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H1N1 (swine) flu is in the news again (courtesy of flickr user Dr Craig)

Around the country, people are lining up to be vaccinated against the H1N1 flu virus. Surprising Science has spent the last three days discussing the history and science of vaccines (see A Brief History and How Vaccines Work, Success Stories, and A History of Vaccine Backlash). Today we answer some of the more common questions about the swine flu vaccine.

Who should get the H1N1 flu vaccine?

There is currently not enough vaccine for everyone who wants it. Vaccines take time to produce and this one has been rolling off the line for just a few weeks. As of Tuesday there were about 22.4 million doses available around the United States. The goal is to have 250 million doses by the end of flu season next spring. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended that certain groups get vaccinated first:
•    pregnant women
•    people who live with or care for children under six months of age
•    young people age six months to 24 years
•    people 25 to 64 who are at higher risk for flu complications due to a health condition or compromised immune system
•    health care and emergency medical service personnel

Why are these groups first?

Pregnant women and young people seem to be especially vulnerable to the H1N1 virus. Babies under six months of age cannot be vaccinated, so it is important to limit their exposure to the virus by vaccinating people who care for them. People with certain health conditions or who have a compromised immune system have a higher risk of having serious flu complications if they get the flu. And medical personnel are the people most likely to come in contact with the virus.

What if I’m not in one of these groups?

Wait your turn. There will be enough vaccine eventually. And if you get the H1N1 flu, it won’t be fun but also probably won’t do you long-term harm. In the meantime, the CDC recommends taking everyday preventative actions like hand washing and avoiding contact with sick people. (And if you get sick, please stay home.)

Is the vaccine safe?

The H1N1 vaccine is made the same way as the seasonal flu vaccine. The manufacturers just tweaked the recipe with the new virus. The Food and Drug Administration approved the vaccine in September. People with allergies to chicken eggs, however, should not be vaccinated as eggs are used to make the vaccine.

I got a seasonal flu vaccine last month. Why won’t that work against H1N1?

For the same reason that your flu vaccine from last year doesn’t protect you from this year’s seasonal flu: There are many different types of flu virus, and they mutate over time. When you are exposed to one type, your body’s immune system learns to protect you from that type only. The others are too different to register with your immune system as the same virus.

I’ve heard that in other countries the vaccine contains squalene. What is it and why is it in their vaccine and not ours? And what about thimerosal?

Squalene is a type of naturally-occurring oil found in plants and animals (including humans). Squalene is a component of some adjuvants of vaccines. Adjuvants help a vaccine’s effectiveness by boosting the immune response. Some countries have added the squalene-containing adjuvant to their vaccine mix for H1N1 because it causes a lower dose of vaccine to be effective; that is, it will allow people to get more doses out of the same batch of vaccine. The World Health Organization has found no evidence of any adverse events in vaccines containing the squalene adjuvant.

The United States government chose not to use any adjuvants in the H1N1 mix in this country. However, some formulations of the vaccine do contain thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that has been used in vaccines for decades. Getting mercury injected into your body may sound a little scary. But concerns about safety of thimerosal are unfounded. Some parents worry that thimerosal may cause autism in young children, but there is no evidence of this. Several studies in recent years have examined the possibility, but no association has ever been found.

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• According to New Scientist, physicists Tie Jun Cui and Qiang Cheng of the Southeast University in China have succeeded in creating the first black hole, built to absorb and trap solar energy. Based on a theory from Professors Evgenii Narimanov and Alexander Kildishev of Purdue University, the Chinese scientists used strips of “meta-materials” (previously used to create Potter-esque “invisibility cloaks”) to recreate the structure of a black hole. “When the incident electromagnetic wave hits the device, the wave will be trapped and guided in the shell region towards the core of the black hole, and will then be absorbed by the core,” says Cui. “The wave will not come out from the black hole.” According to Narimanov, should the creation work, it would allow for the collection of solar energy in areas with little exposure to light.
• Ever wonder what it’s like inside a black hole? Scientists at UC-Boulder created this animation to theorize what the experience would look like:

• In air and space news, one lucky robot is predicted to sail on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. The idea to cruise in space was inspired by the discovery that Titan resembles Earth in many habits, particularly weather-wise. Titan experiences rain, wind, and has many lakes, however, liquid methane and ethane take the place of water. Ellen Stofan, a geologist with Proxemy Research in Maryland, explains that the lake-lander will fulfill one of the three-probe plan to explore this interesting moon. A “balloon-mounted vehicle and an orbiter” will complete the mission, enabling NASA to fully view and discover every region of Titan.

• From the BBC comes news of a “veggie spider” or Bagheera kiplingi, the only arachnid to feast only on plants. Avoiding ants and waiting patiently to snag a piece of its’ favored acacia plants – known as Beltian bodies, the spider really has to work for its’ vegetarian meals. Found in Central American and Mexico, this spider is perhaps the only one not feared by the people.

• Due to excessive animal poaching (104 per day!), African elephants will be extinct in little over 15 years, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare. Despite the international ban on ivory sales, the illicit trade continues.

— Compiled by Audrey Reinhardt

Ball pythons Boa constrictors (courtesy of flickr user Nicovangelion)

Any report on invasive species is bound to have bad news, it seems, and a new report from the U.S. Geological Survey analyzing the threat from nine giant snake species is possibly even worse because we’re talking about GIANT SNAKES (and I’m not generally scared of snakes). These snakes have already made their way here to the United States—as pets or hidden in cargo (Snakes on a Plane was NONFICTION?! -Ed.), usually—and pose a threat to the ecosystems where they might or have already become established. There are five identified as high risk (details below) and four medium risk species (reticulated python, DeSchauensee’s anaconda, green anaconda, and Beni anaconda). There are no low risks, the USGS notes, because all nine “share several traits that increase their risk of establishment, increase the damage they might do, or make eradication difficult.” (Worryingly, the report notes that there are no control tools for eradicating these species once these have become established.)

Specifically, these snakes:

1. Grow rapidly to a large size (some individuals of these species surpass 20 feet in length and 200 pounds in weight);
2. Are habitat generalists (they can live in many kinds of habitats and have behaviors that allow them to escape freezing temperatures);
3. Are dietary generalists (can eat a variety of mammals, bird, and reptiles);
4. Are arboreal (tree-living) when young, which puts birds and arboreal mammals such as squirrels and bats at risk and provide another avenue for quick dispersal of the snakes;
5. Are tolerant of urbanization (can live in urban/suburban areas);
6. Are well-concealed “sit-and-wait” predators (difficult to detect, difficult to trap due to infrequent movements between hiding places);
7. Mature rapidly and produce many offspring (females can store sperm and fertilize their eggs—which in some of these snakes can number more than 100—when conditions are favorable for bearing young);
8. Achieve high population densities (greater impact on native wildlife); and
9. Serve as potential hosts for parasites and diseases of economic and human health significance.

Had they not possessed these features, they might have constituted a low risk.

A Burmese python (courtesy of flickr user aehack)

The five high risk species:

Burmese python (Python molurus)
Native to: Southeast Asia, from Pakistan and India to China and Vietnam to Indonesia
Size: on average, grows to 18 feet and 160 pounds
Eats: terrestrial vertebrates, including lizards, birds and mammals; has been known to attack and kill humans
U.S. states with suitable climate: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas
Already established in: Florida, in the Everglades

Northern African python (Python sebae)
Native to: central Africa from the coasts of Kenya and Tanzania to Mali and Mauritania, and north to Ethiopia and Eritrea; in arid regions, only near permanent water
Size: a typical adult is around 16 feet
Eats: antelopes, warthog, porcupine, caracal, birds, fish, crocodiles, lizards, frogs
U.S. states with suitable climate: southern half of Florida, southern tip of Texas, Hawaii
May already be established in: southern Florida

Southern African Python (Python natalensis)
Native to: ranges from Kenya southwest to Angola and south through Namibia and eastern South Africa
Size: a typical adult is around 16 feet, but can grow bigger than the Northern African python
Eats: antelopes, warthog, porcupine, caracal, birds, fish, crocodiles, lizards, frogs
U.S. states with suitable climate: southern half of Florida, along much of the southern border of Texas, Hawaii

Boa constrictor (Boa constrictor)
Native to: much of central and South America, from Mexico to Argentina
Size: adults are around 13 feet long
Eats: mammals, birds, lizards, fish
U.S. states with suitable climate: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, New Mexico, Texas
Already established in: southern Florida

Yellow anaconda (Eunectes notaeus)
Native to: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay
Size: 10 to 12 feet on average
Eats: fish, turtles, aquatic birds, rodents
U.S. states with suitable climate: Florida, southeast Georgia, southern and eastern Texas, southern California, Hawaii

Couretsy of the CDC, The complex life cycle of Opisthorchis viverrini.

In Southeast Asia, an all-too-common parasite is known to increase the incidence of bile duct cancer in infected individuals. A paper just released in PLoS Pathogens shows how this happens. Knowing the molecular pathway that leads from parasite infection to cancer will almost certainly speed up the search for a cure for this cancer, and will probably add to our understanding of cancer in general.

Cancer is, of course, a category of diseases rather than a single disease. What holds cancer together as a coherent set of conditions is the inappropriate increase of cell proliferation in some tissue or another. Cell proliferation is, of course, normal and expected at some times and places. When an organism is growing there is quite a bit of proliferation. When a wound is healing, cell division must be sped up. Therefore, mechanisms have evolved to increase the rate of cell division, and many cancers are simply this mechanism operating in an inappropriate and sometimes out of control way.

The cause of inappropriate cell proliferation can be a genetic mutation, caused in turn by the chance mutation of an already susceptible gene, or by some kind of chemical or physical irritant.

Or it can be a fluke.

A fluke is a kind of worm in the class Trematoda. There are about 20,000 species of Trematoda, and many of them are parasites that live in mollusks and vertebrates. Commonly, Trematoda spend part of their life cycle in a mollusk, then move to a vertebrate host, and then move back to the mollusk host, as they reproduce alternatively using asexual and sexual mechanisms.

Opisthorchis viverrini, also known as the Southeast Asian or Oriental liver fluke, lives in a certain genus of freshwater snails and in humans, and when it lives in humans, it seems to predispose the humans to cholangiocarcinoma, which is cancer of the bile ducts.

The research reported yesterday identified a certain protein that is very similar to a human growth hormone, but that is found in and produced by the fluke.

Scientists knew that a particular protein of a type known as granulin was produced by the fluke, and it was known that other versions of granulin cause unchecked proliferation of cells. So they isolated the gene for the fluke version of the granulin, and placed the gene in bacteria which allows the production of sufficient quantities of the protein to use in experiments. This, in turn, allowed them to test the hypothesis that this fluke-produced protein acts like other granulin molecules in causing cancer-like growth of cells.

It turns out that fluke produced granulin is an effective cancer-causing agent.

The fluke appears to use the granulin to induce cell growth for its own nutrient supply. In addition, the fluke-produced granulin induces specific antibodies in the host that neutralize the granulin. So, there seems to be something of an arms race between parasite (fluke) and host (human).

Now that the protein is both characterized and linked to the cancer, it may be possible to produce a drug that will fight it, or to refocus efforts on the fluke infection itself to reduce the prevalence of this cancer. Also, the Opisthorchis viverrini system may now serve as a useful model for the study of growth hormone induced cancers.

Another reason that this research is very important is that there were two very strong hypotheses for the prevalence of this cancer in southeast Asia. The fluke could have caused the cancer by simply irritating the cells where the fluke lives. Alternatively, the people in regions where this fluke are common also have a diet high in a particular chemical compound called nitrosamines, abundant in the fermented fish eaten in the region, and thought to be possibly cancer-causing. While this research does not rule those ideas out, it does strongly suggest that fluke-excreted granulin is the culprit that should be addressed first.

This research is published in an OpenAccess journal, so you can read the original by clicking here.

The lunar south pole as it will appear on the night of impact. Photo Credit - NMSU / MSFC Tortugas Observatory.

On Friday, October 9, two space ships will crash into the moon, and you will be able to see it happen.

All you need to do is find the crater Cabeus, which is near the Moon’s south pole. Be watching at 11:30 UT (That’s 4:30 a.m. Pacific Time, 6:30 a.m. Central.) Bring your telescope. It should be a pretty good telescope. According to NASA:

“We expect the debris plumes to be visible through mid-sized backyard telescopes 10 inches and larger,” says Brian Day of NASA/Ames. Day is an amateur astronomer and the Education and Public Outreach Lead for LCROSS. “The initial explosions will probably be hidden behind crater walls, but the plumes will rise high enough above the crater’s rim to be seen from Earth.”

If you live in the eastern part of the United States or anywhere towards daylight (east) from there, it may be too bright. Hawaii is ideal within the US, but anywhere west of the Mississippi is a potential viewing spot. I live four blocks east of the Mississippi, so I guess I’ll have to drag my telescope down to the shore and canoe across for better viewing!

There is another way to see the impacts: Tune in NASA TV. Coverage starts at 3:15 a.m. PDT. In some areas, you may get that station on your local cable system.

But why are the spaceships crashing into the Moon? Has something gone terribly wrong? Are we being invaded by aliens?

Well, this is an experiment cooked up by NASA to see if there is water on the Moon. First, a rocket called The Centaur will hit the moon. This rocket weighs about 2,200 kg and it is going fast, so there will be a great deal of energy released. A huge plume of debris will be blown up as much as 10 kilometers. This plume will be observed from earth, the Hubble space telescope, and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), and analyzed for presence of water.

However, close behind The Centaur will be the LCROSS space ship. This craft has instrumentation on it that will allow a much more detailed analysis of the plume. LCROSS will fly into the plume sent up by The Centaur, analyze the material really fast, and send its data back to earth. And then … it will also crash into the moon.

“If there’s water there, or anything else interesting, we’ll find it,” says Tony Colaprete of NASA Ames, the mission’s principal investigator.

LCROSS will hit the moon about four minutes after The Centaur. The most interesting statement in NASA’s press release regarding this experiment is probably this one:

“Remember, we’ve never done this before. We’re not 100% sure what will happen, and big surprises are possible.”

If you are interested in viewing this spectacular lunar experiment at a public event (and the public events are quite diverse as to what they offer, see if there is one in your area and refer to the LCROSS Viewer’s Guide.

Kigali, a western lowland gorilla at the National Zoo (Credit: Jessie Cohen, National Zoological Park)

About two western lowland gorillas are killed and sold in local markets as bushmeat each week in the region of Kouilou in Congo, according to an undercover investigation. It may not sound like much, but it represents about 4 percent of the local population each month, and half of the population each year. And there are likely only about 200 gorillas left in the area, the BBC reports.

[The conservation group Endangered Species International (ESI)] began its investigation by going undercover, talking to sellers and traders at food markets in Pointe Noire, the second largest city in [Congo].

Over the course of a year, investigators visited the markets twice a month, recording the amount of bushmeat for sale.

“Gorilla meat is sold pre-cut and smoked for about $6 per ‘hand-sized’ piece. Actual gorilla hands are also available,” says Mr Pierre Fidenci, president of [ESI].

“Over time we got the confidence of the sellers and traders. They gave us the origin of the gorilla meat and it all comes from a single region.”

ESI estimates that about 300 gorillas end up as bushmeat in Congo each year.

The Western lowland gorilla is the species of gorilla we’re probably all most familiar with, as they are the ones that are usually found in zoos. (Actually, they’re a subspecies of Gorilla gorilla, the other being the even rarer Cross River gorilla.) And though the 2007 discovery of a previously undiscovered population of the animals in northern Congo was promising, the species is still endangered, threatened by habitat destruction through logging and by outbreaks of the Ebola virus, in addition to commercial hunting.

Mr Fidenci hopes to go back to Kouilou to find out more about the remaining gorillas living there and to find a way to conserve them.

“We intend to stop the killing in the area by providing alternative income to locals and working with hunters not against them. We hope to conduct conservation awareness with educational programs with other NGOs and to create a gorilla nature reserve.”…

Currently, little is done in the country to prevent the poaching of bushmeat, Mr Fidenci says.

“Enforcement does not exist. Even though there are existing laws which protect endangered wildlife against such activities.”

Saving Kouilou’s gorillas may be a small goal for conservationists, but this species could use all the help it can get.

Sunset at the North Pole (courtesy of flickr user lanz)

It has been 100 years (and two days) since the New York Times announced that Robert E. Peary had reached the North Pole on April 16, 1909, making him the first man to do so. (News traveled much slower back then.) Of course, the Times was conveniently ignoring their rival, the New York Herald, which just the week before had named Frederick A. Cook the first man to reach the Pole, on April 21, 1908.

But the Times, the National Geographic Society and even Congress declared Peary the winner. That hasn’t stopped a century of heated discussions on the matter, though. Smithsonian magazine weighed the arguments earlier this year in “Who Discovered the North Pole?” The writer, Bruce Henderson, doesn’t declare either the winner, but he makes a good case for Cook.

The Times took up the matter again yesterday, and this time John Tierney argues that neither Peary nor Cook reached the North Pole. In his blog TierneyLab, he asks “Who Was First at the North Pole?” The next person to make the claim was Richard Evelyn Byrd Jr., who reportedly flew over the Pole in 1926. But Byrd’s diary evidently says he fell short. Norwegian Roald Amundsen followed up his South Pole discovery with further explorations, and he flew a dirigible over the North Pole in 1926. But does flying over the Pole count? If it doesn’t in your book, the first person to travel to the Pole across the ice was Ralph Plaisted from Minnesota. He took a snowmobile to the North Pole in 1968.

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Swine flu won't be the end of the world (courtesy of flickr user Dr Craig)

On Monday, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology released a report assessing the U.S. preparations for the H1N1 flu virus (a.k.a. swine flu), which is expected to soon make a resurgence in this country. But despite the conclusion that the nation is on track in this area (”The preparations are the best ever for an influenza pandemic,” PCAST co-chair Eric Lander said), media reports are focusing on the worst case scenario outlined in the report:

Infected: 150 million
Symptomatic: 120 million
Needing medical attention: 90 million
Needing hospital care: 1.8 million
Needing intensive care unit facilities: 300,000
Deaths: 90,000

However, this is only one scenario, and the flu season could end up being no worse than usual (the low-end estimate is about 30,000 deaths, which is an average flu season). And H1N1 is not expected to bring anything like the 1918-1919 flu pandemic that killed 50 million to 100 million people worldwide.

The H1N1 virus, though, is unlike the regular flu viruses we have been infected with lately, and few people will have any immunity against it. And this means that there is some reason to worry, especially if the virus spreads quickly in September before vaccination can take place (the vaccination program is not expected to begin until mid-October). “This potential mismatch in timing could significantly diminish the usefulness of vaccination for mitigating the epidemic and could place many at risk of serious disease,” PCAST wrote. Thus, one of their main recommendations in the report is to accelerate production of the initial batch of the vaccine and quickly vaccinate 40 million of the most vulnerable Americans (based on age and disease).

Behavior will also matter, the report notes. Individuals should, of course, be certain to wash their hands frequently and stay home when sick. And workplaces could be encouraged to liberalize their rules to make it easier for people to stay home.

I hope that when the swine flu reappears in the coming weeks we will avoid the panic that occurred earlier this year when it first came about. There’s no need, for the moment, to run to the store and buy face masks, and certainly no reason to avoid eating pork or to lock up Afghanistan’s sole pig, again.

In the meantime, here are a couple trusted flu resources:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

World Health Organization