Category Archives: Science and Technology

Chikungunya

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One of the scenarios that pessimists foresee for the new century involves a rapid spread of disease due to population growth, habitat erosion, migration, travel and trade. Already this year, the avian flu H5N1 has reached Europe and Africa; its jump-in-progress to human beings has got the Cassandras clucking. Between this, killer mudslides and embryonic civil wars, 2006 is already proving a fine year for catastrophists — and it’s not even two months old.

In the desi-heavy islands of the Indian Ocean, another odd little disease is on the move. Chikungunya is a mosquito-borne infection that produces high fever, rashes, and intense joint pain. It has no known cure, only symptomatic treatment. It was not thought to kill, but since an epidemic broke out a year ago in the French territory of Reunion, it has caused at least 77 deaths.

In Reunion, “chik” has hit 115,000 people out of a total population of 750,000, and the French media are calling the government to task for its passive response to a crisis in an overseas territory/colony. For those who read French, today’s portfolio of stories in Liberation is edifying.

“I’ve never seen people in such pain,” says Dr. Jean-Luc Yvin, chief of internal medicine … [T]he symptoms of “chik,” as it’s now called, have evolved. “In the first phase last March, we were dealing with simple, typical symptoms: fever, joint pain and rashes. Then the epidemic slowed in May, and we were still getting sporadic, typical cases,” Yvin says. Since the end of 2005, when the epidemic flared up, the symptoms have grown richer. The specialist lists them: skin disorders, mouth sores, digestive ulcers… Joint symptoms seem more severe, with full-fledged arthritis in the hands and feet. And complications never previously described in the literature have appeared: encephalitis, myocardia, hepatitis… [my translation]

In nearby Mauritius, chikungunya has made fewer inroads but anxiety is high. There are 1,700 suspected cases so far this year. According to the Mauritius press, political leaders are responding in classic fashion to the threat to public health and to the nation’s large tourism industry:

Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam denounced foreign press ‘propaganda’ about the virus during a ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the [Labour Party]. For his part, Pravind Jugnauth, leader of the [opposition] MSM, was critical of the government, particularly the initiatives of the health ministry in this period of Shiva Maharatree. [my translation]

The Seychelles, Comoros, and Madagascar have all been touched by chik and South Africa, an air gateway to the region, is keeping a close watch. There are also direct flights between Mauritius and Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai.

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But can you PROVE you aren’t into chemical weapons?

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Brimful points me to the newest issue of the Journal Nature which contains an account (subscription required) of how the U.S. consulate in India “humiliated” one of India’s most prominent scientists (who also serves as an adviser to the prime minister). This is a particularly relevant diplomatic flap given Bush’s impending visit to India:

Scientific cooperation between India and the United States has been dented ahead of US President George Bush’s official visit to New Delhi next month. Bush will find India’s scientific community in a bitter mood following the United States’ failure to give a visa to a leading Indian organic chemist on the suspicion that his work could be related to chemical warfare.

Bush was already preparing to deal with a nuclear establishment unwilling to separate its military and civilian atomic facilities the way Washington wants, a principle at the centre of last July’s historic deal for nuclear cooperation between the two countries (see Nature 436, 446-447; 2005). But the visa issue is creating a new wave of resentment.

Goverdhan Mehta, a former director of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, had been invited as a visiting professor to the University of Florida at Gainesville, but says he was asked to prove that he was not working on chemical weapons before a visa was issued.

This morning’s Washington Post provides greater detail on the incident (thanks Rekha):

In the face of outrage in India, the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi issued a highly unusual statement of regret, and yesterday the State Department said officials are reaching out to the scientist to resolve his case.

“It is very strange logic,” said Mehta, reached at his home in Bangalore early this morning India time. “Someone is insulted and hurt and you ask him to come back a second round…”

The scientist told Indian newspapers that his dealing with the U.S. consulate was “the most degrading experience of my life.” Mehta is president of the International Council for Science, a Paris-based organization comprising the national scientific academies of a number of countries. The council advocates that scientists should have free access to one another.

In his written account, the scientist said that after traveling 200 miles, waiting three hours with his wife for an interview and being accused of deception, he was outraged when his accounts of his research were questioned and he was told he needed to fill out a detailed questionnaire. [Link]

All of this is a result of the the shotgun approach that U.S. consulates have followed due to post-9/11 pressure from the State Department. It’s just easier to harass and deny someone rather than be wrong just once and get blamed for it. Such a policy makes us look even more Draconian in the eyes of the world. If foreign scientists are treated this way, then foreign students will be less inclined to study here. Then we will have real problems since Americans aren’t pursuing science and engineering in the numbers that they once did. It will also cripple important scientific exchange with other countries who are tired of dealing with the U.S.

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What happens in Vegas, stays in Chennai

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Now that the the Amish are phone phreaking…

An Amish teenager will pay a fine and restitution to a neighbor for illegally tapping into his telephone line… The Amish traditionally shun telephones and other modern conveniences in their homes. [Link]

… and godless Chinese churn out Hindu idols…

Nowadays, factories in agnostic, communist China are producing Ganesh, Krishna and other Hindu idols out of plastic and porcelain at such low cost and high quality that Indians are lapping them up. India’s newfound love for mass-produced, “Made in China” images of their gods is driving many in the poorest sections of the nation’s traditional idol-making industry out of business, repeating a pattern seen in its toy-making industry. [Link]

… it was only a matter of time before India started writing software for that den of sin, Vegas (via Digg):

… software development for casinos will now happen in India — a country in which gambling is illegal. [Link]

Bally Systems, [the] world’s largest casino technology [company], is making India its largest… software… development centre… [its] development facility in Chennai will have 250 engineers by mid 2007, against 70 at present. [Link]

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Incredible advert!sing

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As I tried to catch some shut-eye at Chicago O’Hare yesterday, I kept hearing Indian music playing in the background and finally tracked down the source. This very slick ad for Indian tourism is running endlessly on CNN’s airport network. It’s part of the Incredible !ndia campaign, which used to be Incredibly L^me.

I agree with this critique:

Not bad but they need to do a few more urban-themed things… they all seem to focus on rural women spinning around with pots on their heads… There’s nothing wrong with pushing our history (indeed it is a big tourist draw), but by dropping in some stuff from modern India we can really change people’s perceptions. Remember, this is a bit like what Japan did with its Shinkanshens… India must be marketed as a nation where futurism runs alongside tradition. [Link]

The Turkey Welcomes You campaign shows off a modern subway system (watch clip), though it uses a lot of cheesy, Daler Mehndi-esque, gratuitous greenscreen.

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A mass grave of a different feather

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I’m really busy today but I still want to put a topic out there that is worth discussing. This means that I’m going to have to resort to some lazy blogging. Please forgive my complacence. Every blogger knows that a good picture is worth a thousand words and can bail you out from time to time:

A good poster for vegetarianism

A veterinarian doctor puts chickens into a pit for burial at Navapur, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, Monday, Feb. 20, 2006. Farmers burned their dead chickens and health officials went door-to-door Monday in western India for signs of people infected with the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus as a massive poultry slaughtering operation entered its second day. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh)… [Link]

The slaughter seems pretty bad already and may get a lot worse:

The bird flu is taking grip of the world slowly and steadily. Because of massive population density in India and to some extent china/South East Asia, these countries may plunge into a deep deflationery depression cycle. According to some experts, in India, people and poultry live close to each other. In the country side most families keep poultry for eggs. With a serious break out of bird flue, India can lose 18% of its population within the first year. If the outbreak is not controlled, 38% of the population can be affected.

According to media reports, a poultry farmer has died of suspected bird flu in western India, where the country’s first outbreak of the H5N1 avian flu virus has been confirmed. [Link]

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Big boxes looming

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Like two lumbering elephants at the start of the mating season, Wal-Mart and the Government of India are eyeing each other, a little hungrily, a little warily. The dance has begun, and though the ultimate outcome seems clear, the process to get there could be plenty circuitous. HereÂ’s a Standard & PoorÂ’s update, published this month on the Business Week website:

Wal-Mart stated on Feb. 2 that it has applied to create a separate entity in Bangalore devoted to “market research and business development in relationship to the retail industry in India.”
“I think that has been no secret that we think the market opportunity in India is really outstanding,” Wal-Mart spokeswoman Beth Keck told the Associated Press on Feb. 2.

You don’t say. However, the government is playing hard-to-get:

The Indian government opened the doors of its retail market to 51% foreign direct investment (FDI) two weeks ago. But this most recent economic liberalization applies strictly to companies that sell goods through single-branded stores. The partial allowance permits a direct majority ownership interest by foreign entities, which, we think, is good news for many of the world’s marketers of top labels.
In S&P’s view, the widely anticipated FDI policy for limited retail investment, however, effectively slams the “Closed” sign on big-box chains and particularly Wal-Mart, feared by India’s Communist party as potentially putting mom-and-pop stores out of business by sheer virtue of its size. The retail behemoth rang up slightly more in retail sales for the year ending January, 2005, than the entire Asian subcontinent sold to its population of more than 1 billion Â…

But Wal-Mart wonÂ’t be easily dissuaded. Just ask the Mexicans:

Wal-Mart’s experience in emerging markets is the crux of its battle plan. Bentonville has been down this path of limited investment in retail before. Not too long ago, it battled anti-FDI sentiment in Mexico. In S&P’s view, Wal-Mart won that battle. It is now the biggest private employer in Mexico and operates more than 780 stores in that country.

On the positive side, all the eccentric uncles with the ear hair and the roving eye can soon get jobs as People Greeters. I can see it already. “Velcome to Val-Mart,” with a waggle and a smile… Continue reading →

End of the line

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The current issue of Foreign Policy magazine has a spectacular photo essay by Brendan Corr on shipbreaking in Bangladesh: huge ships driven at full speed onto the beach at high tide, armies of workers trudging out to strip them with bare hands. The physical danger is intense; the health and environmental consequences are potentially dire, as these tankers and container vessels and cruise liners are loaded with asbestos and other contaminants.

In Bangladesh, according to the text, shipbreaking employs 200,000 people. Amazingly, it yields 80 percent of Bangladesh’s steel production. So this massive and hazardous recycling effort generates a vital input into the economy. You can provide your own comment about macroeconomic trade-offs.

Shipbreaking has been a major activity in South Asia for years now; here is a 2000 article by uber-reporter William Langewiesche on the Alang beach in Gujarat, which favorable tidal conditions have turned into a surreal junkyard of corroding behemoths. Now, though, it seems that Chittagong has outflanked Alang with even cheaper labor.

This week, the Clemenceau, once France’s biggest aircraft carrier, was forced to break its journey to Gujarat after legal challenges in both countries. President Chirac has now ordered the Clemenceau back home.

Meanwhile the 315 meter-long cruiseship France, is reported to be on its way to Chittagong though the Bangladesh government has demanded it be decontaminated first. Now called Lady Blue, the ship is registered in the Bahamas by a Norwegian company owned by a Malaysian company owned by a Hong Kong company. This opaqueness, standard in the shipping industry, makes accountability hard to enforce. Continue reading →

No Ice Please

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One stereotypical but reliable way to distinguish a FOB from an ABCD is their attitude towards ice. Whereas an ABCD will load their drinks cup up with ice before filling it, a FOB will (usually) leave their cup entirely devoid of crushed frozen water.

Mmmmm … bacteria!

To some extent this is about thrift – why pay for ice when you could be getting more coke – but largely this is a vestigial health mechanism, left over from a childhood in a third world country where ice was unsanitary and teeming with dangerous bacteria. In the USA, it’s superstition, plain and simple.

Or is it? A 7th grader in Tampa Florida decided to compare the bacteria in the ice at a fastfood restaurant to the bacteria in its toilets. Her findings:

Roberts set out to test her hypothesis, selecting five fast food restaurants, within a ten-mile radius of the University of South Florida. Roberts says at each restaurant she flushed the toilet once, the[n] used sterile gloves to gather samples. Roberts also collected ice from soda fountains inside the five fast food restaurants. She also asked for cups of ice at the same restaurant’s drive thru windows.

Jasmine Roberts: “I found that 70-percent of the time, the ice from the fast food restaurant’s contain more bacteria than the fast food restaurant’s toilet water…” [Link]

Note that the ice is not necessarily more unsanitary than the toilet water because bacteria is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, bacteria in yogurt is good for you. Most types of bacteria are benign and the ice in question probably has high levels of harmless bacteria in it. Toilet water may have lower levels of aggregate bacteria (because they are regularly disinfected) but still higher levels of unhealthy bacteria, so you don’t want to start emulating your dog just yet.

In short, her study is far from an argument that fast food ice is unhealthy. Still, I suspect that the ice at a fast food restaurant probably is kinda gross (via Boing Boing).

Related Posts: How to befriend a vegetarian

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Father figure

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First they tell us turmeric in food is good for your health. Now they tell us speaking more than one language protects against senility. By the time they tell us oversized, gold-rimmed aviator glasses are better than Viagra, we’ll all have turned into our fathers:

… Researchers are finding that bilingualism — be it in French, Greek, Portuguese or Hindi — has lifelong benefits.

“Does bilingualism protect you from cognitive decline? Every study we’ve done suggests that it does,” Prof. Bialystok said… while both groups started showing cognitive decline by age 60, the rate of slowing for bilinguals was much slower…

Brain-imaging research released this week shows that the physical inability to silence mental noise is key in making the elderly prone to distraction and poor multitaskers… the elderly lose the ability to power up brain regions, such as the frontal lobe, needed to focus on a task, and to turn down activity in inner brain regions that are most active when a person is in idle or default mode.

In contrast, the brain images of people between ages 20 and 30 displayed a far more dramatic see-saw effect activating and de-activating regions as they shifted out of idle to task. The study found this pattern begins to dull in middle age and actually results in cognitive deficits beyond age 60. [Link]

Researchers say the only thing better than Dad is Gamer Dad, so fire up a Ramayana game and start swinging that priapic mace:

A new study of 100 university undergraduates in Toronto has found that video gamers consistently outperform their non-playing peers in a series of tricky mental tests. If they also happened to be bilingual, they were unbeatable. [Link]

In 2000, a video game based on the Ramayana legend won Thailand’s national game software competition… The prize-winning game portrays several wars between King Rama and Ravana… Rama and Laksman must successfully manoeuvre through four rounds of fight in order to rescue Sita.

The Thai threesome turned to the epic Ramakien, as the Thai version is called, for its unmatched fighting scenes and more than fifty interesting human and semi-human characters… [Link]

Related posts: My Thais, Haldi may help prevent Alzheimer’s

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Barbarians at the gate

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A surging Indian business sector is shattering longstanding industry norms. In pharma, two Indian companies are in the bidding for a large German pharmaceutical (thanks, Sindhya):

The country’s largest pharmaceutical company, Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd, is believed to have put in a bid of €500 million (approximately Rs 2,800 crore) for Germany’s fourth largest generic company, Betapharm… This is €50 million more than the bid of €450 million made by Dr Reddy’s Laboratories…

Industry analysts said it was for the first time that two Indian companies had emerged front-runners for a high-value overseas pharmaceutical company. If the deal materialises, it would be the largest ever overseas acquisition by an Indian company in the pharmaceutical space. [Link]

In Bombay, a matrimonial site is rumored to have been funded by one of Silicon Valley’s toniest VCs, Kleiner Perkins (via Om):

InfoEdge, which owns which owns some of India’s hottest Internet properties including the largest job portal Naukri.com… and matrimonial site Jeevan Sathi has got funding from KPCB and Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures. InfoEdge did $10 million last year with profits of $1.8M. [Link]

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