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The Consumer: Is It Disease or Delusion? U.S. Takes on a Dilemma
By MICHAEL MASON, The New York Times, October 24, 2006
After an avalanche of panicked inquiries from patients across the country who claim to have been stricken with a mysterious skin disease, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is preparing to begin a full investigation.
The patients, clustered in California, Texas and Florida, describe symptoms that include sores that are slow to heal, a sensation of things crawling through their skin, joint pain and persistent fatigue.
Many say they believe they have Morgellons disease, a diagnosis that has received wide attention on the Internet but is viewed skeptically by some doctors, who suspect that it is psychosomatic in origin.
In its investigation, to be carried out in Southern California, the centers will conduct environmental tests as well as physical and psychological evaluations of people who say they are afflicted.
“If it’s a new bug or something, we’ll find it pretty quickly,” said Dan Rutz, a spokesman for the centers and a member of the task force planning the investigation.
“Our minds are open to all the possibilities,” he said.
Whatever its cause, Morgellons disease joins a growing list of symptom clusters that public health officials have been forced to examine closely in part because of the organizing power and unprecedented reach of the Internet.
Morgellons was brought to public attention by a woman in South Carolina, Mary Leitao, who in 2001 created a Web site describing the mysterious sores and bizarre threadlike extrusions that afflicted her young son. She said she had tried for years to find a medical explanation for his illness. Ultimately, she said, doctors accused her of staging it.
Ms. Leitao named the condition Morgellons after a 17th-century medical study she’d found that described French children with roughly the same symptoms.
After creating the Web site, she said, she was inundated with e-mail messages from people who said they also had the disease. More than 7,000 people claiming to have Morgellons have registered on the site.
Brandi Koch, 31, is one of them. Ms. Koch said her illness began three years ago, when her arms and legs started to swell. Doctors diagnosed an autoimmune disease, perhaps arthritis. A few months later, Ms. Koch’s back became spangled with lesions; doctors said it might be scleroderma.
A self-described “Type A personality,” Ms. Koch said she increasingly felt forgetful and detached. Lyme disease, the doctors decided.
“Then the horror really started,” Ms. Koch said. “I noticed there was some kind of matter coming out from my skin, not just from where I had sores.”
The substance, visible to others, was like large flecks of black pepper, said Ms. Koch, who worked out regularly and competed in 10K races before she fell ill.
After a dozen doctors failed to provide a diagnosis, Ms. Koch discovered Ms. Leitao’s Web site and realized that she had Morgellons disease.
“It is the most terrifying, disgusting, horrific thing I’ve ever had,” Ms. Koch said. “I don’t know how anyone could have it without feeling a little crazy.”
Ms. Leitao said that many of the people who visit her site have been told by doctors that their symptoms are delusional — the province of psychiatry rather than infectious disease. Several mothers, Ms. Leitao said, told her that they had lost custody of their children after doctors decided the youngsters’ symptoms were contrived. Earlier this year, a young man in Texas reportedly committed suicide after struggling with what his mother has described as Morgellons.
Doctors themselves are divided over whether Morgellons is a medical or a psychiatric illness. The patients are clearly suffering from something; it is just not clear what that something is.
“I think it’s a real disease,” said Dr. Rafael Stricker, a physician in San Francisco who sees many patients claiming to have Morgellons.
“Certainly there is an element of psychiatric distress here, but that’s because the patients are ill and nobody wants to listen to them,” he said.
Many patients also test positive for Lyme disease, Dr. Stricker has found; certain antibacterial and antiparasitic medications sometimes seem to alleviate the symptoms, he said.
But doctors said that after testing the skin extrusions, laboratories routinely dismiss them as plant or textile material.
“You send away the blood work and specimens, you don’t get anything back,” said Dr. Neelam Uppal, a physician in St. Petersburg, Fla., who treated Ms. Koch and has seen a dozen other patients with similar symptoms.
“I feel it’s a parasite, perhaps a fungus,” Dr. Uppal said. “You have to give patients the benefit of the doubt.”
Despite hints of a physical cause, most patients are eventually confronted with a psychiatric diagnosis. The symptoms bear a close resemblance those of delusional parasitosis, a disorder in which sufferers, often drug abusers, believe they are afflicted with hidden parasites and resist all evidence to the contrary.
Researchers have found that delusions like this can be passed from primary patients to secondary ones, usually susceptible family members or close associates. Psychiatrists call this phenomenon folie a deux.
In one remarkable case, a woman convinced her husband that neighbors were shooting at her with lasers. In another, an elderly woman convinced her live-in sister that they were both being attacked by bugs.
“Parasitosis is a classic form of shared delusion,” said Dr. Mary Seeman, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. “Skin disease is perfect for it. A person gets a rash or something, then the ‘disease’ spreads through any shared space in which there is close contact.”
But the Internet may have greatly altered the dynamics of folie a deux. In the connected, always-on world, separation is no longer so easy, and delusions may be shared and supported far beyond the confines of the home or workplace.
“Morgellons patients feel they’ve been jerked around without getting the care they need,” said Mr. Rutz of the disease control centers.
“Often they show up at the doctor’s office with all this stuff they’ve found online or in the media, and when they try to explain it to a skeptical physician, communication just breaks down,” he said.
While much has been made of the Internet as a medium for psychological support, experts have only begun to ponder its potential for spreading delusional thinking.
“When a person has something bothering him these days, the first thing he does is go online,” Dr. Seeman said. “You can get reinforcement of your ideas very quickly there.”
Those who believe they have this strange new illness have grown accustomed to questions about their mental health.
Ms. Koch, for example, is weary of medicine’s harsh judgments and has all but abandoned doctors’ offices. “If I thought they were really serious about doing the research, I could give them the show of a lifetime,” she said.
“I wish I were nuts,” she added. “That would be the best-case scenario in some ways. But I’m not.”
Worrisome New Link: AIDS Drugs and Leprosy
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, October 24, 2006
With affordable AIDS drugs arriving in many poor countries, experts say a startling and worrisome side effect has emerged: in some patients, the treatment uncovers a hidden leprosy infection.
No one knows how widespread the problem is. Only about a dozen cases have been described in medical literature since the first one was found, in London in 2003. But AIDS specialists in Brazil, India, Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere are reporting that some patients on life-saving antiretroviral drugs are developing painful facial ulcers or losing feeling in their fingers and toes.
And in the third world, where 300,000 new cases of leprosy were discovered last year and where 38 million are infected with the AIDS virus, the problem will inevitably get worse, experts say.
“This is just the peak of the iceberg,” said Dr. William Levis, who treats leprosy patients at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. “It’s early in the game. Most physicians don’t even think about leprosy, so there’s probably much more around than we know.”
Dr. Gilla Kaplan, a professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and one of the first to study connections between AIDS and leprosy, agreed.
Antiretroviral treatment, she said, “is going to flush out the silent leprosy by making it symptomatic.”
Because leprosy, a bacterial disease, can be treated with specialized antibiotics that are supplied free by the Novartis pharmaceutical company, there is little prospect of a worldwide epidemic or large numbers of deaths. “It’s a matter of concern for the individual patients,” said Dr. Denis Daumerie, who leads the efforts by the World Health Organization to eliminate leprosy. “It’s not a matter of concern for public health.”
Still, the disease requires taking multiple pills for six months to two years — an added burden for people who typically already take three AIDS drugs. And because the problem is little known, it often takes doctors weeks to figure out what new ill is besetting their AIDS patients.
Experts say the problem arises when the AIDS drugs cause the immune system to recover. It then generates new white blood cells that carry the bacteria from old, silent leprosy infections to the skin of the face, hands and feet.
That is a new twist on a medical paradox that has confounded tropical-disease specialists for 20 years.
In the mid-1980’s, as it became clear that AIDS was not primarily a disease of gay American men but was killing millions of people — men, women and children — in poor countries, many public health doctors prophesied that it would be a double disaster for those with leprosy.
It seemed a logical assumption since leprosy is caused by a germ from the same family of waxy-walled bacteria as those that cause tuberculosis and mycobacter avium, two major killers of AIDS patients. But it proved a false alarm.
“People expected a big surge in leprosy, but it didn’t happen,” said Dr. Diana N. Lockwood, a leprosy expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
When the predictions did not come true, she said, “we assumed that co-infected people just died before their leprosy became manifest.” The incubation period for the most easily diagnosed form of leprosy is 8 to 13 years, while the incubation period for AIDS is 8 to 10.
But leprosy in people known to have been already infected did not seem to worsen when those patients developed AIDS, too, showing that the two diseases can apparently coexist without reinforcing each other.
So it came as a shock to doctors when AIDS treatment caused hidden cases of leprosy to appear.
The first such patient described in a medical journal was Dr. Lockwood’s, a Ugandan exile in London who was being treated for both tuberculosis and AIDS, and suddenly developed a swollen lesion on his face.
“It took us a while to realize it was leprosy,” Dr. Lockwood said. “Since then, we’ve seen more cases in people from Brazil and India.”
Depending on symptoms, leprosy is often initially misdiagnosed as arthritis or lupus. Painful facial lesions, which are less common, can have many causes; in the Uganda man’s case, doctors said, his immune system probably formed nodules around bacteria next to a facial nerve.
Dr. Michael S. Glickman, a bacteriologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who treated the only co-infected case known in New York, said he too had some difficulty diagnosing his patient’s leprosy.
Dr. Glickman’s patient, a man from Burkina Faso, was suffering from advanced AIDS when he first saw Dr. Glickman six years ago, with a CD4 cell count below 10 (normal is 500 or more). As the patient recovered on antiretroviral therapy to a CD4 count of 600, he developed a lighter-colored patch of skin. Dr. Glickman noticed that it was slightly numb to the touch. Fortunately, he had once visited Dr. Levis’s clinic at Bellevue, and made the connection.
“It was so unremarkable that, if I hadn’t seen leprosy patients, I wouldn’t have known what it was,” he said.
His patient’s leprosy was eventually cured, but he had to have an unusual drug regimen because one typical leprosy drug reacts badly with the protease inhibitors taken by AIDS patients.
Treatment in cities like New York and London is relatively easy, but the real crisis, experts said, will evolve in poor countries with dual epidemics.
In French Guiana, for example, Dr. Pierre Couppié, chief of dermatology at the Central Hospital in Cayenne, said he believed that about 1 in every 500 AIDS patients would develop leprosy lesions soon after starting treatment.
Brazil has the world’s highest per-capita leprosy rate and also one of the most effective AIDS treatment programs in the developing world, and seven Brazilian cases have been mentioned in medical literature. No countrywide study has been done, but Dr. Patricia D. Deps, a leprosy expert at the Federal University of Espirito Santo in Brazil, said it was “becoming more and more common.”
“We don’t have good numbers, but we think about 2 percent of the leprosy cases in Brazil are co-infected with H.I.V.,” Dr. Deps said. The country that most worries experts is India. Not long ago, it had 70 percent of the world’s leprosy cases. Its official caseload is a bit of a mystery now. After an aggressive 20-year campaign to find and treat new cases, India officially declared leprosy “eliminated as a public health issue” last year. However, that statement was carefully crafted: it means there is a national average of lower than 1 case per 10,000 citizens, which could be as many as 100,000 new cases a year.
At the same time, with about 5.2 million people infected with the AIDS virus, India is poised to outstrip South Africa as the country with the most AIDS victims. But its epidemic began much later than South Africa’s or Brazil’s, and it has been slow to roll out AIDS treatment. As treatment grows, leprosy may surge along with it.
Other countries with high numbers of leprosy victims are Myanmar, Madagascar, Nepal and Mozambique.
But there are also great unknowns. “It depends on how good the medical system is,” Dr. Lockwood said. “For example, last year, Congo discovered 11,000 new cases.”
Novartis provides the W.H.O. with clofamizine, rifampicin and dapsone, the standard leprosy regimen, in blister packs and boxes so patients can be handed six months of treatment at a time, already divided into daily doses.
But treating leprosy in AIDS patients may turn out to be more difficult, doctors say, because rifampicin cannot be used. And treatment in wealthy countries includes more expensive anti-inflammatories, as well as thalidomide, which blocks a common inflammatory complication.
Because thalidomide causes severe birth defects, the World Health Organization opposes its use in the third world.
Doctors have long known that dormant diseases can surge as a weak immune system recovers. The threat is sometimes called “Haart attacks” — a grim pun on the medical acronym for “highly active antiretroviral therapy.”
The recovering immune system regains its ability to create fevers, flood infected tissue with white blood cells, break bacteria down into toxic waste products and build nodules around bacteria it cannot kill.
But in a weakened patient, that inflammatory response itself can be dangerous. For example, when doctors know that an AIDS patient has tuberculosis, they often try to give TB drugs for two months to suppress the bacteria before starting antiretrovirals, because the patient’s own immune attack on the tuberculosis bacteria in the lungs can be fatal.
Vital Signs: Hazards: A Study Gauges the Risks for Ears With iPods
By ERIC NAGOURNEY, The New York Times, October 24, 2006
Avid iPod users who wonder if they are putting their hearing at risk may find some relief in a new study that tries to arrive at guidelines for safe listening levels.
The key to avoiding hearing damage, the researchers say, appears to be limiting not so much how long one listens to music but how loud it is played. The study was presented at a recent conference on noise-induced hearing loss in children.
The researchers, who are audiologists, concluded that the average young person could listen to a player at 70 percent of full volume for four and a half hours without much risk. They also said that if people used the earphones that come with the devices they could listen to music at an 80 percent level for 90 minutes a day without great risk.
But listening to the music full blast for just five minutes can affect hearing, they said.
The guidelines, the study said, are generally applicable to other music players. The study also found that it does not much matter whether listeners use headphones that cover the ears or go into them. The real risk, the researchers said, may come when people listening to music do so in a noisy environment. There is a tendency then for them to turn up the volume of the music player. Earphones that block outside noise may be helpful.
The study was prepared by Brian J. Fligor of Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard, Terri Ives of the Pennsylvania College of Optometry School of Audiology and Cory Portnuff, a graduate student at the University of Colorado.
Sunny Side Up
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH, The New York Times, October 21, 2006
General Motors liked the idea of using the sun to power its buildings. But until recently, one immutable economic fact held G.M. back: The upfront costs were simply too high to justify the ultimate payoff.
G.M. is not alone. Even solar energy’s biggest fans concede that the high investment costs have kept companies from pursuing what is arguably the cleanest, most renewable and least politically sensitive energy source around.
But now, G.M. and a small but growing number of other companies and municipalities are getting solar energy from systems installed by others. Even though the installations are right on their own roofs, they buy the electricity much as they would from a utility’s grid. And because the companies that paid for the systems will get a steady income, they can provide power from the sun at competitive electricity rates.
Since June, the roof of G.M.’s parts warehouse in Cucamonga, Calif., has been host to a photovoltaic array with the ability to generate as much as 1.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year. The installation, which G.M. expects will provide half of the building’s electricity, cost G.M. nothing.
A solar developer called Developing Energy Efficient Roof Systems — commonly called Deers — bought the equipment with money it raised from private financiers. Deers and its investors own the cells; G.M. signed a long-term contract to purchase the solar-generated electricity from them, at a discount to the prevailing rate for electricity in the region.
These days, that rate is 9 cents to 10 cents a kilowatt hour; G.M. expects that the solar system will reduce its overall electricity costs by 10 percent a year.
“We assume the risk, because we know that companies like G.M. have budgets to buy electricity, not to spend millions of dollars generating it,” said Jack P. DeLiddo, president of Deers.
G.M. is already negotiating with Deers to put a similar solar array on a warehouse in nearby Fontana. “The savings are small, but it’s exciting to create such an environmentally sound project without any need to shell out capital,” said Kamesh Gupta, manager of planning and programs for General Motors Energy and Utility Services, which purchases all the energy used by G.M.
Similar deals are cropping up elsewhere. Some specify that the users pay the solar developers a fixed rate for electricity, while others specify a fixed discount to the going rate.
Other factors are involved as well. The parties generally negotiate who will retain potential credits for reducing carbon emissions. When the developers and their backers keep the carbon abatement credits, they generally plan to sell them to companies that might otherwise have trouble complying with rules planned in California and expected elsewhere aimed at limiting global warming.
The electricity users could do that, too, but some of them might also use the credits to offset emissions from other parts of their operations.
But the same logic underpins all of the deals: The electricity users get a clean, reliable source of energy. The developers and their backers get an equally reliable return on their investment — which can be as high as $6,000 per kilowatt hour of capacity — as well as the tax credits and rebates that California and other states offer for renewable energy projects.
“Corporations like solar energy, but they would rather make sizable investments in their core businesses,” said Craig Hanson, head of the Green Power Market Development Group, a consortium of large companies working under the auspices of the World Resources Institute to promote renewable energy. “But for the financiers, it’s like buying the bond of a triple-A-rated company. It may not offer a 20 percent return, but it’s a stable and secure investment.”
The “solar services model,” as Mr. Hanson calls the solar contracts, is drawing interest from a diverse group of companies and financiers.
Alcoa is negotiating with developers to put solar cells on a manufacturing plant, although it will not specify details. General Electric Energy Financial Services has installed solar roofs that provide half the electricity used by 23 San Diego schools.
Kevin Walsh, the G.E. unit’s manager for renewable energy, said the company was installing another seven. “For a financier like us, it’s a nice, steady stream of revenue with the risk virtually eliminated,” Mr. Walsh said. His unit, he said, is negotiating with a “big box retailer” to install solar roofs on some of its stores.
Retailers, which normally operate with the kind of razor-thin margins that cannot support large capital investments on anything but the core business, have been particularly receptive to the solar services model.
Whole Foods Market, in a deal with SunEdison, a solar project manager financed by a group of investors that includes Goldman Sachs, has solar cells providing about 10 percent of the energy it uses in three stores and one warehouse, and plans many more. “There’s just no downside,” said Jennifer McDonnell, green mission specialist for Whole Foods.
Staples, which has two distribution centers in California that derive about 15 percent of their electricity from 280 kilowatt solar arrays installed by SunEdison, also plans new ones. It recently put a 120 kilowatt system on an office building in Englewood, N.J., and is planning a large solar array for a distribution center in Killingly, Conn.
Mark Buckley, vice president for environmental affairs, said he had identified 140 stores that seemed to be prime candidates for similar installations.
“We are a frugal business with low margins, so we cannot justify the cost of a solar system,” he said. “This way, we’ve got no capital investment, no operating expenses, and we’re lowering our energy costs even as we reduce our carbon emissions. This is a true win-win.”
That does not mean the deals are free of risk. They are not feasible in locations where the sun does not shine consistently through the year, or in states that do not offer tax incentives and rebates.
The economics do not work for the many industrial companies that have negotiated below-market electricity rates. Users must commit to buying a set amount of energy for at least 10 years.
Older buildings often have aged roofs that cannot support conventional photovoltaic cells (although Mr. Walsh of G.E. Energy Financial Services said his group used a technology that embedded the photovoltaic cells in a new, and removable, roof).
Companies must also persuade their own managements — or in the case of leased buildings, their landlords — to allow the installations. And, of course, the economics only make sense to people who think that prices for conventional energy will keep rising.
“We have an incentive to make sure the systems work well, because that’s how we make our money,” said Jigar Shah, who founded SunEdison in 2003 and is generally thought to have pioneered the solar services model. “But let’s face it, we are putting a hole in their roof, so they have to trust we can do it properly. And if you think electricity rates will go down, these long-term contracts don’t look good.”
But few economists are predicting that electricity rates will plummet. And, even if they do, solar energy would still appeal to companies worried about carbon emissions and looking at ways to improve their public image.
“The energy is clean, and the fixed-price agreement doesn’t fluctuate,” Ms. McDonnell of Whole Foods said. “Seeing whether solar would work is now on our check list for every one of our new stores.”
U.S. Firing Plans for Great Lakes Raise Concerns
By MONICA DAVEY, The New York Times, October 16, 2006
GRAND HAVEN, Mich., Oct. 10 — Even in autumn, the cold, silent expanse of Lake Michigan defines this town, where pleasure boats glide into harbor, fishermen wait patiently for salmon and tourists peer up at the lighthouse.
But the United States Coast Guard has a new mission for the waters off of these quiet shores. For the first time, Coast Guard officials want to mount machine guns routinely on their cutters and small boats here and around all five of the Great Lakes as part of a program addressing the threats of terrorism after Sept. 11.
And, for the first time in memory, Coast Guard members plan to use a stretch of water at least five miles off this Michigan shore — and 33 other offshore spots near cities like Cleveland; Rochester; Milwaukee; Duluth, Minn.; and Gary, Ind. — as permanent, live fire shooting zones for training on their new 7.62 mm weapons, which can blast as many as 650 rounds a minute and send fire more than 4,000 yards.
The notion is so unusual that it prompted United States diplomats to negotiate with Canadian authorities in order to agree that it would not violate a 189-year-old treaty, signed after the War of 1812, limiting arms on the Great Lakes.
Many here in Grand Haven, a town whose history is so lovingly intertwined with the Coast Guard that it holds an annual festival celebrating the service branch, say they think of Coast Guard members mainly as the rugged sailors who race off to search for and save troubled boaters. But even here, in a town that calls itself “Coast Guard City U.S.A.,” some say the thought of members firing machine guns anywhere near these waters strikes them as dangerous to ordinary boaters, potentially damaging to the Great Lakes’ ecosystem and, frankly, a somewhat surprising place to be bracing for terrorists.
“You know exactly what’s going to happen with this,” said Bob Foster, 58, who said he spends every chance he gets on the waters here. “Some boater is going to inadvertently drive through the live fire zone and get blown out of the water.”
Carole Loftis, the owner of Snug Harbor, a popular restaurant with windows on the water, said that although she certainly carried concerns, like most Americans, about terrorism, drunken boating seemed a more frequent threat around here. “This seems a little like overkill,” Ms. Loftis said of the shooting plans.
Despite complaints from some charter boat captains, environmental groups and city leaders around the Great Lakes, the Coast Guard defended the need to mount M-240B machine guns on its boats and to test fire them two or three times a year in “safety zones,” about 70 square miles each.
“The Coast Guard has looked at an increased terrorist threat since 2001,” Rear Adm. John E. Crowley Jr., commander of the Coast Guard district that oversees the Great Lakes, said in a telephone interview. “I don’t know when or if something might happen on the Great Lakes, but I don’t want to learn the hard way.”
Some members of the Coast Guard assigned to law enforcement duties always carried weapons, but most of those were personal semiautomatic pistols. Since the arrival of the boat-mounted machine guns, the Coast Guard has conducted 24 training sessions on the lakes this year, although it has halted the exercises temporarily after news of the program seeped out last month and, with it, a barrage of objection.
“When I heard, I thought it was something from The Onion newspaper or an Internet hoax,” said Mike Bradley, the mayor of Sarnia, Ontario, which sits beside Lake Huron, where 6 of the 34 live fire zones are planned. “This whole thing was done way below the radar.”
The Coast Guard’s plans for permanent training zones were published in the Federal Register on Aug. 1, along with the promise of a month for public comment, but city leaders and ordinary boaters said that most of them never came across the document and that the authorities failed to provide them with any other notice of live fire plans — a fact that left some saying they felt as though the Coast Guard, now part of the Department of Homeland Security, was trying quietly to slip the whole weapons program past them.
Herb Bergson, the mayor of Duluth, got a telephone call in September from a resident who said she was listening to her marine scanner, heard talk of shooting on Lake Superior and wanted the mayor to explain what was going on.
“I didn’t know what to tell her,” Mr. Bergson said. “I was caught just flat-footed. No one told me, and they should have.”
Coast Guard leaders — who have since announced nine public meetings in Great Lakes cities, starting Monday, and have extended until Nov. 13 the period for people to weigh in on the idea — acknowledge that they initially failed to publicize the weapons training program. “I’ve got no good answer for that,” said Lt. j.g. Ryan Barone, a spokesman.
But the plans themselves, which ultimately would mean machine guns mounted on the vessels of more than 50 Coast Guard units throughout the Great Lakes, were carefully conceived, Lieutenant Barone said. Information about the proposal and scheduled public meetings is at uscgd9safetyzones.com.
All of the proposed firing zones sit at least five nautical miles from shores and from Canadian waters, as well as far from commercial shipping lanes and sensitive marine areas, Lieutenant Barone said. During the training days, when Coast Guard gunners will shoot at floating foam buoys, other boaters will be notified on marine radio frequencies, he said, and every test will include a designated safety observer.
Admiral Crowley said, “I don’t feel there’s a risk to anyone out there.”
Around the Great Lakes, some people said they were supportive of the presence of machine guns and the planned tests. The risks of terrorism, they said, cannot be underestimated — even in small towns, even in the Upper Midwest. And as with extra airport safety measures, they said, the live fire tests may be inconvenient but they are needed.
Several ferry operators in Michigan, who carry cars and passengers across Lake Michigan, said they were satisfied that their customers would be safe. Ken Alvey, president of the Lake Erie Marine Trades Association, which represents some 80 marine businesses, said he was comfortable knowing that the Coast Guard members would practice on their new weapons.
“To say we don’t have to worry about our open border with Canada would be foolish,” Mr. Alvey said. “You never know what avenue terrorists will take.”
But others, especially recreational boaters and professional fishing guides, said they were worried. Though most emphasized their support and gratitude to the Coast Guard, they said they did not even listen to their radios much anymore (unless a storm is rolling in) and could miss warnings altogether.
Ron Mihevc, who takes customers fishing out of the harbor at Waukegan, Ill., said he feared that the planned firing zone near Waukegan sits “right in the middle” of a prime fishing spot that draws scores of fishermen. Kelly J. Campise, another Waukegan boat captain, said fishermen already were carrying their clients many miles into Lake Michigan in search of salmon and trout at great fuel expense; going still further away to avoid the firing zones would cost still more, he said.
An 89-page environmental study, commissioned by federal authorities, concluded that rounds left in the lakes from the Coast Guard exercises would cause no harm, but Hugh McDiarmid Jr., a spokesman for the Michigan Environmental Council, said a “fuller environmental risk assessment,” given the lead content of the rounds in particular, was needed.
For years, Coast Guard boats have been armed, and training has been conducted off of the coasts of this country, said Brad J. Kieserman, chief of the operations law group at Coast Guard headquarters.
On the Great Lakes, weapons training by military branches like the Navy has also occurred in years gone by, dating back to World War I and World War II. But in keeping with a treaty known as Rush-Bagot from 1817, Coast Guard vessels on the Great Lakes have historically not included naval armaments.
But in 2003, federal authorities sought an understanding with their Canadian counterparts about Rush-Bagot in preparation for mounting machine guns on cutters so that the Coast Guard could “prevent terrorists or others engaged in criminal activities from crossing the United States-Canadian boundary by water,” according to documents from the exchange between the two countries.
In recent days, though, some Canadian mayors, who said they had not heard of the plans until this fall, have objected vehemently. David Miller, the mayor of Toronto, said he worried about practical, safety aspects of the weapons plan and about the environment, but also about the precedent set for the lakes’ more than 94,000 square miles of water.
“Our treaty had always said that the Great Lakes will not be militarized,” Mr. Miller said. “And in effect, this remilitarizes them in the name of a threat from 9/11.”
By MICHAEL MASON, The New York Times, October 24, 2006
After an avalanche of panicked inquiries from patients across the country who claim to have been stricken with a mysterious skin disease, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is preparing to begin a full investigation.
The patients, clustered in California, Texas and Florida, describe symptoms that include sores that are slow to heal, a sensation of things crawling through their skin, joint pain and persistent fatigue.
Many say they believe they have Morgellons disease, a diagnosis that has received wide attention on the Internet but is viewed skeptically by some doctors, who suspect that it is psychosomatic in origin.
In its investigation, to be carried out in Southern California, the centers will conduct environmental tests as well as physical and psychological evaluations of people who say they are afflicted.
“If it’s a new bug or something, we’ll find it pretty quickly,” said Dan Rutz, a spokesman for the centers and a member of the task force planning the investigation.
“Our minds are open to all the possibilities,” he said.
Whatever its cause, Morgellons disease joins a growing list of symptom clusters that public health officials have been forced to examine closely in part because of the organizing power and unprecedented reach of the Internet.
Morgellons was brought to public attention by a woman in South Carolina, Mary Leitao, who in 2001 created a Web site describing the mysterious sores and bizarre threadlike extrusions that afflicted her young son. She said she had tried for years to find a medical explanation for his illness. Ultimately, she said, doctors accused her of staging it.
Ms. Leitao named the condition Morgellons after a 17th-century medical study she’d found that described French children with roughly the same symptoms.
After creating the Web site, she said, she was inundated with e-mail messages from people who said they also had the disease. More than 7,000 people claiming to have Morgellons have registered on the site.
Brandi Koch, 31, is one of them. Ms. Koch said her illness began three years ago, when her arms and legs started to swell. Doctors diagnosed an autoimmune disease, perhaps arthritis. A few months later, Ms. Koch’s back became spangled with lesions; doctors said it might be scleroderma.
A self-described “Type A personality,” Ms. Koch said she increasingly felt forgetful and detached. Lyme disease, the doctors decided.
“Then the horror really started,” Ms. Koch said. “I noticed there was some kind of matter coming out from my skin, not just from where I had sores.”
The substance, visible to others, was like large flecks of black pepper, said Ms. Koch, who worked out regularly and competed in 10K races before she fell ill.
After a dozen doctors failed to provide a diagnosis, Ms. Koch discovered Ms. Leitao’s Web site and realized that she had Morgellons disease.
“It is the most terrifying, disgusting, horrific thing I’ve ever had,” Ms. Koch said. “I don’t know how anyone could have it without feeling a little crazy.”
Ms. Leitao said that many of the people who visit her site have been told by doctors that their symptoms are delusional — the province of psychiatry rather than infectious disease. Several mothers, Ms. Leitao said, told her that they had lost custody of their children after doctors decided the youngsters’ symptoms were contrived. Earlier this year, a young man in Texas reportedly committed suicide after struggling with what his mother has described as Morgellons.
Doctors themselves are divided over whether Morgellons is a medical or a psychiatric illness. The patients are clearly suffering from something; it is just not clear what that something is.
“I think it’s a real disease,” said Dr. Rafael Stricker, a physician in San Francisco who sees many patients claiming to have Morgellons.
“Certainly there is an element of psychiatric distress here, but that’s because the patients are ill and nobody wants to listen to them,” he said.
Many patients also test positive for Lyme disease, Dr. Stricker has found; certain antibacterial and antiparasitic medications sometimes seem to alleviate the symptoms, he said.
But doctors said that after testing the skin extrusions, laboratories routinely dismiss them as plant or textile material.
“You send away the blood work and specimens, you don’t get anything back,” said Dr. Neelam Uppal, a physician in St. Petersburg, Fla., who treated Ms. Koch and has seen a dozen other patients with similar symptoms.
“I feel it’s a parasite, perhaps a fungus,” Dr. Uppal said. “You have to give patients the benefit of the doubt.”
Despite hints of a physical cause, most patients are eventually confronted with a psychiatric diagnosis. The symptoms bear a close resemblance those of delusional parasitosis, a disorder in which sufferers, often drug abusers, believe they are afflicted with hidden parasites and resist all evidence to the contrary.
Researchers have found that delusions like this can be passed from primary patients to secondary ones, usually susceptible family members or close associates. Psychiatrists call this phenomenon folie a deux.
In one remarkable case, a woman convinced her husband that neighbors were shooting at her with lasers. In another, an elderly woman convinced her live-in sister that they were both being attacked by bugs.
“Parasitosis is a classic form of shared delusion,” said Dr. Mary Seeman, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. “Skin disease is perfect for it. A person gets a rash or something, then the ‘disease’ spreads through any shared space in which there is close contact.”
But the Internet may have greatly altered the dynamics of folie a deux. In the connected, always-on world, separation is no longer so easy, and delusions may be shared and supported far beyond the confines of the home or workplace.
“Morgellons patients feel they’ve been jerked around without getting the care they need,” said Mr. Rutz of the disease control centers.
“Often they show up at the doctor’s office with all this stuff they’ve found online or in the media, and when they try to explain it to a skeptical physician, communication just breaks down,” he said.
While much has been made of the Internet as a medium for psychological support, experts have only begun to ponder its potential for spreading delusional thinking.
“When a person has something bothering him these days, the first thing he does is go online,” Dr. Seeman said. “You can get reinforcement of your ideas very quickly there.”
Those who believe they have this strange new illness have grown accustomed to questions about their mental health.
Ms. Koch, for example, is weary of medicine’s harsh judgments and has all but abandoned doctors’ offices. “If I thought they were really serious about doing the research, I could give them the show of a lifetime,” she said.
“I wish I were nuts,” she added. “That would be the best-case scenario in some ways. But I’m not.”
Worrisome New Link: AIDS Drugs and Leprosy
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, October 24, 2006
With affordable AIDS drugs arriving in many poor countries, experts say a startling and worrisome side effect has emerged: in some patients, the treatment uncovers a hidden leprosy infection.
No one knows how widespread the problem is. Only about a dozen cases have been described in medical literature since the first one was found, in London in 2003. But AIDS specialists in Brazil, India, Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere are reporting that some patients on life-saving antiretroviral drugs are developing painful facial ulcers or losing feeling in their fingers and toes.
And in the third world, where 300,000 new cases of leprosy were discovered last year and where 38 million are infected with the AIDS virus, the problem will inevitably get worse, experts say.
“This is just the peak of the iceberg,” said Dr. William Levis, who treats leprosy patients at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. “It’s early in the game. Most physicians don’t even think about leprosy, so there’s probably much more around than we know.”
Dr. Gilla Kaplan, a professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and one of the first to study connections between AIDS and leprosy, agreed.
Antiretroviral treatment, she said, “is going to flush out the silent leprosy by making it symptomatic.”
Because leprosy, a bacterial disease, can be treated with specialized antibiotics that are supplied free by the Novartis pharmaceutical company, there is little prospect of a worldwide epidemic or large numbers of deaths. “It’s a matter of concern for the individual patients,” said Dr. Denis Daumerie, who leads the efforts by the World Health Organization to eliminate leprosy. “It’s not a matter of concern for public health.”
Still, the disease requires taking multiple pills for six months to two years — an added burden for people who typically already take three AIDS drugs. And because the problem is little known, it often takes doctors weeks to figure out what new ill is besetting their AIDS patients.
Experts say the problem arises when the AIDS drugs cause the immune system to recover. It then generates new white blood cells that carry the bacteria from old, silent leprosy infections to the skin of the face, hands and feet.
That is a new twist on a medical paradox that has confounded tropical-disease specialists for 20 years.
In the mid-1980’s, as it became clear that AIDS was not primarily a disease of gay American men but was killing millions of people — men, women and children — in poor countries, many public health doctors prophesied that it would be a double disaster for those with leprosy.
It seemed a logical assumption since leprosy is caused by a germ from the same family of waxy-walled bacteria as those that cause tuberculosis and mycobacter avium, two major killers of AIDS patients. But it proved a false alarm.
“People expected a big surge in leprosy, but it didn’t happen,” said Dr. Diana N. Lockwood, a leprosy expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
When the predictions did not come true, she said, “we assumed that co-infected people just died before their leprosy became manifest.” The incubation period for the most easily diagnosed form of leprosy is 8 to 13 years, while the incubation period for AIDS is 8 to 10.
But leprosy in people known to have been already infected did not seem to worsen when those patients developed AIDS, too, showing that the two diseases can apparently coexist without reinforcing each other.
So it came as a shock to doctors when AIDS treatment caused hidden cases of leprosy to appear.
The first such patient described in a medical journal was Dr. Lockwood’s, a Ugandan exile in London who was being treated for both tuberculosis and AIDS, and suddenly developed a swollen lesion on his face.
“It took us a while to realize it was leprosy,” Dr. Lockwood said. “Since then, we’ve seen more cases in people from Brazil and India.”
Depending on symptoms, leprosy is often initially misdiagnosed as arthritis or lupus. Painful facial lesions, which are less common, can have many causes; in the Uganda man’s case, doctors said, his immune system probably formed nodules around bacteria next to a facial nerve.
Dr. Michael S. Glickman, a bacteriologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who treated the only co-infected case known in New York, said he too had some difficulty diagnosing his patient’s leprosy.
Dr. Glickman’s patient, a man from Burkina Faso, was suffering from advanced AIDS when he first saw Dr. Glickman six years ago, with a CD4 cell count below 10 (normal is 500 or more). As the patient recovered on antiretroviral therapy to a CD4 count of 600, he developed a lighter-colored patch of skin. Dr. Glickman noticed that it was slightly numb to the touch. Fortunately, he had once visited Dr. Levis’s clinic at Bellevue, and made the connection.
“It was so unremarkable that, if I hadn’t seen leprosy patients, I wouldn’t have known what it was,” he said.
His patient’s leprosy was eventually cured, but he had to have an unusual drug regimen because one typical leprosy drug reacts badly with the protease inhibitors taken by AIDS patients.
Treatment in cities like New York and London is relatively easy, but the real crisis, experts said, will evolve in poor countries with dual epidemics.
In French Guiana, for example, Dr. Pierre Couppié, chief of dermatology at the Central Hospital in Cayenne, said he believed that about 1 in every 500 AIDS patients would develop leprosy lesions soon after starting treatment.
Brazil has the world’s highest per-capita leprosy rate and also one of the most effective AIDS treatment programs in the developing world, and seven Brazilian cases have been mentioned in medical literature. No countrywide study has been done, but Dr. Patricia D. Deps, a leprosy expert at the Federal University of Espirito Santo in Brazil, said it was “becoming more and more common.”
“We don’t have good numbers, but we think about 2 percent of the leprosy cases in Brazil are co-infected with H.I.V.,” Dr. Deps said. The country that most worries experts is India. Not long ago, it had 70 percent of the world’s leprosy cases. Its official caseload is a bit of a mystery now. After an aggressive 20-year campaign to find and treat new cases, India officially declared leprosy “eliminated as a public health issue” last year. However, that statement was carefully crafted: it means there is a national average of lower than 1 case per 10,000 citizens, which could be as many as 100,000 new cases a year.
At the same time, with about 5.2 million people infected with the AIDS virus, India is poised to outstrip South Africa as the country with the most AIDS victims. But its epidemic began much later than South Africa’s or Brazil’s, and it has been slow to roll out AIDS treatment. As treatment grows, leprosy may surge along with it.
Other countries with high numbers of leprosy victims are Myanmar, Madagascar, Nepal and Mozambique.
But there are also great unknowns. “It depends on how good the medical system is,” Dr. Lockwood said. “For example, last year, Congo discovered 11,000 new cases.”
Novartis provides the W.H.O. with clofamizine, rifampicin and dapsone, the standard leprosy regimen, in blister packs and boxes so patients can be handed six months of treatment at a time, already divided into daily doses.
But treating leprosy in AIDS patients may turn out to be more difficult, doctors say, because rifampicin cannot be used. And treatment in wealthy countries includes more expensive anti-inflammatories, as well as thalidomide, which blocks a common inflammatory complication.
Because thalidomide causes severe birth defects, the World Health Organization opposes its use in the third world.
Doctors have long known that dormant diseases can surge as a weak immune system recovers. The threat is sometimes called “Haart attacks” — a grim pun on the medical acronym for “highly active antiretroviral therapy.”
The recovering immune system regains its ability to create fevers, flood infected tissue with white blood cells, break bacteria down into toxic waste products and build nodules around bacteria it cannot kill.
But in a weakened patient, that inflammatory response itself can be dangerous. For example, when doctors know that an AIDS patient has tuberculosis, they often try to give TB drugs for two months to suppress the bacteria before starting antiretrovirals, because the patient’s own immune attack on the tuberculosis bacteria in the lungs can be fatal.
Vital Signs: Hazards: A Study Gauges the Risks for Ears With iPods
By ERIC NAGOURNEY, The New York Times, October 24, 2006
Avid iPod users who wonder if they are putting their hearing at risk may find some relief in a new study that tries to arrive at guidelines for safe listening levels.
The key to avoiding hearing damage, the researchers say, appears to be limiting not so much how long one listens to music but how loud it is played. The study was presented at a recent conference on noise-induced hearing loss in children.
The researchers, who are audiologists, concluded that the average young person could listen to a player at 70 percent of full volume for four and a half hours without much risk. They also said that if people used the earphones that come with the devices they could listen to music at an 80 percent level for 90 minutes a day without great risk.
But listening to the music full blast for just five minutes can affect hearing, they said.
The guidelines, the study said, are generally applicable to other music players. The study also found that it does not much matter whether listeners use headphones that cover the ears or go into them. The real risk, the researchers said, may come when people listening to music do so in a noisy environment. There is a tendency then for them to turn up the volume of the music player. Earphones that block outside noise may be helpful.
The study was prepared by Brian J. Fligor of Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard, Terri Ives of the Pennsylvania College of Optometry School of Audiology and Cory Portnuff, a graduate student at the University of Colorado.
Sunny Side Up
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH, The New York Times, October 21, 2006
General Motors liked the idea of using the sun to power its buildings. But until recently, one immutable economic fact held G.M. back: The upfront costs were simply too high to justify the ultimate payoff.
G.M. is not alone. Even solar energy’s biggest fans concede that the high investment costs have kept companies from pursuing what is arguably the cleanest, most renewable and least politically sensitive energy source around.
But now, G.M. and a small but growing number of other companies and municipalities are getting solar energy from systems installed by others. Even though the installations are right on their own roofs, they buy the electricity much as they would from a utility’s grid. And because the companies that paid for the systems will get a steady income, they can provide power from the sun at competitive electricity rates.
Since June, the roof of G.M.’s parts warehouse in Cucamonga, Calif., has been host to a photovoltaic array with the ability to generate as much as 1.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year. The installation, which G.M. expects will provide half of the building’s electricity, cost G.M. nothing.
A solar developer called Developing Energy Efficient Roof Systems — commonly called Deers — bought the equipment with money it raised from private financiers. Deers and its investors own the cells; G.M. signed a long-term contract to purchase the solar-generated electricity from them, at a discount to the prevailing rate for electricity in the region.
These days, that rate is 9 cents to 10 cents a kilowatt hour; G.M. expects that the solar system will reduce its overall electricity costs by 10 percent a year.
“We assume the risk, because we know that companies like G.M. have budgets to buy electricity, not to spend millions of dollars generating it,” said Jack P. DeLiddo, president of Deers.
G.M. is already negotiating with Deers to put a similar solar array on a warehouse in nearby Fontana. “The savings are small, but it’s exciting to create such an environmentally sound project without any need to shell out capital,” said Kamesh Gupta, manager of planning and programs for General Motors Energy and Utility Services, which purchases all the energy used by G.M.
Similar deals are cropping up elsewhere. Some specify that the users pay the solar developers a fixed rate for electricity, while others specify a fixed discount to the going rate.
Other factors are involved as well. The parties generally negotiate who will retain potential credits for reducing carbon emissions. When the developers and their backers keep the carbon abatement credits, they generally plan to sell them to companies that might otherwise have trouble complying with rules planned in California and expected elsewhere aimed at limiting global warming.
The electricity users could do that, too, but some of them might also use the credits to offset emissions from other parts of their operations.
But the same logic underpins all of the deals: The electricity users get a clean, reliable source of energy. The developers and their backers get an equally reliable return on their investment — which can be as high as $6,000 per kilowatt hour of capacity — as well as the tax credits and rebates that California and other states offer for renewable energy projects.
“Corporations like solar energy, but they would rather make sizable investments in their core businesses,” said Craig Hanson, head of the Green Power Market Development Group, a consortium of large companies working under the auspices of the World Resources Institute to promote renewable energy. “But for the financiers, it’s like buying the bond of a triple-A-rated company. It may not offer a 20 percent return, but it’s a stable and secure investment.”
The “solar services model,” as Mr. Hanson calls the solar contracts, is drawing interest from a diverse group of companies and financiers.
Alcoa is negotiating with developers to put solar cells on a manufacturing plant, although it will not specify details. General Electric Energy Financial Services has installed solar roofs that provide half the electricity used by 23 San Diego schools.
Kevin Walsh, the G.E. unit’s manager for renewable energy, said the company was installing another seven. “For a financier like us, it’s a nice, steady stream of revenue with the risk virtually eliminated,” Mr. Walsh said. His unit, he said, is negotiating with a “big box retailer” to install solar roofs on some of its stores.
Retailers, which normally operate with the kind of razor-thin margins that cannot support large capital investments on anything but the core business, have been particularly receptive to the solar services model.
Whole Foods Market, in a deal with SunEdison, a solar project manager financed by a group of investors that includes Goldman Sachs, has solar cells providing about 10 percent of the energy it uses in three stores and one warehouse, and plans many more. “There’s just no downside,” said Jennifer McDonnell, green mission specialist for Whole Foods.
Staples, which has two distribution centers in California that derive about 15 percent of their electricity from 280 kilowatt solar arrays installed by SunEdison, also plans new ones. It recently put a 120 kilowatt system on an office building in Englewood, N.J., and is planning a large solar array for a distribution center in Killingly, Conn.
Mark Buckley, vice president for environmental affairs, said he had identified 140 stores that seemed to be prime candidates for similar installations.
“We are a frugal business with low margins, so we cannot justify the cost of a solar system,” he said. “This way, we’ve got no capital investment, no operating expenses, and we’re lowering our energy costs even as we reduce our carbon emissions. This is a true win-win.”
That does not mean the deals are free of risk. They are not feasible in locations where the sun does not shine consistently through the year, or in states that do not offer tax incentives and rebates.
The economics do not work for the many industrial companies that have negotiated below-market electricity rates. Users must commit to buying a set amount of energy for at least 10 years.
Older buildings often have aged roofs that cannot support conventional photovoltaic cells (although Mr. Walsh of G.E. Energy Financial Services said his group used a technology that embedded the photovoltaic cells in a new, and removable, roof).
Companies must also persuade their own managements — or in the case of leased buildings, their landlords — to allow the installations. And, of course, the economics only make sense to people who think that prices for conventional energy will keep rising.
“We have an incentive to make sure the systems work well, because that’s how we make our money,” said Jigar Shah, who founded SunEdison in 2003 and is generally thought to have pioneered the solar services model. “But let’s face it, we are putting a hole in their roof, so they have to trust we can do it properly. And if you think electricity rates will go down, these long-term contracts don’t look good.”
But few economists are predicting that electricity rates will plummet. And, even if they do, solar energy would still appeal to companies worried about carbon emissions and looking at ways to improve their public image.
“The energy is clean, and the fixed-price agreement doesn’t fluctuate,” Ms. McDonnell of Whole Foods said. “Seeing whether solar would work is now on our check list for every one of our new stores.”
U.S. Firing Plans for Great Lakes Raise Concerns
By MONICA DAVEY, The New York Times, October 16, 2006
GRAND HAVEN, Mich., Oct. 10 — Even in autumn, the cold, silent expanse of Lake Michigan defines this town, where pleasure boats glide into harbor, fishermen wait patiently for salmon and tourists peer up at the lighthouse.
But the United States Coast Guard has a new mission for the waters off of these quiet shores. For the first time, Coast Guard officials want to mount machine guns routinely on their cutters and small boats here and around all five of the Great Lakes as part of a program addressing the threats of terrorism after Sept. 11.
And, for the first time in memory, Coast Guard members plan to use a stretch of water at least five miles off this Michigan shore — and 33 other offshore spots near cities like Cleveland; Rochester; Milwaukee; Duluth, Minn.; and Gary, Ind. — as permanent, live fire shooting zones for training on their new 7.62 mm weapons, which can blast as many as 650 rounds a minute and send fire more than 4,000 yards.
The notion is so unusual that it prompted United States diplomats to negotiate with Canadian authorities in order to agree that it would not violate a 189-year-old treaty, signed after the War of 1812, limiting arms on the Great Lakes.
Many here in Grand Haven, a town whose history is so lovingly intertwined with the Coast Guard that it holds an annual festival celebrating the service branch, say they think of Coast Guard members mainly as the rugged sailors who race off to search for and save troubled boaters. But even here, in a town that calls itself “Coast Guard City U.S.A.,” some say the thought of members firing machine guns anywhere near these waters strikes them as dangerous to ordinary boaters, potentially damaging to the Great Lakes’ ecosystem and, frankly, a somewhat surprising place to be bracing for terrorists.
“You know exactly what’s going to happen with this,” said Bob Foster, 58, who said he spends every chance he gets on the waters here. “Some boater is going to inadvertently drive through the live fire zone and get blown out of the water.”
Carole Loftis, the owner of Snug Harbor, a popular restaurant with windows on the water, said that although she certainly carried concerns, like most Americans, about terrorism, drunken boating seemed a more frequent threat around here. “This seems a little like overkill,” Ms. Loftis said of the shooting plans.
Despite complaints from some charter boat captains, environmental groups and city leaders around the Great Lakes, the Coast Guard defended the need to mount M-240B machine guns on its boats and to test fire them two or three times a year in “safety zones,” about 70 square miles each.
“The Coast Guard has looked at an increased terrorist threat since 2001,” Rear Adm. John E. Crowley Jr., commander of the Coast Guard district that oversees the Great Lakes, said in a telephone interview. “I don’t know when or if something might happen on the Great Lakes, but I don’t want to learn the hard way.”
Some members of the Coast Guard assigned to law enforcement duties always carried weapons, but most of those were personal semiautomatic pistols. Since the arrival of the boat-mounted machine guns, the Coast Guard has conducted 24 training sessions on the lakes this year, although it has halted the exercises temporarily after news of the program seeped out last month and, with it, a barrage of objection.
“When I heard, I thought it was something from The Onion newspaper or an Internet hoax,” said Mike Bradley, the mayor of Sarnia, Ontario, which sits beside Lake Huron, where 6 of the 34 live fire zones are planned. “This whole thing was done way below the radar.”
The Coast Guard’s plans for permanent training zones were published in the Federal Register on Aug. 1, along with the promise of a month for public comment, but city leaders and ordinary boaters said that most of them never came across the document and that the authorities failed to provide them with any other notice of live fire plans — a fact that left some saying they felt as though the Coast Guard, now part of the Department of Homeland Security, was trying quietly to slip the whole weapons program past them.
Herb Bergson, the mayor of Duluth, got a telephone call in September from a resident who said she was listening to her marine scanner, heard talk of shooting on Lake Superior and wanted the mayor to explain what was going on.
“I didn’t know what to tell her,” Mr. Bergson said. “I was caught just flat-footed. No one told me, and they should have.”
Coast Guard leaders — who have since announced nine public meetings in Great Lakes cities, starting Monday, and have extended until Nov. 13 the period for people to weigh in on the idea — acknowledge that they initially failed to publicize the weapons training program. “I’ve got no good answer for that,” said Lt. j.g. Ryan Barone, a spokesman.
But the plans themselves, which ultimately would mean machine guns mounted on the vessels of more than 50 Coast Guard units throughout the Great Lakes, were carefully conceived, Lieutenant Barone said. Information about the proposal and scheduled public meetings is at uscgd9safetyzones.com.
All of the proposed firing zones sit at least five nautical miles from shores and from Canadian waters, as well as far from commercial shipping lanes and sensitive marine areas, Lieutenant Barone said. During the training days, when Coast Guard gunners will shoot at floating foam buoys, other boaters will be notified on marine radio frequencies, he said, and every test will include a designated safety observer.
Admiral Crowley said, “I don’t feel there’s a risk to anyone out there.”
Around the Great Lakes, some people said they were supportive of the presence of machine guns and the planned tests. The risks of terrorism, they said, cannot be underestimated — even in small towns, even in the Upper Midwest. And as with extra airport safety measures, they said, the live fire tests may be inconvenient but they are needed.
Several ferry operators in Michigan, who carry cars and passengers across Lake Michigan, said they were satisfied that their customers would be safe. Ken Alvey, president of the Lake Erie Marine Trades Association, which represents some 80 marine businesses, said he was comfortable knowing that the Coast Guard members would practice on their new weapons.
“To say we don’t have to worry about our open border with Canada would be foolish,” Mr. Alvey said. “You never know what avenue terrorists will take.”
But others, especially recreational boaters and professional fishing guides, said they were worried. Though most emphasized their support and gratitude to the Coast Guard, they said they did not even listen to their radios much anymore (unless a storm is rolling in) and could miss warnings altogether.
Ron Mihevc, who takes customers fishing out of the harbor at Waukegan, Ill., said he feared that the planned firing zone near Waukegan sits “right in the middle” of a prime fishing spot that draws scores of fishermen. Kelly J. Campise, another Waukegan boat captain, said fishermen already were carrying their clients many miles into Lake Michigan in search of salmon and trout at great fuel expense; going still further away to avoid the firing zones would cost still more, he said.
An 89-page environmental study, commissioned by federal authorities, concluded that rounds left in the lakes from the Coast Guard exercises would cause no harm, but Hugh McDiarmid Jr., a spokesman for the Michigan Environmental Council, said a “fuller environmental risk assessment,” given the lead content of the rounds in particular, was needed.
For years, Coast Guard boats have been armed, and training has been conducted off of the coasts of this country, said Brad J. Kieserman, chief of the operations law group at Coast Guard headquarters.
On the Great Lakes, weapons training by military branches like the Navy has also occurred in years gone by, dating back to World War I and World War II. But in keeping with a treaty known as Rush-Bagot from 1817, Coast Guard vessels on the Great Lakes have historically not included naval armaments.
But in 2003, federal authorities sought an understanding with their Canadian counterparts about Rush-Bagot in preparation for mounting machine guns on cutters so that the Coast Guard could “prevent terrorists or others engaged in criminal activities from crossing the United States-Canadian boundary by water,” according to documents from the exchange between the two countries.
In recent days, though, some Canadian mayors, who said they had not heard of the plans until this fall, have objected vehemently. David Miller, the mayor of Toronto, said he worried about practical, safety aspects of the weapons plan and about the environment, but also about the precedent set for the lakes’ more than 94,000 square miles of water.
“Our treaty had always said that the Great Lakes will not be militarized,” Mr. Miller said. “And in effect, this remilitarizes them in the name of a threat from 9/11.”
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Date: 2006-10-24 03:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-24 03:21 pm (UTC)Those zones look like appreciable chunks of lakeage. But of course we all know small towns are terrorists' number one target, so I shouldn't complain...