I Speculated on the Heartbreaking Disappearance of Michael Negrete

here.

How Transmissible and How Deadly is the Latest Coronavirus Pandemic?

The CDC's website is in the process of updating information.

Is this one of those cases where authoritarianism goes in the favor of the species? China is rapidly shutting down all egress from Wuhan and engaging in massive quarantining efforts there, as they have done with past epidemics.

But since the virus has spread to other countries already, including America, pronouncements like Lipkin's "The horse is already out of the barn" are almost certainly correct.

Efforts are underway to develop a vaccine. Did you invest in any Inovio stock lately?

If, as early reports suggest, the elderly and immunocompromised are most at risk of the worst consequences and will have the highest mortality rate, it might make sense to encourage our loved ones who fall into these categories to try to get any necessary doctor's visits taken care of as soon as possible. I'm not referring to the flu shot, which is ineffective against this novel strain and probably confers no protective benefit in this instance. I'm referring to the risk of exposure which will probably skyrocket once the infection becomes entrenched throughout America. Maybe it won't be the situation, but looking at the latest updates from China with drastically upscaled numbers, it seems likely to be the case.

It would be prudent if physicians could prescribe maintenance medications without seeing patients where it is possible and not risky. I mean during epidemics. How is it in the interest of an elderly person to come sit in a waiting room full of a potentially deadly virus with a high rate of transmission.

For prophylactic purposes, I wonder if lysine would help? I know it's been largely discredited as actually killing many of the viruses it has been reported in the past to kill. But it does lower arginine levels and that is probably what's responsible for the antiviral effects many claim to have witnessed across a spectrum of viruses. And aspirin's antiviral effects (suppressing viral replication) have been reported in the scientific literature recently. It's not just an antipyretic and analgesic. It might have a prophylactic usefulness apart from the cardiovascular benefits.

Won't it be nice when the future is vegetarian or vegan and epidemics like these can become an extreme rarity? Because once again animal "agriculture" (euphemism for pointless torture) is the origin. Humans should be able to evolve away from predation and animal-based diets and decreased epidemiological load will be a great benefit of that.

If you want to see the GATTACA sequencing of the ugly bug, it's all over the internet. Early on this was posted but there's much more now from many different sources (countries).

I was checking in with Laurie Garrett's Twitter or the latest updates. I know if anybody is going to do a great job of digesting the info as it breaks, it is she.It is really alarming to see how quickly it is spreading and she's pretty much compiling the epidemic's updates in real time.

And I do hope the reproduction number on this early prediction is wrong. Scary stuff.

This is the 3rd stat model to show how grossly undercounted the #nCoV2019 is. In this case:
- official reproductive number is 2.5, but this says it's actually 3.6 to 4.0
- only 5.1% of infections in #Wuhan are identified now.
(which would imply 11,680 cases now in China.) https://t.co/cmmiOupEA6

— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) January 24, 2020

Remind Me Again Why We Hounded Aaron Swartz (1986–2013) and Austen Heinz (1983–2015)to Death?

A short, mostly link-based post on Medium. 

All-Weather Philip Glass

Best comment under the video (no idea if it's apocryphal):

David Null:

An art critic for Time magazine returned to his apartment in New York City to find a man in his kitchen: Reviewer: "You're Philip Glass, What are you doing in my kitchen?" Philip Glass: "I'm installing the dishwasher you ordered" - Glass was a plumber and Taxi driver in the 1970s. “While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.” “Even after the premiere of his opera Einstein at the Beach at the Met in 1976, the 39-year-old Glass went back to driving a cab. He kept at it for the next three years.”

Best Ted Talk Ever?

     I adore Laurie Garrett and think her book The Coming Plague is one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read, so I don't know how she muffed that part about a student allegedly bringing a long-extinct plant back to life. I followed up on that after watching this and realized what sounded currently impossible was indeed impossible. It was more a graphic reconstruction of how an extinct plant looked. It was in no way a re-introduction of that species into the world. There would be no way to access that long-lost genetic information or "reconstruct" the plant from scratch via synthetic biology. Scientists have recently found caches of seeds of plants that have been extinct for centuries (as long as 850 years) and managed to bring those species back to life. The new Lazarus species may not be lucky finds of holdout populations but creations of synthetic biology. But if we're talking about plants that go back to the age of the dinosaurs or that antedate them it simply has not happened (and probably never will).A fossil is not a genetic blueprint.

     I saw YouTube commenters picked up on this error too:

anonyarena5 years ago
@ 5:09 QUOTE "Indeed already, a graduate student at Berkeley brought back a form of plant that had been extinct since the Devonian age, and it's back, it's alive, it's replicating it's part of Earth again. Who made that choice? This kid." - This was a rather startling claim! So I checked it out. It turns out the headline "Graduate Student Brings Extinct Plants To Life" only means he did a beautifully rendered illustration of a Devonian age plant. I love you Laurie, but that was very sloppy. He did not bring an extinct plant back to life.

     With that caveat, I'll say I still think this is the best Ted Talk I have ever seen and she did nail the prediction about the cost of the genetic sequencer. They are now going for around a thousand dollars. 

     It's fun to read up on the iGEM competition and see what the kids are creating. There are a number of interesting videos on YouTube detailing these novel organisms. You should see the one where the bacterium's flagellum can collect metals for space mining. Yummy.

 And yeah, probably prepare for CRISPR terrorism.
 


But then there's the glorious side too...

Pretend

Pretend the words don’t have enemies.
May they be beyond

as eyes are, as hills.
This thought consoles me today,

this lie. Let us say the words
into the whipping winds

of the place we live, and wait.
Pretend the words are not somebody

else’s leash. That you are not.

When Capitalism Threatens Medicine

I was reading about bacteriophage therapy (phage therapy) and will confess I ended up horrified by our American attitude of near-total dismissiveness towards this amazing and proven “last line of defense” medical therapy so effective at killing the antibiotic-resistant bacteria now killing us.


What is phage therapy? In brief, it’s using the viruses which destroy bacteria to kill bacteria which are sickening or killing us. It’s the old scenario: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. You might recoil in horror at the idea of someone introducing live virus into your system. That’s a needless worry. These viruses go in and destroy harmful bacteria and then die off as soon as their bacterial “assembly stations” die off. This is a targeted therapy. Unlike antibiotics, they don’t kill off the good bacteria you want in your body.


Most projections now show that deaths from antibiotic-resistant bacteria will outstrip deaths by cancer sometime around the year 2050. One would assume that in a rational world this predicted outcome will be altered by our awareness of it.


Phage therapy is one thing that could alter that outcome. Medical research is now going so fast that it might be a completely different therapeutic approach which solves this growing problem of resistant bacteria. Even people seriously invested in this problem rarely want to address what’s probably more than half of the problem: animal “agriculture” and its horrors. Even the great viral plagues often get their start there.It’s not just the longstanding abuse of antibiotics by the industry which is producing killer microbial entities. It’s the nature of the torture-based “industry” itself. Call it microbiological karma. Nothing reminds me more of how needlessly disgusting we are as a species than pointless cruelty and nowhere does it happen on such a scale (even the bone-chilling atrocities we commit against each other are statistically minuscule in comparison) as in our “animal agriculture” (a pallid euphemism for animal torture). People don’t want to hear it, because change is challenging. But an ethical and compassionate diet would pay dividends for the planet and would reduce the planetary epidemiological load. If you study the history of epidemics, especially modern ones, this is undeniable.


The history of phage therapy is fascinating. In the early part of the twentieth century, it was poised to be the predominant therapy in the treatment of bacterial disease. And then Fleming had that serendipitous discovery of penicillin and history shifted. We put all our eggs in one basket. Phage therapy was used in the former Soviet Union and until recently the only institutions that practiced it were located in three countries that were formerly behind the Iron Curtain. Now America has its first institution dedicated to phage therapy, at the University of California, San Diego. Way to go, UCSD. We need more of this.


If you read even a little about phage therapy, you will quickly learn that chief among the several reasons it is not currently a part of American medicine is the issue with obtaining patents. Patenting biological entities like bacteriophages is not always so easy or inexpensive, and pharmaceutical companies want that monopolistic leverage for profit. So as the ongoing arguments about how “socialist” we want our medicine to be are hashed out, many people die needlessly, since this last line of defense against antibiotic-resistant organisms is simply not there for them. Did you catch this story about phage therapy saving a man’s life? This could be happening all the time. This eleventh hour salvation could be readily available. Phage therapy is not some weird, woo-based medicine. It’s practical medicine that works beautifully when practiced knowledgeably.


I would argue that it is the American government’s responsibility to figure out how to negotiate the pitfalls and financial challenges that stand in the way of American medicine implementing this therapy in a wide-scale and lasting way. The simple fact is it comes down to money before medicine right now. This should surprise no one in America. The pharmaceutical industry is only too happy to produce over-prescribed antibiotics which have significant negative side effects rather than focus on targeted therapies like phage which do not have those negative side effects. But that’s just money. They’re in the business of making money, not the business of attending to citizen welfare. I would expect that latter mission to be part of our government’s oversight. I would expect the government and the medical establishment to use their ingenuity to find ways to make phage therapy a reality and to make it a profitable industry at the same time. It can’t be impossible.