In US heartland, activists press Native Americans to vote

2023/10/24

Codie Horse-Topetchy, a coordinator for Rock the Native Vote, arranges her booth at the Comanche Nation fairgrounds in Lawton, Oklahoma -- she registered 50 people to vote, a big success

Lawton (United States) (AFP) - With an eye on the 2024 presidential election, Codie Horse-Topetchy is feeling jubilant. She just registered 50 people to vote at the Comanche Nation Fair in Lawton, Oklahoma -- a resounding success.

"There was a line this morning," the 20-year-old student, herself a Comanche and Kiowa, tells AFP on the second day of the event at her booth, set up near a series of huge white decorative tepees.

Horse-Topetchy is a coordinator for Rock the Native Vote, an association that encourages the Native American community to go to the polls.

Under a blazing sun, with the help of her aunt Carole, Horse-Topetchy staffed the red-and-blue booth all day. Fans, masks, pins, sweets and even water bottles bearing the organization's logo were on offer.

"For some smaller events, we've got probably like three, sometimes even two, people registered," said the political science student.

In this fertile region of the Great Plains, small towns like Lawton -- with their brick homes and white-roofed farmhouses -- are linked by straight highways running to the horizon.

After Alaska, Oklahoma is the US state with the most Native Americans of voting age -- 12 percent of the population, according to government census statistics.

While Rock The Native Vote has seen an increase in the number of Native Americans registering to vote since the 2020 presidential election, overall voter turnout remains low.

In 2020, it was almost 18 percent lower than the national average, according to a White House report published in March 2022.

"We still have many among the Native community who are not registered," laments the association's director Roxanna Foster.

The 71-year-old is wearing a blue T-shirt that reads "Democracy is Indigenous."

Navajo firefighter Robert Bearden, 26, admits he is on the voter rolls but has never actually cast a ballot -- a deliberate choice.

"I just don't really see any point in voting. It has never really affected me either way," Bearden, who grew up near a reservation in New Mexico, says as he wanders between handcraft and barbecue stands.

Retired Comanche teacher Bernadette Richardson, who is watching traditional dance performances, notes: "Most people are just indifferent."

Richardson's 31-year-old daughter doesn't vote.

For Foster, "part of what we do is to explain to them how much their voice does matter."
Various obstacles

Beyond a sense of disaffection, other obstacles for Native Americans include "physical distance to a voting location," says Gabriel Sanchez, a governance expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

"For Native American tribes that are on reservations and rural areas, they tend to only have one voting box within several miles from where people actually live," Sanchez says.

"You're asking somebody to invest more time and energy to get registered in the first place, and then turn out to vote, than most Americans have to deal with."

Megan Holt of Mississippi's Choctaw Nation, who lives in Lawton, the seat of Comanche tribal government, says she waited three hours in line to vote in 2020.

Because of the waiting time, "I saw so many people just say 'Okay,' and leave," says the 30-year-old phlebotomist.

Holt, who says she plans to vote for the Democratic ticket in 2024, says another barrier to Native American voting is a requirement that every registered voter have an address for their residence.

"There are a lot of us who have a P.O. box -- we don't have an address for a house, and that is keeping a lot of us from voting," Holt says.

A potential turnaround in low Native American registration and turnout could prove decisive in the November 2024 elections.

Joe Biden's surprise victory in the key state of Arizona in 2020 was attributed in part to mobilization of Native American voters, according to the Latino Decisions polling institute.

"We have 39 (tribal) nations in Oklahoma, which is more than Arizona. So I think that we could do the same thing here, if we really put our minds to it," said Horse-Topetchy.

For her, the electoral participation of Native populations is all the more important given their long civil rights struggle.

"My ancestors didn't have the right to vote, even though we were the first people on this land. So I think it's important that we take advantage of that," she said.

Native Americans were not recognized as citizens of the United States until 1924, and only gained the right to vote in all states at the end of the 1950s.

© Agence France-Presse

Publix accused of employee wage theft in federal class-action lawsuit

2023/10/26

Publix has been hit with a collective action lawsuit alleging wage theft from assistant department managers. 

- Miami Herald/Miami Herald/TNS

Publix, the dominant supermarket chain in Florida and the southeastern United States, is accused of not paying several middle managers for work the company forced them to do off the clock, according to a federal lawsuit filed in Tampa.

A failure to pay employees for work done would mean the nation’s seventh largest grocer committed a form of wage theft and violated the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The lawsuit proposes a collective action to include all non-exempt, hourly paid assistant department managers who worked over 40 hours in a workweek in a Publix store after Oct. 18, 2020.

The lawsuit was filed Thursday. Publix hasn’t responded to a request for comment.

A joint statement from Morgan & Morgan’s Ryan Morgan and Shavitz Law Group’s Gregg Shavitz said:

“Every year, according to the Economic Policy Institute, American workers lose as much as $50 billion per year to wage theft. Our clients have experienced something many workers face as we all become reachable on our phones at any time of day or night — that companies expect employees to be in constant communication but fail to track this time worked. It’s unacceptable to force hourly workers to work outside of their shifts and to not pay workers for their time.

“We believe that the assistant department managers’ allegations only scratch the surface of Publix off-the-clock conditions,” the statement continued. “We will work to uncover all the evidence about the extent of these alleged harmful practices in order to hold Publix accountable and recover every possible dollar of these workers’ rightfully earned money.”
Did Publix infringe on workers’ off-time without pay?

The plaintiffs — Brandy Moore of Weeki Wachee, Florida, Caitlin Throckmorton of Douglasville, Georgia, and Christopher Roberts of Calhoun, Tennessee all were assistant department managers at Publix stores.

The lawsuit says assistant department managers often worked in the store before and after shifts by “walking the department with supervisors, cleaning, organizing, stocking, and assisting customers.” Meal breaks, unpaid time away from work, were “routinely interrupted ... to handle work matters including responding to co-workers or supervisors’ inquiries via text or phone, assisting customers, and/or completing paperwork and reports.”

Away from the store, the lawsuit alleges, the managers fielded phone calls and exchanged texts while handling situations related to “scheduling, staffing, operations, goods and supplies, and customers.”

The lawsuit accuses Publix of a deficiency commonly cited by U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour investigators who find a company has shorted workers on pay.

Publix “also failed to maintain a timekeeping system to track time worked outside of its stores despite its employees regularly working outside of its stores,” the lawsuit said.

© Miami Herald

FLORIDA
Seaquarium cited for staffing, animal safety issues in latest federal inspection report

2023/10/26

D.A. Varela/Miami Herald/TNS

MIAMI — A new chief trainer at Miami Seaquarium, appointed by the marine park’s owner, The Dolphin Company, declared himself superior to the attending veterinarian and told employees to disregard her instructions, creating a stressful environment for staff and animals, according to the latest federal inspection of the Virginia Key attraction.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service also cited unfilled veterinarian and veterinarian technician positions, the mishandling of a dolphin who bit a patron’s hand during an interactive session, the danger to a dolphin who ingested plastic and a chunk of concrete in a deteriorating tank, the isolation and lack of shade for a manatee, and rib injuries to a dolphin incompatibly housed with others.

The routine inspection by the agency that oversees animal parks was conducted July 17, about one month before Lolita, the 57-year-old orca and Seaquarium’s star performer for half a century, died on Aug. 18 of kidney failure and old age, according to a necropsy summary. Lolita, also known by her Native American name of Tokitae, or Toki, lived in the Whale Stadium tank but had not been under USDA jurisdiction since March 2022, when The Dolphin Company assumed the lease of Seaquarium from Miami-Dade County.

In order to obtain its USDA license, The Dolphin Company, a Mexico-based marine park operator, agreed not to exhibit Lolita in the aging bowl, which was declared unsafe by the county, under a USDA repair order, and closed to the public.
Veterinarian staffing cited

In July, inspectors spoke to employees who said they were thrust into a conflict between The Dolphin Company trainer and the attending veterinarian, or AV.

“It was reported by several employees that a newly appointed corporate trainer, in charge of dolphin training, was instructing other employees not to contact the AV and undermining her authority,” the report stated. “A Chain of Command chart was displayed in the trainer’s office at Top Deck. This chart showed him at the top of the chain and did not include the AV. When asked, he stated that he did not report to facility management but instead answered to two corporate personnel. Numerous other employees reached out anonymously but hesitated to give formal statements for fear of retaliation.

“Failure to ensure that the attending veterinarian has appropriate authority over the veterinary care of the animals can lead to unnecessary stress, discomfort, and suffering of the animals,” the report said.

Seaquarium did not respond to questions about the report — the second annual inspection conducted under management by The Dolphin Company — or whether the USDA’s required corrections have been made.

The USDA criticized Seaquarium for a lack of “adequately trained employees.” The firing of one vet and staff resignations forced difficult decisions to be made on animal care, the report said.

“The termination of employment of an associate veterinarian on March 27, 2023, resulted in a single veterinarian to care for the 46 marine mammals and hundreds of birds, fish, sharks and rays housed at the facility,” according to the report.

As an example of how the attending veterinarian’s recommendations were not followed, the report cited the Pacific white-sided dolphin Elelo, who underwent a gastroscopy on Jan. 3 for swallowing debris in the Pompano 3 pool. The vet said the dolphin should be transferred to another facility because the floor of the tank was crumbling. Seven months later, Elelo ingested more debris and the vet again said the dolphin needed to be moved “as the pool needs to undergo a significant amount of maintenance.”

“The facility failed to maintain a marine mammal enclosure in good repair and protect the animals from injury,” the report said. Elelo was moved to Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium about a month later.
Dolphin, manatee issues

On March 19, during a “Meet and Greet” interaction at Dolphin Harbor, a dolphin named Gemini disrupted the session by biting a guest’s hand.

“During public exhibition, any animal must be handled so there is minimal risk of harm to the animal and to the public,” the report stated.

Romeo the manatee was not protected from direct sun when the tarp over Pompano 1 pool was removed at times in March and April, exposing his skin and eyes to damaging light. In addition, Romeo was housed alone for months after three other manatees were released back into the wild, not a healthy situation for a social animal, the report stated.

A February CT scan of Bimini showed that the 23-year-old female dolphin had multiple rib fractures in various stages of healing, probably caused by an aggressive dolphin at Dolphin Harbor. After the scan, Bimini was placed with a safer group, the inspector noted.

“Housing incompatible animals together can negatively impact their health and welfare and may cause serious injury and even death,” the report stated, crediting Seaquarium with correcting the problem before the inspection.

In October, 2022, when the USDA released its inspection report from a July 6, 2022, visit, four months after The Dolphin Company took over, Seaquarium was cited for underfeeding nine dolphins as a form of punishment, causing unhealthy weight loss and dangerous aggressive behavior. While the “very thin” dolphins were eating less, they were working harder — scheduled for more interactive sessions, the report said. There was also a lack of communication between then-attending veterinarian Dr. Shelby Loos and staff on the condition of animals.

The general manager at the time, appointed by The Dolphin Company, said the communications problems had been solved and denied that the dolphins were being deprived of food to induce better performances. They were overweight and put on a diet, he said.

The USDA’s 2021 report, issued when the previous owner, Madrid-based Palace Entertainment, ran Seaquarium, cited poor water quality, rotten food, and deficient maintenance, and ordered Lolita’s cramped tank closed for repairs.

The county owns the prime Virginia Key land where the Seaquarium has operated since 1954. It has long been a target of animal activists.

When county commissioners agreed in October 2021, to sign the lease over to The Dolphin Company, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava and Commissioner Raquel Regalado added amendments that gave the county strict oversight and required the new operator to address violations in the 2021 report.

Liíi, a Pacific white-sided dolphin, performs a trick during a training session inside his stadium tank at the Miami Seaquarium on Saturday, July 8, 2023, in Miami. - MATIAS J. OCNER/Miami Herald/TNS

The orca whale died on Aug. 18, 2023, of kidney failure and old age. - Patrick Farrell/Miami Herald/TNS

Aerial view of the Miami Seaquarium, including the tank where Lolita the orca lived in captivity for five decades until her death on Friday, Aug. 18, 2023. - Pedro Portal/Miami Herald/TNS

© Miami Herald

ICYMI

Remains of 3,000-mile-wide ‘lost continent’ discovered on ocean floor, study says

2023/10/26

The splintered remnants of Argoland, a 155 million-year-old continent that once stretched as wide as the United States, were recently located throughout the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. - Dreamstime/Dreamstime/TNS

While Atlantis — a fabled continent said to have been swallowed by the sea — continues to elude its seekers, another long-lost and less famous land mass has been discovered at the bottom of the ocean.

The splintered remnants of Argoland, a 155 million-year-old continent that once stretched as wide as the United States, were recently located throughout the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia.

“Finding Argoland proved challenging,” geologists wrote in a pre-print study posted Oct. 19 in the journal Gondwana Research.

“We spent seven years putting the puzzle together,” Eldert Advokaat, one of the study authors, said in a university news release.

Argoland is believed to have broken off from Australia during the late Jurassic period, when Brachiosauruses and Stegosauruses roamed the Earth. Over the millennia, it then drifted toward Southeast Asia before eventually disappearing.

Researchers have long suspected the continent once existed, as evidenced by a “void” or basin it left behind known as the Argo Abyssal Plain. But no remnants of such a land mass had ever been found.

“If continents can dive into the mantle and disappear entirely, without leaving a geological trace at the earth’s surface, then we wouldn’t have much of an idea of what the earth could have looked in the geological past,” Douwe van Hinsbergen, one of the study’s authors, said in the release.

But finally, the continent’s rocky crumbs have been spotted. Dutch geologists detected traces of the lost land mass in the form of tectonic “mega-units,” which are scattered on the ocean floor and embedded within small islands.

Parts of the continent, which once extended over 3,000 miles, were “hidden beneath the green jungles of large parts of Indonesia and Myanmar,” researchers said.

Using these remains, geologists were able to meticulously map out Argoland’s slow destruction, which they then recreated in a video.

It appears to have fractured into an archipelago during the Late Triassic period, parts of which later plunged into the sea, researchers said.

Other lost continents underwent similar processes, including Zealandia, a submerged mass near Australia, and Greater Adria, a continent once located in the Mediterranean Sea.

Piecing together the life and death of continents is “vital for our understanding of processes like the evolution of biodiversity and climate, or for finding raw materials,” van Hinsbergen said in the release. “And at a more fundamental level: for understanding how mountains are formed or for working out the driving forces behind plate tectonics.”

© The Charlotte Observer

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/08/a-dramatic-volcano-eruption-changed.html

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Meteorologists anticipate a 'strong' El Niño in winter 2023 — but what does that actually mean?

Hurricane Dorian image via Twitter Screengrab
Hurricane forecasts are about to get a whole lot worse

The Conversation

October 13, 2023

Winter is still weeks away, but meteorologists are already talking about a snowy winter ahead in the southern Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. They anticipate more storms in the U.S. South and Northeast, and warmer, drier conditions across the already dry Pacific Northwest and the upper Midwest.

One phrase comes up repeatedly with these projections: a strong El Niño is coming.

It sounds ominous. But what does that actually mean? We asked Aaron Levine, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington whose research focuses on El Niño.

NOAA explains in animations how El Niño forms.




What is a strong El Niño?

During a normal year, the warmest sea surface temperatures are in the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean, in what’s known as the Indo-Western Pacific warm pool.

But every few years, the trade winds that blow from east to west weaken, allowing that warm water to slosh eastward and pile up along the equator. The warm water causes the air above it to warm and rise, fueling precipitation in the central Pacific and shifting atmospheric circulation patterns across the basin

This pattern is known as El Niño, and it can affect weather around the world.


The box shows the Niño 3.4 region as El Niño begins to develop in the tropical Pacific, from January to June 2023.

NOAA Climate.gov

A strong El Niño, in the most basic definition, occurs once the average sea surface temperature in the equatorial Pacific is at least 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) warmer than normal. It’s measured in an imaginary box along the equator, roughly south of Hawaii, known as the Nino 3.4 Index.

But El Niño is a coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon, and the atmosphere also plays a crucial role.

What has been surprising about this year’s El Niño – and still is – is that the atmosphere hasn’t responded as much as we would have expected based on the rising sea surface temperatures.

Is that why El Niño didn’t affect the 2023 hurricane season the way forecasts expected?

The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season is a good example. Forecasters often use El Niño as a predictor of wind shear, which can tear apart Atlantic hurricanes. But with the atmosphere not responding to the warmer water right away, the impact on Atlantic hurricanes was lessened and it turned out to be a busy season.

The atmosphere is what transmits El Niño’s impact. Heat from the warm ocean water causes the air above it to warm and rise, which fuels precipitation. That air sinks again over cooler water.

The rising and sinking creates giant loops in the atmosphere called the Walker Circulation. When the warm pool’s water shifts eastward, that also shifts where the rising and sinking motions happen. The atmosphere reacts to this change like ripples in a pond when you throw a stone in. These ripples affect the jet stream, which steers weather patterns in the U.S.

This year, in comparison with other large El Niño events – such as 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16 – we’re not seeing the same change in where the precipitation is happening. It’s taking much longer to develop, and it’s not as strong.

Part of that, presumably, is related to the whole tropics being very, very warm. But this is still an emerging field of research.

How El Niño will change with global warming is a big and open question. El Niño only happens every few years, and there’s a fair amount of variability between events, so just getting a baseline is tough.

What does a strong El Niño typically mean for US weather?

During a typical El Niño winter, the U.S. South and Southwest are cooler and wetter, and the Northwest is warmer and drier. The upper Midwest tends to be drier, while the Northeast tends to be a little wetter.

The likelihood and the intensity generally scale with the strength of the El Niño event.

El Niño has traditionally been good for the mountain snowpack in California, which the state relies for a large percentage of its water. But it is often not so good for the Pacific Northwest snowpack.


The jet stream takes a very different path in a typical El Niño vs. La Niña winter weather pattern. But these patterns have a great deal of variability. Not every El Niño or La Niña year is the same.  NOAA Climate.gov

The jet stream plays a role in that shift. When the polar jet stream is either displaced very far northward or southward, storms that would normally move through Washington or British Columbia are steered to California and Oregon instead.

What do the forecasts show for 2023?

Whether forecasters think a strong El Niño will develop depends on whose forecast model they trust.

This past spring, the dynamical forecast models were already very confident about the potential for a strong El Niño developing. These are big models that solve basic physics equations, starting with current oceanic and atmospheric conditions.

However, statistical models, which use statistical predictors of El Niño calculated from historical observations, were less certain.

Even in the most recent forecast model outlook, the dynamical forecast models were predicting a stronger El Niño than the statistical models were.

If you go by just a sea surface temperature-based El Niño index, the forecast is for a fairly strong El Niño.

But the indices that incorporate the atmosphere are not responding in the same way. We’ve seen atmospheric anomalies – as measured by cloud height monitored by satellites or sea-level pressure at monitoring stations – on and off in the Pacific since May and June, but not in a very robust fashion. Even in September, they were nowhere near as large as they were in 1982, in terms of overall magnitude.

We’ll see if the atmosphere catches up by wintertime, when El Niño peaks.
How long do El Niños last?

Often during El Niño events – particularly strong El Niño events – the sea surface temperature anomalies collapse really quickly during the Northern Hemisphere spring. Almost all end in April or May.

One reason is that El Niño sows the seeds of its own demise. When El Niño happens, it uses up that warm water and the warm water volume shrinks. Eventually, it has eroded its fuel.

The surface can stay warm for a while, but once the heat from the subsurface is gone and the trade winds return, the El Niño event collapses. At the end of past El Niño events, the sea surface anomaly dropped very fast and we saw conditions typically switch to La Niña – El Niño’s cooler opposite.

Aaron Levine, Atmospheric Research Scientist, CICOES, University of Washington

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

Rare ‘flesh-eating’ bacterium spreads north as oceans warm

Debbie King works out her arms while preparing to transition to using a walker with the help of her husband, Jim King, on Sept. 26 at their home in Homosassa, Florida. 

(Douglas R. Clifford/Tampa Bay Times)

Christopher O’Donnell, Tampa Bay Times

October 22, 2023

Debbie King barely gave it a second thought when she scraped her right shin climbing onto her friend’s pontoon for a day of boating in the Gulf of Mexico on Aug. 13.

Even though her friend immediately dressed the slight cut, her shin was red and sore when King awoke the next day. It must be a sunburn, she thought.

But three days later, the red and blistered area had grown. Her doctor took one look and sent King, 72, to the emergency room.

Doctors at HCA Florida Citrus Hospital in Inverness, Florida, rushed King into surgery after recognizing the infection as Vibrio vulnificus, a potentially fatal bacterium that kills healthy tissue around a wound. While King lay on the operating table, the surgeon told her husband she would likely die if they didn’t amputate.

Just four days after the scrape, Kinglost her leg then spent four days in intensive care.

“The flesh was gone; it was just bone,” she said of her leg.

Cases of V. vulnificus are rare. Between 150 and 200 are reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention every year, with about 20% resulting in death. Most are in states along the Gulf of Mexico, but, in 2019, 7% were on the Pacific Coast. Florida averages about 37 cases and 10 deaths a year.

But a rise in cases nationally and the spread of the disease to states farther north — into coastal communities in states such as Connecticut, New York, and North Carolina — have heightened concerns about the bacterium, which can result in amputations or extensive removal of tissue even in those who survive its infections. And warmer coastal waters caused by climate change, combined with a growing population of older adults, may result in infections doubling by 2060, a study in Scientific Reports warned earlier this year.

“Vibrio distributions are driven in large part by temperature,” said Tracy Mincer, an assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University. “The warmer waters are, the more favorable it is for them.”

The eastern United States has seen an eightfold increase in infections over a 30-year period through 2018 as the geographic range of infections shifted north by about 30 miles a year, according to the study, which was cited in a CDC health advisory last month.

The advisory was intended to make doctors more aware of the bacterium when treating infected wounds exposed to coastal waters. Infections can also arise from eating raw or undercooked seafood, particularly oysters, it warned. That can cause symptoms as common as diarrhea and as serious as bloodstream infections and severe blistered skin lesions.

New York and Connecticut this summer issued health warnings about the risk of infection as well. It’s not the first year either state has recorded cases.

“There’s very few cases but when they happen, they’re devastating,” said Paul A. Gulig, a professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Florida College of Medicine.

‘An Accident of Nature’

Vibriohas more than 100 strains, including the bacterium that causes cholera, a disease that causes tens of thousands of deaths worldwide each year.

The V. vulnificus strain likes warm brackish waters close to shorelines where the salinity is not as high as in the open sea. Unlike some other Vibrio strains,it has no mechanism to spread between humans.

It’s found in oysters because the mollusks feed by filtering water, meaning the bacterium can become concentrated in oyster flesh. It can enter humans who swim in salty or brackish waters through the slightest cut in the skin. Infections are treated with antibiotics and, if needed, surgery.

“It’s almost an accident of nature,” Gulig said. “They have all these virulence factors that make them really destructive, but we’re not a part of this bug’s life cycle.”

Once inside the human body, the bacteria thrive.

Scientists don’t believe the bacteria eat flesh, despite how they’re often described. Rather, enzymes and toxins secreted by the bacterium as it multiplies break down the human tissue in the area below the skin, causing necrosis, or death of tissue cells.

The infection spreads like wildfire, Gulig said, making early detection critical.

“If you take a pen and mark where the edge of the redness is and then look at that two or four hours later, the redness would have moved,” Gulig said. “You can almost sit there and watch this spread.”

Researchers have conducted studies on the bacteria, but the small number of cases and deaths make it tough to secure funding, said Gulig. He said he switched his research focus to other areas because of the lack of money.

But growing interest in the bacteria has prompted talk about new research at his university’s Emerging Pathogens Institute.

Examining the bacteria’s genome sequence and comparing it with those of Vibrio strains that don’t attack human flesh could yield insights into potential drugs to interfere with that process, Gulig said.

Shock and Loss

Inside the operating room at HCA Florida Citrus, the only signs of King’s infection were on her shin. The surgeon opened that area and began cutting away a bright red mush of dead flesh.

Hoping to save as much of the leg as possible, the doctor first amputated below her knee.

But the bacteria had spread farther than doctors had hoped. A second amputation, this time 5 inches above the knee, had to be performed.

After surgery, King remained in critical care for four days with sepsis, a reaction to infection that can cause organs to fail.

Her son was there when she awakened. He was the one who told her she had lost her leg, but she was too woozy from medication to take it in.

It wasn’t until she was transferred to a rehab hospital in nearby Brooksville run by Encompass Health that the losssank in.

A former radiation protection technician, King had always been self-reliant. The idea of needing a wheelchair, of being dependent on others — it felt like she had lost part of her identity.

One morning, she could just not stop crying. “It hit me like a ton of bricks,” she said.

Six different rehab staffers told her she needed to meet with the hospital’s consulting psychologist. She thought she didn’t need help, but she eventually gave in and met with Gerald Todoroff.

In four sessions with King, he said, he worked to redirect her perception of what happened. Amputation is not who you are but what you will learn to deal with, he told her. Your life can be as full as you wish.

“They were magic words that made me feel like a new person,” King said. “They went through me like music.”

Physical therapy moved her forward, too. She learned how to stand longer on her remaining leg, to use her wheelchair, and tomaneuver in and out of a car.

Now, back in her Gulf Coast community of Homosassa, those skills have become routine. Her husband, Jim, a former oil company worker and carpenter, built an access ramp out of concrete and pressure-treated wood for their single-story home.

But she is determined to walk with the aid of a prosthetic leg. It’s the motivation for a one-hour regimen of physical therapy she does on her own every day in addition to twice-weekly sessions with a physical therapist.

Recovery still feels like a journey but one marked by progress. She has nicknamed her “stump” Peg. She’s now comfortable sharing before and after pictures of her leg.

And she’s made it her mission to talk about what happened so more people will learn about the danger.

“This is the most horrific thing that can happen to anybody,” she said. “But I’d sit back and think, ‘God put you here for a reason — you’ve got more things to do.’”

What to Know About ‘Flesh-Eating’ Bacterium Vibrio vulnificus

Infection Symptoms:Diarrhea, often accompanied by stomach cramping, nausea, vomiting, and fever.
Wound infections cause redness, pain, swelling, warmth, discoloration, and discharge. They may spread to the rest of the body and cause fever.
Bloodstream infections cause fever, chills, dangerously low blood pressure, and blistering skin lesions.

To Protect Against Vibrio Infections:Stay out of saltwater or brackish water if you have a wound or a recent surgery, piercing, or tattoo.
Cover wounds with a waterproof bandage if they could come into contact with seawater or raw or undercooked seafood and its juices.
Wash wounds and cuts thoroughly with soap and water after contact with saltwater, brackish water, raw seafood, or its juices.

Who Is Most at Risk:Anyone can get a wound infection. People with liver disease, cancer, or diabetes, and those over 40 or with weakened immune systems, are more likely to get an infection and have severe complications.

Sources:https://www.cdc.gov/vibrio/wounds.html
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24884-vibrio-vulnificus

This article was produced in partnership with the Tampa Bay Times.KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF

How a Big Pharma company stalled a potentially lifesaving vaccine in pursuit of bigger profits

Photo by Louis Reed on Unsplash

LONG READ 

Pro Publica
October 21, 2023

Ever since he was a medical student, Dr. Neil Martinson has confronted the horrors of tuberculosis, the world’s oldest and deadliest pandemic. For more than 30 years, patients have streamed into the South African clinics where he has worked — migrant workers, malnourished children and pregnant women with HIV — coughing up blood. Some were so emaciated, he could see their ribs. They’d breathed in the contagious bacteria from a cough on a crowded bus or in the homes of loved ones who didn’t know they had TB. Once infected, their best option was to spend months swallowing pills that often carried terrible side effects. Many died.

So, when Martinson joined a call in April 2018, he was anxious for the verdict about a tuberculosis vaccine he’d helped test on hundreds of people.

The results blew him away: The shot prevented over half of those infected from getting sick; it was the biggest TB vaccine breakthrough in a century. He hung up, excited, and waited for the next step, a trial that would determine whether the shot was safe and effective enough to sell.

Weeks passed. Then months.

More than five years after the call, he’s still waiting, because the company that owns the vaccine decided to prioritize far more lucrative business.

Pharmaceutical giant GSK pulled back on its global public health work and leaned into serving the world’s most-profitable market, the United States, which CEO Emma Walmsley recently called its “top priority.” As the London-based company turned away from its vaccine for TB, a disease that kills 1.6 million mostly poor people each year, it went all in on a vaccine against shingles, a viral infection that comes with a painful rash. It afflicts mostly older people who, in the U.S., are largely covered by government insurance.

Importantly, the shingles vaccine shared a key ingredient with the TB shot, a component that enhanced the effectiveness of both but was in limited supply.

From a business standpoint, GSK’s decision made sense. Shingrix would become what the company calls a “crown jewel,” raking in more than $14 billion since 2018.

But the ability of a corporation to allow a potentially lifesaving vaccine to languish lays bare the distressing reality of public health vaccine creation. With limited resources, governments have long seen no other option but to team with Big Pharma to develop vaccines for global scourges. But after the governments pump taxpayer money and resources into the efforts, the companies get control of the products, locking up ownership and prioritizing their own gain.

That’s what GSK did with the TB vaccine. Decades ago, the U.S. Army brought in GSK to work on a malaria vaccine and helped develop the ingredient that would prove game-changing for the company. It was an adjuvant, a substance that primed the body’s immune system to successfully respond to a vaccine for malaria — and, the company would come to learn, a variety of other ailments.

GSK patented the adjuvant and took control of the supply of the ingredients in it. It accepted government and nonprofit funding to develop a TB vaccine using the adjuvant. But even though it isn’t carrying the vaccine to the finish line, it isn’t letting go of it entirely either, keeping a tight grip on that valuable ingredient.

As TB continued to rage around the globe, it took nearly two years for GSK to finalize an agreement with the nonprofit Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute, or Gates MRI, to continue to develop the vaccine. While the Gates organization agreed to pay to keep up the research, GSK reserved the right to sell the shot in wealthy countries.

The trial that will determine whether the vaccine is approved won’t begin until 2024, and isn’t expected to end until at least 2028. “We just can’t operate like that for a disease that is this urgent,” said Thomas Scriba, a South African scientist and TB expert who also worked on the study.

GSK pushes back against the premise that the company delayed the development of the TB vaccine and says it remains dedicated to researching diseases that plague underserved communities. “Any suggestion that our commitment to continued investment in global health has reduced, is fundamentally untrue,” Dr. Thomas Breuer, the company’s chief global health officer, wrote in a statement.

The company told ProPublica that it cannot do everything, and it now sees its role in global health as doing early development of products and then handing off the final clinical trials and manufacturing to others. It also said that a vaccine for TB is radically different from the company’s other vaccines because it can’t be sold at scale in wealthy countries.

Though a good TB vaccine would be used by tens of millions of people, it has, in the parlance of industry, “no market,” because those who buy it are mostly nonprofits and countries that can’t afford to spend much. It’s not that a TB vaccine couldn’t be profitable. It’s that it would never be as profitable as a product like the shingles vaccine that can be sold in the U.S. or Western Europe.

Experts say the story of GSK’s TB vaccine, and its roller coaster of hope and disappointment, highlights a broken system, which has for too long prioritized the needs of corporations over those of the sick and poor.

“We don’t ask for a fair deal from our pharma partners,” said Mike Frick, a director of the tuberculosis program at Treatment Action Group and a global expert on the TB vaccine pipeline. “We let them set the terms, but we don’t ask them to pick up the check. And I just find it frankly a little humiliating.”

Steven Reed, a co-inventor of the TB vaccine, brought his idea to GSK decades ago, believing that working with a pharmaceutical giant was essential to getting the shots to people who desperately needed them. He’s disillusioned that this hasn’t happened and now says that Big Pharma is not the path to saving lives with vaccines in much of the world. “You get a big company to take it forward? Bullshit,” he said. “That model is gone. It’s failed. It’s dead. We have to create a new one.”
Gaining Control

In the early 1980s, the U.S. Army was desperate for a way to keep troops safe from the parasite that causes malaria. Military scientists had some promising ideas but wanted to find a company that could help them develop and manufacture the antigen, the piece of a vaccine that triggers an immune response. They called on SmithKline Beckman, now part of GSK, which had a plant outside of Philadelphia committed to the exact type of antigen technology they were researching.

For the company’s part, working with the Army gave it access to new science and, importantly, the ability to conduct specialized research. The Army had laboratories for animal testing and ran clinical trial sites around the world. It’s also generally easier to get experimental products through regulatory approval when working with the government, and Army scientists were willing to be infected with malaria and run the first tests of the vaccine on themselves.

Col. Carl Alving, then an investigator at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, said he was the first person known to be injected with an ingredient called MPL, an adjuvant added to the vaccine. Today, we know that adjuvants are key to many modern vaccines. But at the time, only one adjuvant, alum, had ever been approved for use. Alving published promising results, showing that MPL boosted the shot’s success in the body.

Company scientists took note and began adding MPL to other ingredients. If one adjuvant was good, maybe two adjuvants together, stimulating different parts of the immune system, might be even better.

It was an exciting development, bringing the multiple adjuvants together, Alving said in an interview. But then he learned that the company scientists had filed a patent for the combinations in Europe, which put limits on what he and his colleagues could do with MPL. “The Army felt perhaps a little frustrated by that because we had introduced Glaxo to the field.”

Still, the Army wanted the malaria vaccine. Military personnel started comparing the adjuvant combinations on rhesus monkeys at an Army facility in Thailand and ran clinical trials that tested the most promising pairs in humans and devised dosing strategies.

The Army found that one of the combinations came out on top: MPL and an extract from the bark of a tree that grows in Chile. The bark extract was already used in veterinary vaccines, but a scientist at one of the world’s first biotech companies had recently discovered you could purify it into a material that makes it safe enough for use in humans.

Alving said that at the time, he didn’t patent the work he and his colleagues were doing or demand an exclusive license for MPL. “It’s a question of the Army being the Army, which is not a company,” Alving said. (This was actually the second time the government failed to secure its rights over MPL. Decades earlier, the ingredient was discovered and formulated by scientists working for the Department of Veterans Affairs and a National Institutes of Health lab in Montana. One of the scientists, frustrated that his bosses in Bethesda, Maryland, wouldn’t let him test the product in humans, quit and formed a company, taking the research with him. Though his company initially said it thought MPL was in the public domain and couldn’t be patented, he did manage to patent it.)

Experts say drug development in the U.S. is littered with such missed opportunities, which allow private companies to seize control of and profit off work done by publicly funded researchers. Governments, they say, need to be more aggressive about keeping such work in the public domain. Alving has since done just that, recently receiving his 30th patent owned by the military.

It’s an open secret in the pharmaceutical world that companies participate in global health research because it’s where they get to try out new technologies that can be applied to other, more lucrative diseases.

At an investor presentation in 2016, a GSK executive used the malaria vaccine example to explain the benefit of such work. “Of those of you who think this is just philanthropy, it is not,” Luc Debruyne, then president of vaccines at GSK, told the group. He explained that it was through the malaria work that the company invented the adjuvant that is now in its blockbuster shingles vaccine. And, he explained, vaccines are high-volume products that make a steady stream of money over time. “So doing good business, innovating and doing well for the world absolutely can get married.”

As the Army’s research on the combination of MPL and the bark extract evolved — and its market potential became clear — GSK moved to vacuum up the companies that owned the building blocks to the adjuvant.

In 2005, it bought the company that owned the rights to MPL for $300 million. In 2012, it struck a deal for the rights to a lion’s share of the supply of the Chilean tree bark extract.

The company was now in full control of the adjuvant.
Picking a Winner

GSK eagerly began to test its new adjuvant on a number of diseases — hepatitis, Lyme, HIV, influenza.

Steven Reed, a microbiologist and immunologist, had come to the company in 1994 with an idea for a tuberculosis vaccine. An estimated 2 billion people are infected with TB globally, but it’s mainly those with weakened immune systems who fall ill. A century-old vaccine called BCG protects young children, but immunity wanes over time, and that vaccine does little to shield people from the most common type of infection in the lungs.

Reed had just the background and resources to attempt a breakthrough: An adjunct professor at Cornell University’s medical school, he also ran a nonprofit research organization that worked on infectious diseases and had co-founded a biotech company to create and market products.

He and his colleagues were building a library of the proteins that make up the mycobacterium that causes TB. He also had access to a blood bank in Brazil, where TB was more prevalent, that he could screen the proteins against to determine which generated an immune response that prevented people from getting sick.

At the time Reed pitched the vaccine, the company’s decision over whether to take him up was made by researchers, said Michel De Wilde, a former vice president of research and development at the company that partnered with Reed and later became part of GSK. Today, across the industry, finance units play a much stronger role in deciding what a company works on, he said.

GSK signed on, asking Reed to add the company’s promising new adjuvant to his idea for a TB vaccine.

Reed and his colleagues used more than $2 million in federal money to conduct trials from 1995 to 2005. GSK also invested, but NIH money and resources were the key, Reed said. As the vaccine progressed into testing, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pitched in, as did the governments of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Australia, among others.

Amid all that, in 2003, GSK started testing the adjuvant in its shingles vaccine, according to annual reports, but at a much faster speed. With TB, it performed a small proof-of-concept study to justify moving to a larger one. There’s no evidence it did so with shingles. By 2010, GSK’s shingles vaccine was in final trials; in 2017, the FDA approved it for use.

To employees and industry insiders, GSK was making its priorities clear. The company built a vaccine research facility in Rockville, Maryland, to be closer to the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration; at the same time, it was retreating from TB and other global public health projects, according to former employees of the vaccine division.

All the while, the adjuvant was limited. GSK struggled to ramp up production of MPL, according to former employees there; it relies on a cumbersome manufacturing process. And it wasn’t clear whether there was sufficient supply of the Chilean tree that is essential to both vaccines.

After researchers learned of the TB vaccine’s successful proof-of-concept results in 2018, GSK said nothing about what was next.

“You would have thought people would have said: ‘Oh shit, this is doable. Let’s double down, let’s quadruple down,’” said Dr. Tom Evans, former president and CEO of Aeras, a nonprofit that led and paid for half of the proof-of-concept study. “But that didn’t happen.”

Scriba, who was involved in the study in South Africa, said he never imagined that GSK wouldn’t continue the research. “To be honest it never occurred to us that they wouldn’t. The people we worked with at GSK were the TB team. They were passionate about TB,” Scriba said. “It’s extremely frustrating.”

But Reed said that when the shingles vaccine was approved, he had a gut feeling that GSK would abandon the tuberculosis work.

“The company that dropped it used similar technology to make billions of dollars on shingles, which doesn’t kill anyone,” Reed said.

Those in the field grew so concerned about the fate of the TB vaccine that the World Health Organization convened a series of meetings in 2019.

Breuer, then chief medical officer for GSK’s vaccine division, explained that the pharmaceutical giant was willing to hand off the vaccine to an organization or company that would cover the cost of future development, licensing, manufacturing and liability. If the next trial went well, they could sell the vaccine in the “developing world,” with GSK retaining the sales rights in wealthier countries.

GSK would, however, retain control of the adjuvant, Breuer said. And the company only had enough for its other vaccines, so whoever took over the TB vaccine’s development would need to pay GSK to ramp up production, which Breuer estimated would cost around $200 million.

Dr. Julio Croda was director of communicable diseases for Brazil at the time and attended the meeting. He said he was authorized to spend significant government funds on a tuberculosis vaccine trial but needed assurances that GSK would transfer technology and intellectual property if governments paid for its development. “But in the end of the meeting, we didn’t have an agreement,” he said.

Dr. Glenda Gray, a leading HIV vaccine expert who attended the meeting on behalf of South Africa, said she wasn’t able to get a straight answer about the availability of the adjuvant.

The year after the WHO meeting, after what a Gates representative described as “a lot of negotiation,” GSK licensed the vaccine to Gates MRI, a nonprofit created by the Gates Foundation to develop drugs and vaccines for global health issues that for-profit companies won’t tackle.

GSK told ProPublica that it did not receive upfront fees or royalties as part of the arrangement, but that Gates MRI paid it a small incentive to invest in the company’s global health endeavors. GSK and Gates MRI declined to comment on the amount.

Gates MRI tax documents show a payment designated as “royalties, license fees, and similar amounts that allow the organization to use intellectual property such as patents and copyrights” the year the agreement was finalized. Among available tax documents, that is the only year the organization has made a payment in that category.

The amount: $10 million.
An Uncertain Future

In June of this year, the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust announced they were pledging $550 million to fund the phase 3 trial that will finally show whether the vaccine works. They’ve selected trial locations and are currently testing it on a smaller subset of patients, those with HIV.

Jeremy Farrar, chief scientist at the WHO, said he’s more optimistic than he’s ever been in his career that we’ll have a new TB vaccine this decade.

Gates MRI and GSK declined to say who had the rights to sell the vaccine in which countries, but Gates MRI said it will “work with partners to ensure the vaccine is accessible for people living in high TB-burden lower- and middle-income countries,” and GSK acknowledged that its rights extend to South America and Eastern Europe, two regions with significant pockets of TB.

As expected, Gates MRI will be reliant on GSK to supply the adjuvant, which concerns vaccine hopefuls because of the lack of transparency surrounding its availability. One of the key ingredients, the bark extract, comes from a tree whose harvest and export has been controlled by the Chilean government since the 1970s because of overexploitation. A megadrought and forest fires continue to threaten native forests today. The main exporter of the bark says it has resolved previous bottlenecks, and GSK said it is working on a synthetic version as part of its long-term plan.

In response to questions about why it retained control of the adjuvant, GSK said it was complicated to make, would not be economical to produce in more than one place, and was a very important component in many of the company’s vaccines, so it wasn’t willing to share the know-how.

The adjuvant is only growing in value to the company, as it adds yet another lucrative vaccine to its portfolio that requires it. In May, the FDA approved a GSK vaccine for the respiratory virus known as RSV. Analysts project that the shot will bring in $4 billion annually at its peak. GSK continues to study the adjuvant in additional vaccines.

GSK strongly insists that it has enough of the adjuvant to fulfill its forecasted needs for the RSV, shingles, malaria and TB vaccines through 2035.

The company and Gates MRI said their agreement includes enough adjuvant for research and the initial supply of the TB vaccine, if it is approved. The organizations declined, however, to specify how many people could be vaccinated. GSK also said it was willing to supply more adjuvant after that, but further negotiations would be necessary and Gates MRI would likely need to pay to increase adjuvant manufacturing capacity. For its part, Gates MRI said it is evaluating several strategies to ensure longer term supply.

Several experts said that Gates MRI should test other adjuvants with the vaccine’s antigen. That includes Farrar, who said it would be “very wise” to start looking for a new adjuvant. He is one of the few people who has seen the agreement between Gates MRI and GSK as a result of his previous role as director of the Wellcome Trust. Farrar is now helping to lead a new TB Vaccine Accelerator Council at the WHO and said he believes one of the group’s roles would be to find solutions to any future problems with the adjuvant.

Gates MRI declined to answer when asked if it was considering testing other adjuvants with the vaccine’s antigen. GSK, along with several other scientists and regulators that ProPublica spoke with, expressed that using a new adjuvant would require redoing all of the long and expensive clinical trials.

U.S. government officials, meanwhile, are working to identify adjuvants that aren’t already tied up by major pharmaceutical companies.

For a corporation, the primary concern is “what is this adjuvant doing for my bottom line,” said Wolfgang Leitner, who began his career working at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research on the malaria vaccine as a consultant for GSK. Now the chief of the innate immunity section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, his job is to encourage the development of new adjuvants and to make sure that researchers have access to ones that aren’t tightly controlled by individual companies.

The WHO has also been helping to build a global network of vaccine manufacturers who can develop and supply vaccines to less wealthy countries outside of the shadow of Big Pharma; it is using a technology debuted during the COVID-19 pandemic called mRNA, which deploys snippets of genetic code to trigger an immune response. Reed, an inventor of GSK’s TB vaccine, co-founded the company at the center of that effort, Afrigen, after growing concerned about the fate of the vaccine he made for GSK.

Reed helped create a second TB vaccine, which Afrigen has the rights to manufacture for sale in Africa. But that vaccine has yet to start a proof-of-concept trial.

Over the past five years, an average of just $120 million a year has been spent on all TB vaccine research globally, including money from governments, pharmaceutical companies and philanthropic organizations, according to annual surveys conducted by the Treatment Action Group. For perspective, the U.S. alone spent more than $2 billion developing COVID-19 vaccines from 2020 to 2022. At a special UN meeting on tuberculosis in 2018, the nations of the world pledged to ensure $3 billion was spent on TB vaccine research and development over the next five years. Just 20% of that was handed out.

While that mRNA hub holds promise, it will be years before an mRNA TB vaccine enters a proof-of-concept trial, according to people involved. The pharmaceutical companies that made successful COVID-19 vaccines have refused to share the technology and manufacturing techniques that make mRNA vaccines work. One company, Moderna, has said it won’t enforce its patents on mRNA vaccines Afrigen creates for COVID-19, but it’s not clear what it’ll do if Afrigen applies those techniques to a disease like TB. (Paul Sagan, board chairman of ProPublica, is a member of Moderna’s board.)

To date, the GSK tuberculosis vaccine — which does not use mRNA technology — is the only one that meets a set of characteristics the WHO believes are necessary for a viable TB vaccine.

The phase 3 trial is set to begin early next year. In the time between the two trials, approximately 9 million people will have died from TB.

Does chicken soup really help when you’re sick? A nutrition specialist explains

Photo by Bluebird Provisions on Unsplash

white ceramic bowl with yellow liquid

The Conversation

October 21, 2023

Preparing a bowl of chicken soup for a loved one when they’re sick has been a common practice throughout the world for centuries. Today, generations from virtually every culture swear to the benefits of chicken soup. In the U.S., the dish is typically made with noodles, but different cultures prepare the soothing remedy their own way.

Chicken soup as a therapy can be traced back to 60 A.D. and Pedanius Dioscorides, an army surgeon who served under the Roman emperor Nero, and whose five-volume medical encyclopedia was consulted by early healers for more than a millennium. But the origins of chicken soup go back thousands of years earlier, to ancient China.

So, with cold and flu season in full swing, it’s worth asking: Is there any science to back the belief that it helps? Or does chicken soup serve as just a comforting placebo, that is, providing psychological benefit while we’re sick, without an actual therapeutic benefit?

As a registered dietitian and professor of dietetics and nutrition, I’m well aware of the appeal of chicken soup: the warmth of the broth and the rich, savory flavors of the chicken, vegetables and noodles. What gives the soup that distinctive taste is “umami” – the fifth category of taste sensations, along with sweet, salty, sour and bitter. It is often described as having a “meaty” taste.

The notion that chicken soup is an elixir goes back centuries.
Improved appetite, better digestion

All that makes sense, because amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, and the amino acid glutamate is found in foods with the umami taste. Not all umami foods are meat or poultry, however; cheese, mushrooms, miso and soy sauce have it too.

Studies show that taste, it turns out, is critical to the healing properties of chicken soup. When I see patients with upper respiratory illnesses, I notice many of them are suddenly eating less or not eating at all. This is because acute illnesses ignite an inflammatory response that can decrease your appetite. Not feeling like eating means you’re unlikely to get the nutrition you need, which is hardly an optimal recipe for immune health and recovery from illness.

But evidence suggests that the umami taste in chicken soup may help spur a bigger appetite. Participants in one study said they felt hungrier after their first taste of a soup with umami flavor added in by researchers.

Other studies say umami may also improve nutrient digestion. Once our brains sense umami through the taste receptors on our tongues, our bodies prime our digestive tracts to absorb protein more easily.

This can reduce gastrointestinal symptoms, which many people experience when they’re under the weather. Although most people don’t associate upper respiratory infections with gastrointestinal symptoms, research in children has found that the flu virus increased abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea symptoms.

There are many ways to make chicken soup.

May reduce inflammation and stuffy nose

Inflammation is part of the body’s natural response to injury or illness; inflammation occurs when white blood cells migrate to inflamed tissue to assist with healing. When this inflammatory process occurs in the upper airway, it results in common cold and flu symptoms, such as a stuffy or runny nose, sneezing, coughing and thickened mucus.

Conversely, lower white blood cell activity in the nasal passages can reduce inflammation. And interestingly, research shows that chicken soup can in fact lower the number of white blood cells traveling to inflamed tissues. It does this by directly inhibiting the ability of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell, to travel to the inflamed tissue.
Key ingredients

To truly understand the soothing and healing effects of chicken soup, it’s important to consider the soup’s ingredients. Not all chicken soups are packed with nutritious healing properties. For instance, the ultraprocessed canned versions of chicken soup, both with and without noodles, lack many of the antioxidants found in homemade versions. Most canned versions of chicken soup are nearly devoid of hearty vegetables.

The core nutrients in homemade versions of the soup are what set these varieties apart from canned versions. Chicken provides the body with a complete source of protein to combat infection. Vegetables supply a wide array of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. If prepared the American way, noodles provide an easily digestible source of carbohydrate that your body uses for energy and recovery.

Even the warmth of chicken soup can help. Drinking the liquid and inhaling the vapors increase the temperature of nasal and respiratory passages, which loosens the thick mucus that often accompanies respiratory illnesses. Compared with hot water alone, studies show chicken soup is more effective at loosening mucus.

The herbs and spices sometimes used in chicken soup, such as pepper and garlic, also loosen mucus. The broth, which contains water and electrolytes, helps with rehydration.

So, to maximize the health benefits of chicken soup, I recommend a homemade variety, which can be prepared with carrots, celery, fresh garlic, herbs and spices, to name a few ingredients. But if you need a more convenient option, look at the ingredients and nutrition facts label, and choose soups with a variety of vegetables over an ultraprocessed, nutrient-depleted kind.

In short, the latest science suggests that chicken soup – though not an out-and-out cure for colds and flu – really helps with healing. Looks like Grandma was right again.

Colby Teeman, Assistant Professor of Dietetics and Nutrition, University of Dayton

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

Extreme weather could burn many investment portfolios by mid-century

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash
burning banknotes

The Conversation

October 21, 2023

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges facing humanity today, with potentially severe implications for infrastructure assets. Infrastructure investments such as roads, bridges, ports, airports, and power plants have long lifetimes, typically spanning several decades, and are designed to operate under specific climatic conditions. However, climate change is causing more frequent and intense extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, and storms, which can damage or disrupt infrastructure assets. These physical risks can lead to direct losses, increased maintenance costs, and lower asset values.

At the same time, climate change induces changes in policy, technology, and consumer preferences that can impact the value of infrastructure assets. This is known as transition risks. For example, new regulations and carbon-pricing schemes could make carbon-intensive infrastructure assets less attractive or even “stranded”, leading to significant financial losses . Additionally, changes in consumer behaviour, such as a shift toward electric vehicles or renewable energy sources, could render certain infrastructure assets obsolete.

50% potential loss of value

If the energy transition has a cost for private investors (transition risks), so does climate change (physical risks). Extreme weather events, which experts predict will increase over the next few years, thus greatly increase the risk of losing value in portfolios.

In an August 2023 study, “It’s getting physical”, EDHEC Infrastructure and Private Assets Research Institute shows that some investors could see the value of their portfolio fall by more than 50% before 2050. The average investor’s portfolio, which generally holds around 10 assets, could drop by a quarter.

The reason is that over the past two decades, institutional investors – such as insurance companies, mutual and pension funds – have been allocating more and more capital to private infrastructure companies, which operate motorway toll roads, airports, power stations, bridges, pipelines, wind and photovoltaic farms, and so on. This represents a total value of 4.1 trillion dollars in the 25 most active markets. These markets include sectors like renewable energy projects, sustainable infrastructure development, clean technology ventures, electric vehicle manufacturing, carbon offset trading, and green real estate investment, among others. These infrastructures are particularly exposed to climate risks.

In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, public spending on physical infrastructure has persistently failed to keep up with economic growth; the United States spends only 2.3% of its GDP on infrastructure, compared to 5% for European countries and 8% for China. Still, private-investor exposure appears to be considerable.
27% loss of value on average

To measure the likely losses of infrastructure investors, we randomly constructed thousands of portfolios. To do this, we included hundreds of assets belonging to infrastructure investments across eight industrial superclasses, including transport (air, rail and road), power generation (gas- and coal-fired, nuclear, etc.), renewable energy (wind, solar, hydroelectric, etc.), network utilities (electricity, gas or water distribution), water resources (oil, gas or water pipelines, gas or liquid storage), etc. For all these assets, it is possible to obtain information on the associated climate risks in EDHEC’s InfraMetrics database.

Overall, we observed a high concentration of risk. Most infrastructure investors generally have few assets in their portfolios (between 5 and 20 on average). Their portfolios are poorly diversified, with a relatively limited number of assets held directly by each investor.

Furthermore, portfolios containing infrastructure assets are often concentrated in a single sector – for example, wind farms. In practical terms, an investor who started building a portfolio in 2018 and plans to hold the assets for another 30 years is exposed to losses solely due to physical risks ranging from -54% to -10%, depending on the number of assets held.

In addition, the loss in value of assets exposed to climate change is -27% on average [by 2050]. In a scenario where temperatures rise faster than expected, they could reach 54% for the most-concentrated portfolios. For instance, the “Hot House World” scenario predicts a rise in temperatures of about 3.2ºC above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

Some sectors are also more exposed to climate risks than others. In the transport sector, for example, the loss in net asset value would be four times greater than in the renewable energies sector. Investors in developed countries – in particular the United States, Europe and Australia and others – are the most exposed to losses in value worldwide. Indeed, the more valuable assets are concentrated in a given location, the greater the risk of value destruction.

More inaction, even greater risk

This study shows the scale of the potential losses that investors will have to face. And that’s before the 2050 deadline, as long as climate change predictions remain unchanged. Without action from governments and other stakeholders, climate risks could have a major impact on the overall value of investments, and on the economy as a whole.

However, there is still a glimmer of hope: if the stakeholders manage to organise an effective transition to a low-carbon economy, the losses mentioned in the article could be halved for all investors. All that remains – and this is undoubtedly the most difficult part – is to take action.

Noël Amenc, Professeur de finance, EDHEC Business School; Abhishek Gupta, Associate Director at the EDHEC Infrastructure Institute, EDHEC Business School; Bertrand Jayles, Senior Sustainability Data Scientist, EDHEC Infrastructure & Private Assets Research Institute, EDHEC Business School; Darwin Marcelo, Project Director at the EDHEC Infrastructure & Private Assets Research Institute, EDHEC Business School; Frédéric Blanc-Brude, Directeur de l'EDHEC Infrastructure Institute, EDHEC Business School; Leonard Lum, Data analyst, EDHECinfra, EDHEC Business School; Nishtha Manocha, EDHECinfra Senior Research Engineer, EDHEC Business School, and Qinyu Goh, MSc Urban Science, Sustainability Data Scientist at the EDHEC Infrastructure & Private Assets Research Institute, EDHEC Business School

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

SPILLAGE
Why self-checkout has been an inconvenient 'failure' for both shoppers and stores
A shopper using a self-checkout kiosk in Poland in 2020

(Creative Commons)

Alex Henderson
October 19, 2023

Self-checkout kiosks became increasingly common in stores in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and retailers hailed them as a major convenience for shoppers.

But journalist Amanda Mull, in a biting article published by The Atlantic on October 19, stresses that self-checkout has turned out be the polar opposite of "convenient." Self-checkout, according to Mull, has been a headache for consumers as well as stores.

Mull recalls that in the past, the argument for self-checkout was "scan your stuff, plunk it in a bag, and you're done. Long checkout lines would disappear."

But the journalist adds that the reality of self-checkout has been much different.

"You still have to wait in line," Mull laments. "The checkout kiosks bleat and flash when you fail to set a purchase down in the right spot. Scanning those items is sometimes a crapshoot — wave a barcode too vigorously in front of an uncooperative machine, and suddenly, you've scanned it two or three times. Then, you need to locate the usually lone employee charged with supervising all of the finicky kiosks, who will radiate exasperation at you while scanning her ID badge and tapping the kiosk's touch screen from pure muscle memory."

Mull adds, "If you want to buy something that even might carry some kind of arbitrary purchase restriction — not just obvious things such as alcohol, but also, products as seemingly innocuous as a generic antihistamine — well, maybe don't do that."

Self-checkout, according to Mull, has not only been a hassle for shoppers — it has been expensive for retailers, as "the average four-kiosk setup runs around $125,000." And when stores cut their staffs, she notes, theft became more common.

Some retailers, Mull reports, realize that self-checkout has problems and are cutting back on it — or at least making adjustments.

"Costco is stationing more staffers in its self-checkout areas," Mull reports. "ShopRite is adding cashiers back into stores where it had trialed a self-checkout-only model, citing customer backlash. None of this is an indication that self-checkout is over, exactly. But several decades in, the kiosks as Americans have long known them are beginning to look like a failure."

Amanda Mull's full report for The Atlantic is available at this link (subscription required).