Day: June 12, 2002

Clueless at the United Nations

The Times (UK)’s Richard Owens offers a priceless summary of the first day of the UN World Food Summit in Rome,

The opening day of the UN World Food Summit, dedicated to combating global hunger, was marked yesterday by a sumptuous lunch for the 3,000 delegates served by 170 Italian waiters.

The summit leaders were offered foie gras, lobster, and goose stuffed with olives. followed by fruit compote.

The Rome lunch was a symbol, for Western leaders at least, of the extravagant and bloated bureaucracies that the aid business has created, and went some way towards explaining why so few of them were in attendance yesterday.

Scripting News Shows Why Weblogs Won’t Replace Newspapers

And wouldn’t you know it, Dave Winer himself presents an excellent example of why weblogs will never replace newspapers — because so many webloggers, including Winer, cut corners on fact checking things they publish. Look at this piece of nonsense Winer wrote yesterday,

Theoretically, a week from yesterday, we will know who Deep Throat was. The Washington Post, whose reporters invented the name, says “Only four people on the planet are known to have the name — [Bob] Woodward; his partner, Carl Bernstein; Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of The Washington Post; and of course, Deep Throat himself.” If this is true, then we know that Deep Throat is John Dean, who plans to spill the beans in his book, coming out next Monday. John Robb thinks Deep Throat was Alexander Haig. Others say Henry Kissinger, William Colby (CIA) and L Patrick Gray (FBI).

As I keep saying, doesn’t anybody use Google to verify facts?

Yes, John Dean is writing an e-book to be published by Salon.Com about Deepthroat. No, he is not going to out himself as deep throat.

Dean has been openly speculating about who Deep Throat was for years. In 1975 Dean claimed that Deep Throat was Earl J. Silbert, one of the Watergate Prosecutors. In his 1982 book Lost Honor, Dean changed his mind and fingered Alexander Haig has Deep Throat.

Now Dean says that he’s spent 20 years investigating and this time he’s certain he’s identified the real Deep Throat. If Dean is going to out himself as Deep Throat, it is odd that he told the San Francisco Chronicle,

There’s one person who’s headed into Richard Nixon’s eternal history who outranks me as his worst enemy and that’s Deep Throat. Nixon said Dean was a traitor and Deep Throat was even worse. I wanted to visit with this person.

In fact it’s clear that Dean is just going to throw yet another name into the pot of people who have been identified over the years as Deep Throat. How Winer arrived at the bizarre idea that Dean was going to out himself is beyond me.

Personally, I don’t think Woodward and Bernstein were truthful when they claimed Deep Throat was not a composite character.

Cholera Gives Up Its Secrets In Mice

Cholera still sickens about 300,000 people every year, mostly in developed countries with poor water treatment systems. Efforts to create a vaccine for the disease have been always been stymied. But results from a cholera model in mice appears to offer a clue as to why that is so.

Researchers at Tufts University infected one group of mice with a cultured strain of the cholera bacteria and a second group of mice with a strain of the bacteria taken from the feces of cholera patients.

The strain taken from patients was as much as 700 times more infectious than the cultured strain. Moreover, when the patient strain was placed in a culture, within 18 hours it reverted to the relatively low-infectious version.

The implication is that the cholera bacteria has evolved a behavior usually seen in complex parasites such as malaria that use different forms for transmission between individuals than they have for infecting individuals once they are in the body (cholera has two chromosomes where most bacteria only have a single chromosome which may play a role in the transformation it makes once inside its hosts).

Since vaccines for cholera have focused on causing an immune response to the cultured form of the bacteria, they likely have failed to cause an immune response to the infectious form of the bacteria.

If the results in mice also hold for human beings, then researchers might be able to finally create an effective vaccine by targeting the proteins of the infectious form of the disease.

Source:

Cholera needs guts to survive. Tom Clarke, Nature, June 6, 2002.

Cholera bacterium’s quick change revealed. Deborah MacKenzie, New Scientist, June 2, 2002.