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Tuesday 30th of June 2020
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To this day, the natural reservoir of Marburg is unknown. Marburg lives somewhere in the shadow of Mt. Elgon. Crisis in the Hot Zone Lessons from an outbreak of Ebola. Richard Preston Africa |
In 1980, a French engineer who was employed by the Nzoia Sugar Company at a factory in Kenya within sight of Mt. Elgon developed Marburg and died. He was an amateur naturalist who spent time camping and hiking around Mt. Elgon, and he had recently visited a cavern on the Kenyan side of the mountain which was known as Kitum Cave. It wasn’t clear where the Frenchman had picked up the virus, whether at the sugar factory or outdoors. Then, in the late summer of 1987, a Danish boy whose name will be given here as Peter Cardinal visited the Kenyan side of Mt. Elgon with his parents—the Cardinals were tourists—and the boy broke with Marburg and died. Epidemiologists at usamriid became interested in the cases, and they traced the movements of the French engineer and the Danish boy in the days before their illnesses and deaths. The result was weird. The paths of the French engineer and the Danish boy had crossed only once—in Kitum Cave. Peter Cardinal had gone inside Kitum Cave. As for the Ugandan trappers who had collected the original Marburg monkeys, they might have poached them from the Kenyan side of Mt. Elgon. Those monkeys might have lived near Kitum Cave, and might even have occasionally visited the cave. Mt. Elgon is a huge, eroded volcanic massif, fifty miles across—one of the largest volcanoes in East Africa. Kitum Cave is one of a number of caverns that penetrate Mt. Elgon at an altitude of around eight thousand feet and open their mouths in a deep forest of podo trees, African junipers, African olives, and camphors. Kitum Cave descends into tight passages and underground pools that extend an unknown distance back into Mt. Elgon. The volcanic rock within Kitum Cave is permeated with mineral salts. Elephants go inside the cave to root out
chunks of salty rock with their tusks and chew on them. Water buffalo also visit the cave to lick the rocks, and they may be followed into the cave by leopards. Fruit bats and insect-eating bats roost in the cave, filling the air with a sour smell. The animals drop their dung in the cave—an enclosed airspace—and they attract biting flies and carry ticks and mites. The volcanic rock contains petrified logs, the remains of trees that were enveloped in lava, and the logs are filled with sharp crystals. Peter Cardinal may have handled crystals inside the cave and scratched his hands. Possibly the crystals were tainted with animal urine or the remains of an insect. The Army keeps some of Peter Cardinal’s tissues frozen in cryovials, and the Cardinal strain is viciously hot. It kills guinea pigs like flies. In February, 1988, a few months after Peter Cardinal died, the Army sent a team of
epidemiologists to Kitum Cave. The team wore Racal suits inside the cave. A Racal is a lightweight pressurized suit with a filtered air supply, used for hot operations in the field. There is no vaccine for Marburg, and the Army people had come to believe that the virus could be spread through the air. Near and inside the cave they set out, in cages, guinea pigs and primates—baboons, green monkeys, and Sykes’ monkeys—and they surrounded the cages with electrified wire to discourage predators. The guinea pigs and monkeys were sentinel animals, like canaries in a coal mine: they were placed there in the theory or the hope that some of them would develop Marburg. With the help of Kenyan naturalists, the Army team trapped as many different kinds of wild mammals as they could find, including rodents, rock hyraxes, and bats, and drew blood from them. They collected insects. Some local people, the il-Kony, had lived in some of the caves. A Kenyan doctor from the Kenya Medical Research Institute, in Nairobi, drew blood from these people and took their medical histories. At the far end of Kitum Cave, where it disappears in pools of water, the Army team found a population of sand flies. They mashed some flies and tested them for Marburg. The expedition was a dry hole. The sentinel animals remained healthy, and the blood and tissue samples from the mammals, insects, arthropods, and local people showed no obvious signs of Marburg. To this day, the natural reservoir of Marburg is unknown. Marburg lives somewhere in the shadow of Mt. Elgon.
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China Passes Security Law Giving It Sweeping Powers Over Hong Kong @nytimes Law & Politics |
The Chinese legislature approved the law a day before July 1, the politically charged anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997, which regularly draws pro-democracy protests. “Those who have stirred up trouble and broken this type of law in the past will hopefully watch themselves in the future,” Mr. Tam said in a television interview. “If they continue to defy the law, they will bear the consequences.”
“It’s meant to suppress and oppress, and to frighten and intimidate Hong Kongers,” Ms. Mo said. “And they just might succeed in that.”“It will be a new ballgame, affecting schools, affecting the media, and many other arenas of Hong Kong life.”
Joshua Rosenzweig, the head of Amnesty International’s China team.
“Their aim is to govern Hong Kong through fear from this point forward.”
But critics say that the new security agencies and politically shaded categories of crime, such as “inciting separatism,” could send a chill across Hong Kong society.
“From now on, #Hongkong enters a new era of reign of terror,” Mr. Wong wrote on Twitter.
Announcing his decision to leave Demosisto in a post on Facebook, he said: “I will continue to hold fast to my home — Hong Kong, until they silence and obliterate me from this land.”
“They are doing whatever it takes to crack down on dissent and opposition here. It’s just unthinkable in the year 2020,” said Ms. Mo, the pro-democracy lawmaker. “This is a huge departure from civilization.”The legislation would “ensure the lasting stability and prosperity of Hong Kong,” said a report on CCTV, China’s main broadcaster, “making the pearl of the East even more splendid and beautiful.” |
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07-OCT-2019 :: Joshua Wong told German Media "Hongkong ist das neue Berlin" Law & Politics |
The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos. Xi is building an Algorithmic Society.
“Unity is iron and steel; unity is a source of strength,” “Complete reunification of the motherland is an inevitable trend..no one and no force can ever stop it!” he added.
I am sure Xi sees Hong Kong and Taiwan like a virus and he is looking to impose a quarantine just like he has imposed on Xinjiang.
The Chinese Dream has become a nightmare at the boundaries of the Han Empire.
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Iran issues arrest warrant for @realDonaldTrump asks @Interpol to help @Independent Law & Politics |
An Iranian prosecutor said the country had issued an Interpol arrest warrant for United States Donald Trump for his role in the assassination of a leading military commander earlier this year.
The Tehran prosecutor, Ali Alqasimehr said the international warrant included Trump and more than 30 others allegedly involved in the 3 January drone strike that killed General Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s clandestine overseas paramilitary force, the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported on Monday.
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06-JAN-2020 :: The Assassination Law & Politics |
Rukmini Callimachi wrote the evidence suggesting there was to be an imminent attack on American targets is “razor-thin”
Qasem Suleimani was an iconic figure known as the “Commander of Hearts” and “Soleiman the Magnificent” a reader of Gabriel García Márquez and of course the Leader of Iran’s Quds Force whom a former C.I.A. officer called the “most powerful operative in the Middle East today.”
“When I see the children of the martyrs, I want to smell their scent, and I lose myself.”
“The battle- field is mankind’s lost paradise—the paradise in which morality and hu- man conduct are at their highest,” he says.
“One type of paradise that men imagine is about streams, beautiful maidens, and lush landscape. But there is another kind of paradise—the battlefield.”The front, he said, was “the lost paradise of the human beings.”
The supreme leader, who usually reserves his highest praise for fallen soldiers, has referred to Suleimani as “a living martyr of the revolution.” “In the end, he drank the sweet syrup of martyrdom.”
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The text that saw the future Telegraph India Law & Politics |
Khaldun argues that rulers without administrative skills and rational temper would ruin their existence amidst the havoc wreaked by pandemics.Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah seems to be the first text that explained the intrinsic relationship between a political leadership and the management of pandemics in the pre-colonial period.Khaldun argued that rulers without administrative skills and rational temper would ruin their existence amidst the havoc wreaked by pandemics.
According to him, contagions like the Great Plague “swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out.”
Historically, such pandemics had the capacity to overtake “the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration” and, in the process, challenged their “power and curtailed their [rulers’] influence...”
People moved from their settlement zones and many dynasties and communities “grew weak”.
What we call ‘pandemic migration’ was a matter of destruction for Khaldun.
He categorically asserted that rulers who don’t care about their vulnerable subjects during calamities caused the whole population to vanish.
Rulers who are only concerned with the well-being of their “inner circle and their parties” are an incurable “disease”.
States with such rulers can get “seized by senility and the chronic disease from which [they] can hardly ever rid [themselves], for which [they] can find no cure”
“the feelings of the people of the dynasty become diseased as a result of the contempt in which they are held and the hostility of the ruler. They hate him and await the opportunity of a change in his fortune.”
To thwart calamities, rulers should possess certain qualifications. Khaldun recognizes wisdom, logic, honesty, justice and education as the most desirable qualities in a ruler.
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Did the SARS-CoV-2 virus arise from a bat coronavirus research program in a Chinese laboratory? Very possibly. @BulletinAtomic Misc. |
“Natural spillover or research lab leak? Why a credible investigation is needed to determine the origin of the coronavirus pandemic.”Possibility of laboratory escape of the pathogen was a plausible, if unproven, possibility. It is most definitely not “a conspiracy theory.”
One component of the novel-bat-virus project at the Wuhan Institute of Virology involved infection of laboratory animals with bat viruses.
Therefore, the possibility of a lab accident includes scenarios with direct transmission of a bat virus to a lab worker, scenarios with transmission of a bat virus to a laboratory animal and then to a lab worker, and scenarios involving improper disposal of laboratory animals or laboratory waste.
Official Chinese government recognition early in the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak of biosafety inadequacies in China’s high containment facilities.The Chinese government explanation for the destruction of SARS-CoV-2 samples has no scientific credibility.
It is important to note that no intermediary host has yet been identified for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. China’s top epidemiologist said Tuesday that testing of samples from a Wuhan food market, initially suspected as a path for the virus’s spread to humans, failed to show links between animals being sold there and the pathogen. Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in comments carried in China state media.
It takes only one superspreading graduate student or maintenance worker to start a pandemic.
It is known that a very large percentage of the individuals infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus show no symptoms and do not become clinically ill, which would facilitate an unrecognized infection of one or more laboratory researchers.
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The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of “demographic genocide.” @AP Law & Politics |
The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show.
Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.
The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply.
Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines.
Birth rates in the mostly Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60% from 2015 to 2018, the latest year available in government statistics.
Across the Xinjiang region, birth rates continue to plummet, falling nearly 24% last year alone — compared to just 4.2% nationwide, statistics show.
“This kind of drop is unprecedented....there’s a ruthlessness to it,” said Zenz, a leading expert in the policing of China’s minority regions. “This is part of a wider control campaign to subjugate the Uighurs.”
Another cited as a key obstacle the religious belief that “the fetus is a gift from God.”
“People there are now terrified of giving birth,” she said. “When I think of the word ‘Xinjiang,’ I can still feel that fear.”
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Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa, June 2020 Update @IMFNews Africa |
Across country groupings, growth is expected to fall the most in tourism-dependent and resource-intensive countries. Growth in non-resource intensive countries is expected to come to a near standstill.
High frequency indicators point to a sharp contraction in consumption and output through May.
In South Africa, new vehicles sales in April were only 2 percent of those from the same month last year, though in May they increased to one third of the previous year’s level.
In the first quarter of 2020, consumer confidence in Nigeria and South Africa declined to the lowest in two years although the impact of the COVID-19 shock had not been fully reflected yet. Lockdowns, weaker domestic demand, and the disruption in supply chains affected manufacturing activity.
Data from Google Mobility Trends—which tracks mobile phone users’ location history—confirmed a sharp contraction activity in April across many countries in retail and restaurants (30 percent), tourism and transportation (50 percent), and the workplace (30 percent).
remittance inflows are expected to drop by about 20 percent.
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Elevated Bond Spreads @IMFNews Africa |
The external environment is less favorable. Since April, global growth for 2020 has been revised down by 1.9 percentage points to –4.9 percent; global travel has collapsed and tourism flows have grounded to a halt; remittances are expected to fall by about 20 percent; external financing conditions remain tight despite some easing in recent weeks; and commodity prices remain low. |
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On the 10-MAY-2020 : Africa was at 56,000 confirmed #COVID19 cases continent Misc. |
The number of confirmed cases in Africa has been rising by about 30% a week over the past month, but is set to incline steeply now.
There was a lot of FOX News level, mathematically illiterate magical thinking about Africa and how it was going to dodge a ‘’Silver Bullet’’
That thinking is now debunked. Africa is playing ''Whack a Mole'' with a blindfold on
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02-MAR-2020 :: The #COVID19 and SSA and the R Word Africa |
We Know that the #Coronavirus is exponential, non linear and multiplicative.
what exponential disease propagation looks like in the real world. Real world exponential growth looks like nothing, nothing, nothing ... then cluster, cluster, cluster ... then BOOM!
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Panicked Investors Inundate Brokers After Zimbabwe Shuts Bourse @markets World Of Finance |
Stockbrokers in Zimbabwe are struggling to explain to investors what’s happened to their money after the government shut down the stock exchange.
The Zimbabwe Stock Exchange announced Sunday it suspended trade to comply with a directive issued by the Information Ministry late Friday that the bourse close.
It’s the latest in a series of measures the government has implemented to try and stabilize the nation’s currency.
Traders have been inundated with calls from “shocked and stressed” investors all morning, Thedias Kasaira, managing director at Imara Edwards Securities, said by phone Monday from the capital, Harare.
“Clients are asking and we don’t know what to tell them,” he said. “They want an explanation, but we haven’t been able to give one as we also don’t know the reason.”
Zimbabwe’s benchmark industrial index has risen more than sevenfold this year to a record. Investors have used the domestic bourse as a haven from the country’s collapsing currency and inflation of 786% -- the highest rate in a decade.
Investors with cash in Zimbabwe prefer to buy shares to avoid their money losing value.
Movements in domestic stock prices track the parallel currency markets on the streets of Harare, where the Zimbabwe dollar changes hands at about 100 per U.S. dollar, compared with the official rate of 57.35.
“People are looking at a hedge against inflation; that’s why they are switching from Zimbabwe dollars to equities,” said Lloyd Mlotshwa, head of equities at Harare-based IH Securities. “The stock exchange serves as a proxy to parallel market rates.”
ZSE Chief Executive Officer Justin Bgoni said he wasn’t immediately able to comment when contacted by phone.
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Kenya’s economy will contract for the first time in almost three decades, according to the International Monetary Fund @economics Kenyan Economy |
The lender now sees gross domestic product shrinking by 0.3% in 2020, compared with an April projection of 1% growth, according to a regional economic outlook update published Monday.
That will be the first annual contraction since 1993. The economy will expand 4% next year, the IMF said, down from 6.1% projected two months ago.
The coronavirus pandemic and measures to contain its spread have taken their toll on East Africa’s largest economy.
Key foreign-income earners have been squeezed, with lockdowns in major export markets that wilted horticulture shipments, lower remittances from Kenyans abroad and travel restrictions that weigh on tourism.
Exports of flowers, of which Kenya is the biggest supplier in Europe, jumped 23% in May as orders returned to almost normal.
In addition, shipments of black tea -- Kenya is the world’s biggest exporter -- jumped 15%. Still, central bank Governor Patrick Njoroge said last week it would be foolish to say the worst is over.
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"On our knees": Kenya's tourism revenue collapses Kenyan Economy |
Kenya has lost 80 billion shillings ($752 million) so far in tourism revenue, about half of last year’s total, due to the coronavirus crisis, its tourism minister said on Monday.
The sector is one of the leading sources of foreign exchange, earning 163.56 billion shillings ($1.54 billion) last year, which had been expected to grow 1% in 2020.
Tourism Minister Najib Balala said things would get worse before they can improve. “The second half is almost as good as zero. So we have a major problem,” he told reporters after launching his ministry’s study on COVID-19’s impact.
The estimated losses include cancelled bookings for the high season months of July-October, said Mohammed Hersi, the chairman of the Kenya Tourism Federation, a private sector lobby.
From Indian Ocean beaches to the Maasai Mara wildlife reserve, tourism contributes 10% of Kenya’s annual economic output and employs over 2 million people.
Kenya, which so far has confirmed more than 6,000 cases of the disease, shut its airspace to commercial flights in March. It has also banned movement into and out of the capital Nairobi and the coastal resort city of Mombasa.
“The entire tourism sector is out of business. There are major job losses,” Balala said. “We are on our knees.”
Resorts will be required to observe strict social distancing and hygiene measures to curb the spread of the virus once they reopen, Balala said, without giving any timelines.
The government has also ordered all bars and nightclubs to be closed and it has imposed a daily, nighttime curfew to curb the spread of the virus.
Despite its wide variety of tourist products, Kenya attracts fewer visitors than competitors like South Africa due to frequent political upheavals and insurgent attacks.
Between 2012 and 2015, visitor numbers and tourism earnings fell after a spate of attacks claimed by Somalia’s al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab, which wants Nairobi to pull troops out of Somalia.
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