The Measles Outbreak and American Anti-intellectualism

Ayn Rand wrote, “You can avoid reality, but you can’t avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”

As of February 20, 2015, 154 cases of measles were reported in 17 states and Washington D.C. These cases were traced to the Philippines, where measles is still endemic. This latest outbreak follows 23 outbreaks in 2014, including 383 cases mainly seen in unvaccinated Amish communities in Ohio. Because it is early in the year, epidemiologists fear that the number of cases will continue to escalate rapidly.

After the widespread use of a measles vaccine was instituted in 1978, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted that only 778 cases were reported in the first 14 weeks of 1981, while 3,897 had been reported the previous year during the same period. Prior to the use of the measles vaccine, over 8,000,000 deaths due to measles were reported worldwide. After widespread vaccination was instituted, that number dropped to 800,000.

There are complex reasons why people choose not to vaccinate. Ignorance, fear, lack of education and mistrust in authority all play a role, as do the innate characteristics of human beings.

Anti-intellectualism has been part of America since its founding. In 1964, Richard Hofstadter won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, which chronicles how American society has been underpinned by anti-elitist, anti-scientific and anti-rationalism concepts. However, it has recently become evident that this anti-intellectualist trend is growing. Susan Jacoby published The Age of American Unreason in 2008, in which she traces the current rise of anti-intellectualism and examines the historical trends responsible. Ms. Jacoby cites a number of factors that contributed to the rise, including a shift from reading to the use of videos to get information, and the prevalence of the Internet.

The Internet has made information accessible to more people than ever before, but there an no filters for online information other than the judgment of the person who accesses it. Social media has made it very easy to mount organized attacks on people and unpopular ideas (I’ve no doubt that this post will evoke some vitriolic comments, which will serve to prove my point).

Hofstadter discussed at length how traditional American ideals contribute to anti-intellectualism. The concept of democracy can lead to the idea that all viewpoints are somehow equal and that it is unfair or elitist to promote one over another. There are pervasive cultural issues at the root of this problem.

There is a widespread belief in subjectivism – the philosophy that one cannot know what is true and what is not, or that truth arises from consensus rather than from evidence. Subjectivism is exemplified by the statement, “It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.” Subjectivism is rooted in a desire for fairness, to give all ideas equal credence, and to avoid cultural bias. The prevalence of subjectivism makes it difficult for a scientist to claim that something is absolute, even when there is a large body of evidence to support the claim, because the public has the perception that person claiming the absolute is somehow biased or condescending. The perceived bias may be attributed to the scientist’s employer (e.g., the government, a corporation, or even a university) or to other beliefs the scientist may hold (e.g., political or religious beliefs). But the net result is that claims backed by evidence are considered equivalent to those backed by anecdotes, or that arise from “common sense” or general “knowledge”.

The concept of America is also rooted in egalitarianism, which is the belief in the equality of all men. This belief is enshrined in our founding documents – “All men are created equal.” While this is true in some respects (e.g., the equality of individual rights, or equality before the law), it is obviously untrue in others (e.g., the equality of ability, intellect or expertise). Currently it is perceived to be at least impolite and at worst arrogant to assert that one person may be better than another, and by inference, that one person’s opinion should be given more credence than another’s. This has led to the asinine situation that the pronouncements of a celebrity are given more weight than those of a scientist.

Reversing societal anti-intellectualism will be difficult and will take many years, but it must begin with education, and not necessarily science education. The root belief that must be expunged is that all ideas are equally valuable or deserve equal consideration. That is the belief that encourages public debate of issues that are not debatable in the first place. People must be convinced to accept scientific conclusions not on the basis of authority, but because of trust based on an understanding of the process that produced the conclusion – the scientific method. Scientific communicators should emphasize that reason and evidence, not faith and opinion, are the path to knowledge and encourage critical thinking, rather than expecting their assertions to be blindly accepted as fact. Care should be taken not to denigrate particular political, ideological or religious beliefs, as this only serves to alienate people rather than allowing the evidence to convince the reader of the veracity of the argument.

Having grown up in the 1960s, I can still remember the interest and enthusiasm generated by the space program and the popular excitement of seeing a human being walk on the moon. Even though some die-hard conspiracy theorists even deny that sublime accomplishment, it was science that brought humanity that victory, and most people understood that on a visceral level. It is that trust and respect that scientists must reclaim.

Genomic surveillance elucidates Ebola virus origin and transmission during the 2014 outbreak

Source: www.sciencemag.org

Another follow up to Ebola – The New Black Death on Tekrighter’s Science Blog

See on Scoop.it – Cool Science

10 Things You Might Not Know About Ebola

-The 2014 outbreak of Ebola virus in West Africa has the world on high alert. Currently deemed an international public health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO), the virus has racked up more than 1,060 deaths and sickened 1,975 – making it the deadliest Ebola outbreak ever.

Source: www.dddmag.com

Here’s an update to my post Ebola – The New Black Death? on Tekrighter’s Science Blog.

See on Scoop.it – Cool Science

Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network

Giant academic social networks have taken off to a degree that no one expected even a few years ago. A Nature survey explores why.

Source: www.nature.com

A great article on how social networking is enhancing research collaboration!

See on Scoop.it – Cool Science

Mars One medical director outlines next round of selection

In this short interview, Dr. Norbert Kraft, the medical advisor of the Mars One Project, describes the next round of selection, which will take place over the next few months. LINK: Mission to Mars…

Source: lifeonmars.me

Here’s a follow-up to my post on Mars and the Future of Humanity.

See on Scoop.it – Cool Science

Ebola – The New Black Death?

Ebola. For those who are familiar with it, that word strikes fear into the heart. It is the name of a tropical disease, which has been back in the news recently due to an outbreak in several West African Countries. Ebola is a disease in a class known as hemorrhagic fevers, which are endemic to Africa. It has a high mortality rate, usually killing over half of those who get it ̵ sometimes as many as 90% of patients may die. Because of its fairly rapid progression and gruesome symptoms (uncontrollable internal and external bleeding), it has become a staple for thriller writers and conspiracy theorists, many of whom imply that it could become a weapon for terrorists or the next great global pandemic.

Ebola was first identified in Zaire, in Central Africa, in 1976. While there were only a few hundred cases over the course of the epidemic, the mortality rate was horrific – 88% of those who were diagnosed with the disease died of it. It even wiped out 11 of 17 staff members at a hospital where many of the patients were treated. Thankfully, after a couple of months, the disease vanished as silently as it came. Subsequently, the disease has reoccurred periodically, always in Africa, infecting a few hundred unfortunates at most.

What is Ebola?

Ebola is caused by a virus. A virus is an infectious particle, consisting of genetic material enclosed in a protein coat, which is sometimes surrounded with a membrane. There has been an ongoing debate among scientists as to whether viruses are even alive. It is important to understand that viruses are not bacteria, which are cells. Unlike most bacteria, viruses cannot propagate on their own because they do not contain the cellular machinery necessary to replicate themselves. In order to reproduce, they must infect a host cell, where they hijack the host’s reproductive mechanisms, often killing the host cell in the process.

Ebola is an example of a zoonosis, which is a disease that is transmissible between humans and some animal species. Often, zoonotic viruses are less deadly to their animal hosts than to humans, which means that the virus can be constantly maintained in the animal population. Recurring epidemics are a characteristic of zoonotic diseases, as they are periodically transmitted from the animal host to the human population. It is often difficult to identify the natural reservoir for a zoonosis. Since we know that Ebola also occurs in anthropoid apes, it is strongly suspected that they are the reservoir for the disease.

Disease Progression

At onset, most viral diseases present similar signs and symptoms, making them difficult to diagnose until the secondary symptoms appear. Early Ebola symptoms are flu-like, including tiredness, fever and chills, a sore throat, headache, and general body aches and pains. Unlike some other viruses, an Ebola infection is usually systemic, meaning that multiple bodily systems are affected, including the respiratory system, the circulatory system and the nervous system. One of Ebola’s more frightening symptoms is internal and external hemorrhaging, which can present as black marks under the skin or bleeding from bodily orifices. However, death from Ebola is rarely due to blood loss – rather, it is caused by multiple organ failure brought on by internal clotting and disruption of the body’s fluid balance.

The incubation period for Ebola is about a week or two, meaning that the patient is infected but shows no signs or symptoms during that time. The disease typically runs its course in two to three weeks. It is largely unknown why some people survive infection, and others do not.

There is no specific treatment for Ebola disease. Since it is cause by a virus and not a bacteria, antibiotics are not effective. There has been some work with antiviral drugs, but human tests have yet to be done. Currently, treatment consists of supportive care. It is possible to develop an effective vaccine against Ebola, but such a vaccine is likely years away because of economic considerations, as well as the periodic nature of the outbreaks.

Is Ebola the Next Global Pandemic?

While Ebola is of grave concern in the regions in which it is endemic, it is not a good candidate for the next global pandemic, for several reasons.

One measure of the ease of transmission of a communicable disease is the basic reproduction rate, known as R₀. R₀ indicates how many secondary cases of a disease develop from each primary case. So an R₀=2 means that an infected person is likely to infect two other people. For a disease to spread throughout a population, R₀ must be greater than 1. For example, the R₀ for measles, a highly communicable disease, is 12 -16. R₀ is lower for other communicable diseases such as diphtheria and smallpox. The R₀ for Ebola is estimated as 1 – 4. This value is low, likely because Ebola is principally transmitted by direct contact with the blood and body fluids from infected patients, and not by casual contact. This implies that Ebola is not transmitted during the asymptomatic incubation phase. Further evidence for the poor transmissibility is that Ebola epidemics die out rather quickly. For comparison, The Black Death (bubonic plague) in Europe lasted some seven years, from 1346 – 1353, and the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic lasted two years. The lifetime of an Ebola outbreak is usually measured in months, not years.

The devastating symptoms of active Ebola also disqualify it as a good candidate for a pandemic or a weapon. Patients are likely to be hospitalized and quarantined, not walking around among the population like a flu patient in the early stages would be. The fact that Ebola kills rather quickly also works against it becoming widespread in a population.

The persistence of Ebola in Africa is due to the fact that it is a zoonosis, with a natural reservoir in the primate population. These host animals are not found in other locations. The virus would have to mutate to become suitable for a different host in the wild in order to become established in a different area. Compare this with another zoonosis, bubonic plague. The natural reservoir for that disease was a flea that lived on a rat that was found virtually worldwide.

Finally, medical care and public health policies in other parts of the world are superior to those in the poor countries where Ebola now rages. It is likely that the disease would exhibit both lower mortality rates and transmissibility in more developed countries. It would come under control and die out sooner.

Global air travel and perfunctory inspections when crossing national borders make the possibility of a global pandemic very real, but thankfully, it does not appear that Ebola will be the disease that causes it.

Photo credit: CDC/Cynthia Goldsmith – Public Health Image Library, #10816 This media comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention‘s Public Health Image Library (PHIL), with identification number #1081

NASA: Earth escaped a near-miss solar storm in 2012

Back in 2012, the Sun erupted with a powerful solar storm that just missed the Earth but was big enough to “knock modern civilization back to the 18th century,” NASA said. The extreme space weather that tore through Earth’s orbit on July 23, 2012, was the most powerful in 150 years, according to a statement posted on the US space agency website Wednesday.

However, few Earthlings had any idea what was going on. “If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire,” said Daniel Baker, professor of atmospheric and space physics at the University of Colorado. Instead the storm cloud hit the STEREO-A spacecraft, a solar observatory that is “almost ideally equipped to measure the parameters of such an event,” NASA said. Scientists have analyzed the treasure trove of data it collected and concluded that it would have been comparable to the largest known space storm in 1859, known as the Carrington event. It also would have been twice as bad as the 1989 solar storm that knocked out power across Quebec, scientists said.

“I have come away from our recent studies more convinced than ever that Earth and its inhabitants were incredibly fortunate that the 2012 eruption happened when it did,” said Baker. The National Academy of Sciences has said the economic impact of a storm like the one in 1859 could cost the modern economy more than two trillion dollars and cause damage that might take years to repair. Experts say solar storms can cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything from radio to GPS communications to water supplies — most of which rely on electric pumps.

 

They begin with an explosion on the Sun’s surface, known as a solar flare, sending X-rays and extreme UV radiation toward Earth at light speed. Hours later, energetic particles follow and these electrons and protons can electrify satellites and damage their electronics.

Next are the coronal mass ejections, billion-ton clouds of magnetized plasma that take a day or more to cross the Sun-Earth divide. These are often deflected by Earth’s magnetic shield, but a direct hit could be devastating.

Source: news.yahoo.com

I have touched on this topic before in my blog (Is Technology a Trap for Humanity? – https://tekrighter.wordpress.com/page/3/). Perhaps it’s time for an update.

See on Scoop.it – Cool Science

Mars and the Future of Humanity

Mars. The Red Planet. It has fascinated humans since antiquity.  It was discovered so long ago that there is no record of its discovery.  It is easy to observe, appearing periodically as a morning or evening star, when the sky is too light to see the other  stars. References to Mars can be found in the writings of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. Galileo Galillei was the first person to observe Mars telescopically in the 17th century. In 1903, the famed astronomer Percival Lowell published a book entitled The Canals of Mars that fueled popular fascination with the planet and let to speculation that it was inhabited. It was not long afterwards that Edgar Rice Burroughs published Under the Moons of Mars, the first installment of his famous Barsoom series, and introduced the world to the redoubtable John Carter, the ravishing Martian princess Dejah Thoris, multi-armed green men and other fantastic inhabitants of the dying world.

Exploration of Mars has been part of NASA’s mission since the agency was first created. Indeed, many considered the Apollo moon missions as a prelude to a manned mission to Mars, possibly as early as the 1980s. Unfortunately, after the Apollo 11 moon landing, public support for expensive manned space exploration gradually waned, and the Apollo program was cancelled after the flight of Apollo 17. But it appears that NASA has not given up entirely on a manned mission to Mars.

Such projects are always dependent on political considerations if they are funded by public money. However, there is another effort to put humans on Mars that is privately funded. The Mars One program is a nonprofit project that has the goal of establishing a permanent human settlement on Mars by 2025, beating NASA by at least five years. They have already begun an astronaut selection program, and are planning the construction of a facsimilie of the Martian base on earth, for use in training and for publicity.

Ethical considerations concerning a manned mission to Mars and space exploration in general abound. Astronauats will face potentially dangerous conditions in transit and after landing on other planets. Some people consider the harvest of natural resourses from  other planets, or changing the environment of another planet to suit human needs as unethical. Mars One plans to finanace their project in part by selling broadcasting rights, and at least one person has wondered if such a broadcast will celebrate the triumph of humanity, or simply publicize a tragedy.

Then there is the larger question of the future of humanity as a species. Altruists tell us that it is the responsibility of those of us living now to exercise good stewardship of the planet, so those who come after us will be able to live here too. But it is an undeniable fact that planets, like people, have a life, and that life has a beginning and an end. The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that environmental degradation of Earth is inevitable, whether from natural processes or human activity – the only question is how long it will take for the Earth to become uninhabitable for humankind. When that day comes, the survival of homo sapiens (or whatever species we have evolved to) will depend on whether some of us have managed to leave the third rock from from the sun. And that may be the greatest ethical concern of all.

Photo credit: gunnsteinlye / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

A Mission of Gravity

One of the seminal novels to come out of the Golden Age of science fiction was a book by Hal Clement entitled A Mission of Gravity. It tells of the adventures of some inhabitants of the strange world Mesklin, whose gravity varied from 3g (three times Earth’s gravity) to 700g. The novel proved to be fascinating to many, and has remained in print more or less continuously since its publication in 1953.
Perhaps one reason for the novel’s enduring popularity is that gravity is the member of the four fundamental forces of nature that we are most familiar with, but is arguably the strangest one. Three of these forces, the weak force, electromagnetism, and the strong force have been unified (i.e., shown to have a common mathematical basis), but so far, gravity has stubbornly resisted all efforts at unification.
Classical mechanics, Issac Newton’s theory of physics, assumed that gravity acted at a distance – as an instantaneous force that was not mediated by anything – it was simply a property of the universe. Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity contradicted that view. Einstein described gravity as a warp in spacetime created by massive bodies that acted on the bodies themselves. He envisioned it as propagated by a wave, which traveled at the speed of light, transporting gravitational radiation, in a manner analogous to an electromagnetic wave. However, gravitational waves are incredibly weak and could not be detected by existing instrumentation.
Another difference between gravity and the other three fundamental forces is that a quantum mechanical description of the weak force, electromagnetism, and the strong force has been developed. Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that describes the behavior of systems over infinitesimally small distances. Each of the three forces has been found to be propagated by a specific messenger particle. Einstein envisioned a messenger particle for gravity dubbed the graviton, but, like gravitational waves, the graviton has never been detected. A quantum theory of gravity likewise remains elusive.
Things changed radically on Monday, March 17, 2014, when scientists involved with the BICEP2 project announced the first direct detection of primordial gravitational waves. BICEP2 is essentially a telescope designed to detect changes in the polarization of light. The light, or more exactly, the electromagnetic radiation that BICEP2 detects, is the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) – the radiative signature left by the Big Bang. Using BICEP2, the scientists mapped the pattern of polarization in the CMB, and found that gravitational waves could be the only way to explain this pattern.
The BICEP2 result strongly indicates that gravity must be quantum mechanical, because the polarization patterns observed by BICEP must originate from quantum oscillations in spacetime itself.
BICEP only looked at a small portion of the sky – a sector about 15° by 60°. Scientists expect that even larger gravitational wave patterns exist, but in order to see them, an instrument that can observe the entire sky will be necessary. To do this, a spacecraft rather than an earthbound telescope will be required. Scientists hope that, if these larger patterns are present, they may be able to finally test competing theories of quantum gravity, like string theory and loop quantum gravity.
You can watch the BICEP2 press conference here.

Are We Lucky?

“I’d rather be lucky than smart!” This hackneyed adage is usually delivered sarcastically, in response to someone who just won the lottery, got the big promotion, or left the casino with a pile of cash. The implication is that, if one is lucky, working hard and taking risks is unnecessary. Just wait, and good fortune will come along. If one is unlucky, then industry and risk-taking is all for naught. It’s a philosophy that can lead to nihilism and despair quite quickly.

So, what is luck? It is undeniable that good things seem to happen for no perceivable reason, as do adverse events. For millennia, people have attributed such things to supernatural causes, and have attempted to control them by propitiation of gods, or by seeking talismans that will grant them that nebulous quality called luck. Others believe that the universe is fundamentally random, and that luck is largely a matter of perception. Of course, it’s easier to take the latter view if one is lucky…

The concept of luck has been a fruitful subject for science fiction. Larry Niven explored it in his Known Space stories, in which an alien race actually tried to breed lucky humans by providing incentives for lucky people to mate with each other. J.K. Rowling, the fantastically successful author of the Harry Potter novels, created a magical potion that conferred good fortune on the imbiber, leading one to wonder if she consumed some herself.

A good definition of luck is the occurrence of a preponderance of improbable events over a short time frame  ̵  whether that luck is good or bad is a value judgment based on the observer’s perceptions. This definition assumes that the events in question are statistically independent, that is, the occurrence of one event does not affect the probability of the occurrence of a subsequent event. Misperception of statistical independence can lead to the Gambler’s Fallacy, which has caused much misery over the ages.

However, a theorem called the Law of Large Numbers exists in probability theory. Simply stated, it says that, given a very large numbers of trials, the average of the observed occurrences of a particular result approaches the expected value of those occurrences. Consider an event with a probability of occurrence of one in a million. This means, that in one million observations, you should, on average, observe the event one time. The expected value in this case is one. Is it possible that event will not be observed at all? Certainly! It is also possible that the event will be observed more than once. As the number of observations increases, so does the expected value. If the number of observations is infinite, the expected value becomes a certainty.

The geologist David Waltham has written a book called Lucky Planet, which will be published later this year. The thesis of Lucky Planet is that the earth, due to a highly improbable series of weather patterns, experienced conditions amenable to the genesis of intelligent life. This supports the Rare Earth Hypothesis, which is a possible explanation of why we have not observed any other intelligent life in our universe.

In 2009, NASA deployed the Kepler telescope, whose mission was to search for extrasolar planets in the habitable zone of their parent solar system. To date, NASA scientists have confirmed 961 planets discovered by Kepler, and have extrapolated those results to estimate that the number of earthlike planets in the Milky Way galaxy is likely tens of billions. Estimates of the number of galaxies in the observable universe run into the hundreds of billions.

So, while the earth may indeed be a lucky planet, it doesn’t seem likely we’re alone in the universe. Do the math.

Håkan Dahlström / Foter / CC BY