liveonearth: (moon)

Cheetah population crashes, raising threat of extinction

The world's cheetah population is crashing, leaving the world's fastest land animal approaching extinction, according to new research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. There are now about 7,100 cheetahs left in the wild, the report said, down from an estimated 100,000 at the end of the 19th century. Cheetahs once roamed Africa and Asia, but they have lost an estimated 91 percent of their habitat. Most of the remaining cheetahs are in Africa, with about 50 remaining in Iran. In Africa, 14 of 18 groups studied were decreasing. Zimbabwe's cheetah population has fallen from 1,200 to 170 in 16 years. [USA Today, CNN]

SOURCE

The Week at http://theweek.com/10things/662478/10-things-need-know-today-december-27-2016

My thought: I'm still reading Sapiens and the first section, about how humans absolutely devastated the megafauna of every continent and island, is still reverberating through my consciousness.  The extinction of many species, including the wooly mammoth and the sabre tooth tiger, immediately followed the introduction of our species to a land mass.  We are still causing extinctions.  You would think that we'd make an effort to sustain at least token populations of the more charismatic species.  Instead it appears that the great white hunter would rather have one on his wall than to keep them alive in the wilds.  As the political reality in the US turns even uglier, I have less and less respect and care for my own species.  We may extinct ourselves, but that would be good for many other species.

liveonearth: (desert sand)
If you want to go quickly, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together

-African Proverb
liveonearth: (Default)
I read this that is the fastest spreading viral video of all time. Of course there is controversy around it. As far as I know Joseph Kony really does kidnap kids and make them into murderers and sex slaves. So why not make sure he goes down this year? I like it. World community comes to bear on bad apple because of youtube. What next?

However hardly anybody is giving money to the cause. We all feel rich enough to share the link, but we, myself included, don't feel rich or involved enough to give money to a far-away cause. How can we induce world-tribe behavior? Can it be done? Or is it antithetical to true human nature? We are tribal, but it appears to me that our tribe is not extended by way of computer or television screens. I think that we need to touch and smell each other to feel that the other is part of our tribe.

I can't help but to wonder what happened to this man to make him so vicious. He is human too. How did his compassion get stripped away?
liveonearth: (Default)
Go to time 1:50 on this national geographic video to see two kayakers running rapid #9 on the Zambezi. The amazing thing to me is how many strokes he gets in while going down the ramp into the whitewater. Big.

The Zambezi runs on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, and 100,000 CFS is considered to be low water there. It runs, I have been told, as high as a million CFS. They say in the video that it's high water, but not how high.

Here's a blog with good info and pictures of the Zambezi. I only know of it because some guides I have worked with also worked there. I have no intention of going to run this whitewater. I prefer little creeks and lower risk.
liveonearth: (Default)
----------------------------------------
Breaking News Alert: Studies show AIDS drugs can prevent infection
July 13, 2011 5:45:56 AM
----------------------------------------

Two new studies done in three African countries have shown for the first time that AIDS drugs taken daily can cut by more than half a person’s chance of becoming infected with HIV through heterosexual intercourse.

http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/WUOQBH/QFHR1Y/Z8G8SN/WYSZHH/PW5T2/1G/h

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com
liveonearth: (Default)

I've been hearing a lot about circumcision lately. This morning I hear that the CDC has determined that circumcision reduces a man's chance of contracting HIV by 60%! This is news to me. I even have it in me to doubt it, having not heard it until just now after so much previous noise about the question. I suspect the mechanism of resistance to the virus has to do with the thickening of the skin on the glans when it is exposed all the time, as versus the thin-ness of such skin, more like a mucous membrane, when it is permanently covered. One kind in Africa has issued an edict that all men must be circumcised, and young Zulu men are getting cut as a rite of manhood. Cultural change is in progress in Africa.

Anyway, other mentions include a pack of people in San Francisco who tried to get a law passed BANNING circumcision as male genital mutilation. They didn't get very far, but they did get a lot of attention. And also, in pediatrics class I heard that here on the West Coast 60% of new baby boys are NOT being circumcised, and that number is increasing. The pediatrician's perspective is that we will have a generation of men for whom either circ or non-circ is accepttable, and then the next generation will probably be almost entirely noncircumcised. Cultural change is in progress in America, but in the opposite direction from Africa...
liveonearth: (Default)
Sleeping sickness aka African trypanosomiasis
--parasitic disease in people and animals
--caused by protozoa of genus Trypanosoma
--transmitted by the tsetse fly
--endemic in certain regions of Sub-Saharan Africa (36 countries and 60 million people)
--estimated 50,000 to 70,000 current infx
--3 major epidemics: 1896–1906, 1920 and 1970.
--tse tse flies mainly found by rivers and lakes, in gallery-forests and in wooded savannah
--Sleeping sickness occurs only in sub-Saharan Africa in regions where there are tsetse flies that can transmit the disease.
--For reasons that are so far unexplained, there are many regions where tsetse flies are found, but sleeping sickness is not.
--Worldwide, 25,000 new cases of both East and West African trypanosomiasis are reported each year
--World Health Organization says it is vastly underreported.
--Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT)
--caused by flagellate protozoan, Trypanosoma brucei, which exists in 2 morphologically identical subspecies: Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense (East African or Rhodesian African trypanosomiasis) and Trypanosoma brucei gambiense (West African or Gambian African trypanosomiasis)
--Both parasites transmitted to human hosts by bites of infected tsetse flies (Glossina species)
--tse tse flies are found only in Africa
more )
liveonearth: (Default)
Aka Lymphoid neoplasms, lymphomas a heterogenous group of neoplasms that arise in the lymphatic and reticuloendothelial (RE) systems.
more )
liveonearth: (Default)
Here find five links to youtube to follow a brilliant debate on the proposition "The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world." The Intelligence Squared debaters include Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry against the proposition, and Archbishop Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe attempting to defend it. Hitchens and Fry utterly devastate the Catholics, and I was frankly cracking up.
liveonearth: (Default)
Toto - Africa || performed by PERPETUUM JAZZILE!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09LQlfMmW7s

This choral number has an AWESOME intro--for those who love powerful storms.
hint: make sure your sound is turned up for the intro
=-]
liveonearth: (Default)
Sounds like young South Africans have finally gotten the news that condom use is the way to avoid infection. The report I have here (from The Week) says that people are still having multiple sex partners, but new infection rates have declined significantly. South Africa has the worlds largest HIV positive population, some 5.2 million people. Of South African women age 20-34, one third are HIV positive. One third. It's not hard to imagine the disaster in the future.
liveonearth: (Default)
Africans are more susceptible to HIV because of an adaptation to malaria. It happened by evolution: the Africans who didn't have a certain surface protein on their red blood cells didn't get malaria, because the parasite couldn't get into the RBC's. The particular kind of malaria died out, after everyone that was left was no longer susceptible to it.

That same adaptation that allowed the Africans to survive that strain of malaria also resulted in a change in the genetic makeup of the entire population... and now that change is causing them to be more susceptible to HIV. And estimated 90% of Africans and 60% of African Americans are up to 40% more vulnerable to infection by HIV.

There "has always been this myth that people in sub-Saharan Africa were more likely to get HIV because of differences in their sexual behavior, or that they are more promiscuous" (Dr. Ade Fakoya of the International HIV/AIDS Alliance on BBCnews.com)... but now we have a good reason, aside from promiscuity, for the high infection rates in Africa.

In immunology we were taught that the European populations who are descended from survivors of bubonic plague are less likely to get HIV. So it turns out that your genetic makeup makes a big difference in your susceptibility to HIV, and that probably HIV/AIDS will cause a new layer of evolution in our species. Natural Selection is still operating in humans.
liveonearth: (monkey NO)
I'm still reading How Doctors Think and it continues to increase my awareness of all the ways and reasons that a doctor can arrive at an incorrect diagnosis. I suppose a jury could come to an incorrect verdict in many of the same ways...

This link tells of six medics who face the death penalty because they gave HIV tainted blood to children. The story is painfully incomplete. Did the medics know that this blood was tainted? Is this terrible effort to punish them simply an attempt by the bereaved to gain justice in the "eye for an eye" sense?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6290112.stm

It is hard for me to imagine any doctor intentionally infecting children with the HIV virus. And so much less likely that six of them would do it....knowingly.
liveonearth: (bridge shaking (earthquake))
Check it out, fascinating article: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,405947,00.html ... Three tectonic plates meet in a place called the Afar Triangle in Africa. The triangle is in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Dijbouti, across the mouth of the Red Sea from Yemen. The plates are pulling apart, fissures are opening, and the triangle is already over 100 meters below sea level. Eventually the Red Sea will cross a high bit of land and fill it up, and we'll have one more sea on Planet Earth.

Profile

liveonearth: (Default)
liveonearth

May 2025

S M T W T F S
    123
45678910
11121314151617
1819202122 2324
25262728293031

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated May. 31st, 2025 07:31 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios