Building blocks of life found floating in Milky Way, suggests we are not alone

10 Jul, 2022 

Some of the key building blocks of life - known as nitriles - have

 been detected by scientists at the heart of the Milky Way. 

Photo / Getty Images
Daily Telegraph UK
By Sarah Knapton

The building blocks of life have been found floating near the centre of the Milky Way in a discovery that raises the chance that life could have evolved on other planets in the galaxy.

Organic molecules, known as nitriles, are abundant in interstellar clouds, scientists have discovered, supporting the theory that similar life-sparking particles hitchhiked a ride to Earth.

The theory is known as the "RNA World" theory, which proposes that the ingredients for life arrived on meteorites and comets during a period of heavy bombardment roughly four billion years ago

According to the scenario, life on Earth was originally based on the messenger molecule RNA (Ribonucleic acid), with DNA evolving later.

Nitriles can help to form RNA and a team of researchers have found several types floating in a reservoir near the centre of the Milky Way.

Dr Victor Rivilla, a researcher at the Centre for Astrobiology of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) said: "Here we show that the chemistry that takes place in the interstellar medium is able to efficiently form multiple nitriles, which are key molecular precursors of the 'RNA World' scenario."

Life on Earth appeared around 3.8 billion years ago, approximately 700 million years after the planet first formed. But exactly how it got going is still a mystery.

Scientists have been hunting for regions of the galaxy where complex molecules might exist, and focused on a super-cold molecular cloud at the centre of the Milky Way.

Using two telescopes based in Spain the team measured light bouncing back from the region to determine the chemical composition of its particles.
'Earth-like planetary environments'

They detected three definite nitriles and two possible compounds.

Writing in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, the authors said the discovery not only offered more evidence in support of the "RNA world" theory, but raised the prospect of life evolving "in other places in the Galaxy under favourable Earth-like planetary environments".

Now the team is looking for the other particles, such as basic fats, that are needed to turn nitriles into RNA.

Second author Dr Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, a researcher at CSIC added: "We have detected so far several simple precursors of the building blocks of RNA. But there are still key missing molecules that are hard to detect.

"For example, we know that the origin of life on Earth probably also required other molecules such as lipids, responsible for the formation of the first cells. Therefore we should also focus on understanding how lipids could be formed from simpler precursors available in the interstellar medium."

'An ingrained fear for your life.' Black men say they understand why Jayland Walker fled police

By Nicquel Terry Ellis, CNN
 Sun July 10, 2022

Jayland Walker exits his vehicle and runs before being shot to death by up to eight officers in Akron, Ohio, last month in a still image from police body camera video.


(CNN)Kerwin Webb said he knows the terror that young Black men experience when being pulled over by police.

Webb said tensions are often high and adrenaline is rushing because in too many cases, Black people have lost their lives during police encounters.

So he understands why Jayland Walker led Akron, Ohio, police on a car chase and then ran on foot before eight officers fired dozens of bullets at him. Walker suffered at least 60 gunshot wounds.

"It's the terror of knowing that no matter what you do, this may not end well," said Webb, who heads a job and life skills program for young Black men in Asbury Park, New Jersey. "It's an ingrained fear for your life. What is the best way for me to try to survive? It's the reality of being Black in America."




Why did Ohio officers handcuff Jayland Walker after shooting him dozens of times?

The police killing of 25-year-old Walker last month has reignited a conversation about the fear and panic Black Americans feel during police stops, with some suggesting that Walker ran because he wanted to survive.

Unarmed Black people are killed by police at a rate three times higher than White people, research shows. And many high-profile police killings of Black people in recent years started with a routine traffic stop. Notably, Philando Castile was fatally shot during a traffic stop in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area in 2016. And in April, Patrick Lyoya was killed in Grand Rapids, Michigan, by officer Christopher Schurr, who was trying to arrest him after a traffic stop in a case that has drawn national attention because of the circumstances leading to the shooting and the multiple videos that show Lyoya's final moments.

Black leaders in Akron and across the country say the experience of Black people, including witnessing deadly police encounters, has created a level of fear that explains why an innocent person would still run.

Walker, a Door Dash driver, was unarmed at the time he was killed and had no criminal record.

Webb said he advises the young Black men he mentors to comply with police when stopped, put their hands on the steering wheel where they can be seen, and answer, "Yes, Sir" or "No, Sir." Still, Webb said, that doesn't guarantee a Black person will walk away from the encounter.

Most young Black men in his community are terrified of having contact with police, Webb said. They also fear retaliation from police if they report abuse, he said.

"The thing that creates the distrust is their lived experience," Walker said. "You can go back decades to Black families who have been terrorized by police."

Jayland Walker poses with sister Jada, left, and his mother, Pamela, right.

Black America's strained relationship with police plays out in Akron every day, said local activist Raymond Greene.

Greene said Black residents are subjected to unnecessary harassment by police, and many complain of being treated unfairly during traffic stops. The incident prompted local leaders to call for changes in police procedures for car chases.

Greene said he believes Walker panicked when he saw the police cars and fled. He was a Black man driving at night and he had a gun in his vehicle, Greene said.

"He was scared," said Greene, executive director of The Freedom BLOC. "I know that feeling. They pull you over and, before you stop all the way, there are four or five more (police) cars coming. They have two behind you, one in front of you and one on the side of you. It's terrifying."

Policing experts discourage running

But law enforcement experts say fleeing police is never a good response.

Charles Ramsey, the former Philadelphia police commissioner, said he understands the anxiety Black Americans feel during police stops. He raised his own son, now a police officer, to comply if ever pulled over. Still, Ramsey says running is "the absolute wrong thing to do" and it puts civilians more at risk.

The Jayland Walker shooting revives debate about how police interact with Black people. Here are other high-profile cases

"When you're running, you raise the whole incident to a whole different level," Ramsey said. "Why are you running? Are you involved in something I didn't know about it?
"Police are being trained to deescalate, but deescalation comes from both sides."

If police have reason to believe the person running is armed and a threat to the public, deadly use of force may be justified, said Ramsey, who declined to comment specifically on the Walker case because he needed more information.

Jason Johnson, president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, said he also believes Walker was fearful when he decided to run from police. But Johnson insists that the fear in the Black community is unnecessary because police are not widely abusive or widely racist.

He said the police killings of Black Americans that have received national attention are not normal occurrences.

"It seems like it's a very common occurrence where this happens, when really it's very rare," Johnson said. "So, therefore, having fear of it probably isn't reasonable."

Oral contraceptives could help reduce grey squirrel numbers, research finds

British scientists say trial shows the nonlethal method could help eradicate the invasive species and allow red squirrels to recover

Grey squirrels are an invasive species in the UK, originally brought in as ornamental animals to decorate the grounds of stately homes. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA

Helena Horton Environment reporter

THE GUARDIAN
Mon 11 Jul 2022 

Oral contraceptives for squirrels are working, research has found, and the government hopes they can be used to keep populations down in the UK.

Grey squirrels are an invasive species in the UK, introduced from North America in the 1870s. They pose a problem for wildlife including endangered red squirrels, which they outcompete. They also carry a disease called squirrelpox that does not affect them but can kill reds.

They were originally used as an ornamental species to decorate the gardens of stately homes, before the damage they caused was realised and their release was banned in the 1930s.

Grey squirrels are also a menace to trees, stripping their bark and weakening them. They are a particular problem for broadleaf varieties including oak, which are ecologically important because they support so many other species. It is estimated that the UK is home to around 3 million of the invasive rodents.

Scientists have been trying to find ways to keep the grey population down, and now positive results have been released by the UK Squirrel Accord after a trial of oral contraceptives, which could be used to stop the mammals breeding.

The contraceptive is in production by the Animal and Plant Health Agency (Apha), with further tests being carried out to ensure it is safe and effective.


Conifer plantation push could threaten red squirrel population, study finds

To stop other species ingesting the medication, scientists have designed a special feeding hopper. It has a weighted door that will exclude most other species of wildlife while allowing more than 70% of local grey squirrel populations to access and eat from them.

Apha is testing different methods of keeping red squirrels out of the feeders so that the contraceptives can be put in place in areas where there are both types of squirrel. So far, research suggests that body weight could be used to distinguish between greys and reds. No oral contraceptive has been used in the field at this stage of the research.

The environment minister Richard Benyon said: “The grey squirrel is an invasive species that is causing untold damage in the British countryside, where these pests continue to wreck our fledgling broadleaf trees like oak by stripping bark and disrupting the delicate balance of nature and biodiversity, whilst diminishing our ability to tackle climate change.

“That’s why we continue to support the UK Squirrel Accord and Apha as this important research on oral contraception shows promising signs that could help to eradicate the grey squirrel in the UK in a nonlethal way, as well as helping to recover our beloved red squirrel.”

Other methods that have been used to attempt to reduce grey squirrel numbers include the release of pine martens into certain woodlands. These predators scare off and eat grey squirrels. However, the shy martens would not colonise the urban areas that are grey squirrel strongholds, so as long as woodlands continue to be topped up by grey squirrels from the city, other methods – including contraceptives – will be needed to keep populations down.

Gideon Henderson, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said: “Fertility control can be an effective method complementing other approaches to wildlife management. This … study aims to produce an immunocontraceptive that can be orally administered to grey squirrels through a species-specific delivery mechanism.

“This innovative research has great potential to provide an effective, easily applied and nonlethal method for managing grey squirrel populations. It will help red squirrels – native to the UK – expand back into their natural habitats, as well as protecting UK woodland and increasing biodiversity.”

America Decided The Pandemic Was Over. The Coronavirus Has Other Ideas

By Julia Frost On Jul 11, 2022

“This is what happens when you don’t have politicians and leaders taking a strong stand on this,” she said.

The CDC said it has urged people to monitor community transmission, “stay up to date on vaccines, and take appropriate precautions to protect themselves and others”.

Nearly one-third of the US population lives in counties rated as having “high” transmission levels by the CDC. Cases are rising especially in the South and West.

Many people now see the pandemic as part of the fabric of modern life rather than an urgent health emergency. Some of that is simply a widespread recalibration of risk. This is not the spring of 2020 any more. Few people remain immunologically naive to the virus. They may still get infected, but the immune system – primed by vaccines or previous bouts with the virus – generally has deeper layers of defence that prevent severe disease.

But the death rate from COVID-19 is still much higher than the mortality from influenza or other contagious diseases. Officials have warned of a possible autumn or winter wave – perhaps as many as 100 million infections in the United States – that could flood hospitals with COVID patients. Beyond the direct suffering of such a massive outbreak, there could be economic disruptions as tens of millions of people become too sick to work.

“It feels as though everyone has given up,” said Mercedes Carnethon, an epidemiologist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Carnethon said she also isn’t as cautious as she used to be. She wears a high-quality mask on airplanes, but doesn’t wear a mask at the gym. She is worried that she’ll contract COVID again – she caught it during the Omicron wave during the last American winter. But she doesn’t think a “zero COVID” strategy is plausible.

“I feel there is a very limited amount that I can do individually, short of stopping my life,” Carnethon said. “It’s risky. I’ll be catching COVID at an inconvenient time. I can hope it is milder than the first time I caught it.”

Many experts concerned about ongoing transmission have also pushed back against online fearmongering and apocalyptic warnings about the virus; people are not routinely getting infected every two or three weeks, Rasmussen said.

Population-level immunity is one reason the virus remains in mutational overdrive. The risk of reinfections has increased because newly emergent subvariants are better able to evade the front-line defence of the immune system, and there is essentially no effort at the community level to limit transmission.

Al-Aly, who is also chief of research and development at Veterans Affairs St Louis Health Care System, has scoured the VA’s vast database to see what happened to the nearly 39,000 patients infected with the coronavirus for a second or third time. What he found was sobering. In a paper posted online last month, but not yet peer-reviewed or published in a journal, Al-Aly and his co-authors reported that people with multiple infections have a higher cumulative risk of a severe illness or death.

It’s not that the later illnesses are worse than, or even as bad as, earlier cases. But any coronavirus infection carries risk, and the risk of a really bad outcome – a heart attack, for example – builds cumulatively, like a plaque, as infections multiply.

“Reinfection adds risk,” he said. “You’re rolling the dice again. You’re playing Russian roulette.”

Vaccination remains an important, if still underused, weapon against the virus – even if it’s not that effective at stopping new infections.

Omicron blew through the largely vaccinated population last winter with stunning ease, and since then the subvariants have arrived in rapid succession, starting with BA.2 and BA.2.12.1 in the spring, and now BA.5 and its nearly identical relative BA.4.

Vaccines are based on the original strain of the virus that emerged in Wuhan, China in late 2019. The Food and Drug Administration has asked vaccine makers to come up with new formulas that target BA.5 and BA.4. Those boosters could be ready by March.

But there is no guarantee that these latest subvariants will still be dominant four or five months from now. The virus is not only evolving, it’s doing so with remarkable speed. The virus may continually outrace the vaccines.

“I worry that by the time we have a vaccine for BA.5 we’ll have a BA.6 or a BA.7. This virus keeps outsmarting us,” Al-Aly said.

“We are in a very difficult position with regard to the choice of vaccine for the fall because we’re dealing with a notoriously moving target,” Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s top adviser for the pandemic, said in June, a few days before he, too, announced that he was sick with the virus.

Already there’s another Omicron subvariant that has caught the attention of virologists: BA.2.75. First seen last month in India, it has been identified in a smattering of other countries, including the United States. But it’s too soon to know whether it will overtake BA.5 as the dominant variant.

There is no evidence that the new forms of the virus result in different symptoms or severity of disease. Omicron and its many offshoots – including BA.5 – typically replicate higher in the respiratory tract than earlier forms of the virus. That is one theory for why Omicron has seemed less likely to cause severe illness.

It’s also unclear if these new variants will alter the risk of a person contracting the long-duration symptoms generally known as “long COVID”. The percentage of people with severely debilitating symptoms is probably between 1 and 5 per cent – amounting to millions of people in the US, said Harlan Krumholz, a Yale University professor of medicine.

His colleague, Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunology and expert on long COVID, said in an email that she believes the world is not sufficiently vigilant about the disease any more. She is often the only person masking in a crowd, she said.

“I understand the pandemic fatigue, but the virus is not done with us,” she said. “I fear that the current human behaviour is leading to more people getting infected and acquiring long COVID. I fear that this situation can lead to a large number of people with disability and chronic health problems in the future.”

The precocious nature of the virus has made infectious-disease experts wary of predicting the next phase of the pandemic. Topol warns that a new batch of variants could come out of the blue, the same way Omicron emerged unexpectedly last November with a collection of mutations already packaged together. Omicron’s precise origin is unknown, but a leading theory is that it evolved in an immunocompromised patient with a persistent infection.

“Inevitably we could see a new Greek letter family like Omicron,” Topol said. “There’s still room for this virus to evolve. It has evolved in an accelerated way for months now. So we should count on it.”

“This is what happens when you don’t have politicians and leaders taking a strong stand on this,” she said.

The CDC said it has urged people to monitor community transmission, “stay up to date on vaccines, and take appropriate precautions to protect themselves and others”.

Nearly one-third of the US population lives in counties rated as having “high” transmission levels by the CDC. Cases are rising especially in the South and West.

Many people now see the pandemic as part of the fabric of modern life rather than an urgent health emergency. Some of that is simply a widespread recalibration of risk. This is not the spring of 2020 any more. Few people remain immunologically naive to the virus. They may still get infected, but the immune system – primed by vaccines or previous bouts with the virus – generally has deeper layers of defence that prevent severe disease.

But the death rate from COVID-19 is still much higher than the mortality from influenza or other contagious diseases. Officials have warned of a possible autumn or winter wave – perhaps as many as 100 million infections in the United States – that could flood hospitals with COVID patients. Beyond the direct suffering of such a massive outbreak, there could be economic disruptions as tens of millions of people become too sick to work.

“It feels as though everyone has given up,” said Mercedes Carnethon, an epidemiologist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Carnethon said she also isn’t as cautious as she used to be. She wears a high-quality mask on airplanes, but doesn’t wear a mask at the gym. She is worried that she’ll contract COVID again – she caught it during the Omicron wave during the last American winter. But she doesn’t think a “zero COVID” strategy is plausible.

“I feel there is a very limited amount that I can do individually, short of stopping my life,” Carnethon said. “It’s risky. I’ll be catching COVID at an inconvenient time. I can hope it is milder than the first time I caught it.”

Many experts concerned about ongoing transmission have also pushed back against online fearmongering and apocalyptic warnings about the virus; people are not routinely getting infected every two or three weeks, Rasmussen said.

Population-level immunity is one reason the virus remains in mutational overdrive. The risk of reinfections has increased because newly emergent subvariants are better able to evade the front-line defence of the immune system, and there is essentially no effort at the community level to limit transmission.

Al-Aly, who is also chief of research and development at Veterans Affairs St Louis Health Care System, has scoured the VA’s vast database to see what happened to the nearly 39,000 patients infected with the coronavirus for a second or third time. What he found was sobering. In a paper posted online last month, but not yet peer-reviewed or published in a journal, Al-Aly and his co-authors reported that people with multiple infections have a higher cumulative risk of a severe illness or death.

It’s not that the later illnesses are worse than, or even as bad as, earlier cases. But any coronavirus infection carries risk, and the risk of a really bad outcome – a heart attack, for example – builds cumulatively, like a plaque, as infections multiply.

“Reinfection adds risk,” he said. “You’re rolling the dice again. You’re playing Russian roulette.”

Vaccination remains an important, if still underused, weapon against the virus – even if it’s not that effective at stopping new infections.

Omicron blew through the largely vaccinated population last winter with stunning ease, and since then the subvariants have arrived in rapid succession, starting with BA.2 and BA.2.12.1 in the spring, and now BA.5 and its nearly identical relative BA.4.

Vaccines are based on the original strain of the virus that emerged in Wuhan, China in late 2019. The Food and Drug Administration has asked vaccine makers to come up with new formulas that target BA.5 and BA.4. Those boosters could be ready by March.

But there is no guarantee that these latest subvariants will still be dominant four or five months from now. The virus is not only evolving, it’s doing so with remarkable speed. The virus may continually outrace the vaccines.

“I worry that by the time we have a vaccine for BA.5 we’ll have a BA.6 or a BA.7. This virus keeps outsmarting us,” Al-Aly said.

“We are in a very difficult position with regard to the choice of vaccine for the fall because we’re dealing with a notoriously moving target,” Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s top adviser for the pandemic, said in June, a few days before he, too, announced that he was sick with the virus.

Already there’s another Omicron subvariant that has caught the attention of virologists: BA.2.75. First seen last month in India, it has been identified in a smattering of other countries, including the United States. But it’s too soon to know whether it will overtake BA.5 as the dominant variant.

There is no evidence that the new forms of the virus result in different symptoms or severity of disease. Omicron and its many offshoots – including BA.5 – typically replicate higher in the respiratory tract than earlier forms of the virus. That is one theory for why Omicron has seemed less likely to cause severe illness.

It’s also unclear if these new variants will alter the risk of a person contracting the long-duration symptoms generally known as “long COVID”. The percentage of people with severely debilitating symptoms is probably between 1 and 5 per cent – amounting to millions of people in the US, said Harlan Krumholz, a Yale University professor of medicine.

His colleague, Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunology and expert on long COVID, said in an email that she believes the world is not sufficiently vigilant about the disease any more. She is often the only person masking in a crowd, she said.

“I understand the pandemic fatigue, but the virus is not done with us,” she said. “I fear that the current human behaviour is leading to more people getting infected and acquiring long COVID. I fear that this situation can lead to a large number of people with disability and chronic health problems in the future.”

The precocious nature of the virus has made infectious-disease experts wary of predicting the next phase of the pandemic. Topol warns that a new batch of variants could come out of the blue, the same way Omicron emerged unexpectedly last November with a collection of mutations already packaged together. Omicron’s precise origin is unknown, but a leading theory is that it evolved in an immunocompromised patient with a persistent infection.

“Inevitably we could see a new Greek letter family like Omicron,” Topol said. “There’s still room for this virus to evolve. It has evolved in an accelerated way for months now. So we should count on it.”

The Washington Post

Read original article here

As the BA.5 variant spreads, the risk of coronavirus reinfection grows

Joel Achenbach - Sunday

© An Rong Xu/For The Washington Post

America has decided the pandemic is over. The coronavirus has other ideas.

The latest omicron offshoot, BA.5, has quickly become dominant in the United States, and thanks to its elusiveness when encountering the human immune system, is driving a wave of cases across the country.

The size of that wave is unclear because most people are testing at home or not testing at all. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the past week has reported a little more than 100,000 new cases a day on average. But infectious-disease experts know that wildly underestimates the true number, which may be as many as a million, said Eric Topol, a professor at Scripps Research who closely tracks pandemic trends.

Antibodies from vaccines and previous coronavirus infections offer limited protection against BA.5, leading Topol to call it “the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen.”

Other experts point out that, despite being hit by multiple rounds of ever-more-contagious omicron subvariants, the country has not yet seen a dramatic spike in hospitalizations. About 38,000 people were hospitalized nationally with covid as of Friday, according to data compiled by The Washington Post. That figure has been steadily rising since early March, but remains far below the record 162,000 patients hospitalized with covid in mid-January. The average daily death toll on Friday stood at 329 and has not changed significantly over the past two months.Has coronavirus disrupted your vacation or other travel plans? Share your experience with The Post.

There is widespread agreement among infectious-disease experts that this remains a dangerous virus that causes illnesses of unpredictable severity — and they say the country is not doing enough to limit transmission.

Restrictions and mandates are long gone. Air travel is nearly back to pre-pandemic levels. Political leaders aren’t talking about the virus — it’s virtually a nonissue on the campaign trail. Most people are done with masking, social distancing and the pandemic generally. They’re taking their chances with the virus.

“It’s the Wild West out there,” said Ziyad Al-Aly, an epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “There are no public health measures at all. We’re in a very peculiar spot, where the risk is vivid and it’s out there, but we’ve let our guard down and we’ve chosen, deliberately, to expose ourselves and make ourselves more vulnerable.”

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, would like to see more money for testing and vaccine development, as well as stronger messaging from the Biden administration and top health officials. She was dismayed recently on a trip to Southern California, where she saw few people wearing masks in the airport. “This is what happens when you don’t have politicians and leaders taking a strong stand on this,” she said.

The CDC said it has urged people to monitor community transmission, “stay up to date on vaccines, and take appropriate precautions to protect themselves and others.”Covid deaths no longer overwhelmingly among the unvaccinated as toll on elderly grows

Nearly one-third of the U.S. population lives in counties rated as having “high” transmission levels by the CDC. Cases are rising especially in the South and West.

Many people now see the pandemic as part of the fabric of modern life rather than an urgent health emergency. Some of that is simply a widespread recalibration of risk. This is not the spring of 2020 anymore. Few people remain immunologically naive to the virus. They may still get infected, but the immune system — primed by vaccines or previous bouts with the virus — generally has deeper layers of defense that prevent severe disease.

But the death rate from covid-19 is still much higher than the mortality from influenza or other contagious diseases. Officials have warned of a possible fall or winter wave — perhaps as many as 100 million infections in the United States — that could flood hospitals with covid patients. Beyond the direct suffering of such a massive outbreak, there could be economic disruptions as tens of millions of people become too sick to work.


© David Zalubowski/APTravelers wade through long lines at security checkpoints in Denver International Airport on July 5, 2022.

“It feels as though everyone has given up,” said Mercedes Carnethon, an epidemiologist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Carnethon said she also isn’t as cautious as she used to be. She wears a high-quality mask on airplanes but doesn’t wear a mask at the gym. She is worried that she’ll contract the coronavirus again — she caught it during the omicron wave last winter. But she doesn’t think a “zero covid” strategy is plausible.

“I feel there is a very limited amount that I can do individually, short of stopping my life,” Carnethon said. “It’s risky. I’ll be catching covid at an inconvenient time. I can hope it is milder than the first time I caught it.”

Many experts concerned about ongoing transmission have also pushed back against online fearmongering and apocalyptic warnings about the virus; people are not routinely getting infected every two or three weeks, Rasmussen said.

Population-level immunity is one reason the virus remains in mutational overdrive. The risk of reinfections has increased because newly emergent subvariants are better able to evade the front-line defense of the immune system, and there is essentially no effort at the community level to limit transmission.They got covid. Then, they got it again.

Al-Aly, who is also chief of research and development at Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System, has scoured VA’s vast database to see what happened to the nearly 39,000 patients infected with the coronavirus for a second or third time. What he found was sobering. In a paper posted online last month, but not yet peer-reviewed or published in a journal, Al-Aly and his co-authors reported that people with multiple infections have a higher cumulative risk of a severe illness or death.

It’s not that the later illnesses are worse than, or even as bad as, earlier cases. But any coronavirus infection carries risk, and the risk of a really bad outcome — a heart attack, for example — builds cumulatively, like a plaque, as infections multiply.

“Reinfection adds risk,” he said. “You’re rolling the dice again. You’re playing Russian roulette.”

Vaccination remains an important, if still underused, weapon against the virus — even if it’s not that effective at stopping new infections.

Omicron blew through the largely vaccinated population last winter with stunning ease, and since then the subvariants have arrived in rapid succession, starting with BA.2 and BA.2.12.1 in the spring, and now BA.5 and its nearly identical relative BA.4.

Vaccines are based on the original strain of the virus that emerged in Wuhan, China in late 2019. The Food and Drug Administration has asked vaccine makers to come up with new formulas that target BA.5 and BA.4. Those boosters could be ready this fall.

But there is no guarantee that these latest subvariants will still be dominant four or five months from now. The virus is not only evolving; it’s also doing so with remarkable speed. The virus may continually outrace the vaccines.

“I worry that by the time we have a vaccine for BA.5 we’ll have a BA.6 or a BA.7. This virus keeps outsmarting us,” Al-Aly said.The lucky few to never get coronavirus could teach us more about it

“We are in a very difficult position with regard to the choice of vaccine for the fall because we’re dealing with a notoriously moving target,” Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s top adviser for the pandemic, told The Post in June, a few days before he, too, announced that he was sick with the virus.

Already there’s another omicron subvariant that has caught the attention of virologists: BA.2.75. First seen last month in India, it has been identified in a smattering of other countries, including the United States. But it’s too soon to know whether it will overtake BA.5 as the dominant variant.

There is no evidence that the new forms of the virus result in different symptoms or severity of disease. Omicron and its many offshoots — including BA.5 — typically replicate higher in the respiratory tract than earlier forms of the virus. That is one theory for why omicron has seemed less likely to cause severe illness.

It’s also unclear if these new variants will alter the risk of a person contracting the long-duration symptoms generally known as “long covid.” The percentage of people with severely debilitating symptoms is probably between 1 and 5 percent — amounting to millions of people in this country, according to Harlan Krumholz, a Yale University professor of medicine.

His colleague, Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunology and expert on long covid, said in an email that she believes the world is not sufficiently vigilant about the disease anymore. She is often the only person masking in a crowd, she said.

“I understand the pandemic fatigue, but the virus is not done with us,” she said. “I fear that the current human behavior is leading to more people getting infected and acquiring long covid. I fear that this situation can lead to a large number of people with disability and chronic health problems in the future.”Tracking U.S. covid-19 cases, deaths and other metrics by state

The precocious nature of the virus has made infectious-disease experts wary of predicting the next phase of the pandemic. Topol warns that a new batch of variants could come out of the blue, the same way omicron emerged unexpectedly in November with a stunning collection of mutations already packaged together. Omicron’s precise origin is unknown, but a leading theory is that it evolved in an immunocompromised patient with a persistent infection.

“Inevitably we could see a new Greek letter family like omicron,” Topol said. “There’s still room for this virus to evolve. It has evolved in an accelerated way for months now. So we should count on it.”

A blockchain trial helps eliminate child labor (and safeguard education)

People all over the world enjoy sweets and desserts made from chocolate and cocoa after meals or during breaks from work. Few are aware that much of the cacao used in their production is harvested by children who are forced to work instead of attending school. JICA recently collaborated with Deloitte Tohmatsu Group in an initiative that used blockchain technology in an effort to eradicate child labor and safeguard children's educational opportunities. The project took place in Côte d'Ivoire in West Africa, where many children labor in support of the world's largest cocoa-producing country.

Number of child laborers in each region. The figures in parentheses are the proportion of children who are laborers.

Child labor is on the rise in Africa: One in five is now involved.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that one in ten children are child laborers. In Africa, where child labor is most common, the rate is one in five. Seventy percent of the world's working children are engaged in the agricultural sector, which includes the production of cacao and coffee beans. Most of them are also engaged in domestic labor, helping their parents and not attending school. Because it deprives children of educational opportunities, child labor continues to be a global problem. Although it has been decreasing in the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America, and the Caribbean since 2016, it is actually increasing in Sub-Saharan Africa.

One of the major issues regarding child labor is that it prevents children from attending school. Depriving children of educational opportunities greatly limits their future access to jobs that provide sufficient income.

Côte d'Ivoire accounts for 43 percent of the world's cocoa production. It is reported that 38 percent of the country’s children between the ages of 5 and 17 who are raised in cocoa-producing households are engaged in child labor related to cocoa production.*1 There are multiple reasons for the proliferation of child labor. Côte d'Ivoire’s many small, family-owned farms rely on children for labor—a practice that has been passed down from generation to generation. Another major factor is that as consumers demand cheaper products, costs are shifted onto farmers, reducing their income. Of course, using children for the labor helps lower costs.

• *1 University of Chicago research project

School children in the rural community of Gagnoa, south-central Côte d'Ivoire. The enrollment rate of primary school in Côte d'Ivoire’s largest city of Abidjan is 91.1 percent and the junior high school enrollment rate is 62.4 percent. In contrast, the enrollment rate in rural areas is lower: 74.1 percent for primary schools and 38.5 percent for junior high schools. (From Integrated regional survey on employment and the informal sector 2017)

Children attending classes at the same school as above. The literacy rate among those aged 15 and older in Côte d'Ivoire has improved significantly, from an extremely low 43.9 percent in 2014 to 89.9 percent in 2019. However, many people in rural areas are still unable to read and write. (From UNESCO Institute of Statistics: http://uis.unesco.org/en/country/c)

The blockchain-based child labor deterrent system

In order to eliminate child labor, it is important to make the production process of cacao transparent. This makes buyers such as exporters, retailers, and consumers aware of issues related to production, including child labor and farmer poverty. Buyers who are aware of these problems can be encouraged to purchase sustainable cacao instead at a premium (incentive) price. Paying this premium to farmers who do not employ child laborers not only improves these farmers' incomes, but improves their future quality of life by liberating the children from work so that they can receive an education.

The current supply chain (above left), in which information channels between producers (e.g. farmers) and buyers (e.g. retailers) are not interconnected. Information from the buyer side to the producer side is not traced, making it impossible for retailers, for example, to grasp the nature of problems in production areas. The goal is a circular supply chain (above right) in which producers and buyers share information in real time. Blockchain technology can be used to ensure traceability while preserving information.

JICA collaborated with Deloitte Tohmatsu Group for establishing a system for monitoring child labor by utilizing blockchain technology to make the current situation more transparent.

Blockchain technology allows many participants to share the same data, and protects the reliability of any information shared on this system. It is characterized by its high transparency and low cost of operation, as once registered, all the data is extremely difficult to alter and cannot be erased.

The project started as a trial demonstration in November 2021 in Gagnoa, a rural community 140 kilometers southwest of Yamoussoukro, the capital of Côte d’Ivoire. Participants include farmer-parents of children, members of farmer organizations, teachers and other school staff, and the monitoring team consisting of members of Beyond Beans, an NGO working to eradicate child labor practices in West Africa’s cocoa cultivation.

In the first step, school teachers input data of the attendance of the children into a database, while representatives from the farmer organizations also input information as to whether child labor was used on their farms. If two correlated entries did not match, the monitoring team interviewed both parties and conducted field visits before correcting the database entries. Then local traders paid premium prices for the cocoa beans produced by those farmers’ groups that had low rates of child labor and high rates of school attendance. Meanwhile, schools were rewarded for the accurate input of information in the form of maintenance and renovation of school facilities, improved school lunches, and educational materials.

As a further incentive, the project team provided cash or mobile funds to farmers’ organizations on behalf of the operators. Retailers and consumers did not take part in this demonstration experiment; however, the database will be accessible in the future through QR codes or other means attached to products, allowing buyers to instantly check the information registered with the database. By utilizing blockchain technology with a database, producers and buyers can share information with a high degree of assurance. The application of this blockchain system is also expected to expand in the future to provide information about financial services (such as payments and loans) that are available to farmers.

The flow of data input and incentives in a blockchain system

The leader of a local farmers’ group (holding cacao nuts) receives a computer terminal in which data will be regularly input.

The monitoring team checks information in the database using a terminal.

A successful demonstration: "We want our children to go to school."

ONO Miwa of Deloitte Tohmatsu Consulting was in charge of the field survey. “The farmers and schools we asked to cooperate with this experiment were very supportive,” she said. In addition to their curiosity about this novel idea, many of them were eager to see a decrease in child labor. Global awareness of child labor has been increasing. European and US companies involved in the chocolate business need to certify that they use cacao harvested without child labor, and they have been working on programs to eliminate child labor and to improve farmers' incomes. The government of Côte d’Ivoire is also aware of the problem, and is acting on measures such as the regular declaration of the status of child labor, as monitored by NGOs and local volunteers who patrol farmland areas. Prior to this demonstration, the farm management company that got involved was already implementing a program to stop child labor in the area, so awareness of this issue has spread among the farmers as well.

The results of the demonstration experiment proved the effectiveness of this system. The rate of involvement by farmer groups was 100 percent, whereas the involvement rate by schools reached 95.6 percent. When the registered data was inconsistent, the monitoring team interviewed the children and their parents, who confirmed that most inconsistencies were due to input or application errors. Child labor was revealed in three cases out of 2,366 applications (103 cases applications were not made due to the school's communications environment or excessive workload).

FUJINO Kojiro, Chief Representative of the JICA Côte d'Ivoire Office, was involved in the survey. “Our impression is that this system is viable from a technical standpoint,” he said. “We think this system will enhance the reliability of child labor reporting because it enables more efficient and accurate monitoring of child labor compared to conventional methods that rely on manpower.” He spoke about the needs of the community. “The truth is that farmers want to send their children to school, and their children want to go to school too,” he said. “Education is essential to improving their lives. Free of child labor, they can go to school. It's important to design incentives to achieve this.”

Ms. Ono of Deloitte Tohmatsu Consulting (bottom row, third from left) poses with the research team and farmers who participated in the demonstration experiment.

JICA’s Mr. Fujino (center) interviewing farmers who took part in the project.

Making the system sustainable

Certain issues were revealed in the process of this field survey. Some data were unable to be input on the application due to the communications environment. The application should be improved so that daily data can be input even in areas with a poor communication. In addition, in order to keep communities involved over time, it is important to provide incentives for farmers who do not use child labor to improve their income, for example, by ensuring their products are purchased at a premium price.

A consumer survey conducted in Japan at the same time as the demonstration revealed that teenagers are the demographic most interested in purchasing sustainable chocolate. The most commonly stated reason was to alleviate poverty and cooperate internationally (nearly 35 percent), followed by the desire to safeguard the rights of cacao producers (31 percent). These results indicate a high awareness of the desire for sustainable products among teenagers. Furthermore, there were people who are willing to spend 1.2 to 2 times as much for sustainable products. However, awareness of sustainability goals is low overall, so the need to raise consumer consciousness about production areas and to encourage consumers to purchase more sustainable products at premium prices remains. The proceeds gained through consumer purchases at premium prices will bolster farmers' incomes, protecting their children's educational opportunities, and creating a “chain of happiness.

Percentages of sustainable chocolate buyers in Japan who check the sustainable certification mark at time of purchase, by age group. Nearly half of the teenagers surveyed said they check the mark before purchasing—a remarkably high ratio compared to other age groups. (From a web-based survey conducted from October 29 to November 1, 2021. This survey included at least 100 people in each age group; a total of 1,400 respondents)

Based on the results of the experiment, government agencies and companies in Côte d'Ivoire have expressed interest in this system as a new method of monitoring child labor, and are considering using it in other projects. It may be possible to use the system to build upon other programs to eliminate child labor and improve farmers' incomes, helping to achieve a sustainable, positive society where children do not have to engage in child labor and can attend school.

WAKABAYASHI Motoharu, Deputy General Director of JICA's Africa Department, spoke about using blockchain-based traceability systems more widely in the future.

“By recording the origin of mineral resources and timber and distributing products free of human rights issues and fraud, we can protect human rights, and we can also work together to prevent corruption by making administrative procedures transparent via the blockchain,” he said. “Technology is a crucial tool for overcoming many of Africa’s challenges. JICA intends to continue providing support by connecting social issues with technology."

‘They Painted a Narrative of This Coach Looking for a Quiet Corner to Pray’

CounterSpin interview with Dave Zirin on football prayer ruling

JANINE JACKSON  JULY 9, 2022

\

• 
  

 

Janine Jackson interviewed Dave Zirin about the Supreme Court’s football prayer ruling for the July 1, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

      CounterSpin220701Zirin.mp3

 

Coach Kennedy’s “private, personal prayer” (photo: Sotomayor dissent)

Janine Jackson: While we still reel from the theft of bodily autonomy from half the population, the right wing–dominated Supreme Court has delivered other blows to principles that many believed were assured.

In Kennedy v. Bremerton, a 6–3 ruling determined that Washington state high school assistant football coach Joseph Kennedy had a right to pray in the locker room and on the field. And why should a person be denied their right to what the Court described as a “short,” “personal,” “private” exercise of their religious beliefs?

As our guest and others want us to understand, the court’s ruling relies on a storyline that just doesn’t match the reality, and is much less about freedom than about coercion.

Dave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation and host of the Edge of Sports podcast. He’s also author of numerous books about sports and their intersection with history, politics and social justice, including What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States, and, most recently, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World, which is out now from New Press.

He joins us now by phone from Takoma Park. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dave Zirin.

Dave Zirin: Oh, it’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

The Nation (6/27/22)

JJ: I can feel the heat coming off your piece on this. And I think it’s because of the boldly false premise of this ruling, about the role of coach prayer generally, but in particular about Kennedy. You say that this ruling is wrong from the opening statement. So maybe let’s start there.

DZ: Here’s the issue; it’s a cliche, but it’s true: You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts. And in the decision that was written by Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch, he relied on his own facts. Let’s put it more simply: He lied in describing what took place in the case.

And here’s the thing: Coach Kennedy was not off, as Gorsuch writes, praying on his own. He was not off quietly doing this, and he was not fired for doing it. So they painted a narrative of this coach looking for a quiet corner to pray and then this school board, with pitchforks and torches in hand, forcing Kennedy out of his job.

None of this happened. What Kennedy did in praying in the locker room, and then particularly his prayers after the game on the field, was draw in players to surround him in prayer, asking players to do testimonials about God. All of this thing creates this kind of maelstrom of pressure on the players, that if you are down with your coach, you will pray with your coach. And if you’re not down with that, then, hey, you’re free not to pray with the coach, but anybody who’s ever played high school sports knows that if you don’t do what the coach says, particularly in an autocratic sport like football, you’re going to pay a price for that.

You’re going to pay a price for it, whether it’s in terms of playing time or, maybe even worse for the high school level, you’re going to pay a price for it in terms of being outcast, in terms of being seen as a locker room distraction, or even worse in the parlance of sports, a locker room cancer.

And that is what the Supreme Court basically said could now take place, is a process of bullying in high school sports to make players feel coerced into praying with their coach, and that’s unconscionable. It’s absolutely unconscionable. And I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from folks, including tons of stories about what it was like to play high school sports at private or religious institutions, and the degree of religious peer pressure that would take place, and how it would alienate, ostracize and all the rest of it.

And I should probably add that we would be completely, completely naive if we didn’t just see this as an issue of prayer, but this is about Christian prayer. Like if the coach was Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, whatever you want, Shinto, or wanted to do a prayer of atheism beforehand, there would be a very different response from this Court than Christianity, because this Court has shown itself to be proudly in a relationship with a kind of Christofascism which is quickly overcoming the ruling structures of the United States, if not the people themselves.

Seattle Times (6/29/22)

JJ: And just to underscore the idea of the false narrative, Danny Westneat in the Seattle Times, very close to the issue, wrote a story in which he was saying, as you have said, that Kennedy explained himself. He said he was inspired to start these midfield prayers after he saw an evangelical Christian movie called Facing the Giants, in which a losing team finds God, Christian God, and then goes on to win the state championship.

So the very idea that he was trying to find a personal private space to pray in private, and that he was being denied that, it’s just wholly not true.

DZ: And can I say something else? The school district—and I say this as somebody who made phone calls, spoke to people, I’m not just saying this for the purposes of my own narrative—they made every effort to try to accommodate Coach Kennedy. They made every effort to create spaces for him to pray.

And they did not fire him when he repeatedly and repeatedly ignored what they had to say, thumbed his nose at what they had to say. Look, my wife is a teacher, and if she thumbed her nose at the rules of the district to the degree that Coach Kennedy was doing, she would’ve found herself out of work.

Now, Coach Kennedy, again and again thumbing his nose at what they’re saying to him, and in the end, you know what they did, they didn’t fire him. They suspended him with pay, with the opportunity to reapply back for his job, and partly because I think they realized how hot button this was.

Dave Zirin: “There is a political movement in this country that’s playing for keeps. They don’t care how nice you’re going to be about it.”

They made every effort to try to look like partners in trying to figure this out. And they wanted to look like we want to collaborate with you to find a solution that actually helps and makes everybody feel validated.

And I think what they learned, which I think a lot of us need to learn, is that there is a political movement in this country that’s playing for keeps. They don’t care how nice you’re going to be about it. They don’t care if you’re willing to meet them halfway. They’re not trying for a bigger piece of the pie. They’re trying to take over the bakery right now.

And I think the sooner we realize that the better, because a lot of people in the ruling corridors of the Democratic Party really seem to have not gotten the memo.

JJ: It’s important that it integrates with sports and with athletics here, which I think makes it slot into a different place in some people’s brains. This ruling, it galls, of course, for many reasons, but part of it is the ability for people who have a public platform to express political or social concerns, whether they’re athletes or musicians or artists, it’s framed so differently depending on who they are and what they’re saying.

DZ: Exactly.

JJ: It’s related, but if I can just transition you, you’ve written about Muhammad Ali, about Colin Kaepernick. It’s always been true that there’s been a kind of policing of what people can say, if it’s decided that they’re outside of their purview.

DZ: Yeah. If I could say something about that, I wrote this book The Kaepernick Effect. I interviewed dozens of young people, a lot of them in high school, who took a knee, and they were invariably subject to all kinds of ostracization, pushed off the team, made to feel outcast from the team, oftentimes at the behest of the coach.

And I think one of the things that we need to come to grips with is that this kind of aggressive Supreme Court–led Christian posturing is political. Because people say, well, that’s just religious, what the coach is doing. Taking a knee during the anthem, that’s a political act, and politics have no place in sports.

Do you honestly think it’s not political that this coach is defying the school district time and again, is drawing in students into the prayer circle time and again, is thumbing his nose at the concerns of parents time and again, and now, and I wish I could bet money on this, is going to be on the right-wing gravy train probably for the next decade, doing speeches time and again, and maybe there’ll even be one of those Hollywood movies that only a small segment of the population sees, starring, I don’t know, Gina Carano and Kevin Sorbo, whatever, the actors who occupy that space.

And I think we need to realize that these onward Christian soldiers, like, that’s not just a song to them. This is a movement that they’re trying to build, and trying to collaborate and figure out common solutions I think is going to be a very, very difficult task, because their eye is not on reconciliation.

New York Times (6/30/22)

JJ: Right, right. Thank you for that. And I’m going to let you go, but while I have you, I can’t resist. Today’s New York Times:

More than four months after she was first detained, the WNBA star Brittney Griner is expected to appear in a Russian courtroom on Friday for the start of a trial on drug charges that legal experts said was all but certain to end in a conviction, despite the clamor in the United States for her release.

I know I’m asking a lot in a short amount of time, but I know that for a lot of listeners who follow media closely, they’re going to say, “Wait, there was a clamor in the United States for Brittney Griner’s release? Wait, who’s Brittney Griner?” Thoughts on that?

DZ: We need a much bigger clamor, is my first thought. Brittney Griner is a WNBA superstar. If her name was Tom Brady or Steph Curry, there would be a national day of action to try to get them freed from a Russian prison.

I mean, Brittney Griner is a political prisoner, make no mistake about it.

JJ: In Russia, in Russia—we care about Russia, right?

DZ: Yeah. Facing 10 years behind bars, five years at labor behind bars. I mean, this has nothing to do with drugs. I have serious doubts in the charges in the first place. This is about Ukraine. This is about political posturing. This is about this new cold war that we’re dealing with with Putin.

And this is about them trying to extract political prisoners out of the United States, who are Russian, in an exchange, and I think we need to apply pressure to our own State Department that bringing Brittney Griner home should be an immediate priority.

What’s disturbing is the concern that Brittney Griner, because she’s a woman athlete, because she’s from the LGBTQ community, because she presents in a certain way, that she’s just not getting the coverage or the attention that she otherwise would get.

And I think that’s one of the things also we need to fight against. It’s not just about injustice in Russia; it’s about standing up to injustice and prejudice here at home.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Dave Zirin. He’s sports editor at The Nation, and you can follow his work at EdgeOfSports.com. Dave Zirin, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DZ: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.