Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Amerca's Patient Zero?

Geneticists have traced the arrival of AIDS in America to a single person who came from Haiti in 1969.

In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, University of Arizona researchers analyzed archived blood samples from the first five U.S. AIDS patients. All were recent Haitian immigrants. The geneticists then looked at genetic sequences from another 117 people with HIV subtype B, the most common strain of the virus.

After assembling the sequences, the researchers modeled the probability of various HIV family trees. Did the virus go from Africa to the United States? The chance of that, they found, was just .003 percent. Did it go from Africa to Haiti and then to the U.S.? The chance of that was 99.8 percent -- within the scope of the model, a near certainty.

They found that Haiti, which contains more HIV strains than any other country, likely served as a breeding ground for the disease between 1966 and 1969, at which point a single person carried it to the United States. From there, the rest is tragic history.


Full Story Here

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

OH SHI-

"The heaven shall burn at five and forty degrees, the fire shall come near the great new city... when they shall make a trial of the Normans" (Century 6:97) Nostradamus




San Diego is going down.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Appropriate theme song for this image?



The winner is here:



Just play that while looking at the image.

Skynet has become self-aware




The National Defence Force is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise on Friday.

SA National Defence Force spokesman brigadier general Kwena Mangope says the cause of the malfunction is not yet known and will be determined by a Board of Inquiry. The police are conducting a separate investigation into the incident.


Full article here

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Drug-Resistant Staph Germ's Toll Is Higher Than Thought

A dangerous germ that has been spreading around the country causes more life-threatening infections than public health authorities had thought and is killing more people in the United States each year than the AIDS virus, federal health officials reported yesterday.

The microbe, a strain of a once innocuous staph bacterium that has become invulnerable to first-line antibiotics, is responsible for more than 94,000 serious infections and nearly 19,000 deaths each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculated.

Although mounting evidence shows that the infection is becoming more common, the estimate published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association is the first national assessment of the toll from the insidious pathogen, officials said.

"This is a significant public health problem. We should be very worried," said Scott K. Fridkin, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC.


It's official, we're dead.

Full article here