What do they drink?
"Meant to Keep Malaria Out, Mosquito Nets Are Used to Haul Fish In" by JEFFREY GETTLEMANAN, January 24, 2015.
BANGWEULU WETLANDS, Zambia — Out here on the endless swamps, a harsh truth has been passed down from generation to generation: There is no fear but the fear of hunger.
With that always weighing on his mind, Mwewa Ndefi gets up at dawn, just as the first orange rays of sun are beginning to spear through the papyrus reeds, and starts to unclump a mosquito net.
Nets like his are widely considered a magic bullet against malaria — one of the cheapest and most effective ways to stop a disease that kills at least half a million Africans each year. But Mr. Ndefi and countless others are not using their mosquito nets as global health experts have intended.
Nobody in his hut, including his seven children, sleeps under a net at night. Instead, Mr. Ndefi has taken his family’s supply of anti-malaria nets and sewn them together into a gigantic sieve that he uses to drag the bottom of the swamp ponds, sweeping up all sorts of life: baby catfish, banded tilapia, tiny mouthbrooders, orange fish eggs, water bugs and the occasional green frog.
“I know it’s not right,” Mr. Ndefi said, “but without these nets, we wouldn’t eat.”
Across Africa, from the mud flats of Nigeria to the coral reefs off Mozambique, mosquito-net fishing is a growing problem, an unintended consequence of one of the biggest and most celebrated public health campaigns in recent years.
The nets have helped save millions of lives, but scientists worry about the collateral damage: Africa’s fish.
Part of the concern is the scale. Mosquito nets are now a billion-dollar industry, with hundreds of millions of insecticide-treated nets passed out in recent years, and many more on their way.
Hmmmm.
They arrive by the truckload in poor, waterside communities where people have been trying to scrape by with substandard fishing gear for as long as anyone can remember. All of a sudden, there are light, soft, surprisingly strong nets — for free. Many people said it would be foolish not to use them for fishing.
“The nets go straight out of the bag into the sea,” said Isabel Marques da Silva, a marine biologist at Universidade LΓΊrio in Mozambique. “That’s why the incidence for malaria here is so high. The people don’t use the mosquito nets for mosquitoes. They use them to fish.”
But the unsparing mesh, with holes smaller than mosquitoes, traps much more life than traditional fishing nets do. Scientists say that could imperil already stressed fish populations, a critical food source for millions of the world’s poorest people.
Scientists are hardly the only ones alarmed. Fistfights are breaking out on the beaches of Madagascar between fishermen who fear that the nets will ruin their livelihoods, and those who say they will starve without them. Congolese officials have snatched and burned the nets, and in August, Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, threatened to jail anyone fishing with a mosquito net.
Many of these insecticide-treated nets are dragged through the same lakes and rivers people drink from, raising concerns about toxins. One of the most common insecticides used by the mosquito net industry is permethrin, which the United States Environmental Protection Agency says is “likely to be carcinogenic to humans” when consumed orally. The E.P.A. also says permethrin is “highly toxic” to fish.
So if you eat the fish.... sigh.
The leading mosquito net manufacturers insist that their products are not dangerous. Still, many nets are labeled: “Do not wash in a lake or a river.”
Some labels go even further, warning people to pour any water used in washing a net into a hole in the ground, “away from home, animals and wells.”
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Related: Ebola Reemerging
See: "In addition to its human toll, Ebola has hammered the economies of the three most affected West African nations. The World Health Organization said this week that tracking down every last case and ending the outbreak remains difficult."
At least they got a vaccine:
"Production of flu vaccines each year an uncertain process" by Brady Dennis, Washington Post January 18, 2015
WASHINGTON — In early March, Dr. Robert Daum and other infectious-disease specialists from around the country will gather in a Silver Spring, Md., hotel to choose the influenza strains that vaccine makers should target for next year’s flu season.
It’s an annual medical guessing game of sorts, one backed by data but also plagued with uncertainty. And when the guesses don’t exactly match the reality, as happened this past year, it can mean a dismal and deadly flu season.
Related: New Flu
**********
As it does each year, the group will pore over surveillance information from around the globe, hear presentations from government researchers, and weigh recommendations from the World Health Organization.
The specialists will cast their votes for the four specific flu strains — two each from the ‘‘A’’ and ‘‘B’’ types of the virus — that manufacturers should focus on in making the coming season’s vaccine. Then, they will wait and hope.
Daum said he suspects he will leave feeling the way he so often has in the past — head hanging, discouraged, wishing there was a more reliable way to protect people from the yearly scourge of the flu.
Despite constant tracking and surveillance of the virus in labs across the world and the work of hundreds of specialists at universities, the WHO and agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), picking the correct flu strains still involves a measure of good fortune. Every few years, specialists miss the mark....
!!
Such viral drift has been a persistent problem over the years, although less devastating than the ‘‘antigenic shift’’ that occasionally occurs, creating an entirely new strain that leaves much of the population largely defenseless. That’s what led to the 2009 flu pandemic.
The infamous swine flu $windle.
Still, this flu season has officially crossed into epidemic territory and could prove particularly severe; the CDC said recently that 43 states are experiencing ‘‘high or widespread’’ flu activity, with a growing number of hospitalizations and deaths. And the worst could lie ahead.
A big part of the challenge each year is timing.
Vaccine manufacturers face a constant race to create and churn out enough doses to distribute throughout the country ahead of the annual flu season.
‘‘It can’t just be done overnight,’’ said Dr. David Greenberg, vice president and chief medical officer at Sanofi Pasteur, which produces about 65 million doses of flu vaccine each year. ‘‘It’s a very busy process.’’
Every February, the WHO identifies which strains in the Northern Hemisphere are most likely to wreak havoc the following flu season; the FDA’s recommendations, which historically align with the WHO’s, come soon afterward.
After that, drugmakers develop formulations for each strain, and regulators ensure vaccines from numerous manufacturers are safe and similarly potent. ‘‘Standardization is critical,’’ said Jerry Weir, director of the FDA’s Division of Viral Products.
Manufacturers also must produce and package millions of doses and distribute them to physicians’ offices and pharmacies in time for vaccinations to begin in the fall, ahead of the flu season.
The perpetually tight timetable forces specialists to make choices about the next flu season even before the current one has faded. It’s an educated guess, for sure, that includes data about which strains have dominated in recent years and which are picking up in the Southern Hemisphere and likely to migrate north.
But roll up your sleeve.
But until better predictive models, universal flu vaccines or significantly faster manufacturing come along, the guesswork remains. So does the frustration when the call is wrong.
And the deaths resulting from it!
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Well, that is really deflating.
Bill Belichick ‘100 percent’ sure Patriots met NFL rules
Nobody comes up roses in latest NFL fiasco
‘Deflategate’ leaves Patriots fans undeterred
That rally is okay.
NDUs:
See my point?
And look what I found fishing around in my Globe today:
"Millions of genetically modified insects could be released in Florida Keys" by Jennifer Kay, Associated Press January 26, 2015
KEY WEST, Fla. — Millions of genetically modified mosquitoes could be released in the Florida Keys if British researchers win approval to use the bugs against two extremely painful viral diseases.
Do these mad scientists have no scruples?
Looks like the global depopulation plan is in fact in full swing.
Never before have insects with modified DNA come so close to being set loose in a residential US neighborhood.
That could bring a catastrophic mutation that is untreatable, couldn't it?
‘‘This is essentially using a mosquito as a drug to cure disease,’’ said Michael Doyle, executive director of the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District, which is waiting to hear if the Food and Drug Administration will allow the experiment.
Yeah, it's all for the good.
Dengue and chikungunya are growing threats in the United States, but some people are more frightened at the thought of being bitten by a genetically modified organism. More than 130,000 people signed a Change.org petition against the experiment.
Kinda felt a prick, yeah!
As for threats, you will have to wait until Islamic terror is taking care of, based on the coverage in my paper on a daily basis. Always a handful of articles or more.
Even potential boosters say those responsible must do more to show that benefits outweigh the risks of breeding modified insects that could bite people.
‘‘I think the science is fine, they definitely can kill mosquitoes, but the GMO issue still sticks as something of a thorny issue for the general public,’’ said Phil Lounibos, who studies mosquito control at the Florida Medical Entomology Laboratory.
Like I'm supposed to believe in cited $cienti$ts from an agenda-pu$hing pre$$ that is farting in the face of a record snowstorm.
Mosquito controllers say they’re running out of options. With climate change and globalization spreading tropical diseases farther from the equator, storm winds, cargo ships, and humans carry these viruses to places such as Key West, the southernmost US city.
Sigh.
There are no vaccines or cures for dengue, known as ‘‘break-bone fever,’’ or chikungunya, so painful it causes contortions. US cases remain rare.
Now I'm suspicious of where those actually came from. What Army lab cooked the crap up and released it?
Insecticides are sprayed year-round in the Keys’ charming and crowded neighborhoods.
All the more reason for a pipeline.
But Aedes aegypti, whose biting females spread these diseases, have evolved to resist four of the six insecticides used to kill them.
Oxitec, a British biotech firm, has patented a method of breeding Aedes aegypti with fragments of genes from herpes simplex virus and E. coli bacteria as well as coral and cabbage.
$ee? Reading that sentence was frightening, too.
This synthetic DNA is commonly used in laboratory science and is thought to pose no significant risks to other animals, but it kills mosquito larvae.
So says the lying, distorting, agenda-pu$hing mouthpiece media.
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That is very, very deflating in a fear way.
Related: WHO calls for structural reforms
"After botching the response to the biggest-ever Ebola outbreak with a sluggish performance."
Also see: Edgar Lungu sworn in as new president of Zambia
Did you see the elephant in the room?
