ReportWire

Tag: little evidence

  • Trump is using Tren de Aragua to justify a military buildup and strikes in Latin America

    [ad_1]

    MEXICO CITY — To help justify a sweeping deportation campaign, an extraordinary U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean and unprecedented strikes on boats allegedly trafficking drugs, President Trump has repeated a mantra: Tren de Aragua.

    He insists that the street gang, which was founded about a decade ago in Venezuela, is attempting an “invasion” of the United States and threatens “the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere.” Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Trump described the group as “an enemy of all humanity” and an arm of Venezuela’s authoritarian government.

    According to experts who study the gang and Trump’s own intelligence officials, none of that is true.

    While Tren de Aragua has been linked to cases of human trafficking, extortion and kidnapping and has expanded its footprint as Venezuela’s diaspora has spread throughout the Americas, there is little evidence that it poses a threat to the U.S.

    “Tren de Aragua does not have the capacity to invade any country, especially the most powerful nation on Earth,” said Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan journalist who wrote a book about the gang. The group’s prowess, she said, had been vastly exaggerated by the Trump administration in order to rationalize the deportation of migrants, the militarization of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, and perhaps even an effort to drive Venezuela’s president from power.

    “It is being instrumentalized to justify political actions,” she said of the gang. “In no way does it endanger the national security of the United States.”

    Before last year, few Americans had heard of Tren de Aragua.

    The group formed inside a prison in Venezuela’s Aragua state then spread as nearly 8 million Venezuelans fled poverty and political repression under the regime of Nicolás Maduro. Gang members were accused of sex trafficking, drug sales, homicides and other crimes in countries including Chile, Brazil and Colombia.

    As large numbers of Venezuelan migrants began entering the United States after requesting political asylum at the southern border, authorities in a handful of states tied crimes to members of the gang.

    It was Trump who put the group on the map.

    While campaigning for reelection last year, he appeared at an event in Aurora, Colo., where law enforcement blamed members of Tren de Aragua for several crimes, including murder. Trump stood next to large posters featuring mugshots of Venezuelan immigrants.

    “Occupied America. TDA Gang Members,” they read. Banners said: “Deport Illegals Now.”

    Shortly after he took office, Trump declared an “invasion” by Tren de Aragua and invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used 18th century law that allows the president to deport immigrants during wartime. His administration flew 200 Venezuelans to El Salvador, where they were housed in a notorious prison, even though few of the men had documented links to Tren de Aragua and most had no criminal records in the United States.

    In recent months, Trump has again evoked the threat of Tren de Aragua to explain the deployment of thousands of U.S. troops and a small armada of ships and warplanes to the Caribbean.

    In July, his administration declared that Tren de Aragua was a terrorist group led by Maduro. That same month, he ordered the Pentagon to use military force against Latin American cartels that his government has labeled terrorists.

    Three times in recent weeks, U.S. troops have struck boats off the coast of Venezuela that it said carried Tren de Aragua members who were trafficking drugs.

    The administration offered no proof of those claims. Fourteen people have been killed.

    Trump has warned that more strikes are to come. “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America, please be warned that we will blow you out of existence,” he said in his address to the United Nations.

    While he insists the strikes are aimed at disrupting the drug trade — claiming without evidence that each boat was carrying enough drugs to kill 25,000 Americans — analysts say there is little evidence that Tren de Aragua is engaged in high-level drug trafficking, and no evidence that it is involved in the movement of fentanyl, which is produced in Mexico by chemicals imported from China. The DEA estimates that just 8% of cocaine that is trafficked into the U.S. passes through Venezuelan territory.

    That has fueled speculation about whether the real goal may be regime change.

    “Everybody is wondering about Trump’s end game,” said Irene Mia, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank focused on global security.

    She said that while there are officials within the White House who appear eager to work with Venezuela, others, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, are open about their desire to topple Maduro and other leftist strongmen in the region.

    “We’re not going to have a cartel operating or masquerading as a government operating in our own hemisphere,” Rubio told Fox News this month.

    Top U.S. intelligence officials have said they don’t believe Maduro has links to Tren de Aragua.

    A declassified memo produced by the Office of Director of National Intelligence found no evidence of widespread cooperation between his regime and the gang. It also said Tren de Aragua does not pose a threat to the U.S.: “The small size of TDA’s cells, its focus on low-skill criminal activities and its decentralized structure make it highly unlikely that TDA coordinates large volumes of human trafficking or migrant smuggling.”

    Michael Paarlberg, a political scientist who studies Latin America at Virginia Commonwealth University, said he believes Trump is using the gang to achieve political goals — and distract from domestic controversies such as his decision to close the investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

    Tren de Aragua, he said, is much less powerful than other gangs in Latin America. “But it has been a convenient boogeyman for the Trump administration.”

    [ad_2]

    Kate Linthicum

    Source link

  • Americans Eat Obscene Amounts of Protein. Is It Enough?

    Americans Eat Obscene Amounts of Protein. Is It Enough?

    [ad_1]

    For years, the American approach to protein has been a never-ending quest for more. On average, each person in the United States puts away roughly 300 pounds of meat a year; we are responsible for more than a third of the multibillion-dollar protein-supplement market. Our recommended dietary allowance, or RDA, for protein is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight per day—a quota that a 160-pound person could meet with a couple of eggs in the morning and an eight-ounce steak at night. American adults consistently eat well above that amount, with men close to doubling it—and recent polls show that millions of us want to increase our intake.

    The American appetite for protein is, simply put, huge. And still, Jose Antonio thinks we’re getting nowhere near enough.

    The RDA of 0.8 grams per kilogram is “nothing, literally nothing,” Antonio, a health-and-human-performance researcher at Nova Southeastern University, in Florida, told me. “Most of my friends get that at breakfast.” In an ideal world, Antonio said, totally sedentary adults should consume at least twice that; people who seriously exercise should start with a minimum of 2.2 grams per kilogram, and ramp their levels up from there. (Antonio is also a co-founder of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, which has received sponsorships from companies that sell protein supplements.)

    In Antonio’s pro-protein world, people would be fitter, more energetic, and suffer less chronic disease; they’d build muscle more efficiently, and recover faster from workouts. There is no definitive cap, in his view, on how much protein people should strive for. The limit, he said, is “How much can a human consume in a single day?”

    Among nutritionists, Antonio’s viewpoint is pretty fringe. There is, other experts told me, such a thing as too much protein—or at least a point of rapidly diminishing returns. But researchers don’t agree on how much protein is necessary, or how much is excessive; they’ve reached no consensus on the extent of its benefits, or whether eating extra servings can send our health into decline. Which leaves Americans with no protein ceiling—and plenty of room for our protein hunger to grow, and grow, and grow.

    Read: You’re probably drinking enough water

    Not having enough protein is clearly very bad. Protein is essential to the architecture of our cells; we rely on it for immunity and hormone synthesis, and cobble it together to build muscles, skin, and bone. Among the three macronutrients—the other two being carbohydrates and fat—protein is the only one that “we need to get every day,” Joanne Slavin, a nutrition researcher at the University of Minnesota, told me. Nearly half of the 20 amino-acid building blocks that make up protein can’t be produced in-house. Go without them for too long, and the body will start to break its own tissues down to scavenge the molecules it needs.

    That state of deficiency is exactly what the protein RDA was designed to avoid. Researchers decided the threshold decades ago, based on their best estimations of the amount of protein people needed to balance out their loss of nitrogen—a substance that’s in amino acids but that the body can’t itself make. The average person in the study, they found, needed 0.66 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight to avoid going into the red. So they set the guidelines at 0.8, a level that would keep the overwhelming majority of the population out of the deficiency zone. That number has stuck in the many years since, and Slavin, who has sat on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, sees no reason for it to change. People who are expending extra energy on growth, or whose muscles are taxed by exercise or aging, might need more. But for the typical American adult, Slavin said, “I think 0.8 is the right number.”

    Others vehemently disagree. The current standard is “not enough to support everyday living,” Abbie Smith-Ryan, a sports-nutrition expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. Adults, she and others told me, should be getting more like 1.2 or 1.6 grams per kilogram at baseline. Their beef with the RDA is twofold. For one, the original nitrogen analyses oversimplified how the body metabolizes and retains protein, Stuart Phillips, a protein researcher at McMaster University, in Canada, told me. And second, even if the 0.8 number does meet our barest needs, “there’s a much more optimal amount we should be consuming” that would further improve our health, Katie Hirsch, an exercise physiologist at the University of South Carolina, told me. (I reached out to the USDA, which helps develop the U.S.’s official Dietary Guidelines, about whether the RDA needed to change; a spokesperson referred me to the National Academy of Sciences, which said that the RDA was last reviewed in 2002, and was expected to be reviewed again soon.)

    If Hirsch and others are right, even people who are slightly exceeding the government guideline might not be maximizing their resilience against infections, cardiovascular disease, metabolic issues, muscle loss, and more. People who are working out and still eating the measly 0.8 grams per kilogram per day, Antonio told me, are also starving themselves of the chance to build lean muscle—and of performance gains.

    But the “more” mentality has a limit. Experts just can’t agree on what it is. It does depend on who’s asking, and their goals. For most people, the benefits “diminish greatly” past 1.6 grams per kilogram, Phillips told me. Smith-Ryan said that levels around 2.2 were valid for athletes trying to lose weight. Antonio is more liberal still. Intakes of 3.3 or so are fair game for body builders or elite cyclists, he told me. In one of his studies, he had athletes pack in 4.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight for weeks—a daily diet that, for a 160-pound person, would require three-plus pounds of steak, 16 cups of tofu, or 89 egg whites.

    Read: The Jordan Peterson all-meat diet

    That is … a lot of protein. And most of the other experts I spoke with said that they didn’t see the point, especially for Americans, who already eat more protein than people in most other countries. “There’s very little evidence that more is better,” Marion Nestle, a nutrition researcher at New York University, told me.

    The worry isn’t necessarily that tons of protein would cause acute bodily harm, at least not to people who are otherwise in good health. Over the years, researchers have raised concerns that too much protein could damage the kidneys or liver, leach calcium from the bones, or even trigger cancer or early death—but the evidence on all fronts is, at best, mixed. In Antonio’s high-protein studies with athletes, he told me, their organs have remained in tip-top shape. The known drawbacks are more annoying than dangerous: High-protein diets can raise the risk of bloating, gas, and dehydration; burning through tons of protein can also make people feel very, very hot. Roughly a quarter of the participants in Antonio’s ultra-high-protein study dropped out: Many of them felt too full, he told me, and no longer enjoyed food. One volunteer was so plagued by night sweats by the close of the trial, he said, that she could no longer fall asleep.

    Whether many years of an ultrahigh-protein lifestyle could be harmful is less clear. Native communities in the Arctic have healthfully subsisted on such diets for generations, but they’ve had a long time to adapt; those in Western society might not fare the same.

    Over the years, it’s gotten easy to interpret protein’s apparent lack of immediate downsides as permission to reach for more. But for now, many experts would rather err on the side of moderation. “Would I feed that much to one of my relatives? I would not,” Susan Roberts, a nutrition researcher at Tufts University, told me. Even if protein itself turns out not to be hard on the body, the foods it comes in still might be, including processed meats or sugary “high-protein” powders, shakes, cookies, chips, and bars. People pounding protein also risk squeezing other nutrients out of their diet, Roberts told me—whole grains, nuts, fruits, and vegetables, all of them packed with fiber, a vital ingredient that nutritionists actually do agree we lack.

    Read: Selling the fantasy of high-protein everything

    Plus, Slavin argued, there’s a point at which excess protein becomes a straight-up waste. When people eat more than about 20 to 40 grams of protein in a single sitting, their protein-processing machinery can get overwhelmed; the body eliminates the nitrogen as waste, then treats the rest as it would a carbohydrate or fat. “You can get fat on proteins just like you can get fat on carbohydrates,” Slavin told me. Which makes overdoing protein, in her eyes, “expensive and stupid.”

    The excess can have consequences beyond what our own bodies endure. Meat production drives greenhouse-gas emissions and uses up massive tracts of land. And Maya Almaraz, a food-systems researcher at Princeton, has found that the majority of the nitrogen pollution in wastewater is a by-product of our diets. The more protein we eat, the more we might be feeding toxic algal blooms.

    There’s no denying that protein deficiency is a problem in many parts of the world, even within the United States. Protein sources are expensive, putting them out of reach of poor communities. Meanwhile, many of the people who worry most about getting enough of it—the wealthy, the ultra-athletic, the educated—are among those who need to supplement the least. Experts, for now, may not agree on how much protein is too much for individuals. But if appetite is all we have to curb our intake, going all in on protein might create problems bigger than anything we’ve had to stomach so far.

    [ad_2]

    Katherine J. Wu

    Source link

  • Being Alive Is Bad for Your Health

    Being Alive Is Bad for Your Health

    [ad_1]

    In 2016, I gave up Diet Coke. This was no small adjustment. I was born and raised in suburban Atlanta, home to the Coca-Cola Company’s global headquarters, and I had never lived in a home without Diet Coke stocked in the refrigerator at all times. Every morning in high school, I’d slam one with breakfast, and then I’d make sure to shove some quarters (a simpler time) in my back pocket to use in the school’s vending machines. When I moved into my freshman college dorm, the first thing I did was stock my mini fridge with cans. A few years later, my then-boyfriend swathed two 12-packs in wrapping paper and put them under his Christmas tree. It was a joke, but it wasn’t.

    You’d think quitting would have been agonizing. To my surprise, it was easy. For years, I’d heard anecdotes about people who forsook diet drinks and felt their health improve seemingly overnight—better sleep, better skin, better energy. I’d also heard whispers about the larger suspected dangers of fake sweeteners. Yet I’d loved my DCs too much to be swayed. Then I tried my first can of unsweetened seltzer at a friend’s apartment. After years of turning my nose up at the thought of LaCroix, I realized that much of what I enjoyed about Diet Coke was its frigidity and fizz. That was enough. I switched to seltzer on the spot, prepared to join the smug converted and receive whatever health benefits were sure to accrue to me for my good behavior.

    Except they never came. Seven years later, I feel no better than I ever did drinking four or five cans of the stuff a day. I still stick to seltzer anyway—because, you know, who knows?—and I’ve mostly forgotten that Diet Coke exists. But the diet sodas had not, as it turns out, been preventing me from getting great sleep or calming my rosacea or feeling, I don’t know, zesty. Besides the caffeine, they appeared to make no difference in how good or bad I felt at all.

    Yesterday, Reuters reported that the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer will soon declare aspartame, the sweetener used in Diet Coke and many other no-calorie sodas, as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” I probably should have felt vindicated. I may not feel better now, but many years down the road (knock on wood), I’ll be better off. I’d bet on the right horse! Instead, I felt nothing so much as irritation. Over the past few decades, a growing number of foods and behaviors have become the regular subject of vague, ever-changing health warnings—fake sweeteners, real sugar, wine, butter, milk (dairy and non), carbohydrates, coffee, fat, chocolate, eggs, meat, veganism, vegetarianism, weightlifting, drinking a lot of water, and scores of others. The more warnings there are, the less actionable any particular one of them feels. What, exactly, is anyone supposed to do with any of this information, except feel bad about the things they enjoy?

    It’s worth reviewing what is actually known or suspected about diet sodas and health. The lion’s share of research on this topic happens in what are known as observational studies—scientists track consumption and record health outcomes, looking for commonalities and trends linking behavior and effects. These studies can’t tell you if the behavior caused the outcome, but they can establish an association that’s worth investigating further. Regular, sustained diet-soda consumption has been linked to weight gain, Type 2 diabetes, and increased risk of stroke, among other things—understandably troublesome correlations for people worried about their health. But there’s a huge complicating factor in understanding what that means: For decades, advertisements recommended that people who were already worried about—or already had—some of those same health concerns substitute diet drinks for those with real sugar, and many such people still make those substitutions in order to adhere to low-carb diets or even out their blood sugar. As a result, little evidence suggests that diet soda is solely responsible for any of those issues—health is a highly complicated, multifactorial phenomenon in almost every aspect—but many experts still recommend limiting your consumption of diet soda as a reasonable precaution.

    A representative for the IARC would neither confirm nor deny the nature of the WHO’s pending announcement on aspartame, which will be released on July 14. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Reuters’s reporting is correct: In two weeks, the organization will update the sweetener’s designation to indicate that it’s “possibly carcinogenic.” To regular people, those words—especially in the context of a health organization’s public bulletins—would seem to imply significant suspicion of real danger. The evidence may not yet all be in place, but surely there’s enough reason to believe that the threat is real, that there’s cause to spook the general public.

    Except, as my colleague Ed Yong wrote in 2015, when the IARC made a similar announcement about the carcinogenic potential of meat, that’s not what the classification means at all. The IARC chops risk up into four categories: carcinogenic (Group 1), probably carcinogenic (Group 2A), possibly carcinogenic (Group 2B), and unclassified (Group 3). Those categories do one very specific thing: They describe how definitive the agency believes the evidence is for any level of increased risk, even a very tiny one. The category in which aspartame may soon find itself, 2B, makes no grand claims about carcinogenicity. “In practice, 2B becomes a giant dumping ground for all the risk factors that IARC has considered, and could neither confirm nor fully discount as carcinogens. Which is to say: most things,” Yong wrote. “It’s a bloated category, essentially one big epidemiological shruggie.”

    The categories are not at all intended to communicate the degree of the risk involved—just how sure or unsure the organization is that there’s a risk associated with a thing or substance at all. And association can mean a lot of things. Hypothetically, regular consumption of food that may quadruple your risk of a highly deadly cancer would fall in the same category as something that may increase your risk of a cancer with a 95 percent survival rate by just a few percentage points, as long as the IARC felt similarly confident in the evidence for both of those effects.

    These designations about carcinogenicity are just one example of how health information can arrive to the general public in ways that are functionally useless, even if well intentioned. Earlier this year, the WHO advised against all use of artificial sweeteners. At first, that might sound dire. But the actual substance of the warning was about the limited evidence that those sweeteners aid in weight loss, not any new evidence about their unique ability to harm your health in some way. (The warning did nod to the links between long-term use of artificial sweeteners and increased risks of cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and premature death, but as the WHO noted at the time, these are understood as murky correlations, not part of an alarming breakthrough discovery.)

    The same release quotes the WHO’s director for nutrition and food safety advising that, for long-term weight control, people need to find ways beyond artificial sweeteners to reduce their consumption of real sugar—in essence, it’s not a health alert about any particular chemical, but about dessert as a concept. How much of any sweetener would you need to cut out of your diet in order to limit any risks it may pose? The release, on its own, doesn’t specify. Consider a birthday crudités platter instead of a cake, just to be sure. (Is that celery non-GMO? Organic? Just checking.)

    The media, surely, deserve our fair share of blame for how quickly and how far these oversimplified ideas spread. Many people are very worried about the food they eat—perhaps because they have received so many conflicting indicators over the years about how that food affects their bodies—and flock to news that something has been deemed beneficial or dangerous. At best, the research that many such stories cite is rarely definitive, and at worst, it’s so poorly designed or otherwise flawed that it’s flatly incapable of producing useful information.

    Taken in aggregate, this morass of poor communication and confusing information has the very real potential to exhaust people’s ability to identify and respond to actual risk, or to confuse them into nihilism. The solution-free finger-wagging, so often about the exact things that many people experience as the little joys in everyday life, doesn’t help. When everything is an ambiguously urgent health risk, it very quickly begins to feel like nothing is. I still drink a few Diet Cokes a year, and I maintain that there’s no better beverage to pair with pizza. We’re all going to die someday.

    [ad_2]

    Amanda Mull

    Source link

  • Was the COVID Toilet Panic Overblown?

    Was the COVID Toilet Panic Overblown?

    [ad_1]

    In the dark early days of the pandemic, when we knew almost nothing and feared almost everything, there was a moment when people became very, very worried about toilets. More specifically, they were worried about the possibility that the cloud of particles toilets spew into the air when flushed—known in the scientific literature as “toilet plume”—might be a significant vector of COVID transmission. Because the coronavirus can be found in human excrement, “flushing the toilet may fling coronavirus aerosols all over,” The New York Times warned in June 2020. Every so often in the years since, the occasional PSA from a scientist or public-health expert has renewed the scatological panic.

    In retrospect, so much of what we thought we knew in those early days was wrong. Lysoling our groceries turned out to not be helpful. Masking turned out to be very helpful. Hand-washing, though still important, was not all it was cracked up to be, and herd immunity, in the end, was a mirage. As the country shifts into post-pandemic life and takes stock of the past three years, it’s worth asking: What really was the deal with toilet plume?

    The short answer is that our fears have not been substantiated, but they weren’t entirely overblown either. Scientists have been studying toilet plume for decades. They’ve found that plumes vary in magnitude depending on the type of toilet and flush mechanism. Flush energy plays a role too: The greater it is, the larger the plume. Closing the lid (if the toilet has one) helps a great deal, though even that cannot completely eliminate toilet plume—particles can still escape through the gap between the seat and the lid.

    Whatever the specifics, the main conclusion from years of research preceding the pandemic has been consistent and disgusting: “Flush toilets produce substantial quantities of toilet plume aerosol capable of entraining microorganisms at least as large as bacteria … These bioaerosols may remain viable in the air for extended periods and travel with air currents,” scientists at the CDC and the University of Oklahoma College of Public Health wrote in a 2013 review paper titled “Lifting the Lid on Toilet Plume Aerosol.” In other words, when you flush a toilet, an unsettling amount of the contents go up rather than down.

    Knowing this is one thing; seeing it is another. Traditionally, scientists have measured toilet plume with either a particle counter or, in at least one case, “a computational model of an idealized toilet.” But in a new study published last month, researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder took things a step further, using bright-green lasers to render visible what usually, blessedly, is not. John Crimaldi, an engineering professor and a co-author of the study, who has spent 25 years using lasers to illuminate invisible phenomena, told me that he and his colleagues went into the experiment fully expecting to see something. Even so, they were “completely caught off guard” by the results. The plume was bigger, faster, and more energetic than they’d anticipated—“like an eruption,” Crimaldi said, or, as he and his colleagues put it in their paper, a “strong chaotic jet.”

    Within eight seconds, the resulting cloud of aerosols shoots nearly five feet above the toilet bowl—that is, more than six feet above the ground. That is: straight into your face. After the initial burst, the plume continues to rise until it hits the ceiling, and then it wafts outward. It meets a wall and runs along it. Before long, it fills the room. Once that happens, it hangs around for a while. “You can sort of extrapolate in your own mind to walking into a public restroom in an airport that has 20 toilet stalls, all of them flushing every couple minutes,” Crimaldi said. Not a pleasant thought.

    The question, then, is not so much whether toilet plume happens—like it or not, it clearly does—as whether it presents a legitimate transmission risk of COVID or anything else. This part is not so clear. The 2013 review paper identified studies of the original SARS virus as “among the most compelling indicators of the potential for toilet plume to cause airborne disease transmission.” (The authors also noted, in a dry aside, that although SARS was “not presently a common disease, it has demonstrated its potential for explosive spread and high mortality.”) The one such study the authors discuss explicitly is a report on the 2003 outbreak in Hong Kong’s Amoy Gardens apartment complex. That study, though, is far from conclusive, Mark Sobsey, an environmental microbiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. The researchers didn’t rule out other modes of transmission, nor did they attempt to culture live virus from the fecal matter—a far more reliable indicator of infectiousness than mere detection.

    Beyond that, Sobsey said, there is little evidence that toilet plumes spread SARS or COVID-19. In his own review, published in December 2021, Sobsey found “no documented evidence” of viral transmission via fecal matter. This, at least, seems to track with the three years of pandemic experience we’ve all now endured. Although we can’t easily prove that bathrooms don’t play a significant role in spreading COVID-19, we haven’t seen any glaring indications that they do. And anyway, the coronavirus has found plenty of other awful ways to spread.

    Just because toilet plume doesn’t seem to be a vector of COVID transmission, though, doesn’t mean you can forget about it. Gastrointestinal viruses such as norovirus, Sobsey told me, present a more serious risk of transmission via toilet plume, because they are known to spread via fecal matter. The only real solutions are structural. Improved ventilation would keep aerosolized waste from building up in the air, and germicidal lighting, though the technology is still being developed, could potentially disinfect what remains. Neither, however, would stop the plume in the first place. To do that, you would need to change the toilet itself: In order to create a smoother and thus better-contained flush, you could change the geometry of the bowl, the way the water enters and exits, or any number of other variables. Toilet manufacturers could also, you know, stop producing lidless toilets.

    But none of that will save you the next time you find yourself staring into a toilet’s blank maw. Crimaldi suggests wearing a mask in public bathrooms to protect against not just the plume created when you flush but also the plumes left by the person who used the bathroom before you, the person who used it before them, and so on. You don’t need to have any great affection for masking as a public-health intervention to consider donning one for a few minutes to avoid literally breathing in shit. Sobsey offered another bit of unconventional bathroom-hygiene advice, which he acknowledged can only do so much to protect you: If you find yourself in a public restroom with a lidless toilet, he said, consider washing your hands before you flush. Then “hold your breath, flush the toilet, and leave.”

    [ad_2]

    Jacob Stern

    Source link

  • I’m Sorry, but This COVID Policy Is Ridiculous

    I’m Sorry, but This COVID Policy Is Ridiculous

    [ad_1]

    Cases have surged in China since it dropped its zero-COVID policy in December, and the latest models now suggest that at least 1 million people may die as a result. Many countries have responded by policing their borders: Last week, the CDC announced that anyone entering the United States from China would be required to test negative within two days of departure; the U.K., Canada, and Australia quickly followed suit; and the European Union has urged its member states to do the same. (Taking a more extreme tack, Morocco has said it will ban travelers from China from entering altogether.) At a media briefing on Wednesday, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “It is understandable that some countries are taking steps they believe will protect their own citizens.”

    On Tuesday, a Chinese official denounced some of the new restrictions as having “no scientific basis.” She wasn’t wrong. If the goal is to “slow the spread of COVID” from overseas, as the CDC has stated, there is little evidence to suggest that the restrictions will be effective. More important, it wouldn’t matter if they were: COVID is already spreading unchecked in the U.S. and many of the other countries that have new rules in place, so imported cases wouldn’t make much of a difference. The risk is particularly low given the fact that 95 percent of China’s locally acquired cases are being caused by two Omicron lineages—BA.5.2 and BF.7—that are old news elsewhere. “The most dangerous new variant at the moment is from New York—XBB.1.5—which the U.S. is now busy exporting to the rest of the world,” Christina Pagel, a mathematician who studies health care at University College London, told me. “I’m sorry, but this is fucking ridiculous.”

    By now, it’s well known that travel restrictions can’t stop COVID from crossing borders. At best, they slow its entry. When Omicron was first detected, in South Africa in late November 2021, America blocked travel from southern-African countries in an attempt to prevent the variant from spreading; by mid-December, Omicron dominated the United States. Restrictions can delay the spread of a variant only if they are implemented while cases are low and before travelers have had a chance to spread it. Such policies were more effective early in the pandemic: A BMJ Global Health review concluded that the initial ban on all travel into or out of Wuhan, China, in January 2020 significantly reduced the number of cases exported to other countries and delayed outbreaks elsewhere by “up to a few weeks.” Later on, such restrictions lost value. The COVID Border Accountability Project, which tracks travel restrictions around the world, has found that border closures did not reduce COVID spread, at least through April 2021, Mary Shiraef, the project’s principal investigator and a political scientist at Notre Dame University, told me. (According to the study, domestic lockdowns did slow transmission.)

    At this stage of the pandemic, restrictions make sense only under two conditions, Pagel said: The country deploying them must have low levels of spread and good control policies, and the restrictions must be applied to all other nations, as opposed to just one. Neither of these conditions is being met right now by any country deploying travel measures against China. Even if a single-point ban did serve some useful purpose, the rules in place for China don’t add up. Predeparture testing likely won’t catch most infected travelers from China, Adam Kucharski, a professor of infectious-disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told me. A person could test negative one day and then positive a few days later. If the point of restrictions is to slow local transmission, Kucharski said, calculations based on his research suggest that travelers should be tested twice: once before they arrive, then about three or four days afterward. Doing so would catch infected travelers who initially tested negative while limiting their window for spreading disease.

    Read: Why America scrapped its travel bans

    The best possible outcome of a travel restriction like the one the U.S. now has in place would be a very small delay before the arrival of a catastrophic new variant that has just emerged in China. In that scenario, any extra time might be used to intensify mitigation strategies and assess the degree to which current vaccines are expected to hold up. Historically, though, the time saved by travel bans has been wasted. After countries restricted travel from South Africa to keep Omicron at bay, governments responded by “not really doing much at all domestically,” Kucharski said. In any case, as my colleague Katherine J. Wu has pointed out, the virus is able to spread easily in China right now without any further changes to its genome. Population immunity there is modest, owing to the country’s low natural-infection rate and less effective vaccines, so the virus can infect people perfectly well as is.

    The travel restrictions on China will have little impact on the spread of COVID, but they do send a forceful political message. The U.S. measures are meant to pressure China, by slowing its economic rebound, into being transparent about its COVID situation, Stephen Morrison, the director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, told me. China’s alleged official death count, for example—5,259 as of January 4—seems way too low to be believable, especially amid reports of overflowing Chinese hospitals and funeral homes. So long as the country isn’t more forthcoming, Morrison said, then Chinese tourists, who have only recently been allowed to travel internationally, will continue to be unwelcome.

    Expressing this message through a largely pointless public-health measure comes with a price. When that measure fails to keep COVID spread at bay, faith in public-health institutions could decline, which Pagel said is the “biggest danger” for the next pandemic. It also stokes the long-standing fear that Chinese people are more likely to carry disease than anyone else, whether foreign or American. “We are watching this policy so carefully to see if it will once again invite a racial backlash,” Manjusha Kulkarni, a co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, told me. If a rise in anti-Asian hate and violence comes along with more transparency from China about its COVID situation, the cost of these restrictions hardly seems worth their benefits.

    [ad_2]

    Yasmin Tayag

    Source link