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Don't forget, they had a syphilis outbreak in the late 90's. Wear your raincoat

I know this is offtopic, but you have to be fucking kidding me. This stuff is a biological contamination timebomb waiting to go off. You're basically making a giant tea / sugar / fungus culture, and then drinking the stuff that comes out the bottom.

Now I know Slashdotters aren't always the brightest of people, but surely you see why this isn't a good idea. Here's an FDA bulletin about contamination risks, a CDC article on possible related illness resulting in death - possibly a result of lactic acidosis brought on by this extremely acid drink. Finally, from my faithful companion the Australian Adverse Drug Reactions Bulletin, another report including such delights as rashes, fever, rigors, nausea, vomiting, impaired liver function, elevated white cell count and hepatitis.

Please don't try this at home.

Why does that statistic just not seem to scare me very much? Florida, which had 31 of those 55 attacks, has millions upon millions of visitors every year and an absurdly small number of them get attacked by sharks. Lets compare those 31 nonfatal shark attacks to the 145 people who get toasted by lightning here in Florida every year. So, it would appear that one would be more likely to be killed by lightning than attacked by a shark (at least when in Florida).

Biological warfare is a lot more than 200 years old. I'd wager that man was throwng dead rats into enemy caves as soon as he figured out that dead rats carried disease.

" HIGHLIGHTS: Polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) are manmade chemicals found in plastics used in a variety of consumer products to make them difficult to burn. Some people who ate food contaminated with PBBs in the 1970s had skin problems. Almost nothing is known about health effects of PBDEs in people. PBBs have been found in at least 9 of the 1,613 National Priorities List sites identified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). PBDEs have not been identified in any of the 1,613 sites."

Either way, I guess we should all stop licking our monitors and keyboards just in case.

Take another look at the second article in the original post. Their tests were measured in pg/cm^2. Picograms. As in 10^-12 grams. It's gonna take a while for the compounds to accumulate to toxic levels (on the order of mg/kg body weight).

Also, remember that the PBDEs are primarily used as cleaners and anti-flammability agents in the manufacturing processes of many electronics. They're not being created by your monitors (i.e., there's a finite amount of them per piece of computer equipment, so they'll eventually run out). Your computer won't be "infectious" forever.

Try these sites for more info on PBDE:

• slightly reactionary info at ourstolenfuture.org
• info at the cdc
• a little more technical, including a toxic estimate (for rodents) at accuchem.com

Assuming that people's bodies could be kept at the 20-year-old state indefinitely. All diseases, accidents, violence, etc would happen to you with the probability of a 20-year-old. Consulting medical and acturial databases, how many years would this add to the mean lifespan?

I don't believe that "15 year" answer, so I looked at a mortality table and did the math myself. I came up with an estimate of 800 years.

The acturial tables that you want are called mortality tables. Here is a collection of them from the American National Center for Health Statistics.

NCHS Data Warehouse

Going to the first table, death rates by age, the death rate for 15-24 year olds is 80.7 per 100,000 (all states, 2001).

This means that in the year 2001, in this population group, for each 100,000 people, 99,919.3 of people of these ages lived, and 80.7 of them died.

Or, to scale it down: start with 1000 people. In a year, 1 person dies, and 999 live. What's the average life span of that population? It's a hell of a lot longer than "15 more than normal 60 or so"!

A quick calculation, log(0.5)/log(0.999193)), shows that the median life expectancy of a "perpetual 20 year old", would be 858 more years. That is, if you had 100,000 of these perpetual 20 year olds, after 858 years, 50,000 of them would still be alive.

Calculating average is a bit trickier and I'll leave it alone.

The primary observation was that, while older people are on the average more susceptible to such things than younger people, the difference isn't all that great.

Oh yes it is.

ALL AGES: 848.5
0-1 year: 683.4
1-4 years: 33.3
5-14 years: 17.3
15-24 years: 80.7
25-34 years: 105.2
35-44 years: 203.6
45-54 years: 428.9
55-64 years: 964.6
65-74 years: 2,353.3
75-84 years: 5,582.4
85+ years: 15,112.8

A 50 year old has 5 times the chance of dying as a 20 year old. A 60 year old has 12 times the chance of dying as a 20 year old.

NCHS has lots of interesting tables like these; or you can google for "mortality table" and get tables from other sources, too.

I haven't RTFA yet, but I'll comment anyway. From what I learned in med school so far, you're not allowed to state that the cause of death is "old age" on a death certificate. What I'm trying to get at is, most people don't "die of old age" as the slashdot blurb seems to imply above. Usually it's a problem such as hypertension, atherosclerosis, diabetes, etc. So the person submitting the story should have said "Engineering an end to problems/diseases that arise from old age." There is nothing wrong with aging per se, it's the health problems that are more probable to occur at old age that kills you. I realize it's a matter of semantics, but in such an age-phobic society (i.e. the US), I feel that things like this have to be voiced to stem other social problems such as "age-ism." Moreover, all the money spent to extend the last few years of life is overtaking needed health expenditures in other areas -- such as child healthcare and universal coverage. It seems that 90% of healthcare costs are being spent to extend life just another 10% or less. I'd rather support expenditures in areas such as hospice.

I'm 43 years old, and it has been common knowledge that smoking is bad for your health for my entire lifetime.

It's understandable that, since you were only a small child in 1965, you don't remember when the warnings started appearing on the cigarette packs, or the huge uproar the tobacco companies raised about putting them there. It probably had no relevance to a four-year-old. On the other hand, I'm 30, and since I *knew* the warnings had been there *my* whole life, I actually bothered to look up when it happened. Prior to those warnings, the tobacco companies were still insisting that smoking wasn't bad for you, really. As little as ten years earlier they had sponsors with medical degrees telling you how *good* it was for you.

Smoking appeals to stupid people. I don't care what your IQ or your GPA, if you started smoking from 1960 or after you are a stupid fucker.

Glad you exempted my mom from that blanket statement. She had her first cigarette in 1950, when she was seven. Her older sisters gave it to her to calm her down after a traumatic experience. She smoked for 31 years before finally quitting when I was 8.

A couple of years ago, she survived breast cancer. She has health insurance, so the group of people who shared the cost of her smoking is smaller than the entire State of California. But not everyone is so lucky. There's a lot of people who started smoking before 1960, and even who quit many years ago, who are costing us *all* a lot to take care of now, when the effects are finally showing up.

The fact that a stupid fuck addicted himself or herself to smoking isn't my problem. Their nasty smoke and ash, ruining my meal and making my clothes and hair stink, is my problem.

The fact that your health insurance premiums and tax dollars are helping to pay for the health effects of other people's smoking sounds like your problem to me. My problem too. But, if we started charging people a lot more for health insurance if they smoke, the tobacco companies would pull all their campaign contributions, because it might hurt their sales.

Our society doesn't make people take responsibility for their smoking. The reason we don't is because of tobacco industry lobbying. If we make people pay the costs of their own actions up-front, they will be less likely to smoke. The "gamble" on having cancer or emphysema way, way down the line (well, I'll quit eventually, you know) isn't enough for most people to compute.

I totally agree that there's no justification whatsoever for allowing people to smoke in public. Do nicotine? Sure, do whatever drug you want. Get a patch, get some gum, heck even chew it as long as you don't spit it on the ground. But no one has any right to force anyone *else* to do their drug of choice with them. (Big problem here is, smokers have no sense of smell, and definitely cannot smell their own smoke. So they don't realize that it's blowing your way.)

OK, so your hypothetical man on the street is completely ignorant. What is that supposed to prove?

I'd be interested to know how many times people really defend themselves with their guns (and what is the ratio against "gun accidents" for instance).

Average annual incidence of self-defense actions involving firearms, 1987-1992: 82,500 (USDOJ)

Annual accidental fatalities involving firearms, 1993: 1543

Unintentional firearms-related injuries, 1993: 21,385 (CDC)

The numbers stack up pretty well, I'd say. And that's not even taking into account that the incidence of firearm-related accidents has decreased dramatically in the last decade.

Drug possession is an indication that you're willing to turn yourself into a partial lunatic, a menace to others and also to anyone dependent on you. The injustice here is that alcohol, an addictive drug responsible both directly (85,000, third most frequent "actual" CoD and twice as frequent as MVAs) and indirectly for many thousands of deaths every year, is legal to possess and use in any amount.

Sodomy spreads disease rapidly (for example, there's a reason that far more homosexual men die of AIDS than any other group), so it needs regulation as a disease vector. It is also likely to be directly physically damaging, so if we regulate any form of self-abuse, then we must also regulate sodomy if we are to aim for fairness.

Note that on the above table, "sexual behaviour" (which would include heterosexual promiscuity, AKA "sleeping around") kills more people than illicit drug use, and MVAs kill more than both combined, so the statistics say we should be spending our efforts on condemning alcohol first, then qualifying our drivers better. But even alcohol accounts for only 20% as many deaths as smoking - and those deaths are lingering.

Just in case you don't get the point, the drugs which are already legal and regarded as "mostly harmless" are killing more than half a million Yanks a year. Do we want to make this worse, or better?

Cigarettes are also the leading cause of death by fire.

There are so many ramifications which you've glossed over to claim "victimless" for your two examples that it's hard to know where to start picking your assertion apart.

During November 2002--July 2003, a total of 8,098 probable SARS cases were reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) from 29 countries, including 29 cases from the United States; 774 SARS-related deaths (case-fatality rate: 9.6%) were reported

CDC Mortality numbers for 2003 break down the mortality rates due to HIV infection like this:

1. Male-to-male sexual contact (and the same with IV drug use too): just over 480,000 deaths.
2. IV Drug use: 240,268 deaths.
3. Heterosexual contact: 135,628 deaths.

(That's leaving out the "other" category of blood transfusions and so on.)

Gays and IV drug users are easily at the most risk, but 135 thousand US citizens, give or take, died of AIDS due to heterosexual transmission last year. For comparison, in 2001 the CDC says 163,538 died of a stroke in this country. Note that the number of deaths from AIDS not due to male-to-male contact was 375,896, just 100,000 fewer than among gay men. That's including the drug users.

(I'm still wondering what the heck point you thought you were making about religious nut cases who want AIDS to wipe out all the gay people. The simple truth is that there are loads of fundie religious folks who want that -- and who else? What other large groups want all the gay people to die due to AIDS? You're right that people are nuts in so many different ways, but this one belongs to the fundamentalists, no question.)

You don't know much about methane digesters, do you?

Apparently more than you think.

They get hot - pretty damn hot, hot enough to kill a lot of "bad" things (just like any other form of decomposition, like a garden compost pile).

From the article that you linked

Since methane-producing bacteria are most active in a range of 95 to 105 degrees F, some digesters circulate hot water through pipes to heat the manure and maintain the desired temperature range.

95 to 105 degrees F.

Well, let's look at the CDC.

Ground beef should be cooked until a thermometer inserted into several parts of the patty, including the thickest part, reads at least 160 F.

160 degrees F is what the CDC says is necessary to kill E. Coli, 95 - 105 degrees F are where these machines operate.

Forget about "mutated e. coli" - read a little before making posts demonstrating your ignorance.

Good advice, why don't you take it?

LK

And what is my original claim?

It is a positive claim. It was advanced without context, on its own. No one (including myself) has thus far in this thread argued the contrary position, but have rather asked you to back up your claim.

Let us look to define the terms: a google search for "HIV definition" gives as its first hit a site from the CDC which states:

HIV - human immunodeficiency virus, the virus that causes AIDS

AIDS - acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, a disease in which the immune system is weakened and therefore less able to fight certain infections and diseases; AIDS is caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)

If a virus detected by a given test does not cause AIDS, then it is not HIV, by the very definitions of the terms. Your claim was specific and was contradicts to the very definitions of the terms.

The veracity of the HIV test is one of many problems in the HIV==AIDS hypothesis. Besides, it is your responsibility, not mine, to defend your claims about this alleged disease and this alleged virus.

No. Insetad, why don't you defend the HIV==AIDS hypothesis.

I know very little about the state of the art in medical research on the subject-that's one reason I didn't make any such claims and have little interest in that discussion.

It isn't quite for funny with a simple substitution: Shoko Ashahara for Don Emilio Fulci.

The Aum cult in Japan did manufacture chemical weapons and attacked subways in Japan. It killed a number of people and sickened thousands. They had their own research labs with university trained staff. It was no laughing matter. You can read more about it here.

The way things are going in our culture, when you are old and suffering from Parkinson's you won't be cured, rather you'll be harvested for parts. The thinking at that time will be that you aren't human anymore, or that you are too much of a burden for society. I hope I'm wrong, but I fear not

I doubt this will be a valid concern. Young fresh parts are desireable. Why would you want old parts from someone with a debilitating sickness?

I call B.S. Care to offer some evidence for this sweeping statement? I have no problem with medical advancement, just with "advancement" that is conducted at the expense of someone who has no say in the matter.

Lab rats? Clinical trials on Chimpanzees? These types of tests go on every day and I would certainly say some percentage of them are to the detrimant of those being used for the tests. I'm pretty sure they have no say in the matter as well. Of course that's ok cause they aren't human right? Most human trials are done wiht volunteers, but what about in the past like when MIT did radiation research at a home for the mentally challenged or the Army releasing chemicals into the air on certain populations to test the effects without bothering to tell anyone. There are plenty of sites keeping track of this type of secret studies. Such as above top secret. If you don't find that a credible source you could always look at the CDC pages for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study which was certainly done inappropriatly.

I should probably clarify that I don't think a fertilized embryo is a human yet and that I'm ok with stem cell research etc. I also think that if we are going to ban it then our own government shouldn't be offshoring the research to get around our laws. Besides.. who's to say that with more research we won't work out a method for cloning specific parts and not whole people from whom parts will be harvested. This makes the most sense to me. Like the recent announcment that stem cells may be used to regrow teeth. We might just figure out how to grow just kidneys, livers, hearts, or whatever we need. Then we won't have issues with people dieing while waiting on transplant need lists and can potentially guarantee successful acceptance of new organs by the body.

http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/tfacts115.html

According to the CDC, phenol is a manufactured substance that is used to manufacture nylon, as an antiseptic, or in mouthwash & throat lozenges.

The effects of breathing airborne phenol (Which I assume is what would be coming out of the monitor) are unknown; additionally the CDC lists it as unclassifiable regarding carcinogenity. As such, I wouldn't recommend monitor testers run out looking for a new job, considering that you're likely to run into more heavy doses of carcinogens going to work.

I've been hearing this kind of bullshit for the past 30 years, yet in the meantime Europe keeps getting richer and poverty keeps steadily increasing in the US.

I disagree. The US on the whole is fabulously wealthy. The level of poverty isn't a constant that can be directly compared between countries; our governments define the poverty line. Almost 70 per cent of US residents own homes, and most of us have our own private transportation. Perhaps you're thinking of the pay gap between blue collar workers and senior management, which has been increasing (and will continue as long as regulations of wages, benefits, etc. continues to make hiring riskier for small companies, and as long as the majority of our manufacturing infrastructure remains at a technology level somwhere between the 1930s and the 1960s). It also doesn't help that our welfare system has (or had) the tendency to keep generations of families on the dole, instead of helping them become self-sufficient. Considering that the basic system pays according to the number of dependants, you can see how that creates a growing class of people way below the poverty line.

Europe has lower crime, longer lifespans, lower infant mortality, you name it they've got it. Go back to reading "USA Today" and keep dreaming that you live in utopia.

I don't know if it's a lower crime rate, or the fact that we arrest people at the drop of a hat. Having lots of disposable income and harsh drug law enforcement doesn't help (in urban areas), either. I have no mortality statistics for westernized European countries, so I can't compare the mortality rates, but the average lifespan in the US is about 77 years. I don't contend that the USA is the ultimate utopia, but then again the definition of "utopia" appears to be subjective. What some others suggest would be my definition of Hell. This is not to say that the way it is now is my ideal; I do complain, but on the whole I've had a pretty comfortable life.

p.s. USA Today is junk rag as far as I'm concerned.

This is just not true. Ethylene glycol is HO-CH_2-CH_2-OH, no double bonds involved. For toxicity info, see here or here.

Besides, the compund the article talks about is polyethylene glycol, which is the polymer of ethylene glycol (as the name says), chemical formula is HO-(CH_2-CH_2-O)_n-H (n usually >>100). See here.

I've never studies economics or sociology, so forgive me if I'm an ignorant fool, but its always seemed to me that as long as we are not experiancing large amounts of disease, drought or other reduction in the availability of natural resources, that economic slowdown is more a result of psycology than anything else.

a couple of 400 Megaton ICBMS...a crap load of level 4 labs loaded with nasties...see how many of those 1 billion muslims are left standing

About as many as other human beings in your own country. Do you seriously think that launching piles of nukes or releasing viruses (anywhere in the world) would leave you unharmed? Look up radiation sickness someday, or anthrax, or even a modified strain of smallpox.

a couple of 400 Megaton ICBMS...a crap load of level 4 labs loaded with nasties...see how many of those 1 billion muslims are left standing

About as many as other human beings in your own country. Do you seriously think that launching piles of nukes or releasing viruses (anywhere in the world) would leave you unharmed? Look up radiation sickness someday, or anthrax, or even a modified strain of smallpox.

Well if the director of the facility is calling it a Level 5 facility only 6 years ago I would hardly call that outdated or incorrect as in theory he should know more than anyone about the subject.

The citation you give is on the web site of (what based on this reference amoung others, I judge is essentially) a lobbying organization, giving draft notes from a meeting between representatives of the group and various government officials. Furthermore, that was in 1998, only two years after the 1996 change in terminology. Inexact terminology was excusable.
It is not, say, a current official government publication, or official testimony to congress.

It is now eight years since the correct parlance has changed. Using the old terminology is no longer appropriate.

Of course, while the term for the facility and the bugs may have changed from BSL-5 to BSL-4, that doesn't change how #$%^ing dangerous the stuff really is. They were then and still are the nastiest bugs on the planet, and have not gotten one whit safer in the meanwhile. While I'm not sure what the best location would be for such a facility, you're right: putting one that close to New York City is rank insanity.

Well if the director of the facility is calling it a Level 5 facility only 6 years ago I would hardly call that outdated or incorrect as in theory he should know more than anyone about the subject.

The citation you give is on the web site of (what based on this reference amoung others, I judge is essentially) a lobbying organization, giving draft notes from a meeting between representatives of the group and various government officials. Furthermore, that was in 1998, only two years after the 1996 change in terminology. Inexact terminology was excusable.
It is not, say, a current official government publication, or official testimony to congress.

It is now eight years since the correct parlance has changed. Using the old terminology is no longer appropriate.

Of course, while the term for the facility and the bugs may have changed from BSL-5 to BSL-4, that doesn't change how #$%^ing dangerous the stuff really is. They were then and still are the nastiest bugs on the planet, and have not gotten one whit safer in the meanwhile. While I'm not sure what the best location would be for such a facility, you're right: putting one that close to New York City is rank insanity.

References to BSL5 appear to be using poor/outdated terminology.

A non-canonically sourced article here (coincidentally mentioning Plum island) mentions "The confusion stems from two separate ranking systems, one for organisms and one for facilities. There are four levels of facilities, said Ms. Hays. And there are four levels of organisms. But once upon a time there were five levels of organisms, the top rank reserved for animals diseases forbidden in the mainland U.S."

A passing reference to this old classification system can be seen here.

The current CDC listing of Biosafety Criteria is here.

My quick searches using Google to check US government web sites turns up only a handful of references, all false positives (so to speak). This suggests that any mention of BSL-5 is either outdated, incorrect, fictitious, or (for the paranoid) leaked classified information.


Having read the BSL-4 specs from the CDC, about the only step up I can imagine for a BSL-5 facility is "Remote teleoperation only; no on-site human presence allowed. No material, organic or otherwise, may ever leave the facility." Anyone stupid enough to even try to play with something that would need that level of containment ought to be shot; it isn't even useful as weapon, it just exteminates the species.

I have no personal knowledge of the research done at Plum Island. However, they do have a website.
Not that you are likely to believe what they say about themselves. I suspect the father of your childhood friend just got tired of explaining what he did to freaked out people like you, and don't really consider that anecdote evidence of some big coverup of the research that goes on there.

There is also no point in arguing over whether or not the US is still involved in bioweapons research. None of us knows for certain... and those that do, can't say, or aren't believed (when they say that there is no research aimed at developing bioweapons going on).

However, I don't think the two diseases you mention are likely targets for such research, if it is continuing. Nor is "escaped from a bioweapons research lab" the most likely explanation for the arrival of these diseases.

The disease that we call Lyme disease has been around in Europe for quite awhile. Here is a short history. You are correct that no one really knows when it showed up here, but given the tick-infested state of many of the early immigrants to America, I don't think we really need to invoke some governmental conspiracy theory to explain it. As many of the patient testimonials show, this is a difficult disease to diagnose, and I don't find it hard to believe that it existing for a hundred years or so in the US before anyone really noticed it. Furthermore, I don't think Lyme disease would be a likely target for bioweapon research. It requires a tick bite to transmit, and not even a bite by an infected tick is guaranteed to transmit the illness. And the disease doesn't quickly disable the infected person. So: flakely transmission and unreliable effects. Not the best characteristics for a weapon.

Last I heard, the theory for how West Nile came here was via airplane: either a mosquito or two hitched a ride, or a person on board was infected. Since many infected people never really think they have anything worse than the flu, this is not unreasonable.

West nile is also not the big scary disease it is often made out to be, and again strikes me as an unlikely target for bioweapons research. According to the cdc:

"From 1999 through 2001, there were 149 cases of West Nile virus human illness in the United States reported to CDC and confirmed, including 18 deaths. "

Compare that to these numbers for deaths from the flu: somewhere in the 20,000 to 30,000 range EVERY YEAR.

From the EPA and CDC. Perhaps Outsourcing LCD production is a good thing, after all?

I prefer Hydrogen Oxide.

Wait a second: You worry about terrorism?

Sir, you are absolutely insane.

More Americans die in 36 hours from heart disease than were killed by terrorism in the entire year of 2001 (source)

If you're going to worry, at least worry about something that you actually have any control over - stop smoking. Take care with your diet and make sure that you get enough exercise. Don't drink and drive. Wear your seatbelt and make sure that you maintain your car.

Worrying about terrorism isn't going to do anything, and your reaction to any "terror" event will be the same as if it wasn't terrorism: if there are shots, explosions or big fires - grab the nearest person who needs assistance - and run. Of course, if you've been worrying about your health rather than terrorism - you'll actually be able to run rather than waddle.

From the CDC report Mortality by Occupation, Industry, and Cause of Death: 24 Reporting States (1984-1988) (not the freshest data, I know): chemical engineers (age 20 & up) have a proportionate mortality ratio of 129; computer programmers have a PMR of 174. The big losers, if you're interested, are airplane pilots and navigators (8,795) and "insulation workers" (a staggering 21,188 -- although I doubt it would turn out to be statistically significant). Waiters and cosmetologists both clock in PMRs of over 1000, interestingly enough.

I suspect that once you control for education, race and socioeconomic status chemical engineers don't come out doing quite as well as, say, astrophysicists, but clearly they're not all spilling hydrofluoric acid on themselves on a daily basis.

Sorry for my incorrect statement. I'm rather glad to be proven wrong, as a good friend of mine is a biochemist.

Still, to drag myself back to topicality: I'm still convinced that I wouldn't ever want to work in a cleanroom.

Look at it this way. Would you consider a smart, healthy, fertile child that happens to be susceptible to a certain strain of pneumonia as less fit than a slack-jaw yokel that's one step from monkey that just barely manages to survive that particular infection?

Me personally? No.

From the phage's point of view? If it kills the child in 5-10 days, then it's successful (because it then has a good chance of passing itself onto another host). One of the reasons why Ebola is a failure (albeit a spectaularly successful failure) as a phage; is that it's *too* successful -- it tends to kill it's victims before they've had a chance to spread it to others.

There was a similar discussion here on slashdot (can't find it now, even with Google's help) about how in the 1940's + 50's, when a member of a household was diagnosed with smallpox, the entire house was quarantined for 17+ days (A person is contagious until all the scabs fall off). This caused a food-supply problem for the household (even I don't have that much food on hand, and I have a supply of MREs for the occasional hurricane).

Neighbors & relatives would place food deliveries on the front steps and leave it for the occupants to get later. No contact was allowed until everyone living in the house had a clean bill of health, or had died. (Meaning that: if someone became ill on day 15, the countdown started all over again).

Chip H.

FUD, pure and simple. HIV is only spread by direct contact. If you sneezed directly into someones open wound, you MIGHT be able to infect them. You also might be able to hit the Lotto. Your odds are about the same.
There are many other dangerous dieases out there. See the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) We used to get a flyer every week in the ER telling us whats killing people this week, and what to look out for

*sigh* I wish people would stop and think, research some facts, and then stop and think again.

This oft repeated, yet completely baseless claim that police officers in the U.S. are some selfless, heroic individuals facing death on daily basis for a pittance salary to protect the safety and comfort of all of us un-appreciative citizens. In fact according to CDC statistics Public Safety isn't even in the top 10 when it comes to dangerous industries in the U.S. In fact in Texas a higher percentage of salespeople die on the job than Police Officers and/or Fire Fighters. Everyone of us in the U.S. is far more heroic and brave every time we get in a car and get out on the highway, where you are far more likely to be killed than an officer is in the line of duty. Especially since a large portion of the on the job fatalities of Police Officers results from driving in the exact same traffic that you are.

As far as pay goes, at least in any metropolitan area, Police make pretty good money. I know that in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex most cities for the past four years have had 0-3% raises for city employees...except for Police, who have averaged 5-8% raises per year over that same time period. Negotiated and enforced by their incredibly stong unions. The average Police Officer in Texas, with benefits included, makes just over $33k annually. With Texas cost-of-living that is not a bad salary. Not enough to raise 4 kids on, but certainly enough for a couple, and in major metropolitan areas pay is considerably more.

Additional compensations that they get are:
1)massive ego and power trips,
2)complete immunity from almost any traffic crime, on or off the job (I used to ride with the Police in my City, and numerous times saw officers let other officers off when they saw the badge in their wallet.),
3)Access to some of the most comprehensive databases of information on everyone. And almost no oversight in who they look up or why,
4)The extreme benefit of the doubt in public opinion, the eyes of other enforcement agencies, and the eyes of the courts when it comes to any suspicion of wrong doing.

Just to name a few.

Police Officers do perform a necessary service, however, so do garbage men, street pavers, sewer workers, electrical linemen, and a whole host of other jobs which don't have anywhere near the same prestige. Also the men who become Police Officers are not some small minority with the will and strength to sacrifice themselves, found after long hard searches. Every time there is an advertisement in our City that we are hiring, we get approximately 20 times more applications for the jobs than there are positions to fill. The last time (last month) we were hiring 6 positions and had 53 applications. This is unlike teachers, which the school district is desperate to find qualified people to fill vacancies for, who often have very similar dangerous situations to deal with, with none of the training, and no gun on thier hip, for essentially the same or lower salary.

Sure, the devices will be effective with large containers of standing water like lakes and ponds. But most sources of stagnant water come from garbage, old tires, and even plants.

As the tire is the best man-made nursery for mosquito larvae with its stagnant water and ample shade, simply throwing away used tires correctly will do more to eliminate the mosquito threat than these devices. In fact, the Asian Tiger mosquito is suspected to have arrived in the US on a shipment of used tires from Asia in 1985.

Since it appears that the devices require submersion to be effective, it's unlikely to be practical against most mosquito breeding vectors.

Sure, the devices will be effective with large containers of standing water like lakes and ponds. But most sources of stagnant water come from garbage, old tires, and even plants.

As the tire is the best man-made nursery for mosquito larvae with its stagnant water and ample shade, simply throwing away used tires correctly will do more to eliminate the mosquito threat than these devices. In fact, the Asian Tiger mosquito is suspected to have arrived in the US on a shipment of used tires from Asia in 1985.

Since it appears that the devices require submersion to be effective, it's unlikely to be practical against most mosquito breeding vectors.

Sure, the devices will be effective with large containers of standing water like lakes and ponds. But most sources of stagnant water come from garbage, old tires, and even plants.

As the tire is the best man-made nursery for mosquito larvae with its stagnant water and ample shade, simply throwing away used tires correctly will do more to eliminate the mosquito threat than these devices. In fact, the Asian Tiger mosquito is suspected to have arrived in the US on a shipment of used tires from Asia in 1985.

Since it appears that the devices require submersion to be effective, it's unlikely to be practical against most mosquito breeding vectors.

MSRA= Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus

Here is a great link from the CDC. Like you said, this is the result of years of overabuse and over perscribing of antobiotics. Question for parents - If you took your child to the doctor, with a fever, and he told you "It is a virus, no need for antibiotics, just go home give him fluids and tylenol" Would you be happy? This is what contributes to these problems.People expect to be given medicine when they are sick, they cannot comprehend that the illness will run it's course. I have three teenage sons. Each of them have been on antibiotics less than 5 times. I have friends whose children get antibiotics 5-6 times a year.

We have become a society of quick fixes, if something is wrong take a pill/drug/drink and you'll feel better. We used to have a joke in the ER. You tell a patient " You have the flu, I can give you medicine and you will be better in 7 days, or you can go home and take tylenol, and drink fluids, and you will be better in a week"

I have seen this, and it always brings tears to my eyes. Now, with these solutions so close, yet banned by the selfish ignorance of others, it stirs deep anger within me for those who would do this to children.

Most of us on here agree that OSS is a very important issue. But even it is dwarfed by the importance of this issue. The sanctity of human life, a child's life. The ending of the suffering of millions. Hundreds of millions of suffering people regaining the ability to lead a normal life and be like most moms, dads and children.

Yes, the individuals denying this research do not raise their hands directly to do harm, but they enforce the continuation of harm, suffering and death by not allowing this hope to be researched. It is like a Mafia Don who does not pull the trigger, but gave the order. Do you really think a pacemaker is a good alternative to a healthy heart? A syringe to healthy islet cells? Paralyzation to a working nervous system?

If religious belief is your answer to denying this, I challenge you to post where in what Bible (Hindu, Christian, Muslim, whatever) it is written anywhere that talks about anything like this. I have never seen it written or heard of it written. I have only heard people in power use it to whip up their flock to action on something else they tie to it.

Ignorance is not an excuse for violence, in God's eyes, whether it be passive or active!

-InnerWeb

The CDC has a couple good pages on pandemics, of which the spanish flu was the worst in the 20th century.

If someone wants to smoke and give themselves lung cancer, that's not my problem and I really don't care unless ... they try to get the government to use my tax money to pay for their health care.

Hi Mr. Anti-Smoking. Could you please direct me to where smokers can opt out of Medicare/Medicaid taxes? Most smokers won't ever need to be treated for lung cancer, and would probably rather keep that money taken from each paycheck. Even with your biased research, the best you can do is say 1/3 of smokers will die a 'smoking related' death (Burn deaths? Give me a break). In the meantime, smokers pay taxes too. I'd be willing to wager that the 2/3 who never get a 'smoking related' disease easily pay for the treatment of smokers who do. As a matter of fact, with all the state taxes lumped on cigarettes, I can guarantee they do. So your precious tax money is safe from the smokers. Quite the opposite, our tax money is probably bankrolling your shitty ass state economy. I understand that my opinion is not a popular one, but it's based on fact, not theTruth.

Oh what a little ad money can do....

a. The species jumping is a regular event. It is simply that sometimes the results are relatively benign. Lately however, that is not the case.

b. alien pathogen being able to attack our biochemistry are extremely low to non-existant only if we assume that the attack would be the same as those of Earth origin. As experience with the extremophile microbes indicates, we do not know what is possible or we wouldn't be continually surprised by where we find microbes. Yes, we can explain something after it is discovered but our grasp of biochemistry could only be said to be complete if we could predict.

c. a minor risk compared to the implications of the find! echoes the party line in the early years of the nuclear industry. Considering the preceding point, it is scientific arrogance in the extreme. Plus, how significant would the revelation of a common galactic ancestor be? The Creationists would yell, "Of course!". For the rest of us, neat but where's the value added?

Conclusion: we haven't got a clue what we will find and we are taking a huge risk. But that is human nature. The hope is that we will contaminate Mars and not the other way around.

>Would you rather I put traces of animal fat in your food and soil

Considering in Walkerton farm runoff killed 7 and made 5000 sick, the second looks like a great option.

>would you rather have benzene and arsenic in your drinking water.

Arsenic has no smell (so that can't be the problem in that city!) and considering the maximum exposure factories can give you to benzene (legally), and that it's effects are only from really, really, really long term exposure (unlike that farm water), I think you can guess where I'm heading.

>Why do you think it's illogical to make a distinction between pollutants?

Well, to me, wether I drink naturally poisoned water or synthetically poisoned water, I'm still dead. When something is a dangerous pollutant, to me it really makes no difference if the source is a pig's ass or a tipped over bottle of arsenic. To me they are both deadly, and therefore get the same rating.

I suppose this comes down to arguments like "Would you rather be shot by a musket point blank or an AK-47 round from a distance" Either way, you're probably going to be sorry.

au contraire... maybe you're not familiar with the statistics...

in the US of 1998, 100,000 people were shot, a third of these (>30,000) died from their wounds. a youth of 15-24 is 3 times more likely to be shot than the population at large. a household gun is 22 times more likely to shoot someone other than a burglar.

here in australia, where only the police (more or less) may have guns, we have on average, 4 gun-related deaths per year. the US has around 13 times our population, but has more than 30,000 gun-related deaths per year. some US schools have metal detectors for christ's sake...

yes i believe the US has a huge problem with its love of guns. why every person needs a gun in a modern, largely risk-free society is beyond me. statistics prove that guns only lead to more people getting shot, without decreasing violent crime.

no, i don't think the movies are indicative of modern-day america (i've been there!), although the typical hollywood depiction of US foreign policy is pretty much spot on.... can't wait to see Iraq, the movie... although i'm sure they'll actually have WMDs and have proven links to al quaeda in the movie version.

cheers.

au contraire... maybe you're not familiar with the statistics...

in the US of 1998, 100,000 people were shot, a third of these (>30,000) died from their wounds. a youth of 15-24 is 3 times more likely to be shot than the population at large. a household gun is 22 times more likely to shoot someone other than a burglar.

here in australia, where only the police (more or less) may have guns, we have on average, 4 gun-related deaths per year. the US has around 13 times our population, but has more than 30,000 gun-related deaths per year. some US schools have metal detectors for christ's sake...

yes i believe the US has a huge problem with its love of guns. why every person needs a gun in a modern, largely risk-free society is beyond me. statistics prove that guns only lead to more people getting shot, without decreasing violent crime.

no, i don't think the movies are indicative of modern-day america (i've been there!), although the typical hollywood depiction of US foreign policy is pretty much spot on.... can't wait to see Iraq, the movie... although i'm sure they'll actually have WMDs and have proven links to al quaeda in the movie version.

cheers.

Btw, do these positive effects for a 50 or 60 year old include having a stroke?

full report (source of the referenced voltaic page) is at the cdc site, http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/face9939.html

The concentrated nicotine would take care of your warts.....and you. They do use the stuff for pesticide......stick to the nitrogen....

On the topic of the story, yep it's kind of extreme to pull the nitrogen out to get clock speed, and the major problem I see is the condensate, has anyone attempted to do this with the motherboard in a case at a vacuum and the heatsink exposed through the top of the case. I'm sure something would need to be fashioned from some copper connected to the heat sink to cool any ICs that rely on airflow, but it would be neat to push everything all at once just to see how fast everything could be overclocked.

Yeah, I'll take it, but given that medical care costs have increased by gigantic orders of magnitude in that same time span, we're not getting that much for our dollar.

First you tell me I'm wrong to say that asthma is an immune disorder because one web site says we don't what causes asthma. When I bring you to task for that, you give me another page of assertions that asthma is caused by air pollution.

You must have searched a while for that one, because while there's a ton of evidence that air pollution can trigger asthma attacks, that's a far cry from saying that pollution causes the disease.

In fact, if you're worried about my "assertion" that there is no correlation between between pollution and asthma. Well, doctors specializing in asthma research agree with me.