The nine children in Colorado "had respiratory illness and later developed neurologic illness," the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday.
In the meantime, experts are struggling to understand why so many young people -- ranging in age from one to 18 -- have fallen ill from the virus in the past two months.
"It is concerning," said Robert Glatter, an emergency medicine physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.
"It is not clear why, given the widespread nature of this virus, at this point it is now showing some neurological symptoms in a very small portion of patients," he told AFP.
"The investigation is ongoing to find if there is a link."
Eight of the nine children afflicted with paralysis are up to date on their polio vaccines.
A mosquito-borne virus that can cause debilitating joint pain lasting for years has spread to the continental U.S. after infecting hundreds of thousands of people in the Caribbean and Central America.
The virus is called Chikungunya, an African name meaning “to become contorted.” While the illness, first identified in Tanzania in 1952, has long bedeviled Africa and Asia, the only recorded cases in the U.S. before July involved patients who contracted the virus abroad.
Now, 11 cases have been confirmed as originating in Florida, spurring concern this may be the beginning of the type of explosive growth seen elsewhere from a disease that has no vaccine or cure. Medical and environmental experts are debating how best to quell the outbreak before it takes off.
While the disease generally isn’t fatal, more than 100 people have died in the Western Hemisphere since December, according to the Pan American Health Organization. Treatment includes hydration, rest and medicine that reduces fever or pain such ibuprofen or acetaminophen.
I know that headline sounds completely outrageous. But it is actually true. The U.S. government is borrowing about 8 trillion dollars a year, and you are about to see the hard numbers that prove this. When discussing the national debt, most people tend to only focus on the amount that it increases each 12 months. And as I wrote about recently, the U.S. national debt has increased by more than a trillion dollars in fiscal year 2014. But that does not count the huge amounts of U.S. Treasury securities that the federal government must redeem each year. When these debt instruments hit their maturity date, the U.S. government must pay them off. This is done by borrowing more money to pay off the previous debts. In fiscal year 2013, redemptions of U.S. Treasury securities totaled $7,546,726,000,000 and new debt totaling $8,323,949,000,000 was issued. The final numbers for fiscal year 2014 are likely to be significantly higher than that.
So why does so much government debt come due each year?
Well, in recent years government officials figured out that they could save a lot of money on interest payments by borrowing over shorter time frames. For example, it costs the government far more to borrow money for 10 years than it does for 1 year. So a strategy was hatched to borrow money for very short periods of time and to keep "rolling it over" again and again and again.
This strategy has indeed saved the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments, but it has also created a situation where the federal government must borrow about 8 trillion dollars a year just to keep up with the game.
So what happens when the rest of the world decides that it does not want to loan us 8 trillion dollars a year at ultra-low interest rates?
Well, the game will be over and we will be in a massive amount of trouble.
The only way that this game can continue is if the U.S. government can continue to borrow gigantic piles of money at ridiculously low interest rates.
And our current standard of living greatly depends on the continuation of this game.
If something comes along and rattles this Ponzi scheme, life in America could change radically almost overnight.
And it is hard to believe, but Americans received more than 2 trillion dollars in benefits from the federal government last year alone. At this point, the primary function of the federal government is taking money from some people and giving it to others. In fact,more than 70 percent of all federal spending goes to "dependence-creating programs", and the government runs approximately 80 different "means-tested welfare programs" right now. But the big problem is that the government is giving out far more money than it is taking in, so it has to borrow the difference. As long as we can continue to borrow at super low interest rates, the status quo can continue.
But a Ponzi scheme like this can only last for so long.
It has been said that when the checks stop coming in, chaos will begin in the streets of America.
The looting that took place when a technical glitch caused the EBT system to go down for a short time in some areas last year and the rioting in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri this year were both small previews of what we will see in the future.
And there is no way that we will be able to "grow" our way out of this problem.
As the Baby Boomers continue to retire, the amount of money that the federal government is handing out each year is projected to absolutely skyrocket. Just consider the following numbers...
Nationalist MKs welcomed Netanyahu’s speech on Monday, saying among other things that it was a fitting response to “the lies and slanders of [Palestinian Authority Chairman] Mahmoud Abbas,” and that Netanyahu had “held up a mirror in front of the western world and emphasized the immediate dangers that Iran, Hamas and ISIS place before it.”
Speaking to Arutz Sheva, Hotovely said Netanyahu’s speech sent a loud and clear message that the so-called “two-state solution” is dead.
"The speech yesterday was the way to tell the world that the two-statesolution had died. Netanyahu told the world that Abbas and Hamas are the same, they want to destroy Israel," she said.
In the speech, explained Hotovely, the Prime Minister suggested that the world start thinking outside the box.
"He spoke about the Middle East, about Cairo and Saudi Arabia and inessence hinted at other solutions rather than dividing the country. He alluded to the concepts of confederation. It was an important speech,” she said.
"In principle, there was an official announcement [in the speech] that the two-state solution is impossible and that a Palestinian state will not be established. What solutions will come later requires serious discussions,” added Hotovely.
"The speech yesterday was the way to tell the world that the two-statesolution had died. Netanyahu told the world that Abbas and Hamas are the same, they want to destroy Israel," she said.
In the speech, explained Hotovely, the Prime Minister suggested that the world start thinking outside the box.
"He spoke about the Middle East, about Cairo and Saudi Arabia and inessence hinted at other solutions rather than dividing the country. He alluded to the concepts of confederation. It was an important speech,” she said.
"In principle, there was an official announcement [in the speech] that the two-state solution is impossible and that a Palestinian state will not be established. What solutions will come later requires serious discussions,” added Hotovely.
The Earth seems to have been smoking a lot recently. Volcanoes are erupting in Iceland, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ecuador and Mexico right now. Others, in the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, erupted recently but seem to have calmed down. Many of these have threatened homes and forced evacuations. But among their spectators, these eruptions raise question: Is there such a thing as a season for volcanic eruptions?
While volcanoes may not have “seasons” as we know them, scientists have started to discern intriguing patterns in their activity.
A study published in the journal Terra Nova in February showed that, since the early 19th century, changes in the Earth’s rotation rate tended to be followed by increases in global volcanic activity. It found that, between 1830 and 2013, the longest period for which a reliable record was available, relatively large changes in rotation rate were immediately followed by an increase in the number of large volcanic eruptions. And, more than merely being correlated, the authors believe that the rotation changes might actually have triggered these large eruptions.
Earth's magnetic north and south poles have flip-flopped many times in our planet's history—most recently, around 780,000 years ago. Geophysicists who study the magnetic field have long thoughtthat the poles may be getting ready to switch again, and based on new data, it might happen earlier than anyone anticipated.
The European Space Agency's satellite array dubbed “Swarm” revealed that Earth's magnetic field is weakening 10 times faster than previously thought, decreasing in strength about 5 percent a decade rather than 5 percent a century. A weakening magnetic field may indicate an impending reversal, which scientists predict could begin in less than 2,000 years. Magnetic north itself appears to be moving toward Siberia.
Geophysicists do not yet fully understand the process of geomagnetic reversals, but they agree that our planet's field is like adipole magnet. Earth's center consists of an inner core of solid iron and an outer core of liquid iron, a strong electrical conductor. The liquid iron in the outer core is buoyant, and as it heats near the inner core, it rises, cools off and then sinks. Earth's rotation twists this moving iron liquid and generates a self-perpetuating magnetic field with north and south poles.
It is hard to know how a geomagnetic reversal would impact our modern-day civilization, but it is unlikely to spell disaster. Although the field provides essential protection from the sun's powerful radiation, fossil records reveal no mass extinctions or increased radiation damage during past reversals. A flip could possibly interfere with power grids and communications systems—external magnetic field disturbances have burned out transformers and caused blackouts in the past. But Glatzmaier is not worried. “A thousand years from now we probably won't have power lines,” he says. “We'll have advanced so much that we'll almost certainly have the technology to cope with a magnetic-field reversal.”
Also see:
1 comment:
Second possible case of Ebola in Dallas.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/10/01/texas-ebola-patient/16525649/
Post a Comment