Argentine health officials reported 17 more H1N1 flu deaths, bringing the total to at least 44 in the country hardest hit by the A/H1N1 virus in the southern hemisphere. Health Minister Juan Manzur said that “between 43 and 44 deaths” linked to the virus had been confirmed, a significant jump from the 26 that had been reported by the ministry on Friday.
——-
Argentina has now surpassed Canada as the country with the third highest A/H1N1 flu death toll, following the United States with 127 deaths reported and Mexico, where the epidemic was first discovered earlier this year, with 116 deaths.
“The situation is serious, it’s difficult”, admitted Manzur who took the post this week following the resignation of his predecessor, Graciela Ocaña, over “policy” discrepancies with President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner administration.
“We are contending with a trend that is still on the rise” he said, referring to what is expected to be a further spread of seasonal and A/H1N1 flu in the Southern hemisphere winter.
——
Neighbouring Chile is also suffering from a high incidence of the A/H1N1 virus with at least 14 deaths and 7.342 confirmed cases. This week Paraguay and Uruguay reported their first flu deaths.
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The epidemic in Argentina is noteworthy because of its apparent high mortality rate compared to other countries stricken with the virus. With 1,587 confirmed cases and 44 deaths, one in every 37 confirmed swine flu cases – 2.71% – in Argentina has been fatal.
In Mexico, where the epidemic was discovered, 116 people have died out of a total 8,613 confirmed cases, a mortality rate of 1.35%, about half as high.
By contrast, the United States has 127 confirmed deaths out of 27,717 cases, a mortality rate of 0.46% for known cases, and the death rate could be far lower as US health officials believe one million Americans have contracted the A/H1N1 virus.
Swine flu caused more-severe illness in ferrets than seasonal flu, according to two studies in the journal Science that help explain why the H1N1 virus causes symptoms not seen in regular flu such as nausea and vomiting.
The H1N1 swine flu virus went further into the ferrets’ lungs, and also penetrated the gastrointestinal tract while seasonal flu stayed in the nasal cavity, researchers from the U.S. and the Netherlands found. Ferrets are affected by flu viruses much as humans are, the researchers said.
——-
“These data suggest that the 2009 A(H1N1) influenza virus has the ability to persist in the human population, potentially with more severe clinical consequences,” wrote the Dutch study authors, led by Ron Fouchier at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam.
The two studies were published online today. Both groups found that ferrets infected with swine flu lost more weight than those exposed to seasonal flu, and that the swine flu virus was more widespread in the animals’ bodies.
Again, this virus is down South for the Southern Winter, perhaps doing a bit of genetic reassortment and/or recombination, and will return North this Fall. Whether in a more or less virulent, persistent, or contagious form is up to a genetic roll of the dice.
So keep washing your hands and terrorist fist bumping rather than hand shaking.
This morning, as I was enjoying my morning coffee and perusing on line news, a loud pop emanated from the power supply to my cable modem, and soon the smell of burning electrics and a bit of smoke. Shortly thereafter a loud pop and the same burning smell emanated from my my component stereo system, then my living room light bulb grew really bright and died. Soon the power shut down to the entire apartment building. For the record, all of my equipment is plugged into surge protecting power strips.
Having noticed my living room light burning extraordinarily brightly and having a bit of experience with electrical distribution systems (having worked around and manged a municipal electrical utility for about ten years) I concluded that at least a portion of the 110 volt electrical distribution system in the building had been induced to 220 volts.
It wasn’t long before a couple of technicians from CFE, Comisión Federal de Electricidad, the state entity responsible for the generating, transmitting, and distributing electrical energy, arrived to investigate. Quizzing the fellows as to the cause of the problem, they informed me, just as I had concluded, that one of the 110 circuits entering the building had energized the neutral wire. Ultimately the fellows replaced the service drops to the building within which I live and the house across the street. I should note that the technicians climb concrete poles using slings, which they loop around the pole, and within which they fit their feet and move alternately up the pole. Wooden poles and climbing spurs are the norm where I lived most of my life.
As it turned out, my stereo system is fine and the power supply to the modem was fried. I called Megacable to report the fried power supply and an amiable technician showed up about 6 this evening, replaced the power supply, and all is now as it should be.
Senora Palacio, the apartment building manager, was circulating this afternoon to determine who might have electronic equipment damaged, and my agoraphobic gringo neighbor stopped by to report that his radio (upon which he tunes in static as his “white noise” to drown out urban noises, and sometimes listens to the BBC) and his microwave had been fried. I referred him to La Administradora.
This morning, being without internet service, I again rigged up a router, with an after market antenna, to repeat the signal from the building owner’s Telmex WiFi signal three stories up. It worked fine, though Telmex service is slower than Megacable.
So there you have it, my report of an unusually exciting day in Xalapa.
An excerpt from the transcript of a town hall meeting President Obama conducted in Annandale, VA.
Q Hi, Mr. President. I’m a member of SEIU and I’m down here in Fairfax County working on Change That Works. What can I do, as a member of the union, to help you with your reform bill?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I appreciate the question. The most important thing I think the American people can do right now is to just be informed. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors to get informed about what’s happening in the health care system right now. It’s very complicated and I don’t expect everybody to be an expert, but I want everybody to be well enough informed that the scare tactics of those who would oppose reform don’t work.
So when you hear somebody say this is — “Obama is proposing a government takeover of health care” — that’s an old argument that’s been used for years. I just want to be clear. If you’ve got a health care plan that you get through your employer or some other private plan, I want you to keep it. I actually think reforming the system is the most likely way for you to keep the health care that you’ve got. I don’t want to take it over. I think it’s great that you can keep the care that you’ve got.
All I’ve said is I want to make sure that those things that taxpayers are paying for, that we’re getting our money’s worth. I don’t want to provide $177 billion in subsidies to insurance companies. I don’t want to reimburse for five tests when the evidence shows that you just getting one test is going to be better for you because that means that the taxpayers are saving money and I can use that to lower your costs, or to help somebody who doesn’t have health care at all.
I do think we should have a public plan to compete with the private plans. But these private insurance companies, they’re always telling me what a great deal that they give to the American consumer; if it’s such a great deal, why are they worried about competing against the public plan, especially when they say government can’t do anything? (Applause.) [Bold emphasis added].
So they’ll tell you that we’re trying to take over health care. I don’t want to take over health care.
They’ll tell you that we’re going to try to ration the system. We don’t want to get between you and your doctor. What we do believe is that if there’s good evidence out there that shows that the best way to treat your illness is to give you the blue pill, and instead right now you’re getting prescribed the red pill that costs twice as much, I think that you and your doctor, having that information, are probably going to decide to go with the cheaper pill that does just as good of a job, and that will save you money. That’s not rationing. That’s being sensible.
So whenever you start hearing these arguments about socialized medicine, government takeover, rationing, Canada-style health care, what I need you to do — and I need everybody here to do and everybody who’s watching to do — is to actually pay attention to the argument, and don’t let people scare you out of reforming a system that we know is not working.
America — one of the great things about this country is we’ve got a system that’s sometimes kind of hard to change. Congress gets kind of bogged down, and part of that is because of the way the Constitution is designed — it’s served us well because it keeps us very stable. We don’t have coups and all kinds of governments collapsing all the time. But the disadvantage sometimes is, is that it’s hard for us to make big, bold steps. But the great thing about the system is that, every once in a while, when we finally hit a point where things just aren’t working at all, we are able to generate the political will to finally get things done.
That’s how we got Social Security. After the Great Depression, nobody had any pensions or protection, and people started realizing, we can’t have a country where suddenly older Americans are just on the streets, after working hard all their lives. And finally we got Social Security. And then people said, well, we can’t have older Americans who don’t have any health care, and we got Medicare. At every juncture, when we finally need to make a change, we make a change. This is one of those times.
So don’t be scared about the future. Let’s embrace the future. Let’s go after the future. If we do, then I’m confident that we can create a health care system that gives you choice, allows you to keep your doctor, drives down costs, makes sure that every American doesn’t have to worry if they lose or change their jobs. That’s our aim. That’s our goal. We’re going to make it happen this year.
Thank you, everybody. I appreciate you. Thank you. (Applause.)
Incurious George, demonstrably, is incapable of understanding either the forest or remembering the names of the trees in the forest. President Clinton is able to remember the name of every tree in the forest, but doesn’t seem to quite understand the forest as a whole. Obama is able to understand the forest and remember the name of every tree in the forest.
My seven readers know that I don’t generally delve into the lurid stories of the day, such as SC Gov. Mark Sanford’s peccadilloes or the death of Michael Jackson, to cite current examples. Lurid stories are, after all, the stock and trade of the traditional media.
However, may I observe that Jenny Sanford, the governor’s wife of 15 years, has done what Hillary Clinton, Silda Spitzer, and legions of other wives of prominent male politicians caught with their pants down, so to speak, have not. Sanford told her husband that he would have to face the media and ask for the public’s forgiveness without her by his side.
Sanford reports that she discovered her husband’s affair some months ago and two weeks ago had told him to hit the road.
Meanwhile, Gov. Sanford continues to dig his hole deeper by blabbing to the press about his love for his Argentinian “soul mate” by opining that at least he will “be able to die knowing I had met my soul mate,“. Additionally, the lying sleaze bucket has repaid the state of SC for expenses incurred in traveling to rendezvous with his “soul mate”.
Jenny Sanford is worth a fortune, derived from the Skil Tool Corp.; was a Wall Street vice-president when she met the creep she ultimately married; and is widely reported to be the brains behind her husband’s political ascendancy to three Congressional terms and one as the SC governor.
I heartily salute Jenny Stanford for not subordinating her dignity to her husband’s political needs.
It has taken only four months since Fed Chair Bernanke indicated there were “green shoots” appearing in an otherwise barren economy for the term to reach cliche status. That must be a record for descent into clichehood.
It’s to the point that, like when I encounter the word “paradigm” or the terms “think outside the box”, “push the envelope”, “learning curve”, “sea change”, “tectonic shift”, or “stakeholders” I cease reading whatever it is I am reading.
And while I’m at it, the improper use of compound pronouns, such as “Earl and myself went…” or “when completed return to myself”, the use of “that” when “than” is appropriate, and the redundancy of “past history” really grate at the grammatical sensibilities years ago instilled in me by some really good English composition instructors.
Those who oppose a publicly administered, not for profit, single payer system of health insurance for the USA or even a “public option” to provide competition to the private insurers, the medical/pharmaceutical/insurance combine, are fond of touting competition in their industries.
Health Care for America Now has release a report addressing competition within the health insurance business. As it turns out, in many areas of the USA there is very little competition.
Executive Summary:
Lack of competition in the insurance marketplace poses unique dangers to consumers. Mergers and industry consolidation have created a situation where a small number of large companies control everything from what they charge to what benefits they offer. A public health insurance option would force private insurance companies to compete – bringing down cost, guaranteeing quality, and setting a benchmark for coverage and transparency.
According to the American Medical Association, 94 percent of insurance markets in the
United States are now highly concentrated.
In the past 13 years, more than 400 corporate mergers have involved health insurers, and a small number of companies now dominate local markets but haven’t delivered on promises of increased efficiency.
Shrinking competition among health insurance companies is a major cause of spiraling
health insurance costs.
Premiums have gone up more than 87 percent, on average, over the past six years.
Insurer consolidation of market share disproportionately disadvantages rural and lower population states.In Hawaii, Rhode Island, Alaska, Vermont, Alabama, Maine, Montana, Wyoming, Arkansas, and Iowa, the two largest health insurers control at least 80 percent of the statewide market.
Growing market consolidation is especially bad for small businesses. The more concentrated the market, the more insurance companies can set prices however they want. Small groups and individuals who buy health plans directly from insurers suffer the greatest increases because it’s as if they buy retail while the larger groups buy wholesale.
Insurers are thriving in the anti-competitive marketplace, raking in enormous profits and paying out huge CEO salaries.
Profits at 10 of the country’s largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007 (from $2.4 billion to $12.9 billion). In 2007 alone, the chief executive officers at these companies collected combined total compensation of $118.6 million—an average of $11.9 million each. That is 468 times more than the $25,434 an average American worker made that year.
Industry invests more in buying back its own stock and rewarding its shareholders than in improving system operations, reducing premiums, or in developing ways to pay doctors and hospitals fairly.
July 5th there will be elections for 500 deputies for the national Chamber of Deputies, which as of 2006 included one deputy for each 200,000 person in the nation. There will also be a number of different state and local elections.
Here in Xalapa for the last month or so there has been campaigning by organizations for the various candidates. The candidates set up almost daily along the centro plaza and Parque Enriquez. AMLO, who narrowly lost the 2006 presidential election, many say through fraud, was even in town yesterday speaking to the faithful.
There is a national campaign, “voto en blanco”, propagated it seems primarily through the internet, which advocates submitting a blank ballot and which seems to have gained a bit of traction. Recent polling indicates that 3% of those interviewed favored the “voto en blanco” approach.
The Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) has mounted a campaign encouraging folks to vote. Today, in fact, during my morning exercise walk, I encountered a group of young folks, representing the IFE, who presented me with a key chain and brochure informing me why I should vote. I informed the group that I was a foreigner and, thus, was unable to vote. A couple of the youngsters responded, in jest, with a couple suggestions of voter fraud.
There is a newer political party, the New Alliance party, running candidates. A view of the party’s website, though, features photos only of very light skinned folks. To the point that one might think it a web site for Scandinavian political party. I have no idea of how many candidates the party is fielding or what it represents, or much of anything else about the upcoming elections for that matter, except the polls indicate the PRI is in the lead.
What does it say about USA news consumers when news of Michael Jackson’s death created so much traffic to major news sites so that, for a time, only 10% of those attempting to connect to those news sites did so successfully?
The Honduran military has seized state power after kidnapping and flying the democratically elected president to Costa Rica. Shouldn’t the USA government initiate measures to suspend Honduras from the Organization of American States? Honduras, it seems to me, should be held to the same standard as was Cuba.
Reich correctly informs us that if we want a “public option”, that is a publicly owned, not for profit health insurance program to compete with the private insurers, it is up to us to make it happen.
It will be only masses of voters telling their congressional representatives to include a public option that can counteract the hundreds of millions of dollars given to the congresspersons by the medical/pharmaceutical/insurance combine.
So send a message today to your congressional representatives.
“What Can I Do?”
Someone recently approached me at the cheese counter of a local supermarket, asking “what can I do?” At first I thought the person was seeking advice about a choice of cheese. But I soon realized the question was larger than that. It was: what can I do about the way things are going in Washington?
People who voted for Barack Obama tend to fall into one of two camps: Trusters, who believe he’s a good man with the right values and he’s doing everything he can; and cynics, who have become disillusioned with his bailouts of Wall Street, flimsy proposals for taming the Street, willingness to give away 85 percent of cap-and-trade pollution permits, seeming reversals on eavesdropping and torture, and squishiness on a public option for health care.
In my view, both positions are wrong. A new president — even one as talented and well-motivated as Obama — can’t get a thing done in Washington unless the public is actively behind him. As FDR said in the reelection campaign of 1936 when a lady insisted that if she were to vote for him he must commit to a long list of objectives, “Maam, I want to do those things, but you must make me.”
We must make Obama do the right things. Email, write, and phone the White House. Do the same with your members of Congress. Round up others to do so. Also: Find friends and family members in red states who agree with you, and get them fired up to do the same. For example, if you happen to have a good friend or family member in Montana, you might ask him or her to write Max Baucus and tell him they want a public option included in any healthcare bill.
Please keep in mind that I’ve been seriously looking into orchid growing only for about that last couple of weeks since orchid vendors showed up on the streets and I decided to give it a try. Basically I don’t know squat of the subject. However, I am seeing new root and shoot growth on the plants I have mounted on pieces of tree branches, so figure my method of simulating the plants’ natural habitat, the best I can, works. Though I am reserving final judgment until I see a mass of new roots roots clinging to the mounts and new shoots, blossoms, and pseudobulbs emerging.
Also keep in mind that I live, more or less, within the native range of the orchid plants I have purchased and mounted; and that my remarks pertain to epiphytic orchids, and most particularly “pseudobulb” epiphytic orchids.
Epiphytes, for those who may not know, are benign parasitic plants, the roots of which attach to trees or rocks, thus their roots do not contact soil. The moisture storing pseudobulbs and succulent roots see the orchids through times of little moisture. There has been periodic rain showers here for the last few days, after a couple of dry weeks, and the epiphytes growing on the trees along the avenues here have quite noticeably perked up.
Initially I had mounted a number of orchids on a branch I salvaged, with permission, from a pile in a nearby park which I had placed in my little patio at the bottom of a four story light well. I decided there was insufficient light to the patio for orchids and that it afforded no protection from rain, so moved the orchids to the security grills on the outside of my bathroom and bedroom windows where there is bright light but no direct sunlight and a roof three stories up provides a bit of protection from excessive rain.
Almost all of the orchid growing information web sites I have visited focus on growing orchids outside of their native ranges so provide instructions for growing orchids in pots filled with growing medium, such as ground up tree bark. The sites all caution of over watering orchids.
I have learned, however, that it is difficult to over water mounted orchids. I have been spraying my plants thoroughly, two or three times each day during dry weather while they are becoming established on there wood mounts. I have purchased the plants from street vendors and the roots have been very dry and pseudobulbs shriveled, so figure lots of water is appropriate while the plants acclimate to their new habitat. I have learned also that when buying an orchid plant it is best to buy one with at least three pseudobulbs.
You can see in the photo above, of what I believe is a Encyclia vitellina, that one of the blossoms has produced a seed pod, which means that the appropriate critter happened by and wandered through the blossoms. The photo also shows a fresh shoot of what I believe is a Cattlelya.
I have been reading a bit about pollinating and hybridizing orchids. It seems that the Cattlelya, informally known as the “corsage orchid”, is a favorite for hybridizing. The Cattlelyas have large, showy flowers with easily accessible pollen; and, thus, there are lots of different Cattlelyas. One shown in the photo below.
I have also been reading about growing orchids from seeds, in anticipation of the maturity of the seed pod shown above.
Orchid seeds are almost microscopic, and develop within the pods amidst a fuzzy material which facilitates the spreading of the seed by the wind. The seeds contain no feed stores; and, thus, in their flight to a suitable nursery are reliant upon serendipitous contact with Rhizoctonia fungus which provides nutrients to the barren seeds. A German scientist discovered in the early 1900s that inoculating orchid seeds, placed upon sterilized peat, with ground up roots of adult plants greatly increased germination rates.
Now days orchid seeds are generally germinated in laboratories upon sterilized agar based medium. I’ll be trying the ground root inoculation method.
Gratuitous Editorial: I have been appalled, in researching orchids through the internet, at the number of web sites identifying México as being a part of either Central or South America, and at the number of sites which indicated that epiphytes aren’t parasites, as they don’t harm their hosts.
You have, I’m sure, read or heard news reports of the horrific fire in a day care center in Hermosillo, in the state of Sonora, which heretofore has killed 41 children, with additional children hospitalized with uncertain fates.
John Ross, a long time resident of México and reporter of Mexican affairs, reports the back story of day care privatization, and corruption involving regulators, and even reaching the Sonora governor. It’s an interesting read if you’re of the mind.
As an aside, you will notice from Ross’ references that, unlike the USA newspapers, Mexican newspapers continue to employ investigative reporters.
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