Solutions to US military's ammunition shortage

Charlestown blood drive on Aug. 13

Westerly Demo on Aug. 12

Why so many of us can’t let go of our old electronics, and what we can do about it

Lost in your junk drawer

Eric Williams, Rochester Institute of Technology; Payam Saeedi, Rochester Institute of Technology, and Stacey Watson, University of Waterloo

Think about the last smartphone, tablet or smartwatch you stopped using. Odds are it is not in a recycling bin or a new owner’s hands; it is sitting in a drawer.

From our survey of 4,000 American consumers, we found the single most common thing people did with a device they were finished with was nothing at all: 39% simply stored it. Recycling and reselling, outcomes better for the environment, each accounted for only about 1 in 10 devices. Throwing devices in the trash claimed another 9%.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, our multidisciplinary team blended our expertise in causal inference, sustainability and cybersecurity, to work on the tangled question of what people do with their consumer electronics when they’re done using them. We used statistical models to connect what people say – that is, their stated knowledge and attitudes – to what they actually did.

Why the drawer wins

Two main forces keep devices in the drawer. The first is anxiety about data. People who worried that recycling or reselling a device would compromise their data were 14% and 9% more likely to store it instead.

The second force is simply not knowing how to. People who did not know where to recycle were 10% more likely to hold onto a device, and many also kept old gadgets as a perceived data backup.

Recycling and reselling electronics are a lot easier than a lot of people think. In the U.S., the national chain Best Buy accepts devices for recycling; reselling online is convenient with vendors such as Back Market and Gazelle.

The Cyclospora outbreak was, and still is, a communications failure

Not to mention corruption

Jess Steier, DrPh

The response to the current large outbreak of food-related illnesses caused by a microscopic parasite is a communications failure, not a failure of the investigation. 

A few characteristics of Cyclospora make it tricky to chase down. Because it will not grow in culture, the standard playbook doesn't apply. With most foodborne bacteria, a lab grows the organism, sequences it, and uploads the genetic fingerprint to PulseNet, the national network that flags when a case in one state matches a case in another. 

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has instead been working from partial genotyping, because Cyclospora's genome is complicated enough to defeat the sequencing methods that work for bacteria. 

Cyclospora contamination on produce is often sparse and unevenly distributed, and it tends to sit close to the limit of what a test can detect, which is how contaminated lettuce ends up testing clean. Investigators were left with the oldest tools in the kit: interviews and shipping records.

Important early clues widely missed

Dr. Mike Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (which, of course, publishes my CIDRAP Op-Eds), taught me that when cases start rolling in, the demographics of who is getting sick can hand you an important early clue. 

These cases skewed heavily toward adults, with the CDC putting the median age at 44 across a range from 1 to 89 years, and the relative absence of young children pointed toward something green rather than something fruit. 

If you have young kids you know exactly why. They are devoted fruit eaters. (I used to joke that my daughter was going to turn into a strawberry.) But more spotty toward veggies.

That narrows things, but the hunt continues. There are other important factors, too, like understanding how a growing region is organized into blocks, when each produce item was cut and by whom, how product from different fields gets combined at a processor, how long it takes to move from a field in central Mexico to a restaurant in Michigan, and how fast a perishable product cycles off the shelf. 

RI Bug Alert: More West Nile, new detection of Jamestown Canyon virus

Pediatricians and Health Departments (including Rhode Island) Sidestep Trump’s CDC on Vaccine Guidance

Rational response to the breach of trust

By Karen Brown, New England Public Media

His brainworm ate his memory

For the last 30 years, whenever pediatrician John Snyder wanted to find the most up-to-date research on treating young patients, he would turn to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

If he wanted to learn more about an outbreak of measles or hantavirus, he would pore over the weekly CDC report that came by email. If a patient’s family was traveling to Africa or Asia, he would check the latest CDC vaccine recommendations for overseas travel. 

And if a family was worried about potential side effects from a shot, he could always send them to the CDC’s website to bolster his argument to get the immunization.

Public trust in the CDC has hit bumps in the road during infectious disease outbreaks, but for medical professionals, Snyder said, “the CDC used to be, worldwide, the most trusted source of information pertaining to public health and infectious disease.”

Yet even doctors began losing trust, Snyder said, after Donald Trump was elected president again. Trump quickly tapped longtime anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC.

Within months of his confirmation as secretary, Kennedy had dismissed every member of the CDC’s vaccine advisory board and replaced them with new appointees, some of them prominent vaccine skeptics.

“It turned into a completely unreputable source of information,” Snyder said.

This rupture of scientific trust in the CDC has put many pediatricians like Snyder in a bind, as they no longer turn to the country’s preeminent public health agency and instead search for ways to fill the information gap. Some doctors are launching their own vaccine education efforts, sometimes in collaboration with local public health departments.

On Jan. 5, the CDC removed some vaccines from the recommended vaccine schedule for all children — against the advice of major medical groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics. The number of recommended vaccines shrank as the agency dropped rotavirus, covid-19, influenza, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and meningococcal disease from the list. The agency did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Rhode Island marks VJ Day as a state holiday tomorrow, the only state to do it. Here are some inconvenient truths

The Nuclear Age Began 81 Years Ago—With Lies; It Could End the Same Way

Mitchell Zimmerman for Common Dreams

The atomic age began with a lie.

Eighty-one years ago this week, a single American airplane, flying almost unnoticed over a Japanese city, dropped a single bomb that destroyed the entire city. Three days later another American plane destroyed a second city.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 killed 100,000 people outright. By the end of the year another 100,000 succumbed to radiation sickness, burns, and other injuries from the blasts. Over 90% were civilians.

The stated reason for killing all these people was a lie. The claim that we had to drop atomic bombs to avoid the horrific losses US troops would have been suffered in an invasion of the Japanese home islands was false—and American decision-makers knew it when they decided to drop the bombs.

Because the United States had broken Japanese military codes, American intelligence learned in July 1945 that the Japanese government had already contacted the Soviet Union, America’s World War II ally, to discuss surrender. The Japanese hoped, above all, to ensure that the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender did not require the Japanese Emperor to abdicate—a condition that US readily agreed to in the end.

As Gar Alperovitz convincingly explains in his book, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, the destruction of the two Japanese cities had to do with emerging Cold War politics, not with avoiding an invasion of the Japanese islands.

Those who made the decision knew that Japan was seeking to end the war and believed that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, after the Allies’ victory in Europe, would likely be enough to precipitate Japan’s capitulation.

A long-hidden, top-secret US intelligence study in 1946 confirmed that the atomic blasts were not what ended the war—it was Russia’s August 8, 1945 declaration of war against Japan and Soviet troop movements.

Because Russia was preoccupied with the life-and-death struggle against Nazi Germany, they had not participated in the war against Japan until then. But in July 1945, at a conference in occupied Potsdam, Germany, President Harry Truman secured Joseph Stalin’s promise to join the war against Imperial Japan.

“Fini Japs when that occurs,” Truman observed in his war-time, hand-written journal in July 1945. “We’ll end the war a year sooner now,” Truman wrote in a letter around the same time. “Think of all the kids who won’t be killed.”

US war leaders confirmed the atomic bombing was not needed. The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces General Dwight D. Eisenhower (later President Eisenhower) concluded that “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary... no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”

Fleet Admiral William Leahy, then Truman’s chief of staff, agreed: “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender... The use of this this barbarous weapon... was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.”

Truman did not hesitate to drop the bombs anyway. “The atom bomb was no ‘great decision,’” he said 15 years later.

The World War II era was an age of atrocity. The Second Sino-Japanese War—Japan’s war of conquest against China from 1937 to 1945—caused an estimated 10-20 million deaths. Nazi Germany murdered 6 million European Jews. The Germans also murdered 2 million captured Russian soldiers through starvation. And there was the rape of Nanking, the destruction of Dresden, the 1943 famine of Bengal, and the firebombing of Tokyo and 60 other Japanese cities.

In the face of these unspeakable horrors, the atomic death of 200,000 Japanese civilians stands out because they were the world’s first victims of nuclear warfare—and their unnecessary deaths, excused by a set of lies, ushered in an era of peril for all humanity.

The lies and the dangers did not stop with the end of World War II. As we should have learned, nuclear weapons have a way of spawning lies.

In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, in 2003 the Bush regime constructed the fiction that Iraq had nuclear weapons, as an excuse for invading and occupying the oil-rich nation. But Iraq had neither nukes nor other weapons of mass destruction. The neoconservatives who promoted the invasion of Iraq (and urged President George W. Bush to proceed to invade Iran as well) had manipulated dubious intelligence to promote fears of an imaginary threat.

The price of those lies was high. In the end, the US occupation of Iraq cost the United States trillions of dollars and thousands of US service members’ lives—and caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths.

This year Donald Trump returned to the right-wing dream of overthrowing the Iranian government, again lying about nuclear weapons to support a completely unnecessary war. Trump and his aides claimed that Iran was on the verge of building a nuclear bomb and was developing long-range missiles that could soon strike the United States. US intelligence agencies confirmed that these claims were both lies.

The persistence of presidential lies about fictional nuclear threats should not obscure the all-too-real dangers of nuclear proliferation.

Citizens who are concerned about threats to our existence on this planet have rightly focused on climate change. But a world increasingly subjected to the stresses of climate change and its impacts—extreme temperatures, sea-level rise, mega storms, uncontrollable fires, crop destruction, drought, famine, refugee flows, and xenophobic politics—is a world in which desperate and megalomaniacal rulers may feel tempted to use thermonuclear weapons. And the nuclear age could end, as it began, with lies.

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller "Mississippi Reckoning" (2019).

The best is yet to come

I support Dr. Fauci

An obscene example of Trump committing "stolen valor"

 

URI College of Pharmacy researcher harvests natural viruses to seek treatment for multidrug-resistant bacteria

‘Rhody Phage Cocktail’ aims to help control ‘superbugs’

Dawn Bergantino

URI College of Pharmacy Assistant Professor Callan
Bleik displays a phage plaque spot assay demonstrating
 bacteriophage activity against a methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection.

The discovery of antibiotics transformed modern medicine, turning once-deadly infections into treatable conditions and saving millions of lives. 

But decades of overuse and misuse have accelerated the rise of antibiotic resistance, allowing certain bacteria to evolve into dangerous “superbugs” that evade even the most powerful drugs. 

As multidrug-resistant infections become increasingly difficult to treat, researchers are urgently seeking new strategies to stay ahead of these evolving pathogens.

In the University of Rhode Island College of Pharmacy, Assistant Professor Callan Bleick is leading one such effort. Bleick’s research focuses on improving treatment for drug-resistant bacterial infections, particularly those caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), one of the most prevalent and challenging superbugs in hospitals and healthcare settings.

COVID is still here. Is the pandemic?

Getting vaccinated is still the smartest thing

Laine Bergeson

It’s been three years since the World Health Organization declared an end to the COVID-19 public health emergency, but COVID still circulates worldwide. Does that mean the pandemic is still going on, just in a non-emergency phase? Or has COVID become an endemic virus, like the flu?

CIDRAP News talked with Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) Director Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH, to understand what defines a pandemic, if we’re still in one, and what gives a pathogen pandemic potential.

CIDRAP News: What exactly is a pandemic? 

Michael Osterholm: There’s no magic answer to that question. From my perspective, I usually say the only examples we have in modern history are viral infections that are transmitted via the respiratory route, like the flu and COVID, because the dynamics of transmission make it a worldwide threat, and “worldwide threat” is important in defining a pandemic. A pandemic is not just something that happens in one localized area.

Plagues weren’t viruses, but, in the modern world, a pandemic is almost always a viral infection.

CIDRAP News: Why? 

Michael Osterholm: Antibiotics could be an important part of why bacterial viruses aren't as big of a threat today. But what’s really at the heart of it is what flu and COVID represent today in terms of risk—that is, slight changes in the virus result in increased susceptibility. And when there's a major change in the virus, you virtually have no protection.

“A pandemic is almost always a viral infection.”

For a good example, look at influenza. Each flu pandemic was caused when there was a major shift in the genetics of the virus, so virtually no one was immune. If you look at COVID, it was very much the same thing. 

CIDRAP News: Why were SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) not pandemics? 

Michael Osterholm: Because they are not readily transmitted. We were able to bring them under control, basically with standard control measures that you would use for respiratory illness. And that's good news because the case-fatality rate for SARS and MERS is between 15% and 35%. For COVID, the case-fatality rate was 1% to 1.5%.

CIDRAP News: So pandemics have less to do with severity and more to do with how transmissible a virus is? 

Michael Osterholm: Both how transmissible it is and risk are important. For example, if you have a common cold virus for which we have no previous immunity suddenly spread around the world, most of us would not consider that a pandemic in the sense that it's not a severe illness. So there’s an implied status of severe illness.

CIDRAP News: What’s the difference between a pandemic and an epidemic? 

Michael Osterholm: Epidemic relates back to the issue of transmission. For example, we have a major epidemic of Ebola going on right now, which surely has a high case-fatality rate. It's a very serious illness, but it's not readily transmitted via the respiratory route. 

First mRNA flu shot gets FDA approval, raising hopes for a more effective vaccine

Surprising decision given RFK Jr.'s disdain and funding cuts for all mRNA vaccines

Sarah Boden

A first-of-its-kind flu shot using mRNA technology has been approved for adults 50 years of age and older by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). 

Moderna's mFlusiva is the company's fourth mRNA-based product approved in the United States, according to a Moderna press release. The vaccine has full approval for people 50 to 64 years of age. For those over 65, the FDA granted "accelerated approval," which is temporary: Full approval depends on the long-term safety and real-world effectiveness of the vaccine in this age group.

Earlier this year, it seemed that the vaccine would never make it to market. The FDA refused to review Moderna's application, saying that instead of comparing mFlusiva to the standard-dose seasonal influenza vaccine, the company should instead have used the high-dose vaccine, which is recommended for adults who are 65 and older. Also, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has questioned the safety of mRNA, which is the same technology used to produce the COVID-19 vaccines.

However, a week later, the FDA reversed its decision and agreed to review Moderna's application after outcry from infectious disease experts and warnings that outright refusal to review the application could cause a chilling effect that would deter investments in new pharmaceuticals and dampen innovation. 

Why your doctors keep leaving

It's more than about money, though that is a biggie

By Lesley Henton, Texas A&M University

Edited by Robert Egan

If it feels harder to keep the same doctor, you're not imagining it. Health care leaders say retirements, burnout and changing workforce expectations are making it complicated to keep experienced clinicians in place.

A new study published in the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety suggests the reasons go beyond staffing shortages. Leaders from four major health systems in one of the nation's largest metropolitan areas say generational shifts are reshaping who enters health care, who stays and why clinicians leave.

"We've talked about clinical workforce shortages as a numbers problem involving training and retention," said study co-author Dr. William Sage, founding director of the Texas A&M University Institute for Healthcare Access in Fort Worth. "What these leaders described was something more complicated, as health care organizations are struggling to meet growing patient needs while accommodating five distinct generations of clinicians with different needs and perspectives about work, well-being and career longevity."