Biting back
Paul Reiter is on shaky ground when he denies climate any role in recent
malaria epidemics
(23 September, p 40).
He finds the empirical evidence
“annoying” and none more so than that from Rwanda. I know this case well, having
analysed the upsurge in malaria that swept the country in the second half of
1987 (The Lancet, vol 343, p 714).
Reiter puts this down chiefly to improved surveillance. People who lived
through it wouldn’t agree. From bush taxis to university seminars, the huge
increase in malaria was on everybody’s lips when I arrived there. Better
reporting couldn’t explain the selectivity of the increase the data revealed:
young children more than older people, higher altitude areas more than lower
ones.
The disproportionate increase in all age classes in those high areas suggests
that malaria hadn’t been transmitted there in recent years, and their testimony
bears this out. Statistical analysis linked malaria incidence to rainfall and
even more strongly to temperature, particularly at the higher elevations.
Letter
There are other reasons why malaria is now absent from Europe. The most
efficient vector species tend to be limited to rural areas in Europe, often far
from human habitation. Also, about 90 per cent of malaria cases鈥攖he
majority of which are imported鈥攁re promptly hospitalised, that is to say
within two to four days. This removes them from contact with the rural vectors
and usually before gametogenesis, the stage when the parasite is capable of
infecting mosquitoes via their blood meal. Finally, among the European
anophelines, the ability of Plasmodium falciparum to act as an
effective vector is now much lower than in the past鈥攑erhaps even nil. It’s
a matter that needs to be investigated further.
The climate of much of Europe is already conducive to transmission, and under
current socio-economic circumstances sporadic locally acquired cases of
Plasmodium vivax malaria will continue to occur in limited rural areas and
will quickly be controlled by the competent structures of the relevant national
health service. It is unlikely that epidemic transmission will return, even if
temperatures continue to rise.
For this reason, the predictions of malaria epidemics due to climate changes
in areas where the malariogenic conditions are manifestly unsuitable are not
justified.
More than the climatic factors, the socio-political factors could lead to
substantial changes in malariogenic potential, such as the flow of immigrants
from endemic malaria areas and the accessibility of healthcare. Therefore the
WHO Regional Office for Europe stresses the importance of the epidemiological
surveillance in EU countries, especially in areas where the situation is dynamic
and changeable.
Sweet healing
I am somewhat amused at the search for the “phytochemical agent” in manuka
honey鈥攚hich I suggest is due to the content of aromatic compounds
(7 October, p 32).
The strong antibiotic power of various essential oils and
isolated aromatic compounds has been well demonstrated. Methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), for example, is quite sensitive to many
aromatic compounds. And work done over the past thirty years by French
physicians in prescribing essential oils for the treatment of infections has
also demonstrated that resistance does not develop to these compounds. Minimal
inhibitory concentrations of aromatic compounds against S. aureus are
quite small鈥�0.125 milligrams per millilitre for thymol and carvacrol
(found in the essential oils of red thyme and oregano), 0.25 mg/ml for geraniol
(found in palmarosa) and 0.1 mg/ml for Australian sandalwood, Santalum
spicatum. In the concentrations required to treat wound infections, these
essential oils are non-toxic and non-irritant.
The end is nigh
Hazel Muir’s news item on the possible dangers of creating strangelet
particles ignores one fundamental question which the scientists in hot pursuit
of Nobel prizes and pure knowledge do not answer: what right do they have to
risk, even in the most minuscule probability, my life? I object to them running
the risk, and believe that they are in breach of the law of human rights.
As the only purpose is an expansion of knowledge, not a way to feed the
starving millions, the whole exercise is purely a hobby. If they want a hobby
perhaps they should collect stamps, which does not endanger my life.
Correction
The article “Shore bet”
(23 September, p 16)
should have said that the likely
global contribution of wave power is over 2000 terawatt hours per year if the
development programmes go to plan, rather than 2 terawatt hours per year as
printed.
Challenging science
Michael Snowden
(7 October, p 48)
raises the issue of why science does not
always fare too well in developing countries. His anecdotal observations are
those of an astronomer and thus other specialists might give different
explanations.
There can be no disagreement with his central thesis that the Renaissance
freed the Western imagination and practices from the religious stranglehold of
the Dark Ages. There is also no argument that science is affected by cultural
and social factors.
Galileo, Copernicus and Darwin challenged the idea that there was a creator,
God, who made humans in his image a few thousand years ago and then made other
living creatures for our use. But not all religions share this belief and,
unlike Christianity, they would not have been challenged by discoveries in
science. Asian belief systems, for example, deal with very large time spans.
They also accept as a central tenet that all life forms are related, and they
believe in many extraterrestrial abodes, not just one Earth. Many even have
evolutionary schemes.
South Asian astronomy accepted a heliocentric system from relatively early
times. And as recently published manuscripts reveal, astronomers of the Kerala
school developed an almost identical idea of a heliocentric system nearly a
century before Tycho Brahe did.
Snowden writes about his experiences in setting up a telescope in Sri Lanka
in 1993. There were several players in this event and a plethora of contingent
factors that influenced it. These include debates between universities and
wrangling between ministries鈥攋ust as happens in the US or the European
Union. Such conflicts have nothing to do with Renaissance attitudes.
There’s no doubt that developing countries face real challenges in science.
But the reasons are complex. Indeed, one is precisely the opposite to which
Snowden alludes. Asian scientists live bifurcated internal lives鈥攖heir
rich classical intellectual culture is divorced from their scientific
work鈥攔estricting their scientific imagination and output.
Not so soft landing
Dave Fawthrop seems to think that if cometary debris happens to be in a similar
orbit to the Earth’s around the Sun it will fall gently through the Earth’s atmosphere
(30 September, p 52).
This is not so. Just as it is
impossible to escape Earth’s gravitational field without having a velocity
relative to the Earth of at least 11 kilometres per second, any object reaching
the atmosphere from millions of miles away will be accelerated by the Earth’s
gravity to more than 11 kilometres per second by the time it hits the planet.
This is enough to turn small specks into blazing meteors that can be seen from
miles away. You just cannot cuddle up to Mother Earth.
Tapping the Net
Before anyone gives too much credence to Charles Clarke’s rambling apologia
for the government’s pernicious and paranoid proposals for poking around
everyone’s e-mails
(7 October, p 55)
and his protestation that the government is
technically up to scratch, they might like to consider a reply he gave to the
Home Affairs Committee on Firearms Control.
“What are you going to do about illegally held firearms?” he was asked. By
definition, the whereabouts, type, calibre and numbers of illegally held
firearms are unknown; that is to say there is no available data on them.
However, that does not deter Mr Clarke. “I give great priority,” he expounds,
“to establishing a database of weapons. I believe that that will be the key
weapon to reduced levels of possession of illegally held firearms” (Minutes
of Evidence, paragraph 391, p 54).
Wow, a problem solved by a database without data. There’s got to be a Nobel
prize in that somewhere. I can’t imagine a safer pair of hands to trust our
cyber chat to.
Letter
Charles Clarke is missing a point about communication to which all
governments have had a blind spot. Remember the furore when CB radio was
illegal, and a noble Lord said that it was unwise to allow the public at large
access to communication that was uncontrolled by government?
All forms of communication should be unfettered by regulation except the
existing controls in law such as libel and incitement.
Criminals and subversives will still communicate by some means, whether it is
over the Internet, on a mobile phone or using semaphore. Attempting to regulate
the medium is a simple waste of money. It is no use gleaning intelligence, if
the resources to act on that information aren’t available or the information
gained is unusable in a court.
Every time we hear of “uprisings” such as a countryside march, a fuel tax
protest or football hooliganism, the media claims, “shock horror”, that they
were probably organised on mobile phones and the Internet, as if these forms of
communication were somehow subversive in their own right.
No matter how totalitarian the regime, people will always communicate by any
means available to them. Governments should concentrate their resources on
eliminating the problems in our society that cause people to “rebel”, not
attempt to deny their democratic rights to communicate their dissatisfaction.
Fusion confusion
Fusion energy truly is pie in the sky when even ardent proponents admit that
practical electricity generation is at least 50 years away
(14 October, p 3
and p 4).
The rhetoric about clean and abundant fusion power is oddly reminiscent of
the 1960s, when it was claimed that nuclear (fission) power would be “clean” and
“too cheap to meter”.
In fact, fusion shares some of the worst characteristics of fission. Both
technologies, but especially fusion, are very expensive with highly complex
engineering requirements. If built as proposed in Clarington, Ontario, the
International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) would create large
amounts of radioactive waste that would be harmful for at least 100 years. ITER
would also routinely and accidentally release tritium, a radioactive isotope of
hydrogen that may cause cancer and birth defects when ingested.
The US pulled out of the ITER programme in 1998. The Canadian government
ended its own fusion research programme in 1997, but has stayed on in the ITER
project as a junior partner of the European Union. High cost was one reason for
these decisions: even the scaled-down ITER reactor is expected to cost about
$8 billion. And if environmental benefits are the goal, then let’s admit
that renewable energy and efficiency are the real technologies of the
future.