Zika Virus in Pregnant US Travellers
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) has released a report about nine pregnant travellers from the US who had Zika virus. Of these, one child was born with severe microcephaly. Two live births were normal. Two pregnancies are continuing and appear normal. The rest were terminated, either spontaneously early in pregnancy (two cases), or by elective abortion(two cases). Evidence of Zika infection was found in the tissue examined after one spontaneous abortion. In one case, the fetus was found to have brain atrophy by ultrasound at 20 weeks gestation; this pregnancy was terminated by abortion and evidence of active Zika virus replication was found in the tissue.
The child who was born with microcephaly was discharged to home with a gastrostomy (feeding tube inserted in the stomach.) The mother gave a history indicating that she had been infected with Zika virus symptoms at around 8 weeks gestation. It is not known if there is a vulnerable period during pregnancy, or if the fetus is vulnerable regardless of gestational age when the mother is struck by the virus.
It is very important to determine the likelihood of fetal infection and brain damage when the pregnant mother is infected with Zika virus. So far, although the risk is significant, no definite number can be attached to that risk. Of the approximately 250 women who were evaluated for Zika virus, all but nine were found to be uninfected. Those infected, listed above, had variable outcomes, but of those, at least three of the nine had fetal involvement, and four were spared. With risks of this magnitude, the availability of elective abortion for women whose fetuses are involved is crucial to humane survival for these women.
In addition, it must be noted that children who are born apparently normal may be at increased risk of later mental disorders according to a New York Times report, including autism, schizophrenia, and learning disorders. For all of these reasons, the development of a vaccine against Zika is important to long-term protection of women and children.
According to the New York Times Deal Book, Dow has changed its legal strategy and announced that it would settle a decade-long lawsuit for a payment of almost $1 billion. The change in strategy is said to be prompted by the death on Antonin Scalia and the likelihood of at least a 4-4 split on the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future.
So, despite the obstruction of the Republicans in the Senate, the death of Scalia is having the expected effect: far-right “conservative” positions will be less likely to receive support even if there is no ninth Justice.
Chris Christie Endorses Donald Trump
Chris Christie came out for Donald Trump Friday afternoon with a love-fest for the press. Although the two have had words in the past, the exchanges have been forgotten, and today Donald was effusive in his praise of Christie while Christie called Donald the perfect President.
There is a nightmare quality to the serial endorsements that have just occurred. First Sarah Palin, now Chris Christie, favor Donald Trump. What would government look like if Trump won the presidency and awarded Christie with an administrative post like Attorney General? Could Sarah Palin be Surgeon General?
It is time for “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail” to be resurrected. There is no more suitable mood in which to view the proceedings, especially on the Republican side.
Parry Aftab, a lawyer who leads the Internet safety group WiredSafety, said Mr. Trump’s behavior was a textbook example of cyberbullying.
In particular, she said his methods were characteristic of “mean-girl cyberbullying” because he enlists others to mimic his attacks. She said his conduct resembled the violent and abusive language her organization can often get removed from Facebook and Twitter.
via To Fight Critics, Donald Trump Aims to Instill Fear in 140-Character Doses – The New York Times.
It’s official. Donald Trump is a “mean-girl cyberbully” who enlists others to mimic and amplify his attacks.
There’s no precedent for this in a serious Presidential candidate. Donald Trump will trash anyone significant who criticizes him or refuses to endorse him. The criticism can be extremely mild and the reaction may include sexual harassment, slander, and threats– with the worst abuses coming not from Trump himself but one of his six million followers.
NBC news reported today that the CDC has stated there are now fourteen suspected cases of sexual transmission of Zika virus in the United States. Since there are 30 to 40 million travellers who visit Central and South America each year and return to the US, the potential for this method of transmission is very great. Zika is transmitted primarily by the Aedes mosquito, which also transmits dengue fever and chikungunya, two much more severe diseases that are endemic to South America. Only a fifth of people infected with Zika show symptoms, and it is not known whether an asymptomatic infected pregnant woman can transmit serious disease to her fetus.
Each of the cases of suspected sexual transmission occurred in a couple, the male partner travelling to South America, returning with symptoms of virus infection and having contact with the female partner within two weeks of returning. Several of the suspected cases have occurred in pregnant women. The Zika virus is known to be present during infection in semen, saliva, blood, and urine, although the only known cases of interpersonal infection have occurred through sexual intercourse. The virus has been spreading through South America and the Caribbean after jumping across the Pacific in the last four years, with stops in Yap and Easter Island. Before this spread, the virus had only been known in Asia and Africa after being discovered in a monkey in 1947.
The main reason for concern and for the CDC’s declaration of a public health emergency is the appearance of microcephaly and other fetal anomalies in the offspring of women who were pregnant when they became ill with acute Zika virus infection. In addition to microcephaly, there are suspicions that prenatal Zika exposure is associated with schizophrenia, autism, and other mental disorders later in life. The association with microcephaly has not actually been proven according to Koch’s postulates, but it is unlikely that these criteria will ever be fulfilled in the case of Zika.
This leads to an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) which appeared on February 10, 2016. The editorial enlarges on a case description which appeared in NEJM contemporaneously: a European woman who had been working in northeast Brazil returned to Europe with a history of Zika virus infection contracted when she was thirteen weeks pregnant. An ultrasound performed late in the pregnancy showed microcephaly and intracranial calcifications similar to those that had been seen in other Zika cases. She consulted with national and hospital ethics boards and chose to have a late-term “termination” (abortion.)
The fetus had a very small brain with complete absence of the cerebral gyri (forebrain.) The ventricles (fluid-filled spaces in the brain) were grossly enlarged, there were calcifications in what little cerebral tissue was present, and the brain stem and spinal cord were hypoplastic (shrunken.) Electron microscopy showed particles consistent with Zika virus, and large amounts of viral RNA (genetic molecules that carry instructions for assembling the virus) were found in the brain but nowhere else.
The editorial opined that these findings do not satisfy “Koch’s postulates”, the rules laid down by Robert Koch in the nineteenth century for determining if a disease is caused by a specific organism, whether a bacterium or a virus. However, it is unlikely that these rules will ever be satisfied in this case. The rules are: a specific organism must be isolated from a patient with the disease. The organism must be transmitted by inoculation into a healthy patient. The new patient must then show similar symptoms of disease. Finally, the organism must be isolated again from the second patient.
These postulates were critical during the early days of the development of the science of infectious disease. They were usually satisfied by using laboratory animals rather than humans. In this case, however, performing the experiment in monkeys would take a long time and be very expensive. Waiting for confirmation of Zika as the cause of this devastating birth defect would be unreasonable because the virus is spreading “explosively” through South and Central America right now, and many millions of young women are at risk in these areas.
The editorial in NEJM asks for the rapid development of specific tests that will confirm the presence of Zika and immunity to the disease. The only test available at present that is sufficiently specific is RNA polymerase chain reaction, which detects the presence of the virus itself in blood or tissue. Tests that confirm antibodies to Zika are not specific enough because they cross-react strongly with antibodies to dengue fever and other related flaviviruses endemic to South America. We need a serologic (serum) test that will confirm past infection with Zika specifically enough to distinguish it from dengue.
The editorial also describes the need for really effective measures to control the Aedes mosquito, the vector of not only Zika but dengue, malaria, and yellow fever. To date, there has not been deployed an effective control measure, although new developments show considerable promise. The use of genetic “engineering” devices to create sterile mosquitoes and other advanced techniques offer hope for eventual destruction of Aedes.
The other measure that is desperately needed is effective birth control, prenatal care, and abortion for affected women. These matters are especially difficult considering the deep penetration of Catholic control in many of the countries affected. There is even controversy in countries where abortion is readily available during the first trimester because infection and fetal damage is likely to occur during the second trimester and not be detected until the third trimester. Late-term abortion is controversial even in societies that condone the practice in the first trimester. The damage of microcephaly and multiple fatal fetal anomalies frequently will not be apparent until after the fetus is theoretically viable.
To prevent the tragedy of late-term abortion or the delivery of a dead or severely retarded microcephalic child, a vaccine against Zika virus may be the best answer. We will hope for a really effective vaccine before the Zika virus spreads to southern Europe.
Real World Economics– A Web Site that Exposes the Truth About Economics (by George H. Blackford PhD)
We live in a country in which many people, if not the vast majority, hold beliefs about the federal budget that are demonstrably inconsistent with the facts that exist in the real world. The extent to which this is so is easily seen by considering how many people would be surprised to discover that the size of the federal budget as a fraction of our economy—that is, as a percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—in the 2000s was about where it was in the 1970s and was actually slightly smaller in 2000 and 2001 (17.6%) than it was in 1961 through 1964 (17.8%-18.2%). How many people would be shocked to discover that there were more federal government employees in 1967 (2.85 million civilians plus 3.45 million military) than there were in 2013 (2.77 million civilians plus 1.53 million military)? How many would also be shocked to find that federal employees as a fraction of the civilian labor force has fallen by more than 50% since the 1960s? And how many know that Americans are one of the least-taxed people among the advanced countries in the world?
These are all simple and easily verifiable, real-world facts that most people would find almost impossible to believe given the deluge of disingenuous, antigovernment rhetoric that is designed to encourage us to believe otherwise.
The above is the introduction to a web site that is produced by George H. Blackford, Ph.D., who calls himself an economist at large. The site contains an enlightening series of lessons about recent economic history and an excerpt from a book that Dr. Blackford has written called “Where has all the Money Gone?” The excerpt from the book goes through the history of the American economic situation since about 1913 (when comprehensive statistics began to be kept.) Much of the detail should be familiar to those who have been following this blog as well as those who have been reading the columns of Dr. Paul Krugman. The bottom line is that we are spending less per person and we have fewer employees per citizen than we have had in years past, and we are paying even less in taxes than we have in years past.
For those who have not been following along, this site will give much-needed information about how and why we got into this mess, and why the Republicans (as well as many Democrats) are liable to make thing even worse than they are already. One significant point: “Federal Outlays relative to the size of the economy in 2013 (20.8% of GDP) were below where they were in 1980 (21.1% of GDP).” In other words, Reagan was responsible for much of the disaster that has befallen us; Clinton is responsible for another part, by deregulating financial markets in 1999.
Dr. Blackford’s thesis, supported by many, many numbers, is that we must increase taxes in order to balance the budget. There is no way to cut services or reduce spending, by cutting programs or by reducing fraud and waste, or by any other sleight of hand. Any reduction in the budget, by cutting services, will hurt someone who desperately needs help or put someone out of a job. The only mature way to run our government without hurting citizens is to increase taxes, and the only mature way to increase taxes is to do raise taxes on the well-to-do.
I won’t make the effort to justify Dr. Blackford’s conclusions because he does such a good job of laying them out in a straightforward way. Read his website if you have any doubts.
Absurd Products– Example One
There is a product “on the market” so to speak, of which I was fortunate enough to examine a sample, which is known as an “Earthing Device.” The basic product comes in a foil package like that used to dispense freeze-dried food, and is priced on the package at $19.99; the package art is attractive and lists the many benefits that this device can bestow. Inside is an instruction book, a three-way plug with three LED lights on the other end, a six-foot electrical cord insulated in white vinyl, and several pads of adhesive skin electrodes like those used to attach electrical leads when performing an EKG. There is also a five-by-five foot sheet of foil-like material with a snap fixture for the wire lead. The “business end” of the cord ends in a round plug that fits snugly into the third hole in a three-way electrical outlet.
The instruction book explains how to insert the three-pronged plug device and observe which lights are illuminated. If the two yellow lights are lit and the red light is not, then the electrical outlet is properly wired. Otherwise, various combinations of error are noted by the lights that illuminate. The most important point is that the neutral light should not be lit, as this is the one you will want to plug in to. This three-pronged device is in fact identical to a commercially available device that confirms a three-way socket is correctly wired, except that it is a fetching bright white instead of electrical yellow.
The instruction book is mostly filled with testimonials from about a dozen satisfied users who explain the multifarious benefits of the device: relief of pain, fatigue, swellings, general well-being, and so on. The adhesive electrodes are applied to specific spots on the body for localized pain, and the sheet is to be put on one’s bed to sleep on. Both are hooked to the ground pole on the electrical outlet, so the device simply “grounds” whatever site it is applied to.
The notion that this device could provide any benefits of any type, medical or otherwise, is absurd. Nonetheless, it is offered for sale, and someone must be buying it. This product is absurd.
“We Can Listen to the Universe Now” –LIGO Gravitational Wave Discovery (Today’s ‘Galaxy’ Insight)
The frequencies of gravitational waves that LIGO is designed to detect are actually in the human audible range. So when we’re working on LIGO, we often take its output and put it on a speaker and just listen to it. For this binary black hole system, it made a distinctive, rising “whoooop!” sound. It’s not that we just look up and see anymore, like we always have—we actually can listen to the universe now. It’s a whole new sense, and humanity did not have this sense until LIGO was built.”
via “We Can Listen to the Universe Now” –LIGO Gravitational Wave Discovery (Today’s ‘Galaxy’ Insight).
This ties in to my post about the discovery of gravitational waves with LIGO a couple of days ago. The frequency, as shown in a diagram in one of the articles I referred to, goes from roughly 50 to 500 Hz (middle C is 440 Hz.) So the output can indeed be played on a speaker and make an audible “whoop” noise. The article referenced above also mentions that the colliding black holes are about 1.5 billion light years away from us, an enormous distance; one would not want to be close to this event when it occurred, as it released about three times the mass of the Sun in gravitational wave energy alone in a few tenths of a second.
This web site (The “Daily Galaxy”) has much more about LIGO, the wave discovery, and the recent discovery of a black hole with 21 billion times the mass of the sun. This newly discovered black hole is in the center of the galaxy NGC 4889, and, unbelievably, is currently quiescent, that is, not “feeding” on its surrounding galaxy. I highly recommend this web site for astronomy buffs.
Mr. Donald J. Trump, self-proclaimed billionaire and front-runner for the Republican nomination to run for President in November, is an inveterate liar and everyone seems to know that. To his supporters, it doesn’t seem to matter, partly because they don’t believe the sources that call him out on his lies. To his detractors, it doesn’t matter either, because he doesn’t respond to requests for information or clarification and ignores the complaints.
Here is a particularly egregious example of his lying style:
“We should have never gone into Iraq. I’ve said it loud and clear. I was visited by people from the White House asking me to sort of, could I be silenced because I seem to get a disproportionate amount of publicity. I mean, I was very strong, though: ‘You’re going to destabilize the Middle East.’”
[From an interview with Fox News on October 6, 2015]
Both Washington Post’s “Fact Checker“, in a post on October 21, 2015, and “Politifact” published analyses of his statements. Neither was able to locate any of the twenty-five stories he claimed to have documented his early opposition to the war. The only statement they found that could be construed as cautionary was this:
“Well, he has either got to do something or not do something, perhaps, because perhaps shouldn’t be doing it yet and perhaps we should be waiting for the United Nations, you know. He’s under a lot of pressure. I think he’s doing a very good job. But, of course, if you look at the polls, a lot of people are getting a little tired. I think the Iraqi situation is a problem. And I think the economy is a much bigger problem as far as the president is concerned.”
[From an interview with Neil Cavuto on Fox News on January 28, 2003, where Cavuto asked Trump if Bush should concentrate on the economy or Iraq]
The invasion of Iraq began on March 19, 2003. A week later, Trump was quoted as saying, at an Academy Awards after-party (by the Washington Post): “The war’s a mess.” But it wasn’t until August of 2004 that he elaborated on this statement:
“Look at the war in Iraq and the mess that we’re in. I would never have handled it that way. Does anybody really believe that Iraq is going to be a wonderful democracy where people are going to run down to the voting box and gently put in their ballot and the winner is happily going to step up to lead the country? C’mon. Two minutes after we leave, there’s going to be a revolution, and the meanest, toughest, smartest, most vicious guy will take over. And he’ll have weapons of mass destruction, which Saddam didn’t have.
“What was the purpose of this whole thing? Hundreds and hundreds of young people killed. And what about the people coming back with no arms and legs? Not to mention the other side. All those Iraqi kids who’ve been blown to pieces. And it turns out that all of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong. All this for nothing!”
[From an article in Esquire magazine]
In hindsight, he sounds very perceptive, but before the war he had little to say. He now changes the timing of his statements to fit his new narrative, that he was prescient in warning against the invasion. What’s more, he invents a visit from White House staffers where he is asked to “be silenced” about his inconvenient warnings. Why does he invent these lies? To polish his image as a wise man and visionary counselor, in order to convince his supporters that he is the very man to be our next president.
He is free with his lies because he knows the people who support him don’t believe anyone else when it comes to his statements, and the people who care about truth-telling wouldn’t support him anyway. He’s only interested in controlling the people who naturally gravitate to his camp; he has no interest in attracting new supporters, because they might make inconvenient demands on his speech or his policy positions.
There is a strategy at the bottom of Donald J. Trump’s behaviors, and it is not a strategy aimed at winning the US Presidency. He is planning on developing a group of fanatical supporters, who can be counted on to throw their votes in whatever direction he dictates. In this way, he can make a bargain with whoever the eventual Republican nominee will be, trading his endorsement for a wallet-full of advantages like preferred tax treatment and protection from legal harassment. He is treating the American Presidential election in the same way that he sees the Russians treating their electorate; we know that he “admires” Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Trump does not believe that any Republican candidate will have a chance against Hillary Clinton, and he assumes that she will be the eventual Democratic nominee. He doesn’t believe that Bernie Sanders will become Democratic nominee but his plan doesn’t depend on the eventual line-up, it merely depends on the Republican Party’s ability to see their own advantage in a trade-off of his endorsement for certain undisclosed advantages.
Even if he is the front-runner going into the Republican Convention, he will be reluctant to actually compete in the election; he knows he will lose unless there is a third party candidate to split the Democratic vote, and there is no advantage in spending money in a losing campaign. So far, he has managed to avoid spending a significant amount of his own money, relying on the free publicity that he attracts from television. This is a stark contrast from other candidates, who have spent millions or hundreds of millions, much of it from super-PACs. When it comes to the general election, though, there will be less opportunity for free publicity, more spending from the secret money of super-PACs (which he has not yet exploited) and more obligations to spend his campaign’s money and his own money.
Unless he is much more serious than he appears to be about really trying to become President, there is no future in spending any of his own money on the election campaign. If he had been serious about winning, he would have avoided offending women, or at least apologized for his past remarks. If he had any interest in the real election, he wouldn’t have said so many offensive things about Mexicans. The truth is, he doesn’t care, because he has no intention of putting himself up as a candidate in an actual election (as opposed to a primary contest).
On 2015 September 14 at 09:50:45 UTC, the merger of two black holes with masses in the range of 25-50 stellar masses was detected by a pair of advanced gravitational wave receivers, as reported in a letter to the Physical Review Letters of the American Physical Society on February 11, 2016. This was the first confirmed detection of a “gravitational wave” by the new advanced LIGO (laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory) based on the classic Michelson-Morley interferometer first used in an attempt to detect the presence of a universal ether.
This first attempt failed, resulting in the general conclusion that there is no “universal ether” that surrounds all objects in space and thus no preferred direction for orienting us in space. What was worse, there was no carrier on which to base the radiation of light to create “waves” (unlike the waves on the surface of a pond, which are carried by the water itself.) The new detection shows that the original interferometer was not sensitive enough; now that the sensitivity has been increased by a factor of several thousand, the extremely weak and small amplitude signals that accompany gravity waves can be “felt.”
Several of these new interferometers have been built, but so far only two were on line to record the merger of GW150914 last September. They are the culmination of a long series of increasingly sensitive devices, which have finally been built to reach the predicted sensitivity needed for detection of the most massive gravity waves: those produced by the merger of black holes. First, in 1975, the observation of a binary pulsar system, and later, the calculation of its energy loss, allowed the calculation of the amplitude of such waves at galactic distances and the demonstration of the definite existence of gravitational waves. Over a period of 30 years, the development of increasingly sensitive interferometers finally produced a network that could, theoretically, detect the passage of waves if sufficiently large objects producing waves could be found. By 2011, the upper limits for the magnitude of such waves had been established; finally, in 2015, the first definite signals of gravity waves were detected.
The gravitational waves that are associated with the merger of two medium-sized black holes are very small at this distance, although the source intensity is roughly 2 x 10 to the 56th power ergs. In a time of less than 0.2 seconds, a signal increasing in frequency from about 35 Herz to almost 150 Herz (at maximum amplitude) was detected over a period of just eight cycles. It was calculated that this signal resulted from the final collapse of a binary system of two black holes, their merger, and the “ringdown” or reducing intensity signal after they were unified. A bandpass filter was used to confine the signal to these frequencies for convenient analysis. Only two of the interferometers were turned on and making observations at the time, but this was enough to record an identical signal with a 10 microsecond delay corresponding to the different locations of the two detectors: Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana.
Calculations placed the orbital period of the two black holes at 75 cycles per second, with a separation of roughly 350 kilometers apart, just before the final merger. Each of the black holes must have been less than 210 kilometers in diameter. The signal from this black hole merger traveled far enough to produce a redshift of 0.09– not very far away as galaxies go. A hundred years after the existence of gravitational waves was predicted by Einstein and their mathematical reality was confirmed by Schwarzschild (who published a solution for the field equations that described a black hole) their existence has been confirmed to a high degree of certainty by advances in instrumentation and physical technology.
What does this mean for us? It confirms to a high degree of confidence that Einstein’s predictions were correct and the “standard model” of physics is accurate (as far as it goes.) It opens up a new avenue for observing the universe around us. It makes us more comfortable in the certainty that Einstein was right. Other than that, it’s not very exciting. The implications for astrophysics of this observation are discussed in another technical article in Astrophysical Letters. For those of us deterred by astrophysical jargon, there is an article in Science News that clearly summarizes the findings in nontechnical language.
Physics has become fairly dull (at least, to outsiders) because all the observations made to date agree with our theories of what those observations should look like. The exciting part will be when we find Earth-like planets circulating not-so-distant star systems and tantalizing us with the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. Or else, perhaps, some experiment will uncover an inconsistency in the “standard model” and we will have to start all over again.
Someday, we will solve the problem of travel to other star systems. The evolution of the technique for observing gravitational waves from theory to confirmation in just a hundred years makes me confident that we will not have to wait too terribly long for that trip to Alpha Centauri.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 