsiella. The latter are often lethal, since once Klebsiella infects the bloodstream it can spread to every organ in the body. Wetherbee reviewed procedures in the I.C.U. again and discovered that the Foley catheters, used to drain urine from the bladder, had become a common source of contamination; when emptying the urine bags, staff members inadvertently splashed infected urine onto their gloves and onto nearby machinery. “They were very effectively moving the organism from one bed to the next,” Wetherbee said. He ordered all the I.C.U.s to be decontaminated; the patients were temporarily moved out, supplies discarded, curtains changed, and each room was cleaned from floor to ceiling with a bleach solution. Even so, of the thirty-four patients with infections that year, nearly half died. The outbreak subsided in October, 2003, after even more stringent procedures for decontamination and hygiene were instituted: patients kept in isolation, and staff and visitors required to wear gloves, masks, and gowns at all times.

“My basic premise,” Wetherbee said, “is that you take a capable microörganism like Klebsiella and you put it through the gruelling test of being exposed to a broad spectrum of antibiotics and it will eventually defeat your efforts, as this one did.” Although Tisch Hospital has not had another outbreak, the bacteria appeared soon after at several hospitals in Brooklyn and one in Queens. When I spoke to infectious-disease experts this spring, I was told that the resistant Klebsiella had also appeared at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, in Manhattan, and in hospitals in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, and St. Louis.

Of the so-called superbugs—those bacteria that have developed immunity to a wide number of antibiotics—the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, is the most well known. Dr. Robert Moellering, a professor at Harvard Medical School, a past president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and a leading expert on antibiotic resistance, pointed out that MRSA, like Klebsiella, originally occurred in I.C.U.s, especially among patients who had undergone major surgery. “Until about ten years ago,” Moellering told me, “virtually all cases of MRSA were either in hospitals or nursing homes. In the hospital setting, they cause wound infections after surgery, pneumonias, and bloodstream infections from indwelling catheters. But they can cause a variety of other infections, all the way to bacterial meningitis.” The first deaths from MRSA in community settings, reported at the end of the nineteen-nineties, were among children in North Dakota and Minnesota. “And then it started showing up in men who have sex with men,” Moellering said. “Soon, it began to be spread in prisons among the prisoners. Now we see it in a whole bunch of other populations.” An outbreak among the St. Louis Rams football team, passed on through shared equipment, particularly affected the team’s linemen; artificial turf, which causes skin abrasions that are prone to infection, exacerbated the problem. Other outbreaks were reported among insular religious groups in rural New York; Hurricane Katrina evacuees; and illegal tattoo recipients. “And now it’s basically everybody,” Moellering said. The deadly toxin produced by the strain of MRSA found in U.S. communities, Panton-Valentine leukocidin, is thought to destroy the membranes of white blood cells, damaging the body’s primary defense against the microbe. In 2006, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded some nineteen thousand deaths and a hundred and five thousand infections from MRSA.

Unlike resistant forms of Klebsiella and other gram-negative bacteria, however, MRSA can be treated. “There are about a dozen new antibiotics coming on the market in the next couple of years,” Moellering noted. “But there are no good drugs coming along for these gram-negatives.” Klebsiella and similarly classified bacteria, including Acinetobacter, Enterobacter, and Pseudomonas, have an extra cellular envelope that MRSA lacks, and that hampers the entry of large molecules like antibiotic drugs. “The Klebsiella that caused particular trouble in New York are spreading out,” Moellering told me. “They have very high mortality rates. They are sort of the doomsday-scenario bugs.”

In 1968, Moellering travelled to Malaita, in the Solomon Islands. “I was really interested to see whether we could find an antibiotic-resistant population of bacteria in a place that had never seen antibiotics,” Moellering said. The natives practiced head-hunting and cannibalism, and were isolated as much by conflict as by the island’s dense jungle. Moellering identified microbes there that were resistant to the antibiotics streptomycin and tetracycline, which were then in use in the West but had never been introduced clinically on Malaita. Later studies found resistant bacteria in many other isolated indigenous human populations, as well as in natural reservoirs like aquifers.

Before the development of antibiotics, the threat of infection was urgent: until 1936, pneumonia was the No. 1 cause of death in the United States, and amputation was sometimes the only cure for infected wounds. The introduction of sulfa drugs, in the nineteen-thirties, and penicillin, in the nineteen-forties, suddenly made many bacterial infections curable. As a result, doctors prescribed the drugs widely—often for sore throats, sinus congestion, and coughs that were due not to bacteria but to viruses. In response, bacteria quickly developed resistance to the most common antibiotics. The public assumed that the pharmaceutical industry and researchers in academic hospitals would continue to identify effective new treatments, and for many years they did. In the nineteen-eighties, a class of drugs called carbapenems was developed to combat gram-negative organisms like Klebsiella, Pseudomonas, and Acinetobacter. “They were, at the time, thought to be drugs of last resort, because they had activity against a whole variety of multiply-resistant gram-negative bacteria that were already floating around,” Moellering said. Many hospitals put the drugs “on reserve,” but an apparent cure-all was too tempting for some physicians, and the tight stewardship slowly broke down. Inevitably, mutant, resistant microbes flourished, and even the carbapenems’ effectiveness waned.

Now microbes are appearing far outside their environmental niches. Acinetobacter thrives in warm, humid climates, like Honduras, as well as in parts of Iraq, and is normally found in soil. An article published in the military magazine Proceedings in February reported that more than two hundred and fifty patients at U.S. military hospitals were infected with a highly resistant strain of Acinetobacter between 2003 and 2005, with seven deaths as of June, 2006, linked to “Acinetobacter-related complications.” In 2004, about thirty per cent of all patients returning from Iraq and Afghanistan tested positive for the bacteria. “It’s a big problem, and it’s contaminated the evacuation facilities in Germany and a lot of the V.A. hospitals in the United States where these soldiers have been brought,” Moellering said. Patients evacuated to Stockholm from Thailand after the 2004 tsunami were often infected with resistant gram-negative microbes, including a strain of Acinetobacter that was resistant even to colistin, the antibiotic used, to variable effect, in the outbreak at Tisch Hospital. The practice of “clinical tourism,” in which patients travel long distances for more advanced or more affordable medical centers, may introduce resistant microbes into hospitals where they had not existed before.

Meanwhile, antibiotic use in agricultural industries has grown rapidly. “Seventy per cent of the antibiotics administered in America end up in agriculture,” Michael Pollan, a professor of journalism at Berkeley and the author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” told me. “The drugs are not used to cure sick animals but to prevent them from getting sick, because we crowd them together under filthy circumstances. These are perfect environments for disease. And we also have found, for reasons that I don’t think we entirely understand, that administering low levels of antibiotics to animals speeds their growth.” The theory is that by killing intestinal bacteria the competition for energy is reduced, so that the animal absorbs more energy from the food and therefore grows faster. The Food and Drug Administration, which is often criticized for its lack of attention to the risks of widespread use of antibiotics, offers recommended, non-binding guidelines for these drugs but has rarely withdrawn approval for their application. A spokesman for the Center for Veterinary Medicine at the F.D.A. told me that the center “believes that prudent drug-use principles are essential to the control of antimicrobial resistance.” A study by David L. Smith, Jonathan Dushoff, and J. Glenn Morris, published by PLoS Medicine, from the Public Library of Science, in 2005, noted that the transmission of resistant bacteria from animal to human populations is difficult to measure, but that “antibiotics and antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) are found in the air and soil around farms, in surface and ground water, in wild-animal populations, and on retail meat and poultry. ARB are carried into the kitchen on contaminated meat and poultry, where other foods are cross-contaminated because of common unsafe handling practices.” The researchers developed a mathematical model that suggested that the impact of the transmission of these bacteria from agriculture may be more significant than that of hospital transmissions. “The problem is that we have created the perfect environment in which to breed superbugs that are antibiotic-resistant,” Pollan told me. “We’ve created a petri dish in our factory farms for the evolution of dangerous pathogens.”

Ten years ago, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, in Washington, D.C., assessed the economic impact of resistant microbes in the United States at up to five billion dollars, and experts now believe the figure to be much higher. In July, 2004, the Infectious Diseases Society of America released a white paper, “Bad Bugs, No Drugs: As Antibiotic Discovery Stagnates . . . A Public Health Crisis Brews,” citing 2002 C.D.C. data showing that, of that year’s estimated ninety thousand deaths annually in U.S. hospitals owing to bacterial infection, more than seventy per cent had been caused by organisms that were resistant to at least one of the drugs commonly used to treat them. Drawing on these data, collected mostly from hospitals in large urban areas which are affiliated with medical schools, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found more than a hundred thousand cases of gram-negative antibiotic-resistant bacteria. No precise numbers for all infections, including those outside hospitals, have been calculated, but the C.D.C. also reported that, among gram-negative hospital-acquired infections, about twenty per cent were resistant to state-of-the-art drugs.

In April, I visited Dr. Stuart Levy, at Tufts University School of Medicine. Levy is a researcher-physician who has made key discoveries about how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. In addition to the natural cell envelope of Klebsiella, Levy outlined three primary changes in bacteria that make them resistant to antibiotics. Each change involves either a mutation in the bacterium’s own DNA or the importation of mutated DNA from another. (Bacteria can exchange DNA in the form of plasmids, molecules that are shared by the microbes and allow them to survive inhibitory antibiotics.) First, the bacteria may acquire an enzyme that can either act like a pair of scissors, cutting the drug into an inactive form, or modify the drug’s chemical structure, so that it is rendered impotent. Thirty years ago, Levy discovered a second change: pumps inside the bacteria that could spit out the antibiotic once it had passed through the cell wall. His first reports were met with profound skepticism, but now, Levy told me, “most people would say that efflux is the most common form of bacterial resistance to antibiotics.” The third change involves mutations that alter the inner contents of the microbe, so that the antibiotic can no longer inactivate its target.

Global studies have shown how quickly these bacteria can develop and spread. “This has been a problem in Mediterranean Europe that started about ten years ago,” Dr. Christian Giske told me. Giske is a clinical microbiologist at Karolinska University Hospital, in Stockholm, who, with researchers in Israel and Denmark, recently reported on the worldwide spread of resistant gram-negative bacteria. He continued, “It started to get really serious during the last five or six years and has become really dramatic in Greece.” A decade ago, only a few microbes in Southern Europe had multidrug resistance; now some fifty to sixty per cent of hospital-acquired infections are resistant.

Giske and his colleagues found that infection with a resistant strain of Pseudomonas increased, twofold to fivefold, a patient’s risk of dying, and increased about twofold the patient’s hospital stay. Like other experts in the field, Giske’s team was concerned about the lack of new antibiotics being developed to combat gram-negative bacteria. “There are now a growing number of reports of cases of infections caused by gram-negative organisms for which no adequate therapeutic options exist,” Giske and his colleagues wrote. “This return to the preantibiotic era has become a reality in many parts of the world.”

Doctors and researchers fear that these bacteria may become entrenched in hospitals, threatening any patient who has significant health issues. “Anytime you hear about some kid getting snatched, you want to find something in that story that will convince you that that family is different from yours,” Dr. Louis Rice, an expert in antibiotic resistance at Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center, told me. “But the problem is that any of us could be an I.C.U. patient tomorrow. It’s not easy to convey this to people if it’s not immediately a threat. You don’t want to think about it. But it’s actually anybody who goes into a hospital. This is scary stuff.” Rice mentioned that he had a mild sinusitis and was hoping it would not need to be treated, because taking an antibiotic could change the balance of microbes in his body and make it easier for him to contract a pathogenic organism while doing his rounds at the hospital.

Genetic elements in the bacteria that promote resistance may also move into other, more easily contracted bugs. Moellering pointed out that, while Klebsiella seems best adapted to hospital settings, and poses the greatest risk to patients, other gram-negative bacteria—specifically E. coli, which is a frequent cause of urinary-tract infection in otherwise healthy people—have recently picked up the genes from Klebsiella which promote resistance to antibiotics.

In the past, large pharmaceutical companies were the primary sources of antibiotic research. But many of these companies have abandoned the field. “Eli Lilly and Company developed the first cephalosporins,” Moellering told me, referring to familiar drugs like Keflex. “They developed a huge number of important anti-microbial agents. They had incredible chemistry and incredible research facilities, and, unfortunately, they have completely pulled out of it now. After Squibb merged with Bristol-Myers, they closed their antibacterial program,” he said, as did Abbott, which developed key agents in the past treatment of gram-negative bacteria. A recent assessment of progress in the field, from U.C.L.A., concluded, “FDA approval of new antibacterial agents decreased by 56 per cent over the past 20 years (1998-2002 vs. 1983-1987),” noting that, in the researchers’ projection of future development only six of the five hundred and six drugs currently being developed were new antibacterial agents. Drug companies are looking for blockbuster therapies that must be taken daily for decades, drugs like Lipitor, for high cholesterol, or Zyprexa, for psychiatric disorders, used by millions of people and generating many billions of dollars each year. Antibiotics are used to treat infections, and are therefore prescribed only for days or weeks. (The exception is the use of antibiotics in livestock, which is both a profit-driver and a potential cause of antibiotic resistance.)

“Antibiotics are the only class of drugs where all the experts, as soon as you introduce them clinically, we go out and tell everyone to try to hold it in reserve,” Rice pointed out. “If there is a new cardiology drug, every cardiologist out there is saying that everyone deserves to be on it.” In February, Rice wrote an editorial in the Journal of Infectious Diseases criticizing the lack of support from the National Institutes of Health; without this support, he wrote, “the big picture did not receive the attention it deserved.” Rice acknowledges that there are competing agendas. “As loud as my voice might be, there are louder voices screaming ‘AIDS,’ ” he told me. “And there are congressmen screaming ‘bioterrorism.’ ” Rice came up with the acronym ESKAPE bacteria—Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumanni, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and the Entero-bacter species—as a way of communicating the threat these microbes pose, and the Infectious Diseases Society is lobbying Congress to pass the Strategies to Address Antimicrobial Resistance Act, which would earmark funding for research on ESKAPE microbes and also set up clinical trials on how to limit infection and antibiotic resistance. Rice has also proposed studies to determine the most effective use—at what dosage, and for how long—of antibiotics for common infections like bronchitis and sinusitis.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which chairs the federal interagency working group on microbial resistance. Fauci told me that the government is acutely aware of the severity of the problem. He pointed out that the N.I.H. recently issued a call for proposals to study optimal use of antibiotics for common bacterial infections. It has also funded so-called “coöperative agreements,” including one on Klebsiella, to facilitate public-private partnerships where the basic research from the institute or from university laboratories can be combined with development by a pharmaceutical or a biotech company. Even so, the total funding for studying the resistance of ESKAPE microbes is about thirty-five million dollars, a fraction of the two hundred million dollars provided by the NIAID for research on antimicrobial resistance, most of which goes to malaria, t.b., and H.I.V. “The difficulty that we are faced with is that our budget has been flat for the last five years,” Fauci told me. “In real dollars, we’ve lost almost fifteen per cent purchasing power,” because of an inflation index of about three per cent for biomedical research and development.

Since September 11, 2001, significant funding has been directed toward the study of anthrax and other microbes, like the one that causes plague, which could be used as bioweapons. Although there is little concern that Klebsiella or Acinetobacter might be weaponized, the basic science of their mutation and resistance could be useful in helping us to understand these threats. Fauci hopes to make the case that funds for biodefense should be used to study the ESKAPE bugs, but, for now, he is quick to point out the challenge posed by a lack of resources. “The problem is, it is extremely difficult to do a prospective controlled trial, because when people come into the hospital they immediately get started on some treatment, which ruins the period of study,” he said, referring to research into the treatment of common infections. “The culture of American medicine makes a study like that more difficult to execute.”

These types of studies—on how often, and for how long, antibiotics should be prescribed—are much easier to conduct in countries where medicine is largely socialized and prescriptions are tightly regulated. Recently, researchers in Israel, where most citizens receive their care through such a system, showed that refraining from empirically prescribing antibiotics during the summer months resulted in a sharp decline in ear infections caused by antibiotic-resistant microbes. (In the United States, a 1998 study estimated that fifty-five per cent of all antibiotics prescribed for respiratory infections in outpatients—22.6 million prescriptions—were unnecessary.) In Sweden, the government closely monitors all infections, and has the power to intervene as needed. “Our infection-control people have a lot of authority,” Giske said. “This is power from the legislation.” Once a resistant microbe is identified, stringent protocols are put in place, with dramatic results. Fewer than two per cent of the staphylococci in Sweden are MRSA, compared with sixty per cent in the United States. “Of course, it’s only around ten million people, so it’s possible to intervene because everything is smaller,” Giske said, adding, “Maybe Swedes are more used to this type of intervention and regulation.”

Stuart Levy’s laboratory occupies the eighth floor of a renovated building on Harrison Avenue in Boston’s Chinatown, across the street from Tufts Medical Center. As I passed from his office into the corridor, I detected the acrid smell of agar, which is used to grow bacteria. That day, a laboratory technician was testing specimens taken from the eyes of people with bacterial conjunctivitis who had been given an antibiotic eye drop containing fluoroquinolone. Levy was comparing the bacteria from the infected eyes with those in the noses, cheeks, and throats of the same patients. His technician held up a petri dish with a cranberry-colored agar base. The patient’s specimen was growing bacteria that were susceptible to the antibiotic; the drug had created a large oval clear zone on the plate which resembled the halo around the moon. The study investigates whether an antibiotic applied to the eye would affect bacteria in the nose and mouth as well, which might indicate that what seems to be an innocuous and limited treatment may profoundly change a wider area of the body and foster resistant microbes.

Levy has also received funding from the N.I.H. to study Yersinia pestis, the microbe that causes plague; the Department of Agriculture has sponsored his study of Pseudomonas fluorescens, a soil-based bacterium that has the potential to protect plants from microbial infection. He plans to develop it as a biocontrol agent, so that farmers can be weaned off the potent antibiotics and chemicals they use to treat their fields. “We need to treat biology with biology, not chemistry,” he said. In other studies, Levy and his team are looking at ways to render bacteria nondestructive and noninvasive, so that they might enter the body without harmful effects. This makes it necessary to identify virulence factors—which parts of the bacteria cause damage to our tissues. Levy’s laboratory is targeting a protein in gram-negative organisms called MAR, which appears to act as a master switch, turning on both virulence genes and genes that mediate resistance, like the efflux pump. In collaboration with a startup company called Paratek, of which Levy is a co-founder, his laboratory is screening novel compounds in the hope of finding a drug that blocks MAR.

Frederick Ausubel, a bacterial geneticist at the Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, is searching for drugs to combat bacterial virulence, using tiny animals like worms, which have intestinal cells that are similar to those in humans, and which are susceptible to lethal microbial infection. The worm that Ausubel is studying, Caenorhabditis elegans, is one and a half millimetres in length. “You are probably going to have to screen millions of compounds and you can’t screen millions of infected mice,” Ausubel said. “So our approach was to find an alternative host that could be infected with human pathogens which was small enough and cheap enough to be used in drug screens. What’s remarkable is that many common human pathogens, including Staphylococcus and Pseudomonas, will cause intestinal infection and kill the worms. So now you can look for a compound that cures it, that prevents the pathogen from killing the host.” Ausubel first screened some six thousand compounds by hand and found eight, none of them traditional antibiotics, that may protect the worms. He is also attempting, among other potential solutions, to find a compound that would block what is called “quorum sensing,” in which bacteria release small molecules to communicate with one another and signal when a critical mass is present. Once this quorum is reached, the bacteria turn on their virulence genes. “Bacteria don’t want to alert their host that they are there by immediately producing virulence factors which the host would recognize,” triggering the immune system, Ausubel explained. “When they reach a certain quorum, there are too many of them for the host to do anything about it.” Bonnie Bassler, a molecular biologist at Princeton University, has recently shown that it is through quorum sensing that cholera bacteria are able to accumulate in the intestines and release toxins that can be fatal; Pseudomonas is also known to switch on its virulence genes in response to signals from quorum sensing.

Moellering is enthusiastic but cautious about this avenue of research. “It’s a great idea, but so far nobody has been able to make it work for human infections,” he told me. With certain types of staphylococci, Moellering said, “mutations have occurred spontaneously in nature that cut down on a number of virulence factors . . . but they still cause serious infections. I’m not sure that we have a way yet to use what we know about virulence factors to develop effective antimicrobial agents. And we almost certainly will have to use these agents in combination with antibiotics.” No one, Moellering said, has developed a way to disarm bacteria sufficiently to allow the human body to naturally and consistently defend against them. I asked him what we should do to combat these new superbugs. “Nobody has the answer right now,” he said. “The fact of the matter is that we have found all the easy targets” for drug development. He went on, “So the only other thing we can do is continue to work on antibiotic stewardship.” Meanwhile, new resistant bacteria, Moellering asserted, aren’t going to go away. “We can temper things, we might be able to slow the rate of emergence of resistance, but it’s unlikely that we will ever be able to conquer it.” ♦

ILLUSTRATION: BRUCE MCCALL

Arp - fuck society | 2008-07-17 13:39:52

Oregon wants you to kill yourself. i mean cancer is expensive and shit.... The Oregon Health Plan:
The Reality of When the Government Runs Health Care
“Elect me and your health care problems will all be over.”

The people of Oregon fell for that line almost 20 years ago. Expecting Utopia, what they got was a reality check: long lines for a lottery to pick who’s covered and suicide coverage–instead of cancer drugs.


In 1989. Oregon became the second State, after Hawaii, to attempt complete medical coverage of it’s citizens.

It has not gone as planned.

In fact, it seems to be approaching disaster. Within a few years:

In early 2003, the Oregon Health Plan (OHP) implemented cost saving strategies, reducing benefits and increasing cost-sharing for a substantial portion of its members

Cost-sharing meant that people were being charged premium for the previously funded care. So we have a reduction in Medical care and services, and increased cost. But the degeneration of the plan did not end there. In March of this year, wire services carried the following:

Tens of thousands of Oregonians queued up quickly for a chance at the state’s latest lottery, but this one is no game.

Officials began drawing names last week for a chance at some rare openings in the state’s healthcare plan.

Announced in February, the lottery drew 91,675 hopefuls in 30 days. The winners will receive a postcard notifying them that they can apply for the Oregon Health Plan.

“Budget limitations capped the Oregon Health Plan standard benefit package in mid-2004. Now the plan has room for a few thousand people. The lottery winners will be the first new applicants since the cap was imposed.

Oregon holds lottery to determine who\'s covered

When it was fully funded, it was considered a trailblazing program.

In 1996, the benefit package enrolled five times as many people as are enrolled today, and only 10.7% of Oregon’s population lacked insurance, compared with about 16% today.

Yes, you read that correctly. Not only are the numbers of uninsured increasing dramatically, with only 24,000 insured, but to get on the ‘Universal” plan, you must participate in a lottery.

In June of 2008, it got far worse.

The “Universal” plan does not, apparently include medical care for seriously potentially terminal disease.As The Catholic News Agency reported:

Oregon health plan covers assisted suicide, not drugs, for cancer patient”

Eugene, Jun 6, 2008 / 01:09 am ( CNA).- An Oregon woman suffering from lung cancer was notified by the state-run Oregon Health Plan that their policy would not cover her life-extending cancer drug, telling her the health plan would cover doctor-assisted suicide instead.

That was not a misprint.

On October 27, 1997 Oregon enacted the Death with Dignity Act which allows terminally-ill Oregonians to end their lives through the voluntary self-administration of lethal medications, expressly prescribed by a physician for that purpose.

In 2008, as a cost control measure, Oregon apparently incorporated the act into it’s failing health care plan–because it is far easier to kill patients than to save them. The publicity of the story ultimately saved the patient. The manufacturer of the life preserving drug stepped up and offered it to the patient.

The story appears to be a happy ending for Barbara Wagner, who has been notified by a drug manufacturer that it will provide the expensive medication, estimated to cost $4,000 a month, for the first year and then allow her to apply for further treatment, according to a report in the Eugene Register-Guard.

But the word from the state was coverage for palliative care, which would include the state’s assisted suicide program, would be allowed but not coverage for the cancer treatment drugs.

“To say to someone, we’ll pay for you to die, but not pay for you to live, it’s cruel,” Wagner told the newspaper. “I get angry. Who do they think they are?”

Dignity?

Anything but. Oregon now has half the physicians it needs. It rations health care like no other State. It has become a bizarre replication of the Soviet health care system of old;socialism run amok.

The cure? You guessed it?

“We don’t know, and the American public doesn’t know, what is going to happen in the next two to three to four years nationally,” Speight said. “There are things we can do at a state level that can work with a national model.”

Yeah. They want you to pay for their failure and participate in this irrational death factory.

Arp - fuck society | 2008-07-07 07:11:12

A federal judge this week ordered Google to provide Viacom with records of which users watched which videos on YouTube. The ruling raises fears that the video viewing histories of tens of millions of people could be exposed. The sheer amount of data we're talking about here is massive -- for each and every YouTube video ever watched since YouTube launched in 2005, Google now has to to turn over to Viacom the login name of every user who had watched every video, and their the IP addresses.

Snip from NYT story by Miguel Helft:

Google and Viacom said they were hoping to come up with a way to protect the anonymity of the site’s visitors. Viacom also said that the information would be safeguarded by a protective order restricting access to the data to outside lawyers, who will use it solely to press Viacom’s $1 billion copyright suit against Google.

Still, the judge’s order, which was made public late Wednesday, renewed concerns among privacy advocates that Internet companies like Google are collecting unprecedented amounts of private information that could be misused or fall unexpectedly into the hands of third parties.

“These very large databases of transactional information become honey pots for law enforcement or for litigants,” said Chris Hoofnagle, a senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.

Arp - fuck society | 2008-07-07 07:02:55

This one uses the so-called "microwave auditory effect": a beam of microwaves is turned into sound by the interaction with your head. Nobody else can hear it unless they are in the beam as well. The U.S. military bankrolled early development of a non-lethal microwave weapon that creates sound inside your head. But in the end, the gadget may be just as likely to wind up in shopping malls as on battlefields, as I report in New Scientist.

The project is known as MEDUSA – a contrived acronym for Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio. And it should not be confused with the Long Range Acoustic Device and similar gadgets which simply project sound. This one uses the so-called "microwave auditory effect": a beam of microwaves is turned into sound by the interaction with your head. Nobody else can hear it unless they are in the beam as well.

The effect has long been a laboratory curiosity, with no application. But, over the years, the military has been intrigued. The idea (dubbed "the telepathic ray gun") was mentioned in a 1998 US Army study, which turned up in a recent Freedom of Information Act document dump. Five years later, the Navy decided to put some R&D dollars into the project. Now, as I note on the New Scientist website, Dr. Lev Sadovnik of the Sierra Nevada Corporation has provided more details.



There are health risks, he notes. But the biggest issue from the microwave weapon is not the radiation. It's the risk of brain damage from the high-intensity shockwave created by the microwave pulse. Clearly, much more research is needed on this effect at the sort of power levels that Dr. Sadovnik is proposing. But if it does prove hazardous, that does not mean an end to weapons research in this area: a device that delivered a lethal shockwave inside the target's skull might make an effective death ray.

Dr. Sadovnik also makes the intriguing suggestion that, instead of being used at high power to create an intolerable noise, it might be used at low power to produce a whisper that was too quiet to perceive consciously but might be able to subconsciously influence someone. The directional beam could be used for targeted messages, such as in-store promotions. Sadovnik even suggests subliminal advertising, beaming information that is not consciously heard (a notion also spotted on the US Army's voice-to-skull page). While the effectiveness of subliminal persuasion is dubious, I can see there might be some organizations interested in this capability. And if that doesn't work, you could always point the thing at birds. They seem to be highly sensitive to microwave audio, so it might be used to scare flocks away from wind farms -- or shoo pigeons from city streets.

Arp - fuck society | 2008-05-31 14:47:05

At a handful of sites across the country, after a four-decade hiatus, psychedelic research is undergoing a quiet renaissance.
Hallucinogens such as psilocybin, MDMA (better known as Ecstasy), and the most controversial of them all, LSD, are being tested as treatments for maladies that modern medicine has done little to assuage, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, drug dependency, obsessive-compulsive disorder, cluster headaches, and the emotional suffering of people with a terminal illness.

full four page article here: link

Arp - fuck society | 2008-05-31 14:41:09

For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years.
Newsflash: Time May Not Exist
Not to mention the question of which way it goes...
by Tim Folger

No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years.

But even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”

The trouble with time started a century ago, when Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity demolished the idea of time as a universal constant. One consequence is that the past, present, and future are not absolutes. Einstein’s theories also opened a rift in physics because the rules of general relativity (which describe gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos) seem incompatible with those of quantum physics (which govern the realm of the tiny). Some four decades ago, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt, then at the University of North Carolina, developed an extraordinary equation that provides a possible framework for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. But the Wheeler-­DeWitt equation has always been controversial, in part because it adds yet another, even more baffling twist to our understanding of time.

“One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.”

No one has yet succeeded in using the Wheeler-DeWitt equation to integrate quantum theory with general relativity. Nevertheless, a sizable minority of physicists, Rovelli included, believe that any successful merger of the two great masterpieces of 20th-century physics will inevitably describe a universe in which, ultimately, there is no time.

The possibility that time may not exist is known among physicists as the “problem of time.” It may be the biggest, but it is far from the only temporal conundrum. Vying for second place is this strange fact: The laws of physics don’t explain why time always points to the future. All the laws—whether Newton’s, Einstein’s, or the quirky quantum rules—would work equally well if time ran backward. As far as we can tell, though, time is a one-way process; it never reverses, even though no laws restrict it.

“It’s quite mysterious why we have such an obvious arrow of time,” says Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at MIT. (When I ask him what time it is, he answers, “Beats me. Are we done?”) “The usual explanation of this is that in order to specify what happens to a system, you not only have to specify the physical laws, but you have to specify some initial or final condition.”

The mother of all initial conditions, Lloyd says, was the Big Bang. Physicists believe that the universe started as a very simple, extremely compact ball of energy. Although the laws of physics themselves don’t provide for an arrow of time, the ongoing expansion of the universe does. As the universe expands, it becomes ever more complex and disorderly. The growing disorder—physicists call it an increase in entropy—is driven by the expansion of the universe, which may be the origin of what we think of as the ceaseless forward march of time.
Time, in this view, is not something that exists apart from the universe. There is no clock ticking outside the cosmos. Most of us tend to think of time the way Newton did: “Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably, without regard to anything external.” But as Einstein proved, time is part of the fabric of the universe. Contrary to what Newton believed, our ordinary clocks don’t measure something that’s independent of the universe. In fact, says Lloyd, clocks don’t really measure time at all.

“I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,” says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) “I said something like, ‘Your clocks measure time very accurately.’ They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time.’ I thought, Wow, that’s very humble of these guys. But they said, ‘No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.”

Rovelli, the advocate of a timeless universe, says the NIST timekeepers have it right. Moreover, their point of view is consistent with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. “We never really see time,” he says. “We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on. We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time.

“What happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variable—time, which itself is not observable—we should just describe how the variables are related to one another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it’s only a macroscopic effect. It’s something that emerges only for big things.”

The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality.

By “big things,” Rovelli means anything that exists much above the mysterious Planck scale. As of now there is no physical theory that completely describes what the universe is like below the Planck scale. One possibility is that if physicists ever manage to unify quantum theory and general relativity, space and time will be described by some modified version of quantum mechanics. In such a theory, space and time would no longer be smooth and continuous. Rather, they would consist of discrete fragments—quanta, in the argot of physics—just as light is composed of individual bundles of energy called photons. These would be the building blocks of space and time. It’s not easy to imagine space and time being made of something else. Where would the components of space and time exist, if not in space and time?

As Rovelli explains it, in quantum mechanics all particles of matter and energy can also be described as waves. And waves have an unusual property: An infinite number of them can exist in the same location. If time and space are one day shown to consist of quanta, the quanta could all exist piled together in a single dimensionless point. “Space and time in some sense melt in this picture,” says Rovelli. “There is no space anymore. There are just quanta kind of living on top of one another without being immersed in a space.”

Rovelli has been working with one of the world’s leading mathematicians, Alain Connes of the College of France in Paris, on this notion. Together they have developed a framework to show how the thing we experience as time might emerge from a more fundamental, timeless reality. As Rovelli describes it, “Time may be an approximate concept that emerges at large scales—a bit like the concept of ‘surface of the water,’ which makes sense macroscopically but which loses a precise sense at the level of the atoms.”

Realizing that his explanation may only be deepening the mystery of time, Rovelli says that much of the knowledge that we now take for granted was once considered equally perplexing. “I realize that the picture is not intuitive. But this is what fundamental physics is about: finding new ways of thinking about the world and proposing them and seeing if they work. I think that when Galileo said that the Earth was spinning crazily around, it was utterly incomprehensible in the same manner. Space for Copernicus was not the same as space for Newton, and space for Newton was not the same as space for Einstein. We always learn a little bit more.”

Einstein, for one, found solace in his revolutionary sense of time. In March 1955, when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, he wrote a letter consoling Besso’s family: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Rovelli senses another temporal breakthrough just around the corner. “Einstein’s 1905 paper came out and suddenly changed people’s thinking about space-time. We’re again in the middle of something like that,” he says. When the dust settles, time—whatever it may be—could turn out to be even stranger and more illusory than even Einstein could imagine.