New Research Shows Air Pollution Linked to Higher CoVID-19 Death Rates
A recent study from Harvard research has shown that air pollution in the US is linked to higher death rates of CoVID-19. Research shows that people who live in counties with high levels of PM 2.5 were 15% more likely to die from CoVID-19.
PM 2.5 is an invisible pollutant made up of microparticles that can seep into the lungs and bloodstream. PM 2.5 comes from burning wood and coal, power plants, and automobile exhaust. It is considered one of the most dangerous invisible pollutants, and high levels have been linked to heart disease, diabetes, and chronic bronchitis as well as other respiratory illnesses. All of these conditions are underlying conditions that can make CoVID-19 fatal. An estimated 78% of US patients in the ICU from CoVID-19 have underlying health conditions.
Polluted air is linked to some of the underlying conditions that make COVID-19 more fatal. Seventy-eight percent of U.S. patients who have ended up in intensive care units from COVID-19 have underlying health conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, or chronic lung disease.
A study done in Italy has found similar results, linking air pollution to chronic respiratory conditions. Additionally, research done in 2003 in China showed a correlation between air pollution and death from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which is closely related to CoVID-19.
…it is well known that pollution impairs the first line of defense of upper airways, namely cilia (Cao et al., 2020), thus a subject living in an area with high levels of pollutant is more prone to develop chronic respiratory conditions and suitable to any infective agent
Despite the links of air pollution to CoVID-19 deaths, both the Trump administration and the EPA have cut back on environmental regulations in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. The EPA has announced that it would be letting factories and power plants, as well as other similar facilities, regulate themselves in the middle of the pandemic. The EPA will no longer issue fines for water, air or hazardous waste violations. Some states have discouraged or banned the use of reusable bags. Other states have passed laws to penalize pipeline protestors. Along with the EPA, the Trump administration has said they will no longer expect corporations to comply with pollution reporting or routine monitoring and that they will not be pursuing penalties for breaking these laws.
China’s Richest Man Donates a Million Masks and 500,000 Testing Kits to the U.S.
In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the media and the Trump administration have taken to blaming the coronavirus pandemic solely on China. The claims made by people in power go beyond pointing out that the virus originated in China, and in many cases are statements of fear-based racism. Trump has referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese Virus’ on several occasions. When China is mentioned in the media, it is largely negative.
The United States will be powerfully supporting those industries, like Airlines and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus. We will be stronger than ever before!
With the negative media coverage of China, there has been little to no reporting on the Chinese billionaire who recently shipped half a million testing kits and a million face masks to the U.S. On March 16th, Jack Ma announced that he would donate 1 million masks and 500,000 coronavirus testing kits to the U.S. through his charitable foundation. Additionally, Ma has donated $14.5 million for the development of a vaccine for the virus.
At this moment, we can’t beat this virus unless we eliminate boundaries to resources and share our know-how and hard-earned lessons. United we stand, divided fall!”
Jack Ma
Additionally, Ma’s foundation is donating materials to Japan, Italy, Korea, Spain, and Iran. The destination of the tests and masks has not been specified.
COVID-19 Lockdown Potentially Contributing to a Decrease in Seismic Noise
In light of the current pandemic, human activity and a large portion of transportation have been shut down. New research, from experts who study Earth’s movements, has indicated that shutdowns have resulted in a significant drop in seismic activity.
Campo Dei Fiori Square is seen empty on March 10, 2020 in Rome, Italy Campo Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images
Data from a seismometer at the observatory show that measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 in Brussels caused human-induced seismic noise to fall by about one-third”
Thomas Lecocq, seismologist, the Royal Observatory of Belgium
Seismic noise is the hum of vibrations within Earth’s crust. Earthquakes cause the Earth’s crust to vibrate, but on a day to day basis vehicles and industrial machines also add to vibrations. These day to day vibrations create background noise which can impair seismologists’ ability to detect other signals that occur at the same frequency. A decrease in seismic noise could allow detectors to recognize smaller earthquakes and increase efforts to monitor other seismic events such as volcanic activity.
If lockdowns continue in the coming months, city-based detectors around the world might be better than usual at detecting the locations of earthquake aftershocks”
Andy Frassetto, a seismologist at the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology in Washington DC
This research comes from Brussels and similar changes have been found in a station in Los Angeles. It’s estimated that not every monitoring station will see a significant difference in activity. Certain stations are located in remote areas to avoid human vibrations.
How Crisco toppled lard – and made Americans believers in industrial food
Perhaps you’ll unearth a can of Crisco for the holiday baking season. If so, you’ll be one of millions of Americans who have, for generations, used it to make cookies, cakes, pie crusts and more.
But for all Crisco’s popularity, what exactly is that thick, white substance in the can?
If you’re not sure, you’re not alone.
For decades, Crisco had only one ingredient, cottonseed oil. But most consumers never knew that. That ignorance was no accident.
A century ago, Crisco’s marketers pioneered revolutionary advertising techniques that encouraged consumers not to worry about ingredients and instead to put their trust in reliable brands. It was a successful strategy that other companies would eventually copy.
For most of the 19th century, cotton seeds were a nuisance. When cotton gins combed the South’s ballooning cotton harvests to produce clean fiber, they left mountains of seeds behind. Early attempts to mill those seeds resulted in oil that was unappealingly dark and smelly. Many farmers just let their piles of cottonseed rot.
It was only after a chemist named David Wesson pioneered industrial bleaching and deodorizing techniques in the late 19th century that cottonseed oil became clear, tasteless and neutral-smelling enough to appeal to consumers. Soon, companies were selling cottonseed oil by itself as a liquid or mixing it with animal fats to make cheap, solid shortenings, sold in pails to resemble lard.
Cottolene, made from a mix of cottonseed oil and beef fat, was one of the first commercial shortenings.
Alan and Shirley Brocker Sliker Collection, MSS 314, Special Collections, Michigan State University Libraries
Shortening’s main rival was lard. Earlier generations of Americans had produced lard at home after autumn pig slaughters, but by the late 19th century meat processing companies were making lard on an industrial scale. Lard had a noticeable pork taste, but there’s not much evidence that 19th-century Americans objected to it, even in cakes and pies. Instead, its issue was cost. While lard prices stayed relatively high through the early 20th century, cottonseed oil was abundant and cheap.
Americans, at the time, overwhelmingly associated cotton with dresses, shirts and napkins, not food.
Nonetheless, early cottonseed oil and shortening companies went out of their way to highlight their connection to cotton. They touted the transformation of cottonseed from pesky leftover to useful consumer product as a mark of ingenuity and progress. Brands like Cottolene and Cotosuet drew attention to cotton with their names and by incorporating images of cotton in their advertising.
When Crisco launched in 1911, it did things differently.
Like other brands, it was made from cottonseed. But it was also a new kind of fat – the world’s first solid shortening made entirely from a once-liquid plant oil. Instead of solidifying cottonseed oil by mixing it with animal fat like the other brands, Crisco used a brand-new process called hydrogenation, which Procter & Gamble, the creator of Crisco, had perfected after years of research and development.
From the beginning, the company’s marketers talked a lot about the marvels of hydrogenation – what they called “the Crisco process” – but avoided any mention of cottonseed. There was no law at the time mandating that food companies list ingredients, although virtually all food packages provided at least enough information to answer that most fundamental of all questions: What is it?
Crisco’s marketers were keen to avoid any mention of cottonseed in the brand’s ads. Alan and ShirBrocker Sliker Collection, MSS 314, Special Collections, Michigan State University Libraries.
In contrast, Crisco marketers offered only evasion and euphemism. Crisco was made from “100% shortening,” its marketing materials asserted, and “Crisco is Crisco, and nothing else.” Sometimes they gestured towards the plant kingdom: Crisco was “strictly vegetable,” “purely vegetable” or “absolutely all vegetable.” At their most specific, advertisements said it was made from “vegetable oil,” a relatively new phrase that Crisco helped to popularize.
But why go to all this trouble to avoid mentioning cottonseed oil if consumers were already knowingly buying it from other companies?
The truth was that cottonseed had a mixed reputation, and it was only getting worse by the time Crisco launched. A handful of unscrupulous companies were secretly using cheap cottonseed oil to cut costly olive oil, so some consumers thought of it as an adulterant. Others associated cottonseed oil with soap or with its emerging industrial uses in dyes, roofing tar and explosives. Still others read alarming headlines about how cottonseed meal contained a toxic compound, even though cottonseed oil itself contained none of it.
Instead of dwelling on its problematic sole ingredient, then, Crisco’s marketers kept consumer focus trained on brand reliability and the purity of modern factory food processing.
Crisco flew off the shelves. Unlike lard, Crisco had a neutral taste. Unlike butter, Crisco could last for years on the shelf. Unlike olive oil, it had a high smoking temperature for frying. At the same time, since Crisco was the only solid shortening made entirely from plants, it was prized by Jewish consumers who followed dietary restrictions forbidding the mixing of meat and dairy in a single meal.
In just five years, Americans were annually buying more than 60 million cans of Crisco, the equivalent of three cans for every family in the country. Within a generation, lard went from being a major part of American diets to an old-fashioned ingredient.
Trust the brand, not the ingredients
Today, Crisco has replaced cottonseed oil with palm, soy and canola oils. But cottonseed oil is still one of the most widely consumed edible oils in the country. It’s a routine ingredient in processed foods, and it’s commonplace in restaurant fryers.
Crisco would have never become a juggernaut without its aggressive advertising campaigns that stressed the purity and modernity of factory production and the reliability of the Crisco name. In the wake of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act – which made it illegal to adulterate or mislabel food products and boosted consumer confidence – Crisco helped convince Americans that they didn’t need to understand the ingredients in processed foods, as long as those foods came from a trusted brand.
In the decades that followed Crisco’s launch, other companies followed its lead, introducing products like Spam, Cheetos and Froot Loops with little or no reference to their ingredients.
Early packaging for Cheetos simply advertised the snack as ‘cheese-flavored puffs.’
Once ingredient labeling was mandated in the U.S. in the late 1960s, the multisyllabic ingredients in many highly processed foods may have mystified consumers. But for the most part, they kept on eating.
So if you don’t find it strange to eat foods whose ingredients you don’t know or understand, you have Crisco partly to thank.
Police Dragged Man Off Bus After Philadelphia Said All Riders Have To Wear Masks For Coronavirus
At least seven Philadelphia police officers forcibly removed a man off of a city bus on Friday. People who were there say the man was removed for not wearing a mask.
The incident was caught on camera and the video was shared on Twitter by the Philly Transit Riders Union, an organization that advocates for public transit users. The organization is asking for the incident to be investigated.
While viewers aren’t able to see the events that led up to the officers’ arrival, the footage shows the man, who was not wearing a face mask, being dragged off the bus by several uniformed officers with police yanking at his limbs as he seems to resist being removed. He then tells them he wants their badge numbers.
According to the group, the man was pulled off the bus because he wasn’t wearing a face mask.
Industrial Livestock May Be Origin of COVID-19, Not Chinese Wet Markets
At this point, many epidemiologists do not believe that SARS-CoV-2 made the jump from animal to human in the infamous Wuhan wet-market. Since a lot of people caught it from the market back in January much of the media decided that the Chinese proclivities for wild animals were to blame for the pandemic. This helped perpetuate a racist narrative. Many are even calling for a ban on wet markets.
There is a growing body of evidence that points to a different origin story for Covid-19. We now know that none of the animals tested at the Wuhan seafood market tested positive and about a third of the initial set of reported cases in people in Wuhan from early December 2019 had no connection to the seafood market, including the first reported case. And we also now know, thanks to the leak of an official Chinese report to the South China Morning Post that the actual first known case of Covid-19 in Hubei was detected in mid-November, weeks before the cluster of cases connected to the Wuhan seafood market were reported.
…
The scientists conclude that SARS-CoV-2 evolved from natural selection and not genetic engineering in a lab, and they say that this natural selection occurred through two possible scenarios. One is that it evolved into its highly pathogenic form within humans. In this case, a less pathogenic form of the virus would have jumped from an animal to a human host and then would have evolved into its current form through an “extended period” of “undetected human-to-human transmission”. Under this scenario, there is no reason to believe that the Wuhan seafood market had anything to do with the evolution of the disease, even if it is quite possible that an infected person at the market could have transmitted it to others.
Farm animals can be an excellent incubator for virtual diseases that are evolving to make a jump to humans.
The overwhelming majority of farmed animals are kept in dark, unsanitary, overcrowded factory farms, which stresses their immune systems. Worse, they’re bred primarily for rapid growth and maximum output, not robustness, and their genetic similarity makes them especially likely to transmit disease to one another. Animal after animal, they are churned through the system, often on the same dirty floors, the same stagnant trucks, and the same slaughter lines. This system puts everyone’s health at risk.
But even if the first human was infected at the Wuhan market it’s still easy to point a finger at factory farming.
It’s true, in other words, that an expanding human population pushing into previously undisturbed ecosystems has contributed to the increasing number of zoonoses – human infections of animal origin – in recent decades. That has been documented for Ebola and HIV, for example. But behind that shift has been another, in the way food is produced. Modern models of agribusiness are contributing to the emergence of zoonoses.
EPA Approves Probable Carcinogenic Herbicide For Soybean Use Without Proper Public Review
Isoxaflutole is a herbicide that’s manufactured and sold by BASF, the second-largest chemical producer in the world, under the name brand name Alite 27. It’s currently used on corn plants in 33 states, and the EPA has recently registered the use of the chemical on soybeans in 25 different states. This registration is the Environmental Protection Agency’s assurance that Isoxaflutole does what the label says it does and should not pose an unreasonable hazard to your health. Isoxaflutole is classified by the EPA as a probable human carcinogen, and it is phytotoxic to non-target aquatic and terrestrial plants and moderately toxic to freshwater fish.
The EPA requested public comment on the proposed registration decision and cited that feedback as a key factor in the organization’s decision to move forward with the registration. All fifty-four comments left during the public review period were positive, a show of overwhelmingly support for the use of Isoxaflutole on soybeans.
Alexandra Dapolito Dunn, EPA Assistant Administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, says,
We’ve heard from farmers across the country about the importance of having new means available to combat economically-damaging weeds…We listened and believe this action balances the need to provide growers with the products necessary to continue to provide Americans with a safe and abundant food supply while ensuring our country’s endangered species are protected.”
The comments reviewed by the EPA did not include feedback from environmental groups and journalists. The EPA circumvented a critical part of the usual chemical approval process, opening the herbicide registration for public comment without notifying the Federal Register. The Federal Register notifies the press and environmental groups of significant rule changes and without this notice, the opponents of Isoxaflutole were unable to register their comments.
Nathan Donley is a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, a national, nonprofit conservation organization. He stated,
The press release caught everyone off guard. We were just waiting for the EPA to open the comment period, and we never saw it.”
