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Solomon Islands Assess Tsunami Damage

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Danzig

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA Six thousand people are now thought to have been made homeless by a tsunami that struck the Solomon Islands Wednesday. The government says at least 13 people were killed. Charities say food and water is running low in makeshift hillside camps where villagers in the Santa Cruz Islands have sought shelter. Another huge aftershock has again rattled the South Pacific archipelago.

The damage inflicted by the tsunami is far worse than first thought, according to disaster management officials in the Solomon Islands. Several people are still missing after a magnitude 8 earthquake triggered a destructive wave that swept through low-lying villages.

At least 10 aftershocks were reported Friday, including a powerful tremor that forced villagers to flee to higher ground, although no tsunami alert was issued. Aftershocks continued Saturday, further unsettling islanders.

Damage to the local airstrip had prevented aid reaching stricken communities, but medical supplies and other essentials are now being delivered.

Prime Minister Gordon Darcy Lilo visited the region Friday and declared it an official disaster zone. His government has received offers of help from its neighbors.

Solomon Islands journalist Dorothy Wickham says Australia and New Zealand have volunteered to join the relief effort.

These two countries might be helping out and maybe we also have the Japanese and European Union here, so I am pretty sure they will be either offering or will be asked for assistance," said Wickham. "But this is going to be a difficult one. It is a very remote place. Boats hardly go there and if it is bad weather it is really tough to get into the communities in that area.

Charity workers say several villages have been destroyed, while many others have been badly damaged. The homeless have sought shelter in makeshift camps, where food and water are becoming increasingly scarce. There are also concerns about sanitation and the spread of the disease.

One aid worker said that many wells were covered by debris or had been contaminated, while water storage tanks had been destroyed and coastal areas littered with dead fish and poultry.

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Solomon Islands Assess Tsunami Damage

Powerful aftershock rattles Solomon Islands

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Danzig

A powerful aftershock rattled the Solomon Islands Sunday as aid agencies struggled to get a clear picture of the devastation four days after a 8.0-magnitude quake triggered a deadly tsunami.

The confirmed death toll rose to 10 with the discovery of a child's body in a ditch in the remote Santa Cruz Islands, while more than 3,000 people are squatting in shelters after their homes were destroyed.

Two boats carrying urgently needed supplies of medicine, food, water and tents have arrived at Lata, the main town in the island group, but the fragile communications system meant further shipments were on hold.

Officials in the capital Honiara said they had not been able to receive full assessments of the situation in the outlying islands.

"At the moment we don't know if we are still in the relief stage or have moved to the recovery stage," Red Cross secretary general for the Solomon Islands, Joanne Zoleveke, told AFP.

"We don't know if what we have sent is sufficient or if more is required and we have to charter more boats. We can't make those decisions until we receive assessment reports from Lata and communications are intermittent."

A 6.5-magnitude earthquake which rocked the region early Sunday was centred just 29 kilometres (18 miles) south-southwest of Lata at a depth of 18 kilometres, and followed a 7.0 aftershock late Friday night.

The Solomon Islands government has declared the Santa Cruz Islands a disaster area. Aerial surveys indicate most of the damage is confined to the Lata region.

It was estimated about 590 houses had been destroyed, with most of the destruction caused in the initial earthquake on Wednesday and the metre-high tsunami which swept through coastal villages soon after.

Initial reports put the death toll at 13, but Zoleveke said the intermittent communications with Lata indicated it was not that high.

Gazette.Net: New health care subsidies target inner-Beltway communities

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Danzig

Municipal and Prince Georges County officials hope that state money to subsidize primary care practices will improve inner-Beltway community residents access to health care and decrease their reliance on the emergency room.

Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown (D) announced in January that Seat Pleasant, Fairmount Heights and Capitol Heights would form one of the countys five Health Enterprise Zones, which will get additional funding to attract primary care providers as well as preventative efforts to promote nutrition and healthy lifestyles.

Dr. Ernest L. Carter, deputy health officer at the countys health department, said the county is receiving a grant from the state for $5 million over the next four years, all of which will be used in the ZIP code that includes the three municipalities. He said the area is one of the worst in the state in terms of the ratio between physicians and residents.

There are virtually no physicians per 3,500 residents, Carter said. The health indicators are significantly not meeting the U.S. [public health] standards.

Carter said the Capitol Heights areas provider to population ratio of about 1 provider per 3,500 residents is far below the national standard ratio of 1 to 2,000. When patients dont have easy access to primary and preventative care, they tend to over-utilize the emergency room, causing both an unnecessary financial burden both for themselves and for the health care system, Carter said.

When you dont have primary care you tend to let your diseased state go, so when you do get care you have to be hospitalized, he said. And because they have disjointed care, their medical records arent available and a lot of times they cant describe all of the health events in their life. They end up having redundancies of care like repeat X-rays, so almost everything that causes costs to go up are a function of not being able to access primary care.

Much of the annual $1.2 million in funding will go toward helping physicians set up primary care facilities in the area, Carter said, from tax breaks to loans and other subsidies. The rest of the funding will go toward other initiatives, like health screenings and informational sessions, he said.

And the county hopes to coordinate with municipalities conducting their own outreach efforts, Carter said.

Seat Pleasant Mayor Eugene Grant said that he wants to set up a health house to host regular events for residents, from health screenings and blood testing to workshops on healthy eating, exercise and diabetes management.

Those kinds of educational things are what help to give the desired health outcomes we expect, Grant said. ...By doing all of these things [with increased primary care access], we believe we can realize a reduction in the utilization of the ER, reducing re-admission rates and making sure people dont use the hospital like a clinic.

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Gazette.Net: New health care subsidies target inner-Beltway communities

Scientists use gene therapy to cure dogs of type 1 diabetes

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Danzig

Researchers from the Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona (UAB) have claimed a first by successfully using a single session of gene therapy to cure dogs of type 1 diabetes. The work has shown that it is possible to cure the disease in large animals with a minimally-invasive procedure potentially leading the way to further developments in studies for human treatment of the disease.

The researchers, led by Ftima Bosch, showed that after only a single gene therapy session the dogs no longer displayed symptoms of type 1 diabetes. In some of the cases, monitoring continued over a four-year period with no recurrence of the disease. The same team has previously tested the therapy on mice, but these recent and highly positive results are, as Ftima Bosch says, the first to demonstrate a long-term cure for diabetes in a large animal model using gene therapy.

Using simple needles common in cosmetics treatments, the single session consisted of various injections in the animals rear legs in what is said to be a safe and stress-free procedure. The injections introduce gene therapy vectors with two objectives firstly, to express the insulin gene and secondly, to introduce the enzyme glucokinase.

Glucokinase is an enzyme which regulates the uptake of glucose from the blood. When both genes function in unison they work as a kind of glucose sensor that reduces diabetic hyperglycemia (the excess of blood sugar associated with the disease) by automatically regulating the glucose uptake.

The study highlights the safety of gene therapy mediated by adeno-associated vectors (AAV) in diabetic canines. These vectors, derived from non-pathogenic viruses, are commonly used in other gene therapies and have claimed success in the treatment of several other diseases.

Over the long term, the dogs that were treated displayed good glucose control when fasting and after eating, and also after exercising which is an improvement on dogs that receive daily injections of insulin. No occurrences of hypoglycemia were recorded. Adding to this, the dogs treated with adeno-associated vectors maintained good body weight and did not develop secondary complications.

As there have been numerous clinical trials where AAV vectors have been introduced into skeletal muscle, the strategy applied in this research is certainly valid for clinical application in a wider sense. Further studies and development of the treatment should lead to veterinary trials, which may in turn supply key information for trials with human diabetes sufferers into the future.

Source: UAB

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Scientists use gene therapy to cure dogs of type 1 diabetes

Jamais Cascio – Bad Futurism – Video

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Danzig

Jamais Cascio - Bad Futurism
2012.humanityplus.org Sometimes the best way to figure out how to do something right is to explore all of the ways to do it wrong. In this talk I explore ten ways to create truly awful future scenarios, and then explain why they #39;re bad mdash; and how to get it right. From "one change at a time" to scenarios as morality plays. The various ways in which foresight can go awry are often tempting shortcuts for writing about the ideas of future-building, but are ultimately traps for the unwary futurist.

By: Adam Ford

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Jamais Cascio - Bad Futurism - Video

'Freedom' is Tim McGraw 2.0

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Danzig

By Allison Stewart

Special to The Washington Post.

At this exact moment, Tim McGraw is the third most-popular country artist of the Soundscan era, behind only George Strait (whom he will one day eclipse) and Garth Brooks (whom he won't).

But he's also 45 years old, badly dinged by a drawn-out legal battle with his former record label and dogged by younger -- but by no means superior -- hat acts such as Jason Aldean and Luke Bryan, who are hard on his heels.

This all goes a long way toward explaining "Truck Yeah," a musical speed bump on his otherwise great new album, "Two Lanes of Freedom." The song is a shiny ode to chicks, trucks, chicks in trucks, beer, football and general redneckery. If it sounds familiar, it's because it's one minor chord away from being a 1989 Bon Jovi song, and because almost every male artist in Nashville has recently released a song just like it.

And it raises a question: These days, is it possible for a country singer to avoid the obligatory, shameless pander about how country-proud he is, and also how much he loves his truck? Even if he's one of the most successful musicians of all time? Pose this question to an otherwise good-natured McGraw, and he'll say, in a state of semi-exasperation, "Look, you take all those things into consideration."

Which is another way of saying no, you can't avoid it.

"'Truck Yeah' for me was very reminiscent of the things I did that sort of broke my career out, stuff like

"Truck Yeah" is the first single from "Freedom" and one of the biggest hits of McGraw's career. Big enough, he hopes, to power a post-lawsuit career reboot. The album is an encyclopedic guide to everything McGraw has historically done well -- classic Top 40 honky tonk, romantic ballads, ingratiating Dad Country.

"It's like a 360 album in a lot of ways," McGraw says. "I certainly can see and hear and feel elements of what I've done throughout my career, but at the same time it opens the door and looks out to the future of where I'm headed for. It's a pivotal album in my career, and an invitation to the things I'm gonna do."

Scots law gets lead role in Jimmy Carter information freedom study Scottish role in Jimmy Carter freedom of …

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Danzig

The Jimmy Carter Centre wants to assess the effectiveness of the act and how the Scottish Government in particular responds to it.

Carter has written to Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond to ask the Scottish Government to take part in the study. The centre will work with Scotland's first Information Commissioner, Kevin Dunion, who is now executive director of the Centre for Freedom of Information at the University of Dundee, on the research which will then be available to governments and public bodies worldwide.

Dunion told the Sunday Herald: "The Carter Centre, which has been working on the issue of freedom of information for many years, is developing an implementation assessment tool.

"The idea is that this is a matrix that governments reviewing the functionality of the freedom of information laws and procedures, or governments who are implementing new laws, can use to carry out a kind of internal audit or assessment of how well they're doing.

"Scotland is recognised as having an effective and effectively implemented freedom of information law, and they have a mix of countries taking part.

"The intention is there will be meetings with officials in the Scottish Government and discussions with people in civil society, journalists, and the Information Commissioner.

"The Carter Centre are not looking to say is it a good law or what information people are getting, they're focusing on the mechanics, because there is a lot of evidence that there are some very highly praised laws out there which simply don't work in practice. Scotland has a good law and it works in practice."

The quality of public information and access to it varies wildly across the globe, and the hope is the results of the research, which will be concluded by the end of March, will improve the process across the world.

Dunion added: "There are 93 countries with a freedom of information act -There's some discussions that some countries perform well when you see their law in a league table, but everybody's experience tells us that this is out of all proportion to what happens on the ground.''

A spokesman for the Scottish Government said: "We are delighted that Scotland's world-leading credentials when it comes to freedom of information and open government have been recognised by no less an authority than President Carter, and we will be happy to provide information to help with this assessment.

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Scots law gets lead role in Jimmy Carter information freedom study Scottish role in Jimmy Carter freedom of ...

HS RUNDOWN: Freedom beats Liberty, clinches LVC playoff spot

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Danzig

Freedom withstood a furious late run by Liberty to earn a 52-47 win on Saturday, clinching the LVC's final playoff spot.

Down by 12 in the fourth quarter, Liberty stormed back with a 14-2 run to tie the game at 47-47 with under a minute to go.

But senior Brian Uliana hit a big three to give the Patriots the lead for good.

Freedom had trailed 14-5 in the first quarter, but closed out the first half on a 24-5 run to take a 10-point lead into the half.

Freedom and Liberty finish tied for the LVC East division lead. A coin toss following the game gave the division title to the Patriots.

Freedom will be the 3-seed and will face 2nd-seeded Parkland in Wednesday's LVC semifinals at Easton Middle School.

Liberty will be the 4-seed and will face No. 1-seeded Central Catholic.

The Vikings won their regular season at Emmaus Saturday night by a 52-51 final.

Muhammad Ali Abdur-Rahkmin converted a three-point play with just three seconds left to give Central Catholic the win.

Parkland earned a 56-43 win at Whitehall in its regular season finale.

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HS RUNDOWN: Freedom beats Liberty, clinches LVC playoff spot

Freedom holds off Liberty, clinches LVC playoff spot