“Critics — including researchers who study biosecurity and biosafety — argue it doesn’t really pass a cost-benefit analysis. In some ways, virus hunting is looking for a needle in a haystack — the handful of viruses that might cross over to humans amid tens of thousands that won’t — when we don’t even know how to tell needles from hay, or what to do with a needle once we identify one.
And some experts are raising another, even sharper question: What if viral discovery is not just an ineffective tactic but a terrible idea, one that might not only fail to prevent the next pandemic but potentially even make it more likely?”
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“Monitoring the interface between humans and animals for pandemic prevention has value, particularly when the programs are narrowly targeted at certain objectives: say, a focus on reducing spillover, or surveillance of potential animal infections, or studying viruses that have already spilled over into humans. Research published last month in Nature projects that global warming could drive 4,000 viruses to spread for the first time between mammals, including potentially humans and animals, by 2070, underscoring the changing threat from zoonotic spillovers.
But if the risks of virus hunting are higher than the odds of a virus crossing over into humans and sparking a pandemic naturally, then viral discovery doesn’t just look inefficient. It looks like a bad idea.”
“Over the past four years, Aid Access says it has delivered abortion medication — mifepristone and misoprostol — to more than 30,000 Americans across all 50 states, including the 19 conservative states that currently ban telemedicine abortion.
The organization plays a unique role in the US reproductive rights ecosystem by successfully exploiting legal loopholes that make it easier for an overseas doctor to care for American patients in restrictive states — a role that could become even more key if Roe v. Wade is struck down.”
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“because it operates outside the formal US health care system, Aid Access says it has been penalized by search engines and social media giants that have tried to tackle the spread of Covid-19 misinformation.
Aid Access still pops up on Google if you search the organization’s name, but most users had come to the site while searching for terms like “abortion by mail” and “abortion pills.” Following a series of algorithm updates beginning in May 2020, Aid Access says it no longer shows up in top results for general medication abortion searches — and that ads from its sister organization, Women on Web, which serves countries all over the world, are frequently removed or rejected from Facebook and Instagram for dubious reasons, like “language … that is likely to offend users.”
Republicans might not be able to stop Aid Access right now, but it appears that Silicon Valley can.”
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“Activists note that medication abortion is far safer than many painkillers easily purchased over the counter, and the World Health Organization maintains that individuals can self-administer the drugs without direct supervision of a health care provider during their first trimester. New Lancet research published in February affirmed the safety of the Aid Access model, which also provides the medication at significantly lower cost than in-person surgical abortions or even the new crop of US startups like Hey Jane, Abortion on Demand, and Carafem.”
Substance Use and Intimate Partner Violence: A Meta-Analytic Review 2016. Bryan M. Cafferky, Marcos Mendez, Jared R. Anderson, and Sandra M. Stith. Psychology of Violence. https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/59511278/Cafferky_201820190604-60960-qtu1qv-with-cover-page-v2.pdf?Expires=1643220750&Signature=JmFWS~QkCg86Icul9oqw-3Sz9j5uO~LzKP~HsVRSKQtNbZcNthwDy3nCgpG9yKXqPN2J2hs4tBs5pXVaD7cqLr9OXk9MDuEs37O1A0-c1-ZxX7EWjD16pZdSF3uKci5vDn4Geu2DhSduZ-Jqd~qkfmjK~NJybrESL7vvuiyszzVMhd~XjwQUQKw-PDdYiOY8qMD4oA~ecbZKCSVF~Rmxm5aFaYmnHAtWJb6Xc221n2SG5db3vXeECkCW3Ym09t7YAkY2b-Sg~sjKhHe3vGbUVcPkSj3aMKjsjBuA~mGK6xynPEQkGlmRJ0Htg22yJsh02QBtbqf51KqlGMKsk0L4uA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA ALCOHOL USE IN FAMILY AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE Ashlee Curtis et al. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/am-pdf/10.1111/dar.12925 The Role of Illicit
“By September 2021, the scientists and staffers at the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission had gathered enough data to know that the trees in its green-tree reservoirs — a type of hardwood wetland ecosystem — were dying. At Hurricane Lake, a wildlife management area of 17,000 acres, the level of severe illness and death in the timber population was up to 42 percent, especially for certain species of oak, according to a 2014 forest-health assessment. The future of another green-tree reservoir, Bayou Meto, more than 33,000 acres, would look the same if they didn’t act quickly.
There were a lot of reasons the trees were dying, but it was also partly the commission’s fault. Long ago, the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers and their tributaries would have flooded the bayous naturally, filling bottomland forests during the winter months when the trees were dormant and allowing new saplings to grow after the waters receded in the spring. Widespread European settlement and agriculture largely halted the natural flooding, but in the 1950s, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission began buying bottomland forests for preservation, which it then flooded with a system of levees and other tools.
This made the forests an ideal winter stop for ducks to eat and rest on their annual migration south. Arkansas is a magnet for duck hunters, and the state has issued more than 100,000 permits for duck hunters from Arkansas and out of state for every year since 2014. But it turned out the commission was flooding the reservoirs too early and at levels too high, which was damaging the trees. The ducks that arrive in Arkansas especially love eating the acorns from a certain species of oak — and those oaks are now dying.
Austin Booth, director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, knew that convincing the state’s duck hunters and businesses that there was a serious problem would be tricky. Part of the solution the commission planned to propose to save the trees involved delaying the annual fall flooding, which could mean less habitat for the ducks, fewer ducks stopping in the area and more duck hunters crowded into smaller spaces fighting over targets.
And all the duck hunters would have their own ideas about who to blame for the problem and what the solution should be.
Last September, Booth gave a brief speech that was streamed live on YouTube, outlining the problem. He announced a series of public meetings to begin in the following months. Booth told me that when he began to plan those meetings, he thought of all the government meetings and town halls he’d attended after years working in politics. “I wanted to ratchet down some of the intensity that happens when a government official stands up on a stage and talks down to people,” he said.
Instead, he decided the meetings would be dinners where the Game and Fish staff would eat alongside the people they sought to convince. “I just believe there’s a human component to sitting down and having a meal with someone,” he said. At those dinners, he’d give a brief introduction, then invite people to ask questions of the staff as they ate and mingled.
At the end of the dinners, Booth said he’d stand up again and ask, “Is there anyone that’s going to walk through that door tonight without their questions answered or comments taken for the record, or with their concerns ignored?” No one, he said, came forward. The four dinners were attended by between 50 and 100 people, according to Booth, but those attendees then spread the word, dampening criticism of the new management system.
What’s interesting about this dinner program is that it began during the COVID-19 pandemic, which also required effective science communication to convince the public to accept changes, major and minor, to their lives. Even before this pandemic, there’s been a long history of resistance to public health measures and new vaccines, and many researchers suspected that could likely be the case with COVID-19 as well. The social scientists who study these issues might have counseled an approach like that employed by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, using local messengers who had relationships with the communities in question and who could communicate in less intimidating ways.
But the U.S. did not do that with COVID-19. Instead, rapidly changing information came from only a few sources, usually at the national level and seemingly without much strategy. And as such, many places have seen widespread resistance to public health interventions, like wearing masks and getting the vaccine.”
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“not every issue manifests locally, with local experts able to gather people for friendly dinners. Regarding climate change, Fisher says in her work now she is finding that people are often spurred to action only when the environmental damage becomes an extreme personal risk to them and their family, and when it is seen as preventable. Part of the problem with mitigating COVID-19, she said, was that many people didn’t see the virus as a personal risk — they thought they themselves would be OK, even if so many other people were dying.”
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“the danger of anti-intellectualism becoming more entwined with partisanship is that these attitudes then become more entrenched and harder to overcome. And that will become true on both sides, as each group believes they have the best sources of information — a phenomenon he called epistemic hubris. It’s damaging public debate.
The problems we’ve seen with COVID-19 are also spreading to new groups of people and to other issues. Dana Fisher, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, researches the social science of climate change, and she’s found that people are more likely to seek out sources that confirm what they already believe. “We see that scientific information is very, very clearly cherry-picked,” she said. Increasingly, she sees people looking for information that already supports their worldview, and that’s happening on the right and left. For her, this includes policymakers who have a role to play in solving issues like climate change.
“The medical science priesthood has a long history of treating outside-the-box thinkers harshly. Toward the end of the 18th century, Britain’s Royal Society refused to publish Edward Jenner’s discovery that inoculating people with material from cowpox pustules—a technique he called “vaccination,” from the Latin word for cow, vacca—prevented them from getting the corresponding human disease, smallpox. Jenner’s medical colleagues considered this idea dangerous; one member of the Royal College of Physicians even suggested that the technique could make people resemble cows.
At the time, many physicians were making a good living by performing variolation, which aimed to prevent smallpox by infecting patients with pus from people with mild cases. Some saw vaccination as a threat to their income. Thankfully, members of Parliament liked Jenner’s idea and appropriated money for him to open a vaccination clinic in London. By the early 1800s, American doctors had adopted the technique. In 1805, Napoleon ordered smallpox vaccination for all of his troops.
Half a century later, the prestigious Vienna General Hospital fired Ignaz Semmelweis from its faculty because he required his medical students and junior physicians to wash their hands before examining obstetrical patients. Semmelweis connected puerperal sepsis—a.k.a. “childbed fever,” then a common cause of postnatal death—to unclean hands. Ten years after Semmelweis returned to his native Budapest, he published The Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever. The medical establishment rained so much vitriol on him that it drove him insane. (Or so the story goes: Some think, in retrospect, that Semmelweis suffered from bipolar disorder.) He died in an asylum in 1865 at the age of 47.
The “germ theory” anticipated by Semmelweis did not take hold until the late 1880s. That helps explain why, in 1854, the public health establishment rebuffed the physician John Snow after he traced a London cholera epidemic to a water pump on Broad Street. Snow correctly suspected that water from the pump carried a pathogen that caused cholera.
Public health officials clung instead to the theory that the disease was carried by a miasma, or “bad air.” The British medical journal The Lancet published a brutal critique of Snow’s theory, and the General Board of Health determined that his idea was “scientifically unsound.” But after another outbreak of cholera in 1866, the public health establishment acknowledged the truth of Snow’s explanation. The incident validated the 19th century classical liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer’s warning that the public health establishment had come to represent entrenched political interests, distorting science and prolonging the cholera problem. “There is an evident inclination on the part of the medical profession to get itself organized after the fashion of the clericy,” he wrote in 1851’s Social Statics. “Surgeons and physicians are vigorously striving to erect a medical establishment akin to our religious one. Little do the public at large know how actively professional publications are agitating for state-appointed overseers of the public health.””
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“It may be true that, as American science fiction and fantasy writer Theodore Sturgeon said, “90 percent of everything is crap.” But the remaining 10 percent can be important. Health care professionals who see only the costs of their patients’ self-guided journeys through the medical literature tend to view this phenomenon as a threat to the scientific order, fueling a backlash. Their reaction risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
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“Openness to unconventional ideas has its limits. We don’t take flat-earthers seriously. Nor should we lend credence to outlandish claims that COVID-19 vaccines cause infertility, implant people with microchips, or change their DNA. There are not enough hours in the day to fully address every question or hypothesis. But a little tolerance and respect for outsiders can go a long way. If those habits become the new norm, people will be more likely to see rejection of challenges to the conventional wisdom as the objective assessment of specialists rather than the defensive reaction of self-interested elites. Science should be a profession, not a priesthood.”
“Each year at America’s egg hatcheries, as many as 300 million male chicks are gruesomely killed — usually by being ground up alive or gassed — since they can’t lay eggs and have been bred to be too small to be worth the effort of raising for meat. Researchers around the world are using transgenic engineering and gene-editing tools in an attempt to solve this chicken and egg dilemma.”
“Any system that is powerful and accurate enough to identify drugs that are safe for humans is inherently a system that will also be good at identifying drugs that are incredibly dangerous for humans.”
“Sound enters our ears, light enters our eyes, chemicals splash up in our nose and mouth, and mechanical forces graze our skin. It’s up to our brains to make sense of what it all means and create a seamless conscious experience of the world.
Illusions teach us that our reality isn’t a direct real-time feed coming from our ears, eyes, skin, and the rest of our bodies. Instead, what we experience is our brain’s best guess.
Sometimes, when the information coming in to our sensory organs is confusing, our brains have to edit parts out. Other times, our brains have to fill in some gaps with outright guesses. Our reality, ultimately, is constructed by our brains, built from our imperfect senses, and informed by our past experiences.”