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We thank Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire for today’s inspiring link

There is nothing we admire so much as the ability to communicate complex ideas to intelligent people who aren’t specialists. So that picture framers can understand economics, or economists can understand astrophysics. One master of the art is Stephen Buranyi of Wired. We don’t want to spoil a tour de force article for you, click on the link, it’s a pleasure to read. But we have filleted out the best bits, about Professor Robin Shattock and his team at Imperial College, and their attempts to develop a vaccine based on mRNA which will cure us all of Covid 19.

Firstly Shattock must be pretty bright, you don’t get to be a Professor of Virology at Imperial College otherwise.(Alright , they lost on University Challenge, but they’re still reigning champs) Proof of this is that way back in January 2019 he was warning the world of the dangers of an undiscovered disease x which would spread rapidly through the world wreaking untold clinical and economic damage. Sound familiar? The answer he said was to develop a new type of virus based on messenger RNA, which would be far faster to develop and manufacture than traditional sorts of vaccines.

What you are about to read is a fast and enjoyable romp through the very latest in microbiology, molecular genetics, finance, corporations and academe. The kind of stuff where intelligent people of all sorts are crafting the future, and where your average LSS fan likes to be, we hope. If you don’t, there is always Heat, Best of British Nostalgia and the Sun, and you’re welcome. There’s even a good section on manufacturing, answering a question first posed here on LSS on July 28.

But before we go, we hear the cries of those who will try to bash Big Pharma, whatever that is, as the cause of all this mess because “they failed to see the crisis coming and to develop a vaccine”. Rubbish. Pharmaceutical companies are profit making entities, whose whole commercial and legal structure would collapse if they were forced to devote more than a tiny fraction of their resources to basic research. We think that they do a good job on the whole, with the remit nations have given them. The hard truth is that if you want more research and blue skies thinking, you need to pump a lot more into Universities and Education. More taxes, anyone?

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/coronavirus-vaccine-mrna?utm_medium=applenews&utm_source=applenews

#robinshattock #mRNA #covid19 #coronavirus #sars-Cov-2 #vaccine #vaccinemanufacture #wired #imperialcollege

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Once again, a round up of views and ideas from our regulars

Don’t use soap is the jaw dropping idea of Dr James Hamblin, a lecturer at Yale Medical School. Apparently we have been misusing it for a century ,and this is destroying our microbiomes, which protect us from harmful organisms, as well as leading to auto immune diseases and eczema. But what are we all going to smell like? This one was brought to us by both Dr Stephen Day of Norfolk and Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire. Here’s a plug, and a link from the Guardian.

Clean: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less by James Hamblin is published on 6 August by The Bodley Head (£16.99). To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jul/28/soap-dodger-meet-the-doctor-who-says-we-have-been-showering-wrong?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

New times, new materials is a truism of every age in transition, First there was stone, then there was bronze, then iron and steel. If we are going to make the transition to a sustainable world graphene, which was only discovered in 2004, may play a big part. We thank Mr Gary Herbert of Hertfordshire for the links to a youtube and a website which discuss this fascinating new material, Investors on stand by?

https://www.graphene.manchester.ac.uk/

Four wheels good Four wheels bad One of the delusions of the human mind is that if you abolish an obvious injustice, or right an obvious wrong, then we will all move to a land flowing with milk and honey, with endless beer and skittles and metaphors dripping from the tree of virtue. Combustion vehicles are unsustainable. But we need to be very, very careful indeed about what replaces them, as this article from Forbes by Tilak Doshi shows. Thanks again to the indefatigable Gary Herbert for the link. All progress is slow, uncertain, and needs rethinking at every step of the way!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tilakdoshi/2020/08/02/the-dirty-secrets-of-clean-electric-vehicles/#476ebbf8650b

#microbiome #soap #washing #graphene #globalwarming #electricvehicles #tesla #university ofmanchester

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In 1970 a man called John Passmore wrote a book called The Perfectibility of Man. There have always been thinkers who feel that all human beings (that is what “man” meant back in 1970) have a natural goodness, common sense, and canny wisdom which makes them ready to scale any moral and intellectual heights. Quite soon we will be living like those goody-goody aliens in Star Trek, all white tunics and blonde curly wigs, capturing the crews of passing spaceships and giving them lessons in Peace and Love.

Professor Passmore was refreshingly sceptical about such hopes. But in case you still harbour such illusions allow us to put the last nail in the coffin of universal human goodness and wisdom with the following tale based on real evidence. People have been drinking hand sanitiser to get drunk. That’s right, there’s lots of it about with all this covid business, so why not take the chance to get a free high?

Today we run a hybrid of links from America’s CDC and Medical Express, where the same findings are written up a little more accessibly. In May and June in the states of Arizona and New Mexico, fifteen people were rushed to hospital because they had been knocking back hand sanitiser which contained methanol. Of course four died and three went blind, because that’s what methanol does to you. We at LSS imagine that this is the tip of the iceberg, as they say up in Greenland.

People at all levels make mistakes. Think of Ford and the Edsel. New Coke. That German bloke who decided to invade Russia, mainly because he’d always wanted to. But it’s not just those at the top who mess up. So, as this will be our last blog for a few days, let’s leave you with this thought, gentle readers. Look at the people around you. Some of them may be very ill-advised indeed.

we thank Mr Lindsay Charlton of Kent for this story

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-08-people-dying-sanitizer-cdc.html

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932e1.htm?s_cid=mm6932e1_x

#handsanitiser #methanol #humanstupidity

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In 1965 the world’s population was 3,324 million. 35% of us were hungry. Now it is 7,800 million, only 15% of whom are hungry, which is quite an achievement. But it has come at a sinister price as Daniel Mediavilla explains in El Pais. Every time that we open wild land to cultivation, we destroy its biodiversity. Which opens the way to the rise of those species most likely to harbour pathogens which will jump to humans.

Some of this has been known for some time. Outbreaks of infectious diseases have risen three times in that period, with particular worries about new cultivation setting off outbreaks of Nile fever and Chagas disease. But Daniel points to a new paper by UCL which looks at 184 studies of over 7000 species.**. It seems that species such as bats, rodents and passerine birds, all reservoirs of zoonotic diseases, are particularly favoured by land clearances. Daniel also posts a link to Nature, so our English- speaking friends won’t need a translator.

We at LSS won’t comment on the science, as there are far better qualified persons than ourselves to do so. But we will comment on conspiracy theorists and blame-gamers, whose principle qualifications seem to be heightened emotional anxiety and a firm belief in the infallibility of their own opinions. The origins of coronavirus, and other diseases both past and future lie in the destruction of complex ecosystems and their replacement by monocultures. Which poses an agonising dilemma: how to feed people while keeping them free of killer diseases. It will require masses of deep thought, hard work and lots and lots of humble objective study to resolve that one. But conspiracy theorists don’t have to think at all, really. They know all the answers, and all facts can be plugged into their conspiracy without effort. Thus they can escape from the fear of hard questions, and their own responsibilities, leaving the rest of us to carry the burdens. A pity that we are so few.

read://https_elpais.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Felpais.com%2Fciencia%2F2020-08-05%2Fla-reduccion-de-la-biodiversidad-favorece-la-aparicion-de-nuevas-pandemias.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2562-8

#zoonosis #covid-19 # sars-covid-2 #coronavirus #chagasdisease #nilefever

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There’s an old story from the teaching profession. A teacher’s wife asks him “how did the lesson go today?” And he replies “Badly. The lesson was fine, but the pupils were too stupid to understand it.” Teaching is all about communication: if they don’t understand it is the teacher’s fault, not theirs.

Good journalism is like good teaching-it communicates difficult ideas in way that is easy to understand, and leaves us wanting more. Such is the case with Bloomberg writers Cristin Flanagan, Riley Griffin and Robert Langreth.* In one short article, they summarise everything you need to know about what’s happening in the world of Covid-19. Vaccine development, anti-virals and secondary drugs like dexamethasone are all there. At this point, we are going to get out of the way and say: read and enjoy. Especially if you are the President of the United States, as your knowledge of the subject so far seems to be a little lacking in some areas . Well, we’re only trying to help!

We thank Mr Lindsay Charlton of Kent for this piece

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-coronavirus-drug-vaccine-status/?sref=r3j1EEXP

#coronavirus #covid19 #sars-cov-2 #vaccine #antiviral #dexamethasone

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One of the most frustrating things about medical research is drug resistance. You know the old story- clever people spend years developing a new antibiotic, only for the target to become resistant in a few years. Back to life, back to reality as the old Soul to Soul song would have it. The way bacteria do it is rather clever and we include a detailed link here* for those who are interested. Basically, if you’re a bacterium resistance is all about changing your peripheral bits while keeping your core functions stable.

It’s a moot point whether viruses are alive or not; but they certainly obey Darwinian laws of natural selection, building resistance to hostile drugs. One such is herpes, which can do immense damage to us, as sufferers will know. Now a team at Lund University led by Professor Alex Evilevitch is trying a new approach-target their attack on the core functions, which by definition the virus can’t change. Here we have a report from Mariella Attard of Forbes which outlines the work.*

We at LSS always like it when someone tries to solve an old problem in a new way. Maybe it’s applying the wonders of AI to drug databases and throwing up a new antibiotic. Maybe it’s suddenly realising that birds are dinosaurs, they’ve been living alongside us for millions of years. You always get something new when you look at facts from a different perspective.

We thank Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire for this story If you want to help with the problem of drug resistance visit the website of antibiotic research uk*

here’s how bacteria resist

Resistance mechanisms

here’s the Forbes article

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mariellaattard/2020/08/03/resistance-is-futile-is-this-herpes-treatment-the-future-for-a

#drugresistance #herpes #virus #bacteria

Homepage with ASK

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In a world already on fire from Global Warming and dying of Covid-19, the news of a looming debt crisis is as welcome as a plague of locusts in a memorial garden. Yet such is the eminence of Joseph Stiglitz (Professor, Columbia; Nobel Memorial Prize; Chief Economist World Bank) that we just have to take him seriously. And how we wish we didn’t!

In an article penned with Hamid Rashid for the Guardian he describes a threat to world capital markets posed by a looming debt crisis. * Many of the world’s poorest nations are going to default on their loans quite soon, with all the implications that has for their economies. We leave the details to the good Professor, linked below, as he seems to know a lot about it.

The trouble with economic collapse is that people flee from it, looking to escape to better lives. However heartless it sounds, we at LSS think that people are like charged ions, moving from negative to positive along economic fields, towards money. That is what drives immigration. Many people are calling for ” reduced aid budgets, and for spending our money at home.” We can understand that. In our acquaintance, they are the same people who call most loudly for reduced immigration. So we ask them-wouldn’t spending a little to improve things in the poorest countries turn out to be a good long term investment?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/aug/03/global-debt-crisis-relief-coronavirus-pandemic

#stiglitz #debtcrisis #capitalmarkets #restructuring #immigration #migration #refugee #aidbudget

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Old Hands on LSS will recall our concern for the good Old High Street, that parade of shops in the middle of our town where so much shopping and other social life used to be done. And now on the same topic along comes John Harris of the Guardian, a man beside whom our own efforts are puny indeed.

John has done some of the most refreshing journalism of the last ten years in the UK. In his series Anywhere but Westminster, he and John Domotkos roamed the depressed and fading post industrial landscape of Britain, and recording the voices of its despairing inhabitants. In effect, they saw Brexit(and many other things) coming; try to catch the podcasts if you can still find them. Their very achievement depended on a High Street to interview people in. Now the very existence of the vox pop is in question. And for Harris, the Villain is Jeff Bezos and his mighty Amazon organisation.

I will not spoil the piece* for you, except to point out that Amazon is now worth $1.49 trillion. E- commerce now accounts for 44% of all shopping in the US and 30% in the UK. Harris waxes lyrical on the efforts of those who criticise Amazon, and want to break it up. There is even a link to a blogpost by a disgruntled former employee*

But….the essence of Harris is to always give both sides, just as he did in the Brexit debate. And so he quotes from Bezos himself

The only real constant in retail is customers’ desire for lower prices, better selection, and convenience,” Bezos told his questioners on Capitol Hill. Herein lies what is propelling us into the future, from Seattle to post-industrial Scotland: supply meeting demand.

In other words, Amazon is growing big because most of us want it to. Like Microsoft before it. And ESSO before that. And Ford before that. We want other people to shop in the High Street,so we have somewhere to buy coffee, but we are damned if we do it. And one other thing. We at LSS consider the Amazon Kindle and the library in our pocket thereby afforded, as one of the finest aids to civilisation yet devised.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/02/decline-high-street-amazon-power-tech-giant

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-Amazon

#johnharris #guardian #amazon #jeffbezos #Highstreet

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We at LSS welcome UK Government initiative on the national obesity crisis. Partly their action is due to worries about coronavirus and the Prime Minister’s own terrifying experiences. And partly it addresses a national shame which has been growing since at least the nineteen-eighties of the last century. There’s to be a whole range of new ideas from encouraging cycling to reducing adverts on unhealthy foods, and our link for your jump-off today comes from the Guardian*, although all the outlets covered well. So-three hearty cheers?

“Not quite, my Lord” as the character Baldric put it in the old historical drama series Blackadder II. Weight policies are like a three legged kitchen stool. Leg one: more exercise. (Hooray) Leg two-less junk food. (Hooray) Leg three: less inequality. Not much in the package about that. What happens to kitchen stools with only two legs?

So-what has inequality got to do with it? Astute readers will recall the ground breaking work of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level .* It was a major study of income inequality and how it relates to poor social outcomes across the thirty richest countries in the world. Not even its enemies could deny its rigour and scope. They found that a slew of major social evils came back again and again to the level of relative income inequality, including teenage pregnancy, stress, social mobility, mental illness, life expectancy-and of course obesity.

Since roughly 1985, the poor have been getting fatter and the rich thinner in high inequality societies like the UK and the USA. They found that absolute levels of fat increase too. In the USA 30% of the population were obese, but in more equal Japan, it was only 2.4%. Sumo fans take note. The causes are multifarious; among them we find that stressed people lay down more fat. Comfort eating, especially tasty foods like take-aways, seems to be a consolation for long hours on low pay. In some areas, guzzling on things like pizzas and fizzy drinks shows you have a spare income-it’s a perverse status symbol. But look for yourselves gentle readers; one thing about these two, they do write an easy reader.

And so we say: two cheers to the Prime Minister for the new initiative. But unless something is done about inequality, we fear that the policy could be doomed to failure.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/11/no-10-plans-weight-loss-drive-to-ready-uk-for-expected-covid-19

Wilkinson, R and Pickett, K: The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone Penguin 2010 pp 89 et seq

#borisjohnson #obesity #wilkinsonandpickett #ukgovernment #inequality

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It’s quite clear to rational people that the ultimate solution of the Covid-19 pandemic will only come when there is a safe vaccine. And the research and testing stage looks good at the time of writing. But a vaccine is only going to be really effective if it can leap the following hurdles.

Firstly, everyone must get a dose. Populations with low levels of inoculation are still vulnerable to diseases like measles. They stay endemic.

Secondly, the vaccine must stay high quality all the way from the production point to the patient. How are they going to be affected by temperature, humidity-or just a good old bashing in a truck along a dirt road?

Thirdly, anything you put in the vaccine to preserve it can’t hurt humans. Certain types of person will be hovering, ready to jump on any mistake we have made, so they can take us all back to their beloved Middle Ages.

So-has anyone ever made 7.7 billion of anything to a high standard, and distributed it effectively? What follows is pure fantasy, but some thoughts spring to mind.

Coca-cola and Pepsi have made and distributed colossal numbers of high quality products to their customers across the whole world for many years. A quick glance at the figures suggests 1.9 billion cokes going out every day. We suspect many other food products enjoy these sorts of production runs. It is a colossal achievement of quality and organisation, so yes, it can be done.

Even more encouraging are the results of the IT industry by which we mean phones and tablets. No disrespect to Coke and Pepsi, which we love, but a smartphone is of a different level of complexity to a can of fizzy drink. To send out millions of identical units of this complexity, and in a way that everyone is happy that they will work, is competence indeed. We think the distribution teams at people like Microsoft, Apple and Samsung have a lot to teach the world.

And finally, closer to home……pharmaceuticals. We couldn’t get too much on numbers of pills and doses. But the Fierce Pharma website* has a a flavour of the sheer scale of pharmaceutical mass production and distribution. And basically with drugs, you just can’t make mistakes, there’s too many hungry lawyers for one thing.

With the right finance, production engineers and trainers, this thing can be done. You can put out a high quality medicine in repeated to doses again and again until you reach the billions, and be sure that it works every time. A booster programme will be easy. The thing is-are people going to obstruct it, and how?

https://www.fiercepharma.com/special-report/top-20-generic-molecules-worldwide

#covid-19 #sars-cov#2 #coronavirus #vaccine vaccineproduction #vaccinedistribution

we thank Mrs Margaret Foster of Dorset for the inspiration for this piece