The Top 10 Environmental Developments of 2009

The Top 10 Environmental Developments of 2009: "

10. Cass Sunstein becomes regulatory czar. Sunstein is a true believer in cost-benefit analysis, the bête noire of many an environmentalist. Obama’s appointment of Sunstein to oversee health and environmental regulations may put the brakes on regulatory initiatves.

9. California passes AB 758. The first mandate for energy efficiency standards for existing buildings.

8. Water wars moving east. We tend to think of water disputes as Western. But that’s hanging: Georgia and Alabama fought over water allocation, while Michigan and Illinois fought over endangered species.

7. EPA grants California’s car waiver. Reversing the Bush Administration, EPA approved California’s regulations of greenhouse gases from vehicles.

6. Withdrawal of the Bush Administration’s ESA rule. The Bush Administration tried to reduce substantially the number of federal actions subject to review under the Endangered Species Act. The Obama Administration reversed this action, with an assist from Congress.

5. The 2008 Supreme Court Term. The worst Supreme Court Term for the environment ever. Five losses out of five cases.

4. EPA’s endangerment finding. The government finally got around to finding the obvious: climate change is bad for your health and bad for the planet. The finding opens the door to using the Clean Air Act to address climate change.

3. Copenhagen. Much exaggerated hype followed by much exaggerated hand-wringing. The Copenhagen Accord is a step forward – how big a step, only time will tell.

2. Barack Obama took office, and the Democrats go sixty votes in the Senate. Obama seems to combine Bill Clinton’s pragmatism with a dash of Al Gore’s idealism on environmental issues. Whether the Democrats will succeed in capitalizing on their Senate control remains to be seen.

1. George Bush and Dick Cheney left office. Not everything was negative, but overall, Bush and Cheney headed the most anti-environmental Administration in decades. (Why, you might ask, is this the #1 development, while Obama is #2? The reason is that Bush was much more anti-environmental than Obama is pro-environmental.)

"

Ginkgo Doesn't Improve Memory Or Cognitive Skills

Ginkgo Doesn't Improve Memory Or Cognitive Skills: "JumperCable writes "Ginkgo biloba has failed — again — to live up to its reputation for boosting memory and brain function. Just over a year after a study showed that the herb doesn't prevent dementia and Alzheimer's disease, a new study from the same team of researchers has found no evidence that ginkgo reduces the normal cognitive decline that comes with aging. In the new study, the largest of its kind to date, DeKosky and his colleagues followed more than 3,000 people between the ages of 72 and 96 for an average of six years. Half of the participants took two 120-milligram capsules of ginkgo a day during the study period, and the other half took a placebo. The people who took ginkgo showed no differences in attention, memory, and other cognitive measures compared to those who took the placebo, according to the study, which was published in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"

The Dry Garden: Instead of New Zealand flax, try the giant wild rye called Canyon Prince

The Dry Garden: Instead of New Zealand flax, try the giant wild rye called Canyon Prince: "

Of all the creatures that disperse plants in nature, we humans may be the quirkiest. Take how we distribute New Zealand flax. We fight back its blades along what seems like every other front walk.

This column is to commend an indigenous alternative to New Zealand flax for the gardens of greater Los Angeles: a type of giant wild rye called Canyon Prince. Ninety-nine percent of the time that flax is used in California, this cultivar of Leymus condensatus could perform the same function, but better.

The first reason is size. As beautiful as New Zealand flax is, it needs space. You could hide a rugby scrum behind many full-grown specimens. By contrast, the "giant" in "giant wild rye" is a relative term. This beautiful cultivar introduced by the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden is giant only among grasses. It may reach 3 feet tall.

Plants that stay proportionate to the scale of most homes and gardens are rare. But in the case of Canyon Prince, its steel blue, sword-like foliage not only allows you to see the house but also flatters almost any building -- and vice versa. The effect is so striking that the first suggestion that comes to mind of Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden horticulturist Bart O’Brien is to place it “against blank walls, places where you can really see its structure.”

That said, leave some space so the plant is allowed to luxuriate to its full 2- to 3-foot diameter. There’s nothing sadder than a scrunched-up royal. For more recommendations, click to the jump.

If you’ve got the exposure, choose a sunny spot where Canyon Prince will throw up spires of pale blue flowers that mature into ripe yellow seeds. Planted in shade, you will still enjoy the leaves but can forget the golden waves of grain.

The seeds can produce offspring, but Canyon Prince is more likely to grow from the roots, particularly in sandy soil. Grass nurseryman John Greenlee advises propagating Canyon Prince by dividing it at the roots in his 1992 “Encyclopedia of Ornamental Grasses.” This indeed works well, but allow the divided plants some time to sulk and recover.

That said, if left to spread, Canyon Prince won’t run wild. Instead, its ability to spread from the roots means that when nursery plugs are put in beds with an eye to forming drifts or hedges, they will fill in.

A Channel Island native, Canyon Prince can stand water, though too much will rot it at the crown. It can stand proud in coastal dry gardens with little or no supplemental water. If it becomes ratty or tired looking, it can be cut back clear to the ground, something best done midwinter. But it can go years, even a decade, without requiring much more than admiration.

For members of the modern meadow movement, O’Brien advises using Canyon Prince at the back of a bed, with lower and silkier grasses such as Festuca californica in the foreground. This cultivar of Leymus condensatus also does fine on its own as a specimen plant. It’s not called Prince for nothing.

-- Emily Green

Green's column on low-water gardening appears here weekly. She also blogs on water issues at chanceofrain.com.

Photo courtesy of the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden

"

Disinfectant misuse could help create superbugs

Disinfectant misuse could help create superbugs: "

Disinfectants may be a double-edged sword in the fight against hospital-borne diseases, scientists say.

According to a study to be published in January’s issue of Microbiology, researchers from the National University of Ireland in Galway slowly introduced higher levels of disinfectant to lab cultures of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which lives in the soil and water around us. It can’t seriously hurt healthy people (it’s been implicated in “hot tub itch” and “swimmer’s ear”) but preys on those with compromised immune systems. This opportunistic pathogen can infect the lungs, joints, burn wounds, take advantage of a compromised urinary tract or cause blood diseases. The bacterium can live in man-made environments and colonize catheters and other medical equipment. It’s ideally suited for hospital transmission – the Online Textbook of Bacteriology calls it “the fourth most commonly-isolated nosocomial pathogen accounting for 10.1 percent of all hospital-acquired infections” – but it can infect anyone whose defenses have been weakened, whether from chemotherapy or diabetes, cystic fibrosis or AIDS.

After gradually upping the dose of benzalkonium chloride, an antiseptic used in products that include eyedrops and wet wipes, researchers had on their hands a Frankensteinian pathogen that showed a 12-fold resistance to the common disinfectant. (Generally, showing four or five times the normal resistance level is enough to earn a newer, nastier disease “superbug” status.)

Even worse, that same variant of P. aeruginosadisplayed a whopping 256-fold increase in resistance to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin – even though it had never been exposed to the drug before. That’s worrisome, since the commonly prescribed Cipro has been used to treat such high-profile pathogens as anthrax spores.

The upshot? That hospitals that don’t use enough disinfectant to kill every last bacterium on a given surface could provide an ideal breeding ground for new superbugs. These mutations could become virtually immune to prevention and treatment.

“The message, for heaven’s sake, is use disinfectants properly,” lead author Gerard Fleming said in an interview. “The first line of defense is disinfection. The second line of defense is antibiotics.”

By misusing disinfectants, he concluded, “You're making an environment where you've now lost the first and second lines of defense.”

There’s a dangerous tendency toward using disinfectants as a clean-all, Fleming said, when there was a much more potent, proven remedy to rid oneself of germs.

“Soap and water. I am not messing with you,” Fleming said. “Why doesn’t the surgeon, when he’s going into the theater, just take a hand sanitizer? Why does he go to the sink and scrub and scrub and scrub? Because he’s physically removing the bacteria.”

-- Amina Khan

"

Sustainable Aliens: A New Theory On Why E.T. Hasn't Arrived

Sustainable Aliens: A New Theory On Why E.T. Hasn't Arrived: "

It could happen. (Anton Brzezinski / Forrest J. Ackerman Collection/CORBIS)

By Adam Frank

Part of a scientist's job is to read scientific papers -- lots and lots of scientific papers. You don't just read them: you also skim, peruse, look through, glance at and, occasionally, pore over them. There are just so many papers and just too much else going on. Still, some ideas just stick in your head and, with that in mind, I would like to present my Sort-Of-Best-Unheralded-Scientific-Paper of 2009.

The envelope please ...

People who think about extraterrestrial life have been bothered for a long time by a rather obvious fact: There isn't any here.

This is sometimes called the Fermi Paradox. It's an old conundrum (which may have started with physicist Enrico Fermi) that asks 'If space-traveling ETs exist, why aren't they with us already?'
The idea is simple. Start with a civilization that colonizes one world. Then that world colonizes two more planets. Those worlds go on and do their own colonization. Follow this logic and you end up with a very, very rapid expansion of even a single star-faring civilization. Even one ET with space travel can, in a pretty short time, lead to a galaxy teeming with intelligent life.

Little green friends should already, have overrun us.

Now, you may be of the camp that believes aliens are already here. They're just hiding, or secretly controlling the government, or writing love poetry in crop circles. If you have not yet joined one of these groups then you, like the rest of us, end up with the Fermi Paradox. There should already be aliens all over the place. But there aren't. What happened?

Of course you could argue that extraterrestrial intelligence simply doesn't exist. That is possible, but a total downer, too. So let's ignore that possibility for now and look at what turns out to be an innovative solution to the Fermi question.

The cool thing about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is the way it quickly becomes an exercise in thinking generally about civilizations. This link is inevitable because any rational search strategy forces you to consider what civilizations do, how they evolve and, most importantly, how long they last.Back when nuclear war was our biggest worry, the question of civilization's endurance always seemed to hinge on its bellicosity. Our new-found recognition of climate change and the limits to growth changes that perspective.

Which, finally, leads me to my Sort-Of-Best-Unheralded-Scientific-Paper of 2009. It's called THE SUSTAINABILITY SOLUTION TO THE FERMI PARADOX. Its authors, J. Haqq-Misra & S. Baum, have been quite creative in merging SETI with our new environmental concerns.

Their answer to the Fermi Dilemma is simple. Civilizations, even extraterrestrial ones, can't grow without limits. Instead of using the question the Fermi Paradox raises to infer that we are the only intelligent species in the galaxy, Haqq-Misra & Baum use it to infer that these civilizations have learned a lesson which we are just starting to grasp. You have to pace yourself. You have to live within your means. Exponential growth is not likely to be sustainable.

Here is the abstract from their paper.

No present observations suggest a technologically advanced extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) has spread through the galaxy. However, under commonplace assumptions about galactic civilization formation and expansion, this absence of observation is highly unlikely. This improbability is the heart of the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox leads some to conclude that humans have the only advanced civilization in this galaxy, either because civilization formation is very rare or because intelligent civilizations inevitably destroy themselves. In this paper, we argue that this conclusion is premature by introducing the 'Sustainability Solution' to the Fermi Paradox, which questions the Paradox's assumption of faster (e.g. exponential) civilization growth. Drawing on insights from the sustainability of human civilization on Earth, we propose that faster-growth may not be sustainable on the galactic scale. If this is the case, then there may exist ETI that have not expanded throughout the galaxy or have done so but collapsed. These possibilities have implications for both searches for ETI and for human civilization management

Of course, by its very nature, any paper about SETI and life on other planets is speculation. What is interesting about this paper is the way the concerns of our very real, here-and-now culture reflect in thinking about life and civilization on the largest scales.

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"

Republicans would have impeached Gore over 9/11

Republicans would have impeached Gore over 9/11: "There are a few lessons to be learned about the bathroom bomber incident. Here are six lessons that come to mind:

1. It is pretty easy for single, incompetent individuals to change United States federal policy through the threat of violence.
   

2. Many Republicans believe that unions are a greater threat to national security than terrorists.
   

3. Quite a few conservatives don't believe any criminal suspects are entitled to due process.
   

4. Many conservatives believe that we should institute an apartheid state against Muslims in America.
   

5. If Al Gore had been President on September 11, 2001, there would have been no bi-partisan, United We Stand language coming from conservatives. The aggressive, partisan response we have seen to even this failed attack would have almost certainly meant impeachment proceedings against President Gore sometime in late 2001 or early 2002.
   

6. A substantial minority of elected officials in the Democratic Party is willing to go along, or at least keep silent on with #3 and #4, either because they believe it or because they don't have core values and think those positions are electoral winners. For the same reasons, a smaller minority of elected officials the Democratic Party would even be willing to go along with #2 and #5.

Although, since these are not the first examples of these outcomes, beliefs or counterfactuals, I guess all of these are actually reminders, not lessons.

"

Senator Boxer: Airline Passengers Have New Protections

Senator Boxer: Airline Passengers Have New Protections

Dear Friend: 

I am pleased to let you know about Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s recent announcement of a new rule to protect airline passengers’ rights.  The new rule includes much of the Boxer-Snowe legislation, the Airline Passenger Bill of Rights, which addresses limits on tarmac delays.

I first introduced the Airline Passenger Bill of Rights with Senator Olympia Snowe in 2007, following several incidents at airports where passengers were forced to remain on airplanes for as long as 11 hours. The Boxer-Snowe Airline Passengers Bill of Rights (S.213) is currently pending before the full Senate as part of the FAA Reauthorization bill.

Specifically, the Department of Transportation’s new rule limiting tarmac delays includes three central components of the Boxer-Snowe Airline Passenger Bill of Rights:

• Airlines must give passengers the option to deplane after they have been stuck on the tarmac for three hours. 
• Airlines must provide food, water, access to medical treatment and working restrooms while passengers are trapped on the tarmac. 
• Airlines must provide passengers with delay information on their websites as well as information on how to make formal complaints.

This is a victory for passengers who have been mistreated, and I thank Secretary LaHood for acting to protect passengers’ rights.  This shows that the Department of Transportation understands that no passenger should ever be held captive for hours on an airplane without food, water or sufficient restrooms.

As good as this new rule is, it doesn’t give passengers permanent protection because it could be overturned by a future administration. That is why I will keep working to see that the Boxer-Snowe Airline Passenger Bill of Rights becomes law. 

Sincerely,

Barbara Boxer
United States Senator

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What's Your Temperature? Rethinking 98.6

What's Your Temperature? Rethinking 98.6: "Not only is the average 'normal' temperature lower than previously thought, but body temperature can drop as a person gets older."

Extinct Ibex Resurrected By Cloning

Red Sampling Editor Comments: Can anyone say Jurassic Park?

Extinct Ibex Resurrected By Cloning: "The Telegraph is reporting that for the first time an extinct animal has been brought back via cloning. The Pyrenean ibex, a type of mountain goat, was declared officially extinct in 2000 but thanks to preserved skin samples scientists were able to insert that DNA into eggs from domestic goats to clone a female Pyrenean ibex. While the goat didn't survive long due to lung defects this gives scientists hopes that it will be possible to resurrect extinct species from frozen tissue. 'Using techniques similar to those used to clone Dolly the sheep, known as nuclear transfer, the researchers were able to transplant DNA from the tissue into eggs taken from domestic goats to create 439 embryos, of which 57 were implanted into surrogate females. Just seven of the embryos resulted in pregnancies and only one of the goats finally gave birth to a female bucardo, which died a seven minutes later due to breathing difficulties, perhaps due to flaws in the DNA used to create the clone.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"

In case of serious illness, take one of these to protect your legal rights

In case of serious illness, take one of these to protect your legal rights: "

When a physician urges you to "get your affairs in order," it is the unspoken part of his or her message--the imminence of disability or death--that is likely to get top billing in your mind. Getting your affairs in order, however, is still important. And a newly released guidebook can help get you organized for the task.

Long before healthcare reform opponents began warning of "death panels" bent on dispatching the seriously ill more efficiently, members of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization regularly got questions from clients about how to assure their wishes are carried out. The hospice group turned to the American Bar Assn.'s commission on law and aging for advice.

The result is a new publication--available for free--called "Legal Guide for the Seriously Ill: Seven Key Steps for Getting Your Affairs in Order." In 51 pages of plain English, the guide provides clear step-by-step instructions on:

--Planning how you will pay for the healthcare you need;

--Making a plan for the management of your health and personal decisions during your illness;

--Making a plan for the management of your money and property;

--Planning for the care of dependents;

--Knowing your rights as a patient;

--Knowing your rights as an employee; and

--Getting your legal documents in order.

The new guide reflects new regulatory and legislative changes, including extended COBRA payments that will help laid-off workers extend their existing healthcare insurance coverage. And for each step, the guide provides many, many resources that can provide further help. It's a must for critically ill patients and their caregivers.

The National Center on Caregiving's Family Caregiver Alliance also has posted some helpful advice for critically ill patients.

For those still worried about the prospect of "death panels," here is the official summary of the House healthcare reform bill that touched off those comments.

-- Melissa Healy

"

Climate change bill DOA in the Senate

Climate change bill DOA in the Senate: "The House passed a climate change bill all the way back in June. In November, the Senate declared they would take up the bill in the spring. Now, it appears likely that the Senate will take up the bill never:

Bruised by the health care debate and worried about what 2010 will bring, moderate Senate Democrats are urging the White House to give up now on any effort to pass a cap-and-trade bill next year.

'I am communicating that in every way I know how,' said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), one of at least a half-dozen Democrats who've told the White House or their own leaders that it's time to jettison the centerpiece of their party's plan to curb global warming.(...)

'We need to deal with the phenomena of global warming, but I think it's very difficult in the kind of economic circumstances we have right now,' said Indiana Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh, who called passage of any economywide cap and trade 'unlikely.'

'I'd just as soon see that set aside until we work through the economy,' said Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.). 'What we don't want to do is have anything get in the way of working to resolve the problems with the economy.'

'Climate change in an election year has very poor prospects,' added Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). 'I've told that to the leadership.'

If 2009 taught us one lesson that can be applied to climate change legislation, it should be that cap and trade is never going to pass through the 60-vote Senate. This leaves two options:

1. Get rid of the filibuster
   
   
2. Abandon all attempts at congressional action ASAP, and turn immediately to the Executive Branch

Since #1 isn't going to happen in the short term, that makes #2 the only option for 2010. Fortunately, earlier in the month, the EPA began to take action:

In Monday's much-anticipated announcement, the Environmental Protection Agency said that six gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, pose a danger to the environment and the health of Americans and that the agency would start drawing up regulations to reduce those emissions.

'These are reasonable, common-sense steps,' EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said, adding that they would protect the environment 'without placing an undue burden on the businesses that make up the better part of our economy.' At the same time, however, EPA regulation is no one's preferred outcome -- not even the EPA's. Jackson said her agency and other administration officials would still prefer if Congress acted before they did.

The Obama administration did not want to go this route, for two reasons. The first reason was an argument about how a law passed by Congress would be more difficult to overturn than a regulatory process conducted by the EPA. However, given that an emissions permit market also requires regulation, that was always a pretty flimsy argument. Further, a poorly regulated emission permit market could actually result in another financial bubble. As such, it is entirely unconvincing that the legislative route creates less peril under a future administration that refuses to enforce regulations.

The second reason was political: the Obama administration did not want sole responsibility for pushing greenhouse gas regulations. Well, at this point, nuts to that. Tough. With the 60-vote Senate, and the administration's ongoing protection of conservative Democrats, there is no realistic legislative option. The executive branch is going to have to continue doing the heavy lifting itself.

Lester Brown came to our office today and had a nice chat with us Gristers.(...)

One thing from our chat jumped out at me. In the context of a debate about the clean energy bill in Congress (he thinks it's worse than nothing), Brown made the point that there's actually a lot of good carbon policy in the pipeline, which will get us some big gains in the short-term. He cited the boost in fuel efficiency standards from the EPA and DOT; green stimulus spending flowing through DOE and states; EPA's denial of recent coal mining and power plant permits; new federal enforcement of appliance efficiency standards; EPA's new CO2 reporting requirements; and various state-level policies like renewable mandates.

These are indeed good policies! Notice anything they share in common? That's right: they bypass the U.S. Congress.

My gut tells me that we should have killed the climate change bill in the House back in June. Doing so would have forced the executive branch's hand on the endangerment finding at least four months earlier. The legislative approach was always a dead-end, and so the executive branch needed to be pushed earlier and harder.

Any further time we spend trying to pass a DOA climate change bill of questionable value through the United States Congress is a waste of resources. It is time to cut our losses, and focus our efforts on areas where a difference can actually be made.

"

The Science of Unbelievable things

The Science of Unbelievable things: "

By K C Cole

For all the talk about science and belief, I often feel one critical perspective is missing--one that distorts much of the discourse about science in the public eye: What does it mean to say that something is 'unbelievable'? Or must be taken 'on faith'?

It's complicated. I, for one, do not 'believe' (not really) that there are people on the other side of the Earth for whom my 'up' is their 'down' and vice versa. I may know the Earth is a sphere, but at some level I don't believe it - any more than I believe that my 800 thousand pound 747 is really going to lift off the runway and FLY! Come on! (It does help to know that a modest sized cloud can weigh about as much).

Do I believe I evolved from a whole line of bizarro ancestors, many still around, many long extinct, the most ancient single-celled organisms? Not really. It IS unbelievable--in that, the Intelligent Design argument is correct. For me, at least, watching a flower grow from a seed is always a bit unbelievable, as is watching a baby come into the world--or a puppy for that matter--or contemplating the first flickerings of light from a newborn star. I could go on. Curved space time? Give me a break. All the matter and energy in the universe (not to mention space and time) bursting into being 13.7 billion years ago from some primordial nothing? Don't make me laugh.

So why do I consider all of the above to be true--most of it beyond dispute. Because, of course, of the overwhelming evidence. I do have enough 'faith,' if you will, in the ways of science that I trust it. People who don't understand how science works don't always share this faith, so they have a reason to doubt the fantastical tales we tell. WE know that ideas/facts/concepts become 'true' in science only when they have been thoroughly explored, come through countless trials and ruthless criticism and continue to be tested.....forever. Faith in science is faith in a process of questioning.

That's the main difference between science and religion in my view. Science is a running argument, and faith in it means having respect for the uncanny power it has to ferret out so many unbelievable things that are, nevertheless, true. Faith in religion more often means not arguing...taking things, well, on 'faith.'

I am a person of no faith in some ways, but I am continually awed equally by the flowers in my garden and the insects that eat them--even though at the same time I find it hard to 'believe' that such things can exist. Nevermind love, Bach and chocolate souffle. I am perhaps even more awed that the 3 pounds of slime we have in our heads has been able to come up with tools (science, including it's theories, it's mathematics, it's wonderous 'eyes' and 'ears') to help us understand why and how all of this came to be.

Religion is more compelling than science, some argue, because it allows people to be simply awed. Also: because it has better stories.

Nonsense. There's no better story than the evolution and existence of life and the universe. And anyhow who isn't awed by it is missing the greatest show on Earth.

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"

60 Minutes flubs the California water story

60 Minutes flubs the California water story: "

Last night, 60 Minutes had a long story on the California water crisis, featuring Lesley Stahl interviewing (among others) Arnold Schwarzenegger and UC Davis professor Jeff Mount. On the positive side, the story accurately portrayed the vulnerability of California’s fragile through-Delta water delivery system to a major earthquake or catastrophic levee break. But CBS News flubbed the overall storyline.

In typical media fashion, it oversimplified the story to “Delta smelt versus farmers,” with barely a mention of the two-year closure of the coastal salmon fishery or the crash of the Bay-Delta ecosystem as a whole. Worse, 60 Minutes swallowed whole a tall tale concocted by anti-regulatory interests: that protecting the Delta smelt has economically crippled California agriculture.

That story is demonstrably false on at least two different levels. First, while the San Joaquin valley has had a tough economic year, its woes have not been driven by water shortages. According to this independent report from economist Jeffrey Michael at the University of the Pacific, the real culprit is the collapse of the housing market and therefore of the construction industry:

Reductions in water deliveries due to environmental regulations have increased the Valley unemployment rate by 0.1 percentage point, and the drought 0.2 percentage points for a total water shortage impact of a 0.3 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate. The construction collapse has increased unemployment by at least 2.5 percentage points, and is only one component of the foreclosure and housing crisis that continues to drive the majority of job loss in the San Joaquin Valley.

Indeed, state and federal water suppliers have bent over backwards to give farmers water even as the Bay-Delta ecosystem collapsed. As the graph below shows, average water exports from the Delta increased in recent years (before falling a bit in 2008 and 2009), while Delta smelt and Chinook salmon production were crashing.

From: NRDC, Fish Out of Water: How Water Management in the Bay-Delta Threatens the Future of California's Salmon Fishery (July 2008), p. 16

Second, it’s not true that California agriculture had a bad year across the board. Farming has always been a boom-bust business, as overplanting gluts the market and tough growing conditions deplete it. But 2009 was not a bust year. The California tomato crop, for example, hit an all-time high both in total production and in dollar value at the farm. As for the almond grower that complained to 60 Minutes that he was having to destroy his trees, take that with a grain of salt. Almond trees have a relatively short life-span, so orchards are continually removed and replanted. California almond production was down about 20% in 2009 compared to 2008, but not due to any irrigation restrictions. The fall was due to a combination of late frost, a wet spring during pollination season and heavy bearing last year. Almonds remain a boom crop, to the point that the big concern for almond growers is boosting demand, not increasing production.

So yes, California has a water problem. But no, it’s not a problem caused by the Delta smelt or by environmentalists. Nor is it a problem that’s destroying the California economy or even the California farm economy. Shame on 60 Minutes for perpetuating myths that only get in the way of addressing the real problem.

"

Childhood exposure to tobacco smoke raises risk of emphysema

Childhood exposure to tobacco smoke raises risk of emphysema: "

Scientists have long thought that people who quit smoking recover some of their lung function and health. That may be true, but it appears children exposed to secondhand smoke are not so lucky.

Researchers report today that children exposed regularly to tobacco smoke at home were more likely to develop emphysema in adulthood, suggesting that lungs may not heal completely from early-life exposure. Scientists at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health studied CT scans of 1,781 nonsmoking adults. The participants were asked about their exposure to tobacco smoke in childhood. The CT scans showed that participants with more childhood tobacco smoke exposure had more emphysema-like lung changes.

Emphysema is the destruction of alveolar walls, the place where oxygen is exchanged with carbon dioxide. This damage reduces the elastic function of the lungs. It could be that emphysema is among the most sensitive measure of lung damage, the authors said.

"Some known harmful effects of tobacco smoke are short term, and this new research suggests that effects of tobacco smoke on the lungs may also persist for decades," the lead author of the paper, Gina Lovasi, said in a news release.

The study is published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

-- Shari Roan

Image credit: Matt Harrington / Tribune Media Services

"

Are US Wars Fueling Domestic Terror?

Are US Wars Fueling Domestic Terror?: "Katrina vanden Heuvel It's time to question whether our overreaction to the crimes against humanity on 9/11 has done more to undermine our security than enhance it.

"

Army engineers clean up graffiti along L.A. River

Army engineers clean up graffiti along L.A. River: "The riverbed that runs east of downtown has long been a haven for taggers, an open canvas with easy entry and easy escape routes. Crews are painting over the tags and working to keep new ones out.


For as long as many can remember, the section of the Los Angeles River that runs east of downtown has been an open-air gallery for taggers. No more.

"

Does marijuana make sweet taste sweeter?

Does marijuana make sweet taste sweeter?: "

No, we're not endorsing use of the weed, just noting an interesting piece of science published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by scientists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and Kyushu University in Japan.

The active ingredients in cannabis "act directly on taste receptors on the tongue to enhance sweet taste," according to a release from Monell -- at least that's what happens in mice. One of the authors, Dr. Robert Margolskee of Monell, noted that this phenom may be related to the famed "munchies" marijuana users report. (I'd send you to the research paper but it's not accessible online.)

Talking of marijuana and food, this from an Associated Press article: "Gourmet chefs are taking the art of cooking with marijuana to a higher level. In Denver, a new medical-marijuana shop called Ganja Gourmet serves cannabis-infused specialties such as pizza, hummus and lasagna. Across town in the Mile-High City, a Caribbean restaurant plans to offer classes on how to make multi-course meals with pot in every dish." You have to present a medical card to get served those items at Ganja Gourmet, apparently.

On L.A.'s ongoing medical marijuana dispensary debate, meanwhile, the LA Times' Tim Rutten had this to say on the topic in a Wednesday column:

"There are about 120 Starbucks coffee outlets within the Los Angeles city limits. According to the most reliable estimates, there are somewhere between 900 and 1,000 medical marijuana dispensaries. Mull over the implications of that comparison and you're on the way to understanding why the City Council seems enmeshed in an endless wrangle over how to regulate the number and sites of the nonprofit cooperatives allowed by local ordinance to distribute cannabis to individuals with doctors' prescriptions." His take, in part: The medical necessity is "really rather limited," and "we'd be best regulating the facilities like bars and liquor stores." (But read the whole column here.)

The City Council still hasn't decided how close the dispensaries can be to schools and residential areas and will be taking the matter up again on Jan. 13.

--Rosie Mestel

Photo Credit: Rick Bowmer / Associated Press

"

Beverage Companies, the Human Right to Water, and Water Neutrality

Beverage Companies, the Human Right to Water, and Water Neutrality: "

Elizabeth Royte's blog Waste, Water, Whatever led me to this story by Rebecca Bowe,The Human Right to Water, that recently appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Bowe covered an event called the Second Annual Corporate Water Footprinting Conference, that was

...part of a corporate conference series called Action for Sustainable America, cost approximately $2,000 to attend. Unlike last year, when conference organizers denied press passes to both the Guardian and the San Francisco Chronicle, they opted to allow reporters in this time — perhaps as a show of goodwill after being publicly critiqued for a lack of transparency (see "Tap dreams," 12/10/08). The event was held at Le Meridien, a swank Financial District hotel, and was attended by businesspeople from a variety of high-profile companies.

Representatives from Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestle portrayed their respective corporations as model stewards of the environment, the opposite of the bad raps they've been branded with by social justice advocates, who complain that these corporate entities are responsible for exacerbating water shortages in drought-prone areas. Rather than profit-driven behemoths sapping communities of a critical resource, the spokespeople described their companies as environmentally-minded leaders acutely aware of the widespread lack of access to clean water and actively trying to hatch solutions to alleviate it.

Here is what the panel session on the human right to water covered:

• What is the human right to water?


• As it is not defined as one of the 32 internationally recognized human rights listed in UN Declaration on Human Rights does the corporate community need to specifically recognise this?


• What are practical applications and corporate implications of such a right?


• Is it possible for companies to include the human right to water within strategy and operations?


• Can a rights based approach to water management work – can this be aligned with corporate water strategy?


• What are the responsibility and ethical boundaries for the various water stakeholders (government, rights holders, corporates, utilities, communities) on the right to water?

Sounds good, right? Bowe continues:

Mark Schlosberg, California director of Food & Water Watch, made it clear that he views the human right to water through a very different lens than the other panelists. "The 'human right to water' is not a concept for corporations to implement," Schlosberg said, relaying what was perhaps an unpopular message to a tough crowd. "Just as free speech is not a concept for corporations to implement. The human right to water is a concept which says that nobody should be denied access to clean water for basic human needs. It's not a question of whether or not a corporation wants to adhere to that. It's the responsibility of governments to create laws, and of corporations to follow laws. I don't think that the basic human right to water ... is alienable, just like certain constitutional rights are also inalienable and can't be contracted away."

I get the sense that Mark Schlosberg's viewpoint was not one that was widely shared by the typical corporate attendee, but perhaps I am being cynical. I should note that not all the speakers were corporate types.

Here's more:

Dan Bena, director of sustainability, health, safety and environment for PepsiCo International, kicked off with a presentation about how an estimated 1.5 billion impoverished people living in developing countries worldwide lack access to safe drinking water. Showing images of African children swimming naked in a river, he stressed the frequently repeated statistic that once every 15 seconds, another child in the developing world perishes from waterborne illness.

To hear Bena tell it, PepsiCo is emerging as a corporate trailblazer in protecting people from such a fate. In addition to its conservation efforts, it has donated to an organization that provides microloans to families for small-scale water infrastructure projects, he said. And at the urging of one of its shareholders, it recently agreed to sign a commitment supporting "the human right to water.

But when asked whether PepsiCo, the parent company of Aquafina, has a strategy for reducing the widespread use of bottled water — a flashpoint for environmentalists because it taxes aquifers, requires extensive shipping, and uses tons of plastic to produce — Bena didn't have a straight answer. "We are evaluating it, but I can't tell you," he said. "The critics are certainly very strong, but we think that people, by and large, want the convenience that bottled water provides."

Bowe also noted that Coca-Cola spokesperson Denise Knight trumpeted (Bowe's word) "Water Neutrality", something Coke pursues. But given the fact that Coke annually uses 313 billion liters of water to produce 129 billion liters of beverages and uses more water as its business grows, Knight acknowledged that the term might be somewhat misleading.

Ya think?

One activist referred to the "water neutrality" claim as "greenwashing".

But decide for yourself - read Bowe's entire article.

Wish I could have been there.

"I don't necessarily agree with the term 'human right to water,' because then the lawyers jump in here ... and become rich off of this back-and-forth, knocking-heads process." -- Harry Ott, conference speaker, quoted in the article

"

A Journalist's Research On Bone Scans Leads To Discovery About Herself

A Journalist's Research On Bone Scans Leads To Discovery About Herself: "

By Gisele Grayson

After two months of working on a story about conditions I either had never heard of or that rarely crossed my mind, I learned a few weeks back that I have one--osteopenia.

Scan results for my left hip. (NPR)

Because I haven't gone through menopause, my diagnosis at this point is just a number on a graph that shows my bone density is a bit lower than it probably should be.

Some of the risk factors for low bone density developing into a bigger problem are being white, thin, and if a first-degree relative has had osteoporosis. I fall into two of the three categories, at least.

Premenopausal women don't usually get bone scans. I decided to find out how dense my bones are during research for a story on the marketing of Merck's drug Fosamax and the condition of osteopenia.

After getting the results, I called my ob-gyn, who told me not to worry about the number. At my age, he said, I shouldn't even consider taking any drugs.

What should I do? He recommended upping my calcium intake and getting my vitamin D level tested. If it's low, he said, I should consider doing something about. Oh, and one other thing, he advised me to find time for real exercise--not just hauling around my 2- and 4-year-old kids.

Working on this story took me deep into one of the gray zones of modern medicine. I consider myself to be a pretty well-informed health consumer, but I still had to remind myself to ask questions, especially about some of the statistics thrown my way.

A drug may, for example, reduce fracture risk by 50 percent. But what was the absolute risk of a bone breaking in the first place? If that number is already very low, then the benefit from taking a drug can be vanishingly small.

Even now, after all the research I've done, it's difficult to know what to make of my bone-density report. But one thing I'm definitely going to do is make sure my mother gets her bones scanned. Her mother's shoulders gently rounded in the decade before she died, a sign of bone trouble.

Perhaps I do have a first-degree relative with osteoporosis. If that's the case, then I'd have an even bigger incentive to eat better and get some exercise.

» E-Mail This » Add to Del.icio.us

"

Rodent of the Week: Chemo disrupts birth of new brain cells

Rodent of the Week: Chemo disrupts birth of new brain cells: "

Many people refer to something called chemo-brain that occurs while on chemotherapy. The medications, while attacking cancer cells, also seem to affect cognitive function. A new study depicts what happens in the brain from these potent drugs and suggests a method that may help resolve the problem.

Researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center developed a rodent model to test which among four commonly used chemotherapy drugs crossed the blood-brain barrier. Two medications were known to cross the barrier and two were not expected to do so. But the study showed all four drugs caused a significant breakdown of brain cell regeneration in the animal model, including a 15.4% reduction in new brain cells after use of fluorouracil, a 30.5% reduction following cyclophosphamide, a 22.4% reduction following doxorubicin and a 36% reduction following paclitaxel.

"It could be that all of the chemo drugs cross into the brain after all, or that they act via peripheral mechanisms, such as inflammation, that could open up the blood-brain barrier," the lead author of the study, Dr. Robert Gross, said in a news release.

Previous studies, however, have shown that the experimental growth hormone, IGF-1, may increase the number of new brain cells, which could reduce the cognitive effect of chemotherapy.

The study was published online in the journal Cancer Investigation.

— Shari Roan

Photo credit: Advanced Cell Technology, Inc.

"

About 1% of U.S. children have autism spectrum disorder, the CDC says

About 1% of U.S. children have autism spectrum disorder, the CDC says: "

About 1 in 110 U.S. children suffers from autism spectrum disorders, a broad classification that includes autism, Asperger's syndrome and pervasive developmental disabilities, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported today in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The data, which were released on a provisional basis in October, coincide well with other estimates of autism prevalence, including a report in the journal Pediatrics that same month.

The new data represent a 50% increase from two years ago, when the agency estimated the prevalence of the disorder at about 1 in 150 children. At least some of the increase comes from better diagnosis of the disorder, but some apparently also comes from a complex mix of genetic and environmental factors -- although it is not clear what those factors might be. The new study did not investigate potential causes of the disorder, said lead author Catherine Rice, a behavioral health scientist at the CDC's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. Other CDC groups are looking at potential causes, she said.

The study focused on children who were 8 years old in 2006, the most recent year for which data were available, because other studies have shown that most cases of autism spectrum disorders are diagnosed by that age. The researchers studied case records of children at 11 sites on the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, which covers about 8% of U.S. children. Case records were reviewed to ensure that appropriate diagnostic criteria for the disorders were met, but the children were not studied directly.

The researchers found that 2,757 of 307,790 8-year-olds in the sites had an autism spectrum disorder, an overall prevalence of 9 per 1,000. Rates at individual sites ranged from a low of 4.2 per 1,000 in Florida to a high of 12.1 in Arizona and Missouri. Rice said it is likely the low rates represent an underreporting, but she had no explanation for the states with the highest rates.

Boys were about 4.5 times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with the disorder, which matches well with earlier studies that found about 80% of victims are male. That means that about 1 in 70 boys suffers from the disorder, compared with about 1 in 315 girls. The average age of diagnosis was 4.5, about five months earlier than had been the case in 2002.

-- Thomas H. Maugh II

"

Drink soda, gain 10 pounds of fat a year!

Drink soda, gain 10 pounds of fat a year!: "

If you can’t win hearts and minds, appeal to their stomachs. That's seems to be the philosophy of the New York City health department, which recently released nauseating videos of a man attempting to drink what looks like a gloopy, gelatinous cup of fat.



Viewers seem to have gotten the hint -- but they're spitting it right back out. New Yorkers had had it up to here. They’d been putting up with subway ads sending the same message, as well as a failed proposal for a soda tax this year. "I want this on my Ipod," one commenter at New York Magazine said of the video.

Then again, said commenter Alexandre Laudet over at the Huffington Post, "We are so bombarded with info we almost need to be shocked into listening at times so if it works, why not?"

The American Beverage Assn. called the ads "sensationalized." That may be so -- and it may have inspired the contrarian consumer to crack open another can of soda -- but I'll bet you a mineral water that anyone who's seen the ad will think twice before taking that first sip.

-- Amina Khan

"

Dark Matter Particles May Have Been Detected

Dark Matter Particles May Have Been Detected: "During two seminars at Stanford and Fermilab on Thursday, researchers described signals for two events detected deep in an old iron mine in Minnesota that might mark the first detection of dark matter — or not. The presenters said the chances that the signals they detected were caused by something other than "neutralino" dark matter particles was 23 percent. "One source indicates that we'd need less than 10 total detections within the CDMS' range in order to have a high degree of confidence in the results." The NY Times describes the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search methodology: "The cryogenic experiment is nearly half a mile underground in an old iron mine in Soudan, Minn., to shield it from cosmic rays. It consists of a stack of germanium and silicon detectors, cooled to one-hundredth of a degree Kelvin. When a particle hits one of the detectors, it produces an electrical charge and deposits a small bit of energy in the form of heat, each of which are independently measured. By comparing the amounts of charge and heat left behind, the collaboration’s physicists can tell so-called wimps from more mundane particles like neutrons, which are expected to flood the underground chamber from radioactivity in the rocks around it." Here are the research team's summary notes of the latest results (PDF).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"

California's population grows by less than 1%

California's population grows by less than 1%: "The slowest rate in more than a decade is blamed primarily on the recession, specifically high unemployment and foreclosures.





California's population grew less than 1% in the last year, the slowest growth rate in more than a decade and a vivid indicator of the continued toll that the deep recession has taken on the state.

"

Asshole

Asshole: ""

We had a deal. A few Senators just lied to us.

We had a deal. A few Senators just lied to us.: "I've seen a few post-mortems of the public option campaign kicking around the Internets. Invariably, as more are written, some will blame the people leading the campaign for not adopting different tactics which, the authors of the post-mortems will claim, could have led to victory.

Before this line of writing becomes too widespread, we all need to remember that the only reason we didn't win the public option campaign was because a few Senators lied to us. Unless someone can think of ways to have prevented them from lying, then these post-mortems will be useless.

Back on May 21st, there were only 28 Senators in support of a triggerless public option. Through your tireless participation in a whip count effort, by October 8th we raised that number to 51 when Jon Tester came out in support. By October 30th, when Evan Bayh said he wouldn't filibuster, we were up to 56 Democrats for cloture on health care reform with a public option.

From that point, the only four Senators we still needed all lied to us in one form or another. Both Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln signed a document stating that they supported a public option, only to reverse their positions. Blanche Lincoln's website still comically claimed she supported a public option even as she was declaring her opposition to one on the Senate floor.

Still, Landrieu, Lincoln and Ben Nelson were all part of the group of ten Senators who forged a deal on the public option that included a Medicare buy-in. Further, immediately after that deal was reached, Harry Reid contacted Joe Lieberman to see if he liked the deal. Lieberman told Harry Reid that he was liking what he was seeing, and just wanted to wait for the CBO report. Further, Lieberman had supported an even stronger Medicare buy-in (for Americans aged 50-64) as recently as September 2009.

Six days later, Lieberman and Nelson went on national television to engage in some more mendacity. Lieberman said he would filibuster the deal, even though he had told Reid he liked it, and even though he had recently advocated for it. Ben Nelson badmouthed the deal even though he helped forge it.

And then, when the lying was all done, Rahm Emanuel ordered the Democratic Senate caucus to do as Lieberman said. And the Democratic Senate caucus not only is ready to comply, but to do so without punishing Lieberman (or any of the other liars, for that matter).

To put it bluntly, we had won the campaign, but were lied to by a small number of Senators. In particular, we were lied to by Joe Lieberman. If you have a post-mortem that could have prevented the lying, I'd love to hear it. For, were it not for the lying, the public option campaign would have been won.

Update: Just stop yelling at each other in the comments. Just stop it. It doesn't help anything. I'll keep that in mind myself.

Update 2: Instead of yelling at each other, watch Franken shut Lieberman down. It will make you feel a little better:

"

When asked to pray, what do doctors say?

When asked to pray, what do doctors say?: "

Families often turn to prayer when a loved one is in the hospital. But what happens when they ask their doctor to take part?

A new study reveals how physicians deal with a request for prayer by patients and their families in clinical settings. The 30 doctors surveyed by researchers from Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., and Rice University in Houston were pediatricians or pediatric oncologists chosen from 13 highly ranked hospitals.

In nearly all cases, the patients or their families brought up the idea of prayer, and it was most often related to a child who was seriously ill or dying. And while every physicians wanted to be respectful of the families, they handled prayer requests differently. Researchers boiled those variations down into four scenarios.

In the first, doctors actively took part in the prayer. Some, when asked, attended religious ceremonies such as baptisms. Said one, "...I had the parents ask me to be there for the baptism given to the baby because the baby was dying...I stay at the bedside myself because, I felt like, you know they're part of my family, so...I love to share that."

In the second, physicians were present for the prayers but did not take part, instead standing with the families and perhaps showing respect by bowing their heads. Some even spoke at funerals. Said one pediatric oncologist, "I participate [in prayers]. I mean in the sense that I generaly sit quietly and listen to their prayer in what I hope is a respectful manner."

One, when asked to lead a prayer, explained his reaction: "If somebody wishes me to lead a prayer, I say, 'I don't think that's appropriate or I would prefer not to but I'll be happy to be here with you.' " The physician went on to say he feels it is "manifestly unfair of patients to demand something so personal of their physicians."

In the third scenario, doctors tweaked prayer requests to make them more realistic and appropriate. "I try not to bring myself into it," said one physician, "because I don't want this to be about me, and I don't want them [the family] to think that I have more...power to cure their child than I actually have."

In the fourth, physicians referred patients and family members to religious or spiritual leaders or to the hospital chaplain. One doctor explained that while she told families she would keep them in her prayers, she would also suggest they also talk to a chaplain. "If I don't feel comfortable," she said, "if I feel that their religion is something that I have a hard time understanding, I often ask if they would like to have some spiritual guidance."

The study appears in the December issue of Southern Medical Journal.

Photo credit: Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times

"

A cap-and-trade exercise riles Copenhagen

A cap-and-trade exercise riles Copenhagen: "

Ironies abound here at the global climate talks, from the simple
(holding a global-warming summit in freezing cold, inviting thousands
of delegates from impoverished nations to one of the world’s most
expensive cities) to the sad (the Danish people, some of the nicest on
the planet, being represented on television by baton-wielding police
cracking down on protesters).

But
perhaps the most fascinating irony of all is playing out inside the
host Bella Center, where environmentalists and other nonprofit groups
are getting a quick and brutal immersion in the “cap-and-trade” system
that President Obama has proposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in
the United States.

The
problem here in Copenhagen is space: The Bella Center holds 20,000
people at capacity. The United Nations issued more than double that
many credentials for the climate summit. So as more and more people
arrived this week – delegates, environmentalists, Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez – summit organizers started limiting who could come inside.

They
started by issuing “secondary passes” to nonprofits and requiring
those passes for admission. The groups, commonly referred to as non-governmental organizations or NGOs, are free to trade the passes
amongst themselves.

The
number of passes has declined each day. By some groups’ estimates, the
entire U.S. environmental movement – consisting of 90 groups and
thousands of people – will be down to fewer than 10 total passes by
Thursday.

If
that plan sounds familiar, it should. It’s a super-compressed version
of how Obama wants to reduce the emissions that scientists blame for global
warming: declining cap, tradeable permits, near phase-out in the long
term.

Not
that the parallel is any comfort to NGOs, who complained bitterly today
that their numbers would be reduced from 15,000 total last week to
1,000 total on Thursday.

Mary
Robinson, the honorary chair of Oxfam International, said in a statement
that her group “is extremely concerned about the limited access which
observers have to the international climate talks and the outright
exclusion of some organizations altogether. With the negotiations here
in crisis we desperately need the engagement and witness of people's
organizations to keep the pressure on political leaders to deliver a
fair, ambitious and binding climate deal.”

Conference
organizers said today they will open an overflow center offsite on
Thursday for the locked-out NGOs to watch proceedings. No word on
whether a secondary pass market has sprung up yet.

--Jim Tankersley in Copenhagen

"

When will plug-in cars pay off?

When will plug-in cars pay off?: "

Automakers are promising that affordable plug-in hybrid electric vehicles will be available in the next couple of years, but a new report contends that it will be decades before the fuel savings and lower emissions make up for the high cost of batteries.

Plug-in hybrid - Automotive industry - Technology - Electric vehicle - Energy"

Life expectancy reaches new high

Life expectancy reaches new high: "

The average American lives 77 years and 11 months -- the highest life expectancy in history, according to statistics released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since 2000, life expectancy has increased by about 1.1 years. White women live the longest, an average of 80-and-a-half years.

The data, from 2007, show continued improvements in life expectancy for all Americans, although women are faring better than men, and whites fare better than other racial groups. The gap between whites and blacks declined by 35% between 1989 and 2007. But the race differential is still 4.6 years.

The improvements are largely due to medical advances in the treatment of heart disease, cancer, stroke and lower respiratory disease, said the author of the report, from the National Center for Health Statistics. Some health experts have warned that the obesity epidemic, however, may begin to undermine the trend in a longer life expectancy.

Among states, Hawaii has the lowest death rate, while West Virginia has the highest.

-- Shari Roan

Chart: Percentage of deaths caused by common maladies from 1980 to 2005. Credit: National Center for Health Statistics

"

Wounded soldier's shattered pancreas gets replaced in a whole new way

Wounded soldier's shattered pancreas gets replaced in a whole new way: "

Six days before Thanksgiving, a 21-year-old Air Force enlistee, Tre Francesco Porfirio, was pulling duty in Afghanistan when three high-velocity bullets tore through his pancreas — the fist-size organ that produces insulin and enzymes we need to extract fuel from the food we eat.

With an injury like that, Porfirio's prognosis was very difficult: If he could survive long enough to get to a specialized transplant center, he could perhaps get a transplant of islet cells from a deceased donor and take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life. Or doctors could remove his pancreas, leaving him completely dependent on insulin. Either way, an early death from complications of Type 1 diabetes was highly likely.

But doctors who improvised a way to help the serviceman quickly made Porfirio a pioneer in the technique of islet-cell transplantation instead.

On Tuesday, Dr. Camillo Ricordi, director of the University of Miami's Diabetes Research Institute, told the story of a long-distance islet cell transplant — a still-experimental procedure considered to be the best hope for treating those, such as Type 1 diabetes patients, with a non-functioning pancreas. The transplant involved flying Porfirio's shattered pancreas — now removed — from an operating room at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital in Washington to Ricordi's specialized laboratory, more than 1,000 miles away, at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine. There, on the night before Thanksgiving, the delicate islet cells of Porfirio's own pancreas were extracted and purified — a specialized operation performed at only a handful of transplant centers across the country.

Until now, if you were a patient who couldn't make it in time to one of 15 cities with medical centers equipped to prepare islet cells for transplant, you were out of luck. But physicians willing to try anything to help Porforio have shown that may no longer be true.

The stew of islet cells prepared at the University of Miami was sent back to Walter Reed. There — under the supervision of Ricordi's team in Coral Gables, Fla., watching remotely — physicians carefully fed the purified cells through a tube into the airman's liver. Within days of the procedure, performed on Thanksgiving, Porfirio's islet cells did what all physicians hope they will do in such cases: They began to produce insulin, effectively doing the work of the excised pancreas.

Porfirio is unusual also in that his islet cells came from his own pancreas, which, while in shreds, was not dead yet. Most patients must rely on a deceased donor's pancreas and must take anti-rejection drugs to ensure their immune system doesn't attack the foreign cells. The ability to use Porfirio's own islet cells for the transplant, while "very rare," according to Ricordi, means he will not face rejection issues that make such transplants a lifelong challenge for recipients.

That remote transplant, said Ricordi in an interview, is a first: it could mean patients whose pancreas is destroyed by diabetes or trauma can be treated, potentially, anywhere in the country. Having shown that islet cells can be prepared for transplantation remotely and returned in time to a waiting patient — and then, that physicians with minimal training in such transplants can be supervised in doing them — Ricordi's team says that many more patients may gain access to the procedure. Patients with chronic pancreatitis, an inflammation of the insulin-producing organ, may, with some fancy logistics, be able to get the treatment they need close to home. And patients whose pancreas is compromised or destroyed by trauma can be treated where they are.

— Melissa Healy

"

A cup (or more) of coffee or tea a day could keep Type 2 diabetes away

A cup (or more) of coffee or tea a day could keep Type 2 diabetes away: "

Did you make a stop at your favorite coffee place today for some java or a cup of tea? If not, you may want to schedule one for tomorrow. Because a new study shows that coffee and tea consumption--even decaf versions--could help lower the risk of Type 2 diabetes.

The study, which appears today in Archives of Internal Medicine, is a meta-analysis of 457,922 people in 18 studies published between 1966 and 2009 that looked at the link between drinking coffee and diabetes risk. After analyzing the research, the study authors concluded that every extra cup of coffee consumed in one day was correlated with a 7% decrease in the excess risk of diabetes. Even better results were found for bigger coffee and tea consumers--drinking three to four cups a day was associated with about a 25% reduced diabetes risk compared with those who drank between none and two cups day.

Researchers also saw positive results with decaf coffee and tea (some tea varieties do have caffeine, but typically far less than the average cup of coffee). People who drank more than three to four cups of decaf a day had about a one-third lower risk than those who didn't drink any. And tea drinkers who consumed more than three to four cups a day had about a one-fifth lower diabetes risk than non-tea drinkers.

Because the decreased risk was seen among those who didn't consume caffeine, researchers concluded that that substance couldn't be the only key ingredient. Attention has been focused on other chemicals found in the beverages: magnesium (shown in studies to reduce diabetes risk), lignans (plant-derived chemical compounds that have antioxidant properties), and chlorogenic acids (also plant-derived antioxidants that slow down glucose release after eating).

In the study, researchers speculated that identifying the components of coffee and tea active in reducing Type 2 diabetes risk could potentially pave the way for new therapies to treat the disease. Health experts could also recommend drinking coffee and tea to at-risk patients, in addition to counseling them to exercise more and lose weight.

-- Jeannine Stein

Photo credit: Alex Garcia / Chicago Tribune

"

Shifting gears in L.A. -- latimes.com

Shifting gears in L.A. -- latimes.com

Posted using ShareThis

Kids and drugs: Worrisome signs, here and on the horizon

Kids and drugs: Worrisome signs, here and on the horizon: "

The federal government's annual report of kids' alcohol and drug abuse and attitudes about that abuse seems reassuring enough: Compared with that of recent years, marijuana use is down, use of hallucinogens is way down and use of methamphetamine is way, way down.

But the researchers and public officials who crunch those numbers warned that some of statistics gleaned from an annual survey of 46,000 American eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders are worrisome.

Marijuana use is a good example. American students' marijuana use has declined steadily since the mid-1990s. Now, one in three high school seniors says he or she has smoked marijuana at some point in the past 30 days; just over one in four 10th-graders has done so; and 11.8% of eighth-graders acknowledge they've smoked pot in the past month.

While those numbers represent a steady decline in pot use among U.S. students over the past 15 years, it's a decline that has stalled in the past five years. And kids' attitudes about marijuana use suggest a reversal may be ahead. In 1991, 58% of eighth-graders said they believed occasional marijuana use is harmful. By last year, that number had declined to 48% last year and this year slumped to 45%.

Gil Kerlikowske, the Obama administration's drug policy advisor, called such numbers "a warning sign."

"When beliefs soften, drug use worsens," said Kerlikowske, whose office is expected to release its first draft of policy initiatives to combat and treat drug abuse in February. "Drug use becomes more acceptable," Kerlikowske added in a news conference Monday morning in Washington, D.C.

University of Michigan researcher Lloyd Johnston, who oversees the yearly survey of American school kids, said there was "serious softening" in the risks kids perceived in use of the party drug Ecstasy, of LSD and of inhalants. He called the survey results "an early warning sign [that] a new generation of kids are interested ... in rediscovering these drugs, because they don't understand why they shouldn't be using them."

Closer to home, the survey shows that U.S. adolescents continue to raid their parents' and their friends' medicine chests for drugs to abuse. Use of prescription painkillers is at an all-time high, with one in 10 high school seniors reporting they have taken Vicodin for nonmedical reasons in the past year, and one in 20 seniors reporting the nonmedical use of Oxycontin in that period.

Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which has commissioned the survey for each of the past 35 years, added that teenagers' use of prescription stimulant drugs is holding steady, with just over one in 20 10th- and 12th-graders reporting they have taken "speed" prescribed to many kids in treatment of ADHD symptoms. Volkow said that in many cases, teenagers are taking these drugs before tests or study sessions as "cognitive enhancers." While fewer kids report they're taking Ritalin, the survey detected that much of that decline has merely shifted to Adderall, a newer ADHD drug.

The officials said that kids report some confidence that prescription drugs are less harmful -- in part because they are prescribed by doctors and not produced in street labs. In the survey's first accounting of where kids get the drugs they take, it found that two in three who reported illicit drug use said they got the drugs from a friend or relative. Almost one in five said he or she got drugs with a prescription from a doctor.

-- Melissa Healy

"

The Swiftboating of Science

The Swiftboating of Science: "

Colleague Ari Michelsen alerted me to this article in The Progress Report byFaiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Zaid Jilani, and Alex Seitz-Wald, Global Warming, A Fake Scandal.

I excerpted the following two sections, because the term 'swiftboating' caught my eye. Looks like we have a new application for the process!

THE SWIFTBOATING OF SCIENCE BEGINS: The coordinated attack began last month when more than a thousand stolen internal e-mails from the CRU were dumped on a Russian web server. Hackers then used a computer in Saudi Arabia to post the e-mails on the climate skeptic website Air Vent. Skeptic blog "Watts Up With That" then picked up the story, and it wasn't long before the National Review and the rest of the right-wing blogosphere leaped on the hacked e-mails. Within a few days of the leak, Sen. David Vitter's (R-LA) staff began distributing a letter claiming that the stolen e-mails revealed that global warming "could well be the greatest act of scientific fraud in history." Soon after, right wingers of all stripes took up the cause of using the e-mails to debunk climate science, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, oil empire tycoon David Koch, and radical Fox News host Glenn Beck. Despite all this hysteria, the truth is that the content of the e-mails proved no such thing. Right wingers point to exchanges between climate scientists disparaging global warming deniers, which by itself does nothing to disprove the case of a warming planet. The most prominent e-mail deniers are touting is one from Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann sent to CRU chief Phil Jones, where Mann wrote, "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." While conspiracy theorists were quick to declare that this was evidence of Mann and Jones conspiring to hide data skeptical of global warming, as Time explains, Jones's "'trick'...simply referred to the replacing of proxy temperature data from tree rings in recent years with more accurate data from air temperatures. It's an analytical technique that has been openly discussed in scientific journals for over a decade -- hardly the stuff of conspiracy." Even conservative writer Megan McArdle has admitted, "I have so far seen no evidence of the kind of of grand conspiracy that some critics have charged."

THE MEDIA BOOSTS THE CONSPIRACY: Despite the fact that the e-mails in no way disprove the science of climate change, the mainstream media almost instantly took up the right wing's spin and used it to undermine the case for the existence climate change. NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams quickly adopted the conservative Climategate smear, asking, "Have the books been cooked on climate change?" Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal accused climate scientists of being Stalinists. A variety of Fox News hosts and guests promoted the e-mails over and over again as refuting the science of climate change. One of the worst media reports on the non-scandal appeared on CBS News. The network reported that the "e-mails seem to show that some of the top experts decided to exclude or manipulate some research that didn't help prove global warming exists," and said that the e-mails could cause the Copenhagen conference to "only produce the framework for an agreement that then will be passed on to next year." The mainstream media's willingness to grant legitimacy to the conspiracy theories has had unfortunate consequences. Two of the scientists whose e-mails were leaked have received death threats, prompting the FBI to launch an investigation. The Saudi negotiator in Copenhagen told the press that his government's "confidence" in the science of climate change "has been shaken" by the hacked e-mails.

Read the entire article here.

“I would assume that more interesting issues will be found in the files, and that a useful debate about the degree of politicization of climate science will emerge. A conclusion could be that the principle, according to which data must be made public, so that also adversaries may check the analysis, must be really enforced. Another conclusion could be that scientists like Mike Mann, Phil Jones and others should no longer participate in the peer-review process or in assessment activities like IPCC.” -- Hans van Storch

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