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Bird flu

Bird flu has really dropped from the headlines. Sort of like news about Iraq. But, it's still around (AP article), and scientists are still tracking it with some anxiety. Heaven forbid it mutates in some way that makes it much easier for humans to contract. This has happened with who knows how many over diseases in the history of homo sapiens. Many infectious diseases, from AIDS to SARS, almost certainly had animal origins. In some cases a disease actually goes from affecting only a non-human species to affecting only our species. I've no idea if it's ever happened the other way 'round. I'll ask my cat tonight what he knows.

From a article:

Chickens used to roam every dusty street in every village across Egypt, and many of its city alleys too.

But bird flu is changing that. Chickens have nearly all vanished from sight, slaughtered, abandoned or locked away by a population increasingly aware of, and frightened by, the disease's stubborn grip.

Europeans-borne plague killed-off most Indians in New England before the Pilgrims got there

Did you know that a plague borne by Europeans killed off most native Americans in Massachusetts before the Pilgrims got there? "British fishermen had been fishing off Massachusetts for decades before the Pilgrims landed," James W. Loewen points out. They transmitted to the Native Americans probably what was bubonic plague (possibly small pox or the flu), and

within three years this plague wiped out between 90% and 96% of the inhabitants of southern New England. The Indian societies lay devastated. Only "the twentieth person is scarce left alive," wrote British eyewitness Robert Cushman, describing a death rate unknown in all previous human experience.

Smallpox epidemics followed.

These epidemics constituted perhaps the most important single geopolitical event of the first third of the 1600s, anywhere on the planet. They meant that the British would face no real Indian challenge for their first fifty years in America. Indeed, the plague helped cause the legendary warm reception Plymouth enjoyed in its first formative years from the Wampanoags. Massasoit needed to ally with the Pilgrims because the plague had so weakened his villages that he feared the Narragansetts to the west.

Charles Mann, author of 1491, summarizes it thus:

By the time [of] the Mayflower, Europeans had been visiting New England for more than a hundred years.... New England, [they] saw, was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606 Samuel de Champlain visited Cape Cod, hoping to establish a French base. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there. A year later Sir Ferdinando Gorges—British despite his name—tried to establish an English community in southern Maine. It had more founders than Plymouth and seems to have been better organized. Confronted by numerous well-armed local Indians, the settlers abandoned the project within months. The Indians at Plymouth would surely have been an equal obstacle to [the Pilgrims'] ramshackle expedition had disease not intervened.

Report shows Paul Cameron's dangerous pseudo-science-based hatred

Hat-tip to Frederick Clarkson at Talk To Action. The Box Turtle Bulletin issued a report about homophobic false scientist Paul Cameron, whose discredited statistics supposedly detailing "the gay lifestyle" (as if there is such a monolithic thing) are still routinely cited by the religious right and religio-rightwing Republicans.

(Fred also highlights in the same post this story showing, in his eloquent words, "how indisinguishable the neocon and the religious right view has become. There is no armaggedonist vision or rhetoric here -- only a vision of long-term global militarism.")

1491 . . . Europeans-borne pestilences wiped out Native cultures soon after Columbus

A 2002 Atlantic Monthly article, "1491," by Charles Mann--whose book of the same name was published shortly after the article--summarizes how ominous awareness grew over decades in academia of the horrible truth that a pestilential, near-total extermination of Native American populations struck when early European explorer-invaders brought viruses to the shores of the Western Hemisphere.

One of many consequences was Europeans' inaccurately simplistic impression of ancient Native American cultures' scope and achievements. (Click to enlarge image at right of an artist's rendering of Cahokia, in present-day Illinois. It was the only prehistoric Indian city north of Mexico. "At its peak from 1,100 to 1,200 A.D., the city covered nearly six square miles and boasted a population of as many as 20,000 people.")

James W. Loewen points out that

In 1492, more than 3,000,000 Indians lived on the island of Haiti. Forty years later, fewer than 300 remained. The earliest Portuguese found that Labrador teemed with hospitable Indians who could easily be enslaved. It teems no more. In about 1780, smallpox reduced the Mandans of North Dakota from nine villages to two; then in 1837, a second smallpox epidemic reduced them from 1600 persons to just 31. The pestilence continues: a fourth of the Yanomamos of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela died in the year prior to my writing this sentence.

And consider just the case in point of Hernando de Soto. He landed on May 30, 1539, near Tampa Bay, in Florida with 200 horses, 600 soldiers, and 300 pigs. (An approximation of his route is shown at right.) From Mann's article cited earlier:

The calamity wrought by Soto apparently extended across the whole Southeast. The Coosa city-states, in western Georgia, and the Caddoan-speaking civilization, centered on the Texas-Arkansas border, disintegrated soon after Soto appeared. The Caddo had had a taste for monumental architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After Soto's army left, notes Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddo stopped building community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between Soto's and La Salle's visits, Perttula believes, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent [in about 100 years]. In the eighteenth century the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today in the population of New York City would reduce it to 56,000—not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. "That's one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters," says Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies—was wiped out."

(Why this post now? On August 7, 1679, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, "La Salle," embarked on the Le Griffon, which, incidentally, is almost certainly the vessel discovered near Green Bay not long ago. Its crew, which he led, became the first white men to navigate the Great Lakes by sailing ship. They sailed to Lake Erie, then Lake Huron, then to Michilimackinac (Mackinac), and finally to Green Bay, Wisconsin. La Salle would late provide what is now understood to be written evidence for the destruction of the Caddo people.)

ACT UP at 20

The Nation's recent editorial tribute to ACT UP, "ACT UP at 20," is great. (I'm soon enough to be closer to 40 than 30, and I've pretty much never acted up in my life.) ACT UP benefited America and the world; its legacy touches on politics, medical ethics, medicine, and of course political activism itself.

[1987 marked] six years and at least 30,000 American deaths into the [AIDS] epidemic, Ronald Reagan had yet to give a public address on AIDS. Not a single drug was available to treat HIV. Prevention efforts had been left to volunteers and struggling nonprofits. The right's solution was epitomized by William F. Buckley's modest proposal that gay men with HIV have their buttocks tattooed.

For its first action, in March 1987, ACT UP sent some 250 activists to descend on Wall Street. Armed with cardboard tombstones and anti-Reagan posters, they chanted, "Release those drugs," lighting a fire under the Food and Drug Administration and drugmakers to speed up research and approval. Two years later pharma giant Burroughs Wellcome was finally marketing an HIV treatment but had priced it (AZT) at an impossible $8,000 a year. So ACT UP returned to Wall Street, but this time activists didn't just picket. As former bond trader Peter Staley recalls, "We [had] sealed ourselves into one of their corporate offices using high-powered drills. They didn't back down, so we upped the ante by shutting down the New York Stock Exchange, sneaking past security and using foghorns to drown out the opening bell. The company finally lowered the price three days later."

During the years that followed, ACT UP stormed the National Institutes of Health, the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control to protest their shortcomings. On the local level, Catholic dioceses and boards of education were targeted for blocking HIV information in public schools; city governments for failing to provide care and housing; jails and prisons for setting up segregation units. Some ACT UPers set up guerrilla needle-exchange programs; others staked out the entrances to junior highs to distribute condoms directly to students. Just as essentially, ACT UP members became self-taught experts in such arcane fields as virology and patent law and in so doing rewrote the patient-doctor relationship and helped put the idea of universal healthcare--now favored by a majority of Americans--on the political map.
.....
Today, anyone who gains access to an experimental drug before it's approved, or takes a life-saving medicine that was fast-tracked through the FDA--indeed, anyone engaged in the struggle for healthcare--is indebted to ACT UP's audacity and vision.

SPEAKER PELOSI, CONGRATULATIONS

Congratulations, SPEAKER Pelosi, and THANK YOU for your leadership. Congratulations also to Senate MAJORITY Leader, Harry Reid.

Congratulations to all the victorious Democrats this election cycle, including the Governor of the great State of New York, Eliot Spitzer.

Thank you for your chairmanship of the DNC, Governor Dean.

And Congratulations to all Democrats. We worked hard, and must continue to do so.

Let the First 100 Hours begin!

(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

The gay agenda is equal rights

From Salon.com:

The federal government has largely left the states alone to decide whether gay people can visit their partners in the hospital or have the power to make emergency medical decisions; whether partners can join benefit plans, get health insurance, or receive their partner's pension after they pass away; and whether same-sex couples should be able to adopt children, foster children, or get married.

Americans who aren't gay--and that majority is likely to include you--have all of the above-described rights. Why would you deny other Americans from having those rights? On what reason do you base your prejudice? There is no good rational reason. Especially when using your power, as a member of a majority, to extend those rights to others does not reduce your own possession of those same rights one bit.

Extending economically-enhancing, personally-fulfilling, and community- and relationship-building rights to those that lack them is moral and just. To deny such rights in immoral and unjust. To be satisfied with current bans (they exist in most states) on extending these rights (and there are literally thousands of them codified into law for married people) is to support immoral and unjust laws.

The Salon article continues:

Overall, 45 states have taken some form of legislative action to prohibit same-sex marriage; 26 of those states have voted to amend their state constitutions. The vast majority of those measures, though ratified by public referenda, originated in state legislatures.

In every state in the union there is work to be done on the issue of extending equal rights to gay Americans. Click on your state here to discover organizations through which you can help.

Some national organizations you can get involved include Lambda Legal Defense and the Human Rights Campaign.

Lieberman "in bed with big pharm?"

From the Salon.com article on Sen. Joseph Lieberman's relationship with "big pharm" via his wife:

Among Hill & Knowlton's clients when Mrs. Lieberman signed on with the firm last year was GlaxoSmithKline, the huge British-based drug company that makes vaccines along with many other drugs. As I noted in July, Sen. Lieberman introduced a bill in April 2005 (the month after his wife joined Hill & Knowlton) that would award billions of dollars in new "incentives" to companies like GlaxoSmithKline to persuade them to make more new vaccines. Under the legislation, known as Bioshield II, the cost to consumers and governments would be astronomical, but for Lieberman and his Republican cosponsors, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., the results would be worth every penny. Using the war on terror as their ideological backdrop, the pharma-friendly senators sought to win patent extensions on products that have nothing to do with preparations against terrorist attack or natural disaster.

As the New Haven Register, Lieberman's hometown newspaper, noted in an editorial headlined "Lieberman Crafts Drug Company Perk," that bill is even more generous to the pharmaceutical industry than a similar proposal by the Senate Republican leadership. "The government can offer incentives and guarantees for needed public health measures," it said. "But it should not write a blank check, as these bills do, to the pharmaceutical industry that has such a large cost to the public with what may be an uncertain or dubious return."

What the editorial didn't mention was that the Lieberman bill had also been written by Chuck Ludlam, a former pharmaceutical industry lobbyist who then worked on the Connecticut senator's staff. From his office to his bedroom, Lieberman was totally surrounded by current and former employees of Big Pharma. Ludlam has since retired, and Mrs. Lieberman has quit her job too -- but Lieberman still looks like a politician wholly owned by one of the nation's most troublesome special interests. And while his campaign may not believe that the moralizing senator should he held accountable for those dubious relationships, the press and the public may think otherwise.

On abortion, Hillary makes sense

The Broadsheet gets it right about Hill getting it right on abortion. And no, not "right" as in conservative. (You thought that might be where I was going, right? I mean, correct?) In fact, that's Broadsheet's point.

First, in Senator Clinton's own words, she promotes a commonsense vision of fewer or no abortions in America,

"[n]ot by making them illegal as many are attempting to do, or overturning Roe v. Wade and undermining the constitutional protections that decision provided, but by preventing unintended pregnancies in the first place through education, contraception, accessible health care and services, empowering women to make decisions."

Broadsheet:

[Clinton] also pointedly criticized those Republicans who have blocked such efforts -- not to mention the Food and Drug Administration -- and cited the obstacles poor women face when seeking contraception. "Let's really understand what we're up against," [Clinton] said. "This is not just about Roe, this is not just about choice, this is about contraception, family planning and, most profoundly, women's roles and responsibilities and rights."

Veterans Mis-administration

From Judith Coburn's Salon.com article. (Additional information at Veteransforcommonsense.org and Larry Scott's VA Watchdog.org.) Emphases mine.

While national deficits soar, thanks in part to skyrocketing war costs, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are flooding into the increasingly underfunded V.A. system. As of April 28, the Pentagon says that 2,401 Americans have died and 17,762 have been wounded in combat in Iraq (and 281 more have died in Afghanistan). But these casualty figures seem to be significant undercounts.

After all, 144,424 American veterans have sought treatment from the V.A. system since returning from those wars, not including soldiers actually hospitalized in military facilities.

These figures were wrested only recently from the V.A. after years of fruitless demands from Democrats on the House Veterans' Affairs Committee. The 144,424 figure includes not only many of the 17,762 reported wounded in combat by the Pentagon -- if that figure is, in fact, accurate -- but those wounded psychologically, those injured in accidents and those whose ailments were caused or exacerbated by service in the war. (Think of war, in this sense, as an extreme sport in its toll on the body.) Of course, neither Pentagon nor V.A. figures for the wounded include estimates of soldiers or veterans who don't show up at a Department of Defense or V.A. facility. Among these casualties are post-combat-tour suicides (who obviously can't show up) and the victims of diseases like leishmaniasis, caused by the ubiquitous sand flies in Iraq, who often suffer on their own.

Nonetheless, the V.A. has admitted -- and it has been confirmed by an Army study -- that a staggering 35 percent of veterans who served in Iraq have already sought treatment in the V.A. system for emotional problems from the war. Add this to the older veterans, especially from the Vietnam era, pouring into the system as their war wounds, both physical and emotional, deepen with age or as, on retirement, they find they can no longer afford private health insurance and realize that V.A. healthcare is -- or at least was -- more generous than Medicare.