Never use police, army, US pandemic expert says

Henderson, who likes to describe how he was vaccinated thousands of times against smallpox to demonstrate the immunization’s safety to wary villagers, says it is much easier to halt epidemics by winning the trust of community leaders and making use of gossipy schoolchildren.

He is critical of parts of the U.S. national pandemic plan that call for the use of quarantine and other imposed types of enforcement should influenza or any other infectious disease bring on a pandemic.

“Never use the police or the military,” Henderson told a meeting organized by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity, where he works.

“Once we brought military or police in, we found many citizens retired to the woods,” Henderson told the meeting on Tuesday.

And when the health teams tried to quarantine families, they found a similar response. “People hid,” he said. “They didn’t want to be quarantined so they hid cases.”

But if the government’s objective is not to stop the spread of infection, but rather to protect its own interests, and it sees force as the necessary means, then such advice is useless.

It sure seems to me as though Bush is itching for a reason to declare marshall law, given how many times we’re seeing it recommended as a disaster response. While I don’t believe that an avian flu epidemic is imminent, or even likely, I have little doubt that the first response would be deployment of American troops on American soil for law enforcement.

Hiding in the woods, though… a wise plan to avoid the plague (of soldiers or infection, take your pick). All the more reason to have a designated place for retreat.

Is litigation taking the ‘play’ out of kids’ playgrounds?

Is there real danger on the modern playground?

Safety advocates say yes and want to eliminate it.

Their first target: swing sets.

They’ve convinced Portland Public Schools to remove all swings from elementary schools playgrounds.

But even a playground inspector finds the removal of swing sets a little over the top.

He says that swinging creates motion and is an important part of childhood development.

But the safety advocates don’t stop there.

Portland Public Schools have also rejected merry go rounds, tube slides, track rides, arch climbers, and teeter totters.

But wait, there’s more:

Now, it seems, anything with moving parts is a lawsuit liability, and in some places, that even means moving legs.

In Broward County, Florida, there’s a new rule on the playground: no running.

A parent there commented that “no running on the playground, that’s kind of like no playing on the playground” and another called for a review of what exactly was “safe” or unsafe.

So what can kids still play?

Not dodge ball or tether ball, that’s still too dangerous. And in Beaverton, at Barnes Elementary School, rules there forbid the game of tag.

The more I read about ridiculous things like this, the more I look at my own childhood in amazement. If we took all this at face value, it’s a wonder my generation made it past our elementary school years with all our appendages. All the sharp edges, tetanus-causing metal, and wood splinters! My god, what WERE our parents thinking, sending us to the Playgrounds of Death?!?

Occasionally, I’ll drive past my old elementary school during a hometown visit. Most of the fun playground equipment has long since been removed. I once fell off a concrete retaining wall on my school’s playground, skinning my knee and face. Surely the school has been negligent in banning retaining walls - that retaining wall is one of the few features I still recognize about the playground today. Another child could fall off it at any second!

Maybe we should ban bicycles, too. Learning to ride is just an accident in the making. I remember crashing squarely into the back of a parked car when I was first learning to ride and hadn’t quite mastered the concept of steering. Or maybe it was the parked car - that’s it, ban parked cars.

This begs to be a South Park episode.

If I ever become a parent and turn into one of these overprotective nitwits, I hope someone will slap me.

From Steven Milloy, publisher of Junk Science:

The U.S. Government has finally begun to reverse policy on the insecticide DDT. Let’s hope that this policy shift represents the beginning of the end of what can only be called a crime against humanity: the decades-old withholding of the world’s most effective anti-malarial weapon from billions of adults and children at risk of dying from the disease.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) told the Washington Times this week (May 3) that it endorses and will fund the indoor spraying of DDT in sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria kills more than one million Africans annually, mostly children under five and pregnant women.

The policy change is timely given a recent commentary published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet (April 25) in which a number of researchers accuse the World Bank of deception and medical malpractice in the struggle against malaria.

The researchers charge that the World Bank reneged on its promise to spend $300 million to $500 million for malaria control in Africa; concealed the actual amount of its expenditures; reduced its staff of malaria experts from seven to zero shortly after promising to do more to fight the disease; published false epidemiological studies to exaggerate the performance of its projects; and funded clinically obsolete treatments, against the World Health Organization’?s advice, for malaria in India.

As many environmentalists are quick to point out, DDT was never officially banned. However, the U.S. policy of denying aid to any country still using DDT is nearly as effective a prohibition as an outright ban would have been.

No evidence was ever found to support the allegations portraying DDT as a deadly agent - not the egg shell thinning, not the human health risk. Indeed, bird populations were seen to increase during the DDT years, contradicting the claims of scientific journals and environmental organizations antagonistic to DDT.

Additionally, there’s evidence to suggest that the World Health Organization viewed overpopulation of Third World nations as a threat, and saw no alternative but to increase the number of childhood deaths through malaria. As one worker for one health agency put it: “Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing.”

In short, the malaria epidemic, because of its direct causation by international health agencies and their political motives, appears to have been used as the means to the most significant genocide the world has seen.

The cynical part of me wonders if the existence of a biological population control tool more effective than malaria accounts for the shift in DDT policy, but that remains to be seen.

Shortages of drug for asthma cause concern

The Food and Drug Administration ruled that inhalers containing chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) had to be gone by Dec. 31, 2008. CFCs, commonly used as refrigerants and propellants, have been banned in the United States for most purposes since 1996 because they deplete the ozone layer. But drug companies have been slow to respond.

Bomgaars said that until production of inhalers fueled by hydrofluoroalkane (HFA) — a propellant that doesn’t affect the ozone layer — is ramped up, availability will continue to be a problem.

Sooooo, we’re banning CFCs to protect the ozone, fucking over a bunch of asthmatics in the process. I’m sure each person struggling to find albuterol or pay for the substantially more expensive substitutes appreciates all that’s being done to help protect their health. After all the lip-service from the beltway regarding environmental policy and the supposed public health benefits, I’m speechless at the irony of this move.

New formulations hitting the market cost about twice as much as albuterol with CFCs. At Bartell Drugs, for example, generic versions of albuterol products were in the low $20s. A comparable prescription with the new HFA is in the low $40s.

Dr. Jonathan Becker, an asthma/allergy board certified specialist at Northwest Asthma and Allergy Center, acknowledged that the eco-friendly products are quite a bit more expensive, but said the HFA products also “have the potential to better deliver medications.”…

Bomgaars suggested that those taking albuterol should check with their physicians to see if they should be on it — if it’s still the appropriate drug for them. “Short term, as much as we hate to have people shop around, it may be necessary for them to call around and see if the product is available.”

And how is it we can still be pondering the mystery of expensive health care?

I’d be curious to know just how much, by weight and by volume, the CFCs from inhalers contribute to overall CFC emissions. I’m betting it’s not a significant percentage of either. Instead, this measure reeks of concern over public perception - that we must be “doing something” to save the environment and stop global warming.