Dec
15
Can Hawaii cure your ills?
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West Nile Virus can cause encephalitis (a $15 word that means brain fever) that sickens most people and kills the young, the old, and the immuno-compromised.
It is known to have existed on the North American mainland for only 10 years yet is has already afflicted 25,000 cases, more than 1,000 of them fatal, and those are just the ones we know about.
Birds carry West Nile, sometimes without getting sick — it depends on the species, and mosquitoes vector it from birds to humans.
When West Nile turned up on the Atlantic Seaboard in 1999, officials took time out from their busy schedule of scaring us about Y2K to urge people to eliminate the standing water in which mosquitoes breed (the water that accumulates inside a spare tire, on in a rainspout clogged with leaves.)
There has been sentiment by health officials for some time that West Nile could easily and suddenly become a lot worse, even without mutating, if for some reason we had a season with a lot of mosquitoes when people were weakened by the last round of flu or something.
Enter Hawaii Biotech Inc., which announced Monday it has completed dosing healthy subjects in a safety study of its new West Nile vaccine. CEO Elliott Parks said preliminary data from 24 subjects suggest the drug is safe.
Complete safety and immunological data will be done by a third quarter of next year. Parks described the vaccine as “nonreplicating and designed to be safer than live-attenuated vaccines.”
Hawaii Biotech is also working on a vaccine for dengue fever.
Dec
15
A really big shoe
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“The shoe of the century,” one Baghdad resident said.
By now you’ve seen the video. A Baghdad television reporter, so little-known he has only been kidnapped once, threw his shoes at President Bush during a news conference. In Arab culture this is a lot more insulting than it is to us. (Though my colleague Steve Uyehara challenged us to come up with a culture in which it would NOT be insulting to fling footwear.)
The president showed quick reflexes, as if he had been preparing for this for years. After his term is over he could get a job as a Secret Service agent! Maybe he could replace one of the agents who were so slow to respond.
I haven’t been a big fan of this chief executive, but somehow it pleased me to see his reaction to wingtips on the wing. Not only did he duck smartly, but he seemed genuinely amused. That’s good. You don’t want a commander-in-chief whose temperament would produce any other reaction to this.
The reporter later said he was angry about all the people who have died in the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Well, that’s understandable. We invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, believing it did, and toppled a dictator who did not have weapons of mass destruction, believing he had. We promised to bring peace and didn’t.
Iraqis are justified in being upset, but we Americans should also be upset. We bungled a couple of key things over there, and we need to face up to it in case we need to pull off an operation like this someplace else.
Here are two key things we got wrong:
- Insufficient oversight of security contractors. One company that essentially hired mercenaries to help police Iraq made things worse. Iraqis hated them, and, significantly, U.S. military personnel thought they were a bunch of cowboys. These oafs created more hatred and risk for Americans, thus further endangering actual soldiers. (UPDATE: The Associated Press reports the State Department is recommending that the company’s contract, which expires next year, not be renewed.)
- Mismanagement of rebuilding efforts. No single department or agency was in charge, and, despite the presence of the aforementioned cowboys, no one stopped local mobsters from siphoning off a lot of the reconstruction money. Remember the Marshall Plan? In Iraq we’ve proven we no longer have the know-how to pull off something like that.
If you aren’t aware of these things, check it out.
And if the shoe fits…
Postscript. Late night talk show hosts had a field day with the shoes thrown ’round the world. Leno called the reporter a “shoe-icide bomber.” Letterman complained that when the reporter bought the shoes at Payless “they didn’t even do a background check.” Conan O’Brien said when the reporter dies he’ll be greeted in heaven by 72 podiatrists. Craig Ferguson said the shoes were as close as we’ll get to finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Dec
12
The Big Three U.S. automakers claim they have been wounded by unfair comparisons of their wages to those of Japanese automakers with U.S. assembly lines. However, it turns out that they shot themselves.
The issue is how much employees of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler make compared to employees of Toyota and Honda. We were told the difference was between $40 an hour (Japanese automakers) and more than $70 an hour (U.S.-based automakers).
The numbers, it turns out, were provided by the U.S. automakers themselves. In briefing papers aimed at getting a bailout, they added up wages and fringe benefits, then, for good measure, they added in the benefits they pay to past workers who are retired.
All of this added together, adds up to anywhere from $70 to $77, depending on which automaker you’re talking about.
The New York Times dialed that out to compare apples to apples and found that the Japanese automakers with plants in America pay roughly $45 an hour in wages and benefits while the U.S. carmakers pay roughly $55 an hour.
So when the confusion is removed, employees of the financially-troubled American automakers still make a lot more than employees of the healthier Japanese automakers.
The United Autoworkers union has refused to accept wage cuts, which is why Senate Republicans killed the bailout bill.
O.K. Let it happen in bankruptcy, then, where automakers have the power to reject labor contracts altogether.
These people need to get real or face losing their jobs altogether, with very little sympathy from other Americans, most of whom make less than half of what they do.
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