Eeyore's News and View

The story that the news people won't let die. That might be a little unfair, but it is not really that much of an exaggeration. I guess it was yeasterday that the flu went to over 1000 confirmed cases, with over 50% being in mexico, 25% being in the us and the rest scattered but mostly being in europe (that we know of), a lot of the totalitarian countries won't say. Anyway i figured i would pass along a few more today. http://wtop.com/?nid=345&sid=1660998
Predicting Flu With the Aid of (George) Washington
The best way to track the spread of swine flu across the United States in the coming weeks may be to imagine it riding a dollar bill.
The routes taken by millions of them are at the core of a computer model at Northwestern University that is predicting the epidemic’s future. Reassuringly, it foresees only about 2,000 cases by the end of this month, mostly in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Houston.
In the past decade, the Internet has allowed health agencies to spot emerging viruses much sooner: local public health reports posted on the Web along with items from newspapers and radio stations are harvested by keyword-scanning programs. Now, in tandem with that, supercomputers are being enlisted to predict their spread.
Such models are too new to have established a track record, but last week two separate teams — the one at Northwestern and a friendly rival at Indiana University, using different algorithms — both made predictions that matched almost exactly: flu from Mexico, if left utterly unchecked, would infect only 2,000 to 2,500 people in the United States in four weeks.
Although the number of cases appears to be rising faster than the two models predicted, the Northwestern projection was “still in the ballpark” as of Sunday, said Dirk Brockmann, the engineering professor who leads the epidemic-modeling team at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. The model projected 150 to 170 cases by Sunday, compared with the 226 confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“If it was an order of magnitude off, like 1,000 cases instead of 10,000, I’d be worried,” Dr. Brockmann said.
At the heart of his simulation are two immense sets of data: air traffic and commuter traffic patterns for the entire country, and the yield of a whimsical Web site, Where’s George?
Where’s George? was started more than 10 years ago by Hank Eskin, a programmer who marked each dollar bill he received with a note asking its next owner to enter its serial number and a ZIP code into the Web site, just for the fun of seeing how far and fast bills traveled. By 2006, the site had the histories of 100 million bills.
Dr. Brockmann, visiting from Germany, heard about it in idle chatter and realized that it was just what he needed: a map of face-to-face transactions, exactly the kind that spread influenza.
He was nervous about using it, he said, until another study, tracking millions of cellphones to show how people moved around the country, produced a similar map.
His projection is remarkably detailed — by clicking on a map one can see how many cases a rural county in North Dakota can expect in two weeks versus how many Queens County in New York City can expect.
Dr. Brockmann can put out a simulation in two days, since each update needs 10 hours of computing time after data is updated. Indiana’s model takes about the same on its supercomputer, Big Red, said its team leader, Alessandro Vespignani, an informatics professor.
His model covers the globe, and it is based on air and land travel records for nearly the whole world. “In Africa, predictions are less accurate, but we have truck traffic,” he said.
Like Dr. Brockmann’s, Dr. Vespignani’s domestic model also names New York, California and Texas as future hot spots, followed by Illinois and Florida.
“We were stunned that our maps were very, very similar,” Dr. Vespignani said. “It’s encouraging about the robustness of our methods.”
They do make some similar assumptions. For example, the typical flu has a reproductive number of 1.7 to 2.8 — that is, the number of people each victim infects. Both chose low reproductive numbers, consistent with early data from Mexico. Both generate worst-case scenarios, knowing they are unrealistic.
“My wife just went to gymnastics with our daughter, and people were flipping out because a kid was coughing,” Dr. Brockmann said. Widespread fear “shapes the data,” he said, because it slows flu transmission, as do deliberate interventions like school closings and treatment with the antiviral drug Tamiflu.
Both models can be adjusted for those factors. Both team leaders declined to prophesy beyond four weeks, because the flu and politicians are unpredictable.
Indeed, the models are not so reassuring if one multiplies the four-week projection by the typical so-called doubling time for a flu pandemic, in which the number of cases doubles every 2.3 days. Do that, and every person in the United States is infected by mid-July. “But we don’t do that,” Dr. Brockmann said, “because that would be completely unscientific.”
A C.D.C. spokesman declined to comment on the two models, but he said he knew that school closings had an effect and cited a 2008 study of French school vacations by researchers at Imperial College London.
The study predicted that prolonged closures could cut flu cases by about 15 percent, which in the peak of a pandemic could cut emergency room admissions by 40 percent. But it only worked if the schoolchildren were kept apart, not seeing each other in day care or at the mall.
On Saturday, the New York City Department of Health released the results of a computer survey it gave to 1,996 students and 210 staff members at St. Francis Preparatory School in Queens. It showed a spike of cases from April 19, the day six students came back from Mexico feeling sick, and April 23, when 259 students and staff members reported flu symptoms.
Perusing the results, Dr. Brockmann sounded excited. “This looks like an epidemic curve,” he said. “I can use this.”
Yes, he agreed, that spike could include students who merely panicked. But it could also mean that in a closed setting like a school, the new flu could be transmitted surprisingly quickly.
“Averages don’t tell you very much,” he said of reproductive numbers. “You could have a student transmitting to 15 others, while the average in Queens is 0.1. It’s like putting Bill Gates down in Ethiopia and saying the country has a pretty high average income.”
But one thing remains true: “People have a very weird perception of large numbers,” he said. “If you have 2,000 cases of flu in a country of 300 million, most people think they’re going to be one of the 2,000, not one of the 299,998,000.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/health/04model.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=dollar%20bill&st=cse

So now it has come full circle with a twist, now when we infected the pig, we infected the pig with the new virus. I guess that is an ironic twist.
Canada reports pigs infected with H1N1
For the first time, a sick farmworker has infected pigs with the H1N1 virus, or swine flu, World Health Organization officials said Sunday.
A farmworker who recently had traveled to Mexico has infected a herd of pigs in Alberta, Canada, Peter Ben Embarek, a WHO food safety scientist, said at a news conference. The worker returned to the farm in mid-April, and the animals began getting sick eight to 10 days later, Embarek said.
The infection was mild, and the farmworker and pigs have recovered.
The virus that infected the pigs is the same one that is in circulation among people, and there is no indication that the transfer between species has caused the flu bug to mutate into a new or dangerous form, Embarek said.
"This is not a big surprise," he said, noting that officials had expected that pigs could be infected in areas where the virus is circulating.
Although farmworkers are at risk of contracting the virus from pigs, Embarek emphasized that people cannot become infected from eating pork. Both heat and the curing process used to make ham kill the virus, and the virus doesn't live long on surfaces.
"You can continue to safely eat your prosciutto," Embarek said.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-05-03-canada-flu_N.htm

The Taliban's Atomic Threat
At his press conference Wednesday evening, President Barack Obama endorsed Pakistan's official position that it has secure control over its nuclear-weapons arsenal. Mr. Obama said he was "gravely concerned" about the situation there, but "confident that the nuclear arsenal will remain out of militant hands."
His words are not reassuring in light of the Taliban's military and political gains throughout Pakistan. Our security, and that of friends and allies world-wide, depends critically on preventing more adversaries, especially ones with otherworldly ideologies, from acquiring nuclear weapons. Unless there is swift, decisive action against the Islamic radicals there, Pakistan faces two very worrisome scenarios.
One scenario is that instability continues to grow, and that the radicals disrupt both Pakistan's weak democratic institutions and the military.
Often known as Pakistan's "steel skeleton" for holding the country together after successive corrupt or incompetent civilian governments, the military itself is now gravely threatened from within by rising pro-Taliban sentiment. In these circumstances -- especially if, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified recently, the nuclear arsenal has been dispersed around the country -- there is a tangible risk that several weapons could slip out of military control. Such weapons could then find their way to al Qaeda or other terrorists, with obvious global implications.
The second scenario is even more dangerous. Instability could cause the constitutional government to collapse entirely and the military to fragment. This could allow a well-organized, tightly disciplined group to seize control of the entire Pakistani government. While Taliban-like radicals might not have even a remote chance to prevail in free and fair elections, they could well take advantage of chaos to seize power. If that happened, a radical Islamicist regime in Pakistan would control a substantial nuclear weapons capacity.
Not only could this second scenario give international terrorists even greater access to Pakistan's nuclear capabilities, the risk of nuclear confrontation with India would also increase dramatically. Moreover, Iran would certainly further accelerate its own weapons program, followed inexorably by others in the region (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey) obtaining nuclear weapons, perhaps through direct purchase from Islamabad's new regime.
To prevent either scenario, Pakistan must move to the top of our strategic agenda, albeit closely related to Afghanistan. (Pashtuns on both sides of the border are the major source of Taliban manpower, although certainly not the only locus of radical support.) Contrary to Western "international nannies," the primary conflict motivators in both countries are ethnic and tribal loyalties, religious fanaticism and simple opportunism. It is not a case of the "have nots" rising against the "haves," but of True Believers on a divine mission. Accordingly, neither greater economic assistance, nor more civilian advisers upcountry, nor stronger democratic institutions will eliminate the strategic threat nearly soon enough.
We didn't get here overnight. We are reaping the consequences of failed nonproliferation policies that in the past penalized Pakistan for its nuclear program by cutting off military assistance and scaling back the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program that brought hundreds of Pakistani officers to the U.S. Globally, this extraordinarily successful program has bound generations of foreign military leaders to their U.S. counterparts. Past cut-offs with Pakistan have harmed our bilateral relationship. Perhaps inevitably, the Pakistani officers who haven't participated in IMET are increasingly subject to radical influences.
Moreover, the Bush administration, by pushing former President Pervez Musharraf into unwise elections and effectively removing him from power, simply exacerbated the instability within Pakistan's already frail system. Mr. Musharraf's performance against the terrorists left much to be desired, and he was no democrat. But removing him was unpleasantly reminiscent of the 1963 coup against South Vietnam's Diem regime, which ushered in a succession of ever-weaker, revolving-door governments, thus significantly facilitating the ultimate Communist takeover. Benazir Bhutto's assassination, while obviously unforeseen, was a direct consequence of our excessive electoral zeal.
To prevent catastrophe will require considerable American effort and unquestionably provoke resistance from many Pakistanis, often for widely differing reasons. We must strengthen pro-American elements in Pakistan's military so they can purge dangerous Islamicists from their ranks; roll back Taliban advances; and, together with our increased efforts in Afghanistan, decisively defeat the militants on either side of the border. This may mean stifling some of our democratic squeamishness and acquiescing in a Pakistani military takeover, if the civilian government melts before radical pressures. So be it.
Moreover, we must strive to keep Indo-Pakistani relations stable, if not friendly, and pressure Islamabad to put nuclear-weapons proliferator and father of Pakistan's nuclear program A.Q. Khan back under house arrest. At the same time, we should contemplate whether and how to extract as many nuclear weapons as possible from Pakistan, thus somewhat mitigating the consequences of regime collapse.
President Obama's talks next week in Washington with the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan provide a clear opportunity to take the hard steps necessary to secure Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and defeat the Taliban. Failure to act decisively could well lead to strategic defeat in Pakistan.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124121967978578985.html#mod=rss_opinion_main

Guess how DHS defines who is a terrorist now
May 02, 2009 By Drew Zahn
Two weeks before the U.S. Department of Homeland Security penned its controversial report warning against "right-wing extremists" in the United States, it generated a memo defining dozens of additional groups – animal rights activists, black separatists, tax protesters, even worshippers of the Norse god Odin – as potential "threats."
Though the "Domestic Extremism Lexicon" was reportedly rescinded almost immediately, Benjamin Sarlin of The Daily Beast recently obtained and published online a copy of the unclassified memo, dated March 26, 2009.
While many of the groups listed in the lexicon – such as Aryan prison gangs and neo-Nazis – may indeed be widely considered extremists, others will likely take offense at being described as a potential "threat."
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For example, the memo defines the "tax resistance movement" – also referred to in the report as the tax protest movement or the tax freedom movement – as "groups or individuals who vehemently believe taxes violate their constitutional rights. Among their beliefs are that wages are not income, that paying income taxes is voluntary, and that the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which allowed Congress to levy taxes on income, was not properly ratified."
The report, however, continues in its assessment of tax protesters, asserting that members "have been known to advocate or engage in criminal activity and plot acts of violence and terrorism in an attempt to advance their extremist goals."
Similarly, the lexicon concludes its definition of "black separatists" by asserting, "Such groups or individuals also may embrace radical religious beliefs. Members have been known to advocate or engage in criminal activity and plot acts of violence directed toward local law enforcement in an attempt to advance their extremist goals."
In his blog piece titled "Who You Calling an Extremist?" Sarlin writes, "Partisans leapt to decry the first DHS memo as part of a Democratic conspiracy to marginalize right wingers. But it became clear that DHS's broad descriptions of extremists were symptomatic of an ongoing agency problem that crossed ideological lines."
The lexicon states its purpose is to provide "definitions for key terms and phrases that often appear in DHS analysis that addresses the nature and scope of the threat that domestic, non-Islamic extremism poses to the United States."
Apparently, the DHS analyzes the "threat" level of Internet news websites like WorldNetDaily, for the lexicon defines "alternative media" as "a term used to describe various information sources that provide a forum for interpretations of events and issues that differ radically from those presented in mass media products and outlets."
The term "black power," widely used in a variety of contexts, also merits a definition in the lexicon: "A term used by black separatists to describe their pride in and the perceived superiority of the black race."
The DHS memo also includes precursors to the ill-fated "Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment" report, which prompted outrage from legislators and a campaign calling for the resignation of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano.
For example, the lexicon contains virtually the same broad-stroke language the right-wing extremism report used.
"Rightwing extremism," the lexicon defines as those "who can be broadly divided into those who are primarily hate-oriented, and those who are mainly antigovernment and reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority. This term also may refer to rightwing extremist movements that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration."
The lexicon further points to those who oppose driver's licenses for illegal immigrants.
"Anti-immigration extremism," the lexicon defines as "a movement of groups or individuals who are vehemently opposed to illegal immigration, particularly along the U.S. southwest border with Mexico, and who have been known to advocate or engage in criminal activity and plot acts of violence and terrorism to advance their extremist goals. They are highly critical of the U.S. Government's response to illegal immigration and oppose government programs that are designed to extend 'rights' to illegal aliens, such as issuing driver's licenses or national identification cards and providing in-state tuition, medical benefits, or public education."
Unlike the right-wing extremism report, however, the lexicon includes definitions of extremism across a broad spectrum of issues: anarchy, animal rights extremism, black nationalism, Cuban independence, environmentalism, Jewish extremism, Mexican separatism, right-wing militias, white supremacists, the anti-war movement and more.
Among the more curious groups the DHS appears to be monitoring is the "racial Nordic mysticism" group, defined as "an ideology adopted by many white supremacist prison gangs who embrace a Norse mythological religion, such as Odinism or Asatru."
Among the more comical definitions is the description given of what "racist skinheads" wear, enabling law officers, it appears, to identify skinheads by their preferred brand of footwear:
"Dress may include a shaved head or very short hair," the report states, "jeans, thin suspenders, combat boots or Doc Martens, a bomber jacket, and tattoos of Nazi-like emblems."
Sarlin, who first publicized the memo, reports that a spokesperson for DHS told him the memo was recalled "within minutes" of being issued but declined to offer any details on the reasons for its withdrawal.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=96916