Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The Flu Is Scary When You Think About It

SOCIAL STUDIES - February 25, 2008

I have always heard that one of the largest health problems the world faces is the flu. To be honest, the next thing out of my mouth has usually been some kind of chuckle; I mean, can you imagine the flu of all things, being thought of as a serious problem?

A couple of days of discomfort and grogginess never hurt anyone. Or perhaps we are talking about some form of Darwinian evolution, the survival of the fittest and all that.

Still, I dutifully take my flu shot every year, and I am very sympathetic when I meet people who are, or have been, suffering; despite the fact that I have failed to grasp the doom and gloom, I do know from experience that it is terrible to be sick.

This week has opened my eyes. I, and a majority of my family, have been sick for days. And I mean sick. Unable to eat, spewing forth from both ends as if the sluice gates were perpetually opened, unable to sleep because of the cramps and muscle pain -- you get the idea. My 11-month-old daughter worries me the most as she is not gaining weight anyway, and now this. Perhaps there is something to this fear of the flu after all.

There was an Influenza outbreak at the beginning of the last century, known as the Spanish Flu, or La Grippe. Over the span from 1918 to 1919 the flu killed more people than did the Great World War. In fact, the flu killed more people that season than the Bubonic Plague, which came to be known as the Black Death, did during the five years from 1347 to 1351.

It is thought that this particular flu killed as many as 40 million people. It spread, perhaps from China, through military and commercial trade lines, first to Spain, then to America, and then around the globe. At first in the United States you were most likely to get it in a military training camp before you headed off to the trenches, but that soon changed.

In the U.S. alone, this pandemic shortened the average life span by 10 years, 28 per cent of the population was affected, and, unlike the usual morbidity patterns it mostly targeted those who were between 20 and 40 years old.

Imagine this -- you develop a cold, then some aches, then pneumonia, then cyanosis which means you are unable to get oxygen to your blood, and you eventually die gasping for air amidst the bloody froth. That is influenza. That is something to be worried about.

As anyone who gets a flu shot and then goes on to catch another strain of influenza would tell you, that is a very real and very potent threat for us all.

There are so many ways that the world is supposed to end; scientists recently revised their global sea level predictions and decided that we could be looking at a minimum of 100 foot rise over the next little while -- which puts Moncton and a whole lot of other cities completely under water. Others say the Ross Ice Shelf, or perhaps Greenland will slide into the ocean and cause an Ice Age. I have speculated in these pages that the poles will reverse sometime around 2012 ushering in the next global change.

But after a week of suffering and no end in sight, I am tempted to join T.S. Elliot who wrote in his epic poem The Hollow Men "this is the way the world ends . . . not with a bang but a whimper."

Morbidity rates vary from year to year, according to which strain of influenza is more prominent, but as a gross average the best you are looking at is 30 deaths for every 100,000 people, and the worst without a pandemic is 50 deaths. Now, this means a minimum of 10,000 deaths in Canada alone on average because of the flu, and 1,980,000 deaths worldwide. Keep in mind that most of the deaths do probably occur in less developed countries and so Canada might be lower, but worldwide some two million people might die of the flu this season -- which is incredibly scary.

The World Health Organization has recorded data going back over the centuries and has determined that every 100 year period brings with it three influenza pandemics. The Last three were the Spanish of 1918, the Asian of 1957, and the Hong Kong which occurred in 1968.

It also warns that the conditions are right for the first Pandemic of the new Millennium to occur soon. A pandemic, by the way, simply means a variant of the disease spreads worldwide and infects a larger population.

If you remember my statistics above, you can compare the worst of the last pandemics, the Spanish, which had a morbidity rate that measured somewhere around 1,500 per 100,000 people; or some 50 times the regular death rate.

This gets a little technical but the strain that will cause the problem, according to WHO, is H5N1, a variant of which is the Avian, or Bird Flu which makes the news every now and again. So far the Bird Flu usually stays in Asia, but it is still frightening.

The last two reported cases were on the 21st of February in Indonesia and of the 129 cases confirmed to date in Indonesia, 105 have been fatal.

Not only that; but influenza only ranks about 8th in the leading causes of death worldwide.

I am fairly confident that my family will weather this bout of disease; but I am certainly less confident that there is nothing to worry about.

When I hear that someone has the flu from now on, I am going to be a whole lot more concerned.

Somehow, we all have to figure out how to make this world a healthier place, so that all of these threats to our existence can be a little less threatening.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

They Could Be Dead As You Read This

SOCIAL STUDIES - February 18th 2008

They could be dead by the time you read this.

The purported terrorists who allegedly destroyed the twin towers in New York, that is.

It will probably come as breaking news; and the news will probably be old before it hits the stand. It seems far more likely that the military junta who is in control of the so called trial will just have them shot and sometime later in a memo declare it to have happened.

It is not that I am for terrorism, or even a big fan of our current legal systems, it is just that I cannot believe how far from accepted social practice the United States is willing to move for the sake of public safety.

Even at ball games the entire country sings lustily about it being "the home of the free," but has anyone really stopped to think about what they are saying?

Pretty much the main freedom you have as a citizen of the union is the freedom to tell other people what they cannot be free to do. What with everyone and their dog hopping on the bandwagon of freedom, it is a wonder that anyone can make any decisions for themselves.

Thomas Hobbes the political philosopher worked from one main premise; life is "nasty, brutish, and short." Once we realize that, he argued, we need to start curtailing freedom in order to be safe. You simply cannot kill people because you do not want them to kill you. Therefore you cannot commit crimes because it would make someone mad enough to want to kill you. The same goes with slander, hearsay and the rest of it; we make moral decisions, and force others to live by our decisions to insure the common good.

Of course, Hobbes wrote this during the Civil War in England during the mid-17th century and it was perhaps easier to curtail freedom back then.

The problem is that the social contract is a contract one enters into by mutual assent.

My neighbour and I agree not to shoot our shotguns across the disputed fence because we don't want anyone to shoot our dog. The social contract Hobbes had in mind was not one that could be enforced by the state.

There is another word for enforced social and moral rule: fascism, which Webster's defines as "A political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government (as opposed to democracy or liberalism)."

Laurence Britt, writing in the Free Inquiry Magazine defined 14 characteristics of fascism from which I leave you to draw your own conclusions:

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights.

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism.

5. Rampant sexism.

6. A controlled mass media.

7. Obsession with national security.

8. Religion and ruling elite tied together.

9. Power of corporations protected.

10. Power of labour suppressed or eliminated.

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment.

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption.

14. Fraudulent elections.

Down in Guantánamo there are six people facing charges in the death of the more than 3,000 victims of an act of terrorism in New York City. I have seen the death certificates of two of those victims, as I knew them, and they truly do list cause of death as murder -- so there is no doubt some sort of criminal investigation should ensue.

Those six people are also not your average run of the mill people; one is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed a former senior aide to Osama Bin Laden. Still. . .

They are being tried under the Military Commissions Act as war criminals with far fewer rights than any citizen of the United States would be afforded. They are faced with the very real threat of a death sentence which has been abolished in every western country except the United States. They are being tried for all intents and purposes in a foreign penal colony outside of regular jurisdiction. They are also being defended by U.S. military lawyers and judged by a U.S. military tribunal. There will be no press, no family, no advocates; and the evidence was, it is rumoured, obtained with the use of torture.

An interviewee on the CBC also made the interesting observation that they have waited almost 3,000 days after the fact to begin the trial. Curiously choosing a time corresponding with a national election in which the Democrats are poised to sweep the rug out from under them to show how tough the Republicans can be on terrorism by ushering the 9/11 perpetrators to their final resting place.

The General in charge says they will get a fair trial; so hey, why should we be upset? Perhaps because from the very first trial ever held over there, the Bush administration has tried to go around the basic freedoms afforded by their government; arguing, for example, that prisoners should not be granted the right to appeal because that is a U.S. legal statute and they are being tried outside of U.S. jurisdiction.

They may be guilty for all I know. They may be horrific, terrible, even evil people who should be shot at sunset. But it worries me that I will never really know.

I would like to think I live in a world where people really are innocent until proven guilty and that even the least of us have some sort of protection under the law. If for no other reason, then because I think human rights evoke a Hobbesian sort of reciprocity in which others will treat us with respect and civility when we can muster the courage to do the same.

Of course, they are probably dead already.

Watch out; you never know who could be next.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

It's Not a Patient World: Blame Technology

SOCIAL STUDIES - February 11th, 2008

This is not a patient world. I blame technology.

Before there were answering machines, you never expected anyone to phone you back, you just kept trying at different times on different days until your schedules matched. I do not remember this system stressing me out at all.

With the advent of the answering machine we expected people to get back to us within a few days at the most -- and that assumed they were on vacation or something.

Next we invented the fabulously useful and yet insidiously stress producing cell phone -- which made us think that people were inherently reachable wherever they were and whenever we wanted. Almost immediately this made us treat things like the morning commute as work opportunities instead of the radio listening mind numbing relaxation centred experiences they were meant to be. Still, I think we would give people a period of grace in terms of calling us back, and hope they got to us today or tomorrow.

Grace, that is, until the epidemic of e-mail.

E-mail created an environment where we expected that the person who was not on their cell phone was in fact in front of the computer screen, with nothing better on their mind than responding to each and every individual query from both well meaning and intentionally time wasting compatriots.

Ask yourself, in this technologically savvy world, how much time you would give someone to respond to a message?

For most of us our patience starts to wear thin after a couple of hours. Just stop and think about this for a moment -- how much time do you spend at the gym, on the road, at lunch, or asleep?

I don't return cell phone calls during those moments -- but I am anachronistic. I try not to return phone calls on the day they come in just on principle. I can therefore tell you from experience; it makes people irate when they cannot immediately be in touch with you.

Don't get me wrong, I am no Luddite; I own every single imaginable piece of technology and love it. I am writing this on a laptop that has my ipaq handheld computer and my iPod nano plugged into it. My iPod has a nike sensor so that I can keep track of and download my running; my cable box records 40 hours of programming so I can pause and rewind or even walk away from the few new programs that are actually dribbling out of the writer barren TV-land. I have a cell phone and an Xbox. And my life would not be complete without any of it . . . but that does not mean that we need to let technology control us.

There is a book by a journalist named Carl Honoré called In Praise of Slow which looks at various aspects of our lives as Canadians in order to challenge our assumption that bigger and faster is always better.

Even the sleeve notes from this book are intriguing; they say, among other things, that the average Canadian sleeps 90 minutes less a night then we did a century ago, that we average 72 minutes behind the wheel of a car each day, and that we spend 68 hours a year on hold.

We have sped up and stressed out almost every aspect of our lives from work to play, food to love; and we are killing ourselves because of it.

Here are some scary facts: every day in the United States there are one million employees off on stress leave; one third of all North Americans are obese; the use of drugs in the workplace has risen 78 per cent since 1998 (the drug of choice being crystal meth which lets you work like a superhero till you die); traffic fatalities now stand at somewhere near 1.3 million worldwide, many of which are caused by fatigue (11 per cent of people say they have fallen asleep at the wheel); and there are now 24-hour day cares in many cities.

Why do we need everything to happen right now when it is clearly so harmful to how we should be living?

Why are we so impatient?

It is not like anything is better because of our sense of haste; which you can prove using some simple experiments.

Please try these at home. First, go to any fast food restaurant for a burger and fries (I suggest A&W or Wendy's just to give them a fighting chance) for lunch. Now, go to the market or even a superstore and buy some sirloin steak, some aged blue cheese, and Yukon gold potatoes. Make yourself some bread while grinding up the sirloin in the food processor, make your own fries and season them with sea salt -- use the blue cheese for the cheeseburger and add whatever you like to any of it.

I guarantee you will not even be able to convince yourself you are eating the same meal as lunch.

Next, devote a whole day to doing nothing and see how relaxed you are the following day.

Finally, spend three hours awake and in bed with your spouse -- do anything you want to do, read, talk . . . and see if suddenly you are not way more connected.

Slowing down and becoming more patient does not actually mean giving up anything. It means reclaiming the value in what we already have.

Unless you have chest pain or are bleeding profusely, there is absolutely nothing that needs to be done right now. So put down this paper and go for a walk, take a nap, listen to a song, or just stare into space.

Whatever you do, just try to wait, it will make each task a little more fulfilling and life will be better.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

We all have a role in curbing climate change

SOCIAL STUDIES - February 04, 2008

Europe has been emitting carbon since the dawn of the 20th Century at a rate that would be hard for most of us to fathom. This is the place, after all, which even has poets remarking about their ‘dark satanic mills.’ A friend of mine worked for a year in London a decade ago and told me of hospitals and skyscrapers whose concrete walls were black from the sooty grime of industrialization. Anyone who has ever been to Glasgow, or Berlin, or Prague can confirm that dark and dreary is not just an imaginative turn of phrase when you are talking about the truly industrialized parts of Europe.

I mention this merely to set the stage for a comparison of sorts. Canada is the largest country in the world, containing 7% of the land mass, some 4 million square miles of it, or, if you like, an area the size of all of Europe. Much of Canada is still wilderness, filled with tree and field, river and mountain – whereas you would be hard pressed to throw a baseball into the trees in Europe without hitting some bit of developed land. We also have an extremely small population by comparison to almost everyone else. With all of this being true, we still have a hard time meeting goals that should naturally be easier for us to achieve.

I am not an economist, so I cannot say what is truly behind our dependence on oil refining, mining, or any of the other things that are so harmful to the environment. I am not a sociologist so I am uncertain why cars seem a status symbol in North American society as opposed to a means of travel. I am also not a politician so I am uncertain whether our inability to come up with national policy and intergovernmental cooperation is uniquely Canadian or what.

Our climate change policies seem to reflect disbelief, disinterest, or despair, but we need to something.

Ed Stelmach, the premier of Alberta has announced at the latest round of talks that his province won’t even consider making any cuts until 2020. The three premiers responsible for the majority of our populace are fighting with Stephen Harper over what goals Canada should set and how to reach them. The United States has continued to block and call for more “flexibility” in terms of goals.

Meanwhile those purveyors of grime, keepers of the Satanic Mills, the European Union, have pledged to reduce emissions by at least 20% by 2020 – and a further 10% reduction if the rest of us could ever get on board. So why don’t we?

Let’s put aside for a minute the fact that NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, of all credible resources, published an article in the Journal of Glaciology in which they presented evidence that the Antarctic Ice Shelves were unstable in 2000; or that they have just declared that 2007 the second hottest year for the earth in history. You could even dismiss the fact that some 5000 years ago the Ancient Mayan culture created a calendar that predicted every solar eclipse, every lunar change, and every possible change in the universe with computer like accuracy – and then said that in 2012 everything was going to change.

As an aside, and curiously, the Sun flips its magnetic poles with regularity, and the next flip is due in 2012. We here on earth are long overdue for a flip (the North Pole becomes the South – the polarity reverses) and the ensuing havoc that is caused, the last one was the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal which occurred 780,000 years ago. Just so you know, the poles should reverse every 50,000 years or so, we are definitely on borrowed time.

Putting aside the global rise in temperature, storm systems, loss of biodiversity and all the rest of the warning signs...

It is just a kindergarten like good idea to clean up the mess we make.

As Al Gore, David Suzuki and others who know way more than I about all of this have been pointing out, the cure is not going to be easy to swallow. It never is. The goal, you see, is to reduce carbon emissions - and what the government is worried about is how that affects big industry. So for now, let’s just hope a majority of them can wake up to the fact that they have to change and focus on us as individuals.

What we need to be aware of is that carbon is basically emitted whenever we use any form of energy – and I mean any form of energy, from turning on a light to walking the dog. As we become aware of our individual energy output we can change it by making better choices. In the home that means the funky new light bulbs as an easy first step; but the more difficult ones to make are new appliances and painting your house a darker colour. Believe it or not in colder climates dark colour houses use 5000 less pounds of carbon a year. Then try mowing the lawn less, driving less, buying a hybrid car.

But if you really want to make a difference you have to give up meat. In the United States 260 million acres of land are clear cut and half of all their water is used yearly in the production of animals for food. Worldwide we kill 10 billion animals every year so we can eat. The end result is that we have more heart disease and health problems than we would as a vegetarian, and the world gets more and more polluted.

A vegetarian driving a Hummer is better for the environment than a meat eater driving a hybrid. Of course, Ed won’t like that either what with all those Albertan cows languishing in the fields above the oil. Still, we all have to do our part – what we have failed to recognize so far is that the alternative will kill us.