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This Florida Community May Unleash Genetically Modified Mosquitoes to Fight Zika and Dengue

by EzequielQXI Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Genetically engineered mosquitoes may sound like a sci-fi superbug out of a Stephen Spielberg film, but these are the real deal. The altered insects are the latest approach to quell the spread of mosquito-borne diseases that claim an estimated 725,000 lives globally each year, not to mention Zika virus, which has spread rapidly in the Americas and causes alarming birth defects—and could turn out to affect the adult brain, too—but seldom kills.

Earlier this month, the FDA approved the first proposed US field trial of genetically modified mosquitoes. The trial is planned to launch in Key Haven, Florida, 161 miles south of the Miami-Dade neighborhood where the nation’s first locally transmitted Zika cases have been detected—and five miles from the the heart of Florida’s 2009-2010 outbreak of dengue, a potentially deadly virus that can be spread by the same mosquito. Local opposition has stalled the release of the altered bugs, even as the Zika virus continues to spread in South Florida. Now residents in this island community will get to weigh in on the fate of the trial via a nonbinding local referendum this November. A majority of the mosquito control commissioners for the Keys, who have final say in the matter, have vowed to side with the locals. If a trial is approved, the mosquitoes could be let loose as early as December.

Whether it happens this time or not, the interest in fighting mosquitoes with high-tech methods is only growing. In science labs across the globe, researchers are studying parasitic microbes, various types of genetic modifications, and even new techniques that, in theory, could nearly eradicate local mosquito populations or make it impossible for the mosquitoes to transmit a given disease. In the meantime, here’s what you should know about the proposed release in South Florida.

How are these mosquitoes modified?
Scientists at Oxitec, a UK-based company that has spent years honing its techniques in the lab and in the field, have altered Aedes aegypti—the primary mosquito conduit for Zika, dengue, yellow fever, and chikungunya—with a gene that causes its progeny to die in the larval stage. The researchers sort the altered mosquitoes by sex and release only the males, which then go out and mate with wild females, dooming their offspring. The modified mosquitoes, which can only survive a few days outside the climate-controlled comforts of a laboratory, also carry a gene for a fluorescent protein that lets researchers distinguish modified mosquitoes from wild ones. Both of the inserted genes are non-toxic and non-allergenic.

What if one of these mosquitoes were to bite me?
Assuming just males are released, they won’t—only females bite, because they need your blood to nourish their eggs. A few females get past the screening, but they comprise less than 0.2 percent of the insects released, and the chance of getting bit by one of these rare females is lower still. In the unlikely event that you are bitten by a modified mosquito, the result will be no different than with an ordinary one, according to Matthew DeGennero, a mosquito neurogeneticist at Florida International University. Mosquitoes have been around for 210 million years, he points out, yet we have no evidence that they’ve ever been able to transfer their DNA to any other organisms, including the ones they feed on.

But can’t releasing one organism to control another one mess with the natural balance?
Sure. Humans have made plenty of such blunders trying to control pests. Hawaii’s mongoose infestation, Australia’s poisonous cane toads, and Canada’s thistle-eating weevils are just a few examples of “biocontrol” gone awry. The difference with the Oxitec mosquitoes is that, unlike the introduced species of the past, they are engineered to disappear quickly. It’s actually a great business model, because the mosquito control boards will have to keep purchasing from Oxitec to keep local mosquito populations suppressed. But it also makes it easier to deal with unintended consequences—which the FDA deems unlikely in any case.

One valid concern is that reducing the numbers of Aedes aegypti may allow its cousin Aedes albopictus—which is capable of transmitting the same viruses—to move in. But in addition to being a less-efficient disease carrier, albopictus can have somewhat different habits and meal preferences. Aegypti feed almost exclusively on human blood, and tend to live alongside people in densely populated areas. Albopictus is just as prone to feeding on wildlife and livestock, and tends to stay in more rural settings, where they are less likely to spread disease. But they also show up in places like Los Angeles. In short, it’s complicated.

How will the GM mosquitoes affect other animals that feed on mosquitoes?
Most insect eaters have broad diets, so there’s no evidence that eliminating a specific mosquito will leave anyone without food. Nor will snacking on GM mosquitoes harm the birds, bats, and other fauna that eat the bloodsuckers. On the contrary, DeGennaro says, releasing modified mosquitos is a lot less harmful to the environment than spraying nasty chemicals. Each year 15 million acres across the US are doused in Naled, a neurotoxic insecticide used to keep mosquito populations in check. “Insecticides are very problematic for the environment,” DeGennaro says. “They disturb the ecosystem and affect insects other than the one you’re targeting.” Banned in Europe, Naled is known to kill bees, butterflies, birds, and fish indiscriminately. For this reason, Puerto Rico refused to accept Naled shipments from the US government to combat its Zika epidemic, even though a 20-25 percent infection rate is expected there by summer’s end. The United States, however, deploys tens of thousands of gallons of Naled annually to control Aedes aegypti. The FDA has concluded that the risk GM mosquitos pose for humans and other species is extremely low: “I can’t think of a potential problem with this,” DeGennaro says. “But I can think of a million potential problems with insecticides.”

What if I don’t want to be a guinea pig?
You won’t be, really. Oxitec has already released modified mosquitoes in several countries, including Malaysia, Brazil, and Panama—and more than three million altered skeeters lived out their short lives in the Cayman Islands in 2009 during the company’s first field trial. The proposed trial in the Keys isn’t intended to test the mosquitoes’ safety or environmental impacts—Oxitec has spent 14 years on such studies already. Rather, the purpose is to determine whether the altered mosquitoes can reduce Aedes aegypti populations in this environment the way they’ve done so elsewhere. Oxitec reports that wild aegypti populations have been slashed by more than 90 percent in areas where its mosquitoes were released. Given that aegypti puts more than 40 percent of the world’s population at risk for various diseases, those figures could prove convincing to many health and safety officials—at least until an effective vaccines becomes available.

Genetic tinkering is hardly new, of course. “Humans have been genetically modifying organisms since the dawn of civilization,” DeGennero says. “That’s why we have crops and domestic animals.” For nearly three decades, diabetics have been injecting themselves with insulin produced by genetically modified bacteria. In 2015, 444 million acres of genetically modified seed was planted across the globe, and genetically engineered salmon may be on the menu as early as next year. “This technology has potential to save people’s lives,” DeGennero says. “I would happily have these mosquitos where I live.”

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This Florida Community May Unleash Genetically Modified Mosquitoes to Fight Zika and Dengue

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American Women Are Still Dying in Childbirth at Alarming Rates

by RUDKobyalnb Posted on August 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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In dramatic contrast to the rest of the developed world, the rate of women dying because of complications with pregnancy or childbirth rose in the United States by 27 percent between 2000 and 2014. During the same time period, according to a study that will be published in the September issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 157 other countries reported a decrease in their maternal mortality rates.

Maternal mortality is defined as death while pregnant or within 42 days of being pregnant because of causes related to that pregnancy. The report covers 50 states and the District of Columbia, but researchers described the lack of comprehensive data surrounding maternal mortality as an “international embarrassment.” The lead researcher, editor-in-chief of Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care, with researchers from Boston University, and Stanford University, pointed to a lack of funding as reason for delays in compiling the data, but their conclusion was clear: “There is a need to redouble efforts to prevent maternal deaths and improve maternity care for the 4 million U.S. women giving birth each year.”

The nationwide rates are troubling, but Texas, whose maternal mortality rate doubled over two years, is the state with the sharpest increase. From 2006 to 2010, the maternal mortality rate stayed relatively steady in the state, at about 18 deaths per 100,000 live births. But in 2011, the rate there jumped to 33, and then to 35.8 in 2014. Texas has been at the center of a heated debate around women’s health that included a Supreme Court battle over restriction to abortion access in the state, and in 2013 the Legislature created a task force to study maternal mortality and morbidity. Its first report is set to be released in two weeks. While the state is separately analyzed in this report, the authors do not identify a specific reason for the increase, although they did speculate.

“There were some changes in the provision of women’s health services in Texas from 2011 to 2015, including the closing of several women’s health clinics,” the authors write. “Still, in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval, the doubling of a mortality rate within a 2-year period in a state with almost 400,000 annual births seems unlikely. A future study will examine Texas data by race–ethnicity and detailed causes of death to better understand this unusual finding.”

The “changes in the provision of women’s health services” in Texas began in September 2011, when the state’s family planning budget was cut by two-thirds. Programs that provided prenatal care for low-income women were deeply affected, and the move also excluded clinics that provide abortion services from the funding. And in 2013, Texas passed HB 2, an anti-abortion omnibus bill that set off a domino effect of restrictions that drained half the state’s clinics of resources, ultimately shuttering them.

More recently, Texas awarded $1.6 million in funding for the Healthy Texas Women program to the Heidi Group, an anti-abortion organization. Only the Harris County Public Health Department received more money from the fund, but just barely—it was awarded $1.7 million.

Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, told the Dallas Morning News that the department considered the issue “a complex problem.”

“We’re aware of the numbers and want to see a decrease in this trend, and that’s why the task force is closely reviewing these cases and will make recommendations,” Williams said.

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American Women Are Still Dying in Childbirth at Alarming Rates

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Voter Fraud Is Still a Myth, and 11 Other Stats on the State of Voting Rights in America

by RandolphBeaureg Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Three years ago, the Supreme Court gutted an important provision in the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to a succession of voting restrictions. But recent court decisions have stymied efforts by mostly Republican-led legislatures to restrict voting access in Texas, North Carolina, North Dakota, and elsewhere before the November election.

Still, as the following stats show, the fight for voting access isn’t over yet:

Sources: Card 1: Brennan Center for Justice; Card 2: National Conference of State Legislatures, Brennan Center for Justice; Card 3: North Carolina State Board of Elections, Veasey v. Perry opinion, Frank v. Walker opinion, University of California, San Diego; Card 4: TMJ4, Frank v. Walker opinion; Card 5: University of California, San Diego; Card 6: The Sentencing Project; Brennan Center for Justice; Card 7: 2012 Survey on the Performance of American Elections; Card 8: Justin Levitt, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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Voter Fraud Is Still a Myth, and 11 Other Stats on the State of Voting Rights in America

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Your Olive Oil Is Almost Certainly Fake

by charitys21 Posted on August 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bite is Mother Jones‘ new food politics podcast. Listen to all our episodes here, or by subscribing in iTunes or Stitcher or via RSS.

Walk into your kitchen and pick up your bottle of olive oil. You know, that health-promoting nectar of Mediterranean age-defying prowess, lubricant of pasta, the only thing that makes your kale salad palatable? Yeah, that stuff is almost certainly not what you think it is.

That’s because unless you’ve plucked your own olives from your own backyard grove and crushed the fruit and pressed the oil yourself, that slippery substance was likely cut, adulterated, and deceptively labeled before it reached the bottle in your hands. “It’s amazing how many people there are in America who don’t even know what the real thing tastes like,” laments Larry Olmsted, author of the new book Real Food, Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do About It and our guest on this week’s episode of Bite. “Most oils sold in the United States are fake,” he writes.

Food fraud—or the act of deceiving consumers about a food or ingredient for the sake of profit—affects as much as 10 percent of the global food supply. Of all the instances of food fraud in the United States, according to a scholarly database tracking this very thing, olive oil leads the way, making up 16 percent of cases (followed by milk, honey, saffron, and orange juice). This type of deception has been around for basically as long as we’ve packaged food: Researchers have excavated mislabeled Roman jars containing counterfeit samples of oil.

One of the reasons oil is so often faked is that it’s bottled before you use it, and it travels far before it lands on grocery store shelves. “If it’s something you can’t look at and easily recognize, it’s more likely to be defrauded,” Olmsted explains. The United States imports more olive oil than any other country, and yet regulations on the labeling of said oil are voluntary. The Agriculture Appropriations Bill for fiscal year 2017 urged the Food and Drug Administration to take a harder look at the issue; in an earlier draft report accompanying the bill, the Appropriations Committee stated it was “concerned with reports that consistently describe the prevalence of adulterated and fraudulently labeled olive oil imported into the US.”

Since extra-virgin olive oil is the most valuable oil category in the United States, shady producers and dealers have plenty of incentive to mess with it in hopes of reaping more profit. They defraud consumers in three main ways: by (1) diluting real extra-virgin olive oil with less expensive oils, like soybean or sunflower oil; (2) diluting high-quality olive oil with low-quality olive oil; or (3) making low-quality extra-virgin olive oil, “typically incorporating older—and often rancid—stocks of oil held over from bumper crops of previous seasons,” writes Olmsted. When the University of California–Davis researchers tested olive oil bought off the shelf in 2010, they found that 69 percent of imported “extra-virgin” samples failed to meet international standards.

Aside from imparting rotten flavors and ripping people off, this fraud deprives people of the health benefits that may have prompted them to buy the oil in the first place: Fresh extra-virgin olive oil is high in the omega-3 fatty acids that may reduce the risk of heart disease. It’s also low in saturated fat and contains antioxidants. “Bad oil isn’t just a deception, it’s a crime against public health,” one Italian olive oil trade association president told Olmsted.

So what’s the best way to avoid getting punked? Olmsted offers up some handy advice:

Don’t trust most labels: Be wary of words like “pure,” “natural,” “virgin olive oil,” “premium,” “light,” “made in Italy,” and just “olive oil.” They suggest a low-quality substance, and one potentially made from refining the remainders of the skin and pits of olives rather than the olives themselves. “First cold pressed,” while sounding legit, doesn’t actually mean much these days since extra-virgin olive oil is typically spun out of olives with centrifuges rather than pressed. Even the term “extra-virgin olive oil” gets slapped on bottles of low-grade oil illegally—and enforcement is very sparse—so terminology isn’t necessarily your safeguard.

Stamp of approval: Here in the United States, look for the seal denoting approval by the California Olive Oil Council: “COOC Certified Extra Virgin.” (And here’s its list of 2015 certified oils). Olmsted also recommends Extra Virgin Alliance (EVA) and UNAPROL, the respected Italian olive growers’ association. Concern over olive oil fraud in the United States sparked the Department of Agriculture to add olive oil to its voluntary quality monitoring program in 2012, but so far only two companies participate. (Look for the label “USDA Quality Monitored.”)

Judge the country of origin: “If you have to purchase blindly with no other clue besides where it was made, choose Chile or Australia,” writes Olmsted. The two countries received the highest marks from the US International Trade Commission’s report on average quality of extra-virgin olive oil.

Buy in season and in the dark: Look for bottles with dates listed on them, and buy the oil that was bottled most recently. The end of the year is the worst time to buy oils from the Northern Hemisphere, because they will likely be leftovers from last season; likewise, avoid oils from Chile, Australia, and South Africa during our spring and summer. Olive oil’s quality degrades in the light, so don’t purchase clear bottles that have been sitting by a window; opt for dark glass bottles or cans instead.

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Your Olive Oil Is Almost Certainly Fake

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Wisconsin’s Strict Voter ID Law Is Back on the Books

by GroverTovlw Posted on August 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Wisconsin voters will likely vote this November under the state’s strict voter ID law after a federal appeals court struck down a trial court’s ruling that would have allowed voters to cast ballots without identification.

In Wednesday’s ruling, a three-judge panel from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the trial court’s decision would likely be reversed on appeal. The lower court ruled on July 19 that election officials had to let people vote without ID if they signed a form saying they had problems getting proper documents.

The trial court’s ruling, in turn, came in response to an appeals court ruling in April finding that the state’s 2011 voter ID law would likely prevent people from voting who had legitimate difficulties obtaining documentation to get IDs, and it tasked the trial court with coming up with a method to help those people. That method was the affidavit, which the appeals court ruled Wednesday wasn’t targeted enough, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

“Instead of attempting to identify these voters, or to identify the kinds of situations in which the state’s procedures fall short, the district court issued an injunction that permits any registered voter to declare by affidavit that reasonable effort would not produce a photo ID—even if the voter has never tried to secure one, and even if by objective standards the effort needed would be reasonable (and would succeed),” the appeals court judges wrote, adding that the trial court judge did not attempt to distinguish between genuine difficulties voters might have in obtaining the proper documents and “any given voter’s unwillingness to make the effort that the Supreme Court has held that a state can require.”

Rick Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California-Irvine, wrote Wednesday that the ACLU, which originally brought this case, might appeal the case to the full 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. But the practical effect of the ruling, he noted, is that the strict voter ID law will be in place for November. The ACLU could also appeal Wednesday’s ruling to the Supreme Court.

Dale Ho, the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, says he is disappointed that the judges “removed a safety net for voters after earlier this year holding that such a safety net would be appropriate. Their decision will guarantee disenfranchisement of many Wisconsonites in this fall’s election.”

Ho says the ACLU is evaluating its options, but that an appeal to either the full 7th Circuit or the Supreme Court will happen soon.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, said in a statement that Wednesday’s ruling was “a step in the right direction” and that his administration would “continue to work to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.”

A separate case challenged the 2011 voter ID law and other voter restrictions put in place by Wisconsin Republicans, including limits on early voting and on college students’ ability to register to vote. A federal district judge struck down those provisions on July 29, but its ruling on voter ID affected the ways in which voters can obtain a voter ID. The case is still awaiting appeal. Wednesday’s ruling, for its part, addressed what happens when voters get to the polls without an ID.

This story has been updated with comments from Dale Ho.

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Wisconsin’s Strict Voter ID Law Is Back on the Books

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Why Some American Olympians Had to Crowdfund Their Way to Rio

by PollyGraf09 Posted on August 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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More than 550 American athletes will be competing in the Rio Olympics, but for some, finding the money to get themselves and their families to Rio hasn’t been easy.

On the GoFundMe crowdfunding site, dozens of US Olympians, Paralympians, and their families have set up campaigns to help raise money for their trips. Olympic decathlete Jeremy Taiwo, for example, began his campaign way back in December. Taiwo asked for $15,000 to help fund equipment, health care, and training costs. After meeting the original goal, Taiwo increased it to $47,100 and has so far received $63,375.

Paralympic soccer player Gregory Brigman started his campaign for $6,000 in late July and still has almost $4,000 to go. Brigman wrote that he had to resign from his engineering job in order to have enough time to train. “The U.S. Soccer organization covers all expenses for athletes while playing and training, but they do not support the common bills of life,” wrote Brigman, who is asking for funds to help with daily needs and training costs.

There’s a reason why so many American athletes turn to sites like GoFundMe for financial help: Unlike other countries, the United States doesn’t provide government funding to its Olympic committee. This agreement, set in 1978 as part of the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act, allowed the US Olympic Committee to hold exclusive control over the representation of American athletes and terms associated with the Olympics. As a result, the USOC is responsible for fundraising the amount of money needed to send athletes to the competition, maintain training facilities, secure sponsorships, and pay its staff.

“Our nation stands apart from others because our Olympic and Paralympic teams are not just cheered by an enthusiastic national fan base, but also funded by one,” the US Olympic Foundation, a nonprofit that fundraises for the USOC, notes on its website.

Contrast the United States with the United Kingdom, for instance, which pours about £543 million (about $709 million) from the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport and the National Lottery into UK Sport, a sports agency that manages funding and partnerships for the country’s Olympic athletes. Olympic athletes there are eligible to receive anywhere from £15,000 to £28,000 a year (almost $20,000 to some $37,000) based on their performance. That’s in addition to other services and training support UK athletes receive. In Canada, the government invests about $200 million CAD ($153 million USD) into the Olympics annually, and senior athletes receive $1,500 monthly stipends. Some athletes are given extra funding if they have won medals in the past.

The USOC does dole out millions of dollars for its athletes, as well as cover basic airfare, lodging, and food during the games. It says it spent $73 million in direct funding for athletes and another $81 million for programming in 2013. Sponsorships from private companies such as Deloitte and Chobani also provide funding, but these only cover a certain number of teams and athletes. “Sports that don’t draw a lot of revenue get a smaller share of the funding that’s available, so it’s up to the individual sport federation and how many athletes they support before making the team,” said Mark Dyreson, a professor of kinesiology and history at Penn State University. “In smaller sports, it’s just a handful of athletes that get support.”

Though there’s no comprehensive data on how much American Olympic athletes are paid, an investigation by the Washington Post found that of all the funds involved in the USOC, athletes made the least amount of money. A member of the track and field team made an average income of $17,000, while athletes on the swimming team could make only up to $42,000 in stipends. Even if a track and field athlete was ranked among the top 10 in the country for his events, athletes still brought home an average income of $16,553. The CEO of the track and field team, on the other hand, made about $1.1 million a year, according to the Post. The investigation also called into question how the USOC spent its funds. Though the USOC says that it directs around 90 percent of its budget to supporting athletes, one study found that, in 2012, less than 10 percent of that budget went directly to athletes as cash payments. Instead, the USOC spent a large amount of its money on Olympic training centers where fewer than 13 percent of US Olympians train.

As the Post investigation put it, some International Olympic Committee members will be paid more to watch the Olympics than the actual athletes competing in the Games. “The athletes are the very bottom of a trickle-down system, and there’s just not much left for us,” US javelin thrower Cyrus Hostetler told the Post. “They take care of themselves first, and us last.”

Brigman, of the Paralympic soccer team, told Mother Jones in an email that he is not paid as an athlete, and that the team pays for flights, food, lodging, and some gear. He reached out to some 20 companies and only heard back from one. (It turned him down.) So after resigning from his job, he started his campaign to cover his August bills.

“I had to choose between my job and the team,” Brigman said, “and when asked to play for your country you just don’t think twice about it.”

Of course, going to the Olympics will be a chance for athletes to win medals, which comes with cash prizes, and to secure sponsorship opportunities from private companies. And sponsorship, Dyreson points out, is where American athletes could have more of an advantage than athletes from other countries.

“If you’re an athlete, there’s no better place to fund your training than in the US,” Dyreson said. “It’s just frustrating because athletes here have to be individual entrepreneurs more than athletes in other nations.”

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Why Some American Olympians Had to Crowdfund Their Way to Rio

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Wall Street Billionaires To Advise Trump On Populist Economics

by AdolfoLipinski Posted on August 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Excellent. Donald Trump has introduced his blue-chip economic advisory team:

The list includes strikingly few academic policy experts, usually the bread-and-butter of campaign policy teams. Instead, the advisory team of 13 men — and no women — consists largely of personal friends or longtime business associates of Trump. The median net worth of Trump’s official economic advisers appears to be at least several hundred million dollars.

That wealthy group includes Harold Hamm, a self-made oil billionaire…. Dan DiMicco, a former chief executive of steelmaker Nucor…. Steven Mnuchin…. chief executive of the hedge fund Dune Capital Management…. Steve Roth…. Vornado Realty Trust; hedge fund billionaire John Paulson…. The only academic economist on the team — the only one who has a doctorate in economics — is Peter Navarro of the University of California at Irvine, who focuses on trade with China.

….Trump’s outsider crew at times conflicts with his message of economic populism….His team is filled with hedge fund managers, bankers and real estate speculators.

A whole bunch of Wall Street billionaires plus Stephen Moore, an annual contender for stupidest man in the world. This fits Trump perfectly, especially since he’s not going to listen to any of them anyway. Why should he, after all? He knows more about how the economy works than any of them, believe me.

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Wall Street Billionaires To Advise Trump On Populist Economics

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We’re starting to understand just how Zika and climate change go together

by Sal05Hrbzqzqh Posted on August 5, 2016

We’re starting to understand just how Zika and climate change go together

By on Aug 4, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

Athletes and tourists converging on Brazil this week are crowding into a country where rapid environmental change and natural weather fluctuations nurtured a viral epidemic that has gone global.

The Zika virus has exploded throughout South America, up through Mexico and Puerto Rico and into Florida, but the conditions it needed to fester in northern Brazil were rooted in urbanization and poverty. The initial Brazilian outbreak appears to have been aided by a drought driven by El Niño, and by higher temperatures caused by longer-term weather cycles and by rising levels of greenhouse gas pollution.

A truck sprays insecticide near grounds workers at Olympic media accommodations as part of preventative measures against the Zika virus.REUTERS/Chris Helgren

This combination of human and natural forces is emerging as the possible incubator of a disease that’s painfully elusive to detect, despite its cruel effects on unborn children.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an unprecedented domestic travel advisory this week, warning pregnant women to avoid a Miami neighborhood where more than a dozen Zika cases were confirmed.

The warning came six months after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency “of international concern” in Brazil, where the opening ceremony for the Summer Olympics is scheduled for Friday.

Most Zika infections produce no symptoms, turning their hosts into unwitting harbors for the disease, which is mainly spread through mosquito bites. Unborn children risk microcephaly when their mothers are infected, meaning their heads are small — the result of unusual brain development.

While the effects of El Niño and other weather cycles are beyond the control of humans, the recent spread of the disease into the U.S. is a savage reminder of the heavy toll that humans are taking on their planet — and of the potential for those changes to bite back.

Climate Central research recently showed that warming temperatures have lengthened the mosquito seasons in three quarters of major cities in the United States.

For Americans unaccustomed to fearing tropical diseases at home, the northward march of the outbreak is delivering an exotic threat. Researchers are warning that the disease could reach the halls of power in Washington D.C. and the dense metropolis of New York.

Mosquitoes rely on water to breed and flourish, yet a drought that beset northern Brazil amid a heatwave in 2014 and 2015 — while the disease was stealthily taking root — is thought to have worked in the mosquitoes’ favor.

That’s because households began storing more water, ushering breeding mosquitoes and their larvae inside their homes. Like other developing countries, many in Brazil lack regular access to piped water.

“If you have a drought, you don’t have reliable water access, and that makes you go and get water and store,” said Sadie Ryan, a medical geographer at the University of Florida. “By storing it, you’re creating mosquito habitat.”

Small puddles and ponds of water that accumulate in urbanized areas also tend to favor the lifestyles of the types of mosquitoes that spread Zika, compared with those that tend to thrive in more remote regions. Ryan called these types of mosquitoes “urban capable.”

“In South America up to the ‘70s, there was a really big push for vector control,” Ryan said, referring to efforts to control mosquito populations, such as spraying insecticides. “Then the money went away for it.”

Meanwhile, temperatures have been rising globally because of the polluting effects of fossil fuel-powered industrialization, deforestation and livestock farming, and natural climate cycles have been exacerbating the rate of warming in some places, such as in northern Brazil and California. That’s significant, because mosquitoes can only survive above certain temperatures.

“Once you’re over that minimum temperature, there’s nothing killing the vector,” Ryan said. “There’s nothing slowing it down.”

In a February letter published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, the University of Haifa’s Shlomit Paz and Jan Semenza of the Stockholm Environment Institute and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reported discovering a “striking overlap” between areas in Brazil that were afflicted by extreme weather linked to El Niño, and areas where Zika was lurking one month later.

More recently, a team of American and Venezuelan scientists took a closer statistical look at the relationship between climate and the Zika outbreak, and reported that El Niño and climate change were not the only important factors — though they were both important.

While the team blamed El Niño for the drought that fueled the Zika outbreak, they concluded that climate change and long-term weather cycles, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which is a long-term cycle in trade winds that influences surface temperatures globally, played important roles in pushing temperatures up to those favored by Zika-carrying mosquitoes.

The findings were hurriedly pre-published without being peer reviewed on the website bioRxiv. That provided health officials and policymakers with rapid information about the findings while the details continue to be reviewed and improved.

Anthony Janetos, a professor of earth and environmental studies at Boston University, who wasn’t involved with the recent study, warned that it does not definitively prove the links that the researchers reported.

Because of that, Janetos criticized the researchers for their choice of headline for the paper, which states that the Zika epidemic was “fueled by climate variations.”

“If they’d been able to show that the same patterns occurred in other outbreak regions, such as Puerto Rico, then their circumstantial case would be stronger,” Janetos said. “But they haven’t done that.”

Ángel Muñoz, a climate scientist with affiliations at Princeton and Columbia universities who led the research, acknowledged Janetos’s criticisms, and he said the headline would be changed prior to final publication.

“This paper is not an answer for a lot of the questions that we have, but it’s an important step,” Muñoz said.

“It’s not possible right now to show a formal link between Zika and climate, because no one has enough data,” Muñoz said. “You need years, not months.”

With models warning that the epidemic will worsen before it begins to improve, the human suffering that’s expected in the months and years to come may help scientists continue to tease apart roles of natural forces in driving the outbreak from those of climate change and other problems caused by humans.

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We’re starting to understand just how Zika and climate change go together

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Four Reasons Why the Freddie Gray Case Isn’t Going Away Any Time Soon

by SalvatoreForrest Posted on August 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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In late July, Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby dropped all remaining charges against two officers awaiting trial in the Freddie Gray case and decided not to retry a third, after a judge acquitted three other officers on all counts related to Gray’s death. The decision closed a chapter on a case that was a focal point for the Black Lives Matter movement. But although the criminal case is over, both the state’s attorney’s office and Baltimore police officers are still grappling with the consequences of the failed prosecution. Here’s how:

The six officers charged in Gray’s death will now face an internal affairs review. Led by the Montgomery County Police Department, the reviews—which can move forward now that the criminal cases have been concluded—will determine whether the officers’ actions violated department policy, and whether the officers can return to patrol duty. Such reviews can take several months to complete, however, and an analysis of cases by the Baltimore Sun found that nine of ten misconduct allegations investigated by Montgomery County Police Department do not result in officers being reprimanded. The officers will remain on paid administrative duty until the reviews are complete.

Several officers have sued Mosby for defamation and false arrest. At least five of six officers charged in Gray’s death have filed civil lawsuits against Mosby and Major Sam Cogen, the Baltimore sheriff’s commander who signed the charging documents in the case. Collectively the lawsuits seek more than $3.5 million in damages for charges including defamation, false arrest, false imprisonment, and federal civil rights violations—among their allegations is that Mosby charged the officers in order to appease Black Lives Matter protesters. They also allege that Mosby did not investigate the case as thoroughly as she had initially claimed, and that she deliberately made false statements about officers’ culpability at the press conference where she announced the charges. (Legal observers have said the chances of the suits succeeding are slim because prosecutors generally enjoy immunity from being sued, and the bar the officers’ attorneys would have to meet—showing that Mosby acted with malice—is high.)

Some people want Mosby banned from practicing law in the state of Maryland. At least two complaints have been filed against Mosby with the Maryland Attorney Grievance Commission in an effort to have her disbarred. Ralph Jaffe, who ran for a Maryland democratic US senate seat earlier this year, wrote in a recent Baltimore Sun Op-Ed that he filed a complaint last May because Mosby’s decision to “placate the liberal agitators” reflected “recklessness and a lack of judicial responsibility” and had strained the relationship between the Baltimore police department and the state’s attorney’s office. (A George Washington University law professor who filed a separate complaint against Mosby in June was previously involved in a successful effort to have a North Carolina district attorney disbarred after the failed prosecution of three Duke University athletes in a 2006 rape case.)

The Baltimore police union nearly doubled its membership dues this year to cover legal expenses for the officers charged in Gray’s death. The local Fraternal Order of Police spent around $800,000 last year on legal fees—the vast majority on the Gray case—and was “quickly becoming insolvent” as a result, FOP president Gene Ryan said. Although charges have been dropped and related expenses are expected to fall sharply, according to Ryan the union will continue collecting the increased dues as a precaution against future “malicious prosecution” of other officers by Mosby’s office.

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Four Reasons Why the Freddie Gray Case Isn’t Going Away Any Time Soon

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Proton Gradients and the Origin of Life

by MairaWallner Posted on July 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Where did complex life originate? The New York Times reports on new research from a team led by William Martin of Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf:

Their starting point was the known protein-coding genes of bacteria and archaea. Some six million such genes have accumulated over the last 20 years in DNA databanks….Of these, only 355 met their criteria for having probably originated in Luca, the joint ancestor of bacteria and archaea.

Genes are adapted to an organism’s environment. So Dr. Martin hoped that by pinpointing the genes likely to have been present in Luca, he would also get a glimpse of where and how Luca lived. “I was flabbergasted at the result, I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

The 355 genes pointed quite precisely to an organism that lived in the conditions found in deep sea vents, the gassy, metal-laden, intensely hot plumes caused by seawater interacting with magma erupting through the ocean floor….The 355 genes ascribable to Luca include some that metabolize hydrogen as a source of energy as well as a gene for an enzyme called reverse gyrase, found only in microbes that live at extremely high temperatures.

About a year ago I read The Vital Question, by British biochemist Nick Lane, which was all about this theory. Roughly speaking, his entire book was about the energy needs of these ancient organisms, which is based on something called a proton gradient. This, it turns out, is a complex and highly unusual way of providing energy, but it’s also nearly universal in modern life, suggesting that it goes back to the very beginnings of life. But if it’s so unusual, how did it get its start?

In the beginning, it could only work in a high-energy environment like a deep-sea vent. In these places, there was a natural gradient between proton-poor water and proton-rich water, and that was the beginning of the proton gradient. It’s not the most efficient way of producing energy, but it was the only thing around 4 billion years ago. So willy nilly, life evolved to take advantage of this, and eventually evolved its own proton gradient inside cells.

Martin has been a longtime proponent of this idea as well, and now he’s produced yet more evidence that it’s likely to be true. The energy producing mitochondria in all of your cells are the result of this. Even 4 billion years later, they still depend on a proton gradient. Protons, it turns out, are the key to life.

POSTSCRIPT: And how is the book? It’s good, though fairly dense at times if you’re not already familiar with some basic chemistry and biology. And toward the end it gets rather speculative, so take it for what it’s worth. But overall? If you’re interested in the origins of complex life, it’s worth a read.

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Proton Gradients and the Origin of Life

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