Blog of Jeff

The response to the H1N1 virus hasn’t been terrible, but I don’t think it has been reassuringly good either. Below are some links regarding H1N1 that go into my opinions on it. Mainly, I think it once again shows that Americans are self-absorbed and selfish with a lot of our policies and we won’t even stop and consider the impact of our policies on other countries. Even for ourselves, though, it doesn’t show much intelligence or competence.

· http://www.slate.com/id/2234342/ - This article summarizes a lot of h1n1 information.

· http://www.slate.com/id/2228700/ -This article summarizes the US decision not to use adjuvants (boosters) to cut in half the amount of vaccine we would need.

· http://abcnews.go.com/Health/SwineFluNews/story?id=8296948&page=1&cid=yahoo_pitchlist – ABC News article about the US not using adjuvants because of fear of vaccines.

· http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/2009/09/07/revere-swine-flu-adjuvant-essential-for-global-equity/ - Health blog that includes good adjuvant discussion and quotes from officials.

The way this plays out is more about World Health Organization decisions than by the US but the choices made by both fit together badly.

The World Health Organization recommended that production of season flu vaccines be completed in all major production facilities before shifting to H1N1 production, due to the set-up time that would be lost and have to be duplicated to switch back. That decision was made with awareness that H1N1 would peak sooner than seasonal flu, but they thought the timeline would still allow enough H1N1 vaccine to be in the world prior to peak. That decision is open to a lot of second guessing for several reasons.

The first reason was technological, in that it took longer to successfully implant and grow the virus in eggs than expected, eating into the available time window. It was a misjudgment to assume that the timeline of production of a brand new strain of flu vaccine would be exactly the same as previous strains. to The second reason was political. The WHO also recommended using booster agents, which would substantially reduce the amount of active ingredient needed for each dose. If the US had followed that piece of advice, there would now be more than double as many doses available right now. However, fear of vaccines in general and boosted flu vaccines in particular, led to the US choosing the path of least resistance and utilizing only unboosted vaccines. A third consideration is that most people have never been exposed to this H1N1 variant, meaning there is zero native resistance. However, many people have previously had the seasonal variant in circulation this year. Therefore, it would have been better to be late or have shortages on the seasonal flu vaccine, peaking probably in January, rather than the H1N1 flu, which is peaking now.

The anti-vaccine community thinks that any complications or deaths from vaccines are unacceptable. But they aren’t willing to accept the consequences of thousands, possibly millions of deaths from a planet that isn’t properly immunized. The Gates Foundation is one group has been very vocal in saying the US decision to not use boosted H1N1 flu vaccine will result in many people dying in the rest of the world that could have been saved with the use of boosted vaccines to reach a lot more people a lot faster. The other side effect is that because of delays in getting a substantial percentage of people immunized, the risk of the virus mutating into something worse will be increased.

Most likely, everyone will come out of the H1N1 scare thinking the response was good enough because H1N1 is not significantly more fatal than the regular seasonal flu. But if the disease had turned out to be as deadly as it first appeared in Mexico, this response would not have been good enough by a long shot. The next time a potentially deadly pandemic is discovered, the US (and the rest of the world) need to be able to move a lot faster and be willing to take more political risks or we could be looking at millions of fatalities.

In retrospect, it would have been better to shift some portion of the main five production facilities in the world immediately into H1N1 so that the obstacles to incubation could have been identified right away and some doses of both types would have been available to vulnerable populations and health care personnel before either peak hit. We also could have encouraged people to get H1N1 first, which makes much more sense. The US also needs to start some public awareness initiatives to explain that boosted vaccines are critical to being able to respond quickly to pandemics and start making boosted vaccines available at least as an option, possibly even a cheaper option to encourage it. If even just 10% of the population willingly chose boosted vaccines, it would still be a major benefit for everyone in the US and the rest of the world in stretching out limited supplies and reducing costs. Fear and ignorance are terrible reasons to condemn a lot of people in other countries to an avoidable death.

This is one of those public policy issues that won’t get much attention in this country and most people won’t ever really think about it. But it has major consequences on the rest of the world. In some ways, we are still the same country that handed Native Americans blankets infected with smallpox and thought we were doing them a favor. Part of what is frustrating is that this wasn’t even an intelligent public debate. The Health Department and CDC simply decided Americans are too ignorant, fearful, and uncaring about other people to even bother having a discussion. They may have been right, but that sure doesn’t sound like a policy decision based on hope, change, or better international relations, like those advocated by a certain candidate not so long ago.

William Saletan’s blog about artificial hymens is an interesting mix of dark humor and insanity. The basic idea is that the Chinese have invented a neat little $30 bag of fake blood that lets a woman bleed like she is a virgin. In some countries, that’s a neat little kinky sex toy. In some countries, it can be the difference between life and death, due to certain religions’ belief that a woman must bleed on her wedding night. Either from sex or from a rock, either one will do.

The Egyptian piece comes from the following quotes from an Associated Press piece, “Sheik Sayed Askar, a member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood who is on the parliamentary committee on religious affairs, said the kit will make it easier for Egyptian women to give in to temptation. He demanded the government take responsibility for fighting the product. … Prominent Egyptian religious scholar Abdel Moati Bayoumi said anyone who imports the artificial hymen should be punished. “This product encourages illicit sexual relations. Islamic culture forbids these relations except within the confines of marriage,” Bayoumi said. … “If this thing enters Egypt, the country is going to go to waste. God protect us,” commented a reader on the Web site of Egyptian newspaper Al-Youm Al-Sabie.”

Normally, it is multi-million dollar American movies that are threatening to destroy civilization. I can understand feelings of imminent cultural collapse when they are directed at Tom Cruise. But any country that can be brought down by a $30 Chinese sex toy really ought to go ahead and collapse now, so we can go on with life in the rest of the world.

This is also a great reminder of how moral relativism can fall really, really short. Cultural norms such as an afternoon siesta are fine. I’ve got no problem with a culture that naps. But beating and killing women on their wedding nights should be universally condemned. But it’s not, because the UN human rights council is a complete farce and nobody wants to tell another culture that their practices are barbaric, primitive, and unacceptable in the civilized world. (They have feelings. They are sensitive. They have such a long and proud history of killing women. We need to support them and nurture them until they learn better. Plus they sell us oil.) It’s also another issue that all those millions of peaceful, law-abiding moderate Moslems that we are always hearing about never stand up and address. We have plenty of wacko Christians around also but we also have no problem calling them wacko. And we certainly don’t let them kill their spouses on their honeymoons.

It is also a reminder that Egypt is one of the US’ best allies in that part of the world. With friends like these …

Looks like Saturday morning will be an early dose of work with a project set to kick off at around 5:30 AM. All so I can upgrade two storage arrays and a fibre switch with new firmware. That sounds like a really, really lame way to start a weekend, doesn’t it? And like most IT projects, it will be most successful if none of our end users know I was even there or did anything. It takes a lot of work and sacrifice to constantly keep your labor hidden.

I forgot the key part of my first blog. Here’s the actual church report. I guess I still have enough journalism training in me to recogize that I should actually include references for my blogs …

I am doing something I thought that I would never do, but I am writing this post in praise of the Catholic church. The church just released its bio-ethics paper that has been in the works for six years. I haven’t read it yet and I will probably disagree with a lot of its conclusions but I want to give them props for putting serious time and effort into asking questions that 99.9% of the population isn’t asking. In the case of bio-ethics, we’re quickly going into the land of scientists doing anything and everything that they possibly can without ever asking if they should. There are serious research efforts happening right now that make Dr. Frankenstein look like a pediatrician handing out lollipops and immunizations.

To my mind, one of the great tragedies of the abortion debate is that it seems to have frozen a lot of people’s views and opinions in time. The question of whether a woman has a right to an abortion is an important one but is almost quaint compared to some of the new ones that are coming every day. Right off the bat, we have over 400,000 estimated embryos in freezers in this country right now as left-overs from IVF procedures. That’s well over half-a-million around the globe and nobody has any clear idea about what to do with them. The biological parents have the right to decide, but most never do and are rarely counseled about it. I’m not a radical pro-lifer, but if I was, I would think that a campaign to save those half million embryos from either disposal or eternity in frozen limbo would be a higher priority that stopping abortions. I am also starting to lean against IVF procedures since they result in these spare embryos. (The Catholic church is also taking a stand against such procedures in its report so I may end up agreeing with them on more than I originally expected …)

I lean pro-choice with some limits but I have to honestly say that the thought of half-a-million embryos in freezers really gives me pause and doubt about the consequences of not believing in some set of rights for embryos. My general views have generally followed a belief that embryos do have rights but that those rights are subordinate to the mother’s. That puts me generally in the pro-choice camp. However, since I do believe in some embryo rights, it is really, really hard to say it is OK to put them in a freezer forever or to throw them in the trash especially since the body of the mother is removed from the equation.

If the fetus is not in the mother’s body, why should her rights trump the embryos’ rights? Also, why should her rights trump the father’s? I can see giving a woman final say on an abortion issue since it is her body not the father’s, but for a donated egg and sperm that results in a embryo outside her body, it really seems the two biological parents would have totally equal rights in terms of deciding what can and can’t be done with the fetuses. These are tough questions that families, communities, legal systems, religious groups and governments should have addressed before we had all of these embryos sitting in freezers. It’s too late now for a good answer but we should be thinking about these things before thousands more end up in frozen limbo.

Cloning, experimentation on fetuses, bringing fetuses to term specifically for organ harvesting, using animals to grow human organs, etc., are all scientific realities at this time. I don’t have any grand ideas or conclusions about any of those things, just a recognition of my own moral doubt and confusion about them. With that it mind, I am willing to salute the Catholic Church for taking the lead on asking these questions because I don’t think there is any other organization, particularly at the international level, that could bring them up as seriously and with such a large audience. Even if a lot of people (including myself) end up disagreeing with their conclusions, at least they are getting the conversation a lot closer to where it needs to be in terms of modern scientific reality.

As a side note and point of information about where science is headed, consider this article. It is about a serious effort to bring a mammoth to life by manipulting the dna of an elephant. The same technology is being considered with manipulating chimpanzee dna with that of a neanderthal. Technically, neanderthal’s aren’t human and are therefore exempt from most currently existing bio-ethics policies regarding cloning and experimentation. There is a definite reality to bio-ethics and scientific research and that is that there is a very limited amount of time before the question “Should we do this?” gets replaced with the question of “Should we have done this?”

With that in mind, once again I want to commend the Catholic Church for asking some of those questions and trying to get a conversation started. Even if I end up disagreeing with most of their policy recommendations, at least they have some.

I saw a demonstration today of some pretty impressive technology and business models. It is through a company called Motionpoint (http://www.motionpoint.com/corp/). They use a team of human translators with the use of technology tools to tell them which parts of a website have changed and then they build a translated version of it. The really cool part is that they do not use a mirrored site. Instead, they actually replace the graphics and text from the original site and layer the translated version on top. They make updates within 24 hours of the original site being changed with robotic searches of the site to pick up changes and put them in the translator’s queue. I am really not sure how this compares in cost to other approaches, but in theory, it seems to have big advantages in economies of scale and technology over many translation services. The sales person suggested that it for companies already using a mirrored site approach, Motionpoint generall represents a big savings and that would make sense.

It also means that it is easier than ever to make a business global. For $20,000 or so a year, a company can use the internet to reach audiences that used to require dedicated staff or extremely expensive translation services. I am not sure that I will use their company any time soon, but I definitely think they have a good idea. It seems that every year, language becomes less and less of a barrier for businesses.