Cocaine in the U.S. increasingly cut with a livestock-deworming drug

By "increasingly," I mean that 80 percent of cocaine sold in the U.S. contains this drug now, as opposed to only 10 percent just a few years ago.

By "livestock-deworming drug," I mean levasimole. It may lead to enhanced euphoria in the resulting mix, but it can almost certainly rot your flesh.


 -- Info source here, image credit here.

Ow, my morgellons

nataliedee

Mysophobia watch: Swine Flu edition

It probably doesn't rise to the level of a clinical phobia, but my phobia of mysos has been kicked up a notch by swine flu plus fatherhood. And all of a sudden I find myself dwelling on this:

I mean, everybody's reaching in there to pull out a stir-stick. And there is no way to grab one without getting one's grubby fingers all over the others. And if there's a convention for doing this--like grab on the left, stir with the right--I'm not aware of it.

Developing: Avian flu panic mutates

Seriously though: If you're feeling under the weather drink lots of liquids, call a doctor, and STAY HOME.

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Bonus breaking content: President Obama does not have the Swine Flu.

Science FTW

This has promise:

The solution looks, smells and tastes like water, but carries an ion imbalance that makes short work of bacteria, viruses and even hard-to-kill spores.

Developed by Oculus Innovative Sciences in Petaluma, the super-oxygenated water is claimed to be as effective a disinfectant as chlorine bleach, but is harmless to people, animals and plants. If accidentally ingested by a child, the likely impact is a bad case of clean teeth.

Oculus said the solution, called Microcyn, may prove effective in the fight against superbugs, crossover viruses like bird flu and Ebola, and bioterrorism threats such as anthrax.
| Wired: "Super Water Kills Bugs Dead" |

Really hard to say how much of the news about Microcyn was authored by the Oculus marketing department, but I'll keep an eye out.

Disturbing summary

How Do Neurosurgeons Use Cell Phones?

Not held against their ears.

Morgellons Desease update: I got your vector right here

Interestingly, delusions, such as contagious diseases, can be spread from one susceptible person to another susceptible person. This is how the Internet can serve as a "vector" or transmitter of illness.

Sociologist Robert Batholomew recently suggested the "World Wide Web has become the incubator for mass delusion and it (Morgellons) seems to be a socially transmitted disease over the Internet."

While it's true that there has been an internet explosion of snake-oil treatments trying to cash in on folks who think they have Morgellons, I think it's a little early to conclude that the whole thing is a hoax. Let the CDC do their job, and then report on it. Jeeze.

When doom comes calling, don't pick up

Wash your hands, computer geeks! by Wade Rockett.

I didn't see the debate last night, so it's a slow-post day from Austin. Consider this an open thread to discuss anything we should be blogging about. In the meantime:

Mobile Phone Virus Scare Jumps from Pakistan to Afghanistan

Rumours last week were spread around Pakistan that a deadly virus was being sent through mobile phones, and that anyone answering phone calls from some certain numbers would contract a fatal illness. The rumours claimed that "as soon as you answer your phone blood comes out of your mouth, nose and ears and you die"

The cellular operators moved to calm down subscribers and said in a joint statement "These rumors are completely baseless. They do not make any sense in technological terms." Farah Hussain, a spokeswoman for Warid Telecom, told Reuters that their customer service centers had been inundated with panicky subscribers inquiring about the so-called virus. | link

Okay, so that's not too interesting. But consider that the only other thing I had to post was Maternacord.

Whatever you do, don't anger the bees

We haven't yet discussed Colony Collapse Disorder on this blog. Better late than never, though, so, let's take the emergence of a new hypothesis about CCD's cause as an occasion to dive in. First, what is CCD? I'm glad you asked:

Bumble Bee by ChinchillaVilla.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.

CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.

News articles about CCD are ritually accompanied by a quotation from Einstein:

The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left".

So, that, in short, is what it is. This new theory is that it's caused by cell-phones:

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

They are leaning on one small study which showed that "bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby." But the immediate question that comes up for me is why this began in the U.S.

Cell-phone networks enjoy much greater coverage and penetration per acre in Europe than they do in the U.S., and in Japan and Korea it is even higher. One would think that if these technologies screw with bees, the problems would emerge there first, instead of beginning in the U.S.

Let me toss out this question to our tech-savvy readers: Is there some bandwidth--or some new use of existing bandwidth--that is being rolled out in the U.S. and is just this year being rolled out in Europe? One that for some reason has not been deployed in Korea?

Or alternatively, is there a species of bee that is prevalent here and in Europe, while a different species entirely is native to Asia?

Oh, while were at it, there's another issue with the cell-phone hypothesis. So far it appears that "the parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives." Are they affected by the radiation, too? Seems unlikely.

Morgellons Disease update

Via PR Leap ("Over 2400 companies use PR Leap to get free press release distribution!"), this little gem just came in:

Retired Elementary School Teacher Locked Up in the Nut House For Having Morgellons Disease

Marlene Gregor is a gentle, kind woman who has suffered from a disease called Morgellons, tells here story of how her family felt it best for her to have onsite psychiatric care because she was complaining of “bugs biting and scratching me”. The truth is, she did have bugs under her skin, along with lesions all over her body with multi-colored fibers protruding from them. She also suffered depression, ‘brain fog’ and deep bone pains that no doctor could diagnose.

This horrifying and fascinating disease affects thousand of people in the United States and globally with major concentration of victims in California, Texas, Florida and Oregon. However, many physicians do not recognize Morgellons as a disease and are diagnosing the victim as Delusions of Parasitosis.

Whenever she would see a doctor, and she saw many, they would tell her “it is all in your head”. Marlene knew differently. She began to take a “clustered silver” product that drove the bugs out of her body. She could actually see them exiting. Her depression began to fade along with her brain fog. Her energy returned. And just when she thought she was over the hump, her husband and daughter had her committed, by court order, to the psychiatric ward of their local hospital.

While in the hospital, she convinced her neighbor to smuggle treatment into the hospital where she continued to heal. Marlene spent 4 weeks in the hospital and when she was finally released, nearly all of her Morgellons symptoms were gone. Marlene believes that it will take time to rebuild the trust that was broken between her and her husband. For the moment, Marlene is functioning well without the horrible symptoms of Morgellons consuming all of her time and attention. Marlene plans to produce a video telling her story to the world so that that it will bring hope to those who continue to suffer from this dreadful disease.

Her story and the video will be the second featured on www.MorgellonsHope.com, a site dedicated to supporting Morgellons sufferers, and their friends and families. Jeff Sohler, the site’s founder states, “Morgellons really is the first Internet disease. We felt the best place to support sufferers and bring more awareness to the disease is through this medium. Eventually this awareness will spill out to other areas, and the disease will get the research funding it needs. Of equal importance, its sufferers will be taken seriously and stories like Marlene’s will become a thing of the past.”

MorgellonsHope.com is an on-line Community dedicated to supporting sufferers of Morgellons Disease. The site features the Latest News, Articles, Pictures, Videos, Blogs, Case Studies, a Forum, GeoMap, Product Information, links to just about everything Morgellons on the

Yeah, it does just trail off at the end like that. The only alterations I made were the bolding on some of the more ludicrous sentences.

Notes on the coming plague

Note #1:

More than 300 cases of the highly infectious disease, which is spread by airborne droplets and kills 98% of those infected within about two weeks, have been identified in South Africa.

The disease is a new strain of extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB, and it is so dangerous that South Africa and the WHO are considering forcibly detaining infected patients until they die, to avoid regional or global catastrophe. Link.

Note #2:

Acinetobacter was the second most prevalent infection for soldiers in Vietnam, but the military did not expect to see it as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Researchers are still working to understand where it came from and how patients were infected.

And they say Iraq isn't another Vietnam.

So far, no active-duty soldiers have been killed, but they've brought the infection back to hospitals where it has killed five other people. Link.

On a relatively lighter note (with emphasis on "relatively"), check out this little dumb game Pandemic. There's really not a lot of input from the player (I typically don't have any points to spend on evolving my virus until day 40 or so), and basically you are just watching your virus kill 50 percent of the human population. I'm interested if anyone has a different approach, but my aim has been to keep the visibility of the virus low until it has infected all regions, and yet I've completely failed to infect Western Europe before they close their borders. Apparently, they don't have airports in Western Europe.