Wipeout of polio nears
Although overpopulation propagandists seldom give humankind any credit for improving things on the planet, another great success is at hand in man’s constant battle against disease: the ultimate eradication of polio.
According to the latest figures from the World Health Organization (WHO), the number of polio eases worldwide fell to just 3,997 in 1996, the lowest number of polio cases in history.1 The 1996 total was a decrease of 43 percent from the previous year’s 9,300-odd cases.
Massive “national immunization days” were credited with being the main tool of the polio eradication campaign, which began in 1988. On a single day (18 January) this year in India, for instance, about 127 million Indian children were vaccinated against the disease in what is believed to be the largest health event ever organized by any country.
Last year, 155 countries reported no cases of polio, up from 150 in 1955. Eighteen countries reported just one to 10 cases, and 27 reported more than 10. Fourteen countries failed to submit reports to the WHO.
WHO officials believe at least one national immunization day should be held each year in the countries where polio is still found, or from which it has only recently disappeared. The last case of polio in the Americas occurred in 1991 in a 3-year-old Peruvian boy.
Sixteen of the seventeen countries (Sierra Leone is the exception) which have never held a national immunization day are slated to hold one before the end of this year. Altogether, WHO officials estimate that it will cost about $800 million and several more years time to complete the campaign and wipeout the dread disease. Between 10 million and 20 million people throughout the world are living with some paralytic effect of polio.
Only one disease has ever been eradicated: smallpox disappeared in 1977 after a 10-year campaign. A disease can be eradicated only if it infects no species other than human beings, which is the case with small-pox, polio and measles, which is the next infection targeted for eradication.
Global warming to melt Antarctica
Contrary to all the hype from over-population propagandists who claim that the earth is warming because too many people use too much fossil fuel, a recent article in Scientific American reported that the “greenhouse effect” would actually lead to an expansion of the polar ice cap.2
Researchers found that any global heating, if it is in fact occurring, would cause warmer, wetter air to reach Antarctica, where its moisture would be deposited as snow. (Whatever the amount of global warming, the Antarctic still would remain a might cold region.) Even the sea ice surrounding the continent might expand.
While some predict the imminent collapse of the great West Antarctic ice sheet, other scientists disagree. Their computer models show that the great mass of ice in the Antarctic would actually grow, causing sea levels to fall as water removed from the sea became locked up in continental ice.
One scientist, Dr, Mosley-Thompson of the Ohio State University Byrd Polar Research Center, reported that the “rate of snow accumulation near the South Pole shows that snowfalls have [increased] substantially in recent decades,” a period in which global temperature has allegedly inched upwards. Observations at other sites in Antarctica have yielded similar results.
Animal clones show problems
Even as certain researchers strive to perfect techniques that would enable them to produce human clones, and various nations seek to outlaw human cloning on ethical and safety grounds, a number of reports show that all is not well in the field of animal cloning.3
For instance, in the hoopla of the first animal clone, the sheep Dolly, announced with much fanfare earlier this year, one salient fact was virtually ignored and unreported. Dolly was the sole survivor of 277 sheep embryos made from the cells of adult sheep, and her researchers are not the only ones having troubles.
University of Wisconsin researchers working with cattle clones, now have about 15 still developing cloned cattle embryos, a fraction of the number with which they originally started. Based on the team’s past efforts, few, if any, of the pregnancies are expected to survive to term. As one researcher explained, “We are losing embryos at every step of the process.”
In the case of Dolly, examinations of some of Dolly’s chromosomes have shown “subtle structural change usually found only in cells from older animals,” possible evidence that the chromosomes have retained a molecular memory of the fact that they are derived from a skin cell of a six-year-old animal. “Is she in some sense seven years old?” Ian Wilmut, Dolly’s creator asked rhetorically.
A far more pressing problem among cloned animals is the tendency for the developing embryos to grow overly large in the womb, putting the mother and newborn at significant risk. One veterinary physiologist at Texas A&M University reported that “We’ve had some cattle calves that were just monstrous, up to 180 pounds,” compared with the normal weight of about 80 pounds.
So far the cloning of monkeys appears to have had the most success and scientists in many fields, including AIDS research, have put in requests for cloned monkeys.
