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We're fucked. Sooner or later. It's happened before. http://www.who.int/mediacentre...

I recommend that you watch the movie, "12 Monkeys"; it will help you to alleviate your fears about your particular glitch-in-paradise scenario. (HehHh)

In the age of the airliner, a poultry farmer wipes his nose the wrong way, shakes another guy's hand, 2d guy gets on a jet to Hong Kong, jet stops long enough to change crews and off to sunny California. Kills the guys in the first village, flight crew spreads it to Hong Kong, then right to the US in less than a day.

We're fucked. Sooner or later. It's happened before.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre...

Wow that's so much misinformation and tinfoil hat thinking in one place.

Ahhh.. so many of those that died from measles where probably vaccinated but it was not effective?

I'm not even sure what this means as you provide no information. I assume you mean recent outbreaks in which the vast majority occurred because people had not been vaccinated.

So why get it when measles can be beaten with high dose vitamin A?

Again I'm not sure where your misinformation comes from but the WHO recommends high doses of vitamin A with the vaccine to poorly nourished children in developing countries to kill two birds with one stone.

Don't they test these vaccines? Are there any in depth studies of the effectiveness of vaccines?

[Citation please for your misinformation] Decades of research is easy to google btw.

How about Paul "Profit" Offit's poop vaccine?

Again you provide little information on what is in your mind. I can only assume you mean the rotavirus vaccine which he spent 25 years developing. It saves many, many lives a day. For 25 years of research, he gets money from his invention. So what?

How much was that studied before it was rubber stamped as recommended while he was at the CDC?

Does a clinical trial of 70,000 count as rubber-stamping? Again so much misinformation.

http://childhealthsafety.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/offit-congressional-reprimand/

If that is your only source of information, I suggest you need to fact check it. For example, it wasn't a reprimand. It was a report. In it, he voted for rotavirus vaccines (and this important) that he did not develop. He abstained from voting for the one he did develop with Merck. As for the rest of the blog, misinformation and outright lies. For example, Hanah Poling's family was awarded money for encephalopathy which is not due to a vaccine. The anti-vaccine crowd claims it was for autism but anyone reading the full report sees otherwise. Misinformation at best.

Pig Pharma is not to be trusted and that is why parents aren't getting their kids vaccinated.

So much bias and irrational thinking there. I assume that you also advice parents not to give children aspirin as well as they also make billions for the industry.

Vaccines are not a bad idea per se for some things, but there is very little ethics in the industry, and as past practices have come to light over the years it does not appear that there ever was any.

[Citation Please] Other than a blog from someone who is completely biased.

a pollutant once widely emitted by cars burning leaded gasoline. Decades ago, the United States and Europe banned leaded gas and many other uses of the metal

Do you really think the US and Europe account for the majority of vehicles?

Yes I do. It's not extremely lop sided, but there are more vehicles in Europe and the US combined than there are in China and India combined. I'd also throw all the cars in Japan under the US/Europe column for not using leaded gas.

The USA has always had megacorps that were willing to attack scientists in order to keep on poisoning the people of the USA.

See, for example, how Kehoe, Kettering and Midgely (working for GM, DuPont and the Ethyl Corporation) attacked the reputations and careers of whistle-blowing scientists (like Patterson, Landrigan and Needleman) in order to hide the horrific effects of lead poisoning. The high toxicity of lead was known in the 19th century, and well quantified by the mid-1930s, but hidden from the US public until the 1970s by a concerted corporate disinformation campaign.

In just the last century, we increased our exposure to lead in the environment by 625 times and the effects are going to last for several more generations at least. This poisoning of generations of children, with literally many millions of victims, was done to maximize corporate profits for America's ruling class. And in today's political climate - with Reagan corporatist Obama actually considered to be left-wing or even socialist - you can expect this sort of behavior will continue.

The WHO published the 2013 statistics of deaths in traffic accidents: http://www.who.int/violence_in...

1.24 million people were killed in traffic accident the last year, times more badly injured.

These are the figures consistent with the WW, but this time it is going on on the roads. A car is the main source of deadly traffic accidents.

If not this measure, but something must be done.

The WHO says it is. Broken bones are diseases, too.

What is idiocy is to consider that this is about terrorism, defending from it in particular (because the state doing terrorism is not even questioned). If US would be so worried and invested so much to protect the life of every and each US citizens, would had i.e. stopped/banned or at least muted tobacco companies that kills more than 5 millon people every year, to put an example of deaths caused by what should be criminal behaviour.

How about some facts instead of bullshit. http://www.who.int/features/qa/18/en/. So temperature doesn't seem to rate all that big. However http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_respiratory_tract_infection according to the map certainly favours equatorial regions including the subtropics. Diarrhea is really lethal http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs330/en/, caused by things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholera and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysentry, neither one known as a temperate climate disease more tropical and subtropical. As for the others neither here nor there in terms of warm or cold whether except perhaps sugary drinks are for more likely to be drunk in cold weather. Of course others tropical diseases come to mind like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengi_fever, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_fever_virus#Cause.

Parasitical organism generally by far represent the greatest threat of infection with associated organism and most generally do not abide freezing whether full snow or just overnight frosts which generally limits there spread.

Never to forget tropical and subtropical storms are far more violent and common. As for temperature yes well if it freezing and you deny the elderly heat through greed they will freeze to death, by the same token once it gets past 35 degrees centigrade and you deny the elderly air-conditioning as recommended by Fox not-News http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/10/fox-news-hasselbeck-calls-air-conditioning-the-ugly-side-of-welfare/ they are going to die as well.

So yes if you ignore disease (no universal health care), extremes of weather (everyone for themselves, no federal aid and vulture on down on other people's disasters) and tea bagger greed generally, climate change has no impact on the survivability of the elderly and if you are going to ignore all of those, hell, you just might as well ignore old age as having an impact.

How about some facts instead of bullshit. http://www.who.int/features/qa/18/en/. So temperature doesn't seem to rate all that big. However http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_respiratory_tract_infection according to the map certainly favours equatorial regions including the subtropics. Diarrhea is really lethal http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs330/en/, caused by things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholera and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysentry, neither one known as a temperate climate disease more tropical and subtropical. As for the others neither here nor there in terms of warm or cold whether except perhaps sugary drinks are for more likely to be drunk in cold weather. Of course others tropical diseases come to mind like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengi_fever, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_fever_virus#Cause.

Parasitical organism generally by far represent the greatest threat of infection with associated organism and most generally do not abide freezing whether full snow or just overnight frosts which generally limits there spread.

Never to forget tropical and subtropical storms are far more violent and common. As for temperature yes well if it freezing and you deny the elderly heat through greed they will freeze to death, by the same token once it gets past 35 degrees centigrade and you deny the elderly air-conditioning as recommended by Fox not-News http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/10/fox-news-hasselbeck-calls-air-conditioning-the-ugly-side-of-welfare/ they are going to die as well.

So yes if you ignore disease (no universal health care), extremes of weather (everyone for themselves, no federal aid and vulture on down on other people's disasters) and tea bagger greed generally, climate change has no impact on the survivability of the elderly and if you are going to ignore all of those, hell, you just might as well ignore old age as having an impact.

25 countries are not able to screen all donated blood for one or more of the above infections. [HIV, hepatitis B, hepatitis C and syphilis]

24% blood donations in low-income countries are not screened following basic quality procedures which include documented standard operating procedures and participation in an external quality assurance scheme.

The prevalence of transfusion-transmissible infections (TTIs) in blood donations in high-income countries is considerably lower than in low- and middle-income countries. The prevalence of HIV in blood donations in high-income countries is 0.003% (median), in comparison with 0.1% and 0.6% in middle- and low-income countries respectively.

With those things in mind, I don't have a problem of disallowing donations from certain countries, in theory. In practice, it depends on exactly which countries are on the "no-fly list", and the safety statistics of those countries.

Also, the American Red Cross has called for an end to the lifetime male homosexual donation ban.

I'd prefer to give to other charities with lower administrative overhead, but none of the information you've provided argues compellingly for a boycott of Humble Bundle...then again, that's your choice to make for yourself.

No it isn't. You may have noticed how people have become less healthy as they removed saturated fats from their diet. You may however missed the vast body of evidence that has replaced the crappy epidemiological evidence that wrongly implicated saturated fats in the 70s.

Really. Let's see a few more recent studies, then.

No. This is the thoroughly debunked consensus. It is not longer consensus.

Well then, let's see what major medical and health associations say, then:

• The American Heart Association: (1)
• The Center for Disease Control: (1)
• The European Food Safety Authority: (1)
• The World Health Organization: (1) (2)

It's ketogenic. The metabolic pathways that make this true are fully understood.

Okay, cool beans. Feel free to explain the pathways and why more ketones is a good thing.

No it isn't. You may have noticed how people have become less healthy as they removed saturated fats from their diet. You may however missed the vast body of evidence that has replaced the crappy epidemiological evidence that wrongly implicated saturated fats in the 70s.

Really. Let's see a few more recent studies, then.

No. This is the thoroughly debunked consensus. It is not longer consensus.

Well then, let's see what major medical and health associations say, then:

• The American Heart Association: (1)
• The Center for Disease Control: (1)
• The European Food Safety Authority: (1)
• The World Health Organization: (1) (2)

It's ketogenic. The metabolic pathways that make this true are fully understood.

Okay, cool beans. Feel free to explain the pathways and why more ketones is a good thing.

A decade or two later, we found that many of these wells accessed aquifers that were contaminated by arsenic. And that thus we kids had funded the wholesale poisoning of people in Africa, and that a lot of them had arsenic-induced cancers that were killing them.

Are you sure you're not mixing up two different stories here? Although trace amounts of Arsenic are common in aquifers that contact certain kinds of alluvial sediments, only a few areas have experienced really high concentrations. In particular, this has happened with shallow tube wells in India and Bangladesh. These types of wells were extremely cheap, and were drilled in the millions starting around the 1970's with UNICEF assistance; I am unaware of any similar large-scale occurrence of contamination in Africa.

On looking at the morbidity and mortality modeling from the WHO link, I wouldn't automatically label it an complete tragedy right away, either. The amount of Cancer and other diseases from arsenic contamination (chronic ingestion, the concentration is not the kind required for acute poisoning) is definitely non-trivial. However, following the implementation of the tube wells, infant mortality dropped by something like half (keeping in mind this that the high starting point of mortality means half of a fairly big number), with substantial reductions in prevalence of waterborne diseases. It is entirely possible that the number of lives (and maybe person-years of life) saved by the wells could outnumber those that were lost.

Actually, I strongly suspect that the person-years of life saved could be greatly more than the number lost, but I can't directly substantiate the possibility with numbers, except to say there is evidence that recent anti-arsenic campaigns have resulted in increases in infant mortality, due to avoidance or loss of well water leading to greater use of microbially contaminated water supplies.

Obviously, it would be great to have both clean water with no arsenic at all. Possible with deeper but more expensive wells that have been gradually replacing the older wells (it sounds like other strategies like filtration and rain-water storage have sustainability problems when implemented out in the field), but I doubt UNICEF or similar charitable organizations can get the money they need these days to replace them all at a sweep.

Oh my god! Yes! Nuclear power plants exploding like a bomb and wiping out all life in a huge radius is like the biggest threat of nuclear energy!

I've even got a list of all the nuclear power plant explosions in history:
1. None.
2. Nada.
3. Zilch.
4. Zero.
And the list just goes on and on.

I mean, Chernobyl is just the poster child for deadly explosions (of steam vents that exposed radioactive material that ignited but did not itself explode but that did create a huge cloud of fallout), killing thousands of 31 people and even 33 more from radiation poisoning alone! Why, the expected death toll from Chernobyl could reach into the 4000 range from all of the highly deadly 99% survival rate cancer!!

Not from corporate profits. and seriously, do you think a government operated bureaucracy would have LESS overhead in its' operation?

In a word: yes.

What planet do you live on if you think that?

Earth. Down here in reality we can look at every other developed nation and see that they all have some form of universal health care and they all have lower overhead. According to a World Health Organization study the average is 4% for other countries with a maximum of 7%. As I understand it, in the U.S. overhead costs run from 7% for the largest company plans to 30% for individual plans (and the smaller the pool, the larger the percentage dedicated to overhead). So the worst out of 58 other countries is as good as the most efficient private health insurance plan in the U.S. and the average is almost twice as good as the best U.S. plan and 7 times better than the worst U.S. plan.

Think yours is closer to the mark, but for clarity ICD can also refer to International Classification of Diseases. http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en/

Yes, The World Health Organization does care..

Can you name *any* set of observations of average global CO2 and average global temperature that would cause you to give up your belief?

Sure. If carbon levels go up precipitously for, say, 50 years, and the climate does NOT warm, after having corrected for things like solar radiation output, distance from the sun, etc, I would be convinced that CO2 emissions have nothing to do with warming. Since human activity is, in fact, increasing CO2 levels, and has been for the last 100 years, and global warming has, in fact been occurring, and temperature spikes in the historical record have in fact been correlated with CO2 rises, then I would say that the null hypothesis that there is no correlation between CO2 rises and global warming has been pretty much disproved. Since observations have supported the claim that human activity increases CO2 in the atmosphere (these are facts, as much as anything can be a fact), the further claim that human activity is causing global warming can be judged to be fairly certain.

In addition to our current long running and dangerous experiment, there is other experimental evidence that human activity is causing global warming. Computer models have been built that, in effect, create a 'new world', that can be used to test these sorts of hypotheses. These sorts of studies are confirming and predicting global warming due to CO2 rises. They predict the sorts of temperature rises, on average, that will occur. They have been going on for 30 years, and predicting the sorts of temperature rises we are seeing. So, they are pretty good evidence that CO2 is causative of global warming. Again, that CO2 rise is caused by human activity is not disputed.

Now, you can call me a believer in the 'religion of science' again, but you need to start someplace. You can't be like Descarte, and deny everything, or you get nowhere, or worse, think you've proved the existence of God. My religion, if it is a religion, is that science gets it right much more often than it gets it wrong. It often will get stuck on issues, mainly due to incorrect theoretical explanations, but those incorrect explanations are mostly due to missing facts. As new facts come in, they figure things out, and create a better theory, and the scientific community comes to accept it (perhaps a funeral at a time, as Max Planck quipped). As more observations come in, the theories get better and better. So, yes, I believe what scientists tell me. I have no way to disprove them, and less inclination to try. Their work has made me very comfortable.

The only real puzzle here is how the Koch brothers have managed to convince so much of the population to disbelieve the science, which is in fact as certain as these sorts of things get. They have connected denial of human caused global warming to political belief in a way that makes people who vote republican disbelieve it on an unprecedented scale. This is similar to the belief, after even Bush had disavowed it, that Saddam was responsible for 9/11. It becomes part of the lore of the tribe, and must be protected as a sort of badge of membership. Very clever, but ultimately the millions of deaths projected in this century (estimates are 150,000 people a year being killed by climate change right NOW) will expose them as the villains that they really are.

I would like to thank you. I was dismissive of your views earlier in the thread, and your responses have caused me to read up on the science a bit, something t

Retinas _this_ way around are also damaged by UV light, specifically the longer wavelength UVA as UVB and UVC are stopped at the cornea. What's even more interesting: less than 1% of UV light reaches the retina because it is blocked at the cornea. I highly doubt that putting all that mess in from of the photorreceptors will have a noticeable effect on retinal degradation.

'Maybe because Golden Rice has nothing to do with Monsanto?`

"Monsanto have now agreed to provide royalty-free licenses for its technologies to help fast-track the further development and distribution of the rice." ref

And these farmers can never go into the seed selling business - into perpetuity ...

Not everybody who got measles is still here. It's been thinning the herd for thousands of years. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6020a7.htm from which I quote here: "Of the 118 cases, 47 (40%) resulted in hospitalization. Nine patients had pneumonia, but none had encephalitis and none died." None dying is not all that typical. Here's what the WHO has to say: " Measles is a highly contagious, serious disease caused by a virus. In 1980, before widespread vaccination, measles caused an estimated 2.6 million deaths each year. "It remains one of the leading causes of death among young children globally, despite the availability of a safe and effective vaccine. Approximately 158 000 people died from measles in 2011 – mostly children under the age of five." -- http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs286/en/ Among other kinds of permanent damage, measles causes blindness in some patients. It is not OK to get measles. It's life and long-term health threatening.

Actually, all of those things are out to get me. That's why I carry a gun wherever I go. If some tall thing tries to get me, I'll shoot it!

Needless to say, yes, I am being silly. It's sort of a reference to the joke about trees jumping in front of cars and skiers and such and how the trees are out to get us.

I'd be really curious about your references for those numbers, though. I tried to look up the number of deaths from falling, but the best I could find was the World Health Organization's fact sheet about falls, where they claim that 424,000 people a year die from falls worldwide. Of course, they define a fall as "an event which results in a person coming to rest inadvertently on the ground or floor or other lower level." If I fall off my motorcycle while doing 50 MPH, is that really a "fall-related death"?

As an aside, I'm always wary of statistics that come up with nice round numbers. I have no problem with 851 accidental deaths from firearms. But 26,000 sounds like somebody estimated something. 25,732 sounds a bit more convincing to me.

So now Africa will have 600,000 more people a year to feed, house, and clothe, and they can't even do that now. Yay?

It's a step in the right direction.

Malaria is a major problem preventing the people of the third world from improving themselves. When there are so many things in your daily life that can kill you that are beyond your control, you tend to not pay much heed to the system surrounding you (the part you CAN control). Dictatorships are allowed to strangle populations and steal supplies, and nobody cares enough to act because they're dying (or close to dying). People only tend to take the world aroud them into accout when they have their own problems settled, and that's why it's essential that diseases like Malaria be removed from that long list of hardships.

Additionally, Malaria infects far more people than it kills every year, and those millions that survive are still affected. The cost to farmers sick during the growing season can be phenomenal. Then you also have to account for the cost of that treatment every time a person gets sick. Then there are longer-term hits to society like the lingering disabilities from cases of Cerebral Malaria, which can affect over 500k people a year.

Once we can tackle the elephant in the room, we can worry about feeding the people, and fixing the system that has let them down. Also, if those economic effects are accurate for farmers, this could make the DIFFERENCE between people starving and eating.

Awesome health care, indeed.

Anecdotal evidence which is easily trumped by, you know, actual research (key chart starts on page 18). It turns out that by any objective measure, the NHS gets better results than the US does: The UK is in the top 20, the US is competing with Costa Rica, Cuba, and Slovenia. And if you want to see really all-out socialized medicine, check out France, sitting comfortably as the best in the world.

A big part of what's going on is that your perception of health care is coming from your own experiences using it as someone who probably has a good job and decent insurance. It completely ignores the experiences of those who have a bad job and no insurance. The US has a health care underclass, and you aren't in it, so you don't notice how badly the people in it are treated.

Your non-lethal rotavirus killed almost half a million children under 5 in 2008 alone. This does not include hospitalizations or cases of series side effects (severe dehydration, seizures, etc), just deaths.

http://www.who.int/immunization_monitoring/burden/rotavirus_estimates/en/

Let me show you how broken your thinking is. Here is what you quoted as this thing that requires the Governments to spy everyone. which resulted in 71,803 people killed, wounded, or kidnapped in 2007.

According to this, let us compare to alcohol which is perfectly legal to people of age, and does not require intrusive spying on everyone by Governments. These stats are 2004 so it would be safe to assume that increased population increases these numbers, while "terrorism" is fluctuates massively. For example, in your link the amount of people impacted has gone down annually (which is often due to how they fudge numbers to make things look really really bad). I"m not even touching illegal narcotics which would beat the pants off of these numbers.

Cirrhosis: 372,995 deaths.

Traffic accidents: 268,246

You can read the report yourself, but the point is that the net alcohol related deaths were 2,249,852. So over 30 times the deaths occurred, and it does not mean that we should be spying on everyone.

Real numbers, you have a .00003 percent chance of being killed by a drunk, compared to a .000001 percent chance of being impacted by a terrorist (death, kidnapping, wounding). Pay attention to that, it's dead vs. impacted.

Do you see how broken your logic is, to deem it's okay to spy on people based on some raw numbers? Save the straw man or red herring about how safe the spying keeps us, it's bullshit. Boston is proof that the massive spying on you and I does not make a difference. Save your next fallacy about inept or incompetent people managing the data, it does not change because that is not the point of their spying.

Reality check! More people in the US have been killed annually by appliances falling on them than by terrorists! Here is a fun link for you.

Pay attention and read some history. In every case where people have allowed Governments to abuse their rights and privacy in order to protect them, it has turned out very very badly for that society. Every time, not most of the time. This is why Jefferson stated "Those willing to trade liberty for temporary security deserve neither liberty or security." You should know better, but you are brain washed into believing that it can't happen to you.

Either that, or you are paid to spread propaganda like you just did.

Y'know, disparaging Wikipedia for citing WHO statistics is a really good way to make you look like a jerk. Most of the medical and biological stuff is written by bored graduate students; it's just as accurate as the papers themselves. Save your ire for the history section and other reservoirs of national ego.

Actually, the World War 3 is going on already. Nearly 3,400 people die on the world's roads every day. By 2020 it will be about 5200 every day (1.9 million per year) http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs358/en/index.html

That's not a war. There's no organization intentionally causing all those traffic accidents.

Actually, the World War 3 is going on already. Nearly 3,400 people die on the world's roads every day. By 2020 it will be about 5200 every day (1.9 million per year) http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs358/en/index.html

It is really hard to believe that a scientific committee will publish such a report when:
- the WHO (World Health Organization) published last February an official report proving the contrary ( Health risk assessment from the nuclear accident after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami based on a preliminary dose estimation. 28/02/2013.)
- 12 Fukushima workers (grunts) are already officially diagnosed with thyroid cancer and 15 others are considered "under suspicion of thyroid cancer" and are under medical watch.
- the sheer number of kids living in the surrounding within the 40km perimeter around Fukushima and whose thyroid problems are already officially diagnosed (after Fukushima) and are under medical scrutiny.

Even though the japanese governement doctors tend to say that the cases of Thyroid Cancer are unrelated with the fact that they are working at Fukushima, because they appeared "too quickly", maybe they should also consider the fact that they are constantly exposing themselves to radiation dosage much higher than what is legally authorized and that is also a proven fact.
Plus the sole number of 12 proven cases of Thyroid Cancer + 15 cases under scrutiny in the same work environment is a very high percentage (euphemism).

So, really, who are they kidding?

As we say in french : Ils marchent sur la tête ! (trans. : they act foolishly!)
It reminds me when the french government said that the Tchernobyl radiation cloud stopped at the french border and never crossed the country. Just as stupid and foolish!

For those who claim this is a grand conspiracy theory, you can see the difference between theory and practice, within the actual text of the agreement, summed up by this 2004 quote of Dr Michael Fernex formerly of the University of Basel who worked for the WHO;

"Six years ago we tried to have a conference. The proceedings were never published. This is because in this matter the organisations at the UN are subordinate to the IAEA. Since 1986 the WHO did nothing about studying Chernobyl. It's a pity. The interdiction to publish which fell upon the WHO conference came from the IAEA. The IAEA blocked the proceedings; the truth would have been a disaster for the nuclear industry"

This is the history of how the International Atomic Energy Agency has been able to deal with the human health implications of Nuclear disasters by muzzling the science and medicine that can be conducted. For an accident as serious as Chernobyl even the hamstrung report from the World Health Organisation said;

"The international experts have estimated that radiation could cause up to about 4000 eventual deaths among the higher-exposed Chernobyl populations, i.e., emergency workers from 1986-1987, evacuees and residents of the most contaminated areas. This number contains both the known radiation-induced cancer and leukaemia deaths"

Imagine, based on the actual evidence, what the WHO may have been able to uncover had they been allowed to actually reveal the actual truth of the disaster. The Guardian however points out that the IAEA is ignoring the evidence of the volume of deaths occurring as a result of the Chernobyl disaster.The UNICEF report "Human consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident" summarised it neatly;

"Life expectancy for men in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, for example, is some ten years less that Sri Lanka, which is one of the twenty poorest countries in the world and is in the middle of a long drawn out war"

This isn't from any radioactive fallout from the accident though, it's the economic fallout from a collapsed regional economy manifest as suicide and mental illnesses. So because they didn't die from cancer or radio isotopes those numbers don't get included.

Since cancer takes years to incubate, thus premature deaths and birth defects manifest over time. After this generation, the next generation and long after this disaster has passed into lore it will still be well within the toxic half-life of radioactive isotopes such as cesium 137, strontium 90 and plutonium 239.

The genetic abnormalities and diseases caused by this accident are generations away and unlikely to be seen by anyone alive today and direct exposure will occur as long as there is a food chain to absorb these isotopes and people to eat that food. So the occurrence of recessive gene damage that occurs across generations as the likelihood of combining those genes is increased as more people in the population ingest radionuclides via whatever means.

What we will never know is how many pregnancies fail to com to term from this catastrophe, however we are able to count birth defects, now a common occurrence after the Chernobyl disaster. The New York Academy of Sciences report r

Great article here on the effects of Cherynobyl: http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/backgrounder/en/index.html

It does indeed say many thyroid cancers took years to turn up - but the number STARTED to increase right away, and it's fair to report that hasn't happened.

It seems unlikely that any effects of Fukushima will forever be impossible to count by keeping statistics. You cannot, even with Cherynobyl, ascribe a *particular* cancer case to the one cause, even there they can only say that "the cancer rate is higher by X%". They figure that some extra 4000 will die of cancer (than would have gone on to die of other causes later, of course) - but this is across hundreds of thousands exposed, so it's an increase in cancer rates of 3%-4% on that large group.

Chernobyl had the problem that they DIDN'T STOP DRINKING THE MILK in the area, the contaminated milk. Nobody made that mistake with any food near Fukishima. Worse yet, the kids in the area were iodine-deficient!

The cancer rate increase from Fukishima could be, say, a hundredth of Cherynobyl's (it's probably less), and be 0.03-0.04% ... you'll never be able to say whether the number is higher or not, because the error bar on just COUNTING cancer deaths (when Grandma has cancer and dies of a heart attack, would she have had the attack without the cancer? A doctor's call on that can change the outcome.) is much higher than 0.05%.

The cancer rate around Fukishima could be, say 100,000 dead out of 300,000 people when we add them all up 60 years from now - when the stats said it should have been 101,000. Then some stats guy will have to wearily explain that it was really 101,000 plus or minus 4,000 - and if only 100,000 died, then in that area's case it would have been 99,890, because by 2020, researchers using the disputed "no threshold" model had put the probable deaths at 150.

So our real story here, is why are we caring about a death rate that is smaller than a statistical error bar that nobody gives a crap about, at least as a news story.

"...while getting mediocre results..."

Your utterance of this phrase tells me immediately that you're full of ...

Actually, that was probably the most well-sourced part of my statement. If anything, I was being generous. Just go check out any comparative survey of health care quality or results. For example, this survey from the World Health Organization in 2000 ranked the USA 37th of 191 (but we were #1 in % of GDP spent on it!): decidely mediocre. This one from The Commonwealth Fund in 2010 ranked the USA dead last of the 7 nations studied (but again, first in expense!).

(1) We really don't know about the health effects of low levels of radiation. The linear no-threshold model is a best guess, but health effects could be better or worse than this. See the diagram at the top of this article.

(2) WHO did a big study into the health effects of Chernobyl.

Let me sum up the WHO's report on the dangers of radar

* You may be experiening adverse effects from RADAR if you start having skin burns
  * If you feel your organs starting to cook, you should mitigate the damage by leaving the vicinity of the radar device.

Damage is caused by thermal effects, thats it, and you should generally be aware of when that is happening.

Not this bullshit again. DDT was never banned for malaria prevention, just every other use and is still used for indoor treatment for malaria carrying mosquitoes though I doubt they make wallpaper out of it any more. Pesticides are like anti-biotics, use them only when needed as immunity is built up in the target population which is one of the main reasons that DDT isn't used as much for malaria prevention, just as penicillin isn't used much anymore for infections.
The Stockholm convention banned DDT for all uses except malaria carrying mosquito control though they did discourage it. Currently the World Health Organization does encourage using DDT for indoor use to control mosquitoes in malaria infected areas. Press release, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2006/pr50/en/
And staying on topic, I had a pesticide application ticket many years ago. It was stressed to only use pesticides as a last resort, to use what was effective, and no more and one of the main dangers was how sensitive bees were to insecticides compared to most insects. Fish were also very sensitive to some insecticides and herbicides so you'd have chemicals with a low LD50 yet a high LC50 level. Toxicity can be very complex.

Malaria kills far more people per year than cancer )

Sorry, not even close, according to the World Health Organization (WHO):

• Malaria: ~660,000 deaths worldwide in 2010

• Cancer: 7 million deaths worldwide in 2008

Malaria kills far more people per year than cancer )

Sorry, not even close, according to the World Health Organization (WHO):

• Malaria: ~660,000 deaths worldwide in 2010

• Cancer: 7 million deaths worldwide in 2008

Outside of The Dark Knight, creating panic is not actually an objective of terrorism. It's much more important for them to prove that they can do anything at any time, which is a useful bargaining chip. Fear is useless unless it affects those being extorted.

As for prions, it looks like vCJD may actually be practical as a weapon. Until the late nineties BSE epidemic in Britian, most known prion diseases cases were in people over the age of 55.

The only numbers we have on any prion's success rate were of the first Kuru epidemic in the late 50s. 1 in 50 people were affected; with about 90% being women, and all women being potentially exposed to the disease, it is likely that the rate of problems was around 4%. If vCJD has the same characteristics, this seems like a very low-yield strategy compared to alternatives like chemical poisoning. There are plenty of methods that would be about as untraceable, and could give much more effective, rapid results.

It's worth noting that Asian americans have a higher life expectancy than residents of japan.

Japanese Americans have a higher economic status than the median American, and higher than the median citizen of Japan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income

Since race is strongly correlated with life expectancy, the mere fact of a more diverse population brings US numbers down, even if we handle every racial group better.

When we control for socioeconomic status the race correlation of life expectancy either is drastically reduced or else disappears entirely. You are trying to paint an economic problem the U.S. has (extreme disparity of wealth and serious poverty) which we could attempt to rectify as an inevitable genetic thing that no one can do anything about.

Life expectancy is a poor measure to star with, since it's not closely tied to medical care in particular.

Since it contradicts the considered option of the world medical community you need to at least try to post a link to substantiate such a radical claim.

In fact since 3/4 of the potential years of life lost in the U.S. before the age of 65 are due to medical conditions your claim is nonsense. The link is very strong.*

Social factors are a major cause of premature deaths. Life expectancy at later ages may be more relevant, as medical conditions start taking over causes of death instead of accidents and violence.

The claim is false for those under 65, as well as for those over 65, which are acknowledging here.

The definition of live birth as actually calculated differs from country to country and this has a large impact on numbers. As a way of avoiding those differences in counting live births, I suggest perinatal mortality instead. And, go figure, the US is better than some of the countries that regular infant mortality would suggest would surpass it. The UK (25th) for instance goes from being 2 better than us to 1 worse on rates. It's funny, but the numbers on that wiki link do not correspond to sorty by any of the actual infant mortality numbers. I believe perinatal has it's own landmines, but the time frame immediately surrounding birth is more connected to medical system than from birth to 1.

We do better true, but we are still 24th on the list.

*There is a claim that has been bouncing in the right wing megaphone echo chamber for four years asserting that if you control of accidents and violence U.S. life expectancy jumps to number one. The claim is false and traces to a single miscaptioned table in a report by conservative think tank economists Robert L. Ohsfeldt and John E. Schneider. The table shows that the U.S. would lead in life expectancy if U.S. life expectancy tracked the life vs GDP trendline of the OECD. In fact it does not, it does far worse - which is exactly the problem that needs to be solved.

It's worth noting that Asian americans have a higher life expectancy than residents of japan. I can't find a breakdown for life expectancy by ethnicity for Japan. Since race is strongly correlated with life expectancy, the mere fact of a more diverse population brings US numbers down, even if we handle every racial group better. Life expectancy is a poor measure to star with, since it's not closely tied to medical care in particular. Social factors are a major cause of premature deaths. Life expectancy at later ages may be more relevant, as medical conditions start taking over causes of death instead of accidents and violence.

The definition of live birth as actually calculated differs from country to country and this has a large impact on numbers. As a way of avoiding those differences in counting live births, I suggest perinatal mortality instead. And, go figure, the US is better than some of the countries that regular infant mortality would suggest would surpass it. The UK (25th) for instance goes from being 2 better than us to 1 worse on rates. It's funny, but the numbers on that wiki link do not correspond to sorty by any of the actual infant mortality numbers. I believe perinatal has it's own landmines, but the time frame immediately surrounding birth is more connected to medical system than from birth to 1.

I'm making claims based on studies backed by multiple health organizations.

The World Health Organization, for fuck's sake, says circumcision is good.

http://www.who.int/hiv/topics/malecircumcision/en/

You are correct, the WHO has an agenda...to lower the cases of AIDS around the world.

That's true, but influenza is most dangerous to the people whom the vaccine is least effective on.Specifically, young children (who are not supposed to get it) and those over 65 (on whom it works 9% of the time, as noted in tfa)

Can you tell me how much testing is done to verify these things are safe?

A lot.

How long and how numerous are the human trials?

Why don't you tell me why they are necessary. Okay, a corn has a cspB gene, or a cotton has a Cry1Ab gene, or a soy has C4 epsps gene, or a papaya has prsv cp gene, or an apple has an antisense PPO gene. Why should that bother me, especially considering all the other mandatory testing?

I would be suspicious that anything developed in the past ten years or less is completely guaranteed to be safe for the duration of a human life.

You should be suspicious of things that you have reason to be suspicious of, not things that could potentially have an unknown unknown, which is pretty much everything. You can't prove that something won't be dangerous because you can't prove a negative, but there is neither reason to suspect that GE crops are dangerous nor is there evidence suggesting that GE crops are dangerous, unless you count Wakefield grade rubbish like the Séralini study. It irks me that when people say that some stuff about wifi or cell phones they are mocked but saying it about biotechnology is enlightened.

If you can convince me not to worry about that, I'm all ears!

Read these studies, and statements from various organizations like the WHO, FDA, EFSA, FSANZ,NAP, ANBIO, AAAS, ect. The scientific consensus on genetic engineering is pretty solid. You can hate on Monsanto all you want (although you should be aware that the business end, like the science end, is often fought with misconceptions, half truths, and downright FUD), and I'm not saying there are not nuances that should be rationally discussed (such as herbicide resistant weeds and resistance breakdown, although those are larger issues that have affected non-GE crops as well) but the science behind genetically engineered crops is solid. In many ways, the controversy over genetically engineered crops is the agricultural equivalent to the controversies surrounding evolution, climate change, and vaccines.

Then why did 6 people die already from it? I thought you said humans can't get the virus?

Yup, a dozen of people caught the disease, out of whom 6 died.

Now to put things into perspective, according to WHO, each season, regular human flu infection gets *half a dozen millions* of individuals out of which *up to half a million* die.

The number of "bird flu in humans" is so small that it looks like a fluke. As I said before :

It can only *very very very rarely* enter a human host, only by sheer luck, almost *by error*. We're speaking about a few dozens of individuals each year during avian flu outbreaks, and this is mostly the poeple who are exposed to birds a lot (the farmers handling them working in the overcrowded farms with thousand of chicken cramed in a small place. not the guy eating a chicken wing).

Life sciences are not hardcore-hard sciences. You can never say "never" nor "always". There will always be some weird exception. If you start digging literature for weird case reports you could probably even find single digit occurrences of probable infection by things for which we aren't even the normally taxonomic phylum (who knows that one single virus might have a just that critical mutation just right before jumping onto you). FFS, the human genome contains genes which originally come from life forms to which we aren't even evolutionarily related (if you're curious, it's called "Horizontal Gene Transfer", normally *bacteria* are the ones doing it a lot, but well, never say "never", apparently even the human genome stole a few genes this way).

If you're that much concerned about getting avian flu, go play the lottery instead. Your odds are better at winning cash than catching bird-cold.

Now to back to the poor schmucks who died of avian flu:
- They are people who get exposed to birds a lot (I mention farmers, DigiShaman mentions cock fighting handlers). They get exposed tu much more massive amount of virus. More viruses are playing the "let's try to hop to a human" game, odds of 1 of them winning this game are higher.
- As I mentioned before, these aren't rich westerner in a big modern rich city, they are poor guys in backwaters. Once these get sick, they don't have an as easy access to proper treatments as the former. And risks to get a complication (pneumonia) are higher for them.
(- And for the biologically inclined there might be a - though less important, but interesting - 3rd factor. As this is a bird disease, it looks a lot less like previous seasons' flu than the regular human flu, and thus the white blood cells have a lot less "prior knowledge" to leverage in fighting this peculiar disease. In biological term: chances are lower that one of the "memory B and T cells" have a receptor which more or less works a tiny bit with the newer virus. Same reasons why the last swine flu could more easily infect younger people than the previous flu: it didn't look like anything we've seen since in the last 60 years).

So even if you managed to win the lottery and catch avian flu:
- your personal odds at surviving it are much higher as you'll seek a doctor if you don't feel well and you do have access to proper medication.
- you will probably NOT be dangerous to people around you: the 1 virus who got you has had an enormous chance of managing to infect you across specie barrier. To infect another human, it would need to have the same luck twice in a row. *very-very-very* unlikely... but...
- ...if you happen to have a normal human flu virus inside you at the same time, due to the special way in which influenza genetics works, then there's a risk that both will mix and produce a hybrid which has the human flu's ability to bind to and infect human cells easily.
(Same logic as above also applies to pigs but with a much higher risk for them catching a bird flu)

So I stand by what I've said befor

And let's totally ignore that not a single person died from the meltdown

Ok, I am a massive supporter of Nukes, HOWEVER, NOBODY can honestly claim that not a single person died from the meltdowns. In Japan, the ones that went into the reactors were much older because it was known that their lives will be massively shortened. In fact, they brought retirees in to do the work because it was known that it was going to kill.
Likewise, even IAEA says otherwise, WRT Chernobyl.
2. How many people died as an immediate result of the accident?
The initial explosion resulted in the death of two workers. Twenty-eight of the firemen and emergency clean-up workers died in the first three months after the explosion from Acute Radiation Sickness and one of cardiac arrest.

So, when ppl claim that nobody died, they are either kidding themselves, are ignorant, or lying. I have to believe that you are just ignorant of the situation.
BTW, here is Greenpeace's garbage. GP is far too extremists for me, however, in this case, they are probably closer to the truth than not.
And here is what WHO says.

Now, with all that said, the issue here were companies/groups that were irresponsible. Both Chernobyl and Japan were caused by cheating at protection. The nice thing about Thorium is that NONE of this is possible (with the right design). The reason is that it can NOT have a meltdown. And if the reactors are built small and enclosed in the ground, then it pretty much makes them secured against true nasty situation.

I love it when Europeans speak about our country - it doesn't take them long to open their pieholes before they show themselves to be profoundly ignorant.

...

talks about "fat americans" - except we have a lower obesity rate than the UK by a wide (pardon the pun) margin.

Oh, you've got to love the irony there - we Brits hold the record as the fattest in the EU - but you in the US are still beating us by quite a long fucking way, unless you have more relevant data that you just too fat and lazy to link for us :)

Wikipedia says - US = 35.7% of adults and 17% of children - UK = 22% - graph from 2007 shows the earlier data.

World Health Organisation (which only seems to have data from 2008 - census lag maybe?) says - US is fatter than the UK

I love it when Europeans speak about our country - it doesn't take them long to open their pieholes before they show themselves to be profoundly ignorant.

...

talks about "fat americans" - except we have a lower obesity rate than the UK by a wide (pardon the pun) margin.

Oh, you've got to love the irony there - we Brits hold the record as the fattest in the EU - but you in the US are still beating us by quite a long fucking way, unless you have more relevant data that you just too fat and lazy to link for us :)

Wikipedia says - US = 35.7% of adults and 17% of children - UK = 22% - graph from 2007 shows the earlier data.

World Health Organisation (which only seems to have data from 2008 - census lag maybe?) says - US is fatter than the UK

The WHO also lists diet as a bigger risk to well being yet very little is being done about it. http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/en/ People would much rather waste trillions on medical costs than fight the problem where it starts.