Andrew Sabisky, a UK government adviser, recently resigned over comments supporting eugenics. Around the same time, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins best known for his book The Selfish Gene provoked controversy when tweeting that, while eugenics is morally deplorable, it would work.

Eugenics can be described as the science and practice of improving the human race through the selection of good hereditary traits. Eugenics inevitably brings to mind the atrocities committed by the Nazis, who used eugenic ideology as the rationale for large-scale forced sterilisation, involuntary euthanasia and the Holocaust. Given this sinister history, its bound to be alarming when government officials endorse eugenic ideas.

The eugenics movement of the past has been thoroughly discredited on both moral and scientific grounds. But questions about the ethics of genetically improving humans remain relevant.

The emergence of new genetic technologies often prompts renewed debate. Can eugenic ideas about improving the human race be divorced from the evils of the past and pursued through benign means? Or is there something inherently morally problematic about the idea of genetically improving humans?

A new, morally responsible eugenics may well be defensible, and new genetic technologies must be assessed on their own terms. But we also need to consider the broader political context. If the betterment of individual traits were to be presented as a key strategy to improve human welfare, this would look very much like the individualisation of social problems that was such a central feature of the old eugenics.

Dark past

The father of the eugenics movement was the English explorer and scientist Francis Galton (1822-1911). Influenced by his cousin Charles Darwins work The Origin of Species, Galton was interested in ideas about the heritability of different traits. He was particularly interested in the heritability of intelligence and how to increase societys diminished stock of talent and character. He also believed that social problems such as poverty, vagrancy and crime were ultimately caused by the inheritance of degenerate traits from parent to child.

Galton embarked on an ambitious research programme with the explicit goal to improve human stock through selective human breeding. In 1883 he named this research programme eugenics, meaning good in birth.

Galtons ideas quickly became influential and were widely embraced, first in Britain but subsequently in many other countries, including the US, Germany, Brazil and Scandinavia. At a time coloured by widespread concerns about the state of the nation, lack of social progress and the degeneration of the population, Galtons ideas inspired a popular movement for social reform through selective human reproduction.

The first half of the 20th century saw the enactment of a variety of eugenic policies. Positive eugenics focused on encouraging those of good stock to reproduce, such as through the fitter family contests put on across the US. Negative eugenics involved discouraging or preventing reproduction among those deemed unfit, such as the poor, criminals or the feeble-minded, predominantly by coercive means.

Eugenics is often equated with Nazi atrocities, but many other brutal acts were committed in its name, usually targeting disadvantaged and vulnerable groups, such as the poor, disabled and ill. As part of the negative eugenic effort, forced sterilisation was conducted on a large scale, not only in Nazi Germany but also in the Scandinavian countries (in Sweden, this practice continued until the 1970s) and in the US (where it was revealed that involuntary sterilisation of female prisoners occurred as late as 2010). The US combined eugenic ideology with ideas about racial hierarchy and applied eugenic thinking to immigration. This led to the passing of the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act in order to curb the entry of inferior ethnic groups.

New genetic technologies

After the second world war and the exposure of the Nazi regimes atrocities, eugenics fell out of favour. But worries about eugenics often resurface with the introduction of new genetic technologies that allow us to improve humans in some way, most notably gene editing, such as CRISPR-Cas9, and reproductive technologies, such as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. Reproductive technologies mainly help prospective parents to have children free from genetically based disabilities and disorders, but as our knowledge of the human genome advances, the range of traits we may be able to select away or select for will probably increase, prompting fears of designer babies.

Such technologies are sometimes labelled eugenic by sceptics as a means to discredit them. Arguments then ensue about whether these technologies represent a form of old eugenics and are therefore unethical, or whether they represent a new, benign form of eugenics. Questions about the ethics of genetic technologies and the new eugenics are far from settled.

But even if our ethical analysis should deem such new genetic technologies permissible, it would be disingenuous to present these technological advances as solutions to complex problems such as poverty, unemployment, or poor physical or mental health. We should be wary of biological determinist narratives that blame various forms of disadvantage on individual traits, without acknowledging the importance of social and political factors. This kind of thinking is very much in line with the old eugenics.

We are right to be worried when government officials endorse eugenic ideas. It is reassuring that Sabiskys comments provoked such outrage and that he was forced to resign. But in some respects, in the current age of austerity policies, the individualisation of social problems is an all too familiar theme.

Gry Wester, Lecturer in Bioethics and Global Health Ethics, King's College London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters.

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Genetic Engineering Cannot Save Humanity or Solve All of Our Problems - The National Interest Online

A trained economist and feminist scholar, Gita Sen is director of The Ramalingaswami Centre on Equity and Social Determinants, Public Health Foundation of India, and adjunct professor at Harvard University. She was the only Indian among 10 global leaders awarded by UNFPA for their work on population and development at the recently-concluded International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD+25) Summit in Nairobi. Sen was also one of the movers at ICPD-Cairo in 1994, which put womens rights and gender equality in the spotlight for the first time. Last month, she won the prestigious Dan David Prize for her pioneering work in advancing gender equality, population policies, reproductive and sexual health, and womens human rights. Excerpts from an interview:

The biggest gain which could never have happened without ICPD is the change in how we think about population, family planning, contraception and child bearing. It may be hard to imagine but prior to the Cairo ICPD, whenever population conferences took place, there would be no mention of sex or reproduction.

This changed after Cairo. Earlier, the thrust was on fertility control. So, even if women and girls were talked about, it was mainly around how to control their fertility to reduce the population. The change came about by putting women at the centre of population and development. And it was women who put women at the centre in Cairo. So, the normative shift is not small. However, there is still unfinished business ensuring womens right to bodily autonomy and integrity, including the right to a safe abortion, when needed.

The big gain was that the Indian government signed up. We worked closely with them in Cairo so they would support the rights of women and girls and promote gender equality. After Cairo, the government said they would get rid of population targets. They changed the population policy. This was the big shift.

Because the norm has changed, we can keep pushing against the wrong actions and demand accountability. We are a highly class divided society. The middle class loves to think that it is not its consumption but that of others that does the damage. But one child of a middle-class parent does far more damage to the environment than the third child of a domestic worker. Also, there is demographic evidence that if you control for levels of income and education, childbearing of all religions is exactly the same.

We have to keep saying it. Ill give you an example. Some years ago, the then Chief Minister of Karnataka went to China and was very taken with the Chinese one-child norm, one of the most coercive population policies in the world. Even China has given it up. Anyway, he came back, and said Karnataka must have a policy like that because population growth needs to be reduced.

Some people came to me to ask how they could tell him it wasnt needed. I told them to simply tell him that Karnatakas population had already gone below the replacement level fertility.

No. This is why womens groups, human rights advocates, young people and the media are critical. They have to keep bringing it up. We have good health policies that are keeping with the norms. But the next steps implementation and resources, financial and human are lost somehow. We have to take everyone along and that means upholding peoples rights and making them believe it is their agenda. You can build toilets all your life but you cant make people use them if they dont believe in it or if there isnt enough water. You cant have a top-down approach.

In the southern states, some level of non-fulfilment of rights was there but, by and large, MMR has come down with increasing age of marriage, education and availability of services. Once women start reaching certain levels of education and income earning, they dont want to have many children. I think we need to do better if we have to fulfil womens rights in the area of provision of contraception services. We should follow a very different approach in terms of the information we give women and the services we provide, instead of rounding them all up and throwing them in (sterilisation) camps, like we have been doing all along.

The majority of the country is at or below 2.1 TFR (total fertility rate). So, someone is giving the wrong advice to the PM. The health ministry needs to tell him that the two-child policy is not needed. We have spent a lot of time explaining the population momentum to the health ministry. Even if people have one child, we will have population growth. We have known it for years now that more than 70% of our population growth is coming from this population momentum because India has a high proportion of people in the reproductive age group. What we need to do is raise the age of marriage, improve secondary schooling for girls, provide comprehensive sexuality education and implement the ICPD programme of action, including access to safe abortion services. The delay in tabling the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) (Amendment) Bill, 2019, is unacceptable. Reproductive rights of women are not up for negotiation.

Constitute an advisory group of researchers, academics, womens groups and young people to chart out a strategy for changing the system. Indias commitments at ICPD+25 will help us push harder for womens rights. Womens groups must hold the government accountable. There is much to do but Im optimistic because there are a lot of pressure groups, including the disability and LGBTQIA+ groups, that are willing to work together and bring the momentum back. I believe young people, who are as vocal on climate change as they are on sexual and reproductive health and human rights, will be crucial in bringing about this change.

The writer is an independent journalist writing on development and gender.

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Millions of Americans enjoy feeding and watching backyard birds. Many people make a point of putting food out in winter, when birds needs extra energy, and spring, when many species build nests and raise young.

As a wildlife ecologist and a birder, I know its important to understand how humans influence bird populations, whether feeding poses risks to wild birds, and how to engage with birds in sustainable ways.

There is still much to learn about the risks and benefits of feeding birds, particularly through large integrated national citizen science networks like Project FeederWatch. But we now have enough information to promote healthy interactions that can inspire future generations to care about conservation.

Birds have been taking advantage of human civilization for thousands of years, congregating where grains and waste are abundant. This means that people have been influencing the abundance and distribution of species for a very long time.

Studies show that providing food has myriad effects on birds decisions, behaviors and reproduction. One significant finding is that winter bird feeding increases individual survival rates, can encourage birds to lay eggs earlier in the year, and can also improve nestling survival.

All of these factors alter species future reproductive performance and can increase total bird abundance in later years. Its not always clear how increased abundance of feeder birds impacts other species through competition, but rarer and smaller species can be excluded.

This interactive diagram, based on citizen science data, shows how North Americas top 13 feeder species fare when they compete at feeders. Credit: Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Supplemental food has also led to reduced reproductive success in a few species. This may happen because it improves survival odds for less healthy birds that otherwise would be unlikely to survive and reproduce, or because it leads birds to eat fewer types of natural foods, making their diets less nourishing.

Research also shows that birds are extremely promiscuous. One review examined 342 species and found that in approximately 75%, birds had one or more side partners in addition to their nest mate.

Its not always clear why birds cheat, but several studies have found that supplemental feeding can reduce the amount of infidelity in certain species, including house sparrows. This hints that feeding birds might alter their behavior and have an effect on genetic variation in urban populations.

For birds that provide pollinating services, like hummingbirds and lorikeets, there is some evidence that providing them with sugar water which mimics the nectar they collect from plants can reduce their visits to native plants. This means they will transfer less pollen. Since much bird feeding happens in densely populated urban areas, its unclear how much impact this might have.

Some bird populations depend completely on feeding and would collapse over the winter without it. For example, Annas hummingbirds in British Columbia rely on heated feeders. Other species, such as hummingbirds in the southwest U.S., have become more locally abundant. Northern cardinals and American goldfinches have shifted and expanded their ranges northward with the availability of food.

In one incredible instance, garden feeders seem to have played a role in establishing a new wintering population of migratory blackcaps in the United Kingdom. This group is now genetically distinct from the rest of the population, which migrates further south to Mediterranean wintering grounds.

Scientists still know little about how bird feeding affects transmission of pathogens and parasites among birds. It is not uncommon for birds at feeders to carry more pathogens than populations away from feeders. Some well-documented outbreaks in the U.S. and U.K. have shown that feeding birds can increase problems associated with disease evidence that was collected through feeder watch citizen science projects.

Because we still have a poor understanding of pathogen transmission and prevalence in urban areas, it is extremely important to follow hygiene guidelines for feeding and be alert for new recommendations.

Feeding can also attract predators. Domestic cats kill an estimated 1.3 to 4 billion birds in the U.S. every year. Feeders should not be placed in settings where cats are present, and pet cats should be kept indoors.

Feeders can also support both native and introduced birds that outcompete local species. One study found that feeders attracted high numbers of crows, which prey on other birds chicks, with the result that less than 1% of nearby American robin nests fledged young. In New Zealand, bird feeding largely benefits seed-eating introduced species at the expense of native birds.

The good news is that studies do not show birds becoming dependent on supplemental food. Once started, though, it is important to maintain a steady food supply during harsh weather.

Birds also need access to native plants, which provide them with habitat, food and insect prey that can both supplement diets and support species that dont eat seeds at feeders. Diverse food resources can counteract some of the negative findings Ive mentioned related to competition between species and impacts on bird diets.

Good maintenance, placement and cleaning can help minimize the likelihood of promoting pathogens at feeders. Initiatives like Project FeederWatch have recommendations about feeder design and practices to avoid. For example, platform feeders, where birds wade through the food, are associated with higher mortality, possibly through mixing of waste and food.

Its also important to manage the area around feeders. Be sure to place feeders in ways that minimize the likelihood that birds will fly into windows. For instance, avoid providing a sight line through a house, which birds may perceive as a corridor, and break up window reflections with decals.

There are lots of great reasons to bring birds into your life. Evidence is growing that interacting with nature is good for our mental health and builds public support for conserving plants and wildlife. In my view, these benefits outweigh many of the potential negatives of bird feeding. And if you get involved in a citizen science project, you can help scientists track the health and behavior of your wild guests.

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It's OK to feed wild birds here are some tips for doing it the right way - The Conversation US

Roan antelopes are Africas second largest antelope species. Their populations are stable and growing in some African countries, but in others like Kenya theyre threatened with extinction. To address this, the Kenya Wildlife Service is launching a recovery plan. Johnstone Kimanzi sheds light on why their numbers are declining and what can be done to protect them.

Where can roan antelopes be found in the world today and how many are left?

The roan antelope, which is endemic to Africa, used to be one of the most common antelopes found in almost all African savannas. It is found in 30 countries, mostly within western, central and eastern Africa.

Today there are an estimated 60,000 roan antelopes remaining in Africa. One-third of these are concentrated in four countries: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Zambia and Tanzania. About 60% of them live in protected areas.

In general, the overall population trend of roan antelopes across countries is that theyre decreasing in number - one-third of their population is stable or increasing.

Whats caused a decline in their numbers?

In Kenya, there has been a huge decline in the number of roan antelopes, from 202 in 1976 to 19 individuals in 2019. Roan antelopes are now only found in Ruma National Park, in western Kenya.

This is primarily the result of killing for meat and traditional values such as horns for musical instruments and skin for burial ceremonies.

Poaching is a major threat. In 2013 my colleagues and I revealed that the decline of roan antelopes between 1976 and 2008 was due to snares with an average of 10 roans poached each year.

Ruma National Park is highly accessible to poachers because of a public road and footpath that cut across it. High vantage points adjacent to the park also allow poachers to monitor wildlife and the activities of Kenya Wildlife Services personnel. In addition to this, theres not enough patrolling and monitoring. Poachers are able to use these advantages to lay their snares in the park. It should be noted however that since the translocation of black rhinoceros into the park in 2012, security patrols have been greatly increased.

Alongside poaching, there are other threats which limit the roans population growth.

Too many young roan antelopes are being preyed upon by mainly hyena. For example, in one three-year period (1993-1995), six out of 16 calves born in Ruma were predated on. This is because young roans are kept away from roan herds for six weeks after birth by their mothers and are therefore exposed to predators.

Frequent fire outbreaks, caused by people, diminish the roans habitat in Ruma National Park and may also burn and kill young, secluded roans.

Roans have also lost a lot of their habitat because of bush encroachment. Roan antelope are sensitive and will not survive well to any increase in the density of woody plants or reduction in grass cover as has happened in many protected areas.

In addition to this, a perimeter fence was put up around Ruma in 1994, isolating their habitat. They cant range freely, which would be ideal.

Fencing leads to more competition between grazers. It also means that they are exposed to mineral deficiencies and excesses in soil and plants. This could affect reproduction and death rates in roans.

The changes in weather like more frequent, and longer, droughts have made things worse. During dry seasons, the only source of water in Ruma national park is the Lambwe River, which dries up in extreme drought. This puts huge stress on the water-dependent roans, whose body condition deteriorates due to dehydration, making them more susceptible to disease and consequently death. When the river is in flow, the roans have the added threat of travelling through thick riverine vegetation, which makes them easy prey.

In areas where they come into close proximity with livestock, roan populations are susceptible to diseases, such as anthrax.

The current small population of only 19 roan antelopes in Ruma is at its lowest level in a decade. This may have already resulted in high levels of inbreeding, which would increasethe antelopes vulnerability to disease and stress and reduce their fertility, growth rate and survival.

How can these threats be addressed?

There are a few steps that Kenya must take to establish, and maintain, a stable and growing population of roan antelopes.

New breeding individuals need to be brought in for instance from neighbouring Tanzania to mitigate the effects of inbreeding depression and increase the population in Ruma to at least 50. This is the minimum number needed to maintain healthy population growth. The roan population dipped below 50 individuals in 1990 and hasnt been able to recover since.

Within the park, the roans need a predator-free sanctuary with less competition from other grazers. Eventually, when numbers grow, the roans can be released into Ruma and other former ranges, like the Maasai Mara National Reserve.

To eliminate poaching, footpaths into the park must be closed and cars using the public road should be inspected. There needs to be routine monitoring and maintenance of the parks electric fence. The park also needs intensive de-snaringoperations, and intelligence networks need to be developed to put an end to poaching. Camera traps would be a useful resource.

To make the habitat more hospitable for the roan, the Kenya wildlife service needs to construct and rehabilitate small reservoirs that catch surface runoff water. For good water supply, more must be done to protect existing springs and catchment areas from human degradation. This water can then be pumped to water troughs during the long dry season.

The park also needs a comprehensive fire management plan and plan that combats invasive species - such as Mauritius thorn, Datura stramonium and Eucalyptus fiscifolia - to protect the roans grazing areas.

Vets should be brought in to diagnose and treat sick animals.

Another step is to find ways for nearby communities to generate income from nature conservation activities such as wildlife photography, bird-watching and tour-guiding. This will help support the long-term survival of the animals.

Kenya has a plan to protect the roan antelope. Is it too late?

No, it is not too late. The roan population was only 22 individuals in 1995 and theyve managed to grow and survive.

In South Africa, intensive management of roans increased the population at a rate of 20% per year.

Ive modelled that a population of 43 roans could reach over 550 roans in 45 years if a 32km intensively managed predator-free sanctuary is established in Ruma National Park. This would be coupled with re-stocking roan groups from other countries, eliminating poaching and predation, improving habitat and increasing the human resources to protect them.

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What Kenya must do to save its roan antelope population - The Conversation Africa

As with The Bell Curve, we will have to wait for peer reviews to carefully sift through the science. Early indications might indicate some trouble for Murray. Last month, the psychologists Michelle N. Meyer, Patrick Turley and Daniel J. Benjamin issued a sharp rebuke to his use of their research on polygenic scores in his piece for The Wall Street Journal teasing the new book. He characterized polygenic scores as providing decisive insight into I.Q. that was impervious to racism and other forms of prejudice. In fact, the psychologists assert in response, polygenic scores can and do reflect racism, sexism or other prejudices, as well as more benign environmental factors.

Murray serenely rolls out his propositions, assuring us on occasion that it is all consensus, securely known. And yet several claims are plainly contentious, even to the lay reader. Take Murrays description of male brains as systemizers and female brains as empathizers, drawing on work of the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. Men are drawn to things, in other words, and women to people. (Youll recognize this terminology from James Damores diversity letter to Google.) This rubric becomes an organizing principle in the book, explaining the typically gendered vocations for men and women (Things Jobs and People Jobs). What Murray avoids discussing are the profound questions surrounding one of the studies that scaffold his thinking.

In 2000, Baron-Cohen and colleagues published a study of day-old babies that found that boys looked at mobiles longer (hence systemizers) and girls at faces (empathizers). This study has never been replicated, not even by Baron-Cohen. It was also poorly designed: for one, some of the newborns were propped up; their gaze might have been mediated by how they were held. Not to mention the core question, as posed by the psychologist Cordelia Fine, who has written extensively about bias in research on sex differences in the brain: Why think that what a newborn prefers to look at provides any kind of window, however grimy, into their future abilities and interests?

Or consider Murrays interpretation of why women havent branched into more male-dominated fields over the last 30 years. Once again, he finds an explanation in the female preoccupation with people and emotion as opposed to the male orientation toward things and abstract thought. Sexism cannot be the culprit, he claims. Now that outright prohibition of women entering male-dominated fields has ended, any vestigial opposition ought to have abated in a matter of years. Never mind the wealth of research showing the very real persisting impediments that Murray dismisses. To name just one well-known example: In a study at Yale University, over 100 scientists reviewed a rsum submitted for an open position. The rsums were identical, although half were submitted under mens names and half womens names. The womens rsums were ranked significantly lower than the mens by both female and male faculty.

Why doesnt Murray attend more thoroughly to the role of the environment, to history even if to decisively repudiate their impact? On genetics, too, he dismisses aspects that might dilute the strength of his argument that outside interventions are limited in their effects on personality and social behavior. Developments in epigenetics, for example outside mechanisms that effectively turn genes on or off are waved away as hype.

Stranger still are the inconsistencies. Race is a construct is among the tenets Murray seeks to dismantle. Yet tucked midway through the book is the bland assertion that his evidence does not deny the many ways in which race is a social construct. There is no genetic basis for race. It is a social and legal definition a young, crude one at that, overlaid on the tangled realities of ancestral heredity. Ancestral populations might be more apt, he concedes. Not 40 pages later, however, hes back to huffing at the elite wisdom that race is a social construct. Murray appears to want it both ways: to gesture at a more nuanced and precise formulation but also to harness, when he chooses, the raw rhetorical power of railing against woke dogmas about race.

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Charles Murray Returns, Nodding to Caution but Still Courting Controversy - The New York Times

When reports of a new coronavirus emerged last month, I speculated with fellow epidemiologists about what the media might end up naming the infection. None of us would have guessed that within a week or so a theory would be circulating that coronavirus was a new kind of snake flu mostly because its unlikely the virus originated in snakes, and its not flu.

So where did the snakes come from? The culprit was a widely shared scientific paper, which speculated that the new virus had genetic characteristics and implicated snakes as the source. Leading geneticists were quick to point out that the results werent convincing, and that bats were still the likely suspects. However, that didnt stop snake flu from going viral. Other misinformation about coronavirus has rippled across the internet in recent weeks. From claims the virus is part-HIV to conspiracy theories about bioweapons and reports suggesting the virus was linked to people eating bat soup, stories sparking fear seem to have overtaken the outbreak in real life. Is misinformation really more contagious than the virus itself?

What is the virus causing illness in Wuhan?

It is a member of the coronavirus family that has never been encountered before. Like other coronaviruses, it has come from animals. Many of those initially infected either worked or frequently shopped in the Huanan seafood wholesale market in the centre of the Chinese city.

What other coronaviruses have there been?

New and troubling viruses usually originate in animal hosts. Ebola and flu are other examples severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (Mers) are both caused by coronaviruses that came from animals.

What are the symptoms of the Wuhan coronavirus?

The virus causespneumonia. Those who have fallen ill are reported to suffer coughs, fever and breathing difficulties. In severe cases there can be organ failure. As this is viral pneumonia, antibiotics are of no use. The antiviral drugs we have against flu will not work. If people are admitted to hospital, they may get support for their lungs and other organs as well as fluids. Recovery will depend on the strength of their immune system. Many of those who have died were already in poor health.

Is the virus being transmitted from one person to another?

Human to human transmission has been confirmed by Chinas national health commission, and there have been human-to-human transmissions in the US and in Germany. As of 8 February, the death toll stands at 722 inside China, one in Hong Kong and one in the Philippines. Infections inside China stand at 31,161 and global infections have passed 280 in 28 countries. The mortality rate is 2%.

Two members of one family have been confirmed to have the virus in the UK, and a third person was diagnosed with it in Brighton, after more than 400 were tested and found negative. The Foreign Office has urged UK citizens to leave China if they can. Five new cases in France are British nationals, and British nationals are also among the 64 cases on a cruise liner off Japan.

The number of people to have contracted the virus could be far higher, as people with mild symptoms may not have been detected. Modelling byWorld Health Organization(WHO) experts at Imperial College London suggests there could be as many as 100,000 cases, with uncertainty putting the margins between 30,000 and 200,000.

Why is this worse than normal influenza, and how worried are the experts?

We dont yet know how dangerous the new coronavirus is, and we wont know until more data comes in. The mortality rate is around 2%. However, this is likely to be an overestimate since many more people are likely to have been infected by the virus but not suffered severe enough symptoms to attend hospital, and so have not been counted. For comparison, seasonal flu typically has a mortality rate below 1% and is thought to cause about400,000 deathseach year globally. Sars had a death rate of more than 10%.

Should I go to the doctor if I have a cough?

Unless you have recently travelled to China or been in contact with someone infected with the virus, then you should treat any cough or cold symptoms as normal. TheNHS advisesthat people should call 111 instead of visiting the GPs surgery as there is a risk they may infect others.

Is this a pandemic and should we panic?

Health experts are starting to say it could become a pandemic, but right now it falls short of what the WHO would consider to be one. A pandemic, in WHO terms, is the worldwide spread of a disease. Coronavirus cases have been confirmed in about 25 countries outside China, but by no means in all 195 on the WHOs list.

There is no need to panic. The spread of the virus outside China is worrying but not an unexpected development. The WHO has declared the outbreak to be a public health emergency of international concern, and says there is a window of opportunity to halt the spread of the disease. The key issues are how transmissible this new coronavirus is between people and what proportion become severely ill and end up in hospital. Often viruses that spread easily tend to have a milder impact.

Sarah BoseleyHealth editor andHannah Devlin

We typically think of viral content as a chain reaction: you share something with friends, they share it with their friends, and so on. In disease outbreak analysis, we can measure the transmission of an infection by looking at how many additional cases each infected person creates on average during each of these steps. We call this the reproduction number, and for coronavirus, we estimate its about 2 for a typical infected case in China. What about the reproduction number for online content? A couple of years ago, Facebook researchers looked at the most shared content on the platform from 2014 to 2016, including viral trends such as the ice-bucket challenge and putting an equals sign over your profile picture to support marriage equality.

Remarkably, there wasnt much difference in the transmission. Researchers found the reproduction number was about 2 for all of them. Remember, these were the most shared ideas on Facebook; the vast majority of online content is lucky to get even a single repost.

The scientific community is making huge progress in understanding the infection, but weve had to start at the bottom

To fully explain how viral content and viruses spread, we need to move away from the idea that outbreaks involve simple clockwork infections, passing along a chain from person to person to person until large numbers have been exposed. During the 2015 outbreak of the Mers coronavirus in South Korea, 82 out of 186 infections came from a single superspreading event in a hospital where an infected person was being treated. Its not yet clear how common such superspreading is in the current outbreak, but we do know that these kinds of events are how information goes viral online; most outbreaks on Twitter are dominated by a handful of individuals or media outlets, which are responsible for a large proportion of transmission. If you heard about snake flu, you might have told a couple of friends; meanwhile, newspaper headlines were telling millions.

When tackling disease outbreaks, health agencies often work to identify potential superspreading events, isolating infected individuals to prevent further transmission. However, this isnt the only way to stop an outbreak. As well as tracking down people who are infectious, its possible to target broader social interactions that might amplify transmission. For example, many cities in China have recently closed schools, which can be hotspots for respiratory infections.

Tech companies are now adopting similar approaches to tackle health misinformation. Last year, Pinterest announced it had rewired its search results to make it harder to find vaccine misinformation. It had struggled to remove the content completely the equivalent of finding all the cases during a disease outbreak so instead focused on reducing how many people might be exposed to harmful content. During the current outbreak, Google is attempting to reduce peoples susceptibility to misinformation by displaying links to reputable health sources when users search for information about the virus.

These combined approaches, which target different aspects of transmission, have long been used in disease control. By introducing analogous strategies online, we should have a better chance of effectively curbing harmful viral content.

Ensuring the public has the best possible health information is crucial during an outbreak. At best, misinformation can distract from important messages. At worst, it can lead to behaviour that amplifies disease transmission. The novelty of coronavirus makes the challenge even greater, because viral speculation can easily overwhelm the limited information we do have. The scientific community is already making huge progress in understanding the infection, but weve had to start at the bottom, without stacks of earlier research to stand on. When it comes to stopping the outbreak, well need ladders, not snakes.

Adam Kucharski an epidemiologist and the author of The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread and Why They Stop, published on 13 February

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Misinformation on the coronavirus might be the most contagious thing about it - The Guardian

Brian Dunn, APSU Published 1:40 p.m. CT Feb. 3, 2020

Im about to ruin Finding Nemo for you.

Students patriciate in professor Mollie Chashners Genetics Lab on Thursday, Feb. 14, 2019. (Taylor Slifko, APSU)(Photo: Taylor Slifko)

Thats the warning Austin Peay State University biology professor Dr. Mollie Cashner had while sharing a sneak peek at Feb. 4s Science on Tap presentation: The Weird, Wonderful World of Animal Sex.

Clownfishthe type offish Nemo and his dad, Marlin, are in the movieare a good example of just how weird sex can be in the animal world.

To find out why Marlin actually should be Marlena in Finding Nemo, youll have to attend Science on Tap on Tuesday. Science on Tap happens at 5:30 p.m. on the first Tuesday of every month at Clarksvilles Strawberry Alley Ale Works.

Male praying mantises can mate even after the female has bitten off their heads.(Photo: Contributed)

Austin Peay scientists explore a different topic every month. Last month, computer science professor Dr. James Church discussed advances in facial recognition technology. Science on Tap is sponsored by the APSU College of STEM.

The freaky sex of coral, flatworms and angler fish

All animals have the ingrained desire to reproduce but doing something that sounds simplegetting two cells (the sperm and the egg) togethercan be complicated and diverse, Cashner said. Reproduction can happen in all sorts of ways.

From our human bias, we think thatthose cells somehow magically come together and then theres a stork that brings the baby, Cashner said. That may be how humans do it, but there are lots of other ways, and some of them are prettyfreaky.

Imagine youre a coral, youre literally stuck to the bottom of the ocean floor, Cashner said. How do you get your gametes (sperm and egg) to meet?

The answer might surprise you.

Cashner also will discuss how flatworms use penis fencing, how male angler fish permanently embed in females and how female damselflies deal with overly amorous males.

Female damselflies have a neat truck to deal with overly amorous males.(Photo: Contributed)

Sometimes, animal reproduction can be fatal. Attendees will learn about a marsupial that ends its life with nonstop mating and about how male praying mantises can mate even after the female has bitten off their heads.

There are all sorts of ways, and sometimes reproduction is actuallykind of scary, she said.

To learn more

Read or Share this story: https://www.theleafchronicle.com/story/news/local/clarksville/2020/02/03/februarys-science-tap-explore-weird-wonderful-world-animal-sex/4647954002/

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Februarys Science on Tap to explore Weird, Wonderful World of Animal Sex - The Leaf-Chronicle

It is hard to open a paper or switch on the radio at the moment without being exposed to increasingly concerning updates about the coronavirus outbreak.

This WHO-declared global health emergency had infected almost 10,000 people by last Friday, and killed over 200, and is spreading far more quickly than SARS did in the early 2000s.

There are heaps of unknowns about the novel-coronavirus, including exactly where it originated from, but each day that passes will no doubt bring new information that should ultimately lead to a better understanding as to how we can stop the spread and treat those infected.

Anthony Kwan

A vaccine for coronavirus is at least 12 months away.

READ MORE:* The burden of chronic pain*Why do I get so bloated all the time?*The impact of noise

As alarming as this outbreak is, what we do have on our side is a wealth of information about viruses in general, collated over many decades, and this can inform our approach to this outbreak:

* The name virus comes from Latin, and means "poison"

* The first virus identified that could infect humans was the yellow fever virus, and was discovered by a man named Walter Reed in 1901

* Viruses are very unusual entities, being neither truly alive, nor dead, and are not actually classified as a living organism. This is because they can't survive on their own they need a host organism to be able to reproduce. Depending on the type of virus, effective hosts can be plants, animals, fungi, birds or humans. Viruses are the most abundant biological entity on the planet.

* Viruses are tiny so small in fact that they can't be detected with a normal microscope, and you could fit tens of millions of viruses onto the head of a pin. Size-wise, an average virus is between 20-300 nanometres in diameter, compared with for example an E Coli bacteria that is approximately 1000 nm across.

AP

The Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) has identified as the cause of an outbreak of respiratory illness first detected in Wuhan, China.

* They are basic structures, being made up of simply some nucleic acid (genetic material) that can be either DNA or RNA depending on the virus type, housed inside a protective shell made of protein called the capsid. The capsids of varying virus types will have very different shapes, allowing them to be quite easily differentiated by scientists. Some types of viruses also have a membrane outside the capsid called the envelope.

* The corona virus is an RNA-virus, and has an envelope. It's name comes from the Latin word for crown, as its particles have a characteristic shape reminiscent of a royal crown.

* When viruses infect their host (whether it is a plant, animal, bird or human), they effectively hijack their cells, become activated and start to reproduce, invading more cells as they go. This is the process that makes the host unwell.

* Bacteria differ from viruses in that they can survive on their own, and don't need a host to activate them. They can also be effectively inactivated, or even killed, by antibiotics which sadly have absolutely no effect on viruses whatsoever.

Viruses can cause a huge range of diseases from well-known ones such as measles, the common cold and influenza, to rarer ones that you're likely to never encounter (think Monkeypox or Kyasanur Forest disease). The symptoms caused by the infection will depend on the type of virus involved.

Some viruses, such as Ebola, lead to infections that have huge mortality rates, whilst others will trigger an illness that is barely noticeable to its host. Viruses can also have one effect on one type of host, but a very different one on another (for example, some viruses can be lethal to cats, but hardly cause any symptoms for a dog even though they may still use it as a host).

A virus's only purpose is to reproduce. Once it has achieved that in a host, the offspring of the original virus can invade new cells and new hosts this is how viral infections spread to cause outbreaks of illness. There are many different ways viruses can spread, but the exact mechanism will depend on the type of virus it is: some viruses can be transmitted from mother to unborn child, others are spread through infected faeces or blood, touch, or via sexual contact. Other types will require a "transmitter" or vector to enable them to spread, usually insects as is the case with dengue fever, for example.

Coronaviruses are actually a group of viruses, rather than just the "novel-type" (named 2019-nCoV) that is causing the current outbreak. In humans, coronaviruses typically cause respiratory infections (so illnesses affecting the lungs or airways, including our nasal passages, throats, sinuses and ears), and most of the time these are mild the virus that causes your average winter cold is a type of coronavirus. However, some coronaviruses, such as the novel-type we are seeing today and the SARS virus from 18 years ago, can be far more dangerous. Some coronaviruses can also affect chickens, leading to respiratory issues, and cows and pigs, where they can lead to diarrhoea.

Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP

The World Health Organisation has declared coronavirus to be a global health emergency.

The newly-identified novel coronavirus seems to be able to spread from human to human, which is not the case for all viruses - it is possible that it has mutated or changed its form over the years, as viruses tend to do, to enable this to happen.

At this stage, we don't fully understand everything about this virus, but it appears to be spread by infected droplets, for example when breathing, sneezing or coughing. It is also possible that you could be exposed to the virus by touching an object that has an infected droplet on it we know that some viruses such as the 'flu virus can remain active and potentially infectious for days on inanimate objects or surfaces such as furniture or books, and it is likely that 2019-nCoV has the same capability.

As viruses aren't inactivated by antibiotics, treatment options are limited. Some drugs, known as antivirals, have been developed that can halt or slow down the reproduction cycle of the virus, and these are widely used in diseases like HIV and hepatitis where they have been life-changing.

Sadly at this stage there is no antiviral agent that is known to be effective against the novel coronavirus, though testing is happening around the world to try and identify one that will have some impact.

The most effective way to manage virus outbreaks is to prevent the spread of infection by vaccination. Vaccination programmes have had enormous impacts on morbidity and mortality around the world (the recent measles outbreak in Samoa being a stark example of what can happen when rates of immunisation drop below a certain threshold).

Some viruses, like Ebola, have a much higher mortality rate than others. Vaccination remains the most effective way to deal with a viral outbreak.

It is likely that a vaccine can be developed that will protect people from infection with coronavirus, but there is none in existence at present based on how long it takes to develop and ensure the efficacy and safety of a new vaccine, we are likely looking at 12 months minimum before one could be widely available.

Until vaccination is available, there are some simple things we can do to reduce the likelihood of spread, should cases appear in New Zealand. The most important is to recognise potential symptoms and isolate anyone thought to be carrying the virus this is crucial, but unfortunately recent reports indicate that coronavirus can potentially spread in the 10 days or so before any symptoms appear, so this will make effective "quarantine" difficult to achieve.

For all of us, maintaining really good hygiene, particularly when it comes to hand washing is important, and this applies to limiting the spread of any infection, not just coronavirus.

Focussing on our general health and resilience is important too the fitter and stronger we are, the more able we will be to fight off a virus, should we be exposed. So ensuring our bodies get good nutrition, plenty of vitamins, enough sleep, and minimising the "baddies" including alcohol and smoking, is at this stage the best way to keep ourselves well.

For more information on the coronavirus outbreak, and infections in general, visit http://www.health.govt.nz

Here is the original post:
What you need to know about viruses - Stuff.co.nz

Anti-abortion protesters picket outside Florida State Prison where Paul Hill was executed in 2003 for the murder of abortion provider Dr. John Britton. (Matt Stroshane / Getty Images)

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The anti-abortion movement in the United States has long been complicit with white supremacy. In recent decades, the movement mainstream has been careful to protect its public image by distancing itself from overt white nationalists in its ranks. Last year, anti-abortion leader Kristen Hatten was ousted from her position as vice president of the anti-choice group New Wave Feminists after identifying as an ethnonationalist and sharing white supremacist alt-right content. In 2018, when neo-Nazis from the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) sought to join the local March for Life rally organized by Tennessee Right to Life, the anti-abortion organization rejected TWPs involvement. (The organizations statement, however, engaged in the same false equivalency between left and right that Trump used in the wake of fatal white supremacist violence at Charlottesville. Our organizations march has a single agenda to support the rights of mothers and the unborn, and we dont agree with the violent agenda of white supremacists or Antifa, the group wrote on its Facebook page.)Ad Policy

But despite the movements careful curation of its public image, racism and xenophobia have been woven into it throughout its history. With large families, due to Roman Catholic Church prohibitions on contraception and abortion, Catholic immigration in the mid-1800s through 1900s sparked white Anglo-Saxon Protestant fears of being overtaken demographically that fueled opposition to abortion as a means of increasing birthrates among white Protestant women. At the time, Roman Catholic immigrants from countries like Ireland and Italy who would be considered white today were among the targets of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. As sociologists Nicola Beisel and Tamara Kay wrote with regards to the criminalization of abortion in the late 19th century, While laws regulating abortion would ultimately affect all women, physicians argued that middle-class, Anglo-Saxon married women were those obtaining abortions, and that their use of abortion to curtail childbearing threatened the Anglo-Saxon race.

Hostile anti-Catholic sentiment cut both ways when it came to abortion, however. Until the 1970s, pro-life activism was firmly associated with Catholics and the pope in the minds of American Protestants. This deterred many Protestants from opposing abortion as a Christian moral issuenot only in the political sphere, but even as a matter of denominational teachingbecause of its association with papists (a derogatory term for Catholics). Even the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 decriminalizing abortion did not immediately bring conservative Protestants around. As late as 1976, the conservative evangelical Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) passed resolutions affirming abortion rights. The assumption was that it must not be right if Catholics backed it, so we havent, commented John Wilder, who founded Christians for Life as a Southern Baptist ministry in 1977 as the resistance to the pro-life movement began to dissipate.

This shift occurred in light of the lessening of anti-Catholic prejudice, strategic recruitment of evangelicals by New Right Catholic leaders, and evangelical discomfort with how many abortions took place as women accessed their new reproductive rights.

The cultural position of Catholics had shifted dramatically by the 1970s. As substantial immigration from Latin America and Asia posed a new threat to white numerical superiority, Catholics from European countries became culturally accepted as part of the white race, a readjusting of boundaries that maintains demographic control. The election of Roman Catholic John F. Kennedy as president in 1960 demonstrated how far Catholic acceptance had comeat least among liberals. Although conservative evangelical opposition to his candidacy remained rife with anti-Catholic fears, the rhetoric was less racialized and more focused on concerns about influence from the Vatican.

To counter this lingering prejudice, conservative Catholic leaders seized on the opportunity offered by the specter of atheist Communism in the mid-20th century to establish themselves as part of a Christian coalition with Protestants, unified against a common godless enemy. As Randall Balmer has written, evangelical concerns about being forced to desegregate Christian schools spurred political investment that Catholic New Right leaders capitalized on and channeled into anti-abortion and anti-LGBT opposition.

For white nationalists, meanwhile, as Carol Mason wrote in Killing for Life, Jewish people replaced Catholics as targets for groups like the KKK. Now that abortion is tantamount to race suicidenaming Catholicswhose opposition to abortion has been so keenas enemies would be counterproductive, Mason wrote. Militant anti-abortion and explicit white nationalist groups came together prominently in the 1990s when a wing of the anti-abortion movement, frustrated with a lack of legislative progress, took on a more violent character fed by relationships with white supremacists and neo-Nazis.Current Issue

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White supremacists were already participants in the anti-abortion cause, as Loretta Ross wrote in the 1990s. In 1985, the KKK began creating wanted posters listing personal information for abortion providers (doxing before the Internet age). Randall Terry, founder of the anti-choice group Operation Rescue, and John Burt, regional director of the anti-abortion group Rescue America in the 1990s, adopted this tactic in the 1990s. Terrys first wanted poster targeted Dr. David Gunn, who was murdered in 1993 in Pensacola, Florida. Gunns successor, Dr. John Britton, targeted by a Rescue America wanted poser, was killed in 1994.

The Florida-based KKK organized a rally in support of Dr. Brittons killer, Paul Hill, and Tom Metzger, founder of the racist group White Aryan Resistance (WAR), condoned the killing if it protected Aryan women and children. Burt himself was a Florida Klansman prior to becoming Christian and an associate of both killers. Fundamentalist Christians and those people [the Klan] are pretty close, scary close, fighting for God and country, Burt told The New York Times in 1994. Some day we may all be in the trenches together in the fight against the slaughter of unborn children. Members of the Portland-based skinhead group American Front regularly joined Operation Rescue to protest abortion clinics. Tim Bishop, a representative of the white nationalist Aryan Nations, said, Lots of our people join [the anti-abortion movement]. Its part of our Holy War for the pure Aryan race.

Groups like the Confederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan trafficked in rhetoric that mirrored that of the anti-abortion movementwith an anti-Semitic twist: More than ten million white babies have been murdered through Jewish-engineered legalized abortion since 1973 here in America and more than a million per year are being slaughtered this way. Metzger has claimed that abortion makes money for Jews and called Planned Parenthood a corrupt Jewish organization. In 1996, a series of bombings in Spokane, targeting a newspaper office, a bank, and a Planned Parenthood office, were perpetrated by members of the Phineas Priesthood, who followed the white separatist anti-Semitic religion Christian Identity. In the late 1990s, Eric Rudolph, a clinic bomber, and James Charles Kopp, who murdered a Jewish abortion provider returning home from synagogue, were affiliated with the anti-abortion terrorist organization Army of God and staunch Holocaust deniers.

While in recent years, the mainstream anti-choice movement has been careful to distance itself from overtly racist and white nationalist groups and figures, embedded anti-Semitism appears in the trivialization of the Holocaust and in coded appeals to neo-Nazis. Abolish Human Abortion (AHA), a more recently founded group led by young white men (in a movement that typically likes to put female leaders at the forefront for better mainstream appeal) that views that pro-life movement as too moderate, created an icon linking the acronym AHA in such a way as to resemble newer incarnations of swastikas that are proliferating among white supremacist groups, according to Mason.

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AHA claims that the abortion holocaust exceeds all previous atrocities practiced by the Western World, a statement that signals to anti-Semites an implicit disbelief in the Nazi Holocaust and a trivializing of real historical persecutions. The anti-abortion movement has long framed abortion as a holocausta holocaust that it depicts as numerically more significant than the killing of 6 million Jewish people. Historian Jennifer Holland told Jewish Currents that because Jewish people in the United States are more pro-choice than other religious groups, anti-abortion activists often imply and even outwardly state that Jews are participating in a current genocide and were thus ideologically complicit in the Jewish Holocaust. This frame sometimes goes hand in hand with outright anti-Semitic denial that the Nazi Holocaust even happened.

The framing of abortion-as-holocaust is starkly visible in a law passed by Alabama in May banning abortion in nearly all circumstances and threatening abortion providers with up to 99 years in prison. The law states, More than 50 million babies have been aborted in the United States since the Roe decision in 1973, more than three times the number who were killed in German death camps, Chinese purges, Stalins gulags, Cambodian killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide combined. The framing of abortion as holocaust demeans the significance of the Nazi Holocaust, in turn feeding anti-Semitism already interwoven in the movement.

Florida State Senator Dennis Baxley, discussing the possibility of implementing similar legislation in his state, revealed that nativist fears of replacement went into support for the idea. When you get a birth rate less than 2 percent, that society is disappearing, Baxley said of Western Europe. And its being replaced by folks that come behind them and immigrate, dont wish to assimilate into that society and they do believe in having children.

Anti-choice figures continue to tout demographic concernswhich at their core are a form of white nationalismin order to oppose abortion. In the political sphere, Representative Steve King is the most prominent political figure to emerge as a symbol of both white supremacism and abortion opposition. If we continue to abort our babies and import a replacement for them in the form of young violent men, we are supplanting our culture, our civilization, King stated. King has taken far-right positions on both immigration and abortion, including defending rape and incest as necessary for historical population growth.

These overt expressions of demographic nativism by politicians making decisions about reproductive rights on the state and national level is cause for alarm. With the election of Donald Trump and the rise of the alt-rightan umbrella for white supremacist, male supremacist, and anti-Semitic mobilizationsthe kinder, gentler image the Christian right and the pro-life movement have strategically invested in may be slipping, but also may be less necessary.

Coexisting in abortion opposition is an ideology that honestly seeks to end abortion for people of all races and ethnicities, alongside a white supremacist ideology that only desires to prevent white women from obtaining abortions, but uses universal opposition to abortion as a pragmatic screen for its goals. As Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement in Paramilitary America, told The Nation in an interview in September, for white supremacists, opposing abortion, opposing gay rights, opposing feminism, in white power discourse, all of this is tied to reproduction and the birth of white children.

Commenting on the strategic pragmatism of white supremacist movements, Jean Hardisty and Pam Chamberlain wrote in 2000 that public advocacy of abortion for women of color might alienate potential far right supporters who oppose all abortion. White supremacist leaders, like David Duke, have instead focused on other ways to deter birthrates among people of color, such as encouraging long-term contraception or condemning social welfare programs.

The relationship between Christian right anti-abortion, white supremacist, and secular male supremacist ideology is complex. While they often put aside their differences in order to collaborate on shared goals, the agendas are different and inclusive of conflict.

White supremacist responses demonstrated complicated feelings following the passage of the Alabama law, as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which tracks hate and bigotry, reported. Some, like the founder of Gab, a popular alternative social media forum frequented by white supremacists and neo-Nazis, heralded the Alabama law. Other white supremacists were unsatisfied that the ban would apply to white women and women of color alike. Longtime white nationalist Tom Metzger eschewed the pragmatic approach in posting on Gab that he had instructed comrades in the Alabama state legislature to introduce a bill that releases all nonwhite women within the borders of Alabama to have free abortions on demand. (Its not clear whether this claim is true or which representatives he meant.)

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Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, writes that while abortion is sick and evil, white supremacists should be focused on the immigrant invasion. Lest readers be disappointed, Anglin reassured them, A great reckoning is comingand it is coming swiftly! The glorious vengeance we take upon these whores will shake the cosmos! Anglin recently referred to himself as the self-appointed spiritual successor to Elliot Rodger, the incel (involuntarily celibate) mass killer who intended retribution on all women for his being sexually rejected. Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi credited with coining the term alt-right, tweeted that the ban should punish women who seek abortion, but instead demonizes doctors.

Spencers approach, aligning with his other misogynist comments on women, flies in the face of the Christian right frame of protecting women used to advance its agenda in the mainstream. But its the same approach Donald Trump took while on the presidential campaign trail in 2016, when he stated that women should receive some form of punishment if abortion were banned in the United States. After anti-abortion groups made clear that this comment ran afoul of their strategy for banning abortionthough not necessarily their actual preferencesTrump backtracked and instead focused on punishing doctors and stating that the woman is a victim.

On the other hand, MSNBC reported that AHA activists, who refer to themselves as abolitionists, stand for banning all abortion without exceptions, equating hormonal birth control (even the daily pill kind) with abortion, and advocating that women who have abortions be tried as murderers. Under the current Supreme Court, with its Trump-instated anti-choice majority, and the presidents own anti-woman rhetoric, misogyny, and nativism may be becoming more acceptable strategies.

Trump, after all, shows a perfect willingness to cater to the Christian right, but no genuine personal interest in opposing abortion. His brand of secular misogyny, mingling objectification and vilification of women, demonstrates the same ideology as that put forth by secular male supremacist mobilizations such as Mens Rights Activists (MRAs) and The Red Pill, which have little regard for womens rights and well-being. Trumps secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, demonstrated the administrations willingness to give an ear to male supremacist groups at the expense of women when she invited mens rights groups, which spread the myth that women make widespread false accusations of rape despite all data to the contrary, to weigh in on campus sexual assault policy. The result has been the regurgitation of MRA talking points and a proposed rule gutting Obama-era protection for survivors of campus sexual violence.

The anonymous nature of many online forums, like The Red Pill, poses a challenge for determining how much influence members of these communities have. We might be inclined to dismiss Metzgers claim to have comrades in the Alabama state legislature as mere bluster. But before Bonnie Bacarisses investigative reporting in The Daily Beast in 2017 uncovered New Hampshire Republican state Representative Robert Fisher as the founder of The Red Pill, which promotes conspiracist theories about feminist control of society and advocates manipulating women into sexual intercourse, these online misogynist forums were often assumed to be divorced from real-world politics. An online pseudonym that The Daily Beast has linked to Fishers personal e-mail address advocated voting for Trump in 2016 because hed been accused of sexual violence. A spokesperson for a state anti-violence group said that Fisher was part of a very vocal minority in the NH House right now that is very antiwoman and antivictim, and that there had been surprises in recent legislative votes.

These secular misogynist mobilizations address abortion in a variety of ways, though always through the lens of establishing male power and rights, even when endorsing legal abortion. Male supremacist communities seek control over womens bodies, whether it is through denying abortion care or coercing it, or through defending or even perpetrating sexual assault.

While arguments about mens and fathers rights have been used by politicians in suggesting abortion restrictions, such as requiring that a woman receive consent from the man she conceived with in order to obtain an abortion, this is not a key concern for the movements themselves. The misogynist Red Pill forum instead suggested women should have to obtain permission to give birth and that men be able to opt out of child support. The top posts on the Reddit forum r/mensrights related to abortion complain that women hold all the rights when it comes to reproduction, arguing that it is unjust that men have no say in the matter. Not because abortion kills the mans child, as the Christian right would argue, but because men are responsible for 18 years of child support if the pregnancy comes to term. MRAs and MGTOWs (Men Going Their Own Way) refer to this financial obligation as slavery and advocate for paper abortions, where a man can sever financial responsibilities and parental claims to a child.

Paul Elams A Voice for Men, a leading organization in the mens rights movement over the past decade, established in 2010 an editorial policy that would not take an official position on abortion. Elam did criticize womens authority over abortion and painted child support as a means of controlling men, writing, We have an entire fathers rights movement necessitated by the fact that millions of men have had their lives eviscerated, their freedom forfeit, their assets garnisheed, even where paternity fraud has been proven and acknowledged by the courts.

On Return of Kings (ROK), a website listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group for pickup artists (PUAs) and founded by Daryush Valizadeh, who goes by Roosh V., the coverage of abortion has shifted from a position accepting of abortionthough not out of support for womens human rightsto an increasingly anti-choice position. In 2013, abortion was discussed as beneficial because it reduces the minority population, demonstrating the racism already inherent in this ideology, and sav[es] a lot of alpha players from having to write a check to a single mom. Other posts promoted access to contraception as a means to prevent abortion, criticizing Christian right opposition to birth control as ineffective to stopping abortion.

Two years later, Valizadeh himself wrote a post on ROK titled Women Must Have Their Behavior and Decisions Controlled by Men, recommending that women receive permission from a guardian to access abortion or birth control. He continues, While my proposals are undoubtedly extreme on the surface and hard to imagine implementing, the alternative of a rapidly progressing cultural decline that we are currently experiencing will end up entailing an even more extreme outcome. (In case youre wondering, Valizadeh has identified other offensive posts as satire, but made no such excuse for this one.) In another 2015 article, The End Goal of Western Progressivism Is Depopulation, he condemns abortion rights, birth control, and female empowerment as causes of declining population that risk Western culture. Valizadeh has admitted to perpetrating acts that meet the legal definition of sexual assault and has endorsed the decriminalization of rape. Though he later claimed that endorsement was a thought experiment, similar excuses have been used by other misogynist leaders such as Paul Elam to provide cover for their most egregious statements.

Further ROK posts on abortion described it as murder and criticized abortion and birth control for destroying traditional families. Matt Forney, a writer whose personal blog appealed to both MRAs and PUAs, referred to women who obtain abortions as monsters, and wrote, If a girl is in favor of abortion, there is evil dwelling in her soul. Forney is a noted white nationalist who also wrote for AltRight.com, and Valizadeh attempted to join him in cozying up with the white supremacist alt-right, sharing the concern for the decline of Western culture. (He turned against this movement after meeting hostility for being a non-white man bragging about sexual intercourse with white women.) The strongest opposition to abortion within the sphere of misogynist groups thus appears to stem from an overlap with the white supremacist movement and concern for the decline of Western culture.

In 2019, Valizadeh announced that he had found God and would no longer promote casual sex. His prior arguments about male control of women and his opposition to abortion and contraception on the basis of concern about population decline, however, fit seamlessly into his new perspective, demonstrating how easy it can be to shift from secular to religious misogyny.

As elements of the male supremacist sphere take on more anti-abortion and white supremacist positions, the confluence of this overt misogyny and racism with the anti-abortion movement may strengthen the support for harsher anti-abortion legislation that eschews the anti-abortion pragmatism of the past and becomes more overt about its criminalization of pregnant people. In 2019, Georgia passed a six-week abortion ban, currently blocked in court, that applies criminal penalties for murder (which includes life imprisonment or the death penalty) for terminating a pregnancy, with no exception for pregnant people self-terminating. Bills like this fulfill Trumps and Abolish Human Abortions claims that the criminalization of abortion should include punishments for women; even though Trump backpedaled because of concerns from mainstream anti-choice groups, his support for this position is already out there, along with his dog whistles to white and male supremacists.

Anti-abortion violence has also been climbing in recent years, as has white supremacist and misogynist violence. Given the history of fatal anti-abortion violence in the 1990s perpetrated by individuals with the connections with white supremacist and anti-Semitic groups, the confluence of these ideologies must be cause for concern beyond the political realm as well.

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The Long History of the Anti-Abortion Movement's Links to White Supremacists - The Nation

While health investigators try to pinpoint the exact origin of China's coronavirus outbreak, a prominent public health expert is raising the possibilitythaturbanization and human-animal interactions are potential contributors to the spread of both the novel coronavirus and other diseases.

Dr. Gregory Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist and professor at Duke University, said it's too early to lay the blame on any particular animal or human factor for the current outbreak, but several economic conditions may have played a role.

And if economic patternsdid not influencethe present situation,they are likely toin future scenarios.

"There are some factors that might support the acceleration of these viruses. Those factors include dense populations of humans and animals that harbour them," said Dr. Gray, who leads an international pathogen research network in 30 countries,including China.

"So there's a continual churning, if you will, of reproduction of viruses as it moves from one host to another," he told CBC Radio's Cost of Living.

So far, the virus seems most closely related to coronaviruses from bats. Many of the patients in Wuhan had a link to a large seafood and live animal market. That origin suggests spread from an animal to a human, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Over the past century, global populations have concentrated more and more in large cities. This has boostedeconomic growth and the productivity of nations.

On that front, few countries can rival China in recent decades. The rise of mega-cities combined with population movement has increased theriskof human-to-human infection.

The explosive growth in wealth in China has also created a sharp rising demand for meat protein.So by necessity, people have to interact with animals or meat more frequently.

That could be through traditional live animal markets, such as the one where the current outbreak has been suspected to originate, or through a more industrialized food chain.

Dr. Gray spoke with Cost of Living host Paul Haavardsrud about these economic factors and what they could mean for current and future disease outbreaks in China and beyond.

Here is part of their conversation..

In what sort of circumstances are we seeing that churning of diseases and in what ways might that be accelerated?

Since we've had the recognition that viruses can move sometimes from wildlife, be amplified in domestic animals, and then periodically infect man, there's been a large emphasis on studying these in various animal species.

We've also,over time, improved our surveillance for pathogens that cause illness in domestic animals.

So these two combined effects have given us a warning that there are quite a few coronaviruses out there in wildlife, and that sometimes new coronaviruses emerge in a number of different swine origins that have caused a huge morbidity and mortality in pig populations.

Was the Asian swine fever we saw last year a coronavirus?

No, that was not a coronavirus, but it's a very good example of how the various farms are connected. If the biosecurity in one farm fails, usually through human behaviour or some other step in the process, a virus can find a way to move to a new farm and you basically see amplification in the new farm.

We are very clearly aware that the biosecurity in these industrialized farming settings and sometimes the small and medium farms need to be improved.

Biosecurityrefers to preventative measures designed to protect humans or animals against diseases.

Examples include installing disinfection stations, registering visitors, and parking transport vehicles a mandatory distance from animals.

So is it fair to think about it this way: as the world population grows, and we get more industrialized farming, that's a piece that's contributing to the emergence of all these types of viruses?

I think that's an astute observation and a number of us in the epidemiological field embrace that.

As the world population grows, we are growing more and more dependent on industrialized farming because they can produce protein at a lower cost than ever before.

For very severe diseases for which the clinical recognition is apparent, they're very good at protecting the flocks and herds of animals. But these farms can serve as a hotspot for massive viral or bacterial reproduction, should a virus or bacteria evade the biosecurity and enter.

At the same time, we just can't feed our population without modern agriculture. It's hugely important for food security so we absolutely need large farming. We somehow have to work together to solve these complex problems.

Food security refers to the availability of food and our ability as individuals to access food.

Price, location, scarcity and quality are all potential barriers.

Over the last couple of weeks, was that where your mind started to go to issues around food security?Right now there's a lot of focus on the origins of this virus, and most people are thinking about a specific point in time and a specific food market in Wuhan, but there's other data to suggest this virus might have been circulating apart from the animalsin the general population.

But yeah, we are aware of all the new coronaviruses that have emerged in the last 10 years in pigs, so it's biologically plausible that novel coronaviruses could come out of a large domesticated animal reservoir and somehow gotten into that market.

[It could be] a mutation of the virus or recombination [and] exchange of genetic material,and a new coronavirus emerged and was suddenly infecting a lot of people.

So there's a lot to be discovered yet. Right now I think it's highly speculative to suggest this was amplified in domestic farms in China.

So what do we do about this? Are there policy steps being brought into new light?

The way forward is to realize that human health, animal health, environmental health and agricultural businesses are all interlinked. We all need each other, we all impact each other.

In a similar fashion, the impact of agricultural businesses on the environment is frequently being attacked by people who are worried about wildlife.

This unwillingness for us to work together has caused some really complex problems. So we need to find new ways to approach this, and one way to approach it is something called "One Health,"where you focus on one specific area and you bring everyone to the table and try to work together to study the complex problem, to develop interventions to reduce the problem, and to do so without threatening individual disciplines.

Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

DownloadtheCost of Livingpodcast for more on the economics of everyday life from CBC Radio.

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How urbanization and the way we deal with animals may influence the spread of illnesses like coronavirus - CBC.ca

Climate activists block one of the city's major arteries into downtown Edmonton during the Monday morning commute. Starting at 7 a.m. activists with Extinction Rebellion Edmonton, began using "non-violent direct action to prevent catastrophic climate and ecological breakdown" to block traffic along the Walterdale Bridge. Ed Kaiser / Postmedia, file

Should students be taught that fossil fuels are the enemy of humanity?

That natural gas isnt part of the solution on climate change?

That wearing an I love Alberta oil and gas T-shirt is akin to loving the idea of human extinction?

All of these notions are pushed by Edmonton climate change activist Chris Gusen on his Twitter account. Gusen is one of the activists who blocked commuter traffic on the Walterdale Bridge for a few hours last October.

Twitter is absolutely the perfect place for Gusen, but Im pretty sure theres little to be gained by allowing him regular access to Alberta school students. Gusen now gets that as a guest speaker at the City Hall School program.

When asked about activists like Gusen in schools, Education Minister Adriana LaGrange said its up to individual teachers and boards to set the standard on whom should be allowed access to students. When discussing the critical issues of the day its important to present arguments on both sides, LaGrange said. I have great faith in the majority of our teachers that they are doing that.

At the same time, LaGrange worries about what she calls extremist views in the classroom.

Extremism has to be looked at, she said. Were going to have to look at certain groups and evaluate whether they are extreme or are they providing a balanced approach.

Gusen isnt the only activist regularly welcomed into Alberta schools to preach the gospel of climate alarmism. Torontos Steve Lee is also popping up all the time.

Indeed, embracing leftist activism in public education has been the rage with many education professors, bureaucrats and teachers for years now, so much so that the NDPs first public draft of the new K-4 social studies curriculum reflected a strong bias towards populist leftist ideals.

Before I write another word, I want to stress that Im not against left-wing or right-wing ideas being studied and held under a microscope in class. For example, high school students should study the horrific impacts in the 20th Century of communism and fascism. That said, I no more want social justice warriors to take over the system than I want stifling social conservatives to take similar advantage.

The point of education isnt indoctrination, its the pursuit of truth. Its finding out about the historical pros and cons of socialism, not being told collectivism is the answer to all our problems. Its learning about sexual reproduction, not that abortion is akin to mass murder.

Jason Kenneys government which has a social conservative bent that needs careful scrutiny was elected with the promise to bring back a focus on the acquisition of knowledge and high academic standards in our schools. Ive now interviewed LaGrange about any progress.

One of the strongest pillars of transparency and accountability in our outstanding public school system has long been our system of provincial achievement tests (PATs). Under the NDP, those were wrong-headedly slashed in Grade 3, but LaGrange said a Grade 3 PAT or something like it is coming back.

The most recent results from international PISA testing shows that Alberta schools are still strong but that results are flat and still troubling in math. In 2003, just 7.4 per cent of our students were innumerate, essentially unable to do basic arithmetic. That number is now, tragically, 16.2 per cent.

Under the NDP, a few excellent steps were taken to end this slide, such as banning calculators on a section of the Grade 6 PATs. But LaGrange promises more. While it was a good first step, I do believe theres more that we can do more and my department is confident that we can do more.

On Wednesday, LaGranges 11-person panel of experts will report back with recommendations on the new curriculum. This curriculum has been in the works for more than a decade now, but she promises the new one will come out under her watch.

As for allowing extremist indoctrination in schools, LaGrange does well to consider the governments options here.

I expect that the vast majority of Alberta parents want their children to study climate science. But I also suspect parents want this information presented carefully, that it be prepared by actual subject area experts in economics and climate science, not activists.

As for the teachers who have already permitted non-expert activists to demonize the oil and gas industry in class, they would do well to promptly dig in with their students into how oil and gas has helped raise billions of people from desperate poverty into welcome prosperity.

dstaples@postmedia.com

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David Staples: Preaching that fossil fuels are the enemy of humanity has no place in classrooms - Edmonton Journal

Roe v. Wade is the essence of science denial, and it has been for nearly 50 years. Yet the 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidates share a vision of America that centers around Roe and its long-debunked scientific notions about human biology.

Ever since the first Democratic presidential debates, the candidates have increasingly asserted their ferventbeliefin Roe v. Wade a fallacious decision that is based upon and perpetuates erroneous and obsolete ideas that contradict the fundamental, objective scientific facts of the biological science of human embryology. The most egregious, blatant, and disingenuous of all Roes distortionsisits central tenet that it remains a mystery when human life begins.

More, in order to completely obscure the biological truth and redefine human reproduction to satisfy their political point of view, the politicians have announced numerous policies to augment Roe, including the promise to codify this toxic source of misinformation about human development.

Roe v. Wade declares: We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines ofmedicine, philosophy, and theologyareunable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of mans knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.

Since when should those in medicine, philosophy, and theology be consulted for such a specificallybiologicalissue when they have no such academic expertise? Most philosophers and theologians have never had a graduate course in biology, much less in human embryology, and most physicians briefly learn about human embryology as part of a broader anatomy course and are not properly considered scientists. Human embryology is the study of development of the new individual from beginning to end and is the only science that specializes in when a human life starts; solely the testimonies of those biologists with doctoral degrees in human embryology should, in theory, be consulted. Yet not one human embryologist was allowed to testify during theRoelitigation.

In addition, to help rationalize the decision to reject the concept of personhood of the human embryo and fetus until viability, cited at the time to be between 24 and 28 weeks, Roe refers to ancient scientific ideas about human reproduction when it claims: There has always been strong support for the view that life does not begin until live birth. This was the belief of the Stoics.

The Stoics were a group of Greek philosophers, existing around 300 B.C.E. Are the Democratic presidential candidates endorsing the suggestion that human biology has not advanced for more than 2000 years and that it will never do so?

Among the scientific experts, there is and has long been an international consensus regarding the beginning of a human life. When a human being an individual, living member of the human species begins to exist has been known and documented for more than 100 years and was instituted in 1942 in the Carnegie Stages of Human Embryonic Development. The Carnegie Stages continue to be refined and advanced as the global standard of human embryological research, and Carnegie Stage 1 still documents human sexual reproduction.

Carnegie Stage 1 states that all sexually reproduced human beings begin to exist at the start of the process of fertilization (Carnegie Stage 1a). Human embryologists know that fertilization also initiates the continuum of human life in other words, after fertilization, the new human being does not become a different kind of thing. He or she continues to grow and develop as the same human organism throughout the rest of the embryonic period, the fetal period, and then after birth, during the subsequent stages of life.

Thus, the term human embryo or human fetus is simply the scientific name for an already-existing human being during the embryonic or fetal period of human development. Thus, for sexually reproduced human beings, personhood begins at fertilization, not at viability, first breath, or some later point that conveniently fits a popular political, social, or economic narrative.

Under the Supreme Courts current abortion jurisprudence precedent, as established in Roe v. Wade and modified/upheld in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, states are still prohibited from applying the objective scientific facts and banning abortion prior to viability. However, as medical technology has improved, Roes fetal viability threshold has moved back from 28 weeks not forward to 40 weeks as imagined by the Democratic presidential hopefuls. In the U.S., infants born at 22 weeks gestation have a nearly 25% survival rate and in Japan, the survival rate is over 30%. In Sweden, for infants younger than 22 weeks gestation, the survival rate has improved from 3.6% to 20% over the last decade.

Rather than pledging allegiance to, expanding upon, and imposing their misconceptions and Roe v. Wades absurd scientific myths on the American people, the Democratic presidential candidates should acknowledge that the immediate product of human sexual reproduction is both a human being and a human person and renounce public policies and laws that do not reflect this scientific reality.

Brooke Stanton is the CEO of Contend Projects, a registered 501(c)(3) education organization spreading the basic, accurate scientific facts about when a human life starts and the biological science of human embryology.

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STANTON: The Pro-Abortion Democrats And Their Unscientific Roe-volution - The Daily Wire

It has been nearly nine years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant nuclear disaster, and while people still remain evacuated from the areas most contaminated by radioactivity, many wonder: What happened to the wildlife left behind?

A newly released study by a team of scientists from the University of Georgia and Fukushima University found that years after the disaster at Fukushima, populations of mid-to-large-sized mammals and birds are thriving in the absence of human pressure.

The March 11, 2011, nuclear disaster in Japans Fukushima Prefecture caused by the tsunami that resulted from a massive magnitude-9 earthquake was one of the worst nuclear plant disasters in human history, second only to the 1986 Chernobyl incident in Ukraine.

A wild boar. Courtesy of the University of Georgia.

Through remotely operated, motion-activated cameras placed at 106 sites, researchers saw that some species like raccoons and wild boar were more abundant in the humans excluded zone the most contaminated area people are not allowed to live in when compared to the humans restricted zone where people have returned and the humans inhabited zone that was never evacuated.

The fact that animals seem to be doing well at a population level is counterintuitive. I mean, these are very contaminated landscapes, says James Beasley, the wildlife ecology professor at the University of Georgia who led this project. He says the popular movie or video game perception of abandoned nuclear wastelands is not exactly real life at Fukushima or Chernobyl.

Beasley and the team went to the Fukushima exclusion zone in 2016 to begin this camera study. They set up the cameras across the landscape, including the zone in which people can no longer live because the radiation dose rates are still above the recommended safety threshold.

Even in the most contaminated zones of the field site, Beasley says, it is still safe to set up the cameras if one doesnt linger too long. They wear heavy rubber boots and an alarm that sounds if a certain radiation dose rate is exceeded.

It's okay to put a camera up for a few minutes and then move on. But, you know, that's not the sort of place you want to stop and have your lunch, for example, he adds.

Macaque monkeys. Courtesy of the University of Georgia

Caught on Camera

The observation period lasted for 120 days from 2016 to 2017, and in that time, more than 267,000 photos were captured on the motion-activated cameras. In total, 20 species of mammal and birds were spotted roaming across the three zones surveyed.

Out of all the animals spotted on the cameras, wild boar showed up in the human-excluded zone the most in more than 26,000 of the images to be precise. This is not exactly surprising, Beasley says, because wild boar are opportunistic and reproduce at a high rate. In comparison, wild boar were caught on camera more than 7,200 times in the human-inhabited region during the observation period.

Red foxes, masked palm civets, green pheasant, Japanese macaques, Japanese hares and raccoon dogs were all captured on the cameras. The one lucky camera snap of a baby macaque riding on its mothers back is not just adorable, it is evidence reproduction is happening in this area despite the contamination.

A Japanese serow. Courtesy of the University of Georgia

Timothy Mousseau, a biology professor at the University of South Carolina, was not involved in this study, but also does similar research in Fukushima and Chernobyl. He says the findings in this study reflect what he has seen in his own work in Fukushima: that population-wise, human presence can impact animal abundance more than the radiation effects.

He says the massive clean-up effort of the area was likely a large disturbance for animals in the region. All of this noise and dust and human activity seems to be a much bigger factor shaping the abundance and distribution of the mammals than the radiation effects, says Mousseau.

A hare. Courtesy of the University of Georgia

This study examines the population-level impacts of the disaster and not the molecular-level impacts of radiation. Beasley says while there may not be enough of an impact on physiology or reproduction from the radiation to suppress the population, they will conduct more research on animal health at Fukushima in the future to learn more.

Mousseau did a study on barn swallows in Fukushima shortly after the disaster in 2011 and found they did have genetic damage, but it was minimal. Another study on genetic damage in earthworms and wild boars shows there are molecular impacts of radiation exposure, but these studies need to be continued over time to see if this DNA damage manifests at the population level.

In this case at Fukushima, the inverse correlation of human presence and animal abundance indicates people leaving the area has a positive impact on the rewilding of the landscape, which is similar to findings from longterm wildlife abundance studies in Chernobyl.

Many of the organisms like the birds and insects were pretty dramatically impacted in the first year or two after the accident, Mousseau says. But now, the main message can be optimism.

It's clear that many of these organisms have come back...these areas can self-remediate just by being left alone for a little while.

A badger. Courtesy of the University of Georgia

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In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, some animals are thriving - The Hill

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Evaluation of apoptosis and angiogenesis in ectopic and eutopic stromal cells of patients with endometriosis compared to non-endometriotic controls -...

This undated screen grab shows the cell-division of two fertilized human embryos during the first 24 hours of embryonic development following IVF treatment at a private clinic in London. ( Jim Dyson/Getty Images )

LOS ANGELES - Some of the scientific advancements of the 2010s have been truly mind-blowing, and perhaps none more so than the leaps and bounds weve made in the realm of reproduction.

This was not only the decade in which the first three-parent baby was born, it was the era when a rogue scientist chose to make edits to a set of twin girls DNA, making real the long-imagined scenario of genetically altering human beings while simultaneously thrusting the deeply complicated ethical discussions surrounding this practice into the limelight.

These are the five most life-altering breakthroughs in reproduction from the past decade.

In 2018, Chinese biophysics researcher He Jiankui announced that he had used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to modify the genes of two twin girls before birth. He and his team said that their goal was to make the girls immune to infection by HIV through the elimination of a gene called CCR5.

When the news broke, many mainstream scientists criticized the attempt, calling it too unsafe to try. Where some people saw the potential for a new kind of medical treatment capable of eradicating genetic disease, others saw a window into a dystopian future filled with designer babies and framed by a new kind of eugenics.

At the time, Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a University of Pennsylvania gene-editing expert, said Hes work was unconscionable... an experiment on human beings that is not morally or ethically defensible.

Other experts believe Hes work could propel the field of gene editing forward.

The twins, known as Lulu and Nana, have continued to make headlines since their birth. The gene modification that He claims to have carried out may have caused some unintended mutations in other parts of the genome, which could have unpredictable consequences for their health long term something many scientists who argue against Hes work cite as a reason to hold off on using gene-editing technology on humans.

Only time will tell what will happen to Lulu and Nana and if the edits to their DNA ultimately help or hurt them, but their story pushed the topic of human gene-editing and the ethics surrounding it to the forefront of the global scientific community.

In 2016, a technique called mitochondrial transfer was used successfully for the first time to create a three-parent baby grown from a fathers sperm, a mothers cell nucleus and a third donors egg that had the nucleus removed.

This technique was developed to prevent the transmission of certain genetic disorders through the mothers mitochondria. The majority of a three-parent babys DNA would come from his parents in the form of nuclear DNA, and only a small portion would come from the donor in the form of mitochondrial DNA.

A team led by physician John Zhang at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City facilitated the birth of the first three-parent baby in April 2016.

Using human pluripotent stem cells, researchers were able to make the precursors of human sperm or eggs. In other words, they reprogrammed skin and blood stem cells to become an early-state version of what would eventually become either sperm or an egg.

"The creation of primordial germ cells is one of the earliest events during early mammalian development," Dr. Naoko Irie, first author of the paper from the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge told Science Daily. "It's a stage we've managed to recreate using stem cells from mice and rats, but until now few researches have done this systematically using human stem cells. It has highlighted important differences between embryo development in humans and rodents that may mean findings in mice and rats may not be directly extrapolated to humans."

A 2018 study showed that gene editing can allow two same-sex mice to conceive pups, and two female mice were able to successfully create healthy pups that then went on to reproduce themselves.

A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, led by developmental biologist Qi Zhou, were able to use gene editing to produce 29 living mice from two females, seven of which went on to have their own pups. They were able to produce 12 pups from two male parents, but those offspring were not able to live more than two days.Whether or not the method can one day be used in same-sex human reproduction is still up for debate.

For the first time ever, Chinese scientists were able to clone two primates using the technique that produced Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell via nuclear transfer.

The two cloned female macaques were named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, and their successful birth opened up the possibility of using the same cloning method to one day clone humans.

Original post:
What a time to be alive: Reproductive breakthroughs of the 2010s that changed life as we know it - FOX 10 News Phoenix

Earlier this year a source sent us a copy of an unpublished manuscript describing the creation of the first gene-edited babies, born last year in China. Today, we are making excerpts of that manuscript public for the first time.

Titled Birth of Twins After Genome Editing for HIV Resistance, and 4,699 words long, the still unpublished paper was authored by He Jiankui, the Chinese biophysicist who created the edited twin girls. A second manuscript we also received discusses laboratory research on human and animal embryos.

The metadata in the files we were sent indicate that the two draft papers were edited by He in late November 2018 and appear to be what he initially submitted for publication. A combined manuscript may also exist. After consideration by at least two prestigious journals, Nature and JAMA, his research remains unpublished.

The text of the twins paper is replete with expansive claims of a medical breakthrough that can control the HIV epidemic. It claims successa word used more than oncein using a novel therapy to render the girls resistant to HIV. Yet surprisingly, it makes little attempt to prove that the twins really are resistant to the virus. And the text largely ignores data elsewhere in the paper suggesting that the editing went wrong.

We shared the unpublished manuscripts with four expertsa legal scholar, an IVF doctor, an embryologist, and a gene-editing specialistand asked them for their reactions. Their views were damning. Among them: key claims that He and his team made are not supported by the data; the babies parents may have been under pressure to agree to join the experiment; the supposed medical benefits are dubious at best; and the researchers moved forward with creating living human beings before they fully understood the effects of the edits they had made.

Because these documents relate to one of the most important public interest issues of all timethe ability to change human heredity using technologywe here present excerpts from the twins manuscript, together with some of the experts comments, and explain the questions they raise. The excerpts are in the order in which they appear in the paper.

To understand why the manuscripts have remained unpublished up to now, read the accompanying article on He's attempts to get them into scientific journals. For the case for making their content public, read the op-ed by Kiran Musunuru, a gene-editing specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, who argues the Chinese data shows that gene-editing for reproduction is unsafe and premature.

1. Why arent the doctors among the papers authors?

The manuscript begins with a list of the authors10 of them, mostly from He Jiankuis lab at the Southern University of Science and Technology, but also including Hua Bai, director of an AIDS support network, who helped recruit couples, and Michael Deem, an American biophysicist whose role is under review by Rice University.

Its a small number of people for such a significant project, and one reason is that some names are missingnotably, the fertility doctors who treated the patients and the obstetrician who delivered the babies. Concealing them may be an attempt to obscure the identities of the patients. However, it also leaves unclear whether or not these doctors understood they were helping to create the first gene-edited babies.

To some, the question of whether the manuscript is trustworthy arises immediately.

Hank Greely, professor of law, Stanford University: We have no, or almost no, independent evidence for anything reported in this paper. Although I believe that the babies probably were DNA-edited and were born, theres very little evidence for that. Given the circumstances of this case, I am not willing to grant He Jiankui the usual presumption of honesty.

2. The researchers own data dont support their main claims

The abstract, or summary, lays out the aim of the projectto generate humans resistant to HIVand the main results. It states that the team was successfully able to reproduce a known mutation in a gene called CCR5. The small percentage of people born naturally with this mutation, known as CCR5 delta 32, can be immune to infection by HIV.

But the summary goes well beyond what the data in the paper can back up. Specifically, as well see later, the team didnt actually reproduce the known mutation. Rather, they created new mutations, which might lead to HIV resistance but might not. They never checked to see, according to the paper.

Fyodor Urnov, genome-editing scientist, Innovative Genomics Institute, University of California, Berkeley: The claim they have reproduced the prevalent CCR5 variant is a blatant misrepresentation of the actual data and can only be described by one term: a deliberate falsehood. The study shows that the research team instead failed to reproduce the prevalent CCR5 variant. The statement that embryo editing will help millions is equal parts delusional and outrageous, and is akin to saying that the 1969 moonwalk brings hopes to millions of human beings seeking to live on the moon.

Rita Vassena, scientific director, Eugin Group: Approaching this document, I was hoping to see a reflective and mindful approach to gene editing in human embryos. Unfortunately, it reads more like an experiment in search of a purpose, an attempt to find a defensible reason to use CRISPR/Cas9 technology in human embryos at all costs, rather than a conscientious, carefully thought through, stepwise approach to editing the human genome for generations to come. As the current scientific consensus indicates, the use of CRISPR/Cas9 in human embryos destined to give rise to a pregnancy is, at this stage, unjustified and unnecessary, and should not be pursued.

3. Gene-editing embryos wont bring HIV under control, especially in the worst-affected countries

The end of the abstract and beginning of the main text is where the authors justify their research. They suggest that gene-editing babies could save millions of people from HIV infection. Our commenters call this claim preposterous and ludicrous, and point out that even if the CRISPR method works to create people who are HIV resistant, its unlikely to be practical in places where HIV is rampant, such as in the southern part of Africa.

Rita Vassena: This work offers little justification for the editing and subsequent transfer of human embryos to generate a pregnancy. The idea that editing-derived embryos may one day be able to control the HIV epidemic, as the authors claim, is preposterous. Public health initiatives, education, and widespread access to antiviral drugs have been shown to control the HIV epidemic.

Hank Greely: That this is a plausible way to control the HIV epidemic seems ludicrous. If every baby in the world were given this variation (beyond unlikely), it would begin to affect HIV infection substantially in 20 to 30 years, by which time we should have much better methods of stemming the epidemicas well as existing methods that have substantially, if not yet sufficiently, slowed it. The 64% increase in infections in China (if true) is from a very low base. China has a substantially lower rate of HIV infection than Western countries. The situation in some developing countries remains more serious. But that this high-tech response is likely to be helpful in those countries is not plausible.

4. The parents might have wanted to take part for the wrong reasons

Contrary to some interpretations, the point of using CRISPR on the babies DNA wasnt to prevent them from catching HIV from their father, who was infected. As the paper describes, this was achieved by sperm washing, a well-established technique. Instead, the purpose of the editing was to give the children immunity to HIV later in life. Thus, the experiment didnt provide clear, immediate medical benefits to either the parents or the children. Why did the couple agree? One reason may have been to access fertility treatment at all.

Rita Vassena: I find it worrying that the husband in the couple offered this experimental genome editing was positive to HIV infection, as one can imagine the unnecessary emotional pressure on the couple to consent to a procedure offering no improvement to the patient and their childrens health, but carrying a potential risk of negative consequences. It is worth remembering that HIV infection is not passed on through generations like a genetic disease; the embryo needs to catch the infection. For this reason, preventive measures such as controlling the viral load of the patient with appropriate drugs, and careful handling of the gametes during IVF, can avoid contagion very efficiently. Current assisted reproductive techniques ensure safe procreation for HIV-positive men and women, avoiding both horizontal (between partners) and vertical (between parent and embryo/fetus) transmission, making the editing of embryos in these cases unnecessary. In fact, the couple in the experiment did undergo such ART procedures, consisting in this case of an extended wash of semen to remove all seminal fluid, which may harbor HIV. Extended sperm washing has been used for almost two decades in IVF laboratories worldwide and in thousands of patients; in ours and others experience, it is safe for both parents and their future children and does not entail invasive manipulation of embryos.

Jeanne OBrien, reproductive endocrinologist, Shady Grove Fertility: Being HIV-positive in China carries a significant social stigma. In spite of intense familial and societal obligations to have a child, HIV-positive patients have no access to treatment for infertility. The social context in which the clinical study was carried out is problematic and it targeted a vulnerable patient group. Did the study provide a genetic treatment for a social problem? Was this couple free from undue coercion?

5. The gene edits werent the same as the mutations that confer natural HIV resistance

Here, the researchers describe the changes CRISPR actually made to the twins. They removed a few cells from the IVF embryos to look at their DNA, and found that edits intended to disable the CCR5 gene had indeed taken hold.

But while they expect these edits to confer HIV resistance by nullifying the activity of the gene, they cant know for sure, because the edits are similar but not identical to CCR5 delta 32, the mutation that occurs in nature. Moreover, only one of the embryos had edits to both copies of the CCR5 gene (one from each parent); the other had only one edited, giving partial HIV resistance at best.

Hank Greely: Successfully is iffy here. None of the embryos got the 32-base-pair deletion to CCR5 that is known in millions of humans. Instead, the embryos/eventual babies got novel variations, whose effects are not clear. As well, what does partial resistance to HIV mean? How partial? And was that enough to justify transferring the embryo, with a CCR5 gene never before seen in humans, to a uterus for possible birth?

6. There could have been other, unwanted CRISPR edits

CRISPR isnt a perfect tool. Trying to edit one gene can sometimes create other, unintended changes elsewhere in the genome. Here the team discusses their search for such unwanted edits, called off-target mutations, and say they found just one.

The search was incomplete, however, and the manuscript also glosses over a key point: any cells the researchers took from the early-stage embryos to test didnt, therefore, actually contribute to the twins bodies. The remaining cells, the ones that would multiply and grow to become the twins, could have harbored off-target effects too, but there would have been no way to know that in advance of starting the pregnancy.

Fyodor Urnov: An egregious misrepresentation of the actual data that can, again, only be described as a blatant falsehood. It is technically impossible to determine whether an edited embryo did not show any off-target mutations without destroying that embryo by inspecting every one of its cells. This is a key problem for the entirety of the embryo-editing field, one that the authors sweep under the rug here.

7. The doctors treating the couple may not have known what was going on

Reporting by a variety of news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, has charged that Hes team tricked doctors by switching blood samples and that not all of them knew they were involved in creating gene-edited children. If true, thats a problem, since its the duty of doctors to do what is in the best interest of the patient.

Jeanne OBrien: The IVF procedure described follows the same steps and time line whether or not CRISPR is used for genome editing. The Chinese physicians who performed the IVF may have been unaware of the fathers HIV status or that the embryos were genetically modified. He Jiankui would have only needed a willing embryologist to inject CRISPR at the time of insemination. Hes comments make it appear as if the physicians who performed the IVF were not involved in the subsequent decision regarding which embryos to select for transfer. This is a wake-up call to physicians involved in IVF: the science and technology will continue to progress, and desperate couples with infertility may overlook the unknowns or believe the technology is proven safe. Once we, the infertility physicians, knowingly transfer an embryo with germline editing, we are in essence confirming the safety of the modification to the parents and the future child. Is it ever possible to know that?

8. The manuscript misrepresents when the babies were born

By now, several media reports and people familiar with the research have established that the twins were born in October, not November. Why did Hes team include a false date? It may have been to protect the anonymity of the patients and their twins. In a country the size of China, there could be more than ten thousand sets of twins born each month. The falsified date may have been an attempt to make their reidentification even more difficult.

9. Its not clear if there was a proper ethics review

The paper includes an exceptionally brief discussion of ethics. It says the research plan was registered with the China Clinical Trial Registry, but in fact the public registration occurred only after the twins were born.

Hank Greely: Registered when? The answer is on November 8, 2018, after the births and very shortly before they were announced, and probably in order to increase publication potential. This was not a normal registration. Maybe there was an ethics approvalthough that hospital has denied it. Who is telling the truth? Not sure well ever know. The phrase we were told about a comprehensive ethics review is not very powerful evidence. The article also does not discuss the Chinese ban on assisted reproductive services for HIV-positive parents. It has been reported that He had other men pretend to be the intended fathers for purpose of the required HIV tests. The article doesnt say this. It seems to me likely to be trueand damning. If true, it means He defrauded the Chinese regulatory process.

10. The researchers didnt test whether the HIV immunity worked before creating living human beings

Here the Chinese team outlines their plan to collect blood from the twins to see if their edited cells really resist HIV. That is something they could have tried to learn ahead of time, before creating the girls. Before transferring the embryos, they could have kept them frozen while they made identical edits in laboratory cells and tested the effects of HIV on those cells.

Fyodor Urnov: This statement proves that the research team placed their interests above those of the couple who donated the embryos and of their prospective children. There is zero evidence in the manuscript supporting the essential expectation that the new forms of CCR5 would be HIV-protective. It was essential to have determined that before the embryos were implanted. They could have done so using a known assay: introduce the same edits into immune system cells in the laboratory and then infect them with HIV. Only the cells that have HIV-protective variants of CCR5 survive. The research team chose not to do that assay. Instead, they made children out of embryos that had forms of CCR5 of entirely uncertain functional impact. Were the researchers in a rush? Did they simply not care? Whatever the explanation, this egregious violation of elementary norms of ethics and of research borders on the criminal.

11. An American Nobelist may have helped He justify his experiment

The articles conclusion contains an unexpected digression that puts forth an entirely new justification for the research, one that connects the project to the heart of the HIV epidemic in Africa. Its that many uninfected children of African mothers with HIV suffer a syndrome called HEU that makes them more susceptible to a variety of childhood illnesses. The authors say genome editing could be a novel strategy against HEU.

There isnt any evidence for this idea, but there are some clues about where He got it. In an email he sent on November 22 to Craig Mello, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts who at the time was an advisor to one of his companies, He thanked Mello for suggestions on the topic and enclosed in his email the same paragraph above.

Does that mean Mello, a winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for medicine, contributed a key idea to the paper? Mello was told about the twins project early on but, through a spokesman, says he never gave He advice on how to write the paper. According to Hes email, however, any such interaction was meant to remain unacknowledged. Again, I wont tell people you know what is happening here, he wrote to Mello.

12. The project had other supporters, but some key information is missing

The manuscript concludes by thanking a list of people who, according to He, gave him direct feedback on draft versions of the text or other advice. In an acknowledgement for editing the text, he names Mark Dewitt, a researcher at the University of California. Dewitt didnt reply to emails but earlier gave a description of his role, saying he had warned against the project. William Hurlbut, an ethicist at Stanford, says he gave ethics advice to He but didnt know that the Chinese scientist had created children.

He also thanks W.R. Twink Allen, an equine reproduction specialist in the United Kingdom, and Allens onetime student Jin Zhang, also known as John Zhang, who is now head of New Hope Fertility Center in New York, one of the largest in the US. According to reports, Zhang was planning with He late last year to open a medical tourism business for gene-edited babies.

Of these names, only Allens has not previously been cited in connection with the CRISPR-baby research. Allen did not reply to attempts to contact him by email. Zhang, who has not been forthcoming about his role, told us he was not familiar with the manuscript. I have never seen it, he told us in October.

The version of the twins manuscript we have is missing two critically important disclosures usually present in scientific papers. First, it gives no information about who funded the project or what financial interests the authors have in the outcome. Also missing is a section in which each authors scientific contribution is detailed. This means the text does not explicitly describe the role of the single non-Chinese author, Michael Deem of Rice University in Texas. The nature of Deems roleparticularly any hands-on involvement with the patientscould determine penalties that Deem, or his university, could face. Deems lawyers did not answer questions, including a request for copies of his past statements, which sought to minimize his role in the research. Rice says its investigation is ongoing.

13. The researchers ignored evidence that the gene edits werent uniform

In data attached to the paper, in the so-called supplementary material, are tables that He previously showed publicly. It shows chromatograms, or the readout of the DNA sequences found in the embryos and birth tissues of the twins (the umbilical cord and placenta) when his team tried to measure what editing had happened to the CCR5 gene.

Some observers, including Musunuru in our accompanying op-ed, say these data show clearly that the embryos are mosaic, meaning that different cells in the embryo were edited differently. He says presence of multiple edits is visible in the chromatograms, where several distinct readings are registered in overlapping signals at a given DNA position.

The implication of the data is that the twins bodies could be composites of cells edited in different ways, or not at all. That, Musunuru points out, means only some of their cells might have the HIV-resistant gene edit; it also means some might have undetected "off-target" edits, which could potentially cause health problems. The problem of mosaicism was well known to He from his experiments on animal embryos. One of the mysteries of the research project is why He chose to proceed with embryos if they were flawed in this way.

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In his manuscript, He doesnt resolve the mystery. It says only, The CCR5 gene was deep sequenced for all samples to examine the mosaicism of gene editing. Theres no interpretation of what was found, and no acknowledgement that the data seem to show mosaicism or that its a problem.

Fyodor Urnov: They should have worked and worked and worked until they reduced mosaicism to as close to zero as possible. This failed completely. They forged ahead anyway.

Excerpt from:
Chinas CRISPR babies: Read exclusive excerpts from the unseen original research - MIT Technology Review

For those of you with a bit of extra time on your hands, after having already binged the surprisingly popular show about the wild machinations of mostly toothless tiger trainers, itself closed down for coronavirus.

Consider watching the 2011 Steven Soderbergh film Contagion starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Lawrence Fishburne, Bryan Cranston, Elliot Gould, and others.

This star-studded film is an epidemiological who-done-it. The film follows WHO (World Health Organization) and the CDC (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) researchers as they track a virus that originates in Hong Kong and quickly sweeps across the globe, killing millions in its wake. Luckily our real-life virus, COV-Sars-2, is neither as virulent nor as lethal as the MEV-1 virus from the movie, nor has our society collapsed as quickly and as horribly as the Hollywood version, although some suspect that our economy as we know it will soon unravel.

Even though the movie was filmed a decade ago, the movie is a useful tool for understanding what we are going through, for example, in explaining R0 --r naught, the reproduction number that reflects how contagious a particular pathogen isand the benefits of social distancing. The film is also valuable in suggesting some of the potentially emerging social issues and concerns as our virus progresses. In 2011, the film was hailed for its scientific accuracy, and it remains pertinent a decade later. A number of prominent scientists were consulted by the films creators, including Larry Brilliant, who helped eradicate smallpox, and Ian Lipkin, who is ironically currently suffering from Covid-19.

In one subplot, Jude Law, a muckraking blogger, self-medicates with a homeopathic drug, Forsythia, that he peddles as a cure for the disease. Forsythia was also ironically used by some in China as a potential cure for Covid-19.

Like the many unsubstantiated claimed cures of Covid-19, demand for a claimed cure can quickly outstrip limited supply, creating additional anxiety. Whereas cooler heads will note that stories of miracle cure drugs are simply anecdotal and unhelpful in assessing a drugs true efficacy, the general population still often seems unmoved by the rationality of the scientists. Even the government is stockpiling chloroquine, which may or may not help, based on its own admissions of anecdotal efficacy.

Although it predates our modern world of social media, the movie highlights the danger of social media influencers touting a drug that may or may not work, especially if the pharmaceutical companies are unable to satiate a rapid eruption in demand. In one recent case, a minor Instagram influencer was arrested for selling his own unvetted patent-pending cure. There are also reports of other people being arrested worldwide for peddling fake news on social media regarding the virus. In the film, Jude Law is also eventually arrested for bilking the public.

Like the real world, the movie portrays how various health systems can be quickly overwhelmed by the influx of diseased patients. Bill Gates has been warning of a similar calamity for years. Unfortunately, we are already there is some countries, and nearly there in others.

There are, however, noteworthy differences between the movie and real life: in the film, only a month into the pandemic there are already violent repercussions to shortages of purported cures. With the exception of a handful of cases, we have yet to see violence in response to the failure to supply sufficient potential cures, proven or not, or other basic goods.

The movie also shows other disaster movie tropes, such as the army coming in to take over and limit movement. While this hasnt really happened yet, in reality, though, the army could be helpful as it is presumed to be especially effective in this area having been trained in controlling unruly crowds and in quickly setting up the necessary supply chain logistics for large operations.

But bringing in the army into your own population often creates human rights concerns and violations. In the film, the protagonists are unable to leave their state. In the current situation, we already see legally problematic limitations on freedom of movement with roadblocks set up to keep out New Yorkers, or limitations on the practice of religion, in the form of closing all houses of worship, and even efforts to limit access to some constitutionally protected services such as abortion.

Overall, whatever its limitations and inaccuracies in light of the current pandemic, the film is great at providing a touchstone for helping to understand and appreciate our current condition. If nothing else, its a movie you can watch with your family to help better understand what we are all going through.

But Contagion for all of its accuracies, remains a work of fiction, and like all fiction, we need to appreciate that it is not necessarily a prophetic oracle. While 2020 hindsight (pun intended) often allows us to see where the future was correctly predicted by fiction, its often because our own cognitive biases are designed to see it that way.

And why choose Contagion, amongst the thousands of films and stories as the oracle we trust. Consider, for example, Greenland, a soon to be released Gerard Butler disaster movie about a world-killer asteroid whimsically named Clarke. Perhaps we should be preparing for that unlikely but deadly event. Fun fact: Michael Franck, a stunt actor, plays a helicopter pilot in both Greenland and Contagion.

Or maybe we should consider Contact, a film about figuring out how to communicate with extra-terrestrials that will eventually make contact with humanity.

The scientific bona fides of Contact's author, Carl Sagan, notwithstanding, many see Contact, like we viewed Contagion only a year ago, as fun, fictional, and mostly irrelevant. Yet since 1999, in an early and successful crowd sourcing effort, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been using donated extra computational cycles on our computers to collect and assess data from outer space. Currently, the same technology is also being employed to create one of the world's most powerful supercomputers to determine the correct folding of proteins. Unfortunately, the Berkeley-based SETI researchers have just put that crowd-sourced collection of potential alien communications on hold, and are now combing through the combined data to see if there is extractable publishable information.

Meanwhile, a just published article in Scientific American argues that humanity shouldnt focus on just listening for other intelligence, but rather we should become more proactive in actively messaging alien civilizations. METI, Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the author argues, is such an effort. Like being prepared for eventualities like Contagion, it would be a "very inexpensive, a small bet on what some would consider a low probability risk but with a potentially immense payoff. Just placing the bet makes us think about possible neighbors and what we would want to say to them and what we want them to know about us."

Its not so crazy. A similar bet was placed nearly fifty years ago when the aforementioned Carl Sagan helped develop the golden discs attached to the interstellar Voyager probes to explain to any stumbled upon intelligent life, who and what we are. In fact, it was just a couple of weeks ago when we celebrated the 30th anniversary of Voyager 1 taking its famous pale blue dot photo of Earth. The photo memorably puts our lives and the entirety of human existence, wholly on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, in perspective.

Perhaps if we had paid more attention to another BlueDot named after Sagans- and part of the emerging world of AI predictive analytics software that picked up on an anomalous cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan in late December, we wouldnt be stuck at home watching Tiger King.

See the original post here:
Contagion in the Age of Coronavirus - CTech

Vitamin C: Improves hormone level and fertility in women. Improve sperm quality, motility and protect sperm from DNA damage, thus reducing the chance of miscarriage andchromosomal problems in children.

Food sources: Abundant in plant and fruits including red pepper, broccoli, cranberries, cabbage, potatoes, tomatoes, and citrus fruits like orange, apples etc.

Vitamin D: This is needed to create sex hormone necessary for ovulation and hormonal balance.

Food sources: Eggs, fatty fish, diary, cod liver oil, can also be gotten by sitting out in the early morning sun for at least 15-20minutes daily.

Vitamin E: improves sperm health and motility, also protects eggs, sperm, DNA from damage by free radicals.

Food sources: Almonds, spinach, papaya, dark leafy green vegetables, sunflower seeds, olives.

Iron: Women who do not get sufficient amount of iron may suffer lack of ovulation and possible poor egg health which can inhibit pregnancy at a rate of 60% higher than those with sufficient iron stores.

Food sources: Lentils, spinach, pumpkin seeds (raw), beans, beef, dark leafy vegetables like pumpkin leaves, bitter leaf, water leaf.

Essential Fatty Acids/Proteins/Fibers

Omega -3 acids have been shown to helps to regulate hormones in the body, increase cervical mucus, promote ovulation, and increase blood flow to the reproductive organs. Omega-3 contains 2 acids (DHA AND EPA) that have been shown to lower many forms of diseases.

Food sources: Flax seed, walnuts, fishes (sardines, salmon, our local Titus fish) shrimps, etc

Fats: Saturated fats and cholesterol are also essential for fertility. Cholesterol is a precursor to all hormones produced in the body including progesterone. Just make sure it is from the right foods

Food sources: Coconut oil, grass fed meats, fish, nuts /seeds and avoid hydrogenated oils and vegetables oil cooked at a high heat.

Protein: Eating healthy amount of protein from a wide variety of sources is an important part of a healthy fertility diet as amino acids are the building block for cells in the body. Animal and vegetable sources of protein in appropriate quantities are recommended.

Fiber: Assist the body in getting rid of excess oestrogen and xenohormones in the system and keeps your digestive tracts functioning properly.

Food sources: Cooked whole wheat, banana, apples,strawberries etc.

Important Foods Specific for Fertility

Avocado Pear: They are rich source of plant sterols, as well as monounsaturated fats which reduces inflammation. It also helps in balancing oestrogen, supports the bodys natural ability to produce progesterone critically for ovulation and healthy pregnancy.

Salmon: This fish has plenty of Omega -3 fatty acids which have been proven to provide regular blood flow to the reproductive organs. It regulates prostaglandin which is involved in hormonal production.

Pineapples: This juicy fruits are loaded with Bromelain an enzyme which acts as pain reliever, anti-inflammatory, anti-coagulants, this properties allows it to functions as natures Aspirin causing increase blood flow to the womband promoting implantation. You start consuming pineapple after confirming ovulation or after an embryo transfer if you have done an IVF.

Yams: This African delicacy is rich in vitamins A and C which acts as strong antioxidants preventing oxidative damages to both eggs and sperm. Yams are also believed to be rich in phytoestrogen and a form of natural progesterone. This helps to regulate the oestrogen and progesterone balance necessary for ovulation. For fertility purpose it should be best eaten in the first half of the menstrual periods.

Walnuts: walnuts are significant source of Omega-H 3 and Omaga-6 fatty acid and has played significant role in the improvement of sperm vitality, motility and morphology. Studies have shown that walnut consumption can lower chromosomal abnormalities in male sperm.

Nuts and Seeds: Contain omega 3, zinc and vitamin E. They possess essential fatty acid and zinc, sensitive to heat and can be destroyed if overcooked. The best nuts and seeds for vitamin E are sunflower seeds and almonds. The best seeds and nuts for iron are pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds.

Dark Leafy Vegetables: Contain iron, folic acid, vitaminB2 and vitamin E and are packed with minerals, enzymes, chlorophyll, antioxidants and vitamins essential to healthy fertility. Examples include spinach, pumpkin.

Fruits: Contain vitamin C, flavonoids and a variety of antioxidants. Fruits are the foods highest in antioxidants. Remember that antioxidants are heat sensitive, so to get their benefit, eat your fruit fresh, ripe and raw.

Fish and Shell Fish: possess vitamin D, omega 3, zinc, selenium, vitamin B12 and Coenzyme Q 10(CoQ10). Muscles clam, etc. are some of the most nutrient dense foods we can eat, providing an abundance of essential fatty acids.

Full Fat Organic Unsweetened Yoghurt: While low fat diary diet can be a fertility blocker, full fat yoghurt is an excellent protein source for fertility. Protein based amino acids are the building block for healthy cells in the body. Yoghurt contains probiotics to support healthy vagina flora (vaginal infections can put a real damper on fertility efforts)

FOODS TO AVOID

Sugars: Refined Sugar, soda and pasteurized juices such as bottled apple juice, orange juice and other bottled juice can throw off your blood sugar levels and negatively affect your immune system and hormonal balance. Also avoid any processed/refined and artificial sugars. Some alternatives are Stevia, honey and maple syrup.

Caffeine: Affect your hormonal balance, increase your chance of miscarriage and prevent you from ovulating.

Soy foods: known to contain estrogen mimicking properties. It is best to avoid processed soy foods such as soy milk, soya burgers, soya protein powder, soy chips, soy meats and soy cheeses to avoid a negative impact on your hormones.

Fat Free Foods: Food which is altered to be reduced in fat or fat free is highly processed and can also be high in sugar. Always chose the food as nature intended, full fat diary is one example that was shown in a study (human reproduction) to increase fertility over the fat reduced options. Fat is what our body need to produce hormones.

Eating a natural fertility diet is advised for everyone regardless of fertility issues, age, time, money and location. We all eat so why not do it in a way that supports your fertility and general healthy living.

Link:
BALANCED NUTRITION TO ENHANCE FERTILITY (Part 2) - THISDAY Newspapers

This narrative of replacement theory is regularly raisedby right-wing media with false and racist claims about the dangers of demographic changes and declining birth rates. For example, Fox News' Tucker Carlson fearmongered about the George Soros solution to decreasing birth rates in Hungary, which he described as attempts to import a replacement population from the Third World. Carlson also claimed, At this rate, unless something changes dramatically, there will be no more Hungarians. In another instance, Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt suggested abortion bans are policy solutions to correct the declining birth rates in America. Staunch abortion opponent and white nationalist Rep. Steve King (R-IA) also pushed this fearmongering rhetoric on CNN's New Day when he asserted, you cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else's babies. You've got to keep your birth rate up.

Not only have right-wing media and anti-abortion groups amplified white supremacist rhetoric, they have also attempted to hijack language from the civil rights and abolitionist movements. Increasingly, anti-abortion extremists disavow the pro-life label, instead referring to themselves as abortion abolitionists. These abortion opponents favor the ideological purity of eliminating abortion altogether rather than restricting access with incrementalist approaches. Appropriating language from both the abolitionist and the civil rights movements, so-called abortion abolitionists attempt to make their extremism more tolerable by consistently compar[ing] themselves to anti-slavery abolitionists.

Right-wing media also seize on the opportunity to whitewash and co-opt the language of the civil rights and abolitionist movements. Right-wing news outlets such as The Federalist and National Review are quick to tokenize and appropriate the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s image to claim he would support harsh abortion restrictions when, in fact, King was a vocal supporter of Planned Parenthood and reproductive freedom.

Abortion opponents and right-wing media also consistently propagandize falsehoods about abortion that are immersed in anti-Black racism, such as falsely claiming that abortion advocates promote Black genocide. Dan Forest, the Republican lieutenant governorin North Carolina recently invoked the myth during an event celebrating King, stating, There is no doubt that when Planned Parenthood was created, it was created to destroy the entire Black race." Furthermore, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant used similar rhetoric in a 2018 press conference, implying that black women are participating in the genocide of 20 million African American children through legal abortions.

Right-wing media have amplified this falsehood. For example, Fox News host Laura Ingraham, referred to Planned Parenthood on her podcast as slaughtering African Americans. Ingraham's sidekick Raymond Arroyo echoed her sentiment, repeating alarmist claims about Black genocide." Similarly, Pat Robertson has boosted this false narrative, alleging that Planned Parenthoodis an organization that's trying to set up Black genocide. Anti-abortion outlets such as LifeNews.com have attempted to co-opt Black History Month by pushing this false claim.Declarations of Black genocide are unfounded and racist, no matter how many times right-wing media outlets attempt to claim otherwise.Reproductive rights advocates have consistently called out this falsehood as erroneous. Laurie Bertram-Roberts, executive director of Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, refuted Bryant's allegations, stating, Black women are not committing genocide when the same women hes talking about are the mothers of black children. Bertram-Roberts explained to ThinkProgress how the anti-abortion movement seldom frames white women who have the most abortions in the country as having committed genocide and instead uses this tactic to shame and stigmatize Black women. As ThinkProgress wrote, abortion opponents and right-wing media tether abortion and racism because of the real history of medical racism" of the anti-abortion movement, such as the coerced sterilization of people of color throughout the 20th century. Attorney Shyrissa Dobbins clarified in the National Black Law Journal that the falsehood depends on denying Black women their humanity and their agency to make medical decisions regarding their reproduction."

Furthermore, right-wing media and abortion opponents perpetuate anti-Blackness by advancing the false equivalency between the constitutional right to abortion and slavery. In January, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos used this fallacy when she praised the Trump administration's unwavering support for anti-abortion causes at an event hosted by Colorado Christian University. The Colorado Times Recorder quoted DeVos' speech:

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This Black History Month, right-wing media and abortion opponents should confront the anti-blackness of their movement - Media Matters for America

IOWA CITY A new exhibit this month at the University of Iowa Libraries Main Library Gallery offers visitors a step back in time when horse and buggies were the popular mode of transportation, and businesses of blacksmiths and livery stables lined the streets.

The Pull of Horses on National and Local Histories and Identities exhibit is at the gallery through March 29. Sara Pinkham, exhibit and engagement coordinator with the Main Library Gallery, said the exhibit focuses on the compelling connections between humans and horses at the height of the equine culture in this country.

Horses, along with their human companions, helped build Iowa City, the state and the nation. The animals profoundly shaped human identities, Pinkham said.

The exhibition is a collaboration between curators, Kim Marra and Mark Anderson. Marra is a UI professor of theater and performance history, professor of American Studies and director of graduate studies in the Department of Theatre Arts.

Anderson is the digital scholarship and collections librarian in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio at the university libraries.

A lifelong interest in horses drew Marra to research their influence on society, Pinkham said. While writing a book on horses in performance in New York City around 1900, she realized an intermedin presentation would capture the full experience of working with horses in the city.

Marra then asked Anderson, whose expertise is in finding and digitizing materials in the libraries archives, to help her create a documentary film, The Pull of Horses in Urban American Performance, 1860-1920.

Their work on the film sparked the idea for an immersive exhibition that shows facets of daily life with horses in both urban and rural settings. To help exhibit visitors experience the physical and social impact of these huge, powerful animals, the curators show the film in the center of the gallery, displayed at life-size scale.

Pinkham said the exhibit also offers displays of local equine history through glimpses of town and campus life in Iowa City. Visitors learn about national equestrian culture, with a special emphasis on the multitudes of women who took up the sport of riding and advocated for suffrage.

One of the displays features a scrapbook of articles and photos from the time period and includes a war bride, Magdalena Helen Tylee, born in 1894 in Germany who came to Iowa in 1922. She and her husband farmed in Linn County. When he left home to serve in World War II, The Gazette published a feature story in 1942 about Helen Shes a Soldier, Too. The article pointed out that Tylee opposed the Nazis and was doing her part on the home front to defeat them while her husband served in the armed forces.

The overall exhibit illustrates the predominance of horse culture in Iowa Citys and the countrys past. The stories about life with horses are told through original and reproduction publications, photos, artifacts and ephemera from Special Collections, the Iowa Womens Archives, the University Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries, the State Historical Society of Iowa in Iowa City, and from private collections, Pinkham said.

The exhibit is supported by Friends of the UI Libraries, the Arts and Humanities Initiative, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, the UI Theatre Arts Department and the UI Department of American Studies.

What: The Pull of Horses on National and Local Histories and Identities exhibit

Where: University of Iowa Libraries Main Library Gallery, 125 W. Washington St., Iowa City

When: Monday and Wednesday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.; and Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m., through March 29

Cost: Free

More info: http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/gallery

Comments: (319) 398-8318; trish.mehaffey@thegazette.com

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How have horses shaped Iowa's life and culture? Exhibit at University of Iowa library goes in-depth - The Gazette