And more. . .
We begin with a tragedy within a continuing tragedy via the Los Angeles Times:
Four health workers slain in attack on Pakistan vaccination team
Gunmen shot and killed four health workers carrying out a polio vaccination drive Wednesday in the capital of Pakistan’s restive Baluchistan province, police officials said.
The deadly shooting was the latest to target polio workers — whom Islamist militants accuse of conducting espionage in the guise of vaccination campaigns — in Pakistan, one of three countries where the disease has not been eradicated.
Police said that two armed men on a motorcycle opened fire on the workers as they waited for a security escort in the southwestern city of Quetta. Three women and one man were killed while three others were wounded, authorities said.
More from Deutsche Welle:
Pakistani polio workers demand safeguards
Polio workers in Pakistan have demanded greater security before returning to work after gunmen murdered four vaccination team members. Pakistan is one of three countries where polio remains endemic.
The president of the Pakistani state’s polio workers union, Haleem Shah, said thousands of his colleagues were refusing to finish the campaign to vaccinate 300,000 children in eight districts, including Quetta.
“We are in contact with the government and we have demanded that we won’t participate in the campaign until we are provided with security,” Shah told the news agency AFP.
“The government provides security for one day and if nothing bad happens then they take the security back,” he added.
Since December 2012, more than 30 polio vaccinators have been killed in Pakistan, along with nearly 30 police and security personnel guarding them.
And a small miracle within a larger catastrophe, via the Washington Post:
Guinea, hit by Ebola, reports only 1 cholera case
The health workers rode on canoes and rickety boats to deliver cholera vaccines to remote islands in Guinea. Months later, the country has recorded only one confirmed cholera case this year, down from thousands.
The rare success, overshadowed by the Ebola outbreak that has ravaged Guinea and two other West African countries, is being cautiously attributed to the vaccinations and to hand-washing in the campaign against Ebola.
Helen Matzger of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said Guinea’s experience is encouraging other countries to accept the cholera vaccine and has led the GAVI Alliance — which works to deliver vaccines to the world’s poor — to invest in a global stockpile and the U.N. World Health Organization to increase that stockpile to about 2 million doses.
Another African outbreak from the Associated Press:
Benin says Lassa fever kills 9, no Ebola found
Nine people have died in Benin from Lassa fever, a viral disease common in West Africa with symptoms similar to Ebola, the country’s health minister said.
An outbreak of Ebola is pummeling the three West African countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, and some cases have turned up elsewhere. But so far no Ebola cases have been confirmed in Benin, Health Minister Dorothee Kinde Gazard told reporters late Tuesday.
Authorities will double-check those results with more tests, said Youssouf Gamatie, the representative for the World Health Organization in the country.
AllAfrica covers another continuing African public health woe:
Nigeria: WHO Expresses Concern Over Rising TB Cases in Nigeria
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has expressed concern over the rising cases of Tuberculosis (TB) in Nigeria, which has risen to three times what was initially estimated.
Out of the estimated 3,700 TB cases per year in Nigeria, only about 500 have been placed on treatment
The WHO Country Representative to Nigeria, Rui Gama Vaz, disclosed this at the formal launch of the National Strategic Plan for TB Control (2015-2020) and Dissemination of the First National TB Prevalence Survey Report in Abuja.
An outbreak in the Mideast from the Mainichi:
Saudi Arabia: Deaths from MERS virus reach 348
Saudi Arabia’s Health Ministry says that a total of 348 people have died in the kingdom after contracting Middle East Respiratory Syndrome or MERS.
The ministry’s latest figures, released late Tuesday, include two recent deaths recorded in the capital Riyadh. It brings to 810 the number of confirmed cases in Saudi Arabia since the virus was first identified in 2012.
The virus has since spread to other parts of the world, though it has mostly remained centered in Saudi Arabia. MERS belongs to a family of viruses known as coronaviruses that include both the common cold and SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome.
CBC News covers another epidemic:
Half-million cancers worldwide linked to obesity
Majority of cases occur in North America and Europe, according to study
Excess body weight caused about 481,000 new cancer cases in 2012, according to a new study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization.
That works out to about 3.6 per cent of all cancers worldwide, the majority of which occur in North America and Europe, according to the study published in the medical journal Lancet Oncology on Wednesday.
The study estimates that a quarter of all obesity-related cancers in 2012 are directly linked to rising average body mass index (BMI), especially in developed parts of the world where BMI has been increasing since the 1980s.
While Science looks for the predictive:
Better wildlife monitoring could prevent human disease outbreaks
In the new study, a team lead by Isabelle-Anne Bisson, a conservation biologist with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Washington D.C., set out to assess whether information on wildlife health could be used to predict the emergence of disease in humans. The team looked at historical records of nearly 150 pathogens known to jump from wildlife to humans. They searched through 60 years of scientific and newspaper reports to determine two things: first, whether the pathogens cause visible disease symptoms or death in wildlife, and second, whether human outbreaks were preceded or accompanied by evidence of the disease in animals.
“These pathogens are invisible to the human eye,” Bisson says. “You can’t see them moving through a landscape, but you can certainly detect them through sick and dead animals.”
The team found that out of the nearly 150 pathogens studied, 75 caused visible symptoms in animals, such as seizures, lethargy, unprovoked aggression, or death, meaning signs of the disease could be easily detected. In reality, however, only 13 of the disease outbreaks in humans were preceded by reports in wildlife. This suggests that early warning signs for 64 of the zoonotic pathogens—45% of the total—may have been missed, the team reports online this month in EcoHealth.
The Associated Press covers prosecution on behalf of a corporation:
Chinese woman denied own trial in seed-theft case
A woman accused of conspiring to steal trade secrets from U.S. seed companies and send them to China, where she’s married to the CEO of a large biotechnology firm, will be tried with another suspect despite her claims that she left the firm long before most of the alleged crimes, a federal judge ruled.
Mo Yun, 42, and her brother are among seven people facing charges for allegedly plotting to steal patented seeds from corn fields in Iowa and Illinois, and send them to China to be reproduced. Prosecutors say more than $500 million worth of intellectual property was stolen from Pioneer Hi-Bred, Monsanto, and LG Seeds.
Mo and her brother were arrested this year in the U.S and are scheduled to be tried together in Iowa. The other five suspects are believed to be in China, which has no extradition agreements with the U.S.
Her attorneys recently argued that most of the evidence alleges crimes committed after she left the company in 2008, including allegations of digging in cornfields to find seeds and shipping them out of the country in 2011 and 2012. Trying them together would allow jurors to hear evidence unrelated to Mo and could sway jurors, defense attorney Terry Bird argued.
From Grist, another GMO story:
In Oregon, GMO labeling lost by 800 votes. Now it’s getting a recount
On Nov. 6, Oregon’s initiative to label genetically engineered foods ended up only a few thousand votes away from success. Now it is down by just 812 votes — which means there will be an automatic recount.
What happened? Labeling advocates have scrambled to fix some of the 13,000 contested ballots — the ones voters forgot to sign, for instance. Oregon gives voters the chance to correct these mistakes.
We’ll let you know when we find out what happens! In the meantime: Just 800 votes out of 1.5 million — that’s a butterfly fart away from winning. What if Jurassic World — which features genetically modified dinosaurs this time around — had come out this year?
Climatic bad bee news from the Guardian:
Bee parasite will flourish under global warming, study warns
Gut parasite will increase in prevalence across northern Europe as temperatures rises, leading to honey bee losses
An exotic parasite which targets the insects is set to flourish in northern Europe if the Earth continues to warm, scientists at Queen’s University, Belfast found.
The study assessed the future threat posed by the gut parasite Nosema ceranae, which originates in Asia but can now be found worldwide.
New evidence of the parasite’s superior competitive ability and the link between its population size and climate change has been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Co-author of the study and adjunct reader at Queen’s School of Biological Sciences, Professor Robert Paxton said: “This emerging parasite is more susceptible to cold than its original close relative, possibly reflecting its presumed origin in east Asia.
“In the face of rising global temperatures, our findings suggest that it will increase in prevalence and potentially lead to increased honey bee colony losses in Britain.”
EcoWatch covers the incipient frack:
Maryland Governor O’Malley Is Ready to Allow Fracking in His State
Outgoing Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley has frequently been mentioned as a top-of-the-list contender for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, should Hillary Clinton’s bid fail to materialize. But he just made himself more controversial within the party—and raised the ire of environmentalists—with his announcement that he is ready to allow fracking in the state, where it has so far been banned.
Natural gas companies have been casting a longing eye at Maryland since the fracking boom started. The state’s western panhandle sits on the natural gas-rich Marcellus shale formation, which has proved such a money-maker in Pennsylvania just to its north.
O’Malley said that energy companies that want to frack in the state will have to abide by restrictive environmental and public health regulations, including limits on drilling locations and oversight of risks to air pollution and water contamination. He said he will unveil the final regulations in mid-December before leaving office to be succeeded by Republican Larry Hogan in January. Hogan has made it clear he’s chomping at the bit to open the state to fracking, calling it an “economic gold mine,” and saying during the campaign “States throughout the country have been developing their natural gas resources safely and efficiently for decades. I am concerned that there has been a knee-jerk reaction against any new energy production.”
While MercoPress gets down to the nitty gritty:
Follow the sand to the real fracking boom
When it takes up to four million pounds of sand to frack a single well, it’s no wonder that demand is outpacing supply and frack sand producers are becoming the biggest behind-the-scenes beneficiaries of the American oil and gas boom.
Demand is exploding for “frac-sand”–a durable, high-purity quartz sand used to help produce petroleum fluids and prop up man-made fractures in shale rock formations through which oil and gas flows—turning this segment into the top driver of value in the shale revolution.
“One of the major players in Eagle Ford is saying they’re short 6 million tons of 100 mesh alone in 2014 and they don’t know where to get it. And that’s just one player,” Rasool Mohammad, President and CEO of Select Sands Corporation told Oilprice.com.
Frack sand exponentially increases the return on investment for a well, and oil and gas companies are expected to use some 95 billion pounds of frack sand this year, up nearly 30% from 2013 and up 50% from forecasts made just last year.
Pushing demand up is the trend for wider, shorter fracs, which require twice as much sand. The practice of down-spacing —or decreasing the space between wells—means a dramatic increase in the amount of frac sand used. The industry has gone from drilling four wells per square mile to up to 16 using shorter, wider fracs. In the process, they have found that the more tightly spaced wells do not reduce production from surrounding wells.
After the jump, crude oil train safety anxieties, Japan vows to continue its war on whales and call critics bigots, hue and cry kills an Idaho wolf hunt, Kenya women victimized by water mafias, profusely polluting rickshaws in Uttar Pradesh, an Amazonian deforestation rate decline, a Chinese dam stirs Indian angst, on to Fukushimapocalypse Now! and a new nuclear waste incinerator, corporations socialize decommissioning debt, geriatric reactor inspections, and another reactor restart mooted, plus Swiss who eat their cats for Christmas. . .
Tracking anxiety with ProPublica:
Gov’t Data Sharpens Focus on Crude-Oil Train Routes
A ProPublica analysis of federal government data adds new details to what’s known about the routes taken by trains carrying crude oil. Local governments are often unaware of the potential dangers they face
The oil boom underway in North Dakota has delivered jobs to local economies and helped bring the United States to the brink of being a net energy exporter for the first time in generations.
But moving that oil to the few refineries with the capacity to process it is presenting a new danger to towns and cities nationwide — a danger many appear only dimly aware of and are ill-equipped to handle.
Much of North Dakota’s oil is being transported by rail, rather than through pipelines, which are the safest way to move crude. Tank carloads of crude are up 50 percent this year from last. Using rail networks has saved the oil and gas industry the time and capital it takes to build new pipelines, but the trade-off is greater risk: Researchers estimates that trains are three and a half times as likely as pipelines to suffer safety lapses.
Japan vows to continue its war on whales, from the Washington Post:
Japan vows to resume Antarctic whale hunt for ‘science’ next year
Critics of whaling needed to drop their “zero tolerance” stance and recognize that different countries have “different codes,” said Joji Morishita, Japan’s commissioner to the International Whaling Commission.
Take people in India who don’t eat beef, Morishita told reporters in Tokyo.
“What if they start promoting their habit on the rest of the world, and are promoting an anti-McDonald’s, anti-beef steak movement throughout the world with economic sanctions,” he said. “People can see the stupidity of this if you talk about beef, but what’s the difference between a cow and whales?”
In its ruling in March on a complaint made by Australia and supported by New Zealand, the International Court of Justice said that Japan’s failure to publish results from its supposed research program showed that it was really just commercial whaling in disguise. It ordered Japan to stop its hunt.
More from the Guardian:
Japan likens anti-whaling campaign to attempt to ban kimono
Tokyo’s chief negotiator at the International Whaling Commission attacks ‘eco-imperialist’ countries who want a ‘stupid’ ban on hunting
Joji Morishita, the head of Tokyo’s delegation to the International Whaling Commission, said Japan would defy “eco-imperialist” anti-whaling countries – led by Australia and New Zealand – and resume the slaughter of whales in the Southern Ocean in late 2015.
Morishita said international objections to whaling, partly on the grounds that the hunts are unprofitable and bankrolled by Japanese taxpayers – could be compared to restrictions on the wearing of kimono.
“The average Japanese woman wears kimono perhaps two or three times in her lifetime,” he said. “Those ceremonial kimono cost millions of yen, so some might argue that they are a waste of money. But what if another country then said that only a small number of women could wear kimono?”
Hue and cry kills an Idaho wolf hunt, from the Guardian:
Idaho gray wolf ‘killing derby’ canceled after environmental groups sue
Bureau of Land Management was sued by groups claiming the January hunt on public lands was ‘not in the public interest’
The US Bureau of Land Management has pulled the permit a hunting derby that targeted the Rocky Mountain gray wolf, among several other animals, after environmental groups sued the federal agency.
“BLM’s first-ever approval of a wolf-killing derby on public lands undermines wolf recovery in the Northern Rockies and was not in the public interest,” said Laird Lucas, director of litigation at Advocates for the West, one of the environmental groups suing.
Up to 500 hunters could have participated in the hunting derby, scheduled to take place in January on three million acres of federally owned wilderness. Hunters could have taken a nearly unlimited number of wolves, skunks, weasels, starlings, raccoons, coyotes and jackrabbits. The derby would have taken place over three days annually, for the next five years.
Kenyan water woes from the Thomson Reuters Foundation:
Kenyan women pay the price for slum water “mafias”
Rising before dawn, the women emerged from their ramshackle shacks and squelched through the mud to stand in line for water in Kibera, Nairobi’s biggest slum.
Seven hours later, bullet-grey skies drizzled on and off, but the women stuck by their yellow jerrycans in the glutinous mud, awaiting their turn at the precious water tap.
“Water is life,” said Judith Makhoha, a mother of three, who was buying 200 litres of water to do her laundry. “You can’t live without water.”
Profusely polluting rickshaws in Uttar Pradesh, via the Associated Press:
Rickshaw research reveals extreme Delhi pollution
The three-wheeled rickshaw lurched through New Delhi’s commuter-clogged streets with an American scientist and several air pollution monitors in the back seat. Car horns blared. A scrappy scooter buzzed by belching black smoke from its tailpipe. One of the monitors spiked.
Joshua Apte has alarming findings for anyone who spends time on or near the roads in this city of 25 million. The numbers are far worse than the ones that have already led the World Health Organization to rank New Delhi as the world’s most polluted city.
Average pollution levels, depending on the pollutant, were up to eight times higher on the road than urban background readings, according to research by Apte and his partners at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi.
“And you have to keep in mind that the concentrations at urban background sites, where these official monitors are, are already very high,” he said. The measures “are actually some of the highest levels in air pollution made inside vehicles anywhere in the world.”
From the Washington Post, an Amazonian deforestation rate decline:
Deforestation drops in Brazil’s Amazon
Deforestation in the Amazon rain forest has dropped 18 percent over the past 12 months, falling to the second-lowest level in a quarter century, Brazil’s environment minister said Wednesday.
Izabella Teixeira told participants in a news conference that 4,848 square kilometers (1,870 square miles) of rain forest were destroyed between August 2013 and July 2014. That’s a bit larger than the state of Rhode Island.
The figures were down from 5,891 square kilometers (2,275 square miles) razed during the same period a year earlier, in the wake of the adoption of a controversial bill revising the Forest Code. The measure, which passed in 2012 after more than a decade-long effort by Brazil’s powerful agricultural lobby, mostly eased restrictions for landowners with smaller properties, allowing them to clear land closer to riverbanks.
A Chinese dam stirs Indian angst, via Want China Times:
India’s fears floods and landslides from Tibet dam
New Delhi has expressed its concern over the completion of China’s Zangmu Dam project, a hydroelectric power station on the Brahmaputra river in Tibet, because it allows Beijing to control the river’s flow into Arunachal Pradesh and other parts of the northeastern India, reports the Times of India.
In addition to India, Bangladesh also fears that the dam will cause flash floods and landslides threatening millions of people downstream since the Brahmaputra is one of the strongest Himalayan rivers. The power plant is restricted to dams made off the main body of water that generate electricity. From the perspective of the Chinese government, it poses very little danger.
China put the largest of the hydropower stations into operation on Nov. 23. The mechanism will be good for “harnessing the rich water resources of the river to empower the development of the electricity-strapped region.” A total of US$1.5 billion was spent to complete the six sections of the dam. The first section began its service over 3,300 meters above sea level and construction of other five sections is estimated to be completed next year.
On to Fukushimapocalypse Now!, starting with a new nuclear waste incinerator from NHK WORLD:
Radioactive waste incinerator built in Fukushima
A facility to incinerate radioactive debris and other waste is ready to open in a village near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
The Environment Ministry had been building the temporary incineration facility in the village of Kawauchi since May.
Officials and village delegates marked the completion of the work in a ceremony on Wednesday.
The facility is designed to burn 7 tons of waste per day while removing radioactive cesium.
Socializing corporate costs with the Yomiuri Shimbun:
After liberalization, consumers still to pay for N-plant decommissioning
The government has begun to consider continued inclusion of costs for the decommissioning of aging nuclear reactors in electricity charges, even after the full liberalization of the electricity retail market scheduled in April 2016.
By establishing a system to collect the cost from electricity users, the government aims to ensure some means to secure the necessary funds, which are said to vary between about ¥35 billion and ¥60 billion for each small or medium-sized reactor.
The system, in principle, may also target those who buy electricity from businesses newly entering the market.
The outline of this policy will be explained at an expert panel of the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry to be held at the end of this fiscal year.
Geriatric reactor inspections, via NHK WORLD:
Utility to conduct special inspections on reactors
Kansai Electric Power Company says it will carry out special inspections aimed at restarting 2 aging nuclear reactors.
Last year, the Japanese government limited the operational lifespan of nuclear reactors to 40 years in principle.
Operators must decide whether to decommission their aging reactors or apply for permission to extend their lifespans. The special inspections required include a detailed assessment of the extent of reactor deterioration.
Preparing to fire up, with Jiji Press:
Japan Eyes Restart of Next-Generation N-Reactor
The Japan Atomic Energy Agency on Wednesday applied for a Nuclear Regulation Authority examination to decide whether a next-generation experimental nuclear reactor should be put back into operation.
The High Temperature Engineering Test Reactor in the town of Oarai, Ibaraki Prefecture, eastern Japan, has an output capacity of 30,000 kilowatts, according to the government-backed agency.
No active fault runs under the ground where the facility is located, the agency said, adding that none of the important equipment of the reactor would sustain major damage even if the reactor were hit by a big earthquake that causes ground motion of up to 700 gals.
Finally, from RT, we will avoid the obvious pun:
Eating cat for Christmas: Activists call on Swiss parliament to outlaw pet consumption
Animal rights activists have drawn up a petition to ban the ‘barbaric’ practice of eating pets in Switzerland, where cat meat often appears on traditional Christmas menus in rural areas.
The animal protection group, SOS Chats Noraingue, has handed over a petition with 16,000 signatures, including such notable animal rights defenders as Brigitte Bardot, to the Swiss parliament on Tuesday.
Dog meat is often used to make sausage, while cats are prepared around the holiday season in a similar style to rabbit – in a white wine and garlic sauce. A type of mostbröckli made from marinated cat or dog is another local favorite.
