Things I have heard on the news Lately pt. 2

The one I never Published

News Hours and Science related Articles

After the first “Things I have hear on the news Lately” I was very excited to get another one out. I just needed to get more news. Well, and here we are more than a year later or so. I finally decided that I should publish this, even though it’s not something I have heard on the news lately, but rather a follow up from the previous one.

April 2019

After several weeks, including landing a job in this big city, it’s time to do another round of what I have heard, read or seen these past months. If you want to read the previous post you can click here. Again, many of these news will probably either be about NYC or science, but of course something else might sneak into the mix as well. As a follow up from last time I did a “what I heard on the news lately” you can listen to this short segment, about how the measles outbreak started. We are getting extremely close to forcing people to get vaccinated, which also is probably not the best way to combat this, but the problem is how can we re-teach people about vaccination? This all ties back to what I wrote about earlier too, that the human psychology is extremely cool and fascinating but also very narrow minded (“Illusion of explanatory depth” - Why Facts Don’t Change our Minds). Once you started to believe in one thing, it is extremely difficult to switch those beliefs to something else. Another article that talks about somewhat the same idea is the recent one from New York Times “Why fiction trumps truth”.

1. NYCHA and other landlords. New York housing authority seem to be under fire most of the time. Since we moved here to NYC and Manhattan I don’t think I have heard anything positive about NYCHA. It is unclear who to blame for the situation they are in now, but they are backlogged financially, about 32 billion dollars. Some NYCHA residents in Manhattan recently got their playground upgraded, an upgrade that cost about 770,000$. This is great you might say, and yes it is, the playground is scheduled to reopen this summer. However the problem is that NYCHA wants to replace it with a new residential tower. I understand that we are also in need of more housing, especially for low income people, but what is the point to spend so much money on a playground if it’s going to be taken away anyway? You can also hear or read horror stories about tenants living in awful conditions; mold, leaks and broken locks. This is not exclusive to NYCHA of course, other landlords are equally bad, for instance residents bathroom ceilings falling in, pet parrots eaten by rats and the list goes on. One hot topic is lead paint, like the story I heard on the radio the other week about a mother with her four kids who now is suffering from lead poisoning. The mother found out that the her kids had started to eat lead paint from the walls and window sills, after they discovered that the paint taste very sweet. After a routine control at the doctors, they found out that the kids led level was dangerously high, and so they found out that they did indeed have led painted walls. Just like so many other current residents in NYC. This mom and her four kids are of course not the only people affected by lead, and lead poisoning, and there are probably other landlords who also couldn’t care less about that, just like I sometimes feel as if NYCHA doesn’t either. This is not any recent news, this has been going on for decades, but the question is whose fault is it. It’s a messed up system that completely uses low income people, people who have no other choice than to stay in awful conditions. And while some property managers and landlords get sued for not improving the living standards for the tenants, they most often are only fined a tiny little sum, making it easy for them to continue to break the law over and over again.

2. Ticks and allergy to red meat, aka “alpha gal syndrome”. Did you know that there is a new disease spreading extremely fast that is spreading via ticks. It was believed that this new disease came exclusively from the lone star tick, a tiny little creature that you can find here in the US. However, this tick does not exist in Europe, which has also seen the exact same diseases, and the diseases can also be found in Australia. Ticks do not only carry this pathogen for red meat allergy, but of course, also Lyme disease, carried by the black legged tick. These are two very good reasons to always check your body for ticks, to make sure you do not get any of these diseases. The problem is though, that some ticks, like the black legged one are so tiny it’s almost impossible to spot it. I remember when we went camping in Chequamagon National Forest for memorial day weekend a couple of years ago and we picked ticks of our body and car for days during that trip. If you are interested in knowing what pathogens ticks are currently carrying in your area, or where the hot spots of ticks are, you should download this app called The Tick App. It’s a type of citizen science app and is incorporated in a larger study by researchers from Columbia University, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. The app gives you updates about current hot spots of ticks and their pathogens, and you can also report your own.

Things I have heard on the news Lately

Wednesday Thoughts

News Hours and Science related Articles

Our alarm clock in the bedroom is the radio, cellphones are banned in there. We listen to the local NPR station, WNYC, which is a good way to wake up, you usually get riled up, but other times it can be depressing. Other than that that I get updates from Huffington Post, New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN. I get other updates too, from sources like the Atlantic, Science Magazine, Wired among a lot of others. I don’t read these sources everyday, I would never have time. Sometimes Facebook spits out article after article, and on top of that my friends share article after article. Most of my friends are science oriented, so the articles that pop up are articles that gear towards nature and climate, but of course articles about all of the worlds problems. Instead I save articles, save them on Facebook, save them in my bookmarks, because maybe later today i will have time to read them. I could probably read article after article for several years now. Most of the times they will be saved and forgotten. At one point I thought about sharing what I had read or heard on the radio, but then I forgot about that too. But here we are and I was thinking about sharing some of the news I have read and heard about these past couple of weeks, maybe there will be an even older article too.

1. Tetanus. You probably didn’t miss this story, the story about the 6 year old boy from Oregon who got tetanus after he fell and got a cut on his forehead at the family farm. I guess I never quite understood what tetanus mean in reality, even though the Swedish word for it gives it away, stiff cramp. This 6 year old boy had not been vaccinated for tetanus, this is something that the doctor usually give you anyway when you come in to the hospital if they suspect you might be at risk for tetanus, and haven’t received a booster. It is rare that people aren’t vaccinated against tetanus, even though there are a growing number of individuals who choose to not vaccinate their kids against anything. The parents took care of the cut at home, and it wasn’t until six days later he actually arrived at the hospital. This boy had to spend a total of 57 days in the hospital. He had to stay a large portion of those days in a dark room with earplugs and with little to no stimulation, in order to decrease the cramps that light and noise would trigger. The hospital bill came out to about 800,000$. I think the worst part about this story is that even though this boy had to stay 57 days in the hospital and recovery, with brutal muscle spasms fighting for his life, the parents still chose to not go through with the whole series of vaccinations. Which mean that the boy still is not immune to tetanus and can get it again. You can read more about for instance here.

2. Measles. While we are on the subject of vaccination, we might as well go into the story of the measles outbreak in the US. Unlike tetanus, you will get immune to measles, if you obtain measles, well if you survive. The current measles outbreak in New York is centered in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where 158 people have been sickened, out of which 137 are children. If you google measles outbreak in the US, you will find plenty of years before this year where the US had a measles outbreak. One additional factor that is fueling the measles outbreak, here in New York, is an ultra-orthodox hotline which is serving as a hub for mothers resistant to vaccinating their kids. You can hear an excerpt of the hotline from this link. It is thought that the measles outbreak in Brooklyn, New York stems from travelers visiting Israel where measles are currently on the rise. This is again a story about people being against vaccination, the so called anti-vaxxers. Even though there is nothing that ties anti-vaccination to the orthodox religion in itself, it is thought that maybe this hotline, as I mentioned above, is one of the main reasons? Did you know that the World Health Organization has put Vaccine Hesitancy on the list of Ten Threats to Global Health in 2019?

3. “Illusion of explanatory depth” - Why Facts Don’t Change our Minds. I think it was after Trump got elected and all of the following events that I stumbled on to this article. It covers a couple of psychological studies, from across the country. What they all conclude is that humans often refuse to accept other peoples opinions or ideas, something that probably dates back to the cave age, or the evolutionary theory of “the fittest will survive”. At the same time we are relying on other peoples knowledge in our every day life, to the point that it is hard to understand where one person’s knowledge starts and another person’s knowledge comes in. The result of this is that people think they know more, than what they actually do. I think it is a fitting article to share after the two previous points about tetanus and measles. You can read the full article here.

4. “Florida Shuffle” - How Rehab Recruiters are exploiting Drug Addicts. I heard a crazy story on the radio, which I later googled and found an article about from last year (2018), and then the Mother Jones article they talked about on the radio. I am pretty sure no one has missed the opioid crisis currently going on in the US. The latest in the crisis are “patient brokers” that recruit addicts from the street, from anonymous narcotics, even from rehabs themselves, to go to specific rehabs (as long as they have insurance that will cover the stay). These brokers will pay them money to go to a specific rehab, and then keep paying the addict to continue to stay. Once the rehab is over the addict has money to buy more drugs. This “patient broker” would even pay for the drug addicts stay at hotels and provide drugs in between stays at different rehabs, since you have to have some type of drug in your system to be admitted to a rehab. These brokers are often themselves current or former drug users. This is of course an organized insurance fraud, a fraud by the rehabs themselves filling up otherwise empty beds and rooms. The money they earn on the addicts insurance is partially used to pay the brokers.

5. White House Economic Team interns. Who knows how these interns made the list and who wrote up the list of the interns, but here they are, from the Economic Report of the President, p 624:

   1. Steve Rogers (a.k.a. Captain America)

   2. Peter Parker (Spider-Man)

   3. Bruce Wayne (Batman)

   4. Aunt May (Peter Parker’s guardian)

   5. J. T. Hutt (a superfan abbreviation for Jabba the Hutt, the “Star Wars” gangster who hangs a frozen Han Solo on his wall)

   6. John Cleese

   7. Kathryn Janeway (a “Star Trek” captain)

   8. John Snow (or should it be Jon Snow?)