muted 4.mut.99876 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . The past decade has witnessed a wave of new medications to treat schizophrenia, a debilitating mental disorder that afflicts 1 in 100 people. Armed with results from their own studies, various pharmaceutical companies tout the new drugs, the so-called atypical antipsychotics, as superior to traditional antipsychotic drugs in the battle against schizophrenia.http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/

However, it may be time to lower expectations for atypical antipsychotics. A new investigation, funded largely by the federal government, finds that treatment with any of three of these medications diminishes chronic schizophrenia symptoms only slightly more than a traditional antipsychotic drug does.

�Atypical antipsychotics work better than standard medications, but their advantage is relatively modest, at least for chronic schizophrenia,� says study coauthor Jeffrey A. Lieberman, a psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Although atypical antipsychotics often induce a weight gain of 5 to 12 pounds, Lieberman adds, they�re much less likely than traditional antipsychotics to cause severe movement disorders.http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/

The new investigation, led by psychiatrist Jan Volavka of the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in Orangeburg, N.Y., sharpens an ongoing debate among physicians about whether to prescribe atypical antipsychotics as a primary schizophrenia treatment. These drugs cost at least 10 times as much as traditional antipsychotic medications, such as haloperidol.

Volavka and his coworkers describe their findings in the February American Journal of Psychiatry.

The scientists recruited 157 patients, most around age 40, from state psychiatric hospitals in North Carolina and New York. Participants had suffered from schizophrenia for up to several decades and had previously taken only traditional antipsychotics, which had not yielded any improvement. Over a 14-week trial, patients were randomly assigned to receive one of three atypical antipsychotics�clozapine, olanzapine, or risperidone�or haloperidol.

The three atypical drugs, but not haloperidol, yielded �statistically significant but clinically modest� improvements in schizophrenia symptoms, the researchers say. These symptoms included delusions, hallucinations, apathy, and a lack of verbal and emotional expression. Clozapine and olanzapine worked slightly better than risperidone did.

The new study was funded mainly by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Md., with about 18 percent of the project�s cost assumed by olanzapine�s manufacturer. Previous trials subsidized by pharmaceutical firms have focused on the particular atypical antipsychotic drug made by the funder.

The modest treatment advantage reported by Volavka�s group for atypical antipsychotics �clearly underscores the need for identification of more effective [antipsychotic] treatments,� remarks psychiatrist David A. Lewis of the University of Pittsburgh in an editorial published with the new study.

Researchers need trials longer than the new study to clarify the relative merits of different atypical antipsychotic drugs, especially as frontline treatments for schizophrenia, holds psychiatrist John M. Kane of Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y.

Such a project is now under way. Researchers in 38 states, led by Lieberman, plan to study 1,600 people with schizophrenia treated for up to 1 year with one of five atypical antipsychotics or a traditional medication. Participants in this NIMH-funded study will also receive standard forms of supportive psychotherapy and education (SN: 4/28/01, p. 268: http://www.sciencenews.org/20010428/bob12.asp). Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .

tout 6.tou.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Pharmaceutical giant Wyeth is under scrutiny for its practice of paying ghostwriters to draft scientific journal articles favorable to its products and publishing them under the names of academic researchers. http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/ Some of the ghostwritten reports involve Wyeth’s hormone replacement therapy, Prempo, and deny the results of a federal study that linked the drug to an increased risk for breast cancer. The inquiries come as part of the Senate Finance Committee’s examination of “medical ghostwriting,” part of a broader probe into the influence of drug companies on the health-care industry [Wall Street Journal]. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/

The investigation is being spearheaded by Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, who last week sent a letter to Wyeth’s chairman requesting documentation of the company’s ghostwriting and publishing procedures. The letter [pdf] said Wyeth’s publications resembled “subtle advertisements rather than publications of independent research” and that “any attempt to manipulate the scientific literature, that can in turn mislead doctors to prescribe drugs that may not work and/or cause harm to their patients, is very troubling.” In response, a Wyeth spokesman accused Mr. Grassley of recycling old arguments and insisted that “The authors of the articles in question, none of whom were paid, exercised substantive editorial control over the content of the articles and had the final say, in all respects, over the content” [New York Times].

Previously released documents from Wyeth and DesignWrite, a medical writing company, reveal that Wyeth executives came up with ideas for medical journal articles, titled them, drafted outlines, paid writers to draft the manuscripts, recruited academic authors and identified publications to run the articles — all without disclosing the companies’ roles to journal editors or readers [New York Times]. The controversy centers around Wyeth’s Prempro, a combination of estrogen and progestin, and similar hormone therapies that pulled in $3 billion a year for Wyeth until a large federal study in 2002 found the drug to increase breast cancer risks. Wyeth and DesignWrite proposed and drafted an article supporting Prempro that was published in May 2003 in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology [subscription required] under the name Dr. John Edenon, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales, with no mention of ties to Wyeth or DesignWrite. http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/

Wyeth as of Oct. 29 faced about 8,700 legal claims from women in the U.S. who contend the hormone replacement drugs caused breast cancer and other injuries, according to a company regulatory filing last month [Bloomberg]. Other pharmaceutical companies have faced accusations of unethical ghostwriting in the past. The most well-known involved Merck’s Vioxx, a painkiller that was withdrawn in 2004 after it was linked to heart problems. Currently, Wyeth’s Preempro is still on the market, although only prescribed for severe symptoms of menopause. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .

roboclam 0.rob.102 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. In yet another example of design inspired by nature, scientists at MIT have developed a heavy-duty (but tiny) anchor that burrows into the seabed, just like a clam. Dubbed the RoboClam (not to be confused with the RoboSnail, RoboTuna, or RoboLobster), the device is no bigger than a Swiss army knife but ten times stronger than traditional metal anchors. Researchers say it could be used to anchor anything from small submarines to large off-shore oil platforms.

RoboClam’s model was the razor clam (Ensis directus), an oblong mollusk about seven inches long by one inch wide that can dig to a depth of 70 centimeters at more than one centimeter per hour. Clammers call it the Ferrari of bivalves. Researchers set the razor clam digging in a plexiglass tank [video!] and observed how it used vibrations of its long muscular tongue to make a seemingly impenetrable layer of sand into liquid-like quicksand. Opening and closing its shell helps the clam propel itself downward.http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.wordpress.com

The RoboClam works just like the real thing, and its unique digging method is more energy efficient— meaning cheaper—than other mechanical anchors. So far, the RoboClam prototype can dig down with 80 pounds of force to a depth of about 40 centimeters. The RoboClam can also be run in reverse to dig itself out. If scaled up, the RoboClam could compete against traditional anchor systems or even drilling systems. No wonder Chevron is a major funder of the project.http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.wordpress.com

particles 7.par.2229991 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . Incense and candles release substantial quantities of pollutants that may harm health, a detailed new study of air quality in a Roman Catholic church suggests.http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com/

Even brief exposure to contaminated air during a religious service could be harmful to some people, says atmospheric scientist Stephan Weber of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Essen, Germany. A previous study in the Netherlands indicated that the pollutants in smoke from incense and candles may be more toxic than fine-particle pollution from sources such as vehicle engines.http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com/

Numerous studies have examined the health effects of combustion by-products from major outdoor sources, such as automobiles and power plants. Researchers have also examined some sources of indoor pollution, including stoves. But there have been few investigations of the health consequences of candles and incense, even though they are usually lit indoors, sometimes in crowded spaces with limited ventilation.

Weber conducted the new study in St. Engelbert Church in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. The church staff burns candles during each mass and incense on some holidays.

Weber installed two devices that continuously sampled air during a 13-day period that began on Christmas Eve of 2004. The equipment measured concentrations of particles up to 10 micrometers in diameter (PM10) and also those 1 µm or smaller (PM1), which endanger people's hearts, lungs, and arteries (SN: 8/2/03, p. 72: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030802/bob8.asp).

During the study, incense burners and candles were lit for services at midnight on Christmas Day, on the morning of the following day, and on New Year's Eve. During services on other days, only candles burned.

Concentrations of both types of particles almost doubled during services that used only candles. Simultaneous use of incense and candles raised the concentration of PM10 to about seven times that recorded between services, and PM1 reached about nine times its background abundance.

Particulate-matter concentrations quickly dropped after the candles were extinguished, but remained elevated for 24 hours after simultaneous use of candles and incense, Weber reports in an upcoming Environmental Science & Technology.

Even the relatively modest increase linked to candles concerns Theo de Kok of Maastricht University in the Netherlands. In past experiments, he and his collaborators found that PM10 from candles might be especially harmful because, in the body, unidentified constituents of the smoke readily generate free radicals that damage cells.

After candles had burned in a Dutch chapel for 9 hours, particles in the air there formed 10 times as many free radicals as airborne particulates collected along busy roadways do, de Kok's group reported 2 years ago.

"Even after relatively short exposure, you can expect acute health effects" in susceptible groups, such as shortness of breath in people with asthma, de Kok says. He adds that he knows of no study examining whether groups such as priests and frequent churchgoers have elevated rates of cancer or other pollution-associated health problems.

Incense isn't used exclusively for religious purposes. Some people who live in cramped quarters burn incense to mask household odors, de Kok notes. In fact, an incense-using student originally proposed the study that de Kok's group conducted. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

reading 55.rea.11 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Workers at lead-smelting plants can suffer substantial neural damage from exposure to the toxic heavy metal. Workers who read well, however, experience comparatively less mental impairment, a new study finds.

It's not that the better readers were smarter, but that they have more "cognitive reserve," explains study leader Margit L. Bleecker, a neurologist at the Center for Occupational and Environmental Neurology in Baltimore. She says that people typically gain cognitive reserve—better or more resilient neural connections in the brain—through reading, puzzle solving, and other mentally challenging activities.

Her team recruited 112 men at a lead smelter to participate in a battery of neural assessments. After measuring the men's reading abilities—a rough gauge of cognitive reserve—the researchers split the volunteers into two groups of equal size, consisting of high or low scorers. In other respects—age, number of years worked, educational background—the two groups were similar. Most important, participants in each group exhibited the same range of blood-lead concentrations. http://Louis-j-sheehan.com

In the July 31 Neurology, the researchers report that in each group, men with higher blood-lead values scored more poorly on tests of hand-eye coordination. That's typical of lead poisoning. However, men in the better-reading group performed 2.5 times as well on tests of memory, attention, and concentration—tasks not necessarily related to reading.

The brain is like a muscle, Bleecker concludes: Exercising it strengthens it and makes it better able to counter the ravages of disease and poisoning. http://Louis-j-sheehan.com

health LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US

Already struggling in a tough economy, many small employers are about to face another big hit: markedly higher increases in health-insurance premiums as they head into 2009.
LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US

For many of these companies, the steeper increases couldn't come at a worse time, when the economy is weakening and credit is harder to come by.

"We can't pass these costs on to our customers; the market just won't bear it," said Daniel Lance, who owns E.CAB, a St. Petersburg, Fla., firm that produces finishes and fixtures for elevator-cab interiors.

After no increase last year, E.CAB's premiums jumped 75% to about $6,800 a month when its annual Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida policy came up for renewal this month. Much of the jump was triggered by the hiring of a few older workers by the 25-employee firm, pushing it into a higher-cost actuarial bracket. E.CAB couldn't get a better price from rival insurers.

Rather than pass the cost on to his employees, who aren't required to contribute premiums for themselves though they do for family members, Mr. Lance said he's forgoing new wood-cutting equipment he had planned to purchase. "I just felt it was a bad time [to pass on costs]," he said. "The employees are having a tough enough time, too."

As hard as it has been for businesses to absorb ever-higher health-care costs each year, the collective premiums they paid had actually climbed at a slower rate in recent years. But as small businesses begin to receive their annual renewal notices, employers and health-insurance brokers in the South, Midwest and California report noticeably steeper rises. Some premium increases being quoted to employers are double those quoted just a few months ago.

In a nationwide survey of 30 insurance brokers released by Citigroup last week, more said insurers were raising premiums at a faster rate than those who reported slowing increases.

The clearest evidence of acceleration comes directly from insurers themselves. As they released third-quarter earnings in recent weeks, WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Inc. and Humana Inc. all reported less aggressive pricing by competitors in a number of markets, making it easier to charge premiums that would assure a solid profit.

"Generally speaking, we've been increasing our pricing over the last several months and last several quarters with the thought in mind that it's going to be a lot more conservative in terms of the pricing environment and we're beginning to see that," said James Murray, Humana's chief operating officer, in its earnings conference call with analysts late last month.

For-profit health insurers have seen profit margins shrink this year in the face of higher-than-expected medical costs and pricing missteps, not to mention membership declines as more businesses drop or cut back coverage. While companies with 500 or more employees might have leverage to negotiate, health insurers are "being much more rigid" with smaller firms, said Edward Kaplan, national practice leader at Segal Co., an employee benefits consultancy.

Adding to upward pressure on prices could be dozens of not-for-profit Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans, whose investment portfolios have taken a beating in the recent market turmoil. In recent years, the not-for-profits have been under political pressure in their states to reduce their big surpluses from flush years by providing price breaks to customers. Analysts say they now may have more cause not to.

"Now that investment income is significantly less, we could see less concern about an embarrassment of riches and more about battening down the hatches," said Matthew Borsch, a Goldman Sachs analyst.

C. Steven Tucker, a health insurance broker for small businesses in Illinois, said his clients have been getting increases ranging between 28% and 31% this month, compared to typical increases of 18% to 20%. In Florida, brokers say many plans hit with high increases are high-deductible plans eligible to be used with a health savings account.

A few years ago, health insurers tried to win business with the new health savings accounts by charging low premiums, but since the most popular ones pay 100% of costs after a $1,500 to $3,000 deductible, their costs have been higher than anticipated. "Now the insurers are catching up," said John Sinibaldi, an employee-benefits consultant in Seminole, Fla.

Dottie Jessup, who owns bicycle shops in Clearwater and Palm Harbor, Fla., with her husband, Tom, said they and their 25 employees, who share premium costs 50-50, couldn't handle a 12.5% increase set to go into effect next month. "We don't know what kind of year we're going into," she said.

Instead, they went with their only other option: to raise one plan's deductible to $2,500 from $2,000 and the other to $3,500 from $2,850, in exchange for just a slight premium increase.LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US

"Our concern is that we're getting to the point where we're wondering where this is all heading, because you can only reduce benefits and contain costs so much," she said. "What's our ability to provide benefits to our staff going to look like in the future?"

G. Leo DuMouchel, an Atlanta-area employee-benefits consultant, said that after years of negotiating smaller increases by raising deductibles and paring benefits, many of his small-business customers have run out of that option.LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US

"They've pushed [cost-sharing] to the limit," said Mr. DuMouchel, who added he hasn't seen a premium increase for his clients below 17% since October, compared to 6% to 8% increases last summer. "They know employees can't handle any more."

nest grass 003.gra.2 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Out-of-control grasses may lure song sparrows near San Francisco into bad real estate deals.

Dense stands of an invasive kind of cordgrass spreading through marshes may look like great new territory for Alameda song sparrows to nest. But the lush neighborhoods bring an extra risk of nest-drowning floods, says Cully Nordby of the University of California, Los Angeles.

The birds’ already slim chance of successfully raising chicks drop from 15 percent to about 10 for nests in alien cordgrass, Nordby says.

California has listed this subspecies of song sparrow, Melospiza melodia pusillula, as a species of special concern. Specialized for life along the edges of tidal marshes, the Alameda song sparrow lives only around San Francisco’s South Bay.

GRASSY INVASIONThickets of Spartina cordgrass are taking over tidal marshes around San Francisco as an Atlantic cordgrass invades the West Coast and hybridizes to form a super-tough species. Dense stands trick birds into unwise nesting.C. Nordby

Song sparrows choosing the new cordgrass suburbs lying lower in the marshes than their traditional homes do lose fewer nests to predators. But any advantage on that front disappears as floods in cordgrass wipe out about three times as many nests as in shrubbery elsewhere, Nordby and her colleagues report in an upcoming Biological Invasions.

Flood-prone cordgrass could be a new kind of what biologists call ecological traps, Nordby says. These traps come from environmental changes that turn a species’ normal, healthful urges into really bad ideas.

The cordgrass Spartina alterniflora arrived from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts during the 1970s. Before it could overrun the Pacific species, the two hybridized, and the offspring turned out to be a super cordgrass that overgrows both parent species.

Alameda song sparrows need dense tangles of plants to support cup-shaped nests and hide them from crows, raccoons and other predators. And the novel form of cordgrass could satisfy an animal looking for cover, Nordby says. The hybrid Spartina can grow 2 meters tall, creating a solid thicket that scientists and predators alike must wriggle or thrash through.

Nordby and her colleagues monitored nests in the tidal marshes to compare the fates of birds in the usual habitats with those in the exotic cordgrass.

“One of the tricky parts of doing this research was trying not to just blaze trails right to the nests,” Nordby says. Yet the invasive cordgrass grows closer to the fringe of the marshes than Alameda song sparrows normally nest, and it floods easily. (The Pacific cordgrass species grew near the marsh margins too, but it straggled along in such a loose formation that the birds hardly ever moved in.)

Building a nest and starting a family takes at least a month, Nordby says, so a new home can look great at first. As a full moon approaches and the tides peak higher and breeding season progresses, a once-dry nest turns into a death trap. In 2003, for example, the highest tide of the month rose from 1.89 meters in March to 2.13 meters in July. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang

“I’ve seen eggs floating,” Nordby says. If they manage to settle back down into the nest, parents can take up incubating them again. If the eggs wash overboard, though, they’re doomed. “Even a matter of half an inch can make a difference,” Nordby says.

The grass looks like a problem, says Martin Schlaepfer of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. He says, though, that he’d like to learn more about the preferences of the birds for the new cordgrass versus the familiar nesting sites. In the strictest definition, a trap lures animals away from the old grounds instead of just providing an imperfect habitat.http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang

889

As I noted last week, advisers to the presidential candidates have been fairly mum about which scientists, medical leaders and engineers have signed on to advise and/or support Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama.

It’s something Albert H. Teich also noted when I contacted this director of Science & Policy Programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science several weeks back. Observed Teich in August, “You don’t have any really identifiable science people associated with McCain’s campaign, whereas there are quite a few people on the Obama side.” Indeed, he said, “You could say that there is a brain trust of scientists” linked to the Democratic candidate.

Yesterday, Obama’s campaign released “an open letter to the American people” signed by 61 Nobel laureates. All received their award for achievements in physics (22), chemistry (14) or medicine (25).

In their letter, they argue that during the past eight years, “vital parts of our country’s scientific enterprise have been damaged by stagnant or declining federal support. The government’s scientific advisory process has been distorted by political considerations.”

Commenting on Obama’s stump rhetoric, the letters point “in particular” to measures that the Illinois senator said he plans to implement to meet national and global needs “through new initiatives in education and training, expanded research funding, an unbiased process for obtaining scientific advice, and an appropriate balance of basic and applied research.” Many of these points have been outlined on Obama’s website and in his written responses to Science Debate 2008 questions (all of which are also summarized in the latest issue of Science News and Science News online reports).

Alas, Obama’s plans for boosting the conduct of science and the development of a larger, better trained workforce may be compromised by current events. If, as seems likely, the public will be asked to shoulder a $700 billion-plus bailout of financial institutions in the coming year, Uncle Sam’s purse strings will be stretched taut. Just Wednesday, Obama acknowledged that such a bailout would slow the pace at which he — should he reach the White House — would be able to phase in his proposed changes.http://Louissheehan.BraveDiary.com

When McCain's campaign releases the names of his science and engineering advisers and supporters, we'll post those here as well.

In the mean time, let’s just hope that the new president, whoever it turns it to be, doesn’t neglect science as he deals with Wall Street’s economic struggles. Because science is one of the best long-term investments any nation can make. And it pays off in good times and bad.

bruno

The 16th-century Italian philosopher (and former Catholic priest) Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for a stubborn adherence to his then unorthodox beliefs—including the ideas that the universe is infinite and that other solar systems exist. Art historian Ingrid Rowland vividly recounts Bruno’s journey through a quickly changing Reformation-era Europe, where he managed to stir up controversy at every turn। Having a habit of calling schoolmasters “asses,” Bruno was jailed in Geneva for slandering his professor after publishing a broadsheet listing 20 mistakes the man had made in a single lecture. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

Bruno’s adventures in free thought ended when the Roman Inquisition declared him “an impenitent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretic,” to which he characteristically replied, “You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it।” In 1600 the inquisitors stripped Bruno naked, bound his tongue, and burned him alive. At least his universe survived. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

http://louis-j-sheehan.net

As early as 7,000 years ago, prehistoric societies in the tropical forests of Central and South

America changed over from foraging to food production by cultivating manioc and other

plants with edible, starchy roots, a new study finds.http://louis-j-sheehan.net

Although cultivation appeared later there than in the Middle East, the data support a controversial

theory that tropical-forest dwellers cultivated roots and tubers long before such

practices emerged elsewhere among Native Americans, says a team led by archaeologist

Dolores R. Piperno of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama.

Piperno's group recovered starch grains from milling stones found at a Panamanian site

dated at between 7,000 and 5,000 years old.

Microscopic analysis of the grains identified examples of manioc, arrowroot, and yams, the

researchers report in the Oct. 19 Nature. Earlier microscope observations by Piperno had

uncovered characteristic grain shapes for these and many other modern species of wild and

domesticated plants.

The ancient milling stones also contained starch grains from maize, indicating that the

site's prehistoric residents grew seed crops as well as root crops, the scientists say.http://louis-j-sheehan.net

Piperno suspects that the cultivation of manioc, a staple food in the tropics, first occurred

in South America and then spread northward. Other researchers have uncovered manioc grains

at two sites in Belize that date to 4,700 years ago.

yale

It may be time for mental-health workers to pick up a new depression-fighting tool—the telephone. People taking antidepressant drugs for a bout of depression do particularly well, at least over a 6-month period, if they also take part in a program that includes telephone psychotherapy, a new study finds.

Evidence of telephone therapy's mood-enhancing effect raises the prospect of expanding the reach of depression treatment, says the investigation's director, psychiatrist Gregory E. Simon of Group Health Cooperative in Seattle. Many people suffering from depression don't take antidepressants—even if the drugs have been prescribed for them—and never receive psychotherapy of any kind. Feelings of discouragement when a medication doesn't work right away and the stigma associated with psychological treatment contribute to this problem, Simon holds.

"With this telephone program, we can help many depressed people who aren't reached by traditional in-person treatments," he says. Simon and his coworkers describe their results in the Aug. 25 Journal of the American Medical Association.

Between November 2000 and May 2002, the researchers recruited 600 adults who were beginning antidepressant treatment at medical clinics run by Group Health Cooperative, a prepaid health plan. Generally, primary care physicians had prescribed fluoxetine (Prozac) or related medications. The study excluded people who were already receiving in-person psychotherapy or planned to do so.

Participants were randomly assigned to one of three treatments: typical primary care follow-ups; typical care plus at least three "care-management" telephone calls over 3 months from mental-health clinicians, who checked on medication use and provided feedback from a patient to his or her primary care physician; and typical care plus care management and eight sessions of cognitive-behavioral therapy delivered by phone.

During the cognitive-behavioral therapy, the clinician and patient discussed ways to increase pleasant activities, reverse negative thoughts, and manage daily affairs. Each session lasted 30 to 40 minutes.

Six months after a person's treatment began, 80 percent of those who received telephone psychotherapy reported a marked decline in depression symptoms, compared with 66 percent of the care-management group and 55 percent of those who got only typical primary care follow-ups. Participants who received telephone psychotherapy reported the most satisfaction with their treatment.

Psychiatric interviews conducted by phone at that time also found that interviewer-detected signs of depression had diminished most sharply in the telephone-psychotherapy group. These results fit with evidence that cognitive-behavioral therapy delivered in person boosts the effectiveness of antidepressant drugs (SN: 8/21/04, p. 116: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040821/fob4.asp).http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com

Psychologist Alan E. Kazdin, director of Yale University's Child Conduct Clinic, regards Simon's project as part of a broad movement to make psychological treatments more easily available through sources such as the Internet and self-help manuals, as well as the telephone.http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com

"Telephone psychotherapy won't replace typical psychotherapy, but it will add to what clinicians can do," he says. "We can help more people if we have a diversified portfolio of treatments for mental disorders."http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com

syndrome

Among its many unusual symptoms, the genetic disorder called Williams syndrome robs people of depth perception and the ability to visualize how different parts assemble into larger objects, as in a simple jigsaw puzzle.http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com

An unusual scarcity of tissue in a small corner of the visual system underlies this particular problem in individuals with Williams syndrome, a new brain-imaging study finds. It appears that, at least with respect to vision, this genetic condition creates a slight defect in an otherwise typical brain.

In contrast, some researchers have proposed that a unique course of brain development occurs in Williams syndrome, which is linked to a missing, roughly 20-gene section of chromosome 7 (SN: 2/26/00, p. 142: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20000226/bob11.asp).

"A very circumscribed abnormality of visual processing characterizes the brain in Williams syndrome," says neuroscientist and study director Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Md. He cautions, however, that other symptoms of the disorder, such as extreme gregariousness toward strangers and difficulty understanding metaphors and other forms of abstract thought, may derive from much broader neural disruptions.

Meyer-Lindenberg and his NIMH colleagues describe their findings in the Sept. 2 Neuron.

The researchers tied vision difficulties in Williams syndrome to a shortage of neurons in part of the brain network that locates objects in space and discerns spatial relationships among objects. Another brain network that identifies different objects, as well as a region that receives nerve signals from the eyes, showed no impairment in Williams syndrome, the scientists say.

Meyer-Lindenberg's team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track blood flow throughout the brains of 13 adults with Williams syndrome and 11 adults with no genetic disorders. Both groups performed two tasks. One involved assessing whether pairs of puzzle pieces could fit together to form a square; the other required determining whether two images were situated at the same height on a computer screen.

Analyses of blood flow showed that the people with Williams syndrome had weaker neural activity in a marble-size section of the brain's network for making spatial judgments. Scans of brain anatomy then revealed a deficit of tissue in an adjacent area of the same network among the volunteers with Williams syndrome. Impairment of that small area partially blocks transmission of visual information to the brain region that displays weak activity in fMRI images from those participants, Meyer-Lindenberg theorizes.

Although Williams syndrome usually includes mild-to-moderate mental retardation, all participants in the new study scored in the average range on intelligence tests. This removed the possibility that retardation-related processes in the brain somehow affected the visual systems of Williams syndrome volunteers.

Preliminary evidence from the same participants also links Williams syndrome to a lack of tissue in a frontal brain area already implicated in social behavior, including fear responses to strangers, the NIMH scientist says.

Although the neural basis of the social and intellectual profile of Williams syndrome remains poorly understood, Meyer-Lindenberg and his coworkers have clarified the syndrome's visual-system defect, comments neuropsychologist Helen Tager-Flusberg of Boston University School of Medicine in an editorial published with the new study।http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com

theft

Rhesus monkeys may not regard the eyes as windows to the soul, but these animals do treat a competitor's averted eyes as a license to steal his or her food, a new study suggests. Using the direction of others' gazes to determine what they can or can't see is a basic component of social reasoning in monkeys that, until now, has eluded researchers, contend Yale University researchers Jonathan I. Flombaum and Laurie R. Santos.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

These results suggest that rhesus monkeys "consider others' visual perspectives," says Flombaum. "Without that ability, you can't reason in more-complex ways about what others know."http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

Monkeys' assumptions about what other animals perceive, at least when they're competing for food, represent what was perhaps an early evolutionary step toward people's capacity to reason about what others think and want, the researchers propose in the March 8 Current Biology.

However, there's less to the new study than meets the eye, argues a critic of much of the research into ape and monkey minds. Psychologist Daniel J. Povinelli of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette argues that Flombaum and Santos show only that monkeys avoid a competitor's gaze, not that they make assumptions about what others see.

This debate hinges on six new experiments, each conducted with 16 to 20 monkeys. The animals belong to groups that roam the Puerto Rican island of Cayo Santiago.

In each trial, two researchers approached a lone monkey. Each person stood by a small platform on which a grape rested. From one trial to the next, the experimenters stood in different positions—turned toward, away from, or sideways to the grape. In some trials, one researcher turned his head to the side or covered his chest, eyes, or mouth with a board or piece of foam. In each trial, a grape was visible to one experimenter but not the other.

The monkeys almost always took the grape only from the person who couldn't detect their pilfering.

Situations in which a monkey is competing for food, in this case with the experimenter, elicit a monkey's capacity for surmising what others can see, in Flombaum's view. An earlier study by other researchers had suggested that monkeys don't pay attention to where others are looking, but that test employed a non-competitive setup in which a researcher hid food and then stared at the hiding spot.

Povinelli argues that the Cayo Santiago monkeys acted so as to avoid the experimenter's direct gaze, which the animals interpreted as a threatening signal. "That doesn't have anything to do with understanding others' perceptions," he says.Louis J. Sheehan

Such a threat played no role in one of the experiments, in which one experimenter faced the grapes and the other one faced the opposite direction, Flombaum responds. Neither experimenter faced the monkey. Still, the monkeys filched grapes from the experimenter who looked away from the food.http://louis-j-sheehan.info

In further experiments, the Yale scientists plan to examine rhesus reasoning in more detail. Monkeys will watch a grape roll down a ramp to either an open platform or one with walls that block the experimenter's, but not the monkey's, view of the food. "We want to see if monkeys take only the hidden grapes," Flombaum says.

addition

The social detachment and isolation that characterize autism may stem, at least in part, from a breakdown of brain cells that have been implicated in people's ability to imitate others and to read their thoughts and feelings.

A new brain-imaging investigation tested high-functioning children with autism—kids who score in the normal range on intelligence tests and display only mild-to-moderate social difficulties. As these youngsters view and imitate facial expressions, brain cells called mirror neurons show meager activity, say neuroscientist Mirella Dapretto of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine and her colleagues. Children free of developmental problems exhibit robust responses by these neurons during the same tasks.

"A dysfunctional mirror-neuron system [in autism] could account for both a lack of social motivation and deficits in understanding others' intentions and emotions," Dapretto says.

Mirror neurons, first reported in 1996, respond comparably whether an individual performs a particular action or watches someone else carry it out (SN: 5/24/03, p. 330: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030524/bob9.asp). Studies since then have suggested that these neurons, which coordinate imitation, participate in a network in the brain's outer layer, or cortex. Collaboration between this network and emotion-regulating parts of the brain fosters empathy, the discernment of others' thoughts and feelings, the UCLA researchers propose.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

Dapretto's team used a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner to measure blood flow in the brains of 10 high-functioning children with autism and 10 neurologically healthy children. Participants ranged in age from 10 to 14 years. The scientists determined brain-cell activity by measuring blood flow.

Each child underwent brain scanning as he or she observed a series of 80 photographs of different faces and then went through the series again to imitate the facial expression in each photo. Expressions conveyed anger, fear, happiness, sadness, or neutrality.

Children in both groups maintained good focus on the photos during the tasks and successfully imitated most facial expressions.

However, during the tasks, kids with autism displayed less blood flow in a key part of the mirror-neuron system than the other youngsters did. Autistic children with the worst social skills exhibited the smallest responses.

Dapretto's group proposes that the youngsters with autism intently scrutinized the details of each face photo in order to imitate what they saw because they were unable to discern the meaning of a facial expression and then use empathy to match it. Brain areas that control visual and motor attention showed unusually intense activity while these children observed and imitated facial expressions, the researchers note.Louis

Their report appears in the January Nature Neuroscience.

Yale University neuroscientist Robert T. Schultz calls the new study a valuable addition to evidence linking autism to scant activity in brain areas governing perception and language.

Autistic kids' striking lack of interest in social pursuits still eludes explanation, he adds. "These children have an insensitivity to social rewards that alters their brain development," Schultz remarks. "We don't know why."

epidemic

The Black Death, a bacterial epidemic that wiped out more than 1 in 3 Europeans from 1347 to 1351, was not an equal-opportunity destroyer। http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.comA new report finds that the disease disproportionately took the lives of physically frail people, rather than indiscriminately killing off individuals regardless of their health। http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com

Sharon DeWitte of the University at Albany, N।Y., and James W. Wood of Pennsylvania State University in University Park examined 490 skeletons from London's East Smithfield cemetery, established in 1348 or 1349 solely to bury Black Death victims. The researchers looked for any of four types of bone damage or deformation that have been linked to infections or poor nutrition early in life. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com

For comparison, DeWitte and Wood also studied 291 pre-Black Death skeletons from cemeteries of two medieval Danish towns.

The scientists estimated each individual's age at death and used a computer model to calculate the extent to which frailty contributed to death in the two populations.

Physical infirmities greatly raised the risk of dying for Danes unexposed to the Black Death, the scientists report in the Feb. 5 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For instance, Danes with certain lower-leg lesions exhibited more than five times the risk of dying as their peers without such damage did.

Frailty also showed a strong, but less pronounced, link to death among Britons exposed to the epidemic. Individuals who incurred lower-leg damage before exposure to the Black Death were 50 percent more likely to die during the epidemic than were their non-damaged peers.

The new findings challenge assumptions that Black Death cemeteries contain a representative cross-section of the population from that time.

Forecasting a snow avalanche takes more than measuring the angle of a mountain slope, researchers report in the July 11 Science। Whether an avalanche happens might also depend on how the snow cracks and collapses, the study suggests। http://louis-j-sheehan.com

“The new theory could be a breakthrough in understanding what is going on at the very moment when an avalanche begins,” says University of Edinburgh physicist Joachim Heierli, lead author of the study. It “gives hints on what snow properties to look for to anticipate the risk of triggering a slab avalanche.”

Slab avalanches are the most common and most dangerous because a slab of snow breaks loose and cascades to the slope’s bottom. By modeling this avalanche type the team found that snow fractures much more easily than previously thought. Also, friction between snow layers may be more important in avalanche dynamics than once thought.

“Friction may not stop the fracture from spreading but may stop the avalanche,” Heierli says.

Also, gravity pulling down along the slope is less important than the compression of the snow, the team reports.

All cracked upScientists capture a sudden cracking of the snowpack, which is a clear sign of stress and instability. The way the snow fractures can portend whether the snow layers will collapse in on themselves or slide as a slab down the slope below as an avalanche.A. Duclos, www.data-avalanche.org

In a snow pile, a brittle, collapsible layer sits between a solid, dense snow slab on top and a rigid snow base below। The way the brittle, middle snow layer fractures when it’s disturbed controls whether a snow pile will shear off leading to a violent slab avalanche or will collapse under its own weight। http://louis-j-sheehan.com

Scientists had previously thought that slab avalanches start when shear cracks along the brittle, middle layer of a snowpack spread and that the angle of the slope, and therefore the gravity tugging on the slope, would drive the avalanche.

According to this argument, says Heierli, the critical crack size to start an avalanche should increase as the slope angle decreases. But recent field experiments done by other researchers on snowpacks in Canada showed instead that, in general, the size of the crack in the brittle, middle layer required to start an avalanche increased or remained constant as slope angles increased.

Heierli’s team tried to address this discrepancy between the experiments and the theory of slab avalanche triggers by modeling both the gravitational tug on the snow along the slope angle and the downward pull of gravity perpendicular to the slope, finding the perpendicular pull was more important.

“Some layers inside the snow are a very frail network of ice grains with lots of space in between,” Heierli says. “Some arrangements may crumble like a house of cards because some grains or fragments fall into the space between other ice grains. Then a cavity forms between the two layers.”

Modeling the development of these cavities, or “anticracks,” led the team to conclude that fractures caused by snow crumbling can spread over large areas and create an avalanche similar to what was seen in the most recent field experiments, the study reports.

“This research is really an entirely new paradigm for how the fractures that result in snow avalanches work,” says Karl Birkeland, a scientist with the U.S. Forest Service’s National Avalanche Center. “And, these findings better fit with what we observe about avalanches in the field.”

The new findings also suggest that horizontal snow layers can fracture more easily than once thought and that there is no measured, minimum slope angle to start a snow slide.

“If moving over a flat snow cover, you may trigger a remote avalanche on the hill above you making it come down on you or others,” Heierli says. “Experienced backcountry skiers know this already, but now they may better understand how it can happen.”

Birkeland notes that the new model offers a new way to think about how avalanches are triggered and might lead to better tests for predicting snow slides in the field.

dispatch

MAY 28TH.—Showers and sunshine.

Grant has crossed the Pamunky, and Lee is at the Yellow Tavern—not more than six miles from the city. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.comThe hostile armies are only a few miles apart, and the GREAT BATTLE may occur at any time, at any hour; and we shall hear both the artillery and musketry from my dwelling.

All is quiet on the south side of the river. Nothing from Georgia, except a short address from Gen. Johnston to the army, stating that, having the enemy now where he wants him, he will lead the soldiers to battle.

War and famine develop some of the worst instincts of our nature. For five days the government has been selling meal, by the peck, for $12: and yet those who have been purchasing have endeavored to keep it a secret! And the government turns extortioner, making $45 profit per bushel out of the necessities of the people!

I saw a dispatch, to-day, from Gen. Johnston to his Chief Commissary, at Atlanta, ordering him, after reserving ten days’ rations, to send the rest of the stores to Augusta!

It is said Mr. Memminger and certain members of Congress have in readiness the means of sudden flight, in the event of Grant’s forcing his way into the city.http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com

It is thought, to-day, that Bragg will resign. If he does, then the President will be humiliated; for the attacks on Bragg are meant principally for Mr. Davis. But I doubt the story; I don’t think the President will permit Bragg to retire before his enemies, unless affairs become desperate by the defeat of our army in this vicinity.

repressed

The American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association have both cautioned against the use of repressed memory therapy in dealing with cases of alleged childhood trauma, stating that "it is impossible, without other corroborative evidence, to distinguish a true memory from a false one", and so the procedure is "fraught with problems of potential misapplication"। http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

In a lecture to the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis (ASCH) during their annual conference at the State University Of New York, Dr. Milton Erickson taught the process of indirect hypnosis while Dr. Robert W. Habbick spoke of his research on the use of hypnosis in enhancing learning and reducing anxiety. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.USDr. Habbick explained the use of a triad of suggestions: "(a) enhancing confidence, while (b) strengthening focused interest in the work and (c) improving energy to do the studying necessary." The results of his controlled research pointed the way toward the need to apply hypnosis especially with students who have difficulty studying. In a more recent lecture, Dr. Habbick spoke in Boston to ASCH of the positive effects of using his suggested hypnosis triad with students at the Bureau of Study Council at Harvard University.

Hypnodermatology is the practice of treating skin diseases with hypnosis.

warming

he United States sizzled as thermometers topped 100 degrees in 45 cities from coast to coast: 102 in Sacramento; 103 in Lincoln, Nebraska; 101 in Richmond, Virginia. In the nation's heartland the searing heat was accompanied by a ruinous drought that ravaged crops and prompted talk of a dust bowl to rival that of the 1930s. Heat waves and droughts are nothing new, of course. But on that stifling June day a top atmospheric scientist tes­tifying on Capitol Hill had a disturbing message for his senatorial audience: Get used to it.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

This wasn't just a bad year, James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies told the Senate committee, or even the start of a bad decade. Rather, he could state with "99 percent confidence" that a recent, persistent rise in global tem­perature was a climatic sig­nal he and his colleagues had long been expecting. Others were still hedging their bets, arguing there was room for doubt. But Hansen was willing to say what no one had dared say before. "The greenhouse effect," he claimed, "has been detected and is changing our climate now."

Until this year, despite dire warnings from clima­tologists, the greenhouse ef­fect has seemed somehow academic and far off. The idea behind it is simple: gases accumulating in the at­mosphere as by-products of human industry and agricul­ture—carbon dioxide, mostly, but also methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and chlorofluorocarbons—let in the sun's warming rays but don't let excess heat escape. As a result, mean global tem­perature has probably been rising for decades. But the rise has been so gradual that it has been masked by the much greater, and ordinary, year-to-year swings in world temperature.

Not anymore, said Hansen. The 1980s have al­ready seen the four hottest years on record, and 1988 is almost certain to be hotter still. Moreover, the seasonal, regional, and atmospheric patterns of rising tempera­tures—greater warming in winters than summers, greater warming at high lati­tudes than near the equator, and a cooling in the strato­sphere while the lower at­mosphere is warmer—jibe with what computer models predict should happen with greenhouse heating. And the warming comes at a time when, by rights, Earth should actually be cooler than normal. The sun's radi­ance has dropped slightly since the 1970s, and dust thrown up by recent vol­canic eruptions, especially that of Mexico's El Chichon in 1982, should be keeping some sunlight from reaching the planet.

Even though most clima­tologists think Hansen's claims are premature, they agree that warming is on the way. Carbon dioxide levels are 25 percent higher now than they were in 1860, and the atmosphere's burden of greenhouse gases is ex­pected to keep growing. By the middle of the next cen­tury the resulting warming could boost global mean temperatures from three to nine degrees Fahrenheit. That doesn't sound like much, but it equals the tem­perature rise since the end of the last ice age, and the con­sequences could be devastat­ing. Weather patterns could shift, bringing drought to once fertile areas and heavy rains to fragile deserts that cannot handle them. As run­off from melting glaciers in­creases and warming seawa­ter expands, sea level could rise as much as six feet, in­undating low-lying coastal areas and islands. There would be dramatic disrup­tions of agriculture, water re­sources, fisheries, coastal ac­tivity, and energy use.

"Average climate will cer­tainly get warmer," says Roger Revelle, an oceanogra­pher and climatologist at the University of California at San Diego. "But what's more serious is how many more hurricanes we'll have, how many more droughts we'll have, how many days above one hundred degrees." By Hansen's reckoning, where Washington now averages one day a year over 100 de­grees, it will average 12 such scorchers annually by the middle of the next century.

Comparable climate shifts have happened before, but over tens of centuries, not tens of years. The unprece­dented rapid change could accelerate the already high rate of species extinction as plants and animals fail to adapt quickly enough. For the first time in history hu­mans are affecting the eco­logical balance of not just a region but the entire world, all at once. "We're altering the environment far faster than we can possibly predict the consequences," says Stephen Schneider, a climate modeler at the National Cen­ter for Atmospheric Re­search in Boulder, Colorado. "This is bound to lead to some surprises."

Schneider has been trying to generate interest in the greenhouse effect since the early 1970s, although largely unsuccessfully. Frightening as the greenhouse effect is, the task of curbing it is so daunting that no one has been willing to take the nec­essary steps as long as there was even a tiny chance that the effect might not be real. Since greenhouse gases are chiefly the result of human industry and agriculture, it is not an exaggeration to say that civilization itself is the ultimate cause of global warming. That doesn't mean nothing can be done; only that delaying the effects of global warming by cutting down on greenhouse-gas emissions will be tremen­dously difficult, both techni­cally and politically. Part of the problem is that predict­ing exactly what will happen to the local climate, region by region, is a task that's still beyond the power of even the most sophisticated com­puter model.

+++

Some parts of the world could actually benefit from climate change, while others could suffer tremendously. But for the foreseeable fu­ture the effects will he uncer­tain. No nation can plan on benefiting, and so, says Schneider, we must all "hedge our global bets," by reducing emissions of green­house gases. "The longer we wait to take action," he says, "and the weaker the action, the larger the effect and the more likely that it will be negative." Says meteorolo­gist Howard Ferguson, assis­tant deputy minister of the Canadian Atmospheric Envi­ronment Service, "All the greenhouse scenarios are consistent. These numbers are real. We have to start be­having as if this is going to happen. Those who advo­cate a program consisting only of additional research are missing the boat."

While the greenhouse ef­fect threatens to make life on Earth miserable, it is also part of the reason life is livable in the first place. For at least the last 100,000 years atmospheric carbon dioxide, naturally generated and con­sumed by animals and plants, was in rough equilib­rium, at a couple of hundred parts per million. Without this minute but critical trace to hold in heat, the globe's mean temperature would be in the forties instead of a comfortable 59 degrees. The amount of carbon dioxide has risen and fallen a bit, co­inciding with the spread and retreat of glaciers as ice ages have come and gone. But until the Industrial Revolu­tion, atmospheric carbon di­oxide levels never rose above a manageable 280 parts per million.

Then, beginning early in the nineteenth century, the burning of fossil fuels, espe­cially coal, took off. By 1900, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere had begun to rise steadily, reaching 340 parts per million last year.

Levels of the other green­house gases have also risen. Methane, for example, is generated primarily by bac­terial decomposition of or­ganic matter—particularly in such places as landfills, flooded rice paddies, and the guts of cattle and termites— and by the burning of wood. Methane concentration in the atmosphere has grown steadily as Earth's human population has grown, rising one percent a year over the last decade. Levels of chlo­rofluorocarbons, which are used as refrigerants, as cleaning solvents, and as raw materials for making plastic foam, have climbed 5 percent annually.

The amount of nitrous ox­ide in the atmosphere has quickly increased as well, with about a third of the total added by human activity— much of that emitted by ni­trogen-based fertilizers, and half of that from just three nations: China, the Soviet Union, and the United States. This gas is also re­leased by the burning of coal and other fossil fuels, includ­ing gasoline. And ozone, which forms a beneficial shield against ultraviolet ra­diation when high in the stratosphere, is an efficient greenhouse gas when it ap­pears at airliner altitudes— as it increasingly does, since it too is a by-product of fossil fuel burning.

All these gases are far more efficient at absorbing infrared energy (the invis­ible radiation that ordinarily carries Earth's excess heat into space) than is carbon dioxide. Indeed, atmo­spheric chemists have esti­mated that the combined warming effect of these trace gases will soon equal or ex­ceed the effect from carbon dioxide. And even as growth has slowed in the industrial­ized nations, the Third World is rushing full tilt into development. All told, bil­lions of tons of greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere each year.

The big question is, given the inexorable buildup of these gases—a growth that even the most spirited optimists concede can only be slowed, not stopped— what will the specific effects be? It's hard to say, because the relationship between worldwide climate and local weather is such a complex phenomenon to begin with. The chaotic patterns of jet streams and vortices and ocean currents swirling it around the globe and gov­erning the weather still con­found meteorologists; in fact, weather more than two weeks in the future is thought by some to he inher­ently unpredictable.

So far, the best answers have come from computer models that simulate the workings of the atmosphere. Most divide the atmosphere into hundreds of boxes, each of which is represented by mathematical equations for wind, temperature, mois­ture, incoming radiation, outgoing radiation, and the like. Each mathematical box is linked to its neighbors, so it can respond to changing conditions with appropriate changes of its own. Thus, the model behaves the way the world does—albeit at a very rough scale. A typical model divides the atmosphere verti­cally into nine layers and horizontally into boxes that are several hundred miles on a side.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

Climate modelers can play with "what if" scenarios to see how the world would re­spond to an arbitrary set of conditions. Several years ago, for example, computer models were used to holster the theory of nuclear winter, which concluded that smoke and dust lofted into the at­mosphere in a nuclear war would block sunlight and dangerously chili the planet. To study the greenhouse ef­fect, climatologists first used models to simulate current conditions, then instantly doubled the amount of car­bon dioxide in the atmo­sphere. The computer was allowed to run until condi­tions stabilized at a new equilibrium, and a map could be drawn showing changes in temperature, pre­cipitation, and other factors.

But Hansen's latest simu­lations—the ones he used in his startling congressional testimony—are more sophis­ticated. In them he added carbon dioxide to the atmo­sphere stepwise, just as is happening in the real world. The simulations, begun in 1983, took so much com­puter time that they were not completed and pub­lished until this summer.

Even the best climate model, however, has to over­simplify the enormous com­plexity of the real atmo­sphere. One problem is the size of the boxes. The model used at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, for example, typically uses boxes 4.5 degrees of latitude by 7 degrees of longitude— about the size of the center's home state of Colorado— and treats them as uniform masses of air. While that's inherently inaccurate—the real Colorado contains such fundamentally different fea­tures as the Rocky Moun­tains and the Great Plains— using smaller boxes would take too much computing power.

Another problem is that modelers must estimate the influence of vegetation, ice and snow, soil moisture, ter­rain, and especially clouds, which reflect lots of sun­light back into space and also hold in surface heat. "Clouds are an important factor about which little is known," says Schneider. "When I first started looking at this in 1972, we didn't know much about the feed­back from clouds. We don't know any more now than we did then."

+++

So it is not surprising that while the inure than a dozen major global climate models in use around the world tend to agree on the broadest phenomena, they differ wildly when it comes to regional effects. And, says Robert Cess, a climate mod­eler at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, "The smaller the scale, the bigger the disagreement."

That makes it extremely hard to get national and local governments to take action. Says Stephen Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at the Uni­versity of Maryland, "Unless you can put something down on paper and show the effects on actual locations— even actual buildings—then it's just pie in the sky."

There are, however, some consequences of a warming Earth that will be universal. Perhaps the most obvious is a rise in sea level. "If we went all out to slow the warming trend, we might stall sea level rise at three to six feet," says Robert Buddemeier of Lawrence Livermore Na­tional Laboratory, who is studying the impact of sea- level rise on coral reefs, "But that's the very best you could hope for." And a six- foot rise, Buddemeier pre­dicts, would be devastating.

It would, for one thing, render almost all low cor­al islands uninhabitable. "Eventually," Buddemeier says, "a lot of this real estate is going to go underwater," For places like the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, the Maldives off the west coast of India, and some Carib­bean nations, this could mean nothing less than na­tional extinction. "You're re­ally looking at a potential refugee problem of unprece­dented dimensions," says Buddemeier. "In the past, people have run away from famine or oppression. But they've never been physi­cally displaced from a coun­try because a large part of it has disappeared."

Coastal regions of conti­nents or larger islands will also be in harm's way, par­ticularly towns or cities built on barrier islands and the fertile flat plains that typi­cally surround river deltas. Bangladesh, dominated by the Ganges-Brahmaputra-­Meghna Delta, is the classic case, says Buddemeier. "It's massively populated, ach­ingly poor, and something like a sixth of the country is going to go away."

Egypt will be in similar trouble, according to a study by economist James Broadus and several colleagues at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Like the Ganges-­Brahmaputra-Meghna, the soft sediments of the Nile Delta are subsiding. Given even an intermediate sce­nario for sea-level rise by the year 2050, Egypt could lose 15 percent of its arable land, land that currently houses 14 percent of its population and produces 14 percent of its gross domestic product.

One mitigating factor for some coastal nations that are still developing, such as Be­lize and Indonesia, is that they generally have commit­ted fewer resources to the coastline than their devel­oped counterparts—Austra­lia, for example, or the United States, with such vul­nerable cities as Galveston and Miami. "Developed countries have billions in­vested in a very precarious, no-win situation," Budde­meier says. "The less devel­oped countries will have an easier time adapting."

+++

Indeed, the impact on coastal cities in developed countries may be enormous. The Urban Institute, a non­partisan think tank, is com­pleting a study for the En­vironmental Protection Agency on what a three-foot sea level rise would do to Mi­ami. Miami is particularly vulnerable. Not only is it a coastal city, but it is nearly surrounded by water, with the Atlantic to the east, the Everglades to the west, and porous limestone beneath— "one of the most permeable aquifers in the world," says William Hyman, a senior re­ search associate at the insti­tute. "The aquifer in Miami is so porous that you'd actu­ally have to build a dike down one hundred fifty feet beneath the surface to keep water from welling up." In an unusually severe storm nearby Miami Beach would be swept by a wall of water up to 16 feet above the cur­rent sea level.

Image courtesy of US Army Corps of Engineers

Storms are an even greater danger to Galveston, which Leatherman has studied ex­tensively. Given just a cou­ple of feet in sea-level rise, a moderately bad hurricane, of the type that occurs about once every ten years, would have the destructive impact of the type of storm that oc­curs once a century. And Galveston is typical of a whole range of resort areas on the eastern and Gulf coasts, such as Atlantic City, New Jersey ("almost the whole New Jersey coast, re­ally," says Leatherman); Ocean City, Maryland; and Myrtle Beach, South Caro­lina. "The point is, all these cities have been built on low-lying sandy barrier is­lands, mostly with eleva­tions no higher than ten feet above sea level," Leather­man says. "Just a small rise in sea level will result in a lot of complications."

Even as cities become more vulnerable to moderate storms, the intensity of hur­ricanes may increase dra­matically, says Kerry Eman­uel, a meteorologist at MIT. Hurricane intensity is linked to the temperature of the sea surface, Emanuel explains. According to his models, if the sea warms to predicted levels, the most intense hurricanes will be 40 to 50 per­cent more severe than the most intense hurricanes of the past 50 years.

James Titus, director of the Environmental Protec­tion Agency's Sea Level Rise Project, says communities will have two choices: build walls or get out of the way. For cities such as New York or Boston the answer may well he to build walls. But for most other coastal regions, picking up and moving may work out better. One of the first examples of a regional government making a regu­lation based on the green­house effect took place in Maine last year. The state approved regulations allow­ing coastal development with the understanding that if sea level rises enough to inundate a property, the property will revert to na­ture, with the owner footing the bill for dismantling or moving structures.

Another worldwide con­sequence of global warming is increased precipitation: warmer air will mean more evaporation of ocean water, more clouds, and an overall rise in rain and snow of be­tween 5 and 7 percent. But it won't be evenly distrib­uted. One climate model at Princeton University's Geo­ physical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory predicts that cen­tral India will have doubled precipitation, while the cen­ters of continents at middle latitudes--the midwestern United States, for example— will actually have much drier summers than they have now (this summer's drought could, in other words, be a foretaste). Some and areas, including south­ern California and Morocco, will have drier winters; and winters are when such areas get most of their precipita­tion. Moreover, the effect may be self-perpetuating: drier soil, says Syukuro Manabe, the climatologist who developed the model, leads to even hotter air.

The changes could be po­litical dynamite for nations that already argue over water resources. A prime ex­ample is Egypt and Sudan, both of which draw their lifeblood from the north- flowing Nile. Sudan has been trying to divert a bigger share of the river's water; but downstream, Egypt is experiencing one of Africa's fastest population explo­sions and will need every drop of water it can get. A string of droughts in the Su­dan could make the conflict far worse. The same situ­ation occurs in many other parts of the world.

Not all the tensions will be international. Within na­tions, local effects of global warming will cause interne­cine fights for increasingly scarce water. In the United States, for example, western states have long argued over who owns what fraction of the water in such rivers as the Colorado. In California 42 percent of the water comes from the Sacramento and San Joaquin river ba­sins, which are fed by runoff from the Sierra Nevada and other mountain ranges. Most of the water falls as snow in the winter, which melts in the spring to feed the rivers, reservoirs, and subterranean aquifers. The state's normal strategy for water management calls for keeping the reservoirs low in winter, to provide protection against floods, and keeping them as high as possible in summer, to ensure an ade­quate supply for the giant farming operations in the Central Valley (one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world) and for arid southern California.

Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute for Studies in De­velopment, Environment and Security, in Berkeley, California, has devised a widely praised model that predicts a dramatic disrup­tion of the state's water sup­ply in the event of global warming, even if total precipitation remains un­changed. It focuses on the Sacramento River basin, which alone provides 30 per­cent of the state's water and almost all the water for agri­culture in the Central Valley.

According to the model, higher temperatures will mean that what falls in win­ter will increasingly be rain, not snow, and that more of it will run off right away. California may get the same amount of total annual run­off, but the water-distribu­tion system won't be able to deal with it. "California will get the worst of all possible worlds—more flooding in the winter, less available water in the summer," Gleick says. "This will re­verberate throughout the state." San Francisco Bay will feel a secondary effect. As freshwater supplies shrink in the summer, seawater, which has already infiltrated freshwater aqui­fers beneath the low-lying Sacramento Delta, will con­tinue its push inland. Rising sea level will just compound the effect.

Food is another crucial re­source that will be affected by the global green­house. Taken by itself, a rise in atmospheric carbon diox­ide might not be so bad. For many crops more carbon di­oxide means a rise in the rate of photosynthesis and, there­fore, in growth; and with in­creased carbon dioxide some plants' use of water is more efficient, according to stud­ies done in conventional glass greenhouses. Also, as the planet gets warmer, crops might be cultivated farther north. But as usual, things are not so simple. A temperature rise of only 3.5 degrees in the tropics could reduce rice production by more than 10 percent.

+++

In temperate regions also, the picture is mixed. Cynthia Rosenzweig, a researcher based at Goddard, has been using crop-growth computer models to predict effects of carbon dioxide buildup and climate change on wheat, the most widely cultivated crop in the world. Plugging in temperature changes de­rived from the Goddard cli­mate model, Rosenzweig tested a world with doubled carbon dioxide levels. Be­cause the Goddard model is had at predicting precipita­tion, she did separate runs for normal and dry condi­tions. She found that in nor­mal years the wheat grew better, thanks to the extra carbon dioxide. But in dry years there was a marked in­crease in crop failures, be­cause of excessive heat. Given the likelihood that heat waves and droughts are increasing, she says, no one should count on better yields in years to come.

The nations most likely to reap the benefits of warmer climate are Canada and the Soviet Union, much of whose vast land area is too cold for large-scale crop cul­tivation. There has even been speculation that these countries might go slowly on controlling the greenhouse effect, or even oppose such control; anyone who has spent the winter in Mos­cow or Saskatoon would be sorely tempted by the prospect of better weather.

But again, atmospheric scientists stress that no na­tion can count on benefits. "The models suggest that ecological zones will shift northward," says planetary scientist Michael McElroy of Harvard. "The southwestern desert to the Grain Belt; the Grain Belt to Canada. There might he winners and losers if this shift occurs slowly. But suppose it shifts so fast that ecosystems are unable to keep up?" For example, he says, there is a limit to the distance that a forest can propagate in a year. "If it is unable to propagate fast enough, then either we have to come in and plant trees, or else we'll see total devasta­tion and the collapse of the ecosystem."

According to Irving Mintzer, a senior associate with the Energy and Climate Project of the World Re­sources Institute in Wash­ington, there is another rea­son to be leery of projections for regional agricultural benefits. Just because cli­matic conditions conducive to grain cultivation move north, that doesn't mean that other conditions neces­sary for agricultural super­powerdom will be present. Much of Canada, for exam­ple, does not have the opti­mum type of soil for growing wheat and corn.

Wildlife will suffer, too. In much of the world, wilderness areas are increas­ingly hemmed in by devel­opment, and when climate shifts, these fragile ecosys­tems won't be able to shift with it. Plants will suddenly be unable to propagate their seeds, and animals will have no place to go. Species in the Arctic, such as caribou, may lose vital migratory routes as ice bridges between islands melt.

In the United States the greatest impact will likely be on coastal wetlands: the salt marshes, swamps, and bay­ous that are among the world's most diverse and productive natural habitats. James Titus of the Environ­mental Protection Agency estimates that a five-foot rise in sea level—not even the worst-case scenario—would destroy between 50 and 90 percent of America's wet- lands. Under natural condi­tions marshes would slowly shift inland. But with levees, condominiums, and other man-made structures in the way, they can't. The situ­ation is worst in Louisiana, says Titus, which has 40 per­cent of U.S. wetlands (ex­cluding those in Alaska); much of the verdant Missis­sippi River delta may well vanish.

In many parts of the trop­ics, low forests of mangrove trees thrive in the shallow waters along coastlines. Their dense networks of roots and runners are natu­ral island-building systems, trapping sediment and cush­ioning the damaging effects of tropical storms. But rising sea levels will flood the man­groves; the natural response would be for them to shift with the tide, spreading their roots farther inland. But in places where development has encroached on the shore, the mangrove forests will feel the same squeeze that will threaten marshes.

The only way to eliminate the greenhouse problem completely would be to return the world to its pre­industrial state. No one pro­poses that. But researchers agree that there is plenty that can be done to at least slow down the warming. Energy conservation comes first: us­ing less coal, finding more efficient ways to use cleaner- burning fossil fuels, and tak­ing a new look at nonfossil alternatives, everything from solar and geothermal energy to—yes, even some environ­mentalists are admitting it— nuclear power.

+++

Getting the world's frac­tious nations to agree to a program of remedial mea­sures sounds extremely diffi­cult, but Stephen Schneider sees signs that it may not be impossible. Schneider was one of more than 300 dele­gates from 48 countries who attended the International Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, which took place in Toronto, coinciden­tally, just a week after Hansen's congressional testi­mony. It was, says Schnei­der, the "Woodstock of CO2" (an obvious reference to the "Woodstock of Phys­ics" meeting held last year, during which news of the high-temperature supercon­ductors exploded into the public consciousness).

The meeting was the first large-scale attempt to bridge the gap between scientists and policymakers on a wide range of atmospheric prob­lems, including not just the greenhouse effect but also acid rain and the depletion of the protective layer of ozone in the stratosphere. Four days of floor debates, panel discussions, and closed-door sessions pro­duced an ambitious mani­festo calling for, among other things, the following:

• A 20 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by industrialized nations by the year 2005, using a com­bination of conservation ef­forts and reduced consump­tion of fossil fuels. A 50 percent cut would eventu­ally be needed to stabilize at­mospheric carbon dioxide.
• A switch from coal or oil to other fuels. Burning natu­ral gas, for example, pro­duces half as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy as burning coal.
• Much more funding for development of solar power, wind power, geothermal power, and the like, and ef­forts to develop safe nuclear power.
• Drastic reductions in de­forestation, and encourage­ment of forest replanting and restoration.<
• The labeling of products whose manufacture does not harm the environment.
• Nearly complete elimi­nation of the use of chloro­fluorocarbons, or CFCs, by the year 2000.

Of all the anti-greenhouse measures, the last should prove easiest to achieve. Although CFCs are extremely persistent, re­maining in the upper atmo­sphere for decades, and al­though they are 10,000 times more efficient than carbon dioxide at trapping heat, the process of controlling them has been under way for years, for reasons having nothing to do with the greenhouse effect. Since the early 1970s atmospheric sci­entists have known that CFCs could have destructive effects on ozone. CFCs were banned from spray cans in the United States and Can­ada in the late 1970s, and the appearance of a "hole" in the ozone layer over Antarc­tica in the early 1980s cre­ated an international con­sensus that CFCs must go. Last year 53 nations crafted an agreement that will cut CFC production by 50 per­cent over the next decade; the chemicals may well be banned altogether by the turn of the century.

CFCs are a special case, however. Since they are en­tirely man-made, and since substitutes are available or under development, control is straightforward. "There are only thirty-eight compa­nies worldwide that produce CFCs," says Pieter Win­semius, former minister of the environment of the Netherlands. "You can put them all in one room; you can talk to them. But you can't do that with the pro­ducers of carbon dioxide— all the world's utilities and industries."

Also, there is a lack of ba­sic information on the flow of carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases into and out of the atmosphere and biosphere. Just as one example, there is no good es­timate of how much carbon dioxide, methane, and ni­trous oxide are produced by fires, both man-made and naturally occurring. "We need to better assess global biomass burning as a source of greenhouse gases," says Joel Levine of the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. "We have to understand what we're actually doing when we burn tropical forests and when we burn agricultural stubble after harvest. We don't know on a global basis what the contribution is."

Remarkably, the confer­ence spurred some specific promises from political lead­ers rather than just vague platitudes. Standing before a 40-foot-wide photorealist painting of a cloud-studded skyscape, prime ministers Brian Mulroney of Canada and Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway pledged that their countries will slow fossil fuel use and forgive some Third World debt, allowing devel­oping countries to grow in a sustainable way. Says Schneider, "In the fifteen years that I've been trying to convince people of the seriousness of the green­house effect, this is the first time I've seen a broad con­sensus: First, there is a con­sensus that action is not pre­mature. Second, that so­lutions have to occur on a global as well as a national scale."

In the end, the greatest ob­stacle facing those who are trying to slow the output of greenhouse gases is the fun­damental and pervasive na­ture of the human activities that are causing the prob­lem: deforestation, in­dustrialization, energy pro­duction. As populations boom, productivity must keep up. And even as the de­veloped nations of the world cut back on fossil fuel use, there will be no justifiable way to prevent the Third World from expanding its use of coal and oil. How can the developed countries ex­pect that China, for example, which has plans to double its coal production in the next 15 years in order to spur de­velopment, will be willing or even able to change course?

And then there is poverty, which contributes to the greenhouse effect by encour­aging destruction of forests. "Approximately seventy-five percent of the deforesta­tion occurring in the world today is accounted for by landless people in a desper­ate search for food," says Jose Lutzenberger, director of the Gala Foundation, an influential Brazilian environ­mental group. Commercial logging accounts for just 15 percent of tropical forest loss worldwide. Unfortunately for the atmosphere and the forests themselves, working out an agreement with the tropical timber industry will be far easier than eliminat­ing rural poverty.

Industrialized nations, which created most of the greenhouse problem, should lead the way to finding solu­tions, says State Department official Richard Benedick, who represented the United States during negotiations for cuts in CFCs and who was a conference attendee. The first priority, he says, should be strong conserva­tion efforts—an area in which the United States lags far behind such countries as Japan. The effect of such measures, Benedick feels, can only be positive and the cost is not great. "Certain things make sense on their own merits," he says. Tech­nology can be transferred to developing countries. In some Third World nations a partial solution can be as simple as modernizing en­ergy production and distri­bution. Upgrading India's electric-power distribution system, Benedick says, could double the effective energy output of existing coal-fired power plants.

Addressing the confer­ence, Canadian minister of energy Marcel Masse noted that there is cause for opti­mism. One need look no fur­ther than the energy crisis of a decade ago. From 1979 to 1985, thanks primarily to conservation, substantial cuts were made in the use of fossil fuels by industrialized nations. Only since 1986 and the current oil glut, said Masse, has there been a re­surgence in oil use and coal burning.

Michael McElroy con­cluded, "If we choose to take on this challenge, it appears that we can slow the rate of change substantially, giving us time to develop mecha­nisms so that the cost to society and the damage to eco­systems can be minimized. We could alternatively close our eyes, hope for the best, and pay the cost when the bill comes due."

moth

California residents need no longer worry that anti-moth pesticides will rain down from the sky onto their houses. But they should still be on the lookout for thousands and thousands more moths.http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET

The light brown apple moth, native to Australia, invaded northern California in March 2007 and state agricultural officials say it is a major threat to many different crops proceeded to chow down on crops. Initially, the state planned to spray moth-infested areas, including residential ones, with a chemical that acts as a phony pheromone, mimicking the female scent and throwing the males off course so they don’t mate. According to The New York Times, there were “numerous complaints” of respiratory problems after the chemical was sprayed last November. And after an outcry from Northern Californians who didn’t want it in their town, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger relented and changed course.

The state still plans to spray agricultural areas, but will now battle apple moths in the urban areas by sending in sterilized moths. Starting next year and accelerating in 2010, California plans to release tens of thousands of light brown apple moths, all of which will be sterile. As the genetically engineered moths unsuccessfully try to mate, researchers hope, the moth population will crash.http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET

We wrote last month about a similar situation in Malaysia, where some scientists want to annihilate the population of dengue-spreading mosquitoes by engineering millions of male mosquitoes to have children that would die shortly after their birth. That kind of genetic tampering has made plenty of people nervous, and how effective it will be remains unclear. But on the other hand, the political alternative might be to combat pests with more chemicals—in some places, there’s even a chorus to bring back DDT as the answer to the malaria menace, though DDT would do as much harm to agriculture as it would do to the moths, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

The best answer, of course, it doing as much as possible to keep invasive species out in the first place. But at least Californians haven’t gone down the dark path of sending in another invasive species to kill the moths.

ccd

From 1971 to 2006, there was a dramatic reduction in the number of feral (wild) honeybees in the US (now almost absent);[11] and a significant, though somewhat gradual decline in the number of colonies maintained by beekeepers. This decline includes the cumulative losses from all factors such as urbanization, pesticide use, tracheal and Varroa mites, and commercial beekeepers retiring and going out of business. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de However, late in the year 2006 and in early 2007 the rate of attrition was alleged to have reached new proportions, and the term "Colony Collapse Disorder" was proposed to describe this sudden rash of disappearances.[1]

Limited occurrences resembling CCD have been documented as early as 1896,[6][12] and this set of symptoms has in the past several decades been given many different names (disappearing disease, spring dwindle, May disease, autumn collapse, and fall dwindle disease).[13] Most recently, a similar phenomenon in the winter of 2004/2005 occurred, and was attributed to Varroa mites (the "Vampire Mite" scare), though this was never ultimately confirmed. Nobody has been able to determine the cause of any past appearances of this syndrome. Upon recognition that the syndrome does not seem to be seasonally-restricted, and that it may not be a "disease" in the standard sense — that there may not be a specific causative agent — the syndrome was renamed.[14]

Symptoms

A colony which has collapsed from CCD is generally characterized by all of these conditions occurring simultaneously[15]:

* Complete absence of adult bees in colonies, with little or no build-up of dead bees in or around the colonies.
* Presence of capped brood in colonies. Bees normally will not abandon a hive until the capped brood have all hatched.
* Presence of food stores, both honey and bee pollen:

* i. which are not immediately robbed by other bees
* ii. which when attacked by hive pests such as wax moth and small hive beetle, the attack is noticeably delayed.

Precursor symptoms that may arise before the final colony collapse are:

* Insufficient workforce to maintain the brood that is present
* Workforce seems to be made up of young adult bees
* The Queen is present
* The colony members are reluctant to consume provided feed, such as sugar syrup and protein supplement.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

Scale of the disorder

In the U.S., at least 24 different states[5][16] as well as portions of Canada[17] have reported at least one case of CCD. However, in many cases, beekeepers reporting significant losses of bees did not experience CCD, and a major part of the subsequent analysis of the phenomenon hinges upon distinguishing between true CCD losses and non-CCD losses.[18] In a survey of 384 responding beekeepers from 13 states, reporting the number of hives containing few or no bees in spring, only 23.8% met the specified criteria for CCD (that 50% or more of their dead colonies were found without bees and/or with very few dead bees in the hive or apiary).[18] In the US, despite highly variable anecdotal claims appearing in the media, the best documentation indicates that CCD-suffering operations had a total loss of 45% compared to the total loss of 25% of all colonies experienced by non-CCD suffering beekeepers in 2006-2007; it is further noted that non-CCD winter losses as high as 50% have occurred in some years and regions (e.g., 2000-2001 in Pennsylvania), though "normal" winter losses are typically considered to be in the range of 15-25%.[18]

There are also putative cases reported by the media from India, Brazil[19] and parts of Europe.[20] Since the beginning of the 1990s, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Greece, Slovenia and the Netherlands have been affected by honey bee disappearances, though this is not necessarily associated with CCD;[2] Austria and United Kingdom (where it has been dubbed the "Mary Celeste" phenomenon, after a ship whose crew disappeared in 1872[21]) have also reportedly been affected.[4] It is far from certain that all or any of these reported non-US cases are indeed CCD: there has been considerable publicity, but only rarely was the phenomenon described in sufficient detail. In Germany, for example, where some of the first reports of CCD in Europe appeared, and where — according to the German national association of beekeepers — 40% of the honey bee colonies died,[4] there has been no scientific confirmation; as of early May 2007, the German media were reporting that no confirmed CCD cases seemed to have occurred in Germany.[22]

Possible causes and research

The exact mechanisms of CCD are still unknown. One report indicates a strong but possibly non-causal association between the syndrome and the presence of the Israel acute paralysis virus.[8] Other factors may also be involved, however, and several have been proposed as causative agents; malnutrition, pesticides, pathogens, immunodeficiencies, mites, fungus, genetically modified (GM) crops, beekeeping practices (such as the use of antibiotics, or long-distance transportation of beehives) and electromagnetic radiation. Whether any single factor is responsible, or a combination of factors (acting independently in different areas affected by CCD, or acting in tandem), is still unknown. It is likewise still uncertain whether CCD is a genuinely new phenomenon, as opposed to a known phenomenon that previously only had a minor impact.

At present, the primary source of information, and presumed "lead" group investigating the phenomenon, is the Colony Collapse Disorder Working Group, based primarily at Penn State University. Their preliminary report pointed out some patterns, but drew no strong conclusions.[14] A survey of beekeepers early in 2007 indicates that most hobbyist beekeepers believed that starvation was the leading cause of death in their colonies, while commercial beekeepers overwhelmingly believed that invertebrate pests (Varroa mites, honey bee tracheal mites, and/or small hive beetles) were the leading cause of colony mortality.[18] A scholarly review in June 2007, similarly addressed numerous theories and possible contributing factors, but left the issue unresolved.[13]

In July 2007, the USDA released its "CCD Action Plan", which outlines a strategy for addressing CCD consisting of four main components:[23]

1. survey and data collection;
2. analysis of samples;
3. hypothesis-driven research; and,
4. mitigation and preventative action. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

As of late 2007, there is still no consensus of opinion, and no definitive causes have emerged; the schedule of presentations for a planned national symposium on CCD, titled "Colony Collapse Disorder in Honey Bees: Insight Into Status, Potential Causes, and Preventive Measures," which is scheduled for December 11, 2007, at the meeting of the Entomological Society of America in San Diego, California, gives no indication of any major breakthroughs.[3]