[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 28 February 2020 09:10.
Romania, Village Life in Transylvania
A beautiful little documentary of village life in Gyimes, in the South Eastern Carpathians in 2018. Ancient, vernacular, small farm-houses line the stoned side roads on which horse-drawn vehicles carry logs, hay, stone and people this way and that all day long. Most people live by small-scale farming producing their own honey, cheese, bread, veg and fruit, milk and meat. Water is always from the well, pure, sparkling and cold. Cows and sheep wear bells and high above the village the mountain meadows hum with insect life while the extraordinarily rich flora remains untouched by sprays and chemicals.
Szekler people, Romania’s Hungarian speaking minority live in Gyimes, which now lies within Bacau county. The history of the area and its association with Transylvania, is very complicated .... I am no historian and apologise for any errors I have made.
Enjoy the film, all taken with a little, hand-held Panasonic HC X920.
An elderly cancer patient became the third person known to be infected with the coronavirus to die in Italy, health officials said on Sunday, as the number of people contracting the virus continued to mount.
The death of the woman in a hospital in the small city of Crema in Lombardy, the centre of Italy’s coronavirus scare, followed that of a 77-year-old woman on Saturday and a 78-year-old man on Friday, the first European victim of coronavirus.
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte urged people “not to give in to panic and follow the advice of health authorities”.
“We should not be afraid because of the rising numbers,” he told public radio station Rai Uno, adding in another interview that cases were being discovered “because we are carrying out thousands of checks”.
The head of Italy’s civil protection department, Angelo Borrelli, told a news conference that 152 people had now tested positive for the virus in the country, including the three deceased.
The cancer patient had been hospitalised for a few days, said Lombardy’s health chief, Giulio Gallera. “She’d been tested and they already knew she had the coronavirus,” Gallera said, adding that it was too early to know whether the virus was the actual cause of death.
The deaths, and steadily rising number of cases of infected people, have prompted a series of security measures to try to check the spread of the contagion.
Eleven towns—10 in Lombardy and one in neighbouring Veneto—are under lockdown, with some 50,000 residents prohibited from leaving.
Regional authorities have ordered gathering spots, such as bars, restaurants and discos to close. Schools throughout the affected areas are to remain closed.
An Austrian train from Venice bound for Munich was stopped on Sunday on the Italian side of the Brenner Pass border crossing with Austria because of two possible cases, the Austrian interior ministry said.
It later announced that the passengers had tested negative and train services resumed.
Cultural fallout
The spread of the virus has disrupted high-profile events including Milan Fashion Week and the Venice Carnival while Serie A football matches were postponed. Operas have also had to be cancelled at Milan’s famed La Scala.
Most of the cases in Italy are in Lombardy, a prosperous region in the country’s north, and can be traced back to a 38-year-old man whom authorities have called “patient one”.
The man, who is intensive care, dined last month with another man who had visited China in January. He exhibited flu-like symptoms at the time of the dinner, but has since tested negative for the virus, media reports said.
Health officials are still puzzled over certain cases with no obvious links with infected persons.
“The rapid increase in reported cases in Italy over the past two days is of concern,” World Health Organization (WHO) spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic said on Sunday.
“What is also worrying is that not all reported cases seem to have clear epidemiological links, such as travel history to China or contact with a confirmed case,” he added.
Experts from WHO and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control plan to arrive in Italy on Tuesday, he said.
Conte’s government moved on Saturday to set up checkpoints in the region affected to ensure that nobody leaves the contaminated zone without special permission. Sunday saw police checking all vehicles travelling in and out of the area along Codogno’s main highway.
One police officer told AFP that “we’re going to quickly enforce a total blockade” and that those who had made it into the area in recent days would be unable to leave.
Conte has said that residents could face weeks of lockdown, enough time for any potential infection to incubate.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 06 February 2020 06:22.
The civet, a mammal in the mongoose family, was a carrier of another coronavirus — SARS. But it turned out in that instance that bats were the original source of the virus.
New Coronavirus ‘Won’t Be The Last’ Outbreak To Move From Animal To Human
The new strain of coronavirus that has killed hundreds of people in China and caused a travel lockdown of some 56 million people has been classified as a “zoonosis” because of the way it spreads from animals to humans.
Science writer David Quammen says the virus, which the World Health Organization last week declared a global health emergency, is just the latest example of how pathogens that start in animals are migrating to humans with increasing frequency — and with deadly consequences.
“When there’s an animal host, then it becomes much, much more difficult to eradicate or even control an infectious virus,” Quammen says. “This novel coronavirus — whether or not it turns out to be a huge catastrophe, or something we can control — one thing we know is that it won’t be the last.”
Quammen’s 2012 book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, traces the rise of different zoonoses around the world, including AIDS, Ebola and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). He says that one of the first questions that arise with any zoonosis pertains to the animal host: How is it being transmitted?
In the case of the new coronavirus, researchers believe that the virus may have originated with horseshoe bats in China and then could have possibly spread to other animals — which people then ate.
Quammen notes that humans are the common link in all zoonoses: “We humans are so abundant and so disruptive on this planet. ... We’re cutting the tropical forests. We’re building work camps in those forests and villages. We’re eating the wildlife,” he says. “You go into a forest and you shake the trees — literally and figuratively — and viruses fall out.”
Quammen says that the new coronavirus should be taken seriously. But he also warns against panic: “Being educated and understanding it and being ready to respond and support government response is very useful. Panicking and putting on your surgical mask every time you go on a subway ride, an airplane, is not nearly as useful.”
Interview highlights
On wild animal “wet” markets where viruses can mix
When I was in southern China researching [Spillover], only briefly, I got to see some of these markets where all forms of wild animals were on sale. ... By the time I got there, [these sorts of markets] had gone underground ... suppressed after the SARS outbreak. But then [the markets] gradually came back ... allowed to continue again and proliferate when this new virus began.
If you go into a live market, you see cages containing bats stacked upon cages containing porcupines, stacked upon cages containing palm civets, stacked upon cages containing chickens. And hygiene is not great, and the animals are defecating on one another. It’s just a natural mixing-bowl situation for viruses. It’s a very, very dangerous situation. And one of the things that it allows is ... the occurrence of “amplifying hosts” [a species that rapidly replicates copies of the virus and spreads them].
On the theory that palm civets were “amplifier hosts” for the 2003 SARS outbreak
The civet is a type of mammal that belongs to the family of mongooses. But it’s a medium-sized animal, and it is both captured from the wild for food and captive-bred and raised for food, and it was the first big suspect in the SARS outbreak. It was found that some of the people who got sick very early on had eaten butchered civet. And they tested some civets, and they found evidence of the virus. They found antibodies or fragments of DNA or RNA in these civets, suggesting that they had been infected with the virus. And that didn’t prove they were the reservoir host, but it made them the No. 1 suspect, until a couple of Chinese scientists did further work and they established that, in fact, the virus was not living permanently in the civet population in the wild or in captivity. It [had] a different reservoir host. It was living in bats and had passed, presumably, at a market somewhere. It had passed from a bat into one or more civets, and they became the amplifier host. ...
Thousands of civets in captivity were butchered and electrocuted and smothered and drowned in this first, panicked blind reaction in China to the SARS outbreak.
On why bats are often hosts for viruses
Bats are implicated in what seems to be more than their share [of zoonoses]. There are a lot of different species of bats. One-quarter of all mammal species are bats. But there are other things [special] about them — including aspects of their immune system. There have been some discoveries lately that bat immune systems are “downregulated” in a certain way that allows for the metabolic stresses of being a mammal that flies. And the downregulating of the immune system to avoid overreaction to those stresses seems, perhaps, also to create an environment in which viruses are more tolerated in bats than in other mammals.
On how coronaviruses have evolved through different species
One of the reasons SARS could adapt from bat to civet to human is the fact that it is a coronavirus, which is a group of viruses that are very readily adaptable. Experts call that intrinsic evolvability. Their rate of mutation is very high when they copy themselves. Their genome contains a lot of mistakes, and that represents mutations that are sort of the random raw material for Darwinian evolution. So viruses that have high mutation rates are able to evolve quickly and adapt quickly. And coronaviruses ... have that characteristic.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 30 January 2020 02:36.
Coronavirus Updater:
First cases in Finland, India and the Philippines; death toll reaches 170
Moodie David Report: 30 Jan 2020:
Coronavirus Update: First cases in India, Finland, the Philippines; death toll reaches 170
Finland
The coronavirus outbreak has spread to Finland with the first confirmed case. Finnish media Uutiset said that the individual is a Chinese tourist from Wuhan. The 32-year-old woman is being treated in Lapland Central Hospital in Rovaniemi.
Philippines
The first case in the Philippines has been announced by the World Health Organization.
Today, the Department of Health announced the first confirmed case of the 2019 novel #coronavirus in the Philippines. The patient is 38 years old from China.
UAE
The first cases in the Middle East have been confirmed, with the Ministry of Health & Protection in the UAE announcing that a family of four has been infected. The statement added that the general health situation “is not a cause for concern” and that the Ministry advises “all citizens and residents to adhere to the general health guidelines”.
UK
British Airways has suspended flights to and from Mainland China as the coronavirus outbreak worsens. This comes as the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office advised against all travel to Hubei Province and all but essential travel to the rest of Mainland China.
China
China is likely to have a vaccine for the novel coronavirus for public use within three months. That will include a month and a half of development and a similar period of testing, according to Li Lanjuan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Global Times reports.
1,459 new cases of coronavirus and 3,248 suspected cases, including one in Tibet, were reported across China yesterday alone as the spread of the virus accelerates. The total number of confirmed infections reached 5,974, with 1,239 patients in critical condition. The death toll has reached 132 while 103 patients have recovered. [Source: Global Times]
International
A scientific race to find a vaccine for the virus is underway, writes The Moodie Davitt Report Senior Research & Commercial Analyst Min Jon Jung. Here is a roundup of key breakthroughs so far.
January 10: Chinese scientists posted a complete genome of the coronavirus.
January 28: Hong Kong University Professor Yuen Kwok-yung was successful in producing a vaccine but testing on animals will take months and clinical trials at least another year.
January 29: Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Australia successful in recreating virus outside of China.
The joint global effort may help to shorten the time required to develop a successful vaccine, but the development is both expensive and time-consuming. The vaccine for the SARS virus was developed 20 months after the viral genome was released and the outbreak was contained with public health measures before the vaccine was ready.
Dr Paul Stoffels, Johnson & Johnson’s chief scientific officer, estimated it could take eight to 12 months before his company’s vaccines reach human clinical trials.
The Green New Deal resolution that was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives in February hit a wall in the Senate, where it was called unrealistic and unaffordable. In a Washington Post article titled “The Green New Deal Sets Us Up for Failure. We Need a Better Approach,” former Colorado governor and Democratic presidential candidate John Hickenlooper framed the problem like this:
The resolution sets unachievable goals. We do not yet have the technology needed to reach “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” in 10 years. That’s why many wind and solar companies don’t support it. There is no clean substitute for jet fuel. Electric vehicles are growing quickly, yet are still in their infancy. Manufacturing industries such as steel and chemicals, which account for almost as much carbon emissions as transportation, are even harder to decarbonize.
Amid this technological innovation, we need to ensure that energy is not only clean but also affordable. Millions of Americans struggle with “energy poverty.” Too often, low-income Americans must choose between paying for medicine and having their heat shut off. …
If climate change policy becomes synonymous in the U.S. psyche with higher utility bills, rising taxes and lost jobs, we will have missed our shot. …
The problem may be that a transition to 100% renewables is the wrong target. Reversing climate change need not mean emptying our pockets and tightening our belts. It is possible to sequester carbon and restore our collapsing ecosystem using the financial resources we already have, and doing it while at the same time improving the quality of our food, water, air and general health.
The Larger Problem – and the Solution – Is in the Soil
Contrary to popular belief, the biggest environmental polluters are not big fossil fuel companies. They are big agribusiness and factory farming, with six powerful food industry giants – Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Dean Foods, Dow AgroSciences, Tyson and Monsanto (now merged with Bayer) – playing a major role. Oil-dependent farming, industrial livestock operations, the clearing of carbon-storing fields and forests, the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the combustion of fuel to process and distribute food are estimated to be responsible for as much as one-half of human-caused pollution. Climate change, while partly a consequence of the excessive relocation of carbon and other elements from the earth into the atmosphere, is more fundamentally just one symptom of overall ecosystem distress from centuries of over-tilling, over-grazing, over-burning, over-hunting, over-fishing and deforestation.
The civet, a mammal in the mongoose family, was a carrier of another coronavirus — SARS. But it turned out in that instance that bats were the original source of the virus.
