Month: September 2011

This Just In!

This Just In!

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Here’s something really, really important, and I know you’ll think I’m being sarcastic but I’m not. Kenyan judges can’t wear wigs, anymore.

I think this is one of the most wonderful stories of the year.

Kenya has been undergoing a legal transformation the likes of which I really don’t think another country in the world in my life time has accomplished. After approving a new constitution a year ago, Parliament has been madly passing law after law to make the constitution real.

They’ve done away with numerous unnecessary civil servants in the old regime, consolidated the political boundaries of the country, enfranchised gays and other fringe cultures, mandated a third representation in Parliament by women … the list goes on and on.

I’m not saying that everything newly accomplished in this country born of corruption, tribalism and nepotism is beyond reproach, and this isn’t intended to survey the whole process. But I’m truly impressed by the creation of the new judiciary.

Kenya’s old judges were miserably corrupt. The recently appointed and approved judges to the new Supreme Court are mostly fabulous individuals, pretty free of political baggage and ideology. Oh were that day possible here at home!

As hard to believe as it might be, Kenya even considered chief justices that were not Kenyan! Good lord, can you imagine the U.S. considering some extraordinary foreign justice for a position of meter attendant?

And their approval by Parliament was not without a lot of grumbling and backdoors’ maneuvering mostly by one tribe claiming another tribe was not fairly represented. The appointees sat in the wings, like our own Presidential appointments waiting to be confirmed, just like our dozens of judicial appointees waiting for confirmation.

But unlike here at home, they have all been approved!

I’m not sure this is because the existing Members of Parliament have seen the light, or come round to “country first” or are just exhausted. But the bickering stopped, and these stellar and extraordinarily well qualified individuals have all taken their seats on the bench.

And the oft shouted warning by those who opposed them, that they would be massively disruptive to the current culture, legislating from the bench a cultural autocracy … well, these are among Chief Justice’s Willy Mutunga’s first decrees:

– No judge is to be addressed “My Lord” or “My Lady.”
From now on, it’s “Your Honor” or the Swahili version, “Mheshimiwa.”

– No wigs.
Finally trumping its colonial power, Britain, as more hip, “No head gear of any type will be worn except by the kadhis.” The kadhis is a brilliantly conceived lower court to deal with family Muslim issues and the traditional Muslim headgear will obviously be appropriate.

– Robes to be decided later.
The judges’ colloquium gathered after all appointments had been confirmed just couldn’t reach a consensus on this one, yet. Many said that robes instill a feeling of respect. But Deputy Chief Justice Nancy Baraza said many Kenyans say robes instill fear, not respect.

I’ll let you know how this works out.

But how wonderful that social turbulence, tribal infighting, ideological bickering and political gamesmanship seem to be matters of the past.

And they had no problem increasing their debt ceiling, either.

Safety At Ground Level

Safety At Ground Level

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

The airline you’re going to fly next week isn’t considered among the safest? Should you cancel? And what was that report out this week?

There is enormous confusion over the report widely circulated in the media this week routinely labeled “The World’s Ten Safest Airlines.” The report is an annual one from the Geneva-based Transport Rating Agency (ATRA).

No, I’m not right away listing the ten “safest airlines” because I think for us average travelers it’s a bunch of malarkey. It might have some usefulness for large groups of travelers negotiating a corporate rate structure, or for potential mergers and acquisitions, but for Joes like you and me, forget it.

Here’s why. The analysis was done on only what ATRA calls the “100 most important airlines” without explaining what it meant by “important.”

According to Wikipedia, there are 5,663 airlines in the world. That means the analysis didn’t even consider 5,553. JetBlue, for example, wasn’t considered important enough.

The report is a for-sale report from a profit making consulting firm. It’s sort of like Americans for Progress rating the best Congressmen.

I don’t think ATRA is necessarily political, but it is interested only in the Big Guys. This is because their customers aren’t interested in Ryan Air or Kenya Airways. Or, for that matter, Qatar Airlines, one of the finest carriers in the world.

Click here for what I use to determine if an airline is good or not, the StarRanking. Now admittedly, the star ranking – or quality rank – theoretically doesn’t measure safety. But I think the correlation is obvious. Any business that invests enough to make it noticeably better than its competitors is likely to invest enough to preserve itself well.

A major difference between ATRA and StarRanking is that StarRanking applies no filter of “important airline” to its analysis. Can we even guess what ATRA’s definition of importance is?

In several examples snipped out of its expensive report it’s clear that LARGE means IMPORTANT. If you aren’t among the 100 biggest airlines in the world, you won’t even be considered.

It seems to me that if you want an indication of safety, you find out which airline has had the most crash fatalities. The list of the top 100 fatal airline crashes shows American Airlines right up there with 4 crashes and 55 fatalities, Delta and USAir each had a single crash with more than 130 fatalities, and Air France had two crashes with 358 fatalities.

All four of those airlines are in ATRA’s list of the top ten safest airlines.

OK, I’m playing with statistic a bit. The many airlines with no fatalities whatever are mostly smaller ones and just by that fact have a lower probability of disaster. But there are a few, like Air Jamaica (which has been in business since 1966), Air Seychelles (1985) and Virgin Atlantic (1984) which by both the standards of safety and service would probably win an individual travelers’ loyalty over any of the Big Guys.

The overall winner, by the way, is Pluna Airlines. This little Uruguay carrier has been flying since 1936. No fatalities.

So unless you’re a Fortune 500 or traveler who’s rarely at home, forget about this report. There are better ways to figure this one out.

Yeh for the Apicoplast!

Yeh for the Apicoplast!

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

Go get ‘um DeRisi. And Yeh upstages the NFL season opener with an end-run over the Apicoplast! Yes! The battle against malaria, the first offense that might just actually win, has begun!

Here it is, are you ready?

“Chemical Rescue of Malaria Parasites Lacking an Apicoplast Defines Organelle Function in Blood-Stage Plasmodium falciparum”

For those of you who think you might have a scintilla of a chance of understanding this, it would behoove you to go to the Home Page of “PLOS” in which this article appears.

This is such an incredibly important scientific breakthrough, that this normally complex scientific journal has rearranged its home page since publication yesterday to try to help us lay folk understand.

So will I try, too.

Malaria is the worst parasitic disease of humans today, and as far as we know, has existed for the longest time of any large scale endemic human parasitic disease.

Its effects are devastating. It’s a story of one organism, the malaria parasite, beating up another, human beings.

My own involvement with malaria has been intense. I know I’ve had it twice, once near death, but I’ve probably had it more often than that. My wife was very sick with it once. Early, bad medications helped partially ruin the sight in my right eye.

I’ve held babies in Africa dying of malaria. I’ve had countless employees sick with it.

Probably every single employee manager for me in Africa has had a close relative, like a child, die of malaria.

I’ve had a dozen or so clients who came home with it from safari and were misdiagnosed and then mistreated. I’ve had more clients who seemed to go crazy when using incorrect malarial prophylactics.

Malaria has beaten us up.

I would love to live to see the day when the fight turns. And it may actually happen!

I’m no scientist and most of my understanding comes not from PLOS’ wonderful attempt at a plebian home page, but from the even simpler attempts at explanation.

The best I’ve found comes from the researchers’ own university, Stanford.

It all has to do with the apicoplast!

Well, that’s it, then!

Sort of. Over the last decade, it was discovered that when the malaria is actually in the human blood stream, it swims merrily around with a little “organelle” inside it called an apicoplast. Organelles are sort of like adopted organs of a single-cell organism that were somehow taken from some other single-cell organism.

A long, long time ago. Apparently this happened millions and millions of years ago. We know this from the genetic structure of malaria. As man was increasing his brain size and creating tools to conquer the planet, the joker malaria was searching madly for a better offense.

Somewhere out there, it found an apicoplast and consumed it into itself forever and that was apparently when it became deadly to man.

But we didn’t know why. For the last decade a number of researchers have been trying to create drugs that would specifically target the apicoplast like a nano drone, but to no avail.

We know there have been dozens of drugs starting with quinine that work for a time against malaria. But the parasite, like most diseases, reproduces so quickly that it’s always just a matter of time until natural selection filters out the progeny resistant to the drug, and then the drug becomes useless.

That’s how I got my first case of malaria. We didn’t know it at the time, but the so-called preventative drug was no longer preventative.

But if we could find a drug that specifically targeted the apicoplast? Whoa. That’s like trying to fashion a bullet that doesn’t just hit the bull’s eye, but the right milliquadrant molecule of the bull’s eye.

Struck out on that one.

Alas, genetic research to the rescue. Why not bioengineer a malaria parasite without an apicoplast? They did. But so what?

You can’t exactly go around the world and replace every malaria parasite that’s in someone’s liver with a bioengineered non-apicoplastic parasite and suddenly make them better.

And you’d have to bioengineer your malaria non-apicoplastic guy to be stronger and better than his original cousin, so he could eventually prevail over his weaker apicoplastic cousin.

Oops. Maybe then you’d create a super malaria parasite that with all its history of clever evolution might something else terribly do.

What Ellen Reh and Joseph DeRisi of Stanford did was study exactly what the apicoplast does for our little malaria parasite. And this is the discovery that will get them the Noble Prize.

It creates a single chemical, IPP for short, that is essential to the parasite. Without IPP, the parasite dies.

So what good is that? You can’t go all around the world with microsyringes and remove the IPP from every malevolent little parasite, can you?

No, of course not. But guess what? This IPP doesn’t only keep the parasite alive, it’s also the arsenal that attacks man.

Now a little secondary lesson on vaccines. You know the difference between “live vaccines” and “dead vaccines” and how the live polio vaccine wasn’t such a good idea in the 1950s.

Nor would a live malaria vaccine be any better. Although scientists have tried very hard, no vaccine they’ve produced works quickly enough that the body develops a defense against it before the vaccine prevails and makes the body sick.

So if we engineer millions and billions of malaria parasites without their apicoplast (which Yeh and DeRisi have already done), and though they die remain organic and whole long enough that our body would recognize them as the devils they once were….

Yes, the way a dead vaccine works. The human body then miraculously engineers all these micro molecular weapons that stay in the body long after the freak bioengineered dead non-apicoplastic malaria that provoked the human arsenal has been discarded.

So … that … maybe, when a real apicoplastic malaria sneaks in.. And it doesn’t look all that different from its freak dead cousin that was there a while ago … well, maybe, then:

ZAP!