INDIGENOUS AMERICANS, NORTH AND SOUTH

Central American refugees

This is a diatribe after keeping up with the news.  It is about what is perceived as unwanted immigration of children but is far more than that.

One can interpret the inundation of the Mexican border with Central American refugees as a continuation of the whole population demographic change over the past centuries as indigenous people were forced out of their economies of ecology (being where they were) and into a placeless common culture in which they are no longer people but only objects, paying a high price in suffering.  I’m talking about Native Americans on the prairie little more than a century ago.  They are just recovering now, learning how to organize for prosperity and hoping to create the predictable stability that supports commerce.  It’s not easy and many loved individuals get lost along the way, maybe to booze and autos, maybe to diabetes or cancer.  Some to drugs.

Honduras

There are two interlocking cultures on these conjoined American continents: one is formed by these refugees, like other refugees around the planet whose horizons have shrunk to day-by-day survival.  Ties to group are limited to those immediately present.  Hope is replaced by expedience.  Morality and piety are destroyed.  This is a pandemic as surely as the more obvious disease/hunger/exposure/violence complex that defines people with no assets.  Their bodies are their only wealth and even they are steadily eroded.  The only comfort becomes fatalism and superstition.  They learn to evade all authorities, which in response causes law-enforcers to be predatory, seizing and holding those they suspect. The machinery of justice is snarled and jammed.  Expense mounts.

Third from the right is the president of Mexico

The other culture is that of the 1% who live in blissful denial -- a manufactured world of immediate “rewards”.  A person can only consume so much food, clothing, furnishings, and so on.  The rest of the wealth has to be only symbolized as a corporation, a false person, governed by tax laws and shareholder negotiations.  The refugee culture is governed by raw force and hunger.  The 1% now occupy walled and sequestered zones.  In the frontier past it was the indigenous peoples who were pushed into the spare land and confined there.  Now it is the privileged who take cover in guarded places while the disemplaced people wander back and forth through megacities and vegetable fields.

Conjoined continents

Surrounding both of these cultural networks is the real world of all the other living creatures and resource assets of the planet, including climate and water, but also plants, insects and small mammals.  So far we have been aware of the micro-interactions of disease like TB, HIV, and HepC which vector from human to human, while in the background has been the potential of something cross-species like bird flu or the present Ebola outbreak which seems to originate in bats.  Malaria, of course, is also a vector with wings, much tinier ones on the mosquitoes moving north due to climate change.  Wings cross walls.  All these codes are DNA.  They all fit together.  Every bit of life on the planet has universal code that can be added or subtracted to other creatures.

Honduras

The DNA of these Central American tribal children from high mountains in undeveloped areas is pristine, uncompromised by the chemicals of modern industrial ag chemicals and cities -- until they work in our fields.  Their culture is conservative, religious, and long-standing.  If they are able to find each other in the north and reconnect, perhaps through the Catholic church or maybe websites, they could be contributors to the whole of us.  They certainly look healthier and even cleaner than the Irish starvelings and hunched-over central European peasants after their steerage passage across the sea barely a century ago.

Dallas

Climate refugees have already begun to migrate within the United States.  My brother left the increasingly dangerous tornado alley of Oklahoma.  They say the Black population has returned South. A judge in Dallas has suggested the sheltering of 2,000 unaccompanied Central American children because, he says, as the only inland major city in Texas, they have already sheltered the refugees from New Orleans and other major storms.  

The other big cities in Texas big enough to absorb thousands of fleeing people are on the coast, potential -- perhaps inevitable -- victims themselves.  In time even the people who have evaded interception at the border will either make contact with others already here who can help them, or will die at unknown percentages.  At least no one will throw their bodies into huge industrial kettles to be doused with diesel and burned so no one can dig them out of burial pits.  We’ll just find small bones mingled with t-shirts that once had sparkles on the front, spelling out LOVE.

Maras, gangs that originated in the US

Two economic forces are interacting: one is the “civilized” world’s insatiable appetite for drugs that supply the illusion of grandiosity, and the other is the private armies of criminal soldiers of fortune who supply and enforce the distribution of the drugs, armed with US guns.  The United States are key to both forces, encouraging through media and politics the idea that power and domination are the meaning of life.  This is an idea shared and promoted by our right wing.  They prey upon the sense of danger in the vulnerable, both the quiet families of tribal villages in Central America AND ordinary Americans who are so afraid of children that they go armed in the streets as defense against teenagers in hoodies.  Pedophile is a term of contempt; pedophobe is an suburban disease. 

Underlying everything else is economics, both the channeling of it and the whipping of it into a frenzy of moremoremoremore.  More people out of work.  More small businesses closed down.  More people in prison.  Only now are we seeing the proof of our national culpability in manipulating other countries, sowing more seeds of terrorism and underculture, the dragon teeth of war.   People blame religion, but that’s just a disguise dragged in afterwards.  The corporate hierarchies of organized religion are as easily bought out as any other bureaucracy.

Heart Butte, Montana

So I’m storming around town, fulminating, over-reacting when the hardware store doesn’t have the part I need to make my toilet tank quit leaking, stopping to make contact with Corky at the motel so he’ll come by to help jack up my waste-stack this afternoon.  Home-owning is the matrix of wealth in this country, but at the cost of constant expense and maintenance.  But, hello!  Here’s a Blackfeet fellow peacefully smoking on the stoop of his room.  It’s Tim Weaselhead, a student from 1989-91 in Heart Butte.  We remember each other.

He looks good.  He was on a roofing crew in North Carolina for a few years, then doing demolition in Washington, D.C., and now working on an oil drilling crew.  He has two small children with Misty, a classmate who is living in New Mexico.  If you go to the blog called heartbreakbutte.blogspot.com and go down past the manuscript of the book I wrote about the place, you’ll find the yearbook from 1991.  Tim is in the eighth grade page, wearing a t-shirt that says NIKE.  He was a little guy then, but full of energy and ideas.  He is only a few generations from tribal children sent running for their lives through sub-zero snow, under attack from Baker's cavalry, little more than post-Civil War rabble.

So Tim Weaselhead is the hope.  He's the future.  He’s been taking classes at BCC.  He’s not quite an old-time Indian, but he’s clearly and confidently Blackfeet.  I’ve calmed down.  I’ll order online the part I need.  It’s too smoky to see the mountains today.  That means the fire crews will be out making money.  

A man from the midwest has contacted me to ask whether he should bring his family to a teaching job in Heart Butte.  What should I tell him?  The risks are major.  The rewards are quiet.  The decision is individual.

FREE RADICALS: Part 1

On the subject of sex, beginning with the phenomenon of meiosis, which is a molecular process that enables cells -- and therefore the creatures they constitute -- to create new life forms, and then moving “up” the evolutionary sequences through the past until we get to modern humans with fully functioning prefrontal cortexes that support ethics and empathy, what is worth reflection?  We get into so much trouble, but we love sex so much.  It saves us.

In such a potentially disconcerting context, I would hope to achieve a stance as a “consistent individuated person offering an non-anxious presence” * without passing judgment or making absolute rules.  The ethic here will be one of compassion and outcome, but as frank and oddball as I can get it.  The only outcome that counts is survival and I mean by that physical survival in this world, not some other.  Sometimes it is more compassionate to end survival, and that is an essential contradiction.  “Ethics” are meant to provide counsel in such a case.  Ethics also play a role in the reconciliation of essential differences between the individual and the group.

Fighting roosters

But at what point do such values become necessary?  Mammals?  Does an echidna or platypus have erotic thoughts?  What about birds?  Clearly they do, if one counts song, dance, and combat.  So the roots of sexual instincts must go back to before both birds and mammals branched off.  They are very old, basic -- driving survival.

Bonobos

I’ll start with Neanderthals because it appears that’s when art began and I’m going to assume art and eroticism are so closely related as to be nearly identical -- certainly overlapping.  But I’ll have to stipulate that jealousy, ownership, and sneaking around are present in chimpanzees.  Not bonobos.

Species are shaped by environments, behaviors of species are shaped by society.  Species characteristics and behaviors can produce misery without death or can produce pleasures that do lead to death.  Some parts of this puzzle are universal and some parts are specific to smaller locations.  Behavior that is normal in a small town will get you killed in some big cities.  A topless female on a French beach is fine; the same in Valier will get you in trouble.

I’m going to concentrate on sex as a social and psychological matter rather than as physical acts.  The law, even religious law, concentrates on actual observable actions because states of mind and intentions are hard to detect, much less define.  They make bad law.  Things like contact, penetration, force, and choice of “other” are concrete, perceivable.  The gray areas that persist are because emotion is both physical and mental, maybe observable in the physical world but mostly only available by introspection, empathy and implication.  

It may be that we will be able to perceive ideas on some calibrator some day, but for now I don’t care whether a person gets off on wiggling their big toe in someone’s armpit or licking Jello out of someone’s belly button.  I’m interested in the emotional content of the acts.  I will want to know what flavor of Jello that was and whether the armpit was shaved, because that’s what a writer wants to know.  Because the next step is what that flavor of Jello or state of armpit means to both participants.  Sexual acts are never meaningless.

I have very little experience with physical acts except conventionally and within marriage or from movies.  But part of the reason for that is that I find my emotional skills overwhelmed when it comes to acts of sex.   I care too much.  I wrestle with attachment, bonding, fusion, and notions of identity, partly because of my own individual development and partly because of moving among different cultural contexts, including those represented in books, movies, and the theatre.  I can control my behavior effectively and conservatively, but not my feelings.  This is partly what qualifies me for writing on the subject.  That’s what this blog is: not any one academic department, not any one cultural point of view, but rather writing of all sorts.  Often experimental.  Not always “in good taste.”

For instance, I would suggest that the sexual free spirits of the world (I'm discarding the alphabet categories as too compartmentalized and therefore prescriptive) are (at least in America) occupying the same societal and psychological niche that was once occupied by the autochthonous (native) tribes who seemed so free on the land -- that is, symbols of unfettered desires, acting out, self-funding in forbidden ways.  

So those in the typical culture both desire that that role and fear it to the point of attacking it, trying to criminalize it.  Anyone sexually atypical is either ennobled or degraded, depending on how the cultures and individuals play out against each other.  Some people seek the unknown ambiguous: other people are threatened and cope through rejection, destruction.  The reasons for the difference are worth investigating.

www.derekmurphyart.com

I'm also thinking about the idea that some have gone beyond the desire for intimacy to an ambivalent but obsessive desire for fusion.  Not just obligation or dependence, but loss of identity to the point of a kind of death -- zombiedom.  Or maybe childhood.  Infancy.  Making other people responsible for us, letting them control us.  And there are people willing to do that.  They say there is a growing preference for security over freedom.  It's always a trade-off.

Pornography is an experience rather than an object (certain representations or toys) and that’s why it can’t be pinned down.  What is a turn-on to one person is a shrug to another.  Likewise, its creation can be hot or cold.  To a Victorian a well-turned piano leg may be erotic, let alone a human foot, properly shod.  Pornography may be written in a state of feverish tumescence or not, but the response is always in the brain of the beholder.  The skill of the pornographer (those that ARE skilled) is understanding what the particular trigger is and how to switch it on.

The overbearing relationship of capitalism to sexuality is everywhere in all aspects from the arts of cosmetic enhancement, to the shaping of desire, to the ownership of people used in sexual ways against their will, to the surgical businesses of gender conversion or virginity restoration -- and then, flipping all that over, the well-being of families. 

We must always provide the survival shaping of children’s identities and relationships through their sensoriums, their management of food and sleep, their clothing, the provision of safety or risk, the music they hear, their bedtime stories -- all crucial and we are right to protect it. Survival is not just a matter of employability, but also a matter of sustaining families, however defined.

Disease.  The inability to eliminate AIDS (or any other pervasive disease like TB or Hep C or cancer or other sexually transmitted diseases) may NOT due to any lack of medicine (at least not that alone) but because even with a silver bullet med, there are always social, cultural and psychological structures that prevent access, compliance, or even knowledge that a cure exists.  A killer disease like diabetes is easily prevented by individuals changing their diets, treatable with careful use of meds.  Yet the rate of compliance is about 30%, the rate of testing is low, and stigma is still attached to being fat -- let alone the threat of blindness and amputation -- so diabetes persists.  Public meals are still unadapted, candy dishes are still on desks, even churches that host Weight Watchers meetings also serve pie after services.

What about the deep relationship between war and sex?  It deserves some thought.

 *  phrase from Edwin Friedman [Rabbi and Psychologist--"Generation to Generation" his most quoted book].  He said in counseling, "remain a non-anxious presence who always self-differentiates and stays connected."  Courtesy of Mark Miller.

ENTANGLED LIVES

1942, South Deer Creek, near Roseburg, OR

My mother on the far left, then my Aunt Allie, next my Great-Aunt Florence and some neighbor.

I got caught a little short on blogging today, so I’m going to reblog with some editing and comments.  For five years I sweated out rabies in Portland, OR, as an animal control officer in the field and then research and education coordinator.  One of my most effective tools for motivating the college kids who sold dog licenses door-to-door -- which meant the dogs got rabies shots -- was a movie of little kids in south Chicago dying of rabies.  No cure then, no cure now.  But we had preventive vaccinations.  No one knew whether they would work for sure.

By Nancy Walsh, Staff Writer, MedPage Today

Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco

A third instance of rabies transmission following organ transplantation has occurred, with a patient dying 18 months after receiving a kidney from a deceased donor who was not known to be infected with the rabies virus, researchers reported.

The extended incubation period was an unusual clinical feature because in the two previous episodes of transmission, all unvaccinated recipients developed symptoms within 6 weeks and died, according to Matthew Kuehnert, MD, of the CDC in Atlanta, and colleagues.

Also distinctive was the fact that three other individuals who received organs from the same donor remained asymptomatic and only developed rabies antibodies after post-exposure prophylaxis, the investigators wrote in the July 24/31 Journal of the American Medical Association.

Those previous cases had suggested "a high infectivity rate and an incubation period of approximately 6 weeks in unvaccinated immunosuppressed recipients of solid organs from donors with rabies," according to the investigators.

However, in the present case, that pattern wasn't followed. The organ donor was an apparently healthy male who had returned from a fishing trip and developed symptoms of nausea, vomiting, and paresthesias, and then seizures, altered mental status, dysphagia for liquids, and hemodynamic instability.

The presumed diagnosis at the time of death was ciguatera -- a marine toxin found in certain reef fish -- poisoning.

Family members reported no known exposure to rabies, and examination of the cerebrospinal fluid found no evidence of infectious disease. . .

The recipient initially was diagnosed with sciatica when seen for hip pain radiating to the leg, but was subsequently hospitalized with symptoms including fever, diaphoresis, and abdominal pain in the region of the transplanted kidney.

Encephalopathy followed, along with hemodynamic instability, and death occurred 3 weeks after admission . . .

It turned out that the donor had a history of exposure to wildlife, including trapping raccoons in North Carolina, and had been bitten twice by the animals, which were not available for rabies testing.

Only one previous case of rabies contracted from a raccoon bite has been reported, but they are the most commonly infected animal in the U.S.

Testing of retained serum and central nervous system (CNS) samples from the donor revealed encephalitis, necrosis of neurons, and intracytoplasmic inclusions in the cortex suggestive of rabies, along with viral antigens and RNA.

Gene sequencing of tissues from both donor and recipient revealed a 99.9% match of the N gene, and phylogenetic analysis traced the source as a single county in North Carolina, "confirming organ transplantation as the route of transmission," the researchers reported.

None of the three asymptomatic patients developed rabies, which has raised questions "about mechanisms of rabies virus spread within a host, the cells and tissues in which the virus resides during lengthy incubation periods, and how the virus evades the immune system," the investigators noted.

They suggested that contributing factors could include different immunosuppressive regimens in those patients following their transplants, the type of organ, and quantity of virus present, although the precise reasons remain uncertain.

Viruses are the code of life, but they could be considered either alive or not alive.  Raccoons are definitely alive, unless you’re some kind of frontiersman who needs a hat.  When I was an animal control officer there was a big old boar raccoon in my beat who was a pet, but sometimes got the idea that the humans were the pets.  Or pests.  Then maybe he’d bite them.  I took repeated reports and cautioned them to quarantine and watch the beast for symptoms of rabies.  The vet had given him dog immunization but no one knows whether it works on raccoons.  None of the people who were bitten developed rabies.  

No dog that has been vaccinated has ever developed rabies.  The people who do rabies research work with dogs let them have access to sunshine because rabies virus is killed by sunlight.  So it’s mostly carried by nocturnal animals, but a cow that has been bitten by a rabid animal can carry it for three years without developing symptoms -- and what if the cow bit you in those years?  No one knows.

The world is so full of complex codes, some of them in molecules and some of them in behavior patterns engraved on neurons, that on the one hand it seems impossible to even grasp what’s going on, much less predict.   And then you discover that CSI resources can not only discover that a kidney donor was carrying rabies but also track it to the species and the very county of the state where it lived.  But the key was knowing that the donor hunted raccoons.  Should that be on every organ donor questionnaire now?  “Have you ever hunted a raccoon?”   The veterinarian cautioned we who worked directly with dogs not to give blood, because we had undoubtedly picked up some strange “bugs”.

Few animals are as appealing to humans as dogs, but raccoons certainly are.  In childhood my brothers and I were exploring an old barn and found a couple of half-grown raccoons who were pets, though no one was around.  They climbed on our shoulders and searched our pockets and didn’t offer to bite.  We didn’t think about rabies or any danger at all.

There is no proven 100% effective vaccination for humans exposed to rabies, but there is a nearly 100% effective antidote developed in Israel where street pariah dogs still carry the virus.  The only problem is that it costs $5000 for a course of treatment and not all insurers will pay for it.  Recently some sources noted that a single veterinarian had taken on the task of keeping a supply of the med on-hand, which brings the cost down some.

There are several diseases that develop into dog epidemics, sweeping through the streets, and in fact raccoons are susceptible to dog distemper and whole populations can be wiped out. It is a single-stranded RNA virus of the family paramyxovirus and thus a close relative of measles and rinderpest.  Despite extensive vaccination in many regions, it remains a major disease of dogs.  

As far as I know, people don’t catch it, but when the puppies born under our studio got it and died, I burned their bodies.  I’ve had measles.  Maybe that protected me.  If dog distemper mutated in a way that allowed the dog distemper virus to infect humans, we might be looking at something very ugly indeed. 

(Don't worry -- photoshopped.  I hope.)

XYZ DISEASE

“If we were in the same room, I’d be willing to bet that you didn’t know that November is National XYZ disease Month.  Why should you?

“This event comes around every year at this time. I know about it only because public relations people write or call me to publicize something or other in connection with it.

“Trying to get people to think about XYZ disease for one month of the year is not my idea of effective advocacy. I think about XYZ disease a lot more often than that, and I guess that you do too. Even if we thought about XYZ disease all year long, that would be awareness, not advocacy.

“Some organizations that include the words “XYZ disease” in their names sponsor events that also include the word “cure.” They talk a lot about curing this incurable disease, and they have good reason to talk the talk, while failing to walk the walk. 

“Talking about curing XYZ disease raises money and awareness for these organizations to continue. This is fundraising, not advocacy. In fact, none of us who have XYZ disease are doing any advocacy well.

“In addition to writing about XYZ disease, I do some of what we call “patient advocacy.” But this is essentially advocating for better treatment and understanding of the needs of people with XYZ disease at the hands of our medical professionals.

“True advocacy is organizing to demand funding for research. Inspired by the successes of some disease movements, more than 1,000 disease advocacy organizations are lobbying Congress for medical research funding.”

This information comes from “Disease Politics and Medical Research Funding” by Rachel Kahn Best, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan in the October issue of the American Sociological Review. The full-text of Dr. Best’s article is at  http://asr.sagepub.com/content/77/5/780.full

But deciding whether XYZ disease is underfunded or not is a complicated question, Dr. Best tells me. “It’s also a complicated question whether a disease has enough advocacy or not,” she says. “It’s hard to rank diseases on these scales because there are lots of different ways to compare diseases, including mortality, prevalence, amount of suffering, and potential for scientific progress.”

I think that the biggest problem that XYZ disease advocacy faces is her last point. If somebody does find a cure for XYZ disease and succeeded in stopping it, that would indeed reduce suffering and save lives. The biggest XYZ disease organizations have long been promising a cure in five or 10 years.

It isn’t happening, and it’s not for lack of trying.  Reversing XYZ disease in this country is, however, a social problem, not a research problem. 

The strange thing is that socially other people -- even including some people who have XYZ disease -- continue to stigmatize victims.   Consequently, many people with XYZ disease do not talk about it or attempt to draw attention to it or themselves.  The result is that we can’t be much of an advocate for XYZ disease unless we talk and write about it.

More and more people will have XYZ disease as long as our society fosters it and those of us who have it remain silent. So let’s stop blaming our organizations for being ineffectual.

_________________

The above is ripped off from David Mendosa’s newsletter about diabetes.  Subscribe at <mendosa@mendosa.com>  Diabetes Update  Number 173: When to Check Your A1C.    I hope he will consider it good advertising.  I highly recommend subscribing, whether or not you have diabetes, because it applies to general health and because he fancies it up with lots of nature photos.  But also, I wanted to make the point that the problems people are having with attempts to get action and funding for specific diseases are not related so much to the kind of disease it is -- rare or not, stigmatized or not, affecting children or not -- as it is to the way we are structuring our activism.  There are so many things in our society that have become stale and pot-bound.  We need to do a lot of shaking-up and questioning.  And many people are realizing it.

Elizabeth Kahn Best is thinking about this.  In her article she says:

Using data on 53 diseases over 19 years, I find that in addition to securing direct benefits, advocacy organizations have aggregate effects and can systemically change the culture of policy arenas. Disease advocacy reshaped funding distributions, changed the perceived beneficiaries of policies, promoted metrics for commensuration, and made cultural categories of worth increasingly relevant to policymaking.

Basically she is recommending that patients, through advocacy organizations, get control of the federal budgeting allocations by vividly portraying the consequences of the disease (including both social costs in terms of suffering and in terms of dollars needed in the future) and making a case for the moral significance of funding.  She says,  “Advocacy organizations can produce three types of political outcomes: direct benefits, distributive changes, and systemic effects.”  This is worth reading about on her terms.

In addition I see something a little different.  First of all, disease is not just a nation-by-nation issue anymore.  As people move around more, as the climate changes so that vectors change their range, as diet changes, as poverty goes up instead of down, the problems are cross-border, cross-ocean, cross-class.  It has never been more true that if a Chinese peasant’s baby has the flu, we should worry.  This is highly political.  Though in the past the spread of a disease could be a long, gradual slope (the first known jump of HIV from chimp to human was in 1908 !)  today it can spread like wildfire, the way wildfire spreads today.

On a brighter note, many diseases appear to be converging, to be disorders of cellular-level systems that we daily understand better.  Doctors have been saying for some time that when we get to the level where we can cure AIDS, we will be able to cure and REVERSE a whole cluster of afflictions.  They are messed-up feedback loops, missing molecules, misfiring mechanisms -- stuff we didn’t even know existed ten years ago.  Or maybe even two weeks ago.  The germ theory is old-fashioned.  The doctors are not so much bug-hunters now.  They are code-readers.

At another level, we’re beginning to realize we could save ourselves a lot of trouble if we would fit into our environment a little better.  Not just diet and exercise, but also attitude, emotional stability, and generosity to each other.  It almost sounds religious -- certainly moral.  Remember “moral outrage”?  That wasn’t about taxes?

CAUGHT DIRTY HANDED

“Wash your hands!” cry flu epidemiologists, mothers, nurses, and Tim Barrus.  That last because he cares for boys with HIV, meaning they have no immunity to germs and no ability to develop immunity.  When I took a job at a nearby county nursing home as ward clerk, I thought that since I sat in an office at a computer, hand-washing was not so crucial.  I bristled and balked at the infection control nurse whom I thought was a bully and took her position as an excuse to target and persecute people.  

My neighbor thought I was funny when I described my feelings about this nurse.  When she took a job as a nurse’s aide in the same place, she had the same class in hand-washing and she liked it, thought it was very worthwhile.  One looks at statistics and microscope photos of germs.  One puts red indicator stuff on the hands and then tries to wash it off to illustrate that it takes a lot of careful scrubbing with systematic effort and time.  One is supposed to scrub hands for as long as it takes to sing “Happy Birthday.”   Then one day my neighbor discovered that an unknown aide had stored a wheelchair with feces caked onto it.  She quit.

The best protection is human effort.  Only motivation can protect us.  But there is a webwork of forces in play.  One of the most unexpected and difficult to address has been antibiotics, the miracle med that changed everything for childbirth and war trauma.  They were such an effective force that it was thought justifiable to be more casual about surgery sterility or ordinary patient care.  But antibiotics became a blunt-force weapon, used even for viruses, which antibiotics do not affect.  They are useful only for bacterial germs.  And the fact that when given to livestock as a preventative, they released energy in the animal that let them grow larger faster, meant that they crept into meat.  A third force was that people took their pills casually, not completing the full span of what the doctor prescribed and giving their leftovers to friends or children with the thought of doing a healing kindness.  On the rez they became a political element with patients who were refused antibiotics by doctors who said they were wrong for the diagnosis becoming irate and demanding them, thinking that they were being denied a magic element out of racism.  All these things left germs opportunities to mutate resistance.  

Leland Ground was in my original English class of seventh graders when I was first hired in Browning, Montana, in 1961.  His family is distinguished (some will recognize the name of Mary Ground as a ceremonialist and matriarch) and that particular class was also identified as high achievers.  (In those days we weren’t afraid to say so.)  Decades ago Leland was in an auto accident that badly broke his leg.  Surgery mended the bone with rods and screws.  Over the years the screws worked loose, so about five years ago Leland went back for more surgery.  A veteran, he used the VA hospital.  

His leg became infected with a MRSA -- methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.  The next four years were hand-to-hand combat on the part of both Leland and his dedicated doctor to save his leg from amputation.  Antibiotics, even the ones that are reserved for worst cases, failed.  Installing ports through his skin for dripping antibiotics directly into Leland’s system, which he did daily himself at home, failed.  Except that it caused nausea and memory lapses, general fogging of thought.  Re-opening the incision to clean it out failed.   Radioactive tagging of the infection so as to follow it into the bone failed.  The doctor did not give up.  He finally won.  The whole VA system has been struggling with this and now the media are beginning to report success.

Another person in that class of seventh graders was Mike McKay -- from another distinguished and achieving Blackfeet family.  For some years a while ago he was in charge of cleaning and maintenance of the Browning Indian Health Service hospital.  Once he said something offhand to me about it not being a very high status job (one brother is a lawyer and  a sister is the superintendent of the Browning Public Schools).  I jumped all over him!  He had one of the highest responsibilities on the rez!  He was a crucial partner of the doctors!  Since then he has gone back to college for graduate degrees in science.

Among the things the VA tried -- besides hand-washing -- was changing protective gowns between rooms, wearing masks, and more completely sterilizing rooms.  No matter what they tried, it was effective EXCEPT that people wouldn’t do it.  They were in a hurry, they didn’t really believe it mattered, they forgot.  It was expensive.  The experts could get maybe eighty per cent compliance, tops.

Another strategy was to test patients as they came in to see whether they were carrying MRSA germs, so as to isolate them for treatment.  This is controversial and opinions differ about how effective it is, but everyone was surprised to see the results of the tests -- so many germs!  So wicked!  The best result was that when people could see the extent of the problem, they bought into the solution and tried harder.

But there is another entirely different school of thought out there.  Immunity results from an interaction with the environment.  Medical interventions like vaccination are only an imitation of responses normally triggered by mild infections.  They are good because some of the infections are NOT so mild, in fact, deadly.  (There is backlash even against  vaccination from people who fear interventions with nature.)  Apart from the major diseases that sweep around the planet, killing people in pandemics that keep populations within previously unexceeded limits, there is constant daily interaction between creature and ecology that “teaches” the body how to live there.  Scientists who are thinking along these lines think we don’t get enough dirt in our systems to connect our bodies to the web around us.

Small wonder.  Chemical companies are making fortunes by promoting fear of germs and contamination and then selling us potent “sterilizing” molecules that go to work on the cells of our own bodies, interfering with the systems that control our functioning.  Now we’re beginning to fear those substances and move to “steam cleaning.”  It seems like a better alternative though it means yetanother expensive appliance.

That bossy nurse with her bar of soap was right.  Wash your hands.  But no need to get phobic about it.  No need to boil the patient to cure disease.  Though Leland, who has a strong sense of the ridiculous, laughed when I suggested he unscrew his leg, boil it, and then reinstall it.

DEEP SNOW, SHALLOW PARANOIA

OFFICIAL WEATHER SERVICE ADVICE:

SNOW...HEAVY AT TIMES...WILL CONTINUE TO FALL OVER THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN FRONT AND THE ADJACENT PLAINS THROUGH WEDNESDAY NIGHT. BY THURSDAY MORNING...EXPECT STORM TOTAL SNOWFALL AMOUNTS OF 15 TO 20 INCHES OVER THE PLAINS...AND 2 TO 3 FEET IN THE MOUNTAINS.

CURRENT FORECAST MODELS INDICATE THAT VERY HEAVY SNOW WILL OCCUR THIS AFTERNOON THROUGH TONIGHT...WHEN SNOWFALL RATES COULD APPROACH 2 INCHES PER HOUR. SNOWFALL...COMBINED WITH NORTH WINDS OF 15 TO 25 MPH WITH GUSTS TO 40 MPH...WILL CREATE BLIZZARD CONDITIONS AT TIMES...WITH VISIBILITIES REDUCED TO LESS THAN ONE QUARTER OF A MILE AT TIMES.

THE SNOW IS EXPECTED TO BE HEAVY AND WET...CAUSING WIDESPREAD AND SIGNIFICANT IMPACTS TO LIVESTOCK...TRAVEL...POWER TRANSMISSION...AND ALL OTHER OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES. EXTRA PRECAUTIONS SHOULD BE TAKEN FOR THIS STORM...ESPECIALLY FROM THIS AFTERNOON THROUGH TONIGHT.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

A BLIZZARD WARNING MEANS SEVERE WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. FALLING AND BLOWING SNOW WITH STRONG WINDS AND POOR VISIBILITIES ARE LIKELY. THIS WILL LEAD TO WHITEOUT CONDITIONS...MAKING TRAVEL EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. DO NOT TRAVEL. IF YOU MUST...HAVE A WINTER SURVIVAL KIT WITH YOU...INCLUDING AN EXTRA FLASHLIGHT...FOOD...AND WATER. IF YOU GET STRANDED...STAY WITH YOUR VEHICLE.



For the past few weeks I’ve been trotting over to Pansy’s house every morning to see how she’s getting along. She has cancer and is quietly fading away, getting a little smaller every day. She’s very brave and supported by hospice which sends a nurse, a bath-er, or a social worker just about every day. Her meds come mostly in a little scotch-tape squares she sticks to herself.

Yesterday I waded through the snow to retrieve the shovel I’d hung up in the back garage and dug a path for the cats across my yard, then went over to Pansy’s and dug a “nurse path” across her yard. The snow was six to eight inches deep. Today it’s quite a bit deeper.

In the afternoon I took a nap, maybe too much of one since I had a hard time falling asleep last night. I’d been working my way through a pile of AIDS books of several kinds: one an overview of how to run a support group, one a young man’s coming-of-age story (he turned out to be neither gay nor to have AIDS), one his uncle’s book (a co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex among a long list of more distinguished books), a book of essays by a gay man who fell to his death while hiking before he could finish it. The books cost a penny each plus maybe four dollars each to mail. They are hard to assimilate because their world is so foreign. I mean, I think I’m understanding but then realize that I don’t have the right context. I’ll write reviews later. It does seem important to get a grip on such a major part of our population, particularly given the events since AIDS. But it keeps my head spinning on high.

Esp. now, given the other subject of almost hourly news releases, the swine/bird/human flu that killed dozens in Mexico City. This morning I woke up with a sore throat, aching. That was at 5AM. When I woke up again at 10AM, I was better. So was that flu symptoms or was that from shoveling paths or did I sleep with my mouth hanging open? I’ve signed up with the CDC for automated reports on the world status whenever word comes in. If I’m going to have plague, I want to have it on a planetary level! A strangely shared solitary experience.

If you don’t get emails from me later on, it won’t be because of flu -- but because the electric grid has come down. I wonder how that strip of 200 windmills just outside of town is getting along. If the road weren’t closed, I’d drive out to see what it looks like tonight with their traveling red lights zipping along the snowy prairie. Eerie enough on an ordinary night, reflections on snow must be remarkable.

The newspaper came -- just a few hours late. Probably had to wait until the plows got out. In a bit I’ll bundle up and go for the mail, not because I expect a letter but because there should be two movies in it. The wind is blowing hard. Luckily it’s in my face when I walk the two blocks to the post office and at my back when I return, but my really warm hat and muffler are stored back in the shed. Silly me! I thought it was Spring and forgot what that means here -- or can mean.

This is not a usual Spring. My Calgary friend asked, “Do you think this is the end of the drought?” It sure is this week. Authorities are worrying about reservoir capacity when all this runs off the mountains. Lake Francis just thawed out. A strong wind finally did the job, piling up slush on the bank.

Cough. Is that bronchitis? I can be sure that it’s not AIDS, though I’m notorious for “catching” every disease I hear about in much detail. I have a strong impulse to order lots of books over the internet, but am squeezing every nickel to pay my county taxes. Money. Symptom or disease?

A little kit for fixing my printer came in the mail yesterday and I used a tiny hypodermic to drip solvent where it ought to do some good. If it worked, I can concentrate on print-outs today. Barrus produces so much more print than I am that I lose track of the posts in the computer. I want them on pages so I can put them in chapter piles on my long work table. Old-fashioned.

Should I subscribe to Twitter? Why let swine flu be the only momentary posts I get? Should I switch to the local radio station and give up my Billings NPR feed for the day so I can hear what the sheriff says about cars in the ditch? Should I take aspirin? Should I hunt up the new thermometer I finally bought since usually the only one I can find is for the cats? (It has a loop on the end where you tie a string in case you use it on a big dog and it disappears inside.) I don’t feel feverish.

The blizzard advice (if your car gets stuck...) has one omission. Lots of books. And paper in case you think of something brilliant to write. A clipboard. It’s hard to write in a pickup without a clipboard.

QUACK EVOLUTION: Not About Ducks

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending have written a book called “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.” As one reviewer said, it’s all very interesting and probably mostly wrong. Sort of like the cover, which shows the usual (and discredited) walking continuum from ape to Adonis, this time in the form of florescent skeletons.

Cochran suggests that evolution didn’t stop when modern man emigrated out of Africa 55,000 years ago and was accelerated with the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. The changes in diet, disease, and dispersal probably triggered far more mutations, the favorite example being lactose which allows the digestion of milk. In fact, there have been two mutations that allowed for milk digestion in two different places and times. I’m fine with these ideas.

It never occurred to me to question that evolution has continued all along and will continue through and past homo sapiens, partly because of all the jokes about how television would cause us to evolve into bodies with a big single eye, a fat one-butt sitter, and wheels instead of feet. Many are hoping we will evolve improvements in the brain, maybe something like “mirror cells” which increase empathy and therefore compassion. Because of thinking about Diabetes II, I’ve also had some notion that diseases and malfunctions required or caused mutations when humans began to live in close proximity to domestic animals and to eat cultivated grains. Cochran puts major emphasis on infections producing mutations, which is logical enough. He is returning to an older era of medical assumptions and he claims that cardiac problems, diabetes and other problems are probably not lifestyle issues but rather infections. His model here is helicobacter pilori, a stomach bug that causes most ulcers, though for a long time it was not found and not thought to exist.

Like the fellows at GNXP.com where Cochran also posts, he is very interested in who is smarter, whether IQ is hereditary (IQ is easy to discredit -- it simply asks for the “norm” in a white Euro community, so naturally those are the people who do well.), and what mutations would be helpful. He likes the idea of economics grouping people who then develop mutations that adapt them for special vocations. (If you’re rich and privileged, it’s because you evolved into it? That doesn’t fit the realities as I know them. Are the Kennedys more evolved than the rest of us? The Royal Windsors?) He’s attached to the idea of Ashkenazi Jews doing “brainy” work and becoming, as a result, selected to be smarter -- smarter ones being more likely to survive.

Having thus proved that he’s not afraid of dangerously political subjects, he suggests that homosexuality is a mutation produced by disease. I don’t quite follow his reasoning. First of all, he defines disease as anything that interferes with reproductive success, so why hasn’t homosexuality died out? Some arguments I’ve seen emphasize that to enhance evolutionary survival it is not the individual but the group with the genes that has to survive. Men without children of their own give the family an “uncle” advantage, that is, more males capable of work and battle. That’s something like the “granny” advantage which is an argument for how menopause evolved: so that the older women could contribute labor without the interference of pregnancy.

Cochran doesn’t seem to think in terms of the group, though in this case it would support his inherited mutation theory. But then, we live in a time obsessed with individualism. Our families are so scrambled and dispersed, they hardly count as people who know each other when they see each other. He doesn’t consider families that are assembled from various genetic sources, whether high tech egg/sperm implants or “Saturday Night Specials.” But he doesn’t seem to want to draw a bright line between heredity and upbringing, as though anyone could.

Also, he doesn’t consider pre-natal environment, though it is shown that the mother’s hormone state during gestation has a powerful influence on the unborn child. Of course, he is not at all looking at psychological or cultural influences. Personally, I’ve come to the conclusion that homosexuality is a category that includes genetic gays, plus fuzzily-gendered people, plus psychological gays, plus secretly het people who have their own reasons for seeming homosexual, plus atypical men (short, artistic, gentle) who are pressed into the category because of the stereotypes of others, plus people whom circumstances have “taught” male-on-male sexual behavior (prison, war, predator victims). If there is no objective test that reveals who is which, how can they be sorted? Presumably not all would be relevant to this theory.

Cochran is unclear in other ways. Is he saying there was a one-time disease that caused a genetic mutation in the brain that resulted in inheriting men desiring men? (He doesn’t address female same-sex desire. He wants to talk about testosterone, but I’ve not seen anything that said testosterone is the source of the desire for sex with males, or how could it be that I (female) desire males? I’m aware of studies that suggest testoterone is a thermostat controlling how MUCH desire there is.) Or is he saying that the disease organism itself is passed down somehow?

Or does he think homosexuality is not inheritable -- a one-gay-guy mutation? He says twin studies show that if one is gay, the other is not statistically inclined to be gay. No relevant brain change -- either mutation or disease -- has ever been isolated or identified. He is quick to provide examples like narcolepsy, which also cannot be “found” in the brain. He does seem to believe that gayness must be a brain disease rather than some hormone imbalance or maladjustment of the autoimmune system or maybe caused by something in our environment, like food processing. (My fav villain at the moment.) And he says homosexuality does not “interfere” with being brilliant and productive. (He does not identify his own desire valence, but doesn’t seem married.)

He points out that 6% of sheep demonstrate same-sex mounting, but says that the sheep must have caught the disease because humans screw them. GNXP.com commenters began supplying examples of relatives who “did” chickens, goats, etc. plus examples of famous dog acts. (There are also famous horse acts.) Cochran turned droll and claimed someone had a romantic relationship with an oryx in a certain hotel. By this time they were playing at what the English call “silly buggers.” Nervous joking to show superiority and make it clear that they personally would have nothing to do with such acts.

I’ve blogged about b*st**l*ty from my animal control days when we dealt with actual cases, but have yet to see the Humane Society of the United States take up this issue in their rush to be at the center of all animal controversies. There are logic problems: are these sheep shaggers who infected the ovines with their gay mutators looking for male partners who just happen to be sheep? Aren’t they actually screwing ewes? Gender doesn’t matter so long as the species is different?

Cochran is not a doctor nor a sociologist. He is a physicist specializing in high tech lenses (wouldn’t that be more of a very high level engineer?) and an “adjunct” anthropologist, which I take to be something like a “volunteer” self-taught anthropologist. His audience, as nearly as I can tell (which is not very clearly), are highly educated men, quite conservative, making good money, seemingly rigorous thinkers but not scientists and often single. They are also riveted by sex (while not ever admitting attraction to men and rarely to women who are not the Playboy ideal: young, blonde, buxom) and by religion (but usually the Abramic patriarchal kinds). I would suggest the subjects of sex and religion are entwined, both involving privilege and status. They resist immigration, not on the basis of skin color, but on the grounds of, well, all the things dark skin are supposed to stand for. You know.

Addressing the gay community in this way is both fertile ground and risky behavior, because there is no way to keep it from re-valorizing the issues associated with AIDS, even though HIV is has been proven over and over again to be simply a HUMAN virus and to be transmitted by bodily fluids in general, including spit, tears and milk. It begins to seem like shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre.

JACKSTRAWS: Native American Blood

“Hopi Tribe Asks for Blood Samples of All Scientists Studying Native American Blood.” The hope is to find out whether this category of scholars have a vampire gene or what. “We had thought to take mirrors around to their offices to see whether they had reflections,” said the chief. “But that much travel would leave too big a carbon footprint on the environment. And we are very protective of Grandmother Earth.”

Not really. That’s a down payment on April Fool’s Day, but it sort of makes vivid the issues raised by an article entitled, "Whose Blood Is It?," by Scott Jaschik. December 1. 2008. Copyright 2008. Inside Higher ED. All Rights Reserved. Full Text Available At:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/12/01/blood

Jaschik says, "The basic concept of informed consent in research is straightforward. Those ethics issues may be about to get a legal airing, following a decision Friday by an Arizona appeals court to revive a lawsuit by a small Indian tribe against the Arizona Board of Regents and some researchers involved in the use of blood collected from the tribe. Tribe members consented to the blood being used for research on why they may have been experiencing high rates of diabetes. But they charge that some of the studies conducted with their blood — in some cases by researchers who played no role in the original study, or its informed consent protocols — violated their rights. Some of the additional research challenged the tribe's religious beliefs and members say they never would have contributed to such studies…"

Curiosity about Native American body parts, including bones, scalps and DNA, have been hot topics from the very beginning. In the forties blood type grouping indicated that Native Americans were of Asian descent, which was not politically happy news in two ways: one was that we were at war with Japan, treating Japanese-origin citizens to property seizure and sequestered camps, to say nothing of prejudice and hostility. The other was that the idea of Native Americans having arrived by migrating across the Bering Straits has been used to devalue their status as First Peoples by implying that they were no different from the Euro-immigrants who arrived recently, except earlier.

Beyond that was the preoccupation on the part of Euros with blood quantum as defined by provenance, that is, knowledge of parentage, before there was any ability to analyze blood types and presently actual DNA code. Euros place heavy emphasis on inheritance and legitimacy because what’s at stake is property and status: the sons of kings make out much better than the sons of peasants. Then there’s the question of slavery: one person could own another person, depending on the inheritance of skin color. The “owned” people could be hunted down like any animal and treated as viciously as the owner wished, even if the slave in question had been produced by intercourse with her mother's owner and was half created by the owner’s DNA. Paternity could not be legally proven until recently when analysis of DNA has revealed that even presidents were not above such behavior, though the evidence is found generations later.

So blood is a source of hypocrisy and oppression, except that blood has also been elevated to the status of mystical relationship in the supposed theory of “blood brotherhood” when a white man (always a man) and a red man mingle blood produced by a minor voluntary wound. And since DNA is often found through the analysis of blood, it has taken on a metaphorical relationship, though DNA can also be found by analyzing cells swabbed from the inner cheek or maybe hair. No one talks about “sacred hair ceremonies” or “cheek cell brothers forever.”

The accusation often made against full-blood tribal members by mixed-blood tribal members is that the full-bloods are in-bred. At the same time hopeful people shell out hundreds of dollars to have their blood analyzed in hopes of discovering once and for all whether they are Native American and even to what tribe they belong. The chain of assumptions that the profiting companies make leads them to some strange findings because the suggestions are based on alleles, or partial sections of code. (A Lebanese gentleman might be startled to discover he is Navajo.) The other set of assumptions is about tribes: that tribes are like animal species that don’t mix and have distinct borders, when in fact tribes are more like religious denominations based on affinities and location, what language is spoken.

Maybe the most recent issue has been about money (as though they aren’t all about money in some sense). Since DNA is a code, that code can be valuable and to some very limited extent can be used to create molecules that are possibly medicinal as well as diagnostic and can be patented. Someone can own the code in your blood, without giving the generator of the code any compensation. Many researchers use cancer cells taken from patients decades ago and worth a LOT of money as they have been analyzed and preserved by laboratories.

Like effective medicines, once informed and rigorous protocols are used to generate the original substance, it can be used for purposes not specified in the original agreement. So the Havasupai tribe, whose genetics have been limited by the walls of the Grand Canyon, are of major interest because so many have diabetes. Thus they willingly allowed blood samples to be taken. But then those blood samples were used, without permission or even informing the tribe, for a study of schizophrenia. The slippery slope is that the researcher, who is using only 200 samples, will somehow assert that this tribe carries schizophrenia the way the crowned heads of Europe (definitely inbred on purpose) carry the inability of blood to clot. This quickly becomes “all Havasupai are crazy.”

Now the Havasupai, justifiably paranoid, have gone from trusting doctors to avoiding them, since it is unknown whether wearing a wreath of garlic at medical exams will keep them from stealing your blood. And the researchers feel that a stake has been driven through the heart of their studies. My favorite quote in this article is the clincher: Jonathon Marks, an anthropology professor, says that anthropology depends upon cooperation of the groups they study, not so much for legal reasons as because “if we treat people contemptuously, anthropology disappears.”

Well, Mr. Spock could have told them that. Even Captain Kirk had that firmly in mind.

PRIONS. WHAT THE...?

When I get tired of worrying about money (which appears to be one of those endless loops anyway, mostly because my basic assumptions may be wrong), I worry about the burgeoning problem of bodily disorders based on the assumption that the world is a continuous sheet of code in time, place and substance. (I also think about theology based on this assumption, but it doesn’t worry me -- in fact, it’s a source of reassurance, a kind of repeated assurance that what is now will always exist and has always existed in some form.)

To come back down to earth (my ex-husband and my best former boss both used to say, “Get your feet on the ground!”), Petunia my neighbor came over to see whether I could find out anything on the computer about what is killing her close friend. At first they said she had a blood clot in her brain and inserted a stent to hold open an artery. Now they are saying she has a disease that starts with a “P.” Petunia, who has macular degeneration so can’t write things down, had learned to spell the word which is short anyway. Prion disease.

Petunia’s husband read her the long and rather technical download I gave her from Wikipedia. They tried to puzzle through it as best they could but she still had questions, which I was pretty hard pressed to address. Anyway, at this point no one could answer them for her. The first time I Googled “prion,” I was still back in Portland in the Nineties and there was almost nothing known about them. This was when the first publicity about “mad cow disease” began to hit.

To put it short and crude, prion disease seems to be a mysterious mis-folding of proteins into something that has stopped being a viable part of the constantly transforming feedback loops of a biological being because it is stuck. It is “polymerazed” into something so stable that burning, radioactivity, standard chemicals, just don’t faze it. In terms of my little wood-burning stove in the garage, it makes “klinkers,” stuff that’s left over after the burning has happened. (I guess actually it’s a coal-burner’s term. In childhood I woke every morning to the sound of our coal furnace having its grate shaken to knock the klinkers down out of the way of a new fire.) Hard ash.

And it’s a hardass kind of problem: mad cow, scrapie in sheep, maybe Alzheimer’s, chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, and other mysterious conditions that show no infectious agent, no organ failure, just a stuck brain. Kuru, the cannibals’ disease from eating human brains, is one of the more colorful versions and challenges the idea that it’s a “modern” disease that comes from our changed environment -- since those tribes were talked out of cannibalism and given can openers.

As it turns out, Petunia’s friend and her family had prided themselves on eating lots of venison and elk, partly because they liked hunting, partly because it helps with the money, and partly because they believed it was healthier. People don’t eat the meat, have symptoms right away, and then fall over like the victims of poison mushrooms or death camas. Rather the malfunctions of little cells accumulate until the whole system hits critical mass and everyone notices that something is very wrong. A healthy immune system cannot get rid of prions. Cooking, very high temperatures, bleach -- all the standard household sanitizing measures -- do not work. It’s even hard to test for the stuff.

In the laboratory there are measures that can finally destabilize the interlocked molecules of the protein and disassemble it. But no one so far can figure out how it works. It doesn’t seem to be “alive” in the way that creatures we know use their nucleus information to manage what a cell does -- a tiny entity that’s much more active than we ever imagined until we developed instruments that could watch it block entrance of some things, open gates to other things, change docking ports on its surface, rearrange structures of storage, metabolism and transformation in internal sub-cell structures.

At the same time as I’m looking up “prion,” I’m getting material via a sort of chain-letter network from people who monitor protected high-tech medical journals and newsletters and translate results for the rest of us. Most recently posts have suggested that bisphenol-A interacts with leptin, causing the metabolic dysfunction that we call Diabetes II. (This stuff is in the linings of cans, so watch out, you folks with can openers.) Another suggests something similar pertaining to the chemicals used in children’s nightclothes to make them flame resistant. There is a host of manmade chemicals associated with polymeres and carbons (which is the base of organic life on this planet) as well as many “tweaked” hormones used as pesticides, herbicides, growth promoters and the like. That is, we have produced many molecules by now that are distributed everywhere in our environment -- like in the breast milk and livers of polar bears -- and that we cannot avoid ingesting. They are just a little bit off, not quite normal.

Many of these are prohibited in other countries, but not here because our political system protects big spenders. (Am I paranoid? Well, I watched “The Constant Gardener” last week, and that would make anyone paranoid. And it didn’t even involve the USA.) Anyway, it’s a fool’s assumption that national borders mean much to chemicals which travel on the wind, in the water, in products -- everywhere. So it’s not ridiculous to assume that Petunia’s friend is dying at the hands of some politician tolerating a desk jockey pushing bench chemists to produce new products while not funding extensive testing or government supervision so as not to interfere with CEO income. And there’s no way to simply abstain.

In China or Russia or other manufacturing-intensive economies, life expectancy is dwindling but incomes are growing. I seem to have this near-unconscious and not particularly rational conviction that to be rich is to be “sick” or otherwise doomed in some way, that it undermines judgment and morality. When the prions finally get to reproductive success (and you know the stories about frogs with weird anomalies as well as I do) then the problem will be solved because there won’t be any more people making new skewed substances. Anything that evolves a way to get rid of prions in their systems will survive and repopulate the planet.

Of course, we can jump the evolution queue by inventing things that un-do prions, breaking up the klinkers. But what it it turns out to dissolve proteins in general? Or some unsuspected keystone protein that brings the whole biological carbon-based unit to dissolution? Maybe I’ll go back to worrying about money. But, you know, it seems to be connected.

"RABID"

When I was planning to write a book on animal control, like twenty years ago, I started watching for books about dogs and stashing them to read some day. One was a little paperback originally written in the Seventies by a pair of English authors, David Anne and Anthony Fowles, called simply “Rabid.” I’ve never read “Cujo” by Stephen King, which I think is a later book. I sometimes wonder how many times American writers get their ideas from English or Canadian books. (I can think of several echoes.) Before the Internet came along, it was hard to get books from both countries plus Australia because of trade agreements. Economics can raise barriers more effective than border inspectors. Or could.

The basic idea of “Rabid” is very simple: that people simply lose or never grasp why some laws are made and feel free to evade or ignore them to suit their own convenience and preferences. In fact, my own concern about rabies (because my cats catch bats which are “presumed to carry rabies unless otherwise certified”) is brushed off by local officials, even veterinarians and even though we are officially a rabies quarantine area because of other rabid wild animals, like raccoons. If one wants a bat tested, one will have to pay for it. At first I was very worried and certainly got rabies shots for my cats, but then I gradually sort of absorbed their attitudes and needed the money for other things. Anyway, the cats are hard to catch if they see the carrier cage come out and they wail for the entire thirty mile drive to the veterinary office.

The heroine of this novel called “Rabid” is even more self-centered and willing to cut corners than I am. The plot of the story entwines rabies with sex. I don’t think they meant to imply that rabies IS sex, but they may have meant to say something about selfish, narcissistic behavior. (I read that narcissism is again popular as a pop diagnosis for uncooperative people, but does it ever really become irrelevant?) A rather insecurely married couple, unable to have children, are very attached to their dog, which dies. Another, very ugly but “woofly,” mongrel shows up in their summer vacation villa in France and the woman wants it. Then they are presented with the problem of getting it through the relentless quarantine that has kept England rabies-free for many years. (Yellowstone bison with brucellosis being the opposite problem -- keeping them IN.)

The couple has a friend, a childhood dear friend of the husband’s, who is a bachelor with a boat. The wife sees that if he nips across the channel, they can send the dog back with him. She goes along for the ride. Yes, a “double-meaning” ride. Of course, the dog DOES have rabies and the ensuing pandemonium and destruction is ghastly. The writing team low-balls the story by killing off sympathetic characters, children, and sweet innocent dogs. Some rats also die and, by the end of the story, some human rats. It’s all excessive and pathetic.

Descriptions of the progress of the disease are gruesome but, as far as I could tell, fairly accurate. When people in the book are slow to understand just what rabies means, the authorities bring in a movie to show them in which a man from a Middle-Eastern country where there is still rabies in the dog population dies strapped down on an examination table. When our Multnomah County dog license sellers became over-lenient about making sure every dog was licensed, I showed a similar movie. Dog licenses require proof of rabies immunization, because a high percentage of immune domestic dogs not only protects the individual dog but also is a buffer for the community as a whole. One of the strong reasons for licensing dogs is to get them inoculated, as well as returning them home and helping to finance animal control.

The movie I borrowed to show was from a doctor affiliated with the Oregon Health Sciences University research hospital in Portland who had acquired it in hopes that it would help him understand how to treat a boy afflicted with rabies. It’s an oddity that it’s wealthy people who breach the quarantine laws. In this case a man with a private plane flew his son and his son’s dog up from Mexico. The dog was rabid and bit the son. The situation wasn’t realized soon enough for effective early treatment and the boy became one of the first and the few to survive the full onslaught of the brain virus, because of this doctor. The boy was on full life support and I never did hear whether there were permanent consequences to his mind. (The book never addresses the need to kill a suspected rabid animal without shooting it in the head, which prevents proper diagnosis.)

The movie had been made in the Thirties in Chicago (when the new movie industry was centered there) and the victims were several toddlers who craved and cried out for milk from the nurses -- wearing rubber gauntlets up to their elbows -- held for them in cups, but then attacked and struck the cups away. The movies were silent, filmed on the roof of the hospital for the sake of the bright sunlight. The children were black. Children are more often bitten and rabies is more common in low income parts of town.

By the end of the book, not only people had died but every animal in a twelve mile radius had been killed -- including a famous pack of fox-hunting dogs and a fine race horse plus many beloved pets. About the only leavening element is the loving relationship between the original offending man and his father-in-law, who blames himself for raising a girl who could not think of anything but getting her own way.

No doubt about it: this is a sensational book, but it certainly does have a point to make about human irrationality about both pets and disease. It could have used a bit more rational discussion but it is certainly a good entering wedge for such a discussion. Often, politically, it is the sensational, sentimental and lurid that finally gets people’s attention enough for them to react at all.

This book has several other titles, such as, “The Day of the Mad Dogs.” August reading, I suppose.