Milwaukee’s 1993 cryptosporidium outbreak

Richard
Life cycle of Cryptosporidium spp., the causat...

Image via Wikipedia

In 1993, thousands of Milwaukee residents began falling mysteriously ill – experiencing stomach cramps, dehydration, fever, diarrhea, and even death. Investigators identified the outbreak’s culprit as cryptosporidium, a protozoan parasite that attacks the intestines of mammals. The vehicle for infection? The city’s water supply. While steps were quickly taken to remedy the contaminated water supply, the incident nonetheless sicked more than 400,000 Milwaukee residents and killed 53, making it the largest waterborne disease outbreak in U.S. history.

After some investigation, city inspectors
realized the city water supply had been contaminated by cryptosporidium,
which various testing and filtering systems had failed to detect and
screen out.

The story was at the top of every local
newscast for some days, and weeks later many people were still boiling
water or avoiding tap water altogether. The story was tragic news for
those with compromised immune systems, and was one more complication in
the attempt to maintain the health and well-being of thousands of local
people infected with HIV and with AIDS. For many of these, as well as
others with compromised immune systems, the contamination was fatal.

The story went national, and 12 years later was still cited in
national news stories and scientific studies regarding the safety of
city water supplies, or of “when things go wrong”. (12 years later the
author still hears people say they haven’t drunk Milwaukee tap water
since.)

The City of Milwaukee and State of Wisconsin made numerous changes to
filtration and testing procedures in an attempt to ensure such a
tragedy can never happen again. One of the simplest is to incerease the
frequency of testing for, and acceptable level of, turbidity
(cloudiness) in drinking water.

You can read more here and here.
In the meantime, 2 million residents of the Boston metropolitan area have been ordered to boil their water because it is unsafe for human consumption due to a huge catastrophic break in a major pipe. No cryptosporidium there, but certainly inconvenient and at least a bit unnerving (people have been making runs on stores and buying every single case of water bottles).

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Share

Strange earthquakes in Texas, Ohio, and elsewhere… who’s to blame?

Richard

Welp, here we are again – more earthquakes in regions that don’t typically experience them. A “rare” 4.0 earthquake hit South Texas on Saturday, April 24. The area, it seems,

does not experience these types of quakes.

The depth of this quake was around 5.0km, which
suggests it was either geological or induced by oil production, which
does happen. Never-the-less this is an interesting area to have a quake
due to the fact the area has a large crack running north to south in
Texas, discovered several years ago, origin being unknown.

Meanwhile, a smaller quake rattled Northeast Ohio the same weekend.While Ohio has seen a few small earthquakes before, “it’s not clear what causes them.”

Why the quakes in strange places? Some scientists have speculated, as we have reported before, that the Haiti earthquake in January forewarned increased seismic activity in the Americas. An Iranian cleric, though, offers an alternative explanation:

A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear revealing clothing and
behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.

Iran is one of the world’s most
earthquake-prone countries, and the cleric’s unusual explanation for why
the earth shakes follows a prediction by the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
that a quake is certain to hit Tehran and that many of its 12 million
inhabitants should relocate.

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt
their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases
earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian
media. Women in the Islamic Republic are required by law to cover from
head to toe, but many, especially the young, ignore some of the more
strict codes and wear tight coats and scarves pulled back that show much
of the hair. “What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?”
Sedighi asked during a prayer sermon last week. “There is no other
solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to
Islam’s moral codes.” Seismologists have warned for at least two decades
that it is likely the sprawling capital will be struck by a
catastrophic quake in the near future. Some experts have even suggested
Iran should move its capital to a less seismically active location.
Tehran straddles scores of fault lines, including one more than 50 miles
long, though it has not suffered a major quake since 1830.

There probably are more “immodest” women in Ohio and Texas, to be sure, but I can’t help but feel that this explanation leaves something to be desired.

Share

Giant bacteria colony “the size of Greece” found in ocean

Richard

Apparently the Census of Marine Life, the Herculean scientific effort to identify, categorize, and describe all ocean life, has discovered a “vast carpet” of bacteria on the ocean floor off the coast of South America.

I don’t think words can convey how huge this bacterial mass is, but journalists have tried. From ABC News:

 The census estimated there were a mind-boggling “nonillion” — or
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (30 zeroes) — individual
microbial cells in the oceans, weighing as much as 240 billion African
elephants, the biggest land animal.
[…]The census said they carpeted an area the size of Greece — about
130,000 sq km (50,000 sq miles) or the size of the U.S. state of Alabama. Toxic to humans, the bacteria are food for shrimp or worms and so underpin rich Pacific fish stocks.

Certainly creepy. And Ann Bucklin, head of the Census of Marine Zooplankton, points out that “seventy percent of the oceans are deeper than 1,000 meters [and] the deep layer is the source of the hidden diversity.” Who knows what else is down there – we only just now discovered this Greece-sized mass.

You can read more here, and here and here.
See also our somewhat-related earlier article on mucilages (free-floating blobs of ocean bacteria).

Share

Americans tired of political incivility

Richard

This isn’t exactly bizarre, but it is nonetheless interesting. American political discourse, over the past several years, seems to have escalated out of control. Negative ads? Puh. These days we have congressmen being spit on, racial slurs hurled at African American congressmen (who also happen to be heroes of the civil rights movement), and death threats (including cut gas lines and a coffin left in a congressman’s yard), among other things. What’s interesting to me, though, is that not only are Americans tired of this incivility, they want compromise on a number of issues.

USA Today’s top story reports:

More than two-thirds in a nationwide poll taken for the
study said Americans “should be ashamed of the way elected officials
acted” during the recent health care debate. Half said the tone of
politics has declined since President Obama was elected; just 10% said
it has improved.

Those surveyed were split over whether it was
more important for a politician to be willing to stand firm in support
of principles or be able to compromise to get things done.

When asked about seven specific issues, however,
solid majorities said elected officials should find compromise solutions
on all but one of them, abortion. About two-thirds thought compromises
should be found on immigration and climate change legislation, two of
the most contentious issues now being debated.

There were significant differences by ideology,
however. Liberals by 59%-36% favored the ability to compromise. Conservatives‘ views
were a reverse of that: By 60%-34%, they preferred a willingness to
stand firm.

The telephone survey of 1,000 people, taken by
Zogby International March 24-29, has a margin of error of +/– 3.2
percentage points.

I find it particularly striking that liberals are significantly more likely to seek compromise than conservatives. You can read more here.

Share

Iceland’s fiery volcano

Richard

… resembles something out of Mordor. Take a look at this absolutely stunning photograph of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano taken by photographer Ragnar Th. Sigurdsson:
volcano2.PNG

You can see more here. In the meantime, planes are still grounded across Europe, and the British Royal Navy is contemplating a reenactment of Dunkirk to “rescue” the hundreds of thousands of Britons stranded on the continent.

Additional photographs from a different source can be found here. They are equally stunning. These photographs bring to mind words like “apocalyptic.” For example:

ejafjalla16apr2010-mfulle4136j.jpg

Share

Detect earthquakes with your laptop

Richard

NPR reports:

By downloading a free program, you and your laptop
could help researchers pinpoint earthquakes and even sound an early
warning to surrounding areas.


Newer models of laptops manufactured by companies
like Apple and Lenovo contain accelerometers — motion sensors meant to
detect whether the computer has been dropped. If the computer falls, the
hard drive will automatically switch off to protect the user’s data.


“As soon as I knew there were these low-cost
sensors inside these accelerometers, I thought it would be perfect to
use them to network together and actually record earthquakes,”
geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California at
Riverside says.

So if you’ve got one of those newer laptops, download the program here. Given the increased seismic activity lately, it could come in handy.

Share

Strange signs: the unruly night

Richard 1 Comment

Weird things have been going on lately. Ask anyone – they’ll tell you that it seems like there have been more inexplicable natural disasters (earthquakes in northern Illinois? ominous rumblings beneath Yellowstone, a dormant supervolcano?) than usual lately. While I haven’t seen any hard data on this subject (maybe it’s just another case of media exaggeration – most people, thanks to the media, perceive an increase in violent crime, while in actuality violent crime has decreased over the past decade), it is certainly possible. And the massive quakes in Haiti and Chile weren’t cooked up by media exaggeration.

At any rate, add two more occurrences to the already long list of strange things going on lately. I hate to admit it, but the past few months have left even me with suspicions and whispering doubts in the back of my mind. I typically scoff at doomsday prophets, Seventh Day Adventists, and survivalists… but what if they’re right? I mean, they’ve been saying the world is ending for thousands of years… but if you keep saying something long enough, eventually you’re bound to be right. Right?

So in the meantime, we have a volcanic eruption in Iceland that has led Europe to ground all flights – the largest peacetime grounding of aircraft ever.

Add, on top of that, this bizarre meteor that recently streaked over Wisconsin:

I’m reminded of a foreboding passage from Macbeth:

The night has been unruly: where we lay,
Our chimneys were blown down: and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i’ the air, strange screams of death;
And prophesying, with accents terrible,
Of dire combustion and confus’d events,
New hatch’d to the woeful time: the obscure bird
Clamour’d the live-long night; some say the earth
Was feverous, and did shake.

Let’s hope that the earth’s recent fevers and shakes are not similarly prophetic.

Share

A dearth of updates.

Richard

Hello friends. I apologize for the desperate lack of updates – I’ve been totally wrapped up in my senior thesis for the last few weeks. The good news, though, is that I turned it in yesterday – so expect the usually steady stream of internet weirdness, bizarre facts, and strange news to resume soon.

Share

Life under the ice

Richard

More Antarctic news:

In a surprising discovery about where higher
life can thrive, scientists found a shrimplike creature and a jellyfish
frolicking beneath an Antarctic ice sheet.
lyssianasid-amphipod.jpg

Six hundred feet below the ice where no light
shines, they had figured nothing much more than a few microbes could
exist. That’s why a NASA team was surprised when it lowered a video
camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of the ice sheet in
Antarctica, and a 3-inch shrimp-like creature went swimming by and then
parked itself on the camera’s cable. Scientists also pulled up a
tentacle they believe came from a foot-long jellyfish.

“We were operating on the presumption that
nothing’s there,” said NASA scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will
present the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical
Union meeting tomorrow.

Read more here.

Share

Dining with Hitler, in Asia.

Richard

This is certainly a strange trend. Apparently, Hitler-themed bars and restaurants are a thing in parts of Asia. See: the following article (which was helpfully found by Pamela and forwarded to me by Olivia).

Adolf Hitler? In most western countries he is viewed as history’s
most evil man, and almost all are aware of the horrific genocide he was
responsible for, with many having had family fight and/or die in the war
against Nazi Germany.

However, in Asia, Hitler is a far more distant figure. This distance
might be an explanation for the bizarre case of Hitler restaurants and
bars that can be found throughout Asia.

Here are some photos of these strange Hitler-themed
establishments:

hitl2.jpghitl1.jpg

You can view more here.

Share

The disappearing Lake Peigneur

Richard 2 Comments

Lake Peigneur was once a shallow freshwater lake in Louisiana. Today, it is a deep saltwater lake. What happened? It’s difficult to believe. From Wikipedia:

An unusual man-made disaster on November 20, 1980 changed the structure
of the lake and surrounding land.

In 1980, when the disaster took place, the Diamond
Crystal Salt Company operated the Jefferson Island salt
mine under the lake, while a Texaco oil
rig drilled down from the surface of the lake searching for petroleum.
Due to a miscalculation, the 14-inch (36 cm) drill bit entered the
mine, starting a remarkable chain of events which at the time turned an
almost 10-foot (3.0 m) deep freshwater lake into a salt water lake with a
deep hole.

It is difficult to determine exactly what occurred, as all of the
evidence was destroyed or washed away in the ensuing maelstrom.
The now generally accepted explanation is that a miscalculation by
Texaco regarding their location resulted in the drill puncturing the
roof of the third level of the mine. This created an opening in the
bottom of the lake, similar to removing the drain plug from a bathtub.
The lake then drained into the hole, expanding the size of that hole as
the soil and salt were washed into the mine by the rushing water,
filling the enormous caverns left by the removal of salt over the years.
The resultant whirlpool sucked in the drilling platform, eleven
barges, many trees and 65 acres (260,000 m2) of the
surrounding terrain. So much water drained into those caverns that the
flow of the Delcambre Canal that usually empties the
lake into Vermilion Bay was reversed, making the canal a
temporary inlet. This backflow created, for a few days, the tallest
waterfall ever in the state of Louisiana, at 164 feet (50 m), as the
lake refilled with salt water from the Delcambre Canal and Vermilion
Bay. The water downflowing into the mine caverns displaced air
which erupted as compressed air and then later as 400-foot (120 m) geysers up
through the mineshafts.


Fortunately, all the miners and bystanders escaped this harrowing incident unscathed. Even this description, though, doesn’t do the event justice. Watch this brief clip from the History Channel:

Share