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Freon isn't very good for you...

When those same people regularly bring things that are proven to be dangerous into their homes and they are often ambivalent or even supportive, to say the least, about products which have been statistically shown to lower life expectancy. They will rise up against the laws requiring safe operation of a product and cry "They are taking my liberties away!" Why should (l)users behave any differently when it comes to software? (And for that matter, is it fair to hold software companies to some higher standard of conduct, when other clearly defective products get special legal protection?)

I agree, the script kiddies and software authors are both culpable - but the idiot users aren't exactly innocent. People use Outlook for the same reason virus writers do - because it's easy, and to hell with the consequences.

Starlink.
Since we can't eat the stuff, why not package our food in it?

Very rarely. Sex and Drugs are the main culprits.
CDC Report

Nice unsubstantiated claim there...

(speaking as one who is trained to fight fires including the use of installed Halon systems)

Oh, appeal to authority too... good one! Got Documentation(tm)?

• Exposure to 7% halon for 8 hours produces no ill effects.
• Since low concentrations of Halon 1301 are required to extinguish most fires, and as the agent has a low degree of inhalation toxicity in its natural state, it can be successfully used to attack fires quickly in normally occupied areas.
• Halon 1301 ... a medium for extinguishing fires by inhibiting the chemical chain reaction of fuel and oxygen.
• Most authorities agree that the Halon acts as a chain breaker.

The way Halon puts out a fire, quite simply, is to smother it

If that were the case, how does it manage to work in such low concentrations? It shouldn't be any better than flooding the room with CO2, nitrogen, or some other gas that doesn't support combustion. Tell me, what's the minimum concentration of CO2 needed to put out a fire? At least 34%, perhaps? How about Halon 1301? 5% or so.

Try the CDC (scroll down)

Looks like I'm pretty safe this week.

Folks interested in the book might also be interested in a letter to the editor published in the latest issue of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. The journal is a scholarly source about biological diseases. The letter, Contagion on the Internet, compares the biology and evolution of biological viruses to computer viruses.

Wow, not even close with the stats on Plague. The US averages 10-20 cases per year whereas the majority of Plague cases occur in Asia, with recent outbreaks in India as lately as 1997 with roughly 700 cases.

Given your track record, AnonCow, I'll leave your "starving children" stats for others to tease out, Gods help them.

India's project to build this network is an investment in their future - I can't fault them for that one bit, and am encouraged by it, actually. Given time, it has the potential to produce jobs, technology for exports, and encouragement for investors from other countries...+,+,+.

Don't do them a disservice by "quoting" stats just to deflate your mad-on toward the US.

Evolution is due to things that kill us before we reproduce, so we're all evolving into better drivers.

The health of the animal is also important. No antibiotics? The animal you ate certainly could have been sick , maybe even right before it was butchered. Even if the animal ate substandard food, it can affect you too. Trichinosis is caused by the ingestion of raw or under cooked pork or wild game (can't get more 'organic' than that) infected with Trichinella larvae. Your stomach acid actually breaks down the cysts the worms are in and releases them into your intestines. Wild predators get this disease too, so don't buy the 'the human body has evolved to withstand these bugs' line either. Check this article to learn about one of the little nasties you could be getting by eating raw meat.

Think about it. If eating raw meat was so wonderful and perfect for our bodies, why the hell did we start cooking it? Probably because some bright guy figured out that he didn't get sick as much if it was cooked!

Have fun eating your raw steak from the steer that got sick a month ago and still had a bunch of bateria in its system when it was cut up..........

• Suicide - 11th leading cause of death (28,332 cases)
• Murder - 15th leading cause of death (16,137 cases)

• Car accident fatalities in 2000: 41,821 (source quotes FHA stats.)
• Airplane accident fatalities in 2000: 97 (NTSB source

• 1960 - 160.9 per 100,000 (288,460 cases)
• 2000 - 506.1 per 100,000 (1,424,289 cases)

-sk

Regarding:
Now, the failure of parents to participate in these public health measures does not only impact the health of their own but on all the other children that their children come into contact with. I'm a great believer in draconian, absolute power for public health authorities.

If you trust vaccines to do their job, then those who *aren't* vaccinated should only be a danger to themselves and others who aren't vaccinated. Thus, it should be on their own heads if they don't vaccinate. However, the actual truth is that vaccinations don't even guarantee safety against a disease, and people commonly have to get re-vaccinated. That means, the effects don't last that long, there are potentially dangerous side-effects, and even if you do take the vaccine, you aren't guaranteed. Given a healthy immune system, I'd rather take my chances without the vaccines.

Yes, much of the evidence regarding side-effects of vaccines may be circumstantial at this point, but it should scare you that:

None of the vaccines injected into children have ever been tested for their carcinogenic (cancer causing), mutagenic (mutation causing),or teratogenic (developmental malformation causing) potential. Not a single one.

(from this page)

This is a failure of the drug companies to apply the scientific method! The fact is, the drug companies have a vested interest in making sure their vaccines are widely used. They have little incentive to perform rigorous testing before releasing them on an unsuspecting public. But they have every incentive to keep adding new vaccines to the market, even if they are for diseases that used to be considered "harmless childhood diseases".

Also, I'm concerned about the trend to create vaccines for non-threatening diseases, such as chicken pox! Yes, I know there is a slight chance of worse diseases to those that have had chicken pox, but I'd rather take my chances with a known evil, then with a new vaccine that hasn't been tested for it's carcinogenic effects.

Your statement that: When introducing a new vaccine, there is a certain risk that it will cause (for example) strong allergic reactions in a certain percentage of patients. We have a number of these dangerous vaccines stockpiled, but we don't give them to children.
doesn't take into account all the known dangerous side-effects on the commonly given vaccines! Many of the vaccines are not supposed to be given to children who have a chance of an allergic reaction. Those children's allergy cannot be detected until past the age of one. And yet, the vaccines are being given before the age of one! Is this circular reasoning, or what?

Go read the potential side-effects list on the CDC's website. Though this page states that the severe side effects are rare, the criteria for whether a problem can be considered a side-effect, or whether it is unrelated, are often arbitrary. For instance, if your child starts having seizures (known to be a potential side effect of some vaccines) a week after their vaccination, it may be considered to be unrelated. Only if it happens within the next 24 hours might it be considered related. And yet, the same time of seizure is known to be a potential severe side effect. Is it coincidence that the seizure happened a week later? I think not.

Those side effects don't mention the potential for inclusion of other viruses transplanted from the tissue in which the vaccines are grown. And the common screening procedure to determine if a particular batch of vaccine is safe is, to test it on mice, and see if they keep growing or not! That's not a very rigorous test.

In any case, it is my belief that a healthy immune system doesn't need supplementation from the outside by vaccines. How do you get a healthy immune system? Simple, but not very commonly done by people:

1. Proper nutrition, with a low-fat, high-fiber diet.
2. Regular exercise
3. 6-8 glasses of water a day
4. Regular exposure to sunlight or full-spectum lighting (in the winter time, near the poles)
5. Be moderate in all things (don't over or under-eat, don't overstimulate your system with alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, etc.)
6. Get fresh air (if you live in LA, maybe you need a de-ionizer).
7. Get adequate rest, during the dark part of the night: use shades if needed. Exercise prior to bed makes it easier to get to sleep. Most people need 7-9 hours to be fully rested. Though many "get by" on less (myself included at times) it is not the best for your health.
8. Peace of mind, a happy, hopeful attitude.

I belive that if you follow these principles you can avoid most diseases. And there are a significant number of people who are finding this to be true. I find whenever I do get sick, I have been neglecting one or more of the above.

DDT was banned not because it was not safe and effective for humans -- it was tremendously safe and effective. It was banned because it harmed birds.

What you leave out is more recent information suggesting (not yet proving, admittedly) health risks to humans. The Department of Health and Human Services has determined that DDT may reasonably be anticipated to be a human carcinogen. Its breakdown product DDE is labeled by the EPA as a probable human carcinogen. In mammals DDT is an endocrine disruptor, and has effects on the reproductive and nervous systems.

If you want more definte results before taking any action, remember that it took hundreds of years for us to understand that cigarette smoking was a cause of cancer. We're just beginning to understand the long-term ecological effects of decades of leaded gasoline use.

These chemicals have only been around for decades. When dealing with chemicals that may linger in the enviroment for many years, the only rational course is to stop putting them in the ecosystem at the first sign of trouble.

Fact: To this day, longevity continues to increase, largely because of chemicals developed to use in farming, medicine, and, believe it or not, industry in general by making manufacturing more productive.

Your apologism for industrial polluters negelects the fact that your garbageman and your plumber have more to do with increasing longevity - really, more of a reduction in youth mortality - than any chemical engineering. You also negelct to condsider that more productive manufacturing isn't a net health benefit when what's produced is useless to health, while the side effects are detrimental.

The most basic requirement for health and longevity is an environment that's not full of crap. Producing stuff that might lengthen the lives of some people (those who can afford it) while pouring crap into the ecosystem we all share (though you'll notice that the crap usually isn't dumped right next to the people who can afford the end product, but instead next to the poor) isn't just stupid, it's criminal.

But you already are. It's called the hydrologic cycle. Sure there are a few bugs to work out, but its extremely stable!

For what it's worth, the needless injection was around before star trek, used in the smallpox-irradication mass vaccinations of the 60's and 70's. However groups have steadily dropped the use of liquid "hyposprays" because blood can backwash onto the jet head, potentially infecting people in line. In fact all of the military branches have dropped their use since 1997.

The technology is starting to make a comeback, however. Powder-based systems which opperate much more quickly don't have the risk of backwash, and have disposable heads (as do new designs for liquid media).

For what it's worth, the needless injection was around before star trek, used in the smallpox-irradication mass vaccinations of the 60's and 70's. However groups have steadily dropped the use of liquid "hyposprays" because blood can backwash onto the jet head, potentially infecting people in line. In fact all of the military branches have dropped their use since 1997.

The technology is starting to make a comeback, however. Powder-based systems which opperate much more quickly don't have the risk of backwash, and have disposable heads (as do new designs for liquid media).

CDC

Home

S,mallpox

Picture

Modeling Attacks

Public Health Links:
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

by Laurie Garrett

Covers emerging and re-emerging diseases such as HIV, Ebola, Tuberculosis, Smallpox.

Betrayal of Trust : The Collapse of Global Public Health

by Laurie Garrett, Steven M. Wolinsky

How the public health system, in USA and abroad, was allowed to disintegrate.

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

by Randy Shilts

A chronicle of the first 5 years of the aids epidemic.

Richard Preston (Hot Zone author) on smallpox

CDC

Home

S,mallpox

Picture

Modeling Attacks

Public Health Links:
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

by Laurie Garrett

Covers emerging and re-emerging diseases such as HIV, Ebola, Tuberculosis, Smallpox.

Betrayal of Trust : The Collapse of Global Public Health

by Laurie Garrett, Steven M. Wolinsky

How the public health system, in USA and abroad, was allowed to disintegrate.

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

by Randy Shilts

A chronicle of the first 5 years of the aids epidemic.

Richard Preston (Hot Zone author) on smallpox

CDC

Home

S,mallpox

Picture

Modeling Attacks

Public Health Links:
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

by Laurie Garrett

Covers emerging and re-emerging diseases such as HIV, Ebola, Tuberculosis, Smallpox.

Betrayal of Trust : The Collapse of Global Public Health

by Laurie Garrett, Steven M. Wolinsky

How the public health system, in USA and abroad, was allowed to disintegrate.

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

by Randy Shilts

A chronicle of the first 5 years of the aids epidemic.

Richard Preston (Hot Zone author) on smallpox

CDC

Home

S,mallpox

Picture

Modeling Attacks

Public Health Links:
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

by Laurie Garrett

Covers emerging and re-emerging diseases such as HIV, Ebola, Tuberculosis, Smallpox.

Betrayal of Trust : The Collapse of Global Public Health

by Laurie Garrett, Steven M. Wolinsky

How the public health system, in USA and abroad, was allowed to disintegrate.

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

by Randy Shilts

A chronicle of the first 5 years of the aids epidemic.

Richard Preston (Hot Zone author) on smallpox

CDC

Home

S,mallpox

Picture

Modeling Attacks

Public Health Links:
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

by Laurie Garrett

Covers emerging and re-emerging diseases such as HIV, Ebola, Tuberculosis, Smallpox.

Betrayal of Trust : The Collapse of Global Public Health

by Laurie Garrett, Steven M. Wolinsky

How the public health system, in USA and abroad, was allowed to disintegrate.

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

by Randy Shilts

A chronicle of the first 5 years of the aids epidemic.

Richard Preston (Hot Zone author) on smallpox

CDC

Home

S,mallpox

Picture

Modeling Attacks

Public Health Links:
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

by Laurie Garrett

Covers emerging and re-emerging diseases such as HIV, Ebola, Tuberculosis, Smallpox.

Betrayal of Trust : The Collapse of Global Public Health

by Laurie Garrett, Steven M. Wolinsky

How the public health system, in USA and abroad, was allowed to disintegrate.

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

by Randy Shilts

A chronicle of the first 5 years of the aids epidemic.

Richard Preston (Hot Zone author) on smallpox

While it is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is still the CDC. Check out their website, which is still www.cdc.gov, and see their logo. For further convincing, you could try going to www.cdcp.gov, and realize that that site doesn't exist, much less point to the CDC.

"In February 1998, Larry Wayne Harris, a white supremacist and born-again Christian, boasted to an informant that he had enough military-grade anthrax to wipe out all of Las Vegas. Eight bags marked "biological" had been found in the back of a car he and his accomplice were driving.17 Several days later, federal authorities learned that the anthrax Harris had brought to Las Vegas was a vaccine strain not harmful to human health. Nevertheless, the incident frightened many people and sparked a proliferation of anthrax hoaxes and threats in the second half of 1998 continuing into 1999 by groups including Identity Christians and other antigovernment groups, extortionists, antiabortion activists, and presumed prochoice groups." --CDC, 7/00.

My thoughts were to encourage the /. community help disseminate reports of anthrax outbreaks and possibly help the *world* be on guard - whether it be terrorists or just plain sickos doing this.

I guess my point is: with the great coverage by the /. community (and now, not as much credit to Taco and the rest) when the shit hit the fan on 10/11/01, how can we help the CDC stay on top and others to prevent a widespread panic (and applied to other forms of mischief) by doing our part?

What do you think?

Someone targets airplanes, and people stop flying. Someone targets mail, and people stop using mail. Is this kind of a response reasonable? There's a lot of knee-jerk reactions which are not necessarily effective, and the economic effects of wholesale eschewment of mail and air travel are pretty widespread.

Yet in other areas people are so incredibly complacent. People will put off travel despite an impossibly remote possibility of being a victim of travel, but they'll happily hop on the local highway without regard for hundreds of 20,000lb transports hurtling down the road at 75mph all around them, any of which could crush them to death in the slightest instant if the driver just flicked the steering wheel the tiniest bit. 41,611 people were killed in automobile accidents alone in 1999 on US roads. 430,700 people died per year between 1990 and 1994 from cigarette smoking alone. It's quite stunning really the fear that the media can drum up when we come to live with enormously costly things like the millions that die every year because of voluntarily choosing to eat Big Macs and other high saturated fat foods.

I'm not saying that dying at the hand to terrorists is comparable to voluntarily undertaken risks, but it does seem that some things are being grossly overstated, such as the risks of anthrax.

Five or six thousand people died in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It is a horrid tragedy and I would never try to minimize it, but it pales to the number of people who have died defending democracy. In three of these defining wars, as tabulated below, there were over 350,000 deaths.

Revolutionary war: 4425
World War I: 53513
World War II: 292131
Total: 350069

There are also 40,000 deaths per year in the US, not through terrorism, but through automobile accidents. Would you also suggest that for safeties sake we ban the automobile?

I submitted this to slashdot as a headline, but it was rejected.

This is probably irresponsable reporting, but you should know. After it was reported that a second Florida man had been exposed to anthrax in Florida, I tried calling my local clinic (Valley Medical East Team, Kent Wa.) to get myself and my daughter vaccinated against this horrible disease. I was told they don't have it and that it isn't available to the general public.

What?!?

While the Feds investigate whether it was terrorism or not that exposed the two men to the fatal disease, incubation time keeps on ticking. Pretty much by the time you realize you are sicker than the common cold, it's too late. Why on earth haven't they started vaccinating people?

Better to vaccinate and find out later that it was not terrorism than to wait to find out... when some people may be to late to save.

I really don't care if my insurance will cover it. I will pay for the shots. Just let me have them, is that so much to ask?

Come on CDC & FBI, let us get our vaccinations! I urge folks to call their congress man or woman and begin demanding the availability of these vaccinations. Because if it was terrorism, who knows how wide spread? I don't want to wait until it is too late.

Here are the CDC information pages on this.

You can lookup and call Valley Medical yourself to confirm this.

I submitted this to slashdot as a headline, but it was rejected.

This is probably irresponsable reporting, but you should know. After it was reported that a second Florida man had been exposed to anthrax in Florida, I tried calling my local clinic (Valley Medical East Team, Kent Wa.) to get myself and my daughter vaccinated against this horrible disease. I was told they don't have it and that it isn't available to the general public.

What?!?

While the Feds investigate whether it was terrorism or not that exposed the two men to the fatal disease, incubation time keeps on ticking. Pretty much by the time you realize you are sicker than the common cold, it's too late. Why on earth haven't they started vaccinating people?

Better to vaccinate and find out later that it was not terrorism than to wait to find out... when some people may be to late to save.

I really don't care if my insurance will cover it. I will pay for the shots. Just let me have them, is that so much to ask?

Come on CDC & FBI, let us get our vaccinations! I urge folks to call their congress man or woman and begin demanding the availability of these vaccinations. Because if it was terrorism, who knows how wide spread? I don't want to wait until it is too late.

Here are the CDC information pages on this.

You can lookup and call Valley Medical yourself to confirm this.

Actually, present techniques are more sensitive than a DNA screen. Read about them at the cdc.

Basically, its easier to detect the bacteria themselves than to do a screen on their DNA.

Yeah i am bored and read these, and you can too.

• Some bubonic plauge history.
  
• Center for disease control plague info.
  
• Current Bubonic Plague treatment and here.
  
• Plague outbreak news

Smallpox won't "spread like crazy" because you need to be within close proximity to an infected person. Once it becomes known that there is a major smallpox outbreak, you can be sure people will severely limit their interpersonal contacts. And there is indeed a smallpox vaccine. See this article.

An excerpt:
"The possible use of smallpox virus as a weapon by terrorists has stimulated growing international concern and led to a recent review by the World Health Organization of the global availability of smallpox vaccine. This review found approximately 60 million doses worldwide, with little current vaccine manufacture, although limited vaccine seed remains available (1). Ongoing discussions in the United States suggest that the national stockpile should contain at least 40 million doses to be held in reserve for emergency use, including in case of a terrorist release of smallpox virus (O'Toole, this issue, pp. 540-6).

The current U.S. stockpile contains approximately 15.4 million doses of vaccinia vaccine (Dryvax) made from the New York City Board of Health strain of vaccinia and was produced by Wyeth Laboratories in 13 separate lots. The vaccine is lyophylized in glass vials with rubber stoppers and sealed with a metal band. When rehydrated, each vial contains 100 doses and has a potency of at least 108 plaque-forming units (pfu)/ml. Some vials of the vaccine stockpile have shown elevated moisture levels and thus failed routine quality control testing; however, the vaccine in these vials remains potent, and the failed lots have not been discarded."

The CDC reports taht the vaccine is 93% effective. Which is much better than the 5% who survive without it, but it still sounds like even with a vaccinated US the terrorists could kill a fair number of people. Even according to the military the vaccine has some side effects that sound pretty nasty, but then I have no medical training so I have no idea how it compares to other vaccines. The military also reports that antibiotics can be effective if administered before symptoms appear. I have no idea how often or if it's true. I must admit I'm puzzled why there's so much trouble producing the vaccine. Louis Pasteur made an anthrax vaccine for animals in the 19C and the current human vaccine isn't looking to be a spring chicken either so it seems like pretty established tech. Seems more like the blocks are more incomptenance and buracracy.

In many ways I find smallpox scarier than anthrax, because it can be person to person transmitted. On this one, however, the US government does not appear to be completely asleep at the switch. It has ordered up 40 million doses of vaccine, but they won't be ready till 04. Oh well, hope the terrorists wait three years and I'm one of the lucky ones.

Add some factual information, indeed.

Per your link to the CDC:
"Inhalation: Initial symptoms may resemble a common cold. After several days, the symptoms may progress to severe breathing problems and shock. Inhalation anthrax is usually fatal."

Yes, anthrax is treatable. They can give you an IV of 2 million units of penicillin every two hours and you will die anyway, the vast majority of the time. Note that I didn't say all anthrax is fatal, just inhalational. I am unsure about gastrointestinal or cutaneous infection, but it is my understanding that it can be treated with good success.

Per the Defence Journal
"Within twenty-four to thirty-six hours, the victim experiences the rapid onset of shock and subsequent death. Inhalation anthrax has a mortality of 95-100% despite antibiotic treatment."

Per the Biological Weapons FAQ
"Some authors maintain that anthrax is an even more deadly agent. According to one study, in principle, if its spores were distributed appropriately, a single gram would be sufficient to kill more than one-third of the population of the US. Of course, the authors were quick to point out that an attack of such magnitude would not be feasible. However, more realistic, smaller-scale scenarios still posit large numbers of casualties. For example, the US Law Enforcement Assistance Administration reported in March 1977 that a single ounce of anthrax introduced into the air-conditioning system of a domed stadium could infect 70-80,000 spectators within an hour). And a 1972 study by the Advanced Concepts Research Corporation of Santa Barbara, California, postulated that an aerosol attack with anthrax spores on the New York City area would result in more than 600,000 deaths."

I agree wholeheartedly that getting hysterical is not going to solve anything. However, it is just as naive to discount real, viable threats as it is to fret about weak or unlikely threats. Certainly it is true that anthrax is not going to cause a plague; it doesn't really spread very well. But it just as certainly is true that anthrax is a very potent, low-tech weapon for the psychotically discontent when spores are directly blown into the air.

Certainly it is not safe to produce biological weapons. I think that goes without saying.

Thanks for the link to Bioport, btw! I hadn't found that. And thanks also for the note about Aum Shinrikyo. I hadn't known of any publicized anthrax attacks in modern times. The sources I've looked at so far casually mention that he tried one attack. If it is in fact true that there is some factor that I haven't seen yet that invalidates anthrax as such an easy and potent weapon, I would love to know about it so I can find something else to worry about : )

More links on anthrax:
http://www.metrokc.gov/health/phnr/prot_res/anth ra x.htm

I'm not sure how a discussion of bimetrics devolved into a rant on biological warfare, but I thought it might be useful to add some factual information into this hysteria. As far as I can tell, the sole source provider of Anthrax vaccine is a company called Bioport. ..."easy to produce", well not safely, and not easy to produce in a distribution form that is dangerous in plague proportions. Aum Shinrikyo has tried at least 8 times in Japan to release anthrax spores in various modes, without a single infection. ..."when inhaled is nearly 100% fatal once symptoms occur, regardless of treatment" It is treatable and not anywhere near as fatal as you indicate. Check out US Center for Disease Control's Page on Anthrax for the real scoop. ..."the US government isn't letting anyone but the military be vaccinated!" I think others have successfully refuted this statement, but you will find the animal vaccine in many vetrinary catalogs. The vaccine is rarely asked for, and probably not recommended unless you face a real threat.

gay men are still, and have always been, the #1 'breeders' for AIDS.

Not exactly. Gay men used to account for 80-90% of all reported cases of HIV & AIDS. According to the CDC:

"In 1999 alone, 15,464 AIDS cases were reported among MSM (men who have sex with men), compared with 10,138 among IDUs (intravenous drug users) and 7,139 among men and women who acquired HIV heterosexually."

link...

In other words, in 1999, new AIDS cases among gay men accounted for less than half of all new AIDS cases. While they still are the single group with the largest number of new cases, their respective percentage of all new cases has been dropping and continues to do so.

must be why the lezbos don't get AIDS as much.

"As much" Hmm.... Typical right-wing FUD. As I said, AIDS among WSW (women who have sex with women, the CDC's abbreviation, as are the others I mentioned above) is practically non-existant. Again, from the CDC:

"Through December 1998, 109,311 women were reported with AIDS. Of these, 2,220 were reported to have had sex with women; however, the vast majority had other [Picture] risks (such as injection drug use, sex with high-risk men, or receipt of blood or blood products). Of the 347 (out of 2,220) women who were reported to have had sex only with women, 98% also had another risk-- injection drug use in most cases."

Let's do the math: of the 347 women with new AIDS cases who only had sex with women, 98% had another risk fact, like IDU. Lessee: 2% times 347 equals
~7 PEOPLE! So out of 109,311 women with AIDS, exactly 7 had only the risk factor of being a lesbian. "As much" indeed...

As a final note about lesbians:

"A separate study of more than 1 million female blood donors found no HIV-infected women whose only risk was sex with women."

See that, Mr. Dittohead? NONE! Put that into your right-wing pipe and smoke it.

link...

The government funds AIDS research because it the potential to affect everyone. If we cut off government-sponsored AIDS research, then thousands of babies and straight men & women (and yes, gay men too) would die unnecessarily.

gay men are still, and have always been, the #1 'breeders' for AIDS.

Not exactly. Gay men used to account for 80-90% of all reported cases of HIV & AIDS. According to the CDC:

"In 1999 alone, 15,464 AIDS cases were reported among MSM (men who have sex with men), compared with 10,138 among IDUs (intravenous drug users) and 7,139 among men and women who acquired HIV heterosexually."

link...

In other words, in 1999, new AIDS cases among gay men accounted for less than half of all new AIDS cases. While they still are the single group with the largest number of new cases, their respective percentage of all new cases has been dropping and continues to do so.

must be why the lezbos don't get AIDS as much.

"As much" Hmm.... Typical right-wing FUD. As I said, AIDS among WSW (women who have sex with women, the CDC's abbreviation, as are the others I mentioned above) is practically non-existant. Again, from the CDC:

"Through December 1998, 109,311 women were reported with AIDS. Of these, 2,220 were reported to have had sex with women; however, the vast majority had other [Picture] risks (such as injection drug use, sex with high-risk men, or receipt of blood or blood products). Of the 347 (out of 2,220) women who were reported to have had sex only with women, 98% also had another risk-- injection drug use in most cases."

Let's do the math: of the 347 women with new AIDS cases who only had sex with women, 98% had another risk fact, like IDU. Lessee: 2% times 347 equals
~7 PEOPLE! So out of 109,311 women with AIDS, exactly 7 had only the risk factor of being a lesbian. "As much" indeed...

As a final note about lesbians:

"A separate study of more than 1 million female blood donors found no HIV-infected women whose only risk was sex with women."

See that, Mr. Dittohead? NONE! Put that into your right-wing pipe and smoke it.

link...

The government funds AIDS research because it the potential to affect everyone. If we cut off government-sponsored AIDS research, then thousands of babies and straight men & women (and yes, gay men too) would die unnecessarily.

10,000 Americans die every day
gg made up stats

Made up stats? Let's see...
Assuming a population of 285 millions (U.S. Census Bureau), and an average life of 77 years (NCHS), we can work it out:

285.000.000 / (77*365) = 10140 deaths/day

Pretty close, I would say.

If you need chloroform and bromoform to make this work, the question here is how do you make the end products safe enough for people to use? If you search Google for "chloroform toxicity" you'll find (amongst other things), a fact sheet from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) detailing the effects of exposure to chloroform by humans and animals. Likewise, if you search for "bromoform toxicity", you'll find a paper from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) that explains the effects of exposure to bromoform.

If I was a regular person on the street, I would be seriously concerned that superconducting wires (for example) that were being used in my home contained chemicals that have proven to be carcinogenic to animals (chloroform has been classified by the EPA as Group B2, a probable human carcinogen of low carcinogenic hazard) and have nasty long-term effects such liver damage (both chloroform and bromoform are known to have such effects). I would be concerned for my safety and the safety of others who live in the house. What about leakage, or if the wires break? How do we dispose of these things in the future? It's not like we can just throw them away. Even if the solution were to be in crystalline form, it still doesn't answer questions about exposure to hazards like extreme temperatures, fire and explosions. The bottom line is that we seriously need to consider other options before even thinking about employing this solution.

Is that a Microsoft STD?

Where do you get these wonderful statistics about the average lifespan of homosexuals? I'd like to see even one reference to this, regardless of how dodgy the source might be.

How about the Oxford's International Journal of Epidemiology or The CDC? If do do this Google search, you will find many articles about where the the average life expectancy of a non-HIV infected homosexual is about 42 years. =P

While it is true that women may get the disease easier, at least in Canada, the ratio of males to women who have the disease is 13:1 but that's not the case in Africa. Yet another good reason for women to be chaste and not abuse themselves with IV drugs.

There are also some nice graphs at Aids Central for those who don't want to read.

IANAV[irologist], but here's my two cents anyway.

According to the CDC, Ebola is spread in the air in the laboratory but not, for practical purposes, in humans (yet). In the Africa outbreaks the disease was spread via contact with infected secretions and fluids.

It's long been held that the best strategy for a virus is to be as benign as possible, so that the host lives on to spread the disease and (in the case of humans) doesn't seek treatment. It's not hard to imagine that computer viruses would evolve similarly (who knows how many sleeping viruses there might be out there?). On the other hand, sometimes you wind up seeing selection for certain damaging traits if those traits help the virus multiply. (In the biological world, for example, viruses spread through the water supply often cause severe diahrrea, which damages the host but improves the chances of infecting more hosts. In the computer world, well, I think Code Red is a fine example...)

Does anyone know of attempts to use biological techniques to analyze or fight computer infections? I seem to remember something about a net-based immune-system like construction but I can't find it.

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AFAIK there isn't even a simple policy that says that the CDC is in charge and can ask for manpower help from the military if things get really hairy.

I expect that if things do get hairy, then the CDC will be able to get, or take, all the help they need from anyone they can get their hands on, without many questions being asked. ;-)

What they may be lacking in is preparation and planning.

It may relieve you to know that there is at considerable bioterrorism response money being spent (considerable by public health, maybe not military standards) and programs are being developed in both Atlanta and in state public health departments to respond to bioterrorist attacks. Unfortunately I don't know the full extent of the effort since it's only tangential to my involvement with public health issues, except that I know some of the people working on this.

If this issue receives a shot in the arm (or a kick in the pants) then probably a good response system could be put together reasonably fast, so long as some crusading congressman doesn't screw it up by putting the money and programs in the wrong place. It isn't so much that there isn't anybody working on it, its just not terribly big or visible now.

If you are seriously interested, try going to CDC's Search Page and typing "bioterrorism". Over six hundred documents are returned, including ones describing the smallpox scenario.

AFAIK there isn't even a simple policy that says that the CDC is in charge and can ask for manpower help from the military if things get really hairy.

I expect that if things do get hairy, then the CDC will be able to get, or take, all the help they need from anyone they can get their hands on, without many questions being asked. ;-)

What they may be lacking in is preparation and planning.

It may relieve you to know that there is at considerable bioterrorism response money being spent (considerable by public health, maybe not military standards) and programs are being developed in both Atlanta and in state public health departments to respond to bioterrorist attacks. Unfortunately I don't know the full extent of the effort since it's only tangential to my involvement with public health issues, except that I know some of the people working on this.

If this issue receives a shot in the arm (or a kick in the pants) then probably a good response system could be put together reasonably fast, so long as some crusading congressman doesn't screw it up by putting the money and programs in the wrong place. It isn't so much that there isn't anybody working on it, its just not terribly big or visible now.

If you are seriously interested, try going to CDC's Search Page and typing "bioterrorism". Over six hundred documents are returned, including ones describing the smallpox scenario.

Biological attacks are (at least on current level) probably the most highly overrated threats of them all, though.

While that may possibly be the case, there are a couple of points that also need to be mentioned:

• It not only includes risky feed-back property of nuclear stuff (you think your disease will stay in enemy territory for long?

  True, and this is the reason why biological warfare didn't become something that was used in the battlefield. There's not much use for a weapon that not only kills the enemy but also your own troops (while that holds also applies to "conventional weapons" the ill-effects of friendly fire in this case could be far greater). But it's most likely that the threat the security experts (who themselves have all held government positions) were talking about is internal, rather than external. It's much harder to launch an attack across borders if what you're looking for is stealth (which an essential element in biological attacks). And if the attack is internal, you are more likely to be dealing with extremists who do not care about friendly casualties (commonly referred to as "collatoral damage") because they tend to act under a higher cause (God, Allah, freedom etc).

• and either slow-incubating ineffective (low lethality) aspects (like HIV) or fast and kind of effective disease that quickly runs out of steam (Ebola).

  This is also true, and explains why the casualties of natural outbreaks of Ebola are low (because the virus quickly runs out of steam) and that projected casualties of HIV/AIDS will be high (because the long incubation period assists in infection). But what the exercise seeks to demonstrate is not that the virus itself will be particularly effective, but that the vulnerabilities of such a large society will amplify the effectiveness into "doomsday" status. A large society would have many problems dealing with a bioterrorist attack. The slow reaction time of the public health system (because it would take time for a noticeable pattern of infection to emerge and to be classified as an outbreak) and the widespread panic created by public awareness of the attack, which further creates a "surge" in demand for vaccines are cures that the health system is not prepared for.

If anyone is interested in further information regarding the topic of bioterrorism, then there are sites by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Self Bias Resistor

What do I owe Africa?

Really?

"Fruits of the 21st Century?"

How about if Africa gets itself out of the 6th century by producing something the world wants?

And this time, try not to make it slaves, terrorists, virus es, endangered species, or diamonds to raise money to hack people to death.

--Blair
"You are only as free, happy, smart, and rich as you think you are."

A study on Cry9c (note, not Cry9p) was done after many people complained of an allergic reaction to the corn shells. The corn was developed by Aventis Crop Science USA LP and marketed under the name StarLink(tm). There was no correlation between the response and the protein --- that is to say, the tests did not show any specific binding between the Cry9c and the antibodies (IgM) in the serum of people claiming to have a reaction. For those of you who are interested, the test is known as an ELISA (Enzyme Linked Immuno-Sorbant Assay) and nice little dots show up if the test is positive. Of course, if you don't want to believe the government, there are certainly people willing to say they're full of ... well... something not so nice. See here

I remember reading years ago that NASA's policy on such things was that any samples brought back from other planets were to be treated as Level 4 Biohazard anyway. i.e. glove boxes and biohazard suits.

This is the same standard as pathogens such as Ebola and other haemorragic fevers are kept at.

Is it just me, or are other people slightly sickened when they think about what all happens to red meat?

I am so turned off when I think of steak and hamburgers now, that I can barely order and wolf down a Big Mac or prime rib any more.

In other news, E. Coli just broke out again, this time in Old Folk's Homes. Seems that This strand is a drug-resistant strain!