Dengue Fever

Dengue fever

Texas has been hit with the first-ever outbreak of dengue hemorrhagic fever in the continental U.S.  Sixteen people in Brownsville contracted this severe form of dengue infection.

"The dengue virus (as well as yellow fever) is carried by Aedes aegypti, a day-biting mosquito that is partial to humans.  The mosquitoes breed in open water containers and pools" (from Science News)

Why am I interested in this item?  I attended a Symposium on Biological Pollution in Indianapolis in 1991.  In two days of talks, the single most powerful impression on me was made by a Michigan professor, specializing in diseases and vectors, who told the story of a shipment of used tires from Japan sitting on the docks in Houston (and WHY are we importing used tires?).  Tires collect water, as we know, and they were discovered to harbor the Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes aegypti.  This was reported to the Center for Disease Control, with a request to eliminate the mosquitos before they could move beyond Houston.  When a vector is present, it is only a matter of time before the disease arrives.  The gist of CDC's response:  When it kills as many people as AIDS, let us know.

It sounds cynical and careless on the part of CDC; with a minimal investment the vector could have been eliminated then and there.  Because of CDC's refusal to act, the mosquito spread far and wide, and within a few years had been found as far east as the Carolinas and north to Chicago and Minneapolis.  Now the disease is here, and will be to the end of time, along with the disease. 

What hit me hard is the realization of the political realities that motivated CDC to act as it did.  Public agencies are under severe pressures, and resources are frequently inadequate.  The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the AIDS wheel was squeaking very loud at the time, as it should have been.  I am not excusing CDC--it still seems inexcusable to me--but it made me realize that when the public puts enough pressure on government--even for a good cause--it may have unintended consequences, even tragic ones.

So now we have dengue to add to our inventory of troubles, with yellow fever yet to come.

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"Nepalese porters are the most efficient human load carriers yet recorded.  Norman Heglund...and colleagues observed porters, ages 11 to 68, on a footpath at 2800 meters elevation.  For men, loads averaged 93% of body weight but went up to 183%.  Women's loads averaged 66%...The researchers fitted breathing monitors to some porters and documented that they could carry 60% of their body weight using half the energy that young Europeans use to carry backpacks.  The porters walk slowly and rest often but go many hours with big loads."

  Excerpted from Science News 18 June 05 (digested from June 17 Science)

[This brings to mind a trek through the Himalayas I took in 1975, guided by Sherpas.  We had barefooted Nepalese porters in the mid-elevations from Kathmandu, but when we got to the high country in the Khumbu, our loads were carried by five-foot tall, skinny Sherpanis, who must have been somewhere around 100#.  Each one carried 80# all day long, all the way from the Khumbu to Darjeeling, often covering ten miles and ascending 3000-4000 feet elevation in one day.  That was only one of several phenomena I experienced on that trip--my first time out of the United States.  It was an eye-opener and profoundly shifted my view of the world, and life in general.  All of us Americans on this trek were covered with guilt--I had at least 80# of guilt.  I occasionally think back on this trip, never without pain.

To put a cap on it, the Sherpanis were always laughing and in high spirits, and in the evening sang and danced around (their own) campfire.]

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Coincidence?

Go ahead, tell me that this bird didn't know what she was doing when she chose to nest where two of the foremost birders of the Bay Area were--Alan Hopkins was painting Josiah Clark's house.  OK, cynics, go on--tell me that she nests elsewhere in the city, but 99% of the residents wouldn't know a Pacific Slope flycatcher if they saw one.  Well, I don't believe anyone ever saw one.  This was just one smart little bird.

Invite Wildlife and Expect the Unexpected

by Josiah Clark, Consulting Ecologist and Naturalist

It had been a special spring.  My small yard was robust with native plants and their associated processes.  Over the course of several weeks in April and May I saw numerous hover flies, flies, beetles and spiders on the mallow, manroot and parsnip in my garden that I had never seen before anywhere.  I could tell that new natural processes were at work.

One spring morning I awoke to hear an unusual bird calling out the window.  I was excited that this late migrant had chosen my yard to hang around in and feed.  The bird was a Pacific-slope Flycatcher, formerly called the Western

Flycatcher, the species had recently been split into the Pacific-slope and Cordilleran Flycatchers.

This small flycatcher is a common breeder in spring and summer in riparian, mixed conifer and mixed oak woodland to the north, south and east of San Francisco.  It is generally found nesting around water and where insects are abundant.  The species is seen regularly during migration in SF each year but has not been confirmed breeding in the city in over 50 years.  I believe Grinelle and Miller recorded the bird as a uncommon breeder in GG park in the 1920s.

After about a week with the flycatcher hanging around I mentioned to Alan Hopkins one day, "wouldn't that be wild if this thing actually was looking at these yards as breeding habitat".  That afternoon Alan tracked me down saying,

"Josiah , you have to see this".

To our disbelief, there was the nest!  It was distinct,a tightly woven cup-shaped nest made from lichens, hair and bark.  Redwood bark, dog hair and light twigs were are all used to create a perfect cup for holding the four eggs.  The nest was placed atop a ledge created by a piece of 2x6'' put in place to buffer a painting scafolding from the house, about 8 feet off the ground in a carport area.  Cup-nesting songbirds are among the most vulnerable in SF due to

the abundance of nest predators.  Of the many migratory cup-nesting songbirds that nest in the Bay Area, only a few of them still nest in SF.  The scarcity of cup-nesting migrant songbirds in SF is likely due to many factors including 1)a lack of appropriate habitat 2) high competition for existing nesting sites 3) heavy predation pressure at nests

As the bird incubated, we made sure not to pay too much attention to her, giving her some "psychic privacy".  We could be near the bird without disturbing her so long as we did not stare right at the nest.  Alan Hopkins would work and mix paint in the area just below the nest and the bird would continue sitting trustingly.  In the yard I would stand still and the bird would come in and feed right near me, often on the abundance of insects in the tree mallow and cow parsnip.  The flycatcher would drink and bathe in the trickle of the small pond before returning to fly catching.

(For spatial reasons, I'm omitting four final paragraphs, with details of nesting, singing, and unhappy denouement.)

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Hi Jake:

I heartily agree with the lady about the atrocious tours offered by the UC Alumni Association.  A member of the UCB class of '42 I am a lifetime member of the UC Alumni Association and recently asked them to remove my name from the tour mailing list.  This "Vanishing Cultures" tour is one of the fatest of the "fat cat" tours.  I recall when it was first offered a while back the tour organizer bragged that they would travel by private 757 jet with all first class seats.  I did not realize how many elitists graduated from UCB.  Perhaps they demand these high class tours.  But like that lady I am not up to gawking at vanishing cultures, landscapes and people.

Believe it or not, the tour leaders consider these tours as culture to teach us to better accept our fellow citizens. Actually too many tours are arranged for the express purpose of making money for the tour operators, cruise ships, airlines, etc.  The acquisition of culture is way down on the list of things to be gained--shopping comes way above that!  When will the UC Alumni Association be announcing their tour on the QE2?

Vern Waight

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J.Smeaton Chase, during his rambles up the coast of California in 1911, Òwandered for an afternoon in Golden Gate Park, where I saw bands of quail running fearlessly among the shrubberyÑa charming sight from which I argue that, notwithstanding the general belief, San Franciscans cannot after all be wholly bad.Ó (California Coast Trails: A Horseback Adventure from Mexico to Oregon by J. Smeaton Chase)

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Dangerous Nation:  America's Place in the World From its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century.

by Robert Kagan

"A brilliant and original survey that challenges long-held assumptions and puts important but forgotten events and ideas under the spotlight.  A tour de force of historical writing that should change the way many people view the country's past."

        Walter Russell Mead, Foreign Affairs

"...Kagan shows how America was always a player, and often a ruthless one, in the great game of nations."

        Geoffrey Wheatcroft, N.Y. Tmes Book Review

Excerpt from review in The Economist:

America not only invented the modern liberal republic, but also a new sort of foreign policy founded on a universal ideology about human nature and human affairs.  The Declaration of Independence firmly established the American conviction that man's inalienable rights transcend territorial borders and blood ties.  And this universalist idea grew ever stronger in subsequent years.  In particular, American evangelicals reinforced America's belief in the holy trinity of republicanism, democracy, and commerce.

Americans might prefer to regard their country as an inward-looking place that periodically got dragged into the world's affairs through no fault of its own.  But contemporaries knew differently.  In 1817, America's representative in London, John Quincy Adams, reported that "the universal feeling of Europe in witnessing the gigantic growth of our population and power is that we shall, if united, become a very dangerous member of the society of nations."  Two years later a congressman, returning from a visit to Europe, noted that everyone regarded Americans as "an ambitious and encroaching people".

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A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book of the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilisation by Jonathan Kirsch

The question of whether religions have historically done more harm or good is one of those debates that persist beyond their proper teenaged expiration date. But there is a less futile variation on the argument: what is it in specific faith traditions that can lead to dangerous interpretations?

In the five years since 9/11, much time has been devoted to identifying the elements of Islam that lend themselves to a hateful jihadist ideology. Less has been devoted to what is incendiary in the other two Abrahamic traditions: Judaism and Christianity. Jonathan Kirsch, the author of several acclaimed books on religious themes, goes some way towards remedying that deficit in this thoughtful history and analysis of the most controversial book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation.

A work so problematic that many early Church Fathers found it unfit for inclusion in the canon, it also troubled many later Christians. "There is one sufficient reason for the small esteem in which I hold it - that Christ is neither taught in it nor recognised," wrote the great reformer Martin Luther. Even those Christians who made an uneasy truce with the book urged caution: St Augustine, for example, warned against any literal interpretation of its symbol-strewn wordscape.

Unfortunately, Kirsch shows, Augustine's admonition has been honoured more in the breach than in the observance. The Antichrist, the Great Whore of Babylon, the Battle of Armageddon, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the number 666: these have been picked up by zealots bent on any number of religious, political or cultural crusades. "Revelation", writes Kirsch, "is now - and has always been - a potent rhetorical weapon in a certain kind of culture war, a war of contesting values and aspirations that has been waged throughout human history."

(Omitted here is the emergence and a brief history of apocalyptic writing)

But Revelation was canonised as part of the New Testament, and Kirsch offers a thorough account of the intellectual and spiritual mischief that it has spawned. When Revelation made its way to the New World, apocalyptic imagery was applied to practically every major development in American history, from the Puritan witch-hunt craze to the civil war to any number of social and moral crusades in the 20th and 21st centuries. While apocalypticism has inspired progressive causes, including the civil rights vision of Martin Luther King Jr, it increasingly came to support a fundamentalist conception of a properly Christian society.

Apocalyptic notions are never scarier than when they creep into politics, as they did in the pronouncements of Ronald Reagan. "Apparently never in history have so many of the prophecies come true in such a relatively short time," the then-governor of California declared in 1968. And though Reagan learned to tone down such pronouncements as president, he never abandoned his belief in the approaching Armageddon.

If the current occupant of the White House "does not speak in the familiar vocabulary of apocalyptic fundamentalism", Kirsch writes, "it is mostly because a new and updated 'language arsenal' has been deployed in contemporary America" - an arsenal that in this case, Kirsch explains, uses code phrases such as "intelligent design" and "culture of life". But many of the president's policies resonate powerfully with a large fundamentalist community that takes apocalyptic notions, including those that apply to Israel, with a fervent literalism. For them, and many others, the rapture draws nigh.

Book review from Washington Post