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Entry tags:
Science Tuesday - Reducing paper, AIDS, Turkey, Katrina
Environmental Groups Cutting Catalog Stacks
By MARIA ASPAN, The New York Times, November 19, 2007
Consumers who curse the growing stacks of holiday catalogs in their mailboxes have a new alternative: a coalition of environmental groups has introduced a free Web site, CatalogChoice.org, that allows people to remove themselves from more than 1,000 mailing lists.
Since it opened for business on Oct. 9, Catalog Choice has helped more than 165,000 people opt out of almost 1.7 million catalogs, the groups say.
The Web site, which collects names and then contacts the catalog companies to have people removed from mailing lists, is operated by the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Ecology Center. While the site’s users may be primarily interested in avoiding heavy tomes from the likes of Pottery Barn and Lands’ End, the environmental groups say they are more concerned with reducing the number of catalogs sent to Americans every year (19 billion) and the number of trees used to make them (53 million).
“In the old days, when people lived in rural areas and couldn’t get anywhere, catalogs made much more sense,” said Daniel R. Katz, program director at the Overbrook Foundation, one of three charitable groups that helped finance Catalog Choice. “We don’t need to use such a resource-intensive form of shopping anymore.”
Catalog Choice does not charge consumers to have themselves removed from catalog lists, which sets it apart from paid services like GreenDimes.com, 41Pounds.org and a list run by the Direct Marketing Association.
“Nobody is saying ‘Don’t shop from catalogs,’” Mr. Katz said. “We want to see them make money, but we want to see them do it at less cost to the environment.”
About 16 companies, including L. L. Bean, Lands’ End and Lillian Vernon, have signed up as official merchant partners of Catalog Choice. In exchange for working with the coalition, the merchants are being rewarded with links from the Catalog Choice site to their Web sites.
“We don’t want people to get our catalogs who don’t want our catalogs,” said Laurie Brooks, a spokeswoman for L. L. Bean. “We don’t want to waste paper or our customer’s time.”
U.N. to Say It Overstated H.I.V. Cases by Millions
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, November 20, 2007
The United Nations’ AIDS-fighting agency plans to issue a report today acknowledging that it overestimated the size of the epidemic and that new infections with the deadly virus have been dropping each year since they peaked in the late 1990s.
The agency, Unaids, will lower the number of people it believes are infected worldwide, to 33.2 million from the 39.5 million it estimated late last year.
The statistical changes reflect more accurate surveys, particularly in India and some populous African countries. Some epidemiologists have criticized for years the way estimates were made, and new surveys of thousands of households in several countries have borne them out.
In only a few countries, such as Kenya and Zimbabwe, do the figures reflect widespread behavioral changes, such as decisions by many people to have sex with fewer partners.
Excerpts from the report were given to the news media in advance for release this evening, but an embargo on it was broken by other news organizations. Despite the revised estimates, the epidemic remains one of the great scourges of mankind. This week’s analysis predicts that 2.1 million people died of AIDS in the last year, and 2.5 million were newly infected — or about 6,800 every day.
The agency now believes that the number of new infections each year with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, probably peaked in the late 1990s, or by 2001, at about 3 million.
Although new infections have dropped, the number of people with the disease is growing because more people infected with H.I.V. are living longer, thanks to antiretroviral drugs. With the world’s population growing, the agency believes that the percentage of adults who are now infected remains roughly constant, at about 0.8 percent.
“This is not a surprise,” said Daniel Halperin, an expert on H.I.V. infection rates at the Harvard School of Public Health and co-author of an article published three years ago arguing that estimates of infection rates were too high. “The writing was on the wall years ago,” he said.
“But,” he added, “this doesn’t mean the epidemic is going away, everything is fine and now forget about it — not at all. There are still about 10 countries in southern Africa that are real nightmares.”
In the past, global health officials have treated the epidemic as a cyclone spiraling ever upward with no end to new infections in sight.
But better surveys, particularly a household survey in India, have driven the figures down.
Until recently, most national estimates were made by giving anonymous blood tests to some young women who came into public health clinics because they were pregnant or feared they had a sexually transmitted disease; those results were expanded with statistical models.
But epidemiologists have realized that such a method — usually applied in big urban clinics because it was more efficient — oversampled prostitutes, drug abusers and people with multiple partners, and ignored rural women. Then the statistical extrapolations exaggerated those errors.
Recently, the United States Agency for International Development began financing surveys that chose thousands of households at random in both urban and rural areas and sent in health care workers to take detailed medical and lifestyle histories and blood samples; though expensive, they produced results that are considered more accurate.
In July, India’s estimated caseload was revised downward, to 2.5 million, from 5.7 million — a change that accounts for about half the drop in the new Unaids figures. Officials said then that India’s epidemic was not “generalized” — that is, it had not spread far from the original high-risk groups like brothel workers and clients, truckers, heroin users and gay men. Also, rates among prostitutes appeared to have fallen as condoms gained acceptance. Instead of being considered the world’s worst-hit country, India fell to third place behind South Africa and Nigeria.
Also, some African countries have seen real drops in new cases. It happened relatively early in Uganda, after an aggressive “no grazing” (meaning no casual sex) campaign started 20 years ago. Similar declines appear to have happened in Zimbabwe and Kenya, especially since people saw many friends and relatives die. Rather than embracing condoms or circumcision, people decided to have sexual relations with fewer people, Dr. Halperin said.
“You don’t need a Ph.D. to figure out that if you reduce your number of partners, you reduce your risk,” he added.
A small decline in new infections can quickly cut a country’s total caseload because large numbers of people infected early in the epidemic are still dying.
AIDS advocates fear that any suggestion that the epidemic is lessening in intensity will cause fatigued donors to contribute less.
In September, for example, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis received pledges of only $9.7 billion, well short of the $15 billion to $18 billion it had hoped to raise.
“There’s still a huge epidemic out there that still needs huge resources to win the battle,” said Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance, a non-profit advocacy group.
Really? The Claim: White Meat Is Healthier Than Dark Meat
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR, The New York Times, November 20, 2007
THE FACTS
As Americans carve up their Thanksgiving turkeys this year, an age-old question will come into play: dark meat or white?
Health authorities have long advocated choosing white meat, saying it contains less fat and fewer calories. But the nutritional differences between the two are not so great.
In general, what makes one cut of turkey — or any other type of poultry — darker than another is the type of muscle it contains. Meat is darker if it contains higher levels of myoglobin, a compound that enables muscles to transport oxygen, which is needed to fuel activity. Since turkeys and chickens are flightless and walk a lot, their leg meat is dark while their wing and breast meat are white.
Many people choose white meat over dark because of its lower caloric content. But according to the Department of Agriculture, an ounce of boneless, skinless turkey breast contains about 46 calories and 1 gram of fat, compared with roughly 50 calories and 2 grams of fat for an ounce of boneless, skinless thigh.
But dark meat has its benefits. Compared with white meat, it contains more iron, zinc, riboflavin, thiamine, and vitamins B6 and B12. Both have less fat than most cuts of red meat, so you can’t go wrong either way.
THE BOTTOM LINE
White meat contains less fat and fewer calories than dark meat, but the differences are small.
Observatory: Katrina’s Damage to Trees May Alter Carbon Balance
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, November 20, 2007
The world knows the kind of destruction that Hurricane Katrina brought to New Orleans and other cities and towns on the Gulf Coast.
But destruction of a different sort is the subject of a study in the journal Science by Jeffrey Q. Chambers of Tulane University and colleagues. They report that the storm uprooted or severely damaged roughly 320 million trees, making an impact on the carbon balance in the region.
The researchers analyzed satellite imagery from before and after the hurricane to determine the net change in “nonphotosynthesizing vegetation” — in other words, the increase in dead wood and ground litter. Then they went to sample plots in the region’s forests, corresponding to data points from the images, and counted downed or damaged trees. “A lot of material moved from being a living tree to being litter,” Dr. Chambers said.
The findings have implications for the carbon footprint of the region’s forests. Through photosynthesis, living trees store carbon, but when they die they begin to decompose, and the action of those decomposing organisms releases carbon.
While trees eventually grow back in a heavily damaged forest, Dr. Chambers said, “it takes a lot longer to recover the biomass than it does to lose it.” In some cases, he added, it is possible for a forest to go from being a net storer of carbon to a net source.
That may happen more in the future, he said, because one expected result of global climate change is more severe storms. That means more damaged forests, with fewer living trees and more decomposing ones. “You could see terrestrial ecosystems becoming closer to sources of carbon than to carbon sinks,” he said.
By MARIA ASPAN, The New York Times, November 19, 2007
Consumers who curse the growing stacks of holiday catalogs in their mailboxes have a new alternative: a coalition of environmental groups has introduced a free Web site, CatalogChoice.org, that allows people to remove themselves from more than 1,000 mailing lists.
Since it opened for business on Oct. 9, Catalog Choice has helped more than 165,000 people opt out of almost 1.7 million catalogs, the groups say.
The Web site, which collects names and then contacts the catalog companies to have people removed from mailing lists, is operated by the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Ecology Center. While the site’s users may be primarily interested in avoiding heavy tomes from the likes of Pottery Barn and Lands’ End, the environmental groups say they are more concerned with reducing the number of catalogs sent to Americans every year (19 billion) and the number of trees used to make them (53 million).
“In the old days, when people lived in rural areas and couldn’t get anywhere, catalogs made much more sense,” said Daniel R. Katz, program director at the Overbrook Foundation, one of three charitable groups that helped finance Catalog Choice. “We don’t need to use such a resource-intensive form of shopping anymore.”
Catalog Choice does not charge consumers to have themselves removed from catalog lists, which sets it apart from paid services like GreenDimes.com, 41Pounds.org and a list run by the Direct Marketing Association.
“Nobody is saying ‘Don’t shop from catalogs,’” Mr. Katz said. “We want to see them make money, but we want to see them do it at less cost to the environment.”
About 16 companies, including L. L. Bean, Lands’ End and Lillian Vernon, have signed up as official merchant partners of Catalog Choice. In exchange for working with the coalition, the merchants are being rewarded with links from the Catalog Choice site to their Web sites.
“We don’t want people to get our catalogs who don’t want our catalogs,” said Laurie Brooks, a spokeswoman for L. L. Bean. “We don’t want to waste paper or our customer’s time.”
U.N. to Say It Overstated H.I.V. Cases by Millions
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, November 20, 2007
The United Nations’ AIDS-fighting agency plans to issue a report today acknowledging that it overestimated the size of the epidemic and that new infections with the deadly virus have been dropping each year since they peaked in the late 1990s.
The agency, Unaids, will lower the number of people it believes are infected worldwide, to 33.2 million from the 39.5 million it estimated late last year.
The statistical changes reflect more accurate surveys, particularly in India and some populous African countries. Some epidemiologists have criticized for years the way estimates were made, and new surveys of thousands of households in several countries have borne them out.
In only a few countries, such as Kenya and Zimbabwe, do the figures reflect widespread behavioral changes, such as decisions by many people to have sex with fewer partners.
Excerpts from the report were given to the news media in advance for release this evening, but an embargo on it was broken by other news organizations. Despite the revised estimates, the epidemic remains one of the great scourges of mankind. This week’s analysis predicts that 2.1 million people died of AIDS in the last year, and 2.5 million were newly infected — or about 6,800 every day.
The agency now believes that the number of new infections each year with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, probably peaked in the late 1990s, or by 2001, at about 3 million.
Although new infections have dropped, the number of people with the disease is growing because more people infected with H.I.V. are living longer, thanks to antiretroviral drugs. With the world’s population growing, the agency believes that the percentage of adults who are now infected remains roughly constant, at about 0.8 percent.
“This is not a surprise,” said Daniel Halperin, an expert on H.I.V. infection rates at the Harvard School of Public Health and co-author of an article published three years ago arguing that estimates of infection rates were too high. “The writing was on the wall years ago,” he said.
“But,” he added, “this doesn’t mean the epidemic is going away, everything is fine and now forget about it — not at all. There are still about 10 countries in southern Africa that are real nightmares.”
In the past, global health officials have treated the epidemic as a cyclone spiraling ever upward with no end to new infections in sight.
But better surveys, particularly a household survey in India, have driven the figures down.
Until recently, most national estimates were made by giving anonymous blood tests to some young women who came into public health clinics because they were pregnant or feared they had a sexually transmitted disease; those results were expanded with statistical models.
But epidemiologists have realized that such a method — usually applied in big urban clinics because it was more efficient — oversampled prostitutes, drug abusers and people with multiple partners, and ignored rural women. Then the statistical extrapolations exaggerated those errors.
Recently, the United States Agency for International Development began financing surveys that chose thousands of households at random in both urban and rural areas and sent in health care workers to take detailed medical and lifestyle histories and blood samples; though expensive, they produced results that are considered more accurate.
In July, India’s estimated caseload was revised downward, to 2.5 million, from 5.7 million — a change that accounts for about half the drop in the new Unaids figures. Officials said then that India’s epidemic was not “generalized” — that is, it had not spread far from the original high-risk groups like brothel workers and clients, truckers, heroin users and gay men. Also, rates among prostitutes appeared to have fallen as condoms gained acceptance. Instead of being considered the world’s worst-hit country, India fell to third place behind South Africa and Nigeria.
Also, some African countries have seen real drops in new cases. It happened relatively early in Uganda, after an aggressive “no grazing” (meaning no casual sex) campaign started 20 years ago. Similar declines appear to have happened in Zimbabwe and Kenya, especially since people saw many friends and relatives die. Rather than embracing condoms or circumcision, people decided to have sexual relations with fewer people, Dr. Halperin said.
“You don’t need a Ph.D. to figure out that if you reduce your number of partners, you reduce your risk,” he added.
A small decline in new infections can quickly cut a country’s total caseload because large numbers of people infected early in the epidemic are still dying.
AIDS advocates fear that any suggestion that the epidemic is lessening in intensity will cause fatigued donors to contribute less.
In September, for example, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis received pledges of only $9.7 billion, well short of the $15 billion to $18 billion it had hoped to raise.
“There’s still a huge epidemic out there that still needs huge resources to win the battle,” said Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance, a non-profit advocacy group.
Really? The Claim: White Meat Is Healthier Than Dark Meat
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR, The New York Times, November 20, 2007
THE FACTS
As Americans carve up their Thanksgiving turkeys this year, an age-old question will come into play: dark meat or white?
Health authorities have long advocated choosing white meat, saying it contains less fat and fewer calories. But the nutritional differences between the two are not so great.
In general, what makes one cut of turkey — or any other type of poultry — darker than another is the type of muscle it contains. Meat is darker if it contains higher levels of myoglobin, a compound that enables muscles to transport oxygen, which is needed to fuel activity. Since turkeys and chickens are flightless and walk a lot, their leg meat is dark while their wing and breast meat are white.
Many people choose white meat over dark because of its lower caloric content. But according to the Department of Agriculture, an ounce of boneless, skinless turkey breast contains about 46 calories and 1 gram of fat, compared with roughly 50 calories and 2 grams of fat for an ounce of boneless, skinless thigh.
But dark meat has its benefits. Compared with white meat, it contains more iron, zinc, riboflavin, thiamine, and vitamins B6 and B12. Both have less fat than most cuts of red meat, so you can’t go wrong either way.
THE BOTTOM LINE
White meat contains less fat and fewer calories than dark meat, but the differences are small.
Observatory: Katrina’s Damage to Trees May Alter Carbon Balance
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, November 20, 2007
The world knows the kind of destruction that Hurricane Katrina brought to New Orleans and other cities and towns on the Gulf Coast.
But destruction of a different sort is the subject of a study in the journal Science by Jeffrey Q. Chambers of Tulane University and colleagues. They report that the storm uprooted or severely damaged roughly 320 million trees, making an impact on the carbon balance in the region.
The researchers analyzed satellite imagery from before and after the hurricane to determine the net change in “nonphotosynthesizing vegetation” — in other words, the increase in dead wood and ground litter. Then they went to sample plots in the region’s forests, corresponding to data points from the images, and counted downed or damaged trees. “A lot of material moved from being a living tree to being litter,” Dr. Chambers said.
The findings have implications for the carbon footprint of the region’s forests. Through photosynthesis, living trees store carbon, but when they die they begin to decompose, and the action of those decomposing organisms releases carbon.
While trees eventually grow back in a heavily damaged forest, Dr. Chambers said, “it takes a lot longer to recover the biomass than it does to lose it.” In some cases, he added, it is possible for a forest to go from being a net storer of carbon to a net source.
That may happen more in the future, he said, because one expected result of global climate change is more severe storms. That means more damaged forests, with fewer living trees and more decomposing ones. “You could see terrestrial ecosystems becoming closer to sources of carbon than to carbon sinks,” he said.