U.N. Disaster Chief Warns of More Natural Catastrophes to Come
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/24/world/un-disaster-chief-warns-of-more-natural-catastrophes-tocome.html
DEC. 23, 2014
GENEVA — Thailand ’s Khao Lak coast 10 years ago was a wasteland of palm beaches littered with the detritus of destroyed hotels and corpses blackened by the tropical sun.
Margareta Wahlstrom, the United Nations ’ top official on natural disasters, will be in Khao Lak on Friday for the anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami with a message: “Expect events to happen that you have never seen before. There will be no letup in the coming decades.”
Spurred partly by the tsunami, which the United Nations says killed more than 227,000 people, many countries have built early warning systems and other defenses against natural disasters, said Ms.
Wahlstrom, the head of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.
The perception among some developed countries that disasters mostly afflict poor countries has changed since Hurricanes Katrina in 2005 and Sandy in 2012, earthquakes in Italy, repeated heavy flooding in Central Europe and wildfires in the United States and Russia. “Everywhere, things are going on that didn’t go on 10 years ago,” Ms. Wahlstrom said.
While disaster responses have helped to reduce mortality from such events, their frequency and cost are spiraling up. “Events that we used to say happen once in a hundred years are happening every 20 years and soon maybe every 10 years,” Ms. Wahlstrom said.
Between 1970 and 2012, nearly two million people died in 8,835 disasters, according to a “mortality atlas” the United Nations produced this year, estimating the economic losses at $2.4 trillion. Although data is still imprecise, Ms. Wahlstrom said the United Nations and business accepted that natural disasters cost the global economy about $250 billion a year, probably much more.
Moreover, those estimates do not take into account the long-term and indirect costs of disasters in the form of ruined businesses, unemployment, homelessness and health costs.
Much of the work of the last decade has drawn on disaster risk measures established in the Hyogo
Framework for Action, agreed to at a world conference held in the months after the Indian Ocean tsunami. The anniversary comes as the United Nations is preparing another world conference in March in Sendai, Japan, which was ravaged by the March 2011 tsunami.
The Sendai conference is intended, Ms. Wahlstrom said, to give new urgency to identifying risk of disasters, setting new priorities for managing them and putting greater emphasis on preparing for “the most difficult part of any disaster,” reconstruction. “Many disaster experts say the biggest risk is when we forget,” she said. “That’s when our defenses go down.”
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Avian Flu Detected in the Netherlands and Britain
By ALAN COWELL NOV. 17, 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/18/world/europe/avian-flu-detected-in-the-netherlands-andbritain.html
Photo
People in protective clothing on Monday at a farm in East Yorkshire in the north of England, where a case of bird flu had been found in ducks. Credit Nigel Roddis/European Pressphoto Agency
LONDON — Health officials moved to combat outbreaks of bird flu at poultry farms in Britain and the
Netherlands on Monday, culling thousands of chickens and ducks to avert the spread of infection.
On Sunday, the Dutch authorities blocked the transportation of eggs and poultry across the country after a strain of the flu was detected at a farm in Hekendorp, south of Amsterdam. The strain was said to be lethal for poultry and potentially transmissible to humans.
The authorities ordered the slaughter of 150,000 chickens at the farm. News reports identified the strain as H5N8, which has never been detected in humans, according to the European Center for Disease
Prevention and Control in Stockholm. The strain has been reported in birds in South Korea, China, Japan and, earlier this month, in Germany.
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“This highly pathogenic variant of avian influenza is very dangerous for bird life,” the Dutch government said. “The disease can be transmitted from animals to humans.”
In Britain, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said that a case of the virus had been found in ducks at a farm in the Driffield area of East Yorkshire in the north of England, but that the risk to public health was “very low.” While the exact strain was still being investigated, the outbreak was not caused by the lethal H5N1 strain and “there is no risk to the food chain,” the department said.
The authorities are apparently eager to ensure that, just weeks before Christmas, news of the outbreak does not harm the poultry business at one of its busiest periods.
Health officials ordered the culling of all 6,000 ducks on the British farm and imposed a six-mile restriction zone around it, the department said.
It was not clear if the cases in Britain, the Netherlands and Germany were linked, but officials said one line of investigation was to determine whether a wild bird had transmitted the disease to the farm in
Yorkshire.
“We’ll be looking for other possible sources of the disease, including any links to the disease that we’re seeing in the Netherlands and Germany,” Britain’s chief veterinary officer, Nigel Gibbens, told the BBC,
“and that will include looking at the risk from wild birds spread to our national flock.”
“The link to the disease that they found in Germany and the Netherlands is our most likely source,” he said.
The outbreaks of bird flu in recent days prompted the European Union on Monday to move toward issuing a warning across the Continent, aimed mostly at reassuring importers outside the bloc that the bulk of poultry from the European Union is unaffected, according to Enrico Brivio, a spokesman for the
European Commission, the union’s executive arm.
The Dutch authorities have gone beyond European requirements, dating to 2005, by ordering a nationwide ban of movements of poultry meat, live poultry eggs and other poultry products, Mr. Brivio told a daily briefing.
The case in Yorkshire was less of a concern than the case in the Netherlands, he added. “In Holland we have a very high density of poultry,” said Mr. Brivio. But in Yorkshire, “there is not such a high density” and so “we think, for the moment, the decisions taken by the British authorities are adequate.”
European health experts were expected to meet on Thursday to review the situation.
James Kanter contributed reporting from Brussels.
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Glenn Kessler Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/12/17/one-in-five-women-in-collegesexually-assaulted-an-update/
“We know the numbers: one in five of every one of those young women who is dropped off for that first
day of school, before they finish school, will be assaulted, will be assaulted in her college years.”
–Vice President Biden, remarks on the release of a White House report on sexual assault, April 29,
2014
“It is estimated that 1 in 5 women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time
there — 1 in 5.”
–President Obama, remarks at White House , Jan. 22, 2014
This is an update of an article that originally appeared on May 1, 2014. It now has a Pinocchio rating.
Reports of sexual assault on college campuses spurred the White House early in 2014 to launch a task force to examine the issue. The group’s report was issued on April 29, and the first sentence of the report echoes what both the president and vice president have asserted in public: “One in five women is sexually assaulted in college.”
Where does this oft-repeated statistic come from? We dug into the data so you don’t have to.
The Facts
This statistic is derived from a 2007 study, The Campus Sexual Assault Study , which was conducted for the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice. The researchers, led by Christopher Krebs of RTI
International , also surveyed men, but the statistic cited by the administration focuses on women so we will look carefully at that part of the study.
In the winter of 2006, researchers used a Web-based survey to interview undergraduates at two large public universities, one in the Midwest and one in the South. A total of 5,446 undergraduate women, between the ages of 18-25, participated as part of a random sample. The survey was anonymous and took about 15 minutes to complete. (Participants received a $10 Amazon.com certificate for participating.)
So, first of all, it’s important to remember that this is a single survey, based on the experiences of students at two universities. As the researchers acknowledged, these results clearly can be generalized to those two large four-year universities, but not necessarily elsewhere. Moreover, the response rate was relatively low:
“Another limitation of the CSA study, inherent with Web-based survey, is that the response rates were relatively low. Although the response rates were not lower than what most Web-based surveys achieve,
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they are lower than what we typically achieve using a different mode of data collection (e.g. face-to-face interviewing).”
The survey found that 1,073 women, or 19 percent, said that they experienced attempted or completed sexual assault since entering college. The actual breakdown was that 12.6 percent experienced attempted sexual assault and 13.7 percent experienced actual sexual assault. (There was some overlap.)
The sexual assault instances were further divided into sexual assault while incapacitated from drugs or alcohol or sexual assault through physical force. Most of the sexual assaults were identified as rapes, though the report said “sexual battery” could have included “sexual touching,” such as forced kissing or fondling.
Notice that the percentage of sexual assaults –13.7 percent—was lower than the one-in-five figure cited by administration officials. (It is more like one in seven.) That’s because the president and vice president used careful phrasing that covered a student’s entire time in college. The overall survey interviewed students that included freshmen, sophomores and juniors.
In a 2009 report, the researchers released a closer look at the data (embedded below). This report showed that out of the subset of seniors surveyed (1,402 women), that 19 percent (about 287) had experienced sexual assault.
“Women surveyed in their senior year of college (those having the longest risk period for sexual assault since entering college) had the greatest cumulative prevalence of each type of completed sexual assault,” the report said, referring to Table 1. “Almost 20% of the seniors experienced some type of sexual assault since entering college, with 6.9% experiencing physically forced sexual assault and 16.0% experiencing incapacitated sexual assault.”
In other words, information that is localized to the seniors at two colleges has now been extrapolated by politicians to the universe of college experience. (The report itself states that the data are limited just to those universities.) And to some extent, the results depend on how questions are phrased and answers interpreted. Below we have embedded the key questions that led to the statistic cited by the White
House.
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This season’s flu activity has reached the epidemic threshold, the CDC says
By Abby Ohlheiser
December 30,2014
This year's flu season has officially crossed the epidemic threshold, according to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. Fifteen children have died across the country from influenza, as the number of states reporting a "high" level of influenza activity jumped from 13 to 22 in one week.
The determination follows an earlier warning from the agency that this year's flu season could be a severe one.
Keep in mind, however, that epidemic-levels of flu activity in the U.S. are a typical part of the annual flu season. In other words, it's simply too early to determine just how severe this year's epidemic will be.
The CDC uses several methods to track and characterize the outbreak. "Right now, all of the
CDC's influenza surveillance systems are showing elevated activity," The CDC's flu division said in an e-mailed statement. The influenza season reaches an epidemic level when the proportion of deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza reaches a certain threshold: 6.8 percent. According to the CDC's latest available information on the flu season, the percentage is currently at the threshold.
Some level of flu activity has been reported in almost every state in recent weeks, with particularly high levels in the Southeast and Midwest, according to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. (AP)
The recent increases in flu activity, along with influenza-related hospitalizations and deaths, are so far a "typical pattern for the flu season."
Pediatric death tolls from previous outbreaks range from 35 to 171 deaths per season from influenza-related causes since 2004. That is, every year with the exception of 2009, when the annual flu season reached pandemic levels. During that season, 348 children died of influenza-related causes.
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Centers for Disease Control and prevention
"It is a bit early to make any kind of characterization about pediatric deaths this season," Erin
Burns,a health communications specialist with the Influenza Division at the CDC said in an email, "but from looking at the curve going back to 2011-2012, it doesn't seem like anything unusual is happening." However, the agency cautioned, pediatric death data "typically lag behind" other measures for a season's severity.
That doesn't mean that health officials aren't particularly worried about this flu season, even as assessments of the overall scope of this year's influenza epidemic will have to wait, experts say.
For one thing, the dominant version of the virus this year is H3N2 - which tends to lead to harder-hitting flu seasons. "H3N2 predominant seasons tend to have more hospitalizations and more deaths," CDC director Thomas Frieden warned in early December .
There's an even bigger potential problem: "the most concerning thing about the flu season this year there is a mismatch between the predominant strain that is circulating and what was put in the vaccine," Trish Perl, the head of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Office of Epidemiology and
Infection Prevention told The Post.
The vaccines distributed this year have limited effectiveness against some "drifted" (i.e. antigenically different ) H3N2 viruses present in this year's outbreak. A "drift" is a problem for the effectiveness of vaccines, albeit one not quite as devastating as an abrupt "antigenic shift,"
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which leaves much of the population without an immunity to the new form of the virus. Such a
"shift" preceded the 2009 pandemic, for example.
Drifts happen each year, and vaccine makers must respond to them season to season. But the timing of this year's "drift" was particularly poor. As we explained earlier in December , this year's "drift" in the H3N2 viruses wasn't detected until March, too late to make it into this year's batch of vaccines.
Although the vaccines will still provide some protection against those drifted strains, "it's clearly not complete protection," Perl added, noting that "we could see a lot more illness because we have a lot less people who are immune."
This flu season could be a doozy. The CDC is warning that the flu vaccine isn’t as effective this year. The Washington Post’s Lenny Bernstein explains why. (Pamela Kirkland/The Washington
Post)
Perl noted that experts will be watching the recent increase in flu-related hospitalizations, which can be one of "the first signs that you may have more severity" in an annual flu epidemic.
In order to get a sense of severity, officials compare a current season's weekly rates to those of previous seasons featuring the same predominant strain of the virus. Since 2014-2015 is a H3N2 predominant season, that means looking at 2012-2013's data, the last time the same strain was predominant.
Looking at the CDC's weekly data, influenza-related hospitalization rates for people 65 and older during the most recent week available this season was 38.2 per 100,000 people. That's higher than it was for the same week in 2012-2013, which was 28.4 per 100,000 people. The comparison "suggests this season may be on track to be more severe in terms of hospitalizations in older people, or it may just mean that we are having an earlier season than in 2012-2013," the
CDC's flu division said in an e-mailed statement.
Still, some regions of the country are already experiencing what feels like a severe season, even if national trends are inconclusive. So the high-altitude assessment of this year's season might not match up to the experiences of health workers in areas with particularly high flu activity right now. "When you're in the middle of it, it feels like more" Perl notes.
For now, officials have a couple of messages for those worried about the flu. Namely: if you're not already vaccinated, do it. There are several strains of the flu circulating each year. So while this year's vaccine batch might have a limited effect on the predominant strain, it could still protect against other strains.
Perl particularly urged healthy individuals to get the vaccine this year, noting that what might feel like a "nuisance" of an illness for some is life threatening in more vulnerable populations, some of whom might also have a less effective response to the vaccines. "We forget that this is a bad disease and it kills people," she said, adding that by vaccinating healthy individuals, officials
"are in essence protecting those that are vulnerable."
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