Day: May 6, 2009

Think H1N1 Flu Is Bad? Dengue Fever’s a Bitch

Buck Banks

While the number of confirmed cases of H1N1 influenza remain in the hundreds in Mexico and the scores in the United States, the number of confirmed cases of dengue fever numbers in the many thousands in several states in Brazil. In late April the Brazilian government released statistics on confirmed cases of dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever (a worse version).

The rapid increase in cases was attributed to heavy rains and large amounts of trash accumulating in cities.

The most recent totals released by the Ministry of Health in early April 2009 said that throughout the country dengue virus infected 161,414 people, which many believe is lower than the true number of infections. The state secretariat statistics are typically higher and more accurate that the ministry’s.

One example is Bahia. In the totals of the federal government were 41,093 dengue cases. The government of Bahia said that it reached 55,483 cases in Bahia through April 17, 2009, which represents a 220 percent increase compared to the same period in 2008. Of that total, 47 people have died of dengue.

The municipalities of Jequie, Itabuna, Porto Seguro, Ilheus, and Salvador had nearly half of the confirmed dengue cases in Bahia. Of that total, 389 people were victims of dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF). According to the bulletin, 82 percent of the municipalities in Bahia recorded dengue cases.

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Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Do you realize that under our dynamic leadership of our leader, we have gone from 55 and probably to 40 (Senate seats) in two election cycles, and if the tea leaves that I read are correct, we will wind up with about 36 after this election cycle. So if leadership means anything, it means you don’t lose … approximately 19 seats in three election cycles with good leadership.

— Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY), quoted by the Louisville Courier-Journal , blasting fellow Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Pensito Flu Update: Understanding the True Risk of Infection

Buck Banks

This is a very good article from the Harvard Business Review’S editor’s blog titled “On Your Way to Get a Flu Shot Don’t Trip” that provides some badly needed perspective on the current H1N1 influenza outbreak.

Risk is hard to understand.

For example, if I said that we should be more worried right now about dying from a slip, trip or stumble on level ground than about dying from swine flu, you might think I’m nuts. But I’m not. Statistically, at this moment, we’re about 700 times more likely to die stumbling than from getting swine flu. If swine flu fatalities were a quart of oil, then stumbling fatalities would be about 3 oil drums.

Even if it’s true that tripping is more lethal than swine flu, it’s hard to fathom. H1N1 just seems much scarier right now. Why is that?

Mainly, it’s our brains. They’re not wired to be objective. The analytical response to risk–the part when we come to understand how likely or unlikely something is to occur–is subsequent and sometimes subservient to our emotional response to risk–the part when we’re scared out of our wits.

That is, first we fear, then we figure. Evolutionarily speaking, this makes sense. For the species to survive, we had to meet every uncertainty with caution.

Unfortunately, we didn’t evolve in the presence of mass media, and mass media really messes with our brains. Images, sounds, access to rare but spectacular events–and the ability to instantly share all of that with each other–actually reinforces our emotional response to risk. It makes it harder for us to analyze the risk objectively, to put it in a realistic perspective.

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Michael Savage Makes List of Britain’s Least Wanted

Trish

Michael Savage, nee Michael Alan Weiner

England has it right when it comes to figuring out that hate speech is not defined by whether you agree with it. The country has banned some of America’s most famous haters, who stack up quite well in a group of 16 of the world’s most odious troublemakers.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith took the unprecedented step of “naming and shaming” 16 individuals who were barred from coming to the UK between November and March.

Most of those on the list are foreign Muslim preachers whom the Home Office believes would incite hatred or glorify terrorism if they were allowed in. But the list also includes a number of white supremacists, homophobic preachers and an anti-Arab Jewish militant. Two Slav supremacists on the list have been incarcerated in a Russian jail since October 2007.

One of these idiots is threatening a lawsuit. You might have heard of him.

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Quip du Jour

Trish

The person President Obama wants to put on the Supreme Court is “far to the left,” says one Senate Republican. A “hard-left judicial activist,” a conservative group says. The nominee better remember that judges have to “subordinate themselves to the law,” another GOP senator warned Tuesday.

Imagine what they’ll say when they actually know who the nominee is.

Mike Madden, writing an article for Salon.com, titled, “The Republicans are against it! Whatever it is.“

Can the GOP Survive As a Neo-Confederate Bastion?

Jon Ponder

We are living in a moment of high paradox in political history. Over the past decade, the Republican Party — which was born in the 1850s as an upstart, anti-slavery alternative to the conservative Democratic Party, and whose first successful presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, freed the South’s slaves — has become the last bastion of the Confederacy’s ideal of a Christian, white supremacist oligarchy.

It’s hard to see how the GOP can survive without rolling up its welcome mat for the tattered remnants of the Confederacy, once and for all.

The good news for the country is that the voter rolls of the neo-Confederate GOP are shrinking at the same time its median age is skewing much older, according to recent demographic studies based on polls and voting data:

  • More Southern: Results from the election last November show that the GOP’s power base has retracted into the Deep South: “On Nov. 4 Obama won 55 of the 152 electoral votes of the 11 states of the old Confederacy. While he was winning in Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, John McCain was outperforming George Bush throughout the region as a whole. The Republican vote in the South in 2008 actually increased over 2004.”
  • Shrinking: A Washington Post/ABC poll released last week found that only 21 percent of Americans — that’s about one in five — will admit that they are Republicans.
  • Less diverse and older: Demographic research reported last summer found that only 2 percent of Latinos and just 1 percent of African Americans claim membership in the GOP. The same report found that the party is also getting older — only 15 percent of GOP registrants are under 35 years old.

Of course, the GOP has faced annihilation before — notably in the 1930s after its economic policies led to the Great Depression, in the 1950s when Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy led his party down the anti-communist rabbit hole and in the 1970s after the party forced its own president, Richard Nixon, out of office by threatening to impeach him during the Watergate scandal.

After the debacles of the 1930s and 1950s, the GOP righted itself by waiting out the American public’s notoriously short memories for political skullduggery — and by nominating liberal Republican governors and moderate presidents before regaining control of Congress decades later, in the 1950s and the 1990s, respectively.

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