We begin with the latest measles numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reports that:
From January 1 to February 6, 2015, 121 people from 17 states and Washington DC were reported to have measles [AZ (7), CA (88), CO (1), DC (1), DE (1), IL (3), MI (1), MN (1), NE (2), NJ (1), NY (2), NV (2), OR (1), PA (1), SD (2) TX (1), UT (2), WA (4)]*. Most of these cases [103 cases (85%)] are part of a large, ongoing multi-state outbreak linked to an amusement park in California.
The United States experienced a record number of measles cases during 2014, with 644 cases from 27 states reported to CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD). This is the greatest number of cases since measles elimination was documented in the U.S. in 2000.
The accompanying chart:
And here’s their map of the cases definitively linked to the Disneyland epicenter:
From the Atlantic Monthly, a parallel European outbreak:
Why Is Germany So Calm About Its Measles Outbreak?
A bigger flare-up of the contagious disease has a different cause—and has prompted a much more placid reaction.
While the Robert Koch Institute says Germany has notched nearly 400 measles cases since October, the outbreak has been linked in part to “asylum seekers from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia” rather than “reckless” parents on the West Coast.
Perhaps more importantly, the response to the outbreak in Germany has been considerably more muted. As Rick Noack pointed out, the measles surge “has neither caused a debate about the alleged risks of vaccines nor has the outbreak been featured on front pages.”
There appear to be a number of reasons for the relative calm. The first is that Germany has had its recent share of serious outbreaks, all of which were eventually brought to heel. Following a 2001 outbreak, in which over 6,000 cases were reported in Germany, the World Health Organization later set a goal to eradicate the disease by 2010 as cases dwindled to the hundreds. (Germany’s ongoing flare-up frustrates its plan of ending measles cases within the country by the end of 2015.)
Another reason is that Germany has a pretty steady vaccination rate of 95 percent (the American rate is about 91 percent). Moreover, half of the cases reported in Germany during the past few months are adults who may have fallen into an immunization gap that started in the 1970s. In the place of parents, as Deutsche Welle observes, some blame has fallen on visitors and migrants, who have increasingly become the target of campaigns by anti-immigration groups within the country.
From the Thomson Reuters Foundation, medical exclusion:
HIV-positive migrants denied care at Thai public hospitals
Zaw, an illegal Burmese migrant dying of AIDS-related illnesses, spent a weekend hunched over in waiting rooms at three Thai hospitals near Bangkok – each denying him care as he gasped for breath, his lungs full of fluid.
At a fourth hospital that admitted him, a doctor drove a large-gauge needle between his ribs, draining litres of fluid, but by then the 34-year-old was gravely ill.
Zaw died 40 days later – a death the Bangkok-based HIV Foundation that was helping him says could have been prevented with timely care.
Hospitals across the country are denying insurance and care to migrant labourers like Zaw despite an insurance scheme launched over a year ago, officials and rights advocates say.
And from StarAfrica, countermeasures for an African outbreak honored:
The Gambia bags malaria control award
The Gambia government has been conferred with the 2015 African Leaders Malaria Alliance Award (ALMA), for its excellence effort in the implementation of vector control in the country, thereby recording 95 per cent coverage of vector control, long lasting insecticide nets and residual-spray to effectively reduce the continent’s deadliest disease in the country.
According to a statement from the presidency in Banjul, which was broadcast over the national television channel (GRTS) and published by local newspapers on Monday, the award was handed to the Vice President Isatou Njie-Saidy, on behalf of the Gambian leader Yaya Jammeh, at the recently concluded 24th Ordinary Session of the African Union held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The statement revealed that President Jammeh’s sponsored in-door residual-spraying component of the vector control programme in the country, coupled with the monthly environmental cleansing exercise locally known as “set settal”, were the major contributing factors of the significant decline in malaria cases, by “38 per cent within a 5-year period, from a total of 508,846 episodes of clinical malaria reported in the year 2008 to 273,507 in 2013.”
Climate change concerns from the New York Times:
Climate Change Is of Growing Personal Concern to U.S. Hispanics, Poll Finds
Among Hispanic respondents to the poll, 54 percent rated global warming as extremely or very important to them personally, compared with 37 percent of whites. Sixty-seven percent of Hispanics said they would be hurt personally to some degree if nothing was done to reduce global warming, compared with half of whites.
And 63 percent of Hispanics said the federal government should act broadly to address global warming, compared with 49 percent of whites.
To be sure, more Hispanics than whites identify as Democrats, and Democrats are more likely than Republicans and independents to say that the government should fight climate change. In the poll, 48 percent of Hispanics identified as Democrats, 31 percent as independents and 15 percent as Republicans. Among whites, 23 percent identified as Democrats, 41 percent as independents and 27 percent as Republicans.
Over all, the findings of the poll run contrary to a longstanding view in politics that the environment is largely a concern of affluent, white liberals. Experts say that climate change is growing rapidly as a concern for Hispanics, who are likely to be more physically and economically vulnerable to the effects of global warming, such as more extreme droughts and floods, lower crop yields, and hotter temperatures.
A climate change warning from the Express Tribune:
Climate change: Karachi could submerge by 2060, Senate panel told
A top oceanographer issued an eerie warning on Monday about the possible submerging of Karachi and other coastal districts into the sea by 2060, counting the potential damage that environmental changes could inflict on the country.
“Some parts of Karachi’s Malir area have already gone under water while Sindh’s Thatta and Badin districts will also sink into the water by 2050,” Dr Asif Inam, director general of the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), told a parliamentary panel.
Dr Inam was briefing the Senate Standing Committee on Science and Technology, headed by Professor Sajjid Mir. The meeting was called to discuss the escalating threat of sea intrusion along the coasts of Balochistan and Sindh, as well as the post and pre-partition status of islands.
From Science, evidence from an ice core from Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap:
Ice core suggests humans damaged atmosphere long before the industrial revolution
For as long as people have been releasing pollution into the atmosphere, ice in Earth’s glaciers has been trapping it. The Quelccaya ice core offers a particularly vivid record of atmospheres past, thanks to the tropics’ annual pattern of wet and dry seasons. The wet season brings snow to Quelccaya, and the dry season brings dust. Once everything gets packed down into the glacier, the alternating seasons show up as stripes of “clean and dusty ice,” explains Paolo Gabrielli, an earth scientist at Ohio State University, Columbus. Anything that’s in the air at the time the snow or dust lands will eventually be trapped inside the glacier.
People were mining and smelting copper in South America as early as 1400 B.C.E., and the Incas introduced the smelting of silver ore (which often contains lead) in the 15th century C.E., explains François De Vleeschouwer, an environmental geochemist at EcoLab in Toulouse, France, who was not involved in the study. Smelting these metals in open furnaces released particles into the atmosphere, where they became part of the precipitation and dust that eventually landed, among other places, on the Quelccaya Ice Cap. Gabrielli’s team found traces of metals, including copper and lead, dating to the pre-Columbian period in the Quelccaya ice core, supporting similar evidence of Incan and pre-Incan emissions from De Vleeschouwer’s study of peat records in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. The new paper is the first to quantify precolonial air pollution in South America, showing that the emissions levels “are [high] enough to consider the Incas polluters,” De Vleeschouwer says.
But it wasn’t until the Spanish colonized South America in the 16th century that air pollution really took off, Gabrielli says. The main culprit was probably the gigantic silver mine in Potosí, Bolivia, which exploited the planet’s largest deposit of the precious metal throughout the colonial period—and released unprecedented levels of lead and other metals into the South American atmosphere. Between 1450 C.E. and 1900 C.E., lead levels in the Quelccaya ice core nearly doubled, and the amount of the metal antimony in the ice increased 3.5 times, Gabrielli and his colleagues report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Belated remediation, via the Associated Press:
California pledges changes in protecting underground water
California is proposing sweeping changes in the way it protects underground drinking-water supplies from oil-and-gas operations.
State regulators said Monday that they have notified the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of their plan for bringing the state back into compliance with federal safe-drinking water laws. That’s after a state review found more than 2,500 times that the state had authorized oil field injections into protected water aquifers.
An Associated Press analysis found that nearly half of those injection wells were approved or began injections in the last four years.
Chief state oil and gas regulator Steve Bohlen says California will be making what he calls “long overdue” changes to ensure oil-and-gas operations aren’t contaminating potential groundwater supplies. A letter sent to the EPA on Friday details the state’s plans for dealing with the mistaken permits and seeking new regulatory changes.
Water preservation, via the Baltimore Sun:
Bill aims to end use of plastic “microbeads” in personal care products
Ever notice blue specks on your toothbrush after brushing your teeth? Some brands of toothpaste contain tiny plastic “microbeads” – as many as 300,000 in a single tube – to give the dental product color. Microbeads also are widely used in face and body washes, among other cosmetic products, to gently exfoliate dead skin.
Now, amid evidence they’re showing up in Maryland rivers and the Chesapeake Bay and concerns they could be harmful to fish as well as human health, a bill has been introduced in Annapolis to phase synthetic plastic microbeads out of personal care products and over-the-counter drugs sold in Maryland.
“The unfortunate part of them is that they enter the water ways – they’re not filtered by [wastewater] filtering systems – and then they enter the bottom of the food chain,” said Del. Dan K. Morhaim, a Baltimore County Democrat who’s chief sponsor of the measure.
After the jump, Polish farmers protest against GMOs and for land rights, resolving a clash between wind energy and an ancient heritage, the harms of public land privatization demonstrated, a Chinese South China Sea gas bonanza, on to Fukushimapocalypse Now!, first with a waste storage decision, another containment barrier delay, the missing fuel hunt commences, estimates of radiation release upped again, and China funds six Pakistani reactor plants. . .
The Ecologist covers a Polish protest:
Polish farmers block motorways for land rights, no GMOs
Thousands of small farmers in Poland are blockading motorways and holding demonstrations to demand land rights, a ban on GMOs and an end to oppressive health and safety regulations – and they are refusing to call off the protests until their demands are met.
Poland’s biggest ever farmers’ protest is now entering its second week after closing down key motorways and main ‘A’ roads.
Rallies and blockades have so far taken place in over 50 locations across the country involving thousands of small and family farmers.
Over 150 tractors have been blockading the A2 motorway into Warsaw since the 3rd February and hundreds more have closed roads and are picketing governmental offices in other regions.
From the Associated Press, resolving a clash of interests:
Researchers help guard sunken tribe artifacts from turbines
University of Rhode Island researchers are working with Native Americans to ensure that energy companies hoping to erect massive wind turbines off New England don’t inadvertently disturb the tribes’ ceremonial sites and burial grounds, now submerged under hundreds of feet of water.
Providence-based Deepwater Wind is planning what could be the nation’s first offshore wind farm, located off the coast of Block Island. But federal regulators and Native Americans worry that wind turbines could inadvertently be parked on top of the sunken lands where Native Americans lived thousands of years ago.
Narragansett Indian Tribe oral history holds that they lived on land that is now off Rhode Island’s shore more than 15,000 years ago until their villages were inundated by water and they had to evacuate. Sea level was about 400 feet lower globally during the last Ice Age and what is now covered by water was once dry land.
With the help of the tribe, researchers are trying to figure out the best way of searching the ocean floor to identify ancient archaeological sites so they aren’t disturbed.
From Newswise, the harms of public land privatization demonstrated:
University of Utah Researchers: Federal Lands Takeover Would Harm the Public
The transfer of 31 million acres of land managed by the federal government to Utah would hinder public land management reforms and harm the state, according to a newly released analysis by researchers at the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and Environment at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law.
The analysis offers a stark look at potential ramifications of the land transfer, which was ordered when H.B. 148 (also known as Utah’s Transfer of Public Lands Act) passed into law in 2012. The law ordered the federal government to transfer to the state millions of acres of public land by Dec. 31, 2014 — the issue is still pending and the transfer has not yet occurred.
John Ruple, research associate professor, and Bob Keiter, a distinguished professor of law and Stegner Center director, carried out the analysis of the proposed land transfer. The researchers argue that while supporters of Utah’s Transfer of Public Lands Act claim that the state would manage for multiple uses if Utah took ownership of land currently owned by the federal government, economic realities would force Utah to dramatically increase oil and gas development in order to cover new management expenses.
From SINA English, a Chinese South China Sea gas bonanza:
S.China Sea gas field has 100b cubic meter reserve
China’s first deepwater gas field in the South China Sea has proven reserves of more than 100 billion cubic meters, the country’s largest producer of offshore gas, the China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) announced on Saturday.
The Lingshui 17-2 field, which was discovered in September 2014 and is located 150 kilometers south of South China’s Hainan Province, has been identified as a large-scale gas field, demonstrating that the South China Sea has extensive exploitable oil and gas resources, China Central Television (CCTV) reported on Saturday.
The annual output of the Lingshui 17-2 field is expected to reach 3.5 to 4 billion cubic meters, Xie Yuhong, a manager with the CNOOC, was cited by CCTV as saying. “This figure is relatively conservative,” Xie said.
On to Fukushimapocalypse Now!, first with a waste storage decision form the Mainichi:
Gov’t offers Fukushima Pref. authority to check safety of radioactive waste storage facilities
The environment minister proposed to give Fukushima Prefecture and two prefectural towns the authority to check the safety of planned interim storage facilities for radioactive waste as part of a safety agreement proposal.
Environment Minister Yoshio Mochizuki met with Fukushima Gov. Masao Uchibori at the prefectural government office on Feb. 8 to present the safety agreement proposal over interim storage plans for contaminated soil and other radioactive waste generated by the Fukushima nuclear crisis. The government plans to build interim storage facilities in the Fukushima towns of Okuma and Futaba.
The ministry offered the prefectural and municipal governments the authority to carry out on-site inspections, and when the safety of the facilities cannot be confirmed, the local governments will be able to demand a halt to construction of the storehouses and to accepting the contaminated waste.
Another containment barrier delay, via NHK WORLD:
Fukushima ice wall plan delayed by 2 weeks
The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says a plan to fill in underground tunnels at the defunct facility will be delayed by 2 weeks.
TEPCO officials announced the new schedule at a meeting with the Nuclear Regulatory Authority, or NRA, on Monday. The new timetable will start late this month.
TEPCO had initially planned to remove highly-radioactive water from the tunnels after building an ice wall to stop the water from leaking out of reactor buildings.
The missing fuel hunt commences, via NHK WORLD:
Elementary particle ‘X-Ray’ for Fukushima reactors
Experts will use elementary particles bombarding the Earth to try to determine the location of melted nuclear fuel at the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
The project is aimed at finding clues as to the location of the melted fuel, a step that is indispensable to its removal from the damaged reactors, in order to continue with decommissioning work.
Three reactors at the plant suffered meltdowns following the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck the area in March of 2011. Extremely high radiation levels have been preventing experts from locating and determining the state of the melted fuel.
From SimplyInfo, estimates of radiation release upped again:
NHK Report; Fukushima Meltdowns Released More Radiation Than Assumed
A recent NHK video report on the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns revealed some critical new details about the meltdowns and the extent of the releases from the plant.
The report documents that the water injected into the reactors by fire engines now has a known failure rate. Before, TEPCO had admitted “most” of the sea water injected as a last ditch effort to cool the reactors didn’t make it into the reactors but instead flowed backwards into the turbine buildings. NHK’s report puts actual numbers to the issue. 30 metric tons of water per hour was injected by the fire trucks but only 1 metric ton per hour made it to the reactors. This 1 ton per/hr converts to 4.4 gallons per minute, just slightly less than the contents of the typical 5 gallon pail per minute.
NHK went further and involved a group of experts to determine what this rate of water injection might do. The small amounts of water hitting the hot fuel rods may have actually caused the fuel temperatures to climb, causing them to release more radiation. So the water injection may have actually sustained the meltdowns and caused longer radiation releases to the environment through radioactive steam caused by the water.
And China funds six Pakistani reactor plants, via the Express Tribune:
China investing in six nuclear projects in Pakistan
A Chinese official confirmed on Monday that China is involved in at least six nuclear power projects in Pakistan and is likely to export more to the country, according to an India Today report.
China has uptil now refrained from commenting on its nuclear cooperation with Pakistan. However, Wang Xiaotao, a key official of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said at a press conference on Saturday that Beijing has been involved in the construction of six reactors in the country. The official’s remarks come amid concerns voiced against increased civilian nuclear cooperation between the two countries as per the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG) guidelines.
Addressing a press conference in Beijing, Wang said China “has assisted the construction of at least six nuclear reactors in Pakistan with a total installed capacity of 3.4 million kilowatts.” China was also exporting nuclear technology to Argentina, with the two countries on Wednesday signing a deal for exporting heavy-water reactors.
