“So why have we been so confident that infectious disease is no longer a global threat ….”

Are we confident, or is it just that humans don’t give a thought to anything until it happens? And how do we know in time that a rogue state is going produce a virus and release it, accidentally or deliberately?

To understand some of this? One needs to understand the role of climate change in the evolution of disease. You see just as oxygen is implicated in all healing, it is also involved in sanitising our environment. When our ancestors climbed down from the trees and started to walk upright. the percentage o oxygen in the atmosphere was around 51%.

Now around 21% and a far more friendly environment for all manner of previously unknown pathogens. Fortunately, this is something we can reverse!

In order to increase the oxygen as a percentage of the atmosphere w need to seriously reduce the CO2 content and production.

Seawater can be vacuumed in vacuum towers and the gases vacuumed out then separated via fractional distillation.

Not that we can remove all CO2 or would want to if we could and we can't because of CO2 affinity with H2O. As fast as we take out of seawater, almost as much is reabsorbed from the atmosphere!

That which we remove can be used in glasshouses to purge them of insect predation. The advantage of glasshouses, broad-scale agriculture is the fact they use only around 2% of traditional irrigation And can be purged of insect predation with concentrated CO2 Lights will continue the photosynthesis and oxygen production.

Biodegradable plastic used as ground cover inside will keep the weed species under control minus the herbicide. The increased oxygen production could be piped in nearby houses to assist the disinfection of the adjacent Agri workforce, domestic environment! Otherwise used as piped gas that the workers beath inside CO2 purged glasshouses As would steam cleaning protocols.

This could easily become the only way we could grow our food in the climate-change future. And would mean most summer crop food production would become worker intensive?

All the above protocols only become doable with the production of cheap energy. Given that energy is MSR thorium/nuclear, we can take full advantage of homoneses to improve the overall health of the community/disease reduction/natural herd immunity.

Without which our recent experience will pale into insignificance with what will be in store! TBC.
Alan B.

Very 9ften, even in just the last f0rty years, viruses have come from 'bush-meat', for outside goods, i.e. between populations still living in 'wild' areas, and city-dwellers - pangolins for flashlight batteries, grain for antelope-meat, honey for salt.

The HIV-AIDS virus, the Ebola virus and the Zika virus were just three. Perhaps local populations have inherited immunity, but outsiders can be affected, perhaps the further away, the more so.

Yes, perhaps the Chinese totalitarian system deliberately and consciously ordered its scientists to develop these strains of Covid-19 in order to impair the rest of the world, especially the US in some way. Trumpf carried out his role on behalf of his CCP masters as virus-spreader by impeding the US's medical efforts:

* demeaning Dr Fauci,

* making light of the virus ('It's only a sort of flu'),

* joking about drinking disinfectant and shining a strong light up one's arse;

* opposing masks as wussy;

* allowing rampant travel everywhere;

* never even beginning contact tracing, so now 1.5 million Americans are being infected each week, with any thought of tracing utterly beyond the system. What a hero.

I hope that eventually a full investigation can be made of how this virus spread. And to get ready - readier - for the next one, from the Amazon or S-E Asian or north Queensland jungles.

Joe

Alan B: Go and read a high school science text book and learn something about science because what you've written has some astounding misunderstandings and inaccuracies.

<< Yes, perhaps the Chinese totalitarian system deliberately and consciously ordered its scientists to develop these strains of Covid-19 in order to impair the rest of the world, especially the US in some way. >>
Any wonder our relationship with China is in trouble when we have ignorant and provocative statements like this being put out in the public realm. Yes, the virus might first have become evident in China, but that does not mean it originated there. There is still no definitive proof of its exact origins. Even if we do eventually find it did originate in China, there is at this point absolutely no evidence whatsoever that it was released deliberately. Why the hell would any government release an unknown and deadly virus on its own people? Your statement makes no sense, loudmouth2, and is highly offensive.

Cont. The energy we need for all the above and nation-building rapid rail is nuclear. Not conventional nuclear but MSR thorium nuclear! And available in around 12 months as fully operational 500 MW reactors built inside double-hulled barges, built in Scandinavia! And able to be towed to any suitable shoreline, river system or estuary that serves our needs!

And able to be retasked to burn and re-burn nuclear waste other nations pay us annual billions to take off their hands! And or power we can generate from thorium for around 1 cent PKWH! And as we do so, create copious cancer-curing alpha particle bismuth 213! And consequent annual millions of medical tourists! That'll support outback towns and rural airlines etc!

Power at around 1 cent PKWH would allow us to compete with any current manufacturer using coal-fired power, oil, gas or renewables and beat their pants off at manufacturing! Power for the deionisation dialysis desalination plants we will need to survive the very next drought.

Power we will need to air-condition and sanitise our homes with UV in the rooms that are empty for more than an hour a day! As they inject already air via ozone scrubbers.

Thinkabit. Stand by all that I've written! And challenge you to put up or shut up! Perhaps D Trump is your expert source? Jawhol?

Name the scholarly tomes and experts you have used to validate your cyber bullyboy borderline abuse/verbal vomit. Books and indexes, please!

Thinkabit, as a nom-de-plume, is an oxymoron if ever there was one, because there is no evidence that you can actually do that.

Bogus (flat-earth) links sourced/created in St Petersburg won't prove anything other than my accurate take on you and your disingenuous jaw flap.
Alan B.

Dear Bronwyn,

«Any wonder our relationship with China is in trouble when we have ignorant and provocative statements like this being put out in the public realm.»

Indeed a lame excuse: we did not need COVID in order to recognise the predatory nature of the Chinese cruel regime that oppresses anyone and anything that stands in its way. If something good came out of COVID, then it is this collapse in relationship - which should never have exited in the first place!

So AlanB says: "Thinkabit. Stand by all that I've written! And challenge you to put up or shut up! Perhaps D Trump is your expert source?"

Fine, I will then! Although most of this has been explained to him before but he just keeps ignoring/denying it. Which I bet the crotchety addled brained old fart will do again.

So point by point:

1) "You see just as oxygen is implicated in all healing."
Well at the concentration he's claiming (51% @ 1 atm) it is toxic to many life forms, us included.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity

2) "When our ancestors climbed down from the trees and started to walk upright. the percentage o oxygen in the atmosphere was around 51%."
He's talking about five million years ago. At that time the oxygen content is about what it is now. At no point in the planet's history has the oxygen content been 51%. When the earth first formed an atmosphere and for a long while afterwards there was little/no oxygen. The oxygen we breath is the result of biological activity, initially it was cyanobacteria transforming CO2 into O2, which caused a massive environmental change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

3) "In order to increase the oxygen as a percentage of the atmosphere w need to seriously reduce the CO2 content and production."
CO2 is a very minor component by parts of the atmosphere, at <0.05% there is barely any there. The atmosphere is Nitrogen @ 78% then Oxygen @ 21% then the last 1% is all the minor and trace gases. Even reducing the CO2 content to zero would barely do anything to the O2 component.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere

-- continued below --

4) "Seawater can be vacuumed in vacuum towers and the gases vacuumed out then separated via fractional distillation."
Really? How naive is this man? The world's oceans have about 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water, that's a lot! To put it in perspective the Amazon, the worlds largest river by discharge with a river mouth that is scores of kilometers wide, releases 6600 cubic km of water into the sea a year. It would take about 200,000 years for the Amazon to fill the oceans. And yet pea-brained AlanB thinks we mere humans could effortlessly build machines that could process a sizeable portion of the ocean's water to remove the CO2. But not only that he wants to fractionally distill the CO2 which would require cooling it to very cold temperatures, requiring stupendous amounts of power.
His project is simply not feasible- but besides that what would be the point? Well, he wants to then grow plants in glasshouses with the CO2 produced. They would certainly have to be gigantic greenhouses- like they would have to cover a decent part of the Earth's available land surface area.

So I could go but he just starts drivelling on with his grand plans and of course diverges onto his favourite BS about Thorium. I simply don't have enough word-limited space left to rebut the rest. In short, AlanB's ideas live in dreamland and are very detached from reality.

Hi Bronwyn,

Sorry, you misunderstood my point: I certainly don't assert that Chinese scientists developed this virus etc., etc., but that that was an option - amongst, as you say, many others. My main point was that many viruses originate from the trade between foragers living in forests, and town-based traders, farmers, etc. in 'bush-meat', captured animals and other possible sources of the virus.

Another option may be the bilge-water being released in Chinese waters (Wuhan is an inland port on the Yangtse but with access to the ocean 1500 miles away), which originate elsewhere: there is just the possibility that such bilge may have been taken on-board in waters around Italian cities such as Genoa.

And as the thread started by Don Aitkin pointed out, finding blame does not necessarily 'solve' the problem, or identify its origins. Until the source of the virus is identified, there is not much point in blaming anybody, but the urgent tasks of resolving the issues involved all remain.

Cheers,

Joe

No-one seems to want to focus on the decease that kills common sense ! Meaningless & pointless saturation education !

Bronwyn is a Chinese plant. Blinding servile Beijing.

Bronwyn,

Don't pay much attention to Foul-Mouth.

He's in the pocket of the Chinese.

Hi Individual,

Sounds like it didn't do you any good :(

Joe

Now that China has tested and proved the Covid-19 as an effective biological weapon it will probably be getting ready to trial its big brother the Covid-19 Mark II version.

Slightly off topic perhaps- there appears to be a coming crisis of antibiotics and insect control too- a globalised world is vulnerable here.

There seems to be a bit of Public Relations management around the issue and uncertainty in Corona Adaptation.

I did not misunderstand your point, Joe! You made it badly!
Yes, I can see your thinking is much more nuanced than a lot of what appears on this site, but notwithstanding the rest of your post and your use of the qualifying 'perhaps', the following words of yours were definitely as I described them - provocative and offensive.
<< Yes, perhaps the Chinese totalitarian system deliberately and consciously ordered its scientists to develop these strains of Covid-19 in order to impair the rest of the world, especially the US in some way. Trumpf carried out his role on behalf of his CCP masters as virus-spreader by impeding the US's medical efforts >>
No matter how much you try and insist the misunderstanding was all mine, you most certainly put these words out there without any of the nuance you've added since. My suggestion to you, for what it's worth, is to take greater care in the future, especially on this site where Sinophobia is quickly latched onto and mindlessly repeated.

<< Bronwyn is a Chinese plant. Blinding servile Beijing. >>
I wouldn't bother repeating this nonsense, ttbn (whatever the hell those letters stands for!)
Not that I owe you any explanation, but yes, just for the record I will offer one anyway. I'm a retired person of Anglo heritage. I was born in Australia and have never been to China nor have I ever had any Chinese contacts. I'm well-educated and widely-read and believe strongly in truth and fairness. I do not subscribe to the racist and ignorant anti-Chinese sentiment so prevalent on this site and will call it out at every opportunity. My suggestion to you, for what it's worth, is that you try and debate the points I raise and dispense with the lazy stereotyping and labeling!

Bronwyn,

You just said about yourself above:

"I'm well-educated and widely-read .............."

Please, continue. I would love to hear all about you.

Sorry, Bronwyn, I'll try to be less ambiguous in future :)

As it happens, no, I don't believe that China's scientists deliberately - or accidentally either - created this virus. I'm much more interested in the possibilities that it was a product of the exchange of 'bush-meat' goods between forest foragers and towns-people in southern China, as happens around the world.

Joe

Foul-Mouth,

We all know you are a mouthpiece for the Chinese and we assume your explanation is what Beijing wants us to think.

Bronwyn said "I do not subscribe to the racist and ignorant anti-Chinese sentiment so prevalent on this site and will call it out at every opportunity. "

Answer- I don't think it is wrong to protect ones own country. There are some (especially communists) that believe all wars are racist wars. Perhaps it is racist to protect ones own country but I don't think it is wrong. Maybe the word racism has been used wrongly.

See I am attacking the idea not the wielder- does that make me fair or stupid

People have always protected their own nation their own culture their own family- suddenly seventy years ago this became racist and prejudice. People should read more history. Some would call Araminius a racist- not to mention the Dalai Lama- perhaps they both are- but that doesn't mean they are wrong in their beliefs to protect their own interest. You could perhaps argue that the whole of capitalism to gather resources to themselves is a form of prejudice. Capitalism has been called "enlightened self interest".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_self-interest

Some read books but don't understand their context- or their context. ;) ...

Misop,

Any time you're in Adelaide, let me know and you can come around and kiss my hairy arse.

Cheers,

Joe

loudmouth2
Appreciate your acceptance of constructive criticism. Hopefully, your example might catch on here at OLO!
Regarding the origins of Coronavirus, I wonder whether we'll ever know the truth. At this point, I'm less inclined to blame animals than I am the human factor! I'm not yet persuaded that any possibility of links to biological warfare research can be categorically discounted. There was some compelling information on this linkage early on in the piece, but it appears to have been shut down. I doubt there'll ever be a full, fair and open inquiry ... more likely all we'll end up with is a pin-the-tail-on-China whitewash. But hopefully I'm wrong.

Canem Malum
Yes, refreshing to see someone "attacking the idea not the wielder"!
I agree, it's natural to want to see your own nation and culture flourish and strengthen. But why should this entail conjuring up imaginary threats and demonising other nations, which is what we're currently doing. Surely, we can still stand proudly and strongly as an independent nation and at the same time co-operate and trade respectfully and fairly with other nations, irrespective of whether or not they have different belief and governance systems to our own. And yes, I agree, Capitalism as currently practised by the West is indeed a greedy 'gathering' (or exploiting and stealing) of others' resources. But many, myself included, would argue it doesn't have to be this way.

Foul-Mouth,

This is not the first time you have invited visitors to Adelaide to "come around and kiss my hairy arse" as you put it abouve.

Is this a South Australian custom or something you picked up from you buddies in the CCP when you were last in Beijing getting briefed by Xi?

Mr. Opinion,

I think that he should at least shave for you.

ttbn,

Foul-Mouth made specific reference to his HAIRY arse.

So I don't know where you get this SHAVED bit from unless you and him have some prior arrangement between yourselves that you are not telling the rest of us about.

Take me as I am, Misop, or don't take me.

We're hospitable people in Adelaide, like most country bumpkins - so think of it as a sort of mustache.

But no tongue !

Joe

Oxygen toxic to humans, Thinkabit!? That's straight out of St Peterburg!

I guess you probably believe that crap and are doing your best to breathe as little as possible? Which probably explains some of your thoughtless conclusions, as the brain needs to be fully oxygenated to function at optimum capacity!

Nowhere have I suggested we'd ever remove all CO2 from oceans!

But it's more concentrated there than anywhere, genius!

Repeated compression will liquefy it and allow it to be combined with hydrogen to make all the hydrocarbons we use today, then some! Fuel plastics, fertilizers. And endlessly sustainable without adding a single litre of new CO2 to the atmosphere!

The recovered oxygen can be used with helium in hyperbaric chambers to treat the unwell and keep them safely separated from other patients and health workers. Note. unwell patients are currently treated with your toxic oxygen to aid recovery! And they could use their helium changed voices, to do voice-overs for Disney cartoons?

Built-in UV will ensure the hyperbaric chambers can be thoroughly sanitised between patients.

Meals can be delivered via positive air pressure airlocks to ensure that whatever is in there stays there for a fortnight. And normal bodily excretions can be bagged, stored under the patient in biodegradable plastic and removed from the chambers after a period of patient free UV irradiation.
Alan B.

Ttbn,

Just turning my brain on and re-reading the Straw-Man argument of your first post here ?

Whoever says that infections diseases are no longer global threats ? In the past decade, we've had the Zika virus, various swine and chook flu viruses. In the decade before that, a couple of others, MERS, Alyssa. In the eighties, the HIV-AIDS virus.

Viruses will spring up unexpectedly forever. Some may no more deadly than the flu, to cite Dr Trumpf with his 400,000 dead bodies. Some to come may be more deadly than the current strains of Covid-19. So we can never relax funding and staffing of appropriate health units.

Thank god for scientists with integrity, like Dr Fauci. I hope President Biden appoints him to a suitably senior position, and I'm sure you would agree. He needs to drain every corner of the Trumpf Swampf ASAP.

Joe

Toxic oxygen is toxic to pathogens! And the reason why many municipalities use it to dope/saturate their town water!

We apparently cannot breath pure oxygen but as mixtures that are best that don't include nitrogen.

Deep-sea divers, e.g., use it compressed with helium and talk funny in their bathyspheres when safely breathing that particular mixture.

I'd like to trail 5-hour sessions where the pressure is moved up to 3 atmospheres then in the last hour reduced to ambient pressure again.

Apart from blood clotting, folk die from covid by drowning in their own body fluid with lungs too compromised to absorb enough life-preserving oxygen at normal pressure.

Might be a useful therapy in smoke inhalation? Even in field hospitals/ICU's! Where oxygen inhalation by compromised lungs, is reduced for different reasons. Anyhow, if oxygen therapy is good enough for a noble prize winning Doctor? Good enough for me!

On the topic of smoke inhalation, cool burning of one hectare of grassland can, apart from destroying all the beneficial insects that live there, produce as much CO2 as 6,000 cars!

We need to ignore cultural noise and just look at the evidence. This practice was used as an adjunct to hunting and creating a barrier that limited the opportunity for venomous snakes etc to cross and create a danger for those communities that lived in their wikiups.

Fuel reduction is best accomplished all year round in any weather condition including howling gales, with herded animals (goats) and intensive grazing. Rather than cultural noise!

Burnings always create CO2 as well as lifting and removing scarce trace elements which are lost forever. And land that is burnt and burnt for millennia can progressively become virtual deserts.

Desertification is increasing around the globe as the trees are chopped down and "managed" grasslands burned!
Alan B.

Mud-for-brains AlanB just doesn't know when to give up.

//"Oxygen toxic to humans, Thinkabit!?"

Yep it certainly is numbnuts. I gave you a Wikipedia link that explains it. Here's a relevant sentence from the article referring to oxygen's lung toxicity: "Pulmonary toxicity occurs only with exposure to partial pressures of oxygen greater than 0.5 bar (50 kPa), corresponding to an oxygen fraction of 50% at normal atmospheric pressure." So at your 51% by parts @ 1atm it is toxic.

//"Nowhere have I suggested we'd ever remove all CO2 from oceans! "

Nowhere did I say you were going to remove all the CO2. I did say that your plan was to process a sizeable portion of the world's oceans- which is totally unrealistic.
I also pointed out that even if you do remove CO2 from the atmosphere (which was your overall goal by way of extracting it from the oceans) wouldn't do anything of note to the percentage of O2 in the air which you seemed to think that it would.

//But it's more concentrated there [the sea] than anywhere, genius!

That's pure BS. It is patently clear that you have never studied any chemistry. Because if you had then you would know of Henry's Law.
A simple calculation based on this law using just primary school arithmetic shows that the concentration of dissolved CO2 in water is orders of magnitude less than it is in the atmosphere. In other words the concentration of CO2 by parts in the air is way, way higher than the sea.

AlanB it is time for you to realise that you *very little* about the physical sciences and most the stuff you say is totally wrong. So don't demonstrate to the whole world your lack of education by posting stuff that you know nothing about.

Anyway, this rubbish you've posted about CO2 and oxygen has nothing to do with the topic of this thread so I won't be commenting any further about it.

Alan B.,

About 40% of the planets CO2 is held by the oceans. The rest is basically in the atmosphere.

As the oceans warm they will be less capable of holding CO2 and will release it to the atmosphere.

Think of a cold can of coke. When you pop the top it is fizzy. But let it stand at room temperature and it will lose its fizz.

That's how it works with the oceans: cold oceans will take up some of the atmospheric CO2; warm oceans will release the CO2 back into the atmosphere.

A bigger threat is from a thawing permafrost round the Arctic which will release methane into the atmosphere in great quantities.

Methane is 100x more of a greenhouse gas than CO2 but luckily has a much shorter life than CO2.

This news article was posted today and reckons that Australians might be getting short changed by using the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine:

http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/experts-warning-on-scott-morrisons-strategy-for-herd-immunity/ar-BB1cGWvn

Apparently the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine is only 62% effective compared to the Moderna's 94% and Pfizer's 95% which are being used by the US, UK and France.

My understanding of the article is that the AstraZeneca vaccine will arrest the symptoms in most infected people inoculated as a way of suppressing the transmission of the virus but will not be able to eradicate the virus from society and as a consequence Australia will have recurring outbreaks of the virus. Plus apparently a person inoculated with the AstraZeneca vaccine cannot be re-inoculated thereafter with another type of vaccine; so if the AstraZeneca vaccine doesn't work on a lot of people it cannot be fixed with a Moderna or Pfizer vaccine.

Hmmm . . . . . . . . That doesn't sound too good to me. Do others read it that way or have I misunderstood the article?

Here's Craig Kelly MP on the coronavirus:

http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/we-regret-to-report-that-craig-kelly-mp-is-at-it-again/ar-BB1cHuOU

We need more high school graduates like Kelly and McCormack in our parliaments. We just can't get enough of these intellectual giants.