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Kunjin West Nile Fever Virus Update

 

"I think it's very unlikely that it was an engineered virus. It looks much more like there are sequences very similar in another part of the world, but that doesn't tell us anything about how it might have been introduced. And that is obviously cause for some concern."

- W. Ian Lipkin, M.D., Univ. of California at Irvine -

November 15, 1999  University of California-Irvine ­ By the time the first frost touched Philadelphia this fall, dead crows and other birds in a couple of suburbs had been sent to laboratories to see if the Kunjin West Nile Fever Virus had spread from New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. The Pennsylvania test results are due soon and public health officials are concerned about the implications for next spring and summer. For the first time in history, this virus strain normally found only in Africa, Australia, the Middle East and Eurasia showed up in the United States. Fifty-six people in New York City were infected with the foreign virus and seven died, along with dozens of crows that are especially sensitive to the West Nile Virus. Transmission of the disease is through ticks, mites or mosquitoes that bite birds. Bird blood fills up with the virus rapidly over several days. During that time, insects can bite infected birds and then bite a human who can also become ill.

Photograph of Culex pipiens female mosquito, courtesy Entomology Image Gallery.
Photograph of Culex pipiens female mosquito, courtesy Entomology Image Gallery.

 

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Update on Deformed Calf Fetus

November 13, 1999  Las Vegas, Nevada ­ This past week I talked with Colm Kelleher, Ph.D. Biochemistry and Deputy Administrator at the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) in Las Vegas, Nevada. NIDS paid for a necropsy on the deformed calf fetus born October 22, 1999 at a ranch owned by Joe Martinez in Los Brazos, New Mexico. (See: Earthfiles November 7, 1999 report.) Dr. Kelleher told me that after my radio and Earthfiles.com reports, he requested that the one eyeball from the deformed fetus that had been stored at minus 85 degrees F. be thawed for further examination. I asked Dr. Kelleher if any specific study of the eyeball had been made before by veterinarian Leroy Martinez or NIDS scientists prior to freezing. He said none had been, so now the eye would be studied further. After thawing and further examination, NIDS provided a photograph of the deformed fetus's comma-shaped cornea and elongated pupil shown below.

Eye from deformed calf fetus has two major abnormalities: First, the cornea has a "comma" shape with an angular lateral protrusion. Second, the pupil is an "elongated aperture with rounded edges." Photograph © 1999 by National Institute for Discovery Science, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Eye from deformed calf fetus has two major abnormalities: First, the cornea has a "comma" shape with an angular lateral protrusion. Second, the pupil is an "elongated aperture with rounded edges." Photograph © 1999 by National Institute for Discovery Science, Las Vegas, Nevada.

 

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Environmental Updates and Calf Fetus Shocks Los Brazos, New Mexico

Update Note: More information about fetus eye examination will be added to this report on or about November 13, 1999. Also, please see web site listing below.

November 7, 1999 Environmental Updates -

Primitive Fish A Half A Billion Years Ago

One of the challenges of science is to figure out the beginning of things, from the dawn of the cosmos to how long ago vertebrate animals with bones first appeared on earth. In this past week's journal Nature, two Chinese teams reported the discovery of fish-like fossils with primitive backbones that are about 530 million years old. That puts them in the middle of the Cambrian epoch when all kinds of animal life proliferated on this planet. For Cambridge, England scientist, Simon Morris, the fact there were primitive fish nearly half a billion years ago means that "the so-called Cambrian explosion was more abrupt and dramatic than we thought."

 

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Leonids – and Linearids? – Light Up November Skies

Leonid meteor exploded over Hong Kong on November 16, 1998. Photograph © 1998 by Charanis Chiu, Hong Kong Astronomical Society.
Leonid meteor exploded over Hong Kong on November 16, 1998. Photograph © 1998 by Charanis Chiu, Hong Kong Astronomical Society.

November 6, 1999  Chula Vista, California ­ The International Meteor Organization (IMO) has announced a call for meteor observations between midnight and dawn local times on November 10, 11 and 12. This is not for the famous Leonids. A newly discovered comet this year called Comet LINEAR made its closest approach to the Sun in September. Earth will be passing through whatever dusty debris the comet left in our planet's orbital path on November 11th. This new meteor shower will be called Linearids, not to be confused with Leonids that will arrive a week later on November 18th. Those dates are around New Moon, so dark skies beyond city lights will help meteor watches. But since no one has seen this comet before, scientists don't know whether it will leave a strong meteor wake or not.

 

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Reward Offered As Cat Mutilations Continue in Toronto, Canada

November 5, 1999  Toronto, Canada ­ A $60,000 reward has been offered by the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for information about ten mutilated cats since the current mystery began in August 1999. The reward offer has generated phone calls, but no suspects. The SPCA's lead inspector, Debbie Hunt, is now seeking help from the Toronto Police: "We don't have the resources or enough experience in profiling criminals." Inspector Tony Warr, recent chief investigator in a Toronto bedroom rapist case, will head a new behavioral assessment unit. Their focus will be serial killers, and presumably an international ring of them since similar cat mutilations have been occurring in London, England, San Jose, California, Ft. Worth, Texas and Ontario, Canada at the same time in 1999. Over the past couple of decades, odd cat mutilations have also been investigated repeatedly in Plano, Texas; Tustin, California; Falls Church, Virginia and other U. S. and Canada regions.


Half-cat photographed by Plano, Texas Police Officer
for Incident Report # 91-44994, August 31, 1991.

 

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A New 1999 Book About Crop Circles

"The Nature of God is a circle
of which the centre is everywhere
and the circumference is nowhere."

­ Empedocles of Agrigentum, 490 B.C.

October 29, 1999  Petersfield, Hampshire ­ Lucy Pringle has studied crop formations in England over the past decade and is a founder member of the Centre for Crop Circle Studies, a member of the British Society of Dowsers and Chairman of the Unexplained Phenomena Research Society (UNEX). She is also currently coordinating research into effects of electromagnetic fields on living matter.

 

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A Mysterious “Perturber” at the Edges of Our Solar System

"One would expect comets when they come in around the sun to be roughly uniform in their positions in space. So, if you plotted the closest point of the comet to the sun on a globe or sphere, the comets should be uniformly distributed. In fact, comets are not uniformly distributed."

- Daniel Whitmire, Ph.D., Professor of Physics,
University of Louisiana, Lafayette -

October 25, 1999  Lafayette, Louisiana ­ Physicists in the United States and England have been studying the orbits of comets and are theorizing that something is pulling on the icy clumps that revolve at the dark and outermost edges of our solar system. The "perturber" might be a brown dwarf three times more massive than the sun and orbiting about three trillion miles from earth in the primeval Oort Cloud of ice, rocks and dust that literally surrounds the family of sun, planets, moons, asteroids and comets in our solar system. 

Inset depicts nine planets of our known solar system embedded inside the large cloud of debris left over from the formation of our system known as the Oort Cloud. The hypothetical planet or brown dwarf "perturber" would be about halfway out from the center of the cloud. Diagram courtesy University of Michigan/NASA, 1999.
Inset depicts nine planets of our known solar system embedded inside the large cloud of debris left over from the formation of our system known as the Oort Cloud. The hypothetical planet or brown dwarf "perturber" would be about halfway out from the center of the cloud. Diagram courtesy University of Michigan/NASA, 1999.

 

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A Blast of Solar Wind Provokes Aurora Over Northern U. S.

October 25, 1999  Suitland, Maryland ­ The sun erupted with a massive solar flare on Sunday evening, October 18. Three days later on October 21st, the flare's shock front of charged particles had rippled through space for 93 million miles and struck earth's magnetosphere. The collision of electrons and protons with upper atmospheric molecules created a dramatic glow called aurora borealis or Northern Lights. The magnetic storm was strong over Hudson Bay, the Great Lakes and as far south as Ohio.

By October 22, NASA's Ultraviolet Imager on a polar spacecraft captured dramatic images of the earth's magnetic field interacting with the solar wind. Frequently, when viewed from space, a complete aurora will appear as a circle around one of the earth's magnetic poles. This recent October display was more concentrated in a band along the northern United States.

Image by the Ultraviolet Imager on NASA's Polar spacecraft showing UV emissions from aurora borealis during a strong geomagnetic storm, October 22, 1999. Courtesy NOAA Space Environment Center, Suitland, Maryland.
Image by the Ultraviolet Imager on NASA's Polar spacecraft showing UV emissions from aurora borealis during a strong geomagnetic storm, October 22, 1999. Courtesy NOAA Space Environment Center, Suitland, Maryland.

 

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A U. S. Army Infantryman’s Abduction

October 24, 1999  Findlay, Ohio ­ This week, I interviewed a man who fought in Vietnam from 1966 to 1967 and then came back to California to finish his service, as he said, "in the Combat Developments Experimental Command at Hunter Liggett Military Reservation eighty miles from Fort Ord in the middle of the Mojave Desert."

Editor's Clarification since radio broadcast and posting of this report:

Hunter Liggett Military Reservation is located between Monterey and Paso Robles, California, not in or near the Mojave Desert. This fact was brought to my attention by several earthfiles.com visitors. I confirmed the location now called Fort Hunter Liggett on a map and called George Ritter.

He said, "I came out of Vietnam and went straight to Fort Ord on the ocean. But for the assignment with that Experimental Command, we were bussed for two hours into a desert that I was told was the Mohave Desert. Coming from Findlay, Ohio, I didn't know anything about California and have always assumed that was the desert we were in. I know we passed Soledad prison and Lockwood on our way to where we had guard duty."

 

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Short Updates About Environmental Problems

October 24, 1999 ­

Insecticides and Rat Poisons Hurting Children and Other Life

On Friday, October 22nd, milk contaminated with insecticide killed at least 28 children ages 5 to 15 and sickened 20 others in a Peruvian village. Powdered milk received at their school was prepared in a pot used earlier to mix insecticide.

­ In Apopka, Florida near Orlando, hordes of mice turned up for reasons unknown and residents laid out poisons and traps. Now eagles and hawks and other birds of prey are turning up sick from eating the mice.

 

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