First, a sad but hopeful good bye to a Sbling: Blogger Dr. Karen Ventii of Science to Life will be Leaving Scienceblogs.com to engage in other things. Please drop by and say bye: Last Post
I've always thought that some sort of bird flu, especially one carried by geese, would be an excellent biological weapon, and the theater for its use, I'd always assumed, would be Asia. Between Japan, North Korea, China and The Other China, there are three Tom Clancy-like elements: Sophisticated technological ability, a potentially strong desire to weaken a long standing enemy, strictly controlled borders, and significant overlapping intensive human intelligence capacities. (This last one I'm totally guess at, of course.) A flu easily transmitted from water fowl to human, that is highly virulent and deadly in the latter but not so much the former, is what I'm thinking of.
Revere at Effect Measure points out a way in which this sort of biological 'attack' is actually happening right now, as we speak. The US government restricts vaccines .. included those for bird flu, from being distributed to certain countries.
The ethics of US foreign policy is again called into question when we use vaccines and medicines as tools to punish states we disagree with. The leaders of these states don't suffer. Only their citizens.
Withholding disaster relief to members of one's own population or to other countries and restricting vaccine access may be a new form of international hostility. This is the sort of thing that makes so much sense. To the right wing. This is, of course, why the right wing is fundamentally evil...
Hey, Anyone like collecting meteorites?
Apropos recent conversation on this blog regarding race, you might find it interesting to read: Coming Out to my Doctor as Biracial
Nature vs Nuture ... or more accruately [Nature vs Nurture] vs something other than the nature-nurture dichotomy, a well known and widely abused falsehood, is explored on Neuroanthropology:
"Bad Boys Can Blame Their Behaviour on Hormones."All I can think is: New Scientist, Old School. Old, as in nature-nurture old and biological determinism old. Old as in moldy, rusted, failing ideas old.
But it's not just New Scientist. Discover matches New Scientist with, "Teenage Hoodlums Can Blame Bad Behavior on Hormones." And The Daily Mail delivers "Now Teenage Thugs Can Blame Their Hormones for Bad Behaviour."
... and so on.
