Chemical Technoligist(baller6136)

Chemical Technologist(baller6136)

An interview with sam a Chemical Technologist.

Experts Say Swine Flu Mutations Do Not Warrant New Alarm

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Published: November 27, 2009

The World Health Organization tried this week to dampen fears about mutations seen in the swine flu virus in several countries, noting that both mutations had been found in very few people.

A change that created Tamiflu resistance has been found in about 75 people around the world, said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, chief flu adviser to the W.H.O.’s director general. Two clusters, in cancer units at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina and a hospital in Wales, were both among patients whose immune systems had been severely suppressed by cancer treatment; some had had their bone marrow, which produces infection-fighting white blood cells, wiped out so that replacement blood stem cells could be injected.

Such patients are more likely to develop resistant viruses when on Tamiflu because they can not clear a virus on their own. But the mutant strain appears not to spread easily in people with normalimmunity, like hospital workers.

“We don’t know the full answer, but it is more likely that we are not seeing a major shift,” Dr. Fukuda said.

Widespread Tamiflu resistance is a serious problem in the seasonal H1N1 virus, but it has not crossed over into the swine H1N1.

Dr. Fukuda also said W.H.O. scientists were “not sure” of the level of threat posed by a separate mutation that helps the virus reach the lungs. It has been found in Norway, Ukraine, Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico and the United States, in both serious and mild cases.

Experts still need to see whether the mutation — whose shorthand name in virology is D222G or D225G — is becoming more common, and how often it leads to severe disease, he said.

One isolate from Ukraine with the mutation had changed so thatswine flu vaccine probably would not protect against it well, Britain’s national medical laboratory reported Friday.

Flus mutate so fast, Dr. Fukuda cautioned, that announcing each change is “like reporting changes in the weather.”

More than 100 million swine flu shots have been administered in 40 countries, and the side effects are similar to or lower than those from regular flu shots, he added.

Six cases of anaphylaxis were widely reported in Canada when it was found that all were from one batch of vaccine, which was recalled. Anaphylaxis is an allergic reaction, usually to egg protein, that can range from mild hives to fatal airway swelling. All six patients recovered, and Dr. Fukuda pointed out that there were 172,000 doses in the batch, most of which caused no problems, so it was unclear whether the cause was a bad batch or just a coincidence.

My Thoughts...

I think that swine flu is very bad and people should be a lot more careful. Also,

with 75 people dead with this disease we should be a lot more careful. Lastly, there

are a bunch of other affected places.

Glaciers disappearing from Kilimanjaro

(CNN) -- The ice and snow that cap majestic Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania are vanishing before our eyes.

If current conditions persist, climate change experts say, Kilimanjaro's world-renowned glaciers, which have covered Africa's highest peak for centuries, will be gone within the next two decades.

"In a very real sense, these glaciers are being decapitated from the surface down," said Lonnie Thompson, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University. Thompson is co-author of a study on Kilimanjaro published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study's authors blame the disappearing ice on increases inglobal temperatures and diminished snowfall at Kilimanjaro's summit.

Previous studies of Kilimanjaro's glaciers have relied on aerial photographs to measure the rate of the retreating ice. For this new survey, scientists climbed the mountain and drilled deep into the glaciers to measure the volume of the ice fields atop the 19,331-foot (5,892-meter) peak.

The ice sheet that capped Kilimanjaro in 2007 was 85 percent smaller than the one that covered its plateau in 1912, paleoclimatologists explained in the study.

The mountain's ice cover shrank about 1 percent a year from 1912 to 1953, a rate that has accelerated in recent years. From 1989 to 2007, that rate jumped to 2.5 percent a year. Since 2000, the plateau's three remaining ice fields have shrunk by 26 percent, scientists found.

Thompson and his team of researchers have spent seven years measuring the glaciers of Kilimanjaro, whose snow-capped profile rises dramatically over the surrounding tropical plains.

Using 110 "porters," or local residents, they carried 6 tons of equipment to the mountain's plateau. Battling temperatures as low as 35 degrees below zero, and with very little oxygen, Thompson and his crew lived atop Kilimanjaro for nearly two months, drilling and collecting core ice samples buried thousands of feet below the glaciers' surface.

The new data shows that both the Northern and Southern ice fields atop Kilimanjaro have thinned dramatically in recent years, while the smaller Furtwangler Glacier shrank as much as 50 percent between 2000 and 2009.

As the glaciers break up into smaller pieces, more of the darker surface of the crater is exposed. This causes temperatures to rise on the mountain and accelerates the melting of the ice, scientists say.

"The shrinkage and ultimate disappearance of these glaciers will create tremendous ecological and social problems in the near future," said Doug Hardy, senior research fellow in the Climate Systems Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Hardy contributed research to the new study.

"The Kilimanjaro glaciers are indicators for a larger-scale process," Thompson said. "It's not just Kilimanjaro, it's every tropical glacier in Africa, in the tropical Andes of South America, it's the glaciers in New Guinea. We are losing all those glaciers in today's world."

A snowless Mount Kilimanjaro also could have economic effects.

Kilimanjaro is a tourist attraction and a crucial revenue generator for Tanzania, one of the world's poorest counties. A study published by the Overseas Development Institute in January estimated that 35,000 to 40,000 people visit Kilimanjaro every year, spending almost $50 million annually in the country.

My thoughts.....

Mount Kilimanjaro can only be changing or melting to be exact for one reason. I think that reason is Global Warming. The ice caps are melting so we know that it must be because of global warming. This could also be bad for business and i'm not talking about pollution. I am talking about how much money they will lose with the glaciers melting.Those are my thoughts.

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/11/02/kilimanjaro.glaciers/index.html

Nasa flights will study antartic changes

Nasa flights will study antarctic changes

Thursday the 15th of October, 2009 was

when the first of 17 flights to study the

antarctic was launched from chille. This is to

study the how much ice is under the ice sheet

of Antarctica. I think this would benefit us for

science and future research. That way we

would know how bad global warming really is.

That is some of the facts and how I feel about

this happening.