Locked out of my car

Twice when I was a family doctor many years ago I locked myself out of my car. The memory of these minor misadventures bubbled to the surface recently for no obvious reason. One occasion was commonplace. I had a car door that locked when I shut it if I pressed a button on the handle. I saw my keys dangling from the ignition switch just as I slammed the door. Many of us do this at least once. The other time I locked myself out of my car wasn't commonplace. I had my car keys in my hand as I slammed the car door, trapping both ends of the heavy woolen tie I was wearing, a few inches below the knot, forcing me to stand slightly stooped. That car had a keyhole only in the door on the passenger side not the driver's side, presumably because it was an Australian version of an American designed car. I was part way through my daily round of house calls, so I had my medical bag which contained a pair of scissors and I might have been able to cut myself free, but when I dropped the bag at my feet, my trapped tie prevented me from bending down to open it. I was on a quiet suburban street in mid morning and there wasn't a soul in sight. It began to rain, gently at first, then harder. By the time the postman came by delivering mail, I was soaked, and when I handed him the keys so he could set me free, he was laughing so hard at my predicament it took him an extra moment or two to get the key into the lock. After that I always made sure when buying a new car that both front doors had keyholes.

"Annual report"

To round out the year, here is the email greeting I fired off into cyberspace 10 days or so ago, to scattered friends around the world; it sums up my long-winded posts throughout 2011 --

 This year has been quiet, compared to the past 55 eventful years.  My children have been looking after me very well. Rebecca and Richard have consistently provided at least one meal every week at their place or mine; if at their place, Jonathan drives me out there. David phones almost every day from Kingston or Toronto (or wherever else in the world he happens to be; this week he's in Botswana). Just about every day I see and chat briefly to one or more neighbours in the condominium where I live. Even so, I get terribly lonely living here on my own. I miss Janet Wendy more than it’s possible to express in words. I have photos of her strategically located in several rooms in my apartment, and sometimes when I’m alone I talk to these photos. I’ve done very little traveling: over to Waterloo to talk to the new intake of MPH students, to Hamilton to stay with Karen and Pradeep Kumar and see a couple of plays at the annual Shaw Festival in Niagara on the Lake; and in August I flew to Edinburgh to attend the World Congress of Epidemiology, where I saw and shook hands with many old friends and made some new ones, and at times felt a bit like the Eiffel Tower because so many people wanted their photos taken standing next to me: I still seem to be famous among my fellow epidemiologists, get asked to give talks and write papers that purport to be learned. I flex my literary muscles with posts on my blog, originally a convenient venue for progress reports on Wendy’s condition, now a repository for whatever thoughts are uppermost in my mind at the time.  It’s a form of occupational therapy. When I reread my posts they strike me as boring and turgid, but to my surprise my blog has 20-30 regular readers and has had over 8,000 “hits” since I started it in February 2010. No doubt this includes shadowy spooks from secretive government agencies, but I don’t let that thought deter me from expressing my outrage and disgust at some of the actions of our current crop of elected leaders. It’s no consolation that they didn’t get my vote. 

I hope you have had a good year and that you are looking forward to a happy future. There are occasional photos posted on my blog if you can be bothered to scroll through all the verbiage.

My love and warmest best wishes to you all. 

David and Desre got safely back from Botswana and South Africa yesterday, so we'll have a family reunion, celebration of Rebecca's birthday, and belated seasonal gift exchange on New Year's Eve.

A White Christmas

Very light snow has been falling since the small hours on this overcast day, so rather to my surprise we have a white Christmas. It has covered the green grass of the little park below my north windows and the rooftops below the west windows. If the 7-day forecast is accurate, this light coating of snow may stay there until at least New Year. Until now the mild weather has fooled some migratory birds including Canada geese that have been able to gorge on fallow corn fields that are normally snow covered by this time of year; perhaps now the geese will belatedly head south. I am comforted by the thought that the shortest day is behind us now, and I can look forward to longer days, imperceptibly to begin with but soon the sun will shine again into my north windows, no doubt lifting my spirits further even though it will mean I must tilt the Venetian blinds to reduce the sun's impact on coloured fabric and the spines of my books. 

I took Rebecca and Richard, and Jonathan,  to a Christmas Day dinner at the Lord Elgin Hotel. I remember an elegant, well-appointed restaurant in that hotel, light and airy, with a very good table and excellent wines. It was one of Ottawa's top quality eating places in former times. Now, alas, like several other hotel restaurants, it's fallen on sad days indeed, just a rather grotty greasy spoon sort of place with a special set price menu for Christmas Day. The "home made" butternut squash soup was acceptable, but the meal went downhill after that. The plate on which my roast turkey, gravy and vegetables arrived, was hotter than the almost cold meal which all tasted as if cooked some days if not weeks earlier, and the banana fritters that rounded off our lunch were ice cold, not even re-heated. At least I had a glass of Canadian bubbly white wine to wash my meal down; none of the others had any alcohol to soften the impact.  I'll know better next time, will reserve a table at the Chateau Laurier well ahead of Christmas Day. These days the Chateau may be the only place in Ottawa that still serves a special Christmas Day feast.

It's no longer the season of peace and goodwill, if indeed it ever was. Today it was an extremist Islamic  sect in Nigeria that chose to demonstrate its ill will towards mankind, rather than one of the Middle Eastern or South Asian hate groups. We humans just don't seem able to get along in harmony with one another. What  an unhappy world it is!      

Don't miss this

Turn on your sound and visit
www.classicalarchives.com/feature/dont_miss_this.html.
I've sent the coordinates of this wonderful flash mob orchestral performance to many correspondents so it remains only to urge my unknown readers to look and listen too. Think of it as my seasonal greeting to you!

Iraq and other mistakes

Yesterday the last contingent of American combat troops left Iraq. I wonder how many of them felt ashamed, discomforted, guilty about what they did to that country. The war cost over 100,000 Iraqi lives, about 4500 American lives, and about $1trillion, and left the USA mired in debt that may prove insurmountably burdensome. Yes, they deposed a brutal dictator and a power elite that for decades had dominated that artificially contrived nation, and yes, they installed a form of governance that masquerades as a democracy. But most Iraqis are worse off than they were before their country was invaded, its infrastructure wantonly destroyed, its priceless museum of antiquities looted, sectarian tensions inflamed, indiscriminate violent death a daily reality. Under Saddam, despite his brutality, Iraq had efficiently functioning health care, universal state-financed education, little or no discrimination against women. The Iraqi physicians and other professionals I've worked with in WHO and interacted with in other settings were all very knowledgeable, well trained, competent; and about 50% of the physicians were women. Years ago one of my friends in WHO showed me proudly the superb dental work he'd had done in Baghdad when he'd broken a tooth while working there and consulted more or less randomly the first dentist able to see him on a street where there were several practising dentists.

I remember watching the discussion at the UN Security Council when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State showed photos of what he said were storage sites for "weapons of mass destruction" and thinking at the time his presentation lacked credibility. Now we know it was all lies, that the entire case for war, like the sanctions and "no-fly zones" inflicted on Iraq between the two Gulf wars, was based on lies, that the Bush administration came to power determined to bring down Saddam Hussain's regime and install a puppet state in its place, one that would do America's bidding (and, inter alia, remove one potential threat to Israeli security). For a few years it looked likely that Saddam's fascist regime would be replaced by a failed state. That didn't happen, but 2011-2012 Iraq is certainly a fragile state with the potential to descend readily into the same kind of anarchy and violence  as Somalia.

American foreign policy has been inept for decades. They mistook the Vietnamese war of liberation from colonial rule by the French for an expansionist frontier of the People's Republic of China, when a less paranoid view would have had them helping the Vietnamese break free from French colonialism, helping Vietnam to become a democracy instead of an authoritarian state. That mistaken. paranoid policy cost many thousand American lives, perhaps ten times as many Vietnamese lives, catastrophic genocide in Cambodia, tropical forests destroyed by toxic herbicides, and a generation or more of birth defects caused by dioxins in the herbicides used to destroy the forests.  In Latin America they have repeatedly supported dictators rather than democratically elected leaders. In South Africa they supported the apartheid regime, the CIA led that regime's agents to Nelson Mandela and approved his imprisonment. Almost everywhere they have made enemies of people who could and would have been their friends. If Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and other Arab countries are soon ruled by Islamic fundamentalist governments, it will be because American foreign policy in the region backed dictators rather than encouraging nascent democracies.

As a friend of many Americans it saddens me deeply to spell out these American mistakes, but many more voices than mine are needed to speak these truths to American power, and turn US foreign policy in righteous directions.

The cultural mosaic

Almost every weekday, Rita Celli, the host of the noon hour CBC Radio program, initiates dialogues with her listeners on an interesting topic. This is the very best kind of talk radio, because Rita Celli does not shy away from controversial or highly sensitive subjects. Indeed I believe she deliberately selects sensitive and controversial topics. She is an excellent journalist, knows how to ask questions, how to draw out from the people she interviews the responses that they are sometimes reluctant to provide. As moderator of these daily discussions, she generally preserves her impartiality and equanimity Today she invited her listeners to comment on the announcement by the minister of citizenship and immigration, that women taking the oath of Canadian citizenship would no longer be permitted to do so while their face is concealed by a niqab. The topic of the niqab has come up before in other contexts, for instance in relation to the photo ID requirement for passports and driver's licences. As usual, today's program generated a lively discussion and as usual I was full of admiration for Rita Celli's tact and skill in the face of a few very emotionally fraught comments. On the whole, however, I thought the discussion illustrated very well the cultural mosaic of this wonderful country of Canada and the tolerance that Canadians in general mostly have for cultures and customs different from their own. I found myself in full agreement with one listener's comment that the Minister's decision to ban the niqab at citizenship ceremonies was a demonstration of the meretricious behaviour of the present government which encourages divisive and intolerant conduct   Today's discussion was another vivid demonstration that Wendy and I made the right choice when we chose Canada rather than the USA as the country in which to raise our children.    

Day 1: Feb 22 2010

Monday, February 22, 2010

Day 1: Feb 22 2010

This was my very first post, which got lost when I first posted it. Now, mysteriously, it's come back, out of sequence. It was my first attempt to record some of the events in the lives of Janet Wendy Last and myself. We began our married lives in Adelaide, South Australia early in 1957, having met about 18 months earlier in circumstances I have described publicly twice, first in a CBC Radio broadcast on our 40th wedding anniversary in 1997, then in a little speech at our 50th wedding anniversary banquet. Later I inserted one of those anecdotes in this blog. We have moved about quite a lot in our married lives, though not as much as many immigrant Canadians. I will insert from time to time a few pictures of us at various stages in our lives. Here on the left is a photo of us at Cochem Castle on the Moselle River in Germany, on our  European holiday in 2007. That turned out to be our last European holiday, indeed our last holiday.

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Pandemic influenza

It's been a busy week so far. Yesterday morning I was invited to give a keynote address to open a two-day national workshop on pandemic influenza, convened by the Public Health Agency of Canada. I chose to widen the scope to talk about pandemics in general and to consider some broader issues than control of pandemic influenza. It was a very interesting workshop, which included the perspectives of the World Health Organization, the UK and the USA. Here is the text of my opening talk, which seemed to find favour with many participants who spoke to me afterwards and at the dinner last night.

Historical and other aspects of pandemic disease

The struggle for supremacy between mankind and infectious microbes has fascinated me since I was a medical student nearly 70 years ago. Pandemics are an aspect of this struggle, in which, for a time, microbes gain the upper hand. The world’s population passed 7 billion in October 2011. A crowded world is heating up, its infrastructure is deteriorating, and millions are restlessly moving. UNHCR reported 47 million refugees in 2010; at least that many or more migrated from rural to urban areas. Every year about 200 million migrate internationally, and 600 million or more travel internationally by air. Future pandemics are a certainty, probably soon, perhaps due to new pathogens. Some pandemics have affected the course of history and probably will again in future. Difficult moral and ethical issues can arise in epidemic and pandemic disease control.

Ancient fears and superstitions

A large outbreak of an often mysterious disease that strikes people down seemingly at random has always been a terrifying phenomenon. Such events were explained in ancient times as god’s punishment for the people’s sins, the work of the devil or evil spirits, probably summoned by malign individuals like witches, or those perennial scapegoats, the Jews. Someone had to be blamed and punished, so witches were burnt at the stake, Jews were driven out of the community. Pandemics, even localized epidemics, still have the power to awaken atavistic fears among ignorant and superstitious people, as they did in the Middle Ages. People look for scapegoats, try to find someone to blame. They turn to fundamentalist aspects of faith, make sacrifices to appease vengeful evil spirits or the wrath of god. The economy suffers, hurting those who worship Mammon.

An Adelaide GP’s perspective on the 1958 Asian influenza pandemic

My experience as a GP (family doctor) in Adelaide in the 1958 pandemic of Asian influenza shaped my career. In June 1958, I was 8 1/2 years out of medical school, 4 years in general practice in Adelaide. Asian influenza reached Australia in early winter, in June. In Melbourne, the eminent virologist Macfarlane Burnett (later a Nobel laureate) headed the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute at the University of Melbourne and working with Frank Fenner at the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, began preparing a vaccine. Small quantities of the vaccine reached Adelaide in July, and were given to highest priority public officials, including ambulance attendants, emergency room staff, police (but not GPs). In July, August, early September, my partners and I worked nonstop. We did a lot of house calls in those days; during that pandemic I did up to 30 house calls on many days, as well as seeing patients in my office. Public service radio announcements urged people with flu symptoms to avoid public places like hospital emergency departments (but not GPs’ waiting rooms!). Worldwide deaths in the 1957-58 influenza pandemic were over 2 million. The pandemic struck close to home. It killed two young health professionals I knew very well: a nurse in the maternity department of the hospital where I did most of my obstetrics, and an ambulance driver with whom I played golf. Both had flu vaccine a few days earlier…

In October after the pandemic receded I fell critically ill with a non-bacterial pneumonia. I and my doctor thought for a few days that I would die. I had a daughter aged 10 months and my wife was pregnant with our second child. It was a career changing experience. During my convalescence I thought deeply about what to do with the rest of my life: I decided to leave general practice where I was happy, financially secure, and I’m told, was regarded as a good doctor. Instead I decided to train in public health sciences, especially epidemiology, with the aim of keeping people healthy rather than waiting for them to get sick. That career change brought me to Ottawa 42 years ago.

Pandemic diseases in historical perspective

The outcome of many wars has been determined more by pathogenic micro organisms than by military strategy, tactics, bravery, or superior weapons. The plague that afflicted Athens at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War (426-425 BCE) was described in detail by the historian Thucycides, who was there and got the plague, but fortunately survived it. It was not a pandemic but a localized epidemic, probably louse-borne typhus. The next historically memorable epidemic (or pandemic) was the plague of Justinian, emperor of Constantinople; this afflicted the Empire of Byzantium in 541-542 CE, and was probably bubonic and pneumonic plague.

The Black Death, bubonic, pneumonic and septicemic plague devastated Asia Minor and all of Europe in 1347-1350. That pandemic killed up to 30% of the people of Europe and may have set back the advance of civilization by several hundred years. That was followed in 1485 by the first wave of a mysterious contagious disease called the sweating sickness (or ‘sweats’). This caused severe epidemics in Britain and Europe until 1551, after which it disappeared forever. We have no idea what this was. It might have been a variety of influenza but contemporary accounts don’t sound like influenza. Several medieval epidemics of smallpox and typhus were widespread pandemics.

Influenza and cholera are the best known among lethal pandemics in the past 200 years, a period during which we have had good clinical and statistical records, and increasingly good microbiological and immunological tools. This combination has removed much, but not all, of the superstition, hysteria, ‘fear of the unknown’, victim-blaming and stigmatizing that often occurred during lethal outbreaks of contagious diseases in earlier times.

Cholera has swept across the world in seven pandemic waves since the early 19th century; the seventh cholera pandemic seems to be subsiding now, apart from sporadic outbreaks in Haiti and refugee communities in Africa; but no doubt we haven’t seen the last of cholera.

Influenza

Hippocrates (4th Century BCE) described a disease that sounds very like modern influenza and several writers described outbreaks in Europe as early as 1580. The first European occurrence that we can confidently call pandemic influenza was in 1830-1833. A pandemic in 1880-1882 invaded Europe from Russia. About the same time there were influenza epidemics in China and India. The first truly global pandemic was the ‘Spanish’ Influenza in 1918-1919. This attacked predominantly young people (born after 1882) and had a case fatality rate of at least 2% in people aged under 40. Estimates of worldwide deaths vary from 20 to 100 million. It certainly killed more than all killed in the Great War of 1914-18.

Several potentially catastrophic pandemic waves of influenza have fizzled out or been aborted since 1976, most recently swine (H1N1) and avian influenza (H5N1) which had a higher case fatality rate. We can’t know for certain, but strain-specific vaccines and other counter-measures like isolating and killing infected domestic poultry flocks may have aborted or prevented what could otherwise have become major pandemics possibly with high case fatality rates.

Since its onset in the early 1980s, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has killed about 35-40 million people, but the epidemiology, natural history, and control measures for HIV/AIDS are so different from other pandemics that they require separate discussion, and I won’t go into details. The threat remains real from outbreaks of new and emerging pathogens that could be natural or man-made.

Pandemic disease as a war weapon

In North America and in Australia in early colonial times, blankets used by smallpox patients were given to indigenous aboriginal tribes with the deliberate aim of infecting them with smallpox. These were genocidal acts of biological warfare. About 300 years earlier, the spectacular success of the Spanish invaders against the Aztec empire in Mexico was due less to their guns and steel swords than to the viruses of measles and smallpox that they brought with them; the Spanish invaders were resistant to these viruses but the Aztecs were not, and were decimated. The Spaniards did this unwittingly, but during the plague of Justinian a thousand years earlier, corpses of plague victims were catapulted into besieged cities in Asia Minor with the deliberate intention of starting a plague epidemic. Infected corpses have been dropped down wells to contaminate drinking water since biblical times, so this is an ancient aspect of military tactics. In World War II, the Japanese experimented with plague, and Winston Churchill’s government experimented with anthrax among other organisms, rendering an island near the entrance to the Firth of Forth unfit for human occupancy– it was still “Off Limits” when I worked at the University of Edinburgh in 1965-69. Other nations also experimented with highly contagious pathogens, and no doubt continue to do so. A terrorist group or a small, weak nation with malice aforethought could severely damage a larger, wealthier, well-armed nation, using biological weapons. My son had 30 years in the Canadian forces and worked among other things on security threats to Canada; he told me that NDHQ (like the CIA and NSC in USA) takes this threat seriously – although they haven’t taken the Canadian people into their confidence about this. (The public might be more cooperative with pandemic control measures if they knew about such threats).

Pandemic disease in food crops

The famine in Ireland in 1845 was man-made but it was potentiated by potato blight, a fungus disease that wiped out the harvest of potatoes upon which Irish peasants and city people depended for their survival. One reason I deplore the infatuation of agribusiness with genetically modified food crops such as corn is that these monocultures could be terribly vulnerable; they might be susceptible to invasion by virus, bacteria or fungus which could destroy in one blow the food crops of an entire region. This nightmare scenario is less likely to occur if we encourage biodiversity, avoid monoculture and genetically modified food crops. This biological reality seems to be better understood in Europe than in USA and Canada. However, I don’t really know what I’m talking about here. These may be the ravings of an old man in the process of losing his marbles, so ignore me, or heed me as you wish.

Living in harmony with pathogenic organisms

The laws of evolutionary biology dictate that we can never win a war against pathogenic organisms using antibiotics and anti-viral agents. Micro organisms have generation times of minutes or less in favorable conditions, so resistant strains rapidly evolve. History and headlines every day tell us that humans have never yet learnt how to live in harmony with enemies of our own kind. But we have learnt and continue to learn how to live in harmony with many of our microbial enemies. Safe food and water, kitchen hygiene, vaccines, sera, antibiotics, window screens, bed nets and condoms have enabled us to co-exist with an increasingly wide range of pathogens. Recent genome studies offer great promise of future developments, including creation of non pathogenic strains of dangerous pathogens that could “out-breed” the pathogenic varieties, and genetically enhanced resistance to pathogens like common cold viruses.

Studies of blood group frequencies in countries around the world as long ago as the 1960s demonstrated striking differences; the occurrence of sickle cell anemia in regions where malaria had long been endemic is further evidence to support the hypothesis that regional impact of epidemic, endemic and pandemic disease in previous generations led to these differences in genetic makeup: it is caused by the impact of these diseases on particular genotypes. Plague, smallpox and influenza epidemics in particular appear to have had considerable influence on the genetic make-up, including blood group frequencies, of populations in Southern and Western Europe, Egypt and the Middle East, and India. All this was known about the time Crick and Watson discovered the DNA molecule. Since DNA analysis was perfected, further studies have enlarged our understanding of relationships between genetic makeup and susceptibility or resistance to many diseases, including those such as influenza that have the capacity to cause pandemics. Medical science will surely develop techniques of gene transplant or transfer, or other ways to manipulate the human genome so as to enhance herd immunity to specific viruses, enabling populations to live in harmony with pathogenic micro-organisms that caused devastating epidemics in earlier times.

What happens when we relax mass vaccination?

Paralytic poliomyelitis, measles, diphtheria and whooping cough epidemics occurred when mass vaccination broke down after the USSR collapsed. Small, localized outbreaks have occurred in unimmunized sub-groups such as members of the Dutch Reform Church who have religious objections to vaccines. Cases of measles, rubella and mumps occurred when parents withheld their infants from MMR and other vaccines after the scoundrel Wakefield published a paper, later shown to be fraudulent, claiming an association between MMR vaccination and autism. As formerly common infectious diseases of childhood become vanishingly rare, sporadic cases and even epidemics will return if herd immunity falls below the critical level, which can be calculated for each of these diseases, using mathematical models developed many years ago by Norman Bailey (since refined by others). One of our best defenses against epidemics is maintenance of herd immunity. This can become a challenge when the risk of an adverse reaction associated with each specific vaccine approaches (or exceeds) the risk of acquiring the disease, raising ethical dilemmas about balancing risks and harms against benefits.

Ethical and moral concerns

Fear of contagion is a variation on the theme of fear of the unknown. We think of it as an out-dated emotion but it occurred during the SARS epidemic in Toronto in 2003. ‘Contagion’ (suspected contagiousness) is stigmatizing, harmful, potentially lethal: being Chinese in Toronto during the SARS epidemic could have led to being burnt at the stake if it had happened in medieval times. These sentiments were detected on talk radio in Toronto in 2003. Epidemic control officers have a moral or ethical obligation to dispel these irrational emotions by educating the public, being open and truthful. During the SARS epidemic I was asked by the CBC to give many interviews, the aim being to educate the public and eliminate the tendency to stigmatize groups suspected of disseminating the SARS organism (at that time the nature of the organism was unknown). On one memorable morning I gave 14 separate interviews to 14 breakfast radio programs from St John’s to Victoria, White Horse and Yellowknife. The questions were much the same each time but probably correctly, the CBC producer wanted live programs aimed at the local audience, rather than a single nation-wide interview. The aim was to inform and educate, to avoid the moral problem of stigmatizing the innocent. The World Health Organization didn’t help: WHO officials should have known better: their travel advisory cost Toronto $35M/day in lost business.

The procedures of epidemic control, surveillance, locating cases, notifying, isolation, quarantine, raise ethical challenges. Surveillance reminds us of George Orwell’s 1984, that Big Brother is watching; identifying and notifying cases is potentially stigmatizing. Isolation restricts freedom of cases. Quarantine denies freedom to contacts of cases. The question pandemic control officers must ask is “How can I eliminate the risk that control measures cause harm to anyone?” Other troubling questions arise when we use the “police powers” of public health.

Philosophical considerations

One purpose of history is to help make informed guesses about the future. A few months before I graduated from medical school in 1949, I wrote a gloomy essay about future prospects for humanity. One theme I explored was what I perceived as an alarming, unsustainable population increase. In 1949 the world’s population was 2.4 billion, increasing by 20 million/year. In October 2011, the world’s population passed 7 billion, and it is increasing by 75 million/year. Demographers, agronomists, security analysts in the CIA, and other experts, agree that the world can’t sustain such increasing numbers; the population is projected to reach 9-10 billion by mid-century; at the same time we are losing agricultural land to urban sprawl, soil erosion, desertification, sea level rise, climate change; and the oceans, formerly the source of 30% of human protein needs, are depleted and polluted. Are we about to hit Thomas Malthus’s wall? Is the irresistible force of population growth hitting the immovable object of declining global resources? This is happening now in parts of the world. It is responsible for the increasing number of environmental refugees, from 5 million in 2005 to 47 million in 2010. Wait a wee while and one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will bring you down. What’s your preference? War? Famine? Pandemic Disease?

Perhaps we should welcome rather than take counter-measures next time a pandemic strikes. That would be one way to reduce the surplus population.

.........................................................

Today I had to miss the second part of the workshop on pandemics to attend a U of O function at which my presence was almost mandatory; this had to do with plans for the period from now to 2020 and beyond, to which I've already contributed in a miniscule way. I was very happy to hear from a bright young man in the Development Office about the ways in which the U of O is encouraging and promoting transdisciplinary activities and groups, helping to break through the watertight compartments that sometimes block communication among disparate groups and individuals in the scholarly community.

Bah! Humbug!

At this time of the year I feel really sorry for the people who work in shopping malls, in the few surviving department stores, and this year for the first time even in the neighbourhood book shop. How can they endure hour after hour of carol music? They deserve extra wages for the hardship. I love many Christmas carols but the versions chosen for endless repetition as background to the shopping spree the vendors hope for, are chintzy schlock. Today I heard far worse. A so-called ballad singer was inflicting on CBC Radio's audience her souped up versions of It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, Away in a Manger, Come All Ye Faithful, and Stille Nacht (Silent Night) with her horribly out of tune high and low notes and thumper-thumper instrumentation. If she had come within reach I'd have cheerfully garrotted her. Then there are Christmas lights. Sure, they brighten the long nights, but increasing numbers of people leave their twinklies on for months, until daylight saving summer time begins in April if not longer.

Climate and human health

The latest issue of the British Medical Journal to reach me had a report of a conference in London last month on the health impact of expected climate change in the next 50 years, in the lifetime of my grandchildren. This was attended by leading experts on public health, climate science, agronomy, entomology, strategic studies, food science. It makes grim reading. The consensus is firmer than ever that in the absence of immediate action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, there will be a 4-5 degree C increase in average global temperature by 2060, increased frequency and ferocity of droughts and floods, and sharp decline in productivity of all the world's grain-growing regions. This will lead to hunger, starvation, famine, massive refugee movement and widespread conflicts. More than half the world's population will be living in regions where mosquito-borne diseases occur. Our government denies the need to do anything about these predictable dangers, indeed is doing all it can to prevent any steps towards mitigation of climate change at the conference now in progress in Durban, South Africa. The smugly complacent woman columnist in our national newspaper as usual finds a dissenting voice among the climate scientists and quotes this triumphantly: don't worry, be happy, all those experts are wrong, here is a scientist who says all is well and the observed rise in global average temperatures over the past quarter century, the increased number of extreme climatic events, the melting polar and alpine icecaps are "normal events" and just passing trends. Even more frightening, smart-arse engineers and others assert that they have a solution, just load the upper atmosphere with a bit of sulfur dioxide or other stuff to reflect solar radiation back into space and bring the temperature down that way, while continuing to load the atmosphere with more greenhouse gases. The economy, so say the investors, is more important than survival of grain crops, life-supporting ecosystems, even humans, so long as we can continue with business as usual, continue to "grow" the economy, continue to make profits. A species that acclaims such sentiments doesn't deserve to survive, and won't.