A Bit More Detail

• Ryan Anderson at anthro{dendum} looks at the unnatural history of the beach in California, here.


• Architectuul looks at the architectural imaginings of Iraqi Shero Bahradar, here.


• Bad Astronomy looks at gas-rich galaxy NGC 3242.


• James Bow announces his new novel The Night Girl, an urban fantasy set in an alternate Toronto with an author panel discussion scheduled for the Lillian H. Smith Library on the 28th.


• Centauri Dreams looks at the indirect evidence for an exomoon orbiting WASP-49b, a possible Io analogue detected through its ejected sodium.


• Crooked Timber considers the plight of holders of foreign passports in the UK after Brexit.


• The Crux notes that astronomers are still debating the nature of galaxy GC1052-DF2, oddly lacking in dark matter.


• D-Brief notes how, in different scientific fields, the deaths of prominent scientists can help progress.


• Bruce Dorminey notes how NASA and the ESA are considering sample-return missions to Ceres.


• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina looks at the first test flights of the NASA Mercury program.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at how Japan is considering building ASAT weapons.


• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina looks at the first test flights of the NASA Mercury program.


• Far Outliers looks how the anti-malarial drug quinine played a key role in allowing Europeans to survive Africa.


• At In Media Res, Russell Arben Fox considers grace and climate change.


• io9 reports on how Jonathan Frakes had anxiety attacks over his return as Riker on Star Trek: Picard.


• JSTOR Daily reports on the threatened banana.


• Language Log looks at the language of Hong Kong protesters.


• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how a new version of The Last of the Mohicans perpetuates Native American erasure.


• Marginal Revolution notes how East Germany remains alienated.


• Neuroskeptic looks at the participant-observer effect in fMRI subjects.


• The NYR Daily reports on a documentary looking at the India of Modi.


• Corey S. Powell writes at Out There about Neptune.


• The Planetary Society Blog examines the atmosphere of Venus, something almost literally oceanic in its nature.


• Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money considers how Greenland might be incorporated into the United States.


• Rocky Planet notes how Earth is unique down to the level of its component minerals.


• The Russian Demographics Blog considers biopolitical conservatism in Poland and Russia.


• Starts With a Bang's Ethan Siegel considers if LIGO has made a detection that might reveal the nonexistence of the theorized mass gap between neutron stars and black holes.


• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps looks at Marchetti's constant: People in cities, it seems, simply do not want to commute for a time longer than half an hour.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little looks at how the US Chemical Safety Board works.


• Window on Eurasia reports on how Muslims in the Russian Far North fare.


• Arnold Zwicky looks at cannons and canons.

• Bloomberg notes how an economic boom will let Sweden postpone hard decisions, looks at the popularity of the Korean Wave in China, suggests that subsidies are going to be a big issue for cash-short Arab governments, looks at the investigation in Bulgaria of groups which arrest refugees, and looks at the long-term problems of the Russian economy.


• CBC reports on a Saskatchewan woman who has a refuge for pet rats.


• Global News illustrates the dire social conditions in the Ontario North, hitting particularly strongly First Nations groups.


• The Guardian reports on speculation that Neanderthals may have died in significant numbers from African diseases brought by human migrants.


• MacLean's notes a study of handwriting styles in ancient Israel which suggest that literacy was reasonably common.


• The Mississauga News reports on a new PFLAG support group for South Asians in Peel.


• National Geographic notes the strong pressures on island birds towards flightlessness.


• Science Mag notes subtle genetic incompatibilities between human women and male Neanderthals which would have hindered reproduction.


• The USA Today network has a story examining the recent HIV outbreak in Indiana.


• Vice reports on the huge cleavages within the NDP, something also examined at the CBC.

In July 2014, Adrian Simpson was on a night out in Sierra Leone’s third city of Kenema to celebrate his biggest deal yet: a contract to supply a new business partner with cocoa beans from his company’s plantation.

But as he and the business partners sat drinking beer, an unexpected visitor brought some distressing news.

“We were having a great evening,” said Simpson, managing director of the cocoa unit of London-listed Agriterra Ltd., by phone from London. “Then, an American girl who was studying Ebola wandered over to our table, sat down and said, ‘I think Ebola has arrived.”’

Fast forward to November 2015, and Sierra Leone was declared free from the disease that ultimately claimed almost 3,600 lives in the country, making it one of the hardest-hit by the worst Ebola epidemic yet. The double blow of Ebola and a slump in iron-ore prices devastated the West African nation. While growth is forecast at 0.1 percent this year, the economy contracted 0.25 percent in 2015. Before Ebola began to spread, the government expected growth to reach 14 percent in 2014. Instead, it grew 4.6 percent.

The Black Death didn’t just wipe out millions of Europeans during the 14th century. It left a mark on the human genome, favoring those who carried certain immune system genes, according to a new study. Those changes may help explain why Europeans respond differently from other people to some diseases and have different susceptibilities to autoimmune disorders.

Geneticists know that human populations evolve in the face of disease. Certain versions of our genes help us fight infections better than others, and people who carry those genes tend to have more children than those who don’t. So the beneficial genetic versions persist, while other versions tend to disappear as those carrying them die. This weeding-out of all but the best genes is called positive selection. But researchers have trouble pinpointing positively selected genes in humans, as many genes vary from one individual to the next.

Enter Mihai Netea, an immunologist at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands. He realized that in his home country, Romania, the existence of two very distinct ethnic groups provided an opportunity to see the hand of natural selection in the human genome. A thousand years ago, the Rroma people—commonly known as gypsies—migrated into Europe from north India. But they intermarried little with European Romanians and thus have very distinct genetic backgrounds. Yet, by living in the same place, both of these groups experienced the same conditions, including the Black Plague, which did not reach northern India. So the researchers sought genes favored by natural selection by seeking similarities in the Rroma and European Romanians that are not found in North Indians.

Netea; evolutionary biologist Jaume Bertranpetit of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain; and their colleagues looked for differences at more than 196,000 places in the genomes of 100 Romanians of European descent and 100 Rroma. For comparison, the researchers also cataloged these differences in 500 individuals who lived in northwestern India, where the Rroma came from. Then they analyzed which genes had changed the most to see which were most favored by selection.

Genetically, the Rroma are still quite similar to the northwestern Indians, even though they have lived side by side with the Romanians for a millennium, the team found. But there were 20 genes in the Rroma and the Romanians that had changes that were not seen in the Indians’ versions of those genes, Netea and his colleagues report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These genes “were positively selected for in the Romanians and in the gypsies but not in the Indians,” Netea explains. “It’s a very strong signal.”

• The Big Picture shares photos of the falling shoreline of the Dead Sea.


• blogTO shows the heritage buildings that have survived condo development at Yonge and St. Joseph.


• Crooked Timber wonders at the threat of anti-vaccination people.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that red dwarfs might help produce abiotic atmospheric oxygen comparable to Earth on some worlds and suggests that certain low-mass stars which produce abundant extreme ultraviolet radiation may dessicate their potentially habitable worlds.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper examining the ancient likely shorelines of Mars.


• Joe. My. God. notes a Christian activist's takeover of the microphone at a Muslim event in Texas.


• Language Hat links to a paper that finds weak links between language and genetic history.


• Marginal Revolution notes a robot-run hotel in Japan and suggests Sweden is overrated.


• Spacing calls for much-improved mass transit in Halifax.


• Torontoist wonders about possible improvements in snow removal.


• Towleroad notes a legal challenge mounted by an American dismissed for anti-gay attitudes.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that Herbert Hoover's vice-president, Charles Curtis, was an American Indian.


• Window on Eurasia looks at Russia's turn to fascism and examines how Russian Internet trolls are recruited by the state.

Both nurses and doctors are scarce in the regions most heavily affected by Ebola. Even before the current crisis killed many of Liberia’s health professionals, there were fewer than fifty doctors working in the public health system in a country of more than four million people, most of whom live far from the capital. That’s one physician per 100,000 population, compared to 240 per 100,000 in the United States or 670 in Cuba. Properly equipped hospitals are even scarcer than staff, and this is true across the regions most affected by Ebola. Also scarce is personal protective equipment (PPE): gowns, gloves, masks, face shields etc. In Liberia there isn’t the staff, the stuff or the space to stop infections transmitted through bodily fluids, including blood, urine, breast milk, sweat, semen, vomit and diarrhoea. Ebola virus is shed during clinical illness and after death: it remains viable and infectious long after its hosts have breathed their last. Preparing the dead for burial has turned hundreds of mourners into Ebola victims.

Many of the region’s recent health gains, including a sharp decline in child mortality, have already been reversed, in large part because basic medical services have been shut down as a result of the crisis. Most of Ebola’s victims may well be dying from other causes: women in childbirth, children from diarrhoea, people in road accidents or from trauma of other sorts. There’s little doubt that the current epidemic can be stopped, but no one knows when or how it will be reined in. As Barack Obama said, speaking at a special session of the United Nations, ‘Do not stand by, thinking that somehow, because of what we’ve done, that it’s taken care of. It’s not.’ Preventing the next eruption is an even more distant goal.

As of 1 October, a third of all Ebola cases ever documented were registered in September 2014. More than seven thousand cases have been recorded since March, more than half of them fatal. In epidemiological terms, the doubling times of the current Ebola outbreak are 15.7 days in Guinea, 23.6 days in Liberia and 30.2 days in Sierra Leone. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested at the end of September that unless urgent action is taken, more than a million people could be infected in the next few months.

The worst is yet to come, especially when we take into account the social and economic impact of the epidemic, which has so far hit only a small number of patients (by contrast, the combined death toll of Aids, tuberculosis and malaria, the ‘big three’ infectious pathogens, was six million a year as recently as 2000). Trade and commerce in West Africa have already been gravely affected. And Ebola has reached the heart of the Liberian government, which is led by the first woman to win a presidential election in an African democracy. There were rumours that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was not attending the UN meeting because she was busy dealing with the crisis, or because she faced political instability at home. But we knew that one of her staff had fallen ill with Ebola. A few days ago, we heard that another of our Liberian hosts, a senior health official, had placed herself in 21-day quarantine. Although she is without symptoms, her chief aide died of Ebola on 25 September. Such developments, along with the rapid pace and often spectacular features of the illness, have led to a level of fear and stigma which seems even greater than that normally caused by pandemic disease.

• blogTO recommends things to do in Bloorale and the Junction Triangle.


• The Cranky Sociologists look at the portrayal of gender in The Wire.


• The Dragon's Gaze examines the phenomenon of the tidal disruption of extremely eccentric asteroids in orbit of white dwarfs.


• A Fistful of Euros recommends Orlando Figes' Just Send Me Word, a history of a couple whose romance survived the gulag.


• Geocurrents contests the idea of an "arc of instability".


• Joe. My. God. reports on a Berlin Grindr-based art project that got shut down early for streaming private messages and images.


• Language Log shares video of Jiamg Zemin demonstrating his multilingualism in criticizing a Hong Kong journalist.


• Languages of the World's Asya Perelstvaig is critical of the idea that some words are "ultra-conserved", preserving records of ancient languages.


• Marginal Revolution notes a study suggesting that the French economy is less productive than its age structure indicates.


• The Russian Demographics Blog suggests that the Russian campaign in Ukraine has worked, at least in making European integration more difficult.


• Spacing Toronto notes one complication for construction companies: Toronto's bedrock swells.


• Torontoist covers the Torontonian relief given to survivors of the great 1922 Teminskaming fire in 1922.


• Towleroad shares video on the occasion of Denmark's first recognized same-sex union.


• The Volokh Conspiracy shares information on how Ebola is transmitted.


• Window on Eurasia notes Crimean Tatar disappearances, notes continuing divisions in Ukraine on attitudes towards Russia, and observes that many Chinese immigrants to Kazakhstan are not ethnically Chinese.


• The Financial Times's The World notes that many in Norway are still divided about their country's rejection of the 2022 Winter Olympics.

Top health officials have confirmed the first case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States, saying a patient who recently travelled to Liberia has the disease and is being treated in isolation at a Texas hospital.

[. . .]

Edward Goodman, an epidemiologist at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, said Tuesday the patient is ill and being seen by "highly trained, competent specialists" under intensive care.

[. . .]

According to Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the patient left Liberia on Sept. 19 and arrived in the U.S. the next day.

Ebola symptoms can include fever, muscle pain, vomiting and bleeding, and can appear as long as 21 days after exposure to the virus. The disease is not contagious until symptoms begin, and it takes close contact with bodily fluids to spread.

The patient had "no symptoms" when leaving Liberia or entering the U.S., but began to develop symptoms around Sept. 24. Two days later the patient sought care, Frieden said, and was admitted to hospital on Sunday.

The patient had recently arrived in the U.S. from Liberia and was confirmed to be infected on Tuesday. He reportedly told officials at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital of his recent travels when he went to an emergency department for care last week. He was sent home but was readmitted on Sunday, much sicker.

[. . .]

It's hard to identify Ebola in its early stages because the initial symptoms of the disease—fever, diarrhea, vomiting, and aches—are the same as for many other illnesses, including malaria, which is also common in West Africa.

That's why the Dallas patient was able to leave Liberia on September 19 without any indication that he would soon be ravaged by Ebola. The West African nations where the virus is raging are supposed to test outgoing passengers for fever, to make sure that no one with Ebola symptoms gets on a plane and spreads the disease.

[. . .]

The people who came into close contact with the Dallas patient while he was sick, from September 24 until he was isolated in a hospital room on September 28, are at risk for the virus.

Public health officials are tracking 12 to 18 people in Dallas who had contact with the patient, including 5 children who have been asked to stay home from school. Medical personnel plan to check their temperature twice a day and to look out for other symptoms.

There is little risk of the disease spreading widely in the U.S., Frieden said. Unlike highly contagious airborne pathogens like influenza, the Ebola virus requires contact with bodily fluids such as urine, saliva, feces, vomit, or semen to be transmitted. The risk is highest for people in direct contact with patients—typically healthcare workers and family members. In Africa, the lack of treatment centers and supplies has hampered efforts to contain the virus. But in the U.S., hospitals are better stocked and have better isolation facilities. In addition, public health officials have well-tested strategies to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. “This kind of contact tracing is core public health, it’s what we do day in and day out,” Frieden said.

[. . .]

The patient came to the U.S. to visit family members who are citizens and was not known to be participating in any aid efforts for Ebola patients in Liberia before coming here, Frieden said. The patient left Liberia on a plane the 19th, arrived in the U.S. on the 20th, and became symptomatic on the 24th or 25th, Frieden said. The patient sought medical care on the 26th, but was not admitted to the hospital until the 28th. Asked about that discrepancy, Frieden noted that the symptoms of Ebola, which include fever, severe headache, and muscle pain overlap with symptoms of many other infections. He added that the CDC is urging physicians to ask patients with these symptoms about their travel history.

“It is certainly possible that someone who had contact with this individual, a family member or other individual, could develop Ebola in coming weeks, but there is no doubt in my mind we will stop it there,” Frieden said.

American hospitals have been preparing since midsummer for the possibility of having to care for an Ebola patient, but Tuesday's news took the development out of the theoretical realm. Since then, there have been 12 false alarms—patients suspected of having Ebola who did not have the disease, the CDC said.

"It was virtual before," said Belinda Ostrowsky, an infectious disease expert at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. "Now it's happened, so it just makes us that much more vigilant."

The CDC has been advising hospitals for several months to prepare for patients with Ebola, though each hospital is preparing slightly differently.

At Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, staff ran a drill last week to prepare for possible patients, according to the hospital's epidemiologist, Edward Goodman.

At Montefiore, signs in the emergency department ask patients to let caregivers know if they've recently traveled to the West African nations of Liberia, Sierra Leone, or Guinea.

Canada is considering placing doses of an experimental Ebola vaccine in hospitals around the country that have been designated to treat Ebola cases if any arrive in the country, the new chief public health officer said Wednesday.

Dr. Gregory Taylor said having vaccine at the ready means it could be used if health-care workers treating Ebola patients had risky exposures.

“We’re considering prepositioning some of that at receiving hospitals across the country who may be looking after Ebola patients. This is for the health-care workers,” Taylor said during a news conference held in Banff, Alta., where the federal, provincial and territorial health ministers met Wednesday.

Taylor said that includes the Ontario hospital that has been designated to care for Canadian responders if any become infected in the Ebola zone and are transferred back to Canada for care. He did not mention the hospital by name, but it is Toronto Western.

To date, that need has not arisen.

Here is what it would take for it to become a real airborne risk: First off, a substantial amount of Ebola virus would need to start replicating in cells that reside in the throat, the bronchial tubes and possibly in the lungs. Second, the airborne method would have to be so much more efficient than the current extremely efficient means of transmission that it would overcome any genetic costs to the virus stemming from the mutation itself. Substantial natural hurdles make it unlikely that either event will occur.

Currently, Ebola typically gains entry into the body through breaks in the skin, the watery fluid around the eye or the moist tissues of the nose or mouth. Then it infects various cells of the immune system, which it tricks into making more copies of itself. The end result: a massive attack on the blood vessels, not the respiratory system.

Even viruses that are well adapted to attacking the respiratory system often have a hard time getting transmitted through the airways. Consider the experience so far with avian flu, which is easily transmitted through the air in birds but hasn’t yet mutated to become easily spreadable in that fashion among people.

What's the hold-up? “The difficulty is that those [flu] viruses don’t have the protein attachments that can actually attach to cells in the upper airway. They have to develop attachments to do that,” Schaffner says. So even if a virus were exhaled, it would need to lodge onto something in another person’s cells that are already prepared for it in the upper airway. “Since the virus doesn’t have attachment factors that can work in the upper airway, it’s very rare for it to go human to human, and then it almost always stops and doesn’t get to a third person,” Schaffner notes. Similarly for Ebola, the virus would have to develop attachments that would allow it to easily attach receptors in the upper respiratory pathway—something that neither it (nor any of its viral cousins) has been known to do in the wild.

And yet Ebola already spreads very easily without such mutations. The delicate lock-and-key protein–virus fit required for the virus to successfully latch onto and replicate in the airway has not developed because there is no evolutionary pressure for it to do so; it simply would not be an efficient option. Epidemiologists can take some comfort in that.

The Ebola epidemic in Africa has continued to expand since I last wrote about it, and as of a week ago, has accounted for more than 4,200 cases and 2,200 deaths in five countries: Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone. That is extraordinary: Since the virus was discovered, no Ebola outbreak’s toll has risen above several hundred cases. This now truly is a type of epidemic that the world has never seen before. In light of that, several articles were published recently that are very worth reading.

The most arresting is a piece published last week in the journal Eurosurveillance, which is the peer-reviewed publication of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (the EU’s Stockholm-based version of the US CDC). The piece is an attempt to assess mathematically how the epidemic is growing, by using case reports to determine the “reproductive number.” (Note for non-epidemiology geeks: The basic reproductive number — usually shorted to R0 or “R-nought” — expresses how many cases of disease are likely to be caused by any one infected person. An R0 of less than 1 means an outbreak will die out; an R0 of more than 1 means an outbreak can be expected to increase. If you saw the movie Contagion, this is what Kate Winslet stood up and wrote on a whiteboard early in the film.)

The Eurosurveillance paper, by two researchers from the University of Tokyo and Arizona State University, attempts to derive what the reproductive rate has been in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. (Note for actual epidemiology geeks: The calculation is for the effective reproductive number, pegged to a point in time, hence actually Rt.) They come up with an R of at least 1, and in some cases 2; that is, at certain points, sick persons have caused disease in two others.

You can see how that could quickly get out of hand, and in fact, that is what the researchers predict. Here is their stop-you-in-your-tracks assessment:

In a worst-case hypothetical scenario, should the outbreak continue with recent trends, the case burden could gain an additional 77,181 to 277,124 cases by the end of 2014.

• Al Jazeera notes the breakdown of the Libyan state.


• Bloomberg mentions Finland's new interest in NATO, notes European Union plans to strengthen sanctions against Russia, takes note of China's vetoing of democracy in Hong Kong and looks at China's strengthening of its South China Sea holdings, and in West Africa notes the unburied bodies in the street in countries hit by Ebola and observes the apparent spread of the epidemic to Senegal.


• Bloomberg View observes how the crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong is alienating Taiwan, notes that Scotland may secure its future in the European Union by leaving a United Kingdom hoping to leave, looks at the frightening military theories of Russia, considers whether taxation may spur corporate consumption in Korea, wonders if France's Hollande can pull off Mitterand's turn to the right, examines secular stagnation, considers the issues of Macau, and warns Israel about economic issues ahead.


• CBC looks at how walking bichir fish may explain how vertebrates moved onto the land, notes that Canadian federal government roundtables on the sex trade aren't inviting sex workers, and notes that convicted serial killer Russell Williams has settled lawsuits made by some victims and their families.


• Defense One notes that the Islamic State controls mainly areas around roads (but then, the roads are usually the areas that are controlled).


• The Inter Press Service examines the settlement of Somalian refugees in Istanbul, considers the future of Ukrainian agriculture, looks at the spread of jihadi sentiments in Tajikistan, points out that the United States and Brazil will soon improve genetically engineered trees, examines anti-gay persecution in Lebanon, and looks at the legacies of the balsero migration from Cuba 20 years later.


• National Geographic examines the positions of Yazidis in northern Iraq versus the Islamic State, notes the mobilizatin of Assyrian Christian refugees in the same region, and notes that more trees in the mountains of California means less run-off.


• Open Democracy notes the precedents for Russian policy in Ukraine two decades earlier in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and provides a critical tourist's perspective on Belarus.


• Universe Today notes an ancient star that preserves legacies of the first generation of stars to form, and observes the preparation for the landing of the Philae probe on the surface of its comet.


• Wired examines sriracha and maps where future roads should be placed.