Saturday, November 30, 2013

News Clips For The Day



60 years in an iron lung: US polio survivor worries about new global threat – NBC
JoNel Aleccia NBC News


Martha Ann Lillard was just 5 in 1953 when she became paralyzed by polio and had to use an iron lung respirator. She's spent six decades in the 800-pound device and worries that people in the U.S. don't remember the panic that polio caused.

It’s a long way from central Oklahoma to Syria, but one of America’s last iron lung survivors says she’s a living reminder that an outbreak of polio anywhere in the world is a danger everywhere.

Martha Ann Lillard, now 65, has spent most of the past six decades inside an 800-pound machine that helps her breathe. News this month that at least 13 children have been paralyzed by a resurgence of polio in Syria — where the disease had been eradicated since 1999 — filled her with sadness and dread, she told NBC News. At least four additional cases have been confirmed in the country, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

“If my mother would have had the opportunity to give me the vaccine, she would have done that,” says Lillard, who was a kindergartner in 1953 when she woke up with a sore throat that quickly progressed to something much worse — a life-threatening infection with poliovirus.

“To let somebody go through what I went through and what other children went through. What if people had to do that again? It would be just unbelievable.”
U.S. health experts agree. America’s last outbreak of polio was in 1979, and though risk of reintroduction of the disease is low, they say that growing pockets of unvaccinated children are raising concerns that people may have forgotten the panic over the disease that crippled Lillard — and how easily it could return.

“Scenarios for polio being reintroduced into the U.S. are easy to image and the disease could get a foothold if we don’t maintain high vaccination rates,” says Dr. Greg Wallace, a team leader for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he heads the measles, mumps, rubella and polio epidemiology branch.

“Syria is a good example,” he adds. “They didn’t have any cases. Then they stopped vaccinating for two or three or four years and what do you have?” What you have, according to the World Health Organization, is more than a dozen children permanently paralyzed in Syria, where conflict and a humanitarian crisis have interrupted inoculation efforts that provide a lifetime of protection with just a few doses of vaccine.

It’s a heartbreaking setback in a battle against a disease that’s on the verge of eradication worldwide, with polio still endemic in only three countries, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan, WHO says.

Infectious disease experts in Germany this month warned that Syria’s outbreak could endanger Europe as tens of hundreds of refugees flee the war-torn country and settle in places that have been polio-free for decades.

That idea alarms Lillard, who is one of an estimated six to eight polio survivors in the U.S. still using iron lungs, according to Joan Headley, executive director of Post-Polio Health International, an advocacy group.

Their numbers have dwindled steadily since 1959, when more than 1,200 people in the U.S. relied on the machines that use negative air pressure to passively move air in and out of lungs weakened or paralyzed by the virus.

Lillard says she remembers well the sheer fear her illness caused in her rural Oklahoma town.
“The night before I was paralyzed, the neighbor children ate out of the same bowl of pancake batter that I did,” Lillard recalls. “They just had to pray that nobody got it.”

The first known outbreak of polio in the U.S. was in 1894 in Vermont, but it’s the epidemics in the 1950s that scarred the nation. In 1952, a record 57,628 cases of polio were reported in the U.S., and between 13,000 and 20,000 people a year were left paralyzed, records show.

Poliomyelitis is a viral infection of the spinal cord that mainly affects young children. The virus is transmitted through contaminated food and water. Most people who are infected develop no symptoms and don’t even know they’ve got it. But in about 1 in 200 cases, the virus destroys the nerve cells that activate muscles, causing irreversible paralysis, usually in the legs. It can paralyze breathing muscles, too, sometimes causing death.

Only the vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk and introduced to a waiting nation on April 12, 1955 stemmed the fear and tamed the virus — but that came too late for youngsters like Lillard.

She has spent most of her life inside one of several long metal cylinders in which she’s enclosed with an airtight seal, with only her neck and head sticking out of a foam collar. She has switches inside —along with a goose down comforter and nice sheets — to allow her to roll a tray-like cot in and out.

Lillard owns her iron lung, which was built in the 1940s and runs on a fan belt motor that friends help patch together with car parts when it breaks.
“It feels wonderful, actually, if you’re not breathing well,” says Lillard. “When I was first put into it, it was such a relief. It makes all the difference when you’re not breathing.”

Lillard taught herself with great effort to walk again and she’s able to leave the respirator — but she often doesn’t want to. She says she has tried the portable positive pressure ventilators that most polio survivors use. Those devices force air into the lungs, often through a tube in the throat.

But Lillard says the harsh air from those devices causes “tremendous amounts” of inflammation and worsens asthma caused by post-polio syndrome, a debilitating condition common among many polio survivors. The devices are also difficult to keep clean and could introduce life-threatening bacteria into her vulnerable system, says Lillard, who is 4-foot-9 and weighs just over 100 pounds.

“If I use the positive pressure vent, I’m not as well rested,” she says. “Some people have said I’d rather die than leave my iron lung, and it makes it sound like I’m not trying to be modern, and it’s not like that at all.”

In fact, Lillard is a chatty, outgoing woman who dotes on her three beagles and lives with a housemate so the two of them can take care of each other. She keeps in touch with the world by phone and computer and says she has had to learn to endure in spite of her crippling illness.

“I ask ‘Why’ all the time. I don’t get any answers,” she says. “After you ask so many times and you don’t get answers, you just go on.”
Lillard says she knows she’s an anomaly in a U.S. society that barely remembers the scourge of polio. In 2004, there were 39 people still using iron lungs, and by 2010, perhaps a dozen, experts say.

But with polio back in Syria — and in Cameroon, where it hadn’t been detected since 2009, the WHO reported this week — Lillard says she wants to make sure that people never forget.
“I think the word is to get your child vaccinated,” she said. “Why would we let somebody have to go back through that again


I have been seeing the news articles about polio in Syria for the last few months and wondering about our country.It didn't seem likely to come here, but now with refugees leaving Syria and outbreaks in several other countries, it looks like we need another push in this country to vaccinate our children. I well remember the panic in the US about it in the 1950s, and getting my polio shot. According to the web site WebMD it is currently recommended for all US children, and “in most places” mandated before a child starts school. We're probably protected, certainly from a major outbreak.




North Korea says American it detained is a criminal – NBC

By Jack Kim, Reuters

North Korea said on Saturday it had arrested U.S. citizen Merrill E. Newman for "hostile acts" against the state and accused him of being "a criminal" who was involved in the killing of civilians during the 1950-53 Korean War. 

Newman "masterminded espionage and subversive activities against the DPRK and in this course he was involved in killings of service personnel of the Korean People's Army and innocent civilians," the North's official KCNA news agency said. 

DPRK is short for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. North Korea is technically still at war with the South and the United States as a truce, not a peace treaty, was signed to end the Korean conflict. 
"He admitted all his crimes and made an apology for them," KCNA said. 

In a separate dispatch, KCNA carried what it said was a statement of apology by Newman, made after being detained. "During the Korean War, I have been guilty of a long list of indelible crimes against DPRK government and Korean people as advisor of the Kuwol Unit of the U.N. Korea 6th Partisan Regiment part of the Intelligence Bureau of the Far East Command," it said. 

The unit appears to refer to one of the special operations units of partisan, or irregular, fighters acting against the North. 
Newman, who had been visiting North Korea as a tourist, has been held in Pyongyang since officials took him off an Air Koryo plane that was scheduled to leave the country on Oct. 26. 

Newman is a retiree from Palo Alto in California, and the U.S. State Department has refused to provide any details of the detention. 

North Korea has been holding another U.S. citizen and a Christian missionary of Korean decent, arrested last year and sentenced in May to 15 years of hard labour on charges of committing hostile acts against the state. 


Now that Newman has apologized we are waiting to find out what the North Korean government will do next. I'll try to clip articles as they appear and add them to this blog.





Endangered Species Act turns 40 years old — and faces midlife crisis – NBC
Alan Boyle, Science Editor


The act has helped some animal populations rebound, but others remain perilously close to extinction.

Four decades after going into effect, the legislation that protects some of Mother Nature's most vulnerable creatures is facing an existential crisis.
Since the Endangered Species Act became law, it's generated its share of success stories (such as the bald eagle's resurgence) and less impressive case studies (such as the continuing decline of the Northern spotted owl).

This year's anniversary is generating a lot of talk about the Endangered Species Act's past — and its future.
"There are a lot of pundits out there who will tell you that it has either been a disaster or a huge success," Peter Alagona, a professor of environmental history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, told Smithsonian magazine. "The truth is that it has really been a mixed bag to date, and 'to date' is a really short time. For species that took centuries to decline, 40 years is probably not enough time to recover."

Alagona takes an in-depth look at species protection in a book titled "After the Grizzly," and says the law has done "a really good job" of preventing extinctions. "But it's done a really poor job promoting the recovery of species that are on the list," he said.

What works, what doesn't
The problem is that bringing an endangered species back to a sustainable population often requires more than just restricting human activities in a defined geographical area. Sometimes the solution springs from other factors: The growth of bald eagle populations, for instance, arguably had more to do with the 1972 ban on DDT's agricultural use than with the Endangered Species Act. Even though the eagles were taken off the endangered list in 2007, they're still protected under different laws.

The law's protections aren't always enough to address the bigger problems facing a species and its habitat. Take the Northern spotted owl: Limits on logging in the threatened species' Pacific Northwest forest habitat generated a huge outcry in the 1990s, but even though the protections took effect, the spotted owl population is continuing to decline — mostly due to encroachment by a more aggressive species, the barred owl.

"The conservationists who got into this in the first place got into it because they wanted to save owls, and now they’re being faced with the idea of shooting one owl to protect another," Alagona said.

Politics and science
Even though the status of endangered species is supposed to be determined purely on scientific grounds, politics enters into the picture. Such is the case for the gray wolf, which has recovered enough that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed taking the species off the endangered list. Some environmentalists worry that the move is premature — and have accused the federal government of stacking the deck during its peer-review process. A decision on delisting gray wolves is expected next year.

Then there's climate change: In the decades ahead, species and their habitats could face rapid shifts due to rising sea levels, warmer temperatures and other effects associated with greenhouse-gas emissions.

One of the potential casualties is the endangered red wolf, which is limited to a low-lying coastal habitat on North Carolina's Albemarle Peninsula. Up to a third of that habitat could disappear over the next century, due to land subsidence and sea encroachment. Rising sea levels pose a similar threat to other species, such as the Florida panther, the Key deer and the Atlantic piping plover.

Could the Endangered Species Act be invoked to shut down CO2-emitting coal plants? "You could make that legal argument, but the political reaction would be very intense," Dave Owen, a law professor at the University of Maine, told Outside Online.

Speaking of legal arguments and political reaction, the Fish and Wildlife Service accelerated the pace of its process for protecting species two years ago after a pair of legal settlements — and that has sparked a new round of congressional scrutiny for the Endangered Species Act. House Republicans say the law "has become a tool for litigation that drains resources away from real recovery efforts and blocks job-creating economic activities."

After 40 years, is it high time for an overhaul? Does the act need to be reworked to cover emerging environmental threats, or to reflect economic realities? Either way, feel free to weigh in with your comments.


I wonder which recovery efforts the Republicans think would work better. As for job-creating economic activities, that probably means logging, mining and farming, which continue to encroach on habitat for animals and pollute the environment. The issue is always at base about money, combined with a deep hatred for environmental protection because it causes inconveniences for business people. Such "conservatives" tend to say that they like “people” over “animals.” As long as they are allowed to dominate we will lose our forests, meadow lands and waterways constantly until we can't find a wild squirrel anywhere except in city parks. Or maybe the trend which has started, for larger wild predatory animals to migrate into the cities and become scavengers will increase. That isn't good either. I hope the Republicans don't win when Congress looks at the law. I'll watch for articles about congressional activity.



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Emily Dickinson's Envelope Writings: 'Gorgeous' Poetry In 3-D – NPR
by Craig Morgan Teicher
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The Gorgeous Nothings, by Emily Dickinson, Marta Werner and Jen Bervin is a new book of her last unpublished poems. ­ This daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson, in her late teens, is the only authenticated portrait of the poet past childhood.
Readers always seem to want to get closer to Emily Dickinson, the godmother of American poetry. Paging through her poems feels like burrowing nose-deep in her 19th century backyard — where "the grass divides as with a comb," as she writes in "A narrow Fellow in the Grass."

And yet the deeper one probes the poems, the more their meaning seems to recede, so that their minutiae suddenly speak for an almost inarticulable, often dark truth or wisdom at the core of things: "Zero at the Bone" is how she characterizes the more-than-fear she feels upon meeting the snake who is this poem's subject. Her images are so strange, and yet so startlingly accurate, that it's hard to believe one person could contain such contradictions. Who was this poet, really?

Until now, to fathom Dickinson, fans could make the pilgrimage to her Amherst, Mass., home, scrutinize the authenticated and contested daguerreotypes for clues and, of course, pore over her poems and letters. But now we have another way to approach the Emily who inspires and confounds us: this significant collection of facsimiles and transcriptions of late poems drafted — one might even say grafted — on leftover envelopes.

These 52 pieces were found, unbound, among Dickinson's papers, written on envelopes that had been used or addressed and unsent. They are as much works of visual as textual art, offering the chance to read into Dickinson's slanting handwriting. Her bubbly loops and long strokes suggest, to me at least, the odd confidence of one who knows the peculiar joy of refining and performing her own identity on a private stage, a bit like the names of boys or bands on the backs of middle-school notebooks.
And, if we agree with editor Marta Werner, Dickinson was playing not only with the arrangement of words in poetic lines, but the arrangement of different groups of words on different parts of these envelopes. On a folded-over lip of one envelope, she describes a "Drunken man" (who may also be dead, or almost dead), "Oblivion bending / over him," and, written slanted over the curled edge, "enfolding him / with tender / infamy." It's the medium making the metaphor here, something usually reserved for sculpture. This is poetry in 3-D.

These are late writings, probably composed after she'd sewn up the last of her famous "fascicles," the bound packets in which her poems were found after her death. So these are experiments, perhaps, begun after she'd set the bulk of her legacy in store for "immortality," one of her favorite words. Due, perhaps, to the limits these unusually shaped pages exerted on her writing, the best of these poems are among her most compressed and aphoristic. "A Pang," she writes, "is more / Conspicuous in Spring / In contrast with the / things that sing," blending colloquial and biblical speech in the kinds of enigmatic leaps that make her poems rush with wind.

­ The editors offer endless avenues of interpretation; the typed transcriptions of Dickinson's handwriting are superimposed atop the outlines of their corresponding envelopes, so the multidirectional layout of the text isn't lost. A series of esoteric indexes — by shape of the envelopes, by what direction they are turned, by whether or not they have "penciled divisions," for example — encourage the reader to speculate about the various relationships Dickinson may have conceived between paper and words.

It's a good season to chase after the ever-elusive Emily Dickinson. In addition to this book, there's a corresponding exhibit in Chicago, and all of the poet's online archives were recently organized into one accessible hub. This book is a rare gift for all poetry lovers. We are lucky to have more of Dickinson's ongoing "letter to the World / That never wrote to Me," an endlessly fascinating correspondence, addressed to any of us who find it — so long as we're willing to answer it with concentration and curiosity.


Emily Dickinson was the first poet I ever read on my own, which was in my early teen years. I loved mystery, from Stonehenge to haunted houses, and Emily Dickinson's writing is nothing if not mysterious. I also liked her plain presentation, without complex rhyming and meters to encumber the reading aloud, focusing much more on the meaning of the words. My favorite of her poems goes like this:

To make a prairie (1755)

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

The ideas and truths that she expressed are the heart of introverted thinking at its best. This poem contains the sheer magic that Dickinson's work often held. Like Haikus, the sparse wording adds to the impression of depth – blissful simplicity.




Calif. company finds special value in autistic employees – CBS
ByCarter Evans CBS News November 28, 2013

SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- The most surprising thing about Max Parker’s morning routine is that he has a job to go to -- at all.

He didn’t know a whole lot about it when he got into it. “It was pretty much all new stuff,” he says. But now, he seems to be excelling at it.
Parker is a software analyst. He’s also autistic. Parker says that when he was growing up, he never envisioned having a job like this.

Roughly 75 percent of autistic adults are unemployed, in part because the brain disorder makes it difficult to interact with others. But many on the autism spectrum also have an uncanny ability to focus intensely on minute details -- perfect for the tedious work of hunting for glitches in computer software.

“This is not a charity,” says Chad Hahn, the CEO of MindSpark. “And our employees are good at what they do.”
Hahn, a software designer, used to outsource work to India, but his wife, a social worker, convinced him “high-functioning” autistic adults, like Parker, are well suited for the job.

“If you and I look at a set of instructions over and over again, I don’t know about you, but I would miss some things,” Hahn says. “Max doesn’t miss things. He’s really good at it.”

“Finding jobs for people with autism that focus on technical skills, on concentration, on detail, is exactly the right thing to do,” says Dr. Marcel Just, who studies autism at Carnegie Mellon University.

Just says his research has found autistic brains are wired differently. Most people rely on the front of the brain to process the “big picture” around us. But with autism, it’s the opposite: thinking is dominated by parts of the brain that handle details.

“People with autism can zoom in on detail, with technical knowledge, with expertise, and zoom in, not be bothered by the larger picture and maybe find details that are wrong,” Just says.

Max Parker is one of three autistic employees at MindSpark, and more are training in an on-site classroom.

“Think about how hard it’s been like for them all these years, where people have dismissed them and their abilities, and maybe overlooked what they could do or could be,” Hahn says. “They just needed a chance. They have abilities that are quite valuable. That should be unlocked somehow. And that’s all we’re trying to do here.”
Providing opportunity -- and a paycheck.


This is a happy story. Autism is trying for parents sometimes when the child screams without end or won't talk, but if they are successfully schooled and trained, apparently they can do well as adults and learn to live with their disability. Their IQ varies from case to case.

The following information about autism is from Wikipedia:

“Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and verbal and non-verbal communication, and by restricted, repetitive or stereotyped behavior. The diagnostic criteria require that symptoms become apparent before a child is three years old.[2] Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their synapses connect and organize; how this occurs is not well understood.[3] It is one of three recognized disorders in the autism spectrum (ASDs), the other two being Asperger syndrome, which lacks delays in cognitive development and language, and pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified (commonly abbreviated as PDD-NOS), which is diagnosed when the full set of criteria for autism or Asperger syndrome are not met.[4]

"Autism has a strong genetic basis, although the genetics of autism are complex and it is unclear whether ASD is explained more by rare mutations, or by rare combinations of common genetic variants.[5] In rare cases, autism is strongly associated with agents that cause birth defects.[6] Controversies surround other proposed environmental causes, such as heavy metals, pesticides or childhood vaccines;[7] the vaccine hypotheses are biologically implausible and lack convincing scientific evidence.[8] The prevalence of autism is about 1–2 per 1,000 people worldwide, and it occurs about four times more often in boys than girls.[9

[13] "Early behavioral, cognitive, or speech interventions can help autistic children gain self-care, social, and communication skills.[12] Although there is no known cure,[12] there have been reported cases of children who recovered.[14] Not many children with autism live independently after reaching adulthood, though some become successful.[15] An autistic culture has developed, with some individuals seeking a cure and others believing autism should be accepted as a difference and not treated as a disorder.[16]

"There are many anecdotal reports, but few systematic studies, of aggression and violence in individuals with ASD. The limited data suggest that, in children with intellectual disability, autism is associated with aggression, destruction of property, and tantrums. A 2007 study interviewed parents of 67 children with ASD and reported that about two-thirds of the children had periods of severe tantrums and about one-third had a history of aggression, with tantrums significantly more common than in non-autistic children with language impairments.[29] A 2008 Swedish study found that, of individuals aged 15 or older discharged from hospital with a diagnosis of ASD, those who committed violent crimes were significantly more likely to have other psychopathological conditions such as psychosis.[30]

"Intensive, sustained special education programs and behavior therapy early in life can help children acquire self-care, social, and job skills,[12] and often improve functioning and decrease symptom severity and maladaptive behaviors;[132] claims that intervention by around age three years is crucial are not substantiated.[133] Available approaches include applied behavior analysis (ABA), developmental models, structured teaching, speech and language therapy, social skills therapy, and occupational therapy.[12] There is some evidence that early intensive behavioral intervention, an early intervention model for 20 to 40 hours a week for multiple years, is an effective behavioral treatment for some children with ASD.[134"