Our own death loving lunatic fundamentalists

America’s Armageddonites

Utopian fantasies have long transfixed the human race. Yet today a much rarer fantasy has become popular in the United States. Millions of Americans, the richest people in history, have a death wish. They are the new “Armageddonites,” fundamentalist evangelicals who have moved from forecasting Armageddon to actually trying to bring it about.

Jon Basil Utley

Most journalists find it difficult to take seriously that tens of millions of Americans, filled with fantasies of revenge and empowerment, long to leave a world they despise. These Armageddonites believe that they alone will get a quick, free pass when they are “raptured” to paradise, no good deeds necessary, not even a day of judgment. Ironically, they share this utopian fantasy with a group that they often castigate, namely fundamentalist Muslims who believe that dying in battle also means direct access to Heaven. For the Armageddonites, however, there are no waiting virgins, but they do agree with Muslims that there will be “no booze, no bars,” in the words of a popular Gaither Singers song.

These end-timers have great influence over the U.S. government’s foreign policy. They are thick with the Republican leadership. At a recent conference in Washington, congressional leader Roy Blunt, for example, has said that their work is "part of God's plan." At the same meeting, where speakers promoted attacking Iran, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay glorified “end times.” Indeed the Bush administration often consults with them on Mideast policies. The organizer of the conference, Rev. John Hagee, is often welcomed at the White House, although his ratings are among the lowest on integrity and transparency by Ministry Watch, which rates religious broadcasters. He raises millions of dollars from his campaign supporting Israeli settlements on the West Bank, including much for himself. Erstwhile presidential candidate Gary Bauer is on his Board of Directors. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson also both expressed strong end-times beliefs.

American fundamentalists strongly supported the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. They consistently support Israel’s hard-line policies. And they are beating the drums for war against Iran. Thanks to these end-timers, American foreign policy has turned much of the world against us, including most Muslims, nearly a quarter of the human race.

The Beginning of End Times

The evangelical movement originally was not so “end times” focused. Rather, it was concerned with the “moral” decline inside America. The Armageddon theory started with the writings of a Scottish preacher, John Nelson Darby (1800-1882). His ideas then spread to America with publication in 1917 of the Scofield Reference Bible, foretelling that the return of the Jews to Palestine would bring about the end times. The best-selling book of the 1970s, The Late, Great Planet Earth, further spread this message. The movement did not make a conscious effort to affect foreign policy until Jerry Falwell went to Jerusalem and the Left Behind books became best sellers.

Conservative Christian writer Gary North estimates the number of Armageddonites at about 20 million. Many of them have an ecstatic belief in the cleansing power of apocalyptic violence. They are among the more than 30% of Americans who believe that the world is soon coming to an end. Armageddonites may be a minority of the evangelicals, but they have vocal leaders and control 2,000 mostly fundamentalist religious radio stations.

Although little focused on in America, Armageddonites attract the attention of Muslims abroad. In 2004, for instance, I attended Qatar’s Fifth Conference on Democracy with Muslim leaders from all over the Arabian Gulf. There, the uncle of Jordan’s king devoted his whole speech to warning of the Armageddonites’ power over American foreign policy.

Armageddonite Foreign Policy

The beliefs of the Armageddon Lobby, also known as Dispensationalists, come from the Book of Revelations, which Martin Luther relegated it to an appendix when he translated the Bible because its image of Christ was so contrary to the rest of the Bible. The Armageddonites worship a vengeful, killer-torturer Christ. They also frequently quote a biblical passage that God favors those who favor the Jews. But they only praise Jews who make war, not those who are peacemakers. For example, they vigorously opposed Israel’s murdered premier Yitzhak Rabin, who promoted the Oslo Peace Accords.

Based on this Biblical interpretation, the Armageddonites vehemently argue that America must protect Israel and encourage its settlements on the West Bank in order to help God fulfill His plans. The return of Jews to Palestine is central to the prophetic vision of the Armageddonites, who see it as a critical step toward the final battle, Armageddon, and the victory of the righteous over Satan’s minions. There are a couple internal inconsistencies with this prophecy, such as the presence of Christians already living in the Holy Land and the role of Jews in the final dispensation. In the first case, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other Religious Right leaders tried to pretend that Christians already in the Holy Land simply didn’t exist. As for Jews, they needed to become “born again” Christians to avoid God’s wrath (or, according to some Armageddonites, a separate Jewish covenant with God will gain them a separate Paradise).

Everyone else -- Buddhists, Muslims (of course), Hindus, atheists, and so on – are then slated to die in the Tribulation that comes with Armageddon. As described in the bestselling Left Behind series, this time of human misery ends with Christ then ruling a paradise on earth for a thousand years.

Armageddonites know little about the outside world, which they think of as threatening and awash with Satanic temptations. They are big supporters of Bush’s “go it alone” foreign policies. For example, they love John Bolton. They were prime supporters for attacking Iraq. And, with very few exceptions, they were noticeably quiet about, if not supportive, of torturing prisoners of war (only with a new leadership did the National Association of Evangelicals finally condemn torture in May, 2007). Their support of the Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani shows that they consider aggressively prosecuting Mideast war (to help speed up the apocalypse) more important than the domestic programs of these socially liberal politicians.

On other foreign policy issues, they are violently against the pending Law of the Seas Treaty, indeed any treaty which possibly circumscribes U.S. power to go it alone. They want illegal immigrants expelled and oppose more immigration. They fear China’s growth. They despise Europeans for not being more warlike. The UN figures prominently in their fears, and the Left Behind books present its Secretary General as the Antichrist. Domestically, they strongly support the USA PATRIOT Act and all of President Bush’s actions, legal or illegal.

Armageddonites and Fascism

Author and former New York Times reporter Christopher Hedges argues that worldview and reasoning of the Armageddonites tend toward fascism. In his book American Fascists, Hedges focuses on their obedience to leadership, their feelings of humiliation and victimhood, alienation, their support for authoritarian government, and their disinterestedness in constitutional limits on government power. Theirs was originally a defensive movement against the liberal democratic society, particularly abortion, school desegregation, and now globalization, which they saw as undermining their communities and families, their values, and livelihood. Their fundamentalism is very fulfilling and, Hedges writes, “they are terrified of losing this new, mystical world of signs, wonders and moral certitude, of returning to the old world of despair.”

Hedges, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, also shows that fundamentalists are quite selective. They don’t take the Bible literally when it comes to justifying slavery or that children who curse a parent are to be executed. The movement is also very masculine, giving poor men a path to re-establish their authority in what they perceive as an overly feminized culture. Images of Jesus often show Him with thick muscles, clutching a sword. Christian men are portrayed as powerful warriors.

The overwhelming power and warmongering of the Armageddonites has inspired some resistance from other fundamentalists, but they are a minority. Theologian Richard Fenn writes, “Silent complicity (by mainline churches) with apocalyptic rhetoric soon becomes collusion with plans for religiously inspired genocide.” Their death-wishing “religion” is actually anti-Christian and should be challenged openly by traditional Christians.

The next election will likely loosen their grip on the White House. However, their growing ties to the military industrial complex will remain. Exposure of their war wanting as a major threat to America and the world may well become as destructive for them as was the famous Scopes trial in the 1920s. But that will only happen if Americans become as concerned as foreign observers about the influence of the Armageddonites.

Jon Basil Utley is associate publisher of The American Conservative. He was a foreign correspondent in South America for the Journal of Commerce and Knight Ridder newspapers and former associate editor of The Times of the Americas. He was for 17 years a contract commentator on third world issues for Voice of America. He is a writer and advisor for Antiwar.com, a chairman of ConservativesForPeace.com, and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. For more articles in the Religion and Foreign Policy strategic focus, visit http://www.fpif.org/fpifinfo/4590.

Original article posted here.

Very Interesting Science article that suggests that we may be in trouble upon the earth's magnetic inversion, just like the Mayas predicted.

Solar wind warming up Earth? by Yury Zaitsev

Paleoclimate research shows that the chillier periods of the Earth's history have always given way to warmer times, and vice versa. But it is not quite clear what causes this change. This is what makes predicting climate change so difficult. Although everyone agrees that the climate is changing very fast, hardly anyone can say whether it will be warmer or colder in the next 100 years. At the moment it is getting warmer. The majority attribute this change to human impact on the environment. But are they right? Lev Zeleny, director of the Institute of Space Research at the Russian Academy of Sciences and an Academy corresponding member, believes that before making Kyoto Protocol-like decisions, we should thoroughly study the influence of all factors and receive more or less unequivocal results. In order to treat an illness, we must diagnose it first, he insists. Yury Leonov, director of the Institute of Geology at the Russian Academy of Sciences, thinks that the human impact on nature is so small that it can be dismissed as a statistical mistake. Until quite recently, experts primarily attributed global warming to greenhouse gas emissions, with carbon dioxide singled out as the chief culprit. But it transpires that water vapor is just as bad. Paleoclimate studies have revealed that during the ice ages the climate became much less damp, because the North Atlantic produced little moisture. The increase in temperature in turn increased humidity, and as a result rivers became fuller and more fresh water flowed into the Arctic and the North Atlantic. This fresh water covered the ocean's surface with a thin film, thereby decreasing evaporation. Another chilly period set in, and the flow of the rivers slowed down, marking the beginning of a new cycle. This is not a linear process - the higher the average temperature, the more steam gets into the air. "Judging by Venus, a planet, which is similar to the Earth in all respects, we can see how far this can go. The temperature on its surface is about 500° C (mostly due to a greenhouse effect). At one time, Venus did not have a layer of clouds, and this is probably when it was warmed up by the Sun, causing a greenhouse effect. What if the Sun is responsible for the warming of our climate?" queries Lev Zeleny. "There are two channels of energy transfer from the Sun - electromagnetic and corpuscular radiation," he explains. "The bulk of it - about 1.37 kW per square meter of the Earth's surface - which equals the power of an electric kettle - comes via the electromagnetic channel. This flow of energy primarily fits into the visible and infrared range of the spectrum and its amount is virtually immune to change - it alters by no more than a few fractions of a percent. It is called the 'solar constant.' The flow of energy reaches the Earth in eight minutes and is largely absorbed by its atmosphere and surface. It has decisive influence on the shaping of our climate." The second channel is corpuscular radiation, consisting of solar wind and space rays. Although transferring much less energy, it plays a key role in forming "space weather" - changeable conditions in space which depend on solar activity. Until recently, it was believed that "space weather" had nothing to do with ours, but that idea has been proved wrong. "Solar wind becomes more intense when the Sun is active. It sweeps space rays out of the solar system like a broom," Zeleny points out. "This affects cloud formation, which cools off both the atmosphere and the whole planet. We know from historic records that it was quite cold in 1350-1380. The Sun was very active during this time." Solar wind is also the main transmitter of energy for geomagnetic phenomena in the Earth's magnetosphere, which is formed as a result of the solar wind streamlining the Earth's magnetic field. If the influx of energy exceeds its dissipation, energy accumulates in the magnetosphere. If a certain level of energy is exceeded, any disturbance outside or inside the magnetosphere may release excess energy and cause a magnetic storm. But it may also have no consequences at all. A statistical analysis of solar and geomagnetic disturbances shows a rather low correlation between them. It transpires that most solar bursts do not trigger magnetic storms. It would be interesting to know why this correlation is so low. Nevertheless, other Sun-related phenomena have fairly regular and predictable consequences on the Earth. Of course, they exert influence on humans and other species and, to some extent, on the environment, altering atmospheric pressure and temperature. But they are not likely to contribute much to climate change. This is a global process and is the result of global causes. For the time being, we are far from understanding them fully. "Some dangers are much less discussed today, for instance, the inversion of the Earth's magnetic field," Zeleny warns. "It is gradually changing its polarity; the poles are crawling to the equator at increasing speed. There were whole epochs in the Earth's history when the magnetic field all but disappeared. Such oscillations have taken place throughout almost its entire geological history." Paleomagnetic data show that last time the magnetic field disappeared was several hundred thousand years ago. It is possible that the Earth will lose it again in the 21st and 22nd centuries. The "magnetic umbrella," which protects us from deadly space radiation, will disappear, exposing humankind to a heavy "rainfall" of solar particles and space rays. Our descendants will have to understand how a weaker magnetic field will affect the climate and what protection they will need. Yury Zaitsev is an expert from the Institute of Space Studies. Original article posted here.

Lunatics supporting lunatics

Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour

On July 16, I attended Christians United for Israel's annual Washington-Israel Summit. Founded by San Antonio-based megachurch pastor John Hagee, CUFI has added the grassroots muscle of the Christian right to the already potent Israel lobby. Hagee and his minions have forged close ties with the Bush White House and members of Congress from Sen. Joseph Lieberman to Sen. John McCain. In its call for a unilateral military attack on Iran and the expansion of Israeli territory, CUFI has found unwavering encouragement from traditional pro-Israel groups like AIPAC and elements of the Israeli government.

But CUFI has an ulterior agenda: its support for Israel derives from the belief of Hagee and his flock that Jesus will return to Jerusalem after the battle of Armageddon and cleanse the earth of evil. In the end, all the non-believers - Jews, Muslims, Hindus, mainline Christians, etc. - must convert or suffer the torture of eternal damnation. Over a dozen CUFI members eagerly revealed to me their excitement at the prospect of Armageddon occurring tomorrow. Among the rapture ready was Republican Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. None of this seemed to matter to Lieberman, who delivered a long sermon hailing Hagee as nothing less than a modern-day Moses. Lieberman went on to describe Hagee's flock as "even greater than the multitude Moses commanded."

Throughout CUFI's Israel Summit, videographer Thomas Shomaker and I were hounded by PR agents seeking to prevent us from interviewing attendees about the End Times. The conference, we were told, was about "one message" - evangelical Christians supporting Israel. We were instructed to only interview CUFI leaders capable of sticking to the talking point that their support for Israel has, as Hagee declared, "nothing to do with the End Times." But I was forbidden from asking Hagee about statements he made in his book, "Jerusalem Countdown," that appeared to blame Jews for their own persecution. After doing just that during a press conference, I was removed from the conference by off-duty DC cops summoned by members of Hagee's family.

I have covered the Christian right intensely for over four years. During this time, I attended dozens of Christian right conferences, regularly monitored movement publications and radio shows, and interviewed scores of its key leaders. I have never witnessed any spectacle as politically extreme, outrageous, or bizarre as the one Christians United for Israel produced last week in Washington. See for yourself.

Original article posted here.

Maybe a nice day to end democracy. (Just a thought)

And then there was the worst news yet , , ,

Virtually incurable disease takes hold in region already staggering under the weight of HIV-AIDS

STEPHANIE NOLEN

DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA — Tony Moll knew there was a problem, a grave problem. To tell him so, he had a ward full of patients who were sicker by the day.

But the gentle doctor, a veteran of 20 years of practice in a rural town in the low hills of KwaZulu-Natal province, never considered that he was looking at a problem that some public-health experts say may be the worst threat to humanity in the past half-century.

When the lab called to tell him just what was wrong with those patients, the news left him "in shivers." The Church of Scotland Hospital in Tugela Ferry, an old mission station of low, graceful stone buildings where Dr. Moll is the chief physician, now has the macabre title of "home of XDR TB" - extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis.

The TB bacillus, a bug that has been pesky but totally treatable since the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s, has suddenly morphed into something virtually incurable. And the disease is spread not with a complex exchange of bodily fluids, like AIDS or Ebola, but simply by laughing, talking, coughing or breathing.

Feeding off a vulnerable population and a health system staggering under the challenge of the AIDS epidemic, XDR may already have spread from South Africa, creating the danger of an uncontrollable epidemic on the continent.

After Dr. Moll got the call from the lab, he started keeping track of patients with XDR. In a matter of days, it killed 52 out of 53 people who had it, most within two weeks of arriving at the hospital.

Almost all of them were diagnosed posthumously, because the TB killed them before the lab ever got the diagnostics finished.

"We're losing ground again, facing another untreatable condition," said Dr. Moll, a veteran of the fight with AIDS. "It's put us in a hopeless situation."

Origin of an outbreak

The journey to Dr. Moll's terrifying discovery began in early 2005, when he noticed something peculiar. The staff at his hospital had become accustomed to the marvellous "Lazarus effect" of anti-retroviral treatment for AIDS: seeing desperately sick people quickly start gaining weight and return home or go back to work. But now, in his ward, he had two men in their 30s on ARVs whose HIV infections were suppressed to undetectable levels. Yet their TB, which would normally have cleared up in a matter of weeks, kept getting worse.

He suspected multidrug-resistant TB, or MDR, believed at the time to be as bad as the disease could get. So he collected sputum from 45 patients and sent it off to a lab in Durban for cell culturing. (The only way to tell if a TB strain is drug-resistant is to grow cultures from a patient sample, zap it with the different drugs and see which, if any, fail to kill it.) The process takes six to eight weeks. "In that time, we more or less forgot about it," Dr. Moll said. One of his two young men died.

But the phone call from the lab, when it eventually came, slammed the issue to the top of their agenda: Of the 45 samples, 10 were indeed drug-resistant. But they weren't resistant to just one or two of the drugs used against TB. They were resistant to all six medications available for use in Tugela Ferry. In other words, there was nothing to cure that TB at all.

"That was so scary," Dr. Moll said. His first thought, he confessed, was personal - for himself and his staff. "Because you're talking about airborne transmission, and this means if a patient has got it, you as a doctor or a nurse working with that patient are breathing it in ... you are breathing in XDR as part of your job." Four health workers were among the 52 people who had died.

Immediately, he called the provincial Department of Health and wrote to the national government, expecting a five-alarm response. In his head, he started making plans for how these emergency cases would be handled.

But he didn't get the urgent response he had anticipated. "We were shouting on deaf ears for quite a long time ... everybody just had another problem, cholera here or overwhelming HIV there."

No one seemed to understand the threat of an incurable strain of TB spreading through a community where up to 40 per cent of adults have HIV.

TB is already one of the most common infections in people with HIV-AIDS, and their weakened immune systems make them terribly vulnerable to XDR.

Health system under strain

Nearly two years after Dr. Moll's discovery, South Africa is still trying to come to grips with what's brewing in its midst. Some 340 people have been diagnosed with XDR, and more than half of them have already died.

Yet in Tugela Ferry and other communities, people with this highly contagious, lethal disease are still lying in hospital beds next to patients who don't have it, or they are being sent home to live with their families until a hospital bed in the main treatment centre in Durban becomes available, a wait that can last for months.

It isn't hard to figure out how they wound up with XDR in Tugela Ferry: the TB outpatient clinic has more than 750 patients on its roster, and only two nurses to supervise them. TB treatment needs to be taken for at least six months, or 18 months for MDR, but the drugs are toxic and make people feel terrible. Quite often, when patients start to feel a bit better, they stop taking the drugs and end up with resistant bacteria.

TB projects in other parts of the world run on a model called DOT, or daily observed therapy: A health-care worker watches the patient take the drugs each day. Obviously, that was a non-starter in Tugela Ferry. It is as hard-hit by staff shortages as the rest of the health system in post-apartheid South Africa, where nurses and doctors have been lured away to richer countries, have died of AIDS or have left their jobs due to chronic overwork and lack of support.

The two nurses in Tugela Ferry had no vehicle to track down patients in their rural homes and check up on their drug adherence. Many patients didn't have phones. Even in the hospital, nurses were too overworked to stand at bedsides and monitor treatment.

"The cure rate nationally for TB is only 62 per cent," said Nesri Padayatchi, an expert on drug-resistant tuberculosis for a joint U.S.-South African research consortium on AIDS and TB called CAPRISA. "So if you're not curing, if patients stop taking treatment and very little is put into place to find those people, you know the organism is mutating and becoming resistant. Nobody who works in TB is surprised this happened."

At the international AIDS conference in Toronto this past August, Dr. Moll shared the news of his 52 dead XDR patients and finally got worldwide attention. Teams of international researchers soon flocked here: The World Health Organization sent advisers, while a European team traced all the contacts of the XDR patients.

In one of the few bits of good news in this story, they found that the XDR bug isn't as infectious as regular TB. Research has also found that the spread of the bacteria was almost certainly nosocomial -- hospital-related -- since virtually all of the cases to date have been people who had previously been hospitalized at a time when a then-undiagnosed XDR patient was also in the ward. Genetic typing shows that 89 per cent of the XDR patients have had the same bacteria.

But even in the King George V Hospital in Durban, the specialist referral centre for XDR, patients are still in mixed wards and staff rarely wear respirators or even masks, complaining that these are hot and uncomfortable and make it hard to communicate with patients.

Too little, too late?

Dr. Moll said his program has been given new resources in the past year, including staff to trace contact information for infected patients and vehicles to pursue those who default on treatment. But there is still no help in building space or hiring staff to isolate patients. "We can't isolate our patients here and that is still driving the epidemic on," he said plaintively. "I can't understand" why the government does not supply the funds to set up isolation facilities.

But Lindiwe Mvusi, head of the national TB program in South Africa, insisted the government is doing everything necessary. "Such things, it also comes back to managers. Why are they keeping them in the same ward?" she said. "If they apply their minds, they can isolate the patient. I blame them. They need to find a way of going around it."

The international experts who are here as advisers are nonetheless frustrated. "You would never know there is a huge crisis from the way the South Africans are responding," one doctor said. "It's hard to tell if they don't get it or they're just overwhelmed or what it is."

He and other experts interviewed said South Africa's reviled Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang - best known for urging people with AIDS to eat traditional African vegetables rather than get treatment - has created a dysfunctional environment where anything seen as related to HIV is stalled or blocked. But she has been off the job on sick leave for several months, and the acting minister has galvanized new action on XDR.

"Finally in the past few weeks we are seeing some action," Dr. Padayatchi said. The government is now promising to act quickly on providing new bed space and isolation for those infected, although it is not clear who will staff those facilities, because health-care workers are justifiably reluctant to work in XDR settings.

Meanwhile Dr. Moll is planning to simply start treating people he suspects have XDR rather than waiting eight weeks for tests, because so many of his patients have died by the time the lab results come back.

The first patients from Tugela Ferry began treatment in December, 2006, so it will be another 18 months before there is any clue whether this type of TB can be cured here. In the meantime, two patients have died as a result of the side-effects of the treatment.

Doctors in KwaZulu are already worrying about what to do with people who "fail" treatment, that is, take the full course of drugs, but remain infectious. Currently, people who fail treatment for MDR are simply sent home, but a new debate is emerging here about the circumstances in which people with XDR could be forcibly confined if they fail to adhere to treatment or remain infectious.

"What will we do, how will we address that?" Dr. Padayatchi asked. "Is it any benefit to keep them in hospital for the rest of their lives? I don't see us keeping them in leper colonies for XDR somewhere. And who is going to look after them? Nurses don't want to go work in those hospitals and you can't blame them."

The Medical Research Council estimates there will be 600 new cases of XDR across the country this year, and says there may be other outbreaks that go undetected because patients die so quickly.

XDR was picked up in Tugela Ferry, but while most other hospitals have now been screened, there is no long-term surveillance under way to track the disease.

Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of migrant workers are moving in and out of the country from Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana -- all countries with HIV prevalence rates as high or higher than South Africa's -- while millions of Zimbabwean refugees go back and forth across the border to South Africa. None of these countries have the capacity to screen for XDR or the ability to control the spread of a bug like this.

"It's everywhere; where you will look for it, you will find it," Dr. Mvusi said. "If you look for it in other countries, you will pick it up."

Original article posted here.

An Apocalyptic Prognosis

Sick Future: As Species Disappear, Human Disease May Spike

By Andrea Thompson, LiveScience Staff Writer

NEW YORK-The jeopardized health of Earth's depleted ecosystems is putting our own health in danger as more and more diseases like AIDS, West Nile and Ebola could jump from animals to find a home in humans, new research shows.

Urbanization, deforestation and other habitat changes wrought by humans and global warming are contributing to the decline of many species: a 2006 report in the journal Conservation Biology estimated that nearly a quarter of the world's plant and vertebrate animal species could be extinct by 2050.

One of the most arresting potential consequences of this biodiversity loss, discussed here at a recent symposium at the American Museum of Natural History, is the likelihood that animal diseases will cross the species barrier and begin infecting humans faster than ever in recorded history.

"I think biodiversity is a big factor [in disease emergence]," said ecologist Richard Ostfeld of the Institute of Ecosystem Studies, in a telephone interview. "And clearly climate change is affecting biodiversity."

But predicting which diseases might make this leap is complicated by the fact that researchers know so little about the origins of many of the diseases that plague humans now.

Zoonoses

Humans have suffered from infectious diseases for millions of years, but many pathogens have reared their ugly heads only in the last 11,000 years, since the rise of agriculture. It was then that people began living in denser communities that facilitated the spread of diseases.

Many of these "newer" diseases transferred to humans from animal hosts: some may have jumped from closely related species (for example, AIDS from chimpanzees), while others may have spread from distantly related species that we came in close or constant contact with (such as smallpox from domestic animals). These animal-to-human jumpers, or zoonoses, can be caused by bacteria, viruses and other infectious microbes.

"The role of these pathogens in causing human disease may be particularly important because many of these are highly lethal," said ecologist Kate Jones of the Zoological Society of London.
But according to a new study in the journal Nature, scientists know very little about the origins of many long-established human diseases-a conundrum that makes predicting which disease might next make the jump to humans, and how it will do it, even more difficult.

Sources and stages

The Nature study examined the suspected sources of diseases found in temperate and tropical climates. Many of the temperate diseases, such as measles, mumps, smallpox, influenza A and tuberculosis, are believed to have come from domestic animals as farmers came into close contact with them.

Many tropical diseases, on the other hand, came from wild non-human primates, such as chimpanzees. Though they are not as abundant as domestic animals, these primates are our closest cousins and therefore pose the weakest species barrier for pathogens to morph to our physiology.

In both tropical and temperate zones, virtually all other diseases came from mammals and sometimes birds. For example, rodents, while far removed from us genetically, are in frequent close contact with humans in some places, and so easily spread diseases such as the Black Plague, which wiped out a third of Europe's population in the Middle Ages.

The study authors listed five stages that infectious diseases transition through, from those found exclusively in animals to those that infect only humans:

Stage 1: pathogen is only present in animals and is not transmitted to humans
Stage 2: animal pathogen can be transmitted to humans but not between humans (e.g. rabies)
Stage 3: animal pathogen can be transmitted between humans for a few cycles, causing occasional outbreaks that die out quickly (e.g. Ebola)
Stage 4: animal pathogen can undergo more extended transmission between humans (e.g. yellow fever, dengue fever and cholera)
Stage 5: pathogens exclusive to humans that either co-evolved with us or made the animal-to-human jump (e.g. measles, mumps, rubella, smallpox, syphilis and HIV)
Most animal pathogens never pass Stage 1: adapting to an entirely different physiology is not an easy thing for a pathogen to do. But recently, we've been helping them make that leap through blood transfusions, international travel and intravenous drug use, the authors said.

"People move pathogens around," Ostfeld, who was not involved in the Nature study, said.

Biodiversity

Still, one of the biggest factors these days that could affect the emergence of zoonoses is biodiversity, which is used as a measure of an ecosystem's health: the more variety of living beings there is, the healthier the system is.

"Biodiversity can reduce pathogen transmission among hosts and therefore protect our health," Ostfeld said at the symposium. He has done work to show that infection rates decrease as species numbers increase.

One example he cited looked at hantavirus infection rates in two small rodent "reservoir" species, or those that easily become infected with the disease. In areas of the South American forest where other rodents were cleared out by the researchers, the reservoir species became infected at a greater rate.

It is thought that the hantavirus thrives in this case because the rodents no longer have to compete with other species for resources, so they became more abundant and encounter each other more often, spreading the disease by fighting.

Another example is West Nile virus, which is spread by certain species of birds. The virus seems to be thwarted in areas of high bird diversity, where the virus might encounter a duck instead of a crow, the former being a poor reservoir.

"It's a dead end for the virus," Ostfeld told LiveScience.

But when reservoir species are all that exist in an ecosystem, humans are more likely to come into contact with an infected animal, increasing the chances that the virus could jump species.

Potential patterns

Another study presented at the symposium by ecologist Jones mapped the emergence of infectious diseases since 1940 and found they had increased in recent decades and mostly emerged in the American Northeast and Europe. Ostfeld said this finding made sense considering the low biodiversity associated with these areas compared to the tropics.
Most of the emerging diseases had jumped to humans from wildlife, Jones found, "which supports the suggestion that these kinds of human pathogens [or zoonotic diseases] are an important source of future epidemics and future disease emergence in humans," Jones said.

Diseases can be exposed to new hosts as the planet warms: the spread of warmer temperatures enlarges the potential habitats of organisms, such as mosquitoes, that spread disease, into higher latitudes and altitudes than they inhabited before, Ostfeld explained.
But UCLA's Nathan Wolfe, lead author of the Nature study, cautions that much is still unknown about the impact of biodiversity on disease transmission and emergence. He added that even with high biodiversity, there will always be diseases.

"There will continue to be new diseases that enter into the human population," Wolfe said. "That's inevitable."

To better understand the movement of pathogens and how they might spread and jump to humans, the authors of the Nature study and scientists such as Jones have called for better research into the origins of existing diseases and the development of predictive models and warning systems to alert us to any potential emerging threats-otherwise, the next big outbreak might catch us by surprise.

Original article posted here.

From 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 to five minutes to Armageddon now

Stephen Hawking: World On Brink Of Unprecedented Climate Change, 2nd Nuclear Age

The scientist Stephen Hawking issued a warning this week that the world is on the brink of a second nuclear age and a period of unprecedented climate change.

The University of Cambridge mathematician's comments came as the time on the doomsday clock, which counts down to nuclear Armageddon, was moved two minutes closer to midnight, reflecting concerns among scientists over the rise of new nuclear powers.
Climate change is also increasing the threat of catastrophic damage to the planet, said academics at the Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists (BAS) this week.

"Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no nuclear weapons have been used in war, though the world has come uncomfortably close to disaster on more than one occasion," said Professor Hawking. "But for good luck, we would all be dead.

"As we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age and a period of unprecedented climate change, scientists have a special responsibility once again to inform the public and advise leaders about the perils that humanity faces.

"We foresee great perils if governments and society do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and prevent further climate change."

Since 1947, the clock - with midnight representing nuclear apocalypse - has appeared on the cover of the BAS with its minute hand moved to reflect the perceived nuclear threat.

The hand's position has been altered 18 times including this week's change, which takes the time shown to five to midnight.

Scientists at the magazine, which was founded by University of Chicago physicists alarmed about the dangers of the nuclear age, said people were living in the "most perilous period" since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

They said the "major step" of moving the hand reflected growing concerns marked by grave threats including the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea and unsecured nuclear materials in Russia and elsewhere.

The move towards increased used of nuclear power to replace fossil fuels, and reduce carbon emissions would increase the risk of nuclear proliferation, they added.

The decision to move the clock forward was reached after discussions with the bulletin's board of sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel laureates.

"North Korea's recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran's nuclear ambitions, a renewed emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth," a statement from the board said.

The statement added that the dangers posed by climate change were almost as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons.

"The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades, climate change could cause irremediable harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival," it added.

Sir Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society and a professor of cosmology and astrophysics, added: "Nuclear weapons still pose the most catastrophic and immediate threat to humanity, but climate change and emerging technologies in the life sciences also have the potential to end civilization as we know it."

The closest the clock has come to midnight was at two minutes away in 1953, when the U.S. and Soviet Union tested thermonuclear devices within nine months of each other.

In 1991, in a wave of optimism at the end of the cold war, it was set at its furthest away - 17 minutes to midnight.

It was last moved in February 2002, when, following the terror attacks of events of September 11, 2001, and growing concerns over global terrorism, it was pushed forward by two minutes, moving to seven minutes to midnight.

The BAS said steps could be taken to reduce the current danger level. These included reducing the launch readiness of U.S. and Russian nuclear forces, dismantling, storing, and destroying more than 20,000 warheads over the next 10 years and stopping the production of nuclear weapons material.

Investments in biofuel and other alternative energies could also reduce the need for new nuclear plants said the scientists.

Original article posted here.