Researchers use an algorithm to diagnose infectious disease a continent away.
EXTRACT
“Real world information is often vague, minimal, and at times contradictory, so the challenge is to find ways to make good inferences (disease identifications) from such limited data,” says epidemiologist Stephen Morse of Columbia University, one of the paper’s co-authors and creator of the ProMED-mail site.
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But the potential to detect outbreaks much faster through the use of statistical models applied to field reports is clear. These tools will find their greatest value in places where deadly pathogens are numerous, diagnostic equipment is hard to find, and time is short.
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The network of diagnosed outbreaks of diseases with the potential to cause encephalitis (colored) and outbreaks of encephalitis where the cause was removed (white). The inner network describes the strength and relationship of individual outbreaks to each other. The outer ring gives the composition of the 7 communities of disease that were found by the detection algorithm. Each circle represents one outbreak report. Lines connecting two nodes indicate shared traits between two reports.
I have reached a point where I have been forced to conclude that Monsanto is an evil corporation, as I understand that word. I know, from what you have written me that many of you, as have I and Ronlyn, have signed petitions against Monsanto. Now take the next step. Stop buying their products. Here is a URL where you will find the list of the companies Monsanto owns.
WARNING NOTICE: The list is not accurate and has been removed from Phi Beta Iota. The concept remains valid, but the public must first properly identify all Monsanto companies. We continue to wonder why farmers are not suing Monsanto for willful trespass, unlawful deprivation of property use, and health violations related to the toxicity and third generation infertility that are associated with Monsanto's GMO offerings.
The CDC has produced junk science that demonstrates absolutely nothing, but claims it shows no connection between autism and the vaccine schedule. It's now spinning it as if it proves that there's no link between the modern day nightmare of autism and the vaccines that they push for Big Pharma. Here's the evidence.
This is the first of two stories. I am running them both today, because I want to make the point that in nuclear accidents there is a question as to whether they are ever really “over;” this is the thing that is different about nuclear power. Tar sands oil leaks, such as the one in Arkansas, eventually get cleaned up. Nuclear waste is forever.
US residents near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation may be in grave danger: a nuclear safety board found that the underground tanks holding toxic, radioactive waste could explode at any minute, due to a dangerous buildup of hydrogen gas.
In addition to everything else Fukushima has shown us the unintended consequence of radioactive tuna. This technology is fine, until it's not fine. Then it's a problem for we know not how many years, and creates horrible social problems.
Phi Beta Iota: The irresponsibility — partly in ignorance but mostly in corruption — of most governments — cannot be understated. The “inudstrialization” of the knowledge industry led to fragementation, a disconnect from ethics, and ultimately to a perversion of how knowledge is used, to internalize profits and externalize hazards, risks, and lasting costs. Very uncivilized.
Bradley Manning & The Deepwater Horizon By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
Wednesday, 3. April 2013
Three years ago this month, on the 20th of April, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew itself to kingdom come.
Soon thereafter, a message came in to our office's chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, from a person I dare not name, who was floating somewhere in the Caspian Sea along the coast of Baku, Central Asia.
The source was in mortal fear he’d be identified – and with good reason. Once we agreed on a safe method of communication, he revealed this: 17 months before BP’s DeepwaterHorizon blew out and exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP rig suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea.
Crucially, both the Gulf and Caspian Sea blow-outs had the same identical cause: the failure of the cement “plug”.
To prevent blow-outs, drilled wells must be capped with cement. BP insisted on lacing its cement with nitrogen gas – the same stuff used in laughing gas – because it speeds up drying.
Time is money, and mixing some nitrogen gas into the cement saves a lot of money.
However, because BP’s penny-pinching method is so damn dangerous, they are nearly alone in using it in deep, high-pressure offshore wells.
The reason: nitrogen gas can create gaps in the cement, allow methane gas to go up the borehole, fill the drilling platform with explosive gas – and boom, you’re dead.
So, when its Caspian Sea rig blew out in 2008, rather than change its ways, BP simply covered it up.
Our investigators discovered that the company hid the information from its own shareholders, from British regulators and from the US Securities Exchange Commission. The Vice-President of BP USA, David Rainey, withheld the information from the US Senate in a testimony he gave six months before the Gulf deaths. (Rainey was later charged with obstruction of justice on a spill-related matter.)
Britain's Channel 4 agreed to send me to the benighted nation of Azerbaijan, whose waters the earlier BP blow-out occurred in, to locate witnesses who would be willing to talk to me without getting “disappeared”. (They didn’t talk, but they still disappeared.)
And I was arrested. Some rat had tipped off the Security Ministry (the official name of the Department of Torture here in this Islamic Republic of BP). I knew I’d get out quick, because throwing a reporter of Her Majesty’s Empire into a dungeon would embarrass both BP and the Azeri oil-o-crats.
The gendarmes demanded our film, but I wasn’t overly concerned: Before I left London, Badpenny handed me one of those Austin Powers camera-in-pens, on which I’d loaded all I needed. But I did fear for my witnesses left behind in Azerbaijan – and for my source in a tiger cage in the USA: Pvt Bradley Manning.
Manning could have saved their lives
Only after I dove into deep water in Baku did I discover, trolling through the so-called “WikiLeaks” documents, secret State Department cables released by Manning. The information was stunning: the US State Department knew about the BP blow-out in the Caspian and joined in the cover-up.
Here, again, we have an example of the disconnect between what the American people understand and want, and what the corporate owned Congress is focused on.
The only thing that is going to change this equation is a massive voter turnout that supports compassionate life-affirming policies and politicians prepared to act on those wishes. We did it with Elizabeth Warren, we can do it in other districts.
Click through to see the charts and tables that will help you understand this report better.
PRINCETON, NJ — Americans tilt toward the view that the government is doing too little to protect the environment — at 47% — while 16% say it is doing too much. Another 35% say the government's efforts on the environment are about right. These views have not changed much since 2010, although Americans in most years between 1992 and 2006 were more likely than they are today to say the government was doing too little to protect the environment.
The Great Experiment: Genetically Modified Organisms, Scientific Integrity, and National Wellness STEPHAN A. SCHWARTZ, Columnist – Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
In September 2012, pictures of seriously tumorous rats (Figure 1) went viral across the Internet, setting off passionate and acrimonious exchanges between proponents and opponents of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Charges and countercharges flew like verbal grapeshot across the various levels of the digital world and scientific media as each side tried to spin what these photos meant.
‘GMOs may be creating an entire generation of cancer victims who have a frighteningly heightened risk of growing massive mammary gland tumors caused by the consumption of GM foods. We are witnessing what may turn out to be the worst and most costly blunder in the history of western science: the mass poisoning of billions of people with a toxic food crop that was never properly tested in the first place,” wrote Mike Adams, an award-winning journalist specializing in health issues, in Op-Ed News.1
