Tag Archives: disease

Are Solar Companies Ripping You Off?

by NataliaWarfield Posted on February 10, 2015

green4us

Members of Congress and a big utility are teaming up to raise that question. But experts think their concerns are overblown. Solar panels on the roof of a house in Apache Junction, Arizona. Darryl Webb/AP Back in December, a group of Republican members of Congress from Arizona and Texas sent a worried letter to the Federal Trade Commission. Solar panel companies, the letter claimed, might be using deceptive marketing practices to lease their rooftop systems to homeowners without fully disclosing the financial risks. The concerns were similar to those raised a month earlier by Democratic lawmakers—also from Arizona and Texas—in a letter sent to the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Both letters raised the specter of serious problems in the business model of the country’s fastest-growing energy source. But as the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting revealed last month, the Republicans’ letter was originally drafted by an employee of Arizona Public Service, the state’s biggest electric utility and a long-time opponent of third-party solar companies. The draft was passed by APS to the office of Rep. Paul Gosar (R), which made a few changes, got the Congressman’s signature, and sent it off, according to AZCIR’s report. (The letter is here; the highlights were added by AZCIR to show where changes had been made from the original APS draft.) It’s not the first time APS has engaged in this type of secretive advocacy to undermine solar, an exploding industry that poses an existential threat to the old-school utility’s bottom line. In 2013, the company outed itself as the backer of two secretive nonprofits that ran an aggressive anti-solar ad campaign in the state. Back then, the company’s target was net metering, the policy that requires utility companies to buy excess electricity produced by its customers’ rooftop panels. Now APS’s focus appears to have shifted to the marketing practices of companies that lease solar panels to homeowners. “This is the next evolution in the utility playbook,” said Susan Glick, a spokesperson for The Alliance for Solar Choice, an advocacy group that represents some of the country’s biggest solar companies. APS wants “to demonize rooftop solar and ensure they have a monopoly,” she said. The cost of rooftop solar systems has plummeted in recent years. But some solar companies have realized that many homeowners are still unable to pay north of $10,000 to buy and install panels. Instead, the trendy option is solar leasing: A company installs panels on your roof for free and then charges you a monthly fee for the power they produce, which in theory is less than what you paid your electric utility. A recent industry survey found that about half of all residential solar systems are leased rather than owned. A spokesperson for Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D)—one of the authors of the Democratic letter—told Climate Desk that Kirkpatrick wanted to “take the lead” on the letter to the CFPB “after receiving numerous complaints about solar rooftop leasing practices in Arizona.” The spokesperson added that “any suggestion that the congresswoman issued the letter because of coercion by the utilities is false.” The APS-authored letter from Gosar and his GOP colleagues was more specific. It alleged that, as part of their rush to sign up customers before a federal tax credit expires, solar leasing companies have been overstating the savings that homeowners will receive. Neither Gosar’s office nor APS returned requests for comment. Both letters drew parallels between solar leasing and the subprime mortgage crisis, in which financial companies used shady lending practices to lure home buyers into mortgages they couldn’t really afford. It’s been a couple months now since the letters were fired off, and the response from the feds has been mixed. On Jan. 12 the CFPB responded to Kirkpatrick and her peers, writing that the agency is “currently studying a number of overlapping issues that may implicate the leasing of rooftop panels.” A CFPB spokesperson declined to elaborate on what exactly those issues are and whether these inquiries were instigated by Kirkpatrick’s letter. An FTC spokesperson said the agency had not yet taken any action on solar leasing. Back in Arizona, last month the state’s Corporation Commission opened a docket to collect preliminary information on solar leasing, with the possibility of a more thorough investigation in the future, a spokesperson said. So is the congressional prodding warranted, or just glorified lobbying for one freaked-out utility company? For all the noise, actual complaints against solar leasing companies seem to be relatively rare. According to the AZCIR report, Gosar’s chief of staff said he had not actually seen any complaints, and a spokesperson for Kirkpatrick “declined to answer questions about the quantity of reports, the way the reports reached their office, or to confirm that they reviewed any consumer complaints.” The Corporation Commission docket currently contains only one complaint, from a Scottsdale resident who claimed that “uneducated residents are bamboozled into these programs by unscrupulous businesses looking to make a quick buck.” That was essentially the complaint in a separate 2013 lawsuit against SunRun, a leading solar leasing company, brought by a California man who claimed he was misled about cost savings. SunRun denied the allegation, and that claim has since been dropped, the man’s law firm said. And a smattering of news outlets have reported cases of homeowners finding it more difficult than they expected to sell homes that are attached to a solar lease. But Travis Lowder, an energy finance analyst with the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab, said complaints like this tend to be rare, isolated incidents that don’t reflect systemic flaws with the solar leasing business model. Lowder runs a team that has spent the last several years developing standardized contracts and practices for solar leasing companies. “The solar industry has been very proactive on consumer protection laws,” Lowder said. “They don’t want to put the consumer in the position where the consumer is going to default, because they need that cash flow” to support the large up-front costs of solar installations on other roofs. The biggest issue, Lowder said, comes down the long lifespan of a typical solar lease: 20 years. Over that time scale, a solar lease ultimately amounts to thousands of dollars of debt taken on by homeowners. What’s more, most lease contracts include terms that gradually increase the monthly fees paid by homeowners over time. The pitch to customers is that the solar fee rate will escalate less than the cost of grid electricity. (Over the last decade, the average cost of electricity nationwide rose 36 percent.) The problem is that it’s practically impossible to make iron-clad predictions about cost savings that far in advance. Unforeseen changes to US energy policy or to a customer’s local electricity market, for example, could potentially reduce savings from solar over the grid, while homeowners remain locked in to their original contracts. Energy investors and analysts make those predictive calculations all the time, but always with a number of assumptions about future market conditions and an appreciation for the built-in uncertainty. So the challenge is communicating that uncertainty to customers. Solar leases “are certainly not risk-free,” said Nathanael Green, a renewables policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Still, he said, the agitation from APS is “almost without a doubt a politically motivated attack.” “That doesn’t mean it’s all nonsense,” added Green. “You have to separate out some of the silliness from the real things we can do a better job of.” Either way, courts and state and federal regulators will now have a chance to weigh in. Because Arizona is among the country’s largest solar markets, with a colorful history of conflict between incumbent power companies and their renewable rivals, the outcome there could set the stage for how solar leasing is treated elsewhere. Nicholas Mack, the general counsel of solar financing company Clean Power Finance, has worked with NREL on developing best practices for solar leasing. The solar industry will be ready if the government comes knocking, he said: “I do think we can withstand the scrutiny.”

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Are Solar Companies Ripping You Off?

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Are Solar Companies Ripping You Off?

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Do You Live in a State With Low Vaccination Rates?

by ZenaidaBecerra Posted on February 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Measles is making a comeback: The extremely contagious and potentially deadly disease was eliminated in the US in 2000, thanks to a highly effective vaccine and laws requiring kids to be vaccinated before starting school. But in recent years, it has become easier for parents to opt out—and vaccination rates are slipping. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a major spike in cases in 2014, and 2015 might be even worse—in just over a month, there have been 102 cases (and counting) reported across 14 states, mostly connected to December’s Disneyland outbreak.

As we reported yesterday, Anne Schuchat, an assistant surgeon general and the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, stressed that measles could get “a foothold in the United States and become endemic again,” if people don’t get vaccinated.

Overall, national vaccination rates seem high: The median rate of coverage for the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, administered to most before entry into kindergarten, was 94.7 percent for the 2013-2014 school year. But, as Schuchat points out, the rate is lower in communities where unvaccinated families tend to cluster. In some areas, low rates might have more to do with access to clinics than with beliefs about vaccinations.

“The national estimates hide what’s going on state to state. The state estimates hide what’s going on community to community. And within communities there may be pockets,” said Schuchat. “It’s one thing if you have a year where a number of people are not vaccinating, but year after year in terms of the kids that are exempting, you do start to accumulate.”

Note: This second map has been revised.

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Do You Live in a State With Low Vaccination Rates?

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Elizabeth Warren Says Gay Men Should Be Able To Donate Blood

by RamonAlaniz Posted on December 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Elizabeth Warren and a host of Democratic lawmakers are demanding the Obama administration stand up for gay rights.

A coalition of 80 senators and House members spearheaded by the Massachusetts senator—alongside Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Reps. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.)—sent a letter Monday to Sylvia Burwell, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, protesting the long-standing prohibition that bars men who have had sex with men from donating blood in the United States.

In 1983, the federal government instituted a lifetime ban for any man who has had sex with another man—even once—at any time after 1977. That rule went into effect during the early days of AIDS panic when the disease was largely unknown. Now, technology exists that can detect HIV within a few weeks of infection.

Last month, an HHS panel that handles blood policy advocated tossing out the lifetime ban—but argued for replacing it with a measure that would keep any sexually active gay man from contributing to the blood supply: a ban on donations from any man who had sex with another man within the past year.

To the Democrats in Congress, that slight improvement isn’t nearly enough. The letter calls both the lifetime ban and the one-year deferral policies “discriminatory” and “unacceptable.” The lawmakers urged an end to the lifetime ban by the “end of 2014,” while also pushing for a less-stringent restriction than the one-year celibacy requirement.

“The recommendation to move to a one-year deferral policy is a step forward relative to current policies; however, such a policy still prevents many low-risk individuals from donating blood,” the letter says. “If we are serious about protecting and enhancing our nation’s blood supply, we must embrace science and reject outdated stereotypes.”

The letter may have been better directed at the Food and Drug Administration. That agency’s Blood Products Advisory Panel met earlier this month to consider the one-year deferral proposed by HHS, but the panel of experts seemed more inclined to let the current policy stand rather than loosen the restrictions.

Here’s the full letter:

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Letter to HHS on blood donation ban (PDF)

Letter to HHS on blood donation ban (Text)

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Elizabeth Warren Says Gay Men Should Be Able To Donate Blood

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Car Emissions vs. Car Crashes: Which One Is Deadlier?

by FrederiHanes Posted on November 11, 2014

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared in CityLab and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The ever-thought-provoking David Levinson posed a question at his Transportationist blog earlier this week that’s worth a longer look: Are you more likely to die from being in a car crash or from breathing in car emissions? If your gut reaction is like mine, then you’ve already answered in favor of crashes. But when you really crunch the numbers, the question not only becomes tougher to answer, it raises important new questions of its own.

First, let’s look at US traffic fatalities at the national level. For consistency with the pollution statistics (more on that in a moment), we’ll focus on 2005. That year, there were 43,510 traffic crash fatalities in the United States, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That’s a fatality rate of roughly 14.7 per 100,000 Americans.

Now we turn to deaths attributable to air pollution—more specifically, to particulate matter produced by cars. A research team led by Fabio Caiazzo of MIT, who appears from his university profile to be an actual rocket scientist, recently quantified the impact of air pollution and premature death in the United States for the year 2005. They reported that about 52,800 deaths were attributable to particulate matter from road transportation alone. (Road pollution had the largest share of any individual pollution sector, at around a quarter of all emissions-related deaths.) That’s a mortality rate of roughly 17.9 per 100,000 Americans.

Straight fatality figures make a strong case that car emissions are deadlier than car crashes.

By that estimate, road-related particulate matter was responsible for about 19 percent more deaths, nationwide, than car crashes were in 2005. And keep in mind that particulate matter isn’t the only air pollutant produced by cars (though it is the most significant type). Caiazzo and company attribute another 5,250 annual deaths to road-related ozone concentrations, for instance. In other words, the true health impact of auto emissions may be much greater.

At the city level, this broad conclusion remains the same. Here are the mortality totals and rates attributable to road-related particulate matter in five major metro areas tracked by Caiazzo and colleagues: New York (3,615 / 28.5), Los Angeles (2,092 / 23.3), Chicago (1,379 / 28.4), Dallas (374 / 23.2), Washington, D.C. (533 / 28.6). The rates are well over 20 per 100,000 people in all five places.

Now here are the fatality totals and rates from car crashes in the same five metros, via the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Granted, these figures are from 2009 instead of 2005, but even taking that inconsistency into account, the difference is striking: New York (986 / 5.1), Los Angeles (848 / 6.6), Chicago (565 / 5.9), Dallas (611 / 9.8), Washington, D.C. (408 / 7.5). In no case does the fatality rate even reach double digits.

These straight fatality figures make a strong case that car emissions are deadlier than car crashes at both the national and major metro levels. But death is only one measure of these health impacts. Age of death matters, too, especially since younger people tend to be involved in fatal car crashes. In 2012, for instance, about 55 percent of the people who suffered motor fatalities were under age 45. Caiazzo et al. report that emissions tend to cut lives short about 12 years, whereas crashes cut them short about 35 years.

Levinson tries to adjust for age through the Global Burden of Disease database, which includes a measure called Years of Life Lost. In 2010, there were 1,641,050 years of life lost attributable to particulate matter, against 1,873,160 years of life lost to road injuries.

That might seem like a near wash, but in fact the gap is much wider, because the these data reflect all air pollution, not just road-related air pollution. If we figure (based on Caiazzo*) that 25 percent of all deaths attributable to air pollution come via car emissions, then road injuries account for more than four times as many years of life lost as particulate matter from cars—1,873,160 to 410,288.

The absence of a clear single answer is a revelation in itself, suggesting that the problems are more on par than we typically treat them.

Circling back to the original question, whether car crashes or auto emissions is deadlier, we find any answer requires additional parameters. Strictly speaking, Americans appear more likely to die from auto emissions. In terms of wasted life potential, crashes seem the bigger danger. If anything, the absence of a clear single answer is a revelation in itself, suggesting that the problems are more on par than we typically treat them.

So why don’t elected leaders pay as much attention to emissions-attributable deaths as they do to car fatalities? The answer no doubt has a lot to do with something Levinson’s University of Minnesota colleague, Julian Marshall, said during their discussion of the topic: “no death certificate says ‘air pollution’ as cause of death.” Rather, emissions are yet another risk factor and invisible killer in a world full of risk factors and invisible killers. As such they’re convenient (and perhaps even comforting) to ignore. A road death, meanwhile, is stark and tragic and undeniable—in political terms, a much stronger platform.

But what should cities do about it? Well, they can start by drawing more attention to the problem. A true Vision Zero campaign, for instance, would acknowledge that even a New York without road fatalities wouldn’t be a New York without car-related deaths and illnesses. (That’s not to criticize this initiative; just to make a point.) As a stronger step, cities can follow the likes of London, which recently announced an additional tax on emissions-heavy cars, and start charging these drivers the true cost of their social impact (or something closer to it). A few drivers can pay now, or general public health can pay later, but everyone pays eventually.

* It’s worth pointing out that the Caiazzo study and the GBD reach vastly different conclusions about how deaths are attributable to total emissions in a given year: roughly 200,000 for the former to roughly 103,000 to the latter.

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Car Emissions vs. Car Crashes: Which One Is Deadlier?

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How Unscientific Ebola Steps in U.S. Could Help Spread Virus Elsewhere

by Myrna Posted on October 28, 2014

How hyper-reactive quarantine steps in the United States could worsen the Ebola epidemic in Africa — and perhaps beyond. Read article here – How Unscientific Ebola Steps in U.S. Could Help Spread Virus Elsewhere

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How Unscientific Ebola Steps in U.S. Could Help Spread Virus Elsewhere

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An American Doctor in Sierra Leone Explains How to Fight Ebola

by JaniStanton Posted on October 24, 2014

Mother Jones

With Ebola’s arrival in the United States, some health care workers are questioning how prepared their state-of-the-art hospitals are for the disease. Despite these problems, and some serious missteps in Dallas that led to the infection of two nurses, it’s unlikely that there will be a widespread outbreak here.

More MoJo coverage of the Ebola crisis.


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Liberia Says It’s Going to Need a Lot More Body Bags


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Liberians Explain Why the Ebola Crisis Is Way Worse Than You Think

But in the Ebola-ravaged countries of West Africa, where the disease has infected more than 9,900 people and killed more than 4,800, health workers are facing a much more daunting task. They aren’t simply adapting an existing health care system to deal with the crisis—in many ways, they actually have to build one from the ground up.

Sierra Leone, which has a population of 6 million, only recently emerged from a 10-year civil war and has been rebuilding ever since. From 2009 to 2013, the country spent just $96 per person on health care, according to the World Bank. (The United States spent $8,895 per person during the same period.) So when the virus struck in March, a health system that hardly existed to begin with was stretched to the point of collapse.

Dan Kelly, an American doctor with the University of California, San Francisco, has been working in Sierra Leone for eight years at a health organization called Wellbody Alliance that he co-founded. And he’s been fighting Ebola there since shortly after the start of the outbreak. In an interview with Indre Viskontas on this week’s Inquiring Minds podcast, he said that the first order of business in fighting the disease has been the creation of a “pseudo health care system” with support from international aid groups and agencies like the World Health Organization.

But that new system has to be managed by skilled health care workers—often from developed countries—and Kelly says there simply isn’t enough manpower to go around.

“The crux of this crisis is the human resource issue and staffing,” Kelly explained from Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital. “We don’t have enough people on the ground here to mentor Sierra Leoneans to show them leadership, to accompany them on the way forward, to even provide our own expertise to manage Ebola patients and staff these treatment units.”

Kelly says that as the disease has overwhelmed efforts to control it, doctors and other health workers have been reluctant to come to West Africa to help out. As the outbreak gives way to panic, he says, some worry that border closings or other obstacles could leave them stranded. With so many cases in the region today, would-be volunteers are also fearful of being infected themselves. (On Thursday, several days after Kelly spoke to Inquiring Minds, Craig Spencer, an American doctor who had been working with Ebola patients in Guinea, was diagnosed with the disease after returning to New York.)

Kelly’s organization is teaming up with Partners In Health, an NGO that provides health care to poor people around the world, to recruit medical professionals who are willing to accept the risks of treating Ebola patients in West Africa. Potential volunteers can sign up on the recruitment page of the Partners In Health website. After an interview and training with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they are sent to the Kono District of Sierra Leone or Grande Gedeh County in Liberia to help fight the disease.

“We’ve thought through, carefully, a lot of the challenges in getting staff,” Kelly says. “It’s not like I’m just sitting here saying, ‘Oh, we need staff, we need boots on the ground, we need technical expertise, but I have no idea how you’re going to get there.’ We know, it’s just that other people need to know as well.”

You can listen to the full interview with Kelly below (starting at roughly 2:40).

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An American Doctor in Sierra Leone Explains How to Fight Ebola

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Rwanda Hits Back at America’s Ebola Paranoia

by BradyT03jjkzycx Posted on October 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Rwanda will be begin screening all Americans entering the country for Ebola, regardless if they’re exhibiting symptoms or not, government officials in the East African nation announced Tuesday. Coincidence? The new measure comes just days after two Rwandan students were denied enrollment at a New Jersey school over Ebola fears, even though Rwanda has had zero cases of Ebola. The United States, on the other hand, has had three confirmed cases. Rwanda is also more than 2,500 miles from the closest Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

The US Embassy in Rwanda explains the situation:

On October 19, the Rwandan Ministry of Health introduced new Ebola Virus Disease screening requirements. Visitors who have been in the United States or Spain during the last 22 days are now required to report their medical condition—regardless of whether they are experiencing symptoms of Ebola—by telephone by dialing 114 between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. for the duration of their visit to Rwanda (if less than 21 days), or for the first 21 days of their visit to Rwanda. Rwandan authorities continue to deny entry to visitors who traveled to Guinea, Liberia, Senegal, or Sierra Leone within the past 22 days.

Although there’s no way to tell if the screenings are indeed motivated by retaliation for the ignorant panic displayed by the New Jersey school, this sure is an interesting turn of events.

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Rwanda Hits Back at America’s Ebola Paranoia

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Survey: Four Out of Five Nurses Have Gotten No Ebola Training At All

by KennethCovingto Posted on October 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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A new survey conducted by the National Nurses Union shows US hospitals may not be adequately prepared to handle Ebola patients, should the virus continue to spread. Out of the 2,200 nurses who responded to the union’s questionnaire, 85 percent reported that their hospitals had not provided education on Ebola. 76 percent said their institution had no policy for how to admit and handle patients potentially infected with the virus. More than a third claimed their hospitals didn’t have enough safety supplies, including eye protection and fluid resistant gowns.

The survey results were announced on Sunday, just after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that a health worker in Texas had tested positive for the virus. The CDC’s director, Thomas Frieden cited a “breach of protocol” as the likely reason.

Now—as agency officials scramble to figure out just what that breach was—nurses are pushing back. On Monday, NNU nurses in red shirts rallied in Oakland, Calif. with signs reading, “Stop Blaming Nurses. Stop Ebola.”

“We have been surveying nurses for almost two months about Ebola preparedness,” Charles Idelson, an NNU spokesman, said Monday. “What these survey results clearly indicate is that hospitals are still not doing enough to be properly prepared to respond.”

The CDC has announced plans to deploy an Ebola response team “within hours” at any hospital where an Ebola patient is admitted. At a press conference, Frieden said the agency is responding to calls from hospitals that are underprepared to handle the crisis.

On Monday, Frieden said the the CDC is also working with hospitals to better train health workers on Ebola precautions.”We have to rethink the way we address Ebola infection control,” he said. For example, he said, in some cases health workers may actually be wearing too much protective gear, making it harder to remove and dispose of the material.

The NNU survey showed that, even as the CDC called for more hands-on training, especially on how to properly put on and remove safety equipment, few hospitals have provided it for their employees. Ideslson says most are simply pointing nurses to information on their websites, or linking to CDC information. Staffing is another concern, with 63 percent of nurses reporting that hospital facilities won’t adjust the number of assigned patients per nurse to reflect the additional time required to care for infectious patients.

“We are going to continue to protest the failure of so many of these hospitals to put adequate safety measures in place,” Idelson said; he wouldn’t rule out the potential for healthcare workers to walk out on strike, much as Liberian health care workers have.

The American Hospital Association, an organization that represents nearly 5,000 hospitals nationwide, is now calling on hospitals to bolster their training regimens, turned down my request for an interview, but sent a statement saying, “We strongly encourage all hospitals to conduct employee retraining on how to use personal protective equipment to protect themselves from Ebola and other potentially deadly communicable diseases.”

Even if hospitals are prepared, however, it can be difficult to comply with both patient needs and the social blowback that comes with an Ebola diagnosis. The New York Times reported yesterday that Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, a center that had prepared for an outbreak long before the current crisis began, struggled with the county threatening to stop sewer service, couriers refusing to transport blood samples, and pizza delivery services refusing to come to any part of the hospital. And as my colleague Tim Murphy has reported, Louisiana’s attorney general has said the state, which processes a wide variety of hazardous wastes from around the nation, may take legal action to stop the incinerated belongings of deceased Ebola patient Eric Duncan from coming to one of its landfills.

In his press conference, Frieden warned that such fears are unfounded and counterproductive. “The enemy here is a virus. It’s not a person, it’s not a country, it’s not a place, it’s not a hospital—it’s a virus. It’s a virus that’s tough to fight, but together I’m confident that we will stop it.”

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Survey: Four Out of Five Nurses Have Gotten No Ebola Training At All

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Mark Zuckerberg Just Donated $25 Million to Fight Ebola

by JessikaSegura Posted on October 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have donated $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help combat the Ebola crisis, which has killed more than 4,400 people in West Africa. Zuckerberg announced the nice chunk of cash via his Facebook on Tuesday:

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Post by Mark Zuckerberg.

Scaremongers in Congress and the media have Americans in a tizzy about Ebola: Nearly two-third of Americans now fear the virus will soon infect them or or someone they know. Although Zuckerberg’s donation won’t do much to quell the the panic, it’s certainly a nice response to recent criticism that Silicon Valley types have done little-to-nothing to combat the ongoing public health crisis.

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Mark Zuckerberg Just Donated $25 Million to Fight Ebola

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How deforestation helped unleash Ebola

by ShermanTackett Posted on October 13, 2014

Treebola

How deforestation helped unleash Ebola

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13 Oct 2014 5:38 PM

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Perhaps you have heard about Ebola, otherwise known as The Most Terrifying Disease Of Our Modern Times (Sorry, MERs; panic is a fickle friend). But you might not have heard that Ebola’s origin story also features a favorite environmental arch-villain? And by “favorite,” I mean “actually the worst”: deforestation.

You see, the most recent outbreak of this extra-deadly strain of the Ebola virus began last December, in a town called Meliandou in the sleepy “Forest Region” of Guinea. That is, it used to be forested, as a recent article in Vanity Fair pointed out:

Trees were felled to make way for farms or burned down for charcoal. Endless truckloads of timber were shipped to construction companies. The forest suffered another trauma as mining interests — the Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto, the omnipresent Chinese — pushed aggressively to exploit the country’s natural resources (bauxite mostly). As the forests disappeared, so too did the buffer separating humans from animals — and from the pathogens that animals harbor.

And that buffer was not in place when one fateful fruit bat came into contact with a human toddler late last year:

Ordinary life in Meliandou came to an end on the day last December when the Ebola virus, which had last claimed a fatality thousands of miles away, arrived in the village, most likely in the body of a fruit bat — its natural non-human reservoir, according to a virtual consensus among scientists. Mining and clear-cutting had driven bats from their natural habitats and occasionally closer to people, like those of Meliandou. And fruit bats love palm and mango, which ripen in the village’s remaining trees. Bats also feed in colonies, which makes them tempting targets: a single shotgun blast can bring down 10.

While in many ways Ebola qualifies as a natural disaster, it’s worth remembering that the distinction between “natural” and “human-made” is a fine one. Sandy was a “natural” disaster, for example, but New York City’s bad coastal infrastructure made it worse. Same with Ebola: What could have been an exclusively harmless fruit-bat affair instead took a leap across the thinning fringe of wilderness, traveled by land and by air in our increasingly interconnected world and — well, here we are.

There’s a lot more deep and very sad thinking about epidemics, mourning, and the risks health-workers take to care for others in the Vanity Fair article here. Read it — but maybe bring a box of tissues and a hazmat suit.

Source:
Hell in the Hot Zone

, Vanity Fair.

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How deforestation helped unleash Ebola

Posted in Anchor, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How deforestation helped unleash Ebola