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POPSDengue Fever aka:Breakbone Fever - Doubles in Mexico This is really not good news. The mosquito that carries it also carries yellow fever. Global warming result? Sort of. This mosquito loves to breed in greater numbers when it has access to recently deforested areas - its perfect breeding gound. That's why Yellow Fever was such a big killer when Panama Canal was being built - they cut down many forests to build the canal. Message? Don't even think about buying wood products made from forests in Central America, Mexico, and the Amazon. Oh, a variant of Dengue probably killed millions of Mayans in a fashion similar to Ebola a hundred years before the Spanish arrived and was the result of cutting down forests to plant corn for massive Mayan city states.
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POPSThumb in Eye of Trashiest Eco-Corporate Terrorist! In the name of short term advantage, hoped-for-profit, and self-delusion many corporations are spending like crazy and lying up a storm to convince political leaders to be as dumb as they are. Here's a chance to point out who you think is the worst. My personal favorite is Monsanto with its Round-up ready genetically modified food. The crux of it is that thay are betting that they are smarter than nature and that flooding the world with round up (which originally debut in Viet Nam as Agent Orange) willdo us no harm and that nature will never figure out how to attack is monoculture crops. Go ahead and think about it a bit and then vote.
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POPSHelp Save The World with Your Computer - Interested? Long ago, I participated in a global network doing computations for the genome project. Now you can lend your down time on your computer to fight AIDS, MS and work on clean energy. IBM is hosting. Window, Linux and Mac systems welcome!
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POPSWorld Economic Crisis = 30-50K more kids may die by 2010 I am worrying about paying property taxes, others are planning on buying less for Christmas, some are wondering what comes after unemployment runs out. Thousands of thousands of women in Sub-Sahara Africa are wondering which babies, if their baby will survive. If you knew one of the women, whose baby will probably die if nothing changes - what would you do? Sorry, I had to ask but I have to.
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POPSFlu Risks Could Get Riskier A mix of greed, real concerns, and getting ahead of ourselves to provide political and health cover could brew up a real mess. Let's hope and demand that the decisions on flu shots are super open and that real safety is the driver and not profits or desire to protect political hides.
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POPSAgribusiness and British Government Pull GM Food Trick They will always have a good reason for trying to fool the public and nature with profit of their bosses, not the public or farmers at the root of their experiments. They may be able to fool the public but not nature - and therein lays the problem. When the incentive is profit, rather than safety, sustainability and system impact, then the risk of unexpected and perhaps crop killing consequences goes up!
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POPSCorporate Agi-Science a Planet Killer? The drive to get the world's farmers to be dependent forever on companies for seeds of people's basic cereal foods could open up world to first global crop failure! Do you want to risk that? Read up some on subject yourself and then you will join others with an OMG something has to be done - then do it!
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POPSSomething to Really Worry About - A New Form of Ebola How to humans normally get new forms of influenza? From birds to pigs, then to humans. How do people usually get ebola? Not quite sure but it is thought from primates (monkeys). So if pigs now have a new form of Ebola, do we have something to worry about? Yes! And watch carefully. Why? New flu used come out of South Asia, now - because of the global poultry and pork markets - it can come from anywhere. Get the point? Globalized markets means everything is now globalized faster, and faster, and...
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POPSLatest Version of Bird Flu May Be Pandemic Starter This paradox – emerging from Egypt, the most recent epicentre of the disease – threatens to increase the disease's ability to spread from person to person by helping it achieve the crucial mutation in the virus which could turn it into the greatest plague to hit Britain since the Black Death. Last year the Government identified the bird-flu virus, codenamed H5N1, as the biggest threat facing the country – with the potential to kill up to 750,000 Britons.
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POPSJapanese Raccons found with Bird Flu What this shows is that the h5n1 virus is present in many different species. It breaks out in a form that is deadly to both animals and people when the host animal is gathered together in large numbers. When chickens, ducks, or geese are factory farmed (thousands raised at same time and housed for egg laying or held for delivery to live markets), the natural system "thinks" the species's population is too large and is exhibitig stress that calls for a "system" response to bring the flock back into balance. The system response to re-create balance is influenza which kills weaker or stressed birds and reestablishes balance. Repeated human intervention causes greater system responses until it may reach pandemic levels.
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POPSTransboundary animal diseases a huge danger to Asia “Over the past 10 years, disease outbreaks have affected millions of poor households dependent on livestock for livelihood and food security; occurrence is now considered an emergency,” Carolyn Benigno, animal health officer with the FAO’s Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, told the conference.
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POPSBird Flu Jumps to Pigs in Indonesia The traditional route for flu to humans is from poultry to pigs to people - so this is not goods news at all - in fact it is rather alarming. It is next step to a new pandemic.
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POPSWoodsman Spare that Tree!!! Analysis of these 250,000 tree records reveals that, on average, remaining undisturbed forests are trapping carbon, showing that they are a globally significant carbon sink.
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POPSTet and Bird Flu risk - Word is Finally Out Dr. Olive of the World Health Organization, has let the bird out of the bag. Tet brings millions of birds and people in close contact and that means there is an increased chance for bird flu and mutation of traditional flues into more dangerous versions. The unintended consequence of breeding millions of birds for live market during a short period of time is that all sorts of flu variants can mutate under such conditions - even a pandemic version.
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POPSAlmost funny that Germans might get bird flu from Turkeys! Not funny really but when poultry of any kind are raised in an industrial manner,foul play is in the future(sorry for the pun). Flu virus is most easily mutated and passed along when thousands of birds are caged together - the virus is passed via manure, sweat (yes bird sweat) and urine.
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POPSNew Methods Needed to Combat Bird Flu Greed, as well as the need by small farmers to earn once a year extra cash from selling poultry for Tet (Lunar New Year) has and will continue to subvert the means to contain or stop bird flu and even new flu mutations. Introducing a market for collecting and fermenting/digesting manure can defeat the virus and serve needs of farmers.
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POPSSuprise - Wonder Drug Touted as Protection - Isn't! Drug companies are all about profit and often promise much more than they can deliver. Tamiflu is not the wonder drug is was touted as and it's a good thing that governments did not buy millions of doses. Learn two things: 1. Drug company greed is main reason health care is so expensive. 2. They will be of little or no help in combating the outbreak of the next pandemic.
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POPSThe "Costs" of Deforestation Deforestation "costs" - pandemic The "costs" of deforestation are much higher than the Mr. Brown or others think. In the very near future, it will become obvious that deforestation is driving new outbreaks of Yellow Fever, more resistant strains of malaria, dengue fever, Hanta, as well as Ebola. The "costs" soon will include regional, continental or global outbreaks of one or more of these diseases. And that means millions will die and will not have to worry about climate change anymore. Large systems respond strongly when over-population or some major eco-disruption seems to have occurred. And it is not just deforestation that drives this - huge new dam systems in India and China have certainly contributed to the outbreak of avian influenza.
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POPSBird Flu Just Won't Go Away - Why? It's no secret, it's just that many have not seen that the growth of poultry business tenfold in last ten years has had an impact and that annual rush of preparing for live sales of poultry to celebrate Lunar New Year supports world largest unofficial "virus mutation laboratory" - the live markets and wholesale live poultry dealers!
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POPSBird Flu in India Hits Another State By relying on culling and vaccinating alone, and not looking for other solutions, India can expect more bird flu and we can expect to read of it becoming a pandemic in near future.
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POPSNot Good News As Lunar New Year Approaches The desire for ducks, geese, chickens and pigs with which to celebrate Lunar New Year, brings millions upon millions of poultry and swine to market for the next two months and raises the potnetial for spread of new flu variants, as well as avian flu!
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POPSProfit, status and stupidity still rules science! "There is nothing that can be produced through radiation induced mutation that is not within the spectrum of possibilities of what nature can bring out in that crop, given sufficient space and time. All radiation induced mutation is doing is to facilitate a naturally occurring phenomenon." And there is no residual radiation left in a plant after the mutation induction, he says. " Why is it that scientist's become simpering idiots and unscientific when they enter the promotion game of their favored technical solution for the planet? No danger from residual radiation - true. Danger from unforeseen circumstances due lack of diversity in agriculture - lots! If latest whiz bang, nuked wheat or rice becomes the one crop fits all and nature says, "yummie, let me create a new bacteria or predator for this new over-abundant species," then poof! whole crops are wiped out and new food hunger is created!
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POPSScience and Greed Will Deliver Next Pandemic Greed and science do not make good partners. Breed birds to supposedly be immune to one type of avian flu opens the door to millions of birds and perhaps people be wiped out by a disease that the genetically modified birds do not have any immunity to -- That's why nature favors diversity to protect the whole!
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