From CBC News, a flu shot fail:
Flu shot no match for H3N2 strain reported across Canada
H3N2 strain tends to cause more deaths and hospitalizations, especially among the elderly
Flu season is coming in early and strong this winter, with hospitals across Canada getting flooded with infected patients.
Most flu cases are being reported in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, according to Canada’s Public Health Agency, but there is increasing activity in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland and Labrador.
“We’re at or close to peak, certainly in southern Ontario, for influenza activity,” said Dr. Doug Sider, medical director of communicable disease prevention and control at Toronto Public Health.
Reported and lab-confirmed cases of the flu in Toronto have already exceeded the previous 10-year average, according to Toronto Public Health.
A past outbreak traced from Want China Times:
China, US study retraces emergence of deadly H7N9 strain in humans
Chinese and US researchers said Monday they have found how changes in H9N2, a flu virus that has plagued Chinese poultry farms for decades, helped create the novel avian H7N9 influenza that has killed at least 115 people since 2013 and raised a pandemic concern.
The results, published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, underscored the need for continued surveillance of flu viruses circulating on poultry farms and identified changes in the H9N2 virus that could serve as an early warning sign of emerging flu viruses with the potential to trigger a pandemic and global health emergency.
H9N2, which has low pathogenicity for avians, was first identified in chicken farms in the south China’s Guangdong province in 1994. Genetic analysis indicated H7N9’s six internal genes all originated from H9N2. However, the H7N9 virus is more highly pathogenic in humans than H9N2.
Dual animal epidemics in South Korea from Reuters:
S.Korea to disinfect farms as foot-and-mouth, bird flu spread
South Korea will disinfect farms around the country over the new year and limit the transport of animals, stepping up its effort to contain an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that has spread close to the capital as well as bird flu.
The foot-and-mouth among hogs had been limited to the centre of the country until this week but a case has now been confirmed at a farm just 50 km (30 miles) from Seoul in the north of the country.
The outbreak began five months ago, raising fears about food safety. Nearly 23,000 hogs have been destroyed to contain the outbreak, according to a statement from the agriculture ministry on Tuesday.
From EcoWatch, as if we hadn’t suspected:
Eating Fast Food Linked to Lower Test Scores
Now a study reveals that eating too much fast food might make you dumber as well as fatter. The Ohio State University assistant professor of human sciences Kelly Purtell, working with University of Texas associate professor of human ecology Elizabeth Gershoff, has released a study showing that increased frequency of fast food consumption by fifth graders led to lower test scores in reading, math and science in the eighth grade.
“There’s a lot of evidence that fast-food consumption is linked to childhood obesity, but the problems don’t end there,” said Purtell. “Relying too much on fast food could hurt how well children do in the classroom.”
The study of 11, 740 students looked at their test scores in fifth and eighth grade and questionnaires about their food consumption that they filled out in the fifth grade. Consumption ranged from the 29 percent who had no fast food the week prior to filling out the questionnaire to the 10 percent who had it every day and another 10 percent who ate it four-six times a week.
Pollution, there’s an ap for that, via the Los Angeles Times:
In China, app aims to shame polluters by showing who is fouling air
Sitting at a desk in his small office here, Ma Jun, one of China’s best-known environmental advocates, shows off his latest tool in the fight against the nation’s crippling air pollution: a computer app.
Displayed on a tablet, the app shows a map of northeastern China covered with large orange circles, each representing one of the country’s major polluters, reporting its emissions in real time.
The data come from automated monitoring equipment the government has installed at about 10,000 plants around the country. Ma and his colleagues at the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Beijing-based environmental group that has won international awards for its work, have now made that information available to millions of Chinese on their own computers and ubiquitous mobile devices.
Banishing the blahs with the Independent:
Scientists ‘must be emotionally charged’ about climate change to highlight its dangers, claims expert
Climate scientists must inject more emotion and personal experience into their communications with the public to underline the dangers of global warming, according to a leading professor.
Chris Rapley, a professor of climate science at University College London, is urging colleagues to ditch “academic, fact-based approaches” to the subject in favour of “charged” narratives.
He recently performed 2071, a one-man show giving a personalised account of what climate change means for him, at the Royal Court theatre in London and the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg.
Professor Rapley was prompted to do his show amid a growing realisation that scientists were not communicating the dangers of climate change and the importance of tackling it as well as they could.
From the Washington Post, massively passing gas:
Delaware-size gas plume over West illustrates the cost of leaking methane
The methane that leaks from 40,000 gas wells near this desert trading post may be colorless and odorless, but it’s not invisible. It can be seen from space.
Satellites that sweep over energy-rich northern New Mexico can spot the gas as it escapes from drilling rigs, compressors and miles of pipeline snaking across the badlands. In the air it forms a giant plume: a permanent, Delaware-sized methane cloud, so vast that scientists questioned their own data when they first studied it three years ago. “We couldn’t be sure that the signal was real,” said NASA researcher Christian Frankenberg.
The country’s biggest methane “hot spot,” verified by NASA and University of Michigan scientists in October, is only the most dramatic example of what scientists describe as a $2 billion leak problem: the loss of methane from energy production sites across the country. When oil, gas or coal are taken from the ground, a little methane — the main ingredient in natural gas — often escapes along with it, drifting into the atmosphere, where it contributes to the warming of the Earth.
Methane accounts for about 9 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and the biggest single source of it — nearly 30 percent — is the oil and gas industry, government figures show. All told, oil and gas producers lose 8 million metric tons of methane a year, enough to provide power to every household in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia.
The accompanying graphic:
Moving to save a magnificent creature, via CBC News:
Monarch butterfly may need U.S. endangered species protection
Wildlife agency will conduct year-long status review
Monarch butterflies may warrant U.S. Endangered Species Act protection because of farm-related habitat loss blamed for sharp declines in cross-country migrations of the orange-and-black insects, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said on Monday.
Monarch populations are estimated to have fallen by as much as 90 per cent during the past two decades because of destruction of milkweed plants they depend on to lay their eggs and nourish hatching larvae, according to the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
The loss of the plant is tied to factors such as increased cultivation of crops genetically engineered to withstand herbicides that kill native vegetation, including milkweed, the conservation group says.
Monarchs, unique among butterflies for the regularity and breadth of their annual migration, are also threatened by widespread pesticide use and logging of mountain forests in central Mexico and coastal California where some of them winter, said biologist Karen Oberhauser at the University of Minnesota.
On to Fukushimapocalypse Now!, with a sales effort from the Japan Times:
Foreign Ministry to help local governments export food in face of radiation fears
The Foreign Ministry will help local governments tear down overseas barriers on food imports maintained because of worries over radiation, sources said.
Some states still ban some imports of agricultural, forestry and fishery products because of the fear of contamination from Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant. As a result, the ministry will cooperate with local governments in organizing events overseas to assure regulators and consumers that products are safe.
In 2015, the ministry plans to hold two to three such events, the sources said Sunday.
And a trans-Pacific visitation from the Christian Science Monitor:
Fukushima radiation: US West Coast will likely see peak by end of 2015
At its peak, levels of radioactivity from cesium-137 will still fall far below levels that the US and Canadian governments deem unsafe for drinking water, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists keeping tabs on the eastward voyage of radioactive byproducts from the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power-station disaster in Japan suggest that radioactivity from the byproducts should peak off the US and Canadian coasts by the end of next year. After that, they are expected to begin a gradual decline to background levels.
The chief concern: Radioactivity from cesium-137, the longest-lived of two forms of cesium released in the disaster, which ocean surface currents have carried east. At its peak, levels of radioactivity from cesium-137 will still fall far below levels that the US and Canadian governments deem unsafe for drinking water, according to data in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The nuclear power station lost emergency power when it was hit by a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9 earthquake offshore on March 11, 2011. As a result, the plant couldn’t keep reactors cool or spent-fuel pools filled. Three of four reactors partially melted, while hydrogen explosions wracked buildings containing the reactors. The event released significant amounts of radiation, including leaks of radioactive water to the ocean.
And a Russian report of a Ukrainian leak from RT:
Radioactive leak at major Ukrainian nuclear plant – report
A radioactive leak has been detected at Ukraine’s Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, the largest in Europe, a media report says, citing the country’s emergency services. Ukrainian officials have denied the report.
LifeNews published what it claims is a leaked report by the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, which denies an earlier assessment by the plant’s authorities that the radiation at the facility is equal to the natural background following an incident on Sunday.
On Sunday, one reactor at the plant was automatically shut down after a glitch, becoming the second halt in operations in recent weeks. The reactor was running at 40 percent of nominal power, the plant’s official website said, adding that radiation at the facility being at the level of 8-12 microroentgens an hour.
