![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brdgt
5 Cases of Polio in Amish Group Raise New Fears
By GARDINER HARRIS, The New York Times, November 8, 2005
LONG PRAIRIE, Minn. - Polio was pronounced dead in the Western Hemisphere years ago, after one of the most successful public health campaigns in history. But now it is stealing through a tiny Amish community here in central Minnesota, spreading from an 8-month-old girl to four children on two neighboring farms.
So far, no one has been crippled by the disease; only 1 in 200 cases of polio results in paralysis. But worried public health officials say it may be only a matter of time.
The story of how polio came to this dairy farming community of 24 families, with 19th-century ways that include a deep-rooted suspicion of vaccination, is both a medical whodunit and a cautionary tale, suggesting that eradicating polio may prove far harder than anyone thought, even in the developed world.
No one expects that the United States will be visited by the kind of outbreaks that recently flared up in Africa and Asia, frustrating the longstanding goal of eliminating polio for good by the end of this year. But the Long Prairie cases highlight a weakness in the worldwide campaign.
The 8-month-old Amish girl, whose name has been withheld by health officials, has an immune deficiency that makes her unable to rid her body of the virus.
How she contracted the virus remains a mystery. She may have been infected in a hospital by another immune-deficient patient who nursed it for years. A doctor or nurse may have served as a go-between. Or there may have been a chain of carriers in the Amish community. The virus is spread from stool to mouth, a surprisingly efficient form of transmission.
Regardless, the girl is now a wellspring for polio, a modern-day Typhoid Mary who can pass it along to others. Anyone who has not been vaccinated is vulnerable. And though vaccination rates in the United States are at historic highs, an increasing number of parents are resisting inoculations for their children, fearing that they may cause disorders like autism, a connection scientists have almost universally discounted.
So health authorities are keeping a watchful eye on the girl and her neighbors.
"If that child is a message in a bottle," said Bruce Aylward, coordinator of the global polio eradication initiative at the World Health Organization, "it has just washed up on shore."
The 24 families moved to this windswept stretch of prairie from Wisconsin about three years ago. An Amish community generally includes only as many families as can fit into one house for church services, and each community must come to a consensus on what to accept from modernity.
This one allows windshields for its horse buggies, kitchen cupboards that are attached to walls and some upholstered furniture - all somewhat unusual for the Amish, said Dr. Susan Rutten, a physician from nearby Sauk Centre who makes house calls in four Amish communities. Men can wear dark green shirts, not just navy blue and black.
The farms could have come straight out of children's books. There are ducks and chickens, cattle and hogs. Fence posts are columns of stones enclosed by wire mesh. Lacking electricity, the farms are remarkably quiet. At one, the children rarely yelled or even spoke in the presence of a stranger. The air smelled of turned earth, manure and wood smoke.
The threat of polio seemed remote here - until this summer. That was when the baby was hospitalized with an immune-system disorder.
As her care became increasingly complex, she was shuttled through four hospitals. At the third, she developed diarrhea. On Aug. 27, doctors sent a stool sample to the hospital's laboratory, which determined that the girl had an intestinal virus. In many states, nothing more would have been done.
But in Minnesota, hospitals send such samples to a sophisticated state laboratory. On Sept. 29, the tests matured. A laboratory supervisor called Dr. Harry Hull, the state epidemiologist, to say they had isolated a polio virus.
Dr. Hull was stunned. "I said, 'You have made a mistake,' " he recalled.
Tall and thin, with glasses and bushy eyebrows, Dr. Hull is one of the world's foremost polio experts. Before coming to Minnesota, he worked for 10 years in the World Health Organization's global polio eradication effort. In an interview, he scrawled circles and arrows on a sheet of paper as he described the search for the virus.
The state laboratory redid the tests. The results were identical. Then it sequenced the virus's genomic code. A supervisor plugged the code into a national genomic database, comparing it with the genes of a polio virus.
"Bingo," said Dr. Norman Crouch, the laboratory's director. "It was a 98 percent match. We knew we had nailed it."
The Minnesota laboratory sent the sample to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which confirmed the results. Officials were immediately concerned about where the virus originated and where it might have spread.
Confirming the presence of polio in a city with even one infected person is not impossible, said Dr. Mark D. Sobsey, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of North Carolina. The stool of an infected person contains so many viral particles that tests at a sewage treatment plant can reveal it. Such tests helped track outbreaks in the Gaza Strip and Haiti in recent years.
Since many Amish use outhouses, however, state officials geared up to go door to door. They unearthed a public health form explaining how to collect stool samples. The form had pictures of a flush toilet and a garbage can with a plastic liner - things foreign to many Amish communities. Officials changed the form.
Gary Wax, an epidemiologist for the Minnesota Department of Health, contacted the leader of the Amish community where the child lives and asked for his permission to seek stool samples from those in his community. The leader gave his blessing, Mr. Wax said.
"We really tried to do it in a respectful way rather than just barge right in there," Mr. Wax said.
Since the Amish have no phones, he could not call for appointments. He and his colleagues knocked on doors. They had been warned against speaking directly to Amish women without their husbands present, Mr. Wax said, and the men were "running all over the place, helping each other with harvesting and construction." So if the man was not at home, they left.
"We came back many times to some places," Mr. Wax said. After weeks of effort, just 5 of 24 families in the community agreed to cooperate. Three of the five, including the family of the 8-month-old, proved to have infected children.
"I would be surprised if we don't get a paralytic case someplace," Dr. Hull said.
In a neighboring community, a 38-year-old farmer who is also a sawyer agreed to speak with a reporter only if his name would not be used, saying Amish people avoided calling attention to themselves.
The farmer, who has seven children, explained that nothing in Amish law forbade vaccinations, but that many Amish believed that vaccines weakened the immune system. He added that as a result of the infections, he planned to have his children vaccinated against polio, measles, mumps and rubella, and that most of the families in his community were doing the same. "We'll get vaccinated if we feel it's necessary," he said. "But our definition of necessary may be very different from yours."
A further challenge for public health officials is that their surveillance efforts cannot be confined to a few remote farming communities.
"My mental image of the Amish was that they don't travel at all because they don't drive cars," Dr. Hull said. "That's not true."
The Amish commonly take buses and trains, and occasionally even planes. Families from the baby girl's community recently attended a wedding in Ontario, Canada, that health officials said drew more than 1,000 guests. Some have visited Wisconsin in recent weeks.
Polio experts have long feared that an immune-deficient person could cause an outbreak of paralytic polio. That is a particular hazard in poorer countries.
In much of the developing world, children are given an oral vaccine made of a live, nonparalytic polio virus. Two drops confer partial immunity, making mass vaccination campaigns achievable in poor countries. To become fully immunized, a child must be vaccinated several times. The vaccine causes an infection that usually lasts a few weeks. The infection can spread to others and immunize them, too.
But if the virus spreads too far among previously unvaccinated people, its genes will change and the virus will regain its ability to cripple and kill. Such a virus caused an outbreak of paralytic polio in Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 2000 and 2001, crippling 21. (The outbreaks in Africa and Asia began after many Nigerians refused vaccinations in 2003, suspecting they were a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls.)
The United States and much of the developed world used live-virus vaccinations for decades, but switched in recent years to a dead virus that is injected. The dead virus does not cause an infection or paralysis.
In people with poor immune systems like the 8-month-old Amish child, the live polio vaccine can change to a paralytic form without being passed to anyone else, since such people can nurse a mutating virus for years.
In most of the world, such patients die quickly because of poor medical care. In the West, they can live for years, with a few of them shedding polio viruses all the while. Among experts, these patients are called "chronic excreters." That such a polio wellspring would be born among a largely unvaccinated population like the Amish, Dr. Hull said, was a "random unlucky event."
"It's a model of what might happen if we stop vaccinating too soon," he said.
The Amish girl remains hospitalized in strict isolation. Health officials will not say where. And they are still trying to figure out where she contracted the virus.
Genetic testing showed that the virus was almost identical to that of the oral polio vaccine given in much of the rest of the world but not in the United States. The slight changes to the virus from that of the vaccine suggested that it had been circulating for at least two years. The girl has never traveled abroad.
A fear is that such a person could unwittingly incubate a polio infection for a decade or more and then accidentally reintroduce it - years after experts have declared it eliminated from the world and vaccinations have stopped.
That prospect has long seemed remote, because such children are so rare, Dr. Aylward of the World Health Organization said. But an outbreak of paralytic disease in Minnesota would prove that it was more likely than many had believed, and it would demonstrate that work now under way to better understand the risks posed by chronic excreters would have to be intensified.
"Or we may need to revisit the strategy and time frame for stopping the use of the oral polio vaccine," Dr. Aylward said. "It's a tiny chance, but it's something we need to keep an eye on."
Hazard in Hunt for New Flu: Looking for Bugs in All the Wrong Places
By GINA KOLATA, The New York Times, November 8, 2005
Science moves in mysterious ways, and sometimes what seems like the end of the story is really just the beginning. Or, at least, that is what some researchers are thinking as they scratch their heads over the weird genetic sequence of the 1918 flu virus.
Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, a molecular pathologist at the Armed Forces Institute of Technology who led the research team that reconstructed the long-extinct virus, said that a few things seemed clear.
The 1918 virus appears to be a bird flu virus. But if it is from a bird, it is not a bird anyone has studied before. It is not like the A(H5N1) strain of bird flus in Asia, which has sickened at least 116 people, and killed 60. It is not like the influenza viruses that infect fowl in North America.
Yet many researchers believe that the 1918 virus, which caused the worst infectious disease epidemic in human history, is a bird flu virus. And if so, it is the only one that has ever been known to cause a human pandemic.
That, Dr. Taubenberger said, gives rise to a question. Are scientists looking for the next pandemic flu virus in all the wrong places? Is there a bird that no one ever thought about that harbors the next 1918-like flu? And if so, what bird is it, and where does it live?
"I can't even assign a hemisphere," he said. "It just came from somewhere else. Maybe it's in pigeons. Or in songbirds."
"It's weird, it's really weird," he added. "My view is to be undogmatic as possible and just try to follow the data. This is the result we get. The question is, What does it mean?"
Dr. Taubenberger's question emerged from the science fiction-like search for the 1918 virus that eventually led to its reconstruction.
A decade ago, Dr. Taubenberger and his colleagues found shards of the extinct virus in two fingernail-size snippets of formaldehyde-soaked lung tissue from two soldiers and from the frozen lung of an Inuit woman who died of the flu in 1918 and was buried in permafrost. Slowly and painstakingly, they fished out the tiny fragments of viral genes and began reconstructing them.
The first gene they sequenced was the one that codes for the hemagglutinin protein on the virus's surface. Immediately, Dr. Taubenberger and his colleagues were struck by an oddity: the chain of nucleotides that coded for the amino acids in the protein were arranged differently from those found in any other bird flu.
The genetic code is flexible; there is more than one way that a group of three nucleotides can be arranged to code for the same amino acid. But every bird flu virus ever studied used the same spellings for the hemagglutinin amino acids. Not the 1918 flu.
There were two possibilities, Dr. Taubenberger thought. One was that bird flus have evolved over the decades and that back in 1918, the amino acids in bird viruses were simply coded differently.
Another was that if the 1918 flu virus came from a bird, it was no bird that anyone had considered before.
"We decided there was no way to address this," Dr. Taubenberger said. After all, the birds from 1918 were long gone, and their viruses had died with them.
Then Dr. Thomas Fanning, a scientist in Dr. Taubenberger's group, mentioned that he had a friend at the Smithsonian who worked at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington. It had several thousand preserved birds from the early 20th century that were floating in Mason jars of alcohol.
From there, they reached James P. Dean, a supervisor in the division of birds at the museum, who sent Dr. Taubenberger a computer printout of the birds in the museum's collection - hundreds of birds, with notes telling the species and the exact times and places where they were collected. But which to choose?
Dr. Taubenberger consulted with one of the leading experts on bird flus, Richard Slemons of Ohio State, who chose 40 birds on the museum's list, all waterfowl collected around 1918. The museum found 25 of them.
The scientists took tiny pinches of tissue from passages of the birds' excretory tracts, or cloacas, and Dr. Taubenberger looked for flu viruses in the tissue. Six of the birds had a flu virus. The genetic coding for the amino acids in those viruses was exactly like that in bird flu viruses today, Dr. Taubenberger found.
In fact, the viruses had not even evolved. Human influenza viruses change every year, mutating slightly so they can reinfect people who had just had the flu and developed antibodies against it. But birds, Dr. Slemons said, do not have much of an immune response to influenza, and so there is no particular pressure for the virus to mutate.
Another reason the viruses stay the same, he said, is that some birds live for only a couple of years and so, every year, the viruses have a new bird population to infect. Finally, he said, birds are chronically infected with lots of flu viruses at once, and all the viruses coexist peacefully.
"There are so many that there is no selective pressure on any virus," he said.
But if bird viruses do not evolve and if the waterfowl viruses in 1915 and 1916 look just like bird viruses today, where did the 1918 virus come from? Or was it really a bird virus?
After all, at the time that he looked at the Smithsonian birds, Dr. Taubenberger had reconstructed only part of the virus's genetic sequence. Maybe when he had the whole thing, the picture would change.
It did not. The entire sequence, published last month in Nature, had the distinctive protein structures of a bird virus, he said. And it had that same peculiar way of spelling its amino acids.
When he compared the 1918 virus with today's human flu viruses, Dr. Taubenberger noticed that it had alterations in just 25 to 30 of the virus's 4,400 amino acids. Those few changes turned a bird virus into a killer than could spread from person to person.
Dr. Taubenberger noticed that, so far, the A(H5N1) viruses in Asia have just a few of those changes. They do not, however, have the unusual ways of coding the amino acid instructions that the 1918 virus had. So are the Asian bird viruses on their way to becoming pandemic viruses, or not?
Some experts like Dr. Peter Palese of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York say the A(H5N1) flu viruses are a false alarm. He notes that studies of serum collected in 1992 from people in rural China indicated that millions of people there had antibodies to the A(H5N1) strain.
That means they had been infected with an H5N1 bird virus and recovered, apparently without incident.
Despite that, and the fact that those viruses have been circulating in China more than a dozen years, almost no human-to-human spread has occurred. "The virus has been around for more than a dozen years, but it hasn't jumped into the human population," Dr. Palese said. "I don't think it has the capability of doing it."
Dr. Taubenberger said he could argue it either way.
"It's a nasty virus," he said. "It is highly virulent in domestic birds and wild birds. The fact that it has killed half the humans it has infected makes it of concern, and the fact that it shares some features with the 1918 virus makes it of concern.
"But the fact that it has circulated in Asia for years and hasn't caused a pandemic argues against it. Maybe there are some biological barriers we don't understand."
So where will the next pandemic come from? Dr. Taubenberger says he wonders if it may be from a bird no one has thought of, a bird with a flu virus that has the same funny coding of amino acids that he saw in the 1918 flu.
He has teamed up with scientists in Alaska to get swabs from the cloacas of migrating birds, and he is looking in those samples for flu viruses that look like the one from 1918.
"Probably nobody else has thought much about this," Dr. Taubenberger said. "But we've been staring at the sequence of the virus for the last 10 years, and we've been thinking about it." For him, the story is not over; it has just taken another turn.
Findings: All Together Now: Synchrony Explains Swaying
By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times November 8, 2005
What do pedestrians, some species of fireflies and pendulum clocks have in common? Given half a chance, they act in unison, exhibiting what scientists call synchrony. And that is what lay behind the unexpected swaying of the Millennium Bridge in London five years ago, according to a new study.
This sleek $32 million footbridge, which stretches 1,050 feet over the Thames, opened June 10, 2000, to great fanfare. But as thousands of people streamed across, it began to wobble side to side, inducing queasiness and fears that it might fall. Engineers saw that as the wobbling began, pedestrians adjusted their gait to the wobbling motion. As more people walked in lock step, the wobblier the bridge became.
Steven H. Strogatz of Cornell and his colleagues borrowed mathematics describing the synchrony of fireflies and pendulums and applied them to the dynamics of the bridge. The calculations, reported in the journal Nature, show why the north section of the bridge remained steady with 150 people on it but began swaying when the number exceeded 160.
Christian Huygens, a 17th-century Dutch physicist, first observed synchrony in two pendulum clocks that hung close to each other. Even when he set the pendulums in motion so they were not swinging in unison, they resynchronized within half an hour.
Fireflies along rivers in Malaysia and Thailand also synchronize, thousands flashing on and off at once.
As for the Millennium Bridge, after two years, an extra $9 million and the addition of large shock absorbers, it no longer wobbles. (It was never in danger of falling.)
Essay: Science and Religion Share Fascination in Things Unseen
By LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS, The New York Times, November 8, 2005
Most of the current controversies associated with science revolve around the vastly different reactions people both within the scientific community and outside it have, not to the strange features of the universe that we can observe for ourselves, but rather to those features we cannot observe.
In my own field of physics, theorists hotly debate the possible existence of an underlying mathematical beauty associated with a host of new dimensions that may or may not exist in nature.
School boards, legislatures and evangelists hotly debate the possible existence of an underlying purpose to nature that similarly may or may not exist.
It seems that humans are hard-wired to yearn for new realms well beyond the reach of our senses into which we can escape, if only with our minds. It is possible that we need to rely on such possibilities or the world of our experience would become intolerable.
Certainly science has, in the past century, validated the notion that what we see is far from all there is. We cannot directly see electrons but we now know that material objects we can hold in our hand are actually, at an atomic level, largely empty space, and that it is the electric fields associated with the electrons that keep them from falling through our hands.
And when we peer into the darkness of the night sky, within the size of the spot covered up by a dime held at arm's length, we now know that over 100,000 galaxies more or less like our own are hiding. And we know most contain over 100 billion stars, many housing solar systems, and around some of them may exist intelligent life forms whose existence may, too, remain forever hidden from us.
One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein began to unveil the hidden nature of space and time, and after working for another full decade he discovered that space itself is dynamic. It can curve and bend in response to matter and energy, and ultimately even the calm peace of the night sky, suggesting an eternal universe, is itself an illusion. Distant galaxies are being carried away by an expanding space, just as a swimmer at rest in the water can nevertheless get carried away from shore by a strong current.
Thus, it is perhaps not too surprising that when one approaches the limits of our knowledge, theologians and scientists alike tend to appeal to new hidden universes for, respectively, either redemption or understanding.
The apparent complexity of our universe has compelled some evangelists, and some school boards, to argue that the natural laws we have unraveled over the past four centuries cannot be enough on their own to explain the diversity of the phenomena we observe around us, including the remarkable diversity of life on earth.
For very different reasons, but still without a shred of empirical evidence, a generation of theoretical physicists has speculated that the four dimensions of our experience may themselves be just a grand illusion - the tip of a cosmic iceberg.
String theory, yet to have any real successes in explaining or predicting anything measurable, has nevertheless become a fixture in the public lexicon, and the elaborate and surprising mathematical framework that has resulted from over three decades of theoretical study has been enough for some to argue that even a thus-far empirically impotent idea must describe reality.
Further, it has now been proposed that the extra dimensions of string theory may not even be microscopically small, which has been the long accepted mathematical trick used by advocates to explain why we may not yet detect them.
Instead, they could be large enough to house entire other universes with potentially different laws of physics, and perhaps even objects that, like the eight-dimensional beings in a Buckaroo Banzai story, might leak into our own dimensions.
I wouldn't bet on their existence, but the fact that such potentially infinite spaces could exist and still be effectively hidden in our world is nevertheless remarkable.
Whatever one thinks about all of these ruminations about hidden realities, there is an important difference - at least I hope there is - between the scientists who currently speculate about extra dimensions and those whose beliefs cause them to insist that life can only be understood by going beyond the confines of the natural world.
Scientists know that without experimental vindication their proposals are likely to wither. Moreover, a single definitive "null experiment," like the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 that dispensed with the long-sought-after ether, could sweep away the whole idea.
Religious belief that the universe is the handiwork of an all-powerful being is not subject to refutation. This sort of reliance on faith may itself have an evolutionary basis. There has been talk of a "god gene": the idea of an early advantage in the struggle for survival for those endowed with a belief in a hidden patrimony that gives order, purpose and meaning to the universe we experience.
Does the same evolutionary predilection lead physicists and mathematicians to see beauty in the unobserved, or unobservable? Does the longstanding human love affair with extra dimensions reflect something fundamental about the way we think, rather than about the world in which we live?
The mathematician Hermann Weyl was quoted as having said not long before he died, "My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful."
Mathematicians, artists and writers may choose beauty over truth. Scientists can only hope that we do not have to make the choice.
Lawrence M. Krauss is a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University. His latest book is "Hiding in the Mirror."
Really? The Claim: Antibacterial Soap Works Better Than Regular Soap
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR, The New York Times, November 8, 2005
THE FACTS What happened to plain old soap?
Studies show that more than 70 percent of liquid hand soaps sold are now labeled antibacterial, and Americans seem increasingly willing to pay a premium for them.
But the truth is that most consumers may not always be getting what they think they are. Over the years, studies have repeatedly shown that antibacterial soaps are no better than plain old soap and water.
One study, published in The Journal of Community Health in 2003, followed adults in 238 households in New York City for nearly a year.
Month after month, the researchers found no difference in the number of microbes that turned up on the hands of people who used either antibacterial soap or regular soap. At least four other large studies have had similar findings.
In fact, the only question now may be whether using antibacterial soaps can cause more harm than good by creating strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration convened experts to discuss, among other things, whether antibacterial products should be more tightly regulated because of the potential risks they pose.
THE BOTTOM LINE Studies show that antibacterial soap is no more effective than regular soap.
Copernicus's Grave Is Reported Found
By REUTERS, The New York Times, November 6, 2005
WARSAW, Nov. 5 (Reuters) - Polish archaeologists say they are all but certain they have located the skeletal remains of Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer and cleric whose theory that the planets revolved around the Sun revolutionized astronomy.
Prof. Jerzy Gassowski told a symposium Thursday he believed the remains found under an altar of Frombork Cathedral on Poland's Baltic coast were those of Copernicus.
The age of the skull and bones as well as certain facial features led Mr. Gassowski to say he was "97 percent certain these are Copernicus's remains, but only DNA testing could fully authenticate the find."
A computer reconstruction of the skull showed the head of a gray-haired man of about 70, the age at which Copernicus died. It matched the scar above the left eye and broken nose seen in his portraits.
Copernicus left no known descendants, but burial sites of his relatives may provide DNA samples.
In his treatise "On the Revolution of Celestial Bodies," Copernicus asserted that the planets revolved around the Sun, and that the Earth was not the center of the universe.
When Cleaner Air Is a Biblical Obligation
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY, The New York Times, November 7, 2005
WASHINGTON, Nov. 6 - In their long and frustrated efforts pushing Congress to pass legislation on global warming, environmentalists are gaining a new ally.
With increasing vigor, evangelical groups that are part of the base of conservative support for leading Republicans are campaigning for laws that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which scientists have linked with global warming.
In the latest effort, the National Association of Evangelicals, a nonprofit organization that includes 45,000 churches serving 30 million people across the country, is circulating among its leaders the draft of a policy statement that would encourage lawmakers to pass legislation creating mandatory controls for carbon emissions.
Environmentalists rely on empirical evidence as their rationale for Congressional action, and many evangelicals further believe that protecting the planet from human activities that cause global warming is a values issue that fulfills Biblical teachings asking humans to be good stewards of the earth.
"Genesis 2:15," said Richard Cizik, the association's vice president for governmental affairs, citing a passage that serves as the justification for the effort: "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it."
"We believe that we have a rightful responsibility for what the Bible itself challenges," Mr. Cizik said. "Working the land and caring for it go hand in hand. That's why I think, and say unapologetically, that we ought to be able to bring to the debate a new voice."
By themselves, environmental groups have made scant progress on global warming legislation in Congress, beyond a nonbinding Senate resolution last summer that recommends a program of mandatory controls on gases that cause global warming.
Officials with the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council said they welcomed the added muscle evangelicals could bring to their cause. But they agreed that it remained uncertain how much difference it could make.
A major obstacle to any measure that would address global warming is Senator James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who is chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and an evangelical himself, but a skeptic of climate change caused by human activities.
Mr. Inhofe has led efforts to keep mandatory controls on greenhouse gases out of any emission reduction bill considered by his committee and has called human activities contributing to global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."
"You can always find in Scriptures a passage to misquote for almost anything," Mr. Inhofe said in an interview, dismissing the position of Mr. Cizik's association as "something very strange."
Mr. Inhofe said the vast majority of the nation's evangelical groups would oppose global warming legislation as inconsistent with a conservative agenda that also includes opposition to abortion rights and gay rights. He said the National Evangelical Association had been "led down a liberal path" by environmentalists and others who have convinced the group that issues like poverty and the environment are worth their efforts.
At the same time, Mr. Inhofe said he took the association's stance seriously because of the influence its leaders had on people who generally voted Republican. Evangelical groups including the Noah's Ark Foundation lobbied successfully in 1996 to block efforts by the House to weaken the Endangered Species Act.
Now known as the Noah Alliance, the group continues to work on environmental issues, along with groups like the Evangelical Environmental Network, which describes itself as a "biblically orthodox Christian" organization. It subscribes to a policy of "creation care," which it defines as "caring for all of God's creation by stopping and preventing activities that are harmful," like air and water pollution and species extinction.
Mr. Inhofe said many other evangelical organizations held opposing views on the environment. He cited a coalition of faith organizations, scientists and policy experts known as the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship. The council formed in 2000 only to issue a statement of concerns that declared global warming problems caused by humans as only "speculative." A new version of the council is planning to organize shortly, and members are re-examining their stances.
A member of the original group's advisory committee, Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative group that studies moral issues and public policy, said more recent disputes among conservatives over global warming focused not on the science behind it but on ways to address it.
Mr. Cizik said the alliance's draft position on global warming was still under review by its leaders and would not be issued unless they voted unanimously to support it. If only a majority supports it, he said, it could be released as "an evangelical statement on climate change."
While he was reluctant to predict its potential political impact, he said, "I don't think there's a Republican running for the White House in 2008 who will not have to deal with the emergence of evangelicals on creation care."
John Green, a senior fellow for the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, said a policy statement from the National Alliance of Evangelicals could influence Congress. But the real test, he said, was whether the group's leaders could influence their congregants.
"It's still early in the process," he said of evangelical involvement in the environmental movement. "Among rank and file, evangelicals are as environmental as the rest of us. They're in favor of environmental protections, at least in principle."
On the other hand, he added, "they don't like environmentalists. They associate environmentalists with the Sierra Club and with people who have nontraditional religiosity. Alliance leaders have a real opportunity here, but the impediment is getting over the image of environmentalists."
Mr. Green said the full impact of the alliance position would not be known for several years. But if their support for global warming legislation increases, "then," he said, "Senator Inhofe is going to have to sit up and listen."
By GARDINER HARRIS, The New York Times, November 8, 2005
LONG PRAIRIE, Minn. - Polio was pronounced dead in the Western Hemisphere years ago, after one of the most successful public health campaigns in history. But now it is stealing through a tiny Amish community here in central Minnesota, spreading from an 8-month-old girl to four children on two neighboring farms.
So far, no one has been crippled by the disease; only 1 in 200 cases of polio results in paralysis. But worried public health officials say it may be only a matter of time.
The story of how polio came to this dairy farming community of 24 families, with 19th-century ways that include a deep-rooted suspicion of vaccination, is both a medical whodunit and a cautionary tale, suggesting that eradicating polio may prove far harder than anyone thought, even in the developed world.
No one expects that the United States will be visited by the kind of outbreaks that recently flared up in Africa and Asia, frustrating the longstanding goal of eliminating polio for good by the end of this year. But the Long Prairie cases highlight a weakness in the worldwide campaign.
The 8-month-old Amish girl, whose name has been withheld by health officials, has an immune deficiency that makes her unable to rid her body of the virus.
How she contracted the virus remains a mystery. She may have been infected in a hospital by another immune-deficient patient who nursed it for years. A doctor or nurse may have served as a go-between. Or there may have been a chain of carriers in the Amish community. The virus is spread from stool to mouth, a surprisingly efficient form of transmission.
Regardless, the girl is now a wellspring for polio, a modern-day Typhoid Mary who can pass it along to others. Anyone who has not been vaccinated is vulnerable. And though vaccination rates in the United States are at historic highs, an increasing number of parents are resisting inoculations for their children, fearing that they may cause disorders like autism, a connection scientists have almost universally discounted.
So health authorities are keeping a watchful eye on the girl and her neighbors.
"If that child is a message in a bottle," said Bruce Aylward, coordinator of the global polio eradication initiative at the World Health Organization, "it has just washed up on shore."
The 24 families moved to this windswept stretch of prairie from Wisconsin about three years ago. An Amish community generally includes only as many families as can fit into one house for church services, and each community must come to a consensus on what to accept from modernity.
This one allows windshields for its horse buggies, kitchen cupboards that are attached to walls and some upholstered furniture - all somewhat unusual for the Amish, said Dr. Susan Rutten, a physician from nearby Sauk Centre who makes house calls in four Amish communities. Men can wear dark green shirts, not just navy blue and black.
The farms could have come straight out of children's books. There are ducks and chickens, cattle and hogs. Fence posts are columns of stones enclosed by wire mesh. Lacking electricity, the farms are remarkably quiet. At one, the children rarely yelled or even spoke in the presence of a stranger. The air smelled of turned earth, manure and wood smoke.
The threat of polio seemed remote here - until this summer. That was when the baby was hospitalized with an immune-system disorder.
As her care became increasingly complex, she was shuttled through four hospitals. At the third, she developed diarrhea. On Aug. 27, doctors sent a stool sample to the hospital's laboratory, which determined that the girl had an intestinal virus. In many states, nothing more would have been done.
But in Minnesota, hospitals send such samples to a sophisticated state laboratory. On Sept. 29, the tests matured. A laboratory supervisor called Dr. Harry Hull, the state epidemiologist, to say they had isolated a polio virus.
Dr. Hull was stunned. "I said, 'You have made a mistake,' " he recalled.
Tall and thin, with glasses and bushy eyebrows, Dr. Hull is one of the world's foremost polio experts. Before coming to Minnesota, he worked for 10 years in the World Health Organization's global polio eradication effort. In an interview, he scrawled circles and arrows on a sheet of paper as he described the search for the virus.
The state laboratory redid the tests. The results were identical. Then it sequenced the virus's genomic code. A supervisor plugged the code into a national genomic database, comparing it with the genes of a polio virus.
"Bingo," said Dr. Norman Crouch, the laboratory's director. "It was a 98 percent match. We knew we had nailed it."
The Minnesota laboratory sent the sample to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which confirmed the results. Officials were immediately concerned about where the virus originated and where it might have spread.
Confirming the presence of polio in a city with even one infected person is not impossible, said Dr. Mark D. Sobsey, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of North Carolina. The stool of an infected person contains so many viral particles that tests at a sewage treatment plant can reveal it. Such tests helped track outbreaks in the Gaza Strip and Haiti in recent years.
Since many Amish use outhouses, however, state officials geared up to go door to door. They unearthed a public health form explaining how to collect stool samples. The form had pictures of a flush toilet and a garbage can with a plastic liner - things foreign to many Amish communities. Officials changed the form.
Gary Wax, an epidemiologist for the Minnesota Department of Health, contacted the leader of the Amish community where the child lives and asked for his permission to seek stool samples from those in his community. The leader gave his blessing, Mr. Wax said.
"We really tried to do it in a respectful way rather than just barge right in there," Mr. Wax said.
Since the Amish have no phones, he could not call for appointments. He and his colleagues knocked on doors. They had been warned against speaking directly to Amish women without their husbands present, Mr. Wax said, and the men were "running all over the place, helping each other with harvesting and construction." So if the man was not at home, they left.
"We came back many times to some places," Mr. Wax said. After weeks of effort, just 5 of 24 families in the community agreed to cooperate. Three of the five, including the family of the 8-month-old, proved to have infected children.
"I would be surprised if we don't get a paralytic case someplace," Dr. Hull said.
In a neighboring community, a 38-year-old farmer who is also a sawyer agreed to speak with a reporter only if his name would not be used, saying Amish people avoided calling attention to themselves.
The farmer, who has seven children, explained that nothing in Amish law forbade vaccinations, but that many Amish believed that vaccines weakened the immune system. He added that as a result of the infections, he planned to have his children vaccinated against polio, measles, mumps and rubella, and that most of the families in his community were doing the same. "We'll get vaccinated if we feel it's necessary," he said. "But our definition of necessary may be very different from yours."
A further challenge for public health officials is that their surveillance efforts cannot be confined to a few remote farming communities.
"My mental image of the Amish was that they don't travel at all because they don't drive cars," Dr. Hull said. "That's not true."
The Amish commonly take buses and trains, and occasionally even planes. Families from the baby girl's community recently attended a wedding in Ontario, Canada, that health officials said drew more than 1,000 guests. Some have visited Wisconsin in recent weeks.
Polio experts have long feared that an immune-deficient person could cause an outbreak of paralytic polio. That is a particular hazard in poorer countries.
In much of the developing world, children are given an oral vaccine made of a live, nonparalytic polio virus. Two drops confer partial immunity, making mass vaccination campaigns achievable in poor countries. To become fully immunized, a child must be vaccinated several times. The vaccine causes an infection that usually lasts a few weeks. The infection can spread to others and immunize them, too.
But if the virus spreads too far among previously unvaccinated people, its genes will change and the virus will regain its ability to cripple and kill. Such a virus caused an outbreak of paralytic polio in Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 2000 and 2001, crippling 21. (The outbreaks in Africa and Asia began after many Nigerians refused vaccinations in 2003, suspecting they were a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls.)
The United States and much of the developed world used live-virus vaccinations for decades, but switched in recent years to a dead virus that is injected. The dead virus does not cause an infection or paralysis.
In people with poor immune systems like the 8-month-old Amish child, the live polio vaccine can change to a paralytic form without being passed to anyone else, since such people can nurse a mutating virus for years.
In most of the world, such patients die quickly because of poor medical care. In the West, they can live for years, with a few of them shedding polio viruses all the while. Among experts, these patients are called "chronic excreters." That such a polio wellspring would be born among a largely unvaccinated population like the Amish, Dr. Hull said, was a "random unlucky event."
"It's a model of what might happen if we stop vaccinating too soon," he said.
The Amish girl remains hospitalized in strict isolation. Health officials will not say where. And they are still trying to figure out where she contracted the virus.
Genetic testing showed that the virus was almost identical to that of the oral polio vaccine given in much of the rest of the world but not in the United States. The slight changes to the virus from that of the vaccine suggested that it had been circulating for at least two years. The girl has never traveled abroad.
A fear is that such a person could unwittingly incubate a polio infection for a decade or more and then accidentally reintroduce it - years after experts have declared it eliminated from the world and vaccinations have stopped.
That prospect has long seemed remote, because such children are so rare, Dr. Aylward of the World Health Organization said. But an outbreak of paralytic disease in Minnesota would prove that it was more likely than many had believed, and it would demonstrate that work now under way to better understand the risks posed by chronic excreters would have to be intensified.
"Or we may need to revisit the strategy and time frame for stopping the use of the oral polio vaccine," Dr. Aylward said. "It's a tiny chance, but it's something we need to keep an eye on."
Hazard in Hunt for New Flu: Looking for Bugs in All the Wrong Places
By GINA KOLATA, The New York Times, November 8, 2005
Science moves in mysterious ways, and sometimes what seems like the end of the story is really just the beginning. Or, at least, that is what some researchers are thinking as they scratch their heads over the weird genetic sequence of the 1918 flu virus.
Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, a molecular pathologist at the Armed Forces Institute of Technology who led the research team that reconstructed the long-extinct virus, said that a few things seemed clear.
The 1918 virus appears to be a bird flu virus. But if it is from a bird, it is not a bird anyone has studied before. It is not like the A(H5N1) strain of bird flus in Asia, which has sickened at least 116 people, and killed 60. It is not like the influenza viruses that infect fowl in North America.
Yet many researchers believe that the 1918 virus, which caused the worst infectious disease epidemic in human history, is a bird flu virus. And if so, it is the only one that has ever been known to cause a human pandemic.
That, Dr. Taubenberger said, gives rise to a question. Are scientists looking for the next pandemic flu virus in all the wrong places? Is there a bird that no one ever thought about that harbors the next 1918-like flu? And if so, what bird is it, and where does it live?
"I can't even assign a hemisphere," he said. "It just came from somewhere else. Maybe it's in pigeons. Or in songbirds."
"It's weird, it's really weird," he added. "My view is to be undogmatic as possible and just try to follow the data. This is the result we get. The question is, What does it mean?"
Dr. Taubenberger's question emerged from the science fiction-like search for the 1918 virus that eventually led to its reconstruction.
A decade ago, Dr. Taubenberger and his colleagues found shards of the extinct virus in two fingernail-size snippets of formaldehyde-soaked lung tissue from two soldiers and from the frozen lung of an Inuit woman who died of the flu in 1918 and was buried in permafrost. Slowly and painstakingly, they fished out the tiny fragments of viral genes and began reconstructing them.
The first gene they sequenced was the one that codes for the hemagglutinin protein on the virus's surface. Immediately, Dr. Taubenberger and his colleagues were struck by an oddity: the chain of nucleotides that coded for the amino acids in the protein were arranged differently from those found in any other bird flu.
The genetic code is flexible; there is more than one way that a group of three nucleotides can be arranged to code for the same amino acid. But every bird flu virus ever studied used the same spellings for the hemagglutinin amino acids. Not the 1918 flu.
There were two possibilities, Dr. Taubenberger thought. One was that bird flus have evolved over the decades and that back in 1918, the amino acids in bird viruses were simply coded differently.
Another was that if the 1918 flu virus came from a bird, it was no bird that anyone had considered before.
"We decided there was no way to address this," Dr. Taubenberger said. After all, the birds from 1918 were long gone, and their viruses had died with them.
Then Dr. Thomas Fanning, a scientist in Dr. Taubenberger's group, mentioned that he had a friend at the Smithsonian who worked at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington. It had several thousand preserved birds from the early 20th century that were floating in Mason jars of alcohol.
From there, they reached James P. Dean, a supervisor in the division of birds at the museum, who sent Dr. Taubenberger a computer printout of the birds in the museum's collection - hundreds of birds, with notes telling the species and the exact times and places where they were collected. But which to choose?
Dr. Taubenberger consulted with one of the leading experts on bird flus, Richard Slemons of Ohio State, who chose 40 birds on the museum's list, all waterfowl collected around 1918. The museum found 25 of them.
The scientists took tiny pinches of tissue from passages of the birds' excretory tracts, or cloacas, and Dr. Taubenberger looked for flu viruses in the tissue. Six of the birds had a flu virus. The genetic coding for the amino acids in those viruses was exactly like that in bird flu viruses today, Dr. Taubenberger found.
In fact, the viruses had not even evolved. Human influenza viruses change every year, mutating slightly so they can reinfect people who had just had the flu and developed antibodies against it. But birds, Dr. Slemons said, do not have much of an immune response to influenza, and so there is no particular pressure for the virus to mutate.
Another reason the viruses stay the same, he said, is that some birds live for only a couple of years and so, every year, the viruses have a new bird population to infect. Finally, he said, birds are chronically infected with lots of flu viruses at once, and all the viruses coexist peacefully.
"There are so many that there is no selective pressure on any virus," he said.
But if bird viruses do not evolve and if the waterfowl viruses in 1915 and 1916 look just like bird viruses today, where did the 1918 virus come from? Or was it really a bird virus?
After all, at the time that he looked at the Smithsonian birds, Dr. Taubenberger had reconstructed only part of the virus's genetic sequence. Maybe when he had the whole thing, the picture would change.
It did not. The entire sequence, published last month in Nature, had the distinctive protein structures of a bird virus, he said. And it had that same peculiar way of spelling its amino acids.
When he compared the 1918 virus with today's human flu viruses, Dr. Taubenberger noticed that it had alterations in just 25 to 30 of the virus's 4,400 amino acids. Those few changes turned a bird virus into a killer than could spread from person to person.
Dr. Taubenberger noticed that, so far, the A(H5N1) viruses in Asia have just a few of those changes. They do not, however, have the unusual ways of coding the amino acid instructions that the 1918 virus had. So are the Asian bird viruses on their way to becoming pandemic viruses, or not?
Some experts like Dr. Peter Palese of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York say the A(H5N1) flu viruses are a false alarm. He notes that studies of serum collected in 1992 from people in rural China indicated that millions of people there had antibodies to the A(H5N1) strain.
That means they had been infected with an H5N1 bird virus and recovered, apparently without incident.
Despite that, and the fact that those viruses have been circulating in China more than a dozen years, almost no human-to-human spread has occurred. "The virus has been around for more than a dozen years, but it hasn't jumped into the human population," Dr. Palese said. "I don't think it has the capability of doing it."
Dr. Taubenberger said he could argue it either way.
"It's a nasty virus," he said. "It is highly virulent in domestic birds and wild birds. The fact that it has killed half the humans it has infected makes it of concern, and the fact that it shares some features with the 1918 virus makes it of concern.
"But the fact that it has circulated in Asia for years and hasn't caused a pandemic argues against it. Maybe there are some biological barriers we don't understand."
So where will the next pandemic come from? Dr. Taubenberger says he wonders if it may be from a bird no one has thought of, a bird with a flu virus that has the same funny coding of amino acids that he saw in the 1918 flu.
He has teamed up with scientists in Alaska to get swabs from the cloacas of migrating birds, and he is looking in those samples for flu viruses that look like the one from 1918.
"Probably nobody else has thought much about this," Dr. Taubenberger said. "But we've been staring at the sequence of the virus for the last 10 years, and we've been thinking about it." For him, the story is not over; it has just taken another turn.
Findings: All Together Now: Synchrony Explains Swaying
By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times November 8, 2005
What do pedestrians, some species of fireflies and pendulum clocks have in common? Given half a chance, they act in unison, exhibiting what scientists call synchrony. And that is what lay behind the unexpected swaying of the Millennium Bridge in London five years ago, according to a new study.
This sleek $32 million footbridge, which stretches 1,050 feet over the Thames, opened June 10, 2000, to great fanfare. But as thousands of people streamed across, it began to wobble side to side, inducing queasiness and fears that it might fall. Engineers saw that as the wobbling began, pedestrians adjusted their gait to the wobbling motion. As more people walked in lock step, the wobblier the bridge became.
Steven H. Strogatz of Cornell and his colleagues borrowed mathematics describing the synchrony of fireflies and pendulums and applied them to the dynamics of the bridge. The calculations, reported in the journal Nature, show why the north section of the bridge remained steady with 150 people on it but began swaying when the number exceeded 160.
Christian Huygens, a 17th-century Dutch physicist, first observed synchrony in two pendulum clocks that hung close to each other. Even when he set the pendulums in motion so they were not swinging in unison, they resynchronized within half an hour.
Fireflies along rivers in Malaysia and Thailand also synchronize, thousands flashing on and off at once.
As for the Millennium Bridge, after two years, an extra $9 million and the addition of large shock absorbers, it no longer wobbles. (It was never in danger of falling.)
Essay: Science and Religion Share Fascination in Things Unseen
By LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS, The New York Times, November 8, 2005
Most of the current controversies associated with science revolve around the vastly different reactions people both within the scientific community and outside it have, not to the strange features of the universe that we can observe for ourselves, but rather to those features we cannot observe.
In my own field of physics, theorists hotly debate the possible existence of an underlying mathematical beauty associated with a host of new dimensions that may or may not exist in nature.
School boards, legislatures and evangelists hotly debate the possible existence of an underlying purpose to nature that similarly may or may not exist.
It seems that humans are hard-wired to yearn for new realms well beyond the reach of our senses into which we can escape, if only with our minds. It is possible that we need to rely on such possibilities or the world of our experience would become intolerable.
Certainly science has, in the past century, validated the notion that what we see is far from all there is. We cannot directly see electrons but we now know that material objects we can hold in our hand are actually, at an atomic level, largely empty space, and that it is the electric fields associated with the electrons that keep them from falling through our hands.
And when we peer into the darkness of the night sky, within the size of the spot covered up by a dime held at arm's length, we now know that over 100,000 galaxies more or less like our own are hiding. And we know most contain over 100 billion stars, many housing solar systems, and around some of them may exist intelligent life forms whose existence may, too, remain forever hidden from us.
One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein began to unveil the hidden nature of space and time, and after working for another full decade he discovered that space itself is dynamic. It can curve and bend in response to matter and energy, and ultimately even the calm peace of the night sky, suggesting an eternal universe, is itself an illusion. Distant galaxies are being carried away by an expanding space, just as a swimmer at rest in the water can nevertheless get carried away from shore by a strong current.
Thus, it is perhaps not too surprising that when one approaches the limits of our knowledge, theologians and scientists alike tend to appeal to new hidden universes for, respectively, either redemption or understanding.
The apparent complexity of our universe has compelled some evangelists, and some school boards, to argue that the natural laws we have unraveled over the past four centuries cannot be enough on their own to explain the diversity of the phenomena we observe around us, including the remarkable diversity of life on earth.
For very different reasons, but still without a shred of empirical evidence, a generation of theoretical physicists has speculated that the four dimensions of our experience may themselves be just a grand illusion - the tip of a cosmic iceberg.
String theory, yet to have any real successes in explaining or predicting anything measurable, has nevertheless become a fixture in the public lexicon, and the elaborate and surprising mathematical framework that has resulted from over three decades of theoretical study has been enough for some to argue that even a thus-far empirically impotent idea must describe reality.
Further, it has now been proposed that the extra dimensions of string theory may not even be microscopically small, which has been the long accepted mathematical trick used by advocates to explain why we may not yet detect them.
Instead, they could be large enough to house entire other universes with potentially different laws of physics, and perhaps even objects that, like the eight-dimensional beings in a Buckaroo Banzai story, might leak into our own dimensions.
I wouldn't bet on their existence, but the fact that such potentially infinite spaces could exist and still be effectively hidden in our world is nevertheless remarkable.
Whatever one thinks about all of these ruminations about hidden realities, there is an important difference - at least I hope there is - between the scientists who currently speculate about extra dimensions and those whose beliefs cause them to insist that life can only be understood by going beyond the confines of the natural world.
Scientists know that without experimental vindication their proposals are likely to wither. Moreover, a single definitive "null experiment," like the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 that dispensed with the long-sought-after ether, could sweep away the whole idea.
Religious belief that the universe is the handiwork of an all-powerful being is not subject to refutation. This sort of reliance on faith may itself have an evolutionary basis. There has been talk of a "god gene": the idea of an early advantage in the struggle for survival for those endowed with a belief in a hidden patrimony that gives order, purpose and meaning to the universe we experience.
Does the same evolutionary predilection lead physicists and mathematicians to see beauty in the unobserved, or unobservable? Does the longstanding human love affair with extra dimensions reflect something fundamental about the way we think, rather than about the world in which we live?
The mathematician Hermann Weyl was quoted as having said not long before he died, "My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful."
Mathematicians, artists and writers may choose beauty over truth. Scientists can only hope that we do not have to make the choice.
Lawrence M. Krauss is a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University. His latest book is "Hiding in the Mirror."
Really? The Claim: Antibacterial Soap Works Better Than Regular Soap
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR, The New York Times, November 8, 2005
THE FACTS What happened to plain old soap?
Studies show that more than 70 percent of liquid hand soaps sold are now labeled antibacterial, and Americans seem increasingly willing to pay a premium for them.
But the truth is that most consumers may not always be getting what they think they are. Over the years, studies have repeatedly shown that antibacterial soaps are no better than plain old soap and water.
One study, published in The Journal of Community Health in 2003, followed adults in 238 households in New York City for nearly a year.
Month after month, the researchers found no difference in the number of microbes that turned up on the hands of people who used either antibacterial soap or regular soap. At least four other large studies have had similar findings.
In fact, the only question now may be whether using antibacterial soaps can cause more harm than good by creating strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration convened experts to discuss, among other things, whether antibacterial products should be more tightly regulated because of the potential risks they pose.
THE BOTTOM LINE Studies show that antibacterial soap is no more effective than regular soap.
Copernicus's Grave Is Reported Found
By REUTERS, The New York Times, November 6, 2005
WARSAW, Nov. 5 (Reuters) - Polish archaeologists say they are all but certain they have located the skeletal remains of Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer and cleric whose theory that the planets revolved around the Sun revolutionized astronomy.
Prof. Jerzy Gassowski told a symposium Thursday he believed the remains found under an altar of Frombork Cathedral on Poland's Baltic coast were those of Copernicus.
The age of the skull and bones as well as certain facial features led Mr. Gassowski to say he was "97 percent certain these are Copernicus's remains, but only DNA testing could fully authenticate the find."
A computer reconstruction of the skull showed the head of a gray-haired man of about 70, the age at which Copernicus died. It matched the scar above the left eye and broken nose seen in his portraits.
Copernicus left no known descendants, but burial sites of his relatives may provide DNA samples.
In his treatise "On the Revolution of Celestial Bodies," Copernicus asserted that the planets revolved around the Sun, and that the Earth was not the center of the universe.
When Cleaner Air Is a Biblical Obligation
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY, The New York Times, November 7, 2005
WASHINGTON, Nov. 6 - In their long and frustrated efforts pushing Congress to pass legislation on global warming, environmentalists are gaining a new ally.
With increasing vigor, evangelical groups that are part of the base of conservative support for leading Republicans are campaigning for laws that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which scientists have linked with global warming.
In the latest effort, the National Association of Evangelicals, a nonprofit organization that includes 45,000 churches serving 30 million people across the country, is circulating among its leaders the draft of a policy statement that would encourage lawmakers to pass legislation creating mandatory controls for carbon emissions.
Environmentalists rely on empirical evidence as their rationale for Congressional action, and many evangelicals further believe that protecting the planet from human activities that cause global warming is a values issue that fulfills Biblical teachings asking humans to be good stewards of the earth.
"Genesis 2:15," said Richard Cizik, the association's vice president for governmental affairs, citing a passage that serves as the justification for the effort: "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it."
"We believe that we have a rightful responsibility for what the Bible itself challenges," Mr. Cizik said. "Working the land and caring for it go hand in hand. That's why I think, and say unapologetically, that we ought to be able to bring to the debate a new voice."
By themselves, environmental groups have made scant progress on global warming legislation in Congress, beyond a nonbinding Senate resolution last summer that recommends a program of mandatory controls on gases that cause global warming.
Officials with the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council said they welcomed the added muscle evangelicals could bring to their cause. But they agreed that it remained uncertain how much difference it could make.
A major obstacle to any measure that would address global warming is Senator James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who is chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and an evangelical himself, but a skeptic of climate change caused by human activities.
Mr. Inhofe has led efforts to keep mandatory controls on greenhouse gases out of any emission reduction bill considered by his committee and has called human activities contributing to global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."
"You can always find in Scriptures a passage to misquote for almost anything," Mr. Inhofe said in an interview, dismissing the position of Mr. Cizik's association as "something very strange."
Mr. Inhofe said the vast majority of the nation's evangelical groups would oppose global warming legislation as inconsistent with a conservative agenda that also includes opposition to abortion rights and gay rights. He said the National Evangelical Association had been "led down a liberal path" by environmentalists and others who have convinced the group that issues like poverty and the environment are worth their efforts.
At the same time, Mr. Inhofe said he took the association's stance seriously because of the influence its leaders had on people who generally voted Republican. Evangelical groups including the Noah's Ark Foundation lobbied successfully in 1996 to block efforts by the House to weaken the Endangered Species Act.
Now known as the Noah Alliance, the group continues to work on environmental issues, along with groups like the Evangelical Environmental Network, which describes itself as a "biblically orthodox Christian" organization. It subscribes to a policy of "creation care," which it defines as "caring for all of God's creation by stopping and preventing activities that are harmful," like air and water pollution and species extinction.
Mr. Inhofe said many other evangelical organizations held opposing views on the environment. He cited a coalition of faith organizations, scientists and policy experts known as the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship. The council formed in 2000 only to issue a statement of concerns that declared global warming problems caused by humans as only "speculative." A new version of the council is planning to organize shortly, and members are re-examining their stances.
A member of the original group's advisory committee, Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative group that studies moral issues and public policy, said more recent disputes among conservatives over global warming focused not on the science behind it but on ways to address it.
Mr. Cizik said the alliance's draft position on global warming was still under review by its leaders and would not be issued unless they voted unanimously to support it. If only a majority supports it, he said, it could be released as "an evangelical statement on climate change."
While he was reluctant to predict its potential political impact, he said, "I don't think there's a Republican running for the White House in 2008 who will not have to deal with the emergence of evangelicals on creation care."
John Green, a senior fellow for the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, said a policy statement from the National Alliance of Evangelicals could influence Congress. But the real test, he said, was whether the group's leaders could influence their congregants.
"It's still early in the process," he said of evangelical involvement in the environmental movement. "Among rank and file, evangelicals are as environmental as the rest of us. They're in favor of environmental protections, at least in principle."
On the other hand, he added, "they don't like environmentalists. They associate environmentalists with the Sierra Club and with people who have nontraditional religiosity. Alliance leaders have a real opportunity here, but the impediment is getting over the image of environmentalists."
Mr. Green said the full impact of the alliance position would not be known for several years. But if their support for global warming legislation increases, "then," he said, "Senator Inhofe is going to have to sit up and listen."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-11-08 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-08 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-09 05:26 am (UTC)While the Amish are not 'modern' by our standards, they don't live in a vacuum or a closed community. Their kids consume and deal drugs. They hang out in parking lots and shop where their non-Amish neighbors shop.
The Amish choose to live differently, but they don't close themselves off to the world. Amish businessmen hire non-Amish and thus are exposed to all the things we are exposed to in the suburbs and cities. I mean, after all, there were people in her community who had to cross the border into Canada for that wedding. I don't believe that US Customs and Immigration has a special Amish-only building. Who knows? Maybe someone hailing from a country where polio is endemic was a carrier of the virus and happened to touch something that was touched by one of her neighbors. It's possible.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-08 04:02 pm (UTC)Anyway, I'm rambling. The point of this was to say that I am quite terrified of the idea that there are these anti-vaccination movements afoot, but I am of course not someone who studies public health, and I wondered about your opinion on that from a public health standpoint.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-08 04:09 pm (UTC)Historically, they don't really have a case. The supreme court ruled that vaccinations for diseases that threaten the public health can be mandatory (anyone who refuses vaccination can be imprisoned but not forced to take the vaccination).
Anthropologically, hippies and religious fundamentalists have a lot in common, not just anti-vaccination. It's not universal however, many fundamentalist groups also believe in the power of technology to create utopias.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-08 06:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-08 07:15 pm (UTC)Anti-vaccinations have always used published scientific reports, they just manipulate it to suit their agenda (anti-vivisectionists did the same in the early twentieth century and the AMA ordered medical journals to stop showing pictures of animals and naming or numbering animals in studies).
no subject
Date: 2005-11-08 07:18 pm (UTC)Vaccination laws are state by state (as are many public health issues). Some states allow "philosophical exemptions" but most require religious (which I imagine was probably the result of Christian Science activism, they have been very successful in the twenieth century in the American legal system).
i love science tuesday.
Date: 2005-11-08 05:38 pm (UTC)Chruches getting involved with enviromentialism... ya know, that's not such a bad idea.
Re: i love science tuesday.
Date: 2005-11-08 07:18 pm (UTC)Re: i love science tuesday.
Date: 2005-11-08 07:27 pm (UTC)A Hummer, that's what. heh.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-09 12:21 am (UTC)Healthy' bugs: hype or science?
Some suspect that 'friendly bacteria' drinks are only effective at enriching their producers, but new research suggests that they can indeed boost people's immune systems. Cahal Milmo examines a boom industry to see whether we should be swallowing the manufacturers' claims
no subject
Date: 2005-11-09 12:55 am (UTC)