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Post by swamprat on Apr 21, 2020 0:02:52 GMT
Dan Crenshaw went one on one with HBO's Bill Maher and shut down Maher's claims that President Trump was slow to move on the Coronavirus.
Daniel Reed Crenshaw (born March 14, 1984) is an American politician and former United States Navy SEAL officer serving in the United States House of Representatives for Texas's 2nd congressional district since 2019. When he ran for Congress, he ran as a member of the Republican Party.
Born to American parents of Scots-Irish and Italian-American descent, in Aberdeen, Scotland, Crenshaw grew up in Katy, Texas. His mother died of cancer when he was ten years old. While his father worked in the oil industry, Crenshaw spent some time growing up in Ecuador and Colombia, gaining a proficiency in Spanish by working a variety of after-school jobs, including a long stint at a chicken shop in Chapinero. He graduated from Colegio Nueva Granada high school in Bogotá, Colombia in June 2002.
Crenshaw graduated from Tufts University with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in international relations in May 2006. He earned a Master of Public Administration (MPA) from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in September 2017 and worked as a military legislative assistant for Congressman Pete Sessions.
While at Tufts, Crenshaw joined the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps and was commissioned in the United States Navy after his graduation. He served in the Navy SEALs for ten years, including five tours of duty, reaching the rank of lieutenant commander. His first deployment was to Fallujah, Iraq, where he joined SEAL Team Three. He was based out of Naval Amphibious Base Coronado in Coronado, California.
While serving in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan in 2012, during his third deployment, he was injured by the detonation of an improvised explosive device; he lost his right eye and required surgery to save the vision in his left eye. After the injury, he was deployed to his fourth and fifth tours of duty in Bahrain and South Korea.
As a Navy SEAL, Crenshaw was awarded two Bronze Star Medals, the Purple Heart, and the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with valor. He medically retired from military service in 2016 as a Lieutenant Commander.
On November 6, 2018, Crenshaw was elected to Congress. Following the election, Crenshaw called for the de-politicization of comedy and sports and expressed a desire for political rhetoric to be toned down.
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Post by SysConfig on Apr 21, 2020 2:26:11 GMT
American Charlie Caught!
Via Great Game India, Dr. Charles Lieber is a nano-scientist at Harvard University. He was recently charged by the American authorities for secretly being a Chinese agent.However, there is a mystery surrounding the nature of his work. It is said he was recruited for advanced research into nanowire-batteries. But investigation by GreatGameIndia has shown that Lieber was infact working on virus transmitters that could penetrate cell membranes without affecting the intercellular functions and even measure activities inside heart cells and muscle fibers. Chinese Agent Charles Lieber Dr. Charles Leiber is a nano-scientist at Harvard University who also serves as a chair for Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. He was arrested by the U.S. Department of Defense in January for lying about his association with China’s Thousand Talent Program. It is basically a recruitment plan which seeks to lure Chinese overseas talent and foreign experts to bring their knowledge and experience to China and in return, reward individuals for stealing proprietary information. Chinese Agent Dr. Charles Lieber According to the charging documents, Lieber was a contractual participant of the program and was paid $50,000 monthly, along with $158,000 in living expenses and $1.74 million to set up a research lab at Wuhan University. The fact that Lieber kept his association with the Chinese a secret put his integrity in question as well as financial conflicts of interest, including financial support from foreign governments or foreign entities. Nanowire-Batteries – a Smokescreen? What’s more concerning is that the affidavit released by the federal prosecutors states that Leiber signed an agreement between Harvard and Wuhan Insitute of Technology. According to the affidavit, the purpose of the agreement was to “carry out advanced research and development of nanowire-based lithium-ion batteries with high performance for electric vehicles.”Dr. Charles Lieber at Wuhan Institute of Technology in 2011 However, things don’t add up since the focus of Leiber’s research has never been about nanowire batteries. One nanoscientist and former student of Lieber’s says: “I have never seen Charlie working on batteries or nanowire batteries.” In fact, in all his research papers and patents, there is no mention of “batteries” or “vehicles”.
Although Lieber was released a day later on a $1 million bond, the question remains what exactly was the nature of Leiber’s research. Leiber and his ‘Virus Transmitters’ Dr. Leiber joined Harvard in 1991. In his early days at the university, he made great strides in the field by growing nanowires in a flask. Researchers before Leiber were already creating wire-like structures with the help of semiconductors, metals and other materials. However, their approach would be quite expensive and would need clean-room facilities like the ones used by computer chip-makers. In contrast, Lieber could create nanostructures using nothing but simple and inexpensive chemical techniques. He even went a step further to show how these nanowires could be used as transistors, complex logic circuits, data storage devices, and even sensors. A V-shaped silicon nanowire is attached to bimetal connectors that lift the entire structure up out of the horizontal plane on which it is made. B.Tian and C.M. Lieber, Harvard University In 2001, Harvard Magazine published a report that discussed Leiber and his team’s research into what was termed as ‘Liquid Computing’. The report mentioned how Leiber was at the forefront solving silicon-based microelectronics industry’s greatest challenge – making silicon chips smaller and smaller. Leiber noted that “continued shrinkage ultimately becomes problematic in terms of just how one achieves [it].” Instead, he created tiny logic circuits and memory – the two main components of a computer – using nanowires. And these circuits were really tiny, some of which just a few atoms across! Ten years later, Leiber created a transistor so small it can be used to penetrate cell membranes and probe their interiors, without affecting the intercellular functions. The bio-compatible transistor – the size of a virus – can not only measure activities inside a neuron but also heart cells and muscle fibers. Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories. Charles Lieber created a transistor so small it can be used to penetrate cell membranes and probe their interiors, without disrupting function. The transistor (yellow) sits near the bend in a hairpin-shaped, lipid-coated silicon nanowire. Its scale is similar to that of intra-cellular structures such as organelles (pink and blue orbs) and actin filaments (pink strand). B.Tian and C.M. Lieber, Harvard University In 2017, Leiber and his team successfully created flexible 3D nanowires mesh that can inject into the brain or retina of an animal, attach itself to the neurons and monitor electrical signals between the cells. Once the nanowire has been lifted up, it can penetrate three-dimensional structures such as cells. B.Tian and C.M. Lieber, Harvard University It’s no surprise the Chinese officials were quick to get him onboard considering he’s the brightest brain when it comes to nanotechnology. Not only his research would have made China an important player in this futuristic technology but it would also be a be a step forward towards China’s stated goal of Biological Dominance. Nanotech in the Battlefield The importance of nanotechnology in advanced warfare can be understood from the fact that the United States’ Department of Defense (DoD) is one of the largest supporters of nanotechnology research. They have funded hundreds of millions of dollars into various research related to nanoelectronics and nanomaterials.
The technology could help create nanosensors and nanocoatings that military could use to protect soldiers against chemical and biological attacks. The fact that nanosensors can detect microscopic quantities of chemicals means it can be used as an effective early warning system against chemical warfare agents such as nerve agents and blood agents. One can see why Charles Lieber’s secret association with the Chinese institutes and universities and his expertise in nanotechnology could pose a serious threat. Lieber lied about his involvement with the Thousand Talents Plan and affiliation with the Wuhan Institute of Technology and that makes him no less than a Chinese biowarfare agent.
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Post by swamprat on Apr 21, 2020 20:04:39 GMT
Granted, the HuffPo is an anti-Trump publication and they may be skewing data for the advantage of bad-mouthing him, but they DO make some good points. You cannot ignore the science.
Environmental Destruction Brought Us COVID-19. What It Brings Next Could Be Far Worse. A virus that originated in animals has upended life across the globe. But the next deadly pandemic could make this look like “a warmup.”
By Jimmy Tobias and Chris D’Angelo
04/21/2020
Dr. Richard Kock was on duty at London’s Royal Veterinary College in January 2017 when he received an urgent message from international health officials. He was needed for an emergency response mission in the Mongolian countryside, where a deadly viral outbreak was underway.
He packed his things, caught a flight to the capital city of Ulaanbaatar and drove for two days into the arid steppe. He found a disturbing scene: frozen corpses scattered on hillsides, burn pits stacked with bodies and residents addled with anxiety.
But this pandemic was not targeting humans. It was goat plague, a lethal and highly infectious virus that has killed goats, sheep and other small ruminants in huge numbers since it was first detected last century. There is a vaccine, but its application in Mongolia had been botched. The virus had spilled from domestic livestock into local populations of critically endangered saiga antelope, and it wiped out about 85% of the infected, Kock said.
“Nearly everything died across a huge landscape,” said Kock, who has worked for decades to stem infectious diseases around the world. There are only a few thousand saiga antelope left in Mongolia today, largely due to the goat plague.
The only comforting element of this tale is that the disease is not transmissible to humans. At least, not yet.
But Kock worries. Goat plague is a paramyxovirus, a virus in the same family as measles. Its case fatality rate can be as high as 90%, and some animals that contract it can infect eight to 12 others.
“They are nasty viruses,” Kock said, adding that they’re formidable in their spread and aggressiveness. It wouldn’t take a big tweak in the goat plague’s genome ― “just two amino acids, essentially” ― for it to become infectious to humans, he said. “In theory, it is very possible.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, killing thousands and crushing the global economy, the potential threat of zoonotic spillover — when novel viruses and bacteria jump from animals to people — is becoming increasingly clear. The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 almost certainly originated in bats and is believed to have spilled into humans at a live animal market in Wuhan, China. Readily transmissible and far deadlier than the seasonal flu, COVID-19 is now one of the worst pandemics of animal origin that humans have faced in a century. But it won’t be the last.
There are millions of viruses and bacteria out there that reside in wild animals and can potentially infect humans, and these emerging diseases are on the rise everywhere as humans disrupt ecosystems and exploit animal habitat across the globe. We are living in an age of pandemics, and the next one — let’s call it “Disease X,” as scientists often do — could be even more devastating than COVID-19.
“On a scale of 1 to 100, we could place [the current outbreak] probably somewhere a little below midway,” said Dennis Carroll, the chair of the Global Virome Project and former director of the emerging threats division at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Some known viruses circulating today have much higher mortality rates than the novel coronavirus but don’t spread easily among humans. If one of them mutated and became highly infectious in humans, Carroll said, Disease X could make this pandemic “look like a warmup.”
JOHN MINCHILLO/ASSOCIATED PRESSWorkers wearing personal protective equipment bury bodies in a trench on Hart Island, which is in the Bronx borough of New York City, earlier this month.
A Plague Rooted In Environmental Destruction
Political leaders are taking unprecedented measures to contain a virus that has infected at least 2.31 million people, killed at least 157,000 and forced national economies to their knees. Yet those unprecedented measures address only the symptoms of this crisis, an entirely reactionary response that has so far avoided addressing the root causes of novel disease emergence.
“COVID-19 is just the latest zoonotic disease to emerge that has its roots in the rampant habitat loss occurring around the world and the burgeoning wildlife trade,” a group of more than 100 conservation organizations wrote in a letter to the U.S. Congress last month, urging it to include in its stimulus bill new funding to combat the conditions that give rise to outbreaks like COVID-19. “Global pandemics will likely continue and even escalate if action isn’t taken.”
So far, though, Congress has failed to act on that threat, and the Trump administration is exacerbating the problem with its relentless campaign to roll back wildlife protections and cut environmental programs at home and abroad. All the while, the threat of zoonotic disease continues to intensify.
The virus that causes COVID-19 is just the latest infectious agent to jump from animals into people. HIV, Ebola, Marburg virus, SARS, MERS, Zika ― those, too, originated in animals and are part of the same perilous trend of novel diseases that have surfaced with increasing frequency as population growth, industrial agriculture, deforestation, wildlife exploitation, urban sprawl and other human activities bring our species into continuous contact with animal-borne pathogens.
“Emerging infectious diseases, the majority of which are zoonotic and have their origin in wildlife, have been increasing significantly — both numbers of outbreaks and diversity of diseases — over the past 50 years,” said Dr. Christian Walzer, chief global veterinarian at the New York City-based Wildlife Conservation Society.
The majority of emerging infectious diseases originate in animals, a 2017 study in the journal Nature Communications concluded, and “their emergence often involves dynamic interactions among populations of wildlife, livestock, and people within rapidly changing environments.” A 2015 study found that land use changes, such as urban expansion and deforestation, is the single most significant driver of many of the zoonotic outbreaks that have occurred since 1940.
“In the broadest sense, humans are the main drivers of zoonotic disease outbreaks,” said Catherine Machalaba, a policy adviser and research scientist at the EcoHealth Alliance.
EPPICPHOTOGRAPHY VIA GETTY IMAGESA small island of trees in a clear-cut pine forest. Dramatic changes in land use have contributed to the rise of zoonotic diseases.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought global attention to live wild animal markets, which are common throughout Southeast Asia and Africa and which scientists say provide ideal conditions for new pandemics to spawn. The markets, which are often located in dense, urban areas, bring a wide variety of domestic and wild species, living and dead, into contact with humans. They are potential petri dishes for novel pathogens to evolve and spread.
It is at one such “wet market” in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, that the novel coronavirus, labeled SARS-CoV-2, is believed to have first spilled from its original host (thought to be a bat) into an intermediary host species or directly into humans. The crowded market featured dozens of live and dead animals for sale that rarely, if ever, come in contact in the wild, from fish and rats to monkeys and foxes. These markets are poorly regulated, and endangered species are known to end up in them.
This coronavirus crossed over to humans in China, but the spillover of such diseases is occurring all over the world, including in the United States. Walzer points, for instance, to the rise of Lyme disease in North America, where our suburban developments and shopping malls wiped out wild forests, killed native predators, amplified rodent and deer populations, and fueled outbreaks of the tick-borne illness.
“It’s the classic example of how biodiversity loss has increased the risk for spillover,” Walzer said.
Consider also Nipah, a paramyxovirus, like the goat plague, that first appeared in Malaysia in 1998. That virus — an inspiration for the 2011 film “Contagion” — has its origins in fruit bats, but it spilled over to pigs on a farm where livestock pens abutted mango trees that bats used as a food source.
“Bats were coming in in large numbers, feeding on mangos and, in the process of chewing on the mango, they would drop mangos laden with mucus and other body fluids into the pig pens,” said Jonathan Epstein, vice president for science and outreach at the EcoHealth Alliance, which works to study and prevent zoonotic disease spillover. “That is how it started.”
Nipah does not harm bats. But it sickened pigs and soon infected humans, too. First, it spread to workers on the farm. Then, as pigs were traded around the country, it infected other humans. By the end of the outbreak in 1999, 265 people had contracted the virus and more than 100 had died. Malaysian authorities, meanwhile, had slaughtered millions of pigs to staunch the infection’s spread.
But the story doesn’t end there. Nipah, scientists soon discovered, was also in Bangladesh. Since the early 2000s, the country has suffered from a series of recurrent outbreaks that have claimed scores of lives. In these cases, however, there were no pigs involved. The virus spread here happened via sap from date palm plants, which some in Bangladesh harvest and drink raw in the winter months. Fruit bats have learned to exploit this food source, too, and their saliva, urine and droppings sometimes fall into the pots that people use to collect the palm sap. In this way, scientists say, Nipah has spread from bats to Bangladeshis.
“Nipah is a scary virus because it is super deadly,” said Epstein, who has studied the virus’s spread and notes that it has a case fatality rate in Bangladesh of about 75%.
But there’s another reason Nipah keeps disease experts up at night: Humans can spread the virus directly to each other, with no animal intermediary necessary.
“Nipah has shown human-to-human transmission consistently in Bangladesh, and that is why it is among the top listed infectious disease threats,” Epstein said. “It is only a matter of time before a version of Nipah virus gets into people, one that is both deadly and highly transmissible.”
In other words, there’s no need to speculate about the spillover of a scary disease like goat plague when Nipah is already on the scene.
Live animal markets and COVID-19. Degraded forests and Lyme disease. Agricultural production, disrupted bat habitat and a petrifying new paramyxovirus. These examples all tell the same story: Humanity’s effect on the natural world, and on wildlife especially, is causing novel pathogens to infect, harm and kill us. When we mine, drill, bulldoze and overdevelop, when we traffic in wild animals and invade intact habitat, when we make intimate contact with birds, bats, primates, rodents and more, we run an intensifying risk of contracting one of the estimated 1.6 million unknown viruses that reside in the bodies of other species.
Far From An ‘Unforeseen Problem’
Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has consistently undermined science as part of his pro-development, anti-environment agenda. And the administration’s response to COVID-19 has, unsurprisingly, been defined by similar denial.
Trump spent weeks downplaying the threat, only to suddenly change his tune and insist that no one could have possibly predicted or prepared for such a devastating pandemic. He described the outbreak as an “unforeseen problem,” “something that nobody expected.”
But a crisis of this magnitude was not only possible, it was all but inevitable. Many people, from business leaders to intelligence officials to infectious diseases experts, have been saying so for years.
“If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war,” billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates said in a 2015 Ted Talk, stressing that the U.S. and the world at large are wildly unprepared to respond.
Even Trump’s own appointees in the intelligence community had issued warnings.
“We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support,” says the 42-page Worldwide Threat Assessment that then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats presented to the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2019.
The report highlights stalled progress in combating infectious diseases such as malaria and the measles, as well as the link between emerging pathogens and human encroachment.
“The growing proximity of humans and animals has increased the risk of disease transmission,” it says. “The number of outbreaks has increased in part because pathogens originally found in animals have spread to human populations.”
And yet the Trump administration was caught unprepared, confused and unable to craft a coherent strategy to tackle the threat. Indeed, even in mid-March, the president was still comparing COVID-19 to the seasonal flu.
Beyond their hapless response, Trump and his Cabinet have also promoted a slew of policies that actively exacerbate the potential for zoonotic spillover.
Since taking power in 2017, the Trump administration has been on an anti-environment bonanza, rolling back wildlife and land protections while also working to cut funding for key international conservation programs that help prevent the sort of activities that give rise to infectious disease emergence. In its proposed budget for fiscal year 2021, for instance, the administration seeks to cut more than $300 million from critical USAID and State Department programs that combat wildlife trafficking, conserve large landscapes and otherwise promote biodiversity and wildlife protection abroad.
“USAID is one of the largest global donors for biodiversity conservation,” said Kelly Keenan Aylward, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Washington, D.C., office.
She pointed, for instance, to the agency’s Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment, a landscape-scale effort that focuses on combating wildlife trafficking and deforestation, two key drivers of biodiversity loss. USAID, Aylward said, also funds essential biodiversity programs in the Amazon and Southeast Asia, among other places.
Trump and his small army of industry-linked political appointees are also going after the country’s key domestic wildlife agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act and fighting the illegal wildlife trade. In fiscal year 2021, they aim to slash the agency’s budget by roughly $80 million, including significant cuts to its law enforcement programs. They also want to whittle away at the agency’s Multinational Species Conservation Fund, which finances conservation programs for imperiled species abroad.
The administration also finalized regulations that significantly weaken both the Endangered Species Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, two bedrock conservation laws. It engineered the largest rollback of public lands protection in U.S. history and has presided over a steep decline in the number of new species listed under the ESA. It has withdrawn U.S. membership in UNESCO, a United Nations program that protects hundreds of natural sites around the world, and earlier this month Trump threatened to halt U.S. funding for the World Health Organization over its pandemic response, a clear effort to shift blame away from his administration. All this while advocating drastic cuts to U.S.-sponsored global health programs that fight infectious diseases.
Wildlife and land protection programs, advocates say, should be getting more support, not less — especially in light of a raging pandemic that has its origins in environmental destruction and disruption.
“Conservation and wildlife protection efforts must be prioritized in order to protect not only our precious resources,” said Kate Wall, the senior legislative manager at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, “but the stability of our global economy and, indeed, our very existence.”
‘It Should Be A Defining Movement’
Carroll, the former USAID official, said fighting emerging disease requires social engineering that invests not only in the capability to disrupt future spillover but also measures to manage outbreaks when they occur.
Carroll designed and directed Predict, a USAID disease surveillance program that identified more than 1,000 previously unknown wildlife viruses, including strains of Ebola and dozens of coronaviruses, over the last decade. The project proved that our existing technologies could pinpoint future viral threats. But operating on that scale, it would take centuries to catalog the estimated 1.6 million viruses out there ― what Carroll calls “unknown viral dark matter.”
In September, after $200 million and a decade of virus hunting, Trump’s USAID announced it would not renew the Predict program for another five-year cycle. Carroll left USAID around that time. And on March 31, as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the U.S., the administration officially shuttered the program. USAID subsequently granted the program a six-month extension on April 1 to “provide emergency support” to other countries in their response to COVID-19, but the effective cancellation of Predict had already caused real damage — its field work came to a halt months earlier, and some of the organizations that worked on the program were forced to lay off staffers, according to an April report in the Los Angeles Times.
USAID is now in the process of developing a new project, called STOP Spillover, which is expected to be launched this fall and cost $50 million to $100 million over five years. An agency spokesperson told CNN the program will “build on the lessons learned and data gathered” during Predict and “focus on strengthening national capacity to develop, test and implement interventions to reduce the risk of the spillover.”
Carroll now leads the Global Virome Project, a nonprofit that is working to create what he describes as a “global atlas” of animal viruses that would help prepare for, and ideally prevent, pandemics. Mapping viruses by species and location would allow governments to target hot spots for increased surveillance and ecosystem protections.
Carroll also hopes it will make it possible for scientists to develop vaccines that protect humans from not just one virus but perhaps even whole viral families.
“The demise of Predict,” Carroll said, “will only be a tragedy if we don’t continue to invest in viral discovery.”
STR VIA GETTY IMAGESWorkers prepare to spray disinfectant at the Wuhan Railway Station in Wuhan, China on March 24, 2020. The city in central China is where the coronavirus first emerged late last year.
Disease research and preparing for pandemics isn’t cheap. The Global Virome Project estimates it would cost $1.5 billion over a decade to identify 75% of the unknown viruses in mammals and birds. On the heels of the Ebola crisis in 2016, a commission of global health experts called for an annual global investment of $4.5 billion to help prevent and fight future pandemics, including $3.4 billion to upgrade public health systems across the globe and $1 million for the development of vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics.
But those figures pale in comparison to the costs of a global pandemic, as highlighted by the untold trillions of dollars that COVID-19 is now costing the world economy.
Perhaps the frequency of deadly disease outbreaks ― SARS in 2003, swine flu in 2009, MERS in 2012, Ebola in 2014 and now COVID-19 ― will convince the world it is time for a different approach, Carroll hopes. But he fears that, as with previous outbreaks, resources will dry up once the coronavirus threat dissipates and “collective amnesia” sets in.
“We should not accept the idea that spillover from wildlife into people is inevitable,” he said. “It’s not. Viruses don’t move from animals to people. We facilitate that.”
But we can change our ways.
More than 240 environmental and animal advocacy groups signed an April 6 letter urging the World Health Organization to recommend that governments institute permanent bans on wildlife markets and the use of wildlife in traditional medicines.
To truly solve the underlying conditions that fuel zoonotic pandemics, experts and wildlife conservationists are also calling for a new paradigm that recognizes the interconnection of people, animals and ecosystems, which they call the “One Health” approach.
“It should be a defining movement,” Dr. Christine Kreuder Johnson, project director of the USAID’s Predict program and associate director of the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis, said of One Health, which seeks to prevent infectious disease outbreaks by safeguarding wild animals and their habitat.
Humans have driven up to 1 million species around the globe to the brink of extinction, a United Nations report last year found. A U.N. draft biodiversity plan released earlier this year calls for protecting 30% of all lands and oceans by 2030 to combat the biodiversity crisis, which experts say would help keep new infectious diseases at bay.
Other experts told HuffPost that the U.S. should establish a high-level One Health task force that brings together agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Fish and Wildlife Service, USAID and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to chart a course forward for protecting wildlife habitat, strengthening disease surveillance and preventing pandemics.
Still others, like Dr. Richard Kock, say humans must drastically scale back livestock production, which brought the goat plague to Mongolia and fueled the Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia.
“Pathogens can move incredibly quickly despite attempts to stop them and despite our technology and our medicines,” Kock said. “It is a wake-up call for humanity.”
www.huffpost.com/entry/emerging-disease-environmental-destruction_n_5e9db58fc5b63c5b58723afd
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Post by swamprat on Apr 22, 2020 0:21:18 GMT
"Impossible" you say? Hmmmmm...... Russian space official tests positive for coronavirus after attending Soyuz crew launch to space station By Chelsea Gohd 3 hours ago
"Potential ISS contamination is absolutely impossible."
A Russian Soyuz 2.1a rocket carrying the Soyuz MS-16 spacecraft stands atop the launchpad at Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan to launch three new crewmembers to the International Space Station on April 9, 2020. A Russian official who attended the launch has recently tested positive for the novel coronavirus. (Image: © RSC Energia)
A Russian space official has tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, but it's "impossible" that any contamination has spread to the International Space Station, Russia's space agency told Space.com.
On April 15, the Russian news agency TASS confirmed that Evegeny Mikrin, the deputy CEO and chief designer at RSC Energia, tested positive for coronavirus.
"Mikrin has passed two tests for the coronavirus and both are positive. He has been included in the list of 30 persons officially declared as infected in Roscosmos (Russia's space agency)," a source told TASS. The source added that Mikrin has, reportedly, not so far shown any clinical symptoms of the disease.
Mikrin was present at the most recent crewed launch to the space station, which launched April 9 from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. He was seen relatively close to Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner prior to the launch, according to the New York Post.
However, despite concerns surrounding who Mikrin may have interacted with now that news of his positive diagnosis is public, Roscosmos officials told Space.com that there is no chance that the coronavirus has spread to the space station or among other Roscosmos personnel.
"Potential ISS contamination is absolutely impossible as the number of personnel involved in the related operations has been minimized and those remaining follow the strictest rules and precautionary measures to prevent any possible threat to the crews," Roscosmos public affairs representative Oleg Bolashev told Space.com in an email.
"The same goes about all the Roscosmos staff and those responsible for continuous operations — the number of personnel present at their workplaces has been minimized with most of them working remotely," Bolashev added. "Others are obliged to follow strictest precautionary measures."
NASA has also weighed in, stressing that both NASA and Roscosmos have taken the appropriate precautionary measures to ensure that all staff from both agencies are as safe from infection as possible.
"Officials from NASA and Roscosmos, and our other international partners, actively discuss the safety and health of their combined teams supporting the International Space Station," NASA press representative Dan Huot told Space.com in an email.
"The astronaut crew was placed in strict quarantine with their medical teams weeks before the launch," Huot said."During this time of social distancing, personal protective equipment and health monitoring procedures were followed to protect the crew from any infectious disease. It is standard NASA practice, as it is with all our international partners, to protect astronauts' health prior to launch and monitor them closely when they first arrive at the International Space Station."
Huot added that NASA will not be sending coronavirus tests to the space station. "The Privacy Rule prohibits us from sharing crew medical information, but NASA is not planning to send coronavirus tests to the space station. NASA maintains a robust pharmacy on board to treat a variety of illnesses on board the space station, but we do not currently have the capability to perform tests for infectious viruses," he said.
www.space.com/russian-space-official-iss-launch-positive-coronavirus.html
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Post by swamprat on Apr 22, 2020 21:31:04 GMT
According to the CDC, we are all going to die in the fall. This fall will see heavy cases of regular flu and a coronavirus reinfection. True. Here's the article LiveScience put out:Second wave of coronavirus likely to be even more devastating, CDC director warns By Brandon Specktor - Senior Writer an hour ago
If COVID-19 resurges at the peak of flu season this winter, the health care system will be even more strained than it is now, CDC director Redfield warns.
A resurgence of COVID-19 next winter could hit the United States even harder than the original outbreak has, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has warned.
If the virus has a second wave that coincides with the start of flu season — which is responsible for thousands of American deaths per year — then the nation's health care system will likely be even more overwhelmed and under-supplied than it has been during the current outbreak of coronavirus in the U.S., CDC Director Robert Redfield told The Washington Post on Tuesday (April 21).
"There's a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through," Redfield said. "We're going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time."
The first wave of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has already killed nearly 46,000 people across the country since the first known U.S. case was reported in January. The outbreak has overwhelmed hospitals and exposed huge shortages of test kits and personal protective equipment like masks and gowns for health care workers.
Fortunately, Redfield said, the epidemic arrived toward the end of flu season, which usually peaks between December and February, and creates an annual strain on the U.S. health care system. According to official CDC estimates, the flu killed nearly 32,000 Americans in the 2018-2019 season and resulted in half a million hospitalizations. If flu season had peaked at the same time as the COVID-19 outbreak, "it could have been really, really, really, really difficult in terms of health [care] capacity," Redfield said.
That may well be the case this winter, he cautioned, if a second wave of coronavirus hits near the beginning of flu season.
Because a widely available coronavirus vaccine is likely still 12 to 18 months away, preventing a deadly double-outbreak of respiratory viruses from ravaging the country will depend on a combination of other actions. First, Redfield said, state and federal officials must continue to push for social distancing this summer as more businesses and public spaces reopen. Social distancing has had an "enormous impact … on this outbreak in our nation" since the pandemic began, Redfield said, and that will hold true until coronavirus vaccines are widely accessible.
Second, the country needs to massively scale up testing and contact tracing (individuals exposed to infected people) so that new COVID-19 cases can be identified before they become larger outbreaks. And finally, Redfield said, U.S. health officials must spend the summer months persuading citizens about the importance of getting flu shots in the fall, in order to minimize the number of flu-related hospitalizations.
As Redfield puts it, getting a flu vaccination this year "may allow there to be a hospital bed available for your mother or grandmother that may get coronavirus."
www.livescience.com/covid-19-second-wave-flu-season.html
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