Business

Well, readership, it's been a little bit. I apologize for the nearly year-long disruption in your programming. Coursera, baby, work, and a new house had collectively consumed my free time. Now that I'm getting a little bit of that back, I figured we could get back to getting scared for the right reasons.

Todays episode of the fearblog is all about business. Before I continue, let me add an asterisk that any organization is susceptible to unethical decision making, and if you're part of an organization, you should consider taking this free course. I, personally find the unethical decisions made by businesses to be of a special malice because they classically put material gains over the safety and well-being of their customers. I have frequently encountered people with a flippant attitude towards all regulation, one person even going as far to imply that fire codes were unnecessary. The reality, however, is that many of today's fire codes have their roots in a number of horrible, readily preventable tragedies that occurred as a result of attempts to cut cost or maximize profit. It is of the utmost importance that we learn these lessons from our history, so that we may not need to repeat them.

If you're squeamish, let this be your last line: The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

Credit to womenshistory.about.com for these images.

Credit to nymag.com for this image.

The top three floors are where the factory and its workers were.



 

 

 

The Triangle Waist Company operated a clothing factory in New York City that occupied the top three floors of the ten-story Asch building. The working conditions were then what we might consider deplorable today, with workers preforming long weeks for low wages. Safety standards were equally poor, however, with all but one exit, save for the elevator, that was not locked at all times, and a poorly constructed fire escape in lieu of an additional staircase.[2] Reportedly, the reason for locking the alternate exits was so that the employer could search the employees individually for stolen materials. In addition to all of this, as workers preformed, they would dump their cotton scraps into a waste bin, and these bins were known to have contained hundreds of pounds (two month's worth) of highly flammable cotton scraps at the time of the fire. [3]

The fire is speculated to have been lit by a match or cigarette, possibly by an overheated machine, though, to my knowledge, the exact cause has never been definitively determined. Because the building had no alarm systems, not all of the factory was made aware of the fire until it had practically consumed the lower floor. The workers on the upper two floors, cut off from the stairways, were forced to either flee onto the roof, risk the fire escape (which collapsed immediately, killing a number of people) or bail from the ninth or tenth story windows onto the concrete below. The fire department was actually on scene pretty quickly, but didn't have the equipment available to effectively attack a fire so high up. In total, one-hundred forty-eight people died as a result of the fire,[4] and many more than that would've lost their lives were it not for the heroics showed by both laypersons and firemen that day.

In the aftermath of the blaze, the factory owners were indicted but, ultimately not charged, though they lost the ensuing civil suit. New York state also passed a series of laws and began inspecting factories for conditions that could lead to similar, preventable tragedies. According to the New York Times, the state ultimately found over 200 factories with conditions similar to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. [5]

America's worst maritime disaster also qualifies for this article, costing over eighteen hundred people their lives at five dollars a head. At the end of the civil war, the S.S. Sultana was commissioned to return Union troops and Union POWs who had recently been released from Confederate prison camps. The government was offering five dollars for each soldier transported up the Mississippi river, and the Sultana was offering kickbacks of a little over a dollar a head to Union Officers who were willing to overlook the fact that they were vastly overloading their ship. The ship was so overloaded that there are accounts that the top deck had to be supported by additional struts to keep from buckling. It doesn't sound like much in today's terms, but that was a pretty heft chunk of change at the time. The Sultana's capacity, according to Wikipedia, is listed at 376 passengers, plus eighty-five crew. At the time of its sinking, the ship was recorded as having 2,427 passengers (roughly six times capacity), which led to the deaths of 1800 passengers (though estimates vary from 1300 to 1900, many of the modern estimates I've heard favor the higher tallies), which puts the toll even higher than the highest estimated death tolls from the sinking of the RMS Titanic.

So why did the Sultana explode, burn, sink, and kill eighteen-hundred passengers? There are records that one of the boilers, in need of replacement, was patched instead, to avoid a potentially costly four-day delay. It has also been supposed that the boilers were not only damaged, but operated incorrectly given the ship's conditions. When the boilers did explode, they caught the ship on fire, threw a number of passengers from the ship, collapsed the smokestacks onto the crowded deck, and instantly burned many of the passengers with steam. In a time where swimming was not a common skill, newly released POWs being thrown into the wide, freezing waters of the Mississippi was little short of a death sentence. [6][7]

The last case study in this series focuses on a group of workers known as the 'radium girls'. These workers were young women, hired during the second World War to apply radioluminescent paint with a Radium-based formula. Dial-painters at the US Radium Company were encouraged to point the tips of their brushes for the sake of accurate application of the radioactive paint by 'lip-pointing' the brushes with their lips and tongue. Often, workers would come home so coated with the paint that their clothes would glow in the dark, and others, unaware of the risks, even used the paint cosmetically. At the same time, higher-level workers at the same plant were using shielding and protective gear to handle the paint, implying that the plant operators had some knowledge of the danger. The workers were first alerted to the danger when, over the course of the next few years when they began to fall ill, and some of the girls' jaws decayed outright. [8]

According to the CDC, Radium can be taken into the body through inhalation or ingestion. Radium will distribute throughout the body, but will concentrate most heavily in the bones. Of 4,835 known dial-painters, 85 are known to have developed head cancers (21) or bone sarcomas (64) over the course of their lives (three developed both). [9][10] How does that stack up against the population baseline? Well, according to cancer research UK, there's an overall incidence rate of 3.9 bone sarcoma cases per million that slightly favors men- even divided out over 50 years, that's

 

64 cases / 4835 workers = 0.013237 cases/worker (about one case per hundred workers). / fifty years is 0.0002647 cases per worker per year, compared to the baseline rate of 0.0000039 cases per person per year in the UK. That's an even number of decimal places out, so let's figure out how much higher above baseline the dial-painter rate for bone sarcoma only is. We can throw out the decimals and the math will essentially be the same, presuming the UK incidence rate stays constant over fifty years. 2647/39 = an incidence rate that is 67.9 times above baseline for a fifty year period.

 

Pretty astonishing, right? Not as astonishing as the fact that the US Radium Company actually trained these girls to tip the brushes with their lips. This led to an estimated ingestion of anywhere from "a few hundred to a few thousand microcuries of radium per year", where a maximum bodily load of radium would have been 0.1 microcurie of radium.[11] There are other allegations about US radium, but I was unable to find reliable sources for them, and thus will not air them.

Also worth mention is the battle of Blair Mountain, which was the largest armed uprising on American soil since the civil war. Workers were striking against conditions in which employment involved, among other offenses, living in a company operated town, where workers paid rent to the company and bought supplies from the company store, both of which were operated with prices well above what workers could pay.

This leads me to my other honorable mention: the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, who were hired as strike-breakers by the coal companies among others, and were behind massacres at the paint creek-cabin creek strike of 1912, and the Ludlow, CO strike of 1913. When not slaughtering striking union workers, they would send detectives to otherwise harass and smoke out union members on the job site. It is worth noting that there's little evidence that the detective agency ever received any punishment for these acts, and one of the agency's founders actually went on to become a congressman.

Dear author, I can hear you saying from across the expanse of the web, this is so long ago. Surely we've come far enough that this could never occur again, that union and government intervention are redundant, you say. Well, not really. I give you a 2007 Bangladesh garment factory fire, in which over 100 workers burned to death, in part due to a lack of any emergency exits at all.[1] The factory manufactured clothing for many of our department stores, including Wal-Mart and Tesco. That's not even scratching the surface. What follows is all recent, dates should be notable in the articles.

 

-Factory Workers made to wear diapers to save time. http://www.latintimes.com/did-honduras-factory-workers-choose-wear-diapers-extreme-working-conditions-make-immigrant-workers
-The Foxconn suicides http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides
-An easily preventable dust explosion kills 70, injures nearly 200 http://www.thenation.com/blog/180892/how-deaths-75-workers-chinese-factory-could-have-been-easily-prevented#
-Young men working at an iPhone 6 factory are getting leukemia http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/iphone-6-factory-china-sees-spate-cancer-deaths-1465573
-Chinese workers work themselves to death http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/young-workers-in-dongguan-chinas-factory-of-the-world-dying-of-sudden-unexplained-nocturnal-death-syndrome/story-fneuz9ev-1226998103393
-Chinese poultry factory with locked doors and blocked and/or unlit fire escapes catches fire and kills over 100 workers http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/world/asia/scores-die-in-fire-at-chinese-poultry-plant.html?_r=1
-Garment factory collapse in Bangladesh claims over 1,000 lives. The upper four floors were not constructed to code, were unpermitted, and businesses on the lower floors had closed due to the known safety hazard, while the factory demanded its workers come in. This factory produced for a number of international chains, including Wal-Mart, and this came five months after a pledge by a number of retailers to increase factory worker safety. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/world/asia/bangladesh-building-collapse.html
-If you read any, read this. Vietnamese factory workers in Russia kept in atrocious conditions, beaten regularly, not allowed to use more than 5 liters of sanitation water per 25 people, kept in windowless rooms, and put in deeper debt by factory owners garnishing wages for 'housing' and 'feeding' workers. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-19197095

This list could go on for days. This simply searched four countries: Honduras, India, China, and Russia. This list also only accounts for factory conditions, generally because they're classically among the worst. What do I want? I want you to know how bad things really are out there. I want you to have a realistic view about businesses in the world today. I want you to get pissed, and go do something productive about it. Share this article with your friends, get them pissed too, and you can all go do something productive together. We can build each other up, we can be a force for good in the world, and corporations CAN be a part of that. For example, Firestone's response to the Ebola outbreak when it made it to their rubber plantation.

Please feel free to leave me any questions or comments on the blog or the facebook page.

 

 

 

 

[1]http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/11/25/112-killed-fire-bangladesh-garment-factory.html

[2]Lange, Brenda. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Infobase Publishing, 2008, page 58

[3]Stein, Leon (1962). The Triangle Fire. Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-8714-5.

[4]"New York Fire Kills 148: Girl Victims Leap to Death from Factory" (reprint). Chicago Sunday Tribune. March 26, 1911. p. 1. Retrieved October 3, 2007.

[5]New York Times: "Factory Firetraps Found by Hundreds," October 14, 1911,

[6]Berryman, H.E.; Potter, J.O.; Oliver, S. (1988). "The ill-fated passenger steamer Sultana: an inland maritime mass disaster of unparalleled magnitude". Journal of Forensic Sciences 33 (3): 842–850.

[7]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Sultana

[8]http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/100698sci-radium.html

[9]http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/PHS/PHS.asp?id=789&tid=154

[10]http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp144-c2.pdf

[11]http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/radioluminescent/radioluminescentinfo.htm

 

Ebola!

http://www.naturalnews.com/046275_Ebola_victim_air_transport_continental_USA.html
Click the above link for maximum LOLs.

So, there's a lot of fear flying around about this big Ebola outbreak that's going on in west Africa, and it's only gotten worse since the transport of an infected American doctor back to the US. The popular thing seems to be preparing for a massive stateside Ebola outbreak, which, once you learn a little about Ebola, you will see has a laughably abysmal chance of happening. How about we fly some facts back with him?

First, let's start with a question: What is Ebola, anyway? Ebola is a virus, meaning that it requires a susceptible host cell to be 'alive' and replicate, it is otherwise inert in the environment. That also means that Ebola is affected by antibiotics about as much as it is by Benadryl (see also: not at all), as antibiotics only affect bacteria. Ebola has various strains that are recognized by the US CDC, not all of which are pathogenic in people (Ebola Reston). The virus typically arises in human populations due to an introduction from a wild animal, and is classically native to central Africa; though some non-pathogenic strains have been identified in animals from the Philippines. The virus can transmit person to person, but historically, this has always been by fluid transmission, not airborn transmission (airborn transmission has been noted in pigs and monkeys with Ebola Reston). The virus also has a very lengthy incubation period, making it highly susceptible to public health measures like quarantine and isolation. The severe virulence combined with the fact that the virus spreads by fluid contact means that most outbreaks since we started keeping track in the 70's have simply burned themselves out in one hundred victims or less.[1] Note that in the first two outbreaks, the case load was quite severe, in part due to the fact that nobody knew much of anything about Ebola at the time.

Second, what makes Ebola so dangerous? That's a difficult question to answer, because the exact mechanism of the hemorrhagic part of the hemorrhagic fever isn't known yet, at least to my knowledge. Also, some strains are more virulent (cause worse disease) than others. The basic answer, though, is that in some- not all- patients, the virus causes severe internal bleeding, and the patient dies of hypovolemic shock. To an individual, an Ebola infection is a life threatening event. To a population, however, the story is a little different. The outbreak of Ebola Zaire in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leon has been recognized since march. As of 7/28, there have been a cumulative total of 1201 suspected cases and 672 casualties. That's 672/1201= 55% of reported cases resulting in a fatality, which is still pretty awful, but nowhere near the slate-wiping pandemic it's cracked up to be. Also, with 1201 recognized cases, minus 86 at the time of the initial announcement divided by 120 days (four months between march and July at 30 days each, roughly) equals 9.3 new infections a day, assuming that all infections are cases (symptomatic)- which they aren't.[2] This is in countries that don't have average healthcare, good infection control standards, good sanitation, or even good public health or education measures in place. On the 2000 WHO ranking of 191 countries' healthcare systems, Guinea comes in at #161, Liberia is #186, and Sierra Leon didn't even rank.[3]

In general, the spread of Ebola is facilitated by cultural practices that aren't preformed in the first world. Family members, not trained morticians, handle the bodies and prepare them for burial, and many of these people do not have access to the kind of protective equipment or even basic clean running water and soap necessary to prevent exposure of mucous membranes and open cuts to infected bodily fluids. Another reason that Ebola spreads so easily in these countries is in part due to subpar healthcare systems, where healthcare workers also lack basic body substance isolation equipment like disposable gloves, and needles can get re-used among patients. Symptomatic healthcare workers then come into contact with other uninfected patients and may transmit the disease to them as well.

Now, to consider the case of the good doctor. He's being flown back in field biohazard containment, and he will remain in biohazard containment for the duration of his disease. We actually have a really good track record of disease containment in this country, and even if Ebola did get out, we'd be able to stop its spread fairly easily with basic public health measures such as isolation procedures and quarantines. As Ebola is not a persistent infection, he should be okay for release back into the public once his symptoms resolve. What if the plane crashes? His body, and his Ebola, would likely be incinerated in the subsequent fire. Even if there wasn't a fire and the plane magically broke apart over Manhattan, it's unlikely that the resulting aerosol would pose a hazard to anyone.

What about terrorists? What about terrorists. It's not like there's an epidemic going on in Africa where anyone could just walk in, find an infected person and walk right back- oh wait, yeah, just kidding. Also, the US isn't the only nation with stockpiles of Ebola, you can believe that the Russians have it too, and they aren't exactly known for incredible security in the early post-soviet era. It's pointless to fret about someone nabbing the doctor here in the US and using him to create a biohazard incident. Besides, if you're afraid, the terrorists win, and that's not an America I want to live in.

Why bother taking him over here? I don't know, maybe because our healthcare facilities are just a little better than what Guinea's got going on. That's just a guess, though.

How do you know if you have Ebola? You don't have Ebola, get over yourself.

Ebola's a zombie virus?! Not even kind of close. The victims are alive until they're dead, and then they stay dead. Nobody gets aggressive, nobody tries to eat anyone, people mostly just lay around and die. The video game series Resident Evil did, however, base their zombie-making T-Virus off of Ebola.

Someone told you they could treat Ebola with colloidal silver. And when did they work in a BSL-4 lab, or treat Ebola in the field? This statement is so full of shit, it could be a septic tank. Save your hard-earned money. There's no evidence to date that colloidal silver would have any effect on Ebola virions in the body, and there are no approved antivirals or vaccines available at this time, though there is one in the works. In fact, there's no peer-reviewed evidence to my knowledge that colloidal silver works on anything at all, except to turn you into a smurf.

So let me lay the cards on the table right here and now: you are a hundred a thousand times more likely to die from the emergence of a novel pandemic coronavirus or pandemic antibiotic resistant pneumonia/tuberculosis than you are to catch some magic superstrain of Ebola that somehow escapes biohazard confinement in Atlanta. Questions, comments, ragemail? Leave it here, or on our facebook page.

[1]http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/spb/mnpages/dispages/Fact_Sheets/Ebola_Fact_Booklet.pdf
[2]http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/guinea/recent_updates.html
[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization_ranking_of_health_systems

The Environment Part One

Sorry guys, this week has been insanely busy in the personal life, so instead of a real post, I'm just going to leave this here. It's very much worth watching, and if you can kick in five dollars to their campaign, it's an easy way help make the world a better place for everyone. At bare minimum, I ask you to share either this blog post or this video with your friends.

<iframe src="https://www.indiegogo.com/project/solar-roadways/embedded" width="222px" height="445px" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

If you aren't keen on watching, the summary of their proposal is this: Raise money to start replacing parking lots, driveways, roads, and highways with durable, modular solar panels that react to changing environments. Presently, the heat and sunlight absorbed by our pavement isn't doing us any good, when we could be using it to provide plentiful, cheap energy with land that's already being used instead of marring whole tracts of landscape with acres of panels.

Their campaign can be found here https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/solar-roadways

Also worth your while: These guys want to build a modern operational version of Tesla's Wardenclyffe tower, designed for wireless transmission of electricity anywhere to anyone. Just think- never again having to suffer the frustration of downed power lines or aging electrical infrastructure!
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/planetary-energy-transmitter
<iframe src="https://www.indiegogo.com/project/planetary-energy-transmitter/embedded" width="222px" height="445px" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Interested in contributing to science over the long term, but not interested in repeated investments? You can contribute to the sciences of meteorology, ecology, and climatology by contributing to the Stormtag project. Their goal is to use crowdsourced weather 'stations' to monitor atmospheric conditions. It's as simple as distributing these small devices, known as 'tags', that can even be used as a keychain! The devices monitor a number of weather variables, and report their readings back to a server, where the data is stored and processed. The best part about it is that you get your own personal weather station if you contribute $20 or more! Makes a good (though late) Father's day gift!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jonatherton/stormtag-a-bluetooth-weather-station-on-your-keyri
<iframe width="480" height="360" src="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jonatherton/stormtag-a-bluetooth-weather-station-on-your-keyri/widget/video.html" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"> </iframe>

The scary part? If it weren't for people like you on the internet, some of these great ideas would never get off the ground. Be sure to contribute or share the ideas you believe in, and I encourage you to share this post with others. Feel free to leave any questions or comments on our facebook page or on the blog itself.

Bad Habits

Okay, so we've heard it all before. Bad habits don't just annoy the people around you, they're bad for you. Sounds familiar, I'm sure. Smoking? Lung cancer, yeah, yeah. Drinking? Liver problems, yeah, okay. But wait! What if I told you that you- yes, you- that fixing your bad habit could actually be stimulating to the economy? It wouldn't necessarily be good for the healthcare sector, but their slice of the GDP is big enough.

Let's start with Obesity. The current stats, according to the US CDC, indicate that 35% of US adults (myself included) and 17% of US children are obese. [1,2] Obesity is defined as an adult with a body mass index of 30 or greater, which isn't necessarily true for everyone (some athletes meet a BMI that classifies them as overweight). The estimated annual cost of obesity in the US adults alone is $147 billion (2008 dollars).[2] That's nearly what we paid our troops in 2011, so we could use that money to double their pay, or more nearly double the budget of the Navy, assuming the money goes to the government's hands.[3] That's also enough to give every American a 30 dollar per month gym membership for a full year. The equation goes something like 147x10^12 ($ cost by obesity) / 4x10^9 (citizens) = $367.5 / 12 (months) = $30.625. It's still not enough to supply people with salads on a daily basis, though.

Smoking? What kind of blogger would I be if I didn't at least touch on smoking. From 2009 to 2012, smoking cost the US $289 billion, including $156 billion in lost productivity.[4] That works out to about $96.3 billion a year. The NFPA estimates there are 30,125 fire departments in the US[5], and with an average new fire engine coming in at about $500,000, that's enough money to buy every fire department in the US six brand new fire engines. The math looks something like 30125 x 500000= 15,062,500,000. Then, 9.63x10^10 / 15,062,500,000 = 6.393... That's a lot of big red trucks. I can also tell you on an informal basis that it would reduce the demand on Fire, ER, and EMS systems for smokers with heart and lung diseases such as COPD and congestive heart failure- which means that we get to you faster when you need us.

Of course, bad habits wouldn't be complete without good old Alcohol. The CDC webpage on Alcohol states that there are 1.2 million ER visits, 2.7 million physician office visits (nearly 4 million total), and $223 billion spent on excess alcohol consumption every year. That's almost as much as spent on obesity and smoking combined! [6] That's enough to buy 18,580,000,000 grand slam sluggers- that's two solid weeks of grand slam sluggers three times a day for every American- with a $4 tip (you're going to tip, right?) at Denny's, though that kind of brings us back around to the obesity problem. $223 billion is also thirty-seven times San Francisco's 2008 budget (here), and it's about thirty times what we spent in discretionary spending on AIDS research. [7]

Aside from the incredible economic damage caused by these three readily preventable behaviors, there's an undeniable human cost as well. Excess alcohol intake is associated with more health problems than I frankly care to list here, is involved in two thirds of all assaults per victim surveys, contributes to risky behavior (such as drunk driving or starting fights you can't finish), and outright kills 88,000 Americans each year.[6] Smoking tobacco is a contributor in almost 500,000 deaths (the population of Wyoming or Fresno) each year.[8] So what's to be done?

There's several public health measures that have been shown to be effective. The first draws from the model of seat belt implementation, in which officers can ticket motorists for not wearing seat belts, on top of automakers making seatbelts readily available and public health information campaigns sharing the importance of seatbelt use. Seat belts alone cut motor vehicle accident mortality by half, and with 2.3 million people going to the emergency department for motor vehicle accidents in 2009, that's a lot of lives saved.[9] Another strategy is to impose a tax, which has been shown some limited efficacy in deterring people from excess tobacco use.[4] Also, you can check out this cool, free website with all sorts of helpful resources for cutting back on risky behavior and making lifestyle changes, including those affecting obesity.

Personally, I think the best solution is to look at all the wasted money and think of the gym memberships, think of the firefighters, THINK OF THE DENNY'S!

and support science, too!


1. http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html
2. http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#cite_note-9 (under budget for 2011)
4. http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/economics/econ_facts/index.htm
5. http://apps.usfa.fema.gov/census/summary.cfm
6. http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm
7. http://www.aids.gov/federal-resources/funding-opportunities/how-were-spending/
8. http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/health_effects/tobacco_related_mortality/index.htm
9. http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/seatbelts/facts.html

Death Camps

It's come to my attention that this post may come across with a political charge. This is not intended, and the fear blog does not stand behind any party except science, including history. Please bear this in mind while reading. 

Genocide is not a new phenomenon to mankind. Records exist of genocides occurring well before World War I, including a German genocide of an African population with explicit orders to either shoot them all or drive the population into the desert to die. The definition has a little play because argument exists as to how direct an act must be to constitute a genocide; for example, some people argue that involuntary introduction of disease into a population while offering no medical assistance qualifies as a genocide. The definition also has play when it comes to quantity of people killed since there's no set number or percentage that must be reached first to qualify. Going with Wikipedia's list (take it for what you will), 39 separate genocides have been identified during and since WWI. Of those, few or none were completed in total secrecy, typically with some government policies that were known- sometimes even lauded- publicly.

In many cases, governments utilize propaganda against whatever people they intend to eradicate in order to maintain public support. A popular propaganda technique for these governments is a process known as pseudospeciation, commonly employed in military institutionalization, which teaches the subject population to believe that the targeted group is some other species, something less then human, or even outright animal. Pseudospeciation relies on exaggerating the differences in appearance, behavior, thought, language, diet, history, and culture of a given group to demonstrate to the public how different the target group is in order to scrub the public of any sympathy for that group on a human level. In other cases, the offending government preforms the genocide under the guise of re-locating a population or helping the public at large (such as segregating the Jews into the Ghettos, or the trail of tears to re-locate the American Cherokee population from the Southeast US to Oklahoma). Even in political genocides, there is a understanding that there is a real danger in speaking your mind, backed with real, publicized actions on the government's part, such as during the Stalinist purges that occurred in the 1930's USSR.

So, you can imagine my surprise when multiple people suggested that I cover the alleged FEMA death camps on the blog. Apparently, the source of the circulating 'knowledge' of the camps hails from YouTube- source of all things that are good and true in this world. People who share this information with me often speak of DHS strike teams that arrive at homes that have mailboxes marked with orange stickers to drag unwitting Americans off to FEMA internment camps where they are subsequently gassed en masse. Nevermind that local police can't have a SWAT operation without local media taking extreme interest, nevermind the simple solution of getting a PO Box (problem, government?), nevermind that I've yet to have a specific group consistently identified as being the targets of these internments (the answers range from Republicans to Veterans to gun owners to Christians to anybody at all). So, request accepted.

Honestly, I've wondered 'Why FEMA'? I think it's because they're an easy target for conspiracy theorists, since their popularity tanked in the face of the fiasco in post-Katrina New Orleans. I figure that if FEMA had handled that well, we would today be discussing USPS death camps. I'm not suspicious for an ongoing genocide of the US citizenship by its government for several reasons. First, some claims include witnessing shipments of something on the order of a half million coffins, but I notice a glaring deficit of people asking where their friends and family have suddenly vanished off to. Assuming the 500,000 wasn't a one-time event, I'm sure somebody would've noticed the entire population of Wyoming (or Fresno, CA) disappearing. I'm sure somebody would've seen the armored vehicles, gunfights, and people being forcibly taken out of their quiet suburban neighborhood. Second, when asking what the Department of Homeland Security needs with millions of rounds of ammunition, I would posit that the US Coast Guard is under the DHS, and crazy things tend to happen when departments of government have to use all of their budget or else get the excess cut next year. For those who point to alleged satellite photos of FEMA camps, I will point you to an excellent popular mechanics article on the matter that can be found here. The article points out that one of the alleged camps is legitimately a labor camp, but for North Korea, not the US. The irony should be striking for any Christians in the readership, since the North Korean government is legitimately persecuting its Christian population through incarceration.

Which leads me to what you should be scared of. Genocides happen, and they're still happening today. They've claimed millions of lives, and they're easily among the most heinous of human atrocities. Go look in a mirror. You, who carry and spread the rumors of death and devastation in our Homeland; you who are a capable, thinking, adult human being; you who are, in some cases, armed. If you honest to God believe that this is happening, there is no argument I could make to convince you that these FEMA camps are an outright hoax. It's too easy for you or the internet to say that I've been deceived, or I'm in the pocket of the government- it's too easy just to write me off as a naysayer. If you really believe this, though, why do you sit idly by and chat about it with the same dull tone as one might discuss last night's TV programming? How can you live with yourself, doing nothing while you honestly believe that there are people being killed en masse on your land? If you can accept these conspiracies as just another fact of life, all while in the same breath heralding the merits of the second amendment, you need to take some time for some serious soul searching. If you don't honestly believe it, then why are you spreading this crap? Of the millions dead by genocide, the burden of their death not only hangs from the necks of those who committed the atrocities, but also from the necks of those who knew better and still did nothing.

The simple truth is that while this bullshit entertains, it's simply a passing fancy that only serves to distract from real horrors that are really happening right now in other parts of the world. You don't have to make this stuff up, it's out there now, you just have to care enough to look. Right now, North Korea is intentionally starving its population, throwing people in prison camps indefinitely for saying one cross thing about their leader, or even for being Christian. So if you're really serious about wanting to do something about genocide and government atrocities, pay attention to the world beyond what you're bombarded with on a daily basis, learn something educate yourself, and share your knowledge instead of your youtube videos; support humanitarian organizations like the UN, US Military (believe it or not, a large contributor to humanitarian causes across the world) and the Red Cross; of course, support science and the men and women doing it that are helping to bring us closer every day to world where war and human suffering is no longer necessary.

As always, feel free to leave questions, comments, concerns, and suggestions here on the blog, or on our facebook page.

Deadly Bites

 

So this is probably what you're thinking, right? Maybe you're thinking something along the line of dogsbite.org's dramatic slogan "Some dogs don't let go". Perhaps you're thinking of lions, tigers, and bears. While all of those can do a lot of damage in a short period of time, and they all call out to a primal terror hidden in all of us, they're not at all the most likely to kill you from a bite.

 

In fact, last year there were only ten fatality shark attacks worldwide, out of seventy-two unprovoked attacks[1]. Unprovoked attacks are those situations where there shark was undisturbed in its natural habitat, and attacked an unsuspecting human. That's actually fewer than the number of people killed by jellyfish in the Philippines alone every year (roughly twenty to forty). [9]Nobody sees jellyfish as the horrible monsters they really are by comparison to sharks, but getting sent into heart failure and drowning feet from shore because you brushed a jellyfish seems almost as terrifying to me as getting tasted by a shark. At least trauma care in the US can do something about shark bites, but it's suspected that many Jelly poisonings are mistaken for heart attacks, and not treated as they should be. [9]

 

When it comes to data on dog bites, other than the CDC for raw injury data, dogsbite.org seems to be the go-to place to get information on the internet. They're the second google hit when you search 'dog bite statistics', coming in ahead of the CDC, and behind a lawyer's 'wanna sue somebody?' page. Their website heralds themselves as a public information site, but I feel that they're about as informative as the National Vaccine Information Center, or other fearmongering sites with a bias to preach. They mention Pit Bulls in specific nineteen times on their front page alone as of the time of this writing. Their site is smattered with distorted statistics (such as using a nine year period of dog bite records to be able to say that pit bulls killed 176 people), and relies heavily on anecdotal, not empirical, accounts to strike fear and sorrow into the reader's mind- a tactic that is frequently used by organizations that have no or weak evidence to support their stance. The studies they cite as being significant are frankly pretty limp (or have nothing to do with bite epidemiology), such as this one which only notes a 0.63 events per 100,000 people a year reduction as a result of breed specific legislation. Their article on pit bull owners, which can be viewed here is nothing short of offensive. The kicker is that they have a directory of dog bite lawyers on their site, for your legal convenience.

 The reality when it comes to dogs is that, on a yearly basis, we have 32 deaths from dog bites in the US (still more than sharks globally, and less than Jellyfish)[2], a total of 4.5 million reported bites, 885,000 of which are deemed to require medical attention. Of those, 27,000 require reconstructive surgery.[3] According to the American Humane Association, breed specific legislation is ineffective at reducing dog bite total incidents. [10]According to an American Veterinary Medical Association  report cited on the CDC's dog bite statistics page, it isn't useful to single out one or two breeds for control. The reason is multifaceted, but essentially boils down to dog bite statistics actually being pretty poor.

"Dog bite statistics are not really statistics, and they do not give an accurate picture of dogs that bite. Invariably the numbers will show that dogs from popular large breeds are a problem. This should be expected because big dogs can physically do more damage if they do bite, and any popular breed has more individuals that could bite." [11, page 2/18]

 So how do we effectively reduce dog bites? The numbers don't lie, unaltered dogs bite more. In fact, 92% of fatal dog attacks involved male dogs, 94% of whom were unaltered. Supervise your kids around unfamiliar dogs, teach them that harassing any animal- especially a dog- is going to get them hurt. Don't approach any unfamiliar, chained up, or stressed out animals. It's that easy; Get your dogs altered, teach your kids, and practice a little common sense.

"But Curt!" You say. "This is the fearblog, and you have made me not afraid!" Well, if the very existence of dogsbite.org wasn't enough for you, I won't disappoint. Here's the bite you should really be afraid of:

The mosquito. In and of themselves, mosquito bites aren't deadly, everybody knows that. Mosquitoes, as ectoparasites, are themselves parasitized by smaller organisms that are deadly and disabling to us. Dengue virus infections cause around 22,000 deaths on an annual basis. [5] West Nile Virus caused 286 US deaths, and 5,674 cases in 2012. [6]Yellow fever was at 200,000 cases, and 30,000 deaths last year. [7]Elephantiasis, while causing few or no deaths, has left 40 million disabled and disfigured. [8] 623,357- that's the number of American lives claimed in both World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror combined according to Wikipedia. Every single year, Malaria causes 627,000 deaths, and 207 million clinical episodes. [4]The most efficient method of knocking out these diseases is by knocking out the vector, since the mosquito is a necessary stage in all of these diseases' life cycles, but it's a messy, multi-faceted problem that is unlikely to be solved in the near future. Maybe if we spent as much time and effort and killing mosquitoes as we spend on hunting sharks and attacking pit bulls, there'd be a real glimmer of hope.

So what can you do? Well, you can donate to this cause, which aims to provide better malaria care by tackling the huge problem of counterfeit or watered-down anti-Malarials. Not only is it deadly to people, namely children, who need the medications, it's also contributing to anti-malarial resistance in the parasite population by attacking the parasites with subtherapeutic doses. You can also use an insect repellent of your choosing to protect yourself and your loved ones from mosquito bites. As always, you should support those who support science. Seek to grow your own knowledge, and share what you've learned here (on person, or on facebook, just saying). Please feel free to leave any questions, comments, or concerns here on the blog or on our new facebook page at www.facebook.com/thefearblog

Till next time, kiddies, stay spooky.



[1]http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/Sharks/ISAF/2013Summary.html
[2]http://www.dogsbite.org/pdf/dog-attack-deaths-maimings-merritt-clifton-2013.pdf (questionable)
[3]http://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Dog-Bites/index.html
[4]http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/malaria_worldwide/impact.html
[5]http://www.cdc.gov/dengue/epidemiology/index.html
[6]http://www.cdc.gov/westnile/statsMaps/finalMapsData/data/2012WNVHumanInfectionsbyState.pdf
[7]http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs100/en/
[8]http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs102/en/
[9]http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/jellyfish/textonly/biology_sting.jsp
[10]http://www.americanhumane.org/animals/stop-animal-abuse/fact-sheets/dog-bites.html
[11]https://www.avma.org/public/Health/Documents/dogbite.pdf

MERS

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

 

MERS IS COMIING! BUST OUT YOUR DISASTER KITS, IT'S ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE, KIDDIES!

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/15/health/mers-outbreak-netherlands/

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/mers-mystery/second-mers-case-shows-hospitals-are-ground-zero-mers-n104601

 

Welcome back to the blog! As some of you may have heard, SARS' cousin, MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) has made landfall stateside. MERS-CoV has been the subject of much media speculation and, in some cases, fearmongering since its identification in Saudi Arabia in 2012. Most people don't know much about MERS, except that it's kinda maybe bad to get it, so I'm going to give you a brief rundown.

 

According to the CDC, MERS infection has a lethality rate of about 30% of cases. Since its discovery, we've noted a little over 500 cases, which is relatively few for a new infection. Human-to-human transmission has been observed, but only in limited numbers, usually from an isolated case to family or healthcare workers (that is, generally people who spend extended periods in close proximity to the patient). Typically, new infections of MERS fizzle out within one or two transmissions- not unlike H4N1 avian influenzas. It's unlikely that humans are a reservoir for MERS, since the infection is not persistent, and isolated cases are observed with no detectable chain of transmission. We have pretty good evidence suggesting that Dromedary Camels (those with one hump, as pictured) are the reservoir, but nothing completely solid. There is no antiviral or approved therapy for MERS as of the time of this post, but we do have a reliable test for it. [1]

 

The cases that made stateside were imported from overseas[1], and seem to be sticking to the pattern of little to no interpersonal transmission. Is it possible the virus could mutate to become stable in humans? Of course, MERS has an RNA genome, which means that it's going to have relatively high mutation rate, but I'll wager that the risk of the virus mutating to become stable for interpersonal transmission is minimal. I'm basing my logic off of a similar virus that some of you may remember panicking over at some point earlier in the millennium, the H4N1 Avian Influenza. Like bird flu, MERS is an RNA virus that causes respiratory symptoms, it has a high kill rate, and relatively poor interpersonal transmission (spreading only to those with close, extended contact with the patient). The exact route of transmission for MERS isn't known for sure, but I'd wager that, like Flu, it takes the respiratory route. Of course, there was always the remote possibility of H4N1 gaining the ability to have sustained chains of transmission in people, but it never happened. If it was going to happen, I'd say that with 500 cases spread out over several different countries, there should've been enough exposure to slightly variant strains that it would've happened by now.

 

So, what can you do? First, remain calm, which is different from complacency. That is to say, don't get scared, but be prepared. Wash your hands, limit your contact with people showing signs and symptoms of respiratory disease, wash your hands, stay home if you're sick, wash your hands, don't kiss any camels, WASH YOUR HANDS, keep some N95 masks in your home for you and yours in case it does begin to spread, and don't wait until you're too sick to walk to seek medical attention. Pay attention to news reports, mainly from the CDC at their outbreak reporting page here. Also, support science, and those who support science. Spread the knowledge you've gained here, and do your own research to learn more. Also, sharing the blog page (NEW AND IMPROVED!) won't hurt my feelings. Feel free to leave any questions, comments, or suggestions here, or on our new facebook page at www.facebook.com/thefearblog


ALSO! WE DID IT! The proposed legislation to block the NEIDL was shot down, thanks to all the signatures on that petition.




[1]http://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/mers/faq.html