Why is Downton Abbey just like Walking Dead?
The Binge
Jessica Zafra
IT SEEMED that Downton Abbey, like the zombie apocalypse, would never end. And yet the series created and written by Julian Fellowes will close this sixth season.
Rio reintroduces howler monkeys after century’s absence
RIO DE JANEIRO — Scientists have given Rio de Janeiro something to shout about with the reintroduction of howler monkeys to the city’s famed Tijuca forest after a century’s absence.
Tijuca, a thick forest rising up to the towering Corcovado and statue of Christ the Redeemer, is one of the world’s largest urban woodlands. But environmental degradation has stripped the area of its fauna.
Now, Brazilian scientists are working to bring those riches back, including by releasing native howler monkeys, properly know as Alouattas.
“The howlers disappeared more than 100 years ago. We decided to reintroduce them because it is a resistant species. They essentially eat leaves and fruits, so they are relatively easy to reintroduce,” said Fernando Fernandez, a scientist with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
The first five monkeys were released in early September, a key moment in the program which has been in the works since 2010.
And the creatures are more than just a pretty — or furry — face.
In addition to filling the silent forest with their trademark cries, the monkeys’ excrement, pushed around by dung beetles, helps fertilize soil and trees.
That’s important because the authorities also want to save the endangered Atlantic forest, which once covered the Brazilian coast but today is reduced to about 7% of what European explorers would have found 500 years ago.
In Rio, the Tijuca forest covers 39.5 square kilometers and has been preserved despite being just minutes from neighborhoods of the teeming city which will host next year’s Olympics.
Tijuca administrator Enresto Vivero de Castro says the area can become “a laboratory for the rebuilding of the fauna that could work for other parts of the world.”
DELICATE RELATIONSHIPS
The first monkeys let loose in Tijuca were all rescued from animal traffickers.
The modest speed of the project reflects the care needed to avoid any monkey business between potentially conflicting groups of the primates.
“The howler is the biggest monkey of the Atlantic Forest after the spider monkey. We got five individuals — three males and two females — and before releasing them we let them interact for five months in our research center,” Mr. Fernandez said.
“It’s very important because the Alouattas form social groups and stay together in the forest.”
The pioneering animals are already one down from their original number.
The dominant male Chico expelled a young male named Cesar, so researchers pulled him from the project.
However, Cesar should get a second chance with another group down the road.
Scientists monitoring the four identify the males by a bracelet and the females by a collar. Early reports are that things are going well.
“A month and a half later they are doing fine and are pretty close to where we released them,” Mr. Fernandez said.
“There was some concern when the group met some capuchin monkeys, which are more aggressive. But in the end there wasn’t a problem.”
The more familiar danger to wildlife — humanity — will also have to play its part.
“We hope visitors won’t feed them because that can be fatal. Dogs are a danger too,” Mr. Fernandez said.
The plan now is to release new groups of howler monkeys over the next four years to create a self-sustaining population.
A similar program reintroduced rodents called cutias and also seeks to repopulate Tijuca with sloths, endangered golden lion tamarins and other native animals. — AFP
MERS, Ebola, bird flu: Science’s big missed opportunities
LONDON — Anyone who goes down with flu in Europe this winter could be asked to enrol in a randomized clinical trial in which they will either be given a drug, which may or may not work, or standard advice to take bedrest and paracetamol.
Those who agree could be helping the world prepare for the next potentially deadly disease pandemic as well as helping scientists who are now desperate to plug gaps in knowledge left by previous missed opportunities.
Scientists are largely in the dark about how to stop or treat the slew of never-before-seen global health problems of recent years, from the emergence of the deadly Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus in Saudi Arabia, to a new killer strain of bird flu in China and an unprecedented Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
They have been unable even to pin down where they came from.
That is because vital studies to analyze transmission routes and test experimental drugs or vaccines have simply not been done during epidemics, disease experts say.
It is a failure of science, they say, that should not be allowed to happen again.
“Research in all of the epidemics we have faced over the past decade has been woeful,” said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust global health foundation and an expert on infectious diseases. “The world is at risk because there are huge gaps in our knowledge base.
“We don’t now have a vaccine for SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) if it came back tomorrow; we don’t know how to treat MERS; it took us six to nine months before we started clinical trials of vaccines for Ebola and in the meantime almost 12,000 people lost their lives; and during the H1N1 pandemic, the number of people randomized into clinical studies was very close to zero.”
‘BYZANTINE PROCESS’
Bureaucracy, logistics and lack of forethought are the heart of the problem, according to Trudie Lang, professor of Global Health Research at Oxford University who has been working on ways to lower such barriers.
During the Ebola outbreak that swept through Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, Lang’s team, which specializes in planning and operating trials in vulnerable populations in difficult settings, was tasked with setting up a clinical study of a potential Ebola treatment called brincidofovir.
“It normally takes 18 months to set up a trial, and we did it in 16 weeks,” she told Reuters. “But the problem was we were still behind the curve.”
In the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic, when many governments had stockpiled antiviral drugs such as Roche’s Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza and doctors prescribed them, often as a preventative measure without a confirmed diagnosis, no proper randomized clinical trials were conducted to find out for sure whether they helped.
This has left health officials with little or no concrete evidence on which to base treatment decisions when the next pandemic flu strain threatens the world.
“It is a huge pity we haven’t made the most of our opportunity to generate evidence,” said Chris Butler, a clinical professor at Cardiff University’s Institute of Primary Care & Public Health, who is now working on the European-wide winter flu trial he hopes will help plug the evidence gap.
There is little doubt that launching clinical trials in an outbreak is fraught with difficulty, partly because a new or rare strain of disease can infect so many and overwhelm health services and partly because there are many bureaucratic hurdles.
Lang’s team were awarded funds in September 2014 and by January 2015 were able to start the trial, but this coincided with a sharp drop in the number of patients with Ebola as the West Africa outbreak was beginning to plateau.
Scientists point to vast amounts of form filling, box ticking, contract drafting, committee meeting and agreement signing that are involved in setting up a clinical trial.
“There’s a huge industry around making trialists ‘walk through treacle,’” said Butler. “There’s a myriad of permissions needed. It’s a Byzantine process… which can take months.
“It gives me a headache just thinking about all the approvals” from ethics committees, sponsors, lawyers, research and development leaders and clinicians, he said.
Legal agreements are needed between the suppliers of the product — the experimental drug, vaccine or other intervention — and the people running the trial, the funder and hospitals, clinics or health centers where patients will be recruited.
In an infectious disease outbreak scenario, particularly a fast-moving one like with flu or Ebola, these legal issues can be compounded by competition for access to patients.
During the Ebola epidemic for example, Lang says, there were five or six different research groups seeking to set up and run clinical trials in the three most affected countries, each of which already had limited health systems that had been overwhelmed and crushed by the outbreak.
“It was ludicrous,” she told Reuters. “Because essentially we all had to fight over the same patients.
It was like a land grab, and by that time the [new] cases were going down.”
THINKING AHEAD
Part of the threat of any disease outbreak, be it Ebola in Africa, the 2003 outbreak of SARS epidemic, MERS in Saudi Arabia or the new H7N9 bird flu in China, is the unknown.
Yet Lang and others say there is nothing to say the sorts of clinical trials needed in an epidemic cannot largely be drawn up, agreed, signed and sealed ahead of time.
“We need to have protocols ready to go, we need to have a task force of research staff in each region on standby to be deployed into the next outbreak trials,” she said.
Legal contracts, for instance, cover broadly the same things for any trial — data sharing and storage, patient confidentiality, informed consent, the timing and publication of results, and the pricing, production and availability of the product if and when it proves useful.
And in a rapidly moving outbreak which may be too swift and deadly to allow for months of organization, a coordinated approach would overcome the problem of having multiple research groups with not enough patients.
This would be both scientifically and ethically preferable, said Lang, since if a trial has to be stopped because it runs out of participants with the relevant disease, then everyone who has taken part until then has run a needless risk.
“The main issue is that this needs to be done in days rather than weeks or months,” she said. “That basically means research has to be embedded in the immediate response to an outbreak, and not come as an afterthought.” — Reuters
Dog actors in Modess commercial
Ads & Ends — Nanette Franco-Diyco
A new hire joined the creative department of a multinational ad agency straight from an extended vacation in Europe. She turned out to be my A-student in creativity in all my three advertising classes at the Ateneo a good four years ago.
Here comes the sun
By Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman
With the air-conditioner, television, computer, electric fan, and refrigerator eternally turned on, a typical Filipino household of five members usually has a monthly electric bill of P5,000.
Book honors basketball’s Maestro
By Michael Angelo S. Murillo
THE COUNTRY’s rich basketball history has produced many personalities that have become icons of the sport, one of whom is coach Virgilio “Baby” Dalupan.
The hired assassin’s trade
Movie Review
Sicario
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
By Noel Vera
THE FILM begins with an FBI raid to rescue what are supposed to be drug hostages in an empty house in Chandler, Arizona; the raid ends with two officers dead, and the discovery of the mutilated corpses of men and women, wrapped in plastic, sealed up in the walls — a grim and silent reminder to Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) that war is being waged with unprecedented violence but elsewhere. These are just detritus, the leftovers from past battles.
Macer expresses the desire to get those responsible (for the bodies, for her agents); she’s apparently never heard of the old warning about wishes because she’s quickly attached to a strike force of murky origins (one officer named Matt Graver [Josh Brolin] wears flip-flops to high-level meetings; another named Alejandro [Benicio del Toro] snoozes quietly through mission briefings) and even murkier objectives (a trip to El Paso, Texas suddenly turns into a wire-tense mission to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico).
How realistic is this scenario? Is the USA willing to move so aggressively through a foreign nation? Okay scrub that — are they able to move so through a foreign nation successfully and without any fallout? Director Denis Villeneuve dismisses all skepticism with the unrelenting tone of his action sequences — not so much the assaultive style of a Paul Greengrass, trying to equate documentary realism with the supposed verite of a handheld camera, but a magisterial glide, a kind of unblinking gaze (with understated but precise editing) that tells you what will happen onscreen is inevitable, there’s no avoiding it. Macer finds herself wound tighter and tighter as the mission (a fleet of black Chevrolet Impalas) is joined at the border by Mexican Ford pickups mounted with M429 machine guns; collects a hooded prisoner at a Mexican military base; encounters a traffic jam on the journey back to the Estados Unidos (along the way sleepy-eyed Alejandro casually points out two carloads of armed gunmen zeroing in on their fleet); ends up in a US military base where — more for our benefit than unwitting Macer’s — said prisoner is locked in an interrogation room and sleepy Alejandro, now smiling widely, drags a 25-gallon water jug to where the prisoner, not smiling, sits handcuffed and waiting helplessly.
Equally effective and perhaps imbued with a touch of soaring poetry are the many overhead shots, of Juarez, of El Paso, that look gorgeous yes but turn out to have a thematic point: El Paso’s neatly scrubbed streets shine in stark contrast with Juarez’s urban sprawl — you tingle with pleasure at the orderly grid patterns of a United States suburb, then bristle when Villeneuve switches over to the chaotic capillaries of a Mexican border town. In between are the smoothly curved hills and sparse shrubs of the border desert, uncaring of all the drama happening at its edges.
The film invites comparison with Zero Dark Thirty, maybe the last successfully concluded US foray into a foreign land to be translated so vividly to the big screen; unlike Zero, where both film and director consciously assumed a “no comment” stance on the subject of torture Sicario does, not just on torture but on the many sins the government committed while waging this (Fantastical? Plausible? Prophetic?) escalation on the War on Drugs: torture works, the film says, but those who inflict it are damned — and so are we by implication because we benefit, we let it happen. Not perhaps the message we want to hear but the filmmakers are at least upfront and unambiguous on the issue.
Less obviously the film works as a companion piece to Ridley Scott’s The Counselor, a considerably more literary work (and considerably funnier, no small thing) thanks to a script by novelist Cormac McCarthy, who doesn’t reveal the full extent of his sensibility as dole out as much of that sensibility as he thinks the screen deserves (there’s a difference). Hence nihilism and despair run rampant The Counselor, the same way they do in McCarthy’s earlier No Country for Old Men (but not in his superior The Road — the novel not the movie, which in my opinion is considerably softened; there horror is leavened, modulated, and strengthened by an equally powerful vision of love). Sicario is wrought in a similar spirit: only what wolves do matters, all else is the effort of impotent sheep. A powerful message, but ultimately limited.
Finally Sicario’s eponymous character with his days-old beard growth and centuries-old eyes reminds me of another far more haunting character, Joel Torre’s Detective Juan Mijares, in Lav Diaz’s no-budget epic Batang West Side (West Side Avenue, 2000). Both bear heavy sins, both are involved in the War on Drugs (cocaine for Alejandro, shabu [crystal meth] for Mijares), both atone for sins in their deliberately gravid way; in fact when I see Alejandro prowling the border tunnels in the former I can’t help but recall the casual grace of Mijares’ stride through the streets of Jersey City in the latter (wonder if Del Toro saw Torre’s performance beforehand). Sicario’s trajectory seems ultimately optimistic: we are damned, they are damned, but at least we’re all doing something about the War on Drugs, if only stabilizing a chaotic situation. Diaz’s vision is bleaker: that some mysteries are unsolvable, some crimes irredeemable, some sins unforgivable no matter how far we travel, or suffer, or struggle. We are damned, and all the dirty tactics and shiny hardware in the world aren’t ever going to pull us out into safety.
MTRCB Rating: R-16
Scream and shout
By Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman
MOST local horror booths are funny rather than scary (or perhaps I am only trying hard to appear brave).
One tough bird: vulture’s genes help it thrive on rotting flesh
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON — A diet of putrid rotting flesh may not be your cup of tea, but to the cinereous vulture, found across southern Europe and Asia, it is positively delightful. This tough bird, it turns out, is genetically wired to thrive on the stuff.
Researchers last week said they have sequenced the genome of this big scavenger, also called the Eurasian black vulture, identifying genetic traits that account for a stalwart stomach and powerful immune system that let it carry on eating carrion.
They pinpointed genetic features related to gastric acid secretion that help explain this vulture’s ability to digest carcasses and other features linked to its immune system defense against microbial and viral infections from decomposing flesh.
“It is known that they are all but immune to botulism and that they can happily eat the flesh of an animal coated in Bacillus anthracis that causes anthrax,” said geneticist Jong Bhak of South Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology.
“They also are known to take infected food with rabies, hog cholera and numerous other diseases that would be lethal to most other scavengers.”
This vulture may have the strongest stomach in the world, Mr. Bhak said. “They have an extremely acidic stomach, enough to melt bones and perhaps metals,” Mr. Bhak added.
The cinereous vulture, whose scientific name is Aegypius monachus, can be found in plains, grasslands and mountainous regions from Spain to South Korea, although its numbers are dangerously low in parts of its fragmented range.
It is one of the world’s largest birds of prey, with a wingspan up to 10 feet (3 meters). It is clad in dark brown feathers with a pale head and bluish beak. Its diet consists mostly of the carcasses of medium and large mammals.
The researchers compared its genome to that of the American bald eagle, and learned that the two are more closely related than previously suspected. Mr. Bhak said they share a common ancestor that lived about 18 million years ago.
The cinereous vulture is a member of a group called Old World vultures found in Europe, Asia and Africa. These birds are distinct from the New World vultures like the turkey vulture found in the Americas that live similar lifestyles but are only distantly related. Mr. Bhak said the most recent common ancestor of Old World and New World vultures lived about 60 million years ago.
The research was published in the journal Genome Biology. — Reuters
The benefits of newborn screening
MEDICINE CABINET
REINER W. GLOOR
NEWBORN screening (NBS) is very important and as such Presidential Proclamation No. 540 designates the first week of October of every year as National Newborn Screening Week. The public health advocacy and campaign is led by the Department of Health (DoH) and the Institute of Human Genetics of the UP National Institutes of Health (IHG-NIH). The Newborn Screening Reference Center (NSRC) has been set up as part of the IHG-NIH.
The NSRC provides technical assistance to the DoH-NIH and their partners or network members to attain the objective of screening Filipino newborns.
Similarly, the NSRC assists in providing information and resources to help interested health professionals, public health community, consumers, and government officials in the field of newborn screening.
NBS is important as it establishes if an infant has a congenital metabolic disorder which may lead to mental retardation or even death, if left untreated. A baby may appear to look “normal” immediately after delivery.
However, he or she may, in reality, have metabolic disorders. Should the diagnosis indicate the infant has metabolic disorder then this would require immediate medical attention which can be given even before the clinical signs and symptoms of certain diseases present themselves.
The NBS is a simple procedure and should be done within 24 hours of the delivery of the infant. Just a few drops of blood from the baby’s heel taken by a doctor, nurse, medical technologist, or a trained midwife can yield results. The blood drops are blotted on a special absorbent filter card, and then forwarded to the Newborn Screening Center (NSC) for analysis. Results of newborn screening may be claimed from the health facility where the screening was done normally within seven to 14 working days, from the day the samples were received by the NSC. NBS is usually available in hospitals, lying-in facilities, rural health units, health centers, and several private clinics.
Note that a “negative screen” means that the NBS results are normal and positive NBS results mean that the newborn must be brought again to a health professional for further testing. The positive screen results are immediately forwarded to the parents or caregivers by health facility personnel and should be immediately referred to a specialist for confirmatory testing and further medical management. If and when there are no specialists in one locale, the NBS secretariat office will be able to assist an attending physician.
The NBS can test for disorders including congenital hypothyroidism;
congenital adrenal hyperplasia; galactosemia; phenylketonuria; Glucose-6-Phosphate-Dehydrogenase Deficiency; and Maple Syrup Urine Disease. These can all be treated with proper medical care and a health care professional would be in the best position to explain the diagnosed disorder and corresponding course of treatment.
Newborn Screening is now included in the PhilHealth Newborn Care Package and therefore there should be no more questions as to cost and who is going to pay for it.
One word of advice: please make sure that an accurate address and correct phone numbers are properly provided to the health facility.
In summary, the NBS find out developmental, genetic, and metabolic disorders in an infant. This screening allows measures to be taken before any symptoms develop. Most of these illnesses are very rare, but can be treated if caught early.
On top of the NBS, a health professional may recommend a hearing screen. It is advisable to have babies screened for hearing problems, too.
Log on to www.phap.org.ph and www.phapcares.org.ph. E-mail the author at reiner.gloor@gmail.com.
Halloween parties
ALABANG
On Oct. 31, kids together with their families are in for a treat at “The Witch’s Brew Halloween Party” from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Acacia Manila’s Grand Acacia Ballroom.
The impact of budgets
Getting The Edge In Professional Selling — Terence A. Hockenhull
What can a salesperson do when a customer rejects a suggested product based on cost?