Thomas Fuller of the San Francisco Examiner has a great piece which summarizes the issue of climate and malaria and Mann. Like with the imagined increase in hurricane frequency due to global warming, so it goes with malaria. There’s no correlation. The premise is false.
On Monday, May 17th, I had the privilege of sitting on a panel at the Heartland Institute Chicago ICCC4 conference with regular WUWT contributor Dr. Indur Goklany. He gave his views on the declining mortality we’ve seen worldwide and has published several pieces here on WUWT. He also the author of the book: “ The Improving State of the World”. “Goks” (as his friends call him) gave a PowerPoint presentation on declining mortality in a warming world and you can view the PPT File here.
I’ve culled one of the slides he presented below. If this doesn’t offer proof that when it comes to mankind that “warmer is better”, I don’t know what would. Note the reversal in the southern hemisphere with Australia and New Zealand.
But the most interesting slide is number 10, showing the drop in Malaria worldwide:
Thomas Fuller covers the Mann-Malaria issue below:
Correspondent Barry Woods has done all the heavy lifting on this story, so if you like it, kudos to him–any errors of course are my responsibility.
In the Guardian today there is an article following on about the story of malaria and climate change. I like the quote from Peter Gething of Oxford: “If we were to go back to the 1900s with the correct climate change predictions for the 20th century, modellers would predict expansion and worsening of malaria and they would have been wrong, and we believe they are wrong now.” That’s because despite global warming for the past 30 years, the geographic extent of malaria has lessened, leading logical thinkers to guess that climate change has not worsened the spread of malaria.
Gething was referring to his study published yesterday in Nature that found that bednets and drugs will influence the spread of malaria far more than will climate change, challenging fears that warming will aggravate the disease in Africa.
Many researchers have predicted that rising temperatures will cause malaria to expand its range and intensify in its current strongholds. But unlike usual models, which aim to predict how climate change will affect malaria in the future, researchers looked at how warming affected the disease throughout the last century.
They used a recent epidemiological map of the global distribution of the major malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, and compared this with historical data on malaria’s prevalence in the 1900s.
The researchers — whose work was published in Nature yesterday (20 May) — found that despite global warming, the prevalence of malaria decreased, which they attribute to disease and mosquito control programmes.
Or so you would think. But Matthew Thomas thinks differently. Matthew Thomas said that the study “plays down the potential importance of climate [change]”.
Who is Matthew Thomas? He is a researcher at… Penn State. Matthew Thomas is a researcher… at Penn State… who has just won a $1.8 million grant to study the influence of environmental temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases. Think he has a dog in this hunt?
Ask his co-investigator on the project. Michael Mann…
Where do we ask for a refund?
…
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I’m quoting from an online article oriented to the continuing professional education requirements of defense attorneys (and secondarily to the medicolegal education of American physicians, who are – in effect – perpetually living in a condition resembling being staked out on a mudflat in alligator country).
Under the Social Security Act [42 U.S.C. § 1320(a)(7).], the Office of the Inspector General must exclude a physician from Medicare and Medicaid participation for:
* Conviction for any criminal offense related to a federal or state health care program;
* Conviction for a crime relating to patient abuse;
* Conviction for a felony connected to health care and involving fraud, theft, embezzlement, breach of fiduciary responsibility, or other financial misconduct; and
* Conviction for a felony involving a controlled substance.
The author goes on to observe that “Thus Medicare/Medicaid exclusion mirrors the general characterization of medical and professional licensing law as a veritable house of cards where the removal of one can cause the rest to quickly follow suit.”
I find this professionally hilarious, inasmuch as more and more physicians in America are flatly refusing to see Medicaid clients, and are increasingly – if not declining to accept any more Medicare patients – opting out of Medicare entirely.
But, then, that’s how Obamacare is set up to work. You, the beneficiary of our Marxist Messiah’s largesse, can have “health care” as a National Socialist Party freebie.
Of course, you’re not going to be able to find doctors willing to undertake your routine “health maintenance” care, thus obviating all the cost savings associated with preventive regimes.
This in turn will provide an even greater cost savings for Barry Soetoro and his little ACORN elves, ’cause if people can’t find a service provider to fulfill Barry’s promises of bread and circuses, Barry’s goons don’t have to shell out for it. Ain’t socialism just wonderful?
But that’s pertinent to Dr. Michael Mann’s latest rootings in the public trough, getting himself access to another $1.8 million in taxpayer money, in that it gives us to wonder whether there are parallel elements in the U.S. Code pertinent to the exclusion of people convicted of criminal fraud – such as the charges being presently pursued by the State of Virginia’s Attorney General. Ken Cuccinelli. against Dr. Mann – from federal funding such as this.
My only formal education is in medical jurisprudence. Anybody with better knowledge of the law pertinent to governmental research funding in these United States?
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I recall reading many years ago that Prof Reiter (of the Pasteur Institute in Paris) who is a specialist in Maleria was highly critical of the 2001 IPCC report stating that the report exagerated the possible increase in Malaria with climate change. His view was that Maleria was not a tropical disease and as many posters have noted, it was prevalent in Northern latitudes in the recent historical past. I seem to recall that Professor Reiter may even have been on the committee but resigned due to the biased nature of the 2001 report. Some readers may recall that when the House of Lords carried out some enquiry into climate change, the House of Lords particularly noted Professor Reiter’s comment and found that the 2001 report could not be justified in these parts.
Is Mann pretending to be an entomologist now? My father is an entomologist; my mother had malaria. I, therefore, assert that I am infinitely more qualified to conduct the study, and believe the 1.8 million should be immediately forwarded to me.
—
Indur M. Goklany takes note of:
“…figures, which are both based on South African experience in KwaZulu, [that] show how, among other things, malaria cases and deaths in that region went up when DDT was replaced with pyrethroids, and then fell again when DDT was brought back.”
The pyrethrins and pyrethroids figure large in the medical management of lice infestations (pediculosis), and treatment options have been trending away from lindane to permethrin applications for the past couple of decades owing to the potential for neurotoxicities with lindane use.
I would draw the readers’ attention to the fact that DDT use within residential spaces for the suppression of malaria vectors has unintended additional beneficiary effects.
First, it suppresses other insect vectors of infectious diseases. Anybody out there familiar with the devastating effects of typhus in Italy during World War II, and the almost astonishingly effective address of that deadly disease through the widespread application of DDT “louse powder”?
Second, DDT applied in residential areas reduces the damages done by insects exploiting humans’ storage of foodstuffs, which are considerable in and of themselves. Ants in the pantry and cockroaches in the wainscoting in a temperate climate are nothing compared to what happens to foods not hermetically sealed in a tropical area.
The pyrethroids are nowhere near as effective in these secondary functions, and are themselves to certain extents hazardous to humans when employed to suppress the mosquito vectors of the Plasmodium pathogen species.
As others have observed, there is no panacea. Attacking the vectors with insecticides is helpful. Recognizing that patient factors such as large populations of immune hosts with subclinical and/or nonfatal P. falciparum infections creates a reservoir of incubators for the pathogen is perhaps more important.
Like it or not, in sub-Saharan Africa in particular, there are genetic factors (such as various of the genetic hemoglobinopathies) which are conducive to the maintenance of a humongous population of human malaria carriers. Only barrier methods – bed netting, better housing with “bug-proof” screens – can mitigate the reproduction of the Plasmodium species by denying their vectors access to both infected hosts and new breeding grounds for the parasite.
Malaria is, in fact, a kind of racial curse. In terms of pathogen fitness, a sort of “modus vivendi” has been achieved between the Plasmodium species (including the murderous P. falciparum) and the authochthonous population of sub-Saharan Africa in particular.
This must be recognized. It is not only necessary to re-institute the widespread use of DDT and similarly effective insecticides but also to confront the people whose skin color it is not politically correct to mention that they’ve got to stop sleeping without protection against mosquitoes.
They are – genetically, intrinsically, inescapably – a helluva big part of their own collective problem with malaria.
And now I’ll accept my share of that $1.8 million dollars being funneled into Dr. Mann’s pockets. I think I can make better use of it than he can, and I’m certainly more deserving of it.
—
Grumpy Old Man says:
May 23, 2010 at 1:16 pm
Malaria kills millions of people. DDT may kill a few and damge some. Use the DDT. Climate has very little to do with malaria. Yes, it is associated with hot countries but in the past it has been prevalent in Northern Europe. Good housing and the drainage of stagnant water helps. How someone like Mann can a grant to study this is beyond belief. No background in Epidimiology; exposed as a fraudster in climate science. Whose taxes are paying for this? Do you live in a democracy or what?
We really are in the age of the headline writer, someone writes an erroneous headline and posters sound off about it without ever bothering to actually read the article. Try reading the article! Another Grumpy Old Man
You’ll want to check this post out:
http://climateprogress.org/2010/05/23/climate-change-and-malaria/
REPLY: Certainly predictable, Romm can’t handle anything that might deflect away from his alarmism, so he labels everyone else incompetent and himself as the sole hero who can see the truth. The chorus of climate crickets there sound the same too. -A
“Those skeptics are like mosquitoes…”(*)
(*)Professor Mannsimian
The people who keep repeating that more AGW –> more mosquitoes —> more malaria haven’t been paying attention to the U.S. and Canada since the 1950’s. We haven’t lost any significant numbers of mosquitos over that period, but we did kill off the ones carrying the disease. The ones that fly around and play mini-dracula now don’t carry the disease. So, it seems clear that if we use DDT to kill the mosquitoes until malaria goes away anywhere in the world where there is malaria, just as we did in North America back 50 or so years ago, then it doesn’t matter how many new mosquitoes are born “because of man-caused global warming” or any other reason: they won’t transmit malaria because it will be gone. Why is there so much credence placed in the output of computer models which, first of all, is not data but guesses and second of all contradict the observable genuine data? Would I believe in such foolishness if I had a PhD in some sort of alleged “science”? Why do so many folks believe in computer outputs instead of their own eyes, memories and reason? Why are so many of those folks in charge??
—
Mike directs attention to an explicitly fascist/warmist propaganda site (or are they calling themselves “progressives” again this week?) post on how “climate change” must be the only significant factor in the spread of malaria within the “developing” polities.
I take particular delight in the first line of that 23 May 2010 spew: “
”
There’s the beginning and the end of it, not so? The hysteria and the hype must be pressed, and for the unnamed writer of this post (apparently former U.S. Department of Energy official Joseph J. Romm), there’s a persistent whine about how “…the media has been providing a false balance in its choice of experts to quote….”
Jeez. So it’s heretical and evil and nasty to afford consideration to any deviation from the Cargo Cult Science dogma of the AGW priesthood, eh?
Truth to tell it just delights me to read this specimen’s gripe about “…the coverage by the status quo media” and its whimper about how “That’s because most of the media have been suckered by the antiscience crowd (and lame messaging by scientists and others) into believing that the threat of global warming has been oversold when, in fact, the reverse is true.”
So Dr. Romm wants – without genuine challenge as to factual validity – the observations and opinions of colleagues whose findings are contrary to his own to be disregarded as had been the case in the halcyon days before Climategate, when Dr. Romm’s maunderings were accepted by the “status quo media” without any effort to secure balance of any kind whatsoever.
Well, hell, Dr. Romm. And my growing grandkids now look back nostalgically to those years in which the adults in the family strove conscientiously to maintain the Santa Claus myth. Time passes, people learn better, and all your wishful whimpering isn’t gonna get that toothpaste back into the tube, is it?
Those who have read my own comments on this thread with regard to patient population factors in sub-Saharan Africa which conduce far more puissantly to the persistence and virulence of malaria than does climate must appreciate that outside his narrow field of disciplinary specialization, Dr. Romm – like the rest of the committed AGW religionists – is a bloody ignoramus.
It’s not that I’m a fan of Oliver Cromwell (though I confess to have really enjoyed the hell out of the Cromwell biopic released in 1970, and I freely acknowledge that it was the English Civil War and the subsequent rumbustiousnesses culminating in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that led directly to our own American Revolution), but I do like that quote of his words to Parliament, which I direct to the fuming Dr. Romm and the rest of the warmist fellahin:
—
—
Ike writes about:
Again and again and again, it must be borne in mind that the experience of “the U.S. and Canada since the 1950′s” as well as in southern Italy since about 1969 has demonstrated that it is host population factors that are key to malaria control.
The fact of the matter is that the “significant numbers of mosquitoes” still observed (indeed, take note of those mosquito-borne viral encephalitides about which we have heard so much in recent decades) do not figure as prominently in the prevalence of Plasmodium-caused diseases as does the reduction in the number of humans participating in the Plasmodium species’ orgies of reproduction.
Reduce the number of people with subclinical and subacute malaria infections in any given region, and you hammer down the Plasmodium pathogens to the point at which they cannot maintain their presence in that region.
That’s what the happenings in “the U.S. and Canada since the 1950′s” tells us about this disease. Not one goddam thing else really needs to be known about it, “climate change” included.
—
Objectively speaking, both mosquitos and humans are hosts and vectors for P. falciparum depending on point of view. To a mosquito humans are the vector that passes it from mosquito to mosquito. It is a single cell eukaryote with both asexual and sexual reproductive phases in its life cycle. The asexual phase is in the human and the sexual phase is in the mosquito. Falciparum is by far the deadliest species in the plasmodium genus and doesn’t do well in climates that are either too cold and/or too dry for its primary mosquito vector:
Plasmodium has a very small genome for a eukaryote at about 22 million base pairs if I recall correctly. It is probably the most intensely studied eukaryote on the planet and one of fastest evolving due to small genome size and around 100 million trillion new individuals each year. About 1 trillion individual parasites in each human at the peak of an infection and about 100 million people infected every year. With that many individuals and a baseline mutation rate of about 1 nucleotide change per 10^9 base pairs copied every possible single point mutation is “tested” several times over in the population of every infected human. Resistant strains to anti-malarial drugs that are defeated by a single point mutation pop up rather quickly. Atovoquone is an example. It’s not very effective used alone. Drugs that require 2 or more SPMs for resistance take a lot longer to evolve a resistant strain. Chloroquine is an example where 2 or possibly 3 SPMs are required. If none of the required SPMs alone confers any survival value then it’s just about statistically impossible for resistance to develop. Interestingly there has never been a strain identified that survives in a human with congenital sickle cell anemia which is probably the only reason the sickle cell mutation in humans wasn’t weeded out by natural selection.
Just some trivia I happen to know about it although I had to look up the temperature range of its primary mosquito vector. I had it in my mind that mean winter temperature of about 42F was its lower limit.
I too find Joe Romm to be a bit self-important at times. But, the point of his post is that malaria alarmism was never justified. He reviews several studies and the IPCC report to back up his claim. He does believe the potential changes in the range of malaria due to climate change should be of concern and continued study – this would be true whether climate change was natural or man-made. Anthony and Rich Matarese dismiss Romm’s post as alarmist, when it is the opposite.
And can we not call each other fascist? I get edited for using the d-word here!
REPLY: It’s hard to see past his style for the message, perhaps I’m guilty of not reading deeply enough, but from my perspective it looks like many other essays he has written. Note that he bashes Revkin at the end, where Revkin points out exactly what you say: “The alarm was not justified”.
– Anthony
—
Dave Springer observes that “Objectively speaking, both mosquitoes and humans are hosts and vectors for P. falciparum depending on point of view.”
Regional climate effects upon mosquito populations are really not relevant here. Bear in mind that no matter how efforts at mosquito control had been undertaken in temperate zones (these United States, Canada, southern Italy), the control of the Plasmodium species was not effected until the human hosts’ participation in the parasite’s life cycle had been eliminated.
It’s good to clobber the insect vectors. It helps, but it’s by no means enough. It’s necessary to get the human beings out of the loop. As Dave observed:
With that in mind, chemotherapy and chemoprophylaxis will not do the job, and they’re really not to be relied upon in any grand scheme of malaria control.
These pathogenic parasite species must be denied access to specimens of Homo sapiens who can serve as hosts for the asexual reproductive phase in their life cycles. It is really impossible permanently to knock down the skeeter population that can be exposed to the Plasmodium species, and it is in human beings – keep this in mind – that the pathogens’ resistance mutations primarily take place and are made available for spread to biting mosquitoes and thence to other people.
As for “…the only reason the sickle cell mutation in humans wasn’t weeded out by natural selection,” I direct Dave‘s attention to African trypanosomiasis, which is another goddam good reason for carrying Hemoglobin S around in one’s red cells if one happens to live anywhere in which Trypanosoma brucei gambiense, T. brucei rhodesiense, and their insect vectors are prevalent.
As for my own part, note that I descend from il Mezzogiorno, and like millions of other southern Italians, I’ve got alpha-thalassemia – which is yet another congenital hemoglobinopathy which confers survival benefits in the presence of potentially severe P. falciparum infection. Lotsa microcytic red blood cells (an absolute polycythemia) making for an environment which is to some considerable extent not conducive to merozoitic invasion and the prosperity of Plasmodium trophozoites within them smaller-than-normal erythrocytes.
These quasiprotective hemoglobinopathies are both a blessing and a curse, speaking as to population impacts upon malaria virulence. See my earlier posts on this thread.
—
re; malaria in north America and northern Europe
It didn’t become common in these places until there was a fair number of people traveling trade routes back and forth to the tropical endemic regions. An infected human can bring it to a temperate climate in the summer when the mosquitos are active enough to spread it. The winter generally kills it off and more infected travelers have to bring it back. Less virulent strains P.vivax and P.malariae do better in temperate climates. It’s suspected those species can enter a dormant phase in humans, which is probably genetically connected to the lower virulence, and emerge to spread again when the weather warms up enough for mosquitos to start biting. They all reproduce in their sexual phase in the gut of an adult mosquito so if it’s too cold for adult mosquitos it’s too cold for Plasmodium. Mosquitos generally don’t overwinter as adults in cold climates although it’s possible in some protected niches like deep inside big hollow logs. The typical route is mosquito eggs that lie dormant through the winter at the bottoms of ponds that don’t completely freeze.
So it’s not impossible for P.falciparum to survive northern winters but a combination of factors makes it far more difficult than in the tropics and hence it wasn’t so difficult to eradicate in colder climates with a modest artificial effort to make it even more difficult.
—
Mike tries valiantly to defend Dr. Romm by saying that this specimen had made “….the point of his post…that malaria alarmism was never justified…” and that “He does believe the potential changes in the range of malaria due to climate change should be of concern and continued study – this would be true whether climate change was natural or man-made.”
Bilge. I quote from Dr. Romm’s cited Web log post:
In other words, Dr. Romm does very much ascribe the prevalence of malaria to “global warming,” which in turn he ascribes to anthropogenic carbon dioxide forcing.
A “second order effect” is nonetheless an effect, and
As for the identity between “progressivism” and the other forms of socialism – including fascism – let us consider the distinction between “pregnant” and “a little bit pregnant.”
Either one is by philosophy methodologically individualistic or one is collectivist and therefore socialistic. Is it possible to characterize the political “progressive” of today as someone who affords any real respect to the individual rights to life, to liberty, and to property?
As we look to the close of Dr. Romm’s post, we read (boldprint emphasis in the original) his impassioned reminder about:
So the message from Dr. Romm is ever and always what he has sustained, that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emission is the cause of “catastrophic” climate change, that the spread of malaria does link to anthropogenic global warming as a “second order effect,” and his explicitly “progressive” political assaults upon individual rights are “nonpartisan” to precisely the same extent to which the average reader of these comments can clean and jerk the Empire State Building.
—
— L. Neil Smith
Here’s some good news on the world’s public health front:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/health/24child.html?src=me
“Death rates in children under 5 are dropping in many countries at a surprisingly fast pace, according to a new report based on data from 187 countries from 1970 to 2010.”
Okay…so, if this is happening in a supposed “warming” world, shouldn’t more warmth equal less mortality?
The number one factor in reduction of morbidity/mortality is wealth, and a carbon-control scheme robs wealth and diverts funds from legitimate public health uses including conventional malaria control, nutrition and vaccination.
Putting the brakes on fossil energy usage at this point in human history, without a clearly superior/cost-effective alternative, would be no less than criminal.
@Rich Matarese
I didn’t find any discussion of sickle cell providing resistance to African sleeping sickness in the article you linked and a quick google didn’t reveal any other mention of a link either. Discussion about natural selection, sickle cell, and malaria is not hard to find. It’s one of the classic examples of natural selection in humans. It’s also a good example of how natural selection often resembles trench warfare – each side in the battle loses something and the “winner” is the one that can survive greater losses. For instance, chloroquine resistance comes about (working from memory) through mutations that alter efflux pumps on the cell membrane making them less specific so that they pump chloroquine out of the cell. It might be the other way around and it’s influx pumps mutated to become more specific and turning away chloroquine. In either case the altered specifity of the pumps alters their proper functioning for molecules other than chloroquine and the cell suffers for it. In the absence of chloroquine the mutations that confer the resistance quickly disappear from the population because without the drug the cells with the mutation are at a disadvantage to cells without the mutation. That’s trench warfare again. As soon as the battle is over the sacrifices in the trenches that won the battle are no longer needed.
It may be that the only effective way to fight MDR (multiple drug resistant) staph that’s rampaging through hospitals is a coordinated complete cessation of one or more of the antibiotics in the MDR suite so that the mutation goes away then start using them again but this time in a coordinated rotation so that the staph never gets a chance to build up the MDR suite again.
At any rate this is a subject of interest so if you could point me to a paper that talks about sickle cell providing some resistance to sleeping sickness I would appreciate it.
Is there some other source you can point me to that links sleeping sickness and sickle cell?
@ur momisugly CRS, Dr.P.H.
I don’t think any of the “alarmists” have said major health impacts from AGW were happening now. There is no reason to suppose a linear dependence.
I agree with your second point to a degree. But, if AGW is real and reduces world GDP (the Stern report estimated a 20% drop: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review), then doing nothing would have a “criminal” impact on the world’s poor. Most discussions about GHG emissions reductions call for no reductions and allow for continued growth in third world GHG emissions and for developed countries to start reducing GHG emissions quickly – there is debate over what role big semi-developed countries like China and India should play. Now, I don’t claim to know if Stern is right, but both sides claim they want what is best so neither is morally criminal. We need to be able to look at the problem as one one balancing different risks. It is possible that the world’s leading scientific bodies are closer to the truth than the few skeptical researchers and a community of bloggers. Suppose there is a 30% chance the “warmists” are right. Shouldn’t we under take some modest mitigating actions? What if it is 50% or 70%?
Rich Matarese says:
May 23, 2010 at 7:01 pm
–
Dave Springer observes that “Objectively speaking, both mosquitoes and humans are hosts and vectors for P. falciparum depending on point of view.”
Regional climate effects upon mosquito populations are really not relevant here. Bear in mind that no matter how efforts at mosquito control had been undertaken in temperate zones (these United States, Canada, southern Italy), the control of the Plasmodium species was not effected until the human hosts’ participation in the parasite’s life cycle had been eliminated.
It’s good to clobber the insect vectors. It helps, but it’s by no means enough. It’s necessary to get the human beings out of the loop.
(Later, you use words to the effect that “humans are primarily the vector” …)
—…—…
I understood, from reading about the first mosquito control programs in Panama while building the Canal, that animals were a very important mid-life vector for the mosquitos – that Gorgas and his crew could not have succeeded without also stopping the pet and wild animal transmission.
True? Or more true for the other diseases (dengue fever, yellow fever, cholera, etc) he was attacking as well as malaria, but not malaria?
On the WHO maps of Malaria, in 1945 the disease was endemic in Archangelsk, Northern Russia, on the shore of the Sea of Barents. From Wikipedia, this cities’ yearly average temp is high 4.8C, low -2.7C.
The eradication of malaria from Western countries has nothing to do with temperature or climate. Warmer temperatures will not bring back malaria.
vukcevic says:
May 23, 2010 at 12:32 am
davidmhoffer says:
1900 to 1940 divergence in the CET summer – winter temperatures
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET5.htm
was due to temperatures ( anomalies ) moving in the opposite directions as shown here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CETt.htm>>
Interesting. I thought there might be a correlation with Beck’s claim of an abnormal jump in CO2 for that time period. His methods are highly criticized but here’s the link if you are interested http://www.biokurs.de/eike/daten/berlin30507/berlin9e.htm
Of more interest is the summer trend that you show versus the winter trend. You’re showing a steady decline from about 1750 to 1920 in summer temps, but when combined with the winter temps it would be an annual rise. The reason I find that curious is that all these tree ring studies by Mann et al report flat or slightly increasing temperatures for that time period. But since tree rings can only report the growing season (summer) they should be showing a decline not an increase. Not that they had any credibility left at all, but would be interesting to see if global summer temps follow the same pattern as CET (an increase in annual but a decline in summer).
I also think we should be looking at summer versus winter trends like you have. Since radiance varies with temperature to the power of 4, one would expect that any forcing, natural or otherwise, would have a more pronounced effect on winter temps than summer…. which your graph shows.
—
Writes RACookPE1978 of this deponent:
“(Later, you use words to the effect that ‘humans are primarily the vector’ …)”
Nah. I think you mistook my quote of Dave Springer as having been something I’d said.
For a human being to be considered a vector of infectious disease, there has to be human-to-human transmission as one of the primary modes of contagion. Venereal diseases (now called by the politically correct term “sexually transmitted diseases”) are infectious disorders in which human beings are the vectors. I’m not likely ever to characterize humans as anything but hosts and patients when it comes to a discussion of malaria.
Barring transmittal by way of blood products transfusions – which can and has happened – human-to-human contagion of malaria is not a problem.
When Gorgas was going after yellow fever, he was addressing a flavivirus pathogen – a bug quite different from the Plasmodium species – which in the wild cycles through sylvan primates as a host reservoir. In urban outbreaks (such as the Philadelphia epidemic of 1793), the yellow fever pathogen finds its hosting among human populations.
While there are some zoonotic Plasmodium species which can “cross over” to infect humans, to the best of my knowledge the four species responsible for human malaria (falciparum, ovale, vivax, and malariae) are not reservoir’d among any animal species, either domestic or feral. I came across a pretty good slidekit on parasitology and zoonoses online, and you’re welcome to dig into it.
A check on the CDC Web site supports this contention that there are no non-human critters who play the same role in the life cycles of the four pathogenic species of Plasmodium that we do. Admittedly, I took my first formal courses in parasitology and infectious diseases some thirty-mumble years ago, and I’ve been out of the U.S. Public Health Service not much less time than that, but this ain’t rocket science.
Hm. I wonder if I can get CME credit for participation on this thread.
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@ur momisugly Mike, 8:55 pm
“I don’t think any of the “alarmists” have said major health impacts from AGW were happening now. There is no reason to suppose a linear dependence.”
—
REPLY: Mike, thanks. I’m in the field of public health and have been regularly inundated with presentations blaming increased range of hanta-virus infected rodents etc. directly on global warming/climate change.
I had the pleasure to see Dr. John Holdren, chief science advisor to Pres. Obama, give this presentation to the National Association of Engineers “Grand Challenges” summit in Chicago:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/jph-chicago-04212010.pdf
Please see Slide 24/54:
Harm is already occurring widely. Worldwide we’re seeing, variously, increases in
• floods
• wildfires
• droughts
• heat waves
• pest outbreaks
• coral bleaching events
• power of typhoons & hurricanes
• geographic range of tropical pathogens
All plausibly linked to climate change by theory, models, observed “fingerprints”
—–
This powerpoint presentation should be required reading! Take a deep breath, global health is improving substantially.
—
Dave Springer complains: “I didn’t find any discussion of sickle cell providing resistance to African sleeping sickness in the article you linked and a quick google didn’t reveal any other mention of a link either.
Sorry. I recall a lecturer in parasitology having discussed the perception that sickle trait (Hemoglobin AS) conferring improved survival in cases where a human was infected with Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense, but that was back in the ’70s, and African trypanosomiasis is, for most of us stay-at-home American “primary care providers” a real zebra. I haven’t so much as seen a freshly-caught T. brucei of either principal subspecies under a microscope in more than three decades.
Went scrambling for my antique Parasitology textbook, but no luck. I think my daughter (now with three kids of her own) copped it to press flowers back when she was in grammar school.
With regard to multi-drug resistant organisms (MDRO’s), the most recent CDC guidelines were released in 2010, and the IDSA guys are planning their guidelines on the subject for release in the Fall of this year.
The notion of reserving certain antibiotics for drug-resistant strains of particular pathogens is not novel, but getting people to agree on what they should hold back is tough. In my personal experience, there are considerations other than prevailing patterns of resistance that have to be appreciated, particularly relative toxicities, individual patient allergies and other sensitivities, and drug-drug interactions.
I confess that most of my interest in non-bacterial infectious diseases over the past couple of decades has been focused on HIV-1 and Hepatitis C virus (HCV), which is where the diagnostic and therapeutic juggling act gets really hairy.
Hm. I’d like to see the AGW fraudsters find some kind of causative link between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and patients whose livers get fried by that goddam flavivirus.
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CRS, Dr.P.H. extols yet another one of Barry Soetoro’s apparatchiki and his “drop your pants, bend over, and pray for Vaseline, ’cause we’re gonna screw you!” presentations.
Nah. I ain’t buyin’ that line of crap, either.
Reasoning predicated on erroneous and flagrantly false premises can never be anything but erroneous or mendacious.
As always, that global warming has been taking place over the past couple of hundred years there is no doubt. That this warming is to any significant extent anthropogenic has not only not been proven, but there is one helluva lot of observational evidence supporting sound theory to the effect that it bloody well can’t happen.
Therefore inflicting Barry Soetoro’s “solutions” on this ill-defined problem can have no effect other than economic dislocation on a scale rivaling that induced by widespread aerial bombardment.
Before I see another cent expended on AGW “research,” how about a few bucks spent in getting us a copy of Barry’s long-form printed-on-paper signed-and-embossed official State of Hawaii birth certificate, okay?
As if such had ever existed.
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